Authors: Walter J. Boyne
He hadn't looked at the menu.
"What are you having, Jack?" he asked, anxious for a clue so that
he wouldn't order something too expensive.
"Oscar does the best steak tartare in the world."
He turned to the waiter. "Oscar, I'll have the same. And make mine well-done."
The waiter paused and looked at Winter.
"Make mine well-done too, please, filet mignon style."
Bandfield turned back to Millie. She was smiling fondly at him, as if he'd just done something clever. He felt it must have been the adroit way he handled Oscar.
"What did you order?"
"Lobster. We never get it in Green Bay."
He exulted in the animation of her face; every word seemed to have a counterpart expression in her eyes and on her lips.
She went on, "What do you eat in California besides oranges?"
"Abalone, the best seafood in the world, better than lobster even."
It was a guess—he'd never tasted lobster, and had abalone only
once. "You dive down in the water, and use a tire iron to pull the abalone off the rocks. Then you pound it thin and fry it."
"Do you fry the rocks or the tire iron? Sounds just like our snipe
hunts." She looked at him to see if he had taken the bait. "If you come out to Wisconsin, we'll get you on one. You can be the bag
man—he's the most important." They laughed, not certain who was
kidding whom.
"Sure, sounds great. And if you come to California, I'll introduce
you to all the movie stars." He wondered at what he was saying; her humor had elevated his own, got him joking as he rarely was able to
do with a stranger.
The thought of Hollywood obviously appealed to her. "I really want to go there. I'd love to see a movie star." She hesitated, not
sure if she should confide in him. "Did you see
Son of the Sheik?
I
couldn't believe it when Valentino died." She caught herself, shifting to less revealing ground.
"Do you like baseball?"
They were running the conversation together, each eager for the
other to talk, each with too much to say. He felt at ease, expansive,
and didn't worry much about which fork to use.
"It was the only sport I played in college. I lettered in my junior and senior years."
Mrs. Lindbergh watched with approval as Bandy and Millie submerged themselves in animated conversation, oblivious to the
others. She was content to have Charles talking to the safely married
Frances while she chatted with Jack.
Bandfield was bragging about his airplane when she asked, "Did
you know Uncle Jack is giving me flying lessons?"
Unbelievably, her stock soared. A woman pilot!
"How do you like it?"
"It's fine, except I get sick all the time."
"You'll get over it. It's just nerves."
They went on at machine-gun pace until the shrimp cocktails arrived. They fell into a rhythm, eating the shrimp alternately, one talking while the other chewed.
He found himself telling her about his repair truck and the
college guys. "They thought I was some sort of ragged gypsy,
coming around with a truck with the sides rolled up. But I'd soup up
their Model Ts, hang a Miller downdraft carburetor on one, an
Iverson head on another, and they'd get a little speed out of it. Pretty
soon I had to put them on a list. It got so busy I was even getting bribes to give people priority."
"Bribes!" she said in mock horror. "And what did your parents think of your taking bribes?"
He turned serious—it was a sore point. "Dad didn't take it so well.
He was sort of a rebel, always reading Marxist literature. He even
joined the Communist Party, honest! Every year he'd go off some
where, up in the Northwest, in the woods, rabble-rousing. Some
how my making money rubbed him the wrong way. One day he just
up and left, no word to anybody. I couldn't figure it out."
He was silent, and she reached over and squeezed his arm, sending his pulse soaring. Her own life was so protected; she couldn't imagine her father leaving the family.
The floodgates were open. "It killed my mom. She loved him so,
even if he was hard to live with. She never admitted that he was gone for good, but she was never again the same. When she got sick, she was glad, glad to die and stop missing him."
The plates were cleared, and Bandy stared in amazement as the
waiter ran a little silver roller brush across the white-on-white linen
tablecloth, gobbling up the crumbs. He slid his butter plate over the
stain from the French dressing he'd spilled.
By the time the steaks were served, he thought he was in love. He
knew it when she leaned over and asked, "Can I tell you something
personal?"
He nodded, anxious, and she said, "Don't look now, but your fly is open. I noticed when you came in."
From anybody else, the comment would have generated a lifetime impotence. Instead, it cemented their relationship, bringing them closer as he fumbled with the buttons underneath the table.
There wasn't even a dip in the conversation.
"I knew Slim in flying school, you know. We crashed, had a midair, and they threw me out. I used to think it was terrible, but
now I know it was the best thing that ever happened to me."
She took his lead eagerly. "Why?"
"Because if I hadn't, I wouldn't be here, and I wouldn't have met you."
The food was wonderful. Bandy glanced around the room and realized theirs was the only table that was dry. Everywhere else people were busily engaged in beating Prohibition's dry laws by pouring drinks out of bottles wrapped in brown paper bags.
Refusing coffee, the Lindberghs excused themselves. Winter took Millie and Frank's combined distress at parting in a glance and said,
"Slim, I want to show Frances and Millie some of the nightlife, and we need Bandy along for protection. I'll see that he gets back to the
field."
Lindbergh walked with Bandfield out to the lobby. "Be careful,
Bandy—this isn't Maria." He winked and poked him in the arm. "See you tomorrow."
Jack had asked to have his car brought around; when it pulled up
at the curb, Bandfield for the first time had his eyes forcibly torn from Millie.
He'd seen the car advertised in the
Times.
It was a Rolls-Royce
Silver Ghost, a convertible with a rumble seat the size of a swimming pool.
"Hop in. We're off to Harlem."
He helped Millie climb up the little step at the side of the rumble seat, steadying her as she struggled to get her skirt-encumbered leg
over the coaming, stealing a glance at her ankle and calf. He put one hand on the edge of the rumble seat and bounded in, striking his shin smartly on the edge of the retracted convertible top but masking-the pain.
"You like English cars, Jack?"
"Yeah, they're swell, but this one is manufactured up in Spring
field, Massachusetts, and Brewster, over on Long Island, made the
body."
The trip through the streets dazzled Millie, and Bandfield lapsed
into silence, entranced that her hand had found its way over to his,
enjoying the velvety ride of the Rolls as it headed north past Central
Park. He could tell the neighborhood changes by the head-turning the car caused. All the way up Fifth Avenue it went unnoticed. They turned down Lenox and Jack leaned back to shout, "Spanish Harlem," and point to the melange of signs in Spanish.
Interest switched abruptly as they drove up St. Nicholas to Seventh; dark eyes sparkled and glossy-haired heads swiveled to
watch the Rolls go by, and he could see admiring gestures from the
men on the street.
Past West 132nd it changed. Nobody looked at the car anymore;
the streets were filled with flashy cars, horns blowing, filled with
white people, scarfs streaming out of windows; some of the vehicles
had their tops down, the couples sitting up on the back of the seats,
talking and laughing. They ignored the background of littered
sidewalks and decaying brownstones that spawled people of all ages
into the steps and streets. There was something wrong about them that Bandfield couldn't identify, a strange and hostile quality. He'd
not been around Negroes very much, but these all looked different
from the few families he'd seen in Berkeley. Then he realized it was
the clothing, so ill-assorted, young girls wearing long drab clothes,
heavy older women swathed in layers, the men all in strange combinations of coats and pants. He turned to see Millie's expressive face appalled, registering sympathy.
They pulled up to the curb, where a tall coffee-colored man in a
tan uniform ablaze with brass buttons opened the door for Jack as he
said, "Here we are, Connie's Inn. Everybody always talks about the
Cotton Club, but this is where you see the real talent."
The vibrations hit them as they walked down a flight of stairs past
a sign advertising "Hot Feet," a revue with 30 Beautiful Brownskins
30. It was a strange riffing jazz that Bandfield had never heard before. Millie had her arm through his, and he could feel her bobbing to the music.
A table was found for them near the line of miniature churches,
houses, streets, and tiny stores that served as barrier to the stage. Someone, probably for a theater production, had created a good flat
facsimile of a town, with lights winking from different windows, and
it served here to conceal the footlights.
The waiter brought setups automatically, and whispered to Band-
field to "put his bottle in his pocket, not on the floor." Above them
were the "beautiful brownskins," and beautiful they were. Bandfield
became so raptly involved that Millie kicked him sharply in the same shin he'd barked getting in the car.
She watched intently, moving to the sound of the music for almost half an hour before leaning over to yell in his ear: "The performers sure look different from the people in the street."
He studied them and saw instantly what Millie meant. They were
young, confident, uncompromising. There was no servility in their
glances, no sense of inferiority, and they seemed to share a common
contempt for the people watching.
Millie was upset. She liked the music, but the contrast with the streets outside was just too great.
"It's just not fair. Let's get out of here—I feel like a creepy peeping
Tom."
Bandfield shrugged—he was along for the ride. Frances sensed something, and glanced at Jack, tapping her watch. He signaled the waiter, and whispered briefly to his wife on the way out to the car. Yelling as if he were still inside, he told Bandy: "One more stop—
French onion soup at the Brevoort."
The prospect of soup made out of onions didn't excite Bandfield,
but the way Millie sidled across the soft leather to sit close to him did. As they rode through the streets, she'd point to people on the
sidewalk, unaware of their own poverty, indifferent to the passage of
yet another Rolls.
She leaned forward and shouted to Jack, "It's so terrible that most
of the colored live like this. I never knew it. We don't have many colored families in Green Bay."
Winter yelled back, "You're right, but that's not the half of it. I'll
show you something else you won't find in Green Bay."
He threaded the Rolls through the traffic, turning right on 59th.
They went south on Broadway into the glitter of Times Square, then
turned right again on 43rd to take them through Hell's Kitchen. It was an industrial slum, a turgid mixing of factories, freight yards, and warehouses that forced the laborers to live nearby in roughly
angled, crowded tenements ready to slide into the street.
"Tumbledown town! Twenty years ago, we wouldn't have gotten
through here unharmed. I still wouldn't want to walk here."
He didn't stop until they had made a loop back to Broadway.
"It's not only the colored who are poor, honey. I don't understand
how the country can have so much wealth and so much poverty all at the same time."
Her mood changed, somehow reassured by the egalitarianism of the poor. They rode in a tired, happy, excited silence the rest of the
way to the tree-studded streets and squares of Greenwich Village.
Everyone knew Winter; the doorman at the Brevoort greeted him by name, and they were ushered into the restaurant although it was
just after closing time and the chef was gone. There would be no onion soup. Bandfield was inwardly relieved.