Strivers Row (31 page)

But he got no satisfaction. The maître d' had vanished with nothing but another tired, obsequious smile. Perversely, determined to raise any suspicion he could, Jonah even ordered the pork chops, but the waiter who took his order only nodded and smiled, and told him they would be right out.

He sat back, playing idly with his fork. This was always the lonely part of it. Sitting by himself at a table, or at the end of a bar. Afraid to strike up a conversation with anyone, to have to make up too much about where he lived, or what he did, or why he wasn't in the war.

He stole glances over at the other diners, to see if any of them were looking at him. But all of them seemed to be eating and talking enthusiastically. Honking away at each other in their strange, nasal voices. Spitting out sentences in endless, staccato reams. He thought of something Amanda had told him once, and nearly choked with laughter on his pork chop.

White people,
she had said,
sound like geese with typewriters.

His pork chops arrived, delivered promptly and steaming hot from the kitchen, just as he had been promised. Jonah cut into them at once, stabbing at the meat in his fury. But after a mouthful or two he almost wanted to laugh. The chops thick, and tender, and completely bland—more flavorless, Jonah thought, than anything he could have ordered in the greasiest hash house north of 110th Street. There were some watery green beans and apple sauce on the side, a small mountain of mashed potatoes whipped to an equivalent tastelessness.

After a few, pointless bites, he gave up on the chops, and asked for the check. The waiter moving discreetly away while he fished out cash and the extra meat coupons Jakey had got him for just this purpose, no questions asked.
One sin always summons another.
Flourishing it triumphantly as he handed it over, along with a big tip. The waiter gave him an open grin, a grateful nod before scurrying off.

What would it be like?
To be surrounded always by these honking, oblivious, self-righteous people?
What would it be like to be one of them? Or never really one of them?

He was almost outside, almost past the bar when he saw the maître d' hurrying by. Jonah stopped where he was, and waved the man over—unable to help himself.

“Sir?”

“I would like to see the manager.”

“I see. Is there something wrong, sir?”

His face wreathed in concern. Jonah looked him in the eye, repeating the exact words he had used.

“I asked to speak to the manager.”

The maître d' looked back at him, his lips starting to move as if he were going to say something. Then he turned and walked quickly away, his shoulders bent in concern. Saying to Jonah over his shoulder, “Certainly, sir, just a moment, please—”

But of course he wouldn't recognize him,
Jonah thought as he watched him walk away.
Of course none of them would. They don't know because they don't see us.

The maître d' came hurrying back with the manager, a short, harried, balding man in a gabardine suit. He came toward Jonah with his hand out already, a sheepish grin on his lips.

“Hello, I'm Jimmy Gray, the manager here, is there something—” he said in a placating rush.

Jonah grasped his hand, squeezing it firmly. Feeling Mr. Gray the manager give a respectful, manly squeeze back.

“Nothing at all,” he told him, the words tripping off his tongue. “Nothing at all! I just wanted to tell you to your face what a fine establishment this is, and what a fine dining experience you provide.”

“Why, thank you! Thank you very much, sir,” Mr. Gray beamed, pumping his hand again. The maître d' all smiles again next to him.

“You know, in these troubled times, with so many of our boys away . . . Well, we try to do the best we can,” Gray stammered, almost choking up now, much to Jonah's alarm.

“We do our part!”

Outside he flagged down a DeSoto cab, its green-and-red back fins nearly streaking past him. Stepping up into its cavernous back-seat, and giving the driver his sister's address in the Village. He let his head fall back along the top of the patent leather seat, gazing up, satiated, at the midtown skyscrapers. The cabbie making his way down along the East River, past the ancient slaughterhouses by Turtle Bay.

Jonah caught a sudden flicker of movement out of the corner of his eye. Something incredible—a great black beast bounding toward him at eye level, just outside the open cab window. A steer, of all things, somehow right out on First Avenue, and looking for all the world to Jonah as if it were trying to charge his taxi. He sat mesmerized, unable to move while he watched the animal lower its head and slam a horn into the door right next to him. There was a sound like someone had hit the side of the cab with a sledgehammer, and then everything sped up. The driver swerving his taxi away from the bull adroitly as a matador, Jonah catching just a flash of the beast's huge black-haired snout, within inches of his own face, its eyes rolling madly.

Then they were past it—the cabbie calling back to him with determined nonchalance, “Happens all the time!” Jonah realizing only then that they were passing the ancient slaughterhouses along Turtle Bay. Peering out the back window to watch the receding bull skid on the smooth pavement, a gang of drovers running out across the street after it, shouting and cursing as they hauled it down. In his last glimpse of the beast, it was on its knees, the men gesticulating and yanking at its horns—

The cabbie zizagged down through the Flower District, where restaurant and nightclub managers stood on the curb haggling over bushels of roses and tiger lilies and wildflowers, then across Fourteenth Street with its drab, dingy, bargain stores, its twin brick citadels of the Armory and the Salvation Army headquarters looming across the street from each other. When they passed through the triumphal white arch in Washington Square Park, Jonah got out, his legs still trembling a little, deciding to walk the rest of the way to his sister's, in order to calm himself and kill some time.

He felt a little better the moment his shoes hit the pavement, as he always did when he reached the Village—though here, for all its bohemian affectations, things were really no different from anywhere else. Once, just before the war, he had seen a throng of jeering young workmen besiege a queer Negro couple in a café on Sullivan Street. The owner had locked the door against them, but the men outside beat the windows with the palms of their hands, shaking and spitting on the plate glass and screeching like monkeys. Jonah had watched them from across the street, in the safety of a small crowd that had gathered there. Staring at the two queers, huddled together deep in the recesses of the café. Their frightened faces tinted with makeup, fluttering their long, false eyelashes like women.

He had felt disgust and shame that any colored men could walk around in public like that—yet he had looked on, fascinated, as they clung together. One of the fairies with his arm held protectively over the other's shoulders.
Twice damned, black and queer. And how were they to disguise that, day in and day out?

He strolled south, then cut over through the crooked hump of Minetta Lane, remembering as he always did the stories his father used to tell about the old days down here, just after the Civil War. Fending off not only the whites, but also the franchised colored Tammany thugs—men with names like No-Toe Charley, and Black Cat, and Bloodthirsty. Prowling the narrow, crooked streets with their razors and knives, hired to wring what tribute they could for the machine out of the all but penniless Negro neighborhoods.

All long gone now, together with the rest of the old neighborhood. Replaced by the Italians, or some of the Village's notorious bohemian artists—an inviting Italian tavern situated now at the head of Minetta Lane, where his father's first storefront church had been. His sister lived just across Sixth Avenue, in a yellow-brick apartment building on Cornelia Street, put up only a few years before the present war. Five stories high, sleek and modern, with silver art deco fixtures and fire escapes on the street side, and a white doorman in green-and-gold-buttoned livery at the lobby desk.

“How are
you
today, sir!” he said, a burst of cheeriness personified as he jumped up to push open the door. A short, bulky, middle-aged man, his gray hair just peeking out of the edge of his green, braided doorman's cap. Looking attentively up at Jonah as he ushered him toward the elevator.
A white man, currying his favor.

“She is expecting you, sir, go right ahead!”

He nodded as matter-of-factly as he could, and waited stolidly for the equally sleek art deco elevator, a work of art in itself. Up on the fifth floor her building smelled faintly of polish, and perfume, and the fresh white roses in a vase by the elevator. So unlike the usual hallway smells he was used to in Harlem, of cheap floor cleaner and frying food, hair lye and homemade beer. There were none of the usual tenement sounds of life, either—fighting couples and clanking frying pans; laughter, and children running tirelessly up and down the halls. Instead he felt as if he might have been in a well-ventilated mausoleum, everything cool, and antiseptic, and quiet.

He did catch a hint of life—a recording of “Mood Indigo,” sounding soft and slow and mysterious in the stillness.

He followed it down the hall to her apartment, knocking on a door that matched the delicate mauve color of the hallway. Standing there while she let him wait, trying to compose himself, to fight down the urge to walk back down the hall, or pound with his fists on the beautiful mauve door.

Finally it opened and she stood there, in a yellow silk dressing gown that he knew she had put on just for the effect. Leaning against the door jamb, one arm over her head, a smirk across her beautiful face.

“You're here early,” she said, her voice barely audible above the music. “What's the matter? Run out of real white people?”

“Hello, Sophie,” he said.

He balanced on the edge of his sister's day couch, carefully sipping his tall iced tea. Everything in her apartment so soft and luxuriant— the deep carpet on the floor, the stuffed furniture in blended shades of blue and peach—that he was almost afraid to touch it. The music off now. Sophia, leaning back in her chair, across the coffee table, drinking gin on ice with a splash of lemon juice, a teasing smile playing across her lips.

“I brought you something—” he began perfunctorily, pulling a small fold of bills in a money clip from his pants pocket.

“I told you the last two times. I'm set,” she said tersely.

“Yeah, you're doing all right,” he said, looking deliberately around at the dressed-up apartment, the fine silk dressing gown she was wearing. Vases full of those curious flowers she loved, white on the outside and yellow inside.
False jasmine,
he knew she called it.

“I got a steady gig at the Café now,” she told him, taking a long, deliberate swig from her gin and pausing for effect.

“Archie takes care of the rest.”

“Archie!” he nearly spat in frustration. “That
gangster!
”

“I do what I like, with whom I like,” she snapped—then gave him a small, teasing smile. “I was even thinking of making a small donation to the church—”

He waited a moment before replying, trying to control his temper. “But what's the point of it, Sophie?”

“What?”

“What's the point of living like—like you do, just to take up with somebody like Archie?” he asked, as reasonably as he could.

“Why, because he runs a policy racket? Or because he's colored?”

“Because
you're
colored, Sophie.”

“We're
white,
Jonah. And we're colored. We're white and colored. White black, black white,” she said, as if she were explaining something to a child. “We're as much white as we are colored. You've seen the picture of that white woman.”

“But what's the point of it, Sophie? Being kept in a Village apartment by some gangster. No husband, no family. No proper home—”

“No, not like
your
proper home—”

“Quit that!” he said sharply. “You know what I mean. You have no responsibility to anybody or anything. What's the purpose of that?”

“The purpose is to do what I want to do!” she said fiercely, her drink sloshing in her hand. “I want to sing. I want to have fun. But most of all I want to do what
I
want, all the time. I don't accept any obligation beyond that.”

She checked herself then, and sat down next to him on the day couch, squeezing his arm apologetically. So close that he could feel her breath, with its faint sting of gin, upon his cheek.

“I'm not a Christian like you are, Jonah. It's not like third-grade Sunday school anymore,” she said, almost gently. “Put my hand up and say I accept the Lord in my heart—”

“And what about the rest of them?” he asked her, more reflectively than anything else. “What are
they
supposed to do?”

“Who?” she asked. “Who's that? Your congregation? Your
wife?
”

“You know who. All of them that
can't
pass.”

“We can.”

She leaned in close again, but he stood up now. Pulling away from her, irritated, pacing around her seraglio of an apartment.

“And that's enough? We don't have to care about any of the rest of it? We just leave them behind?”

“Maybe it
ain't
fair,” she shrugged. “So what? I heard somewhere it rains on the just an' the unjust, and every sucker in between. But I'm gonna use my color just like I'm gonna use everything else I got. I'm gonna use it just like I use my voice, or my figure. Hell, I know a lot a girls use a lot more!”

She gave a short, rueful laugh, but he had already turned on her.