A Toast Before Dying

by Grace F. Edwards

  I still walked uptown with Alvin and Ruffin occasionally, and the lights at holiday time, now more subdued, still fascinated me.

  Miss Adele’s apartment looked out on Seventh Avenue and faced her old apartment in the Dunbar. I took the elevator to the eleventh floor, and when she opened the door I could tell the AC wasn’t on, but the apartment seemed cool anyway. She wore a billowing yellow caftan and her chestnut-colored braids were piled like a crown on her head. She was barefoot, so I took off my shoes and left them in the foyer. Pale beige carpeting stretched wall-to-wall in every room except the kitchen, which had terra-cotta tile.

  Just like Dad, she had a grand piano in the living room and artwork covering her walls. Her terrace was enclosed, converted into a small greenhouse with two wicker chairs squeezed in among dozens of plants.

  I settled myself onto the deep sofa as she called from the kitchen. “How’s your father? You should’ve brought him along. He works too hard, you know. Could use a break.”

  She came back into the living room and placed a tray of sandwiches and coffee on the low table, then sank comfortably onto the chair facing me. “Now what’s this about Thea? Something else going on besides what the papers are saying?”

  “I think so, but I’m not sure what to make of it,” I said. “She was once involved with Kendrick Owen, the man who’s in jail for her murder.”

  “But you don’t think he did it?”

  “No, I don’t. I think the cops rushed to judgment, as usual, and tagged the most convenient person. But someone, a young man, told me that he saw a person leave the alley that night.”

  “Why doesn’t he come forward?”

  I showed her the article in the Daily Challenge. “He was killed three nights ago in a drive-by. I was two feet away from him.”

  Miss Adele read the paper, then put it down. “My God! This is terrible. What’s going to happen to Kendrick?”

  “I don’t know. I’m back to square one. The only thing left now is to look at Thea’s life and figure out who would’ve wanted her dead.”

  I reached into my bag and knew I was taking a chance pulling out the bankbook and the photograph of the old woman. But Miss Adele had known my father since before I was born; she knew my mother. And she had been Thea’s coach, the only one who’d cared enough to sponsor her dream of becoming somebody. I had to take the chance or forget everything.

  Miss Adele looked at the picture and smiled, but when she opened the bankbook, I watched her brows come together.

  “Poor Thea. Poor girl, poor thing …”

  I waited, trying to drum up sympathy for a woman who had impacted so many lives I needed a scorecard to keep track. I thought of Laws, Kendrick, Roger, and Michaels: one dead, one in jail, one who’d been held hostage by a divorce settlement, and one whose political career might yet be compromised. Each, at one time or another, had been drawn to her.

  It occurred to me that Thea’s problem went a little beyond Lettie’s syndrome. It was not what Thea had, but what she had wanted, wanted so badly that any one of these men—as much as they loved her—might’ve been better off with her dead.

  Miss Adele spoke, cutting into my thoughts.

  “That girl never got to enjoy anything. Never really got to live.”

  “But why not? I don’t understand,” I said.

  She didn’t answer, but closed the book and tapped it thoughtfully against her open palm. “What’re you going to do with this?”

  “I don’t know. Actually, I’m not even supposed to have it.”

  “How’d you get it?”

  “Well, I didn’t steal it, if that’s what you’re asking. I was helping Gladys Winston sort through Thea’s stuff. I found it in the apartment in a place where no one but Thea would’ve known where it was.”

  That seemed to satisfy her, and I calmed down, allowing my defensiveness to fade.

  She glanced at the book again, leafing through the pages. “Do you have any idea, Mali, where the money came from? Who made these deposits?”

  I shrugged. “Maybe one of her boyfriends. I don’t know which one.”

  She put the bankbook on the table and reached for her cup. Her fingers were fine and long and seamless, as if age had skipped over them and went directly to her wrists, with their prominent veins. She took a sip but still did not look at me.

  “Michaels, perhaps?”

  “You know about Michaels?” I asked.

  “Who doesn’t? Anyone in Harlem with half an eye could see what was happening. Even his wife.”

  “Do you think Anne might’ve …?”

  “No. She’s too … refined for that.”

  “Sometimes refinement can take a backseat when your last nerve is plucked,” I said, remembering how Anne had treated Rita Bayne that day at the beauty salon.

  Miss Adele looked at me, frowning at my lack of sympathy. “This is rather complicated, Mali.” I was about to apologize, but she continued. “But then, Thea had a complicated history, poor thing.”

  I had to bite my tongue. If I heard that “poor thing” tag one more time I would throw up.

  “How so?” I managed to ask.

  “Well, this woman,” Miss Adele took the small photograph from the table and cupped it in the palm of her hand, like a jewel. “This is Dessie Hamilton. Thea’s grandmother.”

  I nodded. “Dad said that Dessie had worked in the Half-Moon years ago.”

  Miss Adele placed the picture on the table again and gazed at it as if she expected the face in the photo to speak.

  “Dessie,” she murmured, more to the picture than to me, “was so beautiful it made you smile just to look at her. I don’t know if your father told you that she had been a dancer at the Cotton Club. She was some beauty, even though she danced in the back row.

  “The gangsters decided her legs weren’t that shapely, so they put her in back of the big-leg dancers. But that didn’t matter. She had some hips and knew what to do with them—like Josephine Baker. And those men caught a glimpse of her and stayed till closing.

  “A few of the girls—not all of them—had ‘friends,’ as we liked to call them in those days. But Dessie held out for the richest one. She figured if it was gonna happen, let it be worth her while. The man was in oil and kept her in furs for twenty years. Except that he was jealous. She couldn’t go anywhere, not that she wanted to, ’cause she loved him. He didn’t want her dancing anymore, so she quit. And they were quite a pair. Went to the Broadway shows, the opera, the nightclubs. She had a beautiful apartment and a maid to clean it. She never had to cook.”

  I nodded, wondering if this was in the genes: Thea’s lifestyle passed down to her the way my mother had given me my gray eyes. “So Dessie’s life was something out of a fairy tale?”

  “Almost. Except who knows how those things end sometimes? The man died suddenly and didn’t leave her much, just some bearer bonds. And she found out she was pregnant. So she got rid of her Cadillac and her furs one by one, and then the bonds.”

  She glanced at me, then stared until my unsympathetic gaze wavered and fell away.

  “I know what you’re thinking, Mali, but you must remember the times. We’re talking early forties. Dessie had stayed home for years. She wasn’t prepared or trained to work. And what options did black women have back then? The most practical one was to stand at 163rd Street on Grand Concourse in the Bronx in a crowd, and if you got lucky some white woman drove up and picked you up to do hours of backbreaking housework and at the end of the day put two dollars in your hand after deducting for a lunch sandwich so stale your own dog wouldn’t have eaten it.

  “But Dessie didn’t go that way; learned quick enough to pinch a penny so hard old Abe cried. That kept her together until the baby was almost two years old. Then one day, she was pushing the carriage down Seventh Avenue and passed the Half-Moon Bar, and the owner, who knew the whole story, offered her a job.

  “At that time, it was mostly men behind those counters, but he put Dessie in there and bus
iness boomed. Dessie stayed even during the war, when she could’ve made more money in a defense plant, but she’d heard those stories about how the best jobs went to all the white folks first—even the old, crippled ones—before they would hire the blacks, and she said no thanks, she’d had her share of short change from white folks. Besides, money was flowing in Harlem in those days. The Moon was jumping and she jumped right with it.

  “She made enough to send her daughter to boarding school, a white boarding school, because she wanted that child to have the education and advantages she herself didn’t have. Besides, the child, Marcella, looked white enough, so why not act white and be white.

  “Marcella came home most holidays, but sometimes she visited or went home with her rich classmates. God knows the grand tale she must’ve concocted to keep that lie going.

  “When Marcella graduated, Dessie went. I don’t know how she pulled that off. I mean Dessie was pretty pale herself, with straight hair, but … not enough to be white-white. Must’ve said she was Mediterranean or the maid or something. I don’t know. Anyway, we spent the next six months laughing about it.”

  “Was it that funny?” I asked.

  Miss Adele fixed me with a stare, and from her silence I came to understand that it wasn’t real laughter at all but the sounds we make to keep from crying, what we do when we realize race has poisoned the core of this country, and the sound we make is the distraction that keeps us from killing somebody.

  “So I laugh,” Miss Adele said, “when I hear white folks say they can trace their family to some village in Scotland or back to France at the time of Louis the Fourteenth. Fine, I say. Except they conveniently blank out that period of slavery when African women were having as many babies by white owners as they were by African men. A lot of those owners sent those white-looking children to Europe to live, marry, and have European children whose grandmama was black.

  “Other children, who were sold away because the owners didn’t want to be reminded, faded into the larger population, their blackness bleached, in the chaos of the Civil War. So I smile because somewhere in the murk of miscegenation is the true legacy that this country refuses to address.”

  “So what Dessie did with her daughter,” I said, “sending her away to a different life, wasn’t new. She was just following a certain pattern.”

  “I suppose, but it seemed to me like too damned much work, and I told Dessie so. I mean the bottom line is we really don’t know anyone’s true pedigree. Anyway, Marcella went away to college, and the summer before she was to graduate, she came home with a baby.”

  “Thea?”

  “Thea. Yes.”

  “Was her father black or white?”

  “Who knows? Marcella stayed exactly one day, stepped out to get something from the store, and never came back. A month later, Dessie received a letter from Nevada, saying Marcella was all right. Later, we heard that she’d been killed in an auto accident on the West Coast.”

  “So Dessie raised Thea?”

  “Yes. Thea never knew her mother or her father.”

  “Did she ever ask?”

  “I suppose so. What child isn’t going to ask about her parents. But how’re you gonna dig up the dead? Marcella was gone. Nothing you could do about that, can you?”

  I sat back, cradling my cup in my hand, thinking how we’re all affected by death in different ways. I knew how I felt about Benin at times, but I couldn’t remember my grief spilling over into such a state where I wandered like a catatonic through everything, allowing everyone to do for me, care for me, touch me, and yet feel nothing.

  But at times, Thea had indeed felt something. Anger, perhaps. Or jealousy. Probably had been jealous of Gladys and her close family. And she’d showed major attitude toward me when Dad had introduced us at the club.

  Miss Adele leaned forward and picked up Dessie’s picture again. “When all this is straightened out and if this picture is available, I’d like to have it,” she said.

  “I’ll see what I can do,” I said.

  “What do you intend to do with the bankbook?”

  “What is there to do,” I said, “but get it back where it belongs as fast as possible.”

  chapter eighteen

  By the time I left Miss Adele, the rain that had been falling had stopped and a late-afternoon sun was edging out of the scattering clouds to bathe Seventh Avenue in a pale coral glow. The wind was cool and smelled faintly of fresh wet leaves. I cut over to Lenox Avenue, where folks with TGIF tattooed on their foreheads emerged from the subway at 145th Street, rushing home in order to rush back out.

  Friday-evening party energy was in the air and I needed to catch up with Gladys before she left her office. I dialed her number and one of the brokers answered. “Miss Winston is with a client,” she said when I gave her my name. “Mali Anderson? Wait, just a minute.”

  Gladys came on. “Mali. How’re you doing?” Her tone was edged with impatience.

  “Sorry to bother you,” I said. “I wanted to know when we’re going back to Thea’s.”

  “Probably next week. I haven’t had time. I’ll call you.”

  She hung up abruptly and I felt relieved. She’d probably been too busy to go back to the apartment.

  I walked down Lenox to 143rd Street, where two large oil-drum shaped barbecue stoves near the curb broadcast a smoking, sharp hickory fragrance into the air. The stoves belonged to Old Man Charleston, and the waiting buyers stepped back as he ambled out of the tiny take-out restaurant draped in a chef’s toque and glistening white apron.

  He cut through the crowd like an ocean liner and opened the stoves to coat the meat with a spread of Charleston’s secret sauce. I watched and wondered, as I often did, where the secret came from, since Charleston had been born right down the avenue in Harlem Hospital.

  After serving a stretch for burglary in the sixties, he’d come out and flipped burgers in a 42nd-Street greasy spoon until his parole was up, then started his street barbecue with a charcoal stove and an umbrella stand. In a year he’d made enough to lease a sliver of store so narrow that CHARLESTON had to be printed vertically on the window.

  He cooked ribs and chicken outdoors summer and winter, and paid his fines promptly when he was ticketed. The take-out line grew longer by the season and often included some of the same cops who ticketed him.

  “Fifteen more minutes,” he announced and wiped his dark face with the plaid towel suspended from his back pocket. “Good things come to those who wait,” he reminded the few grumblers before he disappeared back into the store.

  I followed him inside and he smiled when he saw me. “Mali, Baby. Long time no see. Whassup?”

  “Nothing and plenty.” I laughed. “I need an order of ribs and a favor.”

  “The ribs you got. Name the favor.”

  “I need your picks.”

  “Locked out again?”

  “Again,” I said. He reached under the counter and pulled a palm-size case from the shelf.

  “Mali, I can see in your face you ain’t locked out this time, but don’t tell me what you want ’em for. I don’t want to know. Just have ’em back here tomorrow A.M.”

  “What’re you doing? Renting them out?”

  He raised his hands and stepped back. “Mali, I’m shocked. Shocked that you—”

  “Come on, Charleston. Are you?”

  “Hell no. I may look like a fool but that’s as far as it go. Suppose I rent some dude these picks, he lends ’em to a crackhead, and I go home and find my own crib cleaned. Do that make sense? Only reason I want ’em back here is so I’ll know where they are.”

  I folded my elbows on the narrow counter. “I’ve been meaning to ask you why you keep them.”

  “Girl, sometimes you ask the damnedest questions.” He opened a stack of plastic containers and inspected them for flaws.

  “Listen, I keep ’em to look at every now and then. Specially when things git a little tight, what with the rent and all the other bills, you know what I�
��m sayin’? I pull this box out and gaze long and hard at my used-to-be life. Everybody has somethin’ they don’t never want to go back to. Me, I’ll take the cradle—die—before I see the slammer again. I keep this box to remind me how I got there and to let me know that no matter how bad things are, they ain’t never gonna git as tough as it was in the joint.”

  As he talked, he filled a take-out carton with coleslaw, red rice, and yams, and left enough space for the ribs. He moved quickly and I marveled how someone so large was able to maneuver in such a small space: like the night I wanted a rib sandwich and walked in on the two stickup men who had him pressed to the wall.

  I had been on the job then, and when I’d yelled “Freeze! Police!” Charleston slid out of sight so fast behind the counter I thought the wall he’d been leaning against had been oiled.

  I had drawn my weapon and called for backup when one perp broke for the door. Charleston sprang up with a short-handled chopping knife—the kind you see being flipped in those Benihana restaurants—except that Charleston’s had something extra. Speed. The knife flew past me in a triple arc before landing in the perp’s shoulder blade. A witness later said the momentum pushed the guy down Lenox and right on through the revolving door of Harlem Hospital.

  I would stop in on Charleston from time to time after that, but it wasn’t until I’d left the department that we became good friends. I had come home from a party one night and found I had lost my keys. Dad was playing a wedding upstate and Alvin was sleeping over at a friend’s.

  Ruffin was smart, but not smart enough to unlock the door. Plus, when he heard my voice, he’d set up a howl so loud I thought someone had died. So I went to Charleston’s to sit over coffee and a doughnut until Dad got home.

  The coffee was so bad it talked back. I told Charleston so and he leaned on the counter.