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

by Ed Ifkovic

  “Broadway is Times Square, the theaters,” Waters added.

  Roddy went on. “Broadway down here changes Negroes. You start out black but get whiter and whiter with each success. Sooner or later, you don’t belong anywhere. Certainly you can’t come back to Harlem.”

  Waters hinted, “And Lawson has made some enemies.”

  That surprised me. “Really? Who?”

  He didn’t respond, but rushed to answer knocking at the door.

  Making an artful entrance, preceded by a strong whiff of heady gardenia perfume, Bella sallied in, dramatically slipping off her gloves. She paused a moment under the hall light, a self-conscious gesture, because the light threw her beautiful face into shadows, the heavily accented eyes gleaming against the skin that was almost translucent white. She was wearing a captivating Charleston flare dress, deep indigo with gold threading. Yes, I thought: Theda Bara, temptress, exotic, definitely menacing, on the prowl. The deliberate vamp for the jazz age. A woman ready to turkey trot the night away. She smiled at me and settled into the sofa with a sensuous twist of her body. It was, I thought, a stage entrance, and marvelous at that.

  Ellie and Harriet immediately followed, both rushing in and complaining about the erratic and oily subway trains. They’d bumped into each other on an uptown Broadway platform, endured an intolerable delay at the 125th Street Elevated, and then ran all the way to Central Park West from Broadway. Out of breath, stammering, they stopped babbling when Bella, glancing up from her seat, rolled her eyes and mumbled a hideous crack about chronic Negro lateness. “C.P.T.” Cynically, she translated for me. “Colored people time.” Ellie, reacting as though slapped, turned away, her lips pursed, but managed to greet me with a thin smile. Harriet simply nodded at me. Bella snarled, “Just put it in a chair, girls.”

  We didn’t wait for Lawson to arrive—“He has to sneak out of his job,” Bella confided—and Harriet said that Freddy might not show up. She shrugged. “He’s that way.” I didn’t know what that meant, but suspected Freddy, the militant Jack London socialist of this group, had little desire to spend an afternoon among my bourgeois though cherished trappings. How could he possibly tell his friends he spent an afternoon surrounded by my sumptuous lemon yellow curtains made from French-glazed chintz with the fire-red taffeta bunting?

  “How do you know Freddy?”

  Harriet jumped, surprised that I’d addressed a question to her.

  “High school.” Just two words, blunt, a student’s reluctant response to an annoying teacher.

  Harriet also cultivated a rebel’s look with her tattered jacket, the sleeves frayed and stained. She struck me as a peculiar contrast to the others, who looked like the educated middle-class offspring of respectable, if struggling, families, the sons and daughters of barbers, teachers, store clerks. Perhaps behind the working-class Trotskyite pose, Harriet possessed a father who was a doctor or lawyer, a parent startled by the revolutionary spirit suddenly appearing nightly at the supper table. No, I remembered that Roddy said Harriet’s father was the super at his apartment building. I wondered how Harriet—and the absent Freddy—fit into this loose-jointed budding writer’s group.

  Rebecca announced that lunch was ready. She stood there beaming, proud, this slender woman with the full, generous mouth and small, warm eyes. I noticed that she wore a new dress, a prim lilac-colored creation I’d never seen before. She looked…well, happy.

  She served a lunch of chicken salad, creamy with dill and horseradish; fluffy winter potatoes slathered in butter; and some exotic green vegetable I knew she’d picked up in Chinatown. She served steaming coffee, licorice flavored, followed by an apple Betty that reeked of clove and cinnamon. Waters scurried around, helping his mother serve, and glowing as his friends gobbled—there was no other word—the sumptuous feast. The chatty crowd, separated from their books and manuscripts, ate in monastic silence, absorbed in the rich bounty; any random remark by me was met by monosyllabic agreement. Smiling, content, I let them eat in peace.

  But as the last of the coffee was poured, I looked at Harriet. “Roddy got you into this group?”

  She took a long time answering, as though I were posing a trick question. She glanced at Roddy and finally pointed a finger at him. He answered for her. “Waters had told me that he heard her read at the Y. Then we met at a poetry reading at the Salem Methodist Church, and she learned that Lawson and I had just rented an apartment in the building where her father is the super. Harriet lives in the first apartment. We live just feet away in the back apartment. Weird, no?”

  “When I live there,” she added. “I didn’t even know Pop had new tenants back there.”

  Roddy bit his lip. “Harriet and her father don’t get along that great.”

  She smiled. “There’s just the two of us now, and he wants me to go to some low-rent beauty school to be a hairdresser to all of Harlem. Making a living straightening hair and getting rich like A’Lelia Walker.” She groaned. “That’s when he’s not quoting Jesus to me about my bad behavior. Jesus has a lot to say about my behavior, Miss Ferber.” A shrug. “I want to write. And maybe to paint. I also want to work with political groups on behalf of the enslaved Negro.” She held my eye, challenging. “We’re not all brawling in alleys with razor blades or shooting craps while strung out on gin. ‘Keep your mouth shut, girl,’ Pop warns me. He thinks I’m gonna get arrested. I don’t know why. But the NAACP frightens Pop who’s happy shuffling along in white America, Bible in one hand, bottle of gin in the other.”

  She watched me closely.

  “Good for you,” I responded and she looked to see whether I was serious. “The artist is always an outsider and a colored artist…” I stopped, swallowed my words. “I don’t need to lecture all of you.”

  Anger in her voice. “There are real Negroes outside”—she actually pointed out my noontime window—“and they got a story to tell.”

  Waters jumped in. “Miss Edna tells me I need to tell that story.”

  “You all do,” I emphasized.

  Harriet’s look suggested I’d somehow usurped her vision, a coolness filling her eyes.

  Quietly, Roddy whispered, “We all love Langston Hughes and Claude McKay, Miss Ferber. We carry around Hughes’ The Weary Blues in our back pockets. Our Bible. My only Bible. They promise a new world, these writers up in Harlem.” His voice got louder and he looked at Harriet. “Miss Ferber met…talked to Langston Hughes at a party.”

  “Really?” Doubt in Harriet’s voice, a little disrespectful, and I could see Waters and Roddy—and even the aloof Ellie—breathing in, unhappy.

  “You know,” I went on, deliberately now, “he confided that when he was a young boy in Cleveland, he’d hide in the public library and read magazines for hours. He told me he read my early short stories in American Magazine and Everybody’s, stories of Americans struggling to survive—workers in factories, in the stockyards, women as maids, as shop girls. Folks unsung.” I stopped and shook my head. “Enough.” It was a vainglorious moment, this crowing, and uncalled for. “Let’s talk of your writing.” I stood up. “I want to hear your work.”

  Everyone nodded and looked relieved. As they filed back into the living room, I noticed Roddy saying something into Harriet’s ear—and she didn’t looked pleased. She shrugged him off, her head tilted. His eyes followed her, angry.

  ***

  Lawson arrived as we settled into the living room. He made no apology for being late, for missing lunch, but, bounding into the room and sitting in the center of the sofa, his lap covered with notebooks and typed sheets, he did what I expected him to do: he refocused the energy of the room, realigning the planets of his solar system so that, perforce, he was the blazing sun. A raw power, that, and practiced seamlessly. His looks helped, of course—the tan-colored skin taut over high cheekbones and the rigid jaw, the deep-set black eyes with a hint of violet that were almost too large for him, the s
lender though muscular body evident through the snug dapper-Dan suit he wore, and the blazing cerise necktie appropriated from a page in a fashion magazine. A stunner, this lad. The last to arrive, he was the first to speak, assuming the role of moderator, the teacher calling on students.

  “Do your stuff, my hero,” Harriet muttered in a barely audible voice.

  For the next hour, as we sipped new coffee, I reveled in the verve and spirit of these young writers, exhilarated by the sudden intensity swelling in the room. The petty tensions I sensed among them—yes, Bella and Ellie cast curt glances at each other every so often, and Harriet seemed unable to let go of her simmering distrust of me—now evaporated as each in turn, following Lawson’s presumptuous direction, read a short poem or a paragraph of a story or a snippet of stage dialogue. Ellie, at my request, reprised her summer sonnet about the saxophone player, and Lawson and Harriet got into a short debate about the use of traditional literary form to capture Negro street life.

  “Read Langston,” Harriet said to Ellie. “Not Countee Cullen. Iambic pentameter is real bogus. Read Langston, his jazz and blues stuff. Nobody rhymes any more.”

  Ellie waited for the others to defend her, but no one did.

  Bella read a few paragraphs from a short story she was working on, the opening scene taking place in a jazz club like Small’s Paradise. Her prose was purposely choppy, rhythmic, poetic, Gatlin-gun rat-a-tat; and, surprisingly, she read her words in a lilting, affectionate voice at variance with her usual hard-boiled timbre. “He was a gambler at heart,” she read her last line, “and a sweet-talking honey man, but he threw the best rent parties in the neighborhood.” When she finished, Roddy and Waters clapped. Roddy praised the way she used jazz vernacular in her clipped, tight sentences to mimic street chatter and nightclub atmosphere.

  Roddy read one paragraph of a short story he was beginning to sketch out: an exhausted woman swept the stairs in a tenement, her head swathed in old ripped rags, while her spoiled son, decked out in spats and a shiny razzle-dazzle green suit, maneuvered around her down the stairs. I thought it a little contrived though beautifully written, and said so. He kept nodding furiously, the nervous schoolboy, but finally conceded that he didn’t know what to do with the paragraph. “I can’t find the story I want to write.” He shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know why I brought this piece today.” He dropped the sheet into his lap, folded his hands over it.

  Waters read a two-page story in a faltering, wispy voice, which surprised me. Ellie commented that she liked the way he shot immediately into the heart of the scene. He looked up, grinned at her, almost misty eyed.

  Harriet got jittery when it was her turn, painfully clearing her throat and beginning over. But once she moved past her opening lines, her voice took on authority, force, almost belligerence. She read the opening paragraph of an essay she said was intended for the NAACP’s Crisis, a rousing manifesto of the young leftist Negro in America, climbing what Langston Hughes called the “racial mountain.” Finished, she sat back, triumphant, but no one commented. The look on her face said that she’d made her point.

  I kept my mouth shut.

  Lawson decided to stand when it was his turn. He’d purposely saved himself to the end, something not lost on everyone there. The star attraction. “Everyone expects me to read part of a scene from my play. But no, I won’t. You’re probably all sick of hearing about my play.” He grinned. “You all know that my play can’t seem to find a home on Broadway.” A long, deliberate pause. “Rejected because it…it is too realistic. Rent parties with ten-gallon crocks of gin and grapefruit juice. The Victrola playing scratchy Bessie Smith records. Because it shows Negro life…”

  Harriet interrupted. “Soapbox, Lawson. Get on with it.”

  A flash of anger. “Which is, of course, what your article is all about.”

  “Would Langston Hughes praise it?” Harriet’s voice was sarcastic. And then, surprisingly, a sotto voce remark. “The way he praised Miss Ferber’s short stories?”

  It was a cruel, bitter line, hardly civil, especially since I’d just fed the young lass. Everyone in the room bristled. Waters half-rose, a chivalric knight in defense of damsel Miss Edna, and from the kitchen I could hear Rebecca tsk tsk as she eavesdropped on the conversation.

  Lawson spoke through clenched teeth. “Could you remember where you are, Harriet?” Then he breathed in and smiled. “No, friends, I’m gonna share my fiction this time.”

  Bella groaned, but Lawson ignored her. What he did read, in a deep, throaty voice, was actually riveting: perhaps one hundred words about two men sitting next to each other on the “A” train, one young man irreverently humming a spiritual while the other, a disheveled old man, recalls a race riot he’d lived through as a boy. Simple, evocative prose, unsentimental.

  “Those are characters from your play,” Roddy noted. He looked at Lawson quizzically, mystified.

  “So what?”

  “I like it,” I said. “What happened to your play?”

  Another groan from Bella, though she followed it with a smile.

  Lawson shrugged. “Harlem River, Miss Ferber. It’s been rejected over and over, even uptown at the Lincoln. Negro producers afraid of its…rawness. I don’t understand why.” He was walking around now, antsy, a bead of sweat on his brow, and he moved quietly to the window. He turned to face us. “You know how it is.” The line thundered in the room, stark and bold, and emphatically ended the conversation. “So now I’ll go back to my novel.”

  Harriet grinned. “Christ, another pickanniny scribbling The Great American Novel.”

  Another flash of anger. “Well, why not?”

  Bella was watching the fury build in Lawson. I could see some humor at the corners of her eyes. “Could I star in the film adaptation?” she asked coyly, batting her eyelashes. “Or do you insist on Clara Bow in black face for the role?” He ignored her, though I noticed his lips trembled. “You could sell it to the Famous Artists’ Studio.”

  Lawson seethed. “I’ll make it before you do, honey.”

  “We’ll see about that.”

  No one said anything, but we all stared at the flash fire between the two lovers.

  “It helps to be a…female,” Lawson spat out.

  “Just what are you saying?” Bella countered. “I’m a good girl.” She turned to me. “You know, Miss Ferber, Lawson tried for a part in a Jed Harris production, and was cruelly and publicly dismissed.”

  “Jed? What play?” I was baffled.

  Now Roddy stood up. “Ridiculous. It was not a Jed Harris production, Bella. And you know that. Just cut it out. It was a play produced by some friend of his. A musical revue with a Negro cast. Yes, Mr. Harris was there. But could we stop this bickering, you two?” He pointed to the ostentatious Steinway grand piano nearby. “Look where we are.”

  There was something comical about the moment, such innocence in the line, such foolishness, as everyone mechanically stared at my piano. Ellie and Harriet burst out laughing. Even Bella and Lawson, both on edge, were shaking their heads, smiling. Cathartic, the moment, yet I couldn’t understand the raw, gnawing tension between Bella and Lawson, other than the fact that here were two worldly and ambitious young people whose photogenic looks and native intelligences had not yet given them lives they believed they were destined to lead.

  “Everyone seems to be writing a novel,” Roddy said into the silence.

  “Even you?” I asked.

  “Of course.” A pause. “Sort of.” A chuckle. “Maybe.”

  Again, the laughter in the room.

  “Powder room,” Ellie whispered to me. Waters pointed to a hallway. “First door on the left.” She nodded and left the room.

  The moment Ellie was out of the room Bella whispered to Lawson in a biting tone, “Someone should tell her how to dress.” Lawson groaned. “I mean,” Bella went on, “she looks like a rag doll in
that Victorian smock.” Raw, malicious words, said fiercely, coldly. She avoided looking at me as she crossed her legs and revealed her own fashionable attire, the flapper dress and her strapped high heels with the wide buckles.

  Roddy defended Ellie. “For God’s sake, Bella.”

  Bella rolled her eyes. “Roddy always defends the indefensible. Booker T. Washington, begging and scraping, singing coon songs on Fifth Avenue for a plug nickel.”

  Roddy said nothing.

  Waters was shuffling his papers. “I hope I don’t get this nasty when I grow up.”

  The line made me laugh out loud.

  Lawson spoke to Waters but he was looking at Bella. “Waters, you’re still a boy. You haven’t met women as wicked as Bella before this. I hope you never do. They’re…hard-boiled eggs.” He was staring directly into Bella’s face.

  “Bottle it, Lawson,” Bella sneered.

  Someone knocked on the door, and Waters rushed to get it. He stepped aside as Freddy walked into the room. Dressed in a bulky military parka, a street-arab pork-pie cap pulled over his forehead, he mumbled something about losing track of time.

  “It’s because you can’t tell time yet,” Bella said.

  Freddy ignored her, though he glanced at Ellie. Then, surprising me, he planted himself in the entrance to the living room, his parka still buttoned, his face still stiff with winter cold, and, uninvited, began to recite from memory a short poem, his rapid-fire rat-a-tat delivery a little spine chilling. It was rebellious verse, the lines filled with bitterness about a vicious Southern lynching of a feeble old black man, his hailstone words bouncing off my expensive walls. Cold, cold, yet under the stanza a fire that seared. Stunned, I didn’t know where to look—me, the only white soul in the vast room. Freddy never looked at me. He didn’t care that I was there, that it was the drawing room of Manhattan privilege and wealth and fame. My subdued kingdom, ruled by me from my red moiré armchair. He had something to say. Rebecca had stepped into the room and Freddy kept glaring at Rebecca and Waters, mother and son, back and forth, accusing, harsh, unforgiving.