Название: Starboard Wine
Автор: Samuel R. Delany
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Историческая фантастика
isbn: 9780819572943
isbn:
At the south corner of the block was Mrs. Dade’s funeral parlor. Centered in the block north was Mr. Sterrit’s. Between was Levy and Delany’s, my father’s funeral home. (Undertaker was a word he detested; he considered himself a funeral director.) When I was seven my father had the face of the building covered in red brick. Aluminum letters that stood out from the facade on little posts went up to replace the old sign—green neon letters in their tin shadow masks, the whole metal housing almost as big as I was. The workmen on their scaffold lowered it down over the door, first the L end, then the Y. Levy had died before I was born. Growing up with Levy and Delany, however, it was years before I thought to question why my father had kept the name of his former partner, whom he had later bought out. Originally friends, they had only briefly been in business together. (Years later my mother told me, laughingly: “Your father said he always owed Mr. Levy a great debt: he showed your father every way possible not to run a successful funeral business.”) Still, I wonder, with my father dead twenty years now, whether the two of them found an irony in the suggestion of the Jew and the Irishman running what, by the middle of the ’40s, was considered a rather swell Harlem funeral establishment. At any rate, the irony was misleading. Both were black men. Both owed their ethnic patronymics to the whites who had owned their parents, their great-grandparents.
On our left was Mr. and Mrs. Onley’s grocery store, which the Onleys ran with their grown son Robbie. In summer, green wooden stands sat out under the awning, full of cabbages, carrots, green and red peppers—although what I remember far more clearly is the exotic autumn produce: bananas, kale, pomegranates, coconuts, sugar cane, mangoes. My childhood seems to have been continually punctuated with the refrain, “Would you run down to the store, Sam, and get me …” from my mother. After the few inevitable episodes of change accidentally dropped while lugging the brown paper bag back up the side steps to the kitchen, for several months, as Mrs. Onley stood implacably calm behind the counter in her alternating white, blue, or green smocks, my entreaty was an embarrassed and insistent: “Mrs. Onley, please don’t give the change to me. You just put it in the paper bag. That way I don’t have to even touch it so that upstairs they’ll get it all!”
“No,” she would say, smiling. “You just take it in your hand and be careful.”
On our right was Mr. Lockley’s Hosiary and Housepaint Store. Mr. Lockley was a thin man, slightly darker than wrapping paper, with white hair, a withered face, and a game leg I always used to wonder whether or not was hinged and wooden, like my cousin Jimmy’s. Jimmy had lost his in the Second World War and played a pretty good game of chess. As the years went on, running the store was taken over more and more by Mr. Lockley’s balding son, Albert, and his red-headed daughter-in-law, Minnie. In memory that space, always dim, seems to extend for blocks and blocks under the stamped tin ceiling and the first fluorescent lights in the neighborhood. Beside the narrow aisle, the square counter trays—the front ones of glass, those farther back in the store of wood—held rolls of black electrician’s tape, piles of orange and yellow yo-yos, boxes of carpet tacks, rings of cardboard with walnut-size rubber balls in each central hole, starred about with ten multichrome jacks; mousetraps (we had two under our kitchen sink), the larger versions of which, in my innocence, I had thought must be to catch cats; nails, screws, buttons, stacks of cheap plates so dusty I wondered who would eat from them; hammers, screwdrivers with clear yellow handles, pressboards full of thumbtacks, boxes of staples, Scotchtape rolls, the rrrurring key-copying machine; and small religious pictures in purple plastic frames, dusty as the plates.
Every evening Albert or Minnie would drag across the store window—full of bride dolls with chocolate brown skin, coils of black water hose, and beige boards displaying eight different styles of doorknob—the metal gate.
And the gate, oddly, is what I really want to talk about.
First of all, in those days Mr. Lockley’s was the only store I knew of that had a gate. (We had gates on our back windows at home, in the kitchen and living room behind the ivory and purple draperies, but living with those, day in and day out, I somehow hardly saw them.) Mr. Lockley’s gate had many vertical black shafts, hinged to the numerous diagonals with rollers at their ends, between. If you were out on the street in the morning just as the sun cleared the cornices on the far side of Seventh Avenue, the struts cut the light into gold lozenges webbed with shadow and laid them on the dusty splendor inside.
I guess I was nine.
It was a warm autumn evening, though at six o’clock the sky had lost half its light and doubled the depth of its blue. I watched Albert click the third big padlock to its hasp and turn away toward the stoop to his apartment house. I stepped onto the black metal cellar door, which shifted—tunk!—under my U.S. Keds. I walked to the gate, put my palm against one strut. It was cool and gritty.
I pushed a little.
The gate moved—only it didn’t move like a rigid structure of bolted iron. It rippled, like a curtain. I put my face up against it, looked across it, pushed again. Although the bottoms and tops of the verticals were constrained in metal troughs, the movement across the structure clearly went out in waves. I could see it waving. And I could hear it rattle and watch the waves spread from me out to the upper corners of the window. I put both hands against the metal, my face as close as I could get it, sighting across the gate, which from this angle seemed like a single sheet.
I shook it once.
I waited. I hooked my fingers around the struts and shook it two times.
I waited again.
Then I rattled it as hard as I could. And kept on rattling. The noise hurt my ears. The verticals tap-danced in their trough, and all pattern dissolved in the banging and racketting —
“What in the world are you doing? Stop that!”
I turned around.
“You gone crazy?” my father demanded, as he frequently did these days. He had heard the noise and stepped out of the funeral parlor door to see what his odd nine-year-old was up to. “You stop that and go on upstairs! You’re going to end in the electric chair, I swear,” which seemed to be his most common admonition to me over any and all infractions, minor or major, an admonition his father had used as frequently with him; and since my father had achieved some success under it he felt justified in using it with me—although frankly, to me it was both bewildering and terrifying.
I ran upstairs.
But later, as I lay in my bed on the third floor, listening to the night traffic whisking along Seventh Avenue, I thought again of that gate. Its rigid pieces, some long, some short, were attached in such a flexible way that not only could it fold up during the day at the edge of the store window, but, when it was extended, motion to any part of it was translated across its breadth in audible and visible progression. The motion was passed from juncture to juncture. Each strut took up the motions of the ones that joined its near end and passed a resultant motion on to the ones that joined its far end. No matter how loud the clangor, it was a patterned and orderly process.
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