Goodbye Without Leaving (6 page)

Then there was Desdemona, the Reverend Willhall's daughter. She was fiery and beautiful. Looking at her solemn father and her placid mother, it was hard to tell where she had come from. She wore her glossy hair in a crown of braids on top of her head. Her clothes were suitable for the daughter of a clergyman, except that she liked skirts with slits to show off her legs. She wore gold earrings and her perfect nails were painted with a shade I recognized from my tour days as Frosted African Pumpkin. Desdemona did not speak much, at least not at the foundation. She sat in her office and worked the telephone, and she traveled frequently to raise money.

Mrs. Willhall believed that it was her duty to see that the foundation staff was properly fed. Each morning she started a large pot of vegetable soup on the stove in the huge old kitchen. At lunchtime we sat at a tin-top table eating vegetable soup, cornbread and applesauce. The Reverend Willhall did not believe in conversation with food. We gathered at the table and waited while steaming bowls of soup were placed before us. The Reverend extended his long skinny arms out over the table and intoned; “O Lord, for the food which we are about to eat, we thank you! We thank you! We thank you!”

It often seemed to me unfair that he did not thank his wife, but there you are. We ate in silence, which was just as well, since it was at mealtimes that I felt most alien—the lone white face. Would I ever find some fellow humans to be at peace with?

Upstairs I sat at my console and stared out the window. Dark autumn rain fell steadily. I switched on a record and positioned the needle. That powerful clear voice of Bessie Smith almost knocked me backward. As I listened I realized how very dirty those old dirty songs were, like “I'm Wild About That Thing” and “You've Got to Give Me Some.” It turned out they were written under a pseudonym by a nephew of the Madagascar royal family—the world of music was full of such anomalies. Sunshine suddenly flooded me. I was an anomaly, too. It was all okay.

“‘
You can see my bankbook
,'” I sang along. “‘
But don't you feel my purse
.'” I happily sipped my coffee. There was no one to hear me, so I was free to sing as loud as I liked: “‘
I've got what it takes but it breaks my heart to give it away
.'” It seemed to me to be my personal anthem.

14

It didn't take me long to love my job at the Race Music Foundation. It was rather like being on tour except more restful, and the food was better. I was sincerely interested in women singers of the twenties and thirties. In two weeks I had settled in. I did my work, which required familiarity and devotion—I had plenty of those—and did not call for any special skills, of which I had none.

Considering the nature of the music we were working with—dirty blues, songs about money, praises of God and what-all—the mood at the foundation was solemn. No matter what the weather, the building itself gave off a kind of serious, gray aura I found very consoling. The Reverend Willhall was supernaturally grave. He was especially disturbed when popular groups—by which he meant white acts—remade some classic blues number and turned it into a hit. He would then pick up the phone and put in a sorrowful telephone call to the foundation's lawyer and set him on the case to see if any money could be liberated for the songwriter, or the heirs if the songwriter was dead, as was often the case.

“Those English boys stole ‘Little Red Rooster,'” he would say mournfully. “When will this ever stop?”

I always wanted to say, “Cheer up, Reverend Willhall. No white girl group is ever going to remake Gertrude Perkins' ‘Black Snake Moan' with violins.”

No one else, however, was very happy about my job.

“I worry about your welfare,” Johnny said.

“For a guy who likes rock and roll,” I said, “you sure are funny about spades.”

“I love spades,” Johnny said. “I just don't like my woman hanging around spade-infested areas in the late afternoon.”

Of course, this job was more than just the job of a lifetime. It was a loaded gun and it kept everyone off me, no matter how they nagged. One false move about this, the terrible look in my eye said, and there will be NO WEDDING. My mother knew it, and Johnny knew it. For the first time in my life I had some leverage.

It didn't take much to make me happy. I discovered a singer called Mrs. Verlie Waters, about whom little was known. She made three records, six sides in all: “Big Thumb Blues,” “Empty Head Blues,” “Bad Weather Blues,” “Low Down Dirty Dog,” “Under the Bed Blues” and “No One Can Sing It But Me.” Her voice was sweeter than Bessie Smith's, but not as rich. For a blues singer it was almost girlish. I sat at my console listening to “No One Can Sing It But Me.”

I looked her up in the library. She turned up in a discography which revealed that she had been one of the first female singers to write her own material. In a book entitled
Mama Do No Wrong: Black Lady Singers of the Twenties and Thirties
by Liam L. P. Hunt, I found a paragraph about her. Her parents had been teachers. She had graduated from a colored music academy and then ran off to New Orleans. Her career lasted six years and she died of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-eight. As the song said,
Life sure is rough, it sure is tough, but of that sweet sound I never get enough. No one can sing it but me
.

15

It turned out that unlike my fun-loving and gregarious lover, I was rather antisocial. I felt like a person who had been living on another planet, and who did not quite get how human beings connected in a social setting.

Johnny would come bounding over to my apartment and say, “Wash the blackface off, kiddo. We're invited to a dinner party.”

“You go,” I would invariably reply. “Tell them I have a disease.”

“Come, come, my good woman,” said Johnny. “We can't have this.”

“Please, Johnny. I'm not good out.”

In social situations I was hostile, defensive and shy, not a winning combination. If I was asked what I did, I would morosely answer that I was an ethno-musicologist. Or Johnny would say, “Geraldine used to dance with Vernon and Ruby Shakely.”

“How neat! Are they classical or modern?” some nice host or hostess would politely ask.

“They used to be modern but now they're classical,” I would respond.

Out on the street Johnny always pleaded, “Can't you make a little effort? These are
nice
people.”

“I just don't
get
them.”

“You don't have to get them. Just be nice to them.”

Every invitation, of which there seemed to be hundreds, felt like a death threat. I looked at Johnny with envy. He was like a jigsaw piece that had found its happy little place and fit right in. His colleagues adored him. The senior partners adored him. Their wives doted on him. So why couldn't I sit by his side thinking my own thoughts and ruminating on my dinner like a cow?

These people were
sharp
. They knew their way around, and they all knew each other. Their fathers were partners or their mothers were cousins or had gone to school together, or were intermarried with people who had gone to school together. They wore snappy clothes and owned small European cars. They worked hard and took interesting vacations in wilderness areas. They were healthy and hale and red-cheeked and they had never spent a minute of their lives worried about the essentials. The essentials had all been taken care of. Instead they had worried about grades, getting into college, law school. They worried when their cars didn't work and when cholera broke out in some part of the world they had an impulse to go touring in. Later they had children and worried about early childhood development, what schools to send their children to. When they got together they talked about cooking equipment, and skiing, and gossiped about mutual friends. I was a total misfit.

The older set, the senior partners, lived not in one-bedroom apartments but in large spaces overlooking the park, or in brownstones and duplexes. These people had grown children, all full of accomplishment, and gave large multigenerational dinner parties. At these dinners the great issues of the day were debated. A successful dinner party to this group was one in which spirited discussion took place.

“If I hear one more conversation about social justice, as the colored maid serves me my leg of lamb, I'm going to faint,” I said after one such event.

“How very noble you are,” said Johnny.

“These people just feel they can say anything they want.”

“Vernon Shakely said anything he wanted,” Johnny pointed out. “It's all very well to talk about the white honky devil when your accountant is a white honky devil from the Wharton School of Business.”

“Yes, but Vernon meant what he said,” I countered.

“Well, so do these people,” Johnny said. “And they treat you nicer.”

“They don't treat me nicer. They're like my mother. They only like me because I'm appended to you.”

“You don't give them a chance,” Johnny sighed. “You've had an amazing career. You have lots of interesting things to say.”

“I don't feel that these people are on my side.”

“You're hopeless,” Johnny said. “Life is not about who's on whose side.”

I was incredulous. Could anybody actually believe that life was
not
about who was on whose side? I hung my head. How nice it would be, I thought, to withdraw from reality and spend the rest of my life dancing in front of the stereo in the privacy of my own warm home.

Not only was I shy, I could not cook. The only thing I could fix was red beans and cabbage salad, and neither Johnny nor I felt that this was appropriate for a dinner party.

“Gee,” he said one day. “We can't feed Alice and Simon Crain red beans.”

“I thought Simon used to work in the slums,” I said. “Didn't Alice do some kind of field work in the Caribbean? Why can't we give them red beans?”

“We don't say ‘slums,' “Johnny said. “We say ‘inner city.'”

“We can order out,” I said. “Besides, your kitchen isn't what I would call well equipped.”

“We'll have to do something about this,” Johnny said.

When Johnny said, “We'll have to do something about this,” he wasn't kidding around. The next evening I ambled over to his apartment and found his kitchen full of important-looking boxes, inside of which was a battery of orange enamel French cooking ware: a soup pot, a frying pan, a family of saucepans and a flat pan with little ears.

“It's a gratin,” Johnny said, reading the fancy brochure.

“Oh, yeah?”

“It's to make gratin in.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Well, yes. Look, here's a picture. It says here you scallop the potatoes and cook them in cream and cheese. Sounds swell.”

I peered over his shoulder. “It says here
you
scallop the potatoes and cook them in cheese and cream.”

“We both have to learn,” he said.

I curled my eyebrow at him.

“Hey!” Johnny said. “We're supposed to be a team. Let's have a little cooperative spirit.”

“Oh, take it to work,” I said. “Walk the dog till you feel better.”

“Don't be intractable. Eventually we're going to get married.”

“I don't want to get married. I want things to be the way they are.”

“Come over here.” He put his arms around me. “You wanted to stay a Shakette. Now you want us to live like two graduate students going out on dates and living together on the weekends. Things change. You have to roll with the times.”

“I don't want to roll with the times.” Tears spurted out of my eyes. “Life is nice now. Can't we just groove with the now? Besides, why do you want to marry me? I can't cook. I'm not a social asset. I'm a drag at dinner parties.”

“You're my soul and my inspiration,” Johnny said.

“I never liked that song,” I said.

“But it's true,” Johnny said. “‘
Without you, baby, what good am I
?'”

16

Because I loved him, I tried to get nicer. I read the newspaper every day and tried to figure out what my opinions were. Unfortunately, my opinions were almost identical to Vernon Shakely's, which was not much use if you happened to be a white middle-class person whose boyfriend was a lawyer.

Most intimidating to me was an invitation to the home of Bill and Betty Lister. Bill, a serene, gray-haired man, was Johnny's mentor at the firm. Betty was the administrator at a small foundation that gave away tons of money to worthy causes. They had two children: Penny, a filmmaker who had documented the plight of migrant workers and rural midwives, and Bill Jr., a journalist whose beat was city politics. They lived in a big, somewhat shabby house—after all, it was not material things that mattered—and their walls were decorated with the pickings from their extensive travels: Haitian folk quilts (sewn with tiny stuffed people riding on tiny stuffed buses pursued by trapunto alligators), a !Hmong wall hanging, a watercolor done by a sharecropper at a Freedom School in Mississippi. Their silverware, I noticed, was extremely heavy and old. I mentioned this to Johnny, who had spent a good deal of time telling me how much above such things Bill Lister was.

“Oh, come on,” said Johnny. “People
have
things like that. They don't buy them.”

Betty Lister did not cook but, as Johnny pointed out, this had never stood in her way.

“She has servants to cook for her while she's out doing good deeds,” I said.

“She knows that you can always
hire
people to help you.”

“How very upright of her,” was all that I could say.

Friday night Betty Lister, who believed that a good hostess drew out her shy guests, decided to focus on me. She was a tall, wide-eyed woman, with the wondering gaze of a child. She wore long velvet skirts and what looked like an evening shirt tailored for a woman.