The crowd seems to know it, as there are those among them praying, pinning money grimly to the ribbons that drag along the pavement behind the Negress’s palanquin, and those also clapping and singing and laughing full-throatedly. The men carrying the idol are almost as white as he is; they are even dressed in white, they don’t know that they’re out of place in this place, like the idol they’re carrying, like the woman whose face he is searching for in the crowd.
And it comes back to him now that, walking home through the dark streets, silently with his cousin, making his way as one used to do at night by the light of the celestial bodies, he had asked himself, Why did I keep playing, why was I, am I, not ashamed to have been thought mistaken, laughable, absurd?
He asked his cousin, “Did you hear that person laugh? Was it a man laughing?” And his cousin said no, he was mistaken, it wasn’t a laugh, it was a woman singing along, she was merrily singing the tune he played.
And later that night, mounting the stairs to his room and hearing the click, click, click of his hard-soled shoes on the wooden steps and regarding even the clicking as the solemn expression of his solitude, he was struck by how solemn, in fact, it was when regarded by his own mind, and how also the very same self-solemnness when observed by the mind of another would be laughable.
But he felt a solace in this: that what is solemn to me can be laughable to you and still be no less solemn. Because the person he believed had laughed at him, or else had sung merrily along with him, was still, of necessity — he promised himself not to forget, but he did forget—looking right into him, apprehending the self that he felt, that his name failed adequately to name. As misery and mercy are the same, the first being what God wishes you to feel and the second the version of empathy he feels for you when you are miserable.
If she wasn’t dead, she would be nearly middle-aged by now. Her face could be among the faces of the white women murmuring in their black clothes, whom he is studying one by one as they pass. The crowd is so dense, the street so narrow, that children have climbed the curbside ginkgoes and sweet gums, the telephone poles, the gutters, up there where it must be cooler and the air must be moving instead of stagnating sickeningly in the heat, as it does down here with him among the crowd. There is a bakery with little girls on the roof and a boy and a miserable-looking man in a full suit staring at the backs of the legs of one of the girls as the jeweler was doing before.
If she wasn’t dead, she could call him by his name — will no one ever call him by his name again, sweetly? — but there is a crucial and mundane obstacle in the way of the fulfillment of this hope:
Sixteen and one half years ago, he had climbed up off the parlor floor, poured himself a glass of water, sat down again on the sofa, introduced himself, and asked her what her name was. But she didn’t answer. And he introduced himself again, courteously, asking if she might do him the favor of repeating his name back to him — hoping this way he could be fixed, at least in the universe of words, completely, could be turned into a word so that at least, if he couldn’t be real, he could be not alone. But her eyes were closed, her face was a slack red mask. And he doesn’t know if she didn’t repeat his name for him because she had heard but refused, or because she was already dead or unconscious from the knock of her head on the marble edge of the coffee table, in the parlor there, with an ashtray on it, and an unfinished hand of solitaire.
Night was falling, amid the mass of people and the merrily singing horns.
Solemnity is comical and comedy is solemn. As is evident from these whitish people praying to a Negress, as if she were in fact the thing she only symbolized, and from these Negroes who are, look at them, taking one another’s hands to dance now in the solemnly empty space behind the band that forms the end of the procession up the avenue.
As was evident also when laughing David, dressed only in a linen ephod, danced before the solemn Ark of the Lord to the sound of the singing of the Israelites and the sound of lyres, lutes, tambourines, cymbals, and castanets. And also when Ham, the son of Noah and the father of Canaan, saw his father passed out from drinking and naked in his tent, and went out and told his brothers, thinking it was funny, but they did not see that the nakedness of their father could be laughable, too, and went into the tent backward, a cloak on their shoulders, and covered him, with their eyes averted.
The Negroes are dancing, eight of them, and there is also an old Negro man with close-cropped white hair pointing vehemently at his shoes, and at them, and at his shoes, growling, “You all stop it! You all stop it, now! Get back here, stop it!” Unseeing — the old Negro man unseeing — that the crowd was laughing and clapping its hands to the clamorous, brassy music.
Where has she gone, the girl with the pink legs and the pinafore? You call it a pinafore, a “pinned-in-front,” although the garment, the thing, is buttoned up the back. Which is to say, the name doesn’t need the thing. As the Lord God said there would be light; and a vault between the waters; and on the earth trees bearing fruit, each with its own kind of seed; before the things took form. So that at last, this evening if she were only to see him and accuse him by his name, he would return to the unalloyed natural state that precedes being a thing: being a word. His father was called the same name, and his father, too. His name doesn’t need him.
So that at last, the jeweler having lost track of the girl, night having begun to fall, and he standing at the perimeter of the gap in the crowd in which the Negroes are dancing, a merry-solemn hope emerges from the bottom of his mind: that his name, having preceded him, will succeed him. He wants to laugh out loud in front of all these people — that should a final separation between the thing he is and the name of the thing be at last effected, then his name (the only part of him that can truly be said to be alive) will keep being alive because people, these people here, will want to know who he was, what was his name, and will discover it, and say it out loud.
PART FOUR. Cleveland 1953
19
Gary didn’t come from here. He was born in a suburban hospital on the South Side. But he loved the feast. It gave him a warm feeling. He used to come down here with his mother and dad when he was a boy. Richer people had the summer cottage on Kelleys Island; he had this, these streets, the carnival crowd.
He didn’t speak the language. He knew a handful of dialect words for garden vegetables, kitchen tools, colored people; heirloom words you couldn’t learn from any dictionary. His father was born in a bedroom in one of these tenements. He didn’t know which, and he was never going to know because his father was dead.
Gary was a member of five formal associations: the United Auto Workers, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the American Legion, his softball league, and the Democratic Party. He had two kids, a boy and a girl. His wife took dictation downtown. Maybe six associations if you counted the Methodist Church, but he went only on Christmas and Easter. He felt he belonged here. In Elephant Park. He felt his boy especially belonged here and needed to be taken to the Feast of the Assumption on an annual basis because they lived in an itty-bitty world of cereal and carpeting and because the boy had two names, a first and a last, one for the little self, one for the big self, the shared identity across centuries and an ocean, a name that, when you spoke it, others connected you with a clan and a place. And in this part of town, when they introduced themselves, they said the last name first and the first name last, and the priority here was unmistakable.