Night Song Read online

  “Maybe.”

  “What the hell are you?” Hillary asked wearily. He thought back through the conversation, checking. This had all begun when Eagle went out; Keel had become upset then, though it hadn’t shown on his face.

  “I’m just a student,” Keel said.

  “Must be pretty damned dumb,” Hillary shot back. “You’ve got to be thirty-five at least.”

  Surprisingly, Keel chuckled.

  He’s enjoying this, Hillary thought.

  “I’m not that kind of student.”

  “Don’t I know it,” Hillary grated.

  Keel waved the remark away. Behind them Eagle finished a chorus in unison with Yards Brown and moved into an intricate passage in the upper register. “You want a job?”

  “Doing what?”

  Keel frowned and moved suddenly. Hillary had a feeling that he was controlling his anger. “Look, man. You’re on your ass. What, you too proud to work for me?”

  Hillary came out of the bed half-screaming. “I’ll take it, just get the hell outa here and let me rest, goddamn you!” Keel pushed him back down.

  “You got too much spirit to be down here, Professor. I’m going to let you wait tables in my coffee shop.” He sighed. “Get some rest. I thought you were going to try and kick my ass there for a minute.”

  CHAPTER 2

  The coffee shop was on the east side of Greenwich Village, or as the more resigned Villagers, conceding that Bohemia now extended from the Hudson to the East River would have put it, in the “middle Village.” Some older residents even called this haphazard extension the “new Village.” On St. Marks Place, where the shop was, the renovations which had made this section more than merely habitable, had come more reluctantly than upon neighboring streets. A number of tenements there, however, had been remodeled with new façades to match their gouged-out, redecorated interiors. The untouched buildings were laced with weather-beaten fire escapes and row upon row of small-paned windows. Set between the old and half-new buildings were tiny art galleries whose stark white walls and well-lit interiors were out of place in an area where darkness and dimness gave comfort.

  This finger of the Village dribbled past the old Wanamaker Building where various government departments, the American Express Company and other businesses had set up offices in its altered steel and concrete belly. Nearby stood the worn, brown landmark, Cooper Union. Across the street, its new addition lay sprawled beneath polyethylene drapes which broke the whistling wind for men who worked noisily on it. A variety of ethnic neighborhoods began a block further east: Ukrainian, Polish, Jewish. Beyond lived the Puerto Ricans and a few Negro and Irish families.

  There were a hundred dellies on this east side section. Their windows were filled with warming pans containing Hebrew National franks, and meat and potato knishes. Polish or Ukrainian bars dotted the street. They were usually downstairs, visible from the street, neat with white cloths on the tables. Although they were cool in the summer, they became unbearably cold in the winter. And McSorley’s was here, once Irish, but now peopled by Poles or Ukrainians who did not always understand what the bartender meant when he called at midnight, “Time, Gentlemen!”

  Gaudy newsstands and drugstores with a comfortable odor of pharmaceuticals and perfumes hugged the corners near the lunchrooms where the lonely and the busy gathered for their meals. Second Avenue, that nondescript, cobbled thoroughfare which tumbled an endless torrent of traffic down to Houston Street and beyond held many different businesses. There were Chinese laundries, some dirty and small and reeking of stale human odors; others were small but clean with great philodendra stalking upwards along the front windows. In contrast, spacious laundromats, their doors open, exuded the smell of soap. Kosher and German butcher shops, their hooks heavy with sides of fresh meat stood wall to wall; and there were restaurants, of a dozen different nationalities, which announced their specialties in their respective languages. Beside them, in shops which seemed never to have visitors were the little travel agencies which arranged trips to Russia or Poland, or, as a saving grace, mailed packages to those places.

  On Saturday nights, above the sound of traffic and the noise of many people too close together came music from all over the world played on bongos and congas, on horns of various sizes and shapes made out of metal, wood, or plastic. Against the frenetic background of the cha-cha-cha there came the spirituals of the fearful but devout huddled in a storefront church, isolated from the main chorus by 122 blocks. And above this the Cantor’s tremolo lingered on, sighing over the clatter of the polka.

  In this part of town, it was said that people were more like people.

  The shop was an inverted L-shaped basement; the walls had been primed and painted white to reflect the meager daylight and to kill odors from the past which, however, still passed up in cold little drafts coming through the gray, cracked floorboards only partially covered by imitation orientals purchased secondhand. Candles in cylindrical, colored glasses sat centered on each redchecked table top, and the chairs, designed for another time, conformed to one another only because of their uniform coating of red enamel. Because they cost nothing, travel posters, whose exotic scenes existed in no mind save that of the artist and the tourists who would never view the lie, lay framed neatly against the walls. Above the room which formed the 90-degree angle at the top of the inverted L, a modest sign read: “Musicians’ Room,” and off this was a small room which contained a cot and a dresser. The kitchen, at the very rear of the shop, was on a line with the entrance which opened at the bottom of a small flight of chipped, concrete steps.

  Now, midafternoon, the sun slipping westward across the front of the shop, Hillary entered with Keel.

  “Nice,” Hillary said. He stood with his coat collar pressed tightly against his neck and the back of his head. His clothes had been cleaned and he no longer needed a shave. He had been out of bed three days, pronounced all right by the doctor.

  Keel closed the door quietly behind them and stood easily, surveying the room. Hillary imagined he did this many afternoons, alone, and with a certain satisfaction.

  “You call it Sadik’s,” Hillary commented. He had noticed the sign outside.

  “My name,” Keel said.

  Hillary looked quickly at him, but Keel was busy brushing off imaginary specks from the top of a table.

  “Are you Mohammedan?” Hillary asked.

  Keel grunted and walked slowly around the shop, putting a chair a bit closer to its table, picking up stray pieces of paper and crumbling them in his hand, blowing a random pile of cigarette ashes into space. He motioned for Hillary to follow him. They walked over the old, echoing floor to the small room. “You can use this, Prof,” Keel said. “Watch your cigarettes. I’d like you to open at seven every night and on Sundays at three. We’re open until the last person leaves. Like me, you’ll do a little of everything.” He paused and looked at Hillary, open-faced. “You won’t be able to help me if you hit that bottle too heavily. Why don’t you give it to me?”

  Hillary felt sudden annoyance. He said, “What bottle?”

  “The one Eagle gave you this morning.”

  Magnanimously, Eagle had given Hillary an off-brand bottle of rye the evening before. “Here, mother,” he had said. “Straighten you out.”

  Hillary brought out the bottle not knowing whether Eagle had told Keel or whether Keel had noticed it. He took a drink before giving it to Keel who tapped the cork down and placed it in his pocket. He said, “Ordinarily I don’t care too much what a cat takes, but if you work for me you drink and get drunk on your own time.” He smiled. “I’ll drop back about six, Prof. Get some rest. The bed’s clean. Della made it this morning.”

  Keel moved away and stopped. He leaned against the door and said, “Listen, Prof, don’t you know how to say thanks or is it that you don’t because you consider this your goddamn due?”

  Hillary flushed. “Sorry,” he said.

  He sat motionless until the outer door was closed, the
n, slowly, he leaned back on the bed and was alone for the first time in days. One small window, so smeared with dirt and streaks of paint that it gave only the illusion of light, was above the bed. The dresser was a small, scarred relic with its veneer warping and peeling. A sparkling glass and ashtray sat upon a white hand towel, and Hillary reflected for a moment on Della: who was she that she could through magic of a clean and well-made bed, three clean items upon a battered old dresser hint the presence of hope? He thought of her briefly, then closed his eyes and relaxed; the bed creaked beneath him, and his mind moved back along the road which had brought him here.

  The road was an uneasy one and he slept fitfully, waking at last with a start. His faced itched so he scratched it; then he lighted a cigarette and felt for the bottle he had given Keel. Remembering, he lay back, drawing deeply upon his cigarette and tightening his eyes against the need of it. He did not know how long he held himself this way. When he heard footsteps, he crushed the cigarette quickly underfoot, and lay still, his eyes closed. He heard Eagle exclaim as the door was pushed open, “Damn, Keel gave that cat the bed.”

  “Let’s go to my place, Richie,” the girl’s voice said.

  “What the hell do I want to go to your place for,” Eagle growled.

  The voices and footsteps faded and the door closed behind them. Hillary retrieved the crushed cigarette, saw that it was beyond smoking and lit another. Now the sun was gone, slanting deep over New Jersey, and Hillary, sitting painfully on the edge of his bed, his mind a crater where thoughts ran sluggishly, responded to the hour and the peculiar lean of the shadows by remembering the rear room of the Crimson that was the bar where, at the conclusion of the day’s classes, he had stopped for a bracer before going home to Angela. It had been a daily thing, that stopping for one or two.

  The Crimson had even smelled something like this room, and it had been peopled by perennial graduate students who studiously avoided the conformist uniforms of the undergraduates. There had been too, Hillary recalled, a wild little Jewish (why did he always remember that the man was a Jew?) instructor in the Psych department who stayed at the Crimson bar every afternoon just long enough to drink three martinis. It was said on the campus that he had been awarded the Silver Star for bravery in France, but had ripped it from his tunic as soon as Bradley had fastened it there and had flung it to the ground. The rumor, filled with details and so persistent that it had become fact, was vivid even now. Sternberg didn’t look like a hero. That was his name—Sternberg! The name had come leaping from the depths of forgetfulness. He had been a very pale and small man with black, curly hair. He talked as though he had once lived in the Bronx or Brooklyn. Hillary wondered what he was doing.

  Hillary stood and a draft brought the odor of wet, stale plaster to his nostrils. Then it was gone. He slipped on his coat and walked through the shop, inhabited now by squat, dark forms. The door opened suddenly and a wave of cold air swept in. Without preliminaries Keel said, “I brought you a drink.”

  Hillary stood motionless as a sense of shame, of haying been caught at something, swept over him. Keel took off his coat and with a grand gesture placed the bottle on a nearby table. “Here you are. Just one.”

  Hillary, still assailed by shame but now supported by annoyance, approached the table and tapped his fingers on the top of the bottle. “Eagle was here,” he said. He lifted the bottle and read the label, conscious that Keel was watching him with a smile on his face. A superior smile, Hillary thought.

  “And?”

  Hillary could barely make out his features in the dusk. But Keel’s body was familiar, tall and lean, graceful—like Borden’s. Borden: he had been a helluva basketball player. A tremendous second baseman and a whiz in the hundred-yard dash. A good dancer too. Borden!—a boyhood memory, made all the more painful by their simultaneous discovery that they were different. “He left,” Hillary said.

  “You got one of his beds, you know,” Keel chuckled. “He’s got ’em all over.”

  “I gathered.” Hillary replaced the bottle on the table and slipped out of his coat. Keel picked up the bottle and twirled it slowly in his hand. “How you feel?” he asked.

  “All right.”

  They looked at one another in the dusk. Outside the 8th Street crosstown bus wheezed down the narrow road.

  Keel sighed and glanced at his watch. “We got to start working soon,” he said. His voice was a gentle warning. He extended the bottle toward Hillary.

  “I’ll try without it for a while.” Hillary said.

  “Okay. Let’s light a couple of candles.” Keel pocketed the bottle and took out a book of matches. He lit a candle and his shadow rose, tall and grotesque, against the wall behind him. Hillary lit a couple and for the first time the shop looked comfortable, even warm.

  Keel went to the kitchen and lit the ovens, then turned on the small light in the Musicians’ Room. “Hungry, man?”

  “I could eat,” Hillary said.

  “Della’ll be in shortly,” Keel said, and Hillary noticed that his eyes had gone far away. “She’ll fix up some ’burgers and a few fries. I’m starving.” He broke off, patting his stomach. “Some good American, maybe a piece of pie.…” Keel smiled deep inside himself. It was a good warm smile and Hillary, for the first time, smiled with him and enjoyed it.

  “Maybe I’ll even get to feeling so good that I’ll let you read some poetry. You must know some.”

  Hillary laughed and glanced meaningfully at Keel. “You must know some yourself. Who do you like?”

  Keel shrugged. “John Donne, I guess.”

  There was a silence and the voices of the kids in the street, frantic with their last hours before dinner and homework, echoed faintly in the shop. Donne, the roué turned cleric, Hillary thought.

  “Every once in a while,” Keel said with a little laugh, “some cat with a beard and run-over shoes falls in here and says, ‘Like, daddy, you gotta let me read some truth.’ I say, ‘Who’s truth is it, yours or someone else’s?’ and he answers, as they always do, ‘It’s my truth; it’s the truth I found.’ I don’t let them read. I don’t let anybody read, Prof. If Auden was in town and walked down here the block from his house, I wouldn’t let him read. Poetry, good poetry, is not like that; it’s a private love affair between the guy who wrote it and the guy who likes to read it or hear it on a side. I don’t have bongos, and I like for people to come here half-way pressed.” Keel blinked his eyes. “Eagle is an exception.” He turned and jostled a chair.

  “You make a living here?”

  “If you mean just getting by, I do. Once I wanted to make a living—but it didn’t agree with me. I think I’m almost happy now.”

  “How can you afford me?”

  “That’s no problem. Man, you’re so beat you didn’t even notice that we hadn’t talked salary.”

  “I noticed.”

  “You did, huh?”

  “Yeah.”

  Keel changed the subject. “Where’d you teach?”

  “Upstate.”

  “You haven’t cut out for good?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I think this country can use lots of good teachers.”

  “I don’t think I was too good.”

  “I’d guess you were all right.”

  Hillary stared across the room and tried to remember whether he had been good or not.

  The door opened and he turned. A tall, red-haired girl came in smiling at Keel, and in that second, Hillary knew that had there been a million people in the room she still would have smiled in that special way only at Keel. Hillary wanted not to stare at her, but a quality of gentleness was vivid upon her face; she was the kind of woman each man dreams of having in his bed, in his kitchen, in summers and autumns, all the days of his life. Neat: that was the only word to describe her face. It was devoid of that animal alertness or that coy submissiveness many white women, knowing a Keel Robinson, would have had. There was no sign of any neurotic defiance hidden in her eyes, nothing to sug
gest that she harbored any deep self-hatred for this need to see Keel.

  Hillary did not avert his face. Instead, he veiled his eyes, conscious of the frozen, polite grin on his face as he watched them kiss.

  “Della,” Keel said. Hillary said hello.

  CHAPTER 3

  Until the moment Della joined them, Hillary had felt that no person, no incident, could bring him back to a living and, finally, a painless remembrance of the dead—his wife, her head half through a shattered windshield, the mockery of broken glass falling to the ground seconds after the crash. But Della’s presence that evening had done that. From time to time over the casual meal, he had looked at her and thought automatically of Angela alive; it had not hurt and he was thankful for this woman, whoever she was. It was no wonder then that he had, half the night through (it was now two in the morning) recalled how Keel had looked forward to the moment when Della would arrive. This had been, Hillary thought in retrospect, subtly implicit in the way he and Keel had suddenly become involved in the warm conversation just before she came.

  Hillary understood. He recalled how he had felt long ago when he waited for Angela on a Fayetteville corner, crepe shoes shined, his pegged pants creased, his hair ducktailed and neatly brilliantined. The feeling of impending pleasure was always intense, so intense that it passed beyond self-control and communicated itself to someone else if they were there—perhaps to a sly watcher. It had been that way with Keel.

  But he had gone silent after a time, just short of sullen. He had become curt and, in a way, sad. It was in the sag of his shoulders, in the deepening brown of his eyes between laughs. When the first few hours had passed, Della too, had become quiet, as though she also had a sadness she would or could not lose. When they spoke they did it softly, as if there were a secret between them, or as though they were refusing to intrude upon each other. It was obvious, though, that they were bound together by something.

  So Hillary found himself thinking, painfully yet clearly, and wished it had not been so. He moved aimlessly around the shop. It was a midweek night and there were not many customers. There were a couple of musicians he did not recognize in the Musicians’ Room, but he paid no attention to them. Once he wondered where Eagle was but decided that perhaps he had a gig that night and would not be in.