Colum McCann - Let the Great World Spin (32 page)

“Oh, I’ve got enough bagels,” I said.
“Just stay here a little while,” she said under her breath.
There was a little rim of moist at her eye.
“Really, Claire, I got enough bagels.”
“Stay awhile,” she whispered.
“Claire,” I said, trying to move away, but she had a hold of my elbow like she was clutching a last piece of twine.
“After everyone leaves?”
I could see the little tremble going in her nostrils. She had the type of face when you look closely at it, you think it’s gone all a sudden old. There was a pleading in her voice. Janet and Jacqueline and Marcia were down the far end of the corridor, tickling their ribs now at one of the paintings on the wall.
Sure, I didn’t want to leave Claire there with all those leftover crumbs on the carpet, and the crushed- out cigarettes in the ashtrays and I suppose I could’ve easily stayed, rolled up my sleeves, and started washing the dishes and cleaning the floor and tucking the lemons away in the Tupperware, but the thing is, I had the thought that we didn’t go freedom- riding years ago to clean apartments on Park Avenue, no matter how nice she was, no matter how much she smiled. I had nothing against her. Her eyes were big and wide and generous. I was pretty sure I could’ve just sat down on the sofa and she would’ve served me hand and foot, but we didn’t go marching for that either.
“Mercy,” I said.
I couldn’t help it.
“Ah- hem,” went Jacqueline from the front door, like she was clearing her throat for speech.
“ Coca- Cola one two three,” said Marcia.
I could hear the tip- tap of Janet’s shoes against the wooden floors. Jacqueline gave another little cough. Marcia was adjusting her hair in the mirror and muttering something under her breath.
There it was, I might never have believed it at any other time in my life—three white women wanting me to leave with them, and one of them trying to get me to hold back with her. I was flat- out dilemma’d, tied to a galloping horse. My heart began going hammer and tongs. There was moistness gathering in Claire’s eyes and she was looking at me like I had to decide quickly. One choice was, I went with the others, down the elevator and out into the street, where we could stand and say our goodbyes. The next choice was I stayed with Claire. I didn’t want to lose our run of mornings by playing favorites, no matter how good- hearted she was, or how fancy her apartment, and so I stepped back and flat- out lied to her.
“Well, I got to make my way home to the Bronx, Claire, I got a church appointment in the afternoon, the choir.”
I felt plain- out awkward for the way I was lying. She said of course, yes, she understood, how silly of her, and then she kissed me gentle on the cheek. Her lips brushed against the side of my hair clip and she said: “Don’t worry.”
I don’t know the words for how she looked at me—there are few words—it was a welling up, a rising, a lifting up on the surface from the water, it was the sort of thing that could not be told. It felt for a moment that something had unthreaded down my spine, and my skin got tight, but what could I say? She grabbed hold of my wrist and tweaked it, saying a second time that she understood and she didn’t mean to take me away from the choir. I stood away from her. It was over then, I was sure, happily solved, and the corridor brightened up for me and a few more smiles went around among us, and we declared we’d see each other at Marcia’s next time—though it felt to me that there’d probably never be another time, that was the heartbreaker, I had a good idea that we’d let it slip away now, we had all had our chance, we’d brought our boys back to life for a little while—and we stepped out into the hallway, where Claire pressed the button for the elevator.
The iron gate was opened by the elevator boy. I was last to step in, and Claire pulled me back by the elbow and brought me close again, a sadness settling over her face.
She whispered: “You know, I’d be happy to pay you, Gloria.”

^{my grandmother was}
a slave. Her mother too. My great- grandfather was a slave who ended up buying himself out from under Missouri. He carried a mind- whip with him just in case he forgot. I know a thing or two about what people want to buy, and how they think they can buy it. I know the marks that got left on women’s ankles. I know the kneelingdown scars you get in the field. I heard the stories about the gavel coming down on children. I read the books where the coffin ships groaned. I heard about the shackles they put on your wrists. I was told about what happened the first night a girl came to bloom. I heard the way they like their sheets tight on the bed so you can bounce a coin off them. I’ve listened to the southern men in their crisp white shirts and ties. I’ve seen the fists pumping in the air. I joined in the songs. I was on the buses where they lifted their little children to snarl in the window. I know the smell of CS gas and it’s not as sweet as some folks say.

If you start forgetting you’re already lost.
Claire panicked the moment she said it. It was like all of her face whirlpooled down to her eyes. She got sucked up into her own unexpected words. The bottom of her eyelids trembled a second. She opened a limp, resigned palm, and stared at it as if to say that she had disappeared from herself and all she had left was this strange hand she was holding out in the air.
I stepped quickly into the elevator.
The elevator boy said: “Have a nice afternoon, Mrs. Soderberg.”
I could see her eyes as the door was pulled across: the tender resignation.
The door slid shut. Marcia sighed with relief. A giggle came from Jacqueline. Janet made a shushing sound and stared ahead at the elevator boy’s neck, but I could tell she was holding back a grin. I just thought to myself that I wasn’t going to fall into their game. They wanted to go off and whisper about it.
You know, I’d be happy to pay you, Gloria.
I was sure they had heard it, that they’d dissect it to death, maybe in some coffee shop, or some luncheonette, but I couldn’t stand the thought of any more talking, any more doors closing, any more rattle of cups. I would just leave them behind, go for a walk, a little way uptown, clear my head, glide a little, put one foot in front of the other, and just mash this over in my mind.
Downstairs, the light was pouring clear across the tiles. The doorman stopped us and said: “Excuse me, ladies, but Mrs. Soderberg called down on the intercom and she’d like to see you again a moment.”
Marcia gave one of her long sighs, and Jacqueline said how maybe she was bringing us some leftover bagels, like it was the funniest thing in the world, and I felt the heat pulse up in my cheeks.
“I have to go,” I said.
“Ooh, somebody’s hot under the collar,” said Marcia. She had sidled up beside me and laid her hand on my forearm.
“I’ve got choir practice to go to.”
“Lordy,” she said, her eyes reduced to a slit.
I stared right back at her, then stepped out the door, up the avenue, the burn of their eyes on my back.
“Gloria,” they called. “ Glor- ia.”
All around me, people were walking surefooted and shiny down the street. Businessmen and doctors and well- dressed ladies on the way to lunch. The taxis were driving by with their lights off all of a sudden for a colored woman, since they didn’t want to pickme up, even in my best dress, in the bright afternoon, in the summer heat. Maybe I’d take them the wrong way, out of the city, where the money and the paintings were, to the Bronx, where the money and the paintings weren’t. Everyone knows the taxi drivers hate a colored woman anyway—she won’t tip him, or at the very best she’ll nickel- and- dime him, that’s the thinking, and there’s no way to change it, no amount of freedom- riding is ever going to shift that. So I just kept placing one foot in front of the other. They were my bestshoes, mygoing- to- opera leathers, andtheywere comfortable at first, they weren’t too bad, and I thought the walking would shuck the loneliness.
“Gloria,” I heard again, as if my own name were drifting away from me.
I didn’t look back. I was sure that Claire would run after me, and I kept wondering if I’d done the right thing, leaving her behind, with the radio parts spread around her son’s room, the books, the pencils, the baseball cards, the snow globes, the sharpeners, all neatly arranged on the shelves. Her face came back to me, the slide of sadness along her eyes.
Walk, don’t walk.
I flat- out wanted to go home and curl up, to be buried in my apartment, away from traffic signals. I didn’t want the shame, or anger, or jealousy, even—I just wanted to be home, the doors locked, the stereo on, some libretto sounding out around me, to sit on the broken- backed sofa, drowning everything else until it was all invisible.
Walk, don’t walk.
Then again, I was thinking that I shouldn’t be acting this way, maybe I was getting it all wrong, maybe the truth is that she was just a lonely white woman living up on Park Avenue, lost her boy the exact same way as I lost three of mine, treated me well, didn’t ask for nothing, brought me in her house, kissed me on the cheek, made sure my teacup was full, and she just flat- out made a mistake by running her mouth off, one silly little statement I was allowing to ruin everything. I had liked her when she was fussing all over us, and she didn’t mean harm, maybe she was just nervous. People are good or half good or a quarter good, and it changes all the time—but even on the best day nobody’s perfect.
I could imagine her there, staring at the elevator, watching the numbers go down, chewing on her fingers, watching it all descend. Kicking herself for trying too hard. Running back to the intercom and begging us to stay just a minute more.
After almost ten blocks I got a little stab in my stomach, a stitch. I leaned up against the doorway of a doctor’s office on Eighty- fifth Street, under the awning, breathing heavily, and weighing it all up in my mind, but then I thought, No, I’m not going to turn back, not now, I’m going to keep right on going, that’s my duty and nobody’s going to stop me.
Sometimes you get a bug in your mind. I’m going to make it all the way home even if it takes me a week, I thought, I’m going to step every inch of the way, gospel, that’s what I had to do, no matter what, back to the Bronx.
Marcia, Janet, Jacqueline weren’t calling after me anymore. Part of me was relieved that they let me go, that I didn’t give in to them, didn’t turn around. I wasn’t sure what sort of response I would’ve let loose if they came trundling up alongside me. But another part of me thought that Claire at least should have kept after me, I deserved that much, I wanted her to come tap me on the shoulder and beg a second time so that I knew it mattered, like our boys mattered. And I didn’t want that to be the end of things for my boys.
I looked up the avenue. Park was gray and wide and there was a small rise of hill up ahead, a stepping- stone of traffic lights. I tightened the buckles on my shoes and stepped out into the crosswalk.

^{when i left missouri,}
I was seventeen years old, and I made my way to Syracuse, where I survived on an academic scholarship. I fared pretty well, even if I say so myself. I had gifts for putting together some fine written sentences, and I could juggle a good slice of American history, and so—like a few young colored women my age—we were invited to elegant rooms, places with wooden panels and flickering candles and fine crystal glasses, and we were asked to give opinions on what had happened to our boys over Anzio, and who W.E.B. Du Bois was, and what it really meant to be emancipated, and how the Tuskegee Airmen came about, and what Lincoln would think of our achievements. People listened to our answers with that glazed- over look in their eyes. It was like they really wanted to believe what was being said in their presence, but they couldn’t believe they were present for it.

Late in the evenings I played the piano stiffly, but it was as if they wanted jazz to leap from my fingers. This was not the Negro they expected. Sometimes they would look up, jolted, as if they’d just brought themselves, cold, out from a dream.

We were ushered to the door by the dean of one school or another. I could tell the parties only really began after the door closed and we were gone.

After visiting those splendid houses, I didn’t want to go back to my little dorm room anymore. I walked around the city, down by Thornden Park and out to White Chapel gardens, sometimes until the blue dawn rose, wearing holes in my shoes.

Most of the rest of my college days were spent clutching my school satchel close to my chest and pretending not to hear the suggestions of the fraternity boys who wouldn’t have minded a colored woman for a trophy: they had a safari intent to them.

Sure, I ached for the backroads of my hometown in Missouri, but leaving behind a scholarship would’ve been a defeat for my folks, who had no idea what it was like for me—they who thought their little girl was up north learning the truth of America in the sort of place where a young woman could cross the thresholds of the rich. They told me that my southern charm would get me by. My father wrote letters that began:
My Little Glorious.
I wrote back on airmail paper. I told them how much I loved my history classes, which was true. I told them I loved walking the woods, true too. I told them that I always had clean linen in my dorm room, true as well.

I gave them all the truth and none of the honesty.
Still, I graduated with honors. I was one of the first colored women at Syracuse to do so. I went up the steps, looked down on the crowd of gowns and hats, emerged into a stunned applause. A light rain fell across the college courtyard. I stepped past my college mates, terrified. My mother and father, up from Missouri, hugged me. They were old and ruined and held each other’s hands as if they were just one piece. We went to a Denny’s to celebrate. My mother said that we’d come a long way, us and our people. I shrank back down in the seat. They had packed the car so there was space for me in the back. No, I told them. I’d rather stay a little while as long as they didn’t mind, I wasn’t ready to return just yet. “Oh,” they said, in unison, grinning just a little, “you’re a Yankee now?” It was a grin that held pain—I guess you’d call it a grimace.
My mother, in the passenger seat, adjusted the rearview mirror as they drove off: she watched me go and waved out the window and shouted at me to hurry home.
I went into my first marriage, blank to the schemes of love. My husband- to- be was from a family in Des Moines. He was an engineering student and a well- known debater on the all- Negro debating circuit: he could hold any subject in the palm of his hand. He had bad skin and a beautiful bent nose. His hair was cut into a conservative Afro, tinged cinnamon at the edges. He was the sort of man who adjusted his glasses, precisely, with a middle finger. I met him on the night when he said that what America didn’t realize was that it was forever censored, forever would be, unless common rights were changed. They were the words he used instead of civil rights:
common rights.
It brought a silence to the hall. My desire for him gripped my throat. He glanced across the room at me. He had a lean boyishness, a full mouth. We dated for six weeks, then took the plunge. My parents and two remaining brothers drove north to join us for the wedding. The party had been arranged in a run- down hall on the outskirts of town. We danced until midnight and then the band left, dragging their trombones behind them. We searched around for our coats. My father had been silent most of the time. He kissed my cheek. He told me that not many people were ordering hand- painted signs anymore, that they were all going neon, but if he had one sign he could put on the world he would say that he was Gloria’s father.
My mother gave advice—I still can’t remember a single thing she said—and then my new husband whisked me away.
I looked across at him and smiled and he smiled back, and we both knew instantly that we’d made a mistake.
Some people think love is the end of the road, and if you’re lucky enough to find it, you stay there. Other people say it just becomes a cliff you drive off, but most people who’ve been around awhile know it’s just a thing that changes day by day, and depending on how much you fight for it, you get it, or you hold on to it, or you lose it, but sometimes it’s never even there in the first place.
Our honeymoon was a disaster. The cold sunlight slanted through the windows of a rooming house in a small upstate New York town. I’d heard there were lots of wives who spent their wedding nights apart from their husbands. It didn’t alarm me at first. I saw him curled, sleeplessly, on the couch, trembling as if in a fever. I could give him time. He insisted he was tired and spoke gravely of the strain of the day—I found out years later that he had spent absolutely all of his family savings on the marriage ceremony. I still felt a strong residue of desire for him when I heard him speak, or when he called me on the phone to tell me he wouldn’t be home—it seemed that words had an affection for him, the way he spoke was magical, but after a while even his voice began to grate and he began to remind me of the colors of the walls in the hotel rooms in which he stayed: the colors leached into him and took him over.
After a while he didn’t seem to have a name.
And then he said—in 1947, after eleven months of marriage—that he had been looking for another empty box to fit inside. This was the boy who had been the star of the Negro debating team.
Another empty box.
It felt as if my skull was being lifted from my flesh. I left him.
I avoided going home. I made up excuses, elaborate lies. My parents were still clinging on—what use was it to hurt them? The thought of them knowing that I had failed was coiled up inside me. I couldn’t stand it. I didn’t even tell them that I was divorced. I would phone my mother and tell her that my husband was in the bath, or down at the basketball courts, or out on a big job interview for a Boston engineering firm. I’d stretch the phone all the way to the front door and press the bell and say: “Oh, gotta go, Mom—Thomas has a friend here.”
Now that he was gone he had a name again. Thomas. I wrote it in blue eyeliner on my bathroom mirror. I looked through it, beyond, at myself.
I should have gone back to Missouri, found myself a good job, settled back with my folks, maybe even uncovered a husband who wasn’t scared of the world, but I didn’t go back; I kept pretending I would, and soon enough my parents passed. My mother first, my father a broken man just one week later. I remember thinking that they went like lovers. They could not survive without each other. It was like they had spent their lives breathing each other’s breath.
There was a loss lit in me now, and a rage, and I wanted to see New York. I heard it was a city that danced. I arrived at the bus station with two very fancy suitcases, high heels, and a hat. Men wanted to carry my cases but I walked on, head held high, down Eighth Avenue. I found a rooming house and applied to a scholarship foundation but heard nothing, and took the first job I could find: as a clerk for a betting outfit at the Belmont racetrack. I was a window girl. Sometimes we just walk into something that is not for us at all. We pretend it is. We think we can shrug it off like a coat, but it’s not a coat at all, it’s more like another skin. I was more than overqualified, but I took it anyway. Out I went to the racetrack every day. I thought I’d get out of the job in a matter of weeks, that it was just a moment, a blip of pleasure for a girl who knew what pleasure was but hadn’t fully tasted it. I was twenty- two years old. All I wanted was to make my life thrilling for a while: to take the ordinary objects of my days and make a different argument out of them, no obligations to my past. Besides, I loved the sound of the gallop. On mornings, before the races, I would walk down among the stalls and breathe in all the scents of the hay and the soap and the saddle leather.
There’s a part of me that thinks perhaps we go on existing in a place even after we’ve left it. In New York, at the racetrack, I loved to see the horses up close. Their flanks looked as blue as insect wings. They swished their manes back in the air. They were like Missouri to me. They smelled of home, of fields, of creek sides.
A man came around the corner with a horse brush in his hand. He was tall, dark, elegant. He wore overalls. His smile was so very wide and white.
My second and last marriage was the one that left me eleven floors up in the Bronx projects with my three boys—and I suppose, in a way, with those two baby girls.
Sometimes you’ve got to go up to a very high floor to see what the past has done to the present.