“That’s a bull’s-eye, Ducks. I don’t live in a gingerbread house in a spooky old woods, and I don’t have a cauldron somewhere full of boiling eye-of-newt stew.”
“Then who are you, what are you?”
As calmly and sanely as I’ve ever heard anyone speak, she said, “Think of me this way, Jonah.… I am the city, the soul of the city, spun up from threads raveled off the better souls of all those who have lived here and died here, also those who live here now. One thread of my soul is borrowed from yours, another is a thread from your mother’s soul, another from your grandpa’s soul. Millions and millions of threads. Another is from your Grandma Anita. When you memorized the Our Father, your grandmother gave you a silver dollar and told you to spend it on the day of your confirmation. In your sweet way, you asked her quite solemnly what you should buy with it, and she whispered in your ear, ‘Spending doesn’t mean always buying something, Jonah. Buy nothing. Give it to the poor.’ ”
“You can’t know that,” I protested.
“Is that what your grandma said or isn’t it?”
“Yes. But how—”
“I’ve taken a special interest in you, Jonah.”
She told me what I recounted to you at the beginning of this oral history. As the city, she worried that in spite of all she had to offer her citizens, she might be failing too many. The city knew its every avenue and back street, its every height and all its depths in intimate detail, but it didn’t know what it felt like to be human and live in those thousands of miles of street. And so she, the soul of the city, had taken human form to walk among her people.
As I’ve admitted before, I had a spacious imagination as a boy; and that morning, I found plenty of room in it to accommodate Miss Pearl’s claim to be the soul of the city made flesh. Lately I had spun so many lies, like one of those jugglers on the old Ed Sullivan Show who sets plates spinning atop bamboo sticks of various heights, racing back and forth to keep them in motion, spinning more and more plates until it appeared impossible that he could take them down one at a time before they all crashed to pieces on the stage. They say that you can’t lie to a liar and deceive him. Maybe because I had become such an accomplished young liar, I recognized the pure truth of Miss Pearl’s story, regardless of how fantastic it might seem.
Instead of contesting a word she’d said, I asked, “Why would you—why would the city—take a special interest in me?”
“Because of what you are, Ducks.”
“I’m just a messed-up kid.”
“That’s not all you are.”
“That’s the bigger part of it.”
“That’s the tiniest part.”
“Is it because of the piano?”
“You’ve got great talent, Ducks, but it’s not because of that, either. It’s because of what you are—and you won’t understand what that is for a long time yet.”
A covey of noisy vehicles passed in the street, and when quiet returned, I said, “You know everything that’s ever happened in the city and everything that’s happening now.”
“I do, yes. Sometimes it amazes me how I can keep track of it all. There are a lot of unpleasant things I’d rather not know, I’d rather just sweep out of my head forever, but I’m aware of them all, anyway.”
“And you know what’s going to happen next?”
She shook her head. “That’s a step too far, Ducks. What happens next is up to all the people who live along my streets. Your part of it is up to you.”
Although I tried to be sunny, I couldn’t fully cast off glum. “I’m afraid of what might happen next, and I don’t know what to do.”
When she saw that I was shaking, she put an arm around me, but she offered no advice.
“Tell me what to do,” I pleaded.
51
Birds sang in the trees, crickets chirruped in the grass, bouncy doo-wop music came from a phonograph at the house next door, three laughing children played some game on a porch across the street, and it all sounded like doomsday music to me.
“Tell me what to do,” I said again.
“That’s one thing I can’t do, Jonah. I’ve already given you all the help I can. You’ll have to decide yourself what to do as things happen. But you know what?”
“What?”
“You already know what to do.”
“But I don’t.”
“You already know,” Miss Pearl insisted, “and whatever happens, good or better, bad or worse, you’ll know what to do step by step.”
I buried my face in my hands.
She sat silently beside me for a while. Then: “If you trust me, believe what I’m about to say, it’ll help you in the darkest times.”
Speaking into my hands, I said, “What is it?”
“No matter what happens, disaster piled on calamity, no matter what, everything will be okay in the long run.”
I spread my fingers to filter my words. “You said you can’t see the future.”
“I’m not talking about the future, Ducks. Not the way you mean. Not tomorrow and next week and next month.”