The theater’s sidewalk ticket stand was unattended, and when I entered the lobby, I found no one. I stood there in the calm quiet, scraping my feet on the thick red carpet, admiring the marble wall inserts, dizzy over my meeting with splendor. From the end of the lobby, behind the heavy double doors, came the voice of a woman counting bars of eight, and I went to find her, dragging my suitcase behind me. Leaving it for someone to steal, at that point, would have been the worst option: either this was my life, and it would require all that I’d packed, or this wasn’t to be my life at all, and I’d need all that was in the suitcase to make it back to Kentucky. One, two, three, four, she counted: I might play piano forever, just as Daddy said I’d been born to do. Five, six, seven, eight, and Mr. Glaser might have been a hiccup of my teenaged imagination, and I’d be handing fifteen dollars back over to the Pennsylvania Railroad, going back to live under the rusty heels of Mt. Sterling.
As I pulled one of the heavy doors, the vacuum of the lobby’s relative silence gave way to the acoustic echo of the theater, whose largeness dwarfed anything I’d imagined. Hundreds of yellow vinyl seats sat open like dandelions in bloom. Four marble colonnades held up a second floor that was just as large as the first, and from where I was standing, I could see balconies ringed around a third floor. In one of these balconies stood Mr. Glaser.
“Where the hell you been?” he asked, not kindly.
“When we pay you for a week, that means Tuesday too,” said a woman in a smart black blouse and tap shoes. I matched her voice to the counting.
“I’d been waiting for Mr. Glaser at the station—” I began, but no one was listening. My drama was no more than a passing gust of air. The woman retrieved an apple from a plate she’d balanced on the rung of an onstage ladder. She took a bite out of it before turning back to glare at me as she chewed, and a man sitting on drums examined the wax he’d picked out of his ear. Mr. Glaser disappeared from the balcony, and it was so quiet then in the theater, with everyone staring at me, that I heard his shoes as he descended the stairs. He reappeared at the back of the theater, but he didn’t say hello or goodbye as he walked toward me. He walked behind the last row of seats, then right past me out the double doors.
“Well?” the woman asked. “How much longer will you keep us waiting?”
I’d been standing there gawking at them all like some county grandmother. When I realized, I dropped my suitcase and got out of my coat, which I threw over the back of a seat. It slid to the floor, but I didn’t bother rehanging it. My thin flowered blouse had seemed right for meeting Mr. Glaser in the station but now it seemed wrong for my first evening of work, and the heels of my shoes, as they clacked against the three stairs to the stage, seemed wholly unnecessary. The tenor saxophonist, a boy not much older than me, with the beginnings of an unwilling mustache, gave me a look of great boredom. A male dancer bounced up and down, then scraped his taps on the floor in a tedious shuffle. Music, even onstage at the Apollo Theater, was just a job.
Only the bassist smiled at me as if we were about to do something fun or incredible. He was exactly my color, but his hair was so straight and dark and shiny as to make him look like a china doll. “There’s music on the piano,” he said. “ ‘Stardust.’ ” But all I could see was the reflection of my own hands in the piano’s wood, ebony so polished it showed me even the wrinkles on my knuckles. I was going to play on this giant stage in this giant theater in this giant city. It seemed unreal.
When finally I turned back to the rest of the band, I found the bassist still grinning. It was the nicest thing I’d seen all day. “She’s ready,” he said, picking up his instrument. He spoke slowly and professorially, as though sorting through the many volumes of information in his head. “Count it off, Letty.”
She cursed me all afternoon for not knowing the music, but the bassist kept smiling, and shaking his head behind Letty’s back when she got outraged and sliced the air with her hand for us to stop. I’d never played with a full band, or even half of a band, and it took me some time to stop listening to the other parts enough to focus on my own, but there was something warm about sinking into everyone else’s rhythm while keeping up my end of the whole. At ten ’til seven, a potbellied man came and hustled us off the stage. “I’m Porto Rico,” he said when he saw me, as though I was supposed to know him. “And you must be that new blood come up to throw some spice on the plate.”
I just smiled and nodded: after Letty’s thrashing, I didn’t have enough wits left to offer my Christian name. I gathered my music as the rest of the band packed up and off and disappeared, but when the bassist had rolled his instrument off to the edge of the stage, he came back and took my arm. “Stick around,” he said, leading me down the stage steps, “and I’ll show you stuff.” At the back of the theater, he found my coat and handed it to me, and then he insisted on carrying my suitcase. He took me back through the lobby and up the carpeted stairs I hadn’t seen, up to a third-floor studio with a hardwood floor and an old upright in the corner. I played a few chords, and found that every note missed its true pitch, but that gave the piano a wonderful, whorehouse quality, as if someone had taken a hammer to its strings during a party. “ ‘Stardust,’ ” the bassist told me, and I started playing, and then, four bars in, he asked for “Cottontail.” “Make it fresh,” he said, so I anticipated chords with my index finger, but then, a few bars into that, he asked for “Liza.”
I strode up the bass dutifully, fast as I thought he might want to hear it, but then he asked for more right hand. “It ain’t about just getting from chord to chord,” he said. “You got to use that right hand too, you want to stride right.” He came over and hit some flats I wouldn’t have, and then stood back and asked for “A Night in Tunisia.” We went through “I’ll Remember April,” and “Star Eyes,” and then he asked for “Stardust” again. I’d played with the band for an hour already, and when I started to tire, I began playing the melodies more slowly.
“Okay,” he said, taking the hint, and then he came over to the piano and practically closed the lid on my hands. “Let’s go back down,” he said.
This time we took yet another stair that descended to the back of the main stage, and I had to marvel at what a series of secrets the theater seemed to contain. We watched from the edge of the curtain as three white poodles, outfitted in pink clown costumes, jumped through hoops and ran in circles. Their trainer was upstage, and I could see only his hand occasionally, but the poodles were close enough that I was afraid they’d smell the chicken grease on my clothes.
“It’s so funny,” I whispered to the bassist.
He smiled, but he said, “They’re gone next week.”
“Why gone?”
“Look at those empty seats. That’s why.” It was the biggest crowd I’d ever seen, but half the daffodil seats still bloomed empty, and it made me suddenly mindful of what New Yorkers expected of the world. “Schiffman’s bringing in more soul acts.”
For a finale, the dogs climbed atop each other, the dog on top pawing the second dog’s crisp uniform while the bottom dog turned around in a circle and the crowd clapped politely. Then, after they were hustled offstage by their trainer, a lady acrobat in a red-sequined leotard pulled a trampoline from the wall and dragged it to the center of the stage. She did impossible flips that made her turn in midair two and sometimes three times, and drew wolf whistles when she jumped up and landed in a split.
“What about her?” I asked. “She’s good.”
“Gone. Tomorrow, Thursday, and Friday are Gospel Week. Then she’ll do four shows on Saturday, and be gone. For good.”
Through all this, an older man with a porkpie hat had sat hunched at the piano, playing in such a way that I hadn’t noticed him. But I didn’t ask after his fate. Maybe I didn’t want to know. It was all so beautiful, and yet so sad. Nothing in a city was as solid as it seemed.
“My name’s August,” the bassist told me, and he led me back to the lobby. We stopped at the reception desk, where he pi
cked up a pen and a pad and scrawled out something, then lifted my suitcase again and took me through the double doors to the noises of 125th Street. I thought its business would have retreated somewhat toward evening, but it turned out that a night parade was passing by, lit occasionally by the Christmas lights on a float or the burning sparkler in a marcher’s hand. A league of little girls in majorette uniforms skipped past us, waving their batons, and then a green van full of a barbershop quartet, who sang out its back window. A silent trio of marchers walked past—the man, in a war uniform; an older woman in a checkered dress with a blank sash across its top; and a woman in a flowing white robe and a scarf trailing down her back. The band around her head read ETHIOPIA, but she looked like any Negro from Cleveland. August let me watch for a few minutes, but then he seemed impatient, leaning abruptly to his right and then to his left, and he took my suitcase down the avenue and hailed a taxi.
“No. 456 Lenox Avenue,” he told the driver, as I stepped in, and before he closed the door he gave me the piece of paper, on which he’d scrawled the address. “Ask for Edith.”
The house at 456 Lenox turned out to be a three-story brownstone atop a mortician’s; the block also held a liquor store, a wig shop, and a storefront church called Make Me a Herald. Edith turned out to be a barrel-stomached landlady who, when called downstairs by the mortician’s assistant, took nineteen dollars, showed me down to my basement room, and made me promise I wouldn’t have any gentleman callers. Payday, Letty had told me, would come the Monday after I played my first show. “If you haven’t crawled back to the woods,” she’d added. I had ten dollars and twenty-eight cents to live on for the next six days, and when I got up to my little room and unfastened my suitcase, I found that all my dresses were wrinkled. The tiny armoire in the corner smelled like camphor, and the door facing the inside of my room had been cursed with a long, muddy shoeprint on its bottom panel. I found Caroline standing in my mind, asking me what I ought to do about any of it, and I bit my lip until I tasted blood, and threw out the thought of her. Through the wall, I could smell burning vegetables. Under the noise of the traffic coming through the window, I could hear someone flushing the shared toilet down the hall. I’d packed a yard of velvet ribbon still taped to its spool, and I wondered if I might be able to sell it, since ribbon wasn’t the style in New York. I was happier than I’d ever been. A brave life would be made out of such foolish acts as this.
HIM
August spread its last sunlit street fairs, its tea-sipping Tarot readers and its bean pies for a nickel, its trash-eating squirrels turned fat with extra fur. September passed, scattering the final rooftop parties of the Harlem rich, their named cocktails, their jade cuff links, their lush potted plants folded in the corners of railings. Now October has arrived, dropping a permanent cloud over New York City. Somewhere—perhaps in some portrait-modeled town north of the city—the leaves are changing, but here in Manhattan, the foliage dries to dead brown and drops to the pavement. New York, so it’s said, is the corridor to a New England autumn, but the price of reaching Connecticut is too dear. And even if I were to save the fare, the train would only deposit me at a simple platform, with no one to meet and no one to telephone: I’d simply be lost in someone else’s normalcy. We Harlem Negroes are bolted to this city, where every season springs one color: gray.
On the sidewalks and bus seats of the city, I’ve bred a city person’s way of carrying things, a manner of stuffing a day’s life into one little clutch purse. I’ve a spare pair of nylons in there, a sachet of White Rose Redi, and a leaflet from the Father Divine Peace Mission. A pair of burgundy wool mittens, because, lost in reading, I’ve already left five pairs on the crosstown bus. It’s evidence of myself for the next person, a nice little historic trail of my days in the city, but it’s maddening because nice mittens at Blumstein’s are so dear. I’ve the book I’m reading now—The Street—and a bottle of hand lotion that clinks against the metal brad of my purse. Tink, tink, tink, it says, making me feel like an adult in the city.
Shocking, but October, with its habit of closing every window on the street, has brought me the realization that this city is more crushing, in ways more dull and gormless even, than Mt. Sterling. Making money and staying warm is all: these two simple desires unite everyone from the bus conductor to the drunk man shouting down pennies. To those ends and those ends alone, Harlemites retire to their shared homes and turn on their gas furnaces, they huddle in dry entryways to conduct petty criminal activity, or find the exact middle of a brownstone and make love. They shop in Blumstein’s for wool scarves and crowd onto the north-south bus that arrives at the southwest corner of Lenox and 123rd. Certain days, as if they’ve telegrammed one another to agree, the women bring out closed-toe shoes and black wool coats for the cool air. Those days, the young girls frown at my lime green coat with its missing sash and its pocket full of mauve lipstick and country notions, as if I’ve retained my impoverished happiness on purpose, just to offend them. New Yorkers know everything there is to know about everyone in the world, or so they think, and because they already know, they don’t carry a country person’s wonder. The rest of the world knows there is a New York, but for New Yorkers, there is no other place: New York, as it turns out, is the most provincial place on earth.
October brings people to the Apollo in winter coats. These aren’t the summer people, the girls come up from Georgia to stay with their old Aunts So-and-Such, the boys stopped over at South Street Seaport on a break from the Navy. No, not them—the October audience is full of natives, and, consequently, more demanding. This audience has ridden the subway down from 176th and Broadway in a cold rain, or over the Queensboro Bridge in a hired car with four other junior high dieticians from Jackson Heights. The singers are more queenly in October; the dancers more elastic. August, Vernon, and Jim roll joints and go up to the Apollo’s roof to plan the night’s repertoire: they never ask me to go. Of all the girls involved in the show, only Letty is ever consulted, but she isn’t allowed to opine on the music. Whatever male mystery the three of them cook up, it pleases Mr. Schiffman—he comes on Mondays, bringing us twenties, smiling. Always smiling. On Wednesday, when the house band does not play, I sit in the Amateur Night audience and watch the audience applaud and jeer, launch careers and break hearts. In October, Porto Rico is busy. The audience hisses, and out he comes with his gun to blow a blank up into the air. As the smoke dissipates above his head, he shoves the gun back into his pocket and pulls out a long-handled broom, pushing the pitchy saxophonists and rhythmless jugglers offstage.
“Wait!” they often protest, as if their boring acts might suddenly bloom, but their false hope makes the audience even angrier. “Get that sumbitch outta here!” they yell, and Porto Rico bears down on his broom even harder. It’s something to see before you die, I wrote to Granddaddy. As winter bears down upon us, the Apollo will not stand for anyone who won’t set her roof on fire.
Come October in New York, I’m gifted with fierce and unforgiving illness, and though its roots are not physical, it has left me so weak and distracted that Letty has to pull on my bottom lip and spoon the cream into my mouth after we order malteds at the soda shop.
“You cannot be serious,” she says, catching a milky rivulet on its way down my chin. “You cannot be in love with him.”
“What’s wrong with him?”
“Always trying to get more money out of Mr. Schiffman, that fool. He makes life hard for the rest of us. And you know, he’s always making speeches about how he should get paid for every note he writes. Like he’s God’s gift to music. Your little Marcus Garvey in there doesn’t understand how the world works.”
“Letty,” I say, wiping myself with a napkin where she’s missed with my spoon. “You say it like he’s the devil.”
“No, child-friend. The devil is smarter.”
Though the boy Letty first wanted me to love, Verner, is dull as a hundred-year-old knife. Verner is our tenor sax. He’s eighteen, and he’s come East all t
he way from Kansas City, and has a cowboy’s notions. After Letty tricked me into going on a date with him (Here’s your pay for the week. Take Audrey downtown for a sandwich), Verner got the queer idea that he should hold my hand, and the even queerer idea that it would be fine for him to take his fingers and work them further up my sleeve, until he was caressing my wrist. The queerest part being that he hadn’t said one word to me for the entire fifty streets south we’d traveled. He held my wrist as we walked the aisles of the sheet music store, and just after the clerk gave me my change and we exited the shop, Verner took my shoulder, turned my body into his, and kissed me. He pushed his hot, thick tongue into my mouth, and I tried to cough but couldn’t get any air. He pressed me against the Colony’s glass window with the force of his affections, and I had to smack him across the chest with “Love Call” to get him to stop. “That’s the way!” yelled a woman passing on the sidewalk.
His eyes, when I drew back, bore the same frustration they always had, as though a voice in his head were reciting physics formulae. But that close to his face, I understood, finally, the forced mustache: beneath it was a birthmark that looked like someone had pasted sand to his lip. He’d forever be covering it with bristle and bluster.
“Well all right then,” Letty said, at that night’s show, when I stomped into the ladies’ dressing room during the intermission and told her I hadn’t come all the way to New York to be with a boy I could have met at a tobacco auction. “But I’m afraid you’ll find there’s much less wrong with the young ones. They haven’t had a chance to turn rotten and stink.”
Of Dean Jennings, Letty offered only the most neutral of appraisals. It was a week later, and Mr. Glaser had just moved through the dressing room and pushed aside three naked chorus girls on his way to demand that I play at Dean Jennings’s dinner party. “Up on 132nd,” he said, over the noises of women zipping up dress backs. “Nice place.”
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