Dark Stain (25 page)

She stared at him.

“Old faithful, get me a butt.”

She walked to the dresser and brought him a pack of cigarettes, a booklet of matches. His head was spinning but he inhaled deep drafts of smoke. “You’re tall,” he said. “And beautiful. Quite beautiful. Some of these dark types get fatty after awhile. The wops, thin as breadsticks, beautiful when they’re young. But not you, Carreau. You’ll stay beautiful. Got the blood, the breeding. Pregnant, you’ll spoil your figure. But that’s the blessed shape the Lord okays.” He was excited by what he was saying. It was if he were feeling his way to a door ahead of him, and the door was lettered: BILL, PRIVATE — and he felt that he was going to drag her to that door and lock her in; she would be his forever inside that door. In his reddened eyes, she was a whiskey shape, a dream woman out of some bottle, her hair blacker, her housecoat redder, her eyes bigger, her curves more sensual. He remembered Darton’s story about the Jewish girl, “Listen to me, you holy saint. I’ve been thinking all morning about us two. And I’m not drunk. Dead sober, your hear? I’ve made mistakes in our marriage.” His heart quickened; this was the way to take her. “Couple days ago you said I was keeping you like a hotel woman, a mistress. There’s truth in that. Some truth. Marriage isn’t only love. It’s not only drifting in love. I’ve made mistakes. You, too.”

“Haven’t I been loyal to you?”

Now give it to her! he thought triumphantly. “Loyal to me and to your family. That’s been your mistake.”

“I’ve been a good wife — ”

“Can’t be a good wife until you go all the way.”

“I don’t understand?”

“You’re married to me and to your family. And the priests.” He hadn’t meant to make this last remark but it had catapulted off his tongue like a stone from a sling-shot. He pushed himself up to a sitting position in the bed. “Isabelle, you want a kid?”

“Oh, Bill. Did you come back to torture me?”

“I’m serious. That’s been my mistake — Not having a child. Marriage isn’t only love. It’s having your own family.” He spoke very slowly, an excitement hotter than the rye whirling within him. It was as if he were about to plunge into her deepest part, to utterly possess her, to abduct her into himself forever.

“Bill — ”

“Let’s have a child.”

She rushed to the bed, sitting down next to him, kissing him on the cheek and on his whiskey-smelling mouth.

He slanted his arm around her waist. “Isabelle, remember? Before we got married? I promised that any children would be baptized Catholic? I’m sticking to that promise.” She pressed her face against his chest and he stroked her black hair, grinning just a little to himself as Hayden had grinned at him in parting this morning. “The kid’ll be reared Catholic. But when he’s born, I want a favor, Isabelle. I don’t want him baptized Catholic right away.”

Her face jerked up.

“Not right away. You see, I want to break from your family. Not a serious break. But some coolness. And if the kid isn’t baptized Catholic — ”

“Bill — ”

“The main thing is to get a divorce from the family,” he said. “I’ll keep my promise about the kid.”

She flung away from him. “You’re drunk, terrible!” she sobbed, staggering to the dresser. He watched her swaying from side to side and he thought: She’s the one drunk and I’m the one sober. Let her cry! Let her cry! What was he, a damn shoeclerk to worry about her tears, a woman’s easy tears. He hardened himself against her. Somebody had to be the boss. This God damn equality business was a failure in life and in marriage. Somebody had to be the boss! The brain guy! Craftily, he began to repeat what he wanted, over and over again. Finally she pressed her hands against her temples. “No more, Bill.”

“Okay, I’ll take a shower.”

When he came out of the shower stall, he said. “That booze slowed my body down.”

“I thought you weren’t drunk,” she said.

He tapped his forehead. “Sober as a judge up here. It’s the carcass that won’t take it. You get dressed and we’ll go for a walk. I promised a certain bartender I’d go for a walk.”

She changed into a white linen dress and smeared her lips carnation red, and he kept thinking of how lovely and fresh she had seemed after her bath, her hair damp and smelling of water. She belonged to him. He wanted her to be his alone but wanting was never enough. You had to connive at making a woman private property and no damn trespassing; the world wasn’t a bird cage any more and women were getting all sorts of notions. In his mind, a strange identification took place; the Buckles girl merged with Isabelle; both of them had their God damn principles and what was the difference between Red principles and Isabelle’s aristocratic Catholic principles if they spoiled a woman? You had to make real women out of them for their own good. He smiled at Isabelle, a feeling of rapine in him as if he had kidnapped his own wife.

When they walked out into the street, he was surprised to see that it was broad daylight. They strolled down Clark Street and at the end of the street, across the Harbor, the skyscrapers in Manhattan rose through the hot sky, permanent and gigantic. Maybe Hayden was consulting with ex-Governor Heney? What good was there telling himself he had nothing to worry about?

They passed the boarded-up mansion on Pierrepont Street and Columbia Heights, and at Montague Street, they cut down to the iron railing and the rows of park chairs behind the railing. Isabelle pointed out the babies in the carriages to him, the babies with their mothers and nurses, the small boys and girls on tricycles, but he wasn’t listening to her. The Harbor view poured into his vision, the pinnacled glittering mass of lower Manhattan, the docks, piers, ships, bridges, the Statue of Liberty in the far reach of water — all this was a screen to him and behind the screen was ten o’clock and the cold eyes of ex-Governor Heney.

“Darling,” Isabelle said as they seated themselves, the Harbor in front of them. “Look at that cute monkey. The one in the red beret. How quickly they behave like grownups.”

“I suppose.” He stared out on the Jersey shore with the wartime factories bannering smoke against a blue sky that seemed the tallest blue sky in the world for close at hand were the stone measuring sticks of the Wall Street skyscrapers. In the furthest distance, the skyscrapers of the city of Newark seemed a mirage on the horizon. He breathed of the salty air. “Hell.”

“Don’t you feel better, Bill?”

“I feel fine.”

“Women smoke much more than back home. Have you noticed?”

“Will you stop being so polite?” He turned sideways to her. “I’m sorry for being nasty.”

“I’ve made my allowances.” A small smile, a smile he loved because it had always seemed to him a special smile she had for him and no one else, was on her carnation lips.

“I meant it about a kid.”

“But you said — ”

“I wasn’t kidding about that either.”

“This is no place to discuss it.”

“Why not? Do you think anyone cares about us? Listen to them chattering. Clothes and sons in the Army. And when will the Good Humor man come with the ice cream? Nobody cares about us except me for you and you for me.”

“I cannot alienate my family, Bill.”

“It’s all right to alienate me.”

“You’re exaggerating. They are all fond of you, Bill. Even from the beginning — ”

“You’re the doctor.”

“You talk as if you should have had black coffee.”

“Whiskey.”

“Bill — ”

“If I can admit mistakes, why can’t you? I’m not a thick-glassed Jew spouting theories. You’ve known your family two hundred years. Me, four years in all.”

“Let’s not discuss it any more.”

“Let’s walk.”

“Bill,” she said after awhile. “You can’t be serious. It would kill all the joy in having a child. It’s unnatural. I would be unhappy for nine months and afterwards.”

“Your family’s got a strong hold on you.”

“But it’s all so petty. To hedge a child around with pettiness and deceit.”

“Don’t get moral on me. You don’t want to compromise. I give in that he’ll be reared a Catholic. All I want is for your family not to know it for a year or so — ”

“Why can’t we live without subterfuges, Bill?”

“Life isn’t perfect. That’s why.” He felt pity for himself. Life was a mess and it was eat or be eaten, top dog or under dog.

“Bill,” she said. “I’ve often wondered what you want out of life — ”

“What do you want?”

“You know quite well,” she said with dignity.

“The Carreaus.” He bowed his head. “It’s all a little dusty to me. Family and faith.”

“Yes,” she affirmed. “Family and faith. What do you hope for? You’re not happy, darling. You have these wild fits of yours. You’re always restless and since we’ve come to New York — Bill, this mysterious work of yours isn’t so mysterious. This Klan work isn’t making you happy, Bill.”

“My work’s important and I want to do it. It’s not easy. That’s true. It can’t be easy. It’s a fight to the finish between the masses, the Communists want to run the world and the people who won’t be run by the masses.”

“No, Bill. It’s a war between the Axis and the anti-Axis.”

“That’s what the slogans say. But underneath the slogans? Do you want the niggers to have the rights the Carreaus have? Do you want the four red freedoms to apply to niggers?”

“No, you’re right I suppose. My cousin Leon talks the way you do. So does Uncle Francis but we do want to win the war.”

“Who do you mean by we? The niggers and nigger spoilers or people like us? We’s too big a word. It includes thirteen million niggers, millions of Reds, Jews — ”

“But if you don’t want to win the war — Bill, that’s fascist talk!”

He laughed. “I’m not a fascist. The Jews have smeared everybody fascist if you disagree with them. I want the Japs licked. No colored race ought to have their power. I want Hitler taught a lesson. I’m an American and I want Americans to run this country and the whole world. But I want Americans at the wheel and no niggers, no Jews. I want real Americans at the wheel. I promised I would tell you why we came to New York. You know why? To keep the niggers in their place. You’ve been reading how uppity they are in Harlem? kidnapping white women?”

“Yes. Then the Klan’s in New York City, Bill.”

“We’re in every city in the country,” he boasted. And a damn good thing for America that we are.”

S
AM
didn’t buy the Negro newspapers on Thursday until almost one o’clock. The morning had been exhausting. Detective Wajek, accompanied by a Detective McFessel, had called on Mrs. Buckles at nine-thirty. But the doorbell and telephone had been ringing since seven. Sam had finally removed the receiver from its hook. Reporters and sob sisters had hammered at the door. Psychopaths had bleated their sympathy and offered advice. Just before the two detectives arrived, Mrs. Buckles’ butcher who had read the papers, had held out his red hand for his bill; the butcher wanted his money right away before things got hotter, he had explained. Sam had told the two detectives that Mrs. Buckles couldn’t stay in her apartment. The old lady had a cousin in Queens and it was his intention to drive her out there after the detectives had finished. After the interrogation, he had phoned for a cab to be at the door, and followed by a crowd of demanding brassy voices, he had rushed the old lady downstairs and into the cab. Now it was over.

He walked from the corner newsstand, the two Negro newspapers in his hands. He thumbed through the pages that carried this Thursday’s month, day, year. Both crisp sheets seemed yellowed in his fingers. They had come out too early to carry the Suzy kidnapping. The main story dated to the mass meeting. He skimmed through: “I saw a Harlem cop commit murder. I saw a brutal cop kill a human being. When I came on the scene, Randolph was bleeding like a stuck pig. He was bleeding from wounds on the head and his blood was over his face, running into his eyes. He had a knife in his hand but he never tried to use it. I saw Officer Miller …” Sam hadn’t bought the papers for this eyewitness account. On an inside page, he found the item he was interested in.

Sam reflected that they were making starts. Both sides were making starts. He recalled the sensational stories he had read about Suzy in some of the press despite Wajek’s promise to restrain the yellow sheets. Sam was positive that Wajek was on the level. Hadn’t Wajek suppressed the fact, to date, that Suzy was his girl. God, what some of the papers could have done with that fact. But it made no difference now what the other side did. He had a job to do. He noticed Negroes, passing-by and staring at him. He saw himself with their eyes, a white man reading Negro papers in the middle of the sidewalk. He ought to get going. The day was half gone and he had a job to do. He wanted to talk to Clair. He wanted to speak to Matty Rosenberg, a cop who might help him with the synagogue crime. And there was Marian Burrow.

He walked east to the Harlem Equality League offices. In front of the building, a crowd of Negroes and a scattering of whites had gathered. Sam inched through the crowd to the doorway where two cops stood.

“Nobody goes in unless they got business!” one cop chanted.

The second cop kept waving his baton at the crowd. “Keep moving! Keep moving!”

The crowd shifted at the barked commands, loitered, broke away. New spectators fed the crowd, their faces straining to see and to hear. Their heads tilted back on their necks to peer up at the window behind which the white girl had worked before she had been kidnapped. “I’ve got business in the building,” Sam said to the cops.

“What kind of business?” one of the cops asked.

“Hey!” the second cop exclaimed. “You’re — Come in here.” Inside the doorway, the cop whispered to Sam. “I’d vamoose out of Harlem, Miller. If that crowd knew who you was we’d have a time.”

“I want to go upstairs,” Sam said.

“What for?”

“Business,” Sam said.

“I heard you was on leave of absence?”

“I’m doing a little work on the side.”

“On the q.t., huh? Okay, Miller.”

Sam looked up the flight of stairs and yesterday looked down at him, the yesterday with Clair and Marian in the office but not Suzy. He shook his head from side to side. A voice screamed her name inside of him and he stifled the voice. She was gone and he had a job to do. He had to see Clair now. He climbed the stairs slowly. Maybe, he shouldn’t have come here? What if one of the newspaper boys got wind of the fact that he and Suzy … He stood near the door of the Harlem Equality League and listened to the voices behind the door. Intense, sustained, the voices thundered. It was as if the newspapers had found a voice, speaking with metal mouth for the police stations, the magistrates’ courts, the dens, the tenements, the brothels, a metal-mouthed courier spouting out the red-hot words.

He pushed open the door. Marian was not there, he noticed. Two men were sitting on her desk. A slim woman in a tailored tweed suit was writing at Suzy’s desk. A cop stood guard at the door into the inner office, barring anybody from entering. Ten or twelve other people, mostly men, were smoking, leaning against the files, speaking incessantly as if their tongues were tiny printing presses spinning out headlines.

“Damn secrecy — ”

“Clair won’t say a thing.”

“I see the fine Italian hand, let me tell you.”

“But I’d sooner hang out in a pool parlor all day — ”

“I think the gal’s right here in town.”

“Maybe.”

“See the dish at the desk?”

“Who is she?”

“She’s the writer, Jennie Sand. She’s doing a feature for the slicks.”

“Not bad looking. A lil he-mannish though.”

“This Suzy wasn’t bad looking either.”

“Who cares? I want news. You can’t keep on writing she’s a beauty in my paper as you can in your rag.”

A bald man with a pipe in his mouth lounged over to Sam. “Nothing doing, pal.”

“No?” said Sam.

“Who you writing for?”

Sam shrugged.

“Mum’s the word,” the bald man said bitterly. “I won’t hold it against you.”

“Did Marian Burrow show up?”

“No, the cops still got her. Give me a match, pal.”

Sam gave him a booklet of matches. “Keep them.”

“Your free and easy generosity’s won my heart. Anything you want to know, just ask.”

“Is Clair here?”

“He is. He’s been there since the morning.” The bald man poked his pipe at the door in the partition. “He’s locked up tight as a box of sardines. We’ve heard what they’re talking about but you can’t print it. Clair doesn’t know a damn about where the girl is. The Negro big-shots in there make political speeches to the dicks who don’t give a damn. But can you print that, I ask you, mother of Jesus?”

“Who’s in there with Clair?”

“Matches don’t buy me completely, pal. What are you digging up?”

“Nothing much.”

“Don’t you know that the day of the scoop is over. It’s Richard Harding Davis. It’s over.”

“Who’s in there?”

“Three or four dicks. Councilman Vincent and Christ knows who else. How do you like Jennie Sand over there? I hear she’s fond of newspaper men. She was married to two of them.” The bald man ambled away from Sam to look over the novelist’s shoulder as she wrote.

God, Sam thought: I’d like to give you a story! He could shout at them: I’m Miller! She’s my girl! She came to this office to help me run down … But what good would it do, he wondered. Even if they wrote it up, the blue pencils would censor the truth or garble it. Sam glanced at the files. Inside one of them was the anonymous letter about Aden that Suzy had shown him yesterday. But even if he had the letter, what could he do with it? Go to the anti-fascist groups and compare its style with other documents? God, what could he do to really help Suzy?

He got to see Clair at Clair’s apartment late in the afternoon. Clair led him into a small room; the walls were all books. There were hundreds of them, reaching from the floor to a few feet below the ceiling line. Clair seated himself behind a desk and asked Sam to take the easy chair. It was a room that fitted Clair, Sam thought; a room like a den but not too comfortable, a cloistered work room and library more than a place where a man removes his shoes to read a magazine and smoke in private. There were no pictures, no decorations.

“What a day it’s been!” Clair said. “I am glad that you telephoned my wife. I left her instructions that I wanted to see you.” He kept glancing at Sam, while fiddling with his Phi Beta Kappa key. “You were fine last night. Very fine.”

“I tried to see you at the office. But the office was in an uproar and there was a cop at the door.”

“The detectives came in a few minutes after nine.”

“Have they still got Marian?”

“As far as I know.”

“Where did they take her? To Headquarters?”

“Yes.”

“She was the last person to see Suzy. I was thinking I ought to see her.”

“I can phone her home if you desire. She should be there. Or at her sister’s.”

“Thanks.”

“Please accept my sympathy,” Clair said suddenly.

Sam winced. “We’ve got to run them down! Do you hear, Mr. Clair. We’ve got to, got — ” Then he controlled himself. “What did the detectives have to say?”

“You know the police, Miller. One of them, a Detective Maddigan, practically accused me of being in with the kidnappers. Not in so many words but in the way he expressed himself.”

“Maddigan? I don’t know him. What’d he say?”

“He wanted a list of all white girls who had ever worked for the H.E.L. He wanted to know their present whereabouts. From the H.E.L. to the brothel!” Clair burst out. Instantly, he apologized. “What am I saying? Please forgive me, Miller. I’m over-wrought — ”

“Don’t spare my feelings. We won’t get anywhere being polite.”

Clair nodded. “About last night — I thought that even the most skeptical Negro would have been convinced.” Clair was breathing rapidly, Sam observed. At times Clair made an effort to breath more shallowly but he wasn’t successful.

“I convinced you,” Sam said. “I’m glad.”

Clair turned to the rows of books as if going over their titles. “I trust you as much as if you weren’t a white man,” he said. “As if you were a Negro like myself.” His jaw muscles clenched and unclenched in his white-skinned face. “Forgive me for my initial distrust. I’ve had my fill of distrust today.” His eyes were sad. “I have been a man without a race for too many years to trust readily. But I won’t take up precious time with my personal history. What do you want to do? How can I help you?”

“You might try to get Marian.”

Clair picked up the phone. There was no answer at Marian’s or her sister’s place. “I’ll try a little later. Would you like a sandwich, a drink?”

“No, thanks,” Sam said. A plan of action was slowly maturing in his brain. Matty Rosenberg, the Jewish cop he wanted to see, Marian Burrow, Johnny and the union, all were links in the plan. “I have hopes that Marian might recall some details about the man who spoke to Suzy yesterday. I feel she’d be more at ease with me than with the detectives at Headquarters. This has become a chase, a pursuit. I feel if we keep on trying we’ll catch up with
them
. Your editorial in the Negro press is part of the chase. It was good. Too soon for results, though, isn’t it?”

“I have been in touch with both managing editors. Both of them have received a number of phone calls. Threats and advice. Crank calls, Sam!” he said. “I felt sure of myself writing that editorial. I always feel sure when I am alone at my desk. The issues are clear. I have faith at my desk. But I don’t trust people, especially white people.” He smiled in apology. “I trust the books of white men. I believe in their writings; Lincoln’s, Jefferson’s, Lenin’s writings on equality between the races — I believe in their writings,” he continued as if alone. “Their writings are like last wills and testaments that cannot be altered. Living men are always changing, can always change for the worse. That’s why I said I am, or was a man without a race. Years ago, I passed the color line. Sam, I haven’t spoken to anybody like this. And the time I pick! Stupid!” he exclaimed, a wry smile on his thin lips.

“No, you’re not,” Sam said. The precise scholarly man whom he had known had been supplanted by a man with a twisted face. It was surprising and yet not surprising. He had learned last night that underneath the type, the type and stereotype, underneath the facade of features and the color of skin there was often a human being. Would he have ever known that Mrs. Buckles, genteel in her lace collar, Protestant in her prejudices, this ‘real goyicker’ as his mother might have said, possessed a basic courage, a basic humanity? Would he have ever known, a few weeks ago, that Sam Miller, the Jew and liberal, with his sensitive suspicions had a latent pity innocent as a child’s hand, a pity that had reached out to Suzy’s mother?

Clair was saying. “I want to tell you about myself. God knows why! But I want to! Unless you must go. But I’ll phone Marian again. I want to! My mother was half-Spanish, half-Negro. My father was also half-Negro and half-Scotch. He was a dentist in Minnesota. I knew I was a Negro but people in town treated me as a white. They thought my father was a white man who had married a woman with Negro blood. My mother looked Negro. Not my father. My mother said that she was Spanish and most people let it go at that. We lived there, in the iron ore country. There were few prejudices to speak of. Most of the people were Finns, Swedes, who had brought progressive ideas with them. We had fine schools in our little towns. The old American stock were the sons of pioneers. It wasn’t the South. It wasn’t the North either for that matter. That gave my father the idea of my passing over completely. He sent me on to Harvard. He wasn’t a rich man but he managed. And I became a white man. I passed the color line. I heard ‘nigger talk’ in the East. It hurt. I refused to join a fraternity at Harvard because I knew I was a Negro. I felt that really I didn’t belong. Yet, all the time I lived with whites and went out with whites. At the same time, I became curious about Negroes who had not passed. I visited the Negro section. One summer I travelled South. I was shocked by what I saw and when I returned to school, I began to read everything I could about the Negro people. I still avoided the few Negroes at Harvard. I still lived as a white man. But I had become unsure. I kept on thinking that if my white friends knew I was a Negro they would change. I wanted to be accepted for what I was, an American, but that was just an idealistic hope. In my senior year I screwed up courage to put it to the test. I admitted I had Negro blood to some of my closest friends. They didn’t believe me at first. Some of the fault was my own. I was hyper-sensitive. When one of them, honestly enough as I see it now, advised me to never tell anyone I had Negro blood again, I quarreled with him, with this friend. I’m boring you. But — but I became a Negro! I worked for the N.A.A.C.P. after I graduated. Sam, you were right! There must be complete understanding between men. We must know each other and then — We won’t have to worry about the then. The then will take care of itself if understanding precedes it.”