The Last Leaf of Harlem Page 4
School vacation began. Sis arrived for the long holiday, the car pulling up at the edge of the brick walk and Sis streaking into the house for a round of hugs, then turning to tear upstairs to take off her travel clothes. She put on her play clothes and suddenly her flying feet stopped in front of the sun parlor, its opening door inviting inspection.
She, who was always in motion; never took time for a second look at anything. The never cared whether her bed was smooth or crumpled, or noticed what was on her plate as long as it was something to eat. In the awakening that came when she was eight, it marked her first awareness of something outside herself. She stood in the doorway of the sun parlor that day, her face filled with the joy of her discovery, and in a voice on the edge of tears, she said “It’s the most beautiful room I ever saw in my whole life.”
I did not hear her. I did not really hear her. I did not recognize the magnitude of that moment. I let it sink to some low level of my subconscious. All I saw was that her foot was poised to cross the threshold of my chapel.
I let out a little cry of pain. “Sis,” I said, please don’t go in the sun parlor. There’s nothing in there to interest a child. It’s not a place for children to play in. It’s a place for grownups to sit in. Go and change. Summer is outside waiting for you to come and play wherever you please.”
In a little while the sounds of Sis’s soaring laughter were mingling with the happy sounds of other vacationing children. They kept any doubt I might have had from surfacing. Sis was surely more herself running free than squirming on a chair in the sun parlor.
All the same I monitored that room, looking smudges and streaks, scanning the floor for signs of scuffing. The room bore no scars, and Sis showed no trace of frustration.
The summer flowed. My friends admired the room, though they did it with out superlatives. To them, it was a room I had talked about redoing for a long time. Now I had done it. So much for that.
The summer waned, and Sis went home for school’s reopening as did the other summer children, taking so much life and laughter with them that the ensuing days recovered slowly.
Then my mother’s sister, my favorite aunt, arrived from New York for her usual stay at summer’s end. She looked ten years younger than her actual years. She seemed to bounce with energy, as if she had gone through some process of rejuvenation. We asked her for the secret.
There was n o way for us to know in the brimful days that followed that there really was a secret she was keeping from us. She had had a heart attack some months before, and she had been ordered to follow a strict set of rules: plenty of rest during the day, early to bed at night, take her medicine faithfully, carefully watch her diet.
She was my mother’s younger sister. My mother had been her babysitter. She didn’t want my mother to know that she was back to being a baby again, needing to be watched over, having to be put down for a nap, and spoon-fed pap. She kept herself busy around the clock, walking, lifting, sitting up late, eating her favorite foods and forgetting her medicine.
And then one day standing over the stove involved in making a meal that a master chef might envy, she collapsed, and the doctor was called, and the doctor called the ambulance.
She was in the hospital for ten days. When she was ready to come home to convalesce, we turned the sun parlor into a sickroom, for the stairs to the upper story were forbidden to her. At night we who, when she slept upstairs, would talk family talk back and forth from our beds far into the night, without her we were not quiet, not wanting our voices to wake her if she was asleep, knowing her recovery depended on rest and quiet.
But at night she slept fitfully. The sleeping house and separation from the flock was unbearable. She was afraid of the sun parlor, seeing it as an abnormal offshoot from the main part of the house, its seven long windows giving access to so many imagined terrors. She did not know if w would hear her if she called. She did not know if she would ever get well.
She did not get well. She went back to the hospital, and for our sakes was brave in her last days, comforting us more than we comforted her.
When it was over, we took the sick bed away and restored the sun parlor to its natural look. But it did not look natural. The sadness resisted the sun’s cajoling. It had settled in every corner. The seven long windows streaming light did not help. I closed the door and I locked it.
My mother saw the closed door and the key in my hand. She said as a simple statement of fact, “A little girl wanted to love that room, and you wouldn’t let her. We learn so many lessons as we go through life.”
“I know that now,” I said. “I wish I had known it then.”
Another summer came, and with it Sis. The sun parlor door was open again, the room full of light with the sadness trying to hide itself whenever she passed. I did not know how to say to her, “You can go in the sun parlor if you want to.” I did not know whether she knew it had been a sickroom, and might say, “Take your sun parlor and you-know-what,” though in less succinct phrasing. I did not know if she yet knew that nothing could be the same once it had been different.
Other summers passed, older family members died, and mine became the oldest generation. I was living on the island year-round in the winterized cottage. The sun parlor was just another everyday room; its seven long windows reduced to three of standard size, most of the furniture replaced for sturdier sitting.
Sis was married, a mother, coming to visit when she could, coming, I think to look for bits and pieces of my mother in me, wanting to see her ways, hear her words through me.
It was a year ago that I asked her the question that had been on my mind, it seemed, forever. A dozen times I had bitten it off my tongue because I did not know what she might answer.
“Sis,” I said, “do you remember the summer I painted the sun parlor and acted as if I thought more of it than I thought of you?” I’m not asking you to forgive me. All I want to know is if sometimes my mother said to you when I went out, ‘she’s gone. ‘ “My mother always referred to me as “she” when she was annoyed with me. “She said she’d be gone awhile. You go play in the sun parlor if you want to. There’s nothing in there you can hurt. Nothing in that room is worth as much as a child.’ “
I saw her lips beginning to part. And I felt my heart trembling.
“I don’t want to know the answer. Please don’t tell me the answer. I had to ask the question. It’s enough for me that you listened.”
She smiled.
Vineyard Gazette
1/20/84
Moscow
Non-Fiction
Vineyard Gazette
October 3, 1986
The Moiseyev Dance Company of Moscow, which sometimes tours this country, brings a bittersweet memory of the world-renowned Bolshoi Ballet to my mind and the evening in Moscow, spent in the company of its dancers. It was an enchanted evening that was to end in my humiliation and a torrent of tears. Though the other young Americans with whom I had come to Russia then were present, by some mysterious process, I had been selected to be the center of attention.
It was very flattering and I was in a state of euphoria until the filmmaker, Sergei Eisenstein, said to me in the kindest, coaxing voice, “will you dance for me.” He was the host of this gathering. In this period of the 1930s, he was acknowledged as the filmmaker without equal across the world.
A little amused by the question, I said politely and pleasantly, “I don’t dance.”
Still quietly, still gently, he asked me again to dance. Again I murmured a refusal. The exchange went on for fifteen minutes or more, though it seemed like a day and a night to me, and perhaps to him.
Finally his face and voice full of wrath, his patience completely exhausted, he rose to his feet and bellowed at me in a voice like God’s, “I am the great Sergei Eisenstein and you will dance for me.”
It was then that I burst into rears and fled from the room. I had never danced alone in my life. In my childhood I had learned to dance --little boys and little girls awkward
ly clutching each other -- under the calming eye of a dance teacher. It was one of the expected parlor accomplishments, designed to make all proper children feel at ease in social situations. I knew no dance steps that would fit the exigency that I was quire literally facing. There was only one way out. And I took it.
I flung myself down the stairs; half-hoping I would break my neck and never have to see the sun rinse on Moscow again. There were steps racing behind me, and as I reached the outer door, four young male dancers of the corps de ballet caught up with me, their eyes full of sympathy for my tears.
We walked five abreast with locked arms. They had no English; I have a tin ear and no Russian. We did not talk, but we sang Russian songs all the way to my hotel, they lustily singing the words, I joyously da-da-da-ing along with them, my tears dried my heart mended, the evening restored.
I had come to Russia with a group of twenty-one young black Americans, the youngest just turned twenty-one the oldest, I think, hardly twenty-five, to make a movie about the black condition in America. The film company, Mesrephom, had invited bona fide black actors to come to Russia, but all of them had declined. Though jobs on the stage or screen were scant for black actors, the paper rubles that Russia offered them would not buy them a coup of coffee when they returned to America.
The offer was going begging until it sifted down to a group of adventuresome spirits, among them, Langston Hughes, prose writer and poet and Henry Lee Moon, who wrote fairly regularly for the New York Times and thought the experience would make good copy. They asked me to come along because they liked me. I liked the idea because I liked them.
The 19th Century Russian writers were my gods of good writing. Feodor Dostoevsky becoming my master when I was fourteen and made my discovery of what the word genius meant in the very first book of his that I read. That Russia had become Communist, a state of being that for me was not the solution to man’s dilemma, having learned from the Russian writers that salvation lay in the soul, I was glad to leave New York for a time and re-examine my own soul.
We arrived in Russia, were greeted warmly, were well fed and well housed. Langston, as our resident writer, was asked to read the script and give his opinion. The script had been written by a Russian, and the writing fell far short of the intent. It was Langston’s assignment to rewrite it, a task which he undertook with reluctance, and despair that it would ever come out right.
During the waiting period one of the pleasures planned for us was the meeting with Sergei Eisenstein. And until that moment of disaster, I had been, to all appearances, the most popular person at the party. Every dancer of the ballet asked me to dance with him. I never sat down once. I felt as light as a feather. My pride in my self was monumental. Then came the moment when one by one the other couples left the floor, leaving my partner and me to whirl about the room alone.
Suddenly my partner slowed, stopped, eased me out of his arms, kissed my hand, and left me standing alone on the floor, the center of an endless expanse of Russian eyes. I stood there frozen to the spot. There was thunderous applause, meant, I suppose, to be encouraging. When Sergei Eisenstein thought I was sufficiently encouraged, he asked me to dance. The rest, of course, has already been recorded.
The next day some sorrowful member of my group tried to explain that what had been planned as a mild joke on me to unsettle my natural reserve had gotten out of hand. Word of my dancing achievements -- I couldn’t even tap --was passed from mouth to mouth until it got way out of bounds, and I became an event, the reigning jazz dancer in America, known in every major city. But I had one fault; I was so excessively modest when not on stage that I would never dance offstage when asked. Indeed I would deny that I could dance. I had to be coaxed to a tiresome degree, though in the end it was worth it.
It was not worth it to Sergei Eisenstein. I have asked who had thought up the joke. Had it been someone I trusted it would have hurt me too much. Had it been someone I was so-so about, it would have made our proximity intolerable to me.
Two weeks later, I received an invitation to a dinner party. I did not know, or I could not place, the people who invited me. But it was not unusual to be invited to a party by someone who wanted to know an American better and polish his English with him.
I found my hosts and their guests charming and worldly. It was a lovely gathering. At one point I happened to glance at the dinner table. I saw my place card, and the place card nearest it bore the name of Sergei Eisenstein.
I could not embarrass myself again by running out of the room. Instead, prepared myself to meet my enemy. In Russia it is said that fife shots of vodka drunk one after the other will help you achieve anything.
I drank my five vodkas, with everybody laughing and cheering and calling me a true Russian. I was young. I was healthy. I didn’t blink an eye. I must admit that to this day I don’t know how I did it.
There was an excited murmur. Sergei Eisenstein had entered. Unconsciously I think the guest formed two lines with Eisenstein walking between them, being greeted on each side with the honor that was due his genius. I deliberately stood at the end of the line, and when he reached me, my five vodkas gave me courage to say in the clearest tone, “Ah, the great Eisenstein has arrived.” and make a very low bow.
“He reached for my hand, kissed it and said, “I want to beg your pardon. I know now that a joke was played on you. I am sorry I was made a part of it. Will you forgive me?”
I remember saying in what came out as a childish voice, “You didn’t believe me and I never tell lies.” (And in those days I didn’t) then I gave him a smile that swelled straight from my heart.
I’m certain it was he who asked his hosts to invite me to their party, and to seat me beside him for one of the most memorable evenings of my life. He had brought stills, wonderful stills, of his current pictures, and we sat together while I marveled. I know that I was fortunate to be in his presence. I am not unmindful.
We never made the movie. It had become general knowledge that a movie on the black condition in America was being planned. America had not yet recognized Russia. And an American engineer who was building a great dam for them vowed that if Russian went on with the movie, he would bring his own work to a stop and advised the President to postpone or withhold recognition.
There was much sabotage in Russia in those years when she was reaching for the stature of a world power. One did not have to be a Communist to work in Russia. Russia desperately needed the skills of skilled foreigners. Germans, Americans, Englishmen, Frenchmen were invited for their skills, not their sympathies with the Communist cause, and with the hope that they would complete a project instead of sabotaging it. Russian suspicion of foreigners may have started in those highly crucial years. And outsiders’ suspicion of Russia may have started in those years too. It is true that when one had something to say, it was better to say it outdoors.
Part II
Early Fiction
Hannah Byde
The Messenger
June 1926
One comes upon Hannah in her usual attitude of bitter resignation, gazing listlessly out of the window of her small, conventionally cheaply furnished parlor. Hannah, a gentle woman crushed by environment, looking dully down the stretch of drab tomorrows littered with the ruins of shattered dreams.
She had got to the point, in these last few weeks, when the touch of her husband’s hand on hers, the inevitable proximity in a four-room flat, the very sound of his breathing, swept a sudden wave of nausea through her body, sickened her, soul and body and mind.
There were moments-frightful even to her-when she pictured her husband’s dead body, and herself, in hypocritical black, weeping by his bier, or she saw her own repellent corpse swirling in a turgid pool and laughed a little madly at the image.
But there were times, too - when she took up her unfinished sack for the Joneses new baby – when a fierce, strange pain would rack her. Her breath coming in little gasps, she would sink to the floor, clutching at the tiny garment. Someho
w, soothed, she would be a little girl again with plaited hair, a little eager, visioning girl -“Mama, don’t cry!” she’d say. “Some day I’ll be rich an’ ev’rything. You’ll see, mama.” The real Hannah was a spiritless woman of thirty. Having neither the courage nor strength to struggle out of the mire of mediocrity, had married George Bye at twenty simply because the enticing honeymoon to Niagara would mark the first break in the uneventful circle of her life.
Holiday crowds hurrying in the street.… Bits of gay banter floating up to her… George noisily reading his paper… Wreaths in the shop window across the street.… A proud black family in a new red car … George uttering intermittent, expressive little grunts.… A blind beggar finding a lost dollar bill.… A bullying policeman running in a drunk.… George, in reflective mood, beating a pencil against his teeth
With a sharp intake of breath she turned on him fiercely, her voice trembling with stifled rage, angry tears filming her eyes.
“For God’s sake, stop! You’ll drive me mad!”
He dropped his paper. His mouth fell open. He got to his feet, a great, coarse, not unkindly, startled giant. “Hannah, … What under the sun’s the matter with you?”
She struggled for composure. “It’s nothing. I’m sorry. Sorry, George.” But her eyes filled with pain.
He started toward her and stopped as he saw her stiffen. He said quietly, “Hannah, you ain’t well. You ain’t never bin like this.”
She was suddenly forced into the open. “No,” she said clearly. “I’m not well. I’m sick, sick to death of you, and your flat, and your cheap little friends. Oh,” she said, her voice choked with passion, “I’d like to throw myself out of this window. Anything, anything to get away! I hate you!”
She swayed like some yellow flower in the wind, and for a moment, there was the dreadful silence of partial revelation.