Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone (37 page)

“Oh, come on, Mr. Proudhammer. You're one of the biggest stars we have. No Negro's ever made it as big as you. It must mean a lot to—your people.”

Don't blow your cool, baby. Do
not
blow your cool.

I said, “I don't think it helps them to pay the rent.”

“Oh,” said a lady reporter, some fat bitch from Queens—I just knew it—“there are much more important things than just paying the rent, don't you think so, Mr. Proudhammer?”

“No,” I said. “Do you?”

Barbara touched me on the shoulder.

They scribbled it all in their notebooks—God knows what they were scribbling. God knows I didn't care. I looked at Pete, and I stood up. Pete moved the chair away, and Barbara took my arm. Pete said, “We've got to go now, folks. I'm sorry, but it's doctor's orders.”

We started moving, and lights started flashing again.

“Miss King! What are
your
plans?”

“Our tour ends next month, in Hollywood. And I stay on, then, to do a movie,
Jethro's Daughter.
”

They wrote it all down.

“And when will you and Mr. Proudhammer be working together again?”

“Soon,” said Barbara.

“On stage or on screen?”

“Both. And on television.”

“Any firm commitments—anything that can be announced?”

“We're reading scripts.”

“Will you be in touch with Mr. Proudhammer while he is abroad?”

“I will, or we'll get a new postmaster.”

“Miss King—I know you won't mind my saying this,
you surely must have heard it already—it has sometimes been suggested that your—ah—friendship with Mr. Proudhammer has sometimes tended to compromise your career. That is—putting it bluntly—because some sections of the country still hold very backward ideas about race, and you are white and Mr. Proudhammer is a Negro, and you are friends, some roles which might have been offered to you were not offered to you. Is this true?”

“Is it? I have no idea. I was a little girl when they did
Gone With the Wind,
but since then I've been doing just fine, thank you.”

We got into the wind, and there was the television crew, and a man thrust a mike at me and Pete grabbed his arm and held it.

“This man has been sick,” he said. “Now, if you want to talk to him, you come on gentle, or you can forget it.”

“I'm sorry. I didn't mean to be rough.”

“One question,” said Barbara, “and one question only. And if your crew isn't ready, it's just too bad. Mr. Proudhammer is still under a doctor's care.”

He didn't like her tone. He looked at me and he looked at her. And if we had not been Barbara King and Leo Proudhammer, victims of the economy in a way which it was quite beyond his poor power to understand—looking at Barbara in her mink, and me in my very expensive trenchcoat, and seeing the great black limousine waiting at the curb—what he really felt would have come rushing out, and our blood would have been all over the streets. Along with his, I must say. We looked each other in the eye. He held the mike. The cameras rolled in.

“You've put up a very gallant battle against death,”
he said—Fuck you! I thought—“and all of America, along with Miss King, I'm sure, have been praying that you would live. One question, one question only, Mr. Proudhammer, because we understand that you are still under a doctor's care: how does it feel to know that you mean so much to so many people?”

I thought of Christopher. I thought of Barbara. I said, “It makes me feel a tremendous obligation to stay well. It makes me know that I did not make myself—I do not belong to me.”

He looked tremendously baffled, but he smiled. “Thank you, Mr. Proudhammer.”

“Thank
you,
” I said. And we got into the car.

Amy passed, talking to Alvin, then Sylvia, talking to Andy. They all waved. The car moved forward, up a hill.

I really can't bear any of the American cities I know, and I know, or at least I've traveled through, most of them. And most of them seem very harsh and hostile, and they are exceedingly ugly. When an American city has any character, any flavor at all, it's apt to be, as in the case, for example, of Chicago, rather like a soup which has everything in it, but which is now old, tepid, and rancid, with all of the ingredients turned sour. All of the American cities seem boiling in a kind of blood pudding, thick, sticky, foul, and pungent, and it can make you very sad to walk through, say, New Orleans and ask yourself just why a city with no unconquerable physical handicaps, after all, should yet be so relentlessly uninhabitable. Some key, I suppose, is afforded by the faces, which also seem uninhabitable—at least by any of the more promising human attributes. They look like people who are, or who would like to be, cops; or else, with a sad emphasis,
they look like people who would
not
like to be cops. And I've often thought that if Hitler had had the California police force working for him, he would surely be in business still—not that I am persuaded that he ever retired; the business was his in name only—but, distrustfully, all the same, I like San Francisco because it is on so many hills, one's always looking, walking, up or down, and because you can walk by the water and you can buy crabs by the water and because there are so many faces there of people who do
not
want to be cops. I am probably wrong. I could probably never live in San Francisco. Yet, I'm always glad to see it, and I was very glad, this day, as the car moved up, moved down, as we saw some real houses, houses which looked as if they contained real people and were happy about it, saw the water and the marvelous bridges, under the cold, old sun. It was very beautiful. I leaned back between Barbara and Pete. I closed my eyes and let myself be carried.

They awakened me. It had only taken a few minutes for me to fall fast asleep. Barbara held my arm as we climbed the stone stairs of her building. We walked straight through the lobby, an ornate one, into the elevator. Pete was bringing up my gear.

Barbara had rented a penthouse, and her wide, wide windows faced the bay. The sun was just going down. Barbara's place, at least this big room, was off-white, an off-white which the sun made very vivid, with very heavy, very dark blue drapes. It was a very nice room. The sun was very harsh on my face, it felt wonderful. I walked to the window, and stood there.

Barbara came, and took my coat, and then she was very busy behind me, at the closet, in the kitchen, in the bedroom, in the bathroom, and then back again to the
kitchen. The buzzer sounded and I listened to Barbara's heels in the uncarpeted passageway and I heard Pete come in. It was about four o'clock in the afternoon and the winter sun would soon be going down. I had never watched the sun on the water before, or so it seemed; the wrinkles in the water, like the tinfoil I'd played with as a child, and the sun, like the matches on the tinfoil, and darkening it like that. And it moved the way the tinfoil had moved beneath my hands. But the sound was different. There was a wind on the water, and I could hear it moaning, all the way up here.

Pete came, and stood beside me.

“It's nice,” he said.

“Yes. Yes, it is.”

Barbara came to the window. “Leo, there are pajamas and a dressing gown lying on your bed. I suggest that you change into them—right now. Then you can have one drink with us, and, by then, your bath should be ready.” She turned me away from the window. “Take him away, Pete, and make him comfortable, and I'll make the drinks.”

Pete smiled, and turned into the room with me. “We don't want you to feel that we're running the show, baby—”

“Certainly not,” said Barbara. “But we are.”

Well. The only reason people mind being taken care of is that they are taken care of badly, or that the price is too high—it comes to the same thing. But Pete and Barbara loved me. I was very happy to know that. I was happy to know I knew it. For people
had
loved me, after all, when I had simply not dared to know it, and I had hurt them, and myself, very badly. Beneath Pete's tone, beneath Barbara's wry decisiveness, was a very real fear.
They had almost lost me, after all. Soon, the continent, and then the ocean, would divide us and then they would not be able to tease me and tyrannize me and take care of me anymore. And I could only show my love for them by submitting to their tyranny, by trying to prove with all my actions that I certainly loved them enough, now, to take care of myself when all they would have would be reports of disasters in the air or on the sea, news of earthquakes here or there, or revolutions here or there, and maps, the sunny or the stormy sky, and the untrustworthy mail. I started toward the bedroom, shedding my jacket and my tie as I went, and Pete helped me to undress and I got into the pajamas and the dressing gown and put on my old slippers.

There was a fire in the fireplace and Barbara had pulled the sofa up close to it, and piled it high with cushions. I sank down into all this, feeling rather like a pasha. Barbara came in, and handed the drinks around. She sat down on a big hassock near the fireplace, and lit a cigarette.

“Look,” she said, after a moment, “do you really think it's wise to take off on such a long trip so soon—you know, and alone? Mightn't it be better to stay here just a few more days?”

“Me and Barbara could take care of you,” said Pete. “We'll take turns making nourishing little broths for you, and all”—he laughed—“and you can stay in my pad because the papers will just bug you and Barbara to death if they know you're staying here.” He watched me. “Because you are still very tired, man. I don't think you realize how tired you are.”

“You aren't on any schedule,” Barbara said. “You haven't got to be anywhere at any particular time. I'd
think of that as a luxury, if I were you, and make the most of it.”

I watched the fire. I was trying to find out what I really wanted to do. It was complicated by the fact that, at the moment, I really wanted to do nothing—just sit by the fire like this, with my friends, in safety. I would not be safe once I walked out of here. I would be a target again. I was tired, that was true, tired, above all, perhaps, of being a target; tired of making decisions, tired of being responsible. And for a while, they were saying, and they knew it could only be for a short while, I would not have to do that: they would do for me whatever had to be done, and I could catch my breath, and rest. But I knew that I dreaded seeing Caleb and his wife and his two children, and I dreaded seeing my father, and I dreaded seeing New York. Should I put it all off, or should I get it over with?

Is it necessary, Leo, I asked myself, to think about it in quite such a melodramatic, beleaguered way? Don't sweat it. If you're tired, rest.

“What you say makes sense. I just thought that as long as I was going, I might as well go.”

“But you're not running a race,” said Barbara. “Get there when you get there—get there in easy stages.”

“It doesn't matter when you get to France,” Pete said. “You can have the house as long as you want it. And Barry's housekeeper doesn't care when you get there. In fact, the longer you take, the better she'll like it.”

“You've got a point there,” I said, and smiled and sipped my drink.

“I just don't want you to get too tired,” Barbara said. “I wouldn't mind so much maybe if someone were going
with you—but—and New York's going to be a terrible strain.” She tapped her foot, and looked at Pete. “As a matter of fact, we almost sent for Christopher to come out here and take you back. He's a very good bodyguard, Christopher, almost as good as Pete,” and she smiled. “Frankly, I still think that's a good idea.”

Pete backed her up at once. “I do, too,” he said, “and why don't we do that? Let's say it takes him a couple of days to get out here, well, you can lie around my pad and read and play records, do whatever you want to do, take the car and wander around the city—you know—and then when he comes, he could have a couple of days investigating all the city's dives and making out with all the black broads and sounding out all the black revolutionaries”—he grinned—“be good for him. And then we'd put you both on a plane, and I'd feel a whole lot better, man, because we don't want you fooling around with your luggage and all them simple-minded people and Mr. and Mrs. Ass-kisser on the fucking plane who will already have worn you
out,
baby, before the plane gets off the ground good.”

“But if Christopher's on that plane,” said Barbara, “the autograph-hunting housewives from Des Moines will stay far away, believe me.”

“They'll think Christopher was sent by the Mau Mau,” Pete said.

“He certainly looks it—hell,” I said, “I think he was,” and we laughed.

“And you see,” said Barbara, “that will give Mr. and Mrs. Ass-kisser such a thrill that your box office will climb astronomically. One must think of these things.”

I laughed. “You're very persuasive.” I leaned back in
the cushions—what is it about a fire which makes one feel so safe? “And you might be right. Let me think about it.”

“Well,” said Pete, “if your brother's meeting you tomorrow, you ain't got too long to be thinking—we have to let him know.”

“And let Christopher know,” said Barbara.

I had no practical arguments. Anyway, I was too tired to argue. I didn't want to leave this fire, or this room, but I wanted to get out of the country. I had had it among all these deadly and dangerous people, who made their own lives, and all the lives they touched, so flat and stale and joyless. Once, I had thought a day would come when I would be able to get along with them—and indeed the day had come: I got along with them by keeping them far from me. I didn't have anything against them, particularly; or I had so much against them that the bill could now never be tallied, and so had become irrelevant. My countrymen impressed me, simply, as being, on the whole, the emptiest and most unattractive people in the world. It seemed a great waste of one's only lifetime to be condemned to their chattering, vicious, pathetic, hysterically dishonest company. There were other things to do, other people to see, there was another way to live! I had seen it, after all, and I knew. But I also knew that what I had seen, I had seen from a distance, a distance determined by my history. I was part of these people, no matter how bitterly I judged them. I would never be able to leave this country. I could only leave it briefly, like a drowning man coming up for air. I had the choice of perishing with these doomed people, or of fleeing them, denying them, and, in that effort, perishing. It was a very cunning trap, and a very bitter joke. For these people
would not change, they could not, they had no energy for change: the very word caused their eyes to unfocus, their lips to loosen or to tighten, and sent them scurrying into their various bomb-shelters. And, therefore, I was really rather reluctant to see Christopher, whose destiny was as tied to this desolation as my own, but who felt that his options and his possibilities were different. Indeed, they were, they had to be: but
what
they were was not to be deciphered by staring into America's great stone face. I was nearly twenty years older than Christopher, and it made me ashamed, very often, listening to him, watching him, understanding the terrible round of his days, that not all of my endeavor, not all of the endeavor of so many for so long, had lessened his danger in any degree, or in any way at all sweetened the bitter cup. And, since I was so much older than Christopher, I knew far better than Christopher could how little warrant I had for agreeing that his options and possibilities were different. I had to agree because I loved him and valued him. I had to agree because it is criminal to counsel despair. I had to agree because it is always possible that if one man can be saved, a multitude can be saved. But, in fact, it seemed to me that Christopher's options and possibilities could change only when the actual framework changed: and the metamorphosis of the framework into which we had been born would almost certainly be so violent as to blow Christopher, and me, and all of us, away. And then—how does the Bible put it? Caleb would know—perhaps God would raise up a people who could understand. But, God's batting average failing to inspire confidence, I committed myself to Christopher's possibilities. Perhaps God would join us later, when He was convinced that we were on the winning side. Then, heaven would pass a
civil-rights bill and all of the angels would be equal and all God's children have shoes.