In the living room, where the table had been moved in from the kitchen, he gave out Jules’ soap; and Hap, who was the first dentist in the family (and had got his nickname — Hap — because he was so happy), said: “Well, I’ll get my teeth real clean with this!”
“Now you don’t use that on your teeth,” Elsie said, “more than but once a week!”
“For the rest of the time, you just use tooth powder, like everybody else,” Dr. Corey said. “Why you have to tell a dentist what to brush his teeth with, I’ll never know!” Since her graduation from Dental College at Columbia, she’d shared an office with Hap.
They all laughed. “Tell us about Thanksgiving,” which had been only last week. “How was it this year?”
So he did — about the turkey and the dancing to the records, which Papa had allowed because it wasn’t Sunday, even though they made two trips to chapel, once in the morning and once at sunset. Right after his election, Papa had decided not to get a Victrola but a more expensive Edison Player. The medallion beside the flocked turntable said: “Diamond Disc Official Laboratory Model.” The song Sam and Lewy and John all liked and had played over and over to the point of exhaustive hilarity was the quarter-inch-thick record of Billy Rose and Ernest Hare singing Harry Von Tilzer’s “In Old King Tutankhamen’s Day,” with its infectious refrain: “Old King Tut-tut-tut-tut-tut-tut-tut…” though Jules and Laura preferred the other side: “Barney Google.” The other record Sam and Papa loved to play was the late Enrico Caruso and Mario Ancona singing the duet from Bizet’s The Pearl Fishers. In his study, Papa slipped the crank back into its metal clip on the dark wood and asked: “Do you want to ask Batouta the Moor to come in with us and listen?” (This month Batouta the Moor was Papa’s nickname for Lewy.) “But then, he’s probably out somewhere exploring.” (He was.) So they sat by themselves and listened to the cascading male voices, each rippling down over the other; and Sam would imagine weedy waters and flickering tidelights over submarine grottoes — not that that had much to do with Thanksgiving nor, really, was there much to say about it.
So he told them instead about Lewy and the poetry book with the gold star in it for excellence Lewy’d won in Mrs. Fitzgarn’s and what Reverend Fitzgarn had said about Papa’s sermon and about how John had brought the mule into Mama’s yard and had fallen off it and how it ate Mama’s flowers and she’d just about skinned him alive and — again — about the laughter at Hubert’s letter, when, after Thanksgiving dinner, Papa had read it out.
Once, when he paused, Elsie smiled: “I think we can let him stop now.”
Hap’s wife said: “It’s so good to hear how things are going. And it’s so good to have you up here, Sam.”
Then they talked about other things and laughed lots more and all said how much he’d grown.
Sam was, in fact (it had taken most of the day to register), as tall as Hubert now.
On the way back to Hubert’s rooms Sam saw his first skyscrapers — late that evening, when it was already dark. They’d stopped to stroll in Mount Morris. (Hubert had already given Sam the key and was going to walk Clarice home to her aunt and uncle’s at a Hundred-twentieth Street and Seventh Avenue.) In the November’s-end dark, the three of them climbed the stone steps to the high rocks. Then Hubert and Sam left Clarice, to climb up the rocks themselves. “Those lights over there, like pearls — that you can just see? — ” Hubert explained — “those are skyscrapers… mostly.”
Far away, specular and portentous, they glimmered behind haze-hung night. (It felt as if it might rain any moment.) Sam seemed to be looking across some black and insubstantial river to another city altogether — a city come apart from New York, drifting in fog, in air, in darkness, and wholly ephemeraclass="underline" the idea of a city — with no more substance than his memory of his memories on the train.
When they climbed down, Clarice was leaning against a low boulder. The park lamp behind her threw her into silhouette. “Now doesn’t she look older than the rocks among which she sits?” Hubert asked.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Clarice asked, her hands in her coat pockets, legs crossed under her skirt.
“My rag, my bone, my hank of hair; and she doesn’t care — ”
“Hu-bert — !” Clarice objected.
“I’m teasing you,” he said.
She stood. “Now what Sam — Eshu!” Clarice pulled her coat around her — “Sam should do, if he wants to see skyscrapers, is take a walk across the Brooklyn Bridge. That’s the way really to see New York.” (Sam had already realized Clarice was a person who said “really to see” and “truly to think.” She had declared, loudly and insistently at dinner, that she thought it particularly important Negroes speak with proper grammar. “After all, we’ve been here longer than most of these crackers!” It was practically an echo of Mama, down on the campus. “And that’s why you will not hear me split my infinitives!” “Or hear her say, even jokingly,” Hubert added, “a girl like I.’ ” That made Clarice laugh too. Still, those unified verbs sounded even stranger than her clipped, northern accent.) In the damp night, Clarice said, “That’s the city at its best — Eshu!” A second time she sneezed.
Hubert moved toward her. “We better get you home.”
Distant in the night-haze, the lights burned with soft, pearl-like fires — so different from what burned in Sam.
On their way down, wrapped ’round in shadow, Sam tried to remember Clarice’s body beneath the dress, beneath the coat she pulled even more tightly to her throat. That body had all sorts of lines, gentle, pleasant, that became clear under the fall of her skirt or sleeve when she’d leaned to pass this, sat back with an embarrassed smile, turned in her seat to hear what Hubert said. (Did Hubert ever kiss her? he wondered.) Under a park lamp, he saw her raise a lace-edged handkerchief, pulled over one knuckle, to her nose. Over Hubert’s arm around her shoulder, her breath added its own lace to the fog already wreathing her dark hair. Completing the thought begun minutes ago, she added: “Over the bridge — Eshu! That’s what I’d want to do.”
Sam’s first job in the city was washing walls for three guys who knew Hubert and were painters. He was fired loudly and ignominiously after a week. He just wasn’t fast enough. Perez — the loud, bony one — said, consolingly afterwards, that Sam was a smart boy and shouldn’t be doing stuff like that anyway. And Louis, the fat fellow (who spelled his name completely differently from Lewy down home), said Sam damned well ought to learn how to do stuff like that; smart or not, it didn’t hurt nobody to know how to wash a damned wall! The third one, the one he really liked — whose name was Prince, followed by something Caribbean, Marquez? Cinquez? — had said nothing to him at all, but had smiled at him a few times while they’d worked and had looked on seriously while Louis and Perez bawled him out.
There really wasn’t enough work anyway, Hubert explained that evening back at home — trying to make it easier for sulky Sam. People wanted their houses painted in spring and summer, when they could keep the place open and air it out. Not in winter. That’s why the fellows had been so touchy, because they weren’t making any money themselves.
Three days later Sam got another job as stockboy in Mr. Harris’s men’s haberdashery over on a Hundred-seventeenth Street — mostly packing things down in, and getting things up from, the cellar. The wreath on the door and the tinsel strung in front of the counter surprised him. And the heavy black girl who worked there and who looked like Milly Potts down home — though she had none of Milly’s sense of humor — wore a Christmas pin on her blouse. But then, Christmas was less than two weeks away.