Night Song

by John A. Williams

  Each time it was over he had left, impelled by her obvious, though camouflaged, uneasiness at his presence. What, are you still here? he had felt her to be saying.

  “What are you brooding about?” Della asked.

  “Nothing,” he said, but he knew that in another moment he would begin talking to her about things.

  “Della?” he said, clearing his throat.

  “Yes?” she answered. In the shop her voice was devoid of the guilty tones he had known at night in her bedroom.

  “I want to talk to you. Moe Alvin was here.…” His voice drifted off and down so that Della had to strain forward to hear him, and he saw her reading his face, thinking back.

  “I don’t want to sound like an ass, but have you, like I confess I sometimes do, felt any—shame for—for—being here—?” He broke off and looked anxiously at her, unconscious of the fact that he had pulled a shade back from her.

  “Well, man,” she began cautiously, a smile pulling up the corners of her mouth, the eyes unblinking. “Like, how do you mean?” Her tone was condescending.

  Hillary heaved and clenched his lips. “Alvin asked how I liked working for Keel.”

  “Yes?” she said. Hillary noticed that she was trembling as she opened her bag. Della lit a cigarette and stared at him, waiting.

  “A lot of guys have said the same thing. And I do feel uncomfortable, working for Keel.” He couldn’t look at her now. Instead he stared down at the checkered tablecloth. “I need your help, Della,” he said, without looking up.

  “Go on, man.” The eyes were dancing quietly again.

  “We’re both white—” Hillary said awkwardly. He looked up again. The eyes had gone cold. “What do you mean ‘we,’ white man?” she murmured, anticipating him.

  Desperately, Hillary hurried on. “Those guys saved me, Keel and Eagle—” he fumbled and looked anxiously at Della. “I guess they’re nice guys.” He tried to smile at her. “To be truthful, the only thing I dislike about Keel is that he had you.”

  Della looked over her shoulder as though she wished someone would walk in and interrupt them. A habit, Hillary observed, shared by nearly everyone who came into the shop.

  “I’ve learned a lot of things down here. I’m doing better than I was.”

  “Yes,” she said, flicking her ash into a tray.

  Hillary was nervous but he went on. “In spite of what I know to be intellectually right—that Keel and Eagle are in a sense superior to me, I can’t accept it. That’s why people like Moe Alvin make me feel uncomfortable when they hint that I am inferior.”

  “You’re positive that they’re superior to you?”

  “I just couldn’t take what they have to take every day and still want to live.” He saw in Della’s eyes a hint of her old tenderness. “I guess Faulkner said it somewhere. They endure. They endure the Alvins, the Cranes, the Tolens, the tourists who’ll be flocking in here tonight. They endure themselves. I couldn’t.” Hillary raised his chin in the direction of his room. “Sometimes, when I’ve closed up and everyone has gone, I lie there, drunk often, but more and more frequently sober, and thank God that he made me white.” He dropped his head again. “It’s like the army. The guy next to you gets shot and you’re glad as hell it wasn’t you. It’s the only way you can go on; you count on someone else getting the messy end of the stick.” He watched her inhale carefully on her cigarette.

  “I grew up with a colored guy. Name was Borden.” Hillary paused again. “He didn’t hate me.”

  Della mashed out her cigarette with more force than was necessary. “Like, man, how do you know?”

  Her lips were pulled up again in that tolerant smile she reserved for touring squares.

  “I guess I don’t know.”

  “You’ve found the hatred then?” she laughed lightly.

  Hillary nodded, then knitting his brows slid forward on his elbows and talked to the ashtray which rested between Della’s thumb and forefinger on the table. “I guess I thought I was a hip paddy boy, like some of the kids you see around now in pegs and drapes. I could handle the language, as much as a country boy could be expected to, and I went to colored dances and danced with colored girls.…” He laughed: it was warm recalling those uninvolved youthful days. “They were the only ones who knew how to dance—”

  “Like, man, you don’t have to explain to me.” But she’d said it with a smile and Hillary knew it was all right “We used to hunt down the colored guys, the hipper ones, and watch them lindy. We felt special because after a while if we didn’t show up at a dance they asked for us.” Hillary shook his head. “We never felt the things with them that I feel now.”

  “To accept is part of understanding, man,” she said.

  She never calls Keel, “man,” he thought, looking at her.

  “Agency analysis, huh?” he said.

  “Don’t run. It’s my turn. I listened to you.”

  Hillary nodded. “Shoot.”

  “People hate because they’re hated. It’s that simple. Remove the originating hatred and the other goes, but who’s to tell people like my Keel”—Hillary winced—“and Eagle and all the others, ‘Look, man, the hate is gone!’ They’ve been told this so often and you can see the result. We’re talking about the result.”

  She shook her head. “No I’m afraid when the hate does go—and that’s what keeps me going—not the fact that someone else is getting the poker all the time—Eagle and Keel and the others will have to start placing some faith in that fact. A two-way gig.”

  Why, Hillary wondered, does she insist in talking this way to me? Isn’t there anything between us? She was trembling again. The ashtray beat a tattoo against the table. “You sit there, man, blowing about your crazy times with Negroes.” She leaned back and simulated a smile. “How nice,” she said bitingly.

  “Now I’m going to tell you how it is with me.” She plunged again into her purse and came up with another cigarette. Hillary offered her a match, but she shook it off.

  “I didn’t have any Negro playmates—man.” She paused to let the effect hit Hillary. “I knew some Negroes in college. They seemed people to me, and I avoided saying Negro the way some people avoid saying Jew because they’ve become conveniently vile labels.”

  “I don’t have any oddball sickness for Keel.” She leaned back again and nodded at him wisely. “I know what you think. Sometimes it’s been all over your face. I had a special reason for the gigs with you—”

  “I know,” Hillary said, his face reddening. “You felt sorry for me, but hated me after.”

  Della paused, her small neat mouth shaped into an 0. She wanted to tell him that it was he who should have been sorry for her and for Keel as well, but she allowed his comment to pass; the attack she had readied had exhausted itself with his statement.

  She said simply, as if repeating again what would not be believed, “I love Keel. I dig him. For all the reasons a woman is supposed to feel about a man. I want to hold his hand when we walk, but I don’t; it’s like a rule. People look at us and here’s the way it goes: broads spot us—the contrast I suppose—then they dig me, up, down, all around, then my face.”

  Hillary stared straight down; he too had done this, letting his glance come to rest at last upon her face to see if there were anything readable there.

  “Sometimes they look so damned disgusted. Sometimes there’s no expression, and sometimes,” she said, and Hillary was sure she was speaking to herself, “there seems to be something of encouragement. Very seldom this. Some women stare like animals; Keel’s a good-looking man.”

  Mentally Hillary agreed.

  “The men look at me too, but they look the longest at Keel, like his face would be labeled or something.”

  “Don’t you ever get used to it?”

  “Keel hasn’t.”

  “How about you?”

  “I notice it. But never let Keel know that I’m digging this scene as much as he is.” As she inhaled, Della wondered if she were becoming ma
udlin. Somehow, regardless, it was good to talk about it. “Keel believes—sincerely believes—that for us to hold hands in the street would be to invite trouble; he could get killed or he could kill someone.”

  Hillary remembered the mixed couples he had seen; some held hands, but most did not. It was almost as if there were a tangible fence between them.

  “Who am I to tell my Keel that he’s wrong. I don’t know that he is. Osmosis or something. I feel it too. Once, walking through Times Square, one of those damned southern cracker squares spit on him. I didn’t know it until days after, but there you are.” She leaned forward, smiling, but there was something wrong with the smile. “Here we are, talking, just talking, and I know maybe you’d have to cross the street not to do the same thing—maybe.”

  “C’mon, Della,” Hillary said crisply, “that’s a little too much.”

  “But you’ve got it in you.”

  “I admit one thing and one thing only.”

  The smile was gone. Della waited.

  “I always think of how much I want you for myself.”

  Della slid her chair back and stood, jabbing her cigarette into the tray. She spilled the ash. “I forgot to tell you, man,” she said—her voice carried the uneven tones—“about the white cats who see me occasionally with Keel.” She stood erect and yanked her bag onto her arm. “They proposition me, mentioning Keel—I’m supposed to be easy, you dig—and I know they want me only because Keel has had me. They’re sick.” She looked coldly at him. Deep in her throat, she said, “They make me so mad I could scream!”

  She ran toward the kitchen and slammed the door behind her. Hillary stood and shouted, “Della! Della! That’s not what—” He stopped and listened to her sobs. He approached the door and started to push it open.

  “Come in here,” she gritted, “and I’ll kill you!” Hillary heard her rustling in the silverware and stopped. “Della, I shouldn’t have said that. I’m sorry.” He glanced behind him; what if Keel came now? “I meant it, though not the way you said.” He paused and listened. To hell with Keel if he came. Then he paused again and listened to her sniffing. He thought of what she’d said and he wondered for the part of a second if that was really why he wanted her. He became sick with the thought, steadied himself and asked, “Can I get you anything?”

  “No.” Her sobs were softer now and her nose was stuffed.

  “Della, come on out. Please. I’m sorry.”

  “You damned fool, can’t you see I’m crying for myself, for things you can’t know? I, I gave you the right to say that because I was—”

  The tears and sobs started again and Hillary retreated to his room and lay down.

  Later he would go get a drink and perhaps he would feel better.

  CHAPTER 9

  Sadik’s began to fill early that evening. There was a restlessness along the streets that comes only to New York when its people realize that spring has come again. Down the street, in the hall of the Polish club, the band for that evening was running through its polkas. Small groups of youngsters, already in sandals and shorts, moved along the walks with their congas and bongos, searching for a place to come to rest and play. They merely glanced in Sadik’s and passed on. The Puerto Rican men on the block gathered, leaned alternately against a no-parking sign, and spoke their rapid, flat-toned Spanish. The younger ones were clad in pegs and the distinctive, vented, brocaded shirts. When the cross-town bus passed, going west, it was filled, for the brighter lights of the Village lay on the other side of town. Returning, it was usually three-quarters empty. Now along the stoops the old people sat and watched the panorama of the block, while below the kids romped and fought, made up and fought again. The liquor store a few doors away from the coffee shop, was already catering to its Friday evening clientele: winos, tourists who carried it on the hip thinking to outwit the Village bartenders, young, dapper, Madison Avenue workers who in preparing for a weekend of partying purchased inexpensive liquors and emptied them into bottles bearing well-known labels. David Hillary was a client too. Already the roads were filled with creeping cars bearing out-of-Manhattan, out-of-state license plates. Sometimes faces would peer out of them, interest masked, the understanding there that one did not show emotion in New York City, that you, if you were a tourist in one of the passing cars, were cool too. Somewhere on Third Avenue, fire engines raced, bass sirens growling malevolently. A few kids ran to the corner and traced their passage out of sight. A police car, black, white, and green, its red, car-top-pimple flashing, roared down the street, took the corner with a scream, and tooled after the engines.

  The noise of machines and people filled the open door of Sadik’s. Every table had its candle already lit, and the tiny orange flames licked the glass containers which were white, orange, blue, green, red, purple, or black. The effect was like that of trembling stained glass. Some musicians were there already, listening to records, sipping coffee and liquor out of the pints they had brought with them to take to their respective jobs. With the coming of spring nearly all of them were working either in the city or in the suburbs. There was money, and money generally meant the presence of whisky. A few couples, lost in their explorations of the Village, stopped in and ordered American coffee and looked politely around, wondering when the bongo players and the poets would begin. Other couples, natives, just out because it was a Friday night and lovely, browsed over the menu carefully, seeking something exotic to match the feel in the air.

  Business was good and would get better later.

  Hillary returned Keel’s grin. He had just emerged from his room again, where he had taken another open-throated swallow of rye. For some reason, Keel seemed in a better mood. The past weeks he had been sometimes curt, sometimes extremely indrawn; and Della, Hillary recalled, had not been in every night, and some of the nights when she had been in Keel had not seen her home. Well, Hillary thought, he knew about three of those nights.

  “You’d better watch it, Prof,” Keel said as he went by. “It’s early yet. You haven’t hit it like this in two-three weeks. Something bugging you?”

  Hillary shook his head and picked up the order for two Cappuccinos with Baclava which Della had filled. She did not speak and Hillary retreated from the kitchen with the order.

  Crane and Tolen came in and entered the Musicians’ Room where they sat in labored discussion with Kilroy and with Background, a little man who wore gold-rimmed glasses. Background played strings: bass, cello, viol, violin. He got his name because he whistled inverted chord changes and all the dropped notes which were not obvious to the layman—background music. The noise of the conversation grew until it was difficult to hear the record player. Keel and Della moved quickly and easily about among the tables, their faces lit by the wavering candlelight. Hillary moved jerkily, lifting his legs as though he were walking in a marsh. Della watched him critically.

  So did Keel. For some reason today he didn’t mind that Hillary was drunk and on his way to becoming drunker. Perhaps because it was spring, or perhaps (and this was closer to the truth), it had to do with whatever was going on between Della and himself. So much better than it had been. Now, again, he could feel her love, her concern for him. The good feeling persisted until he visualized being with her, but then it drifted away, sadly, like a night mist carried off by a gust of wind. He walked into the Musicians’ Room where Crane was talking with Background.

  Background was one of those players who was listed in practically every page in every edition of Charles Delaunay’s Discography; he had played with everybody and still performed competently, rising occasionally to great heights and confounding everyone with his acumen and dash; once Feather had tried to prove that Mingus learned from Background.

  Hillary whispered to Kilroy, “That cat still trying to get the dope on Lester?”

  Kilroy smiled. When he wasn’t being an out-and-out clown there was a certain character to his face, which was old and seamed like cordovan leather. “You better know it, man, Cat never gives up.” This
time Kilroy looked up and smiled at Crane, who in turn smiled himself, but Keel saw that the critic was perturbed by the interruption.

  “Get some bread, Background, get some bread,” Keel growled.

  Rod Tolen looked up and graveled, “Man, how you sound? Some things bread can’t buy.”

  “It’ll buy what Crane wants,” Background chuckled.

  “Damned right,” Keel agreed.

  Tolen scoffed. “What you need with bread, Background? You giggin’ steady. You ain’t got no steady ol’ lady, you ain’t on shit, and you don’t drink that much.”

  Background exchanged glances with Kilroy. He said to Tolen, “I want to buy me a couple of burners, man. This crap is gettin’ down to the knitty-gritty here now, and there are two or three cats I wants to burn when the shit hits the fan.”

  There was silence. Keel gave a little smile. He knew Background well. If there was one thing that bugged the musician it was white people telling him he didn’t need money. Tolen should have known better.

  “That’s what I’m gonna do,” Background said into the silence, “but some heat. When you gets as old as me and done as much as me you know that all this talkin’ and signifyin’ don’t get a goddamn thing.” He smiled and turned to Crane. “Now, you was sayin’?”

  Outside in the main room, Hillary returned to the table for the third time; he hadn’t been able to remember whether the middle-aged couple (out-of-towners, obviously) wanted Khave or Viennese; something about those V’s that confused him. He apologized clumsily, sliding the tablecloth nearly to the floor and just barely catching the candle. The woman recoiled at his breath.