Free In the Night Café by Joyce Johnson Page A

even then for a promise like that. It was me my mom and dad both seemed crazy about instead of each other. Maybe that made me lonely from the start.
    Daddy always rinsed out his own coffee cup in the sink and came and went in our house like a shadow. He’d smoke one cigarette, put the ashes quickly in the garbage, then he’d be gone leaving no traces. He wasn’t supposed to smoke at all because of his heart. He spent half his life in his darkroom and his hands were always peeling from the chemicals. I loved to run down-stairs to his store. I’d say, “Let me see the negatives, Daddy.” Because it seemed quite wonderful to me that dark could be light and light could be dark, as if a world of night existed where everything was in reverse.
    Daddy could turn old brown-and-white photos of dead people into pale, almost flesh-toned ones by tinting them with a fine brush, but he never let me watch him do that because it made him too nervous. Every now and then he’d put a Closed sign on his door and disappear for most of an afternoon, and if we’d ask him where he’d been, he’d say, irritatedly, “Just experimenting, just experimenting.” Once he called my mother and me downstairs to the store and showed us his latest “experiments”—photos of the most ordinary things, the Italian vegetable stand around the corner, old ladies gabbing on a stoop, a boarded-up doorway with a colored boy leaning against it. “But Jules, these are so ugly !” my mother exclaimed.
    My mother loved beauty, she wanted to be around it all the time. That was why she’d set her heart on having me on the stage, so we could always have beauty together. She’d never been able to find it on Queens Boulevard. She never spoke against my father, she just said, “I hope you never throw yourself away on anyone.” So naturally, later, I threw myself away as much as I could and never quite got myself back.
    You used to tell me I blamed my mother too much. Other kids didn’t have mothers who wanted the best for them. “Look at me,” you’d say. “You could have had someone like Marie.”
    I’d say, “Okay. But my mother went to extremes.” I just couldn’t let go of the argument.
    â€œSo the theater—all of that—it never should have happened?”
    â€œI loved the theater. But it was wrong. It wasn’t the best start.”
    Then you’d ask me, “What would have been right? Who’s got the answer to that one?”
    â€œYou know where I was when I first knew I was going to paint?”
    I said, “Where?”
    â€œRight here. Right here on the Bowery.”
    â€œOn this street?” It was one of those days we were searching for lofts. We’d gotten down as far as Rivington.
    Tom took a look around, then said, “Yeah. It could have been. That’s what I’m trying to figure out. Without the el, it’s all different.”
    â€œWhat were you doing on the Bowery by yourself?”
    â€œI had important business. I was looking for something that belonged to me. You think you were the only little kid with business? I used to get down here from the Bronx on the el, sneak under the turnstiles. I never had the nickel.”
    He asked me if I remembered how the el had cast a great shadow all along its route, how the tracks had been held up in some places by walls of blackened stones and how the trains had run at exactly the level of the third stories of houses, so you’d find yourself looking into hundreds of rooms.
    He used to keep running away on the el, usually to his grandmother. She’d let him stay with her until the truant officers came around uptown and bothered Marie. His grandmother had a room on Forty-seventh Street where even the bed was covered with feathers and veils that she sewed on hats for people. She had a huge orange cat, Bobbie, that slept all the time on the windowsill.