I
This story is told because others need to know it. They need to know it now, when all the world is making a blind struggle to find youth-a new creative spirit.
It is the experience of just a common, everyday man-myself. But thousands of others have gone through my same experience. They are not finding the help, though, that I found. It is because I found this help-found something that man has always been seeking-that I feel impelled to tell my story.
My name is Harvey Allen. I was born in New York City and had lived there all my life. When the Big Thing happened, I was sixty years old. My wife and I had two sons, both married. We had six grandchildren.
We had lived in the same Harlem apartment for twenty years-with front windows looking out on the street, side air-shafts, and a rear view of clotheslines and fire-escapes. I never see a clothesline now that I don’t think of that day in October.
The neighborhood had changed since our coming. The Ghetto had expanded and taken us in. The color-line was drawn just a block away, in the next street. But the place was home, and we had stuck there.
One of our sons, Walter, lived in Yonkers. The younger son, George, lived over in Brooklyn. We didn’t see either of them often. They both worked hard to support their families. Evenings and Sundays they had their different family interests; and their wives had their own relatives to visit.
My wife, however, made frequent trips to their homes. She helped our daughters-in-law by doing most of the sewing for the grandchildren. But she always returned in time to have my dinner ready at night, when I got home tired from my day’s work. She has never neglected me. Our youthful love affair was a good deal romantic, and we have always been real pals. She is a descendant of one of the old New York families of the best American pioneer blood.
Sometimes of an evening we went to a picture-show. But we had dropped into the habit of spending most of our evenings at home. Occasionally some old friend would call; or Miss Marsh, who had a small room in the apartment across the hall, would drop in for a few minutes. But I usually read aloud, and my wife sewed. We both have always been great book-lovers.
I have never lost my youthful satisfaction in just being with my wife. I liked to look and see her seated there by the table, her white head bent above her sewing, and the rays from the droplight falling across her hands. Her slight figure always carried an air about it; and her hands were shapely and delicate, in spite of all the hard work she had done. Her hair still kept its girlish curl, and she wore it in a loose Grecian knot at the back of her head. She wore her cheap clothes, too, with the distinction of a New Yorker.