Downtown Strut: An Edna Ferber Mystery (Edna Ferber Mysteries) (6 page)

Anger in her voice. “There are
real
Negroes outside”—she actually pointed out my noontime window—“and they got a story to tell.”

Waters jumped in. “Miss Edna tells me I need to tell
that
story.”

“You all do,” I emphasized.

Harriet’s look suggested I’d somehow usurped her vision, a coolness filling her eyes.

Quietly, Roddy whispered, “We all love Langston Hughes and Claude McKay, Miss Ferber. We carry around Hughes’
The Weary Blues
in our back pockets. Our Bible. My
only
Bible. They promise a new world, these writers up in Harlem.” His voice got louder and he looked at Harriet. “Miss Ferber met…talked to Langston Hughes at a party.”

“Really?” Doubt in Harriet’s voice, a little disrespectful, and I could see Waters and Roddy—and even the aloof Ellie—breathing in, unhappy.

“You know,” I went on, deliberately now, “he confided that when he was a young boy in Cleveland, he’d hide in the public library and read magazines for hours. He told me he read my early short stories in
American Magazine
and
Everybody’s
, stories of Americans struggling to survive—workers in factories, in the stockyards, women as maids, as shop girls. Folks unsung.” I stopped and shook my head. “Enough.” It was a vainglorious moment, this crowing, and uncalled for. “Let’s talk of your writing.” I stood up. “I want to hear your work.”

Everyone nodded and looked relieved. As they filed back into the living room, I noticed Roddy saying something into Harriet’s ear—and she didn’t looked pleased. She shrugged him off, her head tilted. His eyes followed her, angry.

***

Lawson arrived as we settled into the living room. He made no apology for being late, for missing lunch, but, bounding into the room and sitting in the center of the sofa, his lap covered with notebooks and typed sheets, he did what I expected him to do: he refocused the energy of the room, realigning the planets of his solar system so that, perforce, he was the blazing sun. A raw power, that, and practiced seamlessly. His looks helped, of course—the tan-colored skin taut over high cheekbones and the rigid jaw, the deep-set black eyes with a hint of violet that were almost too large for him, the slender though muscular body evident through the snug dapper-Dan suit he wore, and the blazing cerise necktie appropriated from a page in a fashion magazine. A stunner, this lad. The last to arrive, he was the first to speak, assuming the role of moderator, the teacher calling on students.

“Do your stuff, my hero,” Harriet muttered in a barely audible voice.

For the next hour, as we sipped new coffee, I reveled in the verve and spirit of these young writers, exhilarated by the sudden intensity swelling in the room. The petty tensions I sensed among them—yes, Bella and Ellie cast curt glances at each other every so often, and Harriet seemed unable to let go of her simmering distrust of me—now evaporated as each in turn, following Lawson’s presumptuous direction, read a short poem or a paragraph of a story or a snippet of stage dialogue. Ellie, at my request, reprised her summer sonnet about the saxophone player, and Lawson and Harriet got into a short debate about the use of traditional literary form to capture Negro street life.

“Read Langston,” Harriet said to Ellie. “Not Countee Cullen. Iambic pentameter is real bogus. Read Langston, his jazz and blues stuff. Nobody rhymes any more.”

Ellie waited for the others to defend her, but no one did.

Bella read a few paragraphs from a short story she was working on, the opening scene taking place in a jazz club like Small’s Paradise. Her prose was purposely choppy, rhythmic, poetic, Gatlin-gun rat-a-tat; and, surprisingly, she read her words in a lilting, affectionate voice at variance with her usual hard-boiled timbre. “He was a gambler at heart,” she read her last line, “and a sweet-talking honey man, but he threw the best rent parties in the neighborhood.” When she finished, Roddy and Waters clapped. Roddy praised the way she used jazz vernacular in her clipped, tight sentences to mimic street chatter and nightclub atmosphere.

Roddy read one paragraph of a short story he was beginning to sketch out: an exhausted woman swept the stairs in a tenement, her head swathed in old ripped rags, while her spoiled son, decked out in spats and a shiny razzle-dazzle green suit, maneuvered around her down the stairs. I thought it a little contrived though beautifully written, and said so. He kept nodding furiously, the nervous schoolboy, but finally conceded that he didn’t know what to do with the paragraph. “I can’t find the story I want to write.” He shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know why I brought this piece today.” He dropped the sheet into his lap, folded his hands over it.

Waters read a two-page story in a faltering, wispy voice, which surprised me. Ellie commented that she liked the way he shot immediately into the heart of the scene. He looked up, grinned at her, almost misty eyed.

Harriet got jittery when it was her turn, painfully clearing her throat and beginning over. But once she moved past her opening lines, her voice took on authority, force, almost belligerence. She read the opening paragraph of an essay she said was intended for the NAACP’s
Crisis
, a rousing manifesto of the young leftist Negro in America, climbing what Langston Hughes called the “racial mountain.” Finished, she sat back, triumphant, but no one commented. The look on her face said that she’d made her point.

I kept my mouth shut.

Lawson decided to stand when it was his turn. He’d purposely saved himself to the end, something not lost on everyone there. The star attraction. “Everyone expects me to read part of a scene from my play. But no, I won’t. You’re probably all sick of hearing about my play.” He grinned. “You all know that my play can’t seem to find a home on Broadway.” A long, deliberate pause. “Rejected because it…it is too realistic. Rent parties with ten-gallon crocks of gin and grapefruit juice. The Victrola playing scratchy Bessie Smith records. Because it shows Negro life…”

Harriet interrupted. “Soapbox, Lawson. Get on with it.”

A flash of anger. “Which is, of course, what
your
article is all about.”

“Would Langston Hughes praise it?” Harriet’s voice was sarcastic. And then, surprisingly, a
sotto voce
remark. “The way he praised Miss Ferber’s short stories?”

It was a cruel, bitter line, hardly civil, especially since I’d just fed the young lass. Everyone in the room bristled. Waters half-rose, a chivalric knight in defense of damsel Miss Edna, and from the kitchen I could hear Rebecca
tsk tsk
as she eavesdropped on the conversation.

Lawson spoke through clenched teeth. “Could you remember where you are, Harriet?” Then he breathed in and smiled. “No, friends, I’m gonna share my fiction this time.”

Bella groaned, but Lawson ignored her. What he did read, in a deep, throaty voice, was actually riveting: perhaps one hundred words about two men sitting next to each other on the “A” train, one young man irreverently humming a spiritual while the other, a disheveled old man, recalls a race riot he’d lived through as a boy. Simple, evocative prose, unsentimental.

“Those are characters from your play,” Roddy noted. He looked at Lawson quizzically, mystified.

“So what?”

“I like it,” I said. “What happened to your play?”

Another groan from Bella, though she followed it with a smile.

Lawson shrugged. “
Harlem River
, Miss Ferber. It’s been rejected over and over, even uptown at the Lincoln. Negro producers afraid of its…rawness. I don’t understand why.” He was walking around now, antsy, a bead of sweat on his brow, and he moved quietly to the window. He turned to face us. “You know how it is.” The line thundered in the room, stark and bold, and emphatically ended the conversation. “So now I’ll go back to my novel.”

Harriet grinned. “Christ, another pickanniny scribbling The Great American Novel.”

Another flash of anger. “Well, why not?”

Bella was watching the fury build in Lawson. I could see some humor at the corners of her eyes. “Could I star in the film adaptation?” she asked coyly, batting her eyelashes. “Or do you insist on Clara Bow in black face for the role?” He ignored her, though I noticed his lips trembled. “You could sell it to the Famous Artists’ Studio.”

Lawson seethed. “I’ll make it before you do, honey.”

“We’ll see about that.”

No one said anything, but we all stared at the flash fire between the two lovers.

“It helps to be a…female,” Lawson spat out.

“Just what are you saying?” Bella countered. “I’m a good girl.” She turned to me. “You know, Miss Ferber, Lawson tried for a part in a Jed Harris production, and was cruelly and publicly dismissed.”

“Jed? What play?” I was baffled.

Now Roddy stood up. “Ridiculous. It was not a Jed Harris production, Bella. And you know that. Just cut it out. It was a play produced by some friend of his. A musical revue with a Negro cast. Yes, Mr. Harris was there. But could we stop this bickering, you two?” He pointed to the ostentatious Steinway grand piano nearby. “Look where we
are
.”

There was something comical about the moment, such innocence in the line, such foolishness, as everyone mechanically stared at my piano. Ellie and Harriet burst out laughing. Even Bella and Lawson, both on edge, were shaking their heads, smiling. Cathartic, the moment, yet I couldn’t understand the raw, gnawing tension between Bella and Lawson, other than the fact that here were two worldly and ambitious young people whose photogenic looks and native intelligences had not yet given them lives they believed they were destined to lead.

“Everyone seems to be writing a novel,” Roddy said into the silence.

“Even you?” I asked.

“Of course.” A pause. “Sort of.” A chuckle. “Maybe.”

Again, the laughter in the room.

“Powder room,” Ellie whispered to me. Waters pointed to a hallway. “First door on the left.” She nodded and left the room.

The moment Ellie was out of the room Bella whispered to Lawson in a biting tone, “Someone should tell her how to dress.” Lawson groaned. “I mean,” Bella went on, “she looks like a rag doll in that Victorian smock.” Raw, malicious words, said fiercely, coldly. She avoided looking at me as she crossed her legs and revealed her own fashionable attire, the flapper dress and her strapped high heels with the wide buckles.

Roddy defended Ellie. “For God’s sake, Bella.”

Bella rolled her eyes. “Roddy always defends the indefensible. Booker T. Washington, begging and scraping, singing coon songs on Fifth Avenue for a plug nickel.”

Roddy said nothing.

Waters was shuffling his papers. “I hope I don’t get this nasty when I grow up.”

The line made me laugh out loud.

Lawson spoke to Waters but he was looking at Bella. “Waters, you’re still a boy. You haven’t met women as wicked as Bella before this. I hope you never do. They’re…hard-boiled eggs.” He was staring directly into Bella’s face.

“Bottle it, Lawson,” Bella sneered.

Someone knocked on the door, and Waters rushed to get it. He stepped aside as Freddy walked into the room. Dressed in a bulky military parka, a street-arab pork-pie cap pulled over his forehead, he mumbled something about losing track of time.

“It’s because you can’t tell time yet,” Bella said.

Freddy ignored her, though he glanced at Ellie. Then, surprising me, he planted himself in the entrance to the living room, his parka still buttoned, his face still stiff with winter cold, and, uninvited, began to recite from memory a short poem, his rapid-fire rat-a-tat delivery a little spine chilling. It was rebellious verse, the lines filled with bitterness about a vicious Southern lynching of a feeble old black man, his hailstone words bouncing off my expensive walls. Cold, cold, yet under the stanza a fire that seared. Stunned, I didn’t know where to look—me, the only white soul in the vast room. Freddy never looked at me. He didn’t care that I was there, that it was the drawing room of Manhattan privilege and wealth and fame. My subdued kingdom, ruled by me from my red moiré armchair. He had something to say. Rebecca had stepped into the room and Freddy kept glaring at Rebecca and Waters, mother and son, back and forth, accusing, harsh, unforgiving.

When it was done, Freddy backed against the wall, arms folded over his chest, and stared across the room toward the polished windows. Out there was Central Park and yellow taxis and uniformed doormen and…and I felt foolish, sitting there in my expensive shoes and expensive haircut. I felt guilty, and I didn’t savor the feeling. I didn’t
believe
I was guilty, yet Freddy’s insistent stare and those violent images echoing in my head made me want to apologize.

Chapter Five

On a brisk Monday morning, sleet slapping the cab window, I headed for the Ziegfeld Theater for the rescheduled meeting with Flo Ziegfeld’s assistant. A waste of time, this meeting, since
Show Boat
—already pruned and polished and gussied up—was set to open. Crews were already erecting the elaborate Mississippi River scenery onstage. So…a perfunctory meeting at ten, an unnecessary review of last-minute changes, my scribbled suggestions analyzed as though they were ancient unearthed cuneiforms, the out-of-town reviews scrutinized. Window dressing, all of it, more sycophantic posturing, more blather about the musical as masterpiece. I wanted to believe all of it.

Of course, after rushing under a proffered umbrella to the stage door, I soon learned that the assistant had not arrived from her home in White Plains. Blame the inclement weather. Blame the faulty trains. No one had tried to call me. I told the frightened young man who informed me of the delay that I’d rather blame frail mankind. The young man apologized over and over, took the blame, which made no sense unless he moonlighted as the God of Thunder and Hail, and nudged me toward a coffee pot and a pile of trade magazines. “I am not an ingénue trying out for a walk-on,” I sneered, and he actually trembled.

“I…”

“Never mind.” I deepened my voice. “I’ll remain here and stare at the peeling walls.”

Which is what I did because I was meeting Waters in the lobby at eleven. I made myself an obvious nuisance, pacing the floor of the small meeting room, and the young man—“My name is Jimmy, if you need me”—a rubicund youngster with pink cheeks and a Renaissance cherub’s head of curls, kept appearing at my side. “I did leave a message with your housekeeper,” he said finally, which I figured he’d just done, believing in time machines and the failure of clocks in my apartment.

“Idle time spent in cramped, moldy theater quarters is a deadly sin,” I told him.

Luckily, Waters showed up early, ambling in, lingering in the lobby. Jimmy reluctantly led him to me. Overjoyed, I embraced Waters in gratitude.

“You look unhappy, Miss Edna,” he greeted me.

“I’ve been marooned on a theatrical island.”

He squinted. “I thought you had a meeting.”

“What gave you that idea?”

I told Waters to sit down, and immediately the Botticelli cherub asked if I needed anything. He eyed Waters with open suspicion, his pale gray eyes narrowing at the sight of the skinny Negro boy chummy with the cranky authoress. Waters was dressed in a creamy off-white Joe College V-neck sweater, voluminous pleated brown trousers over black-and-white tie shoes. He looked ready to play nine rounds of golf at an all-white country club in Bucks County.

We sat on straight-backed chairs, paint stained, and I sipped coffee while Waters sat opposite me, hands folded decorously in his lap. It looked as if I were interviewing him for a job, one he knew he’d never get. “Relax, Waters,” I insisted. “We have time to kill. Clearly my meeting is not going to take place. White Plains is obviously now located in Outer Mongolia, and thus inaccessible save by yak and muscular Sherpa.”

He laughed. “No rehearsals here today?”

“I guess not. The set is going up. Hear the clamor?” We could hear banging and shuffling, which put my nerves on edge.

“Sort of creepy sitting here in this room.”

“Welcome to the world of backstage.” A pause as Waters looked everywhere but at me. I was impatient—and antsy. “Waters, since we have some time now, I’ve been meaning to ask you something.” His eyes got wide, flickering, gold specks in the corners of his deep black pupils. I laughed. “Nothing
that
serious. It’s just that, well, the other afternoon at my apartment there was such…such tension. The spitfire anger. Last summer everyone was so quiet and polite.” I shrugged.

A heartbeat, then his soft-spoken words. “Last summer everyone was on their best behavior in your apartment.”

I’d suspected that. “Well, it’s a comfort knowing I can still intimidate young folks for no reason. I hope I haven’t lost my power to wither a few souls. Nevertheless, the other afternoon…”

He smiled. “I’m certain that’s true, Miss Edna, but, you know, things have been bubbling to the surface lately. I don’t understand a lot of it. Last summer Bella was going out with Lawson, and then
not
going out with him. I think it was real casual with them. Nothing serious. Ellie rarely spoke up. There was no Harriet, no Freddy. You can tell that Bella doesn’t like them in the group. They’re too crude for her. They see her as phony high class. Dicty—Harriet’s word. But I like them. And Roddy wasn’t part of the group then. The fact of the matter is that
he’s
the lightning rod.”

“Roddy? But he’s so…charming, unassuming…”

“Yeah, he may be that, but I’m thinking that may be the problem. He sort of likes to keep away from everyone, real private, and that makes everyone
want
to be with him. When he talks to you, it seems like you’re the only person in the whole world he wants to be with. It’s a strange power to have.”

“Well, he certainly made me like him.”

“Join the club.”

“You’re his good friend, no?”

He thought about his words, his eyes drifting round the room. “Well, we’re friends. I don’t know about the ‘good’ part. You get to know only bits and pieces of him. If you push him, he can get moody. I’ve seen him in a real bad mood. He…he explodes.” He shrugged as if he had no other explanation.

“I like him.”

“I repeat, Miss Edna. Everyone likes him. But no one really
knows
him.” He swallowed. “Sometimes I think he likes playing games. Sometimes it’s like he’s so much older than the rest of us.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, he’s only twenty, I guess. I’m the kid, and Bella and Lawson are a few years older. But Roddy…it’s like he knows something…” He shook his head. “I don’t know what I’m talking about.”

“But what is he all about?”

Waters took a long time answering. “People who smile all the time sometimes got a lot of demons inside them.” He shook his head. “That’s my mom talking to me.”

I grinned. “Sounds like your mother.”

“But it’s not hard to see that in some people.”

“Some people go through life and never see it, Waters.” I leaned in. “But Bella seems to flirt with him—in front of Lawson, no less.

“Because Ellie
likes
him, you know. The two, back and forth, rivals. He keeps both at a distance, which means they go crazy chasing him. ‘Roddy, you promised to help me with my story, my poem.’ That kind of remark. Roddy this, Roddy that. I know it irritates Lawson. He’s said some things to Roddy, not nice things, and Roddy stared back at him, hurt in his face, that sad puppy dog look. It’s funny because Lawson found himself apologizing to Roddy, and he’s not the kind of guy who likes to apologize to anyone.”

I paused. “Is Roddy a good writer? That paragraph he shared the other day was beautiful, if a little stiff.”

“He writes all the time—like he sings all the time—but it’s only his singing that he shares with the world.”

“That’s strange, no?”

“It’s like he doesn’t trust himself, Miss Edna. Even his singing now—you know how he left
Show Boat
because his voice kept disappearing? We all wondered at that. But I heard him singing one day when no one was around. It sounded perfect to me. Roddy believes he can only fail. It’s like someone
told
him that. Just as Bella and Lawson believe they can only succeed.”

“Roddy promised to show me his work when he’s…”

“Ready.” He finished for me. He laughed. “He says that all the time.”

“Let’s hope he’s ready today.”

***

Waters and I were headed uptown to pick up Roddy at his apartment. On Saturday Roddy had lingered when the lunch at my apartment was over, watching the others leave and then helping Waters and Rebecca clean up. He’d been in a chatty mood and even promised to let me read more of his fiction. “I
am
finishing some stuff,” he insisted.

Waters had leaned in, joking, even poking Roddy in the side, teasing that Roddy’s mysterious and long-awaited work was a satirical fiction based on his friends’ lives, some contemporary hard-biting comedy of manners that centered on the young black intelligentsia of Harlem—not the famous “Niggerati Manor” on 136th Street, that rooming house with the black and red walls, where writers like Hughes and Wallace Thurman and Zora Neale Hurston lived rent-free—but a biting, cynical portrayal of undiscovered writers, a look at struggling folks like Bella and Lawson. The remark stopped Roddy as he moved with cups and saucers, and I felt Waters had punctured Roddy’s secrecy. Bella and Lawson as protagonist and antagonist in a modern-day Harlem intrigue, with the delicious addition of gentle Ellie and her silver-throated jazz voice. Maybe even Harriet and Freddy, the street chorus chanting to the pulse of upper Seventh Avenue.

“Is that true?” I’d asked him then.

He didn’t answer.

“I knew it,” Waters exclaimed. “You better make me better looking, more talented, and…older.”

“I’m not much older, Waters. Twenty.”

“Well, make me the same age. No one takes a seventeen-year-old seriously.”

Roddy, very soberly, “I do. That’s the age I left home for good.”

I found myself watching him: the casual, almost delicate gestures, the soft puppy eyes, the languid dipping of his head, the grin.

“Why did you leave home then?”

He debated what to tell me. “We were living out in Brooklyn, far out, forever by subway, so far from Manhattan it was like another country, and my Mama died around the time I turned sixteen. Papa struggled as a plumber but never had any money because he drank it, gambled it. A decent guy, maybe, but a real mean drunk, brutal. Beat me up so’s I had black eyes, stuff like that. You know, he didn’t
like
his kids. As each kid hit sixteen or so, out the door. He married a fierce woman who blamed me for everything, lied about me, real nasty, mocked me because I wouldn’t fight her back, said I ate too much, was home too much, so I just left.”

Waters was staring at him, as if hearing the story for the first time. “Roddy, how come you never told me this?”

Roddy looked into my face. “I wanted to move to Harlem anyway, where the life was. I lived here and there, with different people I met, worked dumb jobs, sold papers, a stock boy at a cigar store. You know, I never finished my last year of high school but I always had a library card. That was important to me. Last year I bumped into Lawson at the bookstore up on 136th Street, the Hobby Horse, a place that sells Negro writers’ stuff. I recognized him because I’d seen him at a family funeral a couple years back.” He smiled. “He’s sort of memorable.”

Waters looked at me. “Lawson is Roddy’s cousin, Miss Edna.”

I nodded. “I know. I keep being
told
that.”

Roddy laughed. “Maybe because we’re so different. I never got his drop-dead looks. Anyway, he’d drifted to Harlem from Philly, where his family lives still. His father is a carpenter, got his own house, I hear. Lawson came to New York to be an actor and a writer. He’s a couple years older than me, you know. Well, he got thrown out of an apartment he shared with some other actors—he didn’t like to pay his share, still doesn’t, truth be told—and we decided to room together.”

“When did you meet Bella?” Waters asked.

“Right after I came to the city.”

“Was she seeing Lawson then?” I asked.

“Why?”

“Bella likes you.”

He shook his head. “No, she doesn’t. She thinks she does.”

Looking as if he’d shared too much with a stranger, Roddy bustled off to the kitchen, and Waters looked at me, puzzled.

“What?” I asked.

“In one second you learn more about him and Lawson than I did after all this time.”

“I’m a reporter, Waters. I ask questions.”

“I ask questions, too. But people don’t answer me.”

I touched his shoulder. “That’s because you’re seventeen.”

“My point exactly.”

Before Roddy and Waters left together, I’d asked if they wanted to join me for lunch on Monday.

Which was why Waters and I, hailing a cab in front of the Ziegfeld Theater, were headed into Harlem to gather Roddy from his apartment. Flo Ziegfeld’s assistant never did show up, and I left without informing the apologetic young man who’d tried to keep a watchful eye on me.

“Did you remind him we’re coming?” I asked Waters as we settled into the back seat of the cab.

“No answer. Sometimes they don’t pay their phone bill.”

“Really?”

“Not everyone is rich, Miss Edna.”

“Thank you, Waters. Now you sound like Harriet or Freddy reading a rousing manifesto in my living room.”

***

Despite the chill and the wisps of light snow in the air, Harlem at midday was a rag-tag kaleidoscope of sidewalks crammed with strollers, folks weaving around mothers lazily pushing carriages with squawking toddlers, men and women chatting, gazing into shop windows, running to cars double-parked in the street. Outside a lunch counter a group of young men leaned into one another, two of them sporting snazzy leopard-skin overcoats. Every head turned as a trio of pretty young women sauntered by, each one in snug-fitting coats, heads covered in cloches so red or blue or yellow the hats seemed dabs of shocking color on an artist’s palette. Arms entwined, they ignored the grinning, foolish young men, though I noticed one woman glanced back over her shoulder as they passed. She tittered. One of the men bowed and did a sudden flirtatious dance step. He doffed his fedora to the woman.

Waters was looking elsewhere. “There,” he yelled. “The Spot.” He was pointing to a tiny eatery tucked in between a cigar store and a florist, a drab-looking place, unpretentious, the name of the restaurant announced in a bold, black-lettered sign nailed over the door, with jagged words painted below: “Where Everyone You Know Is Waiting For You.” Here, I knew, whites and blacks could mingle freely together without a disapproving eye. They could sip famous-though-notoriously-bad coffee, munch on glazed raised sugar doughnuts, and, the more adventurous, a generous slice of rich sweet potato pie.