Behind his bicycle he pulled a small wooden cart on three rubber wheels. In the cart was his dark blue suit coat, carefully folded and wrapped up in brown paper so as not to attract a speck of dust, and atop that package an equally carefully-wrapped little gift box done up in white paper with a gold-colored ribbon, which he’d wrapped himself. In it was his birthday present for Ava Gordon.
In the Union Station’s locker room where the Redcaps kept their uniforms under the tight supervision of Ol’ Crab, Curtis had taken a shower to remove the train grit and then dressed himself in the nice clothes he’d brought, the pressed dark blue trousers and freshly-starched white shirt and the new blue-and-white bowtie he’d bought on Thursday. His shoes were black and shiny, like himself. He had regarded his face in the big square mirror over the washbasin as he’d tied the bowtie—and thank goodness his neighbor Harmon Utley had helped him figure out the mechanics of this, because his mama had thrown up her hands at the intricacy and gone back to bed.
Curtis in the mirror had seen a young man fresh of twenty who was, in truth, not nearly as handsome as Rowdy Patterson but then again his face would not stop a clock like that of “Toothless” Bigjaw Coombs. He was on the average side, he figured, though it had been said he had large and luminous eyes and a nice smile. He had good teeth, again unlike the other fellow that had come to mind. Well, he was used to being average and what was so bad about that? His mama always said it was important to let your personality shine through your face, and then she said she could sometimes see his daddy in there looking back at her and that made her sad so she went back to bed again.
He had put small clips on his trouser legs so no cloth could be caught up in or dirtied by the bicycle chain. He pedalled smoothly onward. A blare of jazz music came at him like an assault from a club’s open doorway. Hot red and blue neon painted the street. He realized his heart was beating harder, not from the exertion of pedalling because that was no trouble, but from his anticipation of the evening. To be asked to go to Ava Gordon’s birthday party! And he’d thought she hardly knew he was alive, even though he slowed down every day as he passed her house after that one time she had been out walking and he had dared with a cold sweat on the back of his neck to pull up beside her, stop and say hello. He recalled that she’d been a little chilly at first, but then he’d told her his name and she’d gotten an interested look in her eyes and she’d said, Curtis Mayhew? I think I’ve heard of you. Are you somebody important? And he’d smiled and shrugged and said, No, I’m just me.
She was so pretty. So fresh-faced and she smelled pretty too, like cinnamon and cloves mixed together in a Mason jar and put out in a sunny place to warm up. And she wore pretty hats and he had never seen her without her white gloves, though really he hadn’t seen much of her since that one day, just glimpses of her through the wrought-iron gate as she sat on the front porch swing or at the little table in the garden drinking lemonade and talking with two other young ladies. But on that Wednesday morning as he’d been pedalling past she’d called to him from behind the gate because she must’ve been waiting for him, and it pleased him no end to realize that she had taken note of his morning passage, and right then and there she’d asked him to come to her birthday party starting at seven o’clock on Saturday night.
Sure I’ll be there, Ava. Wouldn’t miss it for the world!
And it was easy figuring out what to get her as a present, too. That first day of their meeting a yellow butterfly had flown around and around them like some kind of creature from an enchanted tale, as if encircling them with invisible cords to draw them closer and closer, and the butterfly had landed first on her hat and then on his shoulder and she had given a little laugh like the gurgling of the garden fountain when he’d said Oh me, who sent you to listen in on a private conversation? So it was an easy thing to figure out he needed to find some kind of butterfly brooch for her to wear, and after work on Thursday he had pedalled up and down the wide expanse of Canal Street searching the shops, at last finding at the Kress store a small yellow enamel butterfly pin with gold-colored rhinestones set in the wings, and that was just perfect. A little expensive, yes, but perfect.
He was nearing his turnoff onto Governor Nicholls Street, and maybe he had begun working the pedals a few ticks faster. When he took the turn to the left off Rampart he was nearly flying, and he had to dodge between two cars whose drivers both hit their horns with indignation. Then he was pedaling north toward his destination, on both sides of the street the larger houses and small farms of the Faubourg Treme gentry, all of them protected by brick walls or wrought-iron gates. Ava Gordon’s daddy owned two grocery stores in the district. Everybody knew that Mr. Gordon was a fair man when it came to prices on such staples as turnip greens, black-eyed peas and hog jowls. His business smarts had brought him up in the world, and so ahead Curtis saw the big black cars of other high-collared families pulling up to the Gordon manse; for an instant Curtis thought this part of the Treme world was too far above his head, but then again he had an invite directly from Ava so he pushed that little bit of unsurety down and got off his bicycle to unwrap his coat, shrug into it, remove the clips from his trouser legs and walk the last few yards like a gentleman should, pushing his bike ahead of him.
Purple, orange and green paper lanterns were strung above the garden and candles burned in lamps along the porch railing that went nearly all around the two-storied house, which itself seemed ablaze with light. At the open gate Curtis joined a group of young swells who were dressed to the nines. He didn’t recognize any of them. They were showing their engraved invitations to a butler in a tuxedo who stood beside the gate and then they were going in one-by-one. When Curtis reached the man, the butler looked at his bicycle as if it might be a big stinky catfish hauled out of the Mississippi mud.
“Invitation?” the butler asked, his thick white eyebrows rising toward the furrowed forehead.
“Uh…no suh, but I was invited by Miss Ava herself.”
“Name?”
“Curtis Mayhew.”
“Ah,” said the butler after a couple of seconds’ deliberation. “Go ’round to the kitchen entrance, please. That way.” He pointed a white-gloved finger toward a flagstone pathway that disappeared between some shrubbery. Then he turned his attention to the next two people coming in who already were pushing their invitations forward.
Kitchen entrance? Curtis wanted to ask, but the tide behind him was rising and shoving him on, so he guided his bicycle onto the path and went around toward the back of the house. Beyond the shrubbery there was another gate, also open, and he heard voices and young laughter and had the glimpse of other guests in a circular courtyard also lit up by the multi-colored paper lanterns, and there the light gleamed off the brass instruments of a band that was setting itself up on a bandstand festooned with purple and green ribbons and balloons. He was about to go onto the courtyard when a slim octaroon woman in a red dress came out of a door just short of the open gate; she wore a jewelled tiara in her hair, her makeup was perfect and her eyes seized upon first Curtis’s bicycle and then himself.
“Are you part of the entertainment?” she asked.
“Well…ma’am…I’m Curtis Mayhew. I was—”
“Leave your vehicle over there by that tree and go right in.” She motioned toward the door and swept past him leaving the scent of lemony perfume and a business attitude.
He parked his bike, removed the gift box from the cart, straightened his bowtie and smoothed the front of his shirt. Then he went through the door into a busy kitchen where the steam rose up from a multitude of pots on the mile-long stove and three male cooks were laboring while a rotund female wearing a white apron and a seagreen headwrap was watching over them and barking orders like a military sergeant. Instantly Curtis felt himself sweating and wilting in the barrage of noise and steam. The woman’s eyes went to him and her face scowled up as if he were the last thing in the world she wanted to be bothered with.
“Who’re you?” she asked.
“Curtis Mayhew.”
“Oh…you’re the…” She saw the gift box. “What’s that?”
“It’s my present for Miss Ava.”
“Wasn’t necessary,” she said. But she reached out and took it from him anyway. “I’ll see she gets it. Your table’s set up in the courtyard.” Some clatter or hiss or sizzle caught her attention. “Mister Rufus!” she growled. “Is that gonna be gumbo or dried-up mudbottom?”
“My table?” Curtis asked. “I don’t think I—”
“Listen here, sonny!” The woman looked as if she might advance on him like a battleship and run him under. “I don’t have time to be jawin’! Got sixty people soon gonna be hollerin’ for more gumbo, crawdads, fried chicken, and Eyetalian meatballs! Get on out!”
Curtis backed away. Something was mighty wrong but he couldn’t figure out what it was. The woman turned from him and Curtis saw her put the gift box with the butterfly brooch up on a high shelf out of the way of kitchen work. He was about to open his mouth again—though to say what he didn’t know—but he thought better of it and he reasoned he could settle this situation once he got onto the courtyard and found Ava. So he went, as behind him the woman began to tongue-lash one of the other cooks about letting the hush-puppies fry up too hard.
In the courtyard where the dandies and the damsels in their finery were assembling around tables that held platters of the food that was being prepared in the kitchen for their second and third go-rounds, Curtis saw first a dappled pony tied to a post with a purple ribbon wrapped around its neck. Then he laid eyes on the biggest birthday cake he’d ever seen in his life or ever thought could be made by human hands. The thing was three tall layers of purple and green icing, like a cathedral of cake, and arranged upon it were eighteen white candles, yet to be lighted. The cake was positioned on a platform in the center of several large metal buckets of ice bricks, and two servants in tuxedos were keeping it further cool and fly-free with big fans made of woven reeds. There was a crystal punchbowl with foamy green liquid in it, and another servant was filling crystal cups for the guests. The band was getting itself ready; on the front of the bass drum was printed the name The Vanguards. The drummer let loose a few beats on the snare and the bass, and the trumpet player licked his lips and wiped his mouthpiece with a handkerchief.
And there, between the band and the pony, was a small table with one chair behind it and two chairs before it. The table was covered with a white cloth. At the center of the table was a crystal ball, and a handprinted sign set up next to the ball said Have Your Fortune Told.
Was that for him? he wondered. What kind of craziness was this? A mistake had been made…wires crossed…something…
In a daze he crossed the courtyard toward the table. The guests who were busy eating and drinking and merrily prattling let him go through their groups as if he were a ghost at the party. He was nearly to the table when a face appeared before him. She was smiling, she was radiant in her gold-colored gown and her own jewelled tiara, and she was still so pretty.
“Hi, Curtis,” she said. “You’re all set up.”
“Hello,” he said. His mouth was very dry. He had to struggle to focus on her, because he could hear and feel a pulse beating in his head like its own bass drum. “Listen,” he said.
“Yes?” But she was already looking around, looking elsewhere, with places to go and guests to see, and though her eyes sparkled Curtis knew the sparkle was not for him.
“I think—”
“Oh, there’s Preston! Go on, Curtis, I bet you’ll have somebody real quick.”
She started to move away, and for a terrible instant he was paralyzed but he knew he could not sit at that table and pretend to do what that sign said he could do, not even to be at this birthday party for Ava Gordon, not with the dappled and ribboned pony and the Vanguards nearly ready to play and the ice-cooled cake that was impossible for human hands to bake.
“Miss Ava!” he said, and it came out nearly as a forlorn cry amid the happy voices.
When she turned back to him, she did not look to be so pretty after all.
“What is it?” she asked, and there something in her voice that stabbed him.
“I’m…not a fortune-teller. I mean to say…I think…you’ve got me mixed up with somebody else.” He stared at her as she gave him a slow blink, and she was still smiling but it was a mindless thing that had no meaning. “I don’t tell fortunes,” he said.
She just continued to smile vacantly at him.
“I don’t,” he repeated. “That’s not me.”
“Oh,” she said. The smile faded. She touched her throat with her slender fingers, as if she had swallowed something that did not taste good and maybe would not go down right. “Well…I thought…I mean, I heard…that you were sort of…you know…that you could tell things about people.”
“No, miss. I’m just ordinary Curtis.”
“Oh.” When she said that again, there was a finality to the expression. Her eyes had seemed to go darker though they were already midnight black, but for sure their sparkle had gone. “All right then,” she said, and she looked quickly to her left at a young man approaching her and she switched her smile back on like an electric light. “Preston, I’m so glad you got here, we’re about to start the dance!” She touched his shoulder and he put his hand on her shoulder and then they whirled away from Curtis as if they had been hoovered into the throng. He was left staring at the turbulent air where they had been, and the guests moved back and forth in his vision like shadows of shadows.
How long he stood there being jostled by laughing strangers who gave him not a glance, he did not know. He did know that he was not a part of this party, and no part of him would ever be. Suddenly the band gave an explosive warm-up noise and a long-limbed leader in a silver-spangled suit and Brilliantined hair stepped forward, lifted a megaphone to his mouth and said he wanted to lead the group in singing Happy Birthday to that gracious and beautiful Miss Ava Gordon, the suggestion of which raised a whoop and holler from the swells.
Before they could start the song, a hand clasped Curtis’s left arm just above the elbow and there stood the severe-looking butler from the front gate. “I am instructed,” he said as the bandleader counted to three with his baton, “to return you to the kitchen.”
Curtis walked ahead of the man as the first brass notes from the Vanguards rang out and the voices—most of them unable to carry a tune in a gold-plated spitoon—reared up to frighten the overhanging oaks, which in the colored lantern light appeared to Curtis to have been recoiling from the Gordon manse for a number of years.
He was left in the kitchen to the mercy of the female battleship, who was still firing her guns at the hapless and harried cooks over the pots of steaming misery. A few words had been passed between her and Curtis’s escort but she’d given Curtis not a glance. Now, as Curtis stood there both dumbly and numbly not knowing which way to move, the woman’s gaze settled on him like an anvil and she asked, “You want your present back, sonny?”
“No,” he mumbled, and instantly corrected himself with a stronger voice: “No, ma’am.”
She gave no reply. She walked up and down the line of pots to check their progress, and then she regarded Curtis again and hooked a finger at him. “Come on back here and get a piece a’ birthday cake,” she said.
He crossed the checkerboard-tiled floor to a little square table the woman led him to, and she motioned for him to sit at one of the cane-backed chairs. In another moment she placed before him a yellow saucer bearing a piece of snow-white cake adorned with the purple and green icing. A cup of the green-colored punch cooled with an ice cube followed it. Curtis took the fork she offered. She stood close to him, smelling of all the kitchen odors of gumbo, crawdads, fried chicken, Italian meatballs and hush-puppies her coalblack flesh had absorbed.
“This is from the first cake we made this mornin’,” she said, to a question he had considering asking. “Thing collapsed and sat there lookin’
fatter’n a cow turd after a summer rain. In a manner of speakin’, I mean. So this one’s for the help.”
He thanked her and began to eat, but he couldn’t taste very much other than sweet velvet on the tongue.
“Mayhew,” the woman said. “I knew a Mayhew one time. Name of Joe.”
“That’s my daddy.”
“Ohhhhhh, is that right? You don’t look none like him, though. Your mama ever feed you, boy? There’s slim, skinny, and frail, and you is south of those.”
“I take after my mama.”
“I recall Joe was a big fella. Mighty big ’round the shoulders and had that big barn of a back. Oh yeah, I ’member him. I used to work at the Cotton Ball down near the docks on Harmony Street. Place burned down, long gone. But I recall them wild niggers comin’ in there after daylong movin’ that freight, and how they laughed and hollered and raised such a ruckus. Your daddy was one of ’em.”
“I didn’t know him too well,” said Curtis, as he worked on turning the cake into crumbs.
“Hm,” she said. “Bad thing that happened to him. Pitiful.”
“This is good cake,” said Curtis. He took a long drink of the punch, which tasted like sugary lime juice with a little fizzy soda water in it. “That’s good too,” he added.
“Yep,” said the woman, and whether she was replying to her own statement about the fate of Joe Mayhew or to Curtis’s compliments he didn’t know. She stood there for another moment, watching him eat but with eyes that had turned maybe to another time and another place. Then she said, “See yourself out when you’re done. And tell your mama to put some pole beans and corn bread in your belly ’fore a stiff wind blows you away.” With that, she was done with him and she returned to the labors of the kitchen. And Curtis figured she probably ran the house too; he could feel it poised heavily over his head, and it was not a place he wanted to linger in very much longer.
The Listener Page 10
