Strivers Row (65 page)

“Yeah, well. You know, Jonah, one day I just caught up with her. And then I passed her. That's how it happens sometimes.”

“Oh, I see. And now your speed is a jazz piano player,” Jonah said sarcastically, but Adam only shrugged.

“Hazel is an artist. A true artist.”

“I see. And what about Preston?”

“That is a shame,” he sighed lightly. “I'm going to miss that boy.”

“What about—what about
all
of it, Adam? I don't understand. What about running for Congress, and your church—”

“They'll understand,” he said. His voice more than a little patronizing again, as if explaining things that Jonah had no knowledge of. “They'll understand. I won't give Isabel the word until after the election, just for the sake of propriety. But don't think they wouldn't back me anyway. They never much approved of her. Some hoofer from Connie's Inn—in too close with the light-skinned folks—”

“How can you
say
that, Adam?” Jonah asked. Stunned most of all by his friend's calculation—his certainty that he would get what he wanted, no matter what.

“I'm not saying I agree. I'm just saying how it is,” Adam said, shrugging again, patting Jonah on the shoulder and reaching for the door to the dressing room.

“Don't you see, Jonah? What they want is
me
.”

He half-turned as he went back in, looking at Jonah where he stood in the hall, still blinking at him in shock.

“You'll see. It won't make any difference, Brother Minister,” he told him, completely earnest, as if afraid he had neglected Jonah's real concern. “Don't you worry. We're still gonna beat 'em on that housing project!”

The door shut in Jonah's face then, and he started automatically back down the hall. Moving toward his sister's dressing room— only to be confronted by the manager, who stopped him, his jowly white face reddening in embarrassment.

“Mmm, if you'd be good enough to wait a little longer, sir? Miss Dolan will see you. It's just—”

Even before he could get the words out, Jonah had glimpsed a tall, dark figure emerging from a door at the far end of the hall. Unable to fathom that he could be
here
—even as Jonah recognized immediately the way he moved, the shape that had come to shadow him everywhere. He started to run after him, just as he had the night before. Wordlessly now, more curious than tormented. Just needing to know what he was doing, that boy from the train, following him everywhere.
If he was real at all, anymore—

The boy saw him at the same time and began to run just as Jonah did. Moving silently, flying out a door and up the back bolt hole to the street. Jonah heard his sister call out something as he ran by, but he ignored her. Chasing the boy right on out and up the iron steps, into the sudden, blaring swelter of Sheridan Square at night.

A hot wind of exhaust blasted his neck—the Village streets just as filled as Harlem's were with traffic, with soldiers and sailors drunkenly romping about with their girls. A newsstand right in front of him, a couple of grunting men in gloves and overalls throwing bundles of newspapers from a truck to the sidewalk. He ducked around them, looking past the truck, but Jonah still didn't see him until the last possible moment. There, on the other side of Sheridan Park—just climbing into a cab with another tall, colored man in a uniform who looked remarkably like him. Jonah wondering if his hallucinations could be multiplying as he watched, but there was no mistaking him—grinning back with that same sweet man-boy grin before he ducked down into the taxi, and was gone.

“What was that all about? You lost what's left of your mind?” Sophia asked him when he stepped back into her dressing room.

“Have I lost
my
mind? Do you know who that boy is?”

“I dunno. They just call him Red,” she murmured, looking down, arms crossed over her chest.

“Sophie, he's a pimp. A john-walker. I saw him with my own eyes.”

“Ah, he just gets himself in trouble,” she said, shrugging defiantly. “How do you think people make a living, Jonah?”

“What're you talking about, Sophie? Are you
seeing
him? Are you really involved with this boy?”

“I wouldn't call it
involved,
” she muttered, waving a hand at him and sinking back down in the chair before her vanity.

“A pimp now? West Indian Archie wasn't enough? Or are you seeing
him
, too?”

Her whole body seemed to sag into itself, as if she didn't have the strength to hold herself up anymore, and she looked away from him. He took a step toward her, then stopped—the truth just beginning to occur to him. Looking at the marquee card tucked into a corner of her vanity mirror. Her smiling face above the stage name she'd made up for herself: “
Miranda Dolan
.” The photograph just slightly overexposed, in order to make her look more white than ever.

“Or doesn't he
know
? That's it, isn't it? That poor child thinks
Miranda Dolan
is white. Doesn't he?”

“What's it your business, anyway?” she snapped back at him, but her voice was more weary than angry. “What you come up here for? Just to harangue me about my life? You know, when I first saw you sitting out there, I thought maybe Daddy had died.”

“And that would still matter to you?” Jonah asked tentatively, his anger and astonishment seeping away. Sophie sitting on her little chair looking to him now as vulnerable as she had back in high school, when she was mooning over some boy, or a sentimental record.

“But he didn't, did he?” she said. “He ain't never gonna die, is he?”

“Sophie,” he said, squatting down by her and taking her arm. Saying her name as he couldn't remember saying it.

“Sophie, I see what you are here—”

“Jonah, you heard me. I can
sing!
” she flared up, pulling away from him.

“Yeah, you can sing. You can sing
all right
. Is this what you want to be?” he asked her bluntly then. “The white Billie Holiday? Or maybe the white Ella, or the white something else next year—”

“I do what it takes. What they want—”

“—dating boys like that? 'Cause they think you're a white lady, too?”

“Goddammit, I
told
you! I live the way I want to. I don't have to be what anyone says I am!”

“Yes, you do,” he told her, standing up then. “You have to do it, we all have to do it. You can't be what you want any more than those Jews in Germany can go on saying they're Germans. We have to be what we are, we can't hide in some little place like this, nice and generous though it is.”

“Don't
preach
to me, Jonah! Goddammit, don't you dare stand there and try to make me feel guilty, preaching at me like
he
would.”

She turned away from him again, her neck bent over, straightened hair flowing down over her face. Jonah wondering to himself, even as she did, if it was something like what their father would say.

“Come back with me,” he urged her gently. “Right now. Or anytime you want to. You can live with me and Amanda if you want. Have a home with us for as long as you like. Anytime you like. There's plenty of room. That's all I'll say, but you'll always be welcome.”

She said nothing, head still bent away from him, and he wanted to lean down and kiss her cheek. He walked quietly out of the room instead, not wishing to intrude on her anymore.

He walked back up into Sheridan Square again, and caught a cab. Stopping off at the Roanoke Hotel only long enough to check out and retrieve his briefcase with its two changes of clothes, and his counterfeit ration coupons, and his Bible. Standing for one last moment in the neat white room, taking in its pleasantness, and its silence and its vacancy.

He had the cab take him directly to Strivers Row then. Getting out at the corner on Seventh Avenue where he stood for another long moment, and marveled at the same, clamorous nighttime scene he had never expected to see again. In the distance he could hear the thunder of Elder Michaux's revival still going strong, the steady
thump
of his tent band, the choir roaring through a rendition of “I Been 'Buked and I Been Scorned.” Yet even as he listened, the words were drowned out by another phalanx of Commissioner Valentine's motorcycle patrol, cruising down the avenue—the cops wearing their high caps pulled down hard over their eyes. The mobs of servicemen on the sidewalk stopping to stare and grin. The unlikely clumps of people half hidden behind them, gathered together again—staring out from the shadows of the stoops with eyes that showed nothing but hatred.

But he turned away from them now. Springing up the steps of the house that he thought he had left for the last time this morning, and bursting in the front door. Wanting to shout out the news to Amanda that he was back, although he had already decided in the cab that he would say nothing about it. He had told himself he would not burden her with it, even though he knew that it meant his own shame was buried without a trace.
That he was absolved, once again, just as Merton Turnbow had predicted back in college.
Sure that no one need ever know what he had done, what he had been about to do—until he saw the suitcases stacked neatly in the graceful marble foyer and he stopped in his tracks.

He thought, in that moment, that he was wrong, and that somehow she had found out. That with her usual empathy for him she had all but read his mind and packed up all of his things to ship them out with him.

Yet when he saw her, he realized that was impossible. Catching sight of her first where she sat on the edge of a chair in the front parlor. Pocketbook in hand, a light shawl wrapped around her shoulders despite the heat of the night. Standing up as he came into the room, her red eyes and the dried trails of tears down her cheeks visible, even in the muddled light of the single parlor lamp she had turned on.

“Why're you sitting here in the dark?” was all he could think of to ask. Knowing the answer already, but not daring to ask another, more pertinent question, such as,
Why are you ready to go out in the middle of the night?

“I was waiting for you. I wanted to wait for you, even though I got worried you weren't ever coming back,” she told him. Her eyes on him so sad, so pitying that he wanted to turn away but he could not. Stupefied, the full realization of what was going on falling on him like a ton of bricks.

“But I didn't go! Look, I'm back!” he cried, even as he understood how nonsensical and desperate he sounded.

“It doesn't really matter, Jonah. You've been gone for a long time now,” she said, her voice steady no matter how much she might have been crying. “Gone from me, anyhow. Brooding on all your secret things. Running around, never talking to me anymore—”

“We talk!”

“Not like we did,” she said, her voice so sad and certain that he wanted to sob. “Not like we used to, and you know it. You won't let me close to you anymore, Jonah, and I'm done trying to get through.”

She stepped forward, touching his face affectionately.

“Don't worry, I'll make it easy on you with the church. I'm just going to my mother's. You can put it out that she's not feeling well these days. I'll just ease on out—least until we decide what we want to do for sure.”

“You're leaving me,” he said, still unbelieving. And right then he wanted to tell her everything he had been through that whole day and night, everything he had been thinking and hurting about for so long. But the words, the
shame
, stuck in his throat.

“It's that train, isn't it?” he said bitterly, instead. “It's that boy on the train, those drunken bums.
Isn't it?
”

“It isn't that at all,” she said, shaking her head. “Is that what you've been thinking about, all this time? You see, that's what I mean. Was a time you could've told me that.”

“But I have! Now, anyway—”

“You think that'll do? Jonah, you've been away for
so long
now. Maybe you never
were
all here, all the years we've been married. And I thought about that and I started to cry for myself, but I really feel worse for you.”

“That's why you're leaving me,” he said, bitterly. “Because you feel worse for
me
.”

“You have to decide where you're going to be, Jonah. You have to be here, or somewhere, and I'd still like it to be with me. But you have to decide.”

She walked back into the kitchen, and he sat down in the parlor chair she had just vacated. Sitting there for hours even after she had called for the taxi, and come back in to kiss him on the cheek, and tell him that she would call him. After she told him they would talk about it more, and carried her bags down the stairs with the help of the hack—always a strong, able, competent woman. Sitting there long after he had heard her cab drive away, and the darkness burned away on Strivers Row, and he could finally say to himself, in the earliest gray dawn, that his wife had left him.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

MALCOLM

He took Reginald back up to the latest basement room he had been renting, as soon as he could remember where it was. Telling the cabbie to just keep driving north, while he tried to recall the address.

“This just a temporary crib I got. For purposes of business, you understand,” Malcolm told him, but Reginald had just nodded, as trustingly as he had whenever Malcolm had told him anything when they were both boys.

When they'd gotten to his place, he had gone into the bathroom to pull the cash he'd taken from Archie out of his money belt—not wanting Reginald to think that he was scared of anything. Rolling it up into seven, big, impressive wads, and stashing them in all his different coat and pants pockets. Then he had gathered his few belongings and taken Reginald up to the St. Nicholas Hotel, where he flashed a roll around like Dollarbill's down at Small's, and demanded the best suite they had. The clerk had still looked doubtful, but Malcolm threatened to make a big scene, pointing to his brother and telling him about how nothing was too good for our boys in uniform. They got the suite he had asked for, and soon he and Reginald were sitting back deep on the high plump-mattressed bed in his room. Smiling shyly at each other and swinging their feet above the floor like kids, while they talked over how the rest of their brothers and sisters were doing.

“Yeah, Wilfred still teachin' at Wilberforce,” Reginald told him. “Hilda an' Philbert both still up in Lansing. They both thinkin' a gettin' married, last they wrote—”

“
Both
of 'em?”

“Yeah, that's right. Philbert got religion now, too. Wear one a those little, round, straw hats all the time—”

“That right?” Malcolm slapped his knee with exaggerated laughter. “What about Yvonne? An' Wesley an' Robert?”

“Oh, they still in school there.”

“You, uh, see anything a Butch?” Malcolm asked cautiously—his brother's eyes shifting downward the moment he heard the name.

“No, man. He still in the orphanage, I guess,” Reginald told him, then hesitated. Both of them understanding what any mention of Butch, son of the barbershop salesman, would lead to.

“You know, I went to see Mama, 'fore I shipped out.”

“Oh, yeah?” Malcolm asked, his voice studiedly casual. “So how she doin'?”

“Oh, all right. Sometimes she knows me. Sometimes...”

His brother's voice trailed off, both of them silent in the big, white hotel suite. Malcolm had tried going back to Michigan for a few days, soon after Jarvis had fixed him up with his new look, but nothing had gone as expected. He had anticipated the trip as a chance to strut in front of the folks, and show them all that he had picked up. Dropping in at the homes of his old classmates with his brand-new conk and zoot, and asking gleefully,
“Do you remember me?”
But when he tried to pull the latest steps he had learned at the Roseland, they had only grinned stupidly in embarrassment—the women giggling and refusing to talk to him.

He had stopped by to visit the Gohannases, and even Mrs. Swerlein at the county home in Mason. She had let him in, but sat facing him in the parlor with her head down, as if able to do no more than glance fleetingly at his new clothes for a few moments at a time, flinching whenever he forgot and used some dirty word. After that he hadn't even tried to look up Mr. Maynard Allen—or to stop by the state home in Kalamazoo. Afraid that she wouldn't know him. Even more afraid of what he might hear and could do nothing about, the sound of that rubber hose hitting flesh.

“So—how long you been in the navy? Why'n't ya tell me you was signin' up before you did, Nome?” Malcolm teased his brother, trying to push the thought of home away, and plucking at Reginald's sharp, dress uniform with a mixture of envy and wonder.

He had received his own draft notice when he was living back in Roxbury, after quitting the shipyard up in Portland. The day of his examination he had brushed his conk until it stood almost straight up, into a bright red hedge of fuzz, and worn his flashiest, loudest zoot. He had walked into the induction center talking about how he couldn't wait to get hold of a gun so he could kill himself some crackers down South—calling everyone
Baby
and
Daddy-o
. All of the white boys at their physical had laughed and smirked knowingly at him, while the other colored inductees had stared at him as if they would just as soon cut his throat, and the pretty, young colored nurse looked disgusted. But the whole act had gotten him sent to the psychiatrist, all right. The next week, when his draft card had come to Ella's—classifying him 4F with the taut explanation:
Psychopathic personality
—he had stared at that for a long time, knowing it was all part of his hustle, but wondering about it anyway.

“Ah, Malcolm, this ain't the navy. It's the merchant marine,” Reginald said, smiling.

“Oh yeah? What's the difference, exactly?”

“Well, we take supplies an' things. Did a convoy all the way through to Murmansk, up in Russia,” his brother told him proudly, then laughed. “
Man,
you thought Michigan was cold!”

Malcolm recalled hazy images from a newsreel about the fighting on the Russian front. It had seemed incomprehensibly vast— rows and rows of tanks moving across a landscape of endless fields. Soldiers fighting their way through razed cities, commentators talking about the war at the very gates of Asia. There had been film, too, of the American convoys steaming through the North Sea, and the Arctic Ocean. Destroyers dumping depth charges over into the churning gray-and-white seas; torpedo wakes streaking through the water. Even the silhouette of a distant, stricken ship, rising up and plunging down into the water—tiny figures still jumping hopelessly off it, no larger or more significant than maggots off a bone.

“I don't know as you should be doin' that,” he told Reginald seriously—an idea starting to form in his mind.

“Ah, it ain't so bad, Malcolm. They got lots a ships to protect us. They say they got the U-boats on the run, now.”

“Yeah? Well, they say a lot things.”

For the rest of his brother's leave, Malcolm had taken him all around Harlem, trying to talk him into jumping ship. He took him to Jimmy's Chicken Shack, and to Dickie Wells's. He took him to the Renaissance Ballroom, and up to the buzzard's roost at the Apollo for amateur night, where they fell all over themselves watching Moms Mabley, and a big Puerto Rican man in a tutu, chasing the acts off the stage at gunpoint after they had sung their hearts out.

But he spent the whole time, wherever they went, trying to drum into Reginald all the different hustles there were to make a fortune from in Harlem. How they could live together and share expenses in some apartment, or even at the big suite at the St. Nicholas still. Assuring him that the MPs would never catch up to him, not up here in Harlem—that Malcolm would never let them.

He made a point of paying for everything with the thick rolls of money he had gotten from West Indian Archie's bagman. Slapping down big tips everywhere, giving out to any acquaintance he saw who hit him up for a loan. It was true, he kept one eye over his shoulder at all times, afraid that word would make it back to Archie over The Wire about his spending—but he wanted so much more for Reginald to see what he had. Watching the rolls steadily diminishing, too, reminding him every time he flashed them of what he owed.

By the end of Reginald's week in town, he was reduced to taking him back to the Braddock Hotel with him. He had hoped to run into some of his old musician connections, so he could impress his brother—afraid at the same time that they would ignore him if he did. They sat up at the bar, working on the Braddock's watered-down brandy together, Malcolm still trying to convince him of how much money he could make.

“I got the perfect hustle,” he told Reginald. “Learned it from some old Jew. It's solid, an' jim-clean. All you got to do is get yourself a peddler's license, an' a case full a cheap seconds—”

“ ‘Seconds'?”

“Watches, rings. Shirts, dresses. Anything what's got a defect in it. They sell it to you for a beg. Then you take 'em around to barber-shops, beauty parlors, an' come on like it's real hot—like you can't wait to get rid of it. Those niggers give you twice what you paid for it, easy. An' there's no risk, baby brother. That's the beauty part! You get clipped by the blue, all you do is show 'em your peddler's license, an' the bill of sale for what you paid for those seconds—”

“I dunno,” Reginald said, shaking his head and looking down at his drink. Smiling shyly, the way Malcolm remembered him doing when he had been embarrassed as a little kid.

“C'mon, Mr. High Pockets! What don't you know?”

“I don't know if I can do that sorta thing, Malcolm. 'Sides, we shippin' out tomorrow night.”

“Don't you worry. I'll set it all up by then. You can do one with me 'fore your ship goes, an' see how you like it.”

“I dunno,” Reginald said again, still looking embarrassed. “I got some other interests, you know?”

“Other interests? What you talkin' 'bout, ol' man?”

“You, uh—you know any
girls
we can meet, Malcolm?”

“Why'n't you say so?” Malcolm proclaimed, slapping Reginald hard on his shoulders. “ 'Course I know girls! I know any girl you want. Big or small, tight or white.”

He was unable to hold back from telling him about Miranda then. He hadn't mentioned her before, out of fear that they might somehow run into her, out with West Indian Archie. But now he couldn't resist bragging on her—trying anything to impress his little brother.

“I got a white woman myself, you know. She's beautiful, too.”

“Yeah?” Reginald asked, looking up. “She your girlfriend?”

“Sure she is! She's more 'n that, though. Sings in a club, too. I'm managin' her career, least till I decide to start my own, just like Jimmy Carlton—”

“You think I can meet her? I mean, you think she got any friends?”

“Sure,” Malcolm said, thinking. Tapping his long fingers on the edge of the bar.

“Yeah?”

“Sure, sure. She the most beautiful white girl you ever seen,” he repeated, thinking of Miranda with West Indian Archie. Thinking of the rolls in his pocket, quickly diminishing.

He peeled off another bill of West Indian Archie's money, throwing it down on the bar for their drinks. Deciding.

“Come on,” he told Reginald, pulling him off his bar stool.

“We goin' to meet her?”

“Yeah. I gotta get somethin' first, that's all.”

He took Reginald with him up to the apartment on West 144th Street. Sammy opening the door a crack, looking him over from behind the chain—his eyes rimmed with redness.

“Who you with, Red?” he asked suspiciously.

“This is my brother—”

“Well, come in, come in! Lookit him, Cholly Hoss! Even bigger'n you are!” Sammy exclaimed, unlatching the chain.

Inside, the apartment seemed changed to Malcolm from the last time he had seen it. It looked dingier and messier, and there was a funny smell, like old food. Sammy himself seemed different, besides his red eyes. There was a little bristle of hair growing up around the sides of his usually smooth-shaven head, and he was still in one of his silk Japanese bathrobes, walking around in his surprisingly small, childlike bare feet.

“You all right, Hoss?” Malcolm asked him. “I'm fine as thine, Red,” Sammy assured him quickly, moving all about the apartment, in one room and out the other, as if he were looking for something. “I just been takin' a little vacation from work, tha's all. You wanna do some more john-walkin', I let all the girls have a couple days—”

“That's all right, Sammy,” Malcolm cut him off quickly. “I just need to borrow somethin' you offered before.”

“I'm short, old man—”

“I don't mean scratch,” he said directly. “I need that .32-20.” Sammy stopped his padding around, and looked both him and Reginald up and down again.

“You an' your
brother
wouldn't be plannin' to knock over those scores I showed you, would you, Red? 'Cause that would be a solemn drag.”

“Nothin' like that! It's a score a my own. Truth, I'll cut you in. I need somebody to fence it, on the level—”

“You better be, it's my piece you usin',” Sammy told him, retrieving the .32-20 from a notch in the wall behind the icebox. Watching Reginald's eyes widen as he brought out the gun, spinning the cylinder.

“This a big score?” Sammy asked, looking at Malcolm more curiously than ever.

“Biggest I ever knew. But you can see fo' yo'self, soon as I pull it.”

“All right, Red,” Sammy said slowly. “Let's drink on it.”

He had gone into the back bedroom—but instead of bringing out a bottle he returned with a small wooden box full of blow. Cutting the lines out on a mirror on the kitchen table, insisting that they join him. Malcolm could tell that Reginald wanted to leave, but he wanted the surge the coke would give him—that feeling of being keyed up but in control of everything, which Sammy swore was necessary to get nerved up for any stick-up job. They had each done three lines—Reginald dutifully snorting up his powder, too, while they had smiled and cackled at him. And after they had done the coke, Sammy brought out some sticks, just to take the edge off. Then, when they were done with the tea, he had brought out more coke, treating them to a few more lines, afraid that they might have gotten too low.

By the time Sammy returned with a bottle of good scotch, Malcolm had almost forgotten his plans—forgotten even about Miranda, and Archie. His body longing for nothing more than to sink down and go to sleep right on the floor of Sammy's kitchen. But Reginald was pulling at his sleeve. Looking at him through glazed eyes that still reminded Malcolm of how he had been as a little boy—beseeching him as he had that night when he was the only one to hear him get up, to go and break into the Levandow-skis' grocery.