The crowd on the sidewalk surged as the doors to the Provincetown Playhouse opened. Taking Helen’s arm, I shoved our way to the front of the line. I hadn’t wanted to bring her down to Greenwich Village and I was eager to get off the street before we ran into one of my flamboyant friends. After our weekly dinners, Helen and I usually saw a film at one of the movie palaces around Times Square or sat through whatever was onstage at her theater. But she’d been wanting to see Beyond the Horizon for weeks now, even though it’d been sold out since it won Eugene O’Neill the Pulitzer. Then Richard Martin called in a favor and got her a pair of tickets—for a Friday night, no less—and Helen was so excited I simply couldn’t refuse.
There were no chairs inside, only wooden benches cold as church pews. Enough of us crammed into the little space, however, that I was soon shrugging off my coat in air made warm from our collective human heat. Helen was pressed up close against me, so engrossed by the play that she didn’t notice the beads of sweat popping up along her hairline.
I had to admit, the play really was remarkable. I’d never seen anything so true and so sad. The last scene between the two brothers (or, as I had recast them in my mind, the two friends) was still reverberating in my chest as the cast came out to take their bows. When Andy said he loved Rob better than anybody in the world, for a moment as fleeting as a photographer’s flash I saw my kind represented on the stage. What would it look like, I wondered, as I blinked back tears, to see ourselves dramatized realistically and with sympathy? But no, people didn’t like to think of us as farmers and sea captains. Color our cheeks with rouge, clot our lashes with mascara, put us in a vaudeville act to lisp and croon and flap our hands: that was the only role in which to cast a pansy. But we weren’t so unlike those two actors. When Rob put his hand on Andy’s hand and Andy said they’d always been together, just the two of them—well, they looked like me and Felix, or Paul with his benefactor, or any of a dozen pairs of men I knew.
“Are you crying, Albert?” Helen pulled a handkerchief from her pocketbook and offered it to me. “I guess it reminds you of your childhood illness, how sick Rob is at the end.”
“Just something in my eye. Never mind, Helen.” I pushed away her hand. “Come outside, it’s stifling in here.” The tiny theater was crammed full as a streetcar at rush hour. It was a relief to emerge onto MacDougal Street, the tears freezing on my cheeks.
“Don’t lie to me, Albert. You were affected, I could see it.”
I took her elbow as we walked toward Fourth Street, those old cobbles slick with ice. “It was all so unfair, how that stupid girl came between the brothers like that.”
“Stupid girl? But, Albert, don’t you see, it was the brothers who tore themselves apart. She was just a romantic young thing, caught between them and her mother, too. She never had any choice in the matter. Maybe she wanted to go beyond the horizon, did you ever think of that?”
“If you had played her, Helen, I might have understood it that way.”
“No, I’m not pretty enough for the part.”
“Don’t say that. You’re the prettiest woman I know.” It was true. Sure, her jaw was a little heavy and her mouth a bit thin, but I’d grown so used to her face that I couldn’t see her as anything less than beautiful.
“I’m not fishing for a compliment, Albert. In the third act, yes, I was imagining myself speaking those lines, but at the beginning—well, the part needs a beautiful woman for it to make any sense. I mean, why else do those boys think they’re so in love with her? It’s not as if O’Neill gave her any qualities of attraction other than her looks.”
We wandered through Greenwich Village as we spoke, the play having distracted me from my fears. “I still don’t see why any man would give up a sea voyage for her, or a farm for that matter.”
Helen seemed about to speak but shut her mouth with a huff, saying, “Let’s get out of this cold at least. Is that a speakeasy over there?”
I panicked as I looked across the street and saw we’d ended up in front of Antonio’s. Indeed, at that very moment the door opened, piano music streaming out a shaft of smoky light.
“It is, but I hear it’s very Bohemian. You don’t want to go slumming, do you?”
“Why not? I’m not so easily shocked.” Helen gripped my arm. “And anyway, I’ve got you to protect me. Let’s see if we can’t guess at the password.”
But the very idea of taking Helen into Antonio’s brought bile into my throat. The length and breadth of Manhattan was usually sufficient to keep my worlds from colliding. I was a pansy down in the Village, the Colonel’s personal secretary on the Upper East Side, Helen’s young man around Times Square. And I was Felix Stern’s lover west of Central Park, behind the closed doors of the brownstone. To walk into Antonio’s with a woman on my arm was as unthinkable to me as bringing a man home to meet my mother.
“Let’s just look for a cab.” For once my sense of direction didn’t let me down. A taxi was discharging some passengers onto Hudson Street. I grabbed the handle before they could close the door. I gave the driver Helen’s address along with the fare, but I didn’t follow her in.
“Aren’t you coming, Albert?”
I’d never failed to see her home before, but my emotions were so shaken I didn’t think I could sit beside her for fifty blocks without blurting out something that might reveal my secret. Not that it felt false, being with Helen. In all honesty, she’d become my dearest friend. It physically pained me to lie to her, but I couldn’t risk the truth. Even if she were sympathetic to my plight, what if word got back to the Colonel? If he didn’t want people to mistake his secretary for a window dresser, he certainly wouldn’t want a self-proclaimed pansy in the job.
“I was planning to meet up with Paul later on, and, well, it doesn’t really make sense to ride all the way uptown and back again. You don’t mind, do you?” Of course she did. What woman wouldn’t? I leaned in as the taxi’s meter starting ticking over. “Don’t forget, Helen, the Colonel wants to see you tomorrow afternoon at the Ruppert mansion.”
“You’re sure you don’t know what it’s about?”
I shook my head. “I’m just as curious as you are. Telephone me after?” I shut the door and rapped my knuckles against the window, watching until the taxi was well up Hudson before retracing my steps. As I walked, I mussed my hair so that it hung loose over my forehead. On the sidewalk in front of Antonio’s, I pulled the brown bow tie from around my collar and replaced it with the red one I had tucked, earlier that evening, into my jacket pocket.
Chapter 23
I sat speechless in the back of that taxi as the driver started up Hudson Street. Albert had never treated me so shabbily before, but I was more concerned than angry. His excuse was reasonable enough—why come all the way uptown with me just to turn around again?—but I didn’t believe that was his real reason. The play had upset him, I could see that plain as day. I wondered if, like O’Neill’s characters, Albert had once given up something he wanted more than anything else in the world. I didn’t know. Despite all the time we spent together, there was still a gap between us, narrow enough to be overlooked but wide enough for a secret. Sometimes I wondered if he was spending his Saturday nights with a different girl in another part of the city. But no, Albert was as likely to be two-timing me as he was to be spying for the Bolsheviks. The other tenants in the brownstone had a weekly get-together, he’d explained. He and his neighbor, Felix Stern, always attended. Afterward, they’d go out for dinner, or to a party, or to meet up with friends. All perfectly reasonable, nothing for me to suspect, and yet . . . and yet nothing. I told myself to stop looking for trouble where there was none to be found.
Besides, who was I to press him on his secrets? As dear as he was to me, I lived in dread of the day he’d declare his intentions. Confronted with a proposal of marriage, I’d either have to turn him down or confess why I’d never be able to give him children. I imagined that day would eventually come, but until it did I could keep my secret t
o myself. In the meantime, what more could I want from a man than his friendship and affection, his interest in my work, his company on Friday nights? Thanks to Harrison, I knew what I was missing with Albert. As far as I remembered, I wasn’t missing much. I shook my head. My thoughts had gone around in this same circle a thousand times over the past couple of years, and they always led to the same conclusion: Albert couldn’t have been more perfect, or a more perfect gentleman, if I’d ordered him from the Sears catalog.
As late as it was, when the taxi dropped me off I saw Clarence was still awake. He hadn’t spotted me yet and I paused for a moment to watch him, the lobby lit like a stage. He was cleaning the floor, the mop swinging rhythmically across the terrazzo. It was a sad scene for me to see. After the 369th had returned from France to parade so triumphantly up Fifth Avenue, I’d expected Clarence to put his college degree to use and become a teacher. But those first months after the war, his nerves were too raw for New York City. The crowded sidewalks, the fast-moving traffic, the sounds of sirens and car horns all put him on edge. It was all he could do to take up his old position in the lobby, where he gazed through the glass doors to see what was happening on the street, and spoke with people one at a time as they came and went. I often stopped for a talk in the quiet lobby of the sleeping building when I returned late from the theater. On Saturday nights, when Albert was busy, Clarence and I would make it an occasion with a picnic basket prepared by his mother, the taste of garlic and coconut strange on my tongue. I was happy to help him reacclimate to civilian life. After all, Clarence had done much the same for me back when my mother first moved us to Manhattan. My grief over my father’s death was so fresh, I might never have left the apartment if it weren’t for him. I remembered how he’d knock on my door whenever he saw my mother go out. “Come on, Helen,” he’d say, jingling a handful of nickels in his pocket. “Let’s ride the El.”
It took about a year for Clarence to put the war behind him, but just when I thought he’d start looking to the future his father’s headaches had begun. The crippling episodes of pain confined Mr. Weldon to his bedroom, silence and darkness the only cure. Clarence had put off applying for teaching jobs so he could cover his father’s duties around the building. I knew he was doing it for his family’s sake, but still it made me sad to see janitor’s overalls on a college graduate and a mop handle in hands that had been trained to fire a rifle.
Clarence frowned as I walked in alone. “Weren’t you out with Albert?”
“He was meeting up with some friends afterward, so he stayed downtown.” His disapproval made me defensive. “I can find my way home by myself you know.”
“I know, Helen. I just thought better of him is all.”
I was about to remind him I wasn’t one of his little sisters—who weren’t so little anymore, anyway—when I noticed how heavily he was hanging his head. “What’s the matter, has something happened?”
“It’s my father. He was lying down with one of his headaches today when he had some kind of attack. I brought Dr. Wright from the Harlem Hospital to see him.” His eyes welled up.
I took his hand. “My God, what is it?”
“It’s brain ischemia, Helen. He’s practically paralyzed. There’s nothing we can do.”
For months, my mother had been suggesting that Mr. Weldon was taking advantage of his son’s good nature to laze around in bed. She’d be sorry to have even thought such a thing once I told her the truth. “Oh, Clarence. I know it’s late, but may I see him?”
He wiped the tears from his eyes with the back of his hand. “I was hoping you’d say that.”
We took the elevator to the basement, where the custodian’s apartment shared space with the laundry room and the storage closets and the trash incinerator and the furnace. I hadn’t been down here since Clarence and I were children. Back then, his sisters had shared the second bedroom while Clarence slept on the couch. Tiptoeing through the apartment, I saw one of his sisters now had the couch, while the young cousin they’d taken in after his parents died of influenza was curled up between two armchairs pulled together. I remembered Clarence saying his other sister had moved back in with her husband and their baby to save money—they must be in the second bedroom. Where, I wondered, did Clarence sleep?
Mrs. Weldon was at her husband’s bedside. The poor man was propped up on pillows, his face distorted into a grotesque mask, half of the mouth pulled down nearly to his chin, the sounds he made little more than grunts. His lungs were so labored I became embarrassed by how easy it was for me to breath. But his eyes were the worst, I thought, as I took his hand and wished him well. They stared at me full of mute intelligence, the thoughts trapped in a body no longer responsive to his commands.
Mrs. Weldon was grateful for my visit but soon said her husband needed his rest. Clarence walked me down the corridor toward the elevator. Outside one of the storage closets, I saw a doormat and a pair of his shoes. “That’s not where you sleep, is it?”
He opened the door and switched on the light. I saw a cot neatly made up with a blanket, a tiny end table piled with books, a stack of milk crates that served as a dresser for his carefully folded clothes. It would have been tragic if it weren’t for the many pictures taped to the whitewashed walls. Landscapes mostly, some illustrations of birds and flowers, a smattering of postcards depicting Paris. “My sister’s family needed the bedroom after my brother-in-law lost his job. But I’m glad they’re here. My mother will need their help now that she has my father to take care of on top of everything else.”
“But what about you?”
He switched off the light and shut the door. “I’ve already contacted the owners of the building. They’ve agreed to hire me as the new custodian.”
“But, Clarence, you’re qualified to be a teacher. Surely your parents wouldn’t want you to give up your career for their sake?”
He spoke as if I were a pupil slow to understand a lesson. “I wouldn’t even have my college degree if it weren’t for my mother working her fingers to the bone doing laundry, including yours, Helen. I’d never be able to support my whole family on a teacher’s salary. Custodian doesn’t pay much, but it comes with an apartment. You may not know much about rents in this city, but they’re pretty steep, especially for black folks.”
I hadn’t known New York cost more if you were black than if you were white. Poor Clarence, I thought. Sure, he was helping his family, but it was a shame for him to waste his education cleaning floors. “Tell your father I’ll be thinking of him, won’t you?”
“I will. Thanks for seeing him, Helen. I’m sure it meant a lot to him.”
“He was always so good to me, when I was a kid. I guess he knew I’d just lost my own dad.” Tears suddenly rolled down my cheeks. I stopped them with a handkerchief.
“He’s a good father, but strict, too. I’ll never forget the licking he gave me after your mother caught us kissing. I still have a stripe from his switch across my backside.”
My face grew hot. We’d never spoken of that kiss, not in all the years. I remembered being awkward around him that summer, the taste of soap fresh in my mouth. Then we’d each gone off to different high schools and I figured he’d forgotten all about it. But he hadn’t. He even had the scar to prove it. “You never told me you got in trouble too.”
Clarence shook his head. Reaching into the elevator, he pressed the button for my floor. “You have no idea, Helen. You better get on home now.”
• • •
I stopped by the next day with my mother to visit Mr. Weldon—mollified, she’d baked him a pie—but we didn’t stay long. I was haunted by the image of his twisted face as I hailed a taxi to take me to the Ruppert mansion, Pip hidden in my coat. It was the stuff of tragedy, I thought, how easily a strong man could be cut down. I forced myself to think instead of the play I’d seen with Albert last night. That ridiculous theater didn’t do it justice. I knew O’Neill was suspicious of commercializing his work on Broadway, but really, a play that
refreshing and honest deserved to be moved uptown. If only I could convince him to bring Beyond the Horizon to the Olde Playhouse, we might be able to finally turn a reliable profit.
I figured that must be what Jake wanted to talk to me about. All Jake had asked, when he made me manager, was that I not lose him any money. Technically I hadn’t, not in the long run. I’d eventually made up for the loss we took when that first play I’d chosen was so viciously panned in the press. Night after night, most of the comfortable seats Jake had paid for went unoccupied and I’d kicked myself for guaranteeing the playwright a three-month run. As it turned out, though, the play’s bad reviews probably saved my life. With influenza sweeping through the city that fall and winter, any crowded place posed a risk. Albert had agreed, saying it was lucky the baseball season had ended early that year, too. It seemed a cruel coda to the war that our returning soldiers should have brought home an epidemic along with their victory.
Yes, that must be it, I thought. Jake had already thanked me for the information I’d given him about Harry Frazee. The divorce papers had eventually been filed and the court proceedings were spectacularly messy. Selling Babe Ruth had added one hundred thousand dollars to Frazee’s balance sheet for the judge to consider when setting alimony, but Albert explained it was the side deal that really clinched Babe’s sale. The mortgage Ruppert Realty had offered against Fenway Park put over three hundred thousand in Frazee’s pockets, none of it in assets his wife could claim but more than enough to mount a new Broadway show, starring, of course, his Long Island mistress. When the Yankees had announced their acquisition of Babe Ruth last January, it had been thrilling to know I’d played a small part in it. Albert and I had both been in the owner’s box at the Polo Grounds on the first of May to watch Babe bat against his old team. When he clobbered a home run in the sixth, Jake had caught my eye and smiled.
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