Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone (3 page)

And it was because of our father, perhaps, that Caleb and I clung to each other, in spite of the great difference in our ages; or, in another way, it may have been precisely the difference in our ages which made the clinging possible. I don't know. It is really not the kind of thing which anyone can ever know. I think it may be easier to love the really helpless younger brother because he cannot enter into competition with one on one's own ground, or on any ground at all, and can never question one's role, or jeopardize one's authority. In my own case, certainly, it did not occur to me—or did not occur to me until much later—to compete with Caleb and I could not have questioned his role or his authority because I needed both. He was my touchstone, my model, and my only guide. But there is always, on the other hand, something in the younger brother which eventually comes to resent this. The day comes when he is willing to destroy his older brother simply because he has depended on him so long. The day comes when he recognizes what a combination of helplessness and hard-hearted calculation go into the creation of a role, and to what extent authority is a delicate, difficult, deadly game of chance.

Anyway, our father, dreaming bitterly of Barbados, betrayed by Garvey, who did not succeed in getting us
back to Africa, despised and mocked by his neighbors and all but ignored by his sons, held down his unspeakable factory job, spread his black gospel in bars on the weekends, and drank his rum. I do not know if he loved our mother. I think he did. They had had five children—only Caleb and I, the first and the last, were left. We were both dark, like our father, but two of the three dead girls had been fair, like our mother. She came from New Orleans. Her hair was not like ours. It was black, but softer and finer and very long. The color of her skin reminded me of the color of bananas. Her skin was as bright as that, and contained that kind of promise and she had tiny freckles around her nose and a small black mole just above her upper lip. It was the mole, I don't know why, which made her beautiful. Without it, her face might have been merely sweet, merely pretty. But the mole was funny. It had the effect of making one realize that our mother liked funny things, liked to laugh. The mole made one look at her eyes—large, extraordinary, dark eyes, eyes which seemed always to be amused by something, eyes which looked straight out, seeming to see everything, seeming to be afraid of nothing. She was a soft, round, plump woman. She liked nice clothes and dangling jewelry, which she mostly didn't have, and she liked to cook for large numbers of people, and she loved our father. She knew him—knew him through and through. I am not being coy or colloquial, but bluntly and sadly matter of fact when I say that I will now never know what she saw in him. What she saw was certainly not for many eyes; what she saw got him through his working week and his Sunday rest; what she saw saved him. She saw that he was a man. For her, perhaps, he was a great man. I think, though, that, for our mother, any
man was great who aspired to become a man: this meant that our father was very rare and precious. I used to wonder how she took it, how she bore it—his rages, his tears, his cowardice. On Saturday nights he was almost always evil, drunk, and maudlin. He would have come home from work in the early afternoon and given our mother some money. It was never enough—of course; but he always kept enough to go out and get drunk; she never protested, at least not as far as I know. Then she would go out shopping. I would usually go with her, for Caleb would almost always be out somewhere and our mother didn't like the idea of leaving me alone in the house. She was afraid the house would burn down while she was out—fires were common enough in our neighborhood, God knows. So, while our father stood sternly and gloomily in a bar not far away, getting drunk on rum, and Caleb and his friends were in somebody's cellar, getting drunk off cheap wine, we took on the Harlem streets. And this was probably, after all, the best possible arrangement. People who disliked our father were sure (for that very reason) to like our mother; and people who felt that Caleb was growing to be too much like his father could feel that I, after all, might turn out like my mother. Besides, it is not, as a general rule, easy to hate a small child. One runs the risk of looking ridiculous, especially if the child is with his mother.

And especially if that mother is Mrs. Proudhammer. Mrs. Proudhammer knew very well what people thought of Mr. Proudhammer. She knew, too, exactly how much she owed in each store she entered, how much she was going to be able to pay, and what she had to buy. She entered with a smile, ready—she attacked:

“Evening, Mr. Shapiro. Let me have some of them red beans there.”

“Evening. You know, you folks been running up quite a little bill here.”

“I'm going to give you something on it right now. I need some cornmeal and flour and some rice.”

“You know, I got my bills to meet, too, Mrs. Proudhammer.”

“Didn't I just tell you I was going to pay? I don't know why you don't listen, you must be getting old. I want some cornflakes, too, and some milk.”

Such merchandise as she could reach she had already placed on the counter. Sad Mr. Shapiro looked at me and sighed.

“When do you think you're going to be able to pay this bill? All of it, I mean.”

“Mr. Shapiro, you been knowing me for years. You know I'm going to pay it just as soon as I can. It won't be long. I ain't going to move.”

Sometimes, when she said this, she had the dispossess notice in her pocketbook. Mr. Shapiro looked into my face from time to time as though my face would reveal my mother's secrets. (But it never did.) Sometimes he looked at my mother as though he were wondering how such a handsome, almost white woman had got herself trapped in such a place.

“How much does it all come to? Give me that end you got there of that chocolate cake.”

The chocolate cake was for Caleb and me.

“Well, now you put this against the bill.” Imperiously, as though it were the most natural thing in the world, she put two or three dollars on the counter.

“You're lucky I'm soft-hearted, Mrs. Proudhammer.”

“Things sure don't cost this much downtown—you think I don't know it? Here.” And she paid him for what she had bought. “Thank you, Mr. Shapiro. You been mighty kind.”

And we left the store. I often felt that in order to help her, I should have filled my pockets with merchandise while she was talking to the storekeeper. But I never did, not only because the store was often crowded or because I was afraid of being caught by the storekeeper but because I was afraid of humiliating her. When I began to steal, not very much later, I stole in stores which were not in our neighborhood, where we were not known.

Not all the storekeepers were as easy to get around as sad Mr. Shapiro. The butcher, for example, was a very different man, not sad at all, and he appeared to detest all children; still, our mother managed him most of the time, though with an effort considerably more acrid and explicit. But there were times when she did not feel up to it and then we would not even pass his store. We would cut off the avenue at 133rd Street and walk the long blocks west to Eighth Avenue and then walk down to the big butcher shop on 125th Street. Because this shop was so much bigger it could sometimes be a little bit cheaper and yet we did not break our necks to go there because most of the people who served you were so unpleasant. There was something intolerable about being robbed and insulted at the same time, and yet, I suppose, our mother reconciled herself, while stonily and silently making her purchases, by remembering that it was only, after all, a matter of degree.

When we had to do “heavy” shopping, we went shopping under the bridge at Park Avenue, Caleb, our mother, and I; and sometimes, but rarely, our father
came with us. The most usual reason for heavy shopping was that some relatives of our mother's, or old friends of both our mother and our father were coming to visit. We were certainly not going to let them go away hungry—not even if it meant, as it often did mean, spending more than we had. Caleb and I loved to hear that visitors were coming, for it meant that there was going to be a banquet at our house. There were always visitors, of course, at Thanksgiving or Christmas, visitors bringing their hams and chickens and pies to add to ours; but people also showed up for birthdays and anniversaries or for no reason at all, simply because the spirit had so moved them. In spite of what I have been suggesting about our father's temperament, and no matter how difficult he may sometimes have been with us, he was much too proud to have any desire to offend any guest of his. On the contrary, his impulse was to make them feel that his home was theirs; and besides, he was lonely, lonely for his past, lonely for those faces which had borne witness to that past. Therefore, he would sometimes pretend that our mother did not know how to shop and he would come with us, under the bridge, in order to teach her. There he would be, then, uncharacteristically, in shirt-sleeves, which made him look rather boyish; and, as our mother showed no desire to take shopping lessons from him, he turned his attention to Caleb and me. “Look at that woman,” he would say, pointing out a woman who was having something weighed, “can't, she see that that Jew's hand is all over that scale? You see that?” We agreed that we had seen it, whether we had or not. He said bleakly, “You got to watch them all the time. But our people ain't never going to learn. I don't know what's wrong with our people. We need a prophet to straighten out our minds
and lead us out of this hell.” He would pick up a fish, opening the gills and holding it close to his nose. “You see that? That fish looks fresh, don't it? Well, that fish ain't as fresh as I am, and I
been
out of the water. They done doctored that fish. Come on.” And we would walk away, leaving the fish-stand owner staring; a little embarrassed, but, on the whole, rather pleased that our father was so smart. Meantime, our mother was getting the marketing done. She was very happy on days like this because our father was happy. He was happy, odd as his expression of it may sound, to be out with his wife and his two sons. If we had been on the island which had been witness to his birth instead of the unspeakable island of Manhattan, he felt, and I also eventually began to feel, that it would not have been so hard for us all to trust and love each other. He sensed, and I think he was right, that on that other, never to be recovered island, his sons would have looked on him very differently and he would have looked very differently on his sons. Life would have been hard there, too—he knew that—which was why he had left and also why he felt so betrayed, so self-betrayed; we would have fought there, too, and more or less blindly suffered and more or less blindly died. But we would not have been (or so it was to seem to all of us forever) so wickedly menaced by the mere fact of our relationship, would not have been so frightened of entering into the central, most beautiful and valuable facts of our lives. We would have been laughing and cursing and tussling in the water instead of stammering under the bridge: we would have known less about vanished African kingdoms and more about each other. Or, not at all impossibly, more about both.

If it was summer, then, we bought a watermelon,
which either Caleb or our father carried, fighting with each other for this privilege. And it was marvelous to see them fighting this way, the one accusing the other of being too old, and the ancient of days insisting that if his son carried a watermelon for another block that way all the girls in the neighborhood would live to regret it. “For the sake of the family name, man,” he said, “so the family name won't die out, let me carry that melon, Caleb. You going to bust your string.” “Little Leo'll see to it that we carry on,” Caleb said, sometimes; sometimes he hinted broadly that he was carrying on the blood even if he wasn't yet in a position to carry on the name. This sometimes led to a short footrace between them to the steps of our tenement. Our father usually won it, since Caleb was usually handicapped by the weight and the shape of the melon. They both looked very much like each other on those days—both big, both black, both laughing. Caleb always looked absolutely helpless when he laughed. He laughed with all his body, perhaps touching his shoulder against yours, or putting his head on your chest for a moment, and then careening off you, halfway across the room, or down the block. I will always hear his laughter. He was always happy on such days, too. If our father needed his son, Caleb certainly needed his father. Such days, however, were rare—one of the reasons, probably, that I remember them now. And our father's laugh was like Caleb's laugh, except that he stood still, and watched. Eventually, we all climbed the stairs into that hovel which, at such moments, was our castle. One very nearly felt the drawbridge rising behind us as our father locked the door.

The bathtub could not yet be filled with cold water
and the melon placed in the tub because this was Saturday, and, come evening, we all had to bathe. The melon was covered with a blanket and placed on the fire escape. Then we unloaded what we had bought, rather impressed by our opulence, though our father was always, by this time, appalled by the money we had spent and the quality of what we had bought. I was always sadly aware that there would be nothing left of all this once tomorrow had come and gone and that most of it, after all, was not for us, but for others. How come we could do all this for others and not for ourselves? But I knew better than to give tongue to this question. Our mother was calculating the pennies she would need all week—carfare for our father and for Caleb, who went to a high school out of our neighborhood, downtown; money for the life insurance, money for milk for me at school, money for cod-liver oil, money for light and gas, money put away—if possible—toward the rent. She knew just about what our father had left in
his
pockets and was counting on him to give me the money I would shortly be demanding to go to the movies. Caleb had a part-time job after school and already had his movie money. Anyway, unless he was in a very good mood, or needed me for something, he would not be anxious to go to the movies with me.