“What you drinking, handsome?” It was a high-busted waitress with her red and white ruffled blouse pulled way off the shoulders.
“What you pouring, beautiful?” Herbie turned to look at her but couldn’t see her face as she leaned in closer and offered him a tray filled with cheese squares and pimento-stuffed olives pushed onto foil-wrapped toothpicks. He waved his hand and shook his head. “Just bring me whatever y’all dripping from those kegs. And then tell me what time Ethel starts to sing.”
“Any minute now,” the waitress said as she bent over to talk into his ear so that she could be heard over the foot-stomping good time. “You getting your order in just in time; even the owner stops pouring when Miss Ethel takes to the stage.” Her uplifted chest was right in his face, bouncing up and down as she talked. Her breath tickled his ear. Herbie sat up sharply. He didn’t want to be stirred right now.
“I guess he do stop pouring,” he said as he crossed his ankle over his knee. “I’d stop pouring too if this was my spot.”
“Uh-oh,” she said, standing straight up now, her face lost in the smoky haze except for her bright red lips, which she was smirking to one side. “Don’t tell me you got a thing for Miss Ethel too.”
“Why I got to have a thing for her just to recognize her rare talent?” Herbie looked down so he didn’t have to look at her lips. “Me and Miss Ethel go way back. I used to play drums in a little quartet, Ethel was on vocals. We’re friends. Good, good friends.”
“Tell it to your wife, handsome.” She placed a red square napkin at his elbow and started to walk away.
“How you know I got a wife?” Herbie grabbed her hand quickly to hold her there, to hear what she had to say.
“It’s all in the eyes, sweet daddy,” she said as she pulled her hand away.
“What about the eyes?” Herbie’s voice had an urgency to it.
“I got to get your drink, handsome; there’s more’n you needing service.” And calling over her shoulder, she said, “Trust me, sweet thing, it shows.”
Herbie didn’t want it to show. Whatever it was she was seeing, whether it was his yearnings for Ethel or the long-ago memories this place was jostling in him, Herbie hated that his feelings showed. He used to practice the blank smile of the cool cats that hung out at Club Royale and never let it show. But he thought he looked like someone constipated, straining. He decided that it might be easier just to practice not feeling. Maybe that’s what the cool cats had on him.
He fixed his eyes on the small stage. The stage was just a circle, now blackened, raised two feet from the ground. He stared into the circle and traced the outline of the large silver microphone. The cord curled and looped around its base like the tail of an oversized field mouse. A piano and drum set were off to the side. The smoky haze filled with the scent of ribs and chicken sizzling on the grill surrounded the small stage. The smell was still getting to Herbie. He tried to breathe through his mouth. He decided to focus in on the merriment around him. Many of the party people had spilled out of the tent and were dancing in the grass. Their fast feet and shaking hips egged Herbie on to look for a partner and join them on the grass. But then he heard the first strike of a piano key, the slightest rush of a cymbal; he even thought he could hear the yellow light as it spilled down on the small circle of a stage.
A hush moved through the tent like a rushing wave, even drawing the dancers back in. The circle of a stage was fully lit now, ablaze in yellow light. The piano and drums were tapping in sync. Suddenly Ethel stepped out of the shadow into the fiery circle. She was dressed all in red. Even the smoky haze from the barbecue pit retreated like a gentleman bowing. Her roundness filled the stage: her round, droopy eyes with the thick lashes that made her eyes look half asleep; her cheekbones that curved softly, shadowed with bright red rouge; her round lips that were as thick as they were red, and pursed. Even the line that moved down her chest to where her heartbeat rose and fell had a roundness to it. Her gown was tight and cinched in at the waist and made an hourglass of her frame so that when she lowered her head, gracefully acknowledging the rapt attention of the crowd, and then looked up and out, Herbie’s insides turned to jelly. “Damn,” he said softly, “she would have to look so good.”
The crowd clapped and hooted. Somebody yelled, “Come on and sing to me, baby.”
Somebody else called, “Just don’t take my man.”
Ethel laughed and then smiled. And then her rounded face took a serious slant as she pushed the oversized microphone to her healthy lips. The tent was silent again except for the piano and the drums, backdrops to Ethel’s voice: loops and waves of passionate moans and tender shrills and trembling so resonant it was smooth.
Herbie was filled with the impulse to just rush the stage. Just grab her from the stage and take her away with him, someplace where he’d be her only audience. He was getting worked up over the thought. But then there was Noon. There was this new baby that had happened quicker than a whirlwind. There were practicalities.
Ethel trilled her first song, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” And when the club could settle down after clapping and hollering and begging for more, she went into her next song, “Mean to Me.” And then, on “It Don’t Mean a Thing If It Ain’t Got That Swing,” she snapped her fingers to the beat and twisted and twirled and put on a show. The club was clapping and thumping as Ethel controlled the rhythm. When she got louder, they got louder too. When she flew her hands in the air, there were hands everywhere. And when she moved her hips from side to side, the top of the tent threatened to blow. Then she laughed, and they were doubled over laughing with her, and she spoke softly and they swooned. Then she rounded out her set and bowed gracefully again and tried to leave the stage. But their applause held her, planted, in the middle of the raised circle of a stage.
She looked out in the audience again. This time she was looking at Herbie, and she said, “I want to sing this one for a special friend.” And then she closed her eyes and breathed in deep and started to sing “Summertime.”
Herbie closed his eyes too. “Please,” he said softly, “don’t sing that song.” But she was already into it.
And Herbie was tumbling through time against his will. He was back there in Mississippi. He was seven years old. The whole black section of town was celebrating the sixtieth anniversary of the end of slavery, with the annual pork roast. It was morning, and already the huge pits were firing up freshly slaughtered pigs. The smell was all through their little country house, and the smell was making Herbie hungry. He and his baby brother were running through the soft grassy dirt chasing balloons of red and white that were floating everywhere. His daddy had just walked down the road humming in the direction of the barbecue smoke, wearing his stark white chef’s hat that billowed at the top like a pleated curtain.
And then Ethel sang the part about your daddy’s rich and your mama’s good-looking. And Herbie was looking in his mama’s face, how pretty her face looked when she was asleep. Her skin was light, and her hair was dark and usually pinned back in a bun, but at night she let it fall and the loose, crinkly curls fluffed against the pillow and made her face look even softer. He almost hated to wake her that morning. But as his daddy had left, he’d said, “Your mama must be awful tired this morning. I’m going on and help turn those pigs on the grill; wake her up in a little bit so you can have breakfast and get on into town ’fore the parade starts.”
And Herbie was saying, “Wake up, Mommy, please wake up and fix us breakfast.” And his mother was still. And he said, “We caught you some runaway balloons, Mommy, wake up and see them, and then you can fix us something to eat. Come on, Mommy, or we’ll miss the parade.” He shook her again and again, and when she still didn’t move, he told his baby brother to bring the big leather strap from the shed.
“What for?” his brother asked.
“Just bring it, now!” Herbie yelled at him. And his brother struggled with the thick strap that almost weighed as much as he did. Herbie took the strap, and drew
it high, and smacked it hard against his mother’s back.
And his brother covered his eyes and screamed. “Why you whipping Mommy, Herbie? Don’t whip Mommy.”
And Herbie said, “Mommy, I know you gonna spank me for doing this to you, but I got to wake you, come on, Mommy, please wake up. You never slept like this before, Mommy.” And he let the strap strike her back again, and he saw a thickening welt race along her shoulder blade until it opened up, except the blood was brownish instead of bright red.
“Mommy, we’re hungry, please wake up and fix us something to eat, please, please, please.”
And later that day they had to pry the whip from his hands as he listened to his father sob.
By now Ethel was singing the words that hushed the little baby not to cry. It was too late. His face was in his hands. His shoulders were going up and down. Nobody else noticed, though; they were on their feet calling for more as Ethel exited the stage. Except for the high-busted waitress in the red and white off-the-shoulder blouse; she noticed.
Herbie just stared at the blackened stage, at where Ethel had just been like a red flame. His breath was coming in heaves as he tried to pull himself together.
“What’s them married eyes staring at that empty stage for?” It was the waitress again.
“Looking for you, beautiful.” Herbie tried to force a smile. She leaned in and placed a fresh beer at his elbow.
“How you know I wanted that?”
“I didn’t know. Miss Ethel sent it. Said to tell you to come on back in about fifteen minutes.” She exaggerated a smirk as she talked. “And I was gonna take you home with me tonight, Papa. I was gonna work that sadness right outta them eyes.”
“What you talking ’bout sadness?” Herbie stood quickly, and smoothed at his pants, and snatched at his collar. “Where’s Ethel, doll face? I just want to pay a friendly visit to an old friend and be on my way.”
“Whoa, hold it, Mr. Married Man”—she put her palm against his chest—“she said in about fifteen minutes, just calm down, she can’t be that good.”
Herbie sat back down, embarrassed that he was letting it show again. “I just want to talk to her so I can get on home.”
“Yeah, well, you got time, handsome, take your time and finish your beer, she ain’t going nowhere. Just relax your fine self,” she whispered as she stroked his shoulder and then kneaded his back with the ball of her palm. “She got pretty much the same thing any woman got, even your wife. Miss Ethel just parades hers around a little more, advertises it a little better. But it sure ain’t worth no jittery nerves.”
“Where she at anyhow?” Herbie asked as he rolled his neck around. “Damn, that feels good what you doing. Where you learn that? What you do, moonlight in a massage parlor?”
“Let your shoulders go limp,” she said as she hacked at them with the side of her hands. “You like stone. What weight you carrying in these shoulders? What you do for a living?”
“I carry shit,” Herbie answered as he let his shoulders collapse. “I’m a redcap, a porter at the train station, but basically I carry shit.”
“White folks’ shit, huh?” she asked as she pushed her fingers into his back, working down his spine.
“Who else got heavy shit? I could pack everything I own in a paper bag.”
She laughed, and Herbie wished he had paid more attention to her smile earlier. He wanted to turn around and look in her face, but her hands felt so good working his shoulders and his back he couldn’t stand to disrupt their rhythm.
“I believe you probably got a lot of stuff,” she said to the rhythm of her working hands. “You seem like one of them refined men. I bet your wife keeps a big cedar chest, and your china closet is full with real pieces, and y’all probably got expensive figurines sitting on the coffee table, and I’m sure your wife owns a string of genuine pearls, and she dresses the girls in organza dresses on Sunday mornings with long sashes that tie into big bows.”
“How you know I got girls?” Herbie asked, feeling so relaxed now he felt as if he could float off to sleep.
“You do, don’t you?”
“Just one, a newborn, name’s Fannie.”
“A newborn, ain’t that nice? No wonder those eyes look so needy; you ain’t getting no wifely attention right about now.”
“Getting all I can handle.”
She laughed out loud and kneaded his shoulders with her palm. “If you say so, sweetness. Where you live?”
“You tell me, you know every damn thing else. All right, I live across the bridge on Lombard Street.”
“Oh, yeah, you not far from Royale, and the Budweiser, and Peps, lots of clubs over your way.”
“I’m gonna call you Houdini, baby, what don’t you know?”
“Your name.”
“Herb, what’s yours, magic fingers?”
“Houdini,” she said, laughing.
“What time you done tonight, Houdini?”
“Right now,” she said as she gently moved her hand up and down his back.
“Can I buy you a drink?”
“I don’t drink,” she said as she moved around to Herbie’s side.
“Well, can you at least hang around till I say my hellos to Ethel? It’s a for-old-times’-sake meeting.” He felt the jelly in his stomach quiver.
“Your neck’s getting stiff again, sweetness. You can blow one of my best massages on your desires if you want. But if I was you, I’d just take my fine relaxed behind on home.”
“So in other words, you ain’t hanging around so we can, you know, so we can talk some more.”
“Can’t, baby, tomorrow’s Sunday, I got to be up and out early.”
“Doing what?” Herbie asked, trying to look beyond the red and white ruffled off-the-shoulder blouse to get to her face.
She laughed again, and Herbie wished there were more light under the tent so that he could see her better.
“I usher, baby.”
“Usher? At a movie house?” Herbie was thrown off guard.
“At church, tomorrow’s Communion Sunday, so it’s a long day.” She leaned down to kiss Herbie on the cheek. “I really do have to go, Herb, right? I have to go, Herb; like I said, I have an early day. We’ll see each other again. I’m right here every weekend.”
“Can I reach you otherwise, you got a address?”
“Just look for me here, sweet Herb, since I have a feeling I won’t be seeing you in nobody’s church.”
“For all you know I could be chairman of the Deacon Board.”
He watched her disappear into the smoky haze. He listened to her laugh. His back felt like a new back. He could still feel the palm of her hand working it, mashing it, pounding it, until it seemed to open up, expand. It felt wider, as if there were more room on it now to carry all that was heaped on and on it. Day after day. Always some new shit to carry.
He followed the bartender’s instructions back to Ethel’s dressing room. It was really a trailer on the other side of the tent. The midnight air was misty as he walked across the soft grass. The dirt was almost muddy. Barbecue smoke was still swirling around, making the misty air even grayer. He walked up to the trailer and hesitated and then tapped lightly on the door. No answer. He knocked harder several times. He could see yellow light pouring out of the side window. He waited, then turned the handle and opened the door. “Ethel, you in here?” he called into the trailer. “Ethel, it’s me, Herbie. Can I come on in?” He stuck his head in. She was gone.
FIVE
It took the bus ride from Lawnside to Philly for Herbie to let go of his anger at the way Ethel had given him the slip using that fast-talking, back-massaging waitress. Just like Ethel to use something that gives a man pleasure to distract him, he thought. If he hadn’t been under a tent filled with people, he reasoned he and the waitress might have mixed pleasures right on that long bench just to give Ethel splitting time. Suddenly the very thought was funny, and his laughter sliced through his anger as the bus reached his stop. Must be that baby
that’s softening me, he thought as he headed home. He couldn’t even hold on to his anger toward Noon when he thought about the baby. “Those eyes,” he whispered as he turned onto Lombard Street. “Like that baby got a spell over me.” By the time he reached his front steps he had even fixed his mind to apologize to Noon; he had been ready to hurt her for real, call her all kinds of low-down names for the way she’d just shut down on him. But he decided he’d be patient. Find him a little something on the side until Noon came around. She had to come around. Next month they’d be married a year.
He pushed open the door, and the stillness hit him all at once. He walked quickly through the house. The rooms reverberated with silence. Noon wasn’t home. It was well past one; where was she on a Saturday night, with the baby no less? He ran straight to the kitchen; still Pet milk in neat rows on the table. He leaned against the chair, relieved. She would be back. He didn’t think he had been rough enough to chase her down South.
Shit, a whole year without mixing pleasures with his own wife, some husbands would have wrestled her down and taken it by now. He stopped himself from thinking about it. No need in getting worked up. He went out the front door and looked up and down the long block. He blew into the air that was beginning to spit a light drizzle. Then he saw a figure turn the corner. He jumped off the steps and was halfway to the corner before his eyes focused through the drizzle. Damn, it wasn’t Noon, nothing like Noon. It was Bow. Damn, Bow.
“Evening, Bow.” He said it with forced politeness.
“Herbie, how are you?” It was more a declaration than it was a question. “I just left your lovely wife and that cherub of an infant over at the church.”
“Just going back to get an umbrella,” Herbie said, not wanting Bow to know he’d had no idea where his wife was at this hour, “and then over there to the church to escort them on home.” Herbie looked down into the street at the trolley tracks that had a greased-down shine from the rain that was falling heavier now.
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