Over the next few years, half-a-dozen-odd encounters with Paul Robeson, now in a concert, now in another play — along with the tremendous presence Robeson acquired in the black community — soon muddled for Sam the exact memory of the first time he’d seen Robeson on stage. Had he seen All God’s Chillun? No. But then, what was the name of the play he’d seen at the Lafayette? Had he seen Robeson in The Emperor Jones, that alternated with Chillun at the Provincetown through that spring and summer? No — but some years later he saw the movie. And there was so much talk about, and so many articles on, Robeson, that, on occasions one or two decades by, Sam said he’d seen Chillun because he knew he’d seen something with Robeson in it from around that time. And when, in 1944, Sam and his second wife attended — with Hubert and his second wife — the Robeson production of Othello at the Metropolitan Opera House, with José Ferrer as Iago, Uta Hagen as Desdemona, Margaret Webster as Emilia, and Phillip Drury as Cassio, they all went very much as Negroes who’d frequently seen Robeson perform.
Sam had seen him just not quite so frequently.
He remembered the little girls at the post office a good while. Taking care of them for even those moments had allowed him to retain their ruined visages with a kind of pleasure.
But the other thing Sam remembered was the first time he walked across Brooklyn Bridge.
Two weeks after the full moon, Clarice told him: “If you’re going down there, honey, you’ve got to dress warmer than that. May up here just isn’t like May where you and Hubert come from.”
Thoughtfully, Sam stood at the secondhand bureau Hubert had gotten him just for his things. (He had on Hubert’s long johns.) With what little was left over from his pay, after he’d contributed his two dollars a month to Corey and Elsie for food and three-dollars-fifty-cents a week for his half of the rent, Sam had still saved enough to buy first one, another, then a third magic trick from underground Cathay.
Sam fingered the objects on the dresser.
Just that afternoon, down on the table in the hall, he’d found a brown paper package, wrapped in twine, the mailman had brought — from Lewy! Ripping off the paper, he’d found May’s Weird Tales, featuring the first installment of a novel by… Harry Houdini!
Imprisoned With the Pharaohs.
Folded up and slipped around the first pages, Lewy’s letter said: “High Priest Manetho here to Imhotep off spying in the Upper Kingdom,” which made Sam smile at their mutual joke from the afternoon before he’d left that he’d forgotten till now: that Sam was supposed to be a spy in the north and report back to Lewy and John what was going on. “Hi, y’all! You have got a birthday coming up, as I recall. And I got this yesterday — just finished it last night. (I wonder if it’s really by Houdini?) Consider it your present. And write back quickly and tell me what you think. Though I don’t expect a letter from you too soon, as I’m sure you’re awash in beautiful women and bathtub gin (while freckled Rust-Top and I do content us with simple moonshine) and the general sins of the northern fleshpots — and you simply haven’t the time. But I know you: you’ll wait (or try to wait) for the next two installments and read the whole thing at a swoop! But if, in another two months, I haven’t heard from you, then I shall do me magic and ju-ju spells on the assumption that thou hast forgotten thy brothers in the southlands.”
Sam slid the oversized magazine into the top drawer, wondering whether he’d really have the patience to wait for the next two installments before reading it in a night.
The first of Mr. Horstein’s tricks he’d bought was the magic coin that disappeared. Actually, the trick was just a length of black elastic with a clip on one end you could fasten up your sleeve and a bit of gum on the other that you could stick to any quarter or nickel. But now, as he kneaded the stickum, he realized it was losing its adhesion. More and more times it pulled loose from the coin, letting it fall to the rug as often as it snapped the metal glittering from sight.
The most effective trick — and the most expensive (eighty-five cents) — was a little guillotine in which you could cut a cigarette in half; but if you put your finger through the same hole, you could make the blade slip aside so that it appeared — magically — to pass through your finger, leaving it unhurt and whole.
The third one — though it had cost only a dime — didn’t work at alclass="underline" a hollow, metal cup in the form of a thumb’s first joint. Smoking a cigarette, without letting anyone see, you secreted the false thumb in your fist. Then you took the cigarette and poked it into your fingers, putting it out on the bottom of the metal cup the false thumb made. You kept packing the cigarette in, until it was inside your fist completely. Finally you used your other thumb to tamp it down further — only you slid your thumb into the false metal one, got it seated good — then opened both your hands.
The cigarette had disappeared. And nobody was supposed to be able to see the thumb cap (with the cigarette inside) over your real one.
The cap was large enough so that, when Hubert tried it on, it just fell off. And Hubert’s hands weren’t small. Still, Sam’s own thumb was too big to wedge into it. Also, the thumbnail on the cap didn’t look like the broad, oversized nails curving down over Sam’s fingers. And it was painted a luminous pink, that, when Clarice examined it, she said didn’t look like anyone’s skin color she knew — black, white, gray, or grizzly!
Hubert had suggested Sam ask Mr. Horstein for his dime back. But then, though he liked Mr. Horstein, he was still a little afraid of him (he was a Jew, after all), and a dime wasn’t a lot.
Sam pushed all three tricks off the dresser, into the drawer on top of Weird Tales, and closed it.
And, for Clarice, he put on his suit jacket. And his cap.
“Remember — ” That was Hubert, reading the paper in the wing chair; he had folded it back to an advertisement for a new kind of suitcase, made from something called… Naugahyde? “Elsie wants us all over there by four.” Hubert looked across the dark room from under the tasseled lamp. “Since your birthday’s this coming Tuesday, she and Corey are probably going to do something a little special today. So don’t you be late, now.”
When he asked the man behind the bars how to get to the Brooklyn Bridge from the station, Sam was told he should have gotten off at City Hall — which was closer. This was the old stop (Brooklyn Bridge) for workers who repaired the bridge — not for people who wanted to walk across it. But if he went two blocks to the east and turned left, he’d come to the walkway.
Beyond the Oriental ornateness of the Pulitzer Building, he saw the structure between — and above — the swoop and curve of trolley tracks, the girders of the El.
It really was immense!
He turned left onto Rose Street, which took him down under one of the bridge’s stone archways. The arches left and right were walled and windowed, with padlocked doors.
Did people live there, in the base of the bridge? Sam turned into the stone underpass.
Hung from the middle of the overhead stone, its rim painted fresh green, a wooden sign read:
BRIDGE WALKWAY
Beside it was an opening in the stone. The stairway’s walls were close set. As he stood there, two colored girls with gingham showing from under their yellow cloth coats ran down. He glimpsed their shiny shoes, their white socks over their little-girl ankles, bare little-girl legs above — and smiled, as they descended toward him, out of the shadow, laughing — while an older sister in a straw hat with a grownup-looking bluejay feather came down behind, more sedately. She was almost as old as Clarice — and, from the way she turned her shoulders and nodded so faintly without a smile, clearly considered herself to look smart.