And if the house was no protection, that was truly terrifying. Except now with Grandma dead, it would be better. She would not be grabbing him around the neck to give him a penny. She would not have her fits and curse at him. He didn’t have to wonder whether today would be a day she would love him, or a day she would hate him. The baby would have her room now; and he would have his room all for himself. There would not be that dying madwoman old grandma who the day she died he saw naked. She was very white and her hair was combed out on the pillow, and she did not look like an old lady. Lying on the bed naked while the doctor listened to her heart. He saw it just for a second as he walked by her door into his room. A whiteness.
He thought of Williams. Crossing the street, he went around to the side of the house, down the alley to the side door where Williams lived in the cellar. He was being brave, but really he didn’t think Williams was there. When he opened the door, his eyes were not used to the darkness, and by the time he saw Williams, the super had already observed him. And in that voice of murder and menace, so deep that it sounded like singing, Williams said, “What you want?”
The cellar smelled of ashes, of dust, of garbage, and of the green poison in the corners for the mice and roaches. There was also the smell of Williams which filled the basement like its weather, which terrified him — an overwhelming burning smell which proved that Williams ruled in the cellar, that even though his family lived in the house, the cellar belonged to Williams. It was the smell of his constant anger.
I was fascinated by everything he did. He could fix anything. I didn’t know whether he was an old man or a young man. I couldn’t tell. He was very tall and strong, but his fuzzy hair was grey. He was powerful, but he walked slowly, with an effort. Whatever he did was monumental. Shoveling coal — I remember him shoveling coal. It would be summertime. He wore no shirt under his overalls. The coal truck with its chain wheels would back up to the curb in front of the house; the driver would leave the motor on to power the uptilting bed, and climb over the back gate of the truck and sit astride it as it tilted more and more dangerously. Then he’d pull a lever and out would spill the coal with a fearful clattering to the sidewalk, where Williams waited with his shovel. Williams would begin his work while the truck was still there, and would be at it long after the truck had left: diminishing that gigantic mountain of coal shovelful by shovelful, heaving the coal from the pile into the wheelbarrow. When the wheelbarrow was full, he’d plant the shovel in the coalpile and take the barrow down the alley in his slow, torturous, gigantic way. And a few minutes later, bring it back empty and grab the shovel again. Scrape and rattle — that was the sound. The scrape of the shovel on the sidewalk, the momentous silence as the coal flew through the air, and then the rattle of the coal in the wheelbarrow. Williams always shoveled from the bottom, a technique puzzling to a child also puzzled by the transfer of flame from the bottom of one candlewick to the top of another.
“My grandma died,” Daniel said, standing by the door. Williams rose from his cot, so incredibly gigantic that he had to stoop slightly to avoid bumping his head on the pipes running along the ceiling. He lumbered toward Daniel, and Daniel tensed himself to run. But Williams grabbed two empty garbage cans near the door and carried them to the darkness of the cellar back near the coalbin. Then he came back and took two more of the cans, lifting them by the rim as if they weighed no more than paper cups. When Williams tended to the garbage cans, they rattled and crashed as loud as thunder. In his own room upstairs, Daniel sometimes heard the cans crashing around under his feet like a storm under the earth, like a storm that would raise the foundations of the house. Now he held his hands over his ears.
Williams slept on a cot without sheets. Next to his bed was an orange crate on its end, with an old wooden radio, shaped like a wishbone, on top of it. Daniel’s father had given Williams the radio. The radio was connected by a cord to the light fixture in the ceiling. The light was on. Inside the crate were Williams’ clothes, except for his suit which hung on a hanger from a pipe. Also Daniel saw a bottle of whiskey. Williams drank whiskey and got drunk. As he looked at the bottle with his hands over his ears, Williams passed into his vision and sat down on the cot, and took a drink from the bottle.
Williams stared at the floor. “This one trip she ain’t comin’ back,” he said. “She really run away this time.”
“She was crazy,” Daniel said boldly.
Williams looked at him out of his red, murderous eyes. “Not crazy as some.” Daniel understood he meant his mother and father. Now he could hear the footsteps, the murmuring voices of the people visiting upstairs. “She was God-crazy,” Williams said. “Nobody believed like she did. Nobody.” He took a cigarette butt from behind his ear and lit it with a kitchen match struck with his thumbnail. He did this with great deliberation.
“You don’t know nothin’,” Williams said. He looked at the ground between his big feet, spread apart. “Wasn’t so crazy that she didn’t live longer than I goan. You know all those times she run away? Sometime it was just to stand inside that door there,” Williams said pointing right at Daniel. “They go chasin’ up and down the blocks, and she standin’ right where you are.” He began to laugh, a deep laugh that leaped over its long silences, jumping in slow motion from one sound to another. “Sometime she swept up around me. Took a broom and swept the dust,” Williams said. “Sometime she brought me tea in a glass.”
Daniel could see that: she drank tea from a glass. She boiled the water herself so that no one could poison her. The glass, an old memory glass of which there were many, was set in a saucer. She broke a cube of sugar with her fingers (she had strong fingers — he couldn’t snap a sugar cube that way), put half of it in her mouth and sipped the tea through the sugar. Sometimes she put jelly in the bottom of the glass and stirred it around. Her pale blue eyes would squint as she sipped the hot tea. At such times, if she found him watching her, she regarded him with equal curiosity, a shrewd, keen judging look, neither mad in her anger, nor mad with her love. She would just look back at him.
“You pretty dumb,” Williams said.
“I am not.”
“Afraid of that poor old Jew lady.”
“I am not.”
“She the class in the house,” he said, making a motion toward the ceiling with his head. “Yessuh. I believe I’d gone to her funeral if it was up to her.”
“But she’s dead.”
“She’d have the super to her funeral.”
“But she’s dead.”
“G’wan!” Williams suddenly roared. He raised himself from the cot. “Get outta heah!”
Daniel ran, his heart in his throat. He ran up the alley, the bright sun hurting his eyes. He looked back to see if Williams was chasing him. He ran into the house, past all the people in the living room, and he ran upstairs. He passed her door to get to his room. He stopped. Her room was unchanged. A mahogany bed and matching bureau. Her cedar hope chest, and her tin of asthma grass half burned away. He could still smell her. Down in the kitchen was a memory glass flickering like the kind she used to light. If she was dead, why could he still smell her? Why was the light still burning?
He ran into his room and slammed the door.
The baby woke and began to cry.
I could never have appreciated how obscure we were. A poor family in the Bronx, too hot in the summer, and too cold in the winter. I thought we were big time. I thought we were important people. I thought the world really revolved around my family. We had this way of understanding everything. There was nothing my father could not explain. And even if it was bad, we always knew what was happening. It was a terrible strain, but I began to understand that it was worth it. We had no modesty, any of us. We were fierce in our self-importance. We were really important to ourselves. Our lives were important and what happened to us was important. The day’s small plans and obligations engrossed us. Going to school. To work. Shopping. To the meetings at night, to the recurrent meetings. It was all terribly important. And so when they were taken away, one after the other, and I next saw them on television or a moment of their faces in the newspaper, it was like the world had finally agreed to what I always knew — that we were important people. Recognition was just. It was more than just, it was unsurprising.