“Heathens. Ignorant heathens.” Harrison was fuming, his lit cigarette a hazard in his wildly waving hand.
“The play is wonderful, Harrison, we both know that. The audience just didn’t appreciate it. Let’s wait and see what the critics have to say.”
He snorted and dropped the cigarette, grinding the ash with the toe of his shoe. “I’d better go try to charm the reviewers, then.”
My mother gave me a supportive hug, but even she couldn’t put a polish on the disaster that had just unfolded. When she asked where Albert was, I told her he’d fallen down the subway stairs and was recovering in bed. “Oh, the poor boy. Do you want me to check on him?”
“No, Mom, promise you won’t. He’s resting. And anyway, aren’t you coming out with us?” I glanced through the lobby doors to see the line of taxis Pipsqueak Productions had paid for, ready to whisk us up to Harlem. I’d booked the Sugar Cane Club, where Clarence worked, for our opening night party. It was a black-and-tan, the only sort of speakeasy we could go to with an integrated cast.
“I’m too tired, dear. I’ll see you at home later on.”
“Don’t wait up, Mom. It’ll be dawn before the reviews come out.”
“Buck up, Helen.” Harrison sidled up to me, dropping his voice to a whisper. “I just had a heart-to-heart with Alexander Woollcott from the New York Times.”
“Did he say he liked the play?” A good review was my only hope. The production could survive a slow start, but anything less than a full run would ruin us.
“You know how those critics are, air of mystery and all that. But remember how he raved about The Emperor Jones? This role showed Gilpin to much better advantage.” He reached over and tucked my hair behind my ear. “Come on, Helen, everyone’s waiting for us.”
Harrison and I got into the last taxi to pull away from the curb, joined by the set designer and her husband. The two of them prattled together as if they hadn’t a care in the world, and I supposed they didn’t. The set designer had already cashed her check; the reviews would make no difference to her. The actors had twelve-week contracts, which had to be fulfilled even if the play closed early. I’d already paid the Olde Playhouse for the length of the run—Bernice Johnson’s books would balance, at least. No, it was me and Harrison who’d be left holding an empty bag if the show was panned. As far as Pipsqueak Productions was concerned, the only way out of our debts would be bankruptcy.
The taxis pulled up to an unassuming storefront on 135th Street. Clarence, posing as a loiterer, was doing door duty that night. At our arrival, he pulled a chain that lifted a cellar door, sending a beacon of light streaming upward. One by one, the cast and crew descended into the Sugar Cane Club. It didn’t offer the extravagant performances of Small’s Paradise or the segregated voyeurism of the Cotton Club—neither of which I could have afforded to rent for even an hour, let alone the night. At the Sugar Cane Club, a three-piece band provided the entertainment while the kitchen put out only one dish: the best fried chicken in New York City. Thanks to Clarence’s influence, I’d negotiated a comprehensive price with the owner that included all the food we could eat, all the whiskey we could drink, and a fat bribe to the cop on the beat to guarantee we’d be left in peace.
Clarence seemed so alone out on the sidewalk that I let everyone else go down ahead of me. “Isn’t Bernice coming tonight?”
He dropped the cellar door shut while we talked. “No. She doesn’t mind me working here, but it’s not the kind of place she enjoys. Where’s Albert?”
I’d been holding so much back for so many hours that his simple query threatened to unleash a torrent of tears. I took a deep breath and dammed them up again. “He hurt himself, but he’ll be fine. Will you be coming down later?”
“I usually stay until the place closes.”
I wondered when he ever slept. “We’re waiting up for the morning papers. You can’t sit out here until dawn.”
“In that case, I’ll come down before the night is over,” he said, pulling the chain and raising the door for me.
In the club, Harrison was rallying the cast, leading loud rounds of toasts in honor of each and every performance. His optimistic mania soon pervaded the party, and the mood I’d expected to be funereal became instead ecstatic. The young actress who played the dying girl had invited a dazzling group of bright-eyed friends who never seemed to stop dancing. The electricians and stagehands of the Olde Playhouse were determined to make the most of the free food and drink. Charles Gilpin held court, reciting soliloquies from Shakespeare. The woman who played his fiancée turned out to be as fine a singer as she was an actress. She joined in with the band, and soon had everyone singing along.
A whiskey mixed with Coca-Cola was put into my hand. I drank it quickly, as eager to forget about Albert and King as I was to numb my anxiety over the play. There weren’t enough chairs in the place to seat us all, and as the only space in which to stand was the dance floor, I found myself being passed from man to man as everyone from the set designer’s husband to the property master claimed a dance. At one point Harrison pulled me close, his hand sliding up and down my back with the rise and fall of the music. In one ear the drummer’s cymbals hissed and sizzled. In my other, Harrison’s big heart boomed.
As the hours wore on, the stagehands and crew members wandered home to their beds. Those of us who remained arranged ourselves in a bedraggled tableau around tables littered with half-eaten plates of chicken, half-empty glasses of whiskey, and half-smoked cigarettes. Clarence came down, off duty now, and helped the waiters clean up. Around four o’clock, Gilpin sent his wife home and asked for a pot of coffee.
Finally, the boy we’d paid to wait out on the corner came running in with an armful of morning papers. I blearily looked over Harrison’s shoulder as he opened the theater page to Alexander Woollcott’s review. My eyes were unable to focus on the text swimming before my eyes. “Read it aloud,” I said, resting my chin on my palm.
Harrison’s sonorous voice filled the quiet club. “Joseph Harrison’s new play at the Olde Playhouse entirely disregards the talents of Charles S. Gilpin on a tasteless display of propaganda.” He stopped, cleared his throat, continued. “Gilpin is, of course, the Negro actor whose powerful and imaginative performance in The Emperor Jones was honored by the Drama League at their annual dinner last year. As the darky convict who sets himself up as ruler of a jungle island in O’Neill’s prize-winning play, Gilpin proved himself capable of invoking both pity and terror in a role so dominant it was essentially a dramatic monologue. In this new effort, he portrays an arrogant physician whose pride is worth more to him than the life of a helpless child. In The Emperor Jones, Gilpin’s race brought a crucial element of authenticity to the role. Joseph Harrison, on the other hand, might as well have blackened the face of a white actor with burnt cork to portray the cartoonish doctor. The scene in which the doctor examines the dying girl was staged with so little regard for decency that the audience was rightly scandalized. As Jones, Gilpin’s genius was on full display as he transformed from a pompous and unscrupulous ruler into a broken and half-crazed creature. In this play, Gilpin is no more than a foil to the aggrieved father, played with admirable intensity by—”
“Enough!” Charles Gilpin rose from his seat, snatched up his hat, and stalked out of the club, regal as any doomed monarch. Harrison got up to follow him, but I grabbed his sleeve.
“Finish reading.”
Standing, Harrison continued. “The supporting cast executed their parts well enough, and the excellent set design deserves mention, but Charles Gilpin is wasted in this new play, and theatergoers will be wasting their time and money seeing him in it.”
The Sugar Cane Club was silent as a tomb until Harrison unleashed a stream of curses at the critics for their vindictiveness, at the audience for their ignorance, and at Eugene O’Neill for simply existing. His anger spent, he pulled a flask from his pocket and knocked back a shot, then passed it to me. “Go on, Helen, you deserve it.”
The sky was shifting from gray to lavender. I was carrying my coat, and a keen wind raised gooseflesh on my exposed arms. The sidewalk felt unstable beneath my feet, like the beach at Coney Island when the surf pulls away the sand. I grabbed Harrison’s hand to steady myself. He snaked his arm around my waist. A taxi pulled up. He slid in first, pulling me practically onto his lap. He was reaching across me to shut the door when Clarence grabbed the handle.
“You don’t mind if I share a ride, do you?” He got in without waiting for an answer. Soon we were speeding down the early-morning avenues, swerving around delivery trucks and dodging the occasional streetcar. I groaned as my head and my stomach revolved in two different directions.
“You know what we should do, Helen?” Harrison dropped his voice to its most seductive register. “Go out to California, get into the movies. That’s where all the really creative people are nowadays, and all the money, too. Damn these snobbish New York critics. Can you imagine what we could accomplish together, Helen, me directing and you producing?” He put his hand on my cheek. “It was incredibly brave of you to commission this play. It’s not your fault if we both go broke over it, but I’ll be damned if I give Broadway another ounce of my blood. Oh, Helen.” He nuzzled my neck, his whisper warm in the coil of my ear. “If only I’d realized what a treasure you are, I never would have let you go.”
The taxi stopped. “Here we are, sir.”
I lifted my head, expecting to see my apartment building, but we were at Harrison’s place instead. He opened the door on his side of the taxi. I found myself being drawn out along with him. “Come up with me, Helen. We have so much to discuss.”
I wanted nothing more in that moment than to be carried off and tucked into bed. Which is where Albert is right now, I thought—in bed with King. I tried to remember, from my reading of Havelock Ellis, just what it was two men did in bed together, but I was too drunk to sort out the hodgepodge of limbs and lips my imagination conjured.
“Your mother’s expecting you, isn’t she, Helen?” Clarence said. I’d forgotten he was there. Beneath the coat draped over my lap, Clarence’s hand had found mine, his fingers cradling my palm. He wasn’t holding me back—he was offering me a lifeline. It was up to me to take it.
“Go ahead, Harrison. I’ll see you tonight at the Playhouse. We’ll talk about everything then. I’m too tired now.”
Harrison shook his head slightly, as if I were a child who’d written the wrong answer on the blackboard. “You don’t mean that, dear.” He gripped my arm and tugged.
“The lady has said no, Mr. Harrison.” Clarence’s voice cut through the fog in my brain with the clipped authority of a military command.
With a disgusted grunt, Harrison tumbled out of the taxi and into the street, crossing in front of the cab so the driver had to suffer his glare before we could be on our way. Clarence gave our address. I let my head drop to his shoulder, pretending to have fallen suddenly asleep, as I used to do when I was a girl and wanted my father to carry me to bed. Clarence wasn’t fooled. “I don’t know how you can stand to let that man touch you, Helen.”
I didn’t open my eyes. “Why do you hate him so much?”
His hand tightened around mine. “You almost died because of that man. Isn’t that reason enough?”
It was true, I’d almost died. My head swam in a circle around a single question. “How did you know?”
Clarence lowered his voice. “My mother does your laundry, remember?”
For the full tick of a second, I wondered what my laundry had to do with anything. Then I understood. I hid my face against his chest. “I’m so ashamed.”
“Shush.” He kissed my forehead, briefly, lightly. “You survived, Helen. That’s something a person should never be ashamed of.”
The taxi let us out at our shared address. We walked up to our building, our clasped hands hidden under the fabric of my coat. Together we crossed the lobby, stepped into the elevator. He pressed the button for my floor. The jolt of the car tipped me against him. He put his arm around me. I reached up and touched the back of his neck. The elevator stopped but neither of us made a motion to open it. Instead, I lifted my chin. Our mouths met with the inevitability of magnets.
We’d been sitting on the fire escape outside my kitchen window that spring afternoon. We were in eighth grade and I’d just turned fourteen. Since we were eleven years old, Clarence and I had been seated in the same row in every classroom we shared, the alphabet of our names never separating us by more than a desk or two. That year, there’d been no desk between us. For months I’d been seated behind him, free to stare at his neck, which I found unaccountably fascinating. There were days I wouldn’t remember a word of our history teacher’s lecture, I was so mesmerized by the way his neck would stretch and sway as he bent his head forward to take notes. That’s why we were on the fire escape. We were studying for the history test. He was chiding me for having such incomplete notes. He pointed to one particularly blank page and asked me where my mind had been. I blushed so hard I thought I had a fever. There were no words I could put to the way I felt. Instead, I leaned across my notebook and kissed him.
That day, my mother had driven us apart before our tongues could touch. Now there was no one to stop us. A hollow place I hadn’t known existed opened up inside of me, hungry to be filled. I thought of his converted storage closet in the basement. His cot was narrow, but the room had a door and he had it to himself. The drinks I’d had at the Sugar Cane Club made me brave, or reckless, was there a difference? I stretched my arm out and blindly felt the row of buttons, pressing the lowest one.
The elevator descended, then stopped. We broke our kiss and met each other’s eyes. We could move to Paris, I thought. He could teach me French. He’d learned to speak it, during the war. Even in my own imagination, I had to transport the idea of me with Clarence to another country in order to picture it. Because when I thought of the two of us here, those stories from The Crisis leaped off the page. A sentence I’d read typed itself across my mind’s eye, except that I saw Clarence in the tortured man’s place, blinded by those hot iron rods.
He reached out to open the elevator. A few steps would bring us to the cot in his room. It didn’t matter if my skin was only a few shades lighter than Bernice’s. She was black, and I was white, and in America that meant my hand on Clarence’s arm put a target on his back. I wanted to burrow into him, his body a sanctuary from the disaster of the play and Albert’s betrayal, but soon the sun would rise and then what? We were on a runaway train. I found the words to pull the break.
“Won’t Bernice mind?”
He jerked his head back, as if I’d slapped him. “Of course she’ll mind. It’ll break her heart. Why, won’t Albert mind?”
“No.” My tears came with such force they splattered him. “He won’t mind at all.”
“Oh, Helen.” The pity in his voice as he said my name snuffed out the heat between us. I sobbed and he held me, but it was as a favor to a friend. The elevator started up again. When it stopped at my floor, he pressed a flat palm against my collarbone and slowly straightened his arm. I stepped back, alone, into the hallway.
I stared at the elevator until it completed its descent. A neighbor put out her empty milk bottles and saw me standing there. I turned away before she could greet me, digging out my key to let myself in.
Chapter 31
I came in with the Sunday paper tucked under my arm, still amazed to find King in my bed. It had been like a dream, these past (I counted them) thirty-eight hours. To miss any of them would have felt like time wasted except for the way he held me while we slept. Now it was nearly noon. His train for New Orleans departed at five o’clock. Whe
ther, or how often, we’d see each other again was an open question I hadn’t dared ask.
“There you are.” King stretched his arm from under the blanket. I shed my clothes and slid in beside him. “Where’ve you been?”
“I went out for the paper, and I picked up some rolls from the bakery. The percolator’s plugged in, coffee’ll be ready soon.”
“Hallelujah.” He took my chin in his hand and turned my face to examine my eye. “You look like you’ve been kicked by a horse. How bad does it hurt?”
“It looks worse than it is.” I’d seen, when I stopped in the bathroom, the bruise that ringed my eye, the swollen lid dark as a ripe plum. Apparently, it was even more shocking in color than it was to me in the mirror. King told me he’d never seen such a sickly shade of green.
The percolator sighed. “I’ll get it,” King offered. I watched him walk naked from the room, his chest thicker than I remembered, his shoulders broader, but his waist just as trim. Disabled soldiers littered the sidewalks of New York, but King had gone to war and come home without a scratch. I thought of telling him about the protective spell I’d cast by religiously looking for his name on the lists, but I feared that speaking of it would destroy the magic, like Houdini at a false séance.
I was opening the New York Times to the theater pages when he came back carrying two cups of coffee, both with milk. “What are they saying about Helen’s play?” I scanned the columns until I found Alexander Woollcott’s review. I read it to him, the cup of coffee tipping precariously in my hand until King rescued it from my negligent grasp. “Poor Helen,” he said, when I’d gotten through the review’s devastating final line.
I looked at him, stricken. “I should go to her.”
He set the paper aside. “Maybe you could see her after I’m gone?” He took my face carefully in his hands and kissed me. “We have so little time as it is.”
I glanced at the clock. I’d only have King for a few more hours. After that, I could devote myself to Helen, go with her to the play every night this week if she wanted me to. I got up to call and tell her so while King fried some eggs in the kitchenette. I put my hand on the receiver, but I couldn’t make myself pick it up. I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to resist the pull of her voice if she asked me to come, which of course she would, as she had every right to. I was her boyfriend, her best friend, her only friend as far as I could tell. I lifted the receiver but instead of speaking into it I left it off its hook. A few more hours wouldn’t make much difference to her, I told myself, but they might be all I got with King.
Bachelor Girl Page 27