The crowd sits poised to scream, and that’s what they do, and it takes me going on a couple of minutes to realize that sweet, kind Vivian Harris has just fired me onstage. She’s announced my last night. But then, there’s nothing to do but sit down and play—it isn’t in either August’s or my natures to do anything else. Letty and Roland dance their steps as though nothing untoward is happening. Verner keeps blowing and Jim keeps beating, and it hurts me to realize that neither of them is surprised. When the Famous Flames step onstage, and James Brown comes out in his cape singing Please Please Please, we all hustle back behind the curtain, but no one speaks a single word to me, not even when I go to sit on the same bench where Verner is sipping gin from a tumbler.
Through the ladies’ dressing-room door, we can both hear August and Letty skreaking at each other, Letty’s unintelligible words high as a monkey’s, August’s voice booming in its lower register. I wanna be your lover man, James Brown sings, sliding his mike to the floor as he drops to his knees. The Famous Flames bring their horns louder, thus containing the viciousness backstage. The other women in the dressing room seem to be dropping their own opinions into the argument, and every once in a while laughter erupts in the dressing room, or a chorus of umm-hmms, but Verner hears nothing, it seems—he sips his gin like a fish, with his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down and his eyes wide with trying not to look at me. I think to myself how dumb I’ve been, how young and unhip to New York, but then how grown-up too, since something in me is already miles above the petty shit Letty’s just dropped on us. I’m blind with nerves about the two thousand dollars we haven’t saved, but after all, a true Harlemite cannot give anyone the satisfaction of seeing her upset. I get up from the bench and walk—concentrating so as to hold my head high and not swing my arms like a gorilla—to hunch against the back door of the dressing room.
“She can’t even play a bar without humming it,” Letty is screaming.
“High yellow whore,” August shouts, and something thumps against the wall.
Letty comes running out of the dressing room with her arms pinned to her sides and her hair in a topknot. As she strides away, August bursts through the door and grabs me by the arm, a hair rougher than Letty did in the afternoon. He drags me to the stage, where he takes his bass by the neck like it’s an unfaithful lover and drags it across the floor. The endpin scrapes the hardwood and leaves a groove that will last until the floor is refinished, but the chattering audience, immersed in intermission, notices nothing.
“Where’re we going?” I ask him, as we break curtain.
“To our future.”
We hustle ourselves down the stairs at the back of the theater and into the lobby. Brubeck and Paul Desmond have taken the stage, and they’re playing something fast, something rocking, something that won’t slow down for me to hold it. I try, but I can’t make out a time signature. In two years’ worth of nights, I’ve thought I was redefining music itself every time I played a run, and here it turns out I can’t even hear outside the four. Desmond kicks in on his sax just as August rolls his bass through the door, thump, thump, and I hold back to count beats. There must be a signature. All music has a signature. It simply must be. “What will we do without seven hundred dollars?” I ask August, to stall him at the door.
“Manage.” He holds the door open for me to walk through, but I’m standing there, in the lobby, trying to count. Whatever it is, it doesn’t finish in fours. It sounds like the surface of the sun as heard from outer space, bigger than I can understand. “Come on,” August says, shaking his hand in impatience. “We’re through here.”
“I trust you,” I tell him, and walk through the door. Down the avenue, at the Hotel Theresa, a crowd of Cubans stands behind police barricades, waving Cuban flags, and the swell of them bursts onto 125th Street such that a car has to swerve to avoid hitting a little dark-eyed girl in pigtails. Fidel Castro’s in there now. Word has it he’s talking to Malcolm X. So much resistance. So many blueprints. August hails a cab and we zip up to 163rd, up the marble-floored elevator to August’s apartment, where he takes off his shoes, flops on his couch with his arm resting atop its back, and says, simply, “Shit.”
A letter’s been slipped under the door. August stepped over it on his way in the house, because it’s lying with the Times and the Walgreens circular, but when I pick it up I see that it was mailed to me at apartment 3G, and the tenant must have recognized the name and brought it over. Mr. Stanton Wallace, reads the return address, 211 Queen Street, Mt. Sterling, Kentucky. I have no idea how Sonnyboy has found me, no idea what he could want. But it doesn’t seem appropriate to open anything before August’s had his cigarette, so I wait, wondering if I’ll ever again have my name announced to an audience of angels.
PART SIX
Audrey
ICE
I’d meant to be landing in Standiford Field on December 28 with a songwriting credit to my name, a new leather suitcase hanging from my hand, and a diamond big as a filbert on my finger. Once I arrived, I’d spend three days letting my grandfather beat me at checkers. I’d cast new, wide-eyed wonder at the stories he’d repeat without remembering why. I’d speak loudly to his deafness. I’d studiously avoid Mr. Barbour and build, somehow, a bridge between me and Mother: after all these years, my life would wash out more clearly for her now that I, too, had found a husband. On New Year’s Eve, I’d ride with Sylvia up to Lexington in Dr. French’s new Simca and, with the three other musicians Mrs. Raspberry had recruited, play for twenty two-stepping debutantes; I’d be fêted by the same Negroes who wouldn’t even have told me hello on the street when I was a girl in Mt. Sterling.
But it wasn’t like that, not at all. “You know you shouldn’t even ask,” August said, when I reminded him I was traveling.
“But it’s my money.”
He gave me a peculiar look. Not a worried or angry look, but a look that said he wasn’t going to argue—he was just going to tell me. “It’s our money,” he said, “and you’re not going to use it on a plane ticket.”
I still felt it was an argument, and mine to win. I shuffled around all afternoon, unpacked my clothes in front of him and then repacked them in the privacy of our bedroom closet, stroked Jelly Roll’s fur in the wrong direction on purpose. Over dinner, I told him I would go on the train. “It’s not a big deal,” I said.
“I’ve already booked us a gig for New Year’s. Either you can spend all that money going to Kentucky and not even break even by the time you get back, or you could stay right here in New York with me—your husband—and bring four hundred dollars home from the Roseland Ballroom.”
You’re not my husband yet, I wanted to remind him, but it wouldn’t be in keeping with the spirit of things. Instead, I excused myself from dinner and lay on the floor in our bedroom and cried until I was nauseous. I hadn’t cried so hard since my daddy died. The floor was cold enough that the physical pain drowned out some of the hurt in my heart, but still, I kept thinking how love caused a person to make the bitterest sacrifices. I’d get married and have a sweet bouquet, but when their stems were bound with twine, the flowers would be crushed.
I’d meant to call Caroline as soon as August decided, but I didn’t know what, exactly, to tell her. I could tell her that my fiancé’s father had died, since that had been true for many years. I could tell her that the tickets for the flight were sold out, since she wouldn’t possibly know how air travel happened. I could tell her nothing at all. That whole night in bed, while August snored and Jelly Roll padded up and down the hall, excuses darted through my mind and then sat a minute before leaving. I saw the faces of the innocent sixteen-year-old girls who were looking to have a good time and see a local girl made good, the faces of their mothers and fathers, who would suppose I thought myself too important for them all, not knowing that what was keeping me in New York was the same lack of money I’d always known. The next morning, after August left for Sunday dinner with his mother, I went to the post office and mailed Caroline
forty of the vinyl 45’s we’d been saving in the corner of his living room. caroline, in white block letters.—A. Martin—A. Barnes—T. Toy underneath. Every debutante and their mother would have one. I shoved them into my Cartier and dragged them to the post office, where it cost me a fortune to post them in the mail. I imagined Ruth Simmons’s mother lugging the heavy package up Miss Myrtle’s porch in her mail bag, imagined Caroline reading my note. “I’m sorry for the short notice,” I’d written to her, “but I cannot visit on the 31st. Words cannot begin to express my regret.” In fact, there were too many words, far too many to print in one letter. “Please send this gift to the members of the Cotillion on my behalf.”
The disappointment felt like it might ruin me.
Come New Year’s Eve, I did play the Roseland with August, then went with him to an afterparty in Queens, where we kissed at the stroke of midnight, oblivious to everyone else in the room, their paper 1961 glasses and their whiskey-soaked drink umbrellas. The next Monday, August put most of the four hundred dollars into our joint bank account, and laughed as he gave me fifty dollars’ worth of what he called “mad money.” I was going to use part of it to take him on a date. I’d meant to spend my nineteenth birthday sipping grasshoppers from my fiancé’s straw, leaning my head against his cologned shoulder while we watched Thelonious Monk play Town Hall. Every day in December, I’d walked past the posters pasted to construction barriers, orange edging with sky blue letters, the T of Town and the H of Hall slightly enlarged, Thelonious himself immortalized in black silhouette at his piano, as though he would never again rise to eat or kiss his wife or use the toilet. I’d pass under the scaffolding and note the date—January 25, 1961—and the address—113 West 43rd. I’d even collected change for the bus ride downtown and back, as I was so often without small change in New York City. For once, before our relationship became something else altogether, I’d wanted to treat August.
Too late now: we’re married. It’s what I did with my nineteenth birthday. We’d just bused ourselves into Hickory, North Carolina, and August took me to the downtown courthouse and we signed the papers. I had no white dress, no bouquet of daisies. August had no best man, and no gold band from me because I hadn’t had the money. Strange, considering August and I played almost twenty New York weddings together, but we had no one to play at ours. Melodies settled in our ears as we walked up the courthouse steps, but neither of us could be certain we were imagining the same song as the other, let alone the same arrangement. We would have been too embarrassed, standing before the judge and the court clerks, to hum.
August had, at least, French-kissed me for a full minute while the judge who’d called him “boy” tried to hand us our papers. I couldn’t tell whether it was defiance or love. “What were you thinking,” I’d ask him later, “all that time you were kissing me?”
He’d only joke. “Daydreaming about lunch. Every fiber of fish and every pecan in the pie.”
For a honeymoon, we’ve taken the bus up to Kentucky to tell Mother.
“You’re what?” she yells, as though her hearing is shot. “Married?” Mr. Barnett, on his way out to the country to pick up a side of beef, has dropped us off at the edge of Mr. Barbour’s yard, where we walked up the stone steps to find Mother sitting in one of his green metal glide chairs. Dead of the coldest January on record and a full week before Groundhog’s Day, but the sun has come out between snows and offered a day of warmth that will save the minds of the people of Mt. Sterling. Sunday, for once this year, might live up to its name: at ten in the morning, sunlight glances off the iced-in branches and gives the trees a fiery new life. Lucky for Baby Nate, who’s two years old and weary enough of the house that he’s trying, nail by nail, to tear down what his father built. When he hears Mother upset, Nate makes his wobbly run to her chair, where he balances himself against an arm and tugs at the bottom of her rose sweater. She swats his hand away without even looking at him. “How can you be married?” she asks me. “You’re only nineteen. You just turned nineteen yesterday!” Mother turns to August, speaking to him for the first time. “And how old are you?”
He rocks forward, and I can see the outline of his knuckles in his pockets as he clenches his fist. “I’m thirty. Ma’am. Just turned. My and Audrey’s birthdays are the same week. Isn’t that something?”
“My good God,” she says, then yells through the open window at her back. “Jonas! Get out here!”
“I’m sleep, ’Naitha,” he whines. “What you need?”
“Just get yourself on out here!”
Even Baby Nate is silent as the four of us listen to each stair creak with Mr. Barbour’s sleepy weight.
“What—oh—hey! Audrey’s back! Who is the young fellow? Ain’t chaperones usually ladies?”
“Well, that’d be her husband,” Mother says. She scoops Nate into her lap and cries into his hair as she rocks him.
“Oh, hey now,” Mr. Barbour says. “You know your mama’s been dry as a bone, going on a year now. We don’t want to upset her, make her nerves come back.” He puts a hand on Mother’s shoulder. He shuts his eyes tight and opens them again. So recently has he been asleep, he’s likely wishing he were still standing in his dreams. “It’ll be all right,” he says to Mother. “We’ll get to the bottom of all this.” But the seconds pass, and he doesn’t find any other words. He seems unable to take his eyes off Mother’s shoulder. Water begins to drip from the tree at the edge of the porch, making pocks in the snow.
“This what people do in New York City?” Mother asks. “Men marry babies?”
“I’m not a baby. And I’m—we’re not in New York anymore.”
I can’t remember ever seeing my mother cry when she wasn’t also drinking, and without a cushion of alcohol to keep them fierce, her eyes seem gelatinous in their misery, like a beaten horse’s. “Where you been living?” she asks. “Why ain’t you let us know where you was? I oughta kick my own ass for ever letting you trot up there in the first place.”
“No, Mother. It’s been wonderful. I’m having a wonderful life.”
“Wonderful is married at nineteen? Your daddy was alive, he’d kill us all. I guess you’re pregnant.”
“Not yet,” I say, “but it isn’t for lack of trying.” I can’t help but grin at August, whose face has gone ashen. Mother starts sobbing. Mr. Barbour just keeps staring down at her shoulder. Over and over he rubs her back through her sweater, as though he’s looking to unweave its knit. “Our gig at the Apollo got . . . well, no matter—we’re on the road. This week Charlotte, then Greensboro, then Winston-Salem. Next month, we’ll play the islands. I’ll be living on a beach, Mother!”
“That so? Your daddy went off to live at the beach. Next thing you know, he’s dead.” Mother puts a hand over her mouth, inadvertently bumping Nate’s forehead with her Bakelite bracelet. It couldn’t have hurt, but my brother begins to wail, and Mr. Barbour lifts him from Mother’s lap and carries him back into the house. Poor Baby Nate, who hasn’t yet learned to count. I myself have this gift of numbers: no matter how far things deteriorate, August and I have to be back on the bus to Charlotte in twenty-six hours and eighteen minutes.
“Audrey. Get the keys to Jonas’s car and get out here. We’re going into town.”
Mr. Barbour’s kitchen stands darker than it should, given the sun’s sudden winter appearance, and I find myself wondering if anything at all good ever penetrates his windows. Baby Nate screams louder, even, as Mr. Barbour bounces him on his knee, and Mr. Barbour himself looks more afraid than he did on the porch, but he’s not at all surprised when I ask for the car. “Take care of your mama” is all he says. He hands over his ring of four keys.
Mother’s learned to drive in the months I’ve been away, and I can’t help but be proud of the way she shifts into her different gears and paddles her foot from clutch to foot-feed without missing even one beat of crying. A dead rabbit lies splayed on its side in the shoulder of the road, and I’m reminded that to be in the country is to be
surrounded by death, always.
“I’m sorry, Mother,” I say.
“Don’t be. My mama never loved me right. She had too much grief for love to live with it. I got kicked out the nest while I was still hatching, and all I knew was to do the same thing to you. Matter fact, I figured if I loved you the way you ought to be loved, it’d just make me mad for what I ain’t had when I was coming up. I never got enough of nothing, not till I met your daddy, and then he went off and died. I thought your daddy was the onliest thing what ever loved me. But do you know you’re just about the onliest thing I ever loved?”
Ahead of us, a branch of ice falls from a tree and is crushed beneath Mr. Barbour’s wheels. Finally, after all these years, the building that houses the bakery is being rebuilt. It has a new roof now, and a large windowless shoproom where icicles hang. Mother rolls down the window to clear the condensation that’s gathered on the windshield, and with the breeze coming in, I should feel chillled. I don’t.
“Maybe I was flapping around the house like a bird with one wing, but I want you to know—”
“I do.”
“You don’t. You know what you think mamas are supposed to do. You know the ways you wanted to believe I loved you. But I’m telling you, you don’t know the half of it. And I want you to know that that boy, that man—what’s his name?”
“August.”
“He ain’t the be all end all. He ain’t the only one what ever loved you. Me and your daddy, and your granddaddy too—peculiar as he is about showing it—you are our whole life, girl. Always have been. When you was borned, you ain’t never seen three people so happy.” Mother keeps her eyes trained on the road, but she takes one hand from the wheel to hold mine. She smiles. “We think you’re the bee’s knees.” She coughs, then lets her smile go. “Leastwise we did. Until you went and got married ’fore you could even get a chance to smell yourself.”
Saint Monkey Page 27