The Eternal Wonder (12 page)

“HI,” CHRIS SAID,
COMING OUT
of the garage. “What can I do for you?”

“Don’t you know me?” he asked.

Chris stared at him. “I don’t recollect you.”

“Have I changed so much? I’m Rannie—Rann, nowadays.”

Chris’s face, grown round with added weight of years and food, broke into a grin.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” he said slowly, “I’ll just be damned. But you’re twice as tall as you was. You sure have shot up.”

‘‘Like my father,” he said. “Remember how tall and thin he was?”

Chris looked concerned. “Say, I sure was sorry to hear about him. Come on in. I don’t get real busy until around noon when the trucks come in on their way to New York.”

He followed Chris into the garage. They sat down. “I’m the owner now,” Chris said, trying to be offhand.

“Congratulations,” he said.

“Yes,” Chris continued. “Happened last year when Ruthie and I got married. Remember Ruthie?”

Did he not? He had never forgotten the glimpse he had had of that rosebud organ, in childish ignorance that was scarcely old enough to be curiosity. He wondered if Ruthie remembered.

“Of course I remember,” he said. “She was so pretty.”

“Yeah,” Chris said proudly, but pretending carelessness. “I had to marry her to keep the crowd away. She’s pretty, all right. In fact”—he paused for a short laugh—“she was so damned pretty that our kid’s coming a little too soon. We had to hurry the wedding. Course, there was no question I wanted to marry her, but we had to hurry everything. This here garage—I might have waited another year or two—our folks had to help out. But—”

He slapped his knees. “It’s done. I’m on my way, I’m makin’ out. Business is good here on the truck route.” He glanced at the open door. “Here comes Ruthie now, bringin’ me a hot lunch. Have a bite with me? There’s always plenty. She don’t skimp on anything, Ruthie don’t. She’s a damned good kid.”

Ruthie reached the door and hesitated, basket in hand.

“I didn’t know you had company,” she said.

“Come in, hon,” Chris shouted. “Guess who this is!”

She came in, and set the basket on the table beside Chris, and stared.

“Did I see you before?” she asked.

Yes, she was pretty as ever, he thought, her face fuller but almost as childlike as he remembered. But her body was the body of a woman ready to give birth. The mystery of birth! He had scarcely thought of it yet. He had scarcely thought of women, his life so much the life of his mind.

“Yes, you have seen me before,” he said.

They waited while she continued to stare at him. Then she shook her head.

“I don’t remember you,” she said.

He felt a quick relief. She did not remember him. Probably there had been many episodes, none as childish as the one he remembered so vividly.

“He’s Rannie!” Chris shouted, laughing at her puzzlement. “’Member little ole Rannie in school? Always knowin’ all the answers? You sure were a damned know-it-all, Rann—makin’ fools out of the rest of us. We didn’t like you too well for it in them days either.”

“You wouldn’t like me any better now,” he said in a quiet bitterness.

“Aw, it don’t matter now,” Chris said with kindly warmth. “I got my garage. I got my girl—what else do I need? I make good money.”

Ruthie sat down, her eyes still gazing. “You’ve changed,” she announced. “I wouldn’t of known you anywhere. Didn’t you used to be sort of runty?”

“Naw, he wasn’t ever runty—he was just a kid besides us—too smart for us, I reckon. Well, it takes all kinds. What’d you bring? Pork and beans—enough for an army! Have some, Rannie.”

He rose. “No, thanks, Chris. I must be on my way, I’m leaving town—”

“Goin’ where?”

“New York first—Columbia, perhaps. I am to finish in another year. Then I may go on to my doctorate. I haven’t decided.”

Chris let his jaw drop. “Say, how old are you now?”

“Fifteen.”

“Fifteen!” Chris echoed. “Hear that, Ruthie? Still a kid and talkin’ about bein’ a doctor!”

He opened his mouth to explain, “not a medical doctor,” and then did not explain. What was the use? These were not his people.

“Good-bye,” he said. He put out his hand to Chris and then to Ruthie. “I’m glad I came by before I went.” They were warm, they were honest, they were kind, but they were not his people and he went away leaving them behind forever.

“WHEREVER YOU GO, SON,”
HIS
mother had begged him, “stop and see my father—your grandfather—in New York City. He lives alone there in a little apartment in Brooklyn. I don’t know why. He rarely writes to me now. When he came back to America after my mother died, he went to the city where he was born. He said he’d always wanted to live there and to live alone. I’ve felt badly about it—but he was never like anyone else. Sometimes I wonder if you take after him!”

He did not promise that he would seek out his grandfather. He did, however, go to New York and take a room at a small hotel—simple but to him horrifyingly expensive, although his mother had given him the money on which they had once planned to go to Europe before his father died. It was a long, narrow room, “self-contained,” the landlord called it, because at one end there was a small gas stove, a smaller refrigerator, and a sink with a cold-water faucet. Down the dark and dusty hall upon which it opened there was a communal bathroom in which beside the toilet was an old four-legged bathtub. But the room itself was furnished after a fashion, and the bed was clean. The landlord, an ancient bearded Jew who wore a small black cap on his head, was proud of the room.

“You can see a tree outside the window when spring comes,” he said. “A wild tree to be sure; no one planted it, but it grows bigger every year down there out of a crack in the cement.”

This was to be his home then for how long he did not know. For he had not yet made up his mind to go to any school or college, in spite of what he had told Chris. Teachers were not to be trusted. No one was to be trusted. He would live alone and learn. Somewhere in this endless city there were books, a library, museum, and these would be his schoolrooms, these and the streets. There was everything here in the city. He was not ready even to see his grandfather. He had not realized how much he needed to be alone and free—free even of school and teachers. He decided not so much consciously as instinctively, that he would not go back to college nor think of doctorates and degrees. He wanted to learn about life, learn through living. Suddenly he realized that he knew nothing—nothing at all.

HE WAS NOT LONELY BEING ALONE
, for all his life he had been lonely, and now he did not notice that he was any more so. Now, since there was no one who knew him and he knew no one, he could think his thoughts undisturbed. He did not so much think as wonder. Wonder was his atmosphere, wonder at all he saw and heard. The city enveloped him as the sea envelops a fish. He rose early, for in the early morning the city was different from the city at noon or in the evening and the night. The streets were clean, for all night great machines had marched ponderously to and fro, sweeping with great insulating brushes or spouting splashing falls of water that spread over the asphalt and ran gurgling down the drains. In the morning the air was cool. If the wind blew in from the sea, the air was almost pure, but that was before people poured into the streets, before great trucks came lumbering in from the highways, filled with food and goods and spewing out of their tails a foul, thick smoke, before cars and cabs raced each other against the changing streetlights.

He liked to go early to the river, which ran down to the sea. He enjoyed the fish markets and the sellers and buyers of fish of every kind. This was all so new to him, for he was an inlander, born and bred. Most of all he loved the ships. Someday he would sail in a ship across the Atlantic Ocean. But for now this city was huge enough for him to explore. With his already trained and disciplined mind, he divided the city into its parts, racially and nationally. Not all of these people spoke English, and he would try to find out from what part of the world they came—Puerto Ricans, speaking Spanish? It did not wound him, or even touch his real being when they cursed him with strange curses because he was white and different from them. He understood instinctively, with his envisioning mind, why they could naturally hate him. Why not? They had reason to hate him. And the blacks he studied with endless wonder, wandering through their streets, watching them, listening to them with their strange mouthing of the English language so that he found them more difficult to understand than the Puerto Ricans, even though the latter spoke an impure Spanish. The blacks were different from all the others. He felt it, he knew it. With his orderly, comprehending mind, he knew it.

DURING THOSE WEEKS, NOW FAST ACCUMULATING
into months, he continued to live alone and yet not alone among the millions of people who surrounded him. He had a habit of talking with anyone who happened to be near him, asking his countless questions, storing the answers, short or long, into the bottomless wells of his memory, without thought of what use he would make of all he learned. He asked, he listened, he stored, and prompted by his endless capacity for wonder, he continued his life, knowing that this was only a passing moment in the many years. He wrote to his mother regularly, but, as he explained, he had not yet had time to look for his grandfather. His supply of money scarcely dwindled, for he was frugal, eating gargantuan meals but of simple and cheap food, and from time to time earning money by temporary jobs, usually on the wharves, loading and unloading ships. Still trusting no one, he kept his money in a few large bills, hidden on his person or under his pillow at night. He was friendly to his neighbors in passing, but he continued to make no friends. He did not miss friends now, for he had never had them, his thoughts always far beyond theirs.

So time might have continued for him, except for an experience he had one night, near midnight, which made him feel the need of someone to know, someone related to him. He had been to an opera at the Metropolitan, climbing to a seat high under the roof, from whence the figures moving upon the stage were dwarfs. But the music floated upward, the voices superb and pure, and this was what he had come to hear, standing in line for hours before to buy his ticket. He had stumbled downstairs at the end in a dream of delight, and alone in the masses of people pouring out of the doors, he decided against the subway and chose instead to walk, the night being clear and the moon full. At a corner of a dark, half-empty street he waited for the red light to change to green. Standing there, he became aware of a young man, almost a boy—so young he was—slender, his dark hair long over his pale face, approaching him.

“Hi,” the boy said. “You goin’ somewheres?”

“To my lodging,” he replied.

“Haven’t a quarter, have you?” the boy asked.

He felt in his right-hand pocket, found the coin, and gave it to the boy.

“Thanks,” the fellow said. “This’ll buy me a bite to eat.”

“Don’t you work?” he asked.

The boy laughed. “Call it work,” he said carelessly. “I’m on my way now to where the nightclubs are. I’ll pick up five dollars—maybe ten.”

“How? If you don’t work—”

“You mean you don’t know? Where’d you come from?”

“Ohio.”

“No wonder you don’t know nothin’! See—this is how a feller does it. I pick a guy—rich, by himself—and I ast him for ten dollars, five if he ain’t so rich. He looks at me like I’m crazy—maybe tells me to get outta his way or somepin. Then I tell him if he don’t give it to me I will go to a policeman—always do it when I know there’s a policeman ’round the corner—like. I tell him I’ll tell the cop he propositioned me.”

“Propositioned you?”

The boy laughed raucously. “Golly, you’re only a kid! Don’t you know? Some guys like girls, some like boys. On’y difference is, it’s a crime to like a boy. So the guy knows this will make him big trouble so sooner than get into that kind of trouble, the guy’ll give me the money first.”

“You make your
living
like that?”

“Sure—easy and no work. Try it and see.”

“Thanks—I’d rather work.”

“Suit yourself. It ain’t easy to get a job. You got folks?”

“Yes. My grandfather.”

“Okay—so long. I see a guy comin’—”

The boy ran down the street to a restaurant, from whence a well-dressed man had just come. The man paused, shook his head, and the boy ran to the corner where a policeman stood.

Rann waited no longer. Suddenly he wanted to know his grandfather. Tomorrow, early, he would find him. He no longer wanted to be alone in this wilderness city.

THE ADDRESS WAS IN BROOKLYN
and he had not yet been to Brooklyn. He disliked the subway and he liked to walk, especially in the early morning, when the air was still clean and the streets were almost empty. Only great trucks lumbered in from the countryside, bearing their loads of fowl and vegetables and fruits, eggs and meat. He stopped to saunter through Wall Street, that narrow center of the city’s financial heart. He lingered to peer through the iron fence of an ancient cemetery set about an old smoke-blackened church, Fraunce’s Tavern—he knew its history, and paused to stare at its sign, its doors not yet open for the day. And reaching at last to the great Brooklyn Bridge, he stood gazing into the flowing water beneath. The ships, the barges, were on their way. He saw it all in his usual, absorbed fashion, in his habit of wonder, each sight sinking into the depths of mind and memory, and deeper still, into his subconscious, somehow, sometime to emerge when he needed it, whole or in fragment.

Thus he followed one street and another, having studied his map well before he came. He did not like to ask his way, he liked to find it and for that he learned to memorize a map visually so that he always knew where he was. Thus in time, before the sun had reached the zenith of noon, he found himself standing before an old but very clean apartment house. The street was quiet and lined with trees now beginning the first autumn coloring.

He entered the building and found an old doorman in a gray uniform, asleep in an armchair, its brocaded upholstery rich and soft.