Hubert was asking her if everything were all right. She was saying, in subdued tones, in an accent that put her well to the west of Raleigh: “Why, thank ya — thank ya, young gen’l’man. Ah’m Mrs. Callista Arkady and Ah’m goin’ to the funeral of mah son. It’s so kind of y’all to help a bereaved mother. Thank ya — God’ll thank y’all. Thank y’all so much!”
Before turning off, the porter leaned over to Sam, to explain softly, sullenly, snappishly: “She didn’t tip me none! When she first got on the JC, yesterday, I took as much time with her as with anybody else — I did!” John Brown’s accent was considerably to the north. “But she didn’t tip me. You don’t got enough to pay your tips, you don’t ride the train! Even niggers got to know that!”
“Yes, but she’s still a — ” he was about to say “lady,” while he wondered should he give John Brown a nickel. (That’s what John D. Rockefeller tipped his train porter; it had said so in a northern magazine.) Of course the porter hadn’t touched Sam’s bags at all — and, as well, he’d swung back up into the car by now to help the other, white, and — certainly — better heeled passengers.
The woman plowed — mournfully — up the platform through the packs of porters and debarkees, when Hubert turned back to him:
“Well, now — Sam! And how are you there — ” to clap him on both shoulders, then, with his blue bow tie and buttoned-up double breasted showing between tan coat flaps, to give Sam a bear-like, brotherly hug. “So you got here after all!” In almost the same gesture, Hubert hefted up the wicker trunk, leaving Sam with the leather case. “How’s everybody down at the school?”
Sam followed Hubert up the platform, behind the uniformed Negro pushing the baggage cart — far enough ahead so that it would be difficult to catch up and get their bags on. “Mama’s fine, Papa’s fine. Papa says you should write him another letter like the last long one, tellin’ him about the boys in your class. He read that one out to all of us, at Thanksgiving dinner. It made Mama laugh so!”
Hubert chuckled, as Mrs. Arkady vanished around passengers descending, like billows, from the train’s several doors. As he pushed after Hubert through the crowd, Sam looked aside two or three times, expecting to see a blue-eyed child staring at him over its mother’s knitted gray shoulder. But apparently the family for whom there’d been no room in the white cars had gotten off at some prior local stop, so that, Sam realized, with the myriad details that were his train trip north, they too had sunk into yesterday’s consuming sea.
Now and again, Sam glanced at the black ceiling, crossed by pipes, girders, cables, and hung with incandescent bulbs in conical shades, insides enameled white. Train stations, Sam thought, even ones this central and this grand, should sit out under sky, with, yes, an indoor waiting room to one side. But as many times as he’d heard Grand Central Terminal mentioned, it had never occurred to him it would be a structure that wholly closed over… well (he looked through a dozen dark columns above how many trains), a dozen tracks at least! “Hubert,” Sam asked, “where is the sky…?” thinking his brother, two steps ahead, would not even hear the — after all — ridiculous question.
But at the ramp’s end, as, with the crowd, they pushed through a low entrance with a wrought metal transome above, sound around them became hollow and reverberant. They’d stepped into a vast space. With his free hand, Hubert pointed straight up. “They put that there — for folks like you.”
Sam looked.
The hall’s arched ceiling was watery blue — tile blue. Set here and there in it were lights. The whole was filigreed over with gold: a crab, the head and forelegs of a winged horse, a scorpion, a shaggy-haired warrior holding up a club in one hand and, on his other arm, hefting a shaggy pelt. A gilded line, the zodiacal circle, curved to cross another, the ecliptic. Sam stopped, set down his case. People with small bags jostled him. A flat of baggage rumbled by. Directly above was pictured a gilded bee, a pair of carpenter’s triangles beneath her. Awed, Sam pulled his cap from his pocket and, still gazing up, positioned it on his head.
Beyond a central booth bearing above it its own multi-faced spherical time keeper, far bigger across than two tall men laid out foot to foot, a great clock hung between columns.
Curlicued arrows at their tips, oar-long hands lay a diametric certainty across its face, a horizon ruled on the rising moon, on the setting sun. Short hand lower at the left and long hand higher at the right told Sam it was within seconds, one way or the other, of eleven past eight — a slant horizon forward of the dark prow of his trip, lifting and listing from spurious waters, if not the pointer on some turn and bank indicator of the sort Sperry had been putting into aeroplanes since the war’s close, an artificial horizon unknown to him a year ago, when he’d watched John, shirtless in the field, with his rusty hair and freckled skin the hue of a tobacco leaf, play at being a bomber, dancing like a deranged Indian over red earth, feet — blam! blam! — on the earth’s red flesh, running into waves of hip-high grass, holding one hand aloft, thumb and little finger spread from the others, swooping left, turning right, blood remembering some aeronautic invasion, crying Vrummmmmmmmmmmmm, while Sam and Lewy stood at the field’s edge, laughing, clapping, celebrating fantastic catastrophes.
John borrowed a mule from the older boys down at the agi-barn and rode it up to the house, big boots flapping at its slate-colored flanks.
Mama ran out to shake her apron at them. “Get him out of here! Get him out! Boy, what do you think you’re doing? He gets in my Swiss chard and I’ll skin you alive, so help me!”
(Sam had heard her swear like that maybe twice in his life. That’s probably why he remembered it.)
The mule jerked to the side — and John slipped right to the ground. Then Mama started laughing. Splayed on the grass, John was laughing too.
“Get up… from there, John — ” Mama called, between hysteric eruptions. “And get him… out of here!” while the mule wandered over to the porch steps and ate a hollyhock.
The hands’ exact slant was repeated on the smaller, spherical clock’s four faces.
Sam and Hubert made their way through waves of men and women. Again, Sam the Navigator gazed up at sky-tiles like an overturned sea.
For a moment, not the distant lights of the Pegasus in their gilded starbursts — across from the balcony at the halls’ right side, across from Orion above squared pilasters practically without capitals — but the gold lines with which Pegasus was drawn, suggested a caricature of Callista Arkady’s broad, veiled face, but with an ecstatic smile, gazing down.
With some gentleness, as people plunged in echo by, Hubert said: “Come on, Sam,” to bring his eyes down. “We have to get the train.”
The train — this train — was a subway. They didn’t even step outside to get to it. Going down the stairs, Hubert asked him: “You got a nickel?”
At the steps’ bottom, again Sam put his suitcase down, pushed into his pants pocket — feeling scrape his wrist the ten dollar bill Lucius had told Mama should be safety-pinned there, because Sam was going to New York, where things could happen — to pull out his coins. On his palm, Sam forefingered aside the fifty-cent piece, two dimes, two nickels, and five, six, seven, eight pennies: change from the Coca-Cola he’d bought on the train platform yesterday, which, there, had cost two cents more than at the colored grocery —
“Come on,” Hubert said. “I’ll pay for you. I got two — come on, Sam! This is New York; you can’t dawdle here!”