Goodbye Without Leaving

by Laurie Colwin

  As my mother worked on her most consoling fantasy—my wedding—I, jobless and depressed, lived in a state of chronic dread whose focal point was the fact that one of these days Johnny’s mother and mine would meet each other for the first time.

  11

  They fell into each other’s arms, full of smiles and recognition, not for one moment dropping their faintly suspicious regard. Our fathers were much more reserved, stood quietly chatting about the stock market or the World Series, while Johnny moved between them like a Ping-Pong ball, bringing clarity and merriment to the proceedings. I felt slightly sick at the sight of all this conviviality.

  I really was in love with Johnny but I had to overcome quite a lot of resistance to cozy up to him. It had been my initial plan, on what might be called our first date, to spend the night with him and then disappear. That would show him! But I had not reckoned with his determination, which was ferocious and alarming. He had obviously made up his mind about me on the spot. A little flak from some directionless former Shakette was not going to stand in the way of his goal. He was going to wear me down. At the same time, he could not appear to be in collusion with my mother, although their Big Pictures were pretty much the same. As for me, my big fear was that I was losing, giving in, making the mature, sensible adult decision apparently everyone ardently prayed I would make.

  My future husband, I realized as I watched him in action, was a master diplomat. He managed to make everyone feel exactly as they wanted to feel. My mother was free to feel that I would marry Johnny and he would whip me into shape, and I was allowed to feel that Johnny was on my side and loved me for myself. What his mother felt at the time was unknown. As far as I could tell, she felt that she was about to marry my mother. The fathers chatted and drank their drinks, and my mother showed Dolly and Herbert Miller her studio. Then we all sat down at the huge mahogany dining room table while Erna MacIlvaine, the lady who had been cleaning and cooking for my parents for years, served fried chicken, biscuits with honey, butternut squash puree and string beans with almonds.

  Any normal person looking around that table would have had a heart full of pride. Two fine-looking sets of parents: my mother with her hair in a chignon and my father with his French half-glasses; Johnny’s mother, whose hair was short and frisky, dressed in clothes that were chic and age-appropriate (as the women’s magazines say), and his father, who wore a gold watch on a chain. My dearly beloved had taken off his shoe and was doing things to my foot with his foot under the table: a straight-arrow with some strange, lunatic glint in his eye. This should have made me happy as a fly, but I was not any normal person.

  Each bite was as dust. I could not wait for dinner to be over. Minute by minute I felt there was less air in the room. If I were the sort of person who fainted, I would have swooned dead away, but I had never even come close in my life. Finally it was clear that our parents had no need of us at all. We were excused from the table like a pair of ten-year-olds and we sped into the night.

  “Now wasn’t that lovely, lovely, lovely!” said Johnny.

  “Let’s get high,” I said.

  “Now, now,” Johnny said. “It’s not often that two families come together in the spirit of perfect love and commitment.”

  “I want to go to my house,” I said. “I want to be alone.”

  For the first time since I had known him, Johnny looked alarmed. He did not underestimate this part of what my mother called my rebellious streak. He knew if he let me go he would never get me back. He rolled up his figurative sleeves and set to work.

  “Let’s go to Chat’s and have a drink. Sleepy Jim Pulver’s in town. Maybe we could catch a set.”

  “I’m tired.”

  “Pulver comes to town once every ten years,” Johnny said. “Pull up your socks, girl. I’ll send him a note and ask him to sing ‘Bad Money Blues.’ Come on.”

  “I want to stop at my place.”

  “Don’t be silly, Geraldine,” Johnny said. “It’ll take us an hour to get there and back downtown. By that time Pulver may have died. He’s a very old man.”

  I yawned. Suddenly I felt a kind of warmth in my stomach and my limbs felt useless. Was this how people feel when they are about to die of hypothermia? Oh, why not, I said to myself sleepily. What the hell. We’ll go have a beer. We’ll hear Sleepy John Pulver. We’ll go to Johnny’s and smoke dope and take our clothes off. It’ll be fun, fun, fun.

  “Okay, okay,” I said. “Let’s go. It’ll be fun, fun, fun.”

  “We don’t sing that kind of trash, girl,” Johnny said.

  “I’m not dressed for this,” I said. “I need my blue jeans and my high-heel sneakers.”

  “‘Put on your red dress, baby, ’cause we’re goin’ out tonight,’” sang Johnny.

  “‘And wear some boxing gloves,’” I sang. “‘In case some fool might wanna fight.’”

  Oh, my sweet Johnny. He knew the words to all the best songs. As we walked hand in hand to the subway, I thought to myself that a wide knowledge of rock and roll lyrics certainly guaranteed protection of one sort or another.

  12

  Although cornered like a weasel, I took my stand. I told Johnny flatly that I would not get married until I had a job and that was that. Who knew how long it would take me to get one?

  I was gigantically unskilled. I typed slowly and inaccurately with two fingers and could not take dictation—or maybe I could. Graduate students and rock and roll backups generally aren’t asked to try. I did not have a degree in early childhood education, nor had I graduated from the business school. I knew nothing about art or museums, and since my math skills had never been sharp, to say the least, I could not really see myself working in a record store or museum gift shop and learning to make change. I was not going to go back to graduate school, not ever.

  I sat at the tiny desk in the living room I shared with Mary Abbott and wondered which way to turn. Johnny had suggested I write a book.

  “I Was a White Shakette for the FBI,” I said.

  “No, seriously,” said Johnny. “You have had a unique experience.” This sentence made me wince. I would never have a unique experience again.

  I dialed Chicago and called Mack Witherspoon, who was responsible, if anyone was, for my being a Shakette in the first place. I told him I was looking for a job. He suggested I tour with Ronnie and the Tramps, but I said I was looking for a desk job. Even I knew that the day of the girl group was coming to an end. Mack said I should call his friend Pee-Wee Russell, of Pee-Wee’s Lunchtime in Space on radio station WIS (What I Say). Pee-Wee was a big fan of the Shakelys and he would know my name. Maybe he could find me something.

  It turned out that black-owned radio stations don’t usually hire white people, but Pee-Wee, who actually had been a fan of mine, took pity on me. He said he would call up a man he knew, the Reverend Arthur Willhall of the Race Music Foundation, and see if any research jobs were available. They didn’t pay very well, was that all right?

  I said it was.

  Pee-Wee said that the Race Music Foundation was in Harlem. Was that all right?

  I said it was fine. An hour later I was on the subway.

  It was a cloudy autumn day. The sky was the color of pewter, against which the yellow leaves glowed. The sidewalks were the color of slate because they were slate. The Race Music Foundation was housed in an old brownstone on one of Harlem’s nicer streets. The neighborhood surrounding it was somber and old-fashioned. The building itself, a slightly crumbling five-story house, looked mournful.

  I walked up the stairs and rang the bell. The door was answered by a tall, grim, skinny man wearing a dog collar. This was the Reverend Willhall himself, who led me into what had once been a parlor but was now sectioned into an office. On the wall in back of a large desk was a looming poster of Mississippi Fred McDowell which read I DO NOT PLAY NO ROCK AND ROLL. I had been warned by Pee-Wee that the Reverend was no fan of rock and roll, which he felt was black music polluted by commercialism.

 
I sat down in a camp chair and he sat at the desk. Outside, the light lowered. It looked as if it might storm. A London plane tree out in front let down large yellow leaves. The Reverend sat with his elbows on the desk, his fingertips pressed together.

  “The Race Music Foundation has as its purpose”—the Reverend intoned in a deep, rich voice—“the preservation of the music indigenous to the black man. Gospel, blues, rhythm and blues. We do not believe that society as a whole is interested in this music except to plagiarize, or bastardize, or use it as fodder for its own commercial purposes.”

  He did not appear to be speaking to me, and I was tempted to look behind me to see if there was an audience he was, in fact, addressing.

  I said, “You mean that white society is just going to rip it off unless you save it.”

  The Reverend looked at me as if I were a worm. He closed his eyes and opened them again, giving himself the aspect of a lizard.

  “Quite,” he said.

  I heard myself sigh heavily.

  “In this very house,” the Reverend continued, “in this very house, ninety years ago, was born Mother Clara Hart, the foundress of the Hart African Gospel School. It is her generous heirs who have given us this building for our work.”

  He fell silent and closed his eyes. I began to shift uneasily in my chair. I felt I ought to do something, so I coughed. The Reverend Willhall opened his eyes again.

  “We have organized an international network of researchers—a kind of living archive. These researchers send us endless material which must be meticulously catalogued and preserved. On this floor we house the library and reception room. On the second floor, our audio department and research rooms. On the third and fourth floors are the audio library, print, and copying facilities. My wife works here, as does my daughter.”

  He stopped again and was silent. Oh, well, I said to myself, when you have nothing, you have nothing to lose.

  “Reverend Willhall,” I said, “is there a job here?”

  He sat back for a moment without speaking. “We need someone to catalogue female blues singers of the twenties and thirties.”

  “I want it,” I said.

  Reverend Willhall peered at me over his glasses. It occurred to me that I was a tiny bit overexcited.

  “I mean, I love female blues singers of the twenties and thirties,” I said. “I’ve studied them. I used to … um … sing myself.”

  “Yes,” said the Reverend Willhall. “I understand that you were in popular music.”

  “I was.”

  “We don’t have that here,” Reverend Willhall said.

  “I understand.”

  “We operate on a shoestring. The pay is minimal.”

  “I understand.”

  “I cannot give you any guarantees that once you have done this job there will be another project here for you.”

  “I understand.”

  “We have no benefits of any kind.”

  “I understand.”

  “And we need you only three days a week.”

  “I understand.”

  “Come with me and I’ll show you around,” said the Reverend Willhall. “You can start tomorrow.”

  13

  I could not believe my enormous good luck! I felt like dancing down the street, until it occurred to me that now I had a job and I had promised to get married when I got one. Fortunately, this job caused another round of squealing and disapproval. My socially conscious and enlightened sweetheart did not feel it was safe for me to walk around in a black neighborhood.

  “I’m invisible,” I said. “On the tour they used to call me Casper the Friendly Ghost.”

  “I don’t like it.”

  “Tough,” I said. “It’s my job.”

  “Your parents are going to freak,” Johnny said.

  I looked at my beloved in a way that made him nervous.

  “But you haven’t even looked around,” Johnny said.

  “This is the opportunity of a lifetime, buddy,” I said. “You go off and do your law work and let me do my thing. ‘Where do you highbrows find the kind of love that satisfies?’” I sang. “‘Underneath the Harlem moon.’”

  The next day I began my tasks. I sat in a large room on the second floor and began to go through a mountain of cartons containing 78 rpm records and taped interviews with old singers, the children of old singers, the musicians who had worked with these old singers. I found handbills, sheet music, handwritten songs, photographs and other artifacts. All these had to be catalogued and filed. I sat at a console wearing a pair of headphones and listened to old records. Through the scratching and static came the pure strong voices of Bessie Smith, Gertrude Perkins, Mrs. Eartha Parks and dozens of others. Above my desk was a reproduction of a poster (the foundation had the original) of Bessie Smith and Clara Smith (no relation). It said: MY, BUT THESE GIRLS DO SING BLUEFULLY.

  The old records, lent to us by a network of collectors, were processed, through the miracle of modern science, into almost perfect recordings. The foundation covered its costs by leasing these to record companies and clearing the rights with the singers or their survivors.

  I sat alone in an office while across the hall the sound engineer, the pop-eyed, silent but hyper James Hill, worked behind a heavy wooden door lined with what looked like foam-rubber waffles.

  On the third floor worked two young women called Maryanne Thomson and Ava Brent, who ran the audio library and print room.

  Downstairs was the domain of the Willhall family. Mrs. Willhall, whose first name was Queenie, answered the telephone and bossed around the porter, an old soul saved by Reverend Willhall in his preaching days. The porter was known only as Moby, a small, dense black man of about fifty, who carried cartons, hauled equipment and drove the foundation’s battered van. He lived in the basement and used the enormous, ornamental bathroom to wash in. Formerly he had lived on the street, and was now paid just enough to keep him in tobacco and off drink.

  Then there was Desdemona, the Reverend Willhall’s daughter. She was fiery and beautiful. Looking at her solemn father and her placid mother, it was hard to tell where she had come from. She wore her glossy hair in a crown of braids on top of her head. Her clothes were suitable for the daughter of a clergyman, except that she liked skirts with slits to show off her legs. She wore gold earrings and her perfect nails were painted with a shade I recognized from my tour days as Frosted African Pumpkin. Desdemona did not speak much, at least not at the foundation. She sat in her office and worked the telephone, and she traveled frequently to raise money.

  Mrs. Willhall believed that it was her duty to see that the foundation staff was properly fed. Each morning she started a large pot of vegetable soup on the stove in the huge old kitchen. At lunchtime we sat at a tin-top table eating vegetable soup, cornbread and applesauce. The Reverend Willhall did not believe in conversation with food. We gathered at the table and waited while steaming bowls of soup were placed before us. The Reverend extended his long skinny arms out over the table and intoned; “O Lord, for the food which we are about to eat, we thank you! We thank you! We thank you!”

  It often seemed to me unfair that he did not thank his wife, but there you are. We ate in silence, which was just as well, since it was at mealtimes that I felt most alien—the lone white face. Would I ever find some fellow humans to be at peace with?

  Upstairs I sat at my console and stared out the window. Dark autumn rain fell steadily. I switched on a record and positioned the needle. That powerful clear voice of Bessie Smith almost knocked me backward. As I listened I realized how very dirty those old dirty songs were, like “I’m Wild About That Thing” and “You’ve Got to Give Me Some.” It turned out they were written under a pseudonym by a nephew of the Madagascar royal family—the world of music was full of such anomalies. Sunshine suddenly flooded me. I was an anomaly, too. It was all okay.

  “‘You can see my bankbook,’” I sang along. “‘But don’t you feel my purse.’” I happily sipped my coffee. There w
as no one to hear me, so I was free to sing as loud as I liked: “‘I’ve got what it takes but it breaks my heart to give it away.’” It seemed to me to be my personal anthem.

  14

  It didn’t take me long to love my job at the Race Music Foundation. It was rather like being on tour except more restful, and the food was better. I was sincerely interested in women singers of the twenties and thirties. In two weeks I had settled in. I did my work, which required familiarity and devotion—I had plenty of those—and did not call for any special skills, of which I had none.

  Considering the nature of the music we were working with—dirty blues, songs about money, praises of God and what-all—the mood at the foundation was solemn. No matter what the weather, the building itself gave off a kind of serious, gray aura I found very consoling. The Reverend Willhall was supernaturally grave. He was especially disturbed when popular groups—by which he meant white acts—remade some classic blues number and turned it into a hit. He would then pick up the phone and put in a sorrowful telephone call to the foundation’s lawyer and set him on the case to see if any money could be liberated for the songwriter, or the heirs if the songwriter was dead, as was often the case.

  “Those English boys stole ‘Little Red Rooster,’” he would say mournfully. “When will this ever stop?”

  I always wanted to say, “Cheer up, Reverend Willhall. No white girl group is ever going to remake Gertrude Perkins’ ‘Black Snake Moan’ with violins.”

  No one else, however, was very happy about my job.

  “I worry about your welfare,” Johnny said.

  “For a guy who likes rock and roll,” I said, “you sure are funny about spades.”

  “I love spades,” Johnny said. “I just don’t like my woman hanging around spade-infested areas in the late afternoon.”