Read Online Acquainted with the Night by Lynne Sharon Schwartz - Free Book Online

she did with her friends; I should say, with her friends’ husbands, or her husband’s friends, since at that time women like my mother did not have men friends of their own, at least in Brooklyn. When Mr. Simmons arrived at about three forty-five every Wednesday, she offered him coffee—he was coming straight from teaching, and a man’s labor must always be respected—and invited him to sit down on the couch. There she joined him and inquired how his wife and children were, which he told her in some detail. That was truly dull. I didn’t care to hear anecdotes illustrating the virtues and charms of his children, who were younger than I. Then, with an interest that didn’t seem at all feigned, he asked my mother reciprocally how her family was. They exchanged such trivia on my time, till suddenly he would look at his watch, pull himself up, and with a swift, broad smile, say, “Well then, shall we get started?” At last.
    But my father! Sometimes my father would come home early on Wednesdays, just as the lesson was ending. He would greet Mr. Simmons like an old friend; they would clap each other on the shoulder and shake hands in that hearty way men do and which I found ridiculous. And my father would take off his hat and coat and put down his New York Times and insist that Mr. Simmons have a drink or at least a cup of coffee, and they would talk enthusiastically about—of all things—business and politics. Boring, boring! How could he? Fathers were supposed to be interested in those boring things, but not Mr. Simmons. After a while Mr. Simmons would put on his hat and coat, which were remarkably like the hat and coat my father had recently taken off, pick up his New York Times, and head for his home and family.
    And my father would say, “What a nice fellow that Mr. Simmons is! What a really fine person!” For six years he said it, as if he had newly discovered it, or was newly astonished that it could be so. “It’s so strange,” he might add, shaking his head in a puzzled way. “Even though he’s a colored man I can talk to him just like a friend. I mean, I don’t feel any difference. It’s a very strange thing.” When I tried, with my advanced notions, to relieve my father of the sense of strangeness, he said, “I know, I know all that”; yet he persisted in finding it a very strange thing. Sometimes he boasted about Mr. Simmons to his friends with wonder in his voice: “I talk to him just as if he were a friend of mine. A very intelligent man. A really fine person.” To the very end, he marveled; I would groan and laugh every time I heard it coming.
    Mr. Simmons told: things to my father in my presence, important and serious things that I knew he would not tell to me alone. This man-to-man selectivity of his pained me. He told my father that he was deeply injured by the racial prejudice existing in this country; that it hurt his life and the lives of his wife and children; and that he resented it greatly. All these phrases he spoke in his calm, conventional way, wearing his suit and tie and sipping coffee. And my father nodded his head and agreed that it was terribly unfair. Mr. Simmons hinted that his career as a classical pianist had been thwarted by his color, and again my father shook his head with regret. Mr. Simmons told my father that he had a brother who could not abide the racial prejudice in this country and so he lived in France. “Is that so?” said my mother in dismay, hovering nearby, slicing cake. To her, that anyone might have to leave this country, to which her parents had fled for asylum, was unwelcome, almost incredible, news. But yes, it was so, and when he spoke about his brother Mr. Simmons’ resonant low voice was sad and angry, and I, sitting on the sidelines, felt a flash of what I had felt when the neighbor woman being beaten shrieked out of the window on that hot summer night—ah, here is reality at last. For I believed that reality must be cruel and harsh and