by John Okas
Still Swan is no fool. From her profession as a freethinker, a model, the style to which she is accustomed, and the privacy she insists on maintaining, he guesses he is not her only friend, and maybe not her only lover. But for the playboy even trash can be sexy, the play’s the thing, what it seems like is what it is. He doesn’t want to know for certain any fact that would spoil the thrill of having her, blank slate, be however he loves, whomever he loves, like a precious figurine that he can fire and refire in his imagination, change to suit the elaborations of his fantasies. Harry Swan is a man of the world, a pagan, who sees nothing wrong with man touching a goddess, even though she might be far less divine than she lets on. So long as she plays the class act his male ego will rise to the challenge of molding his vision of the goddess that the thorny Sarah exemplifies into a user-friendly form.
And when he finds himself feeling jealous about what she does and who she sees when she’s not with him, or getting suspicious when she begs off a date on the excuse of some vague feminine indisposition, he does not throw the matter up for discussion but spins out in his sports car, romps with playthings, plays the game of pursuit and conquers someone else.
There are brighter sides to their deceiving one another. Under the power of the fantasies Sarah evokes, Harry does indeed develop a serious interest in classical music. In truth Sarah knows no more than the average person about concerti, sonatas and serenades, and would just as soon be dancing down at Kane’s as sitting through an opera or ballet. But for the part she’s playing she feels she must hide the old rags she did on the side along with her heritage of homespun Shibbolite hymns and marching songs. In front of Swan she puts on a disapproving smirk whenever jazz music and dancing are even mentioned. She even is critical when they attend first-class productions together, always finding something wrong, some aspect of the sound, staging, or performance not up to her standards. Nevertheless Swan finds in her presence a quality that can make an evening seem timeless, like magic to him, the first night of theater or music or dance ever in the world.
When they go together to a special benefit performance of Die Gilderfliesze, she takes pencil to her eyebrows and puts on her highest society face. By now she buys new clothes, tailored to her, rather than to someone whose boots she happens to fill, but still keeps the Countess’s serious style. At intermission, she sees Eli Lilywight and Solomon Goldman in the lounge smoking cigars that smell like fish. She guesses the pair of long-in-the-tooth dowdy ladies sipping soda water and chatting next to them are their wives. Bay Area society is small, so she is not surprised Harry knows the Lilywights and the Goldmans.
“Why, Harry Swan!” says Eli, shocked to see his sugar baby outside of her suite at the Golden Gate. “We haven’t seen you down at the club lately. And who is this lovely creature?” He asks as if he didn’t know.
On a rapid rise from model to confidence artist, Sarah doesn’t shy away, or flinch and play the fallen woman. She knows her behavior doesn’t have to be exemplary for her to seem picture perfect. She puts on her longest face, the one that makes her seem older than she really is, and when she is introduced she looks the Lilywights and the Goldmans straight in the eyes, cool as soft cream marble, and strikes a pose of equality and quality, an ageless lady. She is most gracious to the wives, tries her best to fit in with them, complimenting them on their dresses and jewelry, and even finds cause to quote Witherspoon, “Ah, fair sex, thou art the sanity that makes men aspire to civilization.” When they separate neither of the ladies has one catty word to say about the cradle Swan has robbed this week.
“Why, isn’t Harry’s new friend a dear?” they say to their husbands. “So refined looking. He’d be a fool to do to her what he’s done to all the others.”
But Sarah is not like all the others. She gives Swan the option on most of her time, but will not give all her eggs to one rooster. In fact she uses her association with him to make her more popular all around. Being the adored mistress of one of the strongest arms in Bay City society, seen at the ballet and the opera in weighty clothes and having midnight supper with him in soft candlelight at a gilt-edged table at La Belle Epoque adds something to her value. Certainly, now with a bachelor boyfriend, rich and generous, she is put in the fortunate position of being able to turn down work. She starts behaving toward her older men friends as if they were in the way.
“I’m overbooked.” She tells them.
Scarcity of supply makes her customer’s hearts grow fonder. Their demands grow louder, but she turns a deaf ear. A book which delivers its readers to heaven is undeniably a good one, one worth fighting for, and because the only copy is getting hard to come by, being so often seen in the hands of a young and rich unmarried man, most of her clients are happy she will still speak to them on the telephone or answer their notes. Her asking price increases. Not that she says outloud, “buy me this” or “buy me that,” but her daddies know the effect expensive tokens have on her heart.
In the first quarter of thirty-one her cakes are hot and she stacks up impressive income figures. Her suitors combine to push her up and over the library shelves where ordinary editions of the classics are found and install her in the penthouse suite, accommodations analogous to the respectful storage afforded only to original manuscripts.
The nineteenth story of the Golden Gate Hotel overlooks the heart of the Bay area. From the heights of luxury, the good looker looks and looks but sees no Corn Dog coming. Alas, six months and still no brave buck in sight and she knows that little by little, the heart which was all for the one she sees growing up in Glory is becoming tarnished, dulled by the rubbing of rich men.
Quite a Hot Number Fan
At first Sarah is reluctant to have Swan over to the Golden Gate Hotel at all. The freethinker insists she needs no escort and arrives to and from location by taxi. But the months pass and his interest in her stays quick. May arrives and still no Corn Dog in sight, Sarah invites Swan to see where she lives and meet the daughter she has told him so little about.
The peach of Zion holds her breath as the little Glory Bee buzzes out lazily, shyly at first, from behind the curtains where she’s been hiding. She has never mentioned the child’s tan, relying instead on the strategy that it goes without saying that her late husband’s mother, the fictional fruit heiress Maria Santos, might be dark, the sort of thing that happens when a family spends so many generations in the hot Caramban sun. If Swan is surprised by Glory’s darkness, he doesn’t show it. In truth, there is something about the child which is familiar to him. She looks like someone whom he once knew very well but he just can’t seem to remember where or when.
“Say hello to Mister Swan, Gloria.”
The eighteen-month-old girl is graceful, and tall for her age. She pads over in silver ballet slippers Laudette bought her and greets the strange man by walking all around his legs, rubbing up against him like a kitten who wants some petting.
“Friendly, isn’t she?” says the confirmed bachelor.
“Not always,” says Sarah, “but when she likes you, she lets you know it.”
The flatterer flattered, Swan hoists Gloria high and she gives him her glorious tranquil smile.
The face he beholds is a remarkable one. In most respects it is ordinary to the point of being extraordinary. Gloria overcomes plainness with plainness. The conformity of her parts is what makes her special. And where a feature is above or below average, it is put into good proportion by complementary characteristics. Her nose is mid-sized and set midway between her mouth and eyes; her lips are not too big and not too small, and their restful expression, a tastefully straightfaced smile, is halfway between revealing and concealing; it is a smile that bespeaks her level-headedness. Her skin and bones modify one another. Her chin, cheeks, and forehead are strong and dramatic, but they are softened, toned down by the honey semi-gloss finish on her complexion, both dark and light, and neither. The balance struck between definition and mystery goes awry in her eyes. In looking at her Harry keeps coming back
to them. Average for her head, her lights look larger than they actually are because their color is something indescribable. They are iridescent, streaked, patched, and splashed with color. As she moves her head, the sunlight from the window plays with them, and they go from foxy reddish brown, to lustrous sable, to lime green, to ultra-deep violet. Rare jewels, they seem to sparkle with the same spangle-dust the stars are made of. As she shakes her head, her hair, a big, bounteous curly mane of dark brown, also shows subtle streaks of gold, chestnut and raven, piebald to match her eyes. The smooth, soft, blended, tawny tone of her skin which offsets her big, strong bones, also keeps the mulatto mottle in her from making more of a show. All and all her variegation, the party colors of her hair and eyes, is quieted into a racial neutrality. She is a puree rather than a chunky stew. Her native-of-paradise complexion says she hails from some colorful land, midway between nearby and distant, strange and familiar.
The perfect average is a rarity. Taken all together she is too perfect, princess priceless, a pretty pixie baby doll, with a glowing gem-like gaze.
“Da-dee-oh!” She calls. No stranger around strange men, the young Bee even gives him a buzz on the cheek, which Swan takes as a token of his appeal to a new generation of bunnies, and a sign that the child is after his own heart, with a healthy, outgoing disposition.
Swan cannot hold her up for long. Due to more than just her above-average height, the long legacy she got from her grandfather Jeremiah, there is a gravid density to her. He feels her heaviness and must put her down.
Wound up about having a man around the house, Gloria wants to show off the steps she’s seen at Kane’s. It’s hard for Sarah to believe that six months ago she was worried about her daughter being a vegetable. What a jittering bug she is now! Her feet move like quicksilver. She shimmies and shakes her hips, and dramatically extends her legs. She’s lost her baby feet and has balance where another child her age would fall. Like her legs, her arms are slim and yet solid, muscular. She does a hand jive out in front of her, as if the air were water and she were that native girl swimming in a lagoon on that unidentified paradise island. Swan marvels at her show of pleasure, more unabashed and charming than any girl, grown-up or child, he has ever met.
Sarah has seen this side of Gloria before; it happened when she got close to the men and music at the Top Hat Club. She danced and flirted and sat in strange laps. So different, thinks the split pea, from her own cream-white lady tact when she was a little girl. And lately, even though she is self-aware enough to realize it, she has started assuming the part she plays for the men in her life all the time. More and more, even when only Laudette and Gloria are around, she is stony, grim, ravishing, sultry, and delicate; she stifles that part of her which would enjoy listening with Laudette, whistling and singing along with the swing music on the radio in the parlor, and stays, to spite herself, retreated to bed, reading heavy books and essays and polishing herself up for her several daily dates. As for Gloria’s dancing, while not long ago it was cause for rejoicing, currently any sort of commotion leaves Sarah’s nerves jangled. She steps up on her pedestal and puts on her disapproving face, the one she learned from the God of the Shibbolites. She becomes cross, frowns on the dancing, and, finally, when she can take no more, squashes the display.
“That’s enough of that, young lady.” She says skittishly, taking hold of her daughter. “Mister Swan is here for tea, not to see you jump around like a monkey.”
She says to Swan, “Miss Lord is an excellent baby sitter, but in the afternoons she moonlights down at some night club, a dreadful place called Kane’s, I think. She takes care of the band there, and sometimes she takes Gloria with her. I suppose I should forbid it, I worry about how dangerous this contact with these debased forms of music and dance can be. Yes, I will have to talk to her about it. But good help is so hard to come by these days, don’t you think, and I suppose she is doing some good for the world taking care of musicians, whatever their preferences and abilities.”
Harry likes to swing. His newfound taste for music that makes his mind fantasize about gods and goddesses in no way sours him on music that makes him want to tap his feet. For him they naturally complement one another. A night club regular Swan has been into Kane’s Top Hat, has gotten high, danced the double check stomp and gone home with an easy woman, but, even though he suspects Sarah’s class is mostly an act, he takes both mental and sensual pleasure in letting himself be cowed by her high regard for refinement and gentility in the arts, and contempt for the kind of music she really enjoys: all that jazz that got her tangled up with the underdog. It has taken Swan some time to get to airing his other musical appreciations but now that it comes up he can’t help testing the water, indirectly, to see what the chances are of Sarah warming up to the only way he knew until he met her: what’s new and hot in music, what’s cheap about sex.
When the sitter comes to collect Gloria, Swan says to her, “So, Miss Lord, I hear you’re quite a Hot Number fan.”
“Sir, I keep the boys cool if that’s what you mean.”
“Do you really know Earl McCoy personally?” he asks.
Laudette laughs, “Like the back of my hand, Sir Harry, he’s one of my boys. I didn’t know you knew anything about jazz.”
“Well, I enjoy it very much and someday I would very much like to meet Mister McCoy. Perhaps we could convince our friend Sarah to go out dancing with us at Kane’s.”
They both look sidelong at the beautiful, smooth, arch-browed peach. Sarah feels safe behind the mask of who she isn’t in front of everyone, except, perhaps, Laudette. She manages a damning look at both of them anyway, a mask that fools the fool and sends Laudette going about her baby-sitting shaking her head. Like a shot in the arm the mention of her Uncle Early gives Glory a jump. She gets away from her sitter and comes back on the make-believe ball with Harry. She does a running motion in place, chugging her arms like a choo-choo train, before she is closed on again by the sitter.
Dormant genetic memories are brought to consciousness by the lovely catalysts. Harry Swan can’t help falling in love again with the daughter of the woman he loves. What a pair of classics, this mother and daughter! Each a goddess in her own right. He rescues Gloria from the sitter’s grip and gives her another swing around the room.
“Wheeeeeeee! Wooooowheeeeee! Waaaaaaaaaaaah!”
Sarah pretends it is all too much for her. And for once it really is. Not that it takes much nowadays for her to feel faint. She swoons onto the sofa. The hefty Laudette applies the smelling salts and helps Swan get her feet up.
When Sarah comes around she has a brandy and is tough on everybody, “Miss Lord! Didn’t I tell you I’ve been feeling very tired lately? I simply can’t stand the commotion! And, Harry, you should know better!” She calls in the child for chiding, “Do you see what your dancing did to Mummy?”
The playboy is sorry for them all. “Don’t blame them, Cupcake, blame me, it’s all my fault. Let me apologize by taking you and this lovely girl out to lunch.”
“Not today, Harry, I have a headache.”
“Oh, but I’m so proud of you both, and I hate to leave ruffled feathers in the family. Besides I want to show you both off at Sotto Voce.”
The prospect of putting on airs at a swell place like Sotto Voce gets Sarah on her feet.
In the restaurant Gloria does not stop for an instant, making starry eyes at Harry from across the table, but never saying a word. It gets her more than her share of his attention. She has already figured out that she can better interrupt conversations by not interrupting them. When she is good, the topic so often comes around to her and stays there.
“I can’t remember ever meeting a more charming little girl.”
Sarah, on her second glass of champagne, shoots a little scowl of exasperation at Gloria, her own flesh and blood, yet so unlike her. “She never knew her father,” she says in a whisper behind the menu, “Remember I told you he died before she was born, I think she looks for him in every man s
he meets.” Then she puts on her glasses, opens the menu and reads looking like an owl picking out some prey. “I think I’ll have the rabbit,” she says.
After Hours Reports
While her father is lying sleepless under the stars, watching big wheels turning them like grains of sand in the desert sky, and her mother is lying next to any one of several men, pretending she likes it, Gloria is out of the closet and into a whole room with separate bath. She doesn’t have it all to herself though, she must share it with her baby-sitter. The baby is a bug for privacy, and Laudette is as nosy as they come. Eighteen months old, Gloria is already sharp enough to know she would rather not have a roommate. She complains to her mother that Laudette’s snoring keeps her awake, but her grievance falls on deaf ears.
“Mummy is too busy now. Some other time, all right, Baby? Talk to Miss Lord about it.”
Gloria does not know what to make of her Mummy, for she has no other Mummy to compare her too. She accepts that this is the way Mummies are, strange, nervous, unaffectionate. In her characteristic high spirits Gloria appreciates her mother for the way she is. What Sarah lacks in warmth she more than makes up for in the live-and-let-live attitude Gloria craves. She is never one to say “No” to Gloria. It’s always “Ask Miss Lord.”
If only Lawdy were more like Mummy, Gloria wishes, and didn’t care what I did so long as I wasn’t bothering her.
While Sarah takes care of business Miss Lord minds the Bee. She is on call twenty-four hours a day to handle any problem that might come up. Gloria however is not one for problems. She believes that good obstacles make good authority figures. While everything in the room comes under Laudette’s official jurisdiction the floor is an area practically too low for the chubby sitter to get her hands on. Using bed covers and overturned furniture, Gloria subdivides the room, no doubt with the good old days in her subconscious mind, when she was protected in the dead zone of the Blanche house, and very possibly the Running Rabbit in her blood has an instinct for native shelter. In the far corner between the closet and the window, she makes a private encampment to hide herself and disappears under the flap into the dark for hours at a time, talking to herself, her invisible friends, practicing dressing and undressing, and playing with her baby dolls, her toes, her belly button, and her vagina. She would sleep in this tepee if Laudette did not put her foot down at night and insist on tucking her into a proper bed.
