In Sunlight or In Shadow

by Lawrence Block

  Mama wanted Lurleen to know what them nice boys could do.

  So Daddy took her to the place where all the yelling and cheering had come from, and then he said he was sorry he done it. He made her sit in the wagon, eyes closed, while he went and done something to that body, something that sounded meaty, like an axe to a chicken neck.

  And Noreen, she never was the same. She didn’t talk to no one, and they all said it was because of that nice boy, because of what he done. George Tarlin didn’t want her no more, because of what that boy had done.

  But that boy didn’t do nothing.

  Both Lurleen and Noreen knew that.

  And the night before she died by her own hand with Daddy’s too-sharp razor, Noreen said to Lurleen, “Baby girl, you gotta know one thing. Lies, they can kill you. They can kill everything. Don’t you lie about what you done. Don’t you lie about nothing, you hear?”

  And Lurleen, she promised.

  She didn’t lie about nothing for a long time. Then she lied about everything.

  Because, she’d slowly realized, lying about everything was the only way she could ever find the truth.

  Lurleen shook her head. Lines and crowds and upset folk—they always brought a fear up, a fear of what people could do.

  Which was why she looked away from the line, away from the shabby Memphis bank that had taken a good fifty dollars of her hard-earned money and would never give it back, and watched as a train went by.

  Maybe it was the bank or the crowd or the memory. Maybe it was the despair—not that she was short of money, but she was shorter of money than she had been.

  When those box cars went past, side door open, and men sitting on the edge, legs dangling, clothes filthy, she had an uncharacteristic thought. She saw the faces, dirt-streaked as the clothes, and realized she was looking at pale skin beneath some streaks and dark skin beneath other streaks.

  And she thought: Oh, that’s going to cause problems.

  Then she caught herself. She didn’t oppose mixing. Not like everyone else did. In her pre-Frank life, she’d even known couples who were mixed (and sometimes trying to hide it). She’d long ago realized that skin color was no different than hair color. Maybe because of that nice boy she’d met when she was little, the one her sister’s lies had killed. He’d had dark skin. He’d loved reading. George Tarlin never had. He hadn’t been nice neither.

  But the problems . . .

  Lurleen no longer had illusions. She knew that here, in this place where the war was still being fought and Confederate veterans still being honored, where the romance of the past trumped the truth of it, mixing like that was as bad a recipe as that lie—he done it—combined with a pointed finger.

  She turned away, and trudged back to the train station, where she’d left her other bag with one of the porters who guarded such things for people who actually had money.

  She needed to focus on herself now. That was what she had said when she left West Texas; that was what she had meant.

  She was on a voyage of discovery, seeking something better, just like—it seemed—half the country. Only she was doing it in actual train cars, sitting on seats, riding like the first-class lady she was, with other first-class white folk she didn’t want to talk to, because she knew she’d hate them as a matter of principle.

  She needed to collect the money she’d left behind when she’d left her second life behind. Her before-Frank life. She couldn’t’ve done it before he died, and he’d waited one year too long to leave this good earth.

  Now all the little banks were going. The individual banks, the ones that didn’t have branches, but were funded by locals who made the decisions themselves.

  The little banks, the ones whose owners looked a woman in the eye, and said, It’s a new era, sister. Women can vote, so yes, you can open an account here without your husband. And they’d meant it too. She’d thought she was supporting those banks, thought she was doing good. Turned out, all she was doing—as Frank would’ve said if he’d known—was pissing her money away, one seemingly smart decision at a time.

  Only a few stops left. Nashville, Roanoke, Richmond, then points north. Real North. Yankee North, where she hadn’t been since before the Great War. Funny that Before-Frank she’d worked for folks in Yankee North—colored folks in Yankee North—and she hadn’t been up there since she graduated from Barnard.

  Not quite true, of course. None of that was quite true. There was graduation, the apartment, the temporary job as a typist, and Elliot. And then, her father, of course, saving her from a life with That Jew, dragging her home, where Elliot did not follow, could not follow, as Elliot had said in that expensive telephone call she had made from her father’s general store. You understand, sweetheart, right?

  No, she hadn’t understood either man and by the time she had gone north again—just for a moment (a moment that she didn’t count)—Elliot was already married to someone “more suitable,” his mother had said, looking at Lurleen with grim disapproval.

  Lurleen had fled then, vowed not to marry, and when she learned that Elliot had died in the Battle of Argonne Forest, she pretended she didn’t care.

  But she didn’t stop the work she’d started, work she’d started to impress him.

  She hadn’t stopped until . . .

  She leaned her head back and closed her eyes, ignoring the half dozen books in her black suitcase. She had read whatever newspaper she tucked between the handles of her duffel so that it looked like she was carrying papers instead of paper money. But she found herself thinking more than reading.

  She’d thought she was being so practical fourteen years ago. She’d taken the money Elliot’s mother had pressed upon her to forget the engagement ever happened, saying, We shall never speak of this again. Apparently, an upper-class Jewish family in New York City was as embarrassed by a middle-class Christian girl from West Texas as the girl’s West Texas family was by the fact that their daughter had fallen for a Jew. Only no one had seen the liaison back in Texas. There had been a lot of witnesses in among their Barnard-Columbia friends.

  A lot of them who felt that Lurleen and Elliot were a love match, just like Lurleen had. Before that trip. The one she didn’t count.

  The one where Elliot’s mother offered her a shocking five thousand dollars to forget she’d ever known him. To destroy his love letters, tear up the portrait they’d had commissioned for their engagement, and give back the ring.

  She had taken the money, destroyed the letters, torn up the portrait, and given his mother the ring. Out of spite. Out of anger. Out of a hope that taking such a vast sum would somehow harm Elliot and his inheritance.

  But later, when she read his obituary, she’d learned just how much the family was worth, and realized that the fortune they had given her—the money that was more than her father earned in the last ten years of his life—was barely pocket-change to them.

  That was why Elliot could focus on Good Works. Why he didn’t need to earn a living. He knew the living would come to him.

  The scheme Lurleen used was Elliot’s. Initially, they were going to do it together—he and Lurleen. They would change the world, use her pale skin and red-blond hair as camouflage. He would map everything out, use his law degree for assistance, and make sure they got the right information.

  Elliot had been the one who had established the contact with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. He’d been the one who had deduced that their investigative arm needed investigators who could talk to Southern whites, get them to open up, get them to admit the horrors they were committing on a daily basis. He’d been the one who called what they were going to do Good Works, when (she later realized) it was the excitement that appealed to him.

  The risk, the danger.

  The same risk and danger that had sent him Over There against his mother’s wishes.

  His plan for their Southern Good Works had sounded so good in theory, but in practice—well, in practice Lurleen had learned that h
e would have been a burden had he come along, with his curly black hair, the beard that appeared midafternoon whether he wanted it to or not, and his unmistakable New York accent. He’d’ve gotten them thrown out of urban center after urban center—or what passed for urban centers in the pre- and post-war South.

  But his idea with the money, scattering it to banks in different communities, in case they were robbed or lost what they had—that idea had been smart. She always had an emergency fund one train ride away—and sometimes she’d needed every dime.

  It hadn’t been his fault that she had left the money sit for seven years.

  The Frank years.

  She got money out of the bank in Nashville, but not the bank in Roanoke. That bank wasn’t just closed, it was gone entirely—had been since 1926. Apparently there’d been a banking crisis then, one she hadn’t heard about.

  The bank in Richmond was open when she arrived, but didn’t have all of her funds. They offered her $25 of her initial $50 savings, and she took it, figuring the remaining $25 plus the interest it had (in theory) earned since 1917 would never arrive.

  And then she’d gone on to New York.

  The train arrived in Pennsylvania Station in a hiss of steam, accompanied by shouts from the conductors—Last stop! Penn Station! This train will close for service! Last stop!

  She took her bags. She felt grimy and windblown, even though she hadn’t left the train for hours.

  She followed her fellow passengers out the door, down the stairs and onto the platform and then she did like every other rube did around her—she looked up.

  The grandness took her breath away. Stairs leading off the platform, up to the main area, and from here, she could already see steel arches and so much light that it hurt her eyes.

  The platform smelled of steam and German soft pretzels, perfume and sweat. She clung to her bags, alert for the pickpockets and thieves who haunted every large railway station she’d been to, and walked up the stairs with her head held high.

  She’d looked like a rube once. She wasn’t going to do it again. Now, she needed to look like a New York lady who knew where she was going.

  It wasn’t easy. Penn Station looked nothing like she remembered. Oh, the bones had been here before the war—the steel columns, the light—but the people hadn’t. Not in such crowds, with such noise. And there were no vendors, at least that she remembered. Back then, everything had seemed new, like a museum waiting for patrons, and now it had a layer of grime mixed with the echo of a thousand voices.

  New York. Yankee North’s rapid heartbeat.

  She had forgotten how alive this place was.

  She’d already revealed herself as a rube, so she took one last rube step and stopped at the information desk, round and large as the station itself, and sitting in the middle of the flow of people. The tired man running it barely met her gaze, but he did tell her there were hotels all over the area, and they wouldn’t be full in the middle of the afternoon.

  “But,” he said, “a lady like you needs to avoid most of them. If you were my girl, I’d tell you to go to the Hotel New Yorker, just across the way, Eighth and 34th. Take the exit over there. They’ll treat you fine and you’ll be safe.”

  Then he turned away, missing the fact that her eyes had filled with tears. No one had worried about her safety since Frank took ill, and even before then, the bloom had been off the rose. He’d seen her as a wife. A failure of a wife, really, since she hadn’t had the housekeeping skills and the babies never came. Those passionate moments, those exciting moments of love back in the early days—gone as if they had never been.

  She made herself stop thinking about Frank, because thinking about Frank led to that resounding loneliness she felt in the last six months of his life, that realization that when he died (not if, when) no one would care what she did.

  She hovered close to the information booth and stared at the exit across the great hall with its steel arches and marvelous light. The words “To Eighth Avenue” were calligraphed on a sign that she could read from here.

  What would she get when she went there? A hotel room and . . . what? A job? There were no jobs, not even for qualified people. And she really didn’t need one, even with a quarter of her money stolen or lost or destroyed by banks she should never have trusted.

  The other banks had made up for some of it. Years of interest, good years much of it, paid some of the losses.

  And she had to figure out what to do with her cash. After the Bank of the United States made the national news for failing in December, she had decided to reclaim her money from her banks—just like the rest of the country had. That had provided her with a travel goal, although ending up here, where the Bank of the United States had been based, with a duffel filled with cash seemed foolhardy now.

  Part of her still believed, apparently, that anything that came out of New York was just fine. Fine and good and desirable.

  Like Elliot had been.

  A man bumped her, and she swiveled, hitting him in the leg with her solid black case. He tripped, hands open and empty enough for her to realize he probably hadn’t been pickpocketing—or he hadn’t succeeded because she had caught him. She glared at him, and he stumbled forward without an apology.

  Her hand tightened around her duffel. The newspaper was still threaded through the handles, and no one could get in it without moving the paper and touching the latch.

  She had to pay attention, though, because, God knew, no one else cared.

  She walked across the wide open hall, up the stairs, heading toward the street. She emerged on Eighth Avenue to noise and thin sunlight and honking horns. Paved roads and the smell of gasoline. No horses at all—that was a change—and so was the sight across from her.

  A building so large she couldn’t see the top of it without craning her neck. The wings were set back from each other, covered with windows. A man walked around her, said, “Gawk on your own time, sister,” before he disappeared into the crowd.

  Her cheeks flushed and she moved aside. True rube. She’d worked so hard when she traveled on her own all those years ago to look like a native, only to fail in the city where she had spent her most formative years.

  Above the gold-plated doors, an overhang shielded pedestrians. The words Hotel New Yorker ran across in bold letters.

  She crossed the road, careful not to gawk any more, although it was hard. A car honked as it went by her. She had to dodge behind a large black car, parked in front of the curb. A bellboy was pulling suitcases from the trunk as an older man in uniform extended a hand to a woman getting out of the passenger seat.

  Lurleen wished she’d thought to clean up on the train. That grimy coat of travel dirt made her feel like the white trash girl Elliot’s mother had seen—not understanding that even in the South (especially in the South) there were more layers to society than met the eye.

  Lurleen managed to get through the doors before one of the bellboys saw her. She noted him across the large marble lobby, and scurried to the registration desk before he could reach her. She resolutely did not gawk at the chandeliers hanging from the gold-plated ceiling or the second floor balcony railings that looked like they were made of etched glass.

  The man behind the desk did not question her presence at all. Maybe it was the cloche hat or the stylish clothes, no matter how travel rumpled they were.

  The rooms, he told her, started at $3.50 per night, and what kind of accommodations did she want? Something small and comfortable, she said, keeping her voice down. And how long does madam want to stay? he asked. The “madam” gave her pause—no one had called her that before.

  But she was no green girl, not any longer, nor, apparently, could she pass for one.

  “I don’t know how long I’ll stay,” she said in response to his question. “A few days at least.”

  And she gave him the last crisp ten dollar bill she had in her wallet, placing it “on account.” In exchange, he gave her a room key for one of the mid-range floors (his
words) with a view of Eighth Avenue. It would be, he said, quieter.

  The entire place had an air of quiet, surprising in the city, which she had remembered as smelly and noisy and difficult. But she hadn’t expected any place like this.

  The bellboy reached her side, and offered to take her bags. If she didn’t let him, she would be calling attention to herself.

  “I’ll carry the duffel,” she said, and walked away from him, the way she’d seen other society matrons do in smart hotels back south. He trailed behind her, carrying the black suitcase.

  She had an entire gauntlet of employees to go through—the bellboy, the elevator operator, a maid on her floor, all wishing her a good afternoon. Lurleen inclined her head, and let the bellboy open her room with her key, showing her all the special features—the radio with four stations, the private bath, and the windows that opened upward, making it (he said) nearly impossible to throw anything out of them.

  She wanted to ask about “nearly impossible,” and how they knew that, but refrained. Instead, she gave him two bits—too much, probably, but she wanted him out of the room—and when he left, she pulled off her hat and placed it on the dresser, smoothing her hair with one hand.

  Then she removed her coat, hanging it over the chair shoved tight against the brown desk, kicked off her shoes and slipped out of her grimy dress. She sat on the edge of the bed, at sixes and sevens for the moment, knowing she should bathe, but not quite ready to.

  She didn’t want to sleep on the clean white sheets when she was this filthy. But she had to decide what to do.

  She needed to organize her money, place some of it in her wallet, and stash some of it elsewhere. She couldn’t leave it in the room. A hotel this fancy had to provide a safe for its guests, although it made her nervous. But she certainly didn’t trust any bank, even with its private security boxes. There would be no guarantee the doors would be open in the morning.

  She could probably refuse maid service, but that would make people suspicious—why was she doing that? What did she have to hide?

  She hadn’t thought it through, this goal. New York, as if it were the holy grail. The be-all and end-all. She didn’t want to return to school, and she didn’t know what else was available.