by Ann Petry
And she began thinking about him. “All you gotta do is be nice to me, baby.” She hadn’t done or said anything that would indicate that she had no intention of being “nice” to him. It must have been something else that had made him lose interest in her so quickly.
She tried to remember all the things he had said to her to find some clue that would explain his indifference. For he had been indifferent, she decided. He had sat there at the table tonight, making no effort to talk, absorbed in his own thoughts, and even when he had talked to her he had looked at her impersonally as though she were a stranger in whom he didn’t have even a passing interest.
“I could fall in love with you easy, baby.” He had said that just last night. And that first night she had met him, “The only thing I’m interested in is you.”
When he drove her home last night, he had scarcely spoken. He had made no effort to touch her. She sought a reason and remembered that he had fallen silent after the bouncer at the Casino told him Junto wanted to see him.
She walked a little faster. If Junto owned the Casino, then Boots worked for him. Even so, what could Junto have said to him that would make him lose his obvious desire for her so abruptly? It must have been something else that disturbed him, she decided. Perhaps it had something to do with his not being in the army, for she remembered how he couldn’t conceal his annoyance when she persisted in asking him why he hadn’t been drafted.
It didn’t matter anyway. Perhaps it was just as well the thing had ended like this. At least she no longer had to duck and dodge away from his brutal hands. Even if she had been hired at a fat weekly salary, his complete lack of scruple might have been something she couldn’t have coped with.
She pushed open the door of the apartment house where she lived. The hall was quiet. There was no movement in the pool of shadow that almost obliterated the cellar door. And she wondered if every time she entered the hall, she would inevitably seek to locate the tall, gaunt figure of the Super.
The cracked tile of the floor was grimy. The snow that had been tracked in from the street during the morning had melted and mixed with the soot and dust on the floor. She looked at the dark brown varnish on the doors, the dim light that came from the streaked light fixture overhead, the tarnished mail boxes, the thin, worn stair treads. And she thought time had a way of transforming things.
Only a few hours had elapsed since she stood in this same doorway, completely unaware of the dim light, the faded, dreary paint, the filth on the floor. She had looked down the length of this hall and seen Bub growing up in some airy, sunny house and herself free from worry about money. She had been able to picture him coming home from school to snacks of cookies and milk and bringing other kids with him; and then playing somewhere near-by, and all she had to do was look out of the window and see him because she was home every day when he arrived. And time and Boots Smith and Junto had pushed her right back in here, deftly removing that obscuring cloud of dreams, so that now tonight she could see this hall in reality.
She started up the stairs. They went up and up ahead of her. They were steeper than she remembered them. And she thought vaguely of all the feet that had passed over them in order to wear the treads down like this—young feet and old feet; feet tired from work; feet that skipped up them because some dream made them less than nothing to climb; feet that moved reluctantly because some tragedy slowed them up.
Her legs were too tired to move quickly, so that her own feet refused to move at their usual swift pace. She became uneasily conscious of the closeness of the walls. The hall was only a narrow passageway between them. The walls were very thin, too, for she could hear the conversations going on behind the closed doors on each floor.
Radios were playing on the third and fourth floors. She tried to walk faster to get away from the medley of sound, but her legs refused to respond to her urging. “Buy Shirley Soap and Keep Beautiful” was blared out by an announcer’s voice. The sounds were confusing. Someone had tuned in the station that played swing records all night, and she heard, “Now we have the master of the trumpet in Rock, Raleigh, Rock.”
That mingled with the sounds of a revival church which was broadcasting a service designed to redeem lost souls: “This is the way, sisters and brothers. This is the answer. Come all of you now before it’s too late. This is the way.” As she walked along, she heard the congregation roar, “Preach it, brother, preach it.” Suddenly a woman cried loud above the other sounds, “Lord Jesus is a-comin’ now.”
The congregation clapped their hands in rhythm. It came in clear over the radio. And the sound mingled with the high sweetness of the trumpet playing “Rock, Raleigh, Rock,” and the soap program joined in with the plunking of a steel guitar, “If you wanta be beautiful use Shirley Soap.”
A fight started on the third floor. Its angry violence echoed up the stairs, mingling with the voices on the radio. The conversations that were going on behind the closed doors that lined the hall suddenly ceased. The whole house listened to the progress of the fight.
And Lutie thought, The whole house knows, just as I do, that Bill Smith, who never works, has come home drunk again and is beating up his wife. Living here is like living in a structure that has a roof, but no partitions, so that privacy is destroyed, and even the sound of one’s breathing becomes a known, familiar thing to each and every tenant.
She sighed with relief when she reached the fifth floor. The stairs had seemed like a high, ever-ascending mountain because she was so tired. And then she thought, No, that wasn’t quite true, because the way she felt at this moment was the way a fighter feels after he’s been knocked down hard twice in succession, given no time to recover from the first smashing blow before the second one slams him back down again.
And the second blow makes him feel as though he were dying. His wind is gone. His heart hurts when it beats, and it goes too fast, so that a pain stays in his chest. The air going in and out of his lungs adds to the pain. Blood pounds in his head, so that it feels dull, heavy. All he wants to do is crawl out of sight and lie down, not moving, not thinking. She knew how he would feel, because that about summed up what had happened to her, except that she had received, not two blows, but a whole series of them.
Then she saw with surprise that there was a light under her door and she stopped thinking about how she felt. “Why isn’t he asleep?” she said, aloud.
But Bub was asleep, so sound asleep that he didn’t stir when she entered the room. He is afraid here alone, she thought, looking down at him. He was sprawled in the center of the studio couch, his legs and arms flung wide apart. The lamp on the table was shining directly in his face.
Each time she had come home from the Casino, he had been sleeping with the light on. Yes, he was definitely afraid. Well, she wouldn’t be going out any more at night, leaving him alone. She switched the light off, thinking that it would be years now before he had a bedroom of his own. It was highly doubtful that he would ever have one, and there was still the problem of his having no place to go after school.
After she undressed and got into bed, she lay staring up at the ceiling for a long time. She thought of Junto, who could so casually, so lightly, perhaps at a mere whim, and not even aware of what he was doing, thrust her back into this place, and of Boots Smith, who might or might not have been telling the truth, who might for purposes of his own have decided that she wasn’t to be paid for singing. And a bitter, angry feeling spread all through her, hardening and congealing.
She was stuck here on this street, in this dark, dirty house. It was going to take a long time to get out. She thought of the Chandlers and their friends in Lyme. They were right about people being able to make money, but it took hard, grinding work to do it—hard work and self-sacrifice. She was capable of both, she concluded. Furthermore, she would never permit herself to become resigned to living here. She had a sudden vivid recollection of the tragic, resigned faces of the young girl
s and the old man she had seen in the spring. No. She would never become like that.
Her thoughts returned to Junto, and the bitterness and the hardness increased. In every direction, anywhere one turned, there was always the implacable figure of a white man blocking the way, so that it was impossible to escape. If she needed anything to spur her on, she thought, this fierce hatred, this deep contempt, for white people would do it. She would never forget Junto. She would keep her hatred of him alive. She would feed it as though it were a fire.
Bub woke up before she did. He had put the water for the oatmeal on to boil when she came into the kitchen.
She kissed him lightly. “You go get dressed while I fix breakfast.”
“Okay.”
And then she remembered the light shining on his face while he was asleep. “Bub,” she said sternly, “you’ve got to stop going to sleep with the light on.”
He looked sheepish. “I fell asleep and forgot it.”
“That’s not true,” she said sharply. “I turned it out when I left. If you’re scared of the dark, you’ll just have to go to sleep while I’m here, so you won’t be afraid, because this way the bill will be so big I’ll never be able to pay it. Furthermore, I don’t like lies. I’ve told you that over and over again.”
“Yes, Mom,” he said meekly. He started to tell her just what it was like to be alone in the dark. But her face was shut tight with anger and her voice was so hard and cold that he decided he’d better wait until some other time.
It seemed to him that all that week she talked to him about money. She was impatient, she rarely smiled, and she only half-heard him when he talked to her. Every night after dinner she bent over a pile of books placed on the card table and stayed there silent, intent, writing down queer curves and hooks over and over until she went to bed. He decided he must have done something to displease her and he asked her about it.
“Mom, you mad at me?”
They were eating supper. Lutie was startled by his question. “Why, of course not. What made you think I was?”
“You sort of acted like it.”
“No, I’m not mad at you. I couldn’t be.”
“What’s the matter, Mom?”
She framed her answer carefully, trying not to let the hard, cold anger in her color her reply. She frowned, because her only explanation would have to be that they needed to save more than they were doing. “I’ve been worried about us,” she said. “We seem to spend so much money. I’m not able to save very much. And we have to save, Bub,” she said earnestly, “so that we won’t always have to live here.”
During the next week she made a conscious effort to stop talking to Bub about money. Yet some reference to it inevitably crept into her conversation. If she found two lights burning in the living room, she found herself turning one of them out, saying, “We’ve got to watch the bill.”
When she was mending his socks, she caught herself delivering a lecture about being careful and watching out for nails and splinters that might snag them. “They have to last a long time and new ones cost money.”
If he left a cake of soap soaking in the bowl in the bathroom, she pointed out how it wasted the soap and that little careless things ate into their meager budget. When she went to bed, she scolded herself roundly because it wasn’t right to be always harping on the cost of living to Bub. On the other hand, if they didn’t manage to save faster than she had been able to do so far, it would be months before they could move and moving was uppermost in her thoughts. So the next day she explained to him why it was necessary to move, and that they had to be careful with money if they were going to do it soon.
Her days were spent in working and at night she cooked dinner, washed and ironed clothes, studied. She found that, in spite of her resolve never again to dream about some easier and more remunerative way of earning a living, and in spite of her determination to put all thought of singing out of her mind, she couldn’t control a faint regret that assailed her when she least expected it.
Coming home on the subway one night, she picked up a Negro newspaper that had been discarded by a more affluent passenger. And because of her reluctance to give up the idea of singing, it seemed to her that an advertisement leaped at her from the theatrical pages: “Singers Needed Now for Broadway Shows. Nightclub Engagements. Let Us Train You for High-Paying Jobs.”
She tore it out and put it in her pocketbook, thinking cautiously that it was at least worth investigating, but not permitting herself to build any hopes on it.
The next night after work she went to the Crosse School for Singers. It was on the tenth floor of a Forty-Second Street office building. Going up in the elevator, she somehow couldn’t prevent the faint stirring of hope, the beginnings of expectancy.
A brassy haired blonde was the sole occupant of the small waiting room. She looked up from the book she was reading when Lutie opened the door.
Lutie produced the advertisement from her purse. “I came for an audition.”
“Have a seat. Mr. Crosse will see you in a minute.”
A buzzer sounded, and the girl stopped reading to say, “Mr. Crosse’ll see you now. It’s that door to the left. Just walk right in.”
Lutie opened the door. The walls of the room inside were covered with glossy photographs of smiling men and women clad in evening clothes. A hasty glance revealed that all the pictures were warmly inscribed to “dear Mr. Crosse.”
She walked toward a desk at the end of the room. It was a large flat-topped desk and Mr. Crosse had his feet on top of it. As she drew closer to him, she saw that the desk was littered with newspaper clippings, photographs, old magazines, even piles of phonograph records, and two scrapbooks whose contents made the covers bulge. A box of cigars, an ash tray that hadn’t been emptied for weeks from the accumulation of soggy cigar butts in it, and an old-fashioned inkwell, its sides well splashed with ink, were right near his feet. A row of dark green filing cabinets stood against the wall behind the desk.
She was quite close to the desk before she was able to see what the man sitting behind it looked like, for his feet obstructed her view. He was so fat that he appeared to be bursting out of his clothes. His vest gaped with the strain of the rolls of fat on his abdomen. Other rolls of fat completely obliterated his jaw line. He was chewing an unlit cigar, and he rolled it to one side of his mouth. “Hello,” he said, not moving his feet.
“I came for an audition,” Lutie explained.
“Sure. Sure. What kind of singing you do?” He took the cigar out of his mouth.
“Nightclub,” she said briefly, not liking him, not liking the fact that the end of the cigar he was holding in his hand had been chewed until it was a soggy, shredding mass of tobacco, and that the room was filled with the rank smell of it.
“Okay. Okay. We’ll try you out. Come on in here.”
One of the doors of his office led to a slightly larger room. She stood in front of a microphone on a raised platform facing the door. A bored, too thin man accompanied her at the piano. He smoked while he played, moving his head occasionally to get the smoke out of his eyes. His hands were limp and flat as they touched the keys. Mr. Crosse sat in the back of the room and apparently went to sleep.
At the end of her first song, he opened his eyes. “Okay, okay,” he said. “We’ll go back to the office now.”
He lowered his bulk into the swivel chair behind his desk, put his feet up. “Sit down,” he said, indicating a chair near the desk. “You’ve got a good voice. Very good voice,” he said. “I can practically guarantee you a job. About seventy-five dollars a week.”
“What’s the catch in it?” she asked.
“There’s no catch,” he said defensively. “Been in business here for twenty years. Absolutely no catch. Matter of fact, I don’t usually listen to the singers myself. But just from looking at you I thought, That girl is good. Got a good voice. So I decid
ed to audition you myself.” He put the cigar in his mouth and chewed it vigorously.
“When do I start working at this seventy-five dollar a week job?” she asked sarcastically.
“About six weeks. You need some training. Things like timing and how to put a song over. Called showmanship. We teach you that. Then we find you a job and act as your agent. We get ten per cent of what you make. Regular agents’ fee.”
“What does the training cost?”
“Hundred and twenty-five dollars.”
She got up from the chair. One hundred and twenty-five dollars. She wanted to laugh. It might as well be one thousand and twenty-five dollars. One was just as easy to get as the other.
“I’m sorry to have taken your time. It’s out of the question.”
“They all say that,” he said. “All of ’em. It sounds out of the question because most people really don’t have what it takes to be singers. They don’t want it bad enough. They see somebody earning hundreds a week and they never stop to think that person made a lot of sacrifices to get there.”
“I know all that. In my case it’s impossible.”
“You don’t have to pay it all at once. We arrange for down payments and so much a week in special cases. Makes it easier that way.”
“You don’t understand. I just don’t have the money,” she turned away, started past his desk.
“Wait a minute.” He put his feet on the floor, got up from the swivel chair and laid a fat hand on her arm.
She looked down at his hand. The skin was the color of the underside of a fish—a grayish white. There were long black hairs on the back of it—even on the fingers. It was a boneless hand, thick-covered with fat. She drew her arm away. He was so saturated with the smell of tobacco that it seeped from his skin, his clothing. The cigar in his flabby fingers was rank, strong. Seen close to, the sodden mass of tobacco where he had chewed the end of it sent a quiver of revulsion through her.
“You know a good-looking girl like you shouldn’t have to worry about money,” he said softly. She didn’t say anything and he continued, “In fact, if you and me can get together a coupla nights a week in Harlem, those lessons won’t cost you a cent. No sir, not a cent.”
