Downtown Strut: An Edna Ferber Mystery (Edna Ferber Mysteries)

by Ed Ifkovic

  When it was done, Freddy backed against the wall, arms folded over his chest, and stared across the room toward the polished windows. Out there was Central Park and yellow taxis and uniformed doormen and…and I felt foolish, sitting there in my expensive shoes and expensive haircut. I felt guilty, and I didn’t savor the feeling. I didn’t believe I was guilty, yet Freddy’s insistent stare and those violent images echoing in my head made me want to apologize.

  Chapter Five

  On a brisk Monday morning, sleet slapping the cab window, I headed for the Ziegfeld Theater for the rescheduled meeting with Flo Ziegfeld’s assistant. A waste of time, this meeting, since Show Boat—already pruned and polished and gussied up—was set to open. Crews were already erecting the elaborate Mississippi River scenery onstage. So…a perfunctory meeting at ten, an unnecessary review of last-minute changes, my scribbled suggestions analyzed as though they were ancient unearthed cuneiforms, the out-of-town reviews scrutinized. Window dressing, all of it, more sycophantic posturing, more blather about the musical as masterpiece. I wanted to believe all of it.

  Of course, after rushing under a proffered umbrella to the stage door, I soon learned that the assistant had not arrived from her home in White Plains. Blame the inclement weather. Blame the faulty trains. No one had tried to call me. I told the frightened young man who informed me of the delay that I’d rather blame frail mankind. The young man apologized over and over, took the blame, which made no sense unless he moonlighted as the God of Thunder and Hail, and nudged me toward a coffee pot and a pile of trade magazines. “I am not an ingénue trying out for a walk-on,” I sneered, and he actually trembled.

  “I…”

  “Never mind.” I deepened my voice. “I’ll remain here and stare at the peeling walls.”

  Which is what I did because I was meeting Waters in the lobby at eleven. I made myself an obvious nuisance, pacing the floor of the small meeting room, and the young man—“My name is Jimmy, if you need me”—a rubicund youngster with pink cheeks and a Renaissance cherub’s head of curls, kept appearing at my side. “I did leave a message with your housekeeper,” he said finally, which I figured he’d just done, believing in time machines and the failure of clocks in my apartment.

  “Idle time spent in cramped, moldy theater quarters is a deadly sin,” I told him.

  Luckily, Waters showed up early, ambling in, lingering in the lobby. Jimmy reluctantly led him to me. Overjoyed, I embraced Waters in gratitude.

  “You look unhappy, Miss Edna,” he greeted me.

  “I’ve been marooned on a theatrical island.”

  He squinted. “I thought you had a meeting.”

  “What gave you that idea?”

  I told Waters to sit down, and immediately the Botticelli cherub asked if I needed anything. He eyed Waters with open suspicion, his pale gray eyes narrowing at the sight of the skinny Negro boy chummy with the cranky authoress. Waters was dressed in a creamy off-white Joe College V-neck sweater, voluminous pleated brown trousers over black-and-white tie shoes. He looked ready to play nine rounds of golf at an all-white country club in Bucks County.

  We sat on straight-backed chairs, paint stained, and I sipped coffee while Waters sat opposite me, hands folded decorously in his lap. It looked as if I were interviewing him for a job, one he knew he’d never get. “Relax, Waters,” I insisted. “We have time to kill. Clearly my meeting is not going to take place. White Plains is obviously now located in Outer Mongolia, and thus inaccessible save by yak and muscular Sherpa.”

  He laughed. “No rehearsals here today?”

  “I guess not. The set is going up. Hear the clamor?” We could hear banging and shuffling, which put my nerves on edge.

  “Sort of creepy sitting here in this room.”

  “Welcome to the world of backstage.” A pause as Waters looked everywhere but at me. I was impatient—and antsy. “Waters, since we have some time now, I’ve been meaning to ask you something.” His eyes got wide, flickering, gold specks in the corners of his deep black pupils. I laughed. “Nothing that serious. It’s just that, well, the other afternoon at my apartment there was such…such tension. The spitfire anger. Last summer everyone was so quiet and polite.” I shrugged.

  A heartbeat, then his soft-spoken words. “Last summer everyone was on their best behavior in your apartment.”

  I’d suspected that. “Well, it’s a comfort knowing I can still intimidate young folks for no reason. I hope I haven’t lost my power to wither a few souls. Nevertheless, the other afternoon…”

  He smiled. “I’m certain that’s true, Miss Edna, but, you know, things have been bubbling to the surface lately. I don’t understand a lot of it. Last summer Bella was going out with Lawson, and then not going out with him. I think it was real casual with them. Nothing serious. Ellie rarely spoke up. There was no Harriet, no Freddy. You can tell that Bella doesn’t like them in the group. They’re too crude for her. They see her as phony high class. Dicty—Harriet’s word. But I like them. And Roddy wasn’t part of the group then. The fact of the matter is that he’s the lightning rod.”

  “Roddy? But he’s so…charming, unassuming…”

  “Yeah, he may be that, but I’m thinking that may be the problem. He sort of likes to keep away from everyone, real private, and that makes everyone want to be with him. When he talks to you, it seems like you’re the only person in the whole world he wants to be with. It’s a strange power to have.”

  “Well, he certainly made me like him.”

  “Join the club.”

  “You’re his good friend, no?”

  He thought about his words, his eyes drifting round the room. “Well, we’re friends. I don’t know about the ‘good’ part. You get to know only bits and pieces of him. If you push him, he can get moody. I’ve seen him in a real bad mood. He…he explodes.” He shrugged as if he had no other explanation.

  “I like him.”

  “I repeat, Miss Edna. Everyone likes him. But no one really knows him.” He swallowed. “Sometimes I think he likes playing games. Sometimes it’s like he’s so much older than the rest of us.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, he’s only twenty, I guess. I’m the kid, and Bella and Lawson are a few years older. But Roddy…it’s like he knows something…” He shook his head. “I don’t know what I’m talking about.”

  “But what is he all about?”

  Waters took a long time answering. “People who smile all the time sometimes got a lot of demons inside them.” He shook his head. “That’s my mom talking to me.”

  I grinned. “Sounds like your mother.”

  “But it’s not hard to see that in some people.”

  “Some people go through life and never see it, Waters.” I leaned in. “But Bella seems to flirt with him—in front of Lawson, no less.

  “Because Ellie likes him, you know. The two, back and forth, rivals. He keeps both at a distance, which means they go crazy chasing him. ‘Roddy, you promised to help me with my story, my poem.’ That kind of remark. Roddy this, Roddy that. I know it irritates Lawson. He’s said some things to Roddy, not nice things, and Roddy stared back at him, hurt in his face, that sad puppy dog look. It’s funny because Lawson found himself apologizing to Roddy, and he’s not the kind of guy who likes to apologize to anyone.”

  I paused. “Is Roddy a good writer? That paragraph he shared the other day was beautiful, if a little stiff.”

  “He writes all the time—like he sings all the time—but it’s only his singing that he shares with the world.”

  “That’s strange, no?”

  “It’s like he doesn’t trust himself, Miss Edna. Even his singing now—you know how he left Show Boat because his voice kept disappearing? We all wondered at that. But I heard him singing one day when no one was around. It sounded perfect to me. Roddy believes he can only fail. It’s like
someone told him that. Just as Bella and Lawson believe they can only succeed.”

  “Roddy promised to show me his work when he’s…”

  “Ready.” He finished for me. He laughed. “He says that all the time.”

  “Let’s hope he’s ready today.”

  ***

  Waters and I were headed uptown to pick up Roddy at his apartment. On Saturday Roddy had lingered when the lunch at my apartment was over, watching the others leave and then helping Waters and Rebecca clean up. He’d been in a chatty mood and even promised to let me read more of his fiction. “I am finishing some stuff,” he insisted.

  Waters had leaned in, joking, even poking Roddy in the side, teasing that Roddy’s mysterious and long-awaited work was a satirical fiction based on his friends’ lives, some contemporary hard-biting comedy of manners that centered on the young black intelligentsia of Harlem—not the famous “Niggerati Manor” on 136th Street, that rooming house with the black and red walls, where writers like Hughes and Wallace Thurman and Zora Neale Hurston lived rent-free—but a biting, cynical portrayal of undiscovered writers, a look at struggling folks like Bella and Lawson. The remark stopped Roddy as he moved with cups and saucers, and I felt Waters had punctured Roddy’s secrecy. Bella and Lawson as protagonist and antagonist in a modern-day Harlem intrigue, with the delicious addition of gentle Ellie and her silver-throated jazz voice. Maybe even Harriet and Freddy, the street chorus chanting to the pulse of upper Seventh Avenue.

  “Is that true?” I’d asked him then.

  He didn’t answer.

  “I knew it,” Waters exclaimed. “You better make me better looking, more talented, and…older.”

  “I’m not much older, Waters. Twenty.”

  “Well, make me the same age. No one takes a seventeen-year-old seriously.”

  Roddy, very soberly, “I do. That’s the age I left home for good.”

  I found myself watching him: the casual, almost delicate gestures, the soft puppy eyes, the languid dipping of his head, the grin.

  “Why did you leave home then?”

  He debated what to tell me. “We were living out in Brooklyn, far out, forever by subway, so far from Manhattan it was like another country, and my Mama died around the time I turned sixteen. Papa struggled as a plumber but never had any money because he drank it, gambled it. A decent guy, maybe, but a real mean drunk, brutal. Beat me up so’s I had black eyes, stuff like that. You know, he didn’t like his kids. As each kid hit sixteen or so, out the door. He married a fierce woman who blamed me for everything, lied about me, real nasty, mocked me because I wouldn’t fight her back, said I ate too much, was home too much, so I just left.”

  Waters was staring at him, as if hearing the story for the first time. “Roddy, how come you never told me this?”

  Roddy looked into my face. “I wanted to move to Harlem anyway, where the life was. I lived here and there, with different people I met, worked dumb jobs, sold papers, a stock boy at a cigar store. You know, I never finished my last year of high school but I always had a library card. That was important to me. Last year I bumped into Lawson at the bookstore up on 136th Street, the Hobby Horse, a place that sells Negro writers’ stuff. I recognized him because I’d seen him at a family funeral a couple years back.” He smiled. “He’s sort of memorable.”

  Waters looked at me. “Lawson is Roddy’s cousin, Miss Edna.”

  I nodded. “I know. I keep being told that.”

  Roddy laughed. “Maybe because we’re so different. I never got his drop-dead looks. Anyway, he’d drifted to Harlem from Philly, where his family lives still. His father is a carpenter, got his own house, I hear. Lawson came to New York to be an actor and a writer. He’s a couple years older than me, you know. Well, he got thrown out of an apartment he shared with some other actors—he didn’t like to pay his share, still doesn’t, truth be told—and we decided to room together.”

  “When did you meet Bella?” Waters asked.

  “Right after I came to the city.”

  “Was she seeing Lawson then?” I asked.

  “Why?”

  “Bella likes you.”

  He shook his head. “No, she doesn’t. She thinks she does.”

  Looking as if he’d shared too much with a stranger, Roddy bustled off to the kitchen, and Waters looked at me, puzzled.

  “What?” I asked.

  “In one second you learn more about him and Lawson than I did after all this time.”

  “I’m a reporter, Waters. I ask questions.”

  “I ask questions, too. But people don’t answer me.”

  I touched his shoulder. “That’s because you’re seventeen.”

  “My point exactly.”

  Before Roddy and Waters left together, I’d asked if they wanted to join me for lunch on Monday.

  Which was why Waters and I, hailing a cab in front of the Ziegfeld Theater, were headed into Harlem to gather Roddy from his apartment. Flo Ziegfeld’s assistant never did show up, and I left without informing the apologetic young man who’d tried to keep a watchful eye on me.

  “Did you remind him we’re coming?” I asked Waters as we settled into the back seat of the cab.

  “No answer. Sometimes they don’t pay their phone bill.”

  “Really?”

  “Not everyone is rich, Miss Edna.”

  “Thank you, Waters. Now you sound like Harriet or Freddy reading a rousing manifesto in my living room.”

  ***

  Despite the chill and the wisps of light snow in the air, Harlem at midday was a rag-tag kaleidoscope of sidewalks crammed with strollers, folks weaving around mothers lazily pushing carriages with squawking toddlers, men and women chatting, gazing into shop windows, running to cars double-parked in the street. Outside a lunch counter a group of young men leaned into one another, two of them sporting snazzy leopard-skin overcoats. Every head turned as a trio of pretty young women sauntered by, each one in snug-fitting coats, heads covered in cloches so red or blue or yellow the hats seemed dabs of shocking color on an artist’s palette. Arms entwined, they ignored the grinning, foolish young men, though I noticed one woman glanced back over her shoulder as they passed. She tittered. One of the men bowed and did a sudden flirtatious dance step. He doffed his fedora to the woman.

  Waters was looking elsewhere. “There,” he yelled. “The Spot.” He was pointing to a tiny eatery tucked in between a cigar store and a florist, a drab-looking place, unpretentious, the name of the restaurant announced in a bold, black-lettered sign nailed over the door, with jagged words painted below: “Where Everyone You Know Is Waiting For You.” Here, I knew, whites and blacks could mingle freely together without a disapproving eye. They could sip famous-though-notoriously-bad coffee, munch on glazed raised sugar doughnuts, and, the more adventurous, a generous slice of rich sweet potato pie.

  But it wasn’t the abundant confections that attracted folks to the place. Here, according to the ticker-tape scribes in Vanity Fair, writers like Langston Hughes, Wallace Thurman, Zora Neale Hurston, and even W. E. B. Du Bois, occupied tables with famous whites folks like Carl Van Vechten. Here the painter Aaron Douglas lingered throughout the winter afternoons. Here, once, Aleck Woollcott, meeting Negro novelist Jean Fauset for lunch, drank a whopping twenty-five cups of coffee—according to him. “More like twenty-five slices of sweet potato pie,” I’d jibed. Here, now, I was treating Waters and Roddy to lunch because neither had been there, though both desperately wanted to go. The problem was that The Spot made you wait for tables, customers huddled in an overheated entryway, sometimes for an hour. Once inside they paid fifteen cents for a cup of that horrid coffee. Every other eatery, even down on swank Park Avenue, charged five cents. Yet people clamored to get in. City legend maintained that our beloved jazz mayor, the Broadway dandy Jimmy Walker, once was forced to wait for a table, and wasn’t happy.


  The cab cruised past Small’s Paradise, and I noted how drab and downright suspect it looked during harsh daylight; only nighttime, with its glitzy lights and creeping shadows and tinkling streetlights, gave the place its allure. The cab turned down 138th Street, west of Seventh Avenue, and came to a stop midway down the block. I shooed Waters out the door, told the cabbie to wait at the curb, and surveyed the building where Lawson and Roddy lived. A five-story classic brownstone, shabby and dark, with chipped and missing bricks and some cracked windows, one with a board nailed across a shattered pane; a cement stoop, much repaired, with a peeling black wrought-iron railing; and a broken light fixture hanging off loose wires over the entrance. A glass panel in the front door had shattered, a lacy spider’s web. The building looked desperately poor, blighted, though once it had been a stylish structure. The midday sun glinted off the upper windows, but the lower floors lay shrouded in unrelenting shadow.

  Waters was taking his time, and I kept checking my watch. The cabbie, a wiry Irish lad with mushroom carrot hair and a slough boy cap, was whistling a tune that was starting to grate. The longer we waited, the shriller the discordant tune. I knew Waters was not idly chatting with Lawson because on the ride uptown he’d mentioned that Lawson stayed most nights at Bella’s, a few blocks away, where Bella’s indifferent and often soused brother didn’t care. He came home simply to change into his janitor’s uniform before heading to work.

  The super, Mr. Porter, Waters said, was a born-again Bible-thumper who frowned on young women visiting the back apartment where Lawson and Roddy lived, and more than once raised a stink. Certainly young women could not stay over. Of course, Waters confided, Roddy and Lawson often entered through a little-used back door off the back alley, sometimes with friends.

  “I think it’s awful myself, such goings on,” Waters told me, a severe puritanical look on his face. Bella, he told me, lowering his voice, had slipped in by way of the back door one time, but the super heard her raucous laughter at two in the morning and pounded on the door. He’d dragged Bella out, somewhat dishabille, while spouting appropriate Bible verses at her. Interestingly, Roddy claimed, Mr. Porter was a drunk who spent most of his money on the working girls who were housed at Madame Turner’s up on Convent Avenue. On Sundays, all day, he worshiped at the Abyssinian Baptist Church between Lenox and Seventh Avenue, where he prayed for the girls he’d entertained or who entertained him the night before.