Suddenly I relaxed. A feeling of delightful content
surged through me. Approaching New York. Above the
haze, out of all the hustle and bustle of the human maelstrom.
That look of absolute futility I had seen on the
faces in the subway, on the streets, in the early hours of5
morning—these receded from memory. Life was good,
after all. It was a wonderful thing if you viewed it correctly.
And this was the way to view it.
Reflections of a bright young man being smeared all
over the island were things of the past now, as on the right, 10
as far as we could see, the Bronx stretched away, monotonously,
endlessly. I thought how much happier I was up
there, looking at the Bronx, than if I were in the Bronx
down there, looking up at me.
Straight down I made out a Sound steamer. Hell Gate 15
Bridge, a tiny thing like the toys in shop windows.
But the Bronx got me. I had heard much of the Bronx
and once or twice had visited the Zoo. But I never conceived
the Bronx as a few bushels of building blocks thrown
down on a wide green lawn and tumbled about promiscuously. 20
They were blocks, too, whole city squares, miles
and miles of squares.
And there was the Harlem River—and Harlem. I
looked for the homes of the cliff dwellers. They were not
there. The scenery was as flat as the side of a house. 25
Veering slightly to the left, a mere touch from Francis
of the auto wheel in front of him, and we were speeding
over the upper East Side. Now I knew, or thought I knew,
the millions who reside there, more or less in a state of
perpetual congestion. I had often pondered as to where 30
these millions hung their wash, when they washed. To-day
I learned.
Arranged in crisscross rows, compactly and without wasting
an inch of space, that I could see, the roofs of the East
Side were literally covered, literally littered, with clothes
of a sameness that made of whole blocks or squares an
awning. Here and there a red shirt, the only outstanding 5
bit of color. At least I chose to assume that it was a shirt
because I knew that down in those narrow streets, moving
about like minute grains of sand guided only by the confines
of the conventional walls, were people sweltering in
the heat of a summer day, and they needed those shirts 10
another season.
We dropped lower. We saw between the lines of garments,
as we gazed straight downward, a bed, another bed,
then a cot, more beds, a chair or two, now and then a bit
of green I took to be plants, occasionally a bit of carpet 15
on the roof—and babies. The ten or fifteen babies who
do not spend their days in the middle of the streets are
enjoying the pleasures of their own roof gardens. As far
as we could see to the left it was the same—roofs and
clothes and babies, divided into squares like cuts of frosted 20
cake.
We struck Fifth Avenue at 110 Street. To our right
was Central Park. And it was not as large as the palm of
one's hand. In fact it might have been a bare spot from
which a few building blocks had been lifted, evenly and 25
without disturbing the sharply outlined sides and corners.
There was nothing to be seen of the beautiful drives.
The wonderful trees were as clumps of sagebrush, the
gathering spots mere splotches of gray in a patch of moldy
green. The lakes and the reservoir were as bits of broken30
glass with jagged edges and no reason on earth for their
being there.