Ragtime (18 page)

32

And what of Younger Brother? His absence from home since his passionate defense of Coalhouse had caused no undue concern. They were used to his sullen temper. He appeared intermittently at the flag and fireworks plant. He drew his salary. He was not on hand for their departure and so Mother sealed a note and left it on the table in the front hall. The note was never claimed.

Some days after the attack on the firehouse Younger Brother had gone back to the Harlem funeral parlor from which Sarah had been buried. He was met at the door by the proprietor. I should very much like to speak with Mr. Coalhouse Walker, Younger Brother said. I shall wait every evening under the arcade of the Manhattan Casino until he is satisfied that it is safe to receive me. The mortician listened impassively and gave no sign that he knew what Younger Brother was talking about. Nevertheless, every evening thereafter the young man stood at the Casino enduring the stares of the black patrons and timing the intervals between trains of the Eighth Avenue El that periodically rumbled past the building. The weather was warm and through he ornate glass doors of the theatre, which were opened sometimes after the evening concert began, he could hear strains of the syncopated music of Jim Europe and the applause of the audience. Of course Coalhouse had quit his orchestra job and moved out of his rooms weeks before his attack on the firehouse. To the police who tried to trace him it was as if he had never existed.

On the fourth night of Younger Brother’s vigil a well-dressed colored youth approached him and asked him for a dime. Hiding his astonishment that someone so well turned out should beg for a coin, he dug in his pocket and produced it. The fellow smiled and said he seemed to have more change than that, could he manage another quarter? Younger Brother looked in his eyes and saw there the intelligent appraisal of someone empowered to make a decision.

The next night he looked for the colored fellow but did not see him. Instead he became aware of someone else standing under the arcade after the audience had gone inside. He too was a young man in a suit and tie with a derby upon his head. He suddenly began to walk away and Younger Brother Impulsively followed him. He followed him along streets of shabby row houses, across intersections paved with brick, down alleys and around corners. He was aware of going down several streets more than once. Finally on a quiet side street he followed him down under the front steps of a brownstone to a basement door. The door was open. He stepped inside, and went through a short hall to another door and found himself facing Coalhouse, who was seated at a table with his arms crossed. The room was otherwise bare of furniture. Standing about Coalhouse, like a guard, were several Negro youths, all dressed as he was in his characteristically neat and well-groomed manner, with well-pressed suit, clean collar, tie and stickpin. Younger Brother recognized both the one he had followed and the one who had asked for a dime the night before. The door was closed behind him. What is it you want? Coalhouse said. Younger Brother had prepared himself for this question. He had composed an impassioned statement about justice, civilization and the right of every human being to a dignified life. He remembered none of it. I can make bombs, he said. I know how to blow things up.

Thus did Younger Brother commence his career as an outlaw and revolutionary. The family was for a while spared knowledge of this. Only one thing was to link him circumstantially to the black man and that was the disappearance from Father’s factory storeroom of several kegs of gunpowder and packages of dry chemicals of various kinds. The pilferage was duly reported to the police and duly forgotten by them. They were busy working on the Coalhouse case. Over a period of several days Younger Brother transported the materials to the basement apartment in Harlem. He then went to work and concocted three powerful package bombs. He shaved his blond moustache and he saved his head. He blackened his face and hands with burnt cork, outlined exaggerated lips, put on a derby and rolled his eyes. Having in this way suggested his good faith to Coalhouse’s other young followers by appealing to their sense of irony, he went out with them and threw the bombs into Municipal Firehouse No. 2, thereby proving himself to everyone including himself.

Our knowledge of this clandestine history comes to us by Younger Brother’s own hand. He kept a diary from the day of his arrival in Harlem to the day of his death in Mexico a little more than a year later. Coalhouse Walker had militarized his mourning. His grief for Sarah and the life they might have had was hardened into a ceremony of vengeance in the manner of the ancient warrior. It was Younger Brother’s impression that Coalhouse’s eyes with their peculiar gaze of unswervable intention appeared now to be looking beyond what they saw to the grave. His command of the young men’s loyalty was absolute, probably because he had not asked for it. None of them was a mercenary. There were five besides Younger Brother, the oldest in his twenties, the youngest not yet eighteen. Their respect for Coalhouse bordered on reverence. They lived together there in the basement of the brownstone pooling their wages as stock clerks and delivery boys. Young Brother added several comparatively munificent pay envelopes from the flag and fireworks plant before he abandoned New Rochelle altogether. The bookkeeping of the communal treasury was scrupulous. Every penny was accounted for. They mimicked Coalhouse’s dress and so the suit and carefully brushed black derby was a kind of uniform. They came and went from their rooms like soldiers on patrol.

At night they sat for hours and discussed their situation and what it could leas to. They studied the reactions of the press to what they had done.

Coalhouse Walker was never harsh or autocratic. He treated his followers with courtesy and only asked if they thought something ought to be done. He dealt with them out of his constant sorrow. His controlled rage affected them like the force of a magnet. He wanted no music in the basement. No instrument of any kind. They embraced every discipline. They had brought in several cots and laid out a barracks. They shared kitchen chores and housecleaning chores. They believed they were going to die in a spectacular manner. This belief produced in them a dramatic, exalted self-awareness. Younger Brother was totally integrated in their community. He was one of them. He awoke every day into a state of solemn joy.

On both of Coalhouse’s attacks he used automobiles the younger men stole for him in Manhattan. The autos were returned without damage to their garages and if the phenomenon of their disappearance and return was reported to the New York Police it was never connected by them to the events in Westchester. After the bombing of the Municipal Fire Station, when Coalhouse’s picture was published on every font page in the country, he sat down with sheet over his shoulder and permitted one of the young men to shave his head and his neat moustache. The change in him was striking. His shaven head seemed massive. Younger Brother understood that whatever its practical justification this was no less than a ritualistic grooming for the final battle. A day or two later one of the band brought in the daily papers with photographs of the Model T raised from the pond. This tangible proof of the force of Coalhouse’s will made them all feel holy. By the time they received news of Willie Conklin’s flight and sat down to discuss the proper response, they were so transformed as to speak of themselves collectively as Coalhouse. Coalhouse gone to that coal and ice yard, one of them said, Willie be a dead man now. We missed our chance. Naw, Brother, another said, he better to us alive. He keeping Coalhouse in the folks’ minds. He a plague. Now we going do something so terrible bad in this town, no one ever mess with a colored man for fear he belong to Coalhouse.

33

Ah, what a summer it was! Each morning Mother opened the white-curtained glass doors of her room and stood looking at the sun as it rose above the sea. Gulls skimmed the breakers and strutted on the beach. The rising sun erased the shadows from the sand as if the particled earth itself shifted and flattened, and by the time she heard Father astir in the adjoining room the sky was beneficently blue and the beach was white and the first sea bathers had appeared down at the surf to test the water with their toes.

They breakfasted in the hotel at tables covered with starched white cloths. The service was heavy hotel silver. They dined on half grapefruit and shirred eggs and hot breads, broiled fish, ham slices, sausage, a variety of preserves dispensed to oneself from tiny spoons, coffee and tea. And all the while the breezes from the ocean lifted the bottoms of the window curtains and shivered their salt thrill along the high fluted ceiling. The boy was always eager to be up and out. After the first few days they allowed him to excuse himself and watched from their table as he appeared moments later running down the wide steps of the porch with his shoes held in his hand. They were on nodding acquaintances with several of the guests. This would yield to speech eventually and then the mild curiosity aroused by this one’s looks on that one’s dress would be satisfied. They were in no rush. They felt they looked grand and prosperous. Mother brought beautiful summer ensembles from the boardwalk shops. She wore white ad yellow and in the informality of afternoon abandoned herself to no hat and only carried a sun parasol. He face was bathed in soft golden light.

They would swim in midafternoon, when the air became still and the heat oppressive. Mother’s bathing costume was modest but she required several days to feel comfortable in it. It was black, of course, with skirt and pantaloons that came below her knees and low-cut swim shoes. But her calves were exposed and her neck, almost to the bodice. She insisted that they separate themselves by several hundred yards from the nearest bathers. They encamped under a hotel umbrella with its name imprinted in orange upon its escalloped fringe. The Negro woman sat upon a straw chair some yards away. The boy and the brown child studied the tiny crabs that buried themselves with a bubbly trail in the wet sand. Father wore a horizontal striped blue and white sleeveless one-piece bathing suit that made cylinders of his thighs. Mother found it distasteful to see the outlines of his maleness in that costume when he emerged from the water. Father liked to swim out. He lay on his back beyond the breakers spouting water like a whale. He came in staggering through the waves, laughing, his hair flattened on his head, his beard dripping and his costume clinging to him immodestly, and she felt momentary twinges of dislike, so fleeting she didn’t even recognize what they were. After sea bathing everyone retired for a rest. She would remove her costume with relief, having wet it only for a few moments in the foamy surf, and sponge the salt from her skin. She was so fair that the shore was dangerous for her. Yet cooled by her ablutions, powdered and loosely gowned, she could feel the sun stored in her, spreading in her blood, lighting it as the noon it did the sea, with millions of diamond flashes of light. After-the-swim was soon established by Father as the time for amour. He would make his lusty heedless love every day if she allowed it. She silently resented the intrusion, not as in the old days but with some awareness of her own, some sort of expectation on the skin that was only pounded from her. She thought about Father a good deal. The events since his return from the Artic, his response to them, had broken her faith in him. The argument he had had with her brother still resounded in her mind. Yet at moments, for the whole days at a time, she loved him as before—with a sense of the appropriateness of their marriage, its fixed and unalterable character, as something heavenly. Always she had intuited a different future for them, as if the life they lead was a kind of preparation, when the manufacturer of flags and fireworks and his wife would lift themselves from their respectable existence and discover a life of genius. She didn’t know of what it would consist, she never had. But now she no longer waited for it. During his absence when she had made certain decisions regarding the business, all its mysterious potency was dissipated and she saw it for the dreary unimaginative thing it was. No longer expecting to be beautiful and touched with grace till the end of her days, she was coming to the realization that whereas once, in his courtship, Father might have embodied the infinite possibilities of loving, he had aged and gone dull, made stupid, perhaps, by his travels and his work, so that more and more he only demonstrated his limits, that he had reached then, and that he would never moved beyond them.

Yet she was happy to be in Atlantic City. Here Sarah’s child was protected. For the first time since Sarah’s death she could think of her without weeping. She enjoyed being viewed in public, as in the dining room at the hotel or on the veranda in the evening, or strolling on the boardwalk down to the pavilions and piers and shops. Sometimes they hired a chair in which she and Father sat aside and were slowly pushed along by a porter. They made lazy examination of the occupants of chairs going in the opposite direction, or glanced discreetly at the other riders they happened to pass. Father tipped his straw. The chairs were wicker, with fringed canvas tops that reminded her of the surreys of her childhood. The two side wheels were large, as on a safety bicycle; the small wheel in front swiveled and sometimes squeaked. He son loved these chairs. They could be hired too without a man, and he loved that best of all, for then he pushed the chair with his mother and father seated in it and he could direct it as he would, at whatever speed, without their feeling the need of instructing him. The great hotels stood behind the boardwalk, one next to the other, their awnings flapping in the sea wind, their immaculately painted porches lined with rocking chairs and white wicker settees. Nautical flags flew from the cupolas and at night they were lighted by rows of incandescent bulbs strung along their roof lines.

One night the family stopped at a pavilion where a brass band of Negroes stoutly played a rag, she didn’t know which one, that she remembered ringing from her piano at home under the fine hands of Mr. Coalhouse Walker. She had for days lived not in forgetfulness of the tragedy but in relief from it, as if in this resort city by the sea painful thought were blown off by the prevailing breezes as soon as they formed. Now she was almost overcome by the music which was associated in her mind also with Younger Brother. And immediately her love for her brother, a wave of passionate admiration, broke over her. She felt she had neglected him. An image of his lean moody impetuous being flashed in her mind, somewhat reproachful, somewhat disgusted. It was the way he had looked at her over the dining table at home as Father cleaned his pistol. She felt a slight vertigo, and looking into the lights of the pavilion where the indomitable musicians sat in red and blue uniforms with their shiny trumpets and cornets, tubas and saxophones, she thought she saw under each trim military cap the solemn face of Coalhouse.

After that evening Mother’s joy in the seashore was more tenuous. She had to concentrate on each day as it came. She attempted by sheer resolve to make it serene. She as affectionate to her son, her husband, her invalid father; she was affectionate to her Negro woman and most of all to the still-unchristened and beautiful son of Sarah, who was thriving here and seemed to be growing visibly. She began to consider the attentions that were being paid her by various of the hotel guests. They hovered on the edges of her consciousness, waiting for some consideration from her. For simple occupation she was now prepared to bestow this. There were several impressive Europeans at the hotel. One was a German military attaché to his embassy who wore a monocle and always saluted her with discreet gallantry. He was tall and wore that cropped hair they affected and came to dinner in his formal uniform of white, with black bow tie. He made a great show of ordering wines and then rejecting them. There were no women in his party but three or four men, somewhat coarser-looking, whose rank was apparently inferior to his. Father said he was a Captain von Papen and that he was an engineer. They saw him every day walking the beach and unrolling charts and pointing to sea and speaking to his aides. Usually there was at the time a small craft slowly traversing the horizon. It is some kind of engineering survey, Father said lying on the beach sand with his face to the sun. I can’t imagine why the South Jersey coast should interest Germans. Farther was oblivious to the man’s speculative notice of his wife. Mother was amused by this. She knew from the first careless glance she returned to the officer that he presented to her only the most lascivious intentions focused, as it were, in the imperiousness of his monocled gaze. She decided to ignore him.

There was an elderly French couple with whom she learned to exchange pleasantries; she laughed to recall her schoolgirl French and they very generously complimented her accent. They never appeared in the sun except cocooned in endless swaths of linen and gauze topped with Panama hats. For good measure they carried parasols. The man who was shorter than his wife and quite heavy, had liver spots on his face. He wore thick glasses. He had enormous pendent ear lobes. He carried a butterfly net and jar with a cork stopper and she a picnic hamper so heavy that she could not walked upright with it. Each morning she struggled after him over the dunes and they disappeared in the distant haze where there were no hotels, no boardwalk, only the gulls and sandpipers and the dune grasses, where sat the trembling wings for which he lusted. He was a retired history professor from Lyons.

Mother tried to interest Grandfather in the French couple on the basis of their academic background. The old man would have none of it. He was totally engrossed in his condition and too irritable to engage in civilized discourse. He defeated all the diversions she thought up for him—except one, a daily ride in a boardwalk chair in which he could sit and be wheeled without being thought infirm. But he carried a cane across his lap and whenever the pedestrian traffic did not move fast enough for him he lifted the cane and prodded women and men alike, who would turn and stare, outraged, as he sailed past them.

There were other guest, of course, who where not Europeans: a gigantic stockbroker from New York with a huge wife and three immense children, who spoke not a word when they dined; several family groups from Philadelphia, who could be placed quickly by the nasalities of their speech. But Mother found that the persons who interested her were invariably foreigners. They were not a substantial number but seemed to beam more life than her countrymen. The most fascinating of all was a small, limber man who wore jodhpurs and a white silk shirt open at the neck and a flat white linen cap with a button. He was a flamboyant, excited person whose eyes darted here and there, like a child’s, afraid of what they might miss. He carried on a chain around his neck a rectangular glass framed in metal which he often held up to his face as if to compose for a mental photograph what it was that had captured his attention. One cloudy morning on the hotel porch it turned out to be Mother. Caught in the act he came over and in a thick foreign accent made profuse apologies. He was, he said, the Baron Ashkenazy. He was in the moving-picture business and the glass rectangle was a tool of the trade which he could not forbear using even when on vacation. He laughed sheepishly and Mother was charmed. He had shining black hair and his hands were delicate and small. She saw him next on the beach leaping about some distance away, entertaining a child at the edge of the sea, picking up things, running this way and that, and holding up his peculiar rectangular glass. With the sun behind him he was no more than a silhouette. But she immediately recognized his energetic figure, even at that distance, and she smiled.

The Baron Ashkenazy was the first guest to join Mother and Father at their table. He arrived with a beautiful little girl whom he introduced as his daughter. She was astonishingly lovely, about the same age as the boy. Mother had immediate hopes that they would become friends. Of course they sat there and said nothing and didn’t look at one another. But she was a remarkable creature, with the darkest eyes and thick hair like her father’s and a Mediterranean complexion. She wore a fine white lace dress with a satin bodice shaped by the smallest suggestion of a bosom. Father could not take his eyes off the girl. Through dinner she said nothing, nor did she smile. But the explanation was soon forthcoming, after the appetizer, in fact, when the Baron in a lowered voice, his hand going out to touch his daughter’s hand, explained that her mother had died some years before although he did not say of what. He had never remarried. A moment later he was again his ebullient self. He talked incessantly in his European accent, with malapropisms he himself recognized and laughed over. Life excited him. He dwelled on his own sensations and liked to talk about them: the taste of the wine or the way the candle flames multiplied in the crystal chandeliers. His simple delight in everything was infectious and soon Mother and Father wore constant smiles on their faces. They had forgotten themselves. It was enormously pleasurable to see the world as the Baron did, alive to every moment. He held his rectangular glass aloft, framing Mother and Father, the two children, the waiter walking toward the table and, at the far end of the dining room, a pianist and a fiddler who played for the patrons on a small platform decorated with potted palms. In the movie films, he said, we only look at what is there already. Life shines on the shadow screen, as from the darkness of one’s mind. It is a big business. People want to know what is happening to them. For a few pennies they sit and see their selves in movement, running, racing in motorcars, fighting and, forgive me, embracing one another. This is most important today, in this country, where everybody is so new. There is such a need to understand. The Baron lifted his wineglass. He looked at the wine and tasted. You have of course seen
His First Mistake
. No?
A Daughter’s Innocence
. No? He laughed. Don’t embarrass! They are my first two picture plays. One-reelers. I made them for under five hundred dollars and each has brought ten thousand dollars in receipt. Yes, he said laughing, it is true1 Father had coughed and turned red at the mention of specific sums. Misunderstanding, the Baron insisted on explaining to him how this was a good profit but not unusual. The film business was at this time booming and anyone could make money. Now, the Baron said, I have become myself a company in partnership with the Pathé exchange for a story of fifteen reels long! And each reel will be shown, one a week for fifteen weeks, and the customers will come back every week to see what next happens. With a mischievous look he took a shiny coin from his pocket and flipped it into the air. The Baron caught the coin and flattened his hand on the table with a loud smack. The silver jumped. The water shook in the glasses. He lifted his hand, revealing one of the popular new five-cent pieces, a buffalo nickel. Father couldn’t understand why he was doing this. How I named myself, the Baron said with delight. I am the Buffalo Nickel Photoplay, Incorporated!