Atlantis: Three Tales Read Online Free PDF Page B

exhaustive hilarity was the quarter-inch-thick record of Billy Rose and Ernest Hare singing Harry Von Tilzer’s “In Old King Tutankhamen’s Day,” with its infectious refrain: “Old King Tut-tut-tut-tut-tut-tut-tut . . .” though Jules and Laura preferred the other side: “Barney Google.” The other record Sam and Papa loved to play was the late Enrico Caruso and Mario Ancona singing the duet from Bizet’s
The Pearl Fishers
. In his study, Papa slipped the crank back into its metal clip on the dark wood and asked: “Do you want to ask Batouta the Moor to come in with us and listen?” (This month Batouta the Moor was Papa’s nickname for Lewy.) “But then, he’s probably out somewhere exploring.” (He was.) So they sat by themselves and listened to the cascading male voices, each rippling down over the other; and Sam would imagine weedy waters and flickering tidelights over submarine grottoes—not that that had much to do with Thanksgiving nor, really, was there much to say about it.
    So he told them instead about Lewy and the poetry book with the gold star in it for excellence Lewy’d won in Mrs. Fitzgarn’s and what Reverend Fitzgarn had said about Papa’s sermon and about how John had brought the mule into Mama’s yard and had fallen off it and how it ate Mama’s flowers and she’d just about skinned him alive and—again—about the laughter at Hubert’s letter, when, after Thanksgiving dinner, Papa had read it out.
    Once, when he paused, Elsie smiled: “I think we can let him stop now.”
    Hap’s wife said: “It’s so good to hear how things are going. And it’s so good to have you up here, Sam.”
    Then they talked about other things and laughed lots more and all said how much he’d grown.
    Sam was, in fact (it had taken most of the day to register), as tall as Hubert now.
    On the way back to Hubert’s rooms Sam
saw
his first skyscrapers—late that evening, when it was already dark. They’d stopped to stroll inMount Morris. (Hubert had already given Sam the key and was going to walk Clarice home to her aunt and uncle’s at a Hundred-twentieth Street and Seventh Avenue.) In the November’s-end dark, the three of them climbed the stone steps to the high rocks. Then Hubert and Sam left Clarice, to climb up the rocks themselves. “Those lights over there, like pearls—that you can just see?—” Hubert explained—“
those
are skyscrapers . . . mostly.”
    Far away, specular and portentous, they glimmered behind haze-hung night. (It felt as if it might rain any moment.) Sam seemed to be looking across some black and insubstantial river to another city altogether—a city come apart from New York, drifting in fog, in air, in darkness, and wholly ephemeral: the idea of a city—with no more substance than his memory of his memories on the train.
    When they climbed down, Clarice was leaning against a low boulder. The park lamp behind her threw her into silhouette. “Now doesn’t she look older than the rocks among which she sits?” Hubert asked.
    â€œWhat’s
that
supposed to mean?” Clarice asked, her hands in her coat pockets, legs crossed under her skirt.
    â€œMy rag, my bone, my hank of hair; and
she
doesn’t care—”
    â€œ
Hu-bert
—!” Clarice objected.
    â€œI’m teasing you,” he said.
    She stood. “Now what Sam—
Eshu!
” Clarice pulled her coat around her—“Sam should do, if he wants to see skyscrapers, is take a walk across the Brooklyn Bridge. That’s the way really to see New York.” (Sam had already realized Clarice was a person who said “really to see” and “truly to think.” She had declared, loudly and insistently at dinner, that she thought it particularly important Negroes speak with proper grammar. “After