The Early Stories (59 page)

“Have you been waiting long?” Liz asked.

“No, well … the lady upstairs, she said you'd be back. When the man in the taxi let me go from the station … came on back to thank such wonderful people.”

“I'm awfully sorry,” James told him. “I thought you knew we were going off to the movies.” His own voice sounded huge—a magnificent instrument. He must not be too elaborately courteous. Since his New York success, Liz was sensitive to any sign in him of vanity or condescension. She was unfair; his natural, heartfelt impulse at this moment was toward elaborate courtesy.

“You were at the police station?” Liz asked. Their previous encounter seemed to have attuned her to the man's speech.

“… how I do appreciate.” He was still speaking to James, ignoring Liz completely. This assumption that he, as head of the family, superseded all its other elements, and that in finding him the Negro had struck the fountainhead of his good fortune, panicked James. He had been raised to believe in strong women and recessive husbands. Further, the little intruder seemed to need specifically maternal attention. He trembled under his coat, and it was not that cold; the night was warmer than the late afternoon had been.

The man's clothes, in the dimness of outdoors, did not look as shabby
as James would have liked. As for his being young, there were few marks of either youth or age.

“Well, come on inside,” James said.

“Aaaah …?”

“Please,” Liz said.

They entered the little overheated vestibule, and immediately the buzzer rasped at the lock, signalling that Janice had been watching from the window. She ran to the banister and shouted down in a whisper, “Did he get in? Has he told you about the taxi driver?”

James, leading the group, attained the top of the stairs. “How was Martha?” he asked, rather plainly putting first things first.

“An absolute angel. How was the movie?”

“Quite good, really. It really was. Long, though.”

“I was honestly afraid he'd kill him.”

They shuffled each other into the room. “I gather you two have met, then,” James said to Janice and the Negro. The girl bared her teeth in a kindly smile that made her look five years older, and the Negro, who had his hat already in his hands and was therefore unable to tip it, bent the brim slightly and swiftly averted his head, confronting a striped canvas Liz had done in art school, titled
Swans and Shadows
.

At this juncture, Liz deserted him, easing into the bedroom. She was bothered by fears that Martha would stop breathing among the blankets. “Before the doorbell rang, even,” Janice talked on, “I could hear the shouting on the street—Oh, it was something. These terrible things being shouted. And then the bell rang, and I answered it, like you had said to, and
he
said—” She indicated the Negro, who was still standing, in a quiet plaid sport coat.

“Sit down,” James told him.

“—and
he
said that the taxi driver wanted money.
I
said, ‘I don't have any. I don't have a red cent, honestly.' You know, when I come over I never think to bring my purse.” James recalled she could never make change, creating an amount she was left owing them, “toward next time.”

“I
tol
him,” the Negro said, “there were these fine people, in this house here. The lady in there, she tol me you'd be
here
.”

James asked, “Where did you take a taxi
from?
”

The Negro sought refuge in contemplation of his hat, pendent from one quivering hand. “Please, mister … the lady, she knows about it.” He looked toward the bedroom door.

Janice rescued him, speaking briskly: “He told me the driver wanted two thirty, and I said, ‘I don't have a cent.' Then I came in here and
hunted, you know, to see if you left any around—sometimes there's some tens under the silver bowl.”

“Oh, yes,” James said. “I suppose there are.”

“Then I went to the window to signal—I'm scared to death of going downstairs and locking myself out—and down on the street there was this crowd, from across the street at Alex's, and it looked like, when he went back to tell the driver, the driver grabbed him; there was a lot of shouting, and some woman kept saying ‘Cop. Call a cop.' ”

Liz reëntered the room.

“He grab me here,” the Negro humbly explained. He touched with his little free hand the open collar of his red wool shirt.

“So I guess then they went to the police station,” Janice concluded lamely, disappointed to discover that her information was incomplete.

Liz, assuming that the police-station part of the story had been told when she was out of the room, took this to be the end, and asked, “Who wants some coffee?”

“No thanks, Betty,” Janice said. “It keeps me awake.”

“It keeps everybody awake,” James said. “That's what it's supposed to do.”

“Oh, no, ma'am,” the Negro said. “I couldn't do that.” Uneasily shifting his face toward James, though he kept his eyes on the lamp burning above Janice's head, he went on, “I
tol
em at the station how there were these people. I had your address, 'Cause the lady wrote it down on a little slip.”

“Uh-huh.” James assumed there was more to come. Why wasn't he still at the police station? Who paid the driver? The pause stretched. James felt increasingly remote; it scarcely seemed his room, with so strange a guest in it. He tilted his chair back, and the Negro sharpened as if through the wrong end of a telescope. There was a resemblance between the Negro's head and the Raydo shaver. The inventive thing about that design—the stroke of mind, in Dudevant's phrase—had been forth-rightly paring away the space saved by the manufacturer's improved, smaller motor. Instead of a symmetrical case, then, in form like a tapered sugar sack, a squat, asymmetrical shape was created, which fitted, pleasingly weighty, in the user's hand like a religious stone, full of mana. Likewise, a part of the Negro's skull had been eliminated. His eyes were higher in his head than drawing masters teach, and had been shallowly placed on the edges, where the planes of the face turned sideways. With a smothered start James realized that Janice, and Liz leaning in the doorway of the kitchen, and the Negro, too, were expecting him to speak—the
man of the situation, the benefactor. “Well, now, what
is
your trouble?” he asked brutally.

The coffee water sang in its kettle, and Liz, after wrinkling her expressive high forehead at him, turned to the stove.

The Negro feebly rubbed the slant of his skull. “Aaaah?… appreciate the kindness of you and the lady … generous to a poor soul like me nobody wanted to help.”

James prompted. “You and your wife and—how many children?”

“Seven, mister. The oldest boy ten.”

“
—have
found a place to live. Where?”

“Yes, sir, the man say he give us this room, but he say he can't put no beds in it, but I found this other man willing to give us on loan, you know, until I go to my job.… But the wife and children, they don't have no bed to rest their heads. Nothing to eat. My children are tired. They're gettin' sick, they so tired.”

James put a cigarette in the center of his mouth and said as it bobbled, “You say you
have
a job?”

“Oh, yes, mister, I went to this place where they're building the new road to the tunnel, you know, and
he
tol
me
as soon as I get in one day's work he can give me that money, toward my pay. He ast if I could do the work and I said, ‘Yes, sir, any kind of work you give I can do.' He said the pay was two dollar seventy cents for every hour you work.”

“Two seventy? For Heaven's sake. Twenty dollars a day just laboring?”

“Yes, pushing the wheelbarrow … he said two seventy. I said, ‘I can do any kind of work you give. I'm a hard worker.' ”

To James he looked extremely frail, but the notion of there existing a broad-shouldered foreman willing to make this hapless man a working citizen washed all doubts away. James smiled and insisted, “So it's really just this weekend you need to get over.”

“Thas right. Starting Monday I'll be making two seventy every hour. The wife, she's as happy as anybody could be.”

The wife seemed to have altered underfoot, but James let it pass; the end was in sight. He braced himself to enter the realm of money. Here Janice, the fool, who should have left the minute they came home, interrupted with, “Have you tried any agencies, like the Salvation Army?”

“Oh, yes, miss. All. They don't care much for fellas like me. They say they'll give us money to get
back
, but as for us staying—they won't do a damn thing. Boy, you come up here in a truck, you're on your own. Nobody help me except these people.”

The man he probably was with his friends and family was starting to
show. James was sleepy. The hard chair hurt; the Negro had the comfortable chair. He resented the man's becoming at ease. But there was no halting the process; the women were at work now.

“Isn't that awful,” Janice said. “You wonder why they have these agencies.”

“You say you need help, your wife ain't got a place to put her head, they give you money to go
back
.”

Liz entered with two cups of coffee. Hers, James noticed, was just half full; he was to bear the larger burden of insomnia. The cup was too hot to hold. He set it on the rug, feeling soft-skinned and effeminate in the eyes of this hard worker worth twenty dollars a day.

“Why did you decide to leave North Carolina?” Liz asked.

“Missis, a man like me, there's no chance there for him. I worked in the cotton and they give me thirty-five cents an hour.”

“Thirty-five cents?” James said. “That's illegal, isn't it?”

The Negro smiled sardonically, his first facial expression of the evening. “Down there you don't tell them what's legal.” To Liz he added, “The wife, ma'am, she's the bravest woman. When I say, ‘Less go,' she say, ‘Thas right, let's give oursels a chance.' So this man promise he'd take us up in the cab of the truck he had.…”

“With all seven children?” James asked.

The Negro looked at him without the usual wavering. “We don't have anybody to leave them behind.”

“And you have no friends or relatives here?” Liz asked.

“No, we don't have no friends, and until you were so kind it didn't look like we'd find any either.”

Friends! In indignation James rose and, on his feet, had to go through the long-planned action of placing two ten-dollar bills on the table next to the Negro. The Negro ignored them, bowing his head. James made his speech. “Now, I don't know how much furniture costs—my wife gave me the impression that you were going to make the necessary payment with the ten. But here is twenty. It's all we can spare. This should carry you over until Monday, when you say you can get part of your salary for working on the Lincoln Tunnel. I think it was very courageous of you to bring your family up here, and we want to wish you lots of luck. I'm sure you and your wife will manage.” Flushing with shame, he resumed his post in the hard chair.

Janice bit her lip to cure a smile and looked toward Liz, who said nothing.

The Negro said, “Aeeh … Mister … can't find words to press, such
fine
peop
le.” And, while the three of them sat there, trapped and stunned, he tried to make himself cry. He pinched the bridge of his nose and shook his head and squeezed soft high animal sounds from his throat, but when he looked up, the grainy whites of his eyes were dry. Uncoördinated with this failure, his lips writhed in grief. He kept brushing his temple as if something were humming there. “Gee,” he said. “The wife … she
tol
me, You got to go back and thank that man.…”

The Negro's sense of exit seemed as defective as his other theatrical skills. He just sat there, shaking his head and touching his nose. The bills on the table remained ignored—taboo, perhaps, until a sufficiently exhausting ritual of gratitude was performed. James, to whom rudeness came hard, teetered in his chair, avoiding all eyes; at the root of the Negro's demonstration there was either the plight he described or a plight that had made him lie. In either case, the man must be borne. Yet James found him all but unbearable; the thought of his life as he described it, swinging from one tenuous vine of charity to the next—the truck driver, the landlord, Liz, the furniture man, the foreman, now James—was sickening, giddying. James said courteously, “Maybe you'd better be getting back to her.”

“Iiih,” the Negro sighed, on an irrelevant high note, as if he produced the sound with a pitch pipe.

James dreaded that Liz would start offering blankets and food if the Negro delayed further—as he did, whimpering and passing the hat brim through his hands like an endless rope. While Liz was in the kitchen filling a paper bag for him, the Negro found breath to tell James that he wanted to bring his wife and all his family to see him and his missis, tomorrow, so they could all express gratitude. “Maybe there's some work … washing the floors, anything, she's so happy, until we can pay back. Twenty, gee.” His hand fled to his eyes.

“No, don't you worry about us. That thirty dollars”—the first ten seemed already forgotten—“you can think of as a gift from the city.”

“Oh, I wouldn't have it no other way. You let my wife do all your work tomorrow.”

“You and she get settled. Forget us.”

Liz appeared with an awkward paper bag. There were to be no blankets, he deduced; she wasn't as soft as he feared.

Talkative as always when a guest was leaving, James asked, “Now, do you know how to get back? For Heaven's sake, don't take a taxi again. Take a bus and then the subway. Where is your place?”