Marian Burrow admitted him into her sister’s apartment without even asking who had rung her bell. She looked at him without recognition. She seemed older. The lounging pyjamas she was wearing were wrinkled. She was smoking a cigarette whose fumes made Sam cough. He guessed at the kind of cigarette it was. “Hello, Marian,” he said. “Don’t you know me?”
“I know you. You’re Miller.”
“I want to talk to you.”
The living room was full of acrid smoke. The windows and shades were down, the serape on the couch was disarranged as if she had slept under it last night. An empty whiskey bottle stood alongside the wall. The fumes burned Sam’s nostrils. He coughed. “Do you mind if I open a window?”
“Don’t go near them!” She sat on the very edge of the studio bed, her spine curving in, her breasts jutting. She giggled. “I got four sticks left. You open the window, you kill the smoke.”
“Only a minute, Marian.”
Her lips wrenched back in a snarl. The snarl stayed on her face. He knew she was lit. She was smoking the sticks, the reefers, marihuana. He was worried about getting lit himself, breathing in the smoke. That was how the reefer salesmen got the young kids. Get the kids into an unventilated room full of fumes and they would get lit; after that, they became customers. Sam sat down in a chair opposite her.
“What’d you do? Run out of booze?” he asked.
The snarl mask blew off her face and another mask, a giggle mask curved her lips and rounded her plump cheeks. Her eyes were full of laughing. She looked more Negro than Spanish in that relaxed second. “My sister forgot to bring me the booze.”
“Where is your sister?”
“Working.”
“Why aren’t you working?”
“I need a rest. My sister stay in my place. I stay here. You ever dream?”
“Sometimes.”
“Ever dream about cops?”
“Sometimes.”
“I dream all the time. Cops all standing there, looking at me. They — ” She giggled some more. “Sometimes, they got their pants off. Sometimes not. They got their clubs in their hands. Ever dream that?”
“No. Where’d you get the reefers?”
“He drop by to sell my sister. Dirty crook charge thirty cents a piece. Stick of tea’s not worth more than two bits.”
She held up her reefer for him to see. Then, she stretched out on the bed, drawing her knees up. Her naked brown feet beat out time on the serape to some tune thumping in her consciousness.
He coughed, cleared his throat. “Have you been here since I saw you?”
“When were you here?”
“Last night.”
“Last night?” She struggled to a sitting position, her lips hanging loosely. “You God damn liar. You were here couple weeks ago.”
“I was here last night. Yesterday.”
She laughed as if at a big stupid lie. She slapped her hand down on her thigh. “All those white cops standing around. All wanting to line me up. Ever dream that?”
“No.”
“Where’s your club?”
“I’m on a leave of absence. I don’t carry a club.”
“Why not?”
“I’m trying to find Suzy. Maybe you can help me.”
“Nobody can help a woman. A woman can only help herself.”
“Suzy’s been kidnapped.”
She shrugged. “Long time ago. She isn’t the only one.” She wiggled her forefinger for him to come closer. “Long long time. That was the time of the show on Broadway. They want light colored girls. And he said he’d think it over.” Her head lolled back on her neck. “He thought it over. See,” she confided. “He was a cop. Only he let out he was the producer. But he didn’t fool me. You should have heard that white man. Said it was no difference if a man loved a girl. They all come back. Him and all the other cops. Lord, it’s funny, dreams are. All those men.”
“Suzy was kidnapped Wednesday afternoon.”
“No fooling?”
“She was kidnapped Wednesday afternoon.”
“She’s a long long long.”
He saw that she was deep in the drug. Her sense of time was a marihuana sense of time; every minute was an hour to her and yesterday was a marihuana yesterday. “I’m trying to find Suzy.”
Her eyes gleamed comprehendingly. She took another drag on her reefer. He noticed that she exhaled very little of the smoke through her nostrils. She kept the smoke down. “I’m always trying to find. Lord. But they got in the way. All them cops. Go away!” she said to the marihuana cops. “I’ll come across when I want to. Not before.”
“Marian, I want you to help me.”
“What?”
“I want you to help me find Suzy.”
“Find, find,” she hummed, shaking her shoulders as if rhumbaing to some jazz band.
“Marian — ”
She snapped at him. “Bring me a stick!” His nerves tingled. He didn’t know whether she was talking to the marihuana cops or to himself. “In the box over there.” So, it was to him. “Oh,” she moaned, her eyelids closing. “I don’t like to drink alone. I don’t like to drink alone.”
He glanced at the enameled cigarette container on the table. The smoke was burning in patches inside his nostrils, hot little patches.
Her eyelids opened. “I seen you before, white boy. Years back, you white bastard. Think I forget how you lock the door and give me the corn about what’s the difference a man loves a girl. You, you. You push me on the bed, you bastard. Pull my dress up but you didn’t give me the job. Go on back to Harlem where you belong. That’s what you said. Don’t honey talk me. I remember. That’s where I belong,” she crooned, undulating her shoulders.
He hoped that she would forget about the reefer. His head felt as if in an iron mesh and the mesh was tightening. It was a joke all right. He’d get high on the damn marihuana.
“Where’s the stick?” she cried. “Get me the stick.” She pointed one stiff arm at him like a movie actress commanding a host of worshipping males and her face took on a “glamour” look so that she resembled the faces of the Hollywood stars on the walls; but her lips hung loosely and she was subtly hideous like some asylum inmate imitating a famous person. “All come here. All the time. I give the orders.”
“Who are you when you give the orders.” He saw her sleek and brown and fire was all around her; she was trimmed with bands of orange fire; the fire bands were the orange of her lounging pyjamas. But he didn’t see her in pyjamas. He saw her in fire, sitting on a studio bed that was a long bright boat and the boat was rocking gently on a fire sea. He forced himself to remember why he had come but it wasn’t so important any more.
“I’m bigger than all,” she giggled. “You know who?” She danced to her feet and ran to the photographs on the walls, placing her forefinger on a picture of Rosalind Russell. “I’m Garbo. That’s who.” She flung over to a photograph of Cary Grant and singsonged. “Gary Cooper’s my ideal. He stands there with the club.” She ran to the enameled box, took out a reefer and brought it over to him. “Light it.”
He glanced at the plugged cotton filter and then he stared at her. She was in a blaze of orange; her face was like the brown center of some giant flower. She grabbed the cigarette from his hand and pushed it between his lips. She lit a match and held it towards him. The match flamed like a torch. Orange burst in his eyes. He inhaled and his nostrils were seared. The smoke was sweet tasting. “I never smoked one of these before,” he said apathetically.
“More in the factory ‘round the corner. More in the factory.” She tumbled back to the bed, smiling a wide, elusive but happy smile. It was a smile of forgetting, and he wondered why he shouldn’t forget. Let the world go by, forget, forget, forget … His head floated off his neck up to the ceiling. Orange clouds flowed across the ceiling. He thought his head was an orange balloon. It made him laugh. “Sam,” a voice called. He looked away from the orange clouds and there was Suzy in the room, across the way. But it
wasn’t Suzy. But it was Suzy in pyjamas. And it wasn’t, and it was, and Suzy was smiling, and he thought that under the pyjamas Suzy’s breasts were orange and if he touched them they’d be fire and they’d make him forget, but what was there to forget … A funnel was inside his brain and down the funnel, a thousand thoughts, images, fantasies poured. And he knew there was a funnel. He wondered if he could get underneath the funnel, at the tip, and catch what he wanted as it came through. He wondered if he ought to tell Suzy he was glad she’d come back. “Sam, you bastard! Sam! Hey, you white boy, you dreaming?”
He looked at Marian Burrow. He didn’t know that she was Marian but he knew she wasn’t Suzy. He remembered. He was smoking marihuana. He held the reefer far away from him. Suzy? Who was Suzy?
“All standing there. I was in the middle of the floor,” Marian was saying. “They wanted to. They wanted to kick me. But I took my clothes off and they change their mind.” And he heard laughter and heard the voice saying. “I give the orders.” The iron mesh was tightening around his head and he was trying to remember. He was peering into a smiling face above him, close to him.
He felt something smash on his cheek. Slowly, he realized the smile had slapped him. The smile ran away from him through whirling orange into another room, another place that was like an office with desks and newspapers and a woman was dancing with a cat whose eyes had been gouged out. He thought: This is happening to me. He reached out his hand and he didn’t know why and he thought he was reaching for his own hand. He had lost his own hand and he would never find it. But there it was at the end of his arm, his own arm. He found his hand and smashed the fist his hand became against his own jaw. And sobered to recognize Marian laughing on the studio bed.
“I slap you and you — ” she gurgled. “What we care. You and me’ll smoke all the reefers in the world and have us a time. You and me. I’m coming for you.” She got to her feet.
Across the blackness and the dizziness and the flaming, a pen of fire was writing a name. The pen was inside his brain. He said, “Suzy.” He blinked at Marian and she wasn’t Suzy. He felt Marian’s fingers through his hair and heard her say. “We give the orders, you and me.”
“Where is Suzy?”
“Serve her right for spoil the orders. In the dream she come. They don’t look at her. They look at me.” Her fingers were burning rods in his hair, like cables through which fire was leaping from her body into his body and he remembered that he didn’t know where Suzy was and he’d never find Suzy and he said:
“Where is Suzy?”
“Ask Aden. Ask Clair. Don’t ask me,” she said petulantly. “Oh, I’m so sleepy.”
He staggered up from the chair. She gripped him and laughed. “You ever dream? Where’s your billy club?”
He broke from her, walked to the window, fumbled for the shade loop, rolled the shade up. The light of day appeared miraculously like a frozen sheet of ice in front of him. He yanked the window open and stuck his head out into the light, sucking in air through his mouth.
She pulled him away from the window, rammed it shut, tugged the shade down. He gazed at her with lungs full of fresh air. He saw a young doped girl in the room. Two buttons were open in her pyjama top. In the office of the Harlem Equality League she had always looked trim, but now there was a dissolute untidiness about her like the baggy stockings of an old street corner bum. To him, remembering what she had looked like, she was now lost and afraid and locked forever in the marihuana. She seemed to sense, too, that he had escaped the marihuana and escaped her. She screamed. “I’ll swear you bring me the stuff. I swear you screw me, you bastard cop!” Her hands flapped like two cloths on the ends of sticks. She rushed to the enameled box, seized another reefer. She smoked. “All reefer talk,” she said plaintively like a beaten child. She turned her back on him. “You over there. All you, come here. I give the orders, I give the orders!”
There was something he had to remember but his head ached too much. Even before he reached the street, the room and Marian were fading in his brain like a dream.
From the double bed, Bill was moodily watching Isabelle inspecting herself in the mirror. There were two Isabelles, both of them tall in green evening gowns drawn tight around the waist by draw strings. The two Isabelles untied the draw strings; two red mouths opened and said. “Bill, dear, I wish you would tell me when it’s right. Is it too loose?”
“All you women!” he exclaimed. “We’re going to a party and that’s all a woman can think of. Like a damn fool, I break my oath — Christ, I must’ve been crazy.”
She turned around. “I’m your wife. I had a right to know.”
“So you know.”
“Let them dare!” Her black eyes flashed protectively towards the door. He stared at her. He had told her of the organization’s personalities, the organization’s power and she acted as if there wasn’t too much to worry about. To her, the organization was like a bogey man that would vanish at a cry. She was walking towards him. Out of the mirror she came, made of mirror shine and brilliance. Her green gown glinted. She was like a Fifth Avenue window model animated into life. He felt her cool hand stroke his cheek.
He gasped out a short laugh. “The string’s just right. Just right. A fatty can wear it loose. A skinny one like you can wear it tight.”
“Every woman likes to feel snug around the middle.”
“You’ll be the best looking woman at the reception.” His words jittered to a pause. He pulled on his hair. “You’ll be careful. They’re smart, Isa. Hayden, Heney. Smarter than I can ever say. Heney spotted how upset I was. I don’t look upset easy. Not with my pokerface. But Heney — ”
“You know my opinion?”
“Yes.”
“You’re worrying too much — ”
“Too much? Christ! That oath’s no joke.”
“A man can only swear his oath to God and to his country. To no one else.”
“That’s just dandy. Sweet. Lovely.”
“But to whom did you swear your oath, Bill?”
“To the organization.”
“To men like Heney. To that cheap imitator of Huey Long.”
“He’s smarter’n Huey ever was. You’ll be careful? Promise.”
“I promised you last night, darling.”
“Promise again.”
“I promise,” she smiled. “Now, suppose you finish dressing.”
“The party? It begins at eleven, the big party. Life begins at eleven.” He looked down the blackness of his tuxedo trousers to the blackness of his socks. “Isa, I love you. I trust you. My life’s in your hands. I’m not joking. It’s no joke. A woman like you, you have no idea — ”
“I knew you loved me last night.” She stooped over him, kissed him on the forehead.
“All because I broke my oath, because I got scared — ”
She kissed him again. “You trusted me. That’s what matters.” She returned to the mirror and the problem of the draw strings. In a lighter party voice, she added. “I wouldn’t be so blue, darling. I know more than you imagine about secret organizations. My grandfather Michael — You never met him.
He passed away eight years ago. Grandfather was in the Klan years ago. He used to talk of the new type of Klansmen — ”
“How could he be in the Klan? Wasn’t he a Catholic?”
“No.” She flushed. “Grandfather broke from the Church. But, anyway, grandfather became disgusted with what he saw.” She was chattering now as if speaking of soap. He marveled at how cool she was. It must be her breeding, he thought; her knowledge of her family’s history, her family’s ability to survive crisis. He breathed in the scent of her perfume and let the perfume build an elusive night-time universe which would last forever. She finished with the grandfather who had joined the Klan and tightened the draw strings. “Bill, how are they now?”
“Perfect.” He got up out of the bed, walked to the closet for his evening jacket. He put it on. She moved to him, smiling. Her hands rested on his shoulder
s.
“Bill?”
“I’ve been thinking all day that last night was a new beginning for us.”
He kissed her ear. “You’ll be careful,” he said. “You’ll meet Hayden. You’ve met Heney before but it’ll be different tonight. Heney’s worried. Don’t let them pump you!”
“Bill, I didn’t ask you last night?”
“Ask me what?”
“You said the organization had welcomed the disturbances in Harlem?”
“Yes?”
“What about the girl?”
“What girl?”
“The one kidnapped.”
“The organization didn’t welcome that nigger job.”
“I’m glad, Bill.”
“Really? What’s that Red to you?”
“She’s a woman, Bill, a white woman. My grandfather Michael — Bill — Years ago, white men, cheap white trash would black their faces and then go out and commit foul things; violate Negro girls and white girls, too, pretending all the time they were Negroes. My grandfather said that there had to be a dignified relation between white folks and the blacks. The blacks had to know their place. If necessary, they had to be taught their place with violence. But Grandfather Michael detested all underhanded practices.”
The reception for ex-Governor Heney had reached the point of a cocktail glass in almost every hand when they arrived at the Hotel Maurice. The great reception room was humming with the voices of hundreds, men in evening dress, in military uniforms, women in evening gowns. The cocktail glasses reflected the light of the electric crystals overhead. Out of the glasses, the cocktail conversation seemed to pour. Bill guided his wife through the crowd to the buffet bar. Six bartenders, wearing full evening clothes, were busy executing the incessant orders for Manhattans, fizzes, Tom Collins. Bottles gleamed in rows. Outstretched fingers clutched the stems of new drinks. “What’ll it be?” Bill asked Isabelle. “How about champagne cocktails?” She touched his hand with her fingers and her excited eyes sent him her love in a short telegraphic glance. Near them, a white-haired gentleman and a young woman in a blue evening gown were talking. “Thank God for the waiters,” the man said to the young woman. “They stand like watchmen in the night.” “Watchmen?” the young woman questioned. The old man nodded. “Martha, dear girl,” he said. “Haven’t you noticed how the War has changed the atmosphere all over town. Everywhere, the familiar faces are gone. New faces everywhere. That’s why I say thank God for the waiters. That tall one’s Carl. I have seen him around town for years.”
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