I LOVE YOU MAGGIE
Phillip Good
75,500 words
I Love You Maggie Copyright © 2008 by Phillip Good
Cover photo by Dorothy LaGrandeur
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part without permission. The original purchaser may print a single copy for personal use.
To obtain permissions, contact support@zanybooks.com
This book is a work of fiction and any resemblances to persons, living or dead, places, events, or locales is purely coincidental. They are productions of the author’s imagination and used fictitiously.
The fictitious characters occasionally quote without attribution from John Brown’s Body by Steven Vincent Benet.
Chapters 4 and 29 appeared previously in
Muscadine Lines: An Online Journal. http://www.asouthernjournal.com/archives.htm
To purchase more fine e-books like the one you’re reading, go to http://zanybooks.com.
Prologue
When wild woods have found a way to outrun fences,
And hawks fly higher than a frightened gun,
Fleeing from hovering eyes and hands
Truth bursts through preconceptions,
Then I’ll come . . . like a Navajo
Across the burning desert.
Nothing is satisfying: Noises?
Dead brown-green images burnt in the retina?
The coastal hills are green and brown;
Just before twilight,
The sun paints the hills with chiaroscuro touches
And the eucalyptus blaze.
I watch the sunset (glimpses of it)
Through a mesh of branches.
I want something, I’ve never experienced before
. . . Oranges, apples? Cookies raisins-in?
I came charging. (English is boring and Latin is dead
and the song of the cookie-man runs through my head.)
. . . In the bins of avocados, spotted yellow gourds,
Humped and twisted, shiny and shellacked,
On the shelves of brand names,
Regular or jumbo, old not new,
The instant kind?
(You can run, run as fast as you can,
But you can’t catch me . . .)
If it is not here, it may be there.
To the supervisor of my division, room 200:
I thank you for your attention,
Your time, and your forgiveness.
My trip will not entail important business.
I am content enough
And yet the Welfare State cannot imagine,
Could fulfill, I grant you, any reasonable request;
But cannot imagine:
New higher causes wait, new Helens in the western isles.
I came charging . . .
The saddlebags caught fire just outside of town;
Toilet articles dribbled the length of the road;
Car wheels crushed razor, canteen, and freshly toasted bread.
The rearview mirror fell off; the road was bumpy;
He took a wrong turn at night and buried the cycle in the sand.
Whimpered when it came time to look for a place to sleep,
Stumbled wearily from campsite to campsite
Looking for the right place.
Important to find the right place, not to forget
Anything; but he kept dropping, leaving things behind.
If he went back, it should be before he’d driven too far.
Turning back would be an adventure too.
He could not enjoy:
Scurried to lay out his bedroll,
Went supperless, unable to sleep because he was hungry,
Because he was afraid
Of being a trespasser, of being a victim.
He shut his eyes but the roar of the cycle persisted
While a filmstrip of the roadway unrolled continuously.
A sound!
An animal in the underbrush? Someone else, a man?
The stars sifted warily through the trees overhead;
The shadows did not move any closer.
“I will go on for one more day,” he promised.
The next day, the desert road headed into the sun;
The glare from the stony flats seared his eyes.
The crash helmet, white and lined, stored the heat.
He stopped, wet the lining with a bottle of Coke,
And lay down beside the highway.
(Parsons and Barcus were for number one. Wood was merely
unaware of others, unaware so much of him was others, his
conversations someone else’s phrases, the words as little
theirs as his. Though he knew the boundaries of his world,
the road’s edge, the double solid lines one should not cross.)
The shadows gave the desert’s colors context.
The inverted ocean’s bottom writhed for fifteen living miles:
Whole fields of anemones among the pebbles,
Shadow of cholla where no cholla grew,
Life without form that invited hands to grope where eyes had been.
Wood wondered if he watched long enough,
If he would ever come to know,
Or if his first glances,
Colored by his experiences
Were in a mirror taken for a window.
The open view through unfocused light
Trapped a lizard
Shedding his skin on a jagged rock
A bird hunting him,
The shadow of the hawk’s wings,
And the looming mountains.
Truth bursts through preconceptions . . .
. . Then I’ll come, like an unshod Navajo across the burning desert.
The free ferry cut across the Gulf between marshy islets.
A cyclist in boots, black leather jacket, goggles
Back from the slimy beach, a final swarming of memories
Mounts his dented red cycle, the laughing message
“Jesus Saves” painted on the front fender. Bugs
Attracted out of the dust
Sweep over the handlebars into his face. Bug
Blood smears across Wood’s cheeks and cakes the dust.
He leaves the oil cities Orange, Port Arthur;
Crosses the Sabine River;
Passes the rice fields, cotton fields, cane fields;
The rain begins just as the road widens.
He passes a dog, a colored man;
A horse leads a wagonload of cotton into Opelousas.
Speeds through oak-shaded streets, then
The highway Huey built through swampland
From Opelousas to Baton Rouge, New Orleans, along the Mississippi.
The rain comes down in sheets.
The cycle loses all contact with the road.
No place to stop on the highway
And no way to stop. The cross winds
Threaten to blow him against the railings
or into the oncoming traffic.
Ridiculous: no way to stop;
The caked dirt dribbles beneath his undershirt.
The rain-swollen rivers thunder beneath the bridges.
A flock of Negroes crowd round to greet him.
Mademoiselle du Maupin, pigeons over Alexandria.
The town smells of perique and exhumed flesh, coffee and ripe fruit.
The cycle slips sideways in a failed U-turn.
A spray of oil mixed with water;
A cloud of steam from a muffler-scorched pant leg.
Three black faces, sullen and closed,
The only witnesses, other than Lafayette’s statue.
He wheeled the two-banger for one block, then two.
Across the street, the entrance to the St Charles hotel,
A doorman sheltered under a long canopy,
Uniform embroidered with gold braid,
A coat that fell long and heavy past his knees.
Wood unlatched one scorched and sodden saddlebag,
Strode into the lobby, wet and filthy,
Ripped trousers showing a dirty, gray expanse of leg.
“Yassuh, Yassuh, follow me.”
Wood asked for a room with a view.
Would he pay then or when he checked out?
(The bellboy took his oil-smeared saddlebag.)
“When I check out,” Wood said.
New Orleans 1960
Chapter 1 (Mason)
Viewed from a historical perspective, there is nothing precipitous in the rise of a militant Negro movement at this time. I cannot quarrel with those of my colleagues who would posit, sometimes with unwarranted hindsight, its potential emergence some twenty years earlier. The responsible member of the White Citizen’s Council who recoils from what he views as a conspiracy and the uncertain businessman, particularly the Jew, who cannot decide whether or not he wishes the movement to continue, do not seem to realize their relative helplessness before social and historical forces.
Students often suggest in the privacy of my office that petitions or a letter to the appropriate person in power might speed or halt the process. The mechanism for change is not quite so accessible. I must repeatedly caution these eager young students and friends as to the difficulty of focusing responsibility on any particular event or individual.
These explanations do not appear to satisfy them. I realize, of course, that students are not here so much for explanations as for the opportunity to express themselves. I have found in my teaching that students seldom want an answer to question one or question seven. No, questioning is just part of a game for them; they jockey for their positions on the field while still unwilling to learn the rules. Customarily, therefore, their queries will be followed by requests for my signature, my appearance at a debate, or in one memorable case, an invitation to join a student group picketing Woolworth’s.
I can remember being in the cafeteria having coffee with Henry Starr, a former instructor in our department, when I was approached by the student delegation. For once, I was fully grateful for Henry’s exuberant presence. He soon succeeded in convincing the group that he wanted to join their picket line. “What sort of clothes should I wear?” he asked, “How long should I expect to be in jail?” He’d even convinced me of his sincerity when he changed course abruptly and suggested they picket Dals instead. Now Dals is a quality department store, a store that advertises in the New Yorker without even a street or city address—just the name Dals and their trademark, the Georgian pillar. One wouldn’t normally expect many colored persons among their patrons, but as Henry kept insisting to the student delegates over and over until they went away at last, “it was the principle of the thing that mattered.”
I bought us a second cup of coffee (I was in a very good mood) and asked him, for he really was quite interested in protests and the integration movement, why he hadn’t gotten involved. A frown almost suppressed the laughter from his fat Jewish face, but he said quite openly, “Life’s too short.”
That’s it exactly. And when the students bring their petitions I can apologize, I can correct papers busily until they leave, but I can’t tell them and they can’t grasp the simple fact Henry bespoke that day, “Life’s too short.”
Each year, a fresh crop of students to make renewed assaults on my good will. I’ve often wondered why they come to me. I know of nothing in the content of my courses to encourage them. I teach and have taught British history for a number of years, and neither the basic course History 14B nor my advanced honors section contain any material relevant to the Civil War or its aftermath. They come to me I suspect because I lack the barrier of secretaries and the icy manner affected by certain of my senior colleagues. And perhaps they come because I am willing to talk with them. I have learned, however, to respond to students warily and with a large measure of caution.
When I began to teach, I had tremendous faith in my students and in my own potential as a teacher. I felt, because of the lengthy term of graduate study I had just completed, that I would not need to prepare my lectures. The lecture hour could be devoted to questions or a discussion of advanced topics. The students had been provided with a text and would have ample opportunity to review it on their own. Perhaps I would discuss my own research for several periods, give an assignment or quiz, and then comment on the results.
The approach might have worked, elsewhere, but not here, not with these students. I found no eager thirst for learning among them. Indeed they held an unfeeling disregard for me and for my subject. Whatever the nature of my lectures, whatever extra effort I made to whet their interest, they would respond, “How many examinations will there be?” followed by, “How much, (i.e., how little) will we be required to know?”
(What is required? It is required that they know the text; beyond that they need require, even as I, of themselves.)
My old thesis advisor, a man much respected for his theories on economic determinism, his discovery of the Hancock papers, and his teachings, had taken the trouble to write me at the very beginning of my career: “At first you may feel that your students are stupid, unintelligent. They are not. They are merely unlearned in the field in which you are teaching.” Perhaps my students were not stupid, but they could be and often were ignorant and unwilling.
Soon, of course, I discovered the differences, the tremendous variance among them. It was natural to focus first on the bright ones who were so close to me in their aspirations, particularly as they so often drew attention to themselves. One or two would rise to speak on the slightest pretext, their interest in history lapsing as they heard the sounds of their own voices. A few would ask penetrating questions. Questions the limits of the course often prevented me from following through.
At first, I tried to answer all their questions. One young man I remember in particular; he would lean forward chin in palm whenever I would attempt an explanation, gradually twisting his face into a grimace as if he had nothing but contempt for me and the superficial nature of my comments. “Tell us the real story,” that grimace seemed to say. Yet later, I discovered he was not even a real student taking my course for credit but a science major who needed a liberal arts elective.
I may have been obnoxious myself as a student. I suppose I was, we were. I have learned to look beyond the sneer to a student’s potential and to answer snide questions politely but briefly even when they distract from the main purpose of a lecture. Again there are limits.
For the term must have a purpose, in part formal, determined by the syllabus, in part informal, determined by the students’ varying needs. We cannot always follow to its end, material which, because of its very promise, is properly the subject of another semester.
I have learned to lecture watchfully.
When I first enter the classroom, I make a joking comment on the weather, take roll, and gather the students’ assignments close to my side of the desk. I spot the chalk and brushes and any changes in the seating plan that they have created for themselves. Does the seat determine the individual? I am very careful to watch their faces throughout the lecture.
It became increasingly important to know who these highly variable individuals were and to anticipate their demands. Even an idle question from a less than diligent student requires careful consideration. For if a question requires a short answer, then I am to give it a short answer. If a question is inappropriate, I am to ignore, suppress or delay it. All for them! (Who is to tell what is appropriate? What new modes of thought might yield?)
The students have their own criterion. That is appropriate which is to be examined upon! Would that the criteria were as clear-cut from the teacher’s point of view. Of course, the instructor has a basic duty to provide his students with a set of facts and theories similar to those provided other students who have taken the course. But oughtn’t he to teach his students to think for themselves?
By my second or third year of teaching, I thought I understood the basic duty—I was and had been under a great deal of pressure from the department chairman to do so—and determined thereafter to confine my lectures to straightforward presentations of the core material, holding well in reserve the occasional stimulating lecture as a sop to the bright. Call it a compromise. Compromise is often an essential step when differences in understanding exist. (The bright are so varied in their capacity and approach, a talk designed to reach and share with them would have resulted only in confusion.)
Of course, a few students still evade me, incapable of grasping even the simple rote material I present, they sit smiling and fingering their pins. Our department chairman makes a point of their “reservoirs of ability.” After all, they are in college! The fault must be mine; I require greater preparation, visual aids, and so forth! (Perhaps you understand now why I must always postpone another basic task, to know intimately the ninety students of my several classes.)
What if the students, themselves, are unprepared and past caring? If they do not even read the text! If they reject me, I reject them.
(Should I ask them, require them to sit and stare at a book that does not even begin to make sense to them? I have experienced failure with so many books, books I bought for reference, books I bought on a whim. Hard going, meant to be read and reread, I promise myself still I shall get to them someday.)
My schedule provides for office hours. I bring these to the attention of the students, particularly the ones who are in difficulty. I cannot dwell too long on elementary points in class. The majority will be bored and moreover we should fall behind schedule. Come see me during my office hours. Except one had a limited amount of time and, too often, these separate meetings mean merely a repetition of what has already been done in class.
To give them the attention they deserve is not merely a question of time but of involvement. I would have to give each one something of myself. To give them the heart to learn, I would have to be the heart beating for them, beating, beating, till their own hearts took on the rhythm.
I can give them attention. Understanding. Listen to their most rude appeals. But I am not prepared to give communion, a morsel of my flesh, three hours per week to each of ninety students. It would destroy me!
I arrived in New Orleans with my wife Violet to begin teaching shortly after we were married. We had Wendy almost immediately and Diane five years later. My family provided me with a second role, a very happy one, away from school. I discovered something in my relations with them and the community I had missed in my obsession with teaching.
It is not easy to reject one’s students. But I must reject them or accept the part of them that is not me. It is only when I abandoned my vocation and reduced my work to its proper proportions that life became meaningful to me. Life is too short to do otherwise.
Chapter 2 (Mason and Wood)
Mason was just as anxious as his daughter that the meeting with her husband go well and that all of her cautions prove unnecessary. He remembered to lay his pipe and newspaper down before rising to greet the young man. Maggie smiled and laughed and hugged them both. She sat now in the corner of the sofa, watching, as if all she had ever wanted was for both of them to be together.
“I think I’ve seen you before,” he said to Peter, for he remembered having seen the young man, not once, but several times in the Student Center, and once with Maggie. “Could it have been in the Center?”
“Possibly,” Peter agreed, smiling bravely.
“You were talking with . . .” Dr. Mason was reminiscing as Maggie had feared he would, but Peter was occupied not with the words but with the mournful face of the man he still wanted to like him, a face thin, elongated, like a portrait of Lincoln without the beard. “ . . . that integrationist fellow, what is his name? The one who is always getting arrested? I was sitting with Henry Starr having coffee. As a matter of fact, I remember Henry was particularly impressed with you.”
“Oh!” Peter said trying to convey as much good feeling as he could in that single word.
Maggie, now Mrs. Wood, smiled at the two of them to indicate they were doing well. Though, unfortunately, they were behaving exactly as she’d expected, talking without listening, looking over to her constantly for encouragement in the manner of small children.
“As I recall,” Professor Mason continued, “you sat down, Peter, with a group of students sitting near us and introduced this other fellow—what is his name, Zellner?—as . . .”
“Zellner?” Peter shook his head, uncertain.
“Yes, Zellner. Henry knew who he was-one of the local integrationist group-but you introduced him as the President of the Young Conservatives . . .”
“Oh, Lennie!” Peter interrupted, “Lennie Zellner!”
“Leonard Zellner,” Mr. Mason repeated as if he were already somewhat tired of the anecdote. He gave a dry chuckle. “The German fellow at the next table began shouting and you all got into a terrible argument.”
(It was all Lennie’s fault. I introduced him as the President of the Young Conservatives as a joke, expecting him to play the old role; instead he began sounding off about integration. I tried to head him off and talk him round before my friends got sore, but dammed if those die-hard segregationists didn’t start agreeing with him and picking on me. They couldn’t have been listening to what Lennie was saying; they kept asking him what the Conservative Club was going to do about the niggers, and he kept making suggestions about intermarriage that should have turned their stomachs.
I was still trying to calm things down, when this fascist stood up across the cafeteria and hollered, “Go back to Russia” at me. Then everybody began yelling to Zellner to get rid of me. But he can’t. I mean he’s doubled up with laughter and not even trying. He’s Leonard Zellner, the leading integrationist on campus. But all these rednecks are yelling at me and shouting that if it weren’t for troublemakers from the North, the Negro would be happy. I still don’t understand why things happened the way they did, everybody screaming, Zellner calling me a fascist, and this old geezer at the next table guffawing like a donkey.)
“Henry, that was Henry.” Mr. Mason chuckled while Wood finished his mime. “It’s true, you know,” Mason continued, “a lot of the trouble is caused by people from the North who don’t understand the situation.”
Wood thought, “He doesn’t understand it. He doesn’t understand it at all.”
Mr. Mason was thinking of Maggie. She was curled up in a corner of the sofa, smiling, half-asleep. “She doesn’t want to direct,” Mr. Mason thought, “She just wants us all, even this impossible boy, to be together.”
“How did you happen to meet Zellner?” he offered.
“Lennie? I kept bumping into him in different places.”
Pepe’s is a pizza joint near campus. Always noisy, some drunk offering free beer to everybody from an empty bottle, and a table full of fraternity men singing dirty limericks. The place was jammed when Zellner walked by the window; everybody stopped laughing and someone at each table whispered who he was.
A chorus of boos and jeers greeted him when he entered the place and a beer bottle rolled to his feet. He looked around but nobody was going to move over and make room. “C’mon Lennie,” I holler, “sit-in.” He scuttled over to the seat beside me, but before he could order a coke the whole fraternity crowd rose and began to sing:
Glory, glory segregation
The South will rise again
Then the manager turned on a bright light over our table, and a patrol car parked outside the window hoping for trouble.
“I met him the first night I was here.” Wood said . . .
The phone rang in Wood’s hotel room and of course it wasn’t the right number. “I’d like to talk to you anyway.” Wood said.
“Why?” replied a warm female voice.
“Because you’re a girl, and I don’t know anyone in this city.”
“How long have you been here?” A low voice. A brunette; five feet three or four, he guessed.
“This afternoon. I’ve been asleep. Say I’ve got an air conditioning unit in my room.”
“You’ll find them all over New Orleans. We can’t get along without them. I’ll bet you’ve also got a T.V., a studio couch, and a bed lamp.”
“Right! Does the T.V. work?”
“My boy friend has the identical room under yours.”
“Uh. Boy friend.” Wood made a face, invisible over the telephone. “Have you got any girl friends?”
“To whom I could introduce you?”
Wood nodded eagerly, though again his gesture could only be inferred.
“I don’t know about that. Besides I’m sorry but I do have to talk to this friend of mine; my cousin is getting married tonight, and he’s here for the reception.”
“Congratulations. Are you five foot three?” Wood asked.
“No, I’m five-five.” she snapped. The line went dead. Peter was replacing the receiver when he heard her say, “Lots of food at the reception. You sound like you could use some food. Why don’t you come?”
“Thanks. Where is it?”
“In the hotel. Don’t worry about an invitation. We’ve five or six hundred guests expected.”
“How will I recognize you?”
“You won’t.” She hung up. This time he was given no reprieve.
He snapped on the T.V., played with the air-conditioning unit until it was almost check out time, and then took another bath. He packed the wet washcloth and a hotel towel along with his gear, dressed, and slipped out the side entrance. The cars on either side of his cycle had parking tickets; his cycle was safe and untouched.
A newsvendor with an armload of papers offered him two bits of advice:
“Don’t worry about any of them damn parking tickets. Ya just bring him to me if you get one.
“When ya go into one of those striptease joints on Bourbon Street, order a Singapore Sling. She’s a big tall drink, ya can sip it all night and watch the girls, and the bartender can’t do nothing.”
Peter reentered the hotel to look for the wedding reception and found it in a mammoth ballroom on the second floor. Several partitions had been removed to unite three large rooms. Guests in formal clothes were streaming in and out of the entrance along with tall black waiters bearing trays of drinks. Before entering, he checked his own black Dacron-wool, maybe wash-and-wear, against the clothing of the others.
Ignoring the discrepancy, he popped two steps inside. Six hundred or even a thousand people milled about in utter confusion. The odds looked favorable against detection. Purposely ignoring the groups shaking hands in the doorway, he strode toward the far wall, scuttling sideways between the tables of food.
Canapés and boiled shrimp were set beside carved blocks of ice. Carrot sticks, celery, olives, cheese balls, and still warm meat-and vegetable-filled pastries provided highly edible alternatives. After eating his way through half an ice block of shrimp, he began to relax and smile at people and took a glass of champagne from a passing waiter.
“I see you could make it,” the brunette said.
He jumped. “How d’ya do. How did ya know? How d’ya...” he stopped, started again: “All these people, very good food, uh, could I get you a drink?”
She laughed like the champagne. The most beautiful girl in the room, the most beautiful girl he’d seen since he’d started on his travels. The pampered teenagers he’d been admiring were reduced to little girls and the paint and rinses of the older women were artificial in the glare.
The bandleader announced over the p.a. that the first dance would be for the bride.
“That’s my cousin.”
With the next tune, a dozen couples took the floor and he asked her to dance with him.
Her upper body was lavishly endowed, her hips broad, her lips thick and sensuous. The lips were waiting for his judgment. “Do you like me or the dress?”
Embarrassed, afraid to reveal his thoughts, he tried to change the subject. “Uh, who’s the groom?”
“Are you really interested? We’ve other things to eat besides the shrimp.” She gestured toward the table where a waiter had just sat down a fresh tray of hot hors d’oeuvres
“Sure. Say, you’re real aren’t you.” They had a glass of champagne together. He wanted to dance again.
“I’m sorry, I’ve got to stand in the reception line. Here’s my address. Call me if you stay in town.”
“I guess. But what’s your name?”
.” . . Although you’ll be hard to explain to my father. Tell him you go to the University here. Eat all you want. Bye.”
He fitted the fingers of his left hand with canapés and took a position where he could watch her in the reception line. Everyone looked so ordinary beside her.
“Queen Ester,” said a woman next to him.
Peter shook his head, puzzled.
“My niece Miriam,” the stout women repeated, pointing to the girl.
He tried to recall Miriam’s huge Semitic eyes, lids lightly touched with greenish silver. The stout woman interrupted authoritatively: “Are you one of the groom’s classmates?”
“I’m very pleased to meet you.” Peter said promptly, pumping her hand enthusiastically.
“I don’t think we met,” the woman said doubtfully.
“Would you like to dance?” Peter asked.
“Dance, it’s good for you,” another equally stout woman coaxed her friend. Peter took his partner gracefully around a portion of her waist, holding her at conversation length, and began to create a step. They passed Miriam held still more sedately by a thin neurasthenic boy, and Peter winked at her. She looked sufficiently surprised and amused. Peter danced the Hora-bug allowing his partner to shake and have fun.
“The old outdo the young!” a spectator shouted, for the aunts and uncles had stolen the floor from the bride-and groom’s friends following the lead of Peter’s partner.
Peter danced the Hora-bug a second and third time till, leaving his partner breathless and gasping in the doorway, he collared a final glass of champagne for use in the street. The newsvendor was angry.
“Goddam uppity nigger,” he said, pointing down the street. “Wanted me to call him a cab. One of those black bastards from Chicago. Christ, I shouldda chased him another block.”
He gave Peter another piece of advice. “Always use a hammer on the bastards.”
Imagine a Mardi-Gras parade, jostling people, reaching hands, dozens of decorated floats and their costumed riders. Hawkers on Chicago’s Maxwell Street. The showgirls of Vegas on a revolving stage. Then walk along a deserted city street, long after the shops have closed, a light rain having hushed the dust and noises of the day, to run unexpectedly into the very center of the parade: Bourbon street! Dazzling multicolored lights, flambeau bearers, their torches singeing the walls, the sounds of a hundred competing bands, till wearily you reach the quieter, dimmer end of the street where it slips into the older Quarter.
Turning back, Wood saw individuals for the first time: a bearded man in a white chef’s outfit astride a giant hot dog, three toughs leaning against a wall smoking, a waiter in black tux and cummerbund grabbing a quick cigarette in the street, girls walking, men watching, men waiting.
A midget grabbed his legs. “Mitzi on stage now.”
“Buy one drink, stay all night.”
The next barker caught him with his strident voice. “Take a peek,” he offered, “Get your pecker wet. Show goes on continually nine to four.”
“Twelve beautiful girls. On stage all the time. From Vegas, Chicago, Cincinnati, Houston, and bayous, Lola the swamp girl fiery Cajun blood on stage now!”
“Some like to dance, some like to fuck. Whaddya say?” The accents were not Southern but were from no particular time and place, toneless and harsh, like those of an automaton, crude and indifferent. (Watch them, imitate them. Pass like a shadow.)
Two sailors walking the outer edge of the sidewalk were corralled by “’Fraid we’re goin’ to cut your peter off?”
(Note how long the barkers hold the door open, when they drop the curtain.)
“Want to give your girl friend a thrill? Bring the little lady along.” An old carny gag, but the busload of tourists laugh anyway.
Pete passed as a shadow. Borrowing a cigarette from a barker, he leaned back relaxed against photographs of three of the twelve beauties until the smoke reached his lungs and he coughed abruptly. The barker gave him a funny look. Pete smiled as if it were pot not tobacco he was pretending to smoke.
The shine boys clustered round the doorway, platforms and bags full of polish and brushes. “Bug off you little bastards,” the barker said suddenly and let fly with a kick. He caught one of the negroes in the tail. Pete laughed.
“Mind the door for me will ya,” the barker said. “Close the curtain when the cops come. I want to catch a cuppa coffee.”
Peter assumed the post. He waved inarticulately at the passersby. He opened the door a crack and mimed a routine; he shouted, “Bring the little lady along,” at the people’s backs.
“Where’s Vic?” asked another midget down by his waist.
“The guy on the door?” Peter stammered, afraid of losing his job.
“No, the boss.”
“He, uh, gone to Vegas.”
The midget seemed satisfied with the reply.
Pete looked away, uncomfortable. The star attraction was on stage. She walked slowly along the front of the platform, dressed only in babydolls, ready for bed. “That’s Ann,” the midget said, “She’s a fine girl.”
“Hey sailors, get a load of this!” Pete shouted to let off steam. The crowd turned and Ann, her silhouette framed in the doorway, succeeded in luring them in to the bar. (I’m getting good at this, Pete thought.)
“Keeping you busy?” a girl asked from just inside the doorway. Her voice was husky from too little sleep. Like every other girl in the place, she wore too much makeup, but the long sheets of raven black hair made Pete look once then twice.
“Hi Dixie,” said the midget. He lit a cigar.
“Hi Joe,” she acknowledged before turning her attention back to Pete. “Taking Don’s place?”
“Just for awhile,” Pete said, stalling for time, trying to think of what he could say to keep their conversation going, “Uh, your name’s Dixie?”
“Dixie Cupp. That’s my stage name.” She reached out her hand for Pete to shake, “I’m Dixie Mahone. C’mon in and buy me a drink after.”
Too much of an intimacy for him to accept easily. “I’ll run down the street and get ya a cup of coffee to go,” Pete replied, brazenly.
Dixie did not seem pleased by his brashness. “At least wait till I go on stage.”
Don came back. The crowds began to drift by in a thicker stream, groups as well as couples pointing and talking as they walked.
The midget said conversationally, “So Vic’s in Vegas.”
“Whaddya talking about?”
“That’s what this guy said.”
“Who the hell is he?” The two of them looked Pete up and down. He fiddled with his jacket, fumbled for an imaginary pack of cigarettes, found his sunglasses and put them on.
Dixie came to the door. “I’m on now,” she said.”
He followed her into a electric blue grotto whose dim lighting was supposed to make the girls look younger. A few managed to pass the test. Dixie hovered at the end of the apron, while a tryout frisked up and down the platform yelling “whee” and popping her cheeks. Dixie disapproved; a straight dancer, her dyke-style steps carried her in a series of promenades along the platform.
Her long legs already displayed to advantage in a translucent gown with a slit up one side, she removed the gown five minutes into her performance, revealing legs perfectly tapered, flesh still firm and vital at the thigh. Transfixed, Peter was unresponsive as the bartender, a male waiter, and a B-girl tried without success to get him to order a drink.
The B-girl pressed close. “How about a drink, mister?”
“I’m a friend of Dixie’s.”
“It doesn’t make any difference; you have to buy a drink.”
“Get him out of the doorway.” the bartender said.
Dixie returned. She had changed her earrings.
“You are very young,” he said, thinking of the Caesarian scar he’d seen across her abdomen.
Dixie’s hand played with her earlobes. “I can’t talk to you, if you don’t buy me a drink.”
Peter shrugged.
“Call me at home,” she suggested and pressed her phone number into his hand.
Peter walked down the street whistling. He wasn’t sure whether he was happy because he had two new numbers in his little black book or because he had made two friends in his very first day in a new city.
Chapter 3 (Mason and Wood)
Hands clenched behind his back, jaws working on the bit of his pipe, Dr. Mason glared for a few moments at his reflection in the window. A rhyme his dentist had taught him returned: “Lips together, teeth apart.” Taught him too late, regrettably. The enamel had been worn away by the time he was twenty-five and he had to have all his teeth capped, first in plastic, later in porcelain and gold. The recollection distracted him; his hands tapped absently against the table and finally he turned off the light and sat down in his padded rocking chair, arms loose in his lap, the smoke from his pipe wreathing his head at intervals.
Maggie had not been home the previous night. He had been anxious but not seriously worried. Then the next day she missed work. The bookstore called him and his calmness had only added to the confusion. Half a dozen partial explanations had been relayed by her coworkers; nothing definitive.
She did not call for three days. When she did, he felt not angry but betrayed. He could not feel angry once he knew she was all right. She was no longer a child; he could no longer protect her. All he asked was she tell him beforehand what she was going to do. When he heard she was married, he gave them both his blessing and offered to send money.
Post cards were forwarded from New York, Niagara Falls, Chicago. They told him nothing about the details of her departure. Nor did he learn much over the phone. When she reappeared, it was without her new husband and, apparently, the need for any explanation. She would only say vaguely they had gone on a honeymoon and that Pete was still traveling.
“On business?”
She shook her head.
He remained calm. “Tell me about him. Does he go to college?”
Again an absent-minded nod.
He asked her for the name of the college and she spoke, finally, “In California,” pronouncing the name of the state as if it were very far away and not worth thinking about.
For a week Maggie moped about the house. She went back to her old job in the bookstore, but she sat at home in the evenings. Mason was a little annoyed; he’d had plans and now felt obligated to stay home and sit with her.
Then, as abruptly as the original departure, her husband telephoned.
“Did you know he would be coming?” Mason asked.
“Hush, Daddy.”
Her husband would be with them in five minutes, no, half an hour. They would have time to clean the house, time for Professor Mason to change his clothes. No, he was to sit still while they dusted around him. And change his slippers for his pipe. And promise to take his pipe out of his mouth before speaking ... promise not to say the wrong thing.
Well, it didn’t matter. It was only important they all get to know one another as quickly as was feasible and then sit down and discuss the couple’s plans for the future. But this proved impossible.
First, understandably, the lad was tired, travel-worn. He wanted to go to bed; he wanted to be alone with his wife. And then Dr. Mason had always wanted Maggie to marry Mike. Of course, that hadn’t worked out. Perhaps it was for the best. Mike had gone on through college (Maggie had not) and was now on his way to being elected to the legislature from Baton Rouge.
This boy was something like Pete, the first Pete, the Pete Maggie had dated in high school, always underfoot and in trouble. Unfair, of course, to link the boy through a name, or compare him to someone like Mike. The trouble was you just couldn’t talk with him. Did everyone out West talk the way he did, changing the subject half a dozen times and never answering a question? Being tired was no excuse for a lack of politeness and complete incoherence. Would the young man’s conversation focus just long enough for him to tell them what he planned to do? And what right did he have calling Henry a donkey?
“How did you happen to meet this fellow, Zellner?”
. . . Wood wandered in and out of a series of bars buoyed up by his encounter with Dixie Cupp-Mahone. In most of the downtown locals, stony backs and an indifferent bartender greeted his presence. In one, he watched two old men playing dominoes on a checkered tablecloth, but they did not ask him to join them or include him in their conversation. Without being aware of the boundary, he wandered into a colored section where black men sat in doorways sipping beer and occasionally darted across the street to a bar to order another six-pack through the take-out window. The bodies leaning against the fence were hard and suspicious; he could not see the eyes of the men watching him. For a moment, he stood outside a colored bar listening to a warm black female singer’s voice curl between the thighs of the sweaty dancing women; the eyes found him and he moved, drifted back toward the Quarters.
His second round of Bourbon Street was an avoidance tour. The doormen screeched their wares as if he were not a friend. In the bars on Royal where secretaries seemed to slip easily from lap to lap, he was ignored. In one lounge on St Philip whose focus was the barmaid, he was asked for an opinion. “I think he’s right,” said Wood hunched over a beer. “Ed, there’s someone here who agrees with you.” said the big-thighed barmaid. A little man who was sweeping the floor and fetching glasses from the table to the bar looked up when his name was called and spat in the sweepings by Pete’s feet.
A beautiful red-haired boy tried to steer him into a gay bar around the corner. “I want to pick up a girl,” Wood said thinking to discourage him.
“Oh, lots and lots of girls come in there, simply lots and lots of girls. I’ll introduce you to one of them. I know everybody, all the sluts in the Quarter.” The boy looked amused when Pete’s face darkened at his use of the word ‘slut,’ then he apologized; “I didn’t mean that. I know you don’t need to pay for a girl. I’ll introduce you to a nice one; you can even use my apartment if you like. It’s right around the corner.”
Two a.m., close to three: Wood returned to the quiet bar where he had watched the two old men play dominoes and found a crowd had formed outside. One of the hot-dog men had set up shop in the middle. The crowd on the street was merely the fringe of the mob inside. The place was wild, swinging jazz and swinging hips, and don’t dare touch the local beer-it’s lousy.
The proprietor shook maracas in the air over the bar, while the crowd swayed sympathetically with the few compressed in front of the jukebox. Pete let the tide carry him, looked for openings, found a girl who handed him her boy friend’s beer. Sirens wailed, but they could have been part of the music. Pete wondered if he should dance, whom he should dance with. The crowd screamed as the police pushed their way into the bar. The police grabbed indiscriminately and heaved or kicked the crowd through a line of cops into the paddy wagon.
In the station, men and women were put into separate tanks; fifty in a room meant for half that number. No lights and no clear way of getting air. No one seemed to know why the bar had been raided. Every so often someone’s movements would set the whole crowd boiling and people would get bruised accidentally with knee and elbow. The girls began to scream in their tank and one of the Mexican boys was crying in Spanish.
A curly-haired guy, standing next to Pete, seemed to think the party was still going on. “What’ll we sing?” he asked. He slapped the Mexican on the back; the crying stopped. He moved freely through the crowd, despite the pressure, hollering and whispering encouragement. About twenty-four, an open-neck sports shirt displayed the thick blond pelt on his chest. Blurred masculine features, bushy eyebrows, a bent, perhaps broken nose. To Pete, the whole room seemed to be slightly out of focus. The face and the light disappeared in the dust storm.
(He’d slept on a sand bar. The girl woke him. The angle of the sun to the highway never changed.) “In the corner.” the fellow said.
“I don’t have any money for the fine,” Pete whined.
Then someone pushed him and he snapped a vicious elbow back.
“Shut up in there.” a stern voice said from outside.
“Aw fuck you,” “Fuck you.” scattered voices replied from within.
“What the hell, we’re in jail,” the curly haired boy philosophized at Wood’s elbow. And he guided Pete into a corner where the crowd exerted less pressure. A wizened old man in a neat but spotted gray suit and a faded red necktie was already sitting on the floor there.
“This guy,” the curly-haired boy began, “this old guy, just came in to get a pack of cigarettes for his wife when the place was raided. He lives next door to the bar. He’s lived on Dumaine for how long?”
“Thirty years.” the old man on the floor said.
“How old is he?” Pete asked sleepily.
“Seventy-two.”
Pete nodded. Things weren’t yet fully in focus. “Doesn’t look strong enough to push the button.”
“He asked me to get the cigarettes for him.” the curly-haired boy said, “His quarter’s still in the machine.
“I wish these guys would book us. So the old man could phone his wife.” The blue eyes were full of pain as though somebody were hurting him.
One (three?) hours later, the police came finally, opened the cage and formed them into a long line. The curly-haired fellow said his name was Arnold Rosenweig and he lived at 2212 Carondolet. The sergeant wrote it down. The plainclothes inspector took a long look at ‘Arnold Rosenweig’.
“And who are you?”
“Benson Brown,” Pete said.
“Where do you live?”
“Same address.”
“Same address?,” said the inspector, “Sure. Hey, Rosenweig, what’s this guy’s name?”
“Brown, Benson Brown, B-R-O-W-”
“Get out of here.”
Pete caught up with Arnold on the station steps; the sun was already high enough to be warm.
“Thanks Arnold.” Pete said.
“Leonard,” the man replied, “My name’s Leonard Zellner.”
Chapter 4 (Wood)
Alas, Wood and Zellner were not meant to be roommates. For one thing, Wood arose each morning, bright and early with the dawn, ready to eat his weight in eggs and pancakes. Zellner seldom got home before four or five a.m. and then he slept through until noon despite the steadily increasing heat.
For another, Zellner did not have an apartment but a single room off a littered courtyard. The one large double bed where Zellner slept filled most of the space and left Wood with only a few yards of flooring. And though Wood would much prefer to have slept near the huge rattling fan in the window that brought in an occasional cooling breeze, he was condemned instead to the foot of the bed, in the hottest most stifling portion of the room, to be woken each morning in the early hours when Zellner at last came stumbling in.
No food in Zellner’s apartment, Wood discovered the first morning and rediscovered each evening thereafter when he renewed the search for nourishment as if somehow, inexplicably, a well-stocked refrigerator might have materialized during the day. Fortunately, food was to be had in the Quarters nearby, and Wood had coffee and doughnuts each evening before retiring, and fried eggs and grits and a huge glass of orange juice for breakfast, and coffee afterwards and a roll filled with pecans.
Once, the last morning he slept there, he found an oil-stained brown paper bag, still smelling of fresh hot doughnuts, pinioned beneath Zellner’s hand, but the contents of the bag were an inseparable mass of powdered sugar, wax paper and macerated beignet so that Wood, though unaffected by the food’s appearance, was unable to make the fulfilling meal he’d envisioned.
One other thing. Returning early to the room about six one evening—Zellner was not home, of course—Wood heard a knock on the door, and found a thin elderly Negro with graying hair and a slight stoop waiting on the threshold. The Negro peeked in expectantly, even took a step into the room, before Wood blocked his way. The man yelled “Lennar!” and receiving no answer hollered a second time, “I be back,” or what sounded like “I be back” to Wood’s untrained ear. In any event, Wood closed the door well before he was sure the man actually was leaving.
The visit was repeated the next evening at about the same hour, again shortly after Wood entered the room. Apparently, the light in Zellner’s window drew the visitors, for a seemingly endless series of visitors, followed. The last, a slim pockmarked brown girl, smiled, said nothing, then left after only a cursory glance at the Leonardless room. The next morning, Zellner having returned as usual singing just before dawn, Wood went looking for an apartment of his own.
With no particular plan in mind, he purchased the morning Picayune and looked through the classifieds, but the procession of street names only confused him. The street map he had severed neatly from the center of the telephone book offered endless possibilities. Here the Elysian Fields, there Lake Pontchatrain, and the muses—Clio, Erato, Thalia, Melpomene, Terpsichore, Euterpe, Polymnia, and Urania—one after the other on the way uptown.
He drove slowly along St Charles Avenue following the trolley line. The homes on one side of the tracks, toward the river, had wide set porticos and broad stairways. But the room he had seen advertised was on the other side, in a genteel slum where homes had been divided and divided again, first into duplexes, then into apartments, on and on, until, finally, they resolved into some fundamental quantum of space of which no further subdivision was possible.
Wood could accept the scuff marks on the walls and ceilings, for he was not really a very tidy person, but he was not prepared for a window that looked out on a window, or a floor that sloped away from beneath his feet curving into the center of the room, or the awful loneliness and the strange accents of the vacant-eyed people who lived in the houses on either side.
In the end, after a brief walking tour of the Garden District (for Wood prided himself on taking advantage of every moment), he headed the cycle uptown again still following the trolley line. When he judged he was close enough to the Zoo and the University to stop and look around, he had already gone past them, and was lost in a twisting labyrinth of residential streets that even the trolley car avoided. The sun was hidden in a steaming mist and the promises of early morning had given way to an endless brooding gray.
He paused, the cycle braced against one leg, and consulted his map. It told him nothing, perhaps because he no longer had any idea of where he was. The motorcycle’s engine died. Wood tried the kickstarter, failed to start the engine, and tried again.
Everything is going to be all right, Wood thought. Be cool. The cycle would start. It had started before in Amarillo, Fort Worth, Shreveport, Opelousas. Just that ever since he and the cycle had left the breathless agony of Tehachapi Pass, 7000 feet up in the thin mountain air, the cycle had seemed to need more help in starting.
He bent over the motor with a wrench, not so much to repair it, for Wood’s mechanical knowledge was limited to tires and spark plugs, as to hit smartly and firmly at the one spot—fuel line or electrical system—where the obstruction was hidden. At the moment when Wood felt he most needed to keep mind and body focused in the same direction, a young man only a few years older than himself emerged from the cellar doorway of an imposing mansion across the way.
Jacket over one arm and a half dozen books under the other, the young man exuded an air of confidence Wood would have given anything to match. Seizing the opportunity, Wood called out, “Do you know where I can rent a room?” and when the man did not reply added, “Are you renting a room here?”
“Why yes, I rent a room, downstairs,” the man replied warily. He looked at the ground, at the doorway he’d vacated, at the sky, anywhere but at Wood’s blue and gold leather jacket with University of California Wrestling stenciled across its back, anywhere but at the small red motorcycle with “Jesus Saves” painted on its front fender.
“The Vicker sisters live upstairs,” the man continued just as Wood was thinking he might have lost his voice entirely. “Two retired maiden school teachers. They rent rooms. Two of us live downstairs. And a girl lives upstairs, I think.”
Wood smiled eagerly.
“I don’t think they have any more rooms though,” the man added quickly. “How did you find out about the Vicker sisters? Did you hear about them at the University?”
“Can’t be any harm in asking,” Wood said, affably, ignoring the questions.
The man looked dubious.
Wood walked onto the wide front porch. Wide enough and long enough to hold three rooms the size of the one where he was staying.
Two huge chairs were set together before a series of closely spaced windows. Wood knocked on the big front door, using an ornate knocker half again the size of his fist. The curtains moved in one of the windows facing on the porch, but no one answered his knock. He knocked again. Still no answer. He knocked a third time and then walked the length of the porch, conscious as he did so that someone inside the house was tiptoeing from window to window ahead of him each time.
Finally, when he had reached the far end of the porch and was trying unsuccessfully to look past the curtains to the gloom within, the door opened behind him and a faint quavering voice said “Yeass?”
Wood bounded across the porch in the direction of the voice. The figure in the doorway, a slight elderly woman, immediately retreated, as one might step back in fear of a large and untrained puppy. “Can I help you?” she asked when she had regained her composure.
“I’m looking for a room,” Wood said eagerly.
“Yes, we have a room,” the woman replied. She spoke slowly and carefully, her slow measured Southern accents lengthened even further by the quaver associated with advancing age. “I’m not sure you would like it,” she finished at last.
“It looks fine,” Wood reassured her, “I mean the house looks fine. This is a great old house.”
The woman seemed pleased. “It’s a very old house.”
“Our father built this house,” a second equally ancient voice said from the doorway behind her.
A pair of women in their late seventies or early eighties stood framed in the opening, the elderly sisters the young man had spoken of. The one who had answered the door appeared shorter and frailer than the other, though presumably the braver, since it was she who first confronted the stranger. Tiny, dressed all in black, from her shoes to the tight ruffled collar at her throat, Wood guessed she could not have weighed more than seventy or eighty pounds.
“We taught history,” she said unexpectedly, “to three generations of students.”
“I like history,” Wood said.
“Do you?” said the larger sister, “A lot of history is in this city. French, Spanish. Four hundred years. Our father told us so many stories.”
“We taught history to three generations,” interjected the elder. And as an after thought, asked, “Would you like to come in and sit down and talk to us about it?”
Wood stepped slowly over their threshold and into the front hallway, careful not to make any sudden moves that might startle the elderly pair. After some shuffling of chairs, the three of them sat down facing the porch, much he supposed as they had done sixty or more years earlier when a beau came calling. The two elderly women looked at Wood expectantly.
“I’d like to see the room,” he said.
“It’s a big one, a very big one.”
“On the first floor.”
“Just off the front porch.”
“But you’d have to go through the front hall of course, to get in and out.”
“That might not do.”
“No, that might not do at all.”
The pair continued to chatter, heads cocked at various angels like two particularly intelligent parakeets, but neither, Wood noticed after some moments, gave the slightest indication of wanting to go with him to look at the room.
“And you’d have to share a bath,” said the younger sister, or at least Wood assumed she was the younger from the manner in which she deferred to the other, the frail woman in black who had answered the door originally.
“Father left us this house,” the older one said.
“We already told him that.”
“I’d like to see the room,” Wood said.
“You’d want to see the bath too, of course.”
“Of course.” the older sister agreed.
They sat in companionable silence for several moments, planning the room tour, presumably, when the elder sister asked unexpectedly, “You don’t take showers, do you?”
It was not really a question but a request, Wood surmised. He nodded agreement, though he had a sinking feeling this was only the first of many privileges he would be forced to surrender to get the room he wanted, the room he so urgently needed, the room he still had not seen. I’m desperate, he thought. But it is such a nice house. And all the other rooms I’ve seen have been so without hope.
“There’s no way you could take a shower here,” the older one continued.
“Not necessary,” Wood said agreeably.
“And of course, we would have to find some way of signaling when the bathroom was empty.”
“We live on this floor you see.”