In the Night Café

by Joyce Johnson

  Then a letter came from Caroline telling him they’d had a son. Mexico was just too hard, she wrote. “It isn’t a life that makes sense for me with a baby. It doesn’t even make sense for you anymore, and you know it.” “And I did know it,” he said, “but Palm Beach was no answer.” Caroline’s father adored his grandson; he’d finally even forgiven her for running off to New York and Mexico and marrying an artist. He’d offered to pay for everything, to buy them a beautiful old house—there was a room on the second floor that had windows on three sides, perfect for a studio.

  Tom knew it was the wrong move, but he joined her. He figured he owed his kid a good start in life—a childhood better than the one he’d had. He’d packed up all the paintings he’d done—the early figurative stuff influenced by Marsh and Rivera and the work he’d done since he’d broken away, all the abstractions. They owned so little there was hardly anything else to take. “I think I had two pairs of socks, but who needed socks?”

  He used to tell me it was Mexico that taught him black, white and red. “Mexico taught me that.”

  Tom said Caroline’s father was a man who always got what he wanted. None of his children ever got away from him. Caroline had been the only one who’d tried. “The old man crushed them with his money.” I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to be crushed by money. Caroline’s father had bought half a county of worthless swampland in southern Florida, sold it all off acre by acre, got taken to court by some investors and paid off the judge. To a man like that, seven hundred dollars for a painting was laughable, it was nothing.

  Harry Theodore Vincent. Harry T., you called him. He’d wanted to set you up in the construction business. Then he’d offered to buy you a partnership in an architectural firm, something more artistic. He was going to confer on you a future of designing lobbies for hotels. I heard his voice once on the phone, rough and not so aristocratic—“Listen, Miss Whoeveryouare. I’d like to speak to my daughter’s husband.”

  You made me think of him in sinister pastels. A large, pinkskinned man with pure white hair who always carried a fresh, green five-hundred-dollar bill folded up small in his watch pocket—“For life’s little emergencies, Tommy.” Harry T. was from Alabama, from some tobacco farm, as I recall it—but he wore his pale blue suits like a senator, had them custom-made by Tripler’s in New York. He liked to go into restaurants and order oysters, and when the oysters came, he’d put on his pink-rimmed glasses and bring the plate almost up to his eyeballs while his wife and daughters watched breathlessly. “They all right, Mr. Vincent?” the waiter would ask. “They don’t look fresh to me,” Harry T. would be apt to say sternly and send them back.

  “I never eat oysters,” you told me.

  Strawberries—that was the other thing you would never eat because of years of Sunday dinners at Harry T.’s. When strawberries were in season, there was always shortcake, Harry T.’s boyhood favorite, and Harry T. would make a production of smacking his lips over the berries, and you’d see the sweet red juice on his lips and ask the maid to bring you another drink. “Watch out for that booze, boy,” Harry T. would say, his eyes twinkling. He’d made his first killing back in the twenties running rum from the Bahamas. He was a man who knew a thing or two about thirst.

  You told him once you thought your father might have been involved in New York in that line of work. He’d put his arm around you—“You and me, Tom, we’re both upstarts.” And you’d had tears in your eyes. You were taken in, at that moment, totally. Family was what you always craved and never got.

  I’d leave you each Sunday and take the F train to Forest Hills. I had sad little Sunday dinners of my own. I’d walk along Queens Boulevard from the station and when I could afford it, I’d buy my mother lilacs from Spyros the Greek because she was crazy about flowers but never bought them for herself unless company was coming and company never came. Even when my father was alive, she’d never had people over.

  When I was little I’d picked bouquets for her—dandelions and clover—she’d never told me they were weeds. Everything I did then was wonderful. If I wrote a patriotic poem about the war effort, I was going to be another Emma Lazarus. If I whirled on the red oriental rug to the music from the radio, I was going to be Pavlova. Daddy’s heart kept him home from the war—he’d tiptoe in and take a picture. My aunts kept scrapbooks of my achievements. They typed up my clever sayings and showed them to their friends. It was a cult of The Child, and if I’d died at the age of twelve, it never would have ended.

  My mother felt my wonderfulness should be offered to the world. So Daddy took lots of pictures of me in his store in front of the same velvet curtains where little boys sat for blue-suit barmitzvah portraits or war brides corsaged with gardenias posed with their soldier grooms. I’d lean upon an imitation alabaster column and Daddy would bring a braid of hair forward and brush at my bangs and arrange my hand so that it supported my cheek. “Look wistful,” he’d say. Or “Look as if someone just gave you a wonderful present.” He’d fuss with his lights and I’d work on my wistfulness or my joy, telling myself, Don’t blink, don’t blink, so I wouldn’t at the wrong moment. I knew the whole future of the family depended on getting the right shots—on me, though I couldn’t have said why.

  Daddy made shiny prints of me in four different poses, and Ma and I began taking the subway to Forty-second Street and Broadway all the time and sitting around in office after office because show business mostly had to do with sitting around, like waiting to see the doctor. Now and then you’d finally get a minute with a jaded producer—some old man in a striped suit. “Too tall… too short… too young … too old,” the producers used to tell us, hardly looking.

  “Not Swedish enough, sweetheart.”

  “What do you mean, not Swedish enough?” my mother demanded indignantly, mortifying me by holding up one of my blond braids.

  “I don’t see Swedish. Okay?”

  “Ma, let’s go!” I whispered.

  But Ma had iron in her that day. The part called for a blond eight-year-old girl. Well, her daughter was blond and eight, she said—shocking me because I was really nine. My mother said Fair was fair. That was how little she knew about show business. She said nothing would make her walk out of there until the man had seen for himself what a beautiful talent I had. And she straightened the red Woolworth’s bows at the ends of my braids and said, “Don’t let anyone scare you. Show him what you can do.”

  Someone finally put a script in my hands, all typed up on onionskin. It was about a Minnesota farm family whose entire wheat crop had been eaten by locusts and I had to be a little girl dying of scarlet fever in fifteen lines. The first words came out with a squeak, but then my mother’s will got into me, and I read, hardly hearing what I was reading. Maybe it was fear that carried me out of myself, fear of revealing myself as just a nine-year-old little Jewish girl and not being as wonderful as my mother said. I was all mixed up about the lies you had to tell the men in offices, whether such lies counted as real ones or not. I never knew whether it was me who’d landed that part or Ma.

  I met a great actress once, and I asked her, “Did you always know you could do it?” And she said, “I just knew I could execute an intention.” But all the years I was acting or making the rounds trying to get parts, I never had that feeling, not even the eighteen months I played that little Swedish Minnesota girl on Broadway. It was the lights I liked that bathed you and got inside you somehow, and the stage was a clearing in the forest at night and the audience, dark, rustling like trees. And I liked staying up long past my bedtime and eating dinners in the Automat with all my matinee makeup on and the Great White Way that wasn’t white but brown because of the war and the theaters jammed with young servicemen on furlough who’d been given free seats, so even acting was patriotic. I used to tell my mother I was going to marry a sailor.

  You and I once figured out that at least a night or two you were on furlough somewhere in thos
e crowds around Times Square. You’d have been looking for a girl, a grown-up girl of course, not one in pigtails. We used to speculate on the chances we’d actually walked right by each other. “I’d have noticed you, babe,” you said. You said there should have been a voice that said, “Stop right here,” so we could have promised to wait for each other another seventeen years.

  I think I might have been ready even then for a promise like that. It was me my mom and dad both seemed crazy about instead of each other. Maybe that made me lonely from the start.

  Daddy always rinsed out his own coffee cup in the sink and came and went in our house like a shadow. He’d smoke one cigarette, put the ashes quickly in the garbage, then he’d be gone leaving no traces. He wasn’t supposed to smoke at all because of his heart. He spent half his life in his darkroom and his hands were always peeling from the chemicals. I loved to run down-stairs to his store. I’d say, “Let me see the negatives, Daddy.” Because it seemed quite wonderful to me that dark could be light and light could be dark, as if a world of night existed where everything was in reverse.

  Daddy could turn old brown-and-white photos of dead people into pale, almost flesh-toned ones by tinting them with a fine brush, but he never let me watch him do that because it made him too nervous. Every now and then he’d put a Closed sign on his door and disappear for most of an afternoon, and if we’d ask him where he’d been, he’d say, irritatedly, “Just experimenting, just experimenting.” Once he called my mother and me downstairs to the store and showed us his latest “experiments”—photos of the most ordinary things, the Italian vegetable stand around the corner, old ladies gabbing on a stoop, a boarded-up doorway with a colored boy leaning against it. “But Jules, these are so ugly!” my mother exclaimed.

  My mother loved beauty, she wanted to be around it all the time. That was why she’d set her heart on having me on the stage, so we could always have beauty together. She’d never been able to find it on Queens Boulevard. She never spoke against my father, she just said, “I hope you never throw yourself away on anyone.” So naturally, later, I threw myself away as much as I could and never quite got myself back.

  You used to tell me I blamed my mother too much. Other kids didn’t have mothers who wanted the best for them. “Look at me,” you’d say. “You could have had someone like Marie.”

  I’d say, “Okay. But my mother went to extremes.” I just couldn’t let go of the argument.

  “So the theater—all of that—it never should have happened?”

  “I loved the theater. But it was wrong. It wasn’t the best start.”

  Then you’d ask me, “What would have been right? Who’s got the answer to that one?”

  “You know where I was when I first knew I was going to paint?”

  I said, “Where?”

  “Right here. Right here on the Bowery.”

  “On this street?” It was one of those days we were searching for lofts. We’d gotten down as far as Rivington.

  Tom took a look around, then said, “Yeah. It could have been. That’s what I’m trying to figure out. Without the el, it’s all different.”

  “What were you doing on the Bowery by yourself?”

  “I had important business. I was looking for something that belonged to me. You think you were the only little kid with business? I used to get down here from the Bronx on the el, sneak under the turnstiles. I never had the nickel.”

  He asked me if I remembered how the el had cast a great shadow all along its route, how the tracks had been held up in some places by walls of blackened stones and how the trains had run at exactly the level of the third stories of houses, so you’d find yourself looking into hundreds of rooms.

  He used to keep running away on the el, usually to his grandmother. She’d let him stay with her until the truant officers came around uptown and bothered Marie. His grandmother had a room on Forty-seventh Street where even the bed was covered with feathers and veils that she sewed on hats for people. She had a huge orange cat, Bobbie, that slept all the time on the windowsill. Sometimes she’d stay drunk for days and forget to buy food and he’d even have to help her get out of her corset. “She and I just took care of each other,” he said. One time she told some rich woman she made hats and that she had her grandson with her, and the woman had given her a little child’s ring with a bird carved into it. “It was supposed to be the Bluebird of Happiness,” he said, “and I damn near believed it was.”

  Marie said the ring was real silver and took it away to keep for him. She said he’d only lose it. He kept asking for it back, and finally she told him she’d hocked it for two dollars. She wouldn’t tell him where the pawnshop was, but he’d seen lots of them under the el along the Bowery. He made up his mind to find that ring and steal it back, even if he went to jail.

  For weeks he went down there, searching the windows of the pawnshops, staring through the iron gratings at watches and knives and musical instruments. “Finally I knew,” he said. “I wasn’t going to see that little bluebird ring. I never believed there was such a thing as Never before that. I stood on a corner and I looked over at the el—the dark, awful stones of the el. That’s what Never looked like to me.

  “I think it was September,” he said, “and very, very late in the afternoon, and suddenly the stones changed, they turned red as if they were burning deep inside, and light was falling—falling through the tracks—down onto the street in shafts. The el wasn’t beautiful, but it was beautiful. I saw something that day,” he said. “You understand?”

  “I have to buy me some paint, kiddo,” he told me one morning, looking embarrassed. I lent him fifteen dollars. “As soon as I get my hands on some dough, you’re getting it back.”

  I had to go to a job that day. When I came home, there was canvas tacked to the wall opposite the bed and he was priming it with gesso. Now and then he’d step aside and give it that quick, sizing-up stare of his as if something that wasn’t on there yet had flashed out at him. He seemed like a dancer, so quick and light on his feet with the can of gesso in the crook of his arm and the big brush in his hand that he’d brought all the way from Florida. I couldn’t take my eyes off him. I forgot to start dinner or put the groceries away. The truth was, the sight was almost painful because it reminded me I hadn’t found my own work yet. I still hadn’t entirely given up on the theater.

  The gesso had to dry overnight, he said.

  He got up so early the next morning, I was still half asleep. I heard the shade go up, then knew he was moving in and out of the room. He came over to the bed and touched my hair. He said, “Stay there, kiddo.”

  The paint hit the canvas with a sound like rain.

  9

  IN THOSE DAYS, I was a crackerjack typist—one hundred w.p.m. I typed envelopes, theses, just about everything. I’d stick cards up all over the Village: Speed-of-light satisfaction. No job too big or too small. If I ran out of clients, I’d be a Kelly Girl and go around to various offices. I didn’t mind that too much because it was interesting to work in different parts of the city. I’d eat a tunafish sandwich at my desk and walk around on my lunch hour, learning about places like Varick Street and Coenties Slip. I could usually type faster than any of the other secretaries and sometimes they’d ask me to stay on permanently. I’d say, No, I didn’t want a regular job. It was because of the acting—I always had to leave an opening for it—but also I was afraid, afraid offices would get me and I wouldn’t be free anymore. I’d somehow be stuck in a role I’d never meant to choose, an office girl who wore nylons all through the hot weather and a dictation pad on her knee, when I wanted so much more for myself, when my real life hadn’t even started. As a Kelly Girl I saw things I didn’t like in other people’s offices—tyrannies, cruelties—but the beauty of being a Kelly Girl was that none of that had to do with me. I could walk out and go to acting class, hang out with artists at the Cedar. I could tell Kelly Girls to send me
to a different job. I was temporary, I had no stake in any office.

  Now and then on my lunch-hour walks, I’d see something that would make me want to take a picture of it—a mirror high up on a blue-tiled wall that had once been part of someone’s bathroom, a high-heeled red satin shoe smashed onto the cobblestones of Canal Street—ghosts that somehow seemed full of meaning I couldn’t have expressed in words. I was always a little surprised by such moments. I liked to think my father had looked out for such things on those afternoons he closed the store. In acting class, it was always someone else’s thoughts, someone else’s imagination, you had to make real, make your own. Something in me resisted that. I often felt I was only acting as if I were acting. I was getting very tired of as-ifness.

  My mother still bought copies of Show Business every week. She followed the theater the way gamblers followed the racetrack. If she happened to see a casting notice that read: Blonde, 5’3”-ish, 20-30, I’d hear from her immediately. My phone would ring and she’d say excitedly, “Now I want you to take this down.” It gave her enormous satisfaction to think I’d probably never hear of these wonderful opportunities if it wasn’t for her.

  One night she called and got Tom. “That was a man,” she said disapprovingly.

  “True enough,” I said. “I’ll bring him over sometime. You’ll meet him.”

  “Well, please don’t get yourself all involved.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said. I had a policy of making light of my involvements.

  My mother’s explanations for my lack of success in the theater changed from month to month. I didn’t have the right clothes, the right hair, know the right people; I was too retiring in my personality to put myself forward. All these failings in her view were correctable. She would gladly bend the world for me. All I had to do was put myself back in her hands. Our old partnership was what she missed, even the hardships she still complained about—how she’d had to collect me right after school and take me to dance lessons, drama lessons, voice lessons, theaters, rehearsals, casting calls. “It was terrible,” she’d say. “I was never home. We were always going, going. I should have had my head examined.”