Seventeenth Summer (23 page)

When it was time for the floor show even the dim wall lights were switched off and the spotlight tossed a bright lariat of light around the baby grand piano in the middle of the floor. There was a moment’s pause and the pianist came out of the darkness while a spatter of applause from the tables greeted him as he slid onto the bench. I had never seen a colored pianist before.

He sat for a moment, very still, with his head back and his eyes closed, poised and waiting, and then began running his hands up and down the keyboard. His fingers were chocolate-brown against the white keys and his foot kept up a dull beat-beat on the floor; his head bobbed. Jack looked at me and winked approval. This wasn’t small-town music at all. With his eyes still closed,
the colored man leaned back on the bench, way back, one hand limp at his aide and the other like a dark spider on the high notes at the end of the keyboard, quick and supple, tingling the keys in a rippling, tantalizing way until it made my scalp prickle to hear him. Suddenly he swung back into position, both hands playing the whole keyboard, and let out a queer, wild cry that sounded like “Oh, rock the baby!” A laugh went round the room, from table to table, and everyone relaxed. He played on and on, rocking back and forth on the piano bench, rolling his eyes and shaking his head till his white teeth shone like dice against the black of his face. He played “St. Louis Blues” and then “Honeysuckle Rose,” singing as his fingers ran over the keys, with his eyes turning up wildly in his head, drawing out the first words of the song long, sweet, and high, with a sensuously slow half-smile on his lips, holding it till I felt myself looking at Jack and laughing uneasily and almost breathing with relief when he swung off the high note into the rest of the piece. He played on and on, sitting in the bright circle of light, his fingers flashing, and after each number he paused, wiping his forehead, while people at the surrounding tables tossed in their requests like pennies.

“Like it, Angie?” Jack asked.

I nodded, sipping my beer slowly, almost enjoying the bitter, unpleasant taste. Jack ordered another bottle for himself. All around us the room was dark and cool with the underground coolness of wet stone, but the piano, its dark wood shining in the
spotlight glare, set the air warm and throbbing with its music. The glass of beer made me cozy inside.

Jack leaned over and said quietly, “Gee, this is fun, Angie. Each night seems to be more fun because it’s getting near the end. We’ve only got a few more weeks before you go back to school….”

I didn’t notice Jack order again and I didn’t notice the waiter come to our table, but soon there was another full bottle of beer before me. The pianist had launched out with a fast piece, singing as he played, his foot on the pedal of the piano and his shoulders keeping rapid time to the beat of the music. Jack put his hand on mine and together we drummed time. At other tables people were knocking their glasses together in a clinking rhythm. I don’t know how long we sat there sipping beer. I can’t remember that, either. The table top felt like a cushion under my hand. Before long the music of the piano and the sound of the clapping of the audience seemed to come to me as from another room, floating in soft, gentle waves, and the effect struck me as so funny that I giggled!

Jack leaned over to touch my cheek with the back of his hand and I think he was laughing at me. “You’re a honey, Angie. I like you so much tonight!”

I said something to him then—I must have said something. But talking was a queer feeling. I felt as if the thoughts came out of my mouth in bright bubbles and floated over to Jack before they burst into words and the sound of them came back to me. Everything seemed to be at a distance. I looked at the beer in my glass, clear as amber, and even to look at it made me feel mellow.

The colored man was playing again with his head thrown back; quick, sharp notes that seemed to trip over each other. His fingers kept up a rapid sparkle over the keys.

“Look, Jack,” I remember saying, and the thought first puzzled and then amazed me. “He has red nail polish on! Isn’t that funny—for a man?”

“Yeh,” he answered laconically, playing with his beer glass. “It’s pretty funny.” It struck me as so amazing that I wanted to talk about it but Jack looked the other way. And that was all he said.

The whole room was cool with the smell of beer and blue with cigarette smoke. The piano tinkled through my brain in a steady stream and my thoughts seemed to run out with the note sounds. There was a tingle in my head like the sparkle of ginger ale. I could hear myself talking and talking to Jack, the words all mixed up with laughing, and he smiled back at me and I hummed to the music and we laughed and laughed again and I don’t remember all the funny things he said. My brain was in a sing-song. It was such a hot night outside that he had worn no necktie; just a white sport shirt, open at the throat, and I had a blurred thought about how much he looked like the picture of Lord Byron that had hung on the wall of my English room at school.

In the corner the face of the jukebox still shone with light and the twisting of the colors made me giddy. My cheeks were too hot now and I thought how nice it would be to feel for a moment the coolness of the night wind off the lake. “You must drive me down to look at the water before you take me
home, Jack,” I murmured to him. At least I think I did.

He finished his beer and the pianist played one last piece, hunched over the piano, his forehead shining, while he fretted the lower keys in a grumbling boogie-woogie that rumbled out to the very corners of the room, and then slid his long, dark fingers up the keyboard in a flourishing finish. He slid off the piano bench, gave the audience a quick black-and-white grin, and disappeared into a back room.

The bright spotlight was snapped off and the dim wall lights glowed on. The room was filled with an almost pleasant gloom, very quiet and cool, with its damp-stone smell. “We’d better go,” I said. “We’d really better go home because I’m so sleepy now.”

After that I never drank beer again. It had really been a wonderful evening—but no evening can be that wonderful by itself. That’s how I know. I didn’t realize it then and I hate to admit it now, but I must have been a little tight that night!

After that evening at the Rathskeller, Lorraine talked and talked about Martin even more than before. She told me about the smooth girls whom he used to date when he was at the university—long-haired, pretty girls who belonged to the best sororities; she told my mother how particular he was about everything he ate—never touched salads and didn’t like butter on anything but toast; she even asked my father if he knew some man who lived out near Campbellsport who owned a big garage and to whom Martin had sold insurance at the beginning of the summer.
Anything just to say his name. I was surprised at her. In fact, she talked about him so much that my mother began to give my father alarmed, raised-eyebrow looks at the dinner table.

She even asked Jack what kind of rolls Martin bought for his breakfast each morning, and how many, and whether he came every morning or bought a two days’ supply at once. Jack told me later that he had charged the rolls for two weeks now and owed a little over a dollar and a half at the bakery. Martin phoned for three nights in a row, just before supper, and one night he and Lorraine went out for a Coke together, coming home much later, when we had all gone to bed. She borrowed three university annuals from a fellow who lives down our street—she wasn’t just sure what year he had graduated—and looked up his picture. We lay on the livingroom rug one evening, she and I, to look at the books together. We found his graduation picture on a back page and under it a list of the activities in which he had participated and Lorraine pointed out with pride that he had as many as any other boy on the page. He looked much younger then than he did now, with a high, white collar and a shiny look—like a man in a brilliantine ad. We found another picture of him standing before his fraternity house with the rest of the committee for arrangements for the Junior Prom, but only half his face showed for there was another boy standing almost directly in front of him. Quite by accident Lorraine found the picture of the girl he used to date and on whom he had hung his fraternity pin when he was a sophomore.

“Where is his pin now?” I asked her.

“I really don’t know. Maybe that little blonde still has it,” she said. “Some girls are like that, you know, Angie. Never want to give a fellow up even when he doesn’t like her anymore.”

Margaret and Art drove up from Milwaukee late that Saturday afternoon—Margaret had to be back at work the following Monday morning—and Lorraine showed Martin’s picture to them. At suppertime she announced that maybe he was even going to come to Chicago to work in November; he was writing to the main offices to see about a transfer. “You know, he is the kind of man who would be good in any territory,” she commented. “And then if he is down that way he can come to the dances at school next year and he probably will be able to get blind dates for Angie too. That would be good,” she added significantly, “because it takes some girls a long time to get started.” I wondered what had made her change so suddenly; what had made her so sure of herself.

She even said that Martin might drive her back to Chicago when college classes begin in the fall. Art looked at Margaret, winked and said, “Hey, hey, what goes on here? We’ve been away too long, Maggie.”

Jack went out with Swede and Fitz and some of the other fellows that night and Lorraine asked me to walk up to McKnight’s for a Coke with her. “It’s all right for me to be seen without a date,” she explained lightly, “when everyone knows I’m practically going steady anyway….” Martin had called just after supper to say that he wouldn’t see her that weekend—he was driving up to Eagle River and wouldn’t be back until late on Tuesday. He
asked her then to go out with him the following Sunday.

“That’s his birthday,” she told us happily when he had hung up. “I don’t know just how old he will be, but it certainly is something to have him ask me out for that night when he knows other cuter girls in town and everything, isn’t it? We’ll probably do something very special and have dinner somewhere first. I don’t know what I should wear. Either I will have to get something new or borrow something of Margaret’s …” She was giddy with excitement.

Under his breath my father muttered, “Just lucky you’re going back to school in a month, young lady!” and went huffily back to his paper.

I have never known a hotter July. There was a soft, hazy, constant heat that hung over everything and never let up—only seemed to turn dark with evening. In our garden the black earth dried and crumbled brown, shrinking away till the twisted tomato roots showed above the ground. Out in the country the fields were a parched patchwork and only the trees were still green against the dust-yellow roll of the hills.

One afternoon after work, Lorraine walked uptown to pick out a birthday present for Martin. She had thought of giving him a year’s subscription to
Time
magazine but came home with a wallet instead. “I think he’ll like this,” she explained, “because it is such a ‘mannish’ sort of gift.” It was brown pigskin with a long zipper in it and special compartments for driver’s license and personal papers. On one inside corner she had had his initials “M. K.” stamped in gilt. That was Tuesday night and after supper she
wrapped it in white tissue paper and I held my finger on the red ribbon while she tied three small bows. “Maybe I should think of something clever to put on a little card to go with it,” she suggested. “I won’t give it to him till Sunday though.”

Jack came over about nine o’clock and we went for a walk around the park that night. Even the wind off the water was warm. When we came home Lorraine was still up, curled in a chair by the front window. “I just thought I’d sit here and read a bit,” she yawned, “in case Martin calls when he gets back to town. He is supposed to get in tonight. It’s too hot to sleep anyway.”

On Wednesday he didn’t call either and Lorraine puzzled over it all evening, “He must have been delayed in Eagle River,” she explained to me. “That must be it. There wasn’t a postcard for me in the noon mail or anything, was there, Angie?” No, I told her. There hadn’t been a postcard or a letter. Nothing at all.

Kitty and I went for a ride with Jack the next afternoon. It was so hot that he pulled up near the water’s edge at the park and opened the doors of the truck to let the breeze blow through. The sand dredge in the harbor was still at work, its engines rhythmic in the stillness and the lake was almost perfectly calm, greenish near the shore and deep blue farther out. Here and there ominous shadows lay on the surface where silent under-currents shifted beneath. Along the breakwater small waves lipped over the rocks, spreading their foam in quiet frills, then slipping back into the stiller water.

“Your sister and Mar tin figure out what they’re going to do to
celebrate Sunday?” Jack asked, casually making conversation.

“No,” I told him. “He didn’t get back yet.”

“Oh, didn’t he?” his voice pricked up in surprise. “I thought he was supposed to come back on Tuesday night.”

“He was, but he evidently didn’t make it,” I explained. A quick suspicion shot through my brain. “Why, what made you ask?”

“Nothing. I just wondered what they were going to do, that’s all.”

“But I mean, what made you think that he was going to get back on Tuesday night?”

“Because you told me he was,” he answered.

“I know that,” I insisted. “But why did you use that tone of voice when you said you thought he was supposed to come back Tuesday?”

“Don’t be silly, Angie,” he said, looking down at his hands. “I didn’t use any tone of voice.”

“You sound so queer. Why don’t you look at me?” I demanded. “You talk as if you saw him. You talk as if he
did
get back—did he?”

“You’re the one who ought to know that,” he answered and started the motor of the car. I was certain then that something was going to happen.

Thursday and Friday limped by. On Friday night my father came home for the weekend and Lorraine took Martin’s birthday wallet from the corner of her dressing-table drawer, unwrapping it carefully to show to him. “Look, Dad,” she said. “Tell me honestly, if you were a fellow would you like this?”