Changó's Beads and Two-Tone Shoes

by William Kennedy

  The Manhattan convent school Esme had gone to no longer existed in 1953, but when Alex came to visit he told her of one in Albany where Latin Catholics for decades had sent their innocent daughters to be educated bilingually by an order of nuns that was as elite as the Jesuits. Esme flirted casually with Alex, without consequence, and though he owed her nothing, she knew he would godfather Gloria’s every need. He was, after all, Max’s close friend, the Mayor of a heavily Catholic city, he had political power, and he was an Episcopalian, which was almost Catholic.

  “Those nuns are purity itself,” Alex told Esme, “and they’ll preserve her from excessive sophistication.”

  The words were magical to Esme, who wanted Gloria to have the adolescent purity that had eluded her. And so, at age seven, Gloria was enrolled in the convent school at Albany and, except for one year in Cuba with her mother after Castro’s triumph, she spent her elementary and high school years in a cocoon of holiness, as that concept was understood by the holy women of Sagrado Corazón.

  When Gloria asked Renata for instructions on how to behave with a man—“What are the special secret things and how do you do them?”—Renata worried about wounding such innocence.

  “Do you mean kissing and touching?”

  “Yes, but more,” Gloria said.

  “You mean complete sex?”

  “I don’t know how to think about it complete.”

  “You know how it is done, verdad?”

  “I may not,” said Gloria.

  “You know the sex parts of the body.”

  “I know my own, but I don’t know much about them. About that.”

  “What don’t you know?”

  “I don’t know what I don’t know. In health class we saw a slide show on female anatomy but Sister Mary Kneeling Bench referred to those parts of the body in Latin, so we didn’t understand the words. We were told never to wear open-toed sandals because our toes might look like the male organ, which most of us had never seen. Our chests had to be flat, our knees invisible, and we weren’t allowed books, magazines, or movies that might be obscene.”

  “Did you ever see boys from other schools? At dances?”

  “We were chaperoned. If we danced we had to be a foot apart, and if we ever sat on a boy’s lap we were told to put a telephone book under us before we sat down.”

  “No sane person would tell you that.”

  “Some people say the nuns are insane, but they are only holy women.”

  “You know how to get a baby—tell me they let you know that much.”

  “I know it somewhat. When you menstruate you can have babies. I asked Mama if nuns menstruated and she said they did. Then why don’t they have babies? And she said because God knows they’re not married.”

  “Oh, my silly sister. Child, why do you come to me with these questions?”

  “I have a friend, and I want to behave right. I know you know how to behave right with men.”

  “What is right? Sexually safe? Is that your fear?”

  “What do you mean by safe? I want to know how to do things, or not do things, whatever those things are. Do you understand?”

  “I am trying.”

  “I want to be with him.”

  “But that is the point. How do you mean, with?”

  “What do you mean how do I mean with?”

  “I mean do you really want to sleep with him? That way, with.”

  “I want him to like me.”

  “I’m sure he does already.”

  “When we’re close I want to be sure how to do things.”

  “You don’t want to disappoint him if you sleep with him all the way.”

  “What is all the way?”

  “All the way is everything, giving him your body.”

  “Is that so easy to do? Exactly?”

  “Very easy, even when it is not exact.”

  “I think I want to sleep with him even if I don’t sleep with what you call everything.”

  “You don’t sleep with everything, you do everything.”

  “Then no.”

  “No? What do you mean no?”

  “It seems too soon for everything since I really know nothing.”

  “Oh, child—ay ay ay ay ay.” And she waited. “I don’t recommend this, but perhaps, just perhaps to begin, you can tease him and then stop.”

  “Is it possible to stop?”

  “Once you start, the body will want to continue. But you can teach yourself in your mind.”

  “How would I tease him?”

  “You do not say no when he asks. You say yes, un poquito. But not all the way yes. Maybe later it will be yes. Then you push him away, but nicely, and kiss him while you do it. Has he asked about any of this?”

  “No.”

  “What does he do?”

  “He kisses me.”

  “That’s all?”

  “Yes. He’s tall.”

  “Does he touch your body?”

  “My face and arms, my hands. He doesn’t do any of the with thing you mentioned.”

  The with thing. They educated this child to be a social idiot. So Renata spoke of seduction, how to talk to the man, how to be shy, how to grow bolder, when to laugh, because sometimes it really is funny, but you must not laugh at the wrong time or he will lose his mood. She spoke of clothing being loose here, tight there, the positioning of skirts, the crossing of legs, the ways of sitting. Renata put on a dress that shaped her figure but did not drape it, modeled a blouse and a skirt and demonstrated the visible arcs of the breasts, fleeting evidence of stockinged thigh, and the gradations of temptation through lingerie. She spoke of the control of one’s eyes and mouth, the things a man or a woman may desire and which desires you must postpone till another day. She did not speak of coition in explicit language. She did not want to use those words yet, either in Spanish or English, but she spoke of specific places being touched and pushing his hand away from other places. When you decide not to push him away then you are more or less doing it, and you will probably do it all, and then you will be with him. She mentioned the condom, without which you do not do the with thing. She spoke of a favored way of being with and suggested one angular variation on that. There are many ways of being with, she said, but you do not have to do them all at the same time, although some day you may try. The essential attitude when you are finally deciding not to say no is to think deeply about what you are doing, to think of yes as an act of love. One should not, on this night, or this afternoon, be with him just to be with. That may come later. On this night, or perhaps it is an afternoon, one must be the vessel of love, and when that happens you will know everything forever and will need no more lessons.

  “Do you know what love is, amorcita?”

  “I think I do,” Gloria said.

  “Good. Then the nuns have not totally destroyed you.”

  Gloria’s lesson in not going all the way came in March of 1964 when she

  was a second-semester freshman at Bard College and Alex, every other week, came for her in his Cadillac to take her to lunch. Renata and Quinn had wanted her to go to the State University where Renata was taking art history and literature courses to finish her degree, cut short when Batista closed Havana University as a revolutionary hotbed.

  But Gloria chose Bard because it was out of the city and she would live apart from family, but still close to Albany, and Alex. She was a scholarly and intense youth, undistracted by the common teenage fixation on romance. The school offered a focus on her potential career: social work and political science, an outgrowth of the awe she felt for her Aunt Renata, the political rebel. Renata, soon after she and Quinn moved to Albany in 1963, took Gloria to the civil rights protest March on Washington, and being with the vast black throng as Martin Luther King delivered his Dream speech was Gloria’s baptism in racial politics.

  Alex’s political life also seemed unorthodox but fascinating. His lunches with her in Rhinebeck turned into something beyond dining one day when he took her t
o a rural apartment for a rest, he said. But there was no rest, which was why she asked Renata for guidance into the unknown. She absorbed the counseling but continued wavering on the great yes that Alex was seeking. She finally abandoned her virginity when she walked in on two of her classmates doing it with their boyfriends, all in the same room. They laughed at her virginity, couldn’t believe it. Her own “boyfriend,” which was all she could think to call him even though he was fifty-four, talked her into staying in Albany for the summer instead of going to Cuba to be with her mother.

  She lived with Renata and Quinn, and Alex found her a summer job at City Hall in the office of Public Housing, but she left it after a week, bristling at the city’s official condescension toward tenants. Quinn found her more compatible work at Holy Cross Institution, a former Episcopal settlement house, now a nonsectarian social agency that was overseeing the Kennedy-Johnson war on poverty as waged in Albany’s worst slum, The Gut. Quinn brought her to see Baron Roland, the wild-eyed, mercurial, black college professor who directed Holy Cross, and he put her to work with Better Streets and Homes, joining social workers, white volunteers from uptown, and street-savvy nuns unlike any she’d ever met, all these workers coaxing the have-nots of the neighborhood into coping publicly with the social ills that contaminated their lives.

  Gloria was suddenly a friend of lumpen youths, of women who shoplifted by day and whored by night, of winos with nothing better to do once they woke up and found they were still alive, of matrons with children but no husbands, scraping a life together, battling their rotting houses, of widows and retirees looking for an alternative to solitude. Many of them came to Better Streets meetings at the Gethsemane Baptist Church on Franklin Street to voice their grievances to slum landlords and politicians—fix our leaky roofs, kill our rats, pick up our garbage, get us a health clinic, close the brothels, tear down those empty houses. Gloria heard Albany described as a social and political sewer, a city without a soul, ruled by plundering, racist titans. And public titan number one was always Mayor Alex Fitzgibbon, her wonderful lover.

  Maybe twenty people came to the early meetings, mostly women, led by Claudia Johnson, a three-hundred-pound black mother of nine children with a gift for talk, candor, and telling other people how to behave. But when Claudia’s words appeared in newspaper stories written by Quinn and others, Better Streets’ attendance rose—forty, fifty—which is when the ward-level politicians started their threats: Support those commies and you’re off welfare, out of a job, out of luck—and attendance plummeted. But some were immune to political threats and they were joined by uptown whites, and Protestant and Catholic clerics. The draw was Claudia—with her schemes of picketing City Hall on the garbage issue, or dumping garbage on the Mayor’s front lawn to make her point. After two months the city decided to haul a hundred truckloads of garbage and junk out of South End backyards and tear down twelve tumbledown houses.

  “Hey, people,” Claudia preened, “the Mayor is listenin’!”

  Feeling sassy, and with the 1967 election coming up, Claudia invited the state attorney general to come and tell Better Streets members about poll watching—how to check the voting machines, how to challenge any voter who signs the wrong name; and don’t let absentee ballots be counted till the polls close, and watch for people spying on the voters to see how they vote, or telling them how to vote. Gloria passed out mimeographed flyers on the subject. Quinn counted thirty-two attendees, including Mary Van Ort, the black seamstress and her wino husband Tremont, who never missed a meeting, and Lester Sugar, another regular, a white man whose oversize suitcoat hung on him like a poncho and who was famous for collecting four thousand bottles and cans for the Girl Scouts, and Father Matt Daugherty from Siena, and college students, and two newcomers who looked like narks.

  “We’re talkin’ about poll watchin’,” Claudia said. “This gen’man don’t say it but we know we need to catch them cheaters votin’ dead people, and passin’ out five-dollar bills to buy your vote. They been stealin’ elections in this town since before this big mama was born. It’s gotta stop and we can stop ’em.”

  “Whatayou mean we can stop ’em?” Tremont asked. He took off his hat and stood up. “And who is them?”

  “Them is the politicians, honey. Them aldermen, them bosses, the Mayor and his scumsuckin’ gang. We gonna stop ’em from stealin’.”

  “How we gonna do that?”

  “We find us some volunteers who’ll go into those pollin’ places and check out who is exactly who. We see them passin’ out those fives we say, ‘Hey, mister, I seen that and it ain’t legal.’ And we call the attorney general and tell him.”

  “You think they gonna do that passin’ out so’s you can see it?”

  “They got to get the money to the voter, so you just keep lookin’ till you see ’em do it.”

  “They prob’ly go around the corner and do it,” Tremont said.

  “That’s exactly what they do,” said Lester Sugar. “I was there last year and I watched ’em go ’round the corner.”

  “You watched ’em givin’ out five-dollar bills?” Tremont asked.

  “I never saw the money, but I had a scrutiny on it.”

  “That’s the problem,” Claudia said. “My mama used to say, ‘unless you in the bedroom standin’ over ’em with a candle, they’s no way you gonna know what they’re up to.’ This stuff might get nasty, so whoever signs up gotta be ready to stand up to those bozos. Now who’s gonna do it?”

  No one responded.

  “I’d sign up,” Mr. Sugar said, “but I did it last year.”

  “I’d sign up,” said Mrs. Wilson, “but I broke my glasses and I can’t see what they be doin’.”

  “Nobody in Better Streets ready to take a chance,” Claudia said.

  After a silence Tremont said, “All right, where do I sign?”

  Gloria passed a basket for donations, and cookies and soda followed.

  After Quinn dropped his father at the Elks Club he headed into the South End with Matt Daugherty, destination Dongan Avenue, where Tremont Van Ort was lying ill on the stoop of the old three-story brick town house that had been his family home for thirty years. Quinn walked Dongan Avenue as a boy and had forgotten it until he began to write about Better Streets. Before Dongan Avenue became a street it was part of the Pastures, where the Dutch colonists grazed their livestock. Dutch, and then English homes rose on the Pastures greenery and so began the seething American panorama of occupation—swarms of Germans and Irish replacing the Dutch and English; and then Jews, Italians, and now southern blacks—who had The Gut largely to themselves these days—all replacing one another with serial hostility.

  Quinn came to know The Gut with his father when its streets throbbed all day with commerce and all night with sin. George Quinn worked daylight hours out of a second-floor flat in an 1830s wooden house between Dongan and Green Street, the office of Joe Marcello, a numbers-game banker. The game was Policy, which Marcello called “nigger numbers” after the black Caribbean gamblers who brought it to America. White and pale pink Policy slips were published twice a day, six days a week, with twelve winning numbers. You could bet on combinations of numbers from 1 to 78, the odds ranging from 5-to-1 to 400-to-1. You could bet on a “flat” (two numbers) at 30-to-1 or a “gig” (three numbers) at 200-to-1 or a “horse” (four numbers) at 400-to-1.

  George Quinn walked The Gut door-to-door, picking up the play, paying off winners; and when there was no school, Daniel made the rounds with him—the Turk’s grocery store, with a one-arm bandit on the counter, the Double-Dutch Tavern where girls worked the bar day and night, the soap factory, the Albany Water Works, Big Jimmy’s nightclub, the old Times Union where the journalism bug bit Daniel.

  “Any candy for me?” George asked his customers, and they’d give him their numbers. If they couldn’t read or write, George would write their play and their bet on a notepad, take their nickel, quarter, dollar, and put the notepad in his shirt pocket, the money in his coat
. When the weight started ruining the coat’s shape George would go to a grocery or a bar and change his coins for bills. Quinn helped count coins and could keep leftover pennies for candy, or the penny punchboard. He played the punchboard once and won fifty cents. Eight years old and already rich.

  Now, thirty-two years later, Quinn, at the wheel of his ’59 Mercedes 220S, with Matt Daugherty beside him, moved through the streets of the old Gut, houses crumbling and boarded up, pavements pocked with potholes, sidewalks buckled, no people, only the heavy, black dust of a slum in its terminal stage. He drove down South Pearl to Herkimer, this the old Jewish neighborhood and this the street where Isaac Mayer Wise founded Reform Jewry with a fistfight in the old Bethel synagogue, still there, also the street where Claudia lived. He crossed Green and went on to Dongan Avenue, passed St. John’s, the oldest Catholic church in town, built by the Irish, and where Father Peter Young was now helping drunks dry out and get back in the game. Dongan, right there, was where Big Jimmy ran his nightclub, and three blocks south would be where Tremont was lying on his father’s old stoop.

  “You said you came here as a kid,” Quinn said to Matt.

  “I was seventeen,” Matt said. “Before the war, bar hopping, tryin’ to kick the habit.”

  “Coke?”

  “Pussy. Didn’t fit with the seminary. I figured I’d give it the big ride and then kiss it good-bye.”

  “Did you?”

  “I gave it the ride.”

  “And kissed it good-bye?”