Atlantis: Three Tales

  Well, Mr. Harris kept a bottle in his store. Hubert even had a bottle at the house. Not to mention Elsie and Corey’s homemade wines. Sometimes it was hard to remember prohibition was really in force—especially here in Harlem.

  But, Sam reflected, the fellow probably thought I was going to have him arrested for possession of liquor!

  “Hubert?”

  “What?”

  “Do you remember, back home, going into downtown Raleigh, with a bunch of guys, and standing on the corner, across from the park, at the trolley stop—waiting there, and watching the women get on the trolley car?” Sam reached around to pat his pockets for cigarettes. But he’d been in such a hurry to get to Corey and Elsie’s that he hadn’t stopped to buy any. “They’d step up on the step of the car, and their skirts would swing up, so that you could see their shoes, the buttoned kind that went up over their ankles? You remember how we’d nudge each other—or try to keep a straight face. And sometimes, if there was a breeze or something, and the skirt blew up just a little more, you could see the stocking at the top of the shoe—then, boy, you’d really seen something! I did it. You must have done it, too.”

  “Yeah,” Hubert said. “What about it?”

  “Well, we all used to like it—me, John, and Lewy all did it. But some of those boys, out there doing that, were really sent out of sight by it. You must have known one or two of those—the ones who were always suggesting that you go down and do it. You remember?”

  “What if I do,” Hubert said. “What’s the point?”

  “Well,” Sam said, with a feeling in his throat he knew would have been assuaged with the first draw on a cigarette, “now, here, in New York, with skirts up above everybody’s ankles, suddenly it’s nothing to see some lady’s legs. Isn’t that funny? When you’re twelve, thirteen, fourteen—it’s the most exciting thing in the world. Then, you come to a different city—and it ain’t anything anymore. But you remember when it was, don’t you?”

  “Sam,” Hubert said, “why do you want to talk about things like that?”

  “Hubert,” Sam said, “that stuff was important to us. You can’t forget stuff like that.”

  “Like you said, skirts are up now—and in ten or fifteen years, everybody’s going to have forgotten it. You should forget it too. Stuff like that’s nasty, Sam!”

  “Well, I’m not going to forget it,” Sam said. “I had too much fun doing it. I bet you did too.”

  “Boy,” Hubert said, “you are a country nigger to your soul. You better think about gettin’ civilized—that’s what coming up here was supposed to do for you!”

  But, hefting up his box, Sam laughed—though he had already forgotten the brilliant city at one end of the bridge and the empty skiff at the other.

  As he lay in bed, drifting, a summer’s walk returned to Sam, along the south field’s dusty edge-path. Shirtless, John walked ahead. Behind John, his shirt open and out of his pants, Lewy talked heatedly: “John, you can be the White Devil,” Lewy explained. “And Sam—” whose long sleeves were still buttoned at his wrists, with only his collar loose—“will be the Dark Lord. And I’ll be the Ancient Rabbi who understands the Cabala’s secrets and can speak them backwards—”

  John said: “Why you always want to take things back to the Jews, Lewy? Why you do that? Take ’em back to somewhere else, now—Egypt. Or Africa. You should take ’em back to Africa.”

  “You some kind of redheaded African,” Sam gibed, but it would not, this time, break what tensed between his friends.

  “You don’t really want to originate with the Jews, do you?” John asked, turning around to wait, as Lewy, then Sam, caught up.

  “I think,” Lewy said, “with Christianity we already do.”

  “Well,” John said, “that’s different!”

  “I don’t see why,” Lewy said. “Now, me—I’m going to originate everywhere . . . from now on. I’ve made up my mind to it.”

  “Lewy’s doing that,” Sam said, “just to get your goat—”

  “No,” Lewy said. “From now on, I come from all times before me—and all my origins will feed me. Some in Africa I get through my daddy. And my momma. And my stepdaddy. Some in Europe I get through the library: Greece and Rome, China and India—I suck my origins in through my feet from the paths beneath them that tie me to the land, from my hands opened high in celebration of the air, from my eyes lifted among the stars—”

  “Some in Egypt and Arabia,” John said, “you got through the magazines . . . . He’s gonna try an’ out-preach your daddy.” John grinned through his freckles at Sam.

  But the tension was all in Sam’s listening now.

  “—and I’ll go on originating, all through my life, too,” Lewy said. “Every time I read a new book, every time I hear something new about history, every time I make a new friend, see a new color in the oil slicked over a puddle in the mud, a new origin joins me to make me what I am to be—what I’m always becoming. The whole of my life is origin—nowhere and everywhere. You just watch me now!”

  “But you don’t know where you came from in Africa,” John hazarded. “I don’t. And Sam don’t—because the Bishop don’t. You remember, ’cause you asked him if he did.”

  “They didn’t keep records of all that.” As they walked through the summer dust, Lewy grew pensive: “They should have—but that’s how they kept us slaves. You know what I think? I think it’s those deprived of history who create the world’s great histories.” Then he repeated, “I . . . originate, everywhere!”

  “How you gonna stay a nigger,” John asked, “if you come from so many places?”

  “Look,” Lewy said. “Knowing all I really come from, that won’t stop anybody calling me a black bastard,” which startled Sam. (Though nobody really knew who Lewy’s father was, people were pretty sure he’d been a lot blacker than Lewy’s stepfather.) “That don’t stop anybody from calling you a nigger, calling Sam a black boy, calling me colored, calling you a redheaded African, calling Sam a Negro, calling me black. And I guess we’re what we’re called, no matter where we’re from. That’s what calling means—that’s all. It isn’t no more important than that.”

  “Well,” Sam said, “it’s pretty important, what they call you, when it means where you got to live, got to go to school, even what you got to work at.”

  Considering, their shoulders neared with the seriousness of it, to touch each other’s under the sky.

  Then, as if the energy or the anxiety of the closeness became too much, John, hand up and head back, ran into the hip-high grass, to begin imitating a bomber, banking here, swooping there, shouting Vrummmmmmmmmmmmm into the sun . . .

  In half-sleep Sam recalled the insight of his walk home from work on wealth and power and art. Was this prior summer’s amble the origin of that peripatetic revelation? Or had the winter evening’s revelation been the origin of this memory of summer, which, without it, would never have returned? But even as he wondered, both, with sleep, began to slip away.

  A city, Sam thought, turning over, that was everywhere and nowhere, where we all come from, where we all go . . .

  Two weeks after his (pre-) birthday dinner—and after a birthday that seemed less like a birthday than Christmas had seemed like Christmas—, Sam dreamed. Papa’s interpretation of the dream certainly would have been that it came from Sam’s sneaking off to read those magazines that lied so about Egypt and the darker races. Before dismissing that interpretation, however, we should remember that the sneaking was—for Papa—as constitutive as the stories; which put him not so far from the Viennese doctor whose book on the death instinct had been translated into English two years before by the redoubtable C.J.M. Hubback, published first in England and just reprinted in the United States by Boni and Liveright—and who, for his interpretation, would have erected an elaborate structure of authority and transference, language, sexual guilt, and wish fulfillment: Papa and the Viennese doctor had, neither of them, heard of one another; but both were educated men of a sing
le age and epoch, so that they shared a number of ideas. Doubtless the Viennese doctor’s younger Swiss-born rival would have added that the dream indicated a surge of the creative in Sam, frightening in its implications and quite possibly to be repressed, but that still must be reckoned with. And the medical wisdom of half a dozen decades on would have suspected in it the first sign of an apnœa, directly related to smoking, that very likely would get worse—though probably not for years.

  Night. Night the terrible . . .

  Carefully, Sam the Spy walked down the steps into the strange cellar. The light behind him dimmed. He glanced back—someone had just closed the wooden doors up to the street. Moonlit chinks along the ceiling’s edge by the ends of the great beams were winking out, here and there. Outside, he realized, things were toppling over the small openings. Something shook the whole building. Behind, the cellar doors flapped up a moment—but only dirt and darkness tumbled down the steps—before they closed for good under the weight above. Water began running through the single upper window, suddenly to gush—while trickles rilled the walls.

  The subterranean chamber was descending into the sea!

  The pressure grew intense; it was becoming harder to breathe. What light there was in the weedy water dimmed as they sank; but in the last of it, he realized, behind him, beside him, something—formless and dark—was in there with him. It splashed toward him through the darkening flood. He had to get out, get away, only in the enclosing blackness his breath was stifled in his chest—

  Sam tore his face from the pillow, punching and pushing himself up into light. He gasped as the quilt fell to his lap. He sat, gulping. In the middle of the room, the tall figure turned toward him: chills encased him—the thing splashing in the submarine black had transfigured into this moonlit form . . . ? The drape was back over the wing chair. Moonlight sluiced the room.

  As Sam got his orientation back, the figure—frowning Hubert, in his pants, shirtless now but wearing his carpet slippers, and surely on his way out to the hallway’s chilly commode—asked: “Sam . . . ? You all right?”

  “Yeah . . .” Sam was breathing hard.

  The frown fell away before a chuckle. “What were you dreaming about?”

  But in the moonlight, the tomblike dark of the submerged and suffocating crypt was already slipping away.

  “Hubert . . . ?”

  “Yeah?”

  Sam ran his hand around his bare neck, down his naked chest. Nothing was wrong with his breathing now. He took three more breaths to make sure. “Hubert? Back when you were about fifteen—or sixteen, you did something. And Papa got so mad, he chained you to the water pump in the backyard, and he was shouting at you that he was going to leave you chained up in the yard all night—only then he must have gotten even madder, because about ten minutes later, he got this orange crate and came back and began to beat you with it, beat you ’til the slats broke all up, and you were bleeding and crying—and Mama was scared. I think she thought he was going to kill you.”

  “Yeah,” Hubert said. “So did I.”

  “Hubert—what did you do?” The question asked, the last of drifting, of dreaming, vanished, Sam was icily awake, electrically alert.

  Hubert shifted his weight, then shifted it again. “Just . . . stuff. That’s what you were dreaming about?”

  “No—well, maybe I was. I’m not sure. But I woke up thinking about it.” Outside the window, clotheslines hung like lapping lariats that, beyond the frame, would encincture night to day. “Can’t you tell me what it was, Hubert? So I’ll know? I was just nine or ten, and Jules or Laura wouldn’t tell me anything. Jules—I don’t think she really knew what it was about either—but she said if I was that curious, I should ask Papa. But I was afraid to. I thought if it was that awful, if I asked about it he might do the same thing to me. At least that’s what I thought then.”

  “Yeah, maybe he would have—no.” Hubert humphed. “It was just stuff . . . with a girl.” He pursed his lips, debating whether to say more. “You remember Alina, Reverend Fitzgarn’s daughter?” Hubert took a breath, the moonlit admission clearly difficult. “I stole some of Papa’s money, to go out and get a bottle and be with her. And then Reverend Fitzgarn caught the two of us, doing it—or, least ways, just about doing it. And he came raging to Papa that he would have me locked up by the police if Papa didn’t do something himself—and Papa was embarrassed as all get out, at least at first; then he got real mad because I’d shamed him. Then, when he got back to the house, he found out I’d stolen from him too. Five dollars.”

  “Alina Fitzgarn?”

  “Um-hm. Look—just a second, I got to go to the toilet. You be all right?”

  Sam nodded.

  His arms and back gone from ivory to—with his next step—cadaverous gray, Hubert went out through the hall door. Limen to lintel, like a species of mystery, black filled the space ajar. Sam’s fingertips tingled on the quilt. He moved his foot over, beneath the covers, from where it had thrust, on his waking and turning, into cold bedding. Outside in the hall, water gushed into the commode.

  Hubert came back in and pushed the door closed behind him. “I’m gonna have to get me a chamber pot—this getting up and having to go out to pee in the morning every morning at—” he reached into his pants to pull out the pocketwatch Mama had sent him for Christmas (but it had arrived three days late), and held it up—“nearly ten to four!—just isn’t going to make it. At least not in this weather.” He dropped the watch from its chain—so that it swung in the light, turning and unturning—and burlesqued a shiver. “It’s cold out there! I guess—” He swung up the watch and caught it, white-gold flashing in the moon, and dropped his hand toward his pants pocket—“I’m starting to turn into an old man!” (Hubert liked that watch, Sam knew. But each time Hubert took it out, Sam felt not so much jealous of the object as he did simply at sea, himself not knowing the hour.) Hubert had stopped in the middle of the floor on the same spot he’d stood before. In moments he seemed to have settled back into the same discomfort. Hubert took a long, considered breath. At last he said: “Papa didn’t let me stay outside all night, you know. He turned me loose—after he wore himself and that orange crate out. He made me come inside and sit in his study—my nose was bleeding, my arm was sore—and he talked to me. I can remember it, I can see him just as clear, behind his desk. He said we had to call a truce, him and me. He said we had to call a truce between us—that if we didn’t, he was going to kill me or I was going to kill him. If I didn’t drive him to his grave with shame and sorrow, I was going to do it with a gun or my hands. Or worse, he’d have to kill me first. ‘You want to go to New York,’ he said, ‘with Hap and Corey?’ I hardly heard what he was saying, when he said it. I mean, after he’d just about murdered me, it was like he’d turned around and offered me a present. What I’d expected him to say was that I wouldn’t be allowed to go out of the house and had to stay in my room and eat bread and water for the next three months—or something like that. He said, ‘You want to go to New York . . . ?’ ” Hubert reached up across his bony chest to rub his arm with his hand. “You see, Papa’s a strong-headed man. I guess he had to be, to do what he’s done—working at the school, be a minister to all those Negroes down home, get himself elected bishop. But he’s got some strong-headed children too. And he’s smart enough to know you can’t have all these strong-headed people living under one roof—not ten or twelve of us. Not that many. So that’s why I came up here. He loves us, you know. It’s taken me a while to figure that one out. But he does.” Hubert dropped his hand, took a breath. “Look—if you want to talk about this some more, let’s do it in the morning. Is that all right?”

  “Sure,” Sam said. “All right.”

  As Hubert walked into his own room, Sam settled back down in the bed. Very much awake, he pulled the covers to his chin. Even if he didn’t know what might happen in the vestibules of subway cars during rush hour, or what was worse than passing water or doing your business, though some of his i
deas about it might have surprised Hubert, Sam did know—more or less—what “doing it” was. And he knew it was a pretty bad thing even to think about, especially for a bishop’s son—and even more so with a minister’s daughter. Alina Fitzgarn? He could hardly remember what she looked like, except that she was dark and quiet and had been a good friend of Milly’s, till her parents had sent her away. Did her going away have anything to do, Sam wondered suddenly, with Hubert?

  For a while Sam thought about getting out all his magic tricks, new and old, to look them over in the moonlight. But the rectangle of light, that had flooded the rose rug like white oil and lay half on the wall, did not touch the bed. Maybe he should put on his long johns, turn on the light, take Weird Tales from the top drawer, sit over in the wing chair, and read the first installment of Houdini . . . ? (But would he remember it clearly enough when he got the next issue? Lewy read everything right away, then read it again and could tell you all the contradictions between the various parts and didn’t mind at all if you told him what happened next in the story. Sam reread the stories but couldn’t spot the contradictions to save himself. And John wouldn’t let you tell him anything, though he could get real excited and had a hard time not telling you.) Finally Sam pushed back the covers, stood up, and stepped—naked—to the window.

  For four, five, ten seconds he looked at the black windowframe across the alley. Then he pulled the drape and curtain from where he’d put it back over the wing chair’s edge (odd that Hubert had never commented on it; but then, in his family, there were so many things they somehow didn’t talk about) to let it swing before the glass, cutting out most of the light.

  Then Sam turned, bent his knees, and jumped for the bed, to land in a crouch on the thin mattress, springs shrieking beneath (from inside Hubert said: “Sam . . . ?”), grabbed up the covers and shoved his feet under the quilt, to slide down between the sheets’ pools and puddles of warmth and chill, shivering on his back for seconds, clutching the covers to his chin, grinning. (Suppose she’d been awake, in her dark room, looking toward her window. Had she seen him in his, in the moonlight . . . naked?) He lay awake a long time, in wait for morning.