As we crossed Fifty-seventh Street and came on beyond Tiffany’s nudging each other and nodding at the glittering stretches of cosmopolitan shop windows, I was thinking what I was thinking about how this part of midtown Manhattan always made you feel and about how when you were in some neighborhoods, sections, and districts you forgot all about the fact that Manhattan was actually an island, even when you were overlooking the Hudson or the East River or even the Battery. And, of course, it was almost always as if the tunnels and bridges had nothing to do with going onto or going away from an island.
But as the bus moved on along in the canyonlike flow of the Fifth Avenue traffic toward Forty-second Street and the Empire State Building at Thirty-fourth Street, everything you saw, including the ever so obvious variety of people of different nationalities, most of whom seemed to be going about their daily routine activities, reminded you of how directly this part of Manhattan was related not only to Wall Street, the banks, and rail and air terminals and not only to all of the neighborhoods in all the boroughs, but also to the world at large.
Capital of the world I thought again, remembering Ernest Hemingway’s short story about what happened to a young Spanish country boy’s fantasies in a Madrid that was never the capital of the world as Rome had been and Paris and London became. Then there were also Balzac’s young men from the provinces in Paris of the nineteenth century. Philamayork, Philamayork, remembering how the old L N Railroad porters used to call out stations and say here it is, been long hear tell of it, and now here it is. Take everything you brought with you, you’ll need it!
After Thirty-fourth Street there was mostly the sound of the lower midtown Manhattan traffic of that late part of the day, and as we snuggled closer and I kissed her cheek ever so softly as she nodded off, the old sweet heartthrob pop song lyric that I suddenly found myself trying to remember after all those years stretching all the way back to how I was already beginning to feel about pretty girls and crepe myrtle blossoms even before Charlene Wingate told me what she told me that spring now long since once a upon a time was if you go north or south if you go east or west. Because the refrain was then I’ll be happy, which was the title, and the first words of the chorus were then I’ll be happy. There may or may not have been a verse, but the only thing that ever mattered to me was the chorus. I want to go where you go, do what you do, then I’ll be happy, sigh when you sigh, cry when you cry . . .
The next big cross street coming up was Twenty-third, which was still that many blocks away so what you would see first in the distance would be the triangular Flatiron Building in the point where Fifth Avenue crossed over to the west side of Broadway, which came in diagonally from Herald Square and continued on down beyond Union Square and on through Greenwich Village and across Houston Street and Canal Street on its way to City Hall, Wall Street, and the South Ferry.
After Twenty-third Street, Fifth Avenue would continue on across Fourteenth Street and end at the Washington Arch entrance to Washington Square and the New York University campus area. But the bus turned east on Eighth Street, so we got off and came west to Sixth Avenue and then down to Fourth and headed toward Sheridan Square and home that way.
It was not until we came back from our bus excursion to see the fall foliage up along the Hudson River countryside that following Saturday that we finally got around to tasting the roasted chestnuts from one of the sidewalk vendors between Eighth and Waverly on Sixth Avenue. And I said, OK, but I’ll take chinquapins over these and she said, Me, too, and when we got home and looked up chinquapin in the dictionary and found out that the shrub we remembered from Alabama chinquapin thickets as we remembered huckleberry bushes from Alabama huckleberry thickets was actually a species of chestnut, and I said, bush nut rather than tree nut. And that’s also when I said that the only taste of chestnuts I could remember was in a sauce for venison that I had at a big spread for the band one night in Beverly Hills.
I said, Me and you. I said, Me and you this many miles north by east from the chinquapin thickets off the blue poplar trail to Mobile County Training School, and she said, And the huckleberry thickets in the part of Alabama I come from. And I said, And the pecan orchards as you come out of Montgomery heading east on Route 80. And then there was the old crepe myrtle blossom pop tune again, but I didn’t whistle it and I didn’t hum it, but I did cross my fingers as I kissed her again.
VII
The next time Taft Edison and I got together again was when he came back by the library one late morning about two weeks following that afternoon in his workshop, and that was when he said what he said about getting together from time to time beginning even before he was ready to start reading parts of his manuscript to me. Just to keep in touch, he said. Because he had decided that being two book-loving down-home boys he and I had a lot to talk about, especially about the literary possibilities of the down-home idiom. Something beyond the same old overworked sociopolitical clichés about race and injustice that had long since become so usual that they were also the expected and tolerated and
