“I loved that goddamn son of yours,” she said, and suddenly she was crying.
My first reaction was to look quickly around the bar. The only person watching us was the waiter. I turned to Jennifer, covered her hand with my own, and said, “Don’t, Jennifer. Please.”
“I can cry if I want to,” she said.
“All right, cry. But here, take this, dry your eyes...”
“We shouldn’t have told you,” she said. “Keep your damn handkerchief!”
“Jennifer, please!”
“We should have gone off and got married and never told any of you about it.”
“Okay, but that’s not what...”
“We should have known better. You’re all full of crap, each and every one of you. Honest Sam Eisler. Sends an eighteen-year-old kid to Puerto Rico for an abortion! I was only eighteen! Damn it, I don’t want your fucking handker-chief!” she said, and shoved my hand aside.
The waiter materialized again. He was wearing a stern and ominous look. He studied me solemnly for a moment and then said, “This person bothering you, miss?”
Without looking up at him, Jennifer said, “No, you’re bothering me! Would you please go away and leave us alone?”
“Because if he is, miss...”
“Oh, my God!” Jennifer said.
“If he is...”
Jennifer suddenly seized my hand fiercely and looked up at the waiter, her eyes glistening, her face streaming tears. “This man is my lover,” she said. “We meet...”
“Him?” the waiter said.
“Him, yes! We meet here secretly at the Chicago airport, and now you’re ruining everything for us.” She rose suddenly. “Come on, Sam,” she said, “let’s get out of here,” and walked swiftly away from the table. I paid the check while the waiter apologized yet another time, and then I collected the luggage, and carried it in two trips to where Jennifer was waiting outside the bar. Her face was dry. Her eyes still glistened.
“Well,” she said, “thank you for the drinks, Mr. Eisler.”
“I think I prefer Sam,” I said.
“Sure,” she said. “Sam.” She nodded, and then said, “Played your cards right, Sam, you could have had yourself a gay old time here in Chicago.”
“Never was a good card player,” I said.
“Not even in the old days, Mr. Eisler. Not even when two scared kids came to you and asked for advice. It’s a shame you didn’t understand what they needed from you.”
“What did they need, Jennifer?”
“They didn’t need an abortion, Mr. Eisler.”
“Maybe they should have asked for what they needed.”
“Maybe you should have known what they needed.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t,” I said. “I mean that, Jennifer.”
“No sorrier than I, Mr. Eisler,” she said, and her voice caught, and I was sure she would begin crying again. But instead she picked up first one suitcase, and then the other, and then the wig box, and tossed her bag back over her shoulder, and brushed her hair away from her face, and walked off to try to catch a flight back to San Francisco, which was home.
The Sharers
I’m colored.
My wife Adele says that if I had ever really made peace with myself, as I keep telling her I have, I would not refer to myself as “colored.” Instead, I would say, “I’m black” or “I’m a Negro,” but never “I’m colored.” This reasoning stems from the fact that her father was a very light Jamaican who, when he came to this country referred to himself constantly as “a person of color.” Adele is very conscious of any such attempt at masquerade, though I have never heard her refer to herself as a “Negress,” which term she finds derogatory. She also goes to the beauty parlor once a week to have her hair straightened, but she says this is only to make it more manageable, and disavows any suggestion that she does it to look more like a white woman. She, like her father, is very light.
For Adele’s benefit, and to correct any possible misunder-standing, I hereby state that I am a colored black Negro. I was born and raised in a little town near St. Petersburg, Florida, and the only racial discomfort I ever experienced was when I was still coming along and was walking with my sister over a little wooden bridge leading somewhere, I didn’t know where, and a gang of white kids attacked me. They did not touch my sister. They beat me up and sent me home crying. When my grandmother asked me why I had been so foolish as to attempt walking over that particular bridge, I said, “I wanted to see what was on the other side.”
I left home in 1946 to attend Fordham University in New York, where I majored in accounting. I got my degree in June of 1950, and was immediately shipped to Korea. I met a lot of different people there, black and white, Northerner and Southerner, and the only problems I had were trying to stay warm, and fed, and alive. I will tell you more about that later. I met Adele in 1953, when I was discharged, and shortly after that I got the job with Goldman, Fish and Rutherford. I still work there. Adele and I were married in October of 1954, and we now have one child, a daughter named Marcia who is eleven years old and is having orthodontic work done. I tell you all this merely to provide some sort of background for what happened with Harry Pryor.
I had always thought of myself as a reasonable man, you see. I am thirty-eight years old and whereas it infuriates me whenever I hear a racial slur, I still don’t think I would go to the South to do civil rights work. I’m very content with what I have. A good marriage, a good job, a daughter who is going to be a beauty once she gets rid of her braces, a house in North Stamford, and many many friends, some of whom are white.
In fact, everyone in my train group is white. I usually catch the 8:01 express from Stamford, which arrives at 125th Street in New York at 8:38. That’s where I get off. The train continues on down to Grand Central, but I get off at 125th Street because Goldman, Fish and Rutherford has its offices on 86th and Madison, and it would be silly for me to go all the way downtown only to head back in the other direction again. There are generally six or seven fellows in the train group, depending on who has missed the train on any given morning. We always meet on the platform. I don’t know where the 8:01 makes up, but when it reaches Stamford there are still seats, and we generally grab the first eight on either side of the aisle coming into the last car. We carry containers of coffee with us, and donuts or coffee cake, and we have a grand time eating our breakfast and chatting and joking all the way to New York.
The morning I met Harry Pryor, I spilled coffee on his leg.
He is white, a tall person with very long legs. He has a mustache, and he wears thick-lensed glasses that magnify his pale blue eyes. He is about my age, I would guess, thirty-eight or nine, something like that. What happened was that I tripped over his foot as I was taking my seat, and spilled half a container of coffee on him, which is not exactly a good way to begin a relationship. I apologized profusely, of course, and offered him my clean handkerchief, which he refused, and then I sat down with the fellows. None of them seemed to mind Harry being there among us. I myself figured he was a friend of one of the other fellows. He didn’t say anything that first morning, just listened and smiled every now and then when somebody told a joke. I got off at 125th Street, as usual, and took a taxi down to 86th Street.
You may think it strange that a fellow who earns only two hundred dollars a week, and who has a twenty-thousand-dollar mortgage on his house, and a daughter who is costing a fortune to have her teeth straightened, would be so foolish as to squander hard-earned money on a taxicab to and from the New York Central tracks, and only a single express stop from 86th Street. Why, you ask, would a working man allow himself the luxury of a taxi ride every morning and every night, which ride costs a dollar plus a twenty-five cents tip each way, when the subway costs considerably less? I’ll tell you why.