The Street Sweeper (73 page)

‘I’m sorry you lost your job but there’s nothing I –’

‘Sure is cold, huh!’ the Mayor interjected. ‘Everything okay, folks?’

‘Yeah, we’re fine, thanks,’ said Dr Washington. ‘Like I said, I’m sorry, but there’s nothing I can do. I’m on the medical staff and that’s –’

‘No, no there
is
, Dr Washington, you could tell them that you saw me with him … I mean, you used to see me a lot … with Mr Mandelbrot. You could tell ’em that over in the Human Resources. You could tell ’em that we ‘came like friends. You could tell ’em in the Human Resources how you remember me and then –’

‘But I’m sorry, I don’t remember you.’

*

A few weeks after the funeral of Michelle’s grandmother, her husband Charles McCray caught up with his father in the Hungarian Pastry Shop on Amsterdam Avenue instead of on campus as he usually did.

‘Well, I just thought if you meet Adam here, why not me?’ he asked his father as they sipped their coffee.

‘Yeah, but I don’t see him here every week. You see him lately?’

‘No, not for a little while.’

‘I don’t mean to nag you, Charlie, but … I think you should.’

‘I know but … Is he okay?’

‘Actually he’s pretty good. I don’t get into the whole thing with Diana. I mean, I have but not for a while. But it’s his work, it’s going well. You should talk to him about it.’

‘That’s good. What did he say?’

William told him what he knew not only about Adam’s enquiry into the presence of black troops at the liberation of Dachau but also about his unearthing of Henry Border’s 1946 wire recordings from DP camps and his lead on a resistance movement in Auschwitz. The combination of Charles’ guilt at not having paid enough attention to his friend’s work plus his father’s enthusiastic and fairly detailed recollection of all that Adam had told him led Charles to call Adam to arrange to meet for lunch. There Adam put him up to date with what had happened at his meeting with Diana. There was no way either of them could put a positive
spin on what she had said but Adam was buoyed by his friend’s genuine interest in his work. It was no small thing to earn Charles’ professional interest and Charles felt a little ashamed when he noticed how much this interest meant to Adam.

‘Listen, you got to know … I really wish I could have done more.’

‘You talking about tenure?’ Adam asked and his friend nodded. ‘Charlie, I brought that on myself. We both know I did. Like a few things that haven’t worked out that well for me, I brought it on myself.’

‘Well, I wish I could have … I don’t know, maybe if we’d talked before you …’ Charles hesitated before finishing his own sentence. ‘I know, sometimes you want to talk to a friend without having to make an appointment.’ Adam smiled at his friend. It was a moment whose seed had been planted by William McCray a week or two earlier in the always crowded Hungarian Pastry Shop. It could have been planted at any time but somehow, despite its still being winter, the seed had taken that day the father and son had talked over coffee and a strawberry strudel.

‘Dad,’ Charles asked his father a little tentatively as he sipped the last of his coffee that afternoon, ‘I’ve always meant to ask you … Never really got ‘round to it. When Thurgood made the recommendation to the executive committee that they appoint Jake as LDF General Counsel, how did you feel?’

William McCray leaned back in his chair and thought for a moment before speaking.

‘Well, by about as early as May of ‘61 or certainly by the summer of that year, Thurgood was pretty confident Kennedy was going to give him the call and he’d get a judicial appointment of some kind or another. Couldn’t be sure of the level but he knew he’d better start thinking of a successor. And we knew that too.

‘So it was a matter of looking for the right person, right qualities as a lawyer and as an administrator, right seniority so as not to put too many noses out of joint. So who were the best of the more senior lawyers? I’d like to think I was one of them along with Jake and Connie Motley. More than thirty years had to pass before they appointed a woman.’

‘What about Carter?’

‘Bob Carter? Bob Carter … I think Thurgood probably regarded Bob as about the best legal mind he’d ever come across … and
nobody
wrote a better brief.’

‘So why not him?’

‘Well, there were personal problems between them … had been for a while. Also, Bob was with the NAACP then. You have to remember that by then the NAACP and the LDF were quite separate entities, had been for many years so Bob
couldn’t
be a candidate. They were separate institutions by then.’

William noticed Charles shifting uneasily in his seat.

‘I haven’t answered your question, have I?’

‘Yes you have. Well, in part,’ his son answered.

‘You mean, how did I feel, because he was white, because he was a Jew?’

‘Well, yeah, I guess.’

‘That he was Jewish didn’t enter into it, not for me. Of all the attorneys who signed the brief in
Brown
, only a few of them were white but of those that were, all but one were Jews. That stuff didn’t become an issue till much later.’

‘But you noticed that.’

‘No,
I
didn’t. Charles Black did. I’m remembering Charles Black pointing it out.’

‘Who was Charles Black, again?’

‘Charles Black was the white attorney who
wasn’t
Jewish.’

‘And that he was white, that Jake was white?’ Charles asked. His father leaned back in his chair.

‘No question there was a danger that it would open up the possibility for people to distort history and say that blacks had not been the intellectual force behind their own emancipation. That was certainly a danger, still is. But then there was the politics of the decision. It looked good to many of the people to whom we wanted it to look good.’

‘But what about you?’

‘What about me personally? Jake’s appointment made good news.
He
made good news. He was good at it.’ William saw that his son was still not completely satisfied so he went further.

‘Look, Charlie, some men do their best work
away
from the camera, quietly, diligently, consistently, but
out
of the limelight.’

Charles leaned in across the table and took his father’s hand in his and clasped it.

‘I know, Dad. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.’

*

Having already by chance once run into Dr Washington coming out of the York Avenue entrance of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center at a particular time in the afternoon, Lamont Williams, the street sweeper, member of the John Doe Fund’s Ready, Willing and Able team, made a point of being there at exactly the same time on another day. Over several nights in his late grandmother’s Co-op City apartment since he had last seen the oncologist he went over his earlier conversation with her. It seemed impossible to him that she would not, with some effort, perhaps on both their parts, remember him as the Building Services worker who had so often visited Dr Washington’s patient, Henryk Mandelbrot. He needed to approach her again and when he saw her at that same time exiting the York Avenue entrance he knew he had to ignore his nervousness and try again.

‘Dr Washington, I’m Lamont Williams.’

‘Yes?’

‘Now I’m not crazy or dangerous or nothin’ but I just need to talk to you about your patient who died, Henryk Mandelbrot.’

She remembered him from his previous approach to her on York Avenue and was not frightened of him. There were many people on the street, medical and non-medical staff from the hospital, people visiting the hospital and random passers-by. Although she did not notice, the Mayor of East 67th and York was also there. Lamont Williams was too intent on restating his case to Dr Washington to notice the Mayor but the Mayor had noticed both of them again. He was again perplexed by the interaction of the young doctor and the street sweeper.

‘Just for a couple of minutes. Don’t mean to take up too much of your time.’ Standing near visitors and staff smoking on their break, she was perplexed more than anything else.

‘Okay, Mr Williams, what do you want to tell me about Henryk Mandelbrot?’

‘Well … well, now, he was in Auschwitz. It was a death camp in Poland. Did you know that?’

‘I knew he was a Holocaust survivor.’

‘Auschwitz. You remember the number tattoo … on his arm, on his left forearm? He got it in Auschwitz.’

‘I didn’t know that.’

‘He was in the
Sonderkommando
there. They were the prisoners forced to deal with the bodies there in the crematoria, the gas chambers and the ovens. He was part of the resistance inside the camp, I mean resistance from inside, from
within
the
Sonderkommando
. There was a
Sonderkommando
uprising. Did you know that, Doctor?’ In the chill of the winter air the words he spoke were accompanied by steam. People walked past them going uptown, some downtown and the Mayor looked on.

‘No, I didn’t know that. I have to admit, I didn’t know that.’

‘Yeah, he worked in the crematoria there,’ Lamont said, rising to his theme.

‘I still don’t know why you want to tell me all this.’

‘’Cause we were friends.’

‘You and Henryk Mandelbrot?’

‘That’s right and he told me all sorts of things.’

‘But why does it matter to you … that I know you were … friends?’

‘Look, Dr Washington, I know we’re very different people, me and him, different background, race, age … everything. But I met him in the hospital, right there actually outside that door, in my first week. He was in the hospital two times. Right? First time he stayed a while but the second he was in just a few days and then he died. Remember? Over the two times he told me his life story and I told him some of mine and before he died he told me he wanted me to have that candleholder, the Jewish candleholder.’

‘The
menorah?’

‘Right. The family brought in his
menorah
but he gave it to me and when he died I took it home.’

‘I can see this is important to you but I still don’t know why you’re telling me all this.’

‘’Cause they said I stole the
menorah
and they fired me on account of this. Now, I need this job and you saw me with him. You saw me visit him. Don’t you remember? He made jokes about us, like … like he was going to set us up or something. That was just once or twice but I was always there at the end of my shift. You got to remember.’

‘Even if I do, what difference does it make?’

‘Do you remember?’ The question hung frozen in the air.

‘I think I do,’ she said, now looking him in the eye. ‘But even if I do, what difference does it make?’

‘You could tell ’em in the Human Resources that you saw me there all the time … that we were friends, Mr Mandelbrot and me.’

‘But even if I told them that I’d seen you there, often even, what does it prove? Even if I vouched for your friendship, even if I could do that, what difference would it make? Friends sometimes steal from friends.’

‘What use would I have for a
menorah?’

‘I don’t know. I guess you could sell it.’

‘I still have it.’

‘I don’t know, Mr Williams.’

‘It’s Lamont, Lamont Williams.’

The oncologist looked around for a moment and rubbed her hands together to warm them. ‘I can see this is important to you, Lamont,’ she said, her tone now changed, softened, ‘but what difference would it make to Human Resources if I did say –’

Lamont interrupted her as the Mayor looked on. The M66 was arriving. It slowed, stopped, exhaled and opened its doors. Passengers began getting off. It was cold.

‘He was born 15 December 1922 in the town of Olkusz,’ Lamont Williams began. ‘His father was a butcher. He escaped from the ghetto at Dabrowa Gornicza.’ There was desperation now in his voice mixed with a resolve. People were getting off the bus. The Mayor needed to say something to the driver but felt compelled to keep watching them.

‘What?’ the oncologist asked. ‘The ghetto
where?’

‘Dab-rov-a Gorn-itch-a,’ Lamont Williams answered on the partially snow-covered sidewalk of York Avenue. She looked at him. Did he speak Polish? What kind of African American street sweeper was this?

‘Dab-rov-a Gorn-itch-a,’ he repeated. He was going to have to speak louder. The bus was idling, people were lined up to get on.

‘Dab-rov-a Gorn-itch-a, it was one of the ghettoes. It was the one he was put in. Doctor, I have a daughter. I need this job.’

The ‘Mayor’ waved to the driver. He looked at the doctor and the street sweeper still talking. The M66 headed off to the west side on its crosstown journey. The end of the line was also the beginning.

*

It was early May of 1960 and President Eisenhower was both embarrassed and angry. He had denied publicly that the plane that had gone missing over the Soviet Union had been a spy plane only to have Premier Khrushchev announce that not only had the American U2 spy plane been shot down but that they had its pilot, Francis Gary Powers, and all of this only days before a scheduled East–West summit to be held in Paris. The papers were full of it and Elise Border carried the story under her arm as she raced home from work in time to greet her father who was due in from the airport. Where was she going to put everything? Her father was moving out from Chicago to be with her. She was the only family Henry Border had and his health had been poor. She felt she had no choice but to offer to share her apartment with him even though it was cramped enough as it was. What would she do if she met someone? Perhaps it would be only a temporary measure. But her father had been unwell and he had to come first.

Greenwich Village had meant nothing to him when she had said it over the phone, MacDougal Street even less. But a sixth-floor walk-up was immediately understood by everybody, Elise, her father and especially by the men who were paid to carry his possessions up to the two-bedroom apartment in the old brick tenement. Most of what they brought up in the cardboard boxes Arch Sanasarian had helped him pack was the remnant of his career. There were very few personal items he took with
him. But the work he brought over, which she subsequently arranged to have housed at IIT in Chicago after his death, was substantial and the movers took slight comfort from the fact that they could go in and out of the building as the rhythm of their work dictated without continually needing to ask to be let in. This was because the street door didn’t lock and it was just as well because the doorbell was broken. At forty dollars a month it was all Elly Border could afford.