by Ed Ifkovic
“But you enjoyed being cruel to him. You told him he’d have no career in New York.”
“Yes, I did.”
“But why torture him?”
He shrugged. “Because I can.”
“He’s done nothing to you.”
“Oh, but he has. He made demands on me.” A pause. “I just don’t like him.”
“Because he’s with Bella.” A statement.
“That, and he’s too tall.”
“No, he’s too black.”
“Maybe he’s not black enough.” Another pause. “This is not worth talking about, Edna. He’s…nothing.” Suddenly he stressed the word, loud, high. “Nothing!”
The waitress, approaching our table, instantly swiveled and walked away. I noticed other irritated diners glancing at us.
“Jed,” I began, “your voice.”
He didn’t care. “Edna, let me tell you a story. You like stories, I know. You steal them from others and then publish them in the Saturday Evening Post. What did F. Scott Fitzgerald call you in This Side of Paradise? The Yiddish descendant of O. Henry? He lumped you with Zane Grey, no? How that must have got under your skin.” Grinning, Jed made a clownish face, exaggerated, grotesque. “Anyway, one afternoon I was sitting in on auditions for The Chocolate Dandies. It’s an inept plagiarism of Shuffle Along, a cast of hoofers and singers. Bored, I sat there as the performers went through their paces….”
“What are we talking about?” I broke in, annoyed.
“Well, Bella’s beau actually showed up to audition. He was completely right for the part, of course. A young, good-looking Negro, good to look at from the orchestra. Good rich voice. So Lawson read for the part—which takes place, if I remember correctly, in a Harlem jazz club. Or am I thinking of another travesty? The author and the director, I could see, were taken with him. My God, Lawson could have written the scene about himself, so perfect he seemed to us. And they made it clear to Lawson that they liked what he had done. God, the way he beamed.”
I pulled in my cheeks. “But you sabotaged it.”
“Very easy to do, in fact. After he left the room I whispered that I knew his work. I’d seen him act at the Lafayette, a minor role. I told them that he was a shirker, a shuffling and lazy sort, all teeth and brio and no energy to show up on time.”
I was shaking my head. “And Lawson probably knew you did this.”
“Well, he saw me sitting there. Actually he stared directly at me at one point.”
“This was right after you rejected his play?”
“Yes.”
“So he probably suspected.”
“I hope so.” A wolfish smile.
“You blackballed him.”
“Exactly.”
“Jed, this is maniacal…and…”
“Oh, who cares, Edna dear? The life span of a Negro actor in New York is calculated in seconds. A role here, a role there, and next year they’re back to hauling ashes in a basement on St. Nicholas Avenue.”
I gathered my scarf and gloves. “Iago had nothing on you, Jed Harris.”
“Ah, another Negro-and-white melodrama.”
“That one ends in murder, too.”
“Are you expecting a murder, Edna. Perhaps of me?”
“Jed, you’ve forgotten that Roddy Parsons was murdered in his bed.”
“Yes, I know all about it. And your excursions into darkest Harlem, as chronicled in the papers.”
I’d been reaching for my overcoat, but I slipped back into my seat. “You do remember Roddy, don’t you? I don’t mean in my apartment or uptown at the chop suey place. I’ve heard stories already, Jed. You met him before.”
“Why is this important?”
“It’s considered impolite to answer a question with another question, Jed.”
He chuckled. “My, my, Edna, the schoolmarm with verbal stick and lace-collar oxbow.”
“An innocent question.”
“I rather doubt that, Edna. But yes, in fact, I do recall encountering that offensive, brash boy.”
“So you do remember him?”
“I don’t forget things, Edna. That’s why I’m rich.”
“Tell me.”
He snickered. “But I’ll come across as a hero in this little anecdote.”
“I’ll be the judge of your heroism.”
He rattled his coffee cup, and the waitress, hovering, rushed to refill it. He poured so much cream into the brew that it turned murky white, cloying, sickening. “Actually two other times. The first time was when I kicked Lawson out of my office. I suspect you’ve been told about that encounter. He was there, introduced himself, and was snotty. But that’s not the most interesting encounter with the dead lad. One night in Harlem not so long ago.” A pause. “No. Once upon a time in Harlem…”
“Get on with it, Jed.”
“Story telling is the art of selection of detail.”
“Jed!”
“All right. I doubt you’ll hear this version from Bella or Lawson. One night in Harlem I was with Bella at one of those black-and-white clubs and we’d just left and were strolling on the sidewalk. Lawson spotted us. I guess he was coming home from his job because he was wearing that dumb janitor’s uniform. At first I didn’t even recognize him. Christ, he was one more Negro traveling the midnight sidewalks up there—but Bella stared, seemed embarrassed and confused. Like she wanted to be elsewhere. Lawson, of course, was not in a good mood. Well, neither was I. Once before I’d met him uptown, and the three of us actually drank the night away in a club. At least Bella tells me it was Lawson there—I don’t remember. Bella had been pleading for something—some introduction or connection. Lord, the girl is cutthroat. Well, just days before, I’d told this Lawson his career was over—and there he was, pouting, as I strolled by with his girlfriend. He yelled at me, which, I gather, Negroes don’t do to white men down South, so be it. I pushed him.”
“Jed, should you be jostling on the streets?”
“Jostling. Edna, Edna.” Suddenly Jed’s eyes got that steely, cold look, the diamond pinpoints. “You know what he did? He hit me, Edna. He swung and hit me here.” He placed his hand on his left bicep. “Here.”
“Jed, what?”
“That was it, that one moment. But ugly. He hit me. Bella was screaming, crying. And she seemed ready to go to him. Him! There she was, dressed in a sequined flapper outfit I bought. So I stood there, massaging my shoulder, and said, calmly, ‘Bella, choose him or me.’ She got quiet but I repeated my demands. Lawson, mean-eyed, watched. Finally, looking apologetically at Lawson, as though sending him a secret message, she took a step. She came to stand at my side. Lawson fumed.”
“Now I see,” I told him.
Peevish: “No, you don’t.”
“Jed, Lawson never told me this. He just told me about the scene in your office.”
He chuckled. “Would you tell anybody such a story? The black boy losing his girl on a Harlem street corner.”
“But Jed, what does this have to do with Roddy? That was my question to you.”
He stopped laughing. “Oh, that’s right. I get so excited recounting my heroism that I forgot your question.”
“No, you didn’t.”
“True, I didn’t. Well, I neglected to mention that this Roddy fellow was with Lawson when he approached me and Bella.”
“And you knew it was Roddy because you had that scene outside your office?”
“Yes. He stood there, a dumb ass grin on his face, when Lawson and I started spouting nonsense to each other. But the foolish grin dropped when Lawson hit me. He yelled out ‘Whoa’ as if he were writing titles for a William S. Hart cowboy serial, and I pointed at him. I taunted him, deliberately. ‘Ah, yes, so you’re the other failed writer. Failed actor. Lord, it’s a lethal combination…writer and actor. Two sides of a worn-out
coin. The dueling second from my office.’ I went on and on like that. I could see I was getting to him. Lawson had pulled back, licking his wounds, as it were; but this Roddy became enraged. Bella, babbling, kept saying, let’s go, let’s go, come on now, stop. As if that was supposed to make me leave him alone.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“I don’t like to be challenged.”
“For God’s sake, Jed, they’re just young lads.”
“They’re men. But Roddy did the unforgivable.” A pause, as he licked his lower lip. “He made an obscene gesture at me, and he called me a bully. ‘You’re a bully who enjoys beating down those who have no power.’”
“Well, it’s true.”
He ignored that. “No one talks to me like that.”
I drew my lips into a thin line. “But everyone thinks it about you, Jed.”
He was shaking his head, and I doubted whether he heard me. “No one.”
“A street brawl, Jed. Think of it.”
“Then they stormed away, leaving Bella clutching to my side as though I were a piece of driftwood.”
I was shaking my head. “Unpleasant, Jed.”
Jed stood, reached for the check, and he looked directly into my face, smiling. “No one insults me like that, least of all a Negro. I called after this Roddy fellow, ‘I’ll remember your face.’ He turned back to me and bellowed, ‘Probably long after I’ve forgotten yours!’” Jed was reaching into his wallet for cash. “So he got himself murdered one night.” Jed was counting out some dollar bills. “A pity. Really.”
Chapter Thirteen
On Christmas I hosted a brunch for family visiting from Chicago, though no one seemed happy to be in my apartment on the cold, windy day. My sister Fannie kept glancing out the window at the swirling snowflakes and muttering about a cold she was getting. My nieces nodded at their generous holiday checks and talked of ski weekends in Vermont. My mother protested that the mink jacket I’d bought her was too short. Furthermore, she’d clearly recalled suggesting the sable with the red velvet lining. Hadn’t I listened? I had little patience with them all, loved as they were.
Merry Christmas, Edna.
The brunch was superb but untouched by me. Rebecca and Waters were spending the afternoon and evening with relatives, though she’d left a magnificent buffet of cold duck salad, scalloped potatoes, green beans with almond slices, fresh cornbread buttery to the touch, and a rip-roaring chocolate cake so dark and high it seemed some mountainous creation. I put nothing on my plate.
“Edna,” my mother began as she sliced into the cake, her thumb smeared with velvety frosting, “tell us about the murder. I never tire…”
Fannie was frowning. “Mother, we’ve heard it before. I’m not sure why everyone is thrilled that Edna found her name in the tabloids, slinking into squalid tenements to find dead young Negroes.”
I stood. “Have a wonderful Christmas.”
I headed to my workroom.
For a while I lost myself in my mail, but that quickly paled. Through the door I’d slammed, I could hear rustling and whispering as my family left the apartment, though my mother punctuated the blissful quiet with phlegmatic outbursts, which suggested she was dying. I ignored it all, and eventually she left the apartment, going to spend the next few days in Connecticut.
I sat in my workroom, quiet, quiet.
The phone rang once or twice. I didn’t move.
I was thinking of Roddy assailing Jed Harris, that hapless, doomed young man sputtering his rage in defense of his cousin; but, sadly, against a cruel and vengeful man. I wanted to think of Show Boat and The Royal Family; wanted thunderous echoes of “Ol’ Man River” sung from the apron of the stage; of Helen Morgan warbling the melancholic “Bill” while she perched on a piano; of the redoubtable matriarch Fanny Cavendish emoting onstage, a triumphant moment. But I couldn’t. Outside the wind beat the windows and the afternoon winter streetlights shimmered through the naked tops of the forest in Central Park. I shivered.
At five, insane with the quiet, I dressed in a voguish pale-blue chemise accented with the batik scarf I’d gotten as a Christmas gift, and, wrapped in my fur coat, I caught a cab to George and Bea Kaufman’s apartment. He’d proffered an invitation for a Christmas cocktail party, though I’d hedged about going. Now, driven to the edge of madness, I had little choice: two hours of bootleg hooch and doubtless some Broadway trouper embarrassing herself by singing “I wish I could shimmy like my sister Kate,” with piano accompaniment. There’d be scintillating, if frenzied, conversation with George and his tribe of friends. And me: the peripatetic romantic novelist, fashionable now because of So Big…Show Boat…The Royal Family. Me: the dutiful middle-class daughter of the Midwest provinces, transformed into Manhattan’s trendy flapper and drinker of bathtub gin. I smiled as I got out of the cab. Thank God I’d bobbed my hair last summer and had my nose done. I no longer looked like a Semitic Pollyanna.
George Kaufman seemed surprised that I’d come. Tall, gawky, eyeglasses slipping off his nose, his hair a jumble of electric current, he stood there, puzzled. “I thought you said that…” He smiled. “Come in.”
But the party was a mistake, I immediately realized, because there was nowhere to hide. Jammed with frisky, tipsy men and women, all bubbly with holiday zest and bonhomie, they jostled and backslapped and humored. I recognized faces: Marc Connelly, Peggy Wood, Neysa McMein. But I wanted to talk to no one. Dorothy Parker was on her soapbox, and rightly so, about the Sacco and Vanzetti miscarriage of justice, and Aleck Woollcott, who avoided me, was praising Charles Lindbergh, whom he’d just lunched with. George himself, dressed in a foppish tuxedo and holding a champagne glass at a dangerous angle, kept dragging a slender, emaciated young man to each pocket of guests, declaring the skittish young man a rising star in the world of art. I never caught his name—perhaps George forgot it himself—but I overheard snatches of chatter that suggested he’d returned from France where he knew Picasso and had cheese and wine with Natalia Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov. I had no idea who they were, but supposed them exiled Russians who painted oils of dark windswept steppes with borzois and white birch forests. The young man did nothing but grin and scratch an unkempt beard unfortunately speckled with bits of caviar, and I defined him an idiot. George kept leaning into the shorter man’s neck, as though to whisper a forbidden tidbit; but then, throwing back his head, bursting into artificial laughter.
A voice spoke from behind me. “We have to stop meeting like this.” Hearing the slight laughter, I turned. “I’ve been moving across two rooms to get to you. I meet you twice in a couple days, Miss Ferber.”
I faced Langston Hughes, and smiled. “I’m bored here.”
“But this is the most exciting party in Manhattan.” A voice soft and low. “I’ve just started getting invited to such…events.” Then he leaned in, confidentially. “I’m still visiting from Pennsylvania. I’m forced to wear the same suit to them all. I hope no one notices.”
“They won’t. Then you’d better keep the secret to yourself.”
He laughed. “I’m happy to be invited.” He pointed to the crowd. “Famous people here. It’s exciting.”
“This? Exciting? Then we are indeed at the end of American civilization.”
“I hadn’t known it had arrived yet.”
“Clever.”
“Not my line. I stole it from someone.”
“Then you must be a successful writer.”
Another chuckle. “There I go again, confessing my secrets.”
I turned away. “But I need to leave. This”—I waved my hand across the room, filled with laughter and the tinkle of glass—“this is not good for me today.”
He held up a hand, his look anxious. Suddenly, unexpectedly, he recited verbatim a paragraph from my short story “Blue Blood,” which took place in the Chicago stockyards. It had been published in Cosmopol
itan just months earlier. He recited in an assured, dreamy voice meant for me alone: “‘You saw a giant Negro, a magnificent ebony creature with great prehensile arms, and a round head, a flat stomach, flat hips, an amazing breadth between his shoulders. From chest to ankles he narrowed down like an inverted pyramid. He raised those arms that were like flexible bronze, and effortlessly, almost languidly, as you would cut through a pat of soft butter, they descended in a splendid arc.’” When he was finished, a little out of breath, he half-bowed.
I breathed in, thrilled. “You are amazing, Mr. Hughes.”
But now he looked embarrassed, as if he’d violated some moment, overstepped a line into indiscretion. But that hesitancy passed, and his eyes twinkled. “I’ve been savoring that passage, which I love. And I wanted to impress…”
“Which you do anyway,” I broke in. “But,” I grinned, “such theatrics, while touching, shall not keep me from my own quiet apartment this Christmas night.”
Again, the hand in the air. “You sent me some chapters of Lawson Hicks’ novel Hell Fighters.”
The smile disappeared from my face. “And?”
Perhaps unwisely, I’d sent him the first few chapters by messenger, addressed to him at his publisher’s office. Afterwards I’d thought my action rash and probably a little unethical. After all, Lawson had told me he was not interested in publishing, and then he’d walked out. “It’s not ready.” That’s what he said—emphatic. And I’d violated those words. Yet I had such faith in the novel, and I thought that Langston Hughes was the person to look at the chapters.
“I read the pages you sent me,” he began, “and they are a marvel. If he can keep up the tempo—the power—beyond what I’ve read, then, well, it needs to be out there.” A pause. “Thank you for sending it. Young Negro writers, you know…” His voice trailed off. “But I was caught by something else. I wanted to ask you about the murdered boy, Roddy. Lawson, I noticed, dedicated his novel to that sad young man and quoted a few lines of his verse, after the dedication. I got to wondering about his unpublished work. What was left behind?”