Stork Bite

by Simonds, L. K.

  When Mae’s turn came, she did her business and checked herself in the cloudy mirror under a dim bulb. She made sure there was no food between her teeth and applied fresh lipstick. She took a tissue from her clutch, folded it, and blotted her lips, adding a perfect impression to the others imprinted at odd angles on the paper. Mae snapped her pocketbook closed, opened the restroom door, smiled, and made her way back to her date. Hollister stood when she approached the table. “Would you like to dance?” he asked.

  Mae extended her hand, and he led her onto the dance floor and took her in his arms. She pressed her body against his, following the rhythm of his hips. Hollister danced gracefully, intuitively, and slowly. The Home Wreckers paused, and in that brief fermata, Hollister raised Mae’s chin and kissed her, and she discovered fire. “Take me home,” she said.

  “Are you sure?”

  “So sure.”

  Mae unwrapped for Hollister the treasure she had promised Buster as one promises a treat to a dog who behaves himself. The treasure Jax had left untouched, though he had every right to it. Hollister opened Mae’s gift effortlessly, passionately. He was urgent, yet patient. Firm, yet mellow. But when he breached her virginity, she cried out in spite of herself.

  “Mae?”

  “Don’t ask,” she breathed. “And please, don’t stop.”

  Afterward, Mae lay in Hollister’s arms, her face against his chest. “I’ve gone and fallen in love with you,” she said.

  He squeezed her. “Marry me, Mae.”

  “I’m already married.”

  “Get a divorce. Or have it annulled.” He paused, then said, “Jax is a weird little guy.”

  In a single summer, Mae had jilted her fiancé, married a man she did not love, and fallen for her husband’s best friend. Adding a divorce, much less a second marriage, to that mix might be too much for Mae to hold her head up when she walked down the street. She had to preserve some dignity. “Would you mind terribly if we kept on like this?” she asked.

  “Living in sin?”

  She raised up and looked at him. He smiled, and she lay her head down again. “Divorcing Jax won’t get me out of living in sin. Sometimes it feels like everything I think and do—everything I want—is a sin. Like I’m steeped in it.”

  “I know the feeling.”

  Mae closed her eyes. After a long silence, when she was almost asleep, Hollister said, “We’ll keep on just as we are.”

  “Yes,” Mae said. “Just as we are.”

  Mae and Hollister did not leave the house all weekend, and by Sunday afternoon they were down to soda crackers and Campbell’s tomato soup, which they ate in the sunroom while reclining on the couch under a shared blanket. A hard rain had set in and it did not let up all day.

  Hollister leaned over and set his empty bowl on the floor, then he laid his head in Mae’s lap. She set her half-eaten soup on the occasional table and ran her fingers through his heavy, straight hair. It was variegated from blond on top to tawny undertones. He rolled over and slipped his arms around her. “This is whoopee weather,” he said and laid his head against her breast.

  “Shouldn’t we use something, Hollister? I don’t want to get pregnant.”

  “You won’t.”

  “That’s not what Mama said.”

  He laughed, then he raised up and looked at her. He had not shaved all weekend, and his chin and cheeks were thick with sepia stubble. “I had a vasectomy, Mae. When I was in Baton Rouge.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s a surgery doctors do on men, so they can’t get a girl pregnant.”

  Mae had never heard of such a thing. “Ever?” she asked.

  “Well, I’ve heard people say it can be reversed, but, yeah, it’s probably forever.”

  “Why did you do that?”

  “There was a girl I went with at State. Her name was Melody. Is Melody. We went together for a long time. Melody got pregnant, Mae, but she didn’t tell me because she didn’t want to have a baby.”

  Mae had gone to school with a girl who got pregnant and was whisked away before she started showing. The family said she had gone out west to stay with a sick aunt. The girl returned the following year with a much-sobered disposition and no baby. Girls in Whitesboro went off to have their babies, but Mae knew that more sophisticated girls used other methods. “What did she do?” Mae asked.

  “She took care of it.”

  “An abortion?”

  “There was a doctor in town who was popular with the coeds. One night at a party, a friend let it slip that Melody had been to see him.”

  “Hollister, I’m so sorry.”

  “I could never decide which was worse,” Hollister said. “That my kid never got a chance to see the light of day, or that he—she—might have grown up with me for an old man.”

  “Oh, Hollister.”

  “That sounded pathetic, didn’t it? But I couldn’t get that baby out of my head, so a couple of weeks later I went to see that bastard myself. I told him to fix me. He didn’t want to, but I didn’t give him a choice.”

  They sat in silence for a few minutes, then Hollister took Mae’s hand. “Do you want children?”

  “I used to think I did.”

  “And now?”

  Mae leaned over and kissed him. “All I want right now is you.”

  Mae called her mother and told her that she and Jax had separated. Of course, Mae’s mother was not surprised. If anything, she seemed to be relieved. “I don’t want to go through a divorce right now,” Mae said. She did not say that she needed to remain Mrs. Jackson Addington at the law firm because it made life so much easier.

  “The main thing is that you’re away from him,” her mother said. “Just give it some time. A man like Jax won’t take long to meet someone else, and then he’ll come to you for a divorce.”

  “I hope so,” Mae said.

  “I’ll break the news to your Daddy and Vic. They’ll be fine with it. We all want you to be happy.”

  “I love you, Mama.”

  “I love you too, dear.”

  Vic wrote Mae a letter soon after. “I never even got to meet Jax,” she whined. Then she went on to say that she had been on two dates with Dewey Daggett. He had asked her out on more, but their mother had said Victoria was too young to go steady. “Mama says I can only go out with Dewey once in a while. I have to date other boys too, not just him. The meanie.”

  Mae felt she was responsible for the new dating rules their mother had come up with. But when she thought about how quickly young girls fall for boys, she thought her mother’s wisdom would work to Vic’s advantage in the end. “Listen to Mama,” Mae wrote back to her little sister, “and save yourself some heartache.”

  Mae did not make any attempt to locate Jax and ask him for a divorce. She didn’t want to think about her summer marriage and the way she had permitted herself to be paraded all over Shreveport. She could hardly acknowledge it had happened, much less track Jax down and go through the to-do of divorcing him.

  At Carter, Rose, and Peabody—particularly Peabody—Mae continued to be Mrs. Jackson Addington. She was Mrs. Addington to her neighbors on Alexander Avenue too, specifically Mrs. Tidwell, who asked from time to time just how long Mae’s brother intended to stay with her.

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Jax had not seen Mae in the flesh since she left the Washington Youree Hotel, but in his fantasies, their love affair thrived. Their escapades reached around the world, the specifics of which depended on the latest movie Jax had seen or novel he had read. Jax had even gone as far as writing down his ruminations. He collected them in a rolltop desk in his apartment up the street from the dry cleaners, where he had moved after Mae left the Youree.

  One idle rainy afternoon, Jax pulled out some stationery he had lifted from the hotel and wrote a letter to Rudyard Kipling, whose stories enthralled Jax and provided him much fodder for his daydreams. In his letter, Jax described the adventurous and carefree life he enjoyed with his beautiful wife.
He told Mr. Kipling that he and Mae planned to book passage to India in the autumn, and they hoped to visit some of the exotic locations the author used in his stories.

  As Jax penned these words, the thought occurred to him that he really could go to India and see Kipling’s muse firsthand. But then he thought about trying to transport enough Pepto-Bismol to get him through the trip, and he remembered that Mae would not actually be with him. Having his beautiful wife on his arm as he had at the Youree was, in a sense, the entire point.

  This brought to mind a photograph Jax kept in a drawer in the rolltop desk. He took it out and studied it. In the picture, which was taken at evening time, he and Mae sat side by side at a white-clothed table on the Youree’s rooftop. Jax wore a white summer suit, as he had almost every day that summer. Mae wore a chiffon evening dress and a gold necklace and earrings he had given her as a surprise. Her dark, curly hair fell to her bare shoulders.

  They were listening to some singer—Jax couldn’t recall who—and they looked relaxed and happy, even rich and beautiful. The Youree Hotel photographer had snapped the picture when they weren’t looking, and they had been startled by the flash. The next day, the photographer tracked Jax down and gave him the picture. “You have a lovely wife,” he said.

  Jax reached into his pocket. “How much do I owe you?”

  “It’s on the house.”

  The photograph was the only one Jax had of himself in which he looked, if not handsome, at least like somebody. He wanted to put it in his letter to Kipling, but it was the only copy. Then Jax got an idea. He closed the desk and locked it, put on his suitcoat and slipped the photograph into his inside breast pocket. He drove to the Youree and found the photographer. It took the man a week to find the negative and make two dozen copies. By then, Jax had a blazing passion to write letters to famous people all over the world and include the photograph of him with his beautiful wife.

  Jax used the Washington Youree Hotel as his return address, and he bribed the desk clerks, each according to his appetite, to keep him in hotel stationery and save his incoming correspondence. Along with the photograph, Jax slipped a trade card for J. Addington’s Dry Cleaning and Laundry inside each letter.

  Jax became so proficient at penning his fantasies that he decided to write a novel, but he abandoned his manuscript after he realized he was not willing to share his glory with anyone, not even a character of his own creation.

  Many people wrote back. Their letters, bearing colorful postage, made their way from distant lands to the Youree Hotel. Month after month passed, and Jax’s accounts of his marriage to Mae and their adventures together mushroomed into an epic love story that circled the globe. And he did not stop there.

  Jax talked about his wife incessantly to his friends, constructing elaborate high jinks that he and Mae laughed their way through, all the while falling ever more deeply in love. Jax’s experience had taught him that people were generally too well mannered to challenge a story, even one that was an obvious bald-faced lie. Only Hollister, his closest friend, narrowed his eyes as if he might take Jax to task. But in the end, Hollister only smiled and said, “Good for you, my man.”

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  1933

  Prohibition was ending, and Jax wracked his brain for weeks to come up with a last hurrah before he was out of business. The idea he’d been looking for came to him at a time he least expected, on a Sunday afternoon while he was having coffee in the parlor with his mother. She upended her Belleek cup to get the last sip before setting it back on the saucer, and Jax caught a glimpse of the mark on the bottom. “Mama, is that a different cup you have?” he asked.

  His mother turned the cup over on her napkin. “My goodness, Jaxy, you have a good eye. Yes, it’s one of the new ones. Your daddy ordered them to replace the ones that had gotten chipped or broken over the years.”

  The Belleek trademark—a hound, harp, and tower—had changed. To Jax’s thinking, his mother’s old china had become more valuable the minute it did. Everything was always changing, and people would pay good money to hold on to a little bit of how things used to be. Jax put down his cup and saucer and stood. “I gotta go, Mama, I gotta get back to Bossier.”

  “On Sunday, dear? I hope you’re not working on the Lord’s Day.”

  “Course not, Mama.” Jax leaned over and kissed her cheek. “But I forgot I told Mae I’d bring her dry cleaning home with me this afternoon.”

  “I miss seeing Mae, honey,” his mother said. “Looks like she’d take time to see me, or at least pick up the phone, even if she doesn’t want to be around your daddy.”

  “I’m sorry, Mama. Mae’s funny that way. But she loves you very, very much.” Jax leaned down and kissed his mother’s cheek. Then he hugged her and held her tightly, as he always had, and as he never had another woman.

  Jax drove directly to the dry cleaners afterward and found Red Malone reading the Shreveport Journal in the manager’s office. Red was the only one in the building. “Jaxy! What brings you by on a Sunday afternoon?”

  Jax pitched his idea to make one final run of bootleg in memorial bottles that commemorated Prohibition. “We could charge an arm and leg, Red, and I think they’ll pay. Everybody hates to say goodbye to the good times.”

  Red was so keen on the idea that he called Owney Madden himself, and Madden commissioned black ribbons with gold letters that would be affixed to every bottle that went out on the last runs before Prohibition ended.

  Jax wrote Owney a letter on the Washington Youree stationery, and he slipped in the photograph of him and Mae before he sealed the envelope. “We hope to get to New York next year,” Jax wrote, “and the Cotton Club will be at the top of our list of places to visit.” He mailed it to Madden care of the Cotton Club in Harlem.

  Owney never wrote back.

  Jax made one last run to Baton Rouge in the Cessna before America finally ended her illicit love affair with booze. “What’s all this?” Billy Dean asked when he saw the crates stacked in the back of the Cessna, “I won’t be able to give it away by this time next week.”

  Jax pulled out a bottle and pointed to a thin black band that had been added below the Canadian Club label. Gilded script ran the length of the band. It read, “December 3, 1933. Thanks for a great run. Owney and the Gang.”

  “Top drawer,” Billy said. “I can move as much of this as you can get. C’mon inside the hangar. There’s somebody I want you to meet.”

  Jax followed Billy Dean into the hangar, to the limousine, which was parked against the back wall with its innards scattered all around it. A pair of legs, bent at the knees and terminating in heavy work boots, protruded from beneath the car’s front grill. Billy kicked one of the boots, and a long, skinny boy slid out on a creeper. “This here’s my brother, Harvey,” Billy Dean said. “Kid’s a natural grease monkey. Harvey, this is Mr. Addington.”

  Harvey hopped up and wiped his hand on his overalls. He was a skinnier, younger version of Billy Dean, and he looked just as world-weary as his older brother. Harvey shook Jax’s hand firmly but did not speak.

  Billy Dean said, “I flew up to Oklahoma and snatched him out from under the old man’s nose, just like I said I would.” He pointed to a Stinson, one of the half-dozen aircraft in the hangar. “In that bird right over there. She belongs to one of my customers. One of our customers. Yes sir, I done it, didn’t I, Harve?”

  Harvey nodded and grinned, showing tiny, mineral-stained teeth.

  “Harvey here’s takin’ lessons. Already flies better’n his big brother.”

  “How do you like Louisiana, Harvey?” Jax asked.

  The boy nodded.

  “You like it?”

  Harvey glanced at his brother.

  “It’s okay, Harve,” Billy Dean said. “Mr. Addington’s our friend.”

  “Yeth thir,” Harvey said slowly. “I like any plathe that ain’t got the old man in it.”

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  1934

  Cargie Barre was
great with child and mad with summer heat. She had been surprised by her third pregnancy, even though at thirty years of age she was plenty ripe for childbearing. This pregnancy, like the others, was precipitated by carelessness. During the worst of the heat, Cargie spent a lot of quarters going to picture shows. The movie theaters had refrigerated air, and Cargie went when she did not think she could bear to sweat a minute longer.

  She went no matter what was playing, even if she had seen the film half a dozen times. With one exception. She refused to see Imitation of Life a second time because the first time made her as mad as a wet hen. Cargie missed a lot of refrigerated afternoons during Imitation of Life‘s two-week run at the Strand, until The Thin Man came along and knocked it off the Magnascope screen.

  In the movie, white Beatrice was smart and resourceful, whereas black Delilah was as simple as a child. Poor Delilah only took a 20 percent interest in Aunt Delilah’s Pancakes, the business that was built on her secret recipe. Delilah would have refused even that because she found her complete and absolute fulfillment in cooking and cleaning for her white lady. But sympathetic white lady Beatrice, benevolent genius that she was, said she would put the money in the bank for Delilah’s daughter because her negress Delilah was just too simple to consider her own daughter’s future.

  Cargie was further infuriated by the oh-so-clear message that Delilah’s daughter had betrayed her race by trying to pass as a white girl. Righteous Delilah justified Jim Crow by teaching her wayward daughter that one drop of black blood made one black, and such a person could never be truly white, no matter her appearance. Delilah seemed to believe that no matter how tempting the privileges of whiteness, the Godly thing to do was to bow one’s head and accept the millstone the Lord had laid around one’s neck by making one black.

  After the movie, Cargie descended the narrow staircase into the alley and came around the front of the theater in time to hear a white woman comment, “Why, that was the most sympathetic picture about coloreds I ever saw.”