Goodbye Without Leaving

by Laurie Colwin

  34

  Often, as I was hanging around the neighborhood with my beloved boy, I would think of the old days when, instead of a baby sling or pram, I tore around in a chartreuse dance dress with Day-Glo fringe on it. Those days were gone forever. There were no acts like that anymore, except for groups like Jean and the Bee-Bops, but they were retro and only did oldies shows. When I was with Ruby, we were new. like an exile, I knew that I could never return to the home of my childhood. It had vanished—but not, however, without a trace.

  When Little Franklin was six months old, a documentary came out called It Will Never Die, which included footage of Ruby and the Shakettes during the time that I was a Shakette. My own husband bought a print of it at great personal expense.

  “Franklin will want to see this when he grows up,” Johnny said. “Isn’t it great! You actually sing solo on ‘Baby Come Home.’”

  “I sing one line,” I pointed out.

  “Yes, but what a line,” he said.

  The night it aired I watched it solemnly. Johnny was in a wonderful mood: he thought this sort of thing was historic. He loved old family photos, too, even those that made him look like a little creep.

  “I wish Franklin was awake to see this,” he said.

  “It probably wouldn’t mean much to a baby his age,” I said.

  The documentary attempted to explain the origins of rock and roll. It showed gospel singers, old bluesmen (including the late Bunny Estavez), rhythm and blues men, girl groups, a cappella quartets and finally, after Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley and Fats Domino and James Brown and the Famous Flames, a short section on Ruby.

  Ruby, according to this documentary, began in the old tradition and then entered the twenty-first century. The first shot was of her new show: a big set, a huge orchestra and Ruby, in a spotlight, wearing a short sequined dress festooned with fringe made out of tiny glass beads. That dress probably cost as much as she once made in a year.

  It mentioned that she and Vernon were the first to break the color line by hiring a white Shakette. There was an interview with Vernon, who seemed, after all these years, entirely unchanged. He said, “It didn’t never make no never mind to us. We treated them all the same.”

  And then there was some footage from my time: Ivy, Grace and my own self, on a plain, nasty-looking stage. I squinted and saw that the curtain on the stage read “Toledo Auditorium.” And there I was.

  We were backing Ruby on “Get Your Own Boy, Girl,” which had a fast backbeat to which we did one of our more complicated routines, including a lot of shimmying. There I was, frozen in a moment that existed only in history. It was the saddest thing I had ever seen. Then we did “Baby Come Home” and I sang my solo line.

  “God, you guys were great,” said Johnny. He sounded positively awestruck. “Come on, admit it. You were hot stuff.”

  I sat on the couch and did not say a thing.

  “Say out loud, black and proud,” said Johnny, eating a handful of popcorn.

  “Oh, shut up,” I said. I looked around me. Our living room had high ceilings with ornamental moldings in each corner, a fireplace, a coffee table and two sofas that faced it. In a nook was Little Franklin’s Moses basket for when I was sitting around and wanted him near. What am I doing here? I wondered. What happened to the person on the stage?

  “I’m so jealous,” Johnny said. “You really have a past to be proud of. I mean it.”

  “It’s just like watching Little Franklin,” I said finally. “Each day I say to myself, “This is the last day he will be exactly this age.’ Soon he will learn how to crawl and talk and he will never again be the way he is right now. His babyhood is melting away in front of my eyes.”

  “That’s why the motion picture camera was invented, Honey,” Johnny said. “Now everyone can be a historian, and if you get it with the audio attachment, you can be an oral historian, too. I was just browsing the other day in front of that discount camera store and now I think I’m going to take the plunge. I mean, his newborn state has been fully photo-documented. Now let’s get some action.”

  I leaned my head on my husband’s shoulder. What a comforting person he was. Yes, melancholy could easily be banished. Confused about memory or history? Buy a camera! Easy as pie! And the amazing thing, I realized, was that he was right.

  In a few years maybe Little Franklin would want to see this film of his mother. Maybe he would say, “That’s pretty cool, Mom, but it doesn’t really look like you.” Or maybe he would say, “That’s pretty retarded-looking, Mom.” Or maybe Johnny and I had produced some incipient straight-bag, an uptight white boy on his way to the Harvard Business School who would look at me sternly and say, “Mother, can’t you be appropriate, ever?”

  35

  “You know,” said Johnny one morning over breakfast when Little Franklin had become a real baby, with a few teeth and a beautiful grin. “People are getting very interested in rock and roll again. I mean, the good stuff.”

  “Is that so?” I said. “Franklin, spit that out!” My darling son was sitting in his high chair stuffing a large piece of toast into his mouth. He obligingly spat a wet lump of partially chewed bread into my hand.

  “I mean,” said Johnny, “I mean you ought to write something about it. After all, you had firsthand experience.”

  “Johnno,” I said. “I am raising your son. I am not a writer. I don’t want to write about rock and roll. I am very happy. When the time comes for me to find self-fulfilling employment, I will go and look for it. I still have money socked away from Ruby. And for the moment I am perfectly happy to be Little Franklin’s mother.”

  “Ginger says that after a while being just a mother is bad for a person.”

  I wheeled around at my husband. “Bad for a person! It’s bad for her with those two horrible-looking little weasel children. If I had had children like that, I’d have gone back to work the next day. I am the harbinger of new life, and don’t you forget it. I’m sick of everyone expecting me to be something or other. The only person who likes me for myself is Little Franklin.”

  Little Franklin watched this performance with wide eyes, and then he began to cry. I took him out of his high chair and held him in my arms.

  “Listen,” I said. “I had this baby and the first thing everyone wanted to know was when I was going to send him to prep school so I could do some useful work. Then they wanted to know when I was going to have a second one. You people are insane. Your child is being raised by his parents, not by a bunch of nannies. I like being his mother. I don’t want to be anything else for a while. He’s a baby. When he gets a little older, you can send him to law school. Maybe you’re ashamed of me because all the other boys in your firm have wives with babies and big jobs, too. Maybe you’re embarrassed because I’m just nobody.”

  “You aren’t just nobody,” Johnny said.

  “No,” I said “I am Little Franklin’s mother.”

  But really none of this bothered me very much. Having withdrawn from the foreign country of the Race Music Foundation, I crossed the border and entered another exotic place: the world of babies.

  I took Little Franklin to the park, where local mothers met to discuss diaper rash, the acquisition of teeth, nursing, sleep schedules and where to get the many appliances necessary to upscale baby life: baby swings and contraptions that helped them to jump up and down, and portable high chairs. As our babies began to look more like children, we discussed nursery schools, finger food and toilet training.

  But while other mothers perused catalogues of baby items as their little angels took their naps on blankets under the trees, I read Billboard and Cashbox. I read these on the sly—I did not want my husband getting any funny ideas. While other mothers read articles about toys that would raise the IQ’s of their toddlers, I followed the career of Vernon and Ruby and the scores of other acts we used to travel with.

  It turned out that Veronica LeBlanc of Veronica and the Vee-teens had returned to Charleston and opened a knitting shop called
“Vonknitique.” Gladys Williams had died in some drug-related incident King Carter had filed for personal bankruptcy. His sidemen, the Bell Brothers, were doing well in their private security company and performing their old hits such as “Bad Girl,” “Gumdrop” and “Honey Mine” at oldies shows in the San Diego area. As for Ruby, Ruby was golden, a million-dollar act.

  Donald “Doo-Wah” Banks, Ruby’s former saxophonist, was writing the score for a feature film about a black detective by a hot black writer named Will Bartholomew. As I pushed Little Franklin gently on the baby swing, my crush on Doo-Wah came back to me full force.

  I could see him now in his work garb, which consisted of a thick white sweatshirt with the sleeves cut off, old black trousers and beat-up cowboy boots. With shades, he looked somewhat sinister. With his shades off, he was the kind of man children run to when they need a splinter removed. I myself, when overcome with despair on tour, would creep into his room. Although he constantly refused to sleep with me—it was unprofessional, he said—he always made me a sherry flip after a recipe of his grandmother’s. Wah traveled with a quart of milk, a six-pack of eggs and a pint of sherry. This always picked me right up, and once in a while, if I was particularly downcast, he would permit himself to kiss me. This was also bracing.

  As I stood there, consumed with longing for Wah, I said to myself: You ought to get your thing together. Here you are, a wife and mother, daydreaming about a saxophone player when you ought to be thinking about your child’s developmental stages.

  One summery day I found a letter waiting for me from a person I had never heard of, forwarded to me from Flame Records. Every once in a while I got a fan letter from someone who wondered what had happened to me. Often these letters were forwarded by the nice woman in Cleveland who was the president of the Ruby Shakely Fan Club. (One letter had read: “Where are you, my white Shakette? You drove me crazy in the old days.” I did not answer this letter, although I could have said: “Yes, and I drove myself crazy in the old days, too.”)

  This letter was written on glossy stock. At the top, in heavy engraved red letters, was the name Spider Joe Washburn. On the bottom it said: “A friend of Rock and Roll.” Spider Joe, as he signed himself, was writing a book about girl groups, with photos, and he claimed he was desperate to interview me. As I stared at the letter, Little Franklin began to shriek and I realized that he was still strapped in his buggy.

  That night, after Little Franklin was asleep, I wrote a note to Spider Joe telling him that I would consent to be interviewed at our mutual convenience. “I am married and have a baby son,” I wrote. “Although I no longer sing or dance, I keep up with current trends in popular music.”

  This letter contained a number of lies. I did not keep up with trends in popular music. I played the same old music over and over again, only occasionally straying into a Latin music parlor to buy a few Ricardo Rey discs. Furthermore, although I was certainly married, it could no longer be said that my son was a baby.

  36

  Spider Joe was a sort of depraved-looking person, the type that used to hang around the rock and roll scene wearing extremely expensive clothes. I thought these people had disappeared off the face of the earth. He had on ostrich-skin cowboy boots, tailored blue jeans and a workshirt that looked as if it had been made by English shirtmakers. With these Spider Joe wore a string tie, an Australian hat and a Navaho silver bracelet on his wrist. He wore little round glasses with tinted lenses and his moustache was in the style of Fu Manchu. He came at nap time, as I had suggested.

  “Oh, you mean you’ll be asleep?” he had asked.

  “No, my child.”

  “Yo, child,” he had said. “What a gas.”

  It took him quite a while to set up his recording gear, what with making and taking telephone calls. “I gave your number, babe,” he said. It was impossible to hear anything of these calls since his voice dropped to a deep, inaudible murmur.

  “Yo,” he finally said. “Let’s get on it. Testing. Testing. You read? Dig.” He played this back to himself. “This is an interview with Geraldine Coleshares, the white Shakette. Yo, Geraldine. Those were the glory days, right?”

  “Wrong.”

  “I mean, we had a lot of fun, right?”

  I peered at Spider Joe. Suddenly he looked very familiar to me.

  “Did you used to be an act?” I asked.

  Spider Joe turned off his machine. “Yeah,” he said demurely. “Just for like a minute. I was with Brute Force and the Invaders.”

  “That’s not where I know you from,” I said. “I never saw Brute.”

  “I used to manage this act called Homard Roti out of New Orleans, with Huey Moscogne,” said Spider Joe.

  I considered this. I remembered Homard Roti, but not Spider Joe.

  “Oh,” I said, slapping my forehead. “How could I be so dumb! Spider Joe’s Rock and Roll Web! Gosh, I was a teenager then. Is that you?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “But I don’t, like, dwell on it. That was, like, television for teens.”

  “Well, bless my soul,” I said. “You must be a hundred years old.”

  “Spider Joe is a cat, babe. A cat has many lives. But let’s roll. We made great music. When you look back, what do you see?”

  “Well, I’m one who believes with the Reverend Arthur Willhall, at the Race Music Foundation, that rock and roll co-opted black music. I mean, it was great music. In the beginning it gave everybody in it a taste. But then it turned into a kind of corporation of its own. Remember Penny Bones? Her big hits were ‘River of Love’ and ‘Middle of the Night.’ I read the other day that she used to listen to herself on the oldies stations while she was working as a cleaning lady.”

  “That’s life, babe,” said Spider Joe.

  “It isn’t the business I went into,” I said.

  “Yeah, well, let’s talk about then, okay? You used to sing real good, right? Weren’t you on that Shakette single?”

  “You mean ‘I’m Not Yours’? That was three studio singers and Ruby got the money.”

  “Yeah, but you sang. I saw you.”

  “I sang solo on ‘Baby Come Home,’ ‘You Don’t Love Me Like You Used to Do’ and ‘Nobody’s Out There.’”

  These were considered my finest moments. The fact was, I loved to sing, but it was my heart’s desire to be a backup, not a singer. I said this to Spider Joe.

  “You lie, babe. Everybody wanted to be a star.”

  “Actually, everybody did not want to be a star.”

  “But let’s talk about those wonderful days. All of us together. Ruby broke the color line.”

  “Doubtless you mean our color-coordinated dresses,” I said.

  “I mean integration, babe.”

  “Oh, come on,” I said. “I was a novelty, like those singing chipmunks, or the dogs that bark ‘Jingle Bells.’ If it hadn’t meant bucks, believe me, there wouldn’t have been a white Shakette.”

  “Yeah, but Ruby made the statement.”

  “Yes, and as soon as she hit the big time, I was out.”

  “You bitter about those days?”

  “I am not,” I said. “I just don’t want to be nostalgic about a time I didn’t have. By the time we hit the trail, there was no color bar. We all stayed in the same hotels. I loved being a Shakette, but that doesn’t mean that we made a lot of money or got treated very well. Ruby and Vernon turned into business people.”

  Spider Joe switched off his tape. “This is a drag,” he said. “I can’t use this. I want some color, action, some groovy memories about how it was. I don’t mean to sound like hostile, but this is a disappointment.”

  “Well, go interview someone else,” I said. “Go see if you can find that girl Pixie Lehar who danced as Venus Cupid, if she’s not dead from being a hairoyne addict.”

  “I know her,” said Spider Joe. “She lives around here someplace. Her name is Paulette ‘Pixie’ Goldberg. But she got fired before the tour, so I can’t use her. Do you mind if I use your phone on my w
ay out?”

  This interview left me with a sense of gloom which was dispelled by my cheerful son, who woke up from his nap full of unfocused smiles. He and I had a standing afternoon date with his little friend Amos Potts, and Amos’s mother, Ann.

  Amos and Little Franklin had met when they were three months old. On my first trips to our local park, the lawn was full of well-turned-out young matrons with their immaculate children in perfect prams and buggies. At the far end of the park I spied a private-looking person sitting alone, wearing leopard-print stretch pants and espadrilles. She was reading a fashion magazine and smoking a cigarette. Her baby lay sleeping on a woven blanket, shielded from the sun by an oversized, battered alligator handbag. “That’s a mother for me,” I thought, and I was right. Ann and I were the same age, and so were our boys. We were now fixtures in each other’s lives.

  Ann was a poet who lived with her husband, Winston, in what had once been a chic white loft.

  “Now it’s a chic white loft with handprints,” she said.

  We spent our afternoon gazing upon our boys with disbelief. From babies wriggling on sheepskin rugs they had grown into rosy-cheeked toddlers who could cruise around the kitchen pulling dangerous implements down.

  “Isn’t it amazing,” I said to Ann. “So accomplished, and all from two cells. There must be a God.”

  “Maybe there are just two amazing little cells,” Ann said.

  “Don’t these things dog your heels? God, religion and all that?”

  Ann blew a smoke ring. “We thought about having Amos baptized until we read the Book of Common Prayer and Winnie said, ‘I am not having someone renounce Satan and all that crap.’ I myself think all religion is bad.”

  “So does Johnny,” I said. “He says it leads to war. I told him I felt we should join a synagogue, and he said if it meant that much to me I should go and find one.”

  Ann said, “Well, there certainly are a bunch of them around.”