Colum McCann - Let the Great World Spin

“Gloria,” I heard again, as if my own name were drifting away from me.

I didn’t look back. I was sure that Claire would run after me, and I kept wondering if I’d done the right thing, leaving her behind, with the radio parts spread around her son’s room, the books, the pencils, the baseball cards, the snow globes, the sharpeners, all neatly arranged on the shelves. Her face came back to me, the slide of sadness along her eyes.

Walk, don’t walk.

I flat-out wanted to go home and curl up, to be buried in my apartment, away from traffic signals. I didn’t want the shame, or anger, or jealousy, even — I just wanted to be home, the doors locked, the stereo on, some libretto sounding out around me, to sit on the broken-backed sofa, drowning everything else until it was all invisible.

Walk, don’t walk.

Then again, I was thinking that I shouldn’t be acting this way, maybe I was getting it all wrong, maybe the truth is that she was just a lonely white woman living up on Park Avenue, lost her boy the exact same way as I lost three of mine, treated me well, didn’t ask for nothing, brought me in her house, kissed me on the cheek, made sure my teacup was full, and she just flat-out made a mistake by running her mouth off, one silly little statement I was allowing to ruin everything. I had liked her when she was fussing all over us, and she didn’t mean harm, maybe she was just nervous. People are good or half good or a quarter good, and it changes all the time — but even on the best day nobody’s perfect.

I could imagine her there, staring at the elevator, watching the numbers go down, chewing on her fingers, watching it all descend. Kicking herself for trying too hard. Running back to the intercom and begging us to stay just a minute more.

After almost ten blocks I got a little stab in my stomach, a stitch. I leaned up against the doorway of a doctor’s office on Eighty-fifth Street, under the awning, breathing heavily, and weighing it all up in my mind, but then I thought, No, I’m not going to turn back, not now, I’m going to keep right on going, that’s my duty and nobody’s going to stop me.

Sometimes you get a bug in your mind. I’m going to make it all the way home even if it takes me a week, I thought, I’m going to step every inch of the way, gospel, that’s what I had to do, no matter what, back to the Bronx.

Marcia, Janet, Jacqueline weren’t calling after me anymore. Part of me was relieved that they let me go, that I didn’t give in to them, didn’t turn around. I wasn’t sure what sort of response I would’ve let loose if they came trundling up alongside me. But another part of me thought that Claire at least should have kept after me, I deserved that much, I wanted her to come tap me on the shoulder and beg a second time so that I knew it mattered, like our boys mattered. And I didn’t want that to be the end of things for my boys.

I looked up the avenue. Park was gray and wide and there was a small rise of hill up ahead, a stepping-stone of traffic lights. I tightened the buckles on my shoes and stepped out into the crosswalk.

WHEN I LEFT MISSOURI, I was seventeen years old, and I made my way to Syracuse, where I survived on an academic scholarship. I fared pretty well, even if I say so myself. I had gifts for putting together some fine written sentences, and I could juggle a good slice of American history, and so — like a few young colored women my age — we were invited to elegant rooms, places with wooden panels and flickering candles and fine crystal glasses, and we were asked to give opinions on what had happened to our boys over Anzio, and who W.E.B. Du Bois was, and what it really meant to be emancipated, and how the Tuskegee Airmen came about, and what Lincoln would think of our achievements. People listened to our answers with that glazed-over look in their eyes. It was like they really wanted to believe what was being said in their presence, but they couldn’t believe they were present for it.

Late in the evenings I played the piano stiffly, but it was as if they wanted jazz to leap from my fingers. This was not the Negro they expected. Sometimes they would look up, jolted, as if they’d just brought themselves, cold, out from a dream.

We were ushered to the door by the dean of one school or another. I could tell the parties only really began after the door closed and we were gone.

After visiting those splendid houses, I didn’t want to go back to my little dorm room anymore. I walked around the city, down by Thornden Park and out to White Chapel gardens, sometimes until the blue dawn rose, wearing holes in my shoes.

Most of the rest of my college days were spent clutching my school satchel close to my chest and pretending not to hear the suggestions of the fraternity boys who wouldn’t have minded a colored woman for a trophy: they had a safari intent to them.

Sure, I ached for the backroads of my hometown in Missouri, but leaving behind a scholarship would’ve been a defeat for my folks, who had no idea what it was like for me — they who thought their little girl was up north learning the truth of America in the sort of place where a young woman could cross the thresholds of the rich. They told me that my southern charm would get me by. My father wrote letters that began: My Little Glorious. I wrote back on airmail paper. I told them how much I loved my history classes, which was true. I told them I loved walking the woods, true too. I told them that I always had clean linen in my dorm room, true as well.

I gave them all the truth and none of the honesty.

Still, I graduated with honors. I was one of the first colored women at Syracuse to do so. I went up the steps, looked down on the crowd of gowns and hats, emerged into a stunned applause. A light rain fell across the college courtyard. I stepped past my college mates, terrified. My mother and father, up from Missouri, hugged me. They were old and ruined and held each other’s hands as if they were just one piece. We went to a Denny’s to celebrate. My mother said that we’d come a long way, us and our people. I shrank back down in the seat. They had packed the car so there was space for me in the back. No, I told them. I’d rather stay a little while as long as they didn’t mind, I wasn’t ready to return just yet. “Oh,” they said, in unison, grinning just a little, “you’re a Yankee now?” It was a grin that held pain — I guess you’d call it a grimace.

My mother, in the passenger seat, adjusted the rearview mirror as they drove off: she watched me go and waved out the window and shouted at me to hurry home.

I went into my first marriage, blank to the schemes of love. My husband-to-be was from a family in Des Moines. He was an engineering student and a well-known debater on the all-Negro debating circuit: he could hold any subject in the palm of his hand. He had bad skin and a beautiful bent nose. His hair was cut into a conservative Afro, tinged cinnamon at the edges. He was the sort of man who adjusted his glasses, precisely, with a middle finger. I met him on the night when he said that what America didn’t realize was that it was forever censored, forever would be, unless common rights were changed. They were the words he used instead of civil rights: common rights. It brought a silence to the hall. My desire for him gripped my throat. He glanced across the room at me.

He had a lean boyishness, a full mouth. We dated for six weeks, then took the plunge. My parents and two remaining brothers drove north to join us for the wedding. The party had been arranged in a run-down hall on the outskirts of town. We danced until midnight and then the band left, dragging their trombones behind them. We searched around for our coats. My father had been silent most of the time. He kissed my cheek. He told me that not many people were ordering hand-painted signs anymore, that they were all going neon, but if he had one sign he could put on the world he would say that he was Gloria’s father.