Passing Fancies (A Julia Kydd Novel)

by Marlowe Benn

  Curiosity lit his smile. “Très moderne, Mizz K.,” he said, in a voice thick with a charming huskiness. “Très moderne.”

  As she expected, the light was on in Julia’s bedroom when she returned. Christophine would be sitting upright on the bed, notions and bits of fabric spread out around her. For years that had been how she liked to work, and the bed in the maid’s room here was too narrow. The initial inconvenience had quickly become a companionable pleasure, reminiscent of those distant days when the top-floor nursery had been their private domain. Julia made two weak gin fizzes (which was all Christophine would drink) at the library trolley and joined her.

  Christophine mumbled a greeting through lips bristling with pins. She was freshening a hat; already she had a new gentleman friend to impress. Every Sunday she stepped out with friends at the Church of the Freedom Road to Glory Everlasting, a dozen jubilant West Indians who met twice a week above a barbershop in Brooklyn. Her new gentleman was a fellow Trinidadian named Calvin Otto, a widower with two grown daughters.

  “Divine,” Julia said about the hat, setting Christophine’s glass on the bedside table.

  “Hmmm,” Christophine agreed as she laid the hat aside and transferred the pins to her left cuff. She sipped her drink, then yelped. Eyes wide, she exclaimed that she’d forgotten to get fresh eggs for tomorrow morning.

  The mention of domestic duties startled Julia as well. She waved it away, reminded of her earlier observation about Negroes disappearing from white minds beneath invisible roles as maids, porters, and such. She hadn’t immediately thought of Christophine at the time, remembering her only tardily on reflection. In truth she rarely thought of Christophine as either a Negro or domestic help. Was that good or bad? She did pay attention to her, often deeply, but how much did she truly register of Christophine’s life, her hopes and fears and all else she held close inside herself?

  She sat on the edge of the bed and lifted one of Fee’s feet, rubbing her thumb along the arch, where an ache often settled after a long day. “If you could change anything in your life, Fee, what would it be?”

  “More hands,” she joked as she resumed sewing, needle moving in smooth arcs above her lap. “Or better toes.” She nudged Julia with her free foot.

  “I’m serious.”

  “Why you be serious? My life be fine, thank you.” Then her needle paused. “Why?” She studied Julia’s face.

  “I’ve been thinking about last night’s frock, how people noticed it. Your talents are wasted doing housework when you could be doing this.” Julia stroked the hat’s embroidered brim.

  Swift currents glinted beneath Christophine’s dark eyes. Julia was prepared for the usual skepticism but went on when she heard none. “We can find someone else to help with the household when we’re settled again.”

  Still Christophine said nothing. Julia massaged her other foot. “You know there’s nothing you’d rather be doing or that you’re better at.”

  Joy flared in Fee’s eyes. She loved compliments as much as anyone.

  “You’re a modiste,” Julia said. “Or you could be, if you accepted clients.” They’d often danced around this point in the past, each time Christophine yearning for more to do but then drawing back in fear of public scrutiny.

  Christophine took in a sharp breath, a Scandinavian tic she’d learned from Julia’s mother. It was an emphatic but also reluctant yes. Agreeing and resisting in one gulp of air.

  “I have my best job already,” she said. “Fancies just my fun.”

  Julia heard anxiety beneath the usual protest. It was easy to forget that Christophine was nearly forty. The prospect of a clean slate, the fresh horizons that so energized Julia, might loom as a frightening uncertainty to her. Christophine had always been one to avoid surprises, reduce risks. She was the one who made careful arrangements, ensured the larder was stocked, watched the clock when appointments loomed. She valued stability, even predictability. Her sewing came out only when the household was in order. No wonder the idea of forgoing her easy and familiar job to instead take in work, especially work that depended on taste and fashion, seemed a mad, unnecessary plunge.

  Julia jiggled her ankle. “Of course you’ll have a home with me—forever, I hope. Always. But we both made this move to see if something new and wonderful could happen. You might just try it, like I’m trying to make something of Capriole. It could be better, Fee. You could take only as much work as you’d like, and for good money. I’d insist you charge not a penny less than what I paid Lila.”

  As she spoke, a rare thing happened. Christophine’s busy hands slowed, then lay lax in her lap. Fingers stalled inside the forgotten hat, her gaze softened to a smudge. It meant she was far away in her mind, thinking hard, but whether she was looking back or looking forward, Julia could not tell.

  CHAPTER 7

  “Swish it like there’s no tomorrow, Mrs. Clark!” Standing well clear of his guest’s flying heels, Pablo Duveen assessed the whisk of her backside. “All elbows and feet. Those knees will take care of themselves. That’s it. Now you’ve got it. Faster! Let’s hear those tassels hum.” Jacket off, cuffs dangling loose, Duveen stood panting as his pupil pumped her arms and legs in a commotion of crepe de chine and swirling strands of twisted silk.

  A week had passed since the party in Liveright’s offices. Julia gripped her drink and leaned away from the Charleston lesson gathering force on the oriental rug in Duveen’s apartment. She and Austen sat on a narrow green velvet sofa pushed to one edge of the large rug, across from Max Clark, the other half of the tourist couple from San Francisco. Short and muscular, with gray temples and eyes the color of stone, Max looked at least twenty years older than his wife, Dolly. He’d waved off Duveen’s fulsome introduction and said he was in forest products.

  “Let’s go.” Duveen grabbed Dolly’s hand, spun her around, and matched her pace, eight limbs akimbo. They pounded and flailed, too intent to speak, until the phonograph record ended in a scratchy whine. Duveen collapsed into a smoking chair.

  Dolly fell onto the Chesterfield sofa, bouncing against her husband. Her mauve dress was an expensive confection of beads and tiered fringe, cut low in both front and back. Without a flattening bandeau, her plump cleavage jiggled about with unfashionable freedom. Alerted by the dip of Julia’s eyes, she tugged her bodice back into place. “Just wait’ll my friends see this. They’ll think I picked up a touch of something colored, like measles, only fun.” She flopped back, heels sprawled out across the rug, fanny in danger of following them with a thud onto the floor.

  Duveen mopped at his forehead, gasps hissing through his teeth. “Your turn next, Miss Kydd? I’m an excellent teacher. Learned it straight from a Negro myself.”

  Julia thanked him but declined. Six years of ballet study—indifferently pursued and happily abandoned—had ruined her taste for anything so riotous. She liked the more vigorous dance steps but seldom entered the sweaty fray herself.

  Duveen placed a different record on the phonograph, releasing the mournful wails of a blues ballad. He refreshed the Clarks’ drinks while the eerie keening filled the room.

  “Mamie Smith,” he said. “‘Crazy Blues,’ the first big race record. I’m learning everything I can about Negroes these days—I’ll be a professor of all things Ethiop soon, and even then it won’t be enough.” He took a gulp of his gin. “I’m quite addicted.”

  Julia imagined Eva’s beautiful eyes rolling heavenward. Dolly’s remark was ludicrous enough, but Pablo’s zeal reminded Julia of the most extreme bibliophiles who loved books so much they called their favorite volumes mistresses and their libraries seraglios. Such outsize obsession was skin crawling enough for inanimate objects, but Duveen was extolling the supposed attributes of an entire swath of humanity. In idolizing all Negroes, he seemed not to truly know a single one.

  Dolly asked, “What got you so interested in coloreds, Mr. Duveen?”

  “Pablo,” he reminded her. He rose and searched along the lower shelves of the bookca
se. “I’ve known them all my life, naturally, but I never gave them much thought until last fall, when I read the most extraordinary book. Walter White’s The Fire in the Flint. Do you know it?”

  He pulled out a book bound in purple cloth with orange-and-turquoise artwork stamped on its front board and spine. Its bumped corners were badly frayed. “I’ve badgered so many friends about it that my copy doesn’t look like much anymore,” he said with a wink at Julia as he handed it to Dolly, “but this book showed me a new kind of Negro. It’s about a colored physician in the South, facing affreux obstacles and injustices. Sensational stuff—you must read it.”

  Dolly turned it front to back. She stared at its title page as if it were in Greek.

  “Turns out the author lives up in Harlem, so I had to meet him straightaway. To my amazement the man can chat as easily about Proust or Debussy as any Yale man. He and his wife gave the most elegant tea party for me, where I met a crowd of Negroes every bit as intelligent and cultured as you or I. All the talk about natural Nordic superiority is sheer horsefeathers—as anyone would see if they spent an hour with these people.

  “But here’s the remarkable thing. I also rediscovered Harlem. Just a taxi ride away and yet another country, full of marvelous things. Not only French-speaking, Schubert-playing doctors and lawyers but endlessly fascinating ordinary people too. They can turn squalor and vice into an eye-popping, head-spinning party. Just walk into any Harlem club after midnight.”

  “They can sure dance,” Dolly said.

  “There’s more to it than that.” Duveen took his book from her hands. “Even the most cerebral Negro’s soul is fired by passion. They can create art with their bodies, from some deep, primitive instinct for it, without first thinking it to death.” He returned the volume to the shelf, then turned and punched out his words like a roused preacher. “We’ve become all brains and no bodies. We need Negroes to sound a drumbeat in our blood. I’m telling you, we should watch them, learn from them—we should honor and applaud them—we should shine their shoes!”

  Julia studied her drink. She didn’t dare meet Austen’s eye. It was hard to know how much of Pablo’s evangelism to take seriously. He did nothing by halves. He spoke to startle and amaze, to keep his name forever fresh in gossip columns and cocktail conversations. This speech would certainly make the rounds in San Francisco soon.

  Max Clark flicked ash into a heavy cut-crystal tray. “You’re some booster, Mr. Duveen.”

  “Can’t we get a wiggle on?” Dolly hugged her arms.

  “Soon, Dolly, soon.” Duveen took a framed photograph from the piano. “But first consider,” he said, thrusting it at the Clarks. “That’s Walter and Gladys.”

  He towered over them as they peered. “But Pablo,” Dolly said, “they’re white people.”

  Duveen whooped. “A tickle, no?” He showed the photograph to Julia and Austen. “Race is a funny thing. Just like us, Negroes come in all shades. Mulattoes like the Whites—and I swear that really is their name—are called yellow or tan. We call them olive if they’re a tad darker, like Mr. Hurd here.”

  An obliging smile dented Austen’s left cheek. Julia looked away quickly to stifle another laugh. Who was more ridiculous at the moment, Duveen flourishing his self-anointed mantle of authority, or she and the others lined up like schoolchildren gaping at his earnest lecture?

  “The medium shades,” Pablo went on, spouting his new expertise, “range from copper and cocoa to nut brown and seal, plus chestnut and coffee and even maroon. The poor darkest ones are called blue, charcoal, or ebony. You may think these are just a dozen clever ways to split those nappy hairs, but those shades matter—right up and down their own tough little social scale. It’s quite a caste system, as you’ll see tonight. Virtually everyone working in the clubs will be colored, but many will look utterly white. Chorus girls are strictly tans or yellows. Waiters might be coffee colored or sealskins, and the door boys and hounds in the kitchen might be so dark they’re called eight balls and inks.”

  Max Clark rattled the ice in his glass as the ponderous lesson settled over them. Julia pinched her wrist and ignored the jitter of Austen’s shoulders. Duveen beamed to display his prize nuggets of knowledge—a smug grin—yet Julia knew from Eva’s account of these color strictures that the social hierarchy could be oppressive indeed. She had to wonder again at the paradox: so many whites were naturally darker than Eva, including Austen and Philip, who’d turn a good olive or even copper after a few weeks on the Riviera. Something else, more inscrutable and important than skin color, determined race. It made the whole notion suddenly feel specious, a grand and preposterous hoax, and yet the stakes could not be higher.

  “So then.” Duveen returned the photograph to the piano. “Our first stop tonight will be Carlotta’s. You’ll feel plenty of steam when Eva Pruitt sings, Dolly. She’s a scorcher. She’s also written her first novel—not for the faint of heart. It’s got a taste of the more scabrous Harlem goings-on, not just the razzle-dazzle. For people who can’t get there in person, Eva’s book will be the next best thing. We’re hoping it really pops some corks, and I don’t just mean sell lots of copies.” He rapped his knuckles for luck on the gleaming wood.

  Julia remembered Eva’s anxious precautions about the manuscript. Presumably by now the necessary bank accounts had been set up, the funds transferred, and the manuscript safely delivered to Goldsmith’s offices.

  “Before we go, a quick word about Carlotta’s. The owner is a dicey fellow named Leonard Timson. Like most of the bosses in Harlem, he’s up to his eyeballs in shady doings. He did a couple of years in Sing Sing, for God knows what, and is not to be trifled with. Filthy rich too, but one doesn’t ask about that.”

  Shady doings? Eva had only called him a stinker. Perhaps the “filthy rich” part was meant to impress the Clarks.

  He shot Max a pointed look. “Timson loves to show off his club to bigwigs. When I told him I was bringing you tonight, Max, he invited us to sit at his table—quite the honor. You’ll be expected to spend lavishly, but then you’ll be entertained royally in return.”

  Max nodded, and Dolly squeaked. Her third martini was nearly gone. At this rate she would remember little of her excursion.

  “Carlotta’s is the swankiest club we’ll see tonight. From there I thought we’d move on to Bamville or the Band Box. We’ll finish up at a shocking little place called the Sugar Bowl to catch their breakfast show. I promise a night you’ll never forget.”

  The Clarks looked heartened by the pep talk, as if they were heading into battle.

  Duveen clapped his hands on his thighs. “Shall we be off? The sirens of Harlem beckon.”

  Dolly sprang up like a college girl after a touchdown. “Oh yes, oh yes,” she chanted as Max draped a silver fox across her shoulders. “Sirens, Maxie!”

  The street in front of Carlotta’s was clogged with expensive motorcars arriving from the south. Duveen’s entourage rode in a spacious limousine the Clarks had hired for the evening. Their driver maneuvered into the line of cars disgorging bejeweled occupants, and within a few minutes they too stood on the pavement of West 135th Street, inhaling the exotic spring air of Harlem. Duveen spoke to the driver, and the motor pulled away, to await them later.

  Dolly looped her hands around Max’s forearm and gazed up at a marquee lit by thousands of yellow bulbs proclaiming CARLOTTA’s in a florid script. Austen leaned toward Julia. “I was born in Harlem,” he whispered. “Think they’d pay for my autograph?”

  Tented sidewalk boards boasted that inside awaited “the cream of Harlem’s creole talent, the finest sepia stars, and a chorus of bronze beauties!” Down the block two more clubs thrust bright canopies over the sidewalk, luring in patrons like bees to lilies. Between the cabarets the pavement receded into shadow, obscuring the hand-lettered signs of daytime commerce: affordable shoe repair, men’s shaves and haircuts for a dime, and the services of a beautician trained in the patented hair-straightening system of Mrs. C. J. Walker
. But at midnight the street blazed with brilliance, mirrored in the slow glide of passing windows, the swirl of beads and gems, and the glint of silver flasks consulted one last time before their owners disappeared under the clubs’ awnings.

  The crowd jostled them forward. Julia stepped aside to pause before a large poster announcing, CARLOTTA’S OWN HARLEM ANGEL . . . EVANGELINE PRUITT! A soft-focus painting depicted Eva in a provocative profile, her head arched back as she balanced on a floor cushion, arms around one raised knee while her braceleted other leg extended out. She wore a filmy gown that fell open to reveal an unblemished thigh. Her head was wrapped in a gold headdress with tall white feathers, and enormous gold hoops hung from her ears. The artist had painted the phantom shape of large, unnaturally upturned, and cone-like breasts, adding the clear thrust of massive nipples beneath the sheer wash of gold. It was impossible not to stare at the anatomical absurdity. Although skillfully rendered, the painting’s taste was brazen, even vulgar. Julia’s cheeks heated. Eva was beautiful enough. Why graft her gentle face onto this parody of a body? The answer streamed past: customers, wealthy and eager, crowds of them.

  Duveen swept past the poster, probably for the hundredth time, a Clark tucked under each arm. Two stony doormen scanned them and stepped aside as Julia and Austen followed, inside and up a flight of carpeted stairs to a second set of doors, opened for them by another imposing pair of uniformed Negroes.

  “That was easy,” Austen said. “Good thing you wore all those diamonds.” Julia wore her mother’s engagement ring and her favorite sapphire earrings, but her jewels fell far short of Dolly Clark’s—or those of many patrons, she realized, as they adjusted to the club’s dim light and babble: voices, laughter, and occasional rockets of champagne corks.

  The room was much larger than the street front had suggested. A low stage jutted into the center, surrounded by a giant horseshoe space filled with small tables, all draped in white cloths. Two steps up, a mezzanine of upholstered banquettes ringed the club. Several tall replicas of palm trees spiked toward murals of a forest canopy overhead. Suspended fans stirred the palms’ fronds, their shadows, murky with smoke, moving across the painted ceiling like the ceaseless current of a Manhattan Amazon.