Saint Monkey

by Jacinda Townsend

  I ain’t meant to make her feel bad, necessarily. It’s just that she’s always seeing a rainbow and I feel like somebody’s got the duty to tell her about the rain. The more I think on it, the more I do want to go back to New York with her, for a visit, anyways. I figure I’ll make about fifty dollars down to the Tin Cup if I play things right, and that ought to cover all that expensive stuff Gordon was talking about. I could go back with Audrey right after she plays the Cotillion ball.

  Well, when I get in the Tin Cup, wouldn’t you know all of them men is there early, sucking down their beer and whiskey. Even Gordon showed up, though I think he’s just drinking a Coke. “Well hello,” I tell them all, and I get to working right quick. I lay the Fuller flannel out on the bar, set my mirrors out on top of it. The owner’s out in the table area sweeping, whistling a birdcall ever time she bends over with the dustpan.

  “Howdy,” comes some woman’s voice, and I turn up and she’s sitting about a foot away from me and I ain’t even noticed her. Except for the spread of her hips, this lady looks like a stalagmite growing out the middle of the bar stool. She’s got blond hair like honey and blue eyes like a seven o’clock sky, and that kind of skin that only other Colored people know is Black. She’s smoking her cigarettes all showy-like, like she’s an actress in a play and we got to watch her every puff to get the story line.

  “Right nice to meet you,” I tell her.

  “Yeah,” she says, and she goes back to her cigarette, studying it like she’s never seen it before.

  Gordon brings his soda over and sets down on the bar stool between me and the BlackWhite lady, but before he can even get one word out we smell something burning and he’s screaming out, “God Almighty!” He hops along the counter holding his hand over a hole the BlackWhite lady done burnt in his sleeve with her cigarette. She holds her breath like she’s surprised, but she smiles at him like she ain’t.

  “You’re on fire,” she says, her voice slow in all the wrong places of the Deep South. “You might just have to take that shirt off, son.”

  Gordon frowns at her. “Proper ladies don’t smoke.”

  “Proper ladies?” she says, still drowning her words. “Who’s a proper lady in here?” Her giggle echoes off the ceiling. “Proper ladies!” she yells. “Proper ladies! Calling all proper ladies!”

  Gordon grabs her by the shoulders so hard her boobs jog an inch to the left, and I can guess why he’s mad at her—she’s engaged in the wrong kind of enterprise. He puts his face right in hers. “Shut your mouth,” he says, but just like all the rest of us he’s looking right at her plump, soft mouth, with the skin lighter around its corners like it’s filled with cream. I’m seeing a pox scar on her forehead what I might cover with a little 17, but I know Gordon’s probably looking at the lovely hollow in her throat. I’m thinking how I might blend some 14 into the tired circles underneath her eyes, but I know Gordon’t looking at the evening pretty of them.

  “I got concealer,” I tell her, and that breaks everbody’s spell.

  Gordon lets her go. Turns to me and says, “How do?”

  But I’m serious. She ain’t catty. She ain’t petty. She’s clearly a prostitute, which means she needs cosmetics. “Here,” I tell her. “Check it out. I think ivory might be your shade. It’s mine.”

  She palms the concealer and then comes over and sets down in front of all the other men where I done set the Fuller flannel, and as the hour goes on I get so grateful for her, because when the men get to clowning around, she makes them get serious again. When Deacon Ragland turns up his nose at the male makeup pen and says camouflage is for the weaker sex, she tells him well then he ought to buy some of what else I got for his wife. When I put some of the pen on Tyrone’s cheeks and Melton throws his hand over like a queer and starts prissing around, she asks him who the hell he thinks he is, who can walk around with pimples all over his face and still get women. Ever time they start clowning and laughing, I think ain’t none of them buying a damn thing, but I end up selling sixty-three dollars’ worth of makeup. I get to feeling like pretty soon, the Negroes of Mt. Sterling is going to be the best-looking Negroes what ever lived. When I finished with them ladies at Second Baptist, I thought what I’d figured out is that people ain’t going to help you out ’til you get so low they can step on you while they’re doing it. But here’s this prostitute helping me out, and all the menfolk of the town buying stuff they really do think they need now, and when Deacon Ragland leaves with six dollars’ worth of 28 and ain’t called me “young sugar” once, I start to feeling like I might love people all over again.

  When all the men’ve gone home, the lady comes and introduces herself. “My name’s Marialana. Come over tomorrow, I’ll have some money. I’m in that house over on Third Street. You know the one. Second floor, first door on the left.”

  I do. It’s a house with boards crossing all eight of its windows. Front porch with moss growing up its sides like the ground is taking it back. I knock on the door Sunday morning before church but nobody answers, so I go on in and walk up them wood stairs scratched like a hundred bobcats been dancing on them. It’s water beading up on the walls longside the stairs, but I climb myself up in the name of enterprise, past the paint puckering up the banister and the roaches running long into cracks, and I knock on Marialana’s door.

  “Just a minute,” she yells, and I listen to the drip, drip, drip somewhere in the roof, even though it ain’t rained for two days, and I try not to think about my grandmama’s bosom and her weak weak heart.

  “How do,” I say, when she opens up the door. It’s a little room, but she’s done it up right, even put an old Chinese rug near the door and a picture from the dime store on the wall. It’s a sink over along the wall and a parakeet in the corner, dressed up in pants and a rhinestone jacket. “How do,” that bird says to me. He’s swinging. Hooker for a mama, but he’s the happiest bird I ever seen.

  “Whatcha got for me?”

  I open my case. “You want some 17 for your face and some 14 as concealer. I think you’d look right nice with a little purple on your eyes to make the color come out.” I put the case down on her floor on account of she ain’t got no dining table nor sideboy nor nothing, and I’m setting it all out on the Chinese rug when I hear somebody move behind the screen she’s got set up.

  “I’ll be right back,” she says to whoever’s back there, but out pops a shirtless old man. His hair is gray and sticking up in places where it ain’t been cut right.

  “Pookie?” he says.

  It’s my daddy. Looking like something dragged up out of the sea, but still my daddy. And I don’t know what else to do, so I run. I leave that makeup behind me and just run. I would run all the way to church, but he’d follow me. And he just don’t deserve anything Jesus might want to give him.

  PART FIVE

  Audrey

  BEAUTIFUL

  In New York City, the music never stops. Before rehearsal, there’s the radio, Brook Benton singing “A Million Miles from Nowhere” and The Champs blowing “Tequila” through their horns, Alan Freed whispering his excitement into the WINS microphone, pouring Negro music over Italian people’s eardrums. Then there’s rehearsal, Jim spinning the hi-hat, Verner breathing into his sax until it sounds like a jilted woman who’s sorry to be alive. After rehearsal we work, the four of us, playing in and around the featured acts, people like Ella Fitzgerald or The Drifters, sometimes three or four shows in an evening, until, after our last show, August and I have our nights out. We take the IRT to Town Hall or the Village Vanguard, where we see headliners like Billy Eckstine and Ethel Waters. After their final sets we pack off in taxis to after-hours clubs like the Half Note on Spring Street or Tony’s in Brooklyn, where August plays until six or seven in the morning, when we taxi back uptown, happy and drunk and high, to sleep, perchance to dream up new arrangements for old standards while the rest of the city builds its hives. When I wake, long after the normal person’s lunch hour, I find the dark shadows of pedes
trians walking across my ceiling, and I know it’s time to rise and start the music all over again.

  Even last Christmas Eve, when the Apollo went completely dark at two in the afternoon, the music didn’t stop, because Dr. Aubré Maynard telephoned Mr. Schiffman to request that I play a private concert. When I arrived, the housekeeper stood beside Dr. Maynard’s staircase until I agreed, silently, to pass the sitting room and ascend. The sitting room, I supposed, was for proper company—the Lattimores of 137th Street and the Hornes of 132nd—proper Negroes with first-class passages to Spain and sitting rooms of their own. Dr. Maynard’s housekeeper was White. She wore a uniform and had wrinkles around her eyes that suggested much mirth, a wedding at City Hall to a distant Irish relative just arrived, four children crawling through the ironing and pulling up to standing on an abused wooden table. She didn’t tell me her name and I didn’t ask. She never smiled at me or said, “Welcome.” All she must have seen of me is that I was a Negro girl of average height, with thick glasses and hair done in a pageboy. But she no doubt recognized the poverty in the ragged hem of my coat and the envy that made me push my glasses to my nose for a better look at the jade vase from China, and so she stood at the stairs and blocked me from going anywhere except up to Dr. Maynard’s upstairs parlor to play piano for him and Mrs. Maynard while I watched the ten mirrored reflections of him sitting on his sofa, occasionally nodding his head in appreciation. His brownstone held an airy second story and an ethereal third, and even the Wurlitzer’s parlor with its polished floors was a realm away from my cobwebbed little shed in Edith’s basement. In the corner where Janine Maynard sat, two panes of mirrors met, so that she could see the reflections of herself stacked onward to infinity. Make enough of a name for yourself in this city, and you can rise above the place, literally—escape without leaving.

  “Merry Christmas,” I told the housekeeper on my way out. I’d sent cards home to Mother and Grandpap, to my Aunt Juanita and her friend Ida Mae Harris, to Caroline Wallace and Sylvia French, but I’d gotten nothing beautiful in return. Just a letter from Grandpap on lined paper, advising me that they’d all actually expected me to be arriving in the flesh.

  “I’ll be here Christmas,” the housekeeper spat at me, as if it were my fault. “Stuffing a turkey’s ass.” She closed the door before I could tell her anything of my own problems.

  Between Dr. Maynard’s house and mine on Christmas Eve, the newsstand on 127th had been the only business open. There, I bought an issue of Life and ripped out photos of normal places—towns with lovely trees, empty ponds swimming with ducks—and taped them to the wall beside my bed. I lay down, listening in vain for Christmas carolers, remembering how the Christmas cards I’d sent home were so special they’d had tissue paper sheets over them in the store to keep them from being ruined. I looked at my magazine photos and was reminded—screaming ambulances weren’t all I’ve ever known.

  I let thoughts of Dr. Maynard’s rooftop terrace surge through the grooves of my brain, and I felt the magnificence of being Audrey Martin. I didn’t count the squares of sidewalk I’d taken on my way from his home to mine; it didn’t matter whether I’d stopped counting at 256 or 333. I closed my eyes and saw, on the backs of my eyelids, the coal-pregnant mountains and their ceiling of sky, the women of Queen Street crucifying their laundry with wooden clothespins. All the tender things that raised me, the things that made me more than a poor girl passing by someone’s sitting room. The next day, when the Apollo opened again, I couldn’t sit on the notes and love them. I couldn’t make “For Your Precious Love” know that I was the only person who could make the world hear it. Everyone noticed. Jim said it must be heroin, and Letty said she might as well send me to play in a saloon. Mr. Glaser said he’d put me on the first train back to Kentucky. August said they’d never. He says I’m the best piano player they’ve had in the four years he’s been playing the theater, and they’re just trying to draw blood. “Don’t martyr yourself for Jack Schiffman,” he says. “You save some of that special for yourself.”

  John Hammond caught August playing one night at Tony’s and signed him to play for Columbia. It was a one-record session behind Sarah Vaughan, Mr. Hammond had told him, a chance to prove that the bass wasn’t just some bastard piece of wood he found on the trolley tracks, and I wondered whether Mr. Hammond ever had much faith in his judgments, or whether he worried that the bebop he’d heard August play that night seemed more exotic simply because it was being played in Brooklyn. August took a taxi down to East 52nd Street the day the groundhog saw his shadow, and by the time the six weeks of winter had passed, the record was pressed. We were hearing it for the radio. August had three hundred extra dollars. “And this—” he said, showing me his lyrics:

  Caroline

  My little orphan girl

  I’m going to carry you away from here

  Carry you away

  “What’s this?” I asked him.

  “For John Hammond,” he said. “You and I are going to write something.”

  “Hair of fire,” I told him. “Skin of honey,” and by Memorial Day, Tony Toy was laying his voice on a track. It was pressed into vinyl with the red Columbia label, with A. Martin written in white letters under the center hole of every single record of its kind in the nation, right before A. Barnes and T. Toy. Women never get first credit, I know, and anyway August wrote most of the song. But he lied to John Hammond and gave me first credit—he says I’m the most potent muse he’s ever had, and it’s only fitting.

  He won’t let me play it at his house, because he has superstitions. He hisses “no” when I ask. He says listening to your own song is a ridiculous kind of vanity. At my apartment I watch the record spin, watch CAROLINE float around the turntable, upside down and then sideways and then right side up. I hear it on the radio and sing along. For the writing credit I got paid half of what the men did. A four hundred–dollar check, I got in the mail on a Tuesday. I cashed it on a Wednesday. And felt like a bastard no more.

  Yesterday, it rained so hard the grease in the streets made rainbows. Today, the sun, leagues above me, is still deciding what to do with itself for the day. When I got home, at seven in the morning, I found a letter that Edith had slipped under my door. Caroline, writing from Mt. Sterling, inviting me home to give a concert. I read and reread and then spent two hours writing and rewriting, accepting her invitation exuberantly and then nonchalantly, writing a simple yes and then telling her how she knew me before my daddy died and I knew her before her mama died, and how she knew what I wanted out of the world before I even knew there was a world. I told her nothing, and then I told her she should come here and stay. I wrote and rewrote and tossed three page-long letters in the wastebasket. Now it’s nine o’clock, and I have to be at work at eleven, and the futility in those two hours will keep me from sleeping at all.

  An intermittent drizzle begins to fall. Under the faltering sun, the red neon cross atop Make Me a Herald still holds its power over the block. It drowns out all other colors of light and actually colors the shadows on my ceiling. The first time I saw it, I thought I must be dreaming. Now, a man in a purple shirt walks upside down until he’s cut off where he meets my wall, and then, a few minutes later, a woman with a bright yellow dress runs across the blank white space as though she’s late for a coming bus. Closer to the nine o’clock hour I see a pram, and all the colors of the canopy that covers the baby within, and then a boy on a bright blue bicyle zips by, raising his hand for something just as he disappears into my wall. A man whose shadow turns up completely aquamarine floats, like a homing pigeon, into the liquor store next door. I try to sleep, but the colored shadows keep me awake with wonder.

  Harlem’s noises are there always, too, though the passing traffic has become so much a lullaby that I no longer understand how I slept without it. As morning tops, I hear loud voices in the park across the street, so I roll over on my stomach to look out the window and find three boys on the swings. One sits, the tight seat of his pants cradled b
y the swing’s rubber, and the second boy actually swings, like a child, high into the air. The third boy stands in his swing, his arms thrown out in a Y so he can grip the track above his head. “That housedress!” he shouts, in a feminine voice all wrong for his young man’s body. He turns in a knee and throws his head to the side, posing. “It was nasty!” he says. “James, dear, somebody needs to teach your mama how to dress.”

  “Alejandro,” sings the second boy, in falsetto. His voice rolls in and recedes with his swinging. He hits a G, then a B flat, then holds the C for a whole bar before knocking it up to an E that’s high enough to crack his voice. “My love,” he sings, “my life . . . Alejandro.”

  I strip naked and wrap myself in a towel, then make my way down the hall to the bath I share with the five other people who live in the basement—Mrs. Elizabeth Fogle, widowed, and her young son Johnny; Mr. Earnest Hudson and his two roommates, Reggie and Rodney Thorpe, most recently of Hunstville, Alabama, Reggie with a conspiratorial streak that made him confess that he sees Edith, on occasion, enter my room when I’m at the Apollo. Since they all wake and set off for work in the early morning, Edith has usually turned the hot water off by the time I bathe, but today she’s forgotten, because when I turn the tap, I find steam rising off the downpour. Warm as it is when I sit in the tub, it’s all I can do not to fall asleep. Last night at Minton’s Playhouse, August came offstage and kissed me, right on the mouth, before God and everybody, and the memory keeps me awake enough to wash under my arms and between my legs. It seemed unreal, then, in the smoky air of Minton’s, and even in the taxi on the way home. When August lighted a marijuana cigarette and yelled out the window, to the street we were passing, that they were looking at two famous people, I almost believed him. I let the water out and make my toweled way back down the hall, which is filled with the smell of Mrs. Fogle burning breakfast. Johnny squeals in horror at something: impossible to know whether it’s something on the radio or his mother’s blackened bacon. My eyes burn with the toll the night has taken.