Atlantis: Three Tales (18 page)

“Well,” Dr. Corey said. “Isn't this a treat! This is Elsie's blackberry wine—that she made herself last summer. We picked the berries together, when we went out to Asbury Park.”

“We certainly did,” Elsie said. “And bottled it ourselves, too.” She put the tray down on the table. “Now who would like a glass?”

“I'll have some,” Hubert said, laying one forearm on the table. “You want some, Clarice?”

“Oh, yes,” Clarice said. “Thank you.”

“I'll have some,” Sam said.

“I'll have some too,” Lucius said. “But I do have to mention—I mean as a lawyer, now. Hubert'll back me up. You know this is—strictly speaking—
completely
against the law!”

“Against what law?” Dr. Corey said.

“The eighteenth amendment,” Lucius said. “We got prohibition, I hope you remember!”

“This is
not
against the law,” Elsie said. “This isn't moonshine. This
isn't bathtub gin. This is homemade blackberry cordial—it's not going to hurt anybody!”

“When the revenue officers cart you off, you better tell
them
that!” Lucius laughed.

“Now, if you don't want any, Lucius, you don't have to have any. Maybe you think we shouldn't—?”

“Now I'm not saying that! I'm not saying that at all!” Lucius's large hands waved above the table. “I'm just saying—”

“We are not breaking any law,” Dr. Corey said. “This here is medicinal.”

“That's
right!”
Elsie said, as if the idea had just hit her. A smile replaced the moment of worry on her face. “This is medicinal wine. A glass of this after dinner will absolutely help with the digestion. You know, Papa always takes some after Sunday dinner—”

“Mama too,” Dr. Corey said.

“Well, I can just see the police now, breaking in on one of them speakeasies around on Lenox Avenue and the doctors breaking out their prescription pads—”

“If it will make you feel better,” Dr. Corey said, “I will
write
you a prescription for it—”

“No,” Lucius said. “For me? No—you don't have to do that.” And his arm, which had been moving to the laughter like a conductor's, dropped its pinstriped coatsleeve on the table—the original, Sam realized, of the gesture Hubert performed so frequently.

Beside the red and blue wrapping-paper-and-tissue ruins of his birthday, Sam looked at his twenty-nine-year-old brother, with whom he'd spent fewer days in his life than he had with any number of his friends. Leather gloves, magic tricks, book, pen: this birthday, because of Hubert, had been completely unexpected, and was now over—three days before it had actually occurred.

Lucius said he'd walk with them back to Hubert's—the argument with Clarice had quieted to an intense conversation over some fine point of the Jim Crow laws. When they came downstairs, they found there'd
been an unexpected shower that, because of their laughter inside, they'd missed. But the sidewalks were wet—or, at any rate, drying in patches now. Tall Lucius and diminutive Clarice strolled together under a street lamp, over glimmering, puddled pavement, her skirts swinging back and forth below her calves, the heat of their conversation enough to keep the two of them twenty paces ahead.

The box of tricks under his arm (with the other presents inside it), suddenly Sam said: “. . . I get it now!”

Hubert said: “Get what?”

“Nothing,” Sam said. “It wasn't anything. Just something that . . . well, nothing.”

“What was it?”

“Really,” Sam said. “It wasn't anything at all. Just something—that Corey said.”

“Come on. What
was
it?”

“It was just . . .” He knew Hubert wouldn't let it rest. “I get the joke, now. About C.P.T.” Which was a bald lie—to make Hubert stop questioning.

“Oh.” Hubert said. “That.”

But what had come to Sam was the reason the man on the bridge had gotten so upset when Sam had said he was going for a policeman. He hadn't realized Sam had meant for the man in the boat. And the fellow had just asked Sam back to his place for a drink . . . !

Well, Mr. Harris kept a bottle in his store. Hubert even had a bottle at the house. Not to mention Elsie and Corey's homemade wines. Sometimes it was hard to remember prohibition was really in force—especially here in Harlem.

But, Sam reflected, the fellow probably thought I was going to have him arrested for possession of liquor!

“Hubert?”

“What?”

“Do you remember, back home, going into downtown Raleigh, with a bunch of guys, and standing on the corner, across from the park, at the trolley stop—waiting there, and watching the women get on the trolley
car?” Sam reached around to pat his pockets for cigarettes. But he'd been in such a hurry to get to Corey and Elsie's that he hadn't stopped to buy any. “They'd step up on the step of the car, and their skirts would swing up, so that you could see their shoes, the buttoned kind that went up over their ankles? You remember how we'd nudge each other—or try to keep a straight face. And sometimes, if there was a breeze or something, and the skirt blew up just a little more, you could see the stocking at the top of the shoe—then, boy, you'd
really
seen something! I did it. You must have done it, too.”

“Yeah,” Hubert said. “What about it?”

“Well, we all used to like it—me, John, and Lewy all did it. But some of those boys, out there doing that, were really sent out of sight by it. You must have known one or two of those—the ones who were always
suggesting
that you go down and do it. You remember?”

“What if I do,” Hubert said. “What's the point?”

“Well,” Sam said, with a feeling in his throat he knew would have been assuaged with the first draw on a cigarette, “now, here, in New York, with skirts up above
everybody's
ankles, suddenly it's nothing to see some lady's legs. Isn't that funny? When you're twelve, thirteen, fourteen—it's the most exciting thing in the world. Then, you come to a different city—and it ain't anything anymore. But you remember when it was, don't you?”

“Sam,” Hubert said, “why do you want to talk about things like that?”

“Hubert,” Sam said, “that stuff was important to us. You can't forget stuff like that.”

“Like you said, skirts are up now—and in ten or fifteen years,
everybody's
going to have forgotten it. You should forget it too. Stuff like that's nasty, Sam!”

“Well,
I'm
not going to forget it,” Sam said. “I had too much fun doing it. I bet you did too.”

“Boy,” Hubert said, “you are a country nigger to your soul. You better think about gettin' civilized—that's what coming up here was supposed to do for you!”

But, hefting up his box, Sam laughed—though he had already forgotten
the brilliant city at one end of the bridge and the empty skiff at the other.

As he lay in bed, drifting, a summer's walk returned to Sam, along the south field's dusty edge-path. Shirtless, John walked ahead. Behind John, his shirt open and out of his pants, Lewy talked heatedly: “John, you can be the White Devil,” Lewy explained. “And Sam—” whose long sleeves were still buttoned at his wrists, with only his collar loose—“will be the Dark Lord. And I'll be the Ancient Rabbi who understands the Cabala's secrets and can speak them backwards—”

John said: “Why you always want to take things back to the Jews, Lewy? Why you do that? Take 'em back to somewhere else, now—Egypt. Or Africa. You should take 'em back to Africa.”

“You some
kind
of redheaded African,” Sam gibed, but it would not, this time, break what tensed between his friends.

“You don't
really
want to originate with the Jews, do you?” John asked, turning around to wait, as Lewy, then Sam, caught up.

“I think,” Lewy said, “with Christianity we already do.”

“Well,” John said, “that's
different!
”

“I don't see why,” Lewy said. “Now, me—I'm going to originate everywhere . . . from now on. I've made up my mind to it.”

“Lewy's doing that,” Sam said, “just to get your goat—”

“No,” Lewy said. “From now on, I come from all times before me—and all my origins will feed me. Some in Africa I get through my daddy. And my momma. And my stepdaddy. Some in Europe I get through the library: Greece and Rome, China and India—I suck my origins in through my feet from the paths beneath them that tie me to the land, from my hands opened high in celebration of the air, from my eyes lifted among the stars—”

“Some in Egypt and Arabia,” John said, “you got through the magazines . . . . He's gonna try an' out-preach your daddy.” John grinned through his freckles at Sam.

But the tension was all in Sam's listening now.

“—and I'll go on originating, all through my life, too,” Lewy said. “Every time I read a new book, every time I hear something new
about history, every time I make a new friend, see a new color in the oil slicked over a puddle in the mud, a new origin joins me to make me what I am to be—what I'm always becoming. The whole of my life is origin—nowhere and everywhere. You just watch me now!”

“But you don't
know
where you came from in Africa,” John hazarded. “I don't. And Sam don't—because the Bishop don't. You remember, 'cause you asked him if he did.”

“They didn't keep records of all that.” As they walked through the summer dust, Lewy grew pensive: “They should have—but that's how they kept us slaves. You know what I think? I think it's those deprived of history who create the world's great histories.” Then he repeated, “I . . . originate, everywhere!”

“How you gonna stay a nigger,” John asked, “if you come from so many places?”

“Look,” Lewy said. “Knowing all I really come from, that won't stop anybody calling me a black bastard,” which startled Sam. (Though nobody really knew
who
Lewy's father was, people were
pretty sure he'd been a lot blacker than Lewy's stepfather.) “That don't stop anybody from calling you a nigger, calling Sam a black boy, calling me colored, calling you a redheaded African, calling Sam a Negro, calling me black. And I guess we're what we're called, no matter where we're from. That's what calling means—that's all. It isn't no more important than that.”

“Well,” Sam said, “it's pretty important, what they call you, when it means where you got to live, got to go to school, even what you got to work at.”

Considering, their shoulders neared with the seriousness of it, to touch each other's under the sky.

Then, as if the energy or the anxiety of the closeness became too much, John, hand up and head back, ran into the hip-high grass, to begin imitating a bomber, banking here, swooping there, shouting Vrummmmmmmmmmmmm into the sun . . . 

In half-sleep Sam recalled the insight of his walk home from work on wealth and power and art. Was this prior summer's amble the origin of that peripatetic revelation? Or had the winter evening's revelation been the origin of this
memory of summer, which, without it, would never have returned? But even as he wondered, both, with sleep, began to slip away.

A city, Sam thought, turning over, that was everywhere and nowhere, where we all come from, where we all go . . .