by Joyce Meyer
Chick set up folding chairs for us right before the show started. He slapped a drum fanfare on the metal seats. “You’ll be just fine here, Miss Aurelia. You’re my guest. If you have any more trouble, you come and get me.” As if he could have done something about it. “We’ll give everyone the what-for.”
He put us against the wall, beneath a shadowed overhang where no one could see or disturb us.
“Back for another weekend aboard the Admiral . . .” The announcer’s voice boomed, and I’ll bet you could hear it, low and resonant, all the way across the river into Illinois. The red velvet curtain jostled and billowed from last-minute adjustments made behind it. The footlights came up. The spotlight blazed to life. The curtains parted with a faint metallic hiss. For a moment, the silence held. Voices hushed. Silverware stilled.
In spite of the unpleasantness we’d experienced getting on the boat, Aurelia ended up being right as usual. It was worth everything to hear the Blue Notes play.
Eddie Crockett lifted his trumpet to his lips with that air about him I loved, like you were about to hear something you’d never heard before in your life.
T. Bone Finney poised his big fingers over his guitar strings.
All the world seemed to be waiting when Chick, the rhythm man, finally tapped the downbeat on his hi-hat cymbal and the Blue Notes took off.
The gleam in Eddie Crockett’s horn zigzagged like lightning. Dancers flooded the floor, their skirts twirling, their feet prancing, surrounded by hand-painted zodiac signs and little white lights that formed the constellations. Pullman chairs and chrome-and-glass cocktail tables decorated the mezzanine overlooking the floor.
Aurelia had spoken truth about the Brooks Brothers suits, too. If I’d passed this collection of musicians on the street, I wouldn’t have spoken. I wouldn’t have known them, they looked so debonair. T. Bone even wore a black hat cocked low over one eyebrow. Who would have known they could look so fine under the lights?
The Six Blue Notes played all evening while Aurelia whispered the names of the songs to me. “Body and Soul.” “Fussing All the Time.” “Tuxedo Junction.” “One O’Clock Jump.” And it was more than hearing the music that filled me up and set my mind in a jumble. It was the heavenly scent of ladies’ perfume and the quick bursts of laughter and the feeling that, out of the dark, smoky place where our escort had first taken us, Aurelia and I had been afforded the seats of honor.
I got to sit here with Aurelia, yet I was an unworthy person. No matter how many times I snuck away from Wyoming Street and rode the streetcar to the Ville, no matter how often I tried to flee what I had incorrectly thought or done, I suffered Daddy’s reminders in my head. I knew everyone looked at me and did not like what they saw. I didn’t deserve even one moment of the pleasure I felt, listening to Eddie Crockett wail on his trumpet. When wrong happened, it would always somehow be my fault.
If I thought running with Aurelia would allow me to escape my guilt, I’d thought wrong about that. The better I knew the heart of my friend, the more my sense of dishonor grew. Aurelia loved me in spite of everything. How could she be treated so shamefully (“We can’t have you running around on the boat like this. Only Mondays are for the coloreds.”) when mine would always be the heart colored by disgrace?
As Chick nodded his chin to the strokes of his drum brushes, he glanced up and caught Aurelia’s eye. When the number ended and a gentleman dropped a handful of coins into the ashtray they’d set out for tips, T. Bone found us and winked. Curtis Jackson put down fifth-notes on the piano, rippling like rivulets in a stream. Eddie Crockett pointed his trumpet toward us and fingered a rift so unexpected, I figured he’d just taken off into his own personal jam session.
He aimed his music right toward our seats. There might as well not have been anybody else in the ballroom. He serenaded us like he was trying to blow the nails off the roof, running through all that music like it was nothing. It was like he wanted to tease us and teach us right from the stage with his horn wailing, You’d better never do anything again that’s not safe for you, young ladies, but since you’re here anyway, guess I’ll just have to demonstrate what you’ve been missing.
By the time he finished his bebop rendition of “Bloomdido,” Eddie Crockett had everyone in the ballroom on their feet. We jumped from our seats and applauded so hard that our hands stung. Up in the mezzanine, guests forgot about their filet of lemon sole and their lamb steak béarnaise as they whistled their appreciation. Dancers pressed toward the stage.
Aurelia gripped my shoulder. “Don’t know why they won’t let them bring those suits home. Everybody in the neighborhood ought to see. Don’t they look fine?”
I nodded.
“They ought to play here every day of the week. Daddy wouldn’t have to have any other job except this one.” She glowed with pride. “This is the gig he wants. He would die if he couldn’t play his horn. Aunt Maureen ought to see this. Listen—don’t people just love them?”
I didn’t answer. I’d been distracted by the sight of a man pressing a paper bill into Mr. Crockett’s extended hand. His girl clung tighter against him than ivy clings to a trellis. She wore a vermillion pink dress with her full lips painted to match.
The man whispered to his girl and she giggled, swung away from him, tried to pull him away with her hand. But the Blue Notes had gathered at the edge of the stage.
I saw the man insisting. I saw the girl lower her chin in embarrassment and smooth her hair behind one ear. I saw Mr. Crockett shake his head.
T. Bone bent his microphone toward his mouth. “What’s going on here is this fellow is making a request for the lady. He wants us to play ‘Embraceable You.’ ”
A ripple of romantic appreciation ran through the crowd in the mezzanine. Contented and amused, they reseated themselves at their tables and took after their dinners with renewed zeal.
Not until then did I truly sense the danger. I saw the fear flash in Aurelia’s eyes, and knew she expected it to come to the same end as I did.
“We take requests all the time. But see, ‘Embraceable You’ is a pop number. What we been doing up here for you is the bebop jazz.”
Only seconds before, we’d been clapping, but now Aurelia squeezed my hand in despair. I imagined T. Bone trying to change the subject and then Chick saying, “No, sir. Sorry, sir. We don’t know that song.”
“That’s not the kind of music Daddy plays,” Aurelia whispered.
I pictured the man not taking no for an answer, grabbing the book off the stand, and thumbing through pages of music no more readable to the Blue Notes than a barbed-wire fence.
The man would say, “Sure you do. Every band does. It’s right here,” slamming the page onto the stand.
The dancers would turn on them. The rowdy applause from moments before would fade into shouts of contempt. “We want a real ballroom band, not a group that doesn’t know music.”
Eddie Crockett picked up his horn, narrowed his eyes, fingered his valves. Let me tell you, those valves were springy as a cat on a telephone line.
I touched Aurelia’s shoulder. Wait.
“You got to know,” he said to everyone gathered below, “when we play this song it’s a change of pace. We’re used to playing the free expression, where you get away from the melody line and let the instruments follow their own trails. You got to understand we may be a little raw with this kind of music. But I’d like to dedicate the song to this couple here, John and Annette.”
“Do you think he can play it?” Aurelia breathed.
For years after that, I liked to think I read Mr. Crockett’s lips when he turned to Chick. I liked to think I’d been the one to see him say the way he told us he did later, “Lamoretti taught us these notes. No reason we can’t pull it off, add a little hip rhythm to it. Have fun with it.”
That was Eddie Crockett for you. He wouldn’t let himself be broken in front of Aurelia. He went and figured out something to do. I saw him tap his toe so T. Bone could catch the beat. I gue
ssed he hummed a few bars so the rest of the Blue Notes could hear. He swung his arm and snapped his fingers like Lawrence Welk.
When “Embraceable You” started, the man held his girl’s hand in a proud knot. I held Aurelia’s hand. She clung to mine.
The couple pressed against each other, her arm folded against his chest, his nose against her ear so he could breathe in the scent of her hair. She laid her head beneath the jut of his chin. When she lifted her cheek to his, you could see they didn’t care what song was playing. She wrapped her hand around the back of his neck and met his eyes, their hips swaying together in tempo. They danced in a world where skin color didn’t matter and families loved each other no matter what. They danced in a different world than ours.
Chapter Eleven
The more time I spent with Miss Shaw, the more I wanted to find answers to the mystery of her. One day, when Jean and I stopped into Woolworth’s after we’d gone to the Fox to see Grace Kelly in Dial M for Murder, I recognized Miss Shaw sitting alone at the soda fountain, and I froze. She sat there so distinguished, a careful, aristocratic tilt to her jaw.
Every time other diners came up, they stepped past the seat beside her, giving Miss Shaw a wide berth. Every time someone hesitated as if recognizing her, that person would pass by without saying a word. Which led me to believe that I probably shouldn’t bother her, either.
Surely she was tired of me after seeing me so much at the shop. I was sure she was fed up with giving me instructions. When I tried to think of how to start up a conversation, I couldn’t imagine a single appropriate thing to talk about with her. If you spend time sitting at the grave of someone you love, Miss Shaw, why doesn’t that grave have a marker?
I stood in the aisle directly behind her, pretending to be fascinated by the boxes of cotton facial puffs, while she folded her plastic menu into thirds, handed it to the waitress, and ordered a tunafish-stuffed tomato. I perused Lustre-Creme shampoo bottles while the waitress brought her a Coca-Cola, which she sipped daintily through a straw. I read the backs of at least five tins of talcum while I watched the smooth fingers of her white gloves, and realized Miss Shaw had no intention of removing them even while she was eating.
The waitress set her plate down in front of her so hard that the lettuce almost flew off the plate. Jean appeared beside me. “Jenny, we got to get going.”
“Not yet,” I shushed, nodding in the direction of the soda fountain.
Jean followed my gaze. “Oh. It’s her.”
“Yeah.”
Jean sighed. “She’s beautiful, isn’t she?”
“Yeah.”
“How come you’re standing here spying on her?”
“I’m not,” I insisted.
“Then why are you whispering?”
“I’m not whispering,” I whispered.
Jean heaved a sigh of exasperation. “Five minutes,” she said. “Meet me at the front or else I’m going to leave you. I don’t have time to baby-sit you anymore.”
I grabbed an eyelash curler from the shelf and pointed it at my sister. Jean sure knew how to make me mad. “I don’t know why not. I always have to wait around for you, too. I had to wait all night for you the time you left out the window with Billy.”
She tossed her head, flinging her ponytail at me. “It’s not my fault you come snooping into my life all the time.”
Jean trudged off in a huff, and just when I turned to replace the curler in its bin, I saw Miss Shaw looking at me. My face burned with embarrassment. I hadn’t wanted Miss Shaw to catch me scouting her.
“Jenny Blake,” she said, coming over and touching my shoulder with her gloved hand. She’d left her uneaten lunch on the counter. “Are you interested in eyelash curlers? Who would have known? Do you want me to teach you how to use one?”
“Oh, I—” My words got tangled in my throat. Finally I said the first thing that came to mind. “I don’t know why you think you got to be so nice to me,” I blurted. “That’s the biggest mystery about you of all.”
She helped herself to the metal implement and demonstrated as if she hadn’t heard a thing I’d said. “You open it like this and slide it in as close to your eyelid as possible. Then you press. Like this.”
“I don’t know why you think you have to help me with all these things.”
“Every young lady needs to master the intricacies of an eyelash curler. Do you want to know one of my secrets?”
One of her secrets. Finally. I nodded dumbly.
“Move the curler out toward the tips of your eyelashes and press again. Just so.”
I stared at myself in fascination in the small display mirror when she released my lashes. My eyes seemed huge. I could see the copper light reflecting in my pupils.
“There you have it. The fashionable wide-eyed look.”
Well, surely that was one of the questions everybody asked about Miss Shaw. How does she get that fashionable wide-eyed look? At least I knew the answer to something. In an instant I realized how much I wanted to trust this woman. Maybe Jean went bonkers over Grace Kelly because Grace was the sort of person every girl dreamed of being. But to me, Miss Shaw, in her mystifying graciousness, was the daily embodiment of the same thing.
“Thank you for teaching me how to do this,” I said, lifting my curled eyelashes toward her.
“Will I see you at the shop tomorrow?” she asked, as if she was almost afraid I wouldn’t come. Once again, I marveled that no one had seen fit to pause and chat with her. I thought of her picking at the tuna and the tomato while no one so much as gave her a smile or asked her about herself or said hello.
“Of course I’ll be there,” I promised, “but I’ve got to go now.” Jean was already heading toward the door.
I had to race to catch up with her.
The more pennies that kept turning up in my path, the heavier my pockets became. And the heavier my pockets became, the more I wanted to help people the same way that God was helping me. I would never let go of that very first penny I found. But I did give away a lot of the others. Everywhere I looked, I saw plenty of people who I sensed were sad, lonely, hurting, or in need of encouragement.
One day in the Ville, Pruett Jones (who rode the Harris school bus with Aurelia) took a ball to the forehead and I pressed a penny into his palm, telling him I hoped the ball didn’t make too big of a bruise.
When I saw Mrs. Shipley dust off her toddler after he’d taken a nasty fall, I wrote a secret note to her (“You have a nice way with your boy”), taped a penny to it, and stuck it inside her mailbox.
I gave away pennies to everybody because I wanted to help people the same way God kept helping me.
When I observed my last-year’s teacher, Mrs. Martha Dahlberg, sorting through fresh fruit at the greengrocer’s store on the corner, I placed a penny on the grocer’s scale so she would find it when she weighed her purchase.
I even swallowed my pride and gave a penny to Cindy Walker when she showed up on our landing, trying to earn a Girl Scout badge by asking if there was anything in our underprivileged neighborhood that she could help us with.
“You’ve got to have this,” I said expansively. “Go ahead and think I’m stupid if you want to, but I’m giving you this in hopes you’ll see all the good things that keep dropping into your life.”
When people like Cindy looked at me like I was nuts, I wondered if my small acts of kindness were having any effect at all. Several times, I thought about giving up, but I didn’t. Maybe I’d never see anything come of me passing along pennies. But reaching out to hurting people, even in a small way like this, helped me feel better about the hurts in my own life.
I was crossing Grand Avenue later that same week, headed toward the streetcar stop after work, when I heard someone call, “Jenny?” and I glanced back to see Miss Shaw’s blue convertible rolling along behind me. “Would you like a lift somewhere?” she called, her gloved fingers gripping her steering wheel. “I closed the shop early so I can visit the hairdresser. Don’t you l
ive in the direction of Chouteau Street? I go right past there; I certainly wouldn’t mind driving you home.”
Instinct told me to decline even though the Cadillac dazzled me with its gleaming grille and its rockets protruding from the chrome on the front of the car. “I ride the streetcar every day,” I explained.
She pulled her scarf tighter and lifted an eyebrow as if she didn’t think that mattered one jot.
“I’ve never ridden in a convertible before.”
She patted the white leather seat beside her. “Well, it’s about time you tried it out, wouldn’t you say?”
“Really?”
“Sure.”
“You really want to give me a ride?”
“Of course I do. Hop on in.”
I think I forgot to breathe as I climbed in beside Miss Shaw. I shut the door behind me and pressed my spine against the leather seat in amazement. The seat felt so low and broad, it made me feel like a giant held me in the palm of his hand. The minute Miss Shaw popped in the clutch and we sailed up the street, the wind caught my hair like we were flying. I cupped both hands overhead and tried to capture the air as it raced by. On the sidewalk, gazes followed us as we zoomed past. Miss Shaw switched on the radio. After a bit, when the tubes warmed up, we had music.
I gathered my hair in my fist, trying to keep it out of my eyes, to no avail. Miss Shaw tapped her fingers on the wheel in rhythm to the song.
“Did you know Grace Kelly showed off to her friends in a convertible?” I announced. “When she was a teenager, she stood on the front seat and steered with her feet.” I wasn’t trying to elicit information from Miss Shaw this time. I was just feeling chatty.
With her gloved fingers rapping against the wheel she said, “I suppose that means your sister would like to drive a convertible with her feet.”
“Probably. If she got the chance.”
I loved the way Miss Shaw arched her perfectly drawn eyebrows. “I have to tell you, Jenny—I wouldn’t give her the opportunity.”
