Black Alice

by Thomas M. ; Sladek Disch; Sladek Disch

  but though Alice was pleased to be given the responsibility, she was giggling too hard to order.

  When Miss Godwin placed the order, Alice studied her admiringly, as she might have gone through the pages of a fashion magazine. It seemed incredible that anyone so chic would bother to spend her summers tutoring one seventh-grade girl. One eighth-grade girl, that is. Why, Miss Godwin had even been a model in Paris for one of the most famous designers!

  That was a secret between Miss Godwin and Alice and Uncle Jason. Miss Godwin didn't want Alice's parents to know about that, since Mrs. Raleigh had definite ideas about Negro servants and their 'place'. She found it hard to bear that Miss Godwin should have a Master's degree (and, almost, a Ph.D.), but she could never have countenanced the thought that her child's governess had once been a Paris model.

  A skinny, pasty-faced boy with a front tooth missing brought the hamburgers and malts out to the car. Alice's stomach growled, and Miss Godwin discreetly overlooked the fact. It was altogether minutes before Miss Godwin had tucked in the napkin about Alice's dress and opened the door of the glove compartment, in which there were two tidy niches to hold the malted milk cups.

  Observing how daintily Miss Godwin ate her hamburger, even leaving part of it on the side of her paper plate, Alice decided she would do the same. Maybe that was why Miss Godwin had such a good figure. It was time for Alice to start watching her figure, or she'd end up like Mrs. Buckler. (Not to mention her own mother.) But before she knew it, she'd eaten the last of her hamburger and the tail end of her pickle and drained the chocolate malt until it was nothing but noise.

  Chapter 2

  Oh, what a rogue and peasant slave am I! thought Roderick Raleigh, apropos of nothing in particular. Most times Roderick had a much better opinion of himself than that, but in moments of melancholy (and nothing was so liable to bring on melancholic moments as finding oneself, as now, at the corner of 11th Avenue and Boston Street, before the three-story brick residence and office of Jason Duquesne) one tended to recall the sublime words of the Swan of Avon. Is it not monstrous...

  At this point one tended not to recall the exact sublime words, but their tendency was very clear to Roderick. Was it not monstrous that his brother-in-law, Jason Duquesne, should live in such a home as this—the oldest brick residence in the city of Baltimore—amid what could only be called baronial splendour, with surfeiting riches heaped all about, while he, Roderick Raleigh, who was so much better equipped, by nature and upbringing, to appreciate such graces, should have to come begging for crusts of bread at Jason's carved oak door? Was that not monstrous? If that wasn't about the limit of monstrosity, then Roderick Raleigh didn't know what was.

  'Are you getting out, mister?' the cab driver asked.

  'Yes, yes, of course.' Roderick glanced at the meter. $3.55. The last time he'd taken a cab from Exmoor to Jason's it had cost only $3.25. The driver had probably deliberately chosen a longer route. Accordingly, when the driver had given him his change from a five, Roderick only tipped him twenty cents, and when the driver ventured to protest, he gave him a brief, though not unpassionate, sermon on the importance of honesty in small things. Roderick took such a pleasure in sermonising that he often wondered if he had missed his true vocation. Perhaps he should have been a man of the cloth, instead of...

  Instead of what he was.

  At thirty-nine Roderick Raleigh was still looking trim as the day he had (almost) graduated from college. If one were generously disposed, one might have called him handsome, though his handsomeness was in a rather outmoded style. The pencil-thin moustache, for instance, was strongly reminiscent of the later Errol Flynn. He had allowed his temples to grey exactly as much as Cary Grant's. His suit was well cut, costly Without ostentation, and, by contemporary standards, rather drab. No one could challenge his tango, but when he heard fast music his impulse was to lindy rather than to twist. And often enough his true impulse was to go to a table and sit down and catch his breath. But for all of that, Roderick Raleigh still considered himself, if not a young man exactly, not an old man by any means. And not middle-aged either. At thirty-nine Roderick Raleigh was mature, neither more nor less.

  Roderick climbed the four brick steps of the stoop, swinging his walking stick jauntily and whistling a Victor Herbert march tune. He stopped to adjust his tie and smooth the hair at his temples. (The thicker, jet-black pompadour above always looked after itself; for $400 it had damn well better.) He raised his walking stick to press the doorbell, but at the last moment another impulse controlled him and he mashed the steel tip of the walking stick, as though by accident, into the brass plate above the doorbell. The resulting scratch cut across the D of Jason Duquesne and the y of Attorney-at-Law.

  I must apologise for that, Roderick told himself, for he was, as nearly as he could be, a true Southern gentleman with a sense of the proprieties second to no one's. Gently, he passed a leather-gloved finger to the bell and listened to the harsh notes of the antique chime.

  He stood to the side, leaning on the iron railing, and examined the view across Boston Street A horrendous procession of high-rise, government-financed apartment buildings— featureless, red-brick slabs, one just like another—spread up and down the length of Boston Street as far as Roderick could see. At first, when the ugly buildings had started going up five years before, Roderick had been secretly pleased. He was certain they offended Jason as much or more as they offended himself, and Jason would have to live with them every day. He would have only to glance out of his office window to see them, the great, gaunt memento morts, monuments to human ignorance and the triumph of bureaucracy over architecture. On more mature consideration, Roderick had found less cause to rejoice. Jason, who was pushing sixty and had already had two small strokes, would not last more than a few years more (by Roderick's calculations) and then the house on Boston Street would revert to Roderick and Delphinia. Or, more exactly, to Alice, since it was she, unfortunately, and not her parents, who was after Jason sole heir to the Duquesne millions.

  Ugliness, Roderick reflected, is everywhere now. Then, as he was in the habit of editing his own thoughts, amended that to : Uglification is rife. Except that instead of ugliness they called it Urban Renewal. It was worst in New York, but it had spread up and down the coast quick as the pestilence. It had conquered Baltimore. It had even, he could remember, got down as far as Norfolk.

  Strange, how Norfolk kept getting into his thoughts so much lately. And that last evening there... he could remember the dilapidated house on that nameless street by the tidewater... and the ugly modern furniture ...

  Everyone had been in such a rush to be modern then. And where had it got them? Where were they all gone to now—the fraternity brothers, the floozies, the high-old times? Golden lads and lasses must, Like chimney sweepers, come to dust. That was the moral of the story, if it had any moral at all.

  Impatiently, Roderick pressed the doorbell again, then turned back to confront the drear land of Urban Renewal... He smiled, remembering.

  'They call it urban renewal,' Bessy said, chuckling and jiggling the immensity of her bosom, 'but I know what 1 call it. I call it a doublecross. After all the graft I laid out to get hold of that place on East Main ... why, it makes a person positively sick at her stomach.'

  'Then why do you keep laughing about it?' Roderick asked.

  'Because it ain't never going to work, sweet child. Men—and sailors especial—are going to go round tomcatting no matter how much you renew the urban. They can push us off East Main, but they're only going to come looking for us later somewhere else, and I don't see the point, moving it from one street to another. Men is men, and a pretty girl...'

  '... is like a melody,' Roderick concluded gallantly.

  Bessy smiled and patted Roderick on the knee. 'You'll get yours in a minute, honey. Just you be patient and drink up that black coffee. Now, you'll forgive me, won't you—I have to look in on the parlour. Sounds like those brothers of yours are chopping the place into firew
ood.'

  Bessy left the kitchen through the swinging wooden doors, and for one crazy moment looking at her wide hips and huge, drooping buttocks Roderick had thought yes, he might enjoy

  taking her upstairs after all. What would Bogan have had to say about that? But then Bessy turned around, showing her full bulk in profile, and Roderick's unseemly desire quickly ebbed away, to be replaced by the more vivid and abiding emotion of hatred. Christ Almighty, how he hated Donald Bogan!

  He took a penknife off his key chain and wiped the blade on the gabardine of his trousers. He cut a good three-inch gouge into the still-unmarred wood of the door between the kitchen and the parlour. Then, very carefully, he traced a long curve intersecting the vertical gouge at each end: D. The B was harder to make since the curves were smaller, but he worked slowly and, so to speak, lovingly. When he'd graven Bogan's initials for posterity to witness, he started on the initials of their fraternity.

  It was the second night of the Kappa Kappa Kappa Annual Howl. The first night (the only night so far as the University authorities knew) was given over to more innocent pleasures: water-skiing and coeducational baseball in the afternoon, followed by an evening of dancing, light drinking, and, typically, light necking. Roderick's date had been Delphinia Duquesne, only daughter and sole heir of Morgan Duquesne of Baltimore. Despite their living now in Maryland (where Duquesne held an important seat in the state assembly), the Duquesnes were essentially a Southern family. The scuttlebutt at Tri-Kappa was that Duquesne practically owned two whole counties in the west part of Virginia, not to mention real estate in Richmond and Baltimore. Delphinia herself was as Southern as fried grits, and a mite prettier. She'd been 'finished' at St. Arnobia's, outside Charlottesville, and gone from there to a girl's college that was so exclusive that a daughter of Jefferson Davis had actually been refused admittance once upon a time. Such, at least, was the proud tradition. With a background like that one could overlook her looks (which weren't bad, really) and her age (she claimed twenty-eight; thirty-one was likelier), and excuse a certain amount of flightiness. In fact (and Roderick had been trying to convince himself of this proposition for weeks now), it wouldn't be at all hard to fall in love with a girl like Delphinia Duquesne.

  It is one thing to fall in love with a southern belle; it is quite another to make out with her. So, when the brothers of Kappa Kappa Kappa woke up late next morning to take their sweethearts to depot, they were feeling chilled, hungover, and mean.

  They picked up a keg of beer on the way back from the depot and worked on that till four in the afternoon. Then Roderick drove over to the other side of town and bought five quart-size Mason jars of bootleg gin. It would have been quite possible, and almost as cheap, to buy perfectly legal gin just twenty miles away, but what was the fun of that? As the fraternity charter stated, the brothers of Tri-Kappa believed in preserving Sacred Tradition. The bootleg gin was a ritual.

  'Man, that sure's rotten stuff,' said Donald Bogan, ritually smacking his lips over the gin. Bogan, a short, fair senior who always spoke as though he were addressing a public meeting, was Tri-Kappa's unchallenged authority on the art and science of boozing. At twenty-four his face had already taken on the bloat and tinge of an alcoholic.

  'You said it, man,' echoed Warder, the frat president. 'And you want to know something else rotten? last night was rotten. Man, I was as horny as a bullmoose. I feel like I been three years on a desert island with my hands tied behind my back. I mean, Roddy boy, what say we start off down to Hampton Roads and pay our little call on ol' Bessy?'

  'Yeah,' said another pledge. 'I wouldn't mind changing my luck. How about it, Hot Rod? What you got lined up for us?'

  Roderick, as the poorest and least 'connected' of his many brothers (mainly the sons of lawyers, bankers, and state politicos), was under the obligation to work his way through college, and his work consisted mainly in procuring, on the average of once a month, gin and women for his brothers. It was Roderick's belief (and it was well-founded) that his continued membership of Tri-Kappa depended solely on his talents as a provider of these necessaries at reasonable prices.

  'How many?' Bogan asked loudly.

  'Enough,' Roderick promised. 'Seven or eight.'

  'Including ol' Bessy herself? How'd you like that, boys? I bet she ain't more than sixty years and not much more than three hundred pounds. The opportunity is still open. Now who will grasp it? How about you, Hot rod?' Like everything he said, Bogan's laughter seemed to come out of a public address system: it was loud, depthless, and rough-edged.

  'No thanks, Bogan buddy. I haven't had as much gin as you have. I don't think I'd be up to it. I'll leave Bessy to you.'

  Bogan glowered mirthlessly, as the drunken laughter continued around him. Bogan did not like Roderick. Roderick did not like Bogan. Twice Bogan had tried to have Roderick ostracised, and each time Roderick had made him look like a fool. And last night he'd made him look the biggest fool of all, because his date for the dance, Delphinia Duquesne, was the same girl Bogan had brought to last year's Howl—and afterwards bragged that he was engaged to.

  The thirty-one brothers from Kappa Kappa Kappa had piled into six cars and driven the fifty miles into Norfolk in about as many minutes. There were cathouses, of course, within walking distance of the campus, but if they'd gone there they'd have missed the fun of racing down U.S. 64 stoned out of their minds, another sacred tradition. Besides, Bessy's whores cost half of what they got at the U, due to Roderick's canny use of the fraternity's bargaining power.

  Bessy came to answer the door, flashing her professional good cheer and bogus jewellery, and chattered to the boys while shetook a quick head count. 'Well, well, if it ain't the boys from that fraternity!' (She'd been warned never to speak the name of their house aloud in the brothers' presence, since most of them worried about blackmail, police raids, and newspaper publicity and liked to think, therefore, that Bessy thought they were merchant sailors on leave.) 'Isn't that sweet? Girls!' she called out, 'come see what the colleges is turning out.'

  When all the boys had gone into the parlour, Bessy took Roderick aside and scolded him for bringing more than he'd promised. 'With only eight girls, we're going to be at work all night.'

  You know as well as I do you'll be working all night in any case. So what's the fuss?' Roderick smiled appeasingly, and Bessy sighed resignedly as he paid out the fee they had contracted for. They entered the parlour together.

  'Okay, children, have fun,' she said, giving her girls the go-ahead sign.

  Ordinarily that would have been it, but Bogan was still feeling mean, and Bogan never got mean without wanting to give a public demonstration of it. 'I want two of your best tonight, mammy.'

  Two? Lord, ain't that being a mite greedy? We're a little short on supply tonight, honey, as you can plainly see.' She waved a massive hand in a sweeping gesture that made the shiny lavender material of her dress crackle electrically. It was plain to see: there were four frat brothers for every girl. The older boys were already making their choices and heading for the stairs, while the younger ones had settled on to chairs and couches to wait their turn.

  'Hell with that noise!' said Bogan. 'I want what I want when I want it, and by damn I'll have it!' He strode across the room and pulled a tall, light-skinned girl away from a freckled senior.

  The senior said something rude, and Bogan (who had commandeered, as his second choice, a black, rather homely girl that nobody had got to yet) said something ruder.

  'Well now,' said Bessy brightly, when all the girls had been taken upstairs, 'why don't I make the rest of us a nice fresh pot of coffee?'

  'Coffee!' sneered a freshman. 'I want a drink! He fumbled in the pocket of his blazer for the thirty-cent cigar he had bought days before in anticipation of this moment. After he'd bitten off the wrong end, he found himself unable to light it.

  Someone started singing the University anthem. Roderick felt sick. It was the room that did it. Everything in it was new and in the worst possible ta
ste. The green leatherette sofa on which four freshmen were sitting seemed to have come here from some dentist's waiting room. It was flanked with blonde, tiered tables with wrought-iron legs and glass-protected tops. On each table stood a vivid orange plaster pagoda of a lamp. The carpet was as white as an advertisement for laundry soap, but right near the tip of Roderick's oxford was a small dark stain. Blood or coffee, Roderick touched a finger to it. The synthetic material of the rug felt crinkly, like wadded-up cellophane.

  He got to his feet and concentrated on not giving in to a sudden, dizzying sensation of nausea. He was disgusted with the whores, with the whorehouse, with ...

  Himself. Last night he'd whispered protestations of eternal love into Delphinia's ear; tonight he'd come to hire some poor, broken-spirited girl for an hour of joyless love. Never again, he told himself. This would be the last time, absolutely. After all, one was bound to get a disease in the long run.

  Feeling a little better with this matter decided, he leaned back and rested his hot cheek against the wallpaper, where clumps of red and yellow roses wound around a trellis up to the warped mouldings. Across from him above the green sofa was a portrait of Robert E. Lee. Three seniors came downstairs and went out to the cars to drink more gin and exchange lies.

  Three juniors went up the stairs. Robert E. Lee winked at Roderick.

  Roderick went into the kitchen. Immediately he felt better. 'What about that coffee?' he asked Bessy.

  'Why, love you, child, I already brought that around and you said no. Sit you down and tell me how you like it. Cream and sugar?'

  'Black.' He sank into a ricketty wooden chair and Bessy poured him a cupful.

  'Whyn't you go upstairs and look see what your friend Bogan's up to, Roderick? You know where that little peephole is. He's taking way too long by my estimation.'