NIGHTS IN THE GARDENS OF BROOKLYN (36 page)

“Yes.” Nothing more.

I gave up. When we got out on the walk and helped the three sisters into the back of the cab (Bobby and I were to sit on the jump seats and Evan Jones up front, next to the grinning driver), I grabbed Bobby and whispered, “Why the hell didn’t you tell me?”

He smiled blandly. “I didn’t think you’d be color-conscious.”

“It isn’t that. She’s old enough to be my aunt. And I can’t talk Span—”

He waved me into the car with a flourish and said to the driver, “To the Jockey Club, man, and steer like a deer.”

The Jockey Club was maybe not the most exclusive supper club in the area, but it wasn’t the cheapest either. I had certainly never been there for dinner and dancing under the stars, which was obviously what Bobby had in mind; I was more easily satisfied. What was more, it was certainly Gold and not Silver. The social life of the Canal Zone was built around these two fantastically artificial designations. Gold for the whites and the wishful-whites; Silver for the hopelessly dark Negroes from the islands and the Indians from the backwoods and the jungles. There were Gold rest rooms and Silver rest rooms, Gold commissaries and Silver commissaries, Gold swimming pools and Silver swimming pools. I was no agitator. I used the Gold facilities, but it always left a sour taste in my mouth. And the Jockey Club was about as Gold as you could get.

This was not lost on the women or on Evan Jones, all of whom looked at Bobby with such trepidation that he started to laugh. “What’s the matter? This is a big night. Relax.”

The unworthy thought had already crossed my mind that Bobby had invited me to join his family as his front man to gain them angry admittance to forbidden ground. But I didn’t dare tax him with this, certainly not in front of his guests.

It was only when the big cab pulled up in front of the Jockey Club and a uniformed Negro doorman handed us out that I began to get the picture. For not only was the doorman deferential; so was the scuttling Negro headwaiter; and we were shown to a table that was quite near the Latin American band and well in the clear of the palm trees that fringed the unroofed dance floor. Only then did I really try to see the six of us through the eyes not of one who passed through the Gold doors perhaps wryly yet really unfeelingly, but of one whose every waking moment was colored by the unending dreary decisions to be made every time his hand reached for the Silver door and his eyes lingered on the Gold door.

We could all, save for big, black, stolid Concepcion, have passed for light enough to be acceptable in a world where the line
had to be drawn not between white and nonwhite but between approximately light enough and impossibly dark—and by someone not too exigent, someone who would do almost anything to avoid trouble. And that someone would have deftly arranged—as in truth our black waiter did—for Concepcion to be seated at the darkest and most inconspicuous corner of the table, from which she might appear to inquisitive eyes as perhaps a hired chaperone or superior kind of mammy, with our party but not really of it.

The Jockey Club was favored by American naval officers. I counted four junior-officer submariners with their dates, young civil-service stenos or the adolescent daughters of Zone employees (in any case, looking as emptily fresh and untroubled as their cousins in the country clubs back home). There were also a number of tourist couples and businessmen of the type who could afford this kind of evening out. They all took their turn in whispering about our party, in gesturing surreptitiously—and sometimes not so surreptitiously—at the six of us.

But I detected no obvious animosity, nothing more than curiosity or bewilderment, and after a while I began to enjoy the new situation. The puzzlement on these well-bred faces, so used to the easy pegging of their fellow creatures, gave me a kind of secure pleasure. Who were we? Was Bobby an Indian? A South American naval attaché out with his wife? The Joneses, he with his aquiline nose and neat mustache, she with her large-eyed loveliness and good grooming—maybe consular visitors from one of the islands? And I, with my precious skin so patently and painfully fair that I could not expose it to this tropical sun for so much as half an hour without its shriveling and dying? As for Concepcion, it would be no more than a poor pun to say that she was beyond the pale. She was quite simply unthinkable, and all around us our fellow revelers were peeking in uneasy bafflement.

This was fun. I felt a bit of a celebrity and I enjoyed watching Bobby, his arm casually draped across the back of Nita’s chair, his face wreathed in a genial smile of self-satisfaction.

Evan Jones, I learned, was a bacteriologist from Barbados, now working at the Gorgas Hospital in Ancon, from which he and his quiet but very sweet wife had come up for this night on the town. As yet they had no children, and they shared one great dream: to
get away from the artificially imposed restrictions of this colonial outpost, steaming with prejudice and tropical lassitude, and to make a new start either in New York City or in Rio de Janeiro.

Their chances were very slight indeed. Evan and Maria were painfully realistic about this—yet still they dreamed. They had no notion at all of the rank slums and isolated provinciality of Rio, about which I tried to tell them a little; but maybe they were right in not taking me seriously, for they had both already forgotten more than I could ever learn about such matters, and they were concerned not with those familiar miseries but with escaping the abomination of the color label.

I got through a little better about New York; but even here they opposed me with a stubborn disbelief that I just couldn’t understand, until they pointed to the reason for their willful infatuation.

“Harlem, like the upper East Side, is exciting only for the rich,” I remarked sententiously. For the first time Concepcion was following me, at least when Maria bent over and whispered rapidly into her ear. “The limitations the whites impose on you are still there, for the few rich Negroes too.”

“I can’t believe this,” Evan replied. “I see the evidence against it.”

“Evidence?” I stared at him, uncomprehending. “Where?”

He nodded toward the dance floor, where Bobby and Juanita, the most attractive couple on the floor, were executing a nifty tango.

“
There
is a different kind of Negro.” Evan’s hands were clasped tautly, dark against the expanse of white tablecloth. “You can’t know what that means to us.”

Unexpectedly, Maria leaned forward, her face alive with excitement, and placed her delicate fingers on my arm. “You see, none of us is like Bobby. He has self-assurance. He walks in with us where we would never go. He looks not to one side or the other. He has no fear, he does not lower himself. You see?”

To my amazement Concepcion, after listening to a machine-gun burst of translation, slowly turned to me and nodded. Her black face glistened in the dim glow of the torches around us; she was perspiring heavily. Had I been wrong about her also?

“Yes,” I said at length, “I think I do.”

There was no point in my adding that now I understood too their real hopes, which were not for themselves hut for their little sister, who was still young enough and for whom now a golden door had been opened by the bold young American. Even if they did not admire him so, they would have been duty bound to flatter him and to encourage her.

“Well,” Evan said, “if you’ll excuse us. I want to give Maria a whirl.”

We arose and he took her in his arms and twirled her off in the direction of Bobby and Nita. I said to Concepcion, “Would you like to dance? To dance?” and pointed toward the floor, now quite crowded with gliding couples. To my relief, she shook her head slowly and gravely.

So I sat down. With my planter’s punch in one hand and my good cigar in the other, I leaned back grandly and surveyed the scene before me. Those who had been staring at our table, at me and Concepcion, lowered their eyes or glanced too quickly in another direction, but I felt no triumph. I felt instead rather sick for Nita.

If I didn’t share the Joneses’ admiration for Bobby, it wasn’t because I was censorious of his past. I could even understand why he enjoyed romancing gullible girls with vague hints of a life together under the shelter of the American flag. But now, having met one of these girls and her family… How crushed these gentle people would be!

I determined to take Bobby aside to tell him that I wouldn’t be a party to this game any more, even though I knew he’d persuade me not to spoil the fun for the others. But I had no opportunity for even this much conscience-salving; instead I was thrust almost immediately into a posture of solidarity not just with Evan Jones and the three sisters but with Bobby too.

What happened was that after the dance set Bobby and Nita returned to our table, hand in hand and glowing. As Evan and his wife came up too, Bobby, driven either by pity for Concepcion or by a belated readiness to relieve me of my burden, bent gallantly over Concepcion’s chair and demanded of her the privilege of the next dance. I was astonished to see Concepcion smile slowly at
him, then hoist herself out of her chair by pressing down hard on the arms with her palms, as heavy people will. I stood there for a moment, transfixed.

Partly to cover my confusion, I asked Juanita to dance with me. We all moved off—Nita and I, Evan with Maria, and Concepcion solemn as ever, but flexing her great haunches with surprising grace as she followed the tricky steps executed by Bobby, who grinned shamelessly.

I didn’t have a tenth of his deftness, even though I was a little drunk, which is ordinarily helpful. So, although I was anxious to talk with Nita about her sister and Bobby, I didn’t open my mouth once during the three numbers we danced together for fear (or so I told myself) of losing count before all the watching eyes.

One thing I was bent on, however, was testing Concepcion. As soon as the dancers had drifted off the floor, I accosted her and Bobby.

“My turn,” I said. “How about us switching partners?”

“Como?”

Bobby laughed. “The mate wants to navigate with you, baby.”

Nita whispered rapidly to her sister, who shook her head and finally smiled broadly, showing me two gold incisors, then, murmuring something, placed the palm of her hand approximately over her heart, on her massive black-draped bosom. Juanita turned back to me. “She says she’s tired, she’s out of breath.”

Bobby took Nita by the hand. “Tell her she’ll sleep better. Greatest thing in the world for her.” And he clapped me fraternally on the back and sailed off with Nita as the music started once again. Perhaps Conception’s spirit had toughened. She presented herself to me, and as the tourists and naval officers gaped—she dark, looming and indomitable as an aircraft carrier, I skinny, lost and tense as a sailor on his first encounter with a woman of the streets—we worked our way somehow around the floor, not bumping into the other couples only because they carefully cleared a path for us.

After the first number Concepcion detached herself from me with absolute firmness. Once more her hand went to her bosom; this time, having gained my little victory, I was willing to concede. At our table we were shortly joined by Evan and Maria, too
considerate to leave us trapped with each other, and later, when the music had stopped, by Nita and Bobby, who summoned our waiter with an upraised forefinger.

“Repeat for everybody, man.”

When the waiter had returned with the drinks, Evan raised his glass. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, then paused while his wife translated for her older sister, “I should like to propose a toast. To Bobby and to—”

He stopped abruptly. The waiter had been leaning over Bobby’s shoulder, whispering urgently. Suddenly Bobby straightened in his chair, took the startled waiter by the lapel of his mess jacket and spoke out in a perfectly audible voice.

“Put that in writing.”

The waiter stared at him in dismay. “I can’t hardly write.”

“Go tell the captain what I said. And if
he
can’t write, let him deliver the message in person instead of sending you to do his dirty work.”

Evan jerked about to stare at the retreating waiter, then returned his gaze to Bobby. “What is this?”

“Never mind. Drink up.”

“Please tell us what it’s all about.”

Bobby ground out his cigarette in the conch shell ashtray and looked us over almost disdainfully. “They want to put conditions on our staying here.”

“Conditions?” Evan placed his hand to his mouth as if to hide his lips, thumb to one corner, index finger to the other. “Of what sort?”

“Let the captain tell you when he comes.”

We all drank then, without a toast, in a newly oppressive silence. Evan gave his wife a light; she had to steady his hand with her fingers in order to draw flame to the tip of her cigarette.

After a long moment the headwaiter hove into view, with our waiter tagging wretchedly behind. The headwaiter, who minced as he moved, was a Negro too, but many shades lighter and many years older than our original waiter.

He worked his way around the table, skillfully, so that he could stand between Bobby and me. “If I could see you two gentlemen alone …”

“Knock it off, Jack,” Bobby replied coldly. “Spit it out loud and clear.”

“I only wished to explain the management’s wishes in regard to your pleasure. If you gentlemen—” he indicated Bobby and Evan—“wish to dance with the ladies you are escorting, or with this lady, that is fine. And if this gentleman—” he inclined his head in my direction—“wishes to dance with either of your young ladies, there is no objection.”

Bobby jabbed his thumb at Concepcion and me. “But you don’t want her to dance with him. Right?”

“We would prefer not.”

“Why not?”

The headwaiter stared at us miserably. He did not answer.

Bobby repeated the question. “Why not?”

The waiter extended his pink palms pleadingly. It was as if he were demonstrating the evidence of his color. “Maybe if we step into the lobby… There is no need to disturb the other patrons.”

Evan picked up his wife’s wrap. “Bobby, I do not enjoy being where my family is not welcome. Nothing will be gained by making a scene.”