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
“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.
