“She’s married,” he said into my ear. “Now let’s get dressed and get going.”
At the Listers’ our coats were taken by a handsome black man in a purple serving jacket. A handsome black butler served champagne and hors d’oeuvres from a silver tray. We were introduced to Mr. Something, a famous civil libertarian, and Mrs. Something Else, whose oversized black glazed pots were on view at the Hammerschuld Gallery. The enormous dining room table sat twenty. I found the sight of it depressing.
As we stood with our drinks, the door of the kitchen opened. A fine-looking black woman in a black taffeta dress and white apron stood at the door. “Dinner now, Mrs. Lister.”
I gaped at her. “Grace!” I gasped. “Grace, far out!” For it was Grace Bettes, my old dance mate.
“What a world of surprises!” Grace said. And she retreated to the kitchen.
Every head was turned toward me. I felt flushed and hot with confusion. Clearly an explanation was required.
“We were in the Marine Corps together,” I said, struggling to my feet.
I propelled myself into the kitchen. “Grace!” I said, close to tears. “You got your catering thing together!”
“I sure did,” Grace said. “And you’ve still got your Boy Scout. This is my brother-in-law, Percy. Graham’s in the living room with the hors d’oeuvres.”
Grace was putting frilly pantaloons on the crown roast. She looked wonderful. She had perfectly manicured nails and beautiful eyelashes and, even in her taffeta uniform, she looked very glamorous. She told me that she and Graham had a house in Brooklyn and that they had four people working for them. In six months she was going to ease up because she had just discovered that she was going to have a baby.
“This pays ten times more than that cheap bastard Vernon ever paid me,” she said, “and it’s mine.”
“It was fun,” I said.
“Not for me. It was my way out. It got me out of the projects. I sweated my tail off. Now we plow all our profits back into the business and someday Ruby will beg me to cater for her. We’re going to be b-i-g.”
I asked her if she ever heard from anyone from the old days.
“Huh,” she said. “I’m glad those days are over. Ivy got married and she has a little baby girl. Remember Harold Hicks, the drummer? He teaches music in a high school in Arizona. Hey, I gotta work—here’s my card. Give a call.”
Betty’s guests were far too polite to ask me any questions, or perhaps they weren’t interested in how Johnny’s girlfriend knew Betty’s cook.
Dinner was delicious but I was too distressed to eat. I sat in a fog. I heard Johnny explaining who Ruby Shakely was and how shy I was about my brilliant career. As I picked at my spinach soufflé, I remembered Grace and Ivy on stage in their dance dresses, throwing love beads and rose petals.
When we got home, I felt rather low. The feeling that everyone had organized lives except me caused me to collapse on the couch without speaking.
Johnny put his arms around me.
“I guess it was hard seeing Grace,” he said.
I said it had been.
“I guess it demonstrated something to you,” he said.
I told him it had, but on further reflection it was hard to pin down just exactly what.
PART TWO
Race Music
18
My darling Johnny was not too keen on Mary Abbott, my oldest and dearest friend. Perhaps this was plain jealousy; she had come before him in my affections and had known me longer. Or perhaps he intuited that I deferred to Mary. The fact is, she was my moral beacon.
Mary had dark hair, worn straight to her shoulders, and little round glasses. We wore the same clothes interchangeably and after a few years we did not have my clothes or your clothes, but ours. We spent our time drinking tea, listening to records and talking. I told Mary everything. From long habit as the eldest, she told me what she felt I needed to know. Thus, if she did not want to discuss what looked to me very much like a love affair she was conducting with one of her professors, we did not discuss it. I did not mind this a bit. It was part of what Johnny called Mary’s quite unnecessary mysteriousness.
She was the oldest of four daughters in a liberal Catholic family that was constantly scrambling to reconcile the teachings of their church with the social problems of their times. They lived in a ramshackle Victorian house in a Connecticut suburb. Mr. Abbott was a chemist, and Mrs. Abbott was a reading teacher. They had a big Irish setter and a number of cats. The front porch was littered with bird and chipmunk guts. The dog, who was extremely stupid, was frequently lost and large search parties were constantly organized on his behalf. While my parents and I lived in slightly reduced grandeur and sat down every night to a formally set table, the Abbotts lived in a charmingly out-of-control messiness. In order to have dinner, any number of child or adult projects had to be pushed out of the way—this would have been quite unheard of in my parents’ house.
I knew the smell of the Abbott house as well as I knew the house I grew up in. I knew Mary’s likes and dislikes as well as my own. I thought everything about her was original and wonderful, from her taste in music (plainchant, which I found thrillingly exotic, and Tarheel Slim and Little Ann singing “It’s Too Late”) to the fact that she liked to combine hot and cold cereal for breakfast. Before she put her glasses on she was blind as a mole. She had an oldest sibling’s sense of constant responsibility. Nevertheless, she had no fixed opinions, no vested interests, and she was perfectly free to see clearly who was a jerk and who was not. She was awesomely judgmental, but since her judgments matched mine, by and large, this was not much of a problem except when Mary turned her gaze on me.
She said that my good qualities were my bad qualities—this I have come to realize is true of everyone. On the one hand, I was game, eager and perfectly ready to see what was in front of me. On the other hand, I had no sense of direction or destiny.
When I decided to go on tour with Ruby, which I felt was the most focused decision I had ever made, Mary rightly pointed out that this was a stopgap, a charm on the bracelet of experience but not the bracelet itself.
“What will you do after?” she wanted to know.
And what would she do after? Mary’s life was like a ribbon. She would get her degree. She would teach. She would marry some nice liberal Catholic and have a flock of children who resembled her sisters. She knew what she was: daughter, sister, Catholic, intellectual. And I was a terrible daughter, a lousy graduate student who was unable to cope with the hard stuff such as criticism or critical biographies. A proper graduate student did not lie around eating potato chips and reading Victorian novels for fun. When assigned some crucial critical work, the serious graduate student did not fling it across the room shouting “Oh, who cares?”
Mary said, “The fact is, you’re a singer but you don’t want to do all the work that singers do. You don’t want to be ambitious.”
This was true. I wanted experience to wash over me like a gentle wave. This was not the sort of thing that led to a really good job in later life. When the time came, she felt strongly that I should marry Johnny.
“For someone like you, he’s the ideal mate,” she said, making me feel like a lone, lame gorilla who had found her other. “The compromises he knows how to make would be good ones for you to be next to.”
“I hate compromises,” I said.
“I know you do,” said Mary. “But the trouble with you is you hate them in a vacuum. What you have going for you is a nature that hates compromises, but you don’t have anything you do with that nature except not compromise, so you ought to learn how it’s done.”
“What you’re saying is I’m worthless.”
“Don’t be a jerk,” said Mary. “What I’m saying is that temperament has to be attached to action. You did your thing when you went off with Ruby. If it’s going to take you a million years to find out what you ought to be doing next, you ought to marry Johnny because he’ll help you.”
�
�And then I’ll be a sellout like all those nice pals of his.”
“If you think his pals are sellouts, don’t marry him,” Mary said. “Or do you just mean they know what they want and how to get it?”
“I guess I mean that. I mean, I hate to go to these parties where everybody is something except me. I used to be something. It’s like once having been an alchemist or a dairymaid. My era has passed.”
“You poor thing. So young and so washed up.”
This conversation took place at what was increasingly Mary’s apartment. My tiny room was so seldom used that Mary sorted her clothes in it. Each month, however, I gave her half the rent. I did not want to be stranded. I did not want to be forced to get married. I wanted a place of my own even if I never stayed in it.
Mary’s room was positively austere, mine was underused, and the living room functioned as Mary’s study. Unlike me, she knew what she was doing. She was writing her dissertation on the civil rights movement. Then she would get her Ph.D. and teach at a university. Her books and typewriter took up a large table, while her papers were generally spread out over our secondhand couch.
This was not a setting Johnny liked very much. Although his apartment was in what both our mothers thought of as a dicey part of town, it had a kind of raffish bachelor charm. The cast-offs of his parents’ house—they had sold it to a nice young couple and moved into the city—were all good, solid and attractive. The building he lived in was on a street lined with trees and inhabited by old Ukrainians who sat outside their buildings on lawn chairs.
More than a year slipped by me. I watched the snow drift down in big, lazy flakes, stalling the traffic, quieting the street and forming white pelts on the fire escapes. I watched the little buds come out on the trees in the park. I watched children cooling themselves in fire hydrants in the summer. Then the leaves turned yellow and fell off the branches. Then it was winter and another year was gone.
Inside Johnny’s apartment we were snug as a pair of mice. We were finally learning to cook. Thursday nights we practiced, and each Friday night we had a dinner party. On Saturdays we slunk around the neighborhood buying Russian jam, Hungarian sausage, Egyptian beans in cans, Latvian bread and Black Forest cake, which we snacked on over the weekend. On Saturday and Sunday we went to the movies or we kicked around with Johnny’s childhood friend Ben Sennett. On Tuesday nights Johnny and Ben played squash, and I stayed at my old apartment with Mary.
Once a month we had dinner with my parents, and once a month with Johnny’s. In the summer we motored up to Johnny’s parents’ house in Wickham, where I tried my best to be a sporting and energetic future daughter-in-law, but all I really felt was overwhelming exhaustion.
Johnny’s mother, Dolly, was small and trim and full of energy. She was on the Wickham Library Committee, and she had formed a committee of weekenders (as opposed to year-round residents) to help the town council. People said over and over that there was no animosity in Wickham between weekenders and year-rounders because of people like Dolly.
Her society in Wickham was extensive. She knew the old residents, the founding families, the artists who had settled there in the thirties, the young couples loaded with money who had bought charming old farmhouses. Her annual cocktail party was as regular an event as the bake sale, the Memorial Day parade or the Volunteer Fire Department chicken fry.
Yes, there was a trick to it. You inherited your life, or you invented it. You figured out what you wanted life to be and then somehow or other you made it that way. Then, miracle of miracles, you liked it! I sat in Dolly’s efficient, neat house, the material representation of her very being, in fact, and saw what would be laid out for me if I married Johnny. All I had to do was slip quietly into place.
I would help Dolly every year with her party. Johnny and I would eventually buy a sweet little old farmhouse nearby. Soon Dolly and I and my numerous children would do the annual party together. As time went by, I would take over and Dolly would supervise. My children would eventually take it over from me. We would all live together in a pattern as sure and unchanging as the seasons, if I would only knuckle under and get married.
19
“What’s your rush?” I said.
“Listen, sweetheart. We’re not getting any younger.”
“Well, we’re not getting any older.”
“Arrested development is not the secret of eternal youth,” said Johnny. “This is getting silly.”
“In other words, you want to get married because it looks better,” I said.
“I want to get married so I can begin my life.”
This brought me up short. It was the beginning of his life, he felt, and the end of mine, I felt. At the moment I was nothing in particular, which was at least something. Being somebody’s wife did not strike me as a role, an occupation or an identity.
“Listen,” said Johnny. “We love each other. We’re a good team. We even learned how to make pot roast together. We’ve confessed to each other that we admire Archie Bell and the Drells. Let’s get on with it.”
The corner I was being backed into got smaller and smaller. I hadn’t any legitimate excuse. It was a question of how I felt, which had never been considered a valid reason for anything in my family.
“You said we would get married when you got a job you liked,” Johnny said. “You’ve been at the foundation for over a year. You’ve catalogued every single female singer and now you’re into blind guys. How much longer to we have to wait? Blind Lemon Jefferson, Willie McTell—what’s next?”
“Blind guys with one leg,” I said.
“Get serious,” said Johnny.
“Okay,” I said. “I will get serious. Here’s the deal. I will marry you but we have to go to City Hall. Please, Johnny. I just can’t take the white dress. I don’t want my father to give me away. If we’re gonna do it, let’s just do it. Our parents can give us a party after, but I simply cannot go through one of those demeaning traditional weddings.”
“Can I have the judge play ‘Chapel of Love’ before the ceremony? It only takes two minutes and fifty-two seconds.”
“The ceremony?”
“No, the song.”
“He can play ‘It’s Been a Drag’ by James Wray, for all I care. I just want it over with.”
At this Johnny looked sincerely hurt.
“I don’t think you love me,” he said.
“I do love you,” I said. “It’s all that other stuff I don’t love. This is between the two of us. I hate all that dress and veil and cake shit. People should get married in seclusion.”
“It’s a public act,” said my civic-minded husband-to-be. “It’s in the public record. You can look it up.”
“It seems like the most private thing in the world,” I said.
So it was decided. Mary was my best man, so to speak, and Ben would stand up for Johnny. Both were sworn to secrecy.
I bought a genteel-looking dress and wore Johnny’s pearls. Mary lent me a handkerchief and I wore an old blue garter from one of my dance routines. It was also suggested that I wear one of my fringed dance dresses. Johnny showed up with Ben, both wearing banker’s suits, and we stood before the magistrate. When the time came, Johnny slipped a ring box out of his pocket and placed a plain gold band on my finger before I could say the words. To my amazement, I found the actual marriage part very thrilling. I could barely bring myself to look at Johnny when we were pronounced man and wife because I did not want him to see, after my years of protesting, that I had tears in my eyes. We did not get to play “Chapel of Love” but Johnny and Mary sang it all the way down the stairs in City Hall. Then the four of us went out for a tea lunch at a dim sum parlor in Chinatown, and that is how I became Mrs. John Franklin Miller.
After lunch, I allowed my shoulders to be scattered with a few grains of rice. Doubtless now that I was married, I would have a baby any minute. It occurred to me why newly married couples cling to one another—because the enormity of the change in their life makes them dizzy. I
felt rather unsteady.
Johnny and I had both called in sick. As soon as the news was out, Johnny’s partners would give us a big party and Dr. Willhall would mark the occasion by giving me a copy of one of his tracts, “The Sacred Home.”
It was a cloudy, windy day in early fall. As we walked through Little Italy on the way back to what was now our apartment, it seemed to me that, if I looked back, I would see my unmarried past behind me, gray as a floating cloud. Before me stood the dreaded future: I was now an honest woman.
20
It made absolutely no difference whatsoever. My life changed not one whit, except that Johnny and I now had conversations about moving. His bachelor apartment was too small.
“It fit us before we were married,” I said.
“Come on. It’s a one-bedroom.”
I began to get the picture. It was big enough, but only for us, not for the squadron of little Millers Johnny was contemplating. It wasn’t that I didn’t like children. I just didn’t feel ready to have any.
Johnny tried a different tack.
“This is my bachelor apartment,” he said. “We’re married. We should have a new place to start out in.”
“We’ve already started,” I said. “If it’s the bachelor vibes you’re concerned about, we can always fumigate.”
Of course, Johnny was not quite ready to become a doting father and he knew it. So we stayed put—my favorite mode of life—and nothing changed.
I got on the subway in the morning and stood packed with my fellow sardines as I made my way to the Race Music Foundation. A couple of afternoons a week I found myself sprawled on the couch at my old apartment, drinking tea and reading music magazines and watching Mary sitting at her desk doing useful work.
She had acquired a new roommate, a person called William L. Hammerklever who needed a place to sleep one or two nights a week and was willing to pay a month’s rent to do so. Mary, who liked to control information, was not forthcoming about him, so it was hard to get this fellow’s story straight. He was either married or had two teaching jobs, one in the city and one in the suburbs, where he maintained his principal residence. After a while, I began to suspect that William L. Hammerklever was Mary’s lover.
Goodbye Without Leaving Page 6
