You Are My Heart and Other Stories (3 page)

Mr. Pidgeon worked as a caretaker and groundskeeper for the Dutch Reformed Church on Flatbush Avenue that was across from Erasmus, and sometimes, when I saw him in the yard there, raking leaves or tending to gravestones, he would wave to me and I'd go into the yard and we'd talk for a while,
mostly about my progress with the choir. “Control is the secret of beautiful song,” he'd always say to me, the way he did to all of us at the start of choir practice, and he'd urge me to remember that passion without control was as useless as control without passion. If I remembered that, he told me, I could become a pretty good singer.

During the first few practices at Karen's church, I found myself in awe of the way other singers could make their voices do these intricate flips and wiggles that verged on screeches, and at how they could pull them back and turn them into soft liquid harmonies, or could move from minor to major and back again without the musical score telling them when to do it, and I was determined to be able to sing like them. I practiced hard and after a few sessions, and once I was warmed up, I found that I could get to the really high notes and could throw in harmonies that made the music richer and stranger—and I also found, with practice, that I could modulate my voice so that, almost instantaneously, I could get it to go from a full-throated howl to a soft whisper.

Until this time, I'd never thought of Karen in the way I thought of white girls I grew up with: as girls one might want to touch, hold hands with, or kiss. Now, though, especially after a practice or a service, I couldn't think of her in any other way. What was cockeyed was that when I was with her I felt incredibly comfortable and incredibly awkward at the same time. And when her Uncle Joshua or the Reverend Kinnard said “Let us pray,” and she closed her eyes, lowered her head, and drew in a slow, deep breath, I felt something else entirely: a stillness inside me that was like the stillness I sensed in her. I would clasp my hands and lower my head too, but I wouldn't close my eyes because I loved looking sideways and watching her in profile, and when we were apart the rest of the week, and for years to come when I found myself in difficult times, I would often summon up a picture of how beautiful and peaceful she looked in these moments, and this would help me through.

The Friday night before Christmas vacation, we were scheduled to play James Madison at home. They had beaten us on their court in early December—our only defeat so far—but had lost one other game, so that if we beat them this time, we'd move into first place in our division and be on our way to getting an automatic first-round bye to the city championships.

This was my first season on the team, but because we were usually way ahead early into the second half, I was getting to play more than I'd expected to. I wasn't scoring much, but I was distributing the ball well and playing solid defense during the five or six minutes a game the coach called on me. Everybody knew how intense I was—in team scrimmages it was as if my life depended on every single play: if I didn't score, or steal the ball, or if the man I was guarding scored, I
died
!—but what Mr. Ordover, our coach, praised me for—and this, since I'd started going to choir practice, was new for me—was that for all my seemingly madman ways, once I was in the game I could focus and play under control so that I rarely made a turnover, or a mistake on defense.

We broke the game open early on when, during a six minute stretch, Johnny and Olen went on a tear and we outscored Madison 21 to 3. Johnny was having his best game of the year, outplaying the Madison center, Rudy LaRusso (who went on to have a long NBA career after being All-American at Dartmouth), and winding up with 32 points. Olen wasn't far behind, with 24, but best of all was that with a solid lead the coach put me in before halftime to give Jimmy Geller, our regular point guard, a rest, and when the guy guarding me dropped off to double-team Johnny or Olen, I fired away, hitting four straight shots from the top of the key.

We were a pretty happy crew that night, and in the man-byman evaluation Mr. Ordover did after every game, he said that what was most important about my contribution wasn't the points I scored—I was third high scorer, with thirteen—but the
intelligence with which I played. Intelligence, he declared, was what separated the very good ballplayers from the rest.

Most Friday nights after home games, we'd all get together in a back room at Garfield's Cafeteria, where, when the team walked in, the crowd would erupt in cheers. This week though, Jane Friedlander, who lived on Bedford Avenue near Midwood High School, a more middle-class section than ours, had asked me to spread the word that she'd gotten permission from her parents to have a victory party at her house.

As soon as I came out of the gym with Olen and the rest of the team, I spotted Karen—she was across the street with a group of her friends—and I didn't hesitate: I went up to her and told her that Olen and I were going to the party and asked if she wanted to come too. She didn't hesitate either, and after we got to Jane's house and took off our jackets and put down our gym bags, and while everybody stopped dancing and crowded around to tell us how great we were, she stayed next to me.

“So,” she asked a minute or so after things had quieted down, “are you going to ask me to dance, or what?”

“Sure,” I said, and I took her hand and we walked into the middle of the living room. I put my arm around her waist—the record that was playing was one of my favorites: Eddy Arnold singing “To Each His Own”—and I was so excited to feel her close to me—she let her cheek rest against mine the instant we started dancing—that it didn't even occur to me that people might think it unusual to see a white guy dancing with a black girl.

It was only later on in the evening, when the crowd had thinned out and I was standing around with some of the guys and going over plays from the game, that I realized Olen was gone, that Karen was the only black person left at the party, and that maybe people were noticing she was the only girl I'd danced with all night.

Usually at parties—or, the previous few years, when I was on
our synagogue basketball team and we traveled to other synagogues for Saturday night games-and-dances—I danced with lots of different girls, and most times by the end of the evening I would choose one girl to walk home with and maybe get to make out. But this time I danced with Karen every time they played a slow dance, and each time we moved around the floor (she told me a few times how much she liked having me hum softly in her ear) we got closer and closer until, instead of letting her right hand rest in my left hand, she put both arms around my neck and I put both my arms around her waist.

A few minutes before midnight, Jane's mother came down the stairs and said that our parents were probably wondering where we were and that we should consider the next record the last dance. Jane put on Tony Bennett singing “Cold, Cold Heart,” walked up to me and, in a voice that sounded just like her mother's, announced that I hadn't danced with her all night and that I now had the opportunity to correct this significant omission.

So I danced with Jane, and by the time the record ended, Karen was gone. I caught up to her within a few blocks, and when I asked if she was mad at me for not dancing the last dance with her, she hesitated, shook her head sideways, told me not to worry about it, and slipped her hand into mine. We held hands all the way home, and when we got to her house—all the lights except for the porch light were out—she tugged on my hand and led me along the side to the rear door. She let go of my hand then, leaned back against the door, and closed her eyes.

“You can kiss me if you want,” she said.

 

Because my parents both worked in Manhattan, they didn't get home most evenings until after seven, which meant that all through January and early February, from the time I got home from basketball practice until my parents arrived, Karen and I were able to be alone in my apartment. We were careful, and
would enter my building separately, and sometimes, if the coast wasn't clear, she'd go back to her house and we'd only get to be together for choir practice. Walking to and from church, though, we'd duck into doorways to kiss, and sometimes we'd find a car with its door unlocked and would climb in and make out in the backseat. A few times, too, Karen would wind her way through the backyards and alleys of my block, go down to our cellar, ring the kitchen bell—our apartment was on the fifth floor of a six-story building—and I would haul her up in the dumbwaiter.

The first few weeks we were together after Jane's party, we would neck until our lips were almost raw, and I couldn't believe how wonderful it was simply to kiss again and again and again—long, sweet, delicious kisses—and to try out all kinds of things neither of us had ever done before. By the second week of January, Karen was letting me touch her on the outside of her sweater, and a week or so later she let me unhook her brassiere and feel her breasts. After this, we took to lying together on my bed, naked from the waist up, and moving against each other, my leg between hers, or her legs around my waist, until I came. The first time this happened, I panicked and kept saying how sorry I was—“I'm sorry, I'm sorry, oh God, I'm really sorry”—and how this would never, ever happen again, but when I said this Karen just pulled me closer to her, stroked the back of my neck, and kissed me softly on the cheek.

“You are my heart,” she said then, words she repeated the next few times we were together. When the same thing had happened about a dozen times, though, she started a new routine where whenever I said I was sorry, instead of pulling me to her, she would start giggling, after which I would insist that I was really,
really
sorry.

“Sure you are,” she would say, then add: “But I'll bet it felt really,
really
good.”

When she said this, I'd answer that it was certainly
possible
that it felt really, really good, and we'd burst into laughter, and grab
and tickle each other until one of us had wrestled the other off the bed and onto the floor. Sometimes, too—one of our favorite things—we would stay there on the floor, face down, one of us on top of the other, pressing against each other as hard as we could for as long as we could.

When we were in Karen's home, or in church, we never held hands or touched, but the first time we went for a walk together when it wasn't to or from church—this was on a Saturday afternoon, in Prospect Park—she suddenly stopped and glared at me.

“Are you my brother, or what?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “Of course not.”

“Then why aren't you holding my hand?”

I took her hand, and after this whenever we were together, except for when we were on my block, or near her home, or in church—and even in the hallways at school between classes—we would hold hands or walk with our arms around each other.

Because we didn't dare make out in her home, and because our time in my apartment was limited to an hour or so a few afternoons a week, what happened was that we came to spend most of our time together talking. On weekends, and during late February and early March, when my father got laid off and was home all the time—we'd find luncheonettes on Flatbush Avenue, or on Empire Boulevard near the Botanic Gardens and Ebbets Field, and spend hours talking while we drank tea and hot chocolate, and ate toasted English muffins and French fries.

Although everyone at school knew we were going together, and some students and even a few guys on the team began giving us the cold shoulder—not returning our hellos, or crossing to the other side of the street if they saw us coming—and though doing what was considered forbidden back then (
West Side Story
didn't become a movie until a half-dozen years later) may have been part of what made our being together exciting, when we were apart and I thought of being with her again, I
found myself looking forward to our
conversations
—to all the things I wanted to tell her—as much as I did to our physical closeness, because no matter how much we talked, when it was time for us to separate and return to our homes, I always felt we'd hardly even
begun
to talk.

Some of the time we talked about ordinary stuff: our teachers, or students we knew and which ones we thought were for real and which ones were phonies, or about the kinds of things Olen and I had always talked about—basketball, college, and what we wanted to do after college. We talked about our families too, but in a different way from how Olen and I had. With Olen, conversations were mostly about how we would do anything to get away and be on our own, and about what we'd do when we got there, but with Karen, I found myself talking more about what I
felt
about my family—about what it was like to be an only child with parents who made each other miserable and who took their misery out on me. I talked about how angry I got sometimes—totally out of control—and how this made me do some of the crazy things I did so that I could get my parents angry back at me and then have a justification for shouting at them or storming out of the house.