No Name in the Street (Vintage International) Read Free

furious because he thought my life was easy and I thought my life was hard, and I yet had to see that by his lights, certainly, and by any ordinary yardstick, my life was enviable compared to his. And if, as I kept saying, it was not my fault, it was not
his
fault, either. You can certainly see why I tended to avoid my old school chum.
    But I called him, of course. I thought that he probably needed money, because that was the only thing, by now, that I could possibly hope to give him. But, no.He, or his wife, or a relative, had read the Leonard Lyons column and knew that I had a suit I wasn’t wearing, and—as he remembered in one way and I in quite another—he was just my size.
    Now, for me, that suit was drenched in the blood of all the crimes of my country. If I had said to Leonard, somewhat melodramatically, no doubt, that I could never wear it again, I was, just the same, being honest. I simply could not put it on, or look at it, without thinking of Martin, and Martin’s end, of what he had meant to me, and to so many. I could not put it on without a bleak, pale, cold wonder about the future. I could not, in short, live with it, it was too heavy a garment. Yet—it was only a suit, worn, at most, three times. It was not a very expensive suit, but it was still more expensive than any my friend could buy. He could not afford to have suits in his closet which he didn’t wear, he couldn’t afford to throw suits away—he couldn’t, in short, afford my elegant despair. Martin was dead, but
he
was living, he needed a suit, and—I was just his size. He invited me for dinner that evening, and I said that I would bring him the suit.
    The American situation being what it is, and American taxi drivers being what they mostly are, I have, in effect, been forbidden to expose myself to the quite tremendous hazards of getting a cab to stop for me in New York, and have been forced to hire cars. Naturally, the car which picked me up on that particular guilty evening was a Cadillac limousine about seventy-threeblocks long, and, naturally, the chauffeur was white. Neither did he want to drive a black man through Harlem to the Bronx, but American democracy has always been at the mercy of the dollar: the chauffeur may not have liked the gig, but he certainly wasn’t about to lose the bread. Here we were, then, this terrified white man and myself, trapped in this leviathan, eyed bitterly, as it passed, by a totally hostile population. But it was not the chauffeur which the population looked on with such wry contempt: I held the suit over my arm, and was tempted to wave it:
I’m only taking a suit to a friend!
    I knew how they felt about black men in limousines—unless they were popular idols—and I couldn’t blame them, and I knew that I could never explain. We found the house, and, with the suit over my arm, I mounted the familiar stairs.
    I was no longer the person my friend and his family had known and loved—I was a stranger now, and keenly aware of it, and trying hard to act, as it were, normal. But nothing
can
be normal in such a situation. They
had
known me, and they
had
loved me; but now they couldn’t be blamed for feeling
He thinks he’s too good for its now
. I certainly didn’t feel that, but I had no conceivable relationship to them anymore—that shy, pop-eyed thirteen year old my friend’s mother had scolded and loved was no more.
I
was not the same, but
they
were, as though they had been trapped, preserved, in that moment in time. They seemed scarcelyto have grown any older, my friend and his mother, and they greeted me as they had greeted me years ago, though I was now well past forty and felt every hour of it. My friend and I remained alike only in that neither of us had gained any weight. His face was as boyish as ever, and his voice; only a touch of grey in his hair proved that we were no longer at P.S. 139. And my life came with me into their small, dark, unspeakably respectable, incredibly hard-won rooms