“Sure,” Sam said. “All right.”
As Hubert walked into his own room, Sam settled back down in the bed. Very much awake, he pulled the covers to his chin. Even if he didn’t know what might happen in the vestibules of subway cars during rush hour, or what was worse than passing water or doing your business, though some of his ideas about it might have surprised Hubert, Sam did know — more or less — what “doing it” was. And he knew it was a pretty bad thing even to think about, especially for a bishop’s son — and even more so with a minister’s daughter. Alina Fitzgarn? He could hardly remember what she looked like, except that she was dark and quiet and had been a good friend of Milly’s, till her parents had sent her away. Did her going away have anything to do, Sam wondered suddenly, with Hubert?
For a while Sam thought about getting out all his magic tricks, new and old, to look them over in the moonlight. But the rectangle of light, that had flooded the rose rug like white oil and lay half on the wall, did not touch the bed. Maybe he should put on his long johns, turn on the light, take Weird Tales from the top drawer, sit over in the wing chair, and read the first installment of Houdini…? (But would he remember it clearly enough when he got the next issue? Lewy read everything right away, then read it again and could tell you all the contradictions between the various parts and didn’t mind at all if you told him what happened next in the story. Sam reread the stories but couldn’t spot the contradictions to save himself. And John wouldn’t let you tell him anything, though he could get real excited and had a hard time not telling you.) Finally Sam pushed back the covers, stood up, and stepped — naked — to the window.
For four, five, ten seconds he looked at the black windowframe across the alley. Then he pulled the drape and curtain from where he’d put it back over the wing chair’s edge (odd that Hubert had never commented on it; but then, in his family, there were so many things they somehow didn’t talk about) to let it swing before the glass, cutting out most of the light.
Then Sam turned, bent his knees, and jumped for the bed, to land in a crouch on the thin mattress, springs shrieking beneath (from inside Hubert said: “Sam…?”), grabbed up the covers and shoved his feet under the quilt, to slide down between the sheets’ pools and puddles of warmth and chill, shivering on his back for seconds, clutching the covers to his chin, grinning. (Suppose she’d been awake, in her dark room, looking toward her window. Had she seen him in his, in the moonlight… naked?) He lay awake a long time, in wait for morning.
A month later, Sam had lost much of the business about the building of the bridge — though, for a while, working in Mr. Harris’s basement, he tried and tried to recall it. In September, Lewy sent him another letter, apologizing for not having forwarded the next two installments of Imprisoned With the Pharaohs, though he was certain by now it wasn’t really by Houdini at all. That same week Sam started night school. Mr. DeCourtenay, his English teacher, went on at such lengths in the first class about how important it was that they expose themselves only to the finest and greatest of what had been written in English literature, Sam was pretty sure Mr. DeCourtenay didn’t want them reading anything written in America at all — and certainly not if it had been written since nineteen hundred. But why go to school if — this time — he wasn’t going to take it seriously? So he put all ideas of adventure magazines out of his mind — which seemed to be featuring less and less of the Eastern, Egyptian, and Arabian stories he liked, anyway.
Eleven years later in the sixth year of the Depression, a partner in his own floundering Harlem haberdashery, Sam found a book about the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge and, reading it, recalled a surprising amount about it; but, a week after, had forgotten much of it again; and again tried to remember. After eighteen years, when, in his second marriage, he would have his first son, also named Sam, he finally forgot the last fragments of what had happened on the bridge in between — the young man with his ravings, the rower in the boat below.
For a while, though, he did remember sitting naked on his bed, cross-legged, late at night, the curtains pulled back, fingering magic tricks in the moonlight, after Hubert had come home from arguing with some friends after classes and Sam had finally asked him about what had happened back home, all those years ago, when Papa got so mad he’d chained Hubert to the water pump. But, by then, of course, he’d confused that first evening with another several months on.
Well before that, however, he forgot the white woman on the train. He forgot the black woman across the alley.
But, as he always remembered the fields at the bridge’s Brooklyn end, he always remembered
VII.
three brownskinned girls coming down between narrow-set stones, with their yellow coats, black shoes, white socks, a blue feather in the straw hat of the oldest: three inhabitants, delicate as fire, of another city entirely,
though, during the rest of his life, he spoke of them only seven or eight times, all when visiting cities in which he did not live, and only if talking to strangers.
— Amherst / Ann Arbor / New York
ERIC, GWEN,
AND D.H. LAWRENCE’S
ESTHETIC OF UNRECTIFIED FEELING
“It has never bothered me a bit when people say that what I am doing is not art,” Rauschenberg told me. “I don’t think of myself as making art. I do what I do because I want to, because painting is the best way I’ve found to get along with myself.”
Well, so much for euphoria.
I remember standing beside my father’s knee, while, in his blue-black suit, he sat at the mahogany kitchen table and taught me to sing, “Mairzy doats and dozy doats an little lambsy divey. A kidledy divey too — wouldn’t you?” It came out, when you actually sang it, “Mares eat oats and does eat oats and little lambs eat ivy…”