Strivers Row (10 page)

“Oh, that's
cawn
, all right!” he heard Lionel gurgling from what seemed like very far away, and the hostess grunted in grudging acknowledgment of the compliment.

“It's a dollar for a shortie,” she informed them. “Plus fifty cent for a plate a pigs' feet, an' seventy-five for chitlins. There's craps in the front bathroom, an' plain coon-can, five-up, Georgia skin, blackjack, chuck-a-luck, three-card monte, an' dirty hearts in the back. Plus it's a quarter for any record you want to put on, long's they ain't cuttin'.”

Malcolm didn't reply, his head still pulsating from the corn liquor. He let himself be pushed on down an endless, darkened railroad hallway, filled with smoke and people. Most of them women again—not only Thursday girls, but laundresses and waitresses and beauticians right from work, still wearing their pink-and-white uniforms, and smocks. Laughing and gossiping, smoking and elbowing each other—

“I said, ‘That's fine, ma'am, how much do you pay?' She say, ‘Five dollars a week.' ”

“What you say?”

“Well, I had a look all around the room then. She say, ‘What you lookin' for?' I told her, ‘I'm lookin' for what I can steal. You must expect me to steal
some
thin', you only gonna pay me five dollars a week.' ”

“Oh-oh!”

Looking him over lewdly as he pushed by, making clucking sounds with their tongues—

“Lookit that one, now! He beats them mammy dodgers and dicty niggers in there all to pieces.”

“Come here, sugar, and tell me all 'boot it—”

Malcolm grinned shyly and kept moving, going past a bathroom crowded with men kneeling on the tiles as if they were praying, bones rattling in the bathtub. More men were clustered in the other rooms, smoking and throwing cards down exultantly on the bedspreads.

The hallway led at length to a large living room that was almost as crowded as the Savoy ballroom. The rug and the furniture were stacked back against the sideboards and there was an upright piano in one corner, but no one was playing it. Instead, there were only some couples lazily dancing the bump or the mess around to a record of “Evil Woman Blues” while the musicians took their break. Sitting on the chairs and the couch pushed up against the wall, balancing both cigarettes and bottles in their left hands while they held on to their horns with the right.

From time to time, Malcolm noticed, more men would walk out from a back hallway in the seemingly infinite apartment. A woman would generally emerge soon afterward, wiping her face or fiddling with the hem of her dress. When she did, the dour-looking hostess from the door would go over and hand her a couple of bills, plus a little vanity case or a pair of stockings.

Just then he heard someone say,
“Here come the boys!”
and then a whole new crowd of workingmen began to push their way down the hall and into the already overcrowded room. Truck drivers and longshoremen, porters and waiters; welders and riveters and mechanics just off from the night shift of the defense plants out in Jersey. Still wearing their uniforms, too, dressed in dungarees and overalls, and with grease-stained faces, swearing and laughing, all the maids and calkeener girls following them in as if they were magnetically attracted. The phonograph record came off, and the musicians got up off the couch. Someone started in on the piano and then they were all playing, the workingmen dancing and whooping with their women in the middle of the floor.

Malcolm felt slightly embarrassed in their presence, and too intimidated to compete with them for the women. Instead he retreated to the kitchen, drawn by a home smell that went back deep in his brain—

How it felt when he walked into the kitchen back in Lansing and there was food. Not just pudding made from day-old bread, or the lungs the men used to throw out the back of the slaughterhouse—

In the kitchen there were three more women who looked not unlike the dour-faced woman at the door, filling up whole platters with pork, and fresh-baked bread, and beans. He got a plate of pigs' feet for himself, along with potato salad and cornbread, and another plate of bacon and cabbage on the side. It tasted just as good as it smelled, and he wolfed it down, pausing only to tap a cup on the kitchen table.

“Knock me a shortie,” he called out, and one of them took a small cream pitcher and dipped it deep into the washing vat that sat on the floor behind the icebox. She poured it into his cup, and he drank it down at once. Slamming down his dollar on the table, his head swimming now but feeling sated, and better than he had since he'd moved into Ella's, months before. Through all the lonely nights in his little room under the eaves, then up in Portland on that shipyard job, always worrying the boats would fall on him. The trainmen boardinghouses along those reeking Washington alleyways.
Feeling so bad for so long
—

He rested for a while in the euphoria of his satiety, but then the smell of the food being prepared all around him made him think again of his mother in her kitchen—standing straight-backed as ever at her stove, haughtily dropping the porgies and hushpuppies into the frying pan, filling the whole house with their aroma. But also near the end, when all she did was rock back and forth, all day in the corner. Or the last time he had seen her, in the state hospital. The bottom dropping out of his momentary, food-stoked happiness as he remembered those once quick grey eyes now clouded over as she stared up at them uncomprehendingly. Repeating her litany over and over—

“All the people have gone now—”

Malcolm looked around for his friends from the crew, thinking they should go. Feeling the edge of this great night, the specialness of it beginning to slip away. But there was a growing commotion in the hall then, and Malcolm looked out from the kitchen, happy to be interrupted in his solitude.

“Miranda's here!” he heard a man's liquored voice cry out exultantly. “Put the twisters to the slammers! Miranda's here!”

“Now there's some fine Carstairs!”

It was her—the woman from the Savoy. He thought so almost before he actually saw her, or rather he hoped against hope it was her, with the blind, childlike faith with which he had hoped for things ever since the night his Daddy had died, and always been disappointed. Not tonight. It was her all right, he knew her at once even though she had changed her dress, her shoes, her hair. She was wearing a tight yellow wrap now, held up by two thin straps, and her hair was combed down and just over one eye, almost like Veronica Lake. She had even changed the silly flower in her hair, now sporting a yellow daisy that matched her dress. But there was no mistaking her.

“Hello, boys! How was work?” She grinned and winked at the riveters and truckers, the burly longshoremen still in their overalls, as they hooted and whistled back at her.

She was the only white person in the apartment, at least the only white person he could see, other than a couple of faces peering timorously into the living room from the hall—a salty-haired man with a pipe clenched between his teeth and a tweed jacket, of all things, despite the summer heat; and a plain-looking woman in a strapless black dress. Miranda walked by them without a glance, striding right across the bared floor, the big men and even the smirking, scowling kitchen-mechanic gals making way for her.

“Now we'll have ourselves some recreation,” she called out, and winked at them again.

“What kept you, honey?” another man's voice called out. “Why, sugar, you know I always like to do an encore!” she grinned at them. “How's the kong?”

“Fine as thine!”

“Mind if I dive right in?” she asked, sashaying over to a man in the front of the ring of men watching her and grinning now. As Malcolm watched, wide-eyed, she lifted the coffee cup of corn liquor out of his hand and drank it off in one quick swig—the working-men howling in delight, the Thursday girls cursing to see it. She sauntered back across the room and, after a word to the man at the piano, dived right in again, as if the two of them had been playing it together for a whole cross-country tour:

Her voice was full and soft, and pitch-perfect, almost like someone singing in the movies—like Lena Horne's in
Stormy Weather
, he thought. A little huskier around the edges, perhaps, from all the smoke in the room, but that only made it all the more appealing. She sang slow and blue, but with that secret, ironic smile that half-mocked the words at the same time. It was a tone that seemed to say to Malcolm that nothing very bad was going to happen, or that it had happened already, and that things couldn't get any worse.
So different from how his mother sang. Her voice fine, too—but always with that note of pure, plaintive desperation in it—

There was a shout of approval as she wound it down, the men surging in around her. But Malcolm stood by himself in all the uproar, afraid to go up to her again. She obviously sang professionally with some band here or downtown, was known to the other musicians, the horn players beside him laughing and digging each other in the ribs as she sang.

“Yeah, Miranda truly there tonight!”

“Ain't no one comin' up to
that
tab—”

He had still thought to just creep away, to go back down the hall and find his buddies, wherever they were. But then she was coming straight toward him, was almost on top of him before he could move. He didn't know what she would do—terrified that she might pretend not to know him at all, and look right past him. Knowing that if she did there was absolutely no play he could make, that he would just have to stand there and take it.

“Red,” she said instead, in a low, soft voice that made him ache with relief. Walking right up to him and, to his utter delight, taking his hand in hers again.

“How'd you find your way up here? I didn't think they would let you out of the Savoy,” she asked, her smile playful now, making fun of him—but not, he thought, too much.

“Well, you know...” were the only sounds that he was able to produce. Looking around once more for his friends, hoping they could see this but also hoping they had gone.

He started to tell her more, about where they had gone all night and what they had done, but then he stopped abruptly, realizing that he was talking much too much now, and how unlikely it was to impress her. Thinking, too late, that he should have come up with some snappy line for her, some way to play back. He stopped talking altogether, mortified—but then he saw that she was looking at him closely. Smiling a little bit, to be sure, but not grinning, not mocking him at all.
Instead it was a look like only his mother had ever given him sometimes, in her moments of clarity. A look full of unfathomable affection, though still regretful over something—

“Do you know what a beautiful boy you are?” she said all of a sudden, her voice still low and intimate. And he was so startled that he could only answer her truthfully:

“No!”

She raised a hand as if she were going to adjust her hair, but instead she touched his face, his eyebrow, his cheek down to his chin. Very swiftly, her hand darting out just like that, so that no one else in the still crowded room would quite catch it. But he had felt it just the same.

“You are. You're such a beautiful boy. How old are you, Red? Seventeen? Younger?”

He laughed, trying to sound derisive, like he knew how she was funning him—but he was rattled again. He had just turned eighteen the month before, but ever since Jarvis had conked his hair for him back in Roxbury he had looked hard and mean enough to earn his favorite name yet—Satan.

No one else had guessed how young he really was. How had this white girl done it?

A new wave of musicians came down the hall, just freed from their gigs downtown, and the cutting began in earnest. Soon it seemed to Malcolm as if everybody in the room was facing off against each other then—ax against ax, trumpet against trumpet, even piano player against piano player on the same bench, all the empty beer bottles and glasses and cups of corn set atop the upright jangling with each note now. The dancers filling up the floor again, so that they were pressed back against the wall, Malcolm desperate not to let go of her in the crowd and Miranda seeming to understand his confusion.

“Come on. You feel like busting down?” she asked him, and he nodded his head vigorously though he wasn't at all sure what she meant.

She leaned over him then, and said something in that same soft voice to a sax player standing on his other side, waiting his turn to blow; something that sounded like
Hey, Mezz, how 'bout a mezz– roll?
—but he was too overwhelmed by the sudden, sweet smell of her skin like flowers, the sweep of her breasts across his chest, to know what she was talking about. She passed a bill over, got back something long and round that the saxophonist suddenly produced in his hand like an extra digit, and immediately tucked it away down her dress.

“C'mon, Red. Let's go make our own teapad.”

She led him down the back hall, where he had seen the women going with men for a vanity case, or a roll of stockings, but she had no trouble finding an empty room now, with everyone out on the floor. She sat him down on the bed there, and produced what the sax player had given her again from the front of her dress—the joint as long as a man's index finger and as thick as a thumb. She sat next to him, and pulled a small engraved silver lighter with a diamond chip in it from her purse. Flicking it once to light the joint, then taking a long, stiff pull before she passed both the lighter and the mezzroll over to him.

Malcolm took them nervously. He had blown gage before, back in Boston with Jarvis, and some of the crew, but he was never sure if he was getting it right. He was more agitated than ever by the idea of doing it in her presence—so close beside her on the bed, thinking of how her breasts had moved over him when she scored the joint. He flicked his thumb repeatedly at the lighter, misfiring— and then when he did get the joint going took such a deep drag that the smoke poured out his nose, making him gag and cough.