Far Beyond the Stars Page 5

Something from the summer of 1940.

  Benny stumbled out of the office, clutching the picture to his chest, and made it to the stairwell. He couldn't handle the elevator—not today. Its confined spaces would have suffocated him. He needed room.

  He managed to make it halfway down the stairs before he stopped, in shadow, leaning against the wall and sobbing for breath. What had just happened had been beyond humiliating. It had been a basic denial of his humanity. Why did he subject himself to this crap? Why? What was it that drove him, that pushed him to scratch black ink on white paper, to take his private dreams and offer them up to a world that cared not a damn for the dreamer?

  Why couldn't he just walk away from it all? He had asked himself that question a thousand times, and had no answer.

  Except …

  The Trylon …

  SHUFFLE

  CHAPTER 10

  July, 1940

  SUMMER IN HARLEM, 1940, was an oasis of calm for Benny Russell. He was sixteen, a high school senior next year—assuming that he could make up the classes lost through a bout with pneumonia. He was lucky at that; two years earlier, the same disease had cost his mother her life.

  But he was young, and alive, and filled with hope, and knew that this might be the last time that he would ever feel totally secure in the world he had known since childhood.

  He had grown up amidst the tenements and stoops of 127th and Park—knew every alley, every shadow; he had played basketball in the corner lots; and he knew the cops and the guys down at the youth center by sight and by voice.

  His gangly body was too light for football, too slow for basketball. His eyes not good enough for baseball. And as for boxing, well, let's just say that he liked his nose right where it was, thank you. It might have been nice to be the neighborhood sports hero, but that job was already claimed, and the claimant's name was Willie Hawkins.

  Willie was the best athlete in the borough, and everyone knew that. Running, boxing, basketball, football—you just didn't mess with, or bet against Willie Hawkins. He seemed to have always been taller, and stronger, and just better than any of the other kids. If there was any problem with that excellence, it lay in the fact that Willie Hawkins was totally aware of his superiority. You could see it in his stride, in his strut, in the way he told jokes with the confident knowledge that the real joke had been played on everyone but Willie Hawkins.

  Worst of all, the girls knew it.

  In general, Benny didn't care about what girls thought of Willie Hawkins. From the time Willie was in eighth grade, grown women had paid call on the lanky, muscular teenager, had picked him up in their cars, had stopped him on the street to engage him in conversation. That was merely the legend of Willie Hawkins, and that was just the way the world worked.

  There was on only one place that it hurt, only one place where he wished that he could match Willie. That was on the occasions that he saw Jenny watching him.

  Benny stood watching Jenny approach him now, that familiar sway in her walk. She was beautiful, tall, slender. Maybe she wore too much makeup, laughed too loud, stayed up too late. Maybe the older boys whispered about her after she walked past, and maybe she had been seen getting into too many of their cars. But she was still the most beautiful thing in Harlem, and she belonged to Willie Hawkins, whenever he wanted her.

  One day, (Benny was certain), he would tell Jenny what he thought of her. He would tell her that she was a princess, and that no one could understand or appreciate her but him. Until that day, until he found the courage for that confrontation, he would have to hold his tongue, and simply deal with the pain whenever he saw her with Willie and his crowd.

  Today, however, he didn't have to. This was a very special day, and he would have a chance to spend it with Jenny, and Willie wouldn't have much to say about it at all.

  But she had barely reached Benny and offered her greeting when a chopped Chevy filled with laughing, brown-skinned boys pulled up next to the stoop.

  "Hey, Jenny," Willie called, his too-white teeth gleaming. "Why don't you forget about the fair, come on down and watch me hit the ball." He paused. "Promise I'll hit one out of the park for you."

  "Maybe tomorrow," she laughed back. "Unk's been promising me this all year."

  Willie smirked. He could have almost any girl that he wanted—and dangled them on strings. But he seemed to take special pleasure in his ownership of Jenny. He would ignore her until she began to openly date other boys, and then reel her back in like a fisherman with a trout. He had begun the game back in fifth grade, and had yet to tire of it.

  Not that Benny could blame her. He saw the way she looked at Willie. The way everyone looked at him. When they played basketball at school, and went shirts and skins, and they bumped against each other, slicked with sweat and grunting with exertion, showing off their moves, their young, immortal, muscled bodies, Willie was far above all of them, almost godlike in his physical perfection, coordination, sheer animal magnetism.

  Hell, who could blame her?

  Hell, if he was a woman, he would want Willie, not a skinny little spit like Benny. A future professional champ, not a broke-ass little orphan living with his number-running aunt.

  There wasn't even any competition, really. And yet . . .

  "Hey Benny!" Willie called out.

  "Yeah?"

  "Take care of my best girl!"

  Benny just nodded dumbly as Willie whooped and slapped the side of the Chevy. The car belched smoke and roared off down the street.

  Jenny paused at the stoop, and smiled up at Benny. Her smile filled the whole world. "Well," she said. "This is a day! 'Bojangles!'" she said.

  "Bojangles!" Benny replied. He mimed a little dance step. "You ready to go see the best damned dancer in the whole world?"

  "I can't wait," she said.

  She may have been Willie's girlfriend, but today, just today, Benny could pretend that she was his. Today, they were going across to Flushing Meadow, to the World's Fair, to see the legendary Bill "Bojangles" Robinson dance. As they began to walk down the street toward the youth center, he could imagine that she linked her arm through his arm, imagine that she was going out with him, not just for a day at the World's Fair, one arranged by the Youth Center during the fair's Negro Week.

  At the fair, they would treat themselves to exhibits extolling the contributions of Negro Americans to the greatness that was America. It was a thing to inspire pride, and inspiration was something to cherish in this day and age.

  But he knew that when the day was over, he would return her to Willie: he remembered Hawkins' "take care of my best girl" comment, and knew that it was true. This was a loan, a very temporary loan.

  But for the next few hours, he was going to pretend that it wasn't. He would pretend that this summer day, with its cheery sun and promise of adventure to come, was just another in an endless stretch of days that the two had enjoyed together. He would pretend, in effect, that this town was his oyster, and that the girl beside him was his. And just maybe if he dreamed hard enough, it would one day be true.

  The Park Avenue youth center was a central meeting place for the young kids between the ages of nineteen and about eleven. There was always something happening, always a sense of activity, always a bustle.

  When they entered it was, at the moment, filled with the busy sound of a dozen bodies—scuffing leather in the boxing ring, and in the lot just outside, bouncing around the basketball court at a dizzying pace.

  For a minute, he thought that his eyes deceived him, that a kid of nine or so was out on that court, but when he had the chance to watch from another angle, he saw that it was little Cassie out there. Cassie was a tomboy to the limit, the kind that it was difficult to imagine ever putting on a dress. She was only a year younger than he was, but—embarrassingly—she had all of the athletic prowess that he had been denied.

  More embarrassingly, she had an irritating tendency to want to tag along with him. Perhaps she wouldn't spot him today, and he could just slip
past—

  No such luck. "Benny!" she called out, her dark, oval face suffused with pleasure. "Sorry," she said to the boys on the court.

  Jenny laughed musically, and her smile was pure tolerance. "It looks like your fan club spotted you," she grinned.

  "Aww … I don't know why she does that," he said.

  Jenny wagged her head. "No, you really don't, do you?" she asked, and laughed. "Hi, Cassie."

  Cassie glared at Jenny, but she had to tilt her head up to do it. Jenny had the height as well as the natural charm and grace, all of the things that Cassie lacked. He suspected that in a few years, Cassie might be spectacularly beautiful, but right now, he just wished that she would leave him alone. It was embarrassing to have her follow him around, and he wished that she would just go and bug someone else.

  Her dark face was dotted with perspiration, and she was breathing hard. "Are you ready?" she panted. Then almost as if she hadn't noticed Jenny was there, turned and looked up at her, smiling mildly. "Oh," she said. "Hi, Jenny."

  His heart sank. "You're going to the fair?" he said despondently. His image, his dream of having Jenny all to himself through a long, and ultimately, romantic day was beginning to fray around the edges.

  "Heck, yeah," she said. "Mr. Cooley said that anyone who wanted to come today could come, if they had the money."

  Cooley was the Youth Center's director. He was also, during the school year, the science teacher at Lenox High, the man who had guided Benny during the past year or so, guiding him steadily, gently but firmly away from trade classes and toward science and English. He was also Jenny's uncle.

  "You've got talent, boy," Cooley had said to Benny once. "But you're going to have to work to bring it out."

  Talent? That was a word that Benny would never have applied to himself. He had been a quiet, bookish boy through most of his life, the last chosen for any game that required strength or skill. He was certainly no Willie Hawkins, but he knew that he did have a brain. One day, he would run numbers for Big Sid, maybe work his way up into the policy operation. There was money there, and money made the difference in this world.

  "Well," he said, trying another tactic. "Why would you want to go on out there anyway? Anyway, where would you get seventy-five cents?"

  "My grandma gave it to me," she said, and for a moment he thought she was actually going to stick her tongue out at him. "This being Negro Week and all, she thought I should go and see what it's all about and come back and tell her."

  He sighed. It was useless to argue. The fair was only an hour away, but that might as well have been a world for the poorer residents of Harlem. Seventy-five cents just to get in! Then there was transportation and food once on the far side of the gate. That could be prohibitive unless you brought a box lunch, as he and Jenny had.

  There was even a certain sense that the fair wasn't for Negroes. It was for the white folks who had built it, that's what it was. But Benny had yearned to go to it since he had first heard about it. There was something about that fair, and the promise of the future that it represented. But that was too high-falootin' to actually motivate him to go, until Mr. Cooley announced that Bill "Bojangles" Robinson (the greatest dancer in the world!) was slated to perform there. That was different. In fact, that made all the difference.

  Suddenly, his aunt managed to find the seventy-five cents for him. And suddenly, it was permissible for him to fantasize about the other delights he might find there.

  The days of his life might well be filled with deprivation. Maybe the walls of his tenement were thin enough to hear the neighbors snoring or fighting or making love. Maybe there were so few jobs in the neighborhood that his father had been forced to travel further and further every day to find a decent wage, until he was leaving for weeks at a time, and then months, trying to find a place to play his piano. Then five years ago, he had simply not come home at all.

  Maybe there was so little hope to be had that his aunt was absolutely addicted to the numbers, that gambling fever derisively called "nigger stocks," a way for the poor to vicariously experience the thrill of the stock market. Every day, the closing numbers of the New York Stock Exchange were published in the Times. Every day his aunt, and countless thousands like her, had the chance to bet a penny or a nickel or a dollar on a three-digit number, and take the chance on earning six dollars for every penny they invested if that number matched the last three published in the next day's paper.

  He had tried to tell her that this didn't make any sense, that she would invest a thousand pennies for every six-dollar win, but she was convinced that that weekly dollar would pay off one day, and that she would use that money to pay off the bills that choked her, stop collecting numbers slips for Big Sid and maybe even move to New Jersey, where she had a sister who was working for the county, and could get her a job.

  First, she had to get ahead of the bills, because otherwise she wouldn't be able to move.

  Hope was a business, and his aunt Ardelia had invested heavily therein.

  Mr. Cooley rapped on the front door, smiling at them. He was a tall drink of water, with a protruding Adam's apple and a pair of thick glasses, which made him look like a goldfish peering through the side of its bowl.

  "Well," he called, "I guess everyone's here!" Another dozen kids appeared from around the gym: all had been playing ball, or reading, or listening to the radio from which Benny Goodman's swing played exuberantly. (For a white boy, Goodman could really jam, and Benny wasn't too embarrassed by the similarity of names.)

  As a group, the dozen or so of them trooped down the block to the subway station, passing a burned-out tenement as they did. Benny remembered hearing the firetrucks a week before, a distant keening in the night. People were without homes now. Maybe someone had died. He remembered his mother telling him about a fire she had seen as a girl, people trapped on the upper floors, jumping to their deaths even before the fire reached them. He swore that he would get his mother out of here one day.

  Her death had ended that dream. Maybe … just maybe he could do it for Ardelia. He didn't want her to have to live like this.

  And God knew, he wouldn't want to die like that.

  At the subway station, they paid their money to ride downtown. The train was pretty empty at this time of the morning and all of the faces on it were dark.

  As they got closer and closer to downtown, more and more white faces piled on. Ordinarily, he knew that Caucasians looked at him, and people like him with a certain fear and distrust, a sense that there was something wrong with the world because they were forced to share their precious breathing space with Negroes. But today, and for the past year, it had been just a little different. Today they were all adventurers heading in the same direction. Today they were all fairgoers, gone to take just a peek at the future, the world in which all of them would live. That made a difference.

  "Listen to the fight last night, Benny?" Cassie said, looking up at him. A love of boxing was one of the few things that he had to admit they had in common. "Armstrong almost killed that bum!"

  Cassie went into a little of a boxer's crouch, and mimed a couple of punches. Pow! She was Henry Armstrong, Welterweight Champ of the world. Bang! She was Joe Louis, greatest boxer who ever lived.

  "Yeah, I listened."

  Cassie aimed her last punch at his chin, and Benny pretended to wobble as the car began to roll. "I'm telling you," she said. "One of these days there's going to be women's boxing, you know, and I think that I could do real good." She looked up at Jenny. "What do you think?"

  "I think," Jenny said. "That in a couple of years, you're going to forget about all of this stuff, and find out that you're a girl. That's what I think."

  Benny choked back a laugh. He tried to imagine Cassie in anything other than her trademarked sneakers and pants, and couldn't, quite. Cassie looked at Jenny with her mouth flattened into a thin line. "Not me," she said. "I'm going straight for the top."

  Benny loved her at that moment. Like a sister, of cour
se, but he loved her. Unlike most of the people that he knew, or had ever known, Cassie could dream.

  Benny worked his way up next to Cooley, who had a faraway look in his eye. "You thinking about Bojangles?"

  Cooley shook his head "no."

  "Still thinking about that Futurama thing?"

  Cooley shook his head, and his eyes seemed to gleam, set in his face like a pair of dark pearls. "No, there's a special exhibition this week," he said.

  "What's that?" Benny asked.

  "Well, you know that this is Negro Week at the fair, so it had solicited some additional participation from African nations," he said.

  "And what did they get?" Benny asked.

  A heavyset Negro man, his face a succession of dark heavy folds, had listened to the conversation with growing amusement. "Africa?" the heavy man said. "They ain't got nothing to send over but maybe a crate of monkeys and bananas," he said. "I been out to that damn fair—ain't nothing out there but white people. Don't get your little heart up."

  "That's not really true," Cooley said. "The Harp sculpture is actually the work of a Negro, Augusta Savage. And the Democracity song is the work of a Negro, as well."

  The worker's thick mouth twisted into a sneer. "You talk real smart, but you ain't doing these kids no favor. They're just niggers, and that's all they're ever gonna be."

  Their car pulled into the station and Cooley shepherded them off eagerly, happy to get them away from the inebriate. And Benny was happy to go.

  He looked back, feeling sad, and angry, and maybe just a little fearful. What right did this drunk have to spoil his day? It was an adventure, and that was all that there was to it. It was going to be a great adventure, one that he would remember his whole life. That he was sure of.

  They changed trains downtown at Penn Station. Penn was a magnificent granite and marble building two city blocks long. Benny had never been there before, and his mouth dropped open at the sheer scale of the station: the mere pedestals on which the columns stood were taller than Benny. The concourse looked like something from a fantasy, a staggering open space crisscrossed with steel and glass, a ceiling so high it seemed there should have been clouds beneath it.