Clara Callan

by Richard B. Wright

  At 132nd Street we stopped for a red light and Nora pointed to a long lineup in front of a dance club. They were mostly white people.

  “I’ve been to that club,” Nora whispered. “They have wonderful jazz music.”

  The taxi driver misinterpreted her whispering and asked if we wanted to get out at that intersection, but Nora said, “No, please drive on to the address I gave you.”

  I wondered what the driver thought we were about, two white women alone in that part of the city at night. Or did he guess? Perhaps he had transported other hapless creatures like myself across his River Styx. All I could see of my Charon was a thick neck and a flat leather cap covered with union buttons.

  The streets of Harlem were filled even at this late hour: a slow moving parade of dark people. I could smell fried meat and hear dance xband music from the doorways of clubs. Clusters of men stood on street corners smoking cigarettes and talking to the women passing by in their brightly coloured dresses. On this summer night, the people seemed to live on the street. Others leaned out windows and called down to passersby. It was all good-natured, a kind of carnival, and I could have enjoyed looking out at it under different circumstances. Beside me, Nora was twisting a handkerchief and I felt sorry that she had been dragged into this with me.

  We turned down a side street and the driver had trouble with the number. He had to get out of the car and look at a darkened storefront. We were off the main avenue now and it was quiet and empty on that street. When he came back to the car, the driver said, “I’m not crazy about walking around up here.” He was cross with us. We drove another block and stopped in front of a building. To give him his due, the driver got out again and checked the address. “This is it,” he said. Nora paid him and she must have been generous because he thanked her before leaving.

  So the taxi went down the street and we stood in front of the building, watching the tail lights disappear. Nora pressed a buzzer and almost immediately a light appeared in the hallway. It was as if someone had been waiting there in the dark for us. The door was opened by a slender, lightly coloured Negress. She might have been pretty had her face not been so badly pitted by some disease, chicken pox perhaps. Her cheeks were terribly scored and it made her look severe and disapproving. She turned out the hallway light and led us without a word to a small elevator, a kind of brass cage scarcely big enough for three. The woman had a sour winey smell to her. The elevator took us up to the third floor and we went down a hallway past office doors with frosted glass windows with the names of notaries and chiropractors and loan agencies. The shabbiness of the place distressed me; I had expected more from Evelyn’s Park Avenue doctor. I saw myself dying horribly on a table of bloodied sheets behind one of those doors. To calm myself I returned to this thought: When this is over I can go back to my street and my house; I will feel again the coolness under the trees on my veranda; on rainy autumn nights I will enjoy the warmth of my kitchen.

  The Negress opened a door that had no name on the glass and showed us into a small room which looked very like a doctor’s or dentist’s office. Wooden chairs. A bench with armrests. Venetian blinds. A pile of National Geographic magazines on a low table. A lamp in the corner casting a little yellow light. The window was partly open and I could smell the soft rank air from the alley below and hear music from a radio. After the Negress left, Nora and I sat on the wooden bench and she held my hand.

  “Are you all right?” she whispered.

  “Yes, I’m fine,” I answered.

  We could hear dance band music from somewhere and a little thunder and then it rained for a few minutes, just a shower. Nora whispered the names of the songs as they were played on the radio. She said it was a program she heard some nights. She told me she liked to lie in bed and listen to the dance band music that came from the big hotels downtown. She whispered all this to me hurriedly as though she were afraid she would run out of time before she could tell me these things about herself. And so she named the songs as they were played on the radio. “Under a Blanket of Blue,” “The Touch of Your Hand,” “Japanese Sandman.” There was a lovely and sordid wistfulness to all this. The soft thundery air and the rain, the dance tunes. It seemed to infect Nora like a fever and she began to cry. I felt a catch in my own throat. Nora pressed the handkerchief to her eyes.

  “This is so awful,” she said.

  “Yes, it is,” I said.

  I did feel such regret for getting her into all this. If we were found out, her career in radio would be over; there would be a terrible scandal and we would both be in disgrace. It was so horrible and yet we had to see it through. I felt a kind of despair then that passed between us. I think we both felt it. Perhaps it had to do with other feelings that must accompany this kind of experience. The feeling that something was about to be broken. When all was said and done, a human life or the beginning of one was going to be ended. The tramp’s child and mine. I felt something about that. I don’t know. I don’t want to think about it right now. Sitting there on that bench, I wanted to tell Nora how it all came about. I wanted to tell her how the tramp had seized my wrists and whirled me about and flung his suit coat into the grass; how he had fallen on top of me after I stumbled and how he did what he did to me and how the walleyed boy had sat on the railway track and watched us. I wanted to tell her how impossible it would be for me to bear the offspring of such a man and perhaps I almost began to blurt out something. I think I said, “Nora, let me tell you,” or “Nora, I want to tell you,” but then we heard voices in the hallway, a man’s and a woman’s, and the door opened. A tall elderly man came briskly into the room and passed us. He barely glanced our way as he opened the door to the inner office. He had taken off his hat and was shaking the rain from it. I saw that he had a head of beautiful thick white hair and a slight stoop. A woman wearing a nurse’s uniform then came into the room and smiled at us. She was stout, about fifty, with a broad, pleasant face.

  “Hello there,” she said. “Now which one of you is the patient?”

  Nora seemed frozen with terror or grief, tongue-tied. I said, “I am.”

  The woman (was she really a nurse, I wondered) smiled again.

  “That’s fine then. Come along now, dear. The doctor will see you.”

  Nora squeezed my hand and I stood up and followed the woman into the room. There was a table and on it was a white sheet. Everything looked quite clean and I was grateful for this. The doctor’s back was to me. I saw his rounded shoulders as he washed his hands at a sink in the corner. He had taken off his suit coat and was in his shirtsleeves. The woman took me behind a screen and handed me a cotton smock.

  “Take all your clothes off, dear, and put this on. How far along are you now?”

  I told her and she patted my arm.

  “That’s all right then. The doctor will look after things for you.”

  She was really very nice with her broad amiable face. Someone’s grandmother, I suppose. So I was barefoot and naked beneath the cotton gown and I thought, I am dealing with this and it will soon be over and I can return to my life in Whitfield and no one will ever know what happened to me on that Saturday afternoon. Even the details will fade in time. Now and then in the years ahead, the memory will recur in dreams, and awaken me, or when I am an old woman, parting a bedroom curtain on a spring day, looking down on Church Street. But at least I will be able to live around those memories. The event will not have ruined everything. This is how I thought last night and it helped as I lay on the table. The doctor was still at the sink and I looked sideways at his rounded shoulders and silvery hair. Some terrible needs had brought him to this room by the barbecue restaurants and dance halls. I tried to imagine giving your life over to something like drugs or alcohol. How could it happen?

  When he approached the sheeted table he wore a mask across his face, and all I could see was the silvery hair and the blue eyes and the large white hands. The woman too had now put on a little mask to cover her mouth and nose and so they stood above me.
The doctor said nothing, but he patted my shoulder and nodded to the woman.

  “Now we’re going to give you something to make you sleep, dear, and when you wake up, you’ll be as good as new,” she said.

  How could I ever be as good as new, I thought? She was only trying to make me feel more comfortable. I could see that, and I now had confidence in these strangers from another country who were going to make things right again in my life. The woman had placed a rubber cup over my mouth and nose and I felt suddenly closed in, mildly panicked.

  “Breathe deeply, dear,” she said. “Breathe deeply and count along with me. Remember when you were a little girl and skipped with your friends? One, two, buckle my shoe. Three, four, shut the door. Five, six, pick up sticks.”

  She was wrong about my childhood. I hated skipping. I used to watch the other girls, but I never joined in though I remember the songs. I wanted to tell the woman that she had misread me; that I was not that kind of child at all. I was too peculiar and aloof. I wanted to tell her all that, but instead, when I opened my eyes, Nora was holding my hand. For several moments I had no idea where I was, and Nora’s voice seemed to come from the end of a long tunnel. It sounded so hollow and distant, though I heard every word distinctly.

  “It’s all right, Clara. It’s all over now. We’ll be going home in a few minutes.”

  I was looking up at her pale worried face. “Have they gone?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “It’s all over. The coloured woman is going to call a cab for us. You must be very careful. There’ll be some bleeding. We have to watch for hemorrhaging though the nurse said you’ll be fine if you’re careful. Plenty of bedrest for the next week, she said.”

  Then she left and I could hear her talking to the coloured woman. I had a dull ache between my legs and there were napkins there. So the tramp’s seed had been scraped from me. I would not bring his child into the world, but I could not help thinking what a curious mixture it would have been. Still I felt lighter and saw my life as filled now with possibilities.

  The murmuring voices made me want to return to sleep, but Nora and the Negress came over to the table and helped me to my feet. I felt a rush of blood from within, as if I were a vessel of fluids that had been suddenly tipped and was now spilling. A faint sickness overtook me then as I sat on the edge of the table. I told myself that the next few hours would be difficult but they would have to be endured. There is so much to endure. Father used to say that. “You have to put up with things,” he would say. “Every day brings something to put up with.”

  So, we walked slowly through the empty dark office building. Nora with her hat pulled down holding onto one of my arms and the Negress with her frowning pockmarked face and winey smell holding onto the other. We made our way into that cramped cage of an elevator and down to the first floor and out to the street where a taxi was waiting. The air had cooled and there was a faint lightness in the sky between the buildings. I was startled by that. It was nearly daybreak. Nora told me it was half past four. I was grateful to sit down and glad that I was well bandaged, for I didn’t want to soil the seat of the taxi. We drove down Seventh Avenue in that half darkness between the end of night and the beginning of day. At the street intersections, the traffic lights were blinking and the driver didn’t stop. There were almost no cars now, only a few taxis. I saw some coloured people gathered outside a club and a man in shirtsleeves and a derby hat sitting on a curb: down a side street an old peddler was adjusting the harness of his horse and wagon. By the lighted windows of all-night restaurants, people were eating and looking out at the street. Those are some things I saw as we drove downtown early this morning.

  Friday, August 2

  A week of rest and recovery. I have been reading Louise Bogan’s poetry and Thomas Wolfe’s new novel Of Time and the River. It’s very good though I don’t like it as well as Look Homeward, Angel.

  In the afternoons I listen to Nora’s program. How strange to hear her voice on the radio! It is Nora, of course, but then it isn’t. After a few minutes she is someone else, a woman named Alice Dale, likeable and wise, concerned about her headstrong, younger sister who has fallen in love with a teacher at the business school where she is training to be a secretary. The teacher is married, but Effie is determined to be “with the man I love.” There is a quarrel at the kitchen table and the kindly old aunt and uncle are fretting after the young woman storms out of the house. The announcer with his rich beautiful American voice then poses a question and offers an invitation.

  “Will Alice’s heartfelt talk with the young and wilful Effie save her sister from a disastrous turning in her life? Tune in again tomorrow when the makers of Sunrise, the soap that awakens your skin, invite you to walk once again past the white picket fences and front porches of Meadowvale to ‘The House on Chestnut Street.’”

  And then Elgar’s Salut D’Amour played on the organ. It is surely all nonsense and yet I could see the house, the curtains on the windows, the aunt and uncle at the kitchen table. And Nora is utterly convincing as Alice Dale. She is very, very good.

  Monday, August 5

  Beginning to feel more myself again. Yesterday Nora, E.D. and I spent the afternoon in Central Park. A bright day but it has cooled off in New York, and we sat on benches under the trees eating ice cream, watching strolling families and lovers. Nora wants me to stay until the middle of the month, but I am determined to go home next week. I was happy there under the trees listening to Nora and E.D. talk about their program, Evelyn grinding a cigarette under her shoe and lighting another, as she talks about putting the listeners through “the emotional wringer.”

  Everything is grist to her mill as I suppose it is for anyone who writes, whether it’s poetry or radio serials. E.D.: “Did you see that piece in yesterday’s Herald Trib? About the woman who stole from the collection plate to buy groceries? Just a small piece on the back pages. This happened somewhere in Ohio. They were going to arrest her, but someone intervened. I’d like to work something like that in. A woman in the town is hard up and tries to steal something from the offering plate. Maybe her husband is sick. Or better still, why not have her young and unmarried and pregnant.” E.D. gave me a wry look and shrugged. “So she’s desperate. And Alice is the only one who sees her steal the money. She follows her from church and discovers she’s living in some ratty place. Brings her back to Aunt Mary and Uncle Jim. A temporary thing, but she’s a good kid. Her name is Margery or Madeline. Something like that. Effie gets jealous because of all the attention. What do you think, beauty?” We get up and walk under the dappled sunlight, peering through the leaves, and talk some more about this Margery or Madeline.

  Wednesday, August 7

  Today I went along with Nora to the studio at Rockefeller Center. The actors stand in front of microphones with their play scripts. Behind a glass partition, a man in short sleeves signals them and oversees things. Other men open and close doors, use wooden blocks, tread on light steps, play recordings of automobile engines. It all looks so contrived and pedestrian, and yet from the loudspeaker come the sounds and voices of people in this mythical town. When you close your eyes, as I did for a moment, you can see them clearly. It’s a kind of auditory legerdemain. Nora looked pretty and capable standing with her script before the microphone in a polka-dot dress and white shoes. The program’s announcer kept looking at her. He is perhaps in his late thirties and has the weak, handsome face of a matinee idol. He couldn’t take his eyes off Nora, and looking at him, I wondered if there was something going on between them.

  Sunday, August 11

  Yesterday Nora took me to the Automat on Forty-second Street. It is an enormous restaurant with hundreds of tables but the food is kept in locked glass cases along the walls. To get your sandwich or piece of pie, you must insert a nickel or dime into a slot. I found it a very strange way to eat, but New Yorkers seem to take to this kind of thing as if it were perfectly routine. I wonder if all restaurants will be like this in ten years.

>   Later we went to Radio City Music Hall and saw a vaudeville show and a picture. Then we talked far into the night, lying there side by side in her funny little pullout bed. Nora is doing well down here, but she is also discontented. Turning thirty has left her troubled; she would like to marry and have children before it is too late. She hinted that she and the announcer have been “flirting” a bit. Nothing serious. Besides, he’s married and so that could lead nowhere. At one point, Nora got up for a glass of water and then returned, falling into bed and staring at the ceiling as though entirely fed up with things. I remember her doing this at home after an argument with Father: storming into the room and collapsing on the bed, her sudden weight jarring the book I was reading. Last night as I lay there, she seemed embittered. I am going home on Monday and she may have felt (and I could hardly blame her) that in return for all she had done, she was at least owed an explanation. She said, “I wonder what I would do if it happened to me.”

  In the light from the window overlooking the street, I could see her angry little pout; she used to put on the same face when she felt unjustly dealt with by Father.

  “Men just walk away from these things and leave the dirty work to us. I’ll bet the bastard who got you pregnant is now snoring away beside his little wife. He didn’t have to take a taxi up into darkytown in the middle of the night, did he?” I could see she wanted me to reveal the identity of the villain. But my heart was not open to confession. I wasn’t about to tell Nora the sordid details of my encounter with the tramp. She wanted a love story: assignations, letters, meeting in cars on country roads, whispered embraces and the fluttering of hearts in hopeless passion. But since it wasn’t like that, the tale was beyond me.