The Street (34 page)

Her days were spent in working and at night she cooked dinner, washed and ironed clothes, studied. She found that, in spite of her resolve never again to dream about some easier and more remunerative way of earning a living, and in spite of her determination to put all thought of singing out of her mind, she couldn't control a faint regret that assailed her when she least expected it.

Coming home on the subway one night, she picked up a Negro newspaper that had been discarded by a more affluent passenger. And because of her reluctance to give up the idea of singing, it seemed to her that an advertisement leaped at her from the theatrical pages: ‘Singers Needed Now for Broadway Shows. Nightclub Engagements. Let Us Train You for High-Paying Jobs.'

She tore it out and put it in her pocketbook, thinking cautiously that it was at least worth investigating, but not permitting herself to build any hopes on it.

The next night after work she went to the Crosse School for Singers. It was on the tenth floor of a Forty-Second Street office building. Going up in the elevator, she somehow couldn't prevent the faint stirring of hope, the beginnings of expectancy.

A brassy haired blonde was the sole occupant of the small waiting room. She looked up from the book she was reading when Lutie opened the door.

Lutie produced the advertisement from her purse. ‘I came for an audition.'

‘Have a seat. Mr. Crosse will see you in a minute.'

A buzzer sounded, and the girl stopped reading to say, ‘Mr. Crosse'll see you now. It's that door to the left. Just walk right in.'

Lutie opened the door. The walls of the room inside were covered with glossy photographs of smiling men and women clad in evening clothes. A hasty glance revealed that all the pictures were warmly inscribed to ‘dear Mr. Crosse.'

She walked toward a desk at the end of the room. It was a large flat-topped desk and Mr. Crosse had his feet on top of it. As she drew closer to him, she saw
that the desk was littered with newspaper clippings, photographs, old magazines, even piles of phonograph records, and two scrapbooks whose contents made the covers bulge. A box of cigars, an ash tray that hadn't been emptied for weeks from the accumulation of soggy cigar butts in it, and an old-fashioned inkwell, its sides well splashed with ink, were right near his feet. A row of dark green filing cabinets stood against the wall behind the desk.

She was quite close to the desk before she was able to see what the man sitting behind it looked like, for his feet obstructed her view. He was so fat that he appeared to be bursting out of his clothes. His vest gaped with the strain of the rolls of fat on his abdomen. Other rolls of fat completely obliterated his jaw line. He was chewing an unlit cigar, and he rolled it to one side of his mouth. ‘Hello,' he said, not moving his feet.

‘I came for an audition,' Lutie explained.

‘Sure. Sure. What kind of singing you do?' He took the cigar out of his mouth.

‘Nightclub,' she said briefly, not liking him, not liking the fact that the end of the cigar he was holding in his hand had been chewed until it was a soggy, shredding mass of tobacco, and that the room was filled with the rank smell of it.

‘Okay. Okay. We'll try you out. Come on in here.'

One of the doors of his office led to a slightly larger room. She stood in front of a microphone on a raised platform facing the door. A bored, too thin man accompanied her at the piano. He smoked while he played, moving his head occasionally to get the smoke out of his eyes. His hands were limp and flat
as they touched the keys. Mr. Crosse sat in the back of the room and apparently went to sleep.

At the end of her first song, he opened his eyes. ‘Okay, okay,' he said. ‘We'll go back to the office now.'

He lowered his bulk into the swivel chair behind his desk, put his feet up. ‘Sit down,' he said, indicating a chair near the desk. ‘You've got a good voice. Very good voice,' he said. ‘I can practically guarantee you a job. About seventy-five dollars a week.'

‘What's the catch in it?' she asked.

‘There's no catch,' he said defensively. ‘Been in business here for twenty years. Absolutely no catch. Matter of fact, I don't usually listen to the singers myself. But just from looking at you I thought, That girl is good. Got a good voice. So I decided to audition you myself.' He put the cigar in his mouth and chewed it vigorously.

‘When do I start working at this seventy-five dollar a week job?' she asked sarcastically.

‘About six weeks. You need some training. Things like timing and how to put a song over. Called showmanship. We teach you that. Then we find you a job and act as your agent. We get ten per cent of what you make. Regular agents' fee.'

‘What does the training cost?'

‘Hundred and twenty-five dollars.'

She got up from the chair. One hundred and twenty-five dollars. She wanted to laugh. It might as well be one thousand and twenty-five dollars. One was just as easy to get as the other.

‘I'm sorry to have taken your time. It's out of the question.'

‘They all say that,' he said. ‘All of 'em. It sounds out of the question because most people really don't have what it takes to be singers. They don't want it bad enough. They see somebody earning hundreds a week and they never stop to think that person made a lot of sacrifices to get there.'

‘I know all that. In my case it's impossible.'

‘You don't have to pay it all at once. We arrange for down payments and so much a week in special cases. Makes it easier that way.'

‘You don't understand. I just don't have the money,' she turned away, started past his desk.

‘Wait a minute.' He put his feet on the floor, got up from the swivel chair and laid a fat hand on her arm.

She looked down at his hand. The skin was the color of the underside of a fish—a grayish white. There were long black hairs on the back of it—even on the fingers. It was a boneless hand, thick-covered with fat. She drew her arm away. He was so saturated with the smell of tobacco that it seeped from his skin, his clothing. The cigar in his flabby fingers was rank, strong. Seen close to, the sodden mass of tobacco where he had chewed the end of it sent a quiver of revulsion through her.

‘You know a good-looking girl like you shouldn't have to worry about money,' he said softly. She didn't say anything and he continued, ‘In fact, if you and me can get together a coupla nights a week in Harlem, those lessons won't cost you a cent. No sir, not a cent.'

Yes, she thought, if you were born black and not too ugly, this is what you get, this is what you find.

It was a pity he hadn't lived back in the days of slavery, so he could have raided the slave quarters for a likely wench any hour of the day or night. This is the superior race, she said to herself, take a good long look at him: black, oily hair; slack, gross body; grease spots on his vest; wrinkled shirt collar; cigar ashes on his suit; small pig eyes engulfed in the fat of his face.

She remembered the inkwell on the desk in back of him. She picked it up in a motion so swift that he had no time to guess her intent. She hurled it full force in his face. The ink paused for a moment at the obstruction of his eyebrows, then dripped down over the fat jowls, over the wrinkled collar, the grease-stained vest; trickled over his mouth.

She slammed the door of the office behind her. The girl in the reception room looked up, startled at the sound.

‘Through so quick?' she asked.

‘Yes.' She walked past the girl. Hurry, she told herself. Hurry, hurry, hurry!

‘Didya fill out a application?' the girl called after her.

‘I won't need one'—she said the words over her shoulder.

She boarded a Sixth Avenue train at Forty-Second Street. It was crowded with passengers. She closed her eyes to shut them out, gripping the overhead strap tightly. She welcomed the roar of the train as it sped toward Fifty-Ninth Street, welcomed its lurching, swaying motion. She wished that it would go faster, make more noise, rock more wildly, because the tumultuous anger in her could only be quelled by violence.

She sought release from the urgency of her rage by deliberately picturing the train plunging suddenly off the track in a fury of sound—the metal coaches rushing headlong on top of each other in a whole series of thunderous explosions.

The burst of anger died away slowly and she began to think of herself drearily. She was running around a small circle, around and around like a squirrel in a cage. All this business of saving money in order to move added up to less than nothing, because she had forgotten or blithely overlooked the fact that she couldn't find any better place to live, not for the amount of rent she could pay.

She thought of Mr. Crosse with a sudden access of hate that made her bite her lips; and then of Junto, who had prevented her from getting the job at the Casino. She remembered the friends of the Chandlers who had thought of her as a nigger wench; only, of course, they were too well-bred to use the word ‘nigger.' And the hate in her increased.

The train stopped at Fifty-Ninth Street, took on more passengers, then gathered speed for the long run to 125th Street.

Streets like the one she lived on were no accident. They were the North's lynch mobs, she thought bitterly; the method the big cities used to keep Negroes in their place. And she began thinking of Pop unable to get a job; of Jim slowly disintegrating because he, too, couldn't get a job, and of the subsequent wreck of their marriage; of Bub left to his own devices after school. From the time she was born, she had been hemmed into an ever-narrowing space, until now she was very nearly walled in and the wall
had been built up brick by brick by eager white hands.

When she got off the local at 116th Street, she didn't remember having changed trains at 125th Street. She was surprised to find that Bub was waiting for her at the subway entrance. He didn't see her, and she paused for a moment, noting the anxious way he watched the people pouring into the street, twisting his neck in his effort to make certain he didn't miss her. She was so late getting home that he had evidently been worried about her; and she tried to imagine what it would be like for him if something had happened to her and she hadn't come.

At this hour there were countless children with doorkeys tied around their necks, hovering at the corner. They were seeking their mothers in the homecoming throng surging up from the subway. They're too young to be familiar with worry, she thought, for their expressions were exactly like Bub's—apprehensive, a little frightened. They're behind the same wall already. She walked over to Bub.

‘Hello, hon,' she said gently. She put her arm around his shoulders as they walked toward home.

He was silent for a while, and then he said, ‘Mom, are you sure you're not mad at me?'

She tightened her grip on his shoulder. ‘Of course not,' she said. She was neatly caged here on this street and tonight's experience had increased the growing frustration and hatred in her. It probably shows in my face, she thought, dismayed, and Bub can see it.

‘I'm not mad at you all. I couldn't be'—she caressed his cheek. ‘I've been worried about something.'

She thought of the animals at the Zoo. She and Bub had gone there one Sunday afternoon. They arrived in time to see the lions and tigers being fed. There was a moment, before the great hunks of red meat were thrust into the cages, when the big cats prowled back and forth, desperate, raging, ravening. They walked in a space even smaller than the confines of the cages made necessary, moving in an area just barely the length of their bodies. A few steps up and turn. A few steps down and turn. They were weaving back and forth, growling, roaring, raging at the bars that kept them from the meat, until the entire building was filled with the sound, until the people watching drew back from the cages, feeling insecure, frightened at the sight and the sound of such uncontrolled savagery. She was becoming something like that.

‘I'm not mad at you, hon,' she repeated. ‘I guess I was mad at myself.'

Because she was late getting home and she knew that Bub was hungry, she tried to hurry the preparation of dinner. And when she tried to light the gas stove, there was a sudden, flaring burst of flame that seared the flesh of her hand and set it to smarting and burning. Bub was leaning out of the kitchen window intently watching the dogs in the yard below.

‘Damn it,' she said. She covered her hand with a dishtowel, holding the towel tightly to keep the air away from the burn. It wasn't a bad burn, she thought; it was a mere scorching of surface skin.

Yet she couldn't check the rage that welled up in her. ‘Damn being poor!' she shouted. ‘God damn it!'

She set the table with a slam-bang of plates and a furious rattling of knives and forks. She put the glasses down hard, so that they smacked against the table's surface, dragged the chairs across the floor until the room was filled with noise, with confusion, with swift, angry movement.

The next afternoon after school, Bub rang the Super's bell.

‘I changed my mind, Supe,' he said. ‘I'll be glad to help you.'

IT WAS ONLY TWO-THIRTY in the afternoon. Miss Rinner looked at the wriggling, twisting children seated in front of her and frowned. There was a whole half-hour, thirty long unpleasant minutes to be got through before she would be free from the unpleasant sight of these ever-moving, brown young faces.

The pale winter sunlight streaming through the dusty windows and the steam hissing faintly in the big radiators intensified the smells in the room. All the classrooms she had ever taught in were permeated with the same mixture of odors: the dusty smell of chalk, the heavy, suffocating smell of the pine oil used to lay the grime and disinfect the worn old floors, and the smell of the children themselves. But
she had long since forgotten what the forty-year-old buildings in other parts of the city smelt like, and with the passing of the years had easily convinced herself that this Harlem school contained a peculiarly offensive odor.