“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, wh
ole 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 life. Now you must amuse yourself for a while lad. I always sleep an hour before dinner, which is at seven. You see those shelves of books? From what your mother writes, I’m sure you can amuse yourself.”
His grandfather left the room and he went to the bookshelves. There was a biography of Henry James there and he took it down and began to read.
“I SUPPOSE,” HIS GRANDFATHER SAID CHEERFULLY at the dinner table, “that I ought to explain to you about Serena. To tell you the truth, your mother knows nothing about her. When her mother died—my first wife, Sarah—I was in Peking. Sarah had not wanted to go to China with me. She thought of it as a heathen country, instead of what it was, the oldest and most civilized country in the world. So I went alone. Your mother was then about three years old. Sarah went back to her own family. As a matter of fact, we never lived together again though we were not legally separated, but as I said, she died while I was in Peking. When I returned from China, I was a very different man from the brash young fellow I was when I went there, thinking I had so much to teach the Chinese. Instead, they taught me.”
“How long were you there?” he asked.
“I went to stay a year and stayed seven,” his grandfather replied. “When I came home again, I moved here. I had a job in a private foundation—a very wealthy man in Wall Street, who was interested in vital statistics and world population. My office was there, just across the bridge, on the forty-fourth floor of a skyscraper. I met Serena there—matter of fact, she was his daughter, a brilliant, beautiful, willful creature. She fell in love with me first. I hadn’t thought of love. It embarrassed me—she was much younger than I. I went to him about it. He laughed, but he sent her to the Sorbonne for a couple of years. Then suddenly she was back again, standing there at my desk. ‘Well, here I am,’ she said, ‘and I’m just the same.’”
He laughed that high old laughter. “Well, I said, ‘I’ll have to take you seriously.’ Which I did, with the result that I married Serena in due course—or rather, she married me.”
“My mother never told me,” he said.
“No, she wouldn’t, for, as I told you, she never saw Serena,” his grandfather replied. “She continued to live with her aunt, and I went regularly twice a year to see her while she was growing up, but Serena felt she would be happier not to see my child. She always said emotions should never be confused. But little Sue always knew where I was and that she could depend on me, if needed. Nevertheless, I did not ask her to bring you here and live with me when your father died. I felt Serena would be confused, even after death. And I wasn’t sure that Serena wouldn’t come back now and then. I don’t think she’ll mind you—but two women—”