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.
“Would you please—,” he began.
Instantly the old man woke. “What do you want, boy?” he asked, his voice quavering with age.
“My grandfather lives here—Dr. James Harcourt.”
“Does he expect you? He don’t usually get up until afternoon.”
“Will you tell him his grandson, Randolph Colfax, is here from Ohio?”
The old man heaved himself stiffly from his chair and went to the house telephone. In a few minutes he was back.
“He says he’s still eatin’ his breakfast but you can come up. Top floor, to the right, third door. I’ll run you up. The elevator’s over here.”
The vehicle conveyed him to the top floor, and he turned to the right and knocked on the third door. There was an old-fashioned brass knocker and a small engraved card was fastened to the center panel of the mahogany door—JAMES HARCOURT, PHD, MD. And now the door opened and his grandfather stood before him, a white linen napkin in his hand.
“Come in, Randolph,” he said, his voice surprisingly deep and strong. “I’ve been expecting you. Your mother wrote me you were coming. Have you had your breakfast?”
“Yes, sir. I got up early and walked.”
“Then sit down and call it luncheon. I’ll have some eggs scrambled freshly.”
He followed the tall, very thin old figure into a small dining room. The oldest man he had ever seen, wearing a spotless white jacket over black trousers, came into the room.
“This is my grandson,” his grandfather said. “And Randolph, this is my faithful manservant, Sung. He attached himself to me some years ago because I was able to—ah, do him a small favor. Now Sung takes good care of me. Eggs, Sung, scrambled, and fresh coffee and toast.”
The old man bowed deeply and went away. Still standing, he met his grandfather’s electric blue eyes.
“And why have you waited so long to come to me?” his grandfather demanded. “Sit down.”
“I really don’t know,” he answered. “I think,” he continued after a few seconds of thought, “I think I wanted to see everything—the city, the people—first for myself, so that I could always keep them, you know, inside me, as they are… to me, I mean. As one does with pictures, you know—laid away for what purpose I don’t know, but that’s my way of learning: first I see, then I wonder, then I know.”
His grandfather listened attentively. “Very sound,” he said. “An analytical mind—good! Well, here you are now. Where are your bags?”
“At the hotel, sir.”
“You must fetch them at once. Of course we must live together. I have plenty of extra room, especially since my wife died. I live in her room, not my own. We believed in separate rooms, but after she went on her way I moved into her room, thinking it would be easier for her to visit me then—as seems to be the case. Not that she comes often—she’s independent, always was—but when she feels the need, or understands my need, she comes quite promptly. We arranged for all that before she went.”
He listened to this in amazement and with puzzlement. Was his grandmother dead or was she not? His grandfather was still talking.
“I would send Sung with you to get your bags, Randolph, but he is afraid to go to Manhattan. Ten years ago he was wanted by the police for jumping ship. Serena—that’s my wife—and I were shopping on Fifth Avenue. I believe we were looking for a white mink stole for her Christmas gift that year, and he came dashing in, obviously escaping from someone. He couldn’t speak a word of English, but luckily I’d been in Peking for some years doing research at the great Rockefeller Hospital there. I’m a medical doctor as well as a demographer—and my Chinese is fluent enough that I was able to ask him what was wrong. I am entirely out of sympathy with our immigration policies toward Asians, so I told him not to be afraid, for I’d take him as my servant. I gave him my overcoat to carry and took him at once to the men’s department and bought him a decent black suit and had him put it on, and when the police came into the store, I was very angry with them for interfering with my manservant. He came home with us but he is still afraid to go to Manhattan, with which I have every sympathy, not because I am afraid, but because it is a hell hole. So leave it at once, my dear boy, and come here.”
“But Grandfather, I hadn’t planned—”
“Never plan, please. Just do the next thing that happens. You can always go your way. But it would please me to know my only grandson, even briefly.”
How could he refuse? The old gentleman was charming. Sung brought in eggs scrambled with a dash of something delicious—
“Soy sauce,” his grandfather explained.
He was always hungry; he ate heartily, drank three cups of coffee with sugar and thick, sweet cream, ate his way through a mound of buttered toast spread with English marmalade, and in an hour was on his way—“in a taxi,” his grandfather said, stuffing a bill into his coat pocket. “I’m a poor one at waiting.”
IT WAS NEARLY TWO HOURS before he was back with his bags, for the day’s traffic had thickened and the streets, absurdly narrow for so huge a city, were crowded with every sort of vehicle. But he was back at last, excited by the adventure of an unknown grandfather—not permanent adventure, of course, for nothing was permanent except what he stored away in his deepest subconscious self, but something new and someone different from anyone he had ever known. Why had his mother never told him that his grandfather had lived in China, and in Peking, a city of which he had read with a perception of magic? And what was this about his grandfather’s wife? Was she his grandmother? Serena! He could remember having heard that name at home. A beautiful name for a woman, he thought. And, his whole being alive with wonder, he was in the house again and Sung took his bags and began unpacking them and his grandfather led him to a huge window in the room which was to be his.
“This is the only room from which we can see the Statue of Liberty,” his grandfather said. “For that reason Serena would not have this room. She said she simply could not argue with that great stone woman. ‘Ha—Liberty!’ That’s the way she’d talk—Serena, I mean. She was always embroiled in other people’s troubles. Just to read the newspaper would send her to Washington to protest or some such thing… Ellis Island! She was there day after day, trying to help some poor wretch or another. So I took this room. But she was right, you know. By the way, she wasn’t your grandmother. Your mother’s mother was my first wife, a sweet woman, gentle, perhaps ignorant—I was never quite sure how much she knew about anything. My poor Sarah! She’s dead too, but she never comes back to visit me, even though I am now alone—I daresay Serena sees to that!”
He laughed high laughter and then was suddenly grave. “Of course, now that you’re here, Serena may relent. I’ll speak to her—no, I won’t. There’s no use in upsetting one’s true love.”
“My mother never told me anything about your wife, sir,” he murmured, not knowing what to say.
“Oh, she wouldn’t,” his grandfather said cheerfully. “No need to, you know. Each of us has an independent
