He could hardly wait to get to her apartment that night. He ran the last seven blocks, crosstown. They had a date and he’d told her to wear her good dress, the one she called “Alice blue,” because they were going to celebrate something and he was taking her dancing. He wanted to see her twirl in that dress. He wanted to see her smile when she looked at him, which hadn’t happened in some time.
But she wasn’t wearing the dress and didn’t want to go out. She felt sickly and had missed work and was worried she’d be dismissed. Her hip had started up again, a relentless throb. Four months back she’d been burned, the cook accidentally spattering hot sugar on her. When they tried to brush it off, the skin came with it. She missed two days of work and had been lucky to keep the job. But the hurt kept starting up again, twitching under her skin and then blazing by the end of a long day scrubbing, knees to the floor.
He knew she must be feeling very poorly. Before, she’d never reclined on the bed in his presence, never even let him three steps past the doorway.
Looking at her arranged there like a wilted flower, petals spread forlorn, he knew it would be an uphill battle, but he had much to tell her, much to make her understand. Everything had changed for him, for both of them, since the day before. He needed to make her see because it would mean he’d finally be worth her time, her closed-off heart.
There was a brightness in his eye that night, but she’d seen it before, on him, on other men. She’d long ago stopped letting the brightness spark off her. There was no dividend.
“I want you to see it,” he was telling her. “I want you to see it like I did. Like seeing the face of God himself. You realize it’s been there all along. You just didn’t know how to look.”
She turned away from him and remembered. Something long ago was visiting her, something from before he started calling, before any men started calling. She was standing, a long-limbed, long-necked eleven-year-old, before a large window display at Blumstein’s on 125th Street, a rippling row of summer dresses in every color — peacock blue, canary yellow, the deep orange of summer tea on a windowsill. It was as if they were moving in the June breeze, drifting on some clothesline, and if she reached out she could touch the soft linen.
Finding herself struck by the memory of it, she forced herself back. “It’s just another policy game,” she said, shaking her head back and forth on the pillow. “That’s all you’re talking. There’s ten policy bankers in ten Harlem blocks and none of them making a slim dime anymore.”
“This is different,” he said. “Let me show you how.” His voice like sugar on a spoon, crackling in her ear. “Let me show you.”
He’d been working at No. 37 Wall Street for almost a year, evening to sunrise, and had yet to see more than a handful of souls. All those gray-hatted, gray-faced men in their Arrow collars and polished brogues had long dispersed by the time he arrived, all off to some elegant drawing rooms in tall brownstones or Fifth Avenue apartments, in stately buildings dripping with white trim like wedding cakes, or to dinner at Sherry’s, Lobster Newberg, sweet bread in terrapin, jelly rubanée, and cigars, or train rides to homes on Long Island with stretches of lawn that seemed to end somewhere across the ocean.
And there he’d be, in the empty husk they left behind each day, boot to bucket. But he never minded any of it.
Nights, 2, 3 o’clock, he’d sit at one of the brokers’ desks, each night a different one, slippery walnut top, elbows on green felt, fingers spread on the ledgers. He’d sit there in his bleach-specked trousers, his worn work shirt. He’d sit there and he’d read. He’d read the newspapers, one by one, the Wall Street Journal, the Times, the Evening Journal, the Herald the World, the American, everything he could find. And he’d think. He’d wonder about the broker who sat there all day, probably ten or fifteen years younger, a seersucker-suited youth, lazy from summers in Newport, a winter’s month in St. Augustine. Did that man, that mere boy, know the hard majesty of numbers? Or did he stare dreamily out the window and ponder gossamer, the winsome heiress with whom he danced at the previous night’s Mayflower Ball?
Well he, he wouldn’t waste a minute at that desk. And hell if he was going to do his reading in the janitor’s closet. He had a right to be at that desk. He knew none of those brokers saw the numbers float miraculous. Sometimes the digits felt so alive they were shimmering things he could roll across his knuckles like his granddad with his lucky gold piece.
He never doubted his purpose, his reason for being there, for making the long way down to the tip of the island five days a week. After all, he’d been waiting a long time, since coming out of Boys High School in Brooklyn twenty years before. He’d worked as a bellhop, a short-order cook, four years in the Navy, near seven more as a hotel porter, and he could certainly push a mop on those fine marble floors a little while longer. To him, it was like a running leap. And if he ever felt a flicker of uncertainty, he’d pull a worn piece of paper from his pocket. Copied from a periodical, it read:
Immense power is acquired by assuring yourself in your secret reveries that you were born to control affairs.
Because he had a plan he was working on and he could, with a pure heart, promise her that, if she would just wait a little longer, they’d both be gliding across their own marble floors by New Year’s and wouldn’t she like to be a June bride anyway?
That night with her, the plan was no longer shimmering on the horizon. It was trapped in his belly and he could feel it when he laid his hand there, when he rested his hat over it.
When she heard his news, he assured her, she would feel the pain soften and dissolve and she would want to put on her Alice-blue dress and tie a ribbon in her hair and be ready to dance all night, because everything had changed and he would tell her why.
She almost didn’t want him to tell her. She knew how he could talk, first like butterflies flitting softly against her ear, and then, as the story, the idea, the promise would build, a music so lovely, so deep and bone-stirring, and then she’d have to work so hard to keep that hardness inside her. That tightness that had protected her for a year or more with this man, protected her from yet another disappointment — one man forgot to say he had a wife and newborn baby down in Baltimore, one man forgot to tell her he’d just signed up for a hitch in the Merchant Marines, one man forgot to say his mother wouldn’t like to see him with a colored woman on a public street. Or, worst of all, the ones who wanted to stay around but couldn’t — couldn’t hold a job, or got so beaten down by hard labor it was all they could do to keep from jumping off the Willis Avenue Bridge.
Please don’t, she wanted to tell him now. But telling him even that would be showing him something, and she was determined to show him nothing.
So she listened.
He wouldn’t rush. He knew he had to take her through it step by step so she could experience it as he had.
My girl, he said, it was just last night at old No. 37. Finished with floors five through fifteen. Every long corridor swept and mopped, every waste basket emptied, the candle-stick telephones polished, the standing ashtrays shaken out and filled with fresh sand. The smell of Dazzle bleach and carnauba wax heavy in the air.
He was standing in the closet, pouring bleach down the sink drain.