Prairie Nocturne

by Ivan Doig

  He watched her square her music sheets together and lay them away in the black bag. She snapped the clasp shut, then looked at the door as if it were a long way off. “Monty, I can’t tell you how much this has meant to—”

  “Don’t, please,” he heard a voice he scarcely recognized as his own. He pushed up out of his chair and strode over to the window, the farthest point of the room from her. Stood there like a confined man wanting to take a sledgehammer to every building-stone and brick in Harlem. Eventually, as if his head was clearing, he turned around. “Let’s get out of this place. Come on, I’ll stand you to coffee and pie. Give me a minute to ring up J.J. and tell him we’re rehearsing extra today.”

  Susan did not bother to ask whether he was sure such a stroll together was a good idea. Rightly or wrongly, it stuck out all over him that he intended for it to happen. Still, she was surprised when he told her firmly: “No, leave that ridiculous satchel.”

  They walked out into Harlem as it went about its midday business. Kept pace for a block or so with the yam man’s pushcart, Susan’s head turned in astonishment as usual at the pitch of the man’s voice: close her eyes during his chant and she could have sworn he was somebody’s sister from Spain. Kept on the move past the exhortations of the soapbox preacher Monty identified to her as the Reverend Skypiece—“Ambassador hat on him, you wouldn’t know to look at him he delivers ice, would you.” Veered around children lost in sidewalk games. The whole way to the Eat ’Em and Beat ’Em, people on the brownstone stoops or congregated at storefronts would call out to Monty to ask how he was doing by now and he ritually answered “Much better” and “Getting there.” All of them were used to seeing J.J. businesslike at the side of this exotic white woman doctor, but now second looks seemed to be in order.

  “Finally I know a little what it’s like for you,” Susan murmured. “It’s as if they’re counting the pores on us.”

  “That’s what people do. Gets old in a hurry, doesn’t it.”

  He held the door of the eatery for her, and the eye-flicker atmosphere of the street accompanied the two of them in. Monty was greeted by the regulars, but a person did not have to be a vocal expert to hear false notes in the greetings. He made directly for the presiding waitress.

  “Nolene, think we could use the banquet room? High-powered medical consultation. No reason we can’t do it over sweet potato pie and couple cups of joe, though.”

  Her eyebrows inched up, but the snake-hipped waitress automatically slid into motion toward the pie cabinet. “It’s available, Monty,” she provided over her shoulder.

  Not “Mister Rathbun,” Susan took note, along with all else that was registering soundly in her from this excursion. She had the absurd feeling she was leaving a trail of phosphorescence through Harlem, but she squared her shoulders and marched in what she hoped was medical fashion beside Monty to the banquet room at the back.

  In the large empty room he gestured wryly to a table that would have seated twenty, and they were barely in their chairs when the waitress, looking pouty, sauntered in with mugs of coffee and pieces of pie. As the woman’s hands flashed cups, plates, and utensils into place, Susan saw that her skin tone was the same strong cocoa color as Monty’s. Gravely the waitress asked if that would be all, and Monty allowed as how it was for now.

  “Well,” Susan said with forced brightness when they were alone, “here’s to arioso.” She plucked up her fork and tried the pie, which was not as suffocatingly Southern sweet as she had expected. Wordlessly Monty watched her while he toyed with his coffee cup. Three bites ahead of him, she was about to point out this repast had been his idea, when he finally lifted his fork and plowed into his piece of pie. When he was no more than halfway done, though, he dropped the fork to the plate and sat back rigidly. Susan glanced up and froze short of the next bite. She had never seen him this grim, even in the worst of despond after his beating. What he was saying sounded as if he had to half-strangle it to control it at all:

  “This ought to give us enough of a taste, hadn’t it? Of what we can’t have?”

  She knew this had nothing to do with sweet potato pie. Thank goodness his words stumbled out low, wrathful as they were. “You saw for yourself how it is. Just on our little jaunt to here. People looked at us like we’re out of our minds—‘Oh oh, black man and white woman together, the world is about to end.’ ” She winced as he fiercely rubbed the side of his neck. “And this is nothing,” he flung his hand out to indicate the front of the restaurant and beyond, “to what would happen if you took me into a Schraffts, anywhere downtown.”

  She made her own words surge before he could go on. “It is the saddest thing, yes. That people can’t see past that aspect. But Monty, we’ve done miraculously, you and I, given all that’s against us. Your voice is unstoppable now, and as for me, this experience with you has been the best thing that could ever happen to a drying-up voice teacher. And,” she tried to maintain momentum despite the catch in her throat, “onward we each go, in spite of—”

  He cut her off with the force of the expression that had come onto his face.

  “Susan, I—I’m stuck.” He knew he had to get it out if it killed him, even though this was the sort of thing that could. “With telling you how I feel about you. I chickened out of doing it,” he faltered on, “that time at the Broadwater.”

  * * *

  . . . chickened out of doing it, that time at the Broadwater, she was equally shaky when she recorded it in the diary that night.

  “I wouldn’t do it now, neither, if I felt like I had any choice,” Monty had gone on brokenly. The anguish in his voice jarred her. She felt like a raw nurse facing a patient who had something she could not afford to come down with. As she held her breath, he mustered his and gulped out the hardest kind of words. “But it works me over, night and day. That I can’t even begin to say how far gone I am over you.” He spread his hands, palms up, as if their emptiness spoke it better than he could. “I couldn’t stand to not tell you, ever. What the hell kind of way is that for people to have to live?”

  It tore through her. “Caring about me, it sounds like you mean.”

  “Worse than that. Bad as love gets, if I have to put a name to it.” Bleakly he stared across the table at her. “I was hoping it would wear off, Susan, honest. Was I ever hoping that.”

  She knew she had to try to slip a different meaning over this. “Working close as we have on the songs and all, there’s naturally something emotional about it,” she said as if she had been around such cases before. None too successfully she tried to force a chuckle. “I take it as a compliment you’ve come out of this feeling the way you do rather than wanting to box a bossy teacher’s ears.”

  “It’s not just the music,” he responded so intensely it came out bitter, “even though I’ve tried like everything to hold it to that.”

  “Monty. How long have you been putting up with this?”

  “Since sometime back there at the fort,” he said as if saying forever. “When I saw how far you’d stick your neck out for me, that couldn’t help but draw my attention, could it. Then everything else”—his features spoke such wrenching effort that she realized what it had taken for him to work up to this—“the music together like you say, the haywire Klan keeping us cooped up with each other, the two of us up against it all, next thing I knew I was stuck on you. Sparking on you to myself like some fool kid. Tried not to show it. I guess I hope I didn’t.”

  “Then when I showed up here,” she said slowly, “I wasn’t doing you any favor.”

  “Of course you were!” he leapt to defend her against herself. “Only trying to save my neck in more ways than one, weren’t you. Don’t do yourself dirt about coming back East. I couldn’t get you off my mind no matter where you were. Had ever so many conversations in my head with you. ‘Wish she could see this,’ I’d think in Boston or Chicago or any of those. ‘Wish she’d been on hand for last night’s do.’ ” He sunk his face in his hands as he had in the Williams
ons’ office at the Double W, then slowly brought them down and away, saying so low she could barely hear it: “ ‘Wish she was here to talk to.’ ”

  It was her turn to falter. “Monty, we shouldn’t go too far into this.”

  He wiped the corners of his eyes with his fingertips. “Let me just get this said and we’ll go. I need for you to savvy what you’ve meant to me, or I’m going to bust with it.” For several moments he looked off around the banquet room as if for any direction to extricate himself, then turned his gaze back to her. “You know how my spirits get down sometimes, what with—everything. But you’re, how can I best say this, you’re a cure for that even when you’re not trying to be especially. I’m here to tell you, when you march in, life better shape up or you’ll do it for it. Everything is so wound up around you. So down-to-business-or-else. And I get a charge out of that. I really do, Susan. Being with somebody who goes at things all out. It’s just the best feeling being with you, better than any other I’ve ever had, if you follow.” Shaking his head, he said in a defeated tone: “Anyway, that’s it.”

  “I’m afraid I do follow. You poor dear.” She rose abruptly, the scrape of her chair like a slash in the stillness of the room. “Let’s—let’s go back.”

  Those whose eyes followed us out the door and all our way back must have wondered at the shock of the diagnosis, if that’s what it was. Monty appeared—beaten is too savagely remindful to say, but done in, done up, by another of life’s ambushes. I surely looked like a wreck, trying to hold myself together.

  No sooner were they back in the apartment than Monty headed toward the kitchen and, Susan could tell, the telephone.

  “It’s clabbering up to rain, looks like,” he muttered, although the weather did not look anything like that to her. “I’ll tell J.J. to get a move on. He’d throw a fit if he knew about our little excursion, let alone if I was to walk you to the el.”

  “Wait.”

  The word came from her as if it was not sure it had the right to be spoken out loud. Then: “Let’s back up.” Then: “To around pie.”

  As if those blurts took all the effort she had, she sank to the piano bench. He still believed it would be a mercy on them both to step in there to that telephone, but something made him reverse himself and cross the room to sit down as before. If one more serving of goodbye was what it took, he figured he could stand that much.

  Unraveled as she looked, Susan by nature was working herself around to whatever more was. But the next batch of words were out before she seemed ready, before Monty was anywhere near ready. From the sound of her, she could have been sentencing herself as she said, “That’s me as well, everything you’ve said about coming down with this in spite of trying so hard not to.”

  With every care he sized that up, hope and a new anguish both flickering in his almost terminally tense expression. “You’re not just saying that. No, you wouldn’t be.”

  “I—” She had to halt. She mustered a weak smile by the time she could resume. “You asked for it,” came her rueful overture. “It’s been a long time since I was as fond of anyone as I am of you,” she desperately pushed her declaration out, and he had to take it in like a new language. “Comparison hasn’t been easy, though, when I’m”—with pianist dexterity she flexed a pale sudden hand—“such a soda cracker and you’re a graham, so to speak. So I hid any such notions behind the music, didn’t I. Never let myself imagine too far in your direction—you know how quick I can conk a daydream in the head. All the same, if I’d have let myself admit it, tagging through life with you was all I wanted to do. Some chilly teacher I turn out to be—your voice was always pure wonder to me, but it wasn’t everything. You know the rest.” He was madly hoping he did. “Monty, if you can call that love, I ought to have the heart to, too.”

  He would have vaulted over to her then, but she stopped him with a gesture. She had to compose herself, and the odd thing was how mortally inconvenient for both of them this all seemed to her.

  Starch was supposed to have been the remedy against anything like this, wasn’t it. I told him that if I had sometimes been standoffish, there was a reason I stood off. I told him that while I trusted myself to handle any voice, the human element it came from usually needed more than I can provide. I told him he had not been the only one who needed the cure we had worked. In the race of these lines onto the page, the diary transformed. From ledger of daily doings to lasting chapter of revelations. Like an archaeologist reviewing the evidence at a scattered dig, Susan composed on the waiting pages the declensions of fond and how much each meant to her. Samuel, such closeness with him that it would have taken a handwriting expert to tell them apart; Angus, her long admiring affection toward him from far and near; Wes, that entranced time in the old gray stone stratosphere of Edinburgh. And now Monty; the two of them singularities together, more than accustomed to each other, tender toward one another since the reunion afternoon at the Broadwater in ways beyond the power of music. Safe word, fond. But a certain kind of fondness after long enough, she wrote decisively, deserves another name. Somewhere she had read the inlaid words: The beautiful contradiction of love is that it is a fidelity beyond truth, which is merely occasional. She had no idea what came after that. But on the evidence of the feelings she was at last permitting herself to admit about Monty, there wasn’t going to be anything the least bit occasional about it.

  And then there we were, alone together but with everything changed. The fact of attraction had been admitted into the apartment and they both knew it. Each of them had been through enough life to recognize how a situation sharpens on this category of craving. Susan was acutely aware of her nipples budding, natural convergence of blood to the vicinity of the warmed heart. Opposite her, Monty crossed his legs urgently. She had every desire to rush over to him and knew, plain as that door over there, that would jinx this and J.J. would walk in on them. Monty, she saw, shared that precise intuition. Staying desperately planted in his chair, he struggled past the moment to the calendar of complications ahead of them now. “This isn’t real bright of either of us, is it.”

  “Sometimes that can’t be helped. Right now we have to think about something else. If I’m seen with you anymore, if we’re seen as a couple, it will throw your career off.”

  She could almost feel his grimace across the room. “About like beating it in the head with an ax handle, you mean.” The worse pain of truth was written on his face as he looked over at her and slowly spoke. “They wouldn’t go easy on you either. You know that.”

  She was there ahead of him. “I’ve faced it before.” A pause. “With Wes.”

  “Susan, I don’t think you have. Not like this.”

  Just then came J.J.’s usual shave-and-a-haircut knock on the door, she wrote in smaller hand to make the last page of the diary entry come out even, leave a fresh one for whatever next. Before letting him in, Monty looked at me as we both fixed our expressions and said, “Painted in a corner, aren’t we. Two coats.”

  * * *

  J.J. did a skip-step to keep in stride with her. Whatever Susan was marching to today, it didn’t know slow. They were already bearing down on the el station and he still was trying to catch up with her surprise prognosis.

  “Really ready?” he persisted. “Enough that I can put him up in front of people and they won’t mob me for their money back?”

  “His voice is ready,” she repeated.

  “Well, then, amen,” he made his decision. “I’ll set up a musicale or two, sprinkle him around town that way at first. Let Montgomery tune himself up without the whole world listening.”

  “And then?”

  “Maybe tour him some before letting the New York crickets at him. One thing, Miss Duff.” He halted so abruptly at the base of the el stairs that Susan flew past him a couple of steps before she could attend to his next utterance. “You have to understand, you probably won’t see us in Helena again,” and he handed her the black bag in the usual ritual of goodbye.

 
AT THE office in the days after, Susan plunged her mind as far into work as it would conceivably go. She came in very early, now that there were no journeys to Harlem these mornings, and in no time was well on her way to wringing extra effort out of every Over There chapter on the eastern seaboard. This day, with the watchmen’s barrel bonfires barely quenched in her window-framed view of the awakening docks, she just was starting rapid-fire typing when the jangle of the telephone joined in. She let it ring a couple more times while she gathered her mental forces. At this hour chances were it was either the New Jersey state chairman who could not wait to howl about the stiff letter she had sent calling attention to the collecting prowess of the Tammany political machine versus his in Jersey City, or—

  “This is the Amsterdam News,” came the sweet voice at the other end, “wondering if you might be interested in our introductory subscription price for downtown folk.”

  “Monty, it’s all right. I’m here alone, except for a crazy man on the phone.”

  “Not seeing you puts me that way. Maybe we both ought to check ourselves into the loony bin, where things make more sense than this.”

  “You first. I feel like I finally have a head on my shoulders.”

  “Mine’s still spinning. Listen, why I’m calling—you find out how you stand with the Over Theres?”

  “They can use me until after the Observance. That gives us a bit of time.”

  “Take what we can get. Guess what. J.J.’s lined up a musicale. Wait, don’t say anything, here’s the rest of it: even if I have to hogtie everybody involved, I want you on hand there.”

  “That’s dear of you, but—”

  “Never mind dear. It’d buck me up to look out over Cecil’s pointy head and see you. Besides, you deserve to be there as much as I do. We don’t have to be, what’s a nice way to put it, obvious—but I want you in that room hearing the music we’ve put together.”