“’Cause I know it.” Fannie stooped and grabbed Liz’s shoulders and shook them. “And you got to know it too, Liz; you got to believe she’s not.”
“She let a lot a men do it to her, that’s all a whore is.” Liz still played with her fingers.
Fannie couldn’t deny that. Over the years snatches of conversation would catch their ears, between Noon and one woman or the other who’d berate Ethel, say Ethel had been running with so-and-so’s husband or brother or uncle, congratulate Noon for taking Liz in and giving her a good Christian upbringing. Or sometimes Fannie and Liz would be walking to Pop’s, or to school, or to church, and the whispers would walk with them. “That short brown one with the red hair, that’s the one that man-snatching singer saddled Noon with.” Fannie would watch Liz’s reaction, the way the skin on her face tightened with embarrassment and her eyes settled into a pained blankness. Fannie would rush to console Liz, to paint a composite of Ethel that she hoped Liz could love.
“So what, she did it with a few men.” Fannie sat on the closet floor next to Liz. “That don’t make her a whore. A whore is like the women who walk up and down Thirteenth Street and carry butcher knives and don’t have no feeling. I bet your aunt Ethel has a lot of feeling.”
“How you know what she got?”
Fannie drew her knees to her chest. “’Cause I know. I can tell when a person has feelings and when they don’t. If Ethel is a whore at all, she’s a good whore. Like a good witch.”
Liz wanted to tell Fannie about Herbie, see if she’d still think she was a good whore if she knew Ethel had done it with him. She drew lines in the plaster dust that had settled on the closet floor. She looked at Fannie, at the dreaminess to her eyes as she stared through the dust. She decided against it. Fannie could afford this fairy-tale image of Ethel. She knew better, though.
“Somebody’s coming up the steps,” Liz cautioned as she hurriedly covered the plaster hole with the cardboard trunk.
Fannie reached up and pulled the door shut and nestled back against the closet wall. Liz leaned her head against Fannie’s shoulder. Fannie shifted to give Liz more leaning room. “Tell me about her singing again, Liz.”
Liz swallowed the paste that had settled along her tongue and described what she could remember about Ethel in the clubs, and what she couldn’t remember she made up. She told Fannie how Ethel would take her with her to Ike’s or the Postal Card, how people would go crazy over Ethel’s singing, how they’d dance and clap and stomp so much “you’da thought you was in church.”
“What did the nightclubs smell like?” Fannie interrupted her.
“I don’t remember for sure, but if I had to guess I’d say it’s like a cross between Noon’s Manischewitz Concord wine, the Camel cigarettes the insurance man smokes, and body sweat mixed with thick perfume.”
“Well, how did it feel, you know, what did the air feel like?”
“Felt just like church right after someone gets saved and the people are wild and free.”
“Mm, anything that much like church couldn’t have been all bad. Probably why Ethel sang in those places. Probably why she still does. Just trying to save people’s souls is all.”
Then Fannie told her that when she was four or five, she used to think the air was really red and blue inside the clubs. “You know how they use those blue and red bulbs, when I’d walk by one and the door would open, I thought that was just the color of the air. Then one night me and Herbie were coming from the drugstore on South Street, and this man stumbled out of Freddie’s Bar and Grill all bloodied up around his head, blood dripping all over his shirt. So I asked Herbie what happened to him. Herbie said, ‘Bad air in that place, my man was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.’ So I thought for the longest time that when it got late, the red air melted and settled on the heads and shoulders of people who weren’t supposed to be there.”
“You were one smart child,” Liz teased.
“Well, this was before I had you around to make sense of the world for me.” Fannie patted Liz’s head.
“What was it like before I was around?” Liz asked, the laughter gone from her voice.
Fannie was quiet. Then she said, “It was like things were incomplete, like we were waiting for you so they could be complete, we knew you were coming and we just wished you’d hurry up.”
Fannie and Liz were silent sitting on the closet floor in their usher’s uniforms facing the trunk that covered the hole in the wall. “That was nice of you to say that, Fannie.” Liz sighed through the plaster dust that swirled around them lightly. “Very nice.”
SEVENTEEN
Fannie and Liz laughed their way through thirteen and fourteen. They skated to Nat King Cole tunes at crepe-paper-strewn parties at the Y and sniffled over Dorothy Dandridge movies at the Standard Theater on Tenth and South. They slow-dragged with the boys they’d invited over to Julep’s house when Julep’s mother was shopping in New York and her father was in his adjacent dentist’s office filling teeth with the thank-God-it’s-so-loud drill. They pierced each other’s earlobes with burnt needles and then toothpick sticks and got Saturday afternoon part-time jobs: Fannie worked the soda counter at Pop’s; Liz arranged the displays at Betty’s Dress Shop on South Street.
Liz was a straight A student at Overbrook High School, where Jeanie was one of the few black teachers, where most of the students were white, and where Liz had begged to go because that’s where Julep and her cousin went. The teachers loved Liz because of her exceptional reading skills, her perfect posture, her every-thread-in-place appearance, and her manner, which was quiet and polite. Fannie could have gotten all A’s too, except that the teachers said she had a fresh mouth, and the way she’d stare at them bordered on disrespect.
So Fannie and Liz tumbled through thirteen and fourteen like children rolling down a hill where the grass is lush and buffers the lumps and protruding tree roots along the way, hands high in the air, laughing, then catching their breath to laugh some more.
Around fifteen, though, life turned serious; almost every couple of months, it seemed, their laughter was interrupted.
The first time was in October, when Fannie and Liz were on their way home from Julep’s cousin’s Halloween party at a castle of a house on Osage Avenue in West Philly. Herbie picked them up in his ’48 Chrysler, which, even though it was seven years old, still drove like new because he mostly kept it parked. Liz nestled in the backseat, grateful that they didn’t have to walk all the way back downtown, and thought about the high-style elegance of Julep’s cousin’s house with the marble mantel and the grand crystal chandelier. She decided right then she’d live like that someday. That’s when Fannie cried out “Oh, my God,” and Herbie slammed the car to a stop and was immobilized by the sight of Fannie as she bounced around in the front seat, flailing her hands and screaming, “Noon’s daddy. Noon’s daddy’s gonna die.”
Then, in January, Jeanie leaned over the short black fence out back and blew smoke from her mouth as she told Noon she’d heard a rumor about a road, a high-speed road, slated to run right through where they lived. Noon, who rarely cursed, dug her heels in the frozen dirt and said, “The hell they will.” She listened to Jeanie then. Where she used to list off chores and excuse herself politely when Jeanie started her talk about the evil nature of the system, now when she went out back to empty the garbage or spread crumbs for the birds, she put on a jacket and gloves so that she and Jeanie could talk for a while. And when she’d go back in the house, she was so agitated over the very thought of being bulldozed from her block that she’d bang pots around and snap at Fannie and Liz and argue with Herbie over the smallest things for hours afterward.
Then one Wednesday in May, Liz sneaked around the corner the same way she had every Wednesday since the weather broke. And this Wednesday, like always, she dabbed rouge on her cheeks, smeared an extra coating of Vaseline on her lips, tucked her bobby socks all the way in her penny loafers, and tied a scarf around the waist of her pleated jumper so t
he print of her hips would show. She managed to fade into the simmering stream of activity on Catherine Street just so she could watch Fine Willie Mann direct the ritual of getting Club Royale’s weekly inventory into the cellar through a hole in the ground. But this Wednesday he noticed her, extended his hand; said, “You’re Ethel’s red-haired niece, the one Noon and Herbie took in.” He invited her down into the cellar then for a cup of tea.
Willie Mann moved the crates around in the cellar at Club Royale so he could offer Liz a seat. He was tall and light with straight hair that he slicked to the back: his eyes were brown with a hint of gray. His forehead jutted and made his brown-gray eyes appear deep-set and intense. “Fine Willie Mann” the women called him. He knew it too. Even dressed like it. Even when he was just pushing boxes around in the cellar, separating imported from domestic, dry from sweet, red from white, he still wore good wools, or pure silks, or soft cottons. Matching leathers; a lizard belt meant lizard shoes meant lizard strap to his watch. He’d started at Royale when he was only thirteen. Happened to be walking by as Big Carl heave-hoed with cases of bottled beer. Willie Mann offered to help. Suggested they lower them down through the opening in the ground using a rope or chain. Would take some time to devise, but it’d be a huge savings of manpower in the long run. Big Carl liked the way Willie Mann’s mind worked. Hired him on the spot to unpack inventory after school. Winked and smiled when he occasionally showed up with a giggling long-haired classmate to help.
Sister Maybell protested at first. “That pretty boy there is the only grandson I got in the world,” she’d told Big Carl. “Don’t hardly want him caught up so early in all the devilment that goes on in that Club Royale.”
Big Carl eased her mind. Promised to keep Willie Mann in the cellar for most of his work. Until he finished high school. That’s when Willie Mann started in the main room, and the ladies ogled over that fine young thing. And ordered double their usual when he flashed his perfect smile. And it was always easy for him to talk one or the other of them into the cellar on most any night of the week. So he quickly jumped ahead of bartenders twice his age and became Big Carl’s righthand young man.
Liz looked at his watch strap now. She couldn’t look at his eyes. The eyes would just fuel her blood, which had drained from her hands and feet and was splashing around in her head making her woozy, making her feel as if she had to faint. She couldn’t let herself do that. If she fainted, she wouldn’t have every detail of this place to recall each night before she fell asleep: the deep soft couch that held her at its edge; the open-top wooden crates filled with bottles of Seagram’s and Ballantine beer; the desk with an oversized adding machine on its top, the muted throw rug that ran from the desk to just under the couch, the three-legged desk chair with wheels that he sat in now, and swiveled toward her, smiling, extending a cup of tea in a dainty china cup.
“Thank you,” she said as she took the cup and sat back a little on the couch. She took a sip of tea and then looked at him as he smiled. She could finally look at his smile and not pass out. She wanted to return the smile. The chin-thrust-out Lena Horne kind of expression that she and Julep would practice that Fannie said may be okay for Lena, but on them it was fake, phony, and full of shit. Her mouth was filled with the thick silver wires of her braces anyway, so she settled on a closed-mouth, eyes-lowered smile like the shy church girl that she was.
“So, what occasion led you to be standing on my corner?” he asked as he ran his hand through his hair.
“Oh—” She hesitated, took another sip of tea, and thought about which excuse she’d use. She had at least four excuses should Noon or Herbie or somebody from the block want to know what she was doing there. “I was pricing taps for my penny loafers. Taps save the heels, so I figured I’d get some with the money I make at Betty’s Dress shop.”
“Work at Betty’s, do you?” He sat cross-legged, swinging his foot, elbow propped on the arm of the chair, looking at Liz with her grownup hairstyle and little girl’s face.
“Sure do,” she said as she tilted the cup to her lips again. She held the cup by the handle without putting her fingers through the hole and allowed her pinkie to curve back just a bit, away from the rest of her hand, the way she’d seen Julep’s mother do, wanting to make sure Willie Mann knew that she had class. “Just working there on Saturdays for right now, but Betty said I’m doing so well she may talk to my mother about adding on Wednesday evenings.”
“That well?” he asked, letting his eyebrows go up as he tried to decide.
“Yes. I was actually hired to help her dress her window, but she said I have a real eye for quality, you know fabric, and how well a piece is put together, so she wants me to help her pick out her line for next season.” She sat back farther in the couch. The tea was settling her stomach and her head, and she could feel her hands getting warm again; her confidence was coming back. “This is very good tea,” she said.
“It’s only Salada. So you like clothes, I see. You seem to have a sense a style. I mean, I’ve noticed you walking by, and you’re always much more pulled together than your sister.”
Liz felt a flush of warmth along her cheeks at the realization that he’d noticed her. She giggled and sipped her tea again. “Fannie,” she said, “she’s hopeless. She just throws on the first thing her eye hits. Her attitude is, if it’s clean and pressed, who cares if the colors match or the patterns clash?”
“I used to date a lady like that,” he said as he swiveled on the chair. “Drove me crazy. We stayed in more than we’d go out because I’d get to her place and see the wild getup she had on, and all I could do was say, ‘Let’s have Chinese tonight, baby. Take out.’”
Liz forced herself to laugh. She didn’t want to think about him in context with another woman. “Well, I just love clothes,” she said determinedly, to prove herself worthy. “I love the feel of material when it’s good. The way the threads come together in a finished piece is very exciting to me. Noon sews, she sews well, but then I see a dress, or a sweater, or a suit in John Wanamaker’s window, and well, Noon’s work is just not that good. I would never insult her like that, but I am glad I’m earning a little money and can save and start buying some store-bought outfits, you know; even if I have to start at Betty’s, I can work my way to Chestnut Street.”
“After you get taps for your loafers.” He threw his head back and laughed.
Liz could see gold crowns around three of his teeth when he laughed. She had never told anybody, not even Fannie, about how she felt about her home-sewn clothes. She felt suddenly guilty, as if she had betrayed Noon. She placed her cup and saucer on a sideways-turned crate next to the couch. “Well, yes, and maybe I’ll go ahead and let Noon keep making my clothes; she is good, quite, quite good.”
“But not as good as you,” he said as he stopped laughing and moved the wheeled chair in closer to the couch.
“Beg your pardon?” Liz said, not following him.
“I’m saying, Liz”—he lifted her hand from her lap and held it in his own—“Noon’s ability to sew does not surpass your ability to spot superior workmanship in a finished garment. So you’ll keep yourself bound to wearing less than the best because of, of what shall we call it, Liz, not wanting to hurt Noon’s feelings, or loyalty? Neither can really justify settling. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
She did understand exactly what he was saying. He was saying what had been rolling around in her head that she hadn’t been able to put into words. He held her hand tighter. He fingered her watchband. She started feeling weak and clammy again. She squeezed her thighs together. She had never felt such a stirring, not even when she had slow-dragged with the boy at Julep’s, and rubbed his butt while they danced, and let him put his tongue in her mouth.
She thought she might pull Willie Mann to her, that’s what she’d do. Just pull on the arm that held her hand, right to her on that couch. But all at once he squeezed her hand and placed it softly in her lap.
“Listen,” he said as h
e pushed the wheeled chair back to the desk, “I’ve got to settle some balance sheets and get the rest of these crates unloaded—”
“Can I help you do something?” Liz asked, rubbing her hands together so the left hand could share equally in what had just thrilled the right. She shifted in the seat and stared straight at him.
She looked a little like Ethel to him as she sat there now. Ethel’s eyes were larger, and her mouth, fuller. But she and Ethel had the exact same cheekbones, the deep-set kind that made a woman beautiful. He reminded himself then that Liz was still very much a girl despite her stacking that was also like Ethel’s. If his calculations were right, Ethel had left Philadelphia about a year after the war ended, because she had stopped playing at the USO on Broad Street and had come back to Royale full-time. So that would mean that she had left about ten years ago, yeah. So Liz couldn’t be more than fifteen. He was almost twice her age. He decided then what he’d instinctively known when he’d invited her into the cellar, this pretty young thing facing him on his couch with a plumpness to her eyes, like that unmistakable plumpness of a cat’s tail when it stands straight up and the fur gathers in a circle, or a kidney bean when it swells right before it bursts and sends up shoots, or the bulging to the eyes that a calf gets when her sacs are swollen and ready for that first release: This plump-eyed girl sitting on his couch where he had sweet-talked the best into giving it up was just too damned young.
He stood and straightened his striped shirt and refit it into his navy pleated pants. “I’ve also got to get ready for a meeting; in fact, it’s at Reverend Schell’s church, your church, right?”
“Oh, my God!” Liz shouted as she jumped up and grabbed her books from the other side of the couch, grateful for the opportunity to turn away so that her disappointment wouldn’t show. “I was supposed to come straight home; I was supposed to be going to that meeting; it’s important, about some highway coming through here! Oh, God! I’m in trouble, I probably missed dinner. Oh, uh, thanks—thanks for the tea and everything.” She put her hand to her forehead. “What am I gonna say! Noon’s gonna be mad!” She ran to the leaned-over ladder that served as stairs out of the basement.
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