by John Boyd
“Ester are you grieving over Alexander’s leaving?”
Immediately he was wide awake, thinking of Glamorgan and his theft from Wyatt. If the Welsh Bard relished antiquity, then that idle singer of empty lays might be a market for more “original” song lyrics.
Rubbing his eyes, Ward staggered into the midnight kitchen, tore a sheet from the roll of paper towels, took a pencil from the cupboard drawer, and sat down to write an updated version of Hopkins’s “Spring and Fall.” Though driven by needs that mocked mere honesty, Ward was hag-ridden by the self-reproach as he twisted the poet’s lines, yet, in the manner of a poet writing porno for profit, he generated a peculiar enthusiasm for the work. When finished, he realized that “Mini-Boppers and Swingers,” though inspired by the loss of Ester, had the off-beat charm, the mixture of antiquity and modernity Diana Aphrodite had projected that afternoon in his laboratory.
When Freddie came in from the parking lot at 2:30, Ward showed him the lyrics and explained his plan. Tired and worried, Freddie merely glanced at the composition.
“It might be a good song, Al, but I can’t hustle Glamorgan. Like it’s artistic integrity. I’m a bass fiddle virtuoso and old Baby’s Bottom can’t fret a three-string lute.”
Pulling his hand from his pocket, Freddie poured a trickle of coins onto the table top, and a glance told Ward there was less than a day’s rent.
“Old buddy,” Freddie said, “I didn’t want to start phase three so soon, but we need bread. I got you an appointment for a job in the Daisy Chain, out of sight. You’ll have to pass the missy, and if you can pass with her you can pass in the Congo.”
“The missy?”
“Miss Frost. Big John and I call her the missy to humor her. She’s old-timey in her thinking. She’s an old lady, and that’s the way she was raised.”
Freddie slumped onto the sofa, worried and preoccupied, and Ward sat across from him, thinking.
At the Daisy Chain he could meet Glamorgan, and no artistic integrity prevented Ward from pitching his lyrics; but man did not live by bread alone. Little Mama was an habitué of the discotheque, and he could use Dolores to lure the Patriots to him; and blood had a ritual value. There, too, the still silent Diana would seek him.
“One thing, Al,” Freddie sounded embarrassed, “don’t pull your cakewalk strut around the missy, and keep your voice respectful. If you get to sign an application, don’t dash off your signature like a bank president. Write slowly, keeping your eyes about five inches from the paper, and squint.”
“Are you telling me to put on a plantation shuffle?”
“I know how you feel about black pride, Al, but the missy expects things.”
“I don’t buy this servility bit,” Ward snapped. “It hurts the black image.”
“What’s being polite, man?” Freddie flared. “Are you servile when you open a door for a chick, or help her into her coat, or take off your hat? Miss Frost is quality folks. She’s strict, but she’s fair.”
Ward caught himself. Freddie had been instructing him in nothing more than old-fashioned courtesy, and he had become so involved in the black ambience that he was hypersensitive to race.
“Don’t worry, Freddie. I’ll be happy to talk to the phantom of the Daisy Chain.”
“She’s for real, man, but she has to be seen to be believed. And nobody talks to Miss Frost. The appointment’s for her to talk to you. All you say is ‘Yes’m’ and ‘Thanky ma’am.’ ”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Freddie parked behind the Daisy Chain, unlocked the rear door, and led Ward in. Inside, they wound up narrow iron stairs spiraling around a steel pole, past the bird cage, past the machinery for its lift, upward into shadows, and across a catwalk to a door. Past the door, they entered a white-on-white reception lobby, carpeted in white, with two white Louis XVI chairs and a table below a long mirror. Before them were an elevator door, a door to their right, and a door to the left.
“Miss Frost’s private elevator,” Freddie whispered, pointing. “Miss Frost’s private John… Miss Frost’s telephone number is unlisted.”
Ward stifled an impulse to take off his shoes as Freddie turned to the door on their left and rapped lightly.
Inside, a voice tinkled like sleigh bells. “Come in, Freddie. You’re three minutes early.”
Freddie opened the door and entered, saying, “Excuse me for interrupting, Missy, but I brought the new man, Al Atascadero.”
Entering, Ward saw a trim body, precise in its movements, turn from a white filing cabinet at their entrance and stride across a white carpet to a white desk in the center of the room.
Ward had never seen a person so aptly named as Miss Frost. In her mid-forties, young for Ward, though old for Freddie, she was as remote and as beautiful as a distant snow peak rising above white clouds. Her eyes were gray, her skin pale, her hair a silvery gray tinged with the blue of glaciers. As she crossed to her desk, he glimpsed an elegance of legs hosed in silvered mist beneath an off-white tailored miniskirt. The vision of her legs was reassuring to a man with fears of breast obsession.
She swung behind her desk and stood to appraise the new arrival with a formal but not unfriendly glance. Before her the desk was bare except for a white pen in a white holder, a white telephone to her left, and on her right, on a white pillow, a white Pomeranian. The dog growled softly and bared its teeth, but Ward’s eyes were all for Miss Frost. So regal she seemed taller than her five feet, she was an immaculancy of white against the white Louis Seize paneling of the office, which reminded him of an 18th-century Big John’s John.
Before he caught her accent or her scent, some radar acquired with his new pigmentation told him she was a Southerner.
“Atascadero? Unusual name for a Nigra. Your old folks back home must have been owned by Spanish Creoles.”
“Yes’m. We come from Mobile.”
“A very good stock in that region. Some Masai blood with an infusion of Nubian. I know your area well, Al, for we are fellow Alabamans.”
“Thanky, ma’am.”
Then Miss Frost smiled at him and her smile was as elegant as her legs, as imperious as her stride, and Ward knew that Miss Frost was not merely a Southerner—she was a Southern Aristocrat, no doubt, descended in a straight line from some wealthy family of slave traders. And she was the quintessential white missy.
“So, you think you might be interested in a maintenance engineering job at the Electric Daisy Chain? Very good. I like to see ambition in colored folks. But I must warn you I’m a strict taskmistress. As Freddie can tell you, I tolerate no Stepin Fetchits at the Electric Daisy Chain. We expect an honest hour’s work for our dollar and a quarter’s pay.”
It was the first mention of salary. Since it was twenty cents under the legal minimum and Freddie would get half of it, Ward would have preferred less title and more pay. But to mention money would have been an affront to the truly august presence.
“I work hard, ma’am.”
“I will make that decision, Al… Now, step over yonder and fetch me the white manila folder.” She pointed.
In his eagerness Ward pranced over and pranced back, and he knew his prancing had been a tactical error. Despite Freddie’s warning, he had forgotten to shuffle. Strange lights glittered in her eyes, and her voice grew harsh.
“Lay it there.”
She pointed to a spot on the desk in front of her and he complied.
“Pull up that chair.”
She pointed to a chair against the wall with an unpainted wicker bottom, the only non-white area in the room. Moving aside the Louis Seize chair before her desk, Ward brought the wicker chair.
When he returned, Miss Frost was seated behind her desk, her arched back pivoted forward on her pelvis, leafing through the folder.
“Sit!”
He sat. She pulled an application from the folder and a ballpoint pen from the desk, turned the form to face Ward, laid the pen atop the form, and handed them across the desk to Ward, who took them. The dog gr
owled sleepily at his movement.
“Fill in your Social Security number, here, and sign your name, here.”
Ward took his Social Security card from his denim jumper, wrote the number slowly on the line designated, and began, laboriously, to spell out his name.
“I declare, it shouldn’t take forever to sign your name.”
“I don’t write good, ma’am.”
“Go home tonight and practice. Write your name at least fifty times, you hear?”
“Yes’m.”
“Not that I approve of too much education… Oh, well. Return the chair.”
Ward returned the chair and turned back to stand before her.
No longer smiling, Miss Frost looked up at him and through him as if he were standing far behind himself.
“You are now a member of the Electric Daisy Chain Maintenance Engineering Staff. You will be directly responsible to Freddie, who is directly responsible to Big John, who is Chief Maintenance Engineer. Always keep in mind, if you tote the water with dispatch and swing the mop with efficiency, you may someday rise to Big John’s position. Dismissed.”
“Thanky, ma’am.”
Walking softly, they left her office and vestibule, tripped down the stairs, and ran onto the main ballroom floor, swapping African handslaps.
“Man, you made it,” Freddie chortled. “She’s got the hots for you. I saw it when you gave her that little do-si-do cakewalk.”
“How do you figure?” Ward asked. “She got hostile.”
“When she starts looking mean, that’s because she hates herself for what she’s wanting. Missy was raised in Alabama. Someday, she’s going to rise and overcome her raising, and the missy’s day of atonement’s going to be some black man’s day of jubilee. Man, it could be you, and I want a raise in pay when you’re up there influencing policy. Whooee!”
Freddie was fantasizing, but his insight into the cause of Miss Frost’s sudden hostility might be beautiful and true. In a manner Freddie had not foreseen, Miss Frost had blown Ward’s mind with a vision of her flashing legs. Two dollars a day of a debt that had been accumulating for eighteen days was wiped out when Freddie re-introduced Ward to his new boss, Big John. At the introduction, Ward threw Big John a rhyme to put the old man in a good frame of mind.
“You’re a good rhymer, I have to admit, but you’re not the champion wit.” Big John pointed toward Ward’s message on top of his board. “I keep that message as a monument to a young hog jockey who came and went. He got no answer from the lass, but the boy was a master of classical gas.”
Looking at Freddie, Ward said to Big John, “I regret I’m not tops, but I’ll holler you no hollers, for you just saved me thirty-six dollars.”
Outside, as they went to get mop buckets and mops, Freddie explained the thirty-six dollars he had put on Ward’s tab.
“Man, getting something for nothing ruins your character.”
An attempt to obtain thirty-six dollars by fraud from a victim under duress was not exactly character-building for Freddie, either, but in Ward’s continuing dialogue with the young, Freddie was a captive audience who could be taught honesty. There was a greater con artist on the premises—Glamorgan, whose audience was more immediately desired by Ward for economic reasons. And after Glamorgan, the Orange County Patriots.
Perhaps from contriteness, more probably because he knew Ward was hooked by Miss Frost, Freddie gave Ward the keys to the motorcycle at the end of their half-day.
“You may as well drive it, man. You’re into me so far, now, the motorcycle won’t start to recoup my losses if you split.”
Ward encountered strange barriers in his first attempts to speak to Glamorgan. The Welsh Bard rehearsed every morning, except Sundays, between ten and eleven-fifteen in the ballroom of the Electric Daisy Chain. In his retinue from Europe were his sound engineer, his arranger, his director, and his hairdresser. All hummed around the artist, dragging wires on their earphones over Ward’s floor, putting sneaker marks on still-damp places, zooming in to get a better view of Glamorgan’s profile, back-pedaling for a fuller view of his figure.
Freddie split the scene when the group were rehearsing, leaving the floor and its cleaning to his assistant. Though the troupe were polite to Ward, they regarded him as an animate object.
“You, there. Would you move your buckets back a bit? Thenk yo.”
They were focused on Glamorgan.
“Lift your voice just a decibel, Glam, on ‘lo-ove’ to give the audience the full flavor of your Welsh lilt. Wonderful. Now, you register perfectly.”
“Glamorgan, I don’t think you’re sad enough to sing ‘Blue Mists’ tonight. Let’s match your mood with ‘Little Buttercup’ ”
Even Glamorgan’s spontaneity was rehearsed.
“When you turn your head,” his director said, “let’s give them your bright instead of your tender smile, to set the stage for ‘Little Buttercup.’ As you turn, twist your head a little more briskly and let’s flip that right curl over your shoulder… Now, try again… Henry, there’s something wrong with that flipping curl.”
And Henry would trip forward to finger a ringlet. “Oh, dear, I’ve dreadfully overdone the spray. Half a mo, Gorgeous One, and we’ll have your locks springing again.”
Ward understood Freddie’s shyness in this company. Glamorgan’s retainers were expert at the Establishment Shuffle. But Ward was from the Establishment, himself, and as he mopped he waited for a breach in the wall.
Three days after his first day at work, Ward spotted an opening. During a coffee break, he heard Glamorgan say, “What I wouldn’t give for a spot of well-brewed tea.”
On the fourth morning just before the coffee break Ward sidled brashly into the group, saying, “Mr. Glamorgan, being as you’re from England, I expect you’d like a cup of fresh-brewed tea about now.”
“Indeed I would, my good man, but I’m from Wales.”
Minutes later, when Ward returned from the store room hot plate with cups, tea, sugar and cream, a slice of lemon in a bowl, and napkins, he was the focus of British gratitude.
“Tell me, fellow, what is your name?”
The question came from the great Glamorgan, himself, and Ward knew his year of graduate work at Oxford had not been in vain. There he had learned to brew tea, English style.
“Jest Al, sir. Jest Al.”
From that moment on, Jest Al became the favorite American of this wandering contingent of alleged Welshmen.
Teatime became Ward’s second favorite period at the Electric Daisy Chain. His first favorite time came when the whine of the elevator told him Miss Frost was coming down to look in on the rehearsals.
At such times, Ward’s mop adopted a new tempo and he pranced behind it, swishing closer to the spot where she invariably stood. Sometimes a bright “Good morning” tinkled out of the shadows, but out of her voice’s range he could still see her, dressed in white, a most adorable and gracious ghost.
Never once did she criticize his floor work, and his imagination took flight in her presence. She was Helen on the ramparts of Troy looking out over the camps of the Greeks where a black Hector fought in her defense. She was Dido without a willow in her hand wafting her love, Othello, to come again to Carthage. And from her, always, his nostrils picked up the perfume of magnolias fresh-bloomed by moonlight.
Since she barely touched a demure thirty-eight, she was his proof that he was not breast-obsessed.
On the first Monday after the beginning of the tea breaks, Ward brought the typed lyrics of the song he had titled “Mini-Boppers and Swingers” for a reading by the Welsh Bard. Perhaps as a joke, Glamorgan held his hand up for silence, set down his tea, and said, “Listen to these words from Jest Al.”
Ester were you grieving
When you heard my cycle leaving?
Warm, like the love of man, you
In your innocence care for, can you?
But as his fires bank lower
Boy comes to bedroll slower.
> No matter, Ester, how you slice it,
Love’s a game with loaded dice. It
Can’t be won but only played.
All innocents into earth are laid.
Knowing then what you were born for,
Is it virtue that you mourn for?
When Glamorgan finished, there was a dead silence from his group, and his classical brow puckered. In admiration, or disgust? Ward wondered as he waited.
In reproach.
“Ester’s spelled with an ‘h,’ ” Glamorgan said.
Ward’s Ester never used the “h” because no one pronounced it.
“She’s a Cockney, Mr. Glamorgan. This song was written just for you.”
“Just ‘Glamorgan,’ please. And I’m not a Cockney… But the lines do have a pretty sentiment.”
“Sentiment, man,” Ward exploded. “It’s the real McKuen. Look at the sprung rhythms. You don’t see them, any more. And get a load of that mixed metaphor in the middle.”
Glamorgan was studying the script.
“You do talk rather strangely, Jest Al, even for a black… Pardon me, old man. I mean you’d talk strangely even if you were white… Ah, yes. I see. How does one slice a dice game? Rather odd, but amusing. Why don’t we use ‘Mary’? That’s an honest name.”
Glamorgan must have had a hang-up on a girl named Mary, Ward decided, but, more important, his use of the word “we” indicated an interest in the lyrics.
“Mary’s just fine,” Ward said. “And a name like that won’t distract from the sentiment.”
“Or even Margaret,” Glamorgan was lost in thought. “I had a bird in Liver… Cardiff, once, named…”
“Not Margaret,” Ward interjected. “I caught clap in Cleveland once from a girl called herself ‘Margaret.’ ”
“Oh, very well!” A bit of Liverpool whine invaded the Welsh lilt. Ward sensed he was in for a put-down, but negotiations had begun and Ward had deliberately written flaws into the lines to ease negotiations.
“How much do you want for this thing, as it stands?”
“Whatever you think it’s worth, sir,” Ward said. “Say, about two hundred bucks?”
