Downtown Strut: An Edna Ferber Mystery (Edna Ferber Mysteries)

by Ed Ifkovic

  As I tucked myself into a seat, comfortable in the middle of the unlit orchestra, the young director, a stringy man with colicky fair hair, was telling the singers that they’d be hiring only two performers, one male, one female. Some actors groaned. “Sorry,” the man apologized and called out a name. A chubby girl nervously walked onto the stage. Within minutes the pianist struck a chord, and her rich soprano filled the room. I found myself nodding, pleased. One by one, the successive voices swelled and echoed in the hall, and a chill swept up my spine. I closed my eyes, reveled in the sweep of spiritual and plantation work songs, transformed magically by the lyrical mastery of Jerome Kern.

  During a break between auditions, I fiddled with a notepad, reviewing the comments I’d jotted down on the road. I needed to leave, but the intoxicating music…

  At that moment I sensed someone slip into a seat behind me.

  “Miss Ferber.” A high, rumbling voice.

  I turned and stared into the face of the young man with the sloppy grin. What was his name? Randy? No. Roddy. That’s how Waters had introduced him to me yesterday. Roddy Parsons.

  “Roddy,” I said.

  His lazy eyes got wide. “You remember my name?”

  “I remember everything, young man.”

  He grinned and I saw one broken tooth. It gave him a huckleberry-boy look, a Peck’s bad boy of the neighborhood. “I’m not that memorable.”

  “That remains to be seen.”

  I liked his looks. His slightly puffy cheeks were set against a precise jawline, with lazy, drifting eyes below a high, flat forehead. An expansive face, honest and eager, though a little wary; but it was the eyes, intelligent and deep, a rich mocha brown, that held you, invited you in, made you want to share confidences. And, of course, that lopsided grin. He wore his hair close-cropped and neat, almost military, and probably not popular these days of conked and slicked-down hair. His long body looked graceful as he leaned against the seat. I compared him to Waters, the awkward, skinny boy with the narrow, curious face; and with Lawson, the riveting matinee idol whose look was calculated and sure. There was naturalness about Roddy, a baffling blend of innocence and—what?—not experience, but a suggestion of worldliness. It made for an appealing man, seductive yet aloof. You wanted to hug him. I imagined women found the combination irresistible.

  “I wanted to say hello to you yesterday.”

  I squirmed. “Do we know each other? I know I just said that I remember everything, but I lied. I felt I’d met you before.”

  The smile disappeared from his face for a second. “Washington D.C. Well, you didn’t meet me, but you stood a few feet away. And you looked right at me.”

  “When I saw you in my living room yesterday, I thought…”

  Again, the captivating smile. Yes, I thought, it must be easy for girls to follow him around, but that powerful grin could well disguise the life behind it. Roddy could be someone easy to misread. Here was a man who might harbor secrets and no one would ever suspect. Now, tilting his head, he pointed to the stage. “I was in the Negro Chorus in Washington. You were at one of the rehearsals. But I took sick, bouts of laryngitis, couldn’t go on, so I had to leave the company, come back to New York.” He bit his lip. “If I project my voice, I lose it. Doctors figure it’s some virus.” A hint of a smile. “So, for now, the world can’t hear my rich baritone singing your songs.”

  “Well, not my songs. Jerome Kern, I think, would take issue with that.”

  He laughed. “Everything about Show Boat comes from you, Miss Ferber.”

  Said, the line had sweetness to it. I was used to the blatant flattery, unctuous praise, and the vapid posturing of the slick and glittery Broadway crowd. Or the rich Park Avenue matrons and their dollar-sign husbands, squired around the city in silver-colored Pierce-Arrows or sleek Stutz Bearcats, inviting me to candlelight dinners or to weekends on Long Island. Yet this line, said so softly, had about it a sincerity that momentarily silenced me. But he didn’t pause. “So I’m out of the show, but…I don’t know, I like being here. So I sit here, in the back row”—he pointed behind us, dramatically—“and listen to the Negro Chorus. No one tells me to go away. I think they feel sorry for me.”

  Onstage the hopeful Negro singers began to audition again, this time all of them singing together, in harmony, and I strained to hear Roddy’s soft voice speaking into my ear. He leaned in to me and twisted his body. I rose and motioned for him to follow me, which he did, though he seemed hesitant. Once in the lobby, the two of us facing each other, he looked awkward, stepping away from me, plunging his hands into his pockets and then pulling them out. He was the squirrelly schoolboy compelled to socialize with a distant relative, the hectoring spinster aunt. Yet his quiet voice, when he leaned in to me, was lively and questioning, as though afraid he might miss something. I liked his deferential manner, I liked the bright intelligent eyes, and I liked that goofy grin. He stood there, spine erect, though the tilt of his head seemed almost girlish, coy.

  “Roddy,” I began, “please join me for lunch. There’s a coffee shop at the end of the block…” I stopped. My words, delivered so casually, slapped him into silence, the good-looking face closing up, his eyes now shrouded and distant. He glanced quickly over his shoulder, as if seeking a way to flee. Immediately I understood my error. How many workaday eateries in the theater district would gladly entertain a middle-aged white woman sharing a cup of coffee and a tuna salad on rye with a twenty-year-old Negro? Unseemly, perhaps, given the cruel fact that Negroes could not sit alongside whites in theaters, compelled to slink away in the distant balconies, the viciously named “nigger heaven.” While we might actually get seated in some grubby little restaurant, there was no guarantee we’d be served. Hostile, disapproving eyes would watch, narrowed. Probably more in tune with contemporary America than I was, at least an America that didn’t reside in doorman buildings on the Upper East Side, Roddy understood the simple but awful calculus of a Negro youth having a cup of bad coffee in plain sight of censorious eyes. My heart went out to the strapping lad, standing there fumbling with a loose button on his jacket.

  I wanted to talk to this young man, though I wasn’t certain why.

  I spoke with one of Hammerstein’s aides who’d been eying me from an appropriate distance, doubtless having been given the charge of seeing to the untoward and frivolous demands of the temperamental novelist. She’d stepped out into the lobby when Roddy and I left the theater, but she leaned nonchalantly against a back wall, feigning interest in the texture of the wood. When I looked in her direction, she scurried over. “My name is Lorna,” she volunteered. She avoided looking at Roddy. Now, hesitantly, she steered Roddy and me into a small dressing room, actually pulled up chairs for us, and miraculously, or so it seemed to me, she wheeled in a tray of covered salads and sandwiches wrapped in waxed paper, as well as a pot of steaming coffee. But she didn’t look happy. When I said thank you, she gasped, as though I’d cursed her with a particularly offensive obscenity, and, turning on her heels, she muttered, ”No, thank you!” That made no sense. Her stern eye moved to Roddy, who purposely avoided eye contact with the skittish woman, though he managed a polite “Thank you” which she failed to respond to. She whispered to me that the food was intended for the absent Ziegfeld assistant—and for me. “In case you wanted lunch. This was for the two of you.” She pointed to the spread of food, glancing at Roddy as if he’d usurped a decent man’s final meal. I ignored her, and when she blathered on about something, I turned away. She left us alone.

  Roddy and I sat at a small table, just feet apart from each other, and I could see he was anxious.

  “I’m making you nervous.”

  “No, you’re not,” he lied.

  “Tell me about yourself, Roddy.”

  He stammered a bit but grinned. “I don’t know what to say, Miss Ferber. Yesterday, you know, when I sat in your living room, I actually believed for
a minute that someday I’d be a writer…like you. I mean, Waters invited me to your home, and I sat there…you know…” His face darkened, and he glanced away. “Foolish, maybe.” As he spoke, he seemed to sink into the uncomfortable chair, his arms folding gracefully and his neck bending. He reminded me of a hardy flower, now suddenly wilting.

  “What do you write?” I asked him.

  “Poetry, mainly. Short stories.” A pause. “I mean, I try to write…” Another pause. “When Waters asked me to be a part of his group, I told him no.”

  “Why?”

  He shrugged. “Well, I haven’t published anything yet.” He blinked nervously. “And I don’t like to show people my stuff. I’m never…sure about it.”

  “No matter, Roddy.”

  He held up his hand, a gesture of resignation. “Lawson had a poem in The Crisis. Beautiful. Bella had a one-act play produced up in Harlem. At a drama workshop at the Lincoln. Everyone loved it…So I said no, I can’t be a part of the group, but Lawson kept pushing me. He said—why not? Do it, do it. C’mon.” He grinned. “So I did it. Here I am now, sitting with the woman who wrote So Big.”

  “Will you show me your writing? I know you said you don’t like to but…” I stopped. He glanced down at his hands, then looked over my shoulder. “Last summer, when I sat down with Waters’ friends, I enjoyed reading their work. There’s something about their…energy.”

  Again the grin. “They told me they were terrified of you.”

  Now I laughed out loud. “I’m not an ogre, Roddy.”

  Hurriedly he said, “No, no, it’s not that. It’s just that, you know, we all write and talk to each other, but suddenly we were headed south of 125th Street and into your apartment. And we’re thinking So Big, Show Boat, Pulitzer Prize. And you were right there…”

  “Well, I hope they’ve lost their fear of me.”

  He waited a bit. “I doubt that. A little fear is a good thing, no?”

  I nodded. “Good point. Usually I demand it in the folks I encounter. I like people to tremble when I stroll into a room.”

  For the first time he laughed loudly, a hearty, throaty roar. He threw back his head but then thought better of it, stopping abruptly and looking serious. “I’m sorry.”

  “For what?”

  He didn’t say anything for a while. “I’m a little uncomfortable with you, I have to tell you.”

  “The ogre part of me?”

  The sheepish smile. “No, the part of me that’s always scared around people.”

  “Well, I’m glad you’re part of the group,” I said. “You’re a charming young man, smart, and these days I find most young men boors, clods, bounders.”

  “You don’t know me, Miss Ferber.”

  “I doubt if you fit into any of those three categories.” I took a sip of coffee. “I’m glad Lawson is pushing you…”

  “Lawson is my cousin, you know. A distant cousin. I read his stuff and I think I can’t do that.”

  “Let me judge…”

  He was shaking his head furiously. “Not yet. I don’t have anything I’m ready to show you. Just yet. Maybe later…“

  “Are you sure?” I grinned. “Every day there are budding writers at my door, clamoring for me to read their work. They hand me poems as I step out of taxis.”

  He was still shaking his head. “No.” Emphatic, strong. “Not yet.” A sly grin. “Maybe. Someday.”

  “Lawson is a confident young man.” I smiled. “And so is Bella. Confident woman, that is.”

  “That’s because they’re clever, talented, and they’re both so good looking. Everyone falls in love with Lawson. It’s like a curse for him.” He leaned in, pretending to share a confidence. “The other side of my family. The ones with the better genes. We live together, you know. Uptown in a cheap apartment. I work at a smelly, oily warehouse and Lawson is a hotel janitor. We talk all the time about where we’ll end up. He dreams of being downtown on Broadway—the first important Negro playwright—and my most recent dream was singing in the Negro Chorus of Show Boat.”

  “Maybe you’ll get your chance again.”

  “Maybe someone has to die for me to get back up there.” Idly, he pointed through the wall toward the unseen stage. “Not worth it. Anyhow, my singing is not the best. There are other opportunities. You know, this whole Harlem Renaissance going on. That’s what got us going, Miss Ferber. That’s what sparked our group to meet. Harlem is filled with life now. Just sixty or so years after slavery, well, Harlem is a place where black folks have their…their own world. It’s like a…Negro kingdom there. The jazz, the shows, it never stops. Harlem is jam-packed with writers and artists and…” His voice rose as his words ended. “Uptown. It’s…it’s unstoppable.”

  He hadn’t touched the sandwich I’d given him, but now, tentatively, he sipped his coffee. His fingers, long and delicate and dark, trembled a bit as he touched the cup, and I thought: he’s still nervous. This conversation was a novelty for him—maybe even a violation of some sort. The nosy novelist was making him nervous.

  “One time I saw Langston Hughes walking on 136th Street,” he said, a hint of awe in his voice. “Ever since he published The Weary Blues poems last year, well, he’s our hero. The way he uses jazz rhythms…” Roddy’s fingers tapped lightly on the table.

  I smiled. “Would you believe I met him recently at a party at Carl Van Vechten’s apartment? He told me he takes the train in from Pennsylvania, where he’s living these days. We had a nice chat, very brief, before he was called away, but he has a way of inviting confidences. I asked him about his poetry, but within minutes he had me talking about growing up in Appleton, Wisconsin. Quite a talent, I thought.”

  Roddy laughed but looked away, glancing at the closed door. “I should go back. I believe in being as visible as possible. I want them to be aware of the overgrown boy in the back row. Maybe I’ll be hired as an understudy. I don’t know.” Again, he glanced at the door. “And Ellie’s meeting me later. She was hoping they might need another girl for the Negro Chorus. You remember Ellie.”

  “Of course. The quiet girl who sat next to Lawson. The sonneteer. I remember her one sonnet last summer.”

  “You know, quiet little Ellie with the freckles on her nose is also a wonderful chanteuse. She has an angel’s voice.”

  “A jazz singer?”

  Nodding, Roddy stared into my face for the first time. “She’s wonderful. Like…like Florence Mills. Sweet but, you know, tough.”

  “She looks so quiet, Roddy. I can’t imagine her on a stage.”

  “She sings in Negro clubs uptown but they don’t pay a hill of beans, Miss Ferber. Especially someone just starting out. But tonight she’s singing a few numbers in the early show at a club for white folks. Small’s Paradise. You heard of that place? Her big break. Maybe.” He reached down into a leather satchel he’d carried over his shoulder and had placed on the floor, and rifled through some papers. He handed me a small flyer, smudged black-and-white type on cheap yellow paper. “We got these done to, well, promote her. Her friends. Me and Lawson, actually. For her brief set at Small’s Paradise up on Seventh Avenue. A real important nightclub, you know.”

  I stared at the crude sheet, and read: “Ellie Payne, Songstress, with the Charlie Johnson Band.” A snippet of a review below a grainy snapshot of her. “A jazz singer with a tear in her voice.” The quote was from some magazine I’d never read. Roddy saw me reading it. “We made that up,” he confessed. “Actually Lawson said it, but no one’s heard of Lawson—yet.”

  “I like it.”

  “You should come hear her,” Roddy said now. “Everyone comes up to Small’s Paradise at night. Up to Harlem, I mean. The clubs there.”

  Everyone except me. The current fad of well-heeled white nightclubers flocking uptown in ermine and pearls held no appeal for me. Lines of sleek limousines idling at curbs, while do
wntown businessmen ogled the light-skinned showgirls at the Cotton Club or Connie’s Inn. Once or twice I’d been escorted by Noël Coward or Aleck Woollcott or Robert Benchley to glitzy nightclubs where syncopated orchestras played New Orleans ragtime or jazz. One time Noël actually got me dancing and a photographer from the Tribune snapped my picture. I feared I’d see it published one day…to my utter embarrassment. Fun, those times, but not addictive. Giddy flappers with Dutch-boy bobs and batik scarves looked like errant schoolboys at recess. I tried to ignore the current fascination with hidden-away taboo speakeasies and flowing bootleg bathtub gin and the drunken cheers of “twenty-three-skidoo” and “oh-you-kid.” Cat’s meow, my foot.

  I shook my head. “I spend my evenings in bed with a good book.” I reached out to touch his wrist, and he was tempted, I sensed, to pull his hand away. “Maybe someday that book will be written by you.”

  “You’re more of a dreamer than the rest of us, Miss Ferber.”

  “It’s not a bad dream, Roddy.”

  He was already standing. “That, and five cents will get me a ride on the subway headed downtown.”

  ***

  Yet, an hour later, as I sat with Jed Harris at the Selwyn Theater, I found myself showing him the cheap flyer.

  Jed had arrived at the theater just as a full dress rehearsal ended and the director Burton was reading his notes to the cast. Hearing the menacing stomp of feet behind him, Burton turned, and I saw his face tighten, his lips draw into a thin line. I’d been sitting in a back row seat and watched as Jed, unshaven, with a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth, swaggered down the aisle, announced in a truculent snarl that he didn’t like what little he’d seen, and had serious doubts about the future careers of those quivering actors up onstage. Walking toward him, Burton shot him a contemptuous look that was lost on the imperious Jed. Running his tongue over his lips, Jed dramatically dropped the cigarette on the floor and crushed it, swiveled around and spotted me sitting in the back row. A sickly smile. “I want another run-through,” he declared.