The next day at noon he got a letter from home. He came upstairs in the barracks and sat on his bunk, and Millie always wrote the same way she talked. He was afraid to open it at first.
Dear Solly:
“I miss you so very much these days, no matter how hard I try to fill my life with other things. I work with the Red Cross, the air-raid wardens, and I still go down to the Stage Door Canteen. It doesn’t do any good at all.”
His face began to fill and he looked up and around.
“I suppose it is simply because you are my life, and without you there is very little left. I just don’t seem to be able to grin and bear it like other wives I know. Some of my friends go to dances and go out on dates with the available men, but nothing like that interests me. I try awful hard to be brave and strong like you want me to be, but sometimes the tears just fill up my eyes no matter what. I wish you were here to kiss them away, my darling. My family doesn’t understand me at all. They say, go out and have a good time. Don’t be so serious. You’re only young once. But where is the good time without you, sweetheart? I think your mother understands.”
He stared at the letter, smiling bitterly. Your family is right. You should get yourself a solid 4-F citizen, and get it regularly. That way I wouldn’t feel so damn guilty about Fannie Mae Branton.
“I spoke to my boss about you the other day. There is a possibility of your getting a job in our firm after you finish law school. I told them what a great brain you are.”
Our firm! She thinks she’s a partner in the firm already.
“Every move I make, darling, is with you in mind. Every plan, every thought is just for you.”
Well, he wouldn’t let this letter make any difference, he told himself belligerently. A letter was a letter—that’s all—and nothing more. It didn’t change him and it didn’t change Millie, and it couldn’t write Fannie Mae out of existence. He wouldn’t wait a day longer. He’d write her tonight and tell her about Fannie Mae, and she would just have to be a sensible woman. She had her phony family in Crown Heights and all those colored society boys. She was beautiful and eligible and could marry easily again. She could call her shots.
“I love you so much my heart really aches sometimes with loneliness. There’ll never be another man for me, my darling, even if the war should last a hundred years.”
You don’t even know the man I am now, he thought. I’m the bitterest bastard in the world. How in hell can anybody love me?
She had never written him a letter like this one. Damn her sweet time. It was as if she sensed the whole business between him and Fannie Mae and was trying to head it off. It was if she smelled the sordid mess all the way to New York City, all the way to the lily-white Wall Street law firm where she worked.
He put the letter aside and stared across the barracks. She didn’t need him. Her family were bigshots and would be glad to shake her loose from him. She was the only daughter of one of the “first” families of Brooklyn, colored, that is. And proud of her light-skin bourgeois heritage. He knew all about her family’s background. Her grandfather came from Virginia as a boy and worked in Wall Street in the Stock Exchange—with a broom and a mop and pail. His benevolent boss generously gave him tips on the Market and invested his savings wisely for him and made him “nigrah” rich, and Grandpa opened up a catering business. Catering to good rich white folks. One of the family’s proudest moments and most often-used quotations was a famous compliment paid to Grandpa by his Wall Street boss. “Neal, boy, you are the whitest black man I ever met. If you’d been born white, you’d been a robber baron just like Vanderbilt or Morgan.”
They were one of the first “families” to move into fashionable Crown Heights on President Street, before the grand white folks started running for their very lives. Grandpa worked himself to death and Grandma ruled the roost. Millie had had the cream of the crop of the young men of Negro society to choose from, but she had chosen Solly after three months’ acquaintance. She met him at the Urban League. Solomon Saunders, Junior, who had neither pot nor window nor pedigree. He wasn’t even a first-generation New Yorker. Well, she could go back to her colored society, her pretty light-skinned colored boys.
Solly remembered the Sunday evening he’d had to go to meet the family like they do in the corny novels about upper-upper-upper-class rich white folks. And they had stared down their skinny Nordic-type bourgeois noses at him suspiciously and superciliously. But Grandma liked him immediately. She said: “He’s dark, but he’s good-looking. And he reminds me of your grandpa, and he’s got more get-up about him than all these trifling spoiled pantywaisted colored fraternity boys put together and multiplied.”
He laughed, remembering. When they were courting and he wanted to get her goat or bring her down a couple of notches from her high and queenly horse, he would tease her to death about her family. He would tell her, “I keep forgetting your family are Black Irish, baby, and I sure don’t want to get your Irish up, my wild Black Irish Rose!”
He would laugh and laugh and she would be angry and insulted and stop speaking to him. But now as he reconstructed it, he thought maybe he had not made her angry after all.
Her family was unbelievable. Her father was not a go-getter like his pa before him. His managing of the catering business was a holding operation. Her pretty, vivacious mother was a social climber, although no one seemed to know just where she was climbing or how far up. Millie’s brother considered business a vulgar occupation. His name was Roderick and he called his grandpa “Papa” and he stuttered and stammered badly.
Once before Grandpa died he had a man-to-man talk with Roddy. “Rod, doggone, boy, you the last button on Jacob’s coattail. You got to carry the family’s name onward and upward, you know what I mean?” Roddy said, “All right, Pa-Pa-Pa-Pa-Pah—pa.”
“Doggonit, boy, you been kicked outa some of the best schools in the country, colored and white. What you gonna do with yourself?”
“I don’t know, Pa-Pa-Pa-Pa-Pahh—pa.”
Grandpa said, “Well, I can see you ain’t gon be no doctor or lawyer or chicken-eating preacher, and I’m glad you ain’t gon be no schoolteacher. I’ll tell you what I’ll do. Maybe a change of environment would do you some good. I’ll set you up in some little business anywhere you want to go—Cleveland, Ohio, or Dee-troit, Michigan, or Chicago, or something like that. Anything you want to do anywhere you want to go.”
Roddy said, “I don’t want to leave you, Pa-Pa-Pa-Pahh—pa.”
Grandpa was swiftly losing patience with the last button on Jacob’s coattail. “What in the hell you gon be in life, Roddy?”
“Nu-nu-nu-nu-noth-ing, Pa-Pa-Pa-Pahpa.”
Grandpa had stared at the last button and broken into a loud and boisterous laughter, and all the rest of them had run into the room, and he had laughed till the tears streamed down his face and they had to bring him a Scotch and soda to calm his nerves. He dropped dead three weeks later.
Solly still didn’t believe the Belford family actually existed. They were an old-fashioned novel he had read in a pocketbook edition.
Solly sat up on his bunk in the sun-washed barracks. One thing he had done with Millie was to make her move away from home and stay away. She was in their apartment with his mother. Well, she would go back to her people now. And everybody would be happy. He picked the letter up again.
“I have some good news for you, darling. We are going to have a baby.”
His eyes stared at the written words unbelievingly, his stomach trembling. It was a false alarm—women were always having false alarms. He felt a chill move from the middle of his back fanlike out toward his shoulders and wave after wave after wave after wave. His face began to fill.
“The doctor says there’s no doubt about it. Of course, I’ve known for some time now, but I did not want to bother you. You have enough on your mind—”
He didn’t read any further. He thought his heart would leap from his chest. He put the letter under his pillow and got up and walked
across the barracks and down the stairs and out into the pouring rain. He was going to be a father. He did not realize it was raining. He was going to be a father—a thing he’d never been before.
The Thanksgiving party in Ebbensville was a great success. About fifty-five or sixty soldiers and thirty young courageous women. The dinner was served in the colored Pythian Temple. A big turkey dinner with every one of those Southern trimmings—turkey dressing and candied yams and potato salad and English peas and cranberry sauce and ice cream and cake and punch and lots of other things and plenty of everything, and afterwards a dance with a live dance band from Camp Johnson Henry, and Solly hardly spoke to Fannie Mae all afternoon and evening. He danced with her once near the beginning of the dance and then he went around dancing from Southern lady to Southern lady, and he watched six or seven other soldiers rushing Fannie Mae, and every now and then their eyes would meet, her large eyes full of questions unasked and unanswerable, and linger momentarily, and then look off into miles of emptiness. And Bookworm Taylor was having himself a natural ball.
Worm danced with Fannie Mae three or four rounds in succession and tried to bring her out of her distraction, as the music went around and around, and he tried to jitterbug with her, but she told him she didn’t feel like it. Bookworm was a real gone bug. Like the cats at the Track on Lenox Avenue. Worm grabbed one lady and they bugged for a while. He threw her this way and that and cut all kinds of fancy steps, Savoy Ballroom style, and the lady refused to be confused. She kept right up with him to the tune of “One o’clock Jump,” and the joint was leaping as people stopped dancing to make room for Worm and the swivel-hipped long-legged brown-skin lady who was time enough for him. The crowd made a circle and gathered around him and the lady, and they clapped their hands as the band played over and over again, the “One o’clock Jump,” ad-libbing and off-jiving as they went along, and sneaking in portions of “Flying Home” and soaring way out and ending with the “Jump” again with the three trumpets blasting to the top of the roof, and the people shouting and clapping their hands. Bookworm was a natural bug.
The next time Solly glimpsed Worm he was dancing with the same young lady, doing a slow drag with his big head resting seriously upon her shoulder and cheek to cheek and his eyes closed to the awfully disturbing music of the “Stormy Monday Blues” and the vocalist making like Billy Eckstein.
It was Thanksgiving back in New York City, Solly thought, and already the stores have begun the great commercial push toward Christmas with lights and decorations and phony Santa Clauses, and what was Millie doing tonight on this, the first Thanksgiving of their marriage? She seemed a million years and miles away, unreachable in time and space. At the moment he could not even conjure up her face from out of his fickle memory. Lovely vivacious voluptuous Millie Saunders with their baby in her belly. With their baby in her belly.
“You look like you’re lost,” Solly heard her say, coming up behind him. “Aren’t you having a good time? After all,” she said with an exaggerated smile, “why do you think I went to all this trouble plotting and planning? It was all done just to make you happy. To raise your morale.” She was in his arms now, dancing without any effort at all it seemed.
“I’ll always be true, baby,” the man sang in a voice that imitated Billy Eckstein. He had known what it would be like, dancing with her. She would be light as a soft summer breeze in his arms and so damn comfortable, he would feel at home as if he had a permanent residence in this place, and yet it was so upsetting and disturbingly sweet, her warm breath on his neck. She would remind him of Millie, and she did remind him painfully of Millie, as they danced their dance—Millie Saunders, his wife, with their baby in her belly and hundreds and hundreds of miles away, with his child in her swelling stomach—Millie Saunders. And at this moment Fannie Mae was more like Millie than Millie Saunders ever was.
“Come back, pretty Mama.
Love me one more time . . .”
He loved Millie Belford Saunders—nobody else—nobody else! But Fannie Mae was here and now and a bitter reality, sweet and tender, and at this moment he related to her from far far greater depths. The singer made up his own lyrics.
“All this conniving,” Fannie Mae said teasingly, “just to get you to dance with me. Just to get you in my arms again. It’s a sin and a shame.” But he sounded just like Eckstein.
“You certainly went to an awful lot of trouble,” he said in what he meant to be an offhand manner. “Not to mention the tremendous expense.” He was warm from being close to her. And shamed.
“Why aren’t you enjoying yourself?” she asked him almost angrily, looking up into his darkening eyes.
She was an armful—just right for him—and yet so goddamn wrong. “I am enjoying myself. What makes you think I’m not? And why wouldn’t I be? I’m dancing with the loveliest girl in the State of Georgia. How do I sound?” How did he sound?
“Come home, baby, need you all the time.”
“But not in the State of New York—is that it?” He could feel her anxious nippled softness breathing against his angry chest and her heart beating violently against his ribs and her thighs against his aching thighs. And felt her throbbing in the him of him.
Now was the time to tell her he was married. Now that she had asked for it. But he couldn’t spoil her party for her, not here on the dance floor. He would tell her tonight when it was all over, and then it would be all over between them. It had never really begun. It couldn’t begin. “New York is a pretty large State you know. Gobs and gobs of people.”
“That’s what they tell me,” she said. “But being a little naïve country girl, I wouldn’t know anything about it at all.”
The band had changed from “Stormy Monday” to “Good Night, Sweetheart,” and the tempo had quickened and then the band drifted into “Home Sweet Home” and the tempo quickened. She looked up into his face and said, “Joe Taylor asked me to let him take me home.”
“That’s nice,” he said. What else could he say? “A prince of a fellow is Joseph Taylor. The very best. I mean, he really is.”
“I told him you were taking me home,” she said.
“That’s even nicer,” Solly said absent-mindedly. “But you better beware of this fellow, Solomon Saunders. He’s not as nice as Joseph Taylor.”
“I figured there was things you and I might have to talk about—but maybe there isn’t.”
“There is,” he whispered. “There definitely is.” She misunderstood his meaning. Her face warmed up her dark eyes brightened.
Outside in the cool night air that bit into their warm nervous bodies, she walked close to him till they reached her car, and then she turned to him and said, “Do you want to drive?”
“Why not?”
And she gave him the keys and he got behind the steering wheel and she in beside him and close up against him and her innocent happy head up against his nervous shoulder. She reached toward his handsome somber face and caressed his cheeks. She gave him directions to get to her house and they didn’t speak another word till they reached her house, and she said, “Do you want to go in for a while and sit on the porch? The full moon is out tonight.”
He said, “I love full moons.” And they went down the walk together hand in hand with the full moon bright and a ripened yellow and casting soft shadows onto the walk, into the flower gardens on each side of the walk, and the side of her slim nervous body walking against his agitated body. They came up on the porch and sat on a bench, and she turned toward him and said, “Solly! Solly!” And put her arms around his neck and his arms went around her waist, which was just an armful custom-made for arms like his, and at that moment he forgot everything else as his lips held her lips soft and firm as he remembered them, and her sweet breath against his cheeks and her active bosom softly against his chest, and after a moment there was a breathing spell in which she asked him, “What’s the matter, Solly?”
The silky sweetness of her Southern accent got on his nerves. “It’s getting
late,” he said. “We have to make reveille tomorrow morning, Thanksgiving party notwithstanding. Got to fight that war for democracy. Got to get that Double-V for Victory.”
“I understand,” she said quietly. “I understand.” And she put her arms around his neck again, and he firmly and deliberately took them away from around his neck and placed them in her lap.
“What’s the matter, Solly? What did I do? You couldn’t be jealous of Joe Taylor—”
His mind deliberately played around with the question. In a way though he was jealous of Bookworm Taylor. “I am insanely jealous of the good Private Joseph No-Middle-Name Taylor. Yes I am.” Bookworm could be completely honest with Fannie Mae, and that was a tremendous advantage. His own relationship with her was based on lies of commission and omission.
“Maybe,” she said, “you still blame me for your being in town the night the police picked you up. Maybe that’s what the matter is.” She said, “All the girls in the club were telling me tonight how handsome you are, as if I didn’t already know you’re the handsomest man in all the world, and the kindest and the most deeply feeling and the most intelligent, and I’m the luckiest woman in the world—” She stopped to catch her breath. “Don’t blame me, Solly. Please don’t blame me, darling, about that night. I’m so sorry about everything—”
And Then We Heard the Thunder Page 20