And so I found myself now on Basin Street, the southern boundary and main thoroughfare of Storyville, with a run of bordellos three and four stories high and a block deep, but all of them with mansion facades, a mash of cupolas and towers and balconies from Queen Anne and Queen Victoria and Second Empire styles. And among them were the lower-slung saloons and dance halls and cabarets, most of them selling women too, a bottom floor providing song and dance and whiskey to smooth the transition to the upper floor. And on the opposite side of the street, just about everything done on this side was illegal, with a three-block passenger shed running into the Southern Depot on Canal Street, everyone stepping off a train of the St. Louis & San Francisco Railway getting a vivid introduction to the city of my birth.
And I jostled through the men who staggered and drifted and prowled on Basin: the lonely soldiers, and the slumming parties of uptown boys, and the pairs of pals or of brothers or of fathers and sons, and the isolated ones, alone and full of desire that they could express nowhere but here. All of these men working up to a woman. And I just walked for a time from the Canal Street end of Basin—if Mother was singing in Storyville, it would be on Basin Street, I was sure—and the music from inside the establishments jumbled together outside, the Negro perfessers with upright pianos and the cornetists and the brass combos, and from out here in the street, the spasm bands, with washboards and wooden-box fiddles and Confederate bugles. All of them playing jazz over the din of male voices.
And now and then I heard a fragment of a singing voice. A woman singing. From a cabaret. From a saloon. None of them Mother. And I was thinking I’d made a big mistake to come here. I thought if I did find her, I’d just pay back her five dollars and go. But no. I’d just slip quietly away. I’d been happy for the chance to be with the octoroon girl. My mother had known what I wanted, what I needed, and she made sure I had it. And if now she saw herself cast in a role in the vast melodrama of Storyville, I was not going to cast myself in it with her. She was not asking me to. She’d even warned me not to come here. But what did she think she was doing?
And maybe I was entirely wrong. Maybe I’d misread the clues in her telegrams. Maybe she was not even here. Maybe she was somewhere else in New Orleans.
Still, I walked on, going “Down the Line,” as they called the cruise in this direction along the brothels of Basin. I crossed Bienville Street into the last block, which would end, I knew, at St. Louis Cemetery Number 1, where everyone lay above the ground, in concrete or marble, so when the heavy subtropical summer rains came, as they did in this town, the bodies wouldn’t rise from the earth and float away. I passed Willie V.’s place without looking at it. And halfway along the block, from a wide-fronted vernacular building with no stoop and made for music and booze and sex, came a piano and a voice that I knew, even as a hawker stepped from the doorway into the midst of the passing gaggles of men and said my mother’s name. Just the one name. He said, loud enough to be heard by all the men around him but still conversational, persuasive, “The famous Isabel is singing right now, gents. Straight from Broadway. And backing her up are the prettiest cabaret girls in The District. Just step through that door.”
I stepped through. Others did too. The place was jammed with men front to back. They were remarkably quiet for Storyville. I slid immediately away from the door but parallel to the street, not going any farther inside. On the wall to my right was a long cherrywood bar with a mirrored top. On the opposite wall was a wide staircase. Like showgirls on a stage set, the house girls were draped all the way up the balustrade. They wore ruffled camisoles and high stockings and nothing in between. Over everything and everyone stretched a ceiling full of electric bulbs making it bright as Louisiana noontime. And at the far end was a raised platform with an upright piano where a Negro in a pearl-gray derby and checkered vest played sweetly and sadly, in the solo moments putting in half a dozen notes for every one note you’d expect.
And at the front edge of the platform was my mother, her hair stacked high on her head and sparkling with jewels, and she was wearing a long, jade-green gown, her décolletage fringed in black feathers. And she was why the men were almost entirely silent. Her voice—she had a lovely, rich, vibrating singing voice, my mother—her voice filled the place. She sang, “Baby won’t you please come home, ’cause your mama’s all alone.” And my mother didn’t mean Mama. She honkytonked up her voice, rasping that word, picking out some man I couldn’t see in a table close to the platform: It was to him she sang your mama. And it was as if she had just given this audience that she utterly commanded permission to laugh. They did. From the street front of the place all the way to the stage, they laughed raucously and then instantly went quiet again to hear her. And she came down off the platform as she sang, “I have tried in vain never more to call your name.”
I lost sight of her. Men immediately before me stood up, trying to see my mother as, I imagined, she played the crowd, moved among them, brushed against them, smelled them, these men who were out simply for a buzz and a whore but were surprised and excited to find Isabel, a great Broadway actress, singing as if for each of them individually, “When you left, you broke my heart, because I never thought we’d part.”
This was a mistake, coming here. And why should I have begrudged her this audience adulation? It was what she lived for, always. And if it was a selective audience, if it was not an easy one to win over—or even to silence—then all the more satisfying. And for them to be entirely riveted on her even as half-naked young women decorated the stairway nearby, waiting to open themselves to any man in this audience at any time: This was a standing ovation, a dozen curtain calls, an armful of long-stem red roses; this was eternal youth.
She sang the growling, heartfelt climax, “Every hour in the day, you will hear your mama say, Oh, baby, won’t you please come home.”
I was not a baby any longer. She was not a mama. We neither of us had a home to wait in or to come home to. We never had.
The song was over. The crowd was cheering now. They all rose and they cheered, and derbies were flung into the air, rising into the bright perpetual day of the electric lights above us.
I wished to move. I wished to walk out the door now and go find a hotel and sleep in a bed and put all this out of my mind. I also wished to make my way toward the stage and guide my mother over to the bar—start there, if I must—buy her a drink and then persuade her to leave this place. But those two opposite impulses seemed to have exactly the same motive force, because I did not move at all. In either direction. I simply stood there watching as some of the men settled back into their tables and some of them headed for the staircase.
I could see her again. I watched her, still near the stage, as she bent to a table, the one she’d pointed to, she bent to the derbies there and talked with her typical post-performance animation. She said something grandly and the derbies laughed. And she watched them laugh. And she watched one of them particularly. And when they were finished laughing, she leaned close to that man, very close, almost as if to kiss him, but at the last moment she moved her face to the side of his and she said something directly into his ear. She drew back and he was rising instantly, and the other men had watched this and I could not hear the sounds they were making but they were clearly in envious awe of the man, who shot the most animated of his companions a sharp, silencing look and they all abruptly turned their heads away.
The man took his place beside her, and my mother slipped her hand into his arm, and they walked this way, heading for the door. I pulled the brim of my fedora down, but Mother did not look in my direction. She gave the man beside her a glance—so did I, and he was a thick-necked, ruffian-shouldered man with a long-ago-broken nose and tiny eyes—and it was only the one glance she gave him, and after that, she was focused on the door. They passed by and out and I stepped to the door myself and through and onto the sidewalk, and I looked to my right, Up the Line. I didn’t see them. I
looked Down the Line, and they were walking together, leaning into each other.
I had only one impulse now. I turned away and headed off in the opposite direction, hustling as fast as I could through the crowd of horny men.
53
Thirty-six hours later I was arriving at the Illinois Central Railroad Station at the south edge of Grant Park. And an hour after that I was standing in Clyde’s office and I was holding the postcard of Luisa and me and the two dead Mexican snipers and I was stuck on her all over again, just like I was when Bunky snapped me from behind, and Clyde had just lit his cigar and I was feeling hotter standing here ten stories above Michigan Avenue than I had at any time in the past few weeks in the tierra caliente of Mexico.
And he had just said, “So what became of your señorita, do you suppose?”
And I had just answered, “Did I get drunk and send a telegram I don’t remember?”
And he had just responded to that, “Nah. Call it a newsman’s intuition.”
And I had just shrugged and looked away from him.
And now one of Griswold’s endless supply of young stenographers, a redhead in a white shirtwaist and a long black skirt, showed up in Clyde’s door and said, “They’re ready, Mr. Fetter.” She was clearly a little fluttery, as if Clyde and I were very special characters, and since we were not, in her eyes—she’d sassed us both a couple of times each in the last few months—since this fluster was about whoever she’d just left, I was very curious indeed about the meeting.
So we followed her down the hall and into the electric elevator, whose metal doors she yanked open and shut behind us and whose power handle she operated herself, as if she already had the vote and was moving on to any job she’d like to do. We ascended. We followed her again, down the heavily carpeted hall, and she passed a door in the left-hand wall and abruptly stopped and turned and faced us. She nodded us in. We stepped through, into the publisher’s conference room.
At the far end of the table, backdropped by the horizon line of Lake Michigan, sat Paul Maccabee Griswold and a tall, thin man in a bespoke, black, three-piece suit with a gray pinstripe.
Clyde and I didn’t know where to go. Since they were at the end of the table, perhaps we were to sit here, at this end, far away, and face them. But the man in the black suit motioned for us to come down to them. He pointed us to the closest chairs, which were at a right angle to theirs, directing me with a “Mr. Cobb” to the one on the long side of the table, closest to him.
I sat, and Clyde sat beside me. Though the air in this room was smotheringly hot and palpable with barely hidden moisture, the man in the black suit did not appear to have a single drop of sweat on him. He pushed back a bit, angled his chair to face me. Griswold moved himself only minimally, only so he could hold his face on us without getting a crick in the neck. I got the feeling he’d rather have us at the other end of the room and was not happy with the stranger seeming to run the show.
A silence followed. The man held his eyes unwaveringly upon me, large, black eyes that had something wrong in their stare—like the eyes of a prostitute—though that impression may have been an aftereffect of my recent evening in Storyville—and that was wrong, actually, for these eyes, though they were certainly impenetrable, were not like the eyes of anyone who was submitting to anything. He had a bit of Richard Harding Davis about him, a brick of a chin, like a prizefighter who could take a punch, and him making me think of Davis made me consequently think that this was a newspaperman, that Griswold had hired some star editor away from Pulitzer or Hearst and wanted his new man to massage my story.
And Griswold was saying, “You’ve written a surpassingly good story here, Cobb. Three surpassingly good stories.”
The guy in the black suit and I were still looking at each other. He had some of the face lines of a prizefighter, too, of a younger man looking prematurely older because his face was a focal point for aggressive attention. But just a hint of that, really. And his hair was as black as his eyes and Brilliantined into absolute obedience on each side of a right-hand part. He had no mustache, no beard, and the nakedness of his face should have made him seem more open, in a way, but it only emphasized his opacity. And yet, opaque though he was, he was clearly conveying a keen interest in me. I was not sure exactly how. His implacable attention was part of it, certainly. But there was something else.
“In fact,” Griswold said, “your stories are so surpassingly good that much larger issues become involved.”
I looked now at the long-jowled, wide-girthed Griswold, who seemed to be working on expanding his vocabulary with a word-for-the-week. This week: surpassingly. He paused to let the possibility of those larger issues sink in and he pushed his lower lip up and drew the sides of his mouth down, thus putting on his characteristic seriously-silent mask.
I was aware of the prickly mood that was coming over me.
Then he said, “This is the man to speak to those larger issues. Gentlemen, meet James P. Trask, special assistant to the Secretary of State of the United States.”
Trask rose from his chair. “I will stand to shake your hand, Mr. Cobb. To offer all due respect.”
I stood as well, trying to flip the throw bar in my head and switch tracks in this new direction. The Federal Government was why I’d been called back to Chicago. The Federales.
We shook hands, firmly.
“Please,” he then said, pointing to my chair.
I sat. He did too.
He took an envelope from the inside pocket of his suit coat. He handed it to me.
“This is first,” he said.
I opened the envelope, which was sealed in red wax with the American eagle spreading its wings in bas-relief. I unfolded the letter and found the eagle again, in a familiar form: the letterhead of the President of the United States. It was dated two days ago. Written as I was somewhere between Lake Charles and Baton Rouge.
“I saw one of these recently,” I said.
“So I read in your surpassingly good story,” Trask said, smiling slightly. His back was to Griswold and I had no doubt he was asking me to quietly share our mutual assessment of the man. Trask was manufacturing a little bond between us. Instantly he made the smile vanish. “This one is real,” he said.
And so I found that the President of the United States had written this to me:
Dear Mr. Cobb,
I am a great admirer of your work. Not only do you keep the President and his cabinet informed on the status of battlefields around the world, you make a crucial contribution to our democratic society. The free press makes sure all ideas can be expressed, all institutions, all public officials, can be held accountable. It is the freedom upon which all our other freedoms rely.
Sometimes, however, a democratic society might humbly and carefully request a different sort of contribution, one that is rarely required but is, nonetheless, just as crucial.
I hereby introduce you to James P. Trask, who is acting as my personal representative and who will speak to you on my behalf. I hope you will give the matters he will discuss and the favors he will request serious consideration. Your country calls you to a high service, Mr. Cobb.
Sincerely,
Woodrow Wilson
And there was his sharp-edged, forward-slanting signature. It was vividly black from a broad-nibbed pen. I’d been traveling for more than three days and all the while had to keep myself from considering why the biggest scoop of my career, the biggest scoop for this newspaper in many years, hadn’t been rushed into print. They were going to kill the story. That much was clear to me now. But in spite of all this, I was looking at a personal appeal from the president of my country, and though I was bucking and snorting inside at the thought of my story being spiked, I had a powerful urge to put a fingertip on the signature, to touch this barely dried ink which he himself put there to endorse his regard for me. To ask
something important of me. As critical as I sometimes was of Woodrow Wilson, he was still the man who tried to watch over us all, look after our needs, tried to lead us all. We empowered him to do that. I needed to yield to my good reporter instincts now. I needed to hear what the President would say through his Mr. Trask, hear it without my intervening and influencing or obscuring the words. I had to listen.
Trask turned his body around in his chair to face Griswold as much as possible. “You have the thanks, Mr. Griswold, not only of the Secretary of State but of the President himself. Would you be so kind as to affirm that what I will ask of Mr. Cobb has been endorsed by you?”
“Yes, of course,” Griswold said. “I take it that letter is from the President?”
Trask looked over his shoulder at me. “Would you mind?”
I leaned forward and extended the letter in Griswold’s direction. He was used to having someone on hire to reach for things on his personal behalf, but it was clear Trask wasn’t going to intervene, and so Griswold collected himself and made the effort. He even lifted his butt off his chair to reach out and take the letter from me.
He sat and put on his wire-rim reading spectacles. He opened the letter and gave it a careful look, pushing that lower lip up as far as it would go. When he finished, his mouth loosened, and he looked at me and nodded. Here was another goddam old man whose approval gave me a little goddam lift. Now that I was in this goddam mood, I even retrospectively basked a bit in his praise for my story.
The Hot Country Page 29
