News from the World (18 page)

“He's going to drive me crazy,” said Gerald. Beverly was standing in front of him, her coat on, ready to leave for the theater.

“We'll be late,” she said.

“I don't know,” he said. “I just don't know. Why don't you sit down here next to me? Do we have to go see that play? Couldn't we give away the tickets?”

“You mustn't let him do this to us,” she said. “Don't answer him anymore.”

When they got home that night, Gerald wrote his son a long letter. He described the house he had lived in as a child, and the quarrels he had heard on both sides of the thin walls. He described Janet Lee whom, up to now, he had long forgotten. He even remembered whose picture Janet had carried in her locket—a baby snapshot of herself. He didn't write to Jack.

Several weeks passed with no word from Boston. Then a postcard arrived. It read: “I'll be in New York the evening of April 23rd. I have to give a lecture. Hope you can spare me an hour. I'll be returning to Boston on the last shuttle so it will be the briefest of visits.”

“I won't see him,” said Gerald.

“What are you going to do?” Beverly asked. “Tomorrow is the twenty-third.”

“He did it on purpose, not giving me time to write him back.”

“You can phone,” she said.

“I won't do it,” he said loudly. “I won't let him
make
me do anything. He takes his chances. It's his lookout. He should have called
me
, after all.”

“But if he's coming all this way . . .”

“Bev, you're so contrary. He's coming to the city to give a lecture. These professors and their lectures . . .”

She looked baffled.

Gerald watched a late movie on television. He was thinking about what he was going to do, and he felt badly about it. But he knew himself. He didn't want to see Jack and he wasn't going to. What was significant about his first twelve years was that he had survived them. He didn't need anyone from that time of his life to remind him of what it had been like.

The following evening, they left a note scotch-taped to the front door saying they had a sudden emergency and had had to go out. Beverly hesitated as they stood in the hall, waiting for the elevator, then she asked Gerald if they couldn't expand the note somewhat. It looked so scant.

“It doesn't matter what I write,” Gerald said. “He'll get the point.”

“I feel sorry for him,” she said softly.

“Don't,” he said, and gripped her arm strongly as the elevator door opened.

They stayed out until one in the morning. For an hour after the movie they had seen, they sat in a coffee shop on 57th Street, sharing a pastry, looking through the paperback books they had bought in a nearby store. Then they walked home through a light rain.

Jack's answer had been slipped under the door. Gerald picked it up but didn't look at it. Then, as Beverly stood in front of the dresser mirror removing hairpins, he read it.

“I'm sorry,” it began. “But I see. I understand. After all, what did we have in common except blind hopes?” It was signed with the initial
J
as though, Gerald thought, he had been too disheartened to write out his name.

“Well, what do you think?” he asked, handing Beverly the note. He glimpsed on its back the message he had left for Jack. The brief sentence, the word
emergency,
looked stern and powerful to him.

“It'll be finished now, I guess,” she said.

“We didn't have
anything
in common,” Gerald said. “Not one thing!” His voice grew louder. “Blind hopes . . . a rich little bastard like that with his buttons sewed on for life!”

He bent suddenly to untie his shoelaces. The muscles of his back tightened. Instead of the lisle hose he was wearing, he felt once again around his ankles the wet thickness of black wool stockings, and in his empty hands, he felt the hard, cinder-packed snow as he shaped it with his freezing palms. Raising his head quickly to sight the boy walking away from him in a navy blue coat, he brought his arm up in an arc and threw the snowball past his wife standing there in front of her mirror, staring at him, past the beige walls of the bedroom, at the retreating back, seeing just beyond it the dark winter sky, and joyously breathing in a great draught of the cinder-smelling arctic air, as the boy he struck so unerringly cried out in pain.

THE LIVING

A
FTER THE FUNERAL,
we stood around awhile on the street corner right near the funeral parlor. There was a lot of vegetables in crates sitting out in front of a grocery store and I couldn't help my eyes sliding over to those big purple bananas that the Puerto Ricans buy. Flies was buzzing over everything, but those purple bananas wasn't even sweating like the other fruit, flies didn't bother them, they lay there looking like they was in a cold cellar. They made me feel bad and I don't know why.

My wife—I don't live with her no more but we still married—she was crying and mopping up her face and pulling at her dress because she was so hot. I couldn't stop myself from seeing she was getting fat, especially in her shoulders. Why do I have to notice so much? Sometimes I wish I was a little like her, holler when things are bad, and laugh when it's okay. But not me. I'm always seeing the things that are all around what I should be paying attention to. Like when I go for a job, I'm watching the man's face, seeing how his teeth fit in his jaws, what his shirt cuffs look like and what he's got on his desk, instead of asking him where and how much and how long.

My wife calls Curtis the “little baby.” I don't understand why she thinks he's so little. He is old enough to be buried in his cadet suit.

Quite a few people came to the funeral, mostly neighbors, I guess. Even my brother came. I haven't seen him for eight years, and after he looked at Curtis lying in the coffin, he remarked how big he'd grown. But then the last time he'd seen Curtis was just a few months after he'd been born when we were still living in Brooklyn before we moved uptown.

“What are you looking at those vegetables for when you should be thinking about your dead baby!” my wife cried. And Yvonne, who is ten now, started howling and grabbed my wife around her middle. Yvonne looked very neat, I noticed, and her shoes were all polished up. I hadn't seen her for a long time. I used to go by and visit them, but my wife and I always had to have our fight, and it got so the children would just go out of the room to get away, so I hardly ever had a chance to talk to them.

“What good is thinking about him going to do him now?” I asked her. “You should of thought about him when you let him go up to the roof all the time just so you could be alone to work yourself all up about what a mean bastard I was and how bad I did you!” She began to yell and moan. I couldn't even make out what she was saying. I started wondering how they got Curtis to look so nice when he had fallen four stories to the street. Then the grocer came out and waved his hands at us and shouted in Spanish, calling us names probably.

Most of the people who had come to the funeral had gone off down the street. My brother was standing in front of the funeral parlor and talking to Light Marsh, who is my wife's cousin. I don't know why
he
came to Curtis' funeral. That's a man who's hardly interested in anything living or dead except his car. But he was going to drive us out to the cemetery so I didn't make my usual remarks about him.

It was a terrible hot drive. Light all the time talking about these gadgets he's got for his Caddie and pointing at them with his long finger and driving with the other hand, while my wife carried on in her corner. My brother kept grinning at Light and then turning around to look sad at me. Yvonne rested herself against my ribs and I patted her head and felt sorrier for her than I did for anybody else. Suddenly she looked up while Light and my brother were arguing about which was the fastest way to the cemetery.

“Why did they have that doll in the window?” she asked me. At first, I didn't know what she meant. Then I remembered that in the funeral parlor window, on a shelf, there had been this plastic doll held upright by some kind of metal prong and the doll had a crown and was wearing some kind of lace cape. When I first walked in, I had noticed how dusty the shelf was and how the crown looked like it was made out of a silver candy wrapper.

“I don't know,” I answered.

“Isn't it supposed to be for dead people? Why they get that doll then?” she whispered.

“Maybe she's supposed to be a saint or something like that,” I said.

“Don't tell her none of your lies,” my wife said.

Light had begun to talk about the war and this country and how crazy everything was getting and what hard times were coming, and I laughed. “Hard times
coming
?” I said. “What I want to know is, when are they
going
?”

“You ought to get into a steady business,” my brother said. I think he's been saying that since I was three and he was five.

“You mean, like the numbers?” I asked.

“Why don't you go to school and take up something,” he asked. “You ought to grab what's there.”

“He know all about grabbing,” said my wife.

“Did it hurt Curtis?” Yvonne asked.

All of a sudden, I got scared, sitting in that big white car that probably had thirty-six payments left on it, with my brother all shut into his best suit and my wife getting fatter every minute, and Light Marsh telling me all about the world and Yvonne asking me questions like I was supposed to know everything.

“No, baby, no, it couldna hurt him,” my wife said. “He didn't know what hit him.”

“The ground hit him,” Yvonne said, and sat up straight.

Then, pretty soon, Yvonne starts out with “Daddy—” but we was there, and I got busy getting out of the car. I'll never know what she was going to ask me, maybe, who the hell was I anyhow?

Some of the people who had been at the parlor had got there their own way, and they were standing near the hole with the preacher. His head was bowed and sweat was running down his forehead.

They had this carpet, maybe five feet by five, made out of stuff that was supposed to look like grass, and it was spread over the dirt they had dug out of Curtis' grave. There were so many gravestones sticking up out of the ground, you wouldn't think there was room for one more child.

The coffin was closed up now. It had a sling around it so it could be lowered into the ground. There were two men standing a few yards away, leaning on shovels. Gravediggers, I guess. They were wearing caps and work clothes. They didn't have any expression at all on their faces, but even so I thought they was laughing at us. Maybe it's because I figure colored people is funny to white people whether they're dead or alive. I had this picture of myself—it was so fast I hardly saw it—of me lifting up one of those shovels and bashing their heads in.

They threw some dirt on Curtis and lowered him and I heard the preacher's voice getting louder, but I couldn't get any sense out of what he was saying. The graveyard stretched further than I could see. I heard cars so I knew there must be big highways all around.

Light said he'd drive us back to the parlor. My brother went off with some man who was going his way. He shook my hand before he left and told me not to feel too bad. And I said, yeah, I'd try not to.

Light showed off all the way back, asking Yvonne would she like a doll and telling me to drop around, he'd get me a good job, and asking how we was paying for all this funeral expense. I didn't want to talk about that. I gave my wife the thirty-eight dollars I had, and she must have got the rest somewhere, maybe from her daddy who runs an elevator in an apartment building downtown, and has a little house with a yard in the Bronx. I don't know why he didn't come to Curtis' funeral, maybe because he knew I'd be there.

We got out of the car in front of the grocery store. My wife wasn't crying anymore but she looked awful. Her hat was coming down the back of her head, and her eyes looked big and starey.

“You want to go to a movie?” I asked.

“What is the matter with you,” she said.

“Yeah, Daddy. Can we go?” Yvonne asked.

“Well . . . I thought it would be better, so you don't have to go back home right now. There's a Loew's right up here near by.”

She was looking at me, but I was looking over her shoulder. There were fewer bananas in the box now. Somebody must have been buying them while we were out putting Curtis in the ground.

“Don't you feel
bad
?” she asked like she'd been thinking hard to find the thing to say that would straighten me out.

“I feel bad,” I said.

Then we all started to walk up the block, and pretty soon we came to the movie. I didn't look to see what was playing.

It was cool inside, that big black coolness I've always liked about movies. Hardly anybody was in there, a few people with nothing to do, getting out of the sun.

I bought Yvonne some peanuts and she settled back in her seat. My wife took off her hat and sank down and rested her head. They were showing a cartoon. It didn't look so good on that big screen. The animals had those faces that don't look like anything living or dead, and the voices they put in them were screaming and laughing and hooting so loud it made me hunch down in the seat.

I don't know . . . but I think there's nothing worse than that, nothing sadder anyhow, than a movie on a hot weekday afternoon with maybe a dozen people sprinkled around, watching a cartoon that's supposed to be for children.

I began to feel so bad sitting there, looking at my wife's and Yvonne's faces in the light from the screen, then looking back at the cartoon and seeing some goddamn big mouse in a cape running along the floor, that I could've yelled.

And then I did yell. My wife and Yvonne grabbed me up out of the seat and took me up the aisle and I was yelling all the time, thinking of how the street would be, of those sweating, rotting vegetables at the grocer's, and that plastic doll, and Light Marsh in his white man's car, and Curtis dead and dressed up like he was going to war, and the man I had to see tomorrow about a job sorting packages. None of it mattered, not even my yelling mattered.

We were all gone, not just Curtis, but Yvonne, my wife and me, gone, gone, gone . . .