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

by Ed Ifkovic

  Bella melodramatically rolled her eyes upward with no attempt to conceal her obvious annoyance. She reached across the table and took a cigarette from Roddy’s breast pocket. Deliberately, she held it out toward Jed, pointing it at him, waiting for a light, but Jed, who’d been fidgeting with matches after lighting one of his own, didn’t budge. Finally, shyly, Roddy reached into his pocket, found matches, and lit her cigarette. Bella blew smoke across the table, her mouth making a faint, whistling trill; and for a second all of us watched, enthralled, as she exhaled the thin line of gray smoke.

  The front door clanged as Ellie joined us, dressed now in street clothes, her neck swathed in a bright blue wool scarf. She seemed perplexed at the unexpected visitors at the table, looking from me to Jed, worry on her face. “Is everything okay?”

  “I heard you were brilliant.” Bella, so snide.

  Ellie ignored her, turning to Roddy. “They asked me to return in two weeks. I’m to do a longer set. Maybe midnight on a weekend. They’re…” Her voice was bubbly and excited but she stopped. “I’m sorry.” She looked at me, eyes bright. “I’m so up in the air.”

  I sipped the murky coffee an old waiter placed before me, which was a mistake. Tasteless, foul. Some oily concoction best used to lubricate one’s touring car. “I only caught the last of your numbers, Ellie, but I must say, I liked it a lot. You have a lovely voice.”

  She shook her head up and down and whispered a quiet thank you. When she spoke, she was looking at Roddy. “You’ll have to help me on a new number. That song from Shuffle Along really worked for me. The way you helped me last week…”

  A curious word to stress, I thought.

  Bella interrupted, a smile on her face. “Everyone wants Roddy to help with their stumbling careers.” Sweetly, with no sweetness in her voice. “Roddy, you do remember you were going to read my play with me…”

  Roddy looked from one to the other, but spoke to me. “Bella’s finished a play. A full-length play. The part I read was good…” He was nodding his head a little too much.

  A gentle diplomat, I thought, but his charming manner only seemed to irk the two women, who stared icily at him.

  Bella waved her hand in the air, dismissing the comment.

  Silence around the table. “You’re all old friends?” I asked.

  Bella expelled smoke. “Lawson, when he has time for me, is my boyfriend.” Defiantly, Bella reached over and covered Roddy’s wrist with her hand, a sudden move that made him jump. He pulled his hand away, embarrassed. Bella laughed a throaty, cigarette laugh, though no one else did.

  Ellie was frowning. “Miss Ferber, all the men love Bella.”

  The line hung in the air, words laced with resignation.

  “But end up with you,” Bella shot back.

  “I think we…” Roddy blathered, the failed diplomat.

  “You all live in Harlem?”

  Ellie said, “I live a bunch of blocks up from here with my grandfather over on Convent Avenue. Two subway stops. Bella lives with a brother and his wife over on St. Nicholas.”

  Roddy added, “And Lawson and I live a few blocks away from here. The super of the building is Harriet’s father.”

  “And what about Harriet?” I asked. “She struck me as a strong-willed young woman.”

  Roddy showed that boyish grin. “She is that.”

  Bella smirked. “Roddy insisted she be a part of the group. No one asked for my vote. So much for democracy. She hardly fits in, trust me.”

  “Come on, Bella,” Roddy said. “She’s all right.”

  Ellie spoke up. “She wants to write political poetry, and she latched onto Waters at some reading, and then onto us. And she was already friendly with Freddy.”

  I went on. “Yes, what about Freddy? Another fascinating young man.” Bella scoffed at that. “Where does he live?”

  Roddy took his time answering. “No one knows. You know, we joke about it. All of us. Freddy wanders, checks in with his sister who lives next door to Ellie, sometimes sleeps on her floor. Even Harriet claims she doesn’t know. He’s the…well, rebel.”

  “Ah, young writers.” I was smiling.

  “All would-be writers,” Roddy concluded. “See what Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston did to us?”

  “Ellie,” I began, “when I heard you sing tonight, I thought of that sonnet you read in my living room last August—the one about the saxophone player in the alley.”

  Ellie raised her eyebrows. “Lord, you remember that?”

  “I remember the rhythm, the way you played with images. Like your singing…” I paused. “I’d like to read it again.”

  She intrigued me, this young woman. She had a marvelous face, a pretty face. Bella was harshly beautiful, the blunt beauty of stage vixens; but Ellie had a natural loveliness with her gentle oval face, her soft hazel eyes, her dimpled chin.

  I had an idea. “Why don’t you have Waters gather your group again? Let’s have lunch at my apartment. We’ll do it soon. Is that possible?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Roddy began. “It’s hard to round up folks—to reach people, even by phone. Jobs, you know.” He smiled. “Thank you, but…”

  “Why not?” I persisted.

  He bit his lip. “Well, all right.” He stared from Bella to Ellie.

  I nodded. “Let Waters know. He can plan it with his mother. I’ll tell her about it. A nice lunch.” I paused. “Bella, let me read something of your play.”

  Her eyes got wide. “Well, thank you.” Genuine, surprised.

  Jed half-stood. “Edna, we…”

  I ignored him.

  “Roddy, what about you?”

  Bella and Ellie both smiled. “Roddy shares snippets of his stories,” Ellie said. “Like little prose poems, filled with stark images of Harlem life. He writes all the time but only opens the door…a bit.” She rubbed her thumb and index finger together.

  “I’m not…”

  “Ready,” Bella blurted out.

  “Roddy’ll have those three words etched onto his tombstone,” Ellie added.

  Roddy seemed to be enjoying the casual ribbing. “I do write. All the time.” He breathed in and repeated, “All the time. Really.”

  “Those aren’t the three words,” Ellie emphasized.

  Roddy blushed. “An editor told me my stories were…stale.”

  Jed turned his chair to the side, staring absently at a chalkboard menu.

  “Let me see one, Roddy,” I suggested.

  He shook his head. “No, I’m not…you know.”

  Everyone but Jed laughed. It was an honest, good moment, spontaneous, happy, the tension gone from the conversation. But it couldn’t last. As the minutes passed, something else was obvious. Both women leaned toward Roddy, smiling, cavalierly touching his arm, catching his eye, nodding at him. Idle flirting. Ellie reached out and touched his wrist, and Bella flinched. By her own admission Bella was dating Lawson, though it was probably impossible to be involved with a man who understood—and relished—just how good-looking he really was. Yet Bella coyly flirted with Roddy, while Ellie seemed unable to take her eyes off him. Curious, this young trio. And also maddening, I suspected, for the two women; for Roddy, who possessed schoolboy good looks and a gather-near-me sensibility, displayed little interest in either woman. Again, the careful diplomat treading dangerous waters. His kindnesses and attentions came off as perfunctory, routinely friendly. Sensing himself mired in deadly quicksand, he’d decided to dream of rock ledges where he was isolated and safe.

  Rocking in his chair, Jed had said nothing during our conversation, spending his time chain-smoking and occasionally glancing sideways at the vivacious Bella, who did likewise. He looked colossally bored. Suddenly, standing so quickly we all jumped, he grumbled, “Enough of this nonsense.” Scarcely nodding at everyone, he slapped an outrageously generous fi
ve-dollar bill on the table and headed to the door.

  “My ride,” I commented, standing to put on my coat. “Talk to Waters,” I told Roddy. “Rebecca will make a wonderful lunch. Soon.”

  Outside Jed hailed a cab that had pulled in front of Small’s Paradise. An old man and woman had been heading toward it but stopped, startled by Jed’s fierce, insistent whistle. I tottered after him.

  Settled into the backseat, I turned to him. “You were rude, Jed.”

  “So?”

  ‘You didn’t open your mouth once.”

  “I figured I’d let you do all the talking for both of us.”

  “And you know them,” I insisted. “Don’t tell me you don’t.”

  “Rubbish. You expect me to chitchat with that vain and beautiful girl about her jazzbo boyfriend?”

  “Lawson?”

  “It doesn’t matter…”

  “They’re eager, young…”

  “They’re a dime a dozen.”

  “So are you. And me.”

  “You know you don’t believe that, Edna. You’re a famous and rich novelist and I’m a famous producer who’s also rich.” He grinned. “Who’s also notoriously rude.”

  “I don’t care…”

  “For God’s sake, Edna. Slumming in Harlem doesn’t mean having coffee with the residents in a grimy chop suey slop hole.”

  I fumed, turned away.

  The cab had been idling at a red light. Through the dusky windows I saw a young man standing across the street from the chop suey joint. I strained to see him because something about him…It was Freddy, I realized, the nomadic young man from my living room. He was standing in a doorway, leaning against a plate-glass window, partially lost in night shadows, but he was gazing, his body rigid, at the trio of friends then leaving Harry Chang’s. Or, more precisely: arry hang’s. As the cab jerked forward, I twisted my head back, but by now he’d disappeared into the darkness of the street.

  Chapter Four

  On Saturday morning, watching Waters Turpin as he helped his mother prepare lunch for the young writers, I found myself thinking about him. I’d known the sweet boy for years, of course, and liked his intelligence and civility, a lad who spoke in a soft, buttery voice and yet seemed to have a lot to say. But I hadn’t realized his love of the written word until last summer when I spotted him nestled in a wing chair with one of my books in his lap. I paid attention.

  For years, when he stayed with relatives during his school breaks, he’d visit his mother at my apartment. I encouraged it because I found him charming, inquisitive, and above all, respectful. I’d even paid him for an occasional chore. My dinner guests knew him not only because he helped his mother serve her delicious meals but because he sometimes bantered quietly but eagerly with the likes of George Kaufman, Aleck Woollcott, and Neysa McMein. He had no fear of celebrity, and they joyfully coddled him.

  He spotted me watching him and grinned. “Thank you, Miss Edna.”

  With Roddy’s help, he’d reached everyone, and they were free to come—and delighted with the invitation. But orchestrating this lunch got me thinking how little I knew about who they were, these budding writers and performers who were older than Waters and enmeshed in grown-up intrigues. Two visits last summer and that one brief encounter the other day told me little about them. In summer they’d talked about writing, all of them imbued with a kind of bright glow, intoxicated. I had little sense—I really hadn’t paid it that much mind—of their differing personalities, their foibles and quirks. I did observe—it was hard not to—that Bella and Lawson were too stunning for their own good, both a little cocky with their accidental birthright; but Ellie…well, nothing at all. Not then. A pleasant enough girl, simply. The writer of the sonnet I enjoyed. I’d imagined her a breathless Emily Dickinson, sheltered among her books.

  How much had changed in a day or so! The introduction of newcomer Roddy had shifted that imagined landscape. He was a lad I’d taken to, though I sensed most people were similarly drawn to him. He got me thinking about the dynamic interaction among these new characters. And, I supposed, the new equation that involved Jed Harris, whose obvious recognition at my apartment of Bella and Lawson—and possibly Roddy—suggested another story behind the story. Perhaps a story that Roddy was not privy to. Jed, the incessant yammerer, silenced in that chop suey joint uptown and on the cab ride back downtown. Ellie, transformed from the sweet literary mouse who wrote Edna St. Vincent Millay sonnets into a vampish version of Josephine Baker, though she didn’t approximate Baker’s notorious shimmying derriere. I was intrigued. The fatigue I experienced at the end of the Show Boat tryouts—that gnawing ennui that always followed the writing of a novel or a play—was evaporating.

  I’d seen Jed Harris at the Selwyn Theater the following afternoon and purposely mentioned our brief interlude in Harlem—and his uncharacteristically taciturn performance. “That young Bella is a beautiful woman,” I began.

  His words were clipped. “Too beautiful. I don’t know why you’re fascinated with her. Frankly, Edna, just look into her eyes. That girl is all ambition and money. She wants to own the world.”

  “So?”

  “She’s a Negro girl playing with fire.” He turned away but glanced back. He locked eyes with me. “Look into her eyes, Edna. What I see is ruthlessness. Evil.” The last word was icy.

  I smiled. “Amazing, Jed. You got all of that from a brief moment in my apartment and a moment in Harlem?”

  “She’s not that complicated.” Now his words were whispered, with Jed a sign that he was seething.

  “Of course, but you must have met her before, no?” I probed.

  “I’ve met everybody before. And she’s, well, a type.”

  “That’s too easy…”

  He walked away.

  ***

  Roddy was the first to arrive at my apartment, clumsily dropping a book and some typed sheets onto the coffee table. Waters had answered the door, hopping with excitement, and for a moment the two of them playfully bumped each other, some ritualistic testosteronic act I never understood, nor wanted to. Standing in the doorway of my workroom watching them, I heard Waters chuckling about something Bella had said about Roddy. Though Roddy narrowed his eyes at the remark, Waters seemed oblivious to his discomfort.

  “She’s so…stunning,” Waters went on. “She’s almost like Theda Bara.”

  I assumed he meant the outlandish eye makeup and the sultry come-hither glances she hurled at any available male. A flapper vamp, waiting for Valentino to visit her Arabian desert oasis.

  I wandered into the room, paused, and foolishly spoke: “Yes, Roddy, Bella does seem to favor you.” Said so intrusively and loudly, the line came off as hopelessly puerile, a line stolen from a previous century’s parlor-room melodrama. Roddy blushed and didn’t know where to look in the room. Not looking at me, he mumbled, “She’s Lawson’s girl, you know.”

  Waters spoke up. “Sometimes she is, sometimes she isn’t. Off and on.”

  “That’s because each one of them wants something the other is not,” Roddy noted.

  “What does that mean?” I asked.

  He breathed in. “Lawson and Bella see their futures spent with friends other than…us. People they haven’t met yet.” He pointed to Waters and himself.

  “That’s not a testimony of friendship.”

  He grinned. “Everybody uses somebody else when they’re young.”

  I smiled at him. “You’ll discover that the habit doesn’t disappear with advanced age, dear Roddy.”

  Waters wasn’t through ribbing Roddy. “And little Ellie, shy as a skittish kitten, seems to have discovered Roddy’s charms. Whatever they are.”

  Roddy shot him an affectionate look, though there was some warning in it. “I don’t think Miss Ferber is interested in the twists and turns of young romance.”

  Now I
laughed. “But it’s a pleasure seeing you squirm, Roddy.”

  He chuckled. “I do a lot of that, Miss Ferber.”

  Waters went on, “Lately Ellie and Bella pull at Roddy like two uptown swells fighting over a last piece of fried chicken.”

  “Come on, Waters. Enough. Besides most times they resent me,” Roddy said, an edge to his voice now.

  “Why, for heaven’s sake?” I asked.

  He paused. “Because I don’t want any romance…now.” He shook his head briskly. “Sometimes they fight with me, bloodthirsty, like I’m their enemy. It’s just real insane. Like they want to kill me.”

  “And you fight back?”

  He waited a second, reflected on what his answer should be. “I just watch. I figure their battles over me have nothing to do with me.” He seemed puzzled by his own words. “It’s like they discovered how much they don’t like each other and I’m there, stuck in the middle, so they use me as an excuse.” A pause. “Maybe.” He smiled that wide smile. “Although I do got me a fierce temper, Miss Ferber—if the mood is right.”

  “Are you at all interested in Ellie or Bella?” I asked. “A little bit? I’m nosy. Forgive me.”

  He smiled but didn’t answer.

  “Bella is Lawson’s girl,” Waters said.

  Roddy, staring around the room, uncomfortable, echoed the remark. “Bella is Lawson’s girl. I’m not a creeper.”

  Waters added, “Bella and Lawson belong together, I think. I don’t mean just their movie-magazine looks. Both are real talented, I think. But both’ll do anything to get downtown into the money and fame. You know, Miss Edna, Lawson has dreams of having his play produced on Broadway. The new naturalistic drama. Like a Negro Eugene O’Neill.”

  “And Bella would like to star in it,” Roddy added. “I hate to say this, but sometimes I think she stays with him just to see if he’ll make it—and carry her along. Still and all, Broadway?”

  “You don’t seem so sure.”

  Roddy sighed. “The fact of the matter is that there’s only room for this many”—he held up two fingers—“Negroes down here on Broadway. This…this world is hundreds of illusionary miles from Harlem. Delusional miles. You know, Broadway goes up through Harlem, but that’s not Broadway, if you know what I mean.”