Talcum powder motes tickled his nose. He reached under her skirt and slid his hands up to the asymmetry of her thighs. Under the heavy brace, the injured leg had narrowed. No matter how many exercises she did or how much she walked, the leg remained thin, vulnerable. When Violet thought he was looking at it, she would say that at least it wasn’t getting worse.
Joshua smiled. The hunger was building again. He slid his hands further up her leg. He rose and kissed her lips.
“Say, buster,” she said softly. “The brace.”
He kissed her again. “No time. We’ll work around it.”
In just a few weeks, he’d grown addicted to the feel of her, the smell of her. Even the talcum. He was surprised, after the first couple of times, how she took her pleasure. Some of the French women had done that. He learned to like that, their response, to wait for it. But where did this sheltered American girl learn about it? When he asked her, she smiled. She said maybe she was a natural. That smile, that attitude that she knew more than he did—at first it could make him nervous. Then he started to like it, too. He stopped thinking about how she was bound to come to her senses, realize she had no business being with the likes of him. He steered her back onto the bed and fell onto his elbows, then into her. He couldn’t get enough.
Afterward, they lay in a dozy haze. The morning light dazzled. Her head rested on his shoulder, fingertips tracing a rib, back and forth. The buckles on her brace bit into his upper thigh, just as they had to be biting into hers. He couldn’t remember feeling so complete. Until now, the idea of heaven never made any sense to him. Bliss was a word without meaning. What could that be—endless ice cream on sunny days? Now he knew what those poets had been talking about, or should have been talking about. The part about having it forever, though, that still didn’t make sense.
“I hope I remember this,” she said, “when I’m old and fat.” She had raised up to stare into his eyes, inches from his face.
He smiled. “You won’t need to remember anything. We’ll still be doing it.”
She lay back and rested her head on the pillow, then leaned over to kiss his ear. “You like fat white women?”
“My favorite.” He kissed her eyelid.
“Joan says we’re going to hell, living like this.”
“What do you think?”
She didn’t answer.
“What do you think?”
“I wish my only remaining friend didn’t talk like that.”
“Violet—that’s superstition. You know that? Some of the guys on the line over in France used to talk that way. ’Course, heaven and hell weren’t any crazier than what happened to us every day.”
She was quiet, not wanting to say something wrong about the war, still trying to figure out that part of Joshua. She knew he didn’t sleep right. Once she woke up in the night to find him lying next to her staring at the ceiling. Another time she found him smoking out in the other room. A couple of times she found his hand squeezing her arm or her leg, grunting and moaning. He could have his eyes wide open but not be awake. What happened in France was never far from him. When she asked about it, he put her off. He said it was getting better. She hoped it was, that it would keep getting better, even that she could help him with it.
“Anyway,” he said, “you don’t need to take that sort of talk from her.”
“It’s not what she says, the sin and hell part. But it’s being by ourselves so much. Knowing that just by being together we make people angry. I try not to go out on the street around here. The women, the colored ones, they give me hard looks.”
“You just give ’em hard looks right back.”
“At least they don’t spit at me, curse me out, like those longshoremen did, that time we were over near the river.”
She could feel his heart speed up with the memory. She pulled her head up. “We can’t fight them all, Josh. Where would you start?”
“I know it. I know it, but I can’t help wanting to.”
She dropped her head onto the pillow and rested her fingertips against his cheek. “It makes me sad. It’s our happiness that makes them angry.”
Joshua sat up and swung his legs to the floor. He stood and reached for his underdrawers. “That ain’t it.”
“No?”
“They don’t care if we’re happy or miserable. It’s that we are, that we exist. A pretty yaller-haired girl and some ignorant nigger buck.”
“I don’t like it when you talk like that.”
“Us not saying the words won’t stop them from saying them, from thinking them.”
Violet sat up, her forearm holding the sheet across her breasts. She watched him catch his big toe on the waistband of his shorts. His foot went through cleanly on a second try. He sat on the bed.
“Say it, Violet. Whatever’s eating at you.”
“Well, there’s my parents and your parents, and our happiness makes them unhappy, too.”
“We can’t live our lives to make other people happy. Not even our own folks.”
She nodded her head. “I keep thinking that if we talked to them, if we showed them how much we loved each other, they’d stop feeling that way. Then they’d know how right this all is.”
He gave her a tight smile. “Don’t you worry about it, sweet girl. It’s out of your hands. I’m never giving you up. Not ever.”
Violet pivoted carefully on her bottom until her legs touched the floor on the side opposite from Joshua. Her hand automatically tugged the skin where the brace pinched. Facing the wall, she let her face clench, squeezed her eyes tight. The moment passed. She ran both hands through her hair and took a breath. She had to get up, get moving. “Can you face more scrambled eggs?”
“Didn’t your mama teach you how to fix nothing else?”
“How to mix a sidecar?” She reached for the cane. It was a bright morning. A breeze moved the curtains over the back window.
“That’s dinner, not breakfast,” he said as he stood. “Remember, Cecil’s coming.” They met at the foot of the bed. He grabbed her and lifted her off her feet with a hug. She held on as tight as she could, before he started packing.
* * *
Violet couldn’t deny it. The tiny kitchen—an alcove, really—was just plain dirty. She started the coffee and let her eyes play over the counter, the hot plate, the sink. There was no excuse for it, even if they’d be moving out soon. She couldn’t leave the place looking like this. As soon as Joshua left for Saratoga, she would wash each of their mismatched plates and cups. She would wash them twice. And the few pots. Then she would scrub down the table that the hot plate sat on, then the walls and the floor. At least twice.
The sourness of the apartment was weighing her down. No one came to that neighborhood, the Fort Greene section of Brooklyn, unless they lived in one of the ramshackle buildings that were carved up into too many apartments with too many people in them. She could hear conversations through walls, plus every footstep on the floor above. A door slam across the street could startle her. Their neighbors were almost all colored, but only a few were like Joshua. A lot seemed beaten down, defeated. Some she had trouble understanding when they spoke, almost like in a foreign language. She felt conspicuous around here, and then there was her limp.
The leg. It was part of her, sure, but it didn’t always feel that way. It had its own moods. Sometimes it wanted to hurt because she had done too much, or moved the wrong way without thinking. Sometimes it wanted to hurt because it wanted to hurt. And sometimes it didn’t. Always, though, she had to take it into account. Before moving, she had to think. What was the best way for this shift? How should she distribute her weight? How could she stay steady? If she didn’t check in with the leg, it imposed its own punishments. It might be satisfied with a quick jolt of pain. Or it might drop her heavily to the floor, inflicting humiliation as well as pain. She could get off the floor on her own now, using the cane, but it was a spectacle, pathetic and graceless and grunting.
“Why, Miss Violet!” Cecil’s voice, with an ov
erlay of put-on southern accent, snapped her out of it. He strode toward her ahead of Joshua and offered a formal bow. “Honey chile, I’m just hoping there’s some scrambled eggs in my future.”
She put on a smile and offered a shallow curtsy. “Sir Cecil, I do hope it’s to your liking. And a cookbook will be on today’s shopping list.” Both men laughed, then crowded in to pour themselves coffee.
When they left her alone before the skillet, Violet found herself remembering that day. She was wearing a blue crepe dress with a drop waist. Her mother said that no woman over forty could wear that. She topped it off with a pale blue cloche hat with gold ribbon and flowers. She thought her hair peeked becomingly out of its low brim.
The bank seemed dark when she entered. A tall guard offered to help her. She had to tilt her head back to see his face. After Griff was summoned to greet her, he left her in a sitting area near the back. He had to finish a meeting. The roar from the street seemed to tilt the building. Something knocked her down. Then she was looking up at Joshua’s face, ghostly with clinging dust. She couldn’t make sense of it, not then. It should have been Griff, but it was Joshua. And it had been Joshua ever since.
“Violet!” Joshua’s voice came from the sitting room.
“Oh, goodness.” She yanked the pan off the burner and scraped the eggs onto a plate. She pulled the charred parts out with a fork. She could eat those parts, or maybe make do with the toast.
“The butter’s turned,” she said as she placed the plates on the table, “so it’s jam only.”
Joshua told her to sit and he’d get her coffee. He came back with the salt and sprinkled it liberally on his eggs.
“We really should be the ones making with the pots and pans,” Cecil said, “what with your leg and all, standing there. This here man of yours was a wizard at opening cans of vittles in France.”
“That’s sweet,” Violet said, “but I need to be on my feet. And standing’s easier than walking. I need to do it all. To get stronger.”
“Will Joan come today?” Joshua asked.
“No, she’s on at the clinic. She’s coming tomorrow, after you boys leave for Saratoga.” She turned to Cecil. “Joan comes all the way out here to Fort Greene to work with me on her day off. Only a real friend would do that.”
“Hey, hey,” Joshua put in, “we’re paying her. The Cooks pay their way.”
Ready to change the subject, Violet said, “I thought I heard you talking about that Brotherhood that you two used to be part of. The African thing.”
Joshua cleared his throat. “Cecil has news.” Violet turned.
“Well,” Cecil started, visibly calculating how to frame the news. “You know about the investigation of that bombing where you got hurt, how it’s been going nowhere? It’s been in the papers. They can’t figure out who the hell did it, or why, or how.”
“We do know how,” she said. “They blew up a bomb.”
Cecil smiled. “Okay, but how did it get there? Anyway, now they’ve started sniffing around the Brotherhood, trying to connect it to the bombing.”
“Was the Brotherhood that radical? Did they bomb places?” She looked at Joshua.
“I don’t know of anything like that,” he said, shrugging. “But there were some angry men there. Real angry. Some big talk, you know.”
“What does this matter to us?” she asked. “Do they think you two placed the bomb?”
Cecil grinned. “No, no, nothing like that. Just something for us to know about. Keep an eye on, you know? We deal with the police some, in our business.”
“And”—Joshua placed his cup down—“we got to get going. Off for Saratoga tomorrow to start the big changes, remake that business.” He made to stand up. “Cecil, why don’t you warm up the car. I’ll be down in a sec.”
After Cecil left, Joshua reached over and took Violet’s hands. “We’ll be up there maybe four days, maybe five. Not more than that. You’ll be okay getting ready for Montreal?”
She nodded. “Sure. You go off for the racing season with all the rich people and I’ll scrub down the kitchen. Maybe go back to the library and find something to improve my mind even more.”
“Not even more! I’ll never catch up.” When she didn’t smile, he leaned over to look into her face. “If I’m going to sell this business, I have to go where the big shots hang out. We’ll have our meetings, figure out the best deal we can get, then I’ll head out and meet you in Montreal. Then it’s next stop, London.”
They stood and met in an embrace. “We shouldn’t have to live like this,” she said. “Nervous. Hidden away.”
“Not much longer. In September—you can write this down—in September we’ll be in London, with a new life. Our life together. A better one. It’s going to happen. I promise you.”
“And the captain will marry us on the ship?”
“He will, or he’ll answer to me.”
They looked at each other some more. They were out of words. He was out of promises. He kissed her again and left.
* * *
The dark bar of the Jubilee Club was quiet, the only noise the ballad being sung by the crooner in the next room. Babe, a straight-up Manhattan in front of him, was feeling tip-top. Nothing like banging out two home runs against the first-place Indians to pick up a fellow’s spirits. He’d been on championship clubs before and this Yankee squad was starting to get that feel, that strut. They thought they were good and, hell, they were good. Only a couple of games back in the standings. He thought they’d run down those Indians sooner or later and knock them off. So did the other guys.
He wasn’t sure what time it was, but that was definitely the third show of the night in the next room. As soon as it ended, it would be time for that cute blond number in the chorus. He was looking forward to the next part of the evening.
“Babe,” a large man said as he straddled the stool next to him. He called to the bartender for a double bourbon. Babe was as convivial as the next guy, maybe more so, but this guy could’ve taken a stool a little farther down the bar. Just give them both a little space, you know, especially when you’re big, like both of them were. Glancing out the corner of his eye, Babe thought the guy looked familiar. This time of night, a lot of guys look familiar.
“Remember me?” the man said.
Babe shrugged.
“We met in Shreveport, spring training. John Slaughter.” John Slaughter extended his hand.
Babe didn’t move a muscle. He remembered this son of a bitch. “Ain’t that someone calling you from the other room?” He turned back to his drink.
“So it’s like that.”
“What’d you expect, you start trying to mess up a man’s life, his livelihood? You and that prick commissioner.” Babe finished the drink and signaled for another. Damn. He’d been in a good mood.
“You know, Babe, we’re just protecting you, protecting all the ballplayers. You know, the integrity of the game.”
“Listen, you dumb-ass sonofabitch. Who do you think pays your salary to run around the country ‘protecting the integrity of the game’? Me”—Babe thumped himself in the chest—“little old me, the man who puts those rear ends in the seats. So where the hell do you get off investigating me? Aren’t you satisfied with screwing those eight saps out in Chicago?”
Slaughter looked into the mirror over the bar like it might hold the answer to Babe’s tirade. He threw back his drink. Babe could feel how good it would be to give this guy a quick shot to the kisser. That’s what the old man always said. Get the first punch in. Then the rest is easy. But this guy wasn’t worth it, and hitting a cop was always a dumb move, even if he was a funny sort of half cop. Babe didn’t need Slaughter to get even more interested in investigating him. “Hey, pal, there’s that voice again, the one in the next room, calling you.” Babe said. “You need to leave.”
The big man looked back at Babe. His face was like stone. “First, I came here to tell you something. Something that may surprise you.”
“Great. S
urprise me.”
Slaughter pulled out one side of his suit coat to show folded up papers in the inside pocket. “See these? They’re blank subpoenas. You know what they are?”
“Sure. Everyone does. Something legal.”
“I can use them to get records, papers, any damned thing I ask for from anybody I want. All I got to do is fill in the names. Judge Landis, he’s a shrewd bastard. Made some kind of deal with the local prosecutor here, guy who’s running for election now. You know him?”
Babe grunted. He’d probably met the guy, but he had better things to do than follow all the goddamned lowlife politicians in the world.
“Well, the judge, he wants me to use these to find dirt, dirt on that 1918 World Series of yours.”
“I didn’t do nothing wrong with that Series. We won the sucker, you know.” The bartender delivered his drink. It glowed in the bar’s half-light, tawny with promise. Babe let it sit on the bar. He needed to listen, maybe think.
“We just go where the evidence leads us, Babe. There’s a few things I’m gonna need to figure out.”
“So?”
“So, if you know about something laying around, something you don’t want me to see . . . Well, now you know I’m gonna come looking.”
It was Babe’s turn to look into the bar mirror. He looked back at Slaughter’s dead features. “Why you telling me this?”
“Maybe you’re not the only one who thinks those eight saps in Chicago got screwed.” Slaughter reached for his wallet while he slid off his stool.
Babe put his hand out. “On my tab.”
“I pay my own way,” Slaughter said.
Babe watched him walk out. His stomach didn’t feel right. That goddamned paper that Rothstein had. He was going to have to take care of that. He thought about that Speed Cook guy. Maybe he could take care of it.
Then the blond number came sashaying in wearing a silver dress. Just looking at how she moved, Babe’s stomach stopped bothering him.
Chapter 17
Babe was with a tall, well-dressed man as he approached Cook in the Ansonia’s lobby. He looked more than a bit off his feed.
The Babe Ruth Deception Page 13
