The Boy Who Granted Dreams

  “Don’t you start talkin’ shit. No, I ain’t spittin’ on somethin’ belongs to you, ‘cause you ain’t white after all.” Cyril chuckled again, delightedly. “Look here now. Alabama, 1922. Jim Rollins, ten times blacker than me, he went t’ bed with a white girl. Miscegenation. That means, mixin’ the races. That’s a big-time crime. They use to hang folks for a thing like that, boy. But wait now: ‘cause then they come to find out that that woman in Jim Rollins’ bed, she was Eye-talian. Read it right here — name of Edith Labue. So he got off. Because you Eye-talians ain’t white as far as Americans is concerned. You got what they call ‘the black drop’,” and Cyril laughed again. “We almost kin, boy. You a brother, so that’s why when March the tenth come around, you won’t be on my list of whites to spit on.”

  “Where’d you dig up that paper?”

  “My brother-in-law’s personal co-llection. He an activist in Civil Rights for po’ darkies like us’ns, Massa Chrismuss,” Cyril joked. “I was talkin’ about you, and he come out with this story.”

  “Why were you talking about me with your brother-in-law anyway, brother Cyril?”

  “I was tellin’ him you wasn’t so bad for a white boy. And now we know why that is. Yes, we got the ex-pla-nation. You ain’t white!” Cyril went into another laughing fit. “Time to get t’ work, pickaninny. You sholy do have that black drop, mmmm-hmmm, ‘cause you is plumb shiftless, not like a real white boy.” He handed a box to Christmas. “I don’t guess you’d mind too much goin’ up to the Concert Room and settin’ up this mixer,” he told him. “But don’t spend all mornin’ with yo’ gal. We only do a half day today, and we got us a pile o’ work.”

  Christmas took the box. “If I hurry up, will you teach me how to build a radio? I want to give one to a friend who’s getting married.”

  Cyril looked at him for a few seconds, as if he needed to make an important decision. “Seein’ we only do a half day today,” he said, “if you got nothin’ better t’ do, then come on up an’ eat at my house. I do believe I have a couple radios ready t’ go.”

  “At your house?” Christmas asked, in wonderment.

  “What the matter now? Do the idea of eatin’ with a nigger make you sick to you’ stomach?”

  Christmas laughed. “It makes me hungry. Will you give me a good price?”

  Cyril flapped a hand at him scornfully. “Plain t’ see you is half white, boy. When a black man like me say he got a spare radio, an’ he invite you along to his house fo’ lunch, that mean: It a present. You don’t understand a damn’ thing about negroes.”

  “Do you mean it?” said Christmas, surprised.

  “Does I mean what? That you don’ understand nothin’ about us? Uh-huh.”

  “Cyril, you’re great. You’re a real friend. I’ll pay you back, I swear it. Someday I’ll pay you back.”

  “Shake it but don’ break it, massa,” growled Cyril. He bent over his worktable. “Now hurry up with that mixer. You remember how you ‘spose to do it?”

  “Sure,” said Christmas, walking towards the inner door.

  “First, you disconnects–”

  “I know, brother, I know,” and Christmas went out of the repair shop, ignoring Cyril’s grumblings. Then he ran up the stairs to the Concert Room.

  “Christmas, you mustn’t make plans about the two of us,” Maria told him after they’d been together for a couple of weeks, trying out every corner of N.Y. Broadcast where they could possibly make love. “I’m going to marry a Portoricano like me.” Christmas answered her, smiling, “I’m glad, Maria, because I plan on marrying a Jewish girl.” From then on, their relations, stripped of sentimental worries, had grown even more passionate.

  Maria’s job was to contact the artists engaged for the various broadcasts. She had opened the studio doors to him, and finally Christmas could see how radio happened. In his free time he went to recording sessions or live broadcasts. He listened to music, but also to comedy shows and discussions. And every one of the studios he saw became familiar to him in a short time. He’d met technicians, comedy directors, even a few actors. He sat in the darkness of the room and listened. He was learning. Dreaming.

  “I have to set up the mixer,” he told Maria when he saw her in the Concert Room.

  Maria was as glowing as ever. She shook her dark locks at him and pointed to the dismembered console in the sound room. “All yours,” she said, and — once the soundman had left the room — she stroked his back. “I dreamed about you last night,” she whispered.

  “What was I doing?” asked Christmas, intent on untangling the tangle of wires.

  “Like always,” said Maria.

  “Even in your dream?”

  She pressed against him, her arms around him. “Of course,” she said. “So today I’m not even interested.”

  He turned to look over his shoulder at her. “I can take care of that.”

  Maria flicked his hair. “Do you want to go to the theater with me tonight?” she asked, looking serious.

  “The theater?”

  “Yes, the theater. Victor Arden, the good pianist who works for us when he’s free, just gave me two tickets for tonight.”

  “And you want to go to the theater with me?” asked Christmas, astonished.

  “Yes … all right?”

  “This is the day for invitations.”

  “Who’s the other girl?”

  Christmas laughed. “It’s Cyril. I’m going to his house for lunch.”

  Maria tilted her head, her black eyes sparkling. “You’re different from anybody I know. No white would go to a colored man’s house for lunch.”

  “Well, if it comes to that, you’re not so white either …” Christmas winked at her.

  “For doing that, whites don’t make so much problems.”

  “Anyway, I just found out that Italians aren’t white,” smiled Christmas. He pulled her close and kissed her. “You, Cyril, and I are just Americans. End of story.”

  “Nice dream.”

  “That’s the way it is, Maria.” Christmas said firmly.

  Maria stared at him. “You have the gift of making people believe your stories, you know that?”

  Christmas looked at her soberly. “That’s how it is, Maria,” he insisted.

  Maria looked down and stepped away. “So, we’ll go to the theater?” she said as Christmas went back to untangling wires.

  “Where?”

  “The Alvin. They’ve just now built it. Tonight’s the opening. Their first show. It’s Funny Face, a musical with Fred and Adele Astaire, you know — that brother and sister-”

  “’Lady be Good’!” exclaimed Christmas. “My mother sings it all the time. When I tell her I’m going to see them she’ll die of envy.”

  “Maybe I can get two more tickets for another night …”

  “I’m crazy about you, Maria,” said Christmas, hugging her. “That would be so wonderful.”

  “Tonight, then?”

  “Sure — but what am I supposed to I wear?” Christmas said, looking worried.

  “You look fine the way you are. Everybody will be jealous of me.”

  “Maria!” called a man in jacket and tie, appearing in the Concert Room. “We’re about to begin.”

  “I have to go,” Maria said hastily. “West Fifty-Second. Alvin Theater …”

  “Funny Face,” said Christmas, making one.

  Maria laughed and hurried away.

  Now it was late at night. Christmas was walking through the dark streets of Manhattan, with no precise destination, thinking about the day that was ending now.

  Lunch at Cyril’s house had been full of surprises. He learned about a part of the city he‘d never seen. From 110th Street north, where the green expanse of Central Park ended, the view of the rich neighborhoods mutated radically. Within a few blocks the “Negro Tenements” began; barracks-like structures around 125th Street that weren’t much different from the ones in the Lower East Side ghetto where he’d grown up. But Cyril didn’t
live in one of those. He had a house made out of wood and bricks, like the ones Christmas had seen in Bensonhurst and everywhere in Brooklyn. And in that rickety two-storey house, its façade scabbed by the damp cold of winter and muggy heat of New York summers, Cyril lived with his wife Rachel; with his wife’s sister Eleanor; with his brother-in-law Marvin — the civil rights activist; and their three sons, five, seven and ten years old; with Cyril’s old mother, Grandma Rochelle — daughter of two slaves in the South and widow of a freed slave; and with the brother-in-law’s father, Nathaniel, who in his youth had been a friend of Count Basie’s father and who spent the whole time playing a green-painted upright piano in the kitchen, accompanied by nonstop grumbling from Grandma Rochelle who kept opining over and over that musicians were lyin’ cheatin’ men and good for nothin’. Christmas sat at the table and ate sweet potato pie after two helpings of fried catfish.

  But the thing that astonished Christmas the most — after the naturalness with which he’d been welcomed to the house — was the shack that Cyril called his laboratory. This was a kind of wooden ruin standing shakily on the scrap of yard behind the house. It might once have been a latrine. Cyril had expanded it with scrap lumber and other materials fitted together and made it into a little workshop. Inside the laboratory reigned a chaos even more striking than the repair shop at N.Y. Broadcast. And a series of odd devices and gadgets. Christmas had examined them one by one, admiring Cyril’s ingenuity. “Prototypes,” Cyril said proudly. “Every one of them works. Look here,” and he took two narrow wooden poles and fitted one into the other. They reached fully twenty feet high. He fastened the mast to the shack’s outer wall. At the top of the pole, a rudimentary antenna swayed. Cyril plugged the cord into a black box that started buzzing. Then he inserted a microphone and unrolled the cord all the way to the kitchen, setting the microphone near old Nathaniel, who continued playing the piano relentlessly while the woman washed dishes. Then Cyril led Christmas across the street and one block down. He banged on the door of a closed grocery store. “Open up, nigger!” he shouted, and when the shop owner opened the door, laughing in a deep toneless voice, Cyril hustled Christmas inside. In the back room of the grocery store, once a battered radio’s tubes had warmed up, Christmas could hear every note Nathaniel was playing and Grandma Rochelle shouting at him to stop that noise while he told her he couldn’t stop because he was Count Basie’s daddy’s friend.

  “How ‘bout that, white boy?” asked Cyril, hands on hips and chest inflated. “I’ve got me a station, too.” Christmas was dumbstruck until they came back to the laboratory. “Jesus, you’re a genius,” he said. Cyril gave an embarrassed smile, hugely pleased; then he took down the rudimentary aerial. Inside the laboratory, he lifted up a cloth. “Here’s the radio for yo’ friend,” he said. “It won’t win no beauty contests, but it works,” he added, pointing to a large old saucepan in which he’d drilled openings to hold the tubes. “I make ’em, and I give ’em to folks up here,” Cyril explained. Then he asked the couple’s names, took a fine paintbrush and black enamel paint and wrote on the lid, in the tremulous and hesitant calligraphy of a child, “Santo and Carmelina Filesi.”

  Christmas went back home on the subway, with the radio packed in a large cookie box that Cyril’s wife had tied with a ribbon. He delivered the wedding present to Santo. It was set to N.Y. Broadcast, and Christmas showed off, telling the Filesi family — gathered around this wonder of science — that yes, he knew the man whose voice they were hearing; his name was Abel Nittelbaum, and he was a little bit stuck-up but really he was a nice guy. Santo was moved and embarrassed at the gift. “Hey, us two — we’re the Diamond Dogs,” Christmas reminded him. They talked for a little while and Santo told him he’d changed stores. “Now I’m head salesman in the menswear department of Macy’s,” he said. Christmas congratulated him and then said he had to go home and spot-clean his brown suit because he was going to the theater tonight to see the Astaires. At that, Santo’s eyes lit up. He took Christmas by the arm and told his mother that she should tell Carmelina he’d be right back, and he hustled his friend up to Thirty-Fourth Street. He led him into Macy’s, conferred with the manager, and then put Christmas into a dressing room. He had him try on a navy wool suit, and then asked an alteration lady to cuff the pants right away with a one-inch turn, and then he wrapped it up and said, “The head Diamond Dog needs a suit like this.” Then they went back to the house on Monroe Street, not saying another word, because that’s how things were with them.

  That evening, at the Alvin Theater, Christmas looked very elegant. At least he felt that way. And Maria clung to his arm all through the show, as Adele and Fred Astaire filled the stage with their innate grace, she in the role of Frankie and he as Jimmy Reeve, and together they sang “Kiss and Make Up.” After the performance, Maria took Christmas backstage to meet Victor Arden, the pianist. And while they were talking, Adele Astaire came past, wrapped in a black velvet coat, and Christmas said “Brava!” to her, in Italian. The actress made him a playful little bow. Her brother Fred appeared at the door of his dressing room and protested: “Don’t I get a compliment?” Then Christmas told him, “Mister, you don’t just dance, you slide. It’s as if you were skating on a sheet of ice. Incredible,” and he made a little bow, like the one Adele Astaire had made for him. The two Astaires had laughed and gone off arm in arm, satisfied.

  It was because of this accumulation of emotions that Christmas still wasn’t ready to go home that night. Cyril’s brilliance, Santo’s friendship, and the magic of the theater had left him too excited to sleep. His head was full of a thousand thoughts. The theater had bewitched him. He’d never in his life seen a musical. Everything was perfect in the theater. The theater was where a perfect life went on, Christmas thought, sporting his brand new blue wool suit, with his overcoat flung open despite the cold, because he liked seeing himself in it as he walked.

  When he realized he’d ended up in front of the N.Y. Broadcast studios, he looked at the huge letters over the entrance. Beyond the revolving door he could see the silhouette of the night watchman slumped over his desk. The whole building was in darkness, except for a light on the top floor, the seventh, where the executive offices were. Christmas reached into his pocket and touched the key to the back door. And then he smiled, turned back down the side alley, opened the door to the workshop, went through the room without turning on any lights and went up to the second floor, to studio number three, a large recording room where comedies were broadcast. There was a polished table in the middle, with nine microphones set up on its surface.

  Christmas came into the shadowy studio, sat down at the table, and let his coat fall to the floor. He took off his jacket and rolled up his shirtsleeves; he’d seen actors do this. He leaned towards a microphone and turned it on.

  He heard the electrostatic crackle, and then nothing.

  Christmas thought of the tense silence before the curtain rose at the theater. He shut his eyes and suddenly he seemed to be reliving the explosion of lights as soon as the orchestra began to play enfolding Gershwin music.

  Then he cleared his throat and said, “Good evening, New York …”

  Karl Jarach was thirty-one years old. Karl’s father, Krzysztof, son of a small grain merchant in Bydgoszcz, Poland, had arrived in New York in 1892. When he landed at Ellis Island he didn’t know how to do anything. He tried working at the port, as a longshoreman, but since he was small of stature and slightly built, he only held out for three months. For another six months he tried working as a stonemason. But for that profession, too, Krzysztof lacked muscle. At a dance organized by the little Polish community that gathered in the evenings to speak their language, Krzysztof met Graznya, and they fell in love. They were married that same year, and Graznya’s father hired Krzysztof as a sales clerk in his hardware store. By the end of the next year, Krzysztof had applied his own father’s rules, learned in the grain market of Bydgoszcz, to the business of hardware: rationalizing purchases and stock, and inv
esting in new discoveries. The store’s commercial activity benefited greatly from this. Graznya’s father promoted him to manager, and in the course of the following year Krzysztof, going up to his neck in debt with his bank, moved the hardware store from its cramped narrow room on Bleecker Street to much more luminous and airy quarters on Worth Street at Broadway. Krzysztof had a good nose for business, and the two large show windows displaying hardware and household articles, thereby attracting women even from outlying neighborhoods — quickly proved to be a good investment. He was able to pay off the bank loan in record time. The only thing that wasn’t working in Krzysztof’s life was that his Graznya seemed unable to give him a son. And so her mother, who was making herself ill over it, went to church and made a vow to the Madonna.

  In only three months, Karl was conceived.

  Karl was the most spoiled baby in the entire Polish community. He grew up happily, with no economic problems, and when he was old enough to go to the university, Krzysztof had already put aside the money he would need for Karl’s studies. But Karl surprised everyone by saying he didn’t want to go to college. At that point Krzysztov, although disappointed, began to groom him to manage the hardware business. But Karl was always distracted, he didn’t apply himself, he was bored; and, whenever he could, he read incomprehensible books about the nascent technology of radio wave transmission. “That’s it!” roared Krzysztov at dinner one evening, losing patience with his son for the first time in his life.

  “If it’s this radio that interests you, go into radio, for the love of God! But stop wasting your life!”

  The paternal roar had a beneficial effect on Karl’s torpor. Within a week the abstractions in his books had been transformed into a list of newborn radio stations and radio manufacturing facilities in the New York area. Karl knocked on all their doors and was finally hired by N.Y. Broadcast as an entry-level employee.

  His father bought him two suits so that, he said, he’d never look like some useless Pole. And thanks to one of those suits, Karl was noticed by a manager who took a liking to him and gave him a chance to show what he could do. And just as Krzysztof had applied the rules he’d learned in his father’s granary to the hardware business, so Karl applied his own father’s rules to the business of radio.