In America (15 page)

“Yes. To be alone with you.”

“Well, we can only be alone for a minute. I have to go right back to the cabin to help Mama decide what to wear for the farewell banquet tonight. But I brought you this.” She was holding out a small red plush album with gilt edges.

“A present?” said Ryszard. “You have a present for me, you adorable girl?”

“Oh no, it's mine!” she exclaimed. “It's my most precious possession, except for—” She stopped, abashed. The list of her precious possessions was rather long.

“Still, you want to show me your most precious possession. And that proves you do like me. What is it?”

“My autograph book!” she called out triumphantly. “And my showing it to you doesn't prove anything at all. I show it to everyone I know and everyone I meet, even if I like them only a little.”

“Oh,” said Ryszard in mock dismay.

“You have to look inside. It has verses people have written to me. Every young lady owns one.”

Ryszard leafed through the pages of robin's-egg blue, salmon, grey, pink, buff, and turquoise. “‘Be good, dear child, and let who will be clever.' Who wrote that?”

“My father.”

“Do you agree?”

“Mr. Karool, you do ask the silliest questions!”

“Richard. And this?”

“Which?”

How he enjoyed reciting, in his ridiculous Polish accent, “In the tempest of life / When you need an umbrella / May it be upheld / By a handsome young feller.” If Maryna could see him now! “Who is the author?”

“My best friend, Abigail. We were at Miss Ogilvy's Academy together, she was just a year ahead of me, but now she's married.”

“Which means you envy her?”

“Maybe I do and maybe I don't. That's a very intimate question!”

“Not so intimate as I can be.”

“Mr. Kreel, you just have to stop that. And write something in my book, didn't you say you were a writer? If you write something in it, then I'll never forget you.”

“I must write something for you to remember me? You would not remember me always if I follow you to Philadelphia?”

“You're coming to Philadelphia?”

“To see the Centennial Exposition, of course. You said that I must see it.”

“But I—”

“And you shall be my guide.” He pulled her toward him: why not, they were landing in New York tomorrow. “I press you to my heart. Don't say that we must part. Or I shall find a—” And she, too, fled. Farewell, Philadelphia Miss.

*   *   *

NARROWING WATER
, islands, tugboat, then
the
island, Manhattan, sultry wind, and the gulls, cormorants, falcons wheeling and circling overhead as the
Germanic
started upriver, eventually shuddering and bumping into White Star's pier at Twenty-third Street. On their right, the relentless
contra naturam
of a modern city, a city devoted to the recasting of all relations into those of buyer and seller. A successful city, a city to which people wanted to emigrate. At any cost, whatever the indignities.

The steerage passengers were still being herded off the
Germanic
onto the barge that would transport them back down the river to Castle Clinton, the former fort at the bottom of Manhattan where they would be interrogated and examined, when the customs officials who had come aboard to interview the first-class passengers and check their baggage had finished with them and welcomed them to America. Ryszard and Julian descended into the steaming street and hired a hackney carriage to take them to their hotel.

Its size astonished even Julian. By telegraph from Liverpool he had booked a double room at the Central Hotel—for the name. “It looks like a bank,” said Ryszard.

Is this normal weather, he inquired of the clerk after they had registered (in a free country, as Julian pointed out, one need not show any identity document) and after asking him where to purchase stamps to mail his stack of letters (“Just give him the letters,” whispered Julian. “He does it and puts the postage on our bill”).

“You mean the hot wave?” said the clerk. “Oh, it's not so hot as it can be. Not in July. No, sir. This is nothing. You should come back next month!”

Following the two black porters who sprang forward to take charge of their trunk and bags, they crossed the huge lobby, with its several aroma zones of polished brass and oiled wood and chewing tobacco, looked into the cavernous dining room where four times a day the guests descended for their meals (Ryszard noting that the heat apparently authorized men to dine without their jackets, Julian explaining that, as on the ship, in American hotels there is no separate charge for meals, their cost being included in the price of the room), reached their immense room with its handsome but, their skin told them, useless ceiling fan, and decided to go out immediately for a walk. And it was when they stepped back on the street that Ryszard, who had been busy observing, judging, concluding from the moment they had landed two hours ago, had his epiphany. Perhaps it was seeing the sign as they emerged from the hotel. Broadway. They were on Broadway! His agile mind slowed and all he could think was: I'm here, I'm actually here.

On the ship, that cruel microcosm, Ryszard was nowhere; therefore he could feel he was everywhere, the king of consciousness. You pace your world, as it moves across a surface of unmarked sameness, from one end to the other. It's small, the world. You could put it in your pocket. That is the beauty of traveling on a ship.

But now he was somewhere. He had not felt dumbfounded when the destination had been St. Petersburg or Vienna (though his head had long been stocked with pictures of those, to him, mythical cities), had not felt stunned the first time by the sheer this-ness of where he was, and that it looked as pictured. It was New York that produced this spell, or maybe it was America, Hamerica, made too mythical by a suffusion of dreams, of expectations, of fears that no reality could support—for everyone in Europe has views about this country, is fascinated by America, imagines it to be idyllic or barbaric and, however conceived, always a kind of solution. And all the while, deep down you are not entirely convinced it really exists. But it does!

To be so struck that something really exists means that it seems quite unreal. The real is what you don't marvel over, feel abashed by: it's just the dry land surrounding your little puddle of consciousness. Make it real, make it real!

That evening they returned on foot almost to the bottom of the island. As night fell the streets were still aswarm, shoppers and office workers giving way to the entertainment crowd, which included a multitude of streetwalkers. Lingering in Union Square, watching the well-dressed go into the theatres; peering into a bar on Bleecker Street at half-naked women on the laps of shirtsleeved men canted back in their chairs (“This is what, oddly enough, Americans call a saloon. Also a dive,” said Julian); passing streets where suffocating tenement dwellers had dragged pallets and planks out on fire escapes and sidewalks to sleep … Ryszard remaining silent; Julian commenting that a slum in New York had a different meaning from a slum in Liverpool because here people had hope (“Ships aren't leaving New York weekly packed with poor people emigrating to Liverpool,” he said). But Ryszard didn't mind, hardly heard Julian's platitudes. He was listening to the voice in his own strangely empty head. I'm here. Where did I think I was going? I'm here.

It exists … but then, do you?

*   *   *

OF COURSE
you have your things you do. Your ways of behaving. If you are a man, anywhere you go, you can always hunt for sex. If, man or woman, you are someone given to more exotic entertainment, such as art, you can spend time checking out the local facilities, if only to deplore their insufficiency. If you are a journalist, or a writer of fiction playing at being a journalist, you will want to get your fill of the local misery. The unrelenting servility of the Negro waiters in the hotel restaurant, exclaiming “Yes sir! Yes sir!!” to every request, confirmed his impression that the politest people to be encountered in New York were those from Africa, who had been brought here in chains, while the people felt to be a menace were Europeans who had most recently chosen to come here. Wherever he was warned not to venture he went: the valley of hovels and shanties that started a few streets west of the Central Park, dark and fearful backstreets such as Bayard and Sullivan and West Houston, even the infamous Rag Pickers Row and Bottle Alley, where the most impoverished, most miserable, and therefore most dangerous lived. The risk of having his wallet lifted was the least of the dangers he was told he would be incurring. You would think he had landed on an island of cannibals.

Ryszard had the writer's perpetually available blankness of mind. Julian had the comfort of his interests—science, inventions, progress. What he saw when he traveled illustrated or added to what he already knew. It was Julian, alone, who went off to the Centennial Exposition two days after they arrived. The latest prodigies of American inventiveness were on display—the telephone! the typewriter! the mimeograph machine!—and he returned after a day in Philadelphia enchanted with what he had seen. Ryszard, although his paper wanted a firsthand account of this national jubilee and world's fair, had begged off: he could not bear another round of Julian explaining the modern and the sensible to him. It was New York, its rawness, its irreverence, that attracted Ryszard. Indeed, he suspected he might have felt even more at home in the city of thirty years ago that Dickens had excoriated, when pigs were still to be seen on the cobblestone streets. Of the three articles he sent back to the
Gazeta Polska
before they moved on—“The Life of a Great Transatlantic Steamship,” “New York: A First View,” and “American Manners”—the second and third were full of lively description and judicious admiration for the city's energies.

Ryszard's one advantage as a traveler over Julian: his taste for sexual entertainment. Having, by chance at sea, for the first time in his life glimpsed something of the abjection of prostitution, Ryszard determined to efface this disturbing knowledge by a jolly visit to a whorehouse on land. The evening ended memorably on an exchange with a fellow client in the lounge of the house in Washington Square where, returning downstairs from his hour with a luscious Marianne, he stopped to drink a glass of champagne and bask in pleasure's boost to the gradual refilling of his mind.

“Can't place the accent,” said the man amiably.

“I am a journalist from Poland,” Ryszard said by way of introducing himself.

“I'm a journalist too!” Not the profession Ryszard would have guessed for this pleasant-looking older man with the creased face and the build of a sportsman. “Have you come over to write about America?” Ryszard nodded. “Then you should read my books. I can't resist recommending them.”

“I want to read as many books about America as I can.”

“Great! That's the spirit! The subjects may seem a little narrow to you. I mean, I'm no Tockveel—”

“Who?” said Ryszard.

“Tockveel, you know, that Frenchman who came here, must be almost fifty years ago.”

“Right,” said Ryszard.

“But, you'll see, in my books you'll be learning about things most foreigners don't know anything about. There's the one last year,
The Communistic Societies of the United States,
and the one three years ago,
California: For Health, Pleasure, and Residence,
and—”

“But this is, this is”—Ryszard, happily excavating the word from his passive vocabulary—“uncanny, Mr.…”

“Charles Nordhoff.” He held out his hand and Ryszard seized it warmly.

“Richard Kierul.” My God, Ryszard thought to himself. I'm changing my name. In America I really am going to be Rich-ard. “Uncanny,” he repeated. “Because California is where I am going and expect to stay for a while. And I am very interested in communities which live according to a higher standard, one of mutual cooperation.” He paused. “That is, I presume, what you mean by communistic.”

“Yes, and there have been plenty of them, in Texas and Pennsylvania and California, all over, though they don't work in the end, of course. But that's what this country's about. We try everything. We're a country of idealists. Or isn't that your impression?”

“I confess,” said Ryszard, “I have not seen much of that so far.”

“No? Well, you haven't seen the real America. Get out of New York. Nobody cares about anything here except money. Go out west. Go to California. It's paradise. Everyone wants to go there.”

*   *   *

DOESN'T IT SEEM
very American, he said to Julian, to whom he reported this exchange (though not its setting) on his return to the hotel, that America has its America, its better destination where everyone dreams of going?

Ryszard realized he had fully outlived his shock and astonishment only when he and Julian set their date of departure. He was no longer marveling; it was all quite real. Indeed, by that operation which an acute mind has always at the ready to master wonderment, he had decided that what stunned him with its uniqueness was not unique: this Noah's Ark of escapees from every flood, every disaster on earth, already the third largest city in the known world, was not going to be the only one of its kind. Wherever there is promise there will be this ugliness, this vitality, this discontent, as well as this self-congratulation. On Sunday, the third day of their stay, Ryszard went to a church in Brooklyn to hear its eminent minister, the author of a recent best-selling volume entitled
The Abominations of Modern Society,
preach a sermon on the inhumanity and godlessness of New York. Such denunciations struck Ryszard as of a piece with the boasting about the extremes of weather. We have the greatest country. And we have the most sinful metropolis. Surely not. Immobilizing traffic, swirls of paper detritus, construction sites, homely buildings layered with shop signs and advertising, faces of every color and shape, this continual arriving, and building, and leaving—soon the world will be full of cities like this.