A Matter of Conviction

He could remember a Fourth of July in Harlem. He had been eight years old at the time, and there had been no law forbidding the use of fireworks in those days. He had sat with his mother at the window of their sixth-floor apartment, overlooking the street, hearing the explosions of the firecrackers and the cherry bombs, watching the Roman candles erupt over the rooftops. The street was a bedlam of noise and excitement, boys igniting fuses and then running, tin cans leaping into the air with the force of contained explosion, girls shrieking. It had been a hot day, and even on the sixth floor there was no breeze. He had leaned out over the sill, watching the excitement in the street below. His father, in the parlor, was listening to the Yankee game.

At six o’clock, his mother discovered they were out of bread. His father, absorbed in the impending doom of a White Sox rally, would not budge from the radio.

“You go down, Henry,” his mother said. “I’ll watch you from the window.”

He took the money for the bread and ran down the steps. The grocery store — the only open one on the street — was three doors away. In the street, the noise and the excitement claimed him completely. His eyes wide, he walked to the grocery store, made his purchase and was starting back when the older boys surrounded him.

At first he thought it was a game. Then he saw that they were all holding burning pieces of clothesline in their hands, and then he realized they were touching the ropes to the fuses of firecrackers, and suddenly the explosions came, bursting at his feet, bursting in the air over his head, a medley of cacophony unleashed by the boys. He tried to escape the sound, fear rolling over him in engulfing shock waves, but the boys would not break the circle, would not let him out of the exploding circle of red and yellow, would not allow him to run away from the fear, the fire, the threat, the bombs, and he tried to yell but his voice was drowned out in the terrible roar of the explosions, the stink of the gunpowder, and far above him his mother’s voice yelling, “Henry! Get away from him! Henry!” while the firecrackers burst around him and he shrieked in silent terror.

His father sprang from the mouth of the tenement like a wild man, striking the nearest boy a blow that sent him sprawling to the pavement. He picked up his son and ran upstairs with him, and Hank clung to the loaf of bread in his arms, squeezing it to a pulp. Upstairs, his mother said, “I shouldn’t have sent him. You had to listen to your damn ball game! I knew he shouldn’t be on the streets today! I knew it! I shouldn’t have sent him.”

Hank’s father said, “He’s all right, he’s all right. They didn’t hurt him.”

And maybe they didn’t.

But he began stuttering on the day of the incident, and he did not stop stuttering until he was eleven years old, and even then not completely. All through adolescence, whenever anything upset him, the old stutter would come back, and he would remember again that Fourth of July in Harlem with the firecrackers exploding around him, the devils of hell at his feet, at his head, surrounding him.

He climbed the steps of the tenement in which Mary Di Pace lived. He found her apartment on the fourth floor. The catch for a milk-bottle lock hung limply from the outside of the door, and his first thought was, They still steal milk in Harlem. He smiled grimly. Men could develop satellites to spin in outer space, men could shoot rockets to the moon, devise intercontinental ballistic missiles which could destroy cities, and in Harlem — unless you put a wire loop on your door, a loop controlled from inside the apartment — they still stole your milk. Sighing, he knocked on the door.

“Hank?” her voice called.

“Yes.”

“Just a minute, please.”

He waited in the hallway. From somewhere in the building, he heard the voices of a man and woman raised in heated argument.

“So what do you do with the money?” the man wanted to know.

“What do you think I do with it? I buy rubies and furs, what the hell do you think? I buy gasoline for my Cadillac!”

“Don’t get smart, you stupid bitch! I give you forty dollars a week for the house. So where is it? Every Wednesday, you’re broke. What do you do with it? Eat it?”

“I keep a stable of Arabian ponies,” the woman said. “That costs money. I give cocktail parties for the ladies in the Social Register. What the hell do you think I do with all that money, all that big forty dollars?”

“I know what you do with it,” the man said. “You play the goddamn numbers. You think I don’t know?”

“Shut up, the windows are all open,” the woman said.

“The hell with the windows! Stop spending my money on the numbers!”

The door opened.

Mary smiled. “Hello, Hank,” she said. “Come in.”