Portraits and Observations (16 page)

“Hi there, good-lookin’,” said Jackson, admiring his fiancée’s efforts to make herself comfortable. “The number to play is seven seven three, and peace is the word. Ooble-ee-do!”

Miss Thigpen ignored these compliments. “Earl,” she said, “it
was
São Paulo, honey?”

“Was what?”

“Was where we got engaged.”

“Yeah. São Paulo. Brazil.”

Miss Thigpen seemed relieved. “That’s what I told Mr. Lyons. He wanted to know. He’s the one writes for the paper. You met him?”

“Yeah,” said Jackson. “I rubbed palms with that cat.”

“Maybe you heard?” said Miss Thigpen, looking at me. “About us being married in Moscow. ’Twas Earl’s idea. I didn’t even know we were engaged. I lost fifty-six pounds, but I didn’t know we were engaged until Earl had this idea about us being married in Moscow.”

“Bound to be a big story,” said Jackson, and though he snapped his glittering fingers, his tone was serious, slow, as though thinking long thoughts. “The first couple of Negro Americans married in Moscow. That’s front page. That’s TV.” He turned to Miss Thigpen. “And I don’t want you to go telling that cat Lyons anything about it. Not till we’re sure the magnetic vibrations are right. With a big thing like this, you got to feel the right vibrations.”

Miss Thigpen said, “You ought to see Earl’s wedding suit. He had it made in Munich.”

“Crazy, man, crazy,” said Jackson. “Brown tails with champagne satin lapels. Shoes to match, natch. And on top of that, I’ve got a brand-new overcoat with a—how d’ya call it—Persian lamb collar. But man, nobody’s going to see
none
of it, not till The Day.”

I asked when that would be, and Jackson admitted that no exact date had been set. “Mr. Breen’s handling all the arrangements. He’s talking to the Russians. It’ll be a big thing for them, too.”

“Sure,” said Miss Ryan, retrieving orange hulls off the floor. “Put Russia on the map.”

Miss Thigpen stretched out in her negligee and prepared to study a musical score; but she seemed troubled, unable to concentrate. “What bothers me, it won’t be legal. Back home, in several states, they don’t consider it legal, people married in Russia.”

“
What
states?” said Jackson, as though resuming with her a tedious argument.

Miss Thigpen thought. “Several,” she said finally.

“It’s legal in Washington, D.C.,” he told her. “And that’s your hometown. So if it’s legal in your hometown, what have you got to worry about?”

“Earl,” said Miss Thigpen wearily, “why don’t you go find your friends and have a game of Tonk?”

Tonk, popular with some elements among the cast, is a five-card variation of ordinary rummy. Jackson complained that it was useless for him to try getting up a game. “There’s nowhere for us to play. All the sharps [gamblers] are bunked in with a lot of squares [nongamblers].”

The door of our compartment was open, and Ducky James, a boyish, blond Englishman who is prop man for the production, passed by, announcing, in his Cockney accent, “Anybody wants a drink, we’ve set up a bar in our place. Martinis … Manhattans … Scotch …”

“That Ducky!” said Miss Thigpen. “If
he’s
not the lucky one! I
don’t wonder he’s handing out drinks. You know what happened to him? Just before we got on the train along comes this telegram. His aunt died. Leaving him ninety thousand pounds.”

Jackson whistled. “How much is that in real money?”

“Two hundred and seventy thousand dollars, thereabouts,” said Miss Thigpen. Then, as her future husband stood up to leave the compartment, “Where you going, Earl?”

“Just thought I’d find out if Ducky plays Tonk.”

Presently we had a visit from Twerp, an all-white boxer puppy who gaily trotted into the compartment and promptly proved herself unhousebroken. She belonged to the company’s wardrobe mistress, a young woman from Brooklyn named Marilyn Putnam. Miss Putnam appeared, calling, “Twerp! Twerp! Oh,
there
you are, you little bitch. Isn’t she a little bitch?”

“Yes,” said Miss Ryan, down on her hands and knees scrubbing at the carpet with wadded newspaper. “We have to live in here. For God’s sake.”

“The Russians don’t mind,” said Miss Putnam defensively. She scooped up her puppy and kissed its forehead. “Twerp’s been being naughty up and down the corridor—haven’t you, angel? The Russians just smile.
They
understand she’s only a baby.” She turned to leave and almost collided at the door with a girl who stood there crying. “Why, Delirious,” she said to the girl, “darling, what’s the matter—are you sick?”

The girl shook her head. Her chin trembled, her large eyes quivered with fresh tears.

“Delirious, honey, don’t take on so,” said Miss Thigpen. “Sit down. Say what’s wrong.”

The girl sat down. Her name was Dolores Swann; but like many
of the cast, she had acquired a nickname, in this case the descriptive Delirious. A singer in the chorus, she has red poodle-cut hair. Her pale gold face is as round as her eyes, and has the same quality of show-girl innocence. She swallowed and wailed, “I lost both my coats. Both of them. My fur coat and the blue one, too. I left them back there in the station. Not insured or anything.”

Miss Thigpen clucked her tongue. “Only
you
could do a thing like that, Delirious.”

“But it wasn’t my fault,” said Miss Swann. “I was so scared. You see, I got left behind. I missed the bus. And it was terrible, running around trying to find a taxi to take me to the station. Because none of them wanted to go to
East
Berlin. Well, finally this man spoke English and he felt sorry for me and he said he would. Well, it was terrible. Because police kept stopping us and asking questions and wanting to see papers and, oh—I was sure I was going to be left there in the pitch-black with police and Communists and what-all. I was sure I’d never see any of you again.”

The reliving of her ordeal brought on more tears. Miss Ryan poured her a brandy, and Miss Thigpen squeezed her hand, saying, “It’s all right, honey.”

“But you can imagine how I felt, how relieved I was when I got to the station—and there everybody was. You hadn’t left without me. I wanted to hug everybody. I put down my coats to hug Ducky. I hugged Ducky and forgot about my coats. Until just now.”

“Think of it like this, Delirious,” said Miss Thigpen, as though searching for a comforting phrase, “just remember, you’re the only person who ever went to Russia without a coat.”

“I know a more unique claim that we can
all
make,” said Miss Ryan. “Not only unique, but nuts. I mean, here we are—rattling off to Russia without our passports. No passports, no visa, no nothin’.”

Half an hour later Miss Ryan’s claim became less valid, for when
the train stopped at Frankfurt a. d. Oder, which marks the German-Polish border, a delegation of officials boarded the train and, quite literally, dumped the company’s long-absent passports into Warner Watson’s lap.

“I don’t understand it,” said Watson, parading through the train delivering the passports to their individual owners. “This very morning the Russian Embassy told me the passports had gone to Moscow. Now they suddenly turn up at the Polish border.”

Miss Ryan quickly riffled through her passport and found blankness on those pages where the Russian visa should have been stamped. “For God’s sake, Warner. There’s nothing here.”

“They’ve issued a collective visa. They have, or they’re going to, don’t ask me which,” said Watson, his timid, tired voice skidding to a hoarse whisper. His skin was gray, and under his eyes purple bruises of fatigue were prominent as paint.

“But, Warner …”

Watson held up a protesting hand. “I’m not human,” he said. “I’ve got to go to bed. I’m going to go to bed and stay there until we get to Leningrad.”

“Well, it’s a pity,” said Miss Ryan as Watson fled, “a damned shame we can’t have a stamp in our passports. I like souvenirs.”

The train was scheduled to stay at the border forty minutes. I decided to get off and look around. At the end of the car, I found the exit door open and started down the small iron steps leading onto the tracks. Far ahead I could see the lights of a station, and a misty red lantern swinging back and forth. But it was dark where I was, except for the yellow squares cast by the train’s windows. I walked along the tracks, liking the fresh feel of the cold and wondering whether I was in Germany or Poland. Suddenly I noticed figures running toward me, a set of shadows that, drawing nearer, turned into three soldiers, pale flat-faced men with awkward ankle-length
coats and bayoneted rifles strapped to their shoulders. They stared at me in silence. Then one of them pointed to the train; he grunted and motioned for me to get back on it. We marched along together, the four of us, and I said in English that I was sorry, I hadn’t realized passengers were not allowed off the train. There was no response, merely another grunt and an urging forward. I climbed the train steps and turned to wave at them. They didn’t wave back.

“Darling, you haven’t been
out
,” said Mrs. Gershwin, whose compartment I passed in returning. “Well, you shouldn’t. It isn’t safe.” Mrs. Gershwin was one of the two people occupying compartments to themselves. (The other was Leonard Lyons, who had obtained privacy by threatening to leave the train unless his erstwhile roommates, Herman Sartorius and Warner Watson, were removed. “It’s nothing personal,” he said, “but I’m a working man. I’ve got to turn out a thousand words a day. I can’t write with a lot of characters sitting around.” Sartorius and Watson had therefore been forced to move in with the Ira Wolferts. As for Mrs. Gershwin, she’d been allotted her solo status because, in the view of the management, “She deserves it. She’s a Gershwin.”) Without discarding her diamonds, Mrs. Gershwin had changed into slacks and a sweater; she’d tied ribbons in her hair and slippered her feet in bits of fluff. “It must have been freezing out there. I see snow on the ground. You ought to have some hot tea. Mmmmm, it’s lovely,” she said, sipping dark, almost black tea from a tall glass set in a silver holder with a silver handle. “That darling little man is brewing it on his samovar.”

I went to look for the tea-maker, who was the attendant for Car 2; but when I found him, at the end of the corridor, he was contending with more than a blazing samovar. Twerp, the boxer puppy, was yapping between his legs and snapping at his trousers. Moreover,
he was undergoing an intense interview, Lyons asking the questions and Robin Joachim acting as translator. Small and haggard, the Russian had a pushed-in, Pekingese face creased with wrinkles that seemed to indicate nutritional defects rather than age. His mouth was studded with steel teeth, and his eyelids drooped, as though he were on the verge of sleep. Between dispensing tea and fending off Twerp, he answered Lyons’s quick-fire queries like a wilted housewife talking to the censor. He said he was from Smolensk. He said his feet hurt him, his back hurt him, that he always had a headache from overwork. He said he only made two hundred rubles a month ($50, but much less in actual buying power) and considered himself underpaid. He said yes, he’d very much appreciate a tip.

Lyons paused in his note-taking and said, “I didn’t know they were allowed to complain like this. The way it sounds, I get the impression this guy is a discontent.”

The attendant gave me my tea, and at the same time offered me, from a crumpled pack, one of his own cigarettes. It was two-thirds filter and one-third tobacco, good for seven or eight harsh puffs, though I didn’t enjoy that many, for as I started back to my compartment the train lurched forward with an abruptness that sent both tea and cigarette flying.

Marilyn Putnam poked her head into the corridor. “Holy mackerel,” she said, surveying the wreckage, “did
Twerp
do that?”

In Compartment 6 the berths had been made for the night, indeed for the whole journey, since they were never remade. Clean coarse linen, a crunchy pillow that smelled of hay, a single thin blanket. Miss Ryan and Miss Thigpen had gone to bed to read, having first turned the radio as low as it would go and opened the window a finger’s width.

Miss Thigpen yawned, and asked me, “Did you see Earl, honey?”

I told her that I had. “He’s teaching Ducky to play Tonk.”

“Oh,” said Miss Thigpen, giggling sleepily, “that means Earl won’t be home till dawn.”

I kicked off my shoes, and lay down in my berth, thinking in a moment I’d finish undressing. Overhead, in the berth above mine, I could hear Miss Ryan muttering to herself, as though she were reading aloud. It developed that she was studying Russian, using for the purpose an old English-Russian phrase book the U.S. Army had issued during the war for the benefit of American soldiers who might come in contact with Russians.

“Nancy,” said Miss Thigpen, like a child asking for a bedtime story, “Nancy, say us something in Russian.”

“The only thing I’ve learned is
Awr-ga-nih-ya raneen
 …” Miss Ryan faltered. She took a deep breath “… 
V-pa-lavih-yee
. Wow! I only wanted to learn the alphabet. So I can read street signs.”

“But that was nice, Nancy. What does it mean?”

“It means, ‘I have been wounded in the privates.’ ”

“Really, Nancy,” said Miss Thigpen, bewildered, “why on earth would you care to memorize something like that?”

“Go to sleep,” said Miss Ryan, turning off her reading light.

Miss Thigpen yawned again. She pulled the covers up to her chin. “I’m about ready to.”

Soon, lying there, I had a sense of stillness traveling through the train, seeping through the cars like the wintry color of the blue light bulb. Frost was spreading at the corners of the window; it seemed like a web-weaving in reverse. On the muted radio an orchestra of balalaikas made shivery music; like an odd and lonely counterpoint, someone somewhere nearby was playing a harmonica.

“Listen,” whispered Miss Thigpen, calling attention to the harmonica. “That’s Junior,” she said, meaning Junior Mignatt, a member
of the cast still in his teens. “Don’t you know that boy is lonesome? He’s from Panama. He’s never seen snow before.”

“Go to sleep,” said Miss Ryan. The northern roar of wind at the window seemed to echo her command. The train shrieked into a tunnel. For me, fallen asleep fully clothed, the tunnel lasted all night long.