A Walker in the City by Alfred Kazin

Author:Alfred Kazin [Kazin, Alfred]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Beyond! Beyond! It was the clean, general store smell of packaged white bread in the A&P that Passover week I could not eat matzoh, and going home, hid the soft squunchy loaf of Ward's bread under my coat so that the neighbors would not see. It was the way past the car barns at the end of Rockaway Avenue, that week my father was painting in New Lots, and I took that route for the first time, bringing him his lunch one summer afternoon. I could not wait to get out on the other side of the dark subway station. I had never seen another part of Brownsville where the going was so strange, where streets looked so empty, where the sun felt so hot. It was as if there were not enough houses there to stand in its way. When the sun fell across the great white pile of the new Telephone Company building, you could smell the stucco burning as you passed; then some liquid sweetness that came to me from deep in the rings of freshly cut lumber stacked in the yards, and the fresh plaster and paint on the brand-new storefronts. Rawness, sunshiny rawness down the end streets of the city, as I thought of them then—the hot ash-laden stink of the refuse dumps in my nostrils and the only sound at noon the resonant metal plunk of a tin can I kicked ahead of me as I went my way. Then two blocks more, and the car barns I loved. The light falling down the hollows in the corrugated tin roof seemed to say Go over! Go over!, marked the place from which the stacked trolley cars began all over again their long weary march into the city. I liked to see them stacked against each other, a thin trail of track leading out of the sheds, then another track, then another, until everywhere you could see, the streets were wild with car tracks pointing the way back to the city.

Beyond was that day they took us first to the Botanic Garden next to the Brooklyn Museum, and after we went through the bamboo gate into the Japanese Garden, crossed over a curved wooden bridge past the stone figure of a heron dreaming in the water, I lay in the grass waiting to eat my lunch out of the shoe box and wondered why water lilies floated half-submerged in the pond and did not sink. They led us into the museum that day, up the big stone steps they had then, through vast empty halls that stung my nose with the prickly smell of new varnish and were lined with the effigies of medieval Japanese warriors—the black stringy hairs on their wigs oppressively unreal, the faces mock-terrible as they glared down at us through their stiffly raised swords, everything in that museum wearisome and empty and smelling of floor polish until they pushed us through a circular room upstairs violently ablaze with John Singer Sargent's

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