Black Alice
Page 5
'All right I But I still fail to see what there is that makes you laugh.'
'Because I could see the answer right away. It looks hard, but, it's really simple. If there were two families, there would have to be three girls and four boys—but there would only be four adults. So there have to be more than two. If there were four families, there would be at least five girls and six boys, eleven altogether. So one of the families would only have two children. And it would be worse for more than four families. So the answer has to be three?'
Alice giggled happily at this piece of induction. Miss Godwin rose from the table, closing Alice's book. 'Come, Miss Logician, we're going to be late.'
Roderick lighted a cigarette and waved bye-bye. Or so Alice thought. To Miss Godwin it had looked more as if he were waving out the match.
Roderick blew a smoke ring and watched it expand till it hit Alice's empty milk glass and broke up. Yawning, he pulled her math book towards him and turned the pages at random. Eight-thirty was a beastly time to get up in the morning.
Because Miss Godwin's Saab was back at the garage for repairs, they had to take a bus to the Baltimore Museum, which suited Alice perfectly. Buses were more fun than cars. On Saturdays the Gwynn River Falls bus was always full of screaming teenagers in bright clothes on their way to the municipal beach. Alice would be at the beach herself—in the afternoon—where she would meet her friend Dorothy, after she'd had lunch at Howard Johnson's. She knew it was considered gauche, but despite herself she still liked Howard Johnson's best of all the restaurants in Baltimore.
She sat very quietly on the green plastic seat so that she could hear the Number One Song in the Nation which was blaring out of three transistor radios that boys on the bus were holding outside the windows. At home she wasn't allowed to listen to the Big Beat stations, so she was always hungry for
e sound of it. Some of the older girls wore shorts, some stretch pants—all in the wildest electric blues and oranges and fuchias. One girl had a blouse that was candy-apple red. Very vulgar, Alice thought. She wondered what Miss Godwin would say if she used candy-apple red on her nails. The boys on the bus were excruciatingly handsome—though Alice wasn't really interested in boys. They wore blue jeans that were practically in rags and the longest, longest blond hair—and they were so brown. She decided she would try to recapture the vivid chaos of the scene in art class. But however was she to get the feeling of the Number One Song into the painting? From the bus stop it was three blocks to the Museum. Miss Godwin would take her to the door, then go further downtown to take care of her shopping.
This summer the children's art teacher was an older New York woman who said her name was Lonnie Braggs. Miss Braggs was, to Alice's way of thinking a complete ninny. She strolled around in riding breeches from student to student, praising everyone's work indiscriminately, no matter how bad it really was. Last week she'd told Alice that her collage was as good as the Braque on the third floor of the Museum, when Alice knew perfectly well it was a wretched mess. Even the pasting had been botched. When she'd pointed that out to Braggs (who didn't like to be addressed as 'Miss Braggs'), Braggs had said: 'The crucial thing, darling, isn't what it looks like or how neat it is, but how honestly it expresses your emotions. Self-expression—that's the ticket! When I said it was as good as Braque, I meant it was as honest.' How could you ever talk to someone like that? Maybe Braggs really did believe what she said and wasn't able to tell any difference between a good painting and a bad painting.
When they reached the side entrance to the Museum, Miss Godwin took Alice's hand. 'I'll see you at this door at twelve o'clock exactly. Our table is reserved at Howard Johnson's for half-past. Remember, when you paint, to look sloppy and wild-eyed. From what I've heard of your Miss Braggs that'll put you right at the head of the class. Au revoir.9
'Miss Raleigh? Miss Godwin?' A tall Negro in livery strode up to talk to them and touched his cap. T am Mr. Duquesne's chauffeur. Mr. Duquesne has had a stroke, and you are to come with me to his house.'
'Uncle Jason!' Alice shrieked. 'Oh, not Uncle Jason.' Miss Godwin held her hand very tight as they walked to the
waiting limousine. The chauffeur helped them into the spacious back seat. His hps showed no more expression than a cat's, and his eyes were hidden behind heavy sunglasses.
'Is he going to die?' Alice implored. Without answering, the chauffeur closed the back door and got in behind the wheel. The back seat was closed off from the front by a glass window.
Miss Godwin found the microphone that communicated to the driver and switched it on. 'Will you describe Mr. Duquesne's condition, please?'
The chauffeur spoke into another microphone, and the sound of his voice seemed to come out of the floor of the car. 'I can't say, ma'am. I didn't see his Honour, myself. The doctor's with him now. It was the doctor gave me my orders.'
I see. Thank you.'
Alice almost made the mistake of giggling when it occurred to her that Miss Godwin should have ended the discussion by saying 'Over and out.' It was really a magnificent car. Much bigger than the Horners' old Caddy. Funny, that Uncle Jason had never mentioned having such a car. Maybe he'd been saving it as a surprise. But why did he want a car like this when he hardly ever left the house? And a chauffeur!
It was terrible, his having another stroke, and it seemed very strange and ominous that he should want to see her immediately afterwards. Unless—but Alice didn't want to consider that unless.
The limousine came to Boston Street and drove right on past. 'Say,' Alice shouted, 'that was Boston Street! He should have turned left there! I think the driver must be lost. Don't you think you should tell him he's lost, Miss Godwin?'
But Miss Godwin made no reply. She stared straight in front of her with a queer, tense expression that Alice had never seen before. At last Alice herself picked up the microphone, pressed the button, and said: 'You're going the wrong way. You've gone past Uncle Jason's street. It was blocks ago!' But the microphone must have been broken, for the chauffeur didn't answer or even look around.
It wasn't until they entered the waterfront district that Alice knew the man had been lying all along. They hadn't been going to Uncle Jason's at all. Alice was being kidnapped! At last!
How thrilling!
Chapter 5
The only seat in the bus left unoccupied was the one beside Mrs. Elizabeth McKay, and in a sense that was occupied too, at least in part, by her spillover. In the space still left free in that seat she had deposited her bag, a bountiful cloth carryall as ample as herself. Now, as the bus pulled into its Baltimore terminal, she replaced the sheaf of pamphlets with which she had whiled away the hours from Norfolk into the top of the bulging satchel.
She waited till the last white-uniformed sailor was off before she attempted the narrow aisle herself. The cleaning man helped her down the steps. Such courtesies were paid her more and more often of late, and it could not be out of respect simply for her bulk, for she had been carrying that around for a good fifteen years already. No, they could see, somehow, that she was dying, that she was as good as dead. Their courtesy was a funereal gesture, like tipping your hat to a hearse.
'Well, you're no spring chicken yourself, honey,' she thought sourly, as she smiled good-bye and thank-you to the cleaning man.
Having wrested the carryall away from a porter, she found herself a taxi outside the terminal, and without really giving it a thought (for her corns and bunions were crying aloud for mercy), she threw open the back door. Too late she saw that the driver was white.
Before she could mumble an apology, the white man had lifted the canvas bag out of her hands and settled it on the front seat. 'Where to, ma'am?' he asked.
Startled, she could not remember, for a moment, where it was she had to be. She entered the cab reluctantly. When she did find her voice, it was scarcely audible, and she had to repeat her destination: The Royalton Hotel.'
Well, this certainly wasn't the Baltimore she remembered! As soon as the shock of
it had worn off, she found herself resenting the driver. If he'd been coloured, she could have taken off her shoes.
Reaching the Royalton, she overtipped ridiculously, and the driver, out of appreciation or from that same sense of her decrepitude, carried the bag to the desk of the hotel. Settling it down, the topmost pamphlet tumbled out. It's blurred, four-colour cover represented what seemed to be a rather thickly wooded golf course; above this a jumble of various lettering tried to disguise the advertising throwaway as a magazine: Sunrise, a Magazine for Those Who Care. Special Hot Weather Problems Issue! Then, beneath in a flowery script, the epitaph: There shall be no more death.'
Thank you,' she said tartly, snatching it back, fearful that he would notice the mailing address glued in the lower right hand corner: Green Pastures Funeral Home, North Tidewater Road, Norfolk. Va.
'Hell of an hour,' the sleepy desk clerk commented, as she signed the register. (Elizabeth Brown, with a special curlicue at the end and a circle instead of a dot over the i.) He was a white man too, though the old bellhop who took her bags up the creaking, carpeted stairs was just the colour you'd expect.
'Many white men stay at this hotel?' she asked nervously.
' 'Bout half of 'em's white. You got no cause to worry.'
Seemed as if Baltimore was getting as integrated as that heaven she remembered some preachers used to talk about, with black and white singing the Lord's praises and glory hand in hand. Hah! Wasn't but one place, here or hereafter, ever really got integrated, and that was a cathouse. White and black, they paid their dues and they took their fun.
The two flights of stairs were longer than she was prepared for, and by the time she was in Room 323, she didn't have breath left to thank the man. Within the thick envelope of her bosom, her heart was pounding like an air-hammer. Without troubling to unpin her hat, she sank down on to the thin mattress of the iron bedstead and sat perfectly quiet until the battleship-grey walls of the room had stopped their sideways spinning.
It wasn't, Room 323, anything to write home about, but she wouldn't be needing it beyond eight, nine o'clock that night. Twelve hours, at the most.
It would have been nice now to take a hot shower, but she'd taken a room without bath. Just a sink in the one corner and the can across the hall. She was paying for the room out of her own pocket, and she wasn't about to spend a nickel more than she had to. Let Harry and the others ... (she had her own reasons for not naming, too precisely, those others to herself) ... let them throw away their money on booze and high living. You can't expect the young people to do anything else with it, after all. For her own part, she knew where her money was going. A perpetual plot with a Remembrance Beacon burning day and night. Because it didn't matter a jot nor a tittle if you had yourself the biggest splashiest funeral in town, with a handcarved Italian marble headstone to boot—if you didn't own the plot outright, it was all a vanity. Come ten, twenty years, they'd maybe dig you up again to make room for the next in line, and your last state would be no better than your first. There was a plot, she had seen it many times, at the edge of the coloured Baptist Cemetery in Nansemond County, such a plot...
Sighing—but only from the weariness of her bones; not, today at least, from resignation—she began unpinning her hat and taking out hairpins. The tight bun of her frizzled iron-grey hair loosened, and her whole aching body seemed to ease. Sweet Jesus, yes, that was better. Enough better that she was able to get over to the sink and wash her face and brush her teeth, which were full of the Planter's Peanuts she'd eaten all night on the bus. She lingered a moment before the fly-specked mirror admiringly. It was not her face, of course, for there wasn't much of that left to sing about, but her tooth, a single gold upper incisor, that she regarded. She remembered how, when she'd come home with that tooth, she'd bragged to May-belle that someday she'd have a whole head full of gold teeth. It certainly had seemed like it, in those days.
There are a lot of girls who, when they've got the money, can't think of ways to get rid of it fast enough. Though their boyfriends can, sure enough.
Not Bessy McKay, not her. She'd kept her money in a safe deposit box in the biggest old bank in Norfolk, right on through the war. Then, when the next boom came, in '48, she'd been ready for it. Her own house, McKay's, with a dozen of the prettiest black girls and high-yallers in the Confederate States of America. Clean, too. It was in the classic style, was McKay's, harkening back to the days before Prohibition, when Norfolk had been at its finest. Bessy's girls didn't have to go out hooking in hotel lobbies or honkytonks, no indeedy. And when there were conventions, they'd practically hold them in Bessy's house. Navy officers, college boys, policeman—you name it, they'd all paid their visits. Of course, she had had to move out of the centre of town in '50, everybody'd had to, but her second house, on the tidewater, was every bit as grand if not more so. And modern? Oh, very. And then ... well, it did say that the Lord would destroy the houses of the evil, though when it came to that she could have advised the Lord, if He'd have listened, of many houses eviller than hers...
And where had it all gone to, the money? All the time she'd had to work for it, she'd grudged every nickel, but when it started coming in from every side, she'd just stopped bothering. A little here and a little there: clothes, a treat for the girls, loans to friends who drifted out of sight or vanished into prison (Harry Dorman, that sonofabitch, still owed her five hundred, and be damn she'd get it back this time!). And liquor.
And liquor. She fumbled around in the carryall for the bottle, which was wrapped in the little calico dress, screwed off the cap and let a good, burning swig ride down, smoothing the flutters in her stomach. Then another, for luck. She was going to need it. How had she ever got caught up in this crazy scheme anyhow?
But the whiskey had the answer to that question ready to hand, and it came floating up before her, the image of it, like a bundle of helium balloons sailing past the delighted eyes of a child: the flower-decked cars; the richly crusted bronze casket; her own folded hands and sweetly smiling lips; the marble stone and the angel faces; the inscription, O Lord, I am not worthy!
Miss Godwin was sitting there as stiff as one of those Egyptian statues at the museum, arms and legs composed in neat right-angles, hands clenched about the little yellow handkerchief in her lap. Alice wondered if she knew yet that they were being kidnapped, for her anxious expression could have been just as much for Uncle Jason's sake as for their own. If she didn't know, would it be safe for Alice to tell her?
The best course, she decided, was to say nothing and watch the way they were driving very carefully so she would be able to retrace it, if need be. It was rather careless of her kidnappers, she thought, not to have blindfolded herself and Miss Godwin.
The limousine pulled into a huge municipal parking lot, half empty because of the weekend, and pulled up beside a copper-coloured Buick. The Negro chauffeur (except he probably wasn't really a chauffeur) got out and opened Alice's door.
'Can my governess come with me, please?' she asked of him, for she did feel a teensy bit uneasy.
'C'mon, kid.'
Miss Godwin leaned down and kissed Alice on the forehead.
'You had better do what he says, mademoiselle. Promise me you'll be brave.' Alice promised. While Miss Godwin pretended to wipe away an imaginary tear from the corner of Alice's eye, she handed her, without comment, the book of Just-So Stories that had been in her big canvas carryall. Alice had been intending to impress Miss Braggs with her first edition that morning. 'C'mon, kid.'
Miss Godwin pushed Alice out the door. Then, for the first time really, Alice was frightened. For the man in the driver's seat of the Buick had eyes as green as the pulp of a lime. It was Reverend Roland Scott. He smiled, acknowledging her recognition.
She wanted to scream, as she would have wanted to scream in a scary movie, but because there was nobody else screaming she found she could manage nothing more than a puppyish yelp. The Negro chauffeur lifted her up by her arms and placed her beside the dr
iver of the Buick. She managed to keep hold of the book. He slammed the Buick's door shut, then the back door of the limousine, and, getting in behind the wheel, he drove off into the flat, asphalt distance. Miss Godwin pressed her nose against the back window to wave good-bye.
The Buick followed after a few minutes. When it was turning from the parking lot into the street, not moving fast yet, Alice tried the handle of the door. It had been locked without her noticing, and there seemed to be no way to unlock it. She tried to wind the window down, but that wouldn't work.
The Reverend Roland Scott (except, of course, he probably wasn't any more Reverend than the Negro had been a chauffeur) laughed. Alice began to scream, more from anger than fear, and the Reverend Roland Scott cuffed her.
'That wasn't very nice,' she said.
'Don't scream.'
'You didn't have to hit me.'
'That wan't anything, kid. That was a lovepat. You behave now, or you will get hit.'
She began silently to cry. Tears dripped down on the frayed cover of Just-So Stories. Her kidnapper, as she might have expected, paid no attention. He was a heartless brute. They were leaving the waterfront district and entering an area of slums and cheap hotels, though not the worst slums certainly that Baltimore could offer.
'Am I kidnapped?' she asked, just to make sure.
'Uh-huh. Relax, kid. It ain't going to be as bad as all that.'
Taking his own advice, her kidnapper drew out a package of filter cigarettes from his shirt pocket (Alice noted the brand carefully), punched the car lighter, and, in a moment, lit up. 'Now,' he said, exhaling two thin jets of smoke from his nostrils. 'A little kidnapping doesn't have to be bad at all. If you behave. In no time at all you'll be back home again.'
'Oh, I'll behave,' Alice promised, crossing her fingers. 'Will I get back home today? You see, I have to meet a friend at the beach this afternoon.'
He chuckled. 'Not today exactly. But soon.'