Downtown Strut: An Edna Ferber Mystery (Edna Ferber Mysteries) (15 page)

“But Jed, what does this have to do with Roddy? That was my question to you.”

He stopped laughing. “Oh, that’s right. I get so excited recounting my heroism that I forgot your question.”

“No, you didn’t.”

“True, I didn’t. Well, I neglected to mention that this Roddy fellow was with Lawson when he approached me and Bella.”

“And you knew it was Roddy because you had that scene outside your office?”

“Yes. He stood there, a dumb ass grin on his face, when Lawson and I started spouting nonsense to each other. But the foolish grin dropped when Lawson hit me. He yelled out ‘Whoa’ as if he were writing titles for a William S. Hart cowboy serial, and I pointed at him. I taunted him, deliberately. ‘Ah, yes, so you’re the other failed writer. Failed actor. Lord, it’s a lethal combination…writer and actor. Two sides of a worn-out coin. The dueling second from my office.’ I went on and on like that. I could see I was getting to him. Lawson had pulled back, licking his wounds, as it were; but this Roddy became enraged. Bella, babbling, kept saying, let’s go, let’s go, come on now, stop. As if that was supposed to make me leave him alone.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“I don’t like to be challenged.”

“For God’s sake, Jed, they’re just young lads.”

“They’re men. But Roddy did the unforgivable.” A pause, as he licked his lower lip. “He made an obscene gesture at me, and he called me a bully. ‘You’re a bully who enjoys beating down those who have no power.’”

“Well, it’s true.”

He ignored that. “No one talks to me like that.”

I drew my lips into a thin line. “But everyone thinks it about you, Jed.”

He was shaking his head, and I doubted whether he heard me. “No one.”

“A street brawl, Jed. Think of it.”

“Then they stormed away, leaving Bella clutching to my side as though I were a piece of driftwood.”

I was shaking my head. “Unpleasant, Jed.”

Jed stood, reached for the check, and he looked directly into my face, smiling. “No one insults me like that, least of all a Negro. I called after this Roddy fellow, ‘I’ll remember your face.’ He turned back to me and bellowed, ‘Probably long after I’ve forgotten yours!’” Jed was reaching into his wallet for cash. “So he got himself murdered one night.” Jed was counting out some dollar bills. “A pity. Really.”

Chapter Thirteen

On Christmas I hosted a brunch for family visiting from Chicago, though no one seemed happy to be in my apartment on the cold, windy day. My sister Fannie kept glancing out the window at the swirling snowflakes and muttering about a cold she was getting. My nieces nodded at their generous holiday checks and talked of ski weekends in Vermont. My mother protested that the mink jacket I’d bought her was too short. Furthermore, she’d clearly recalled suggesting the sable with the red velvet lining. Hadn’t I listened? I had little patience with them all, loved as they were.

Merry Christmas, Edna.

The brunch was superb but untouched by me. Rebecca and Waters were spending the afternoon and evening with relatives, though she’d left a magnificent buffet of cold duck salad, scalloped potatoes, green beans with almond slices, fresh cornbread buttery to the touch, and a rip-roaring chocolate cake so dark and high it seemed some mountainous creation. I put nothing on my plate.

“Edna,” my mother began as she sliced into the cake, her thumb smeared with velvety frosting, “tell us about the murder. I never tire…”

Fannie was frowning. “Mother, we’ve heard it before. I’m not sure why everyone is thrilled that Edna found her name in the tabloids, slinking into squalid tenements to find dead young Negroes.”

I stood. “Have a wonderful Christmas.”

I headed to my workroom.

For a while I lost myself in my mail, but that quickly paled. Through the door I’d slammed, I could hear rustling and whispering as my family left the apartment, though my mother punctuated the blissful quiet with phlegmatic outbursts, which suggested she was dying. I ignored it all, and eventually she left the apartment, going to spend the next few days in Connecticut.

I sat in my workroom, quiet, quiet.

The phone rang once or twice. I didn’t move.

I was thinking of Roddy assailing Jed Harris, that hapless, doomed young man sputtering his rage in defense of his cousin; but, sadly, against a cruel and vengeful man. I wanted to think of
Show Boat
and
The Royal Family
; wanted thunderous echoes of “Ol’ Man River” sung from the apron of the stage; of Helen Morgan warbling the melancholic “Bill” while she perched on a piano; of the redoubtable matriarch Fanny Cavendish emoting onstage, a triumphant moment. But I couldn’t. Outside the wind beat the windows and the afternoon winter streetlights shimmered through the naked tops of the forest in Central Park. I shivered.

At five, insane with the quiet, I dressed in a voguish pale-blue chemise accented with the batik scarf I’d gotten as a Christmas gift, and, wrapped in my fur coat, I caught a cab to George and Bea Kaufman’s apartment. He’d proffered an invitation for a Christmas cocktail party, though I’d hedged about going. Now, driven to the edge of madness, I had little choice: two hours of bootleg hooch and doubtless some Broadway trouper embarrassing herself by singing “I wish I could shimmy like my sister Kate,” with piano accompaniment. There’d be scintillating, if frenzied, conversation with George and his tribe of friends. And me: the peripatetic romantic novelist, fashionable now because of
So Big
…
Show Boat
…
The Royal Family
. Me: the dutiful middle-class daughter of the Midwest provinces, transformed into Manhattan’s trendy flapper and drinker of bathtub gin. I smiled as I got out of the cab. Thank God I’d bobbed my hair last summer and had my nose done. I no longer looked like a Semitic Pollyanna.

George Kaufman seemed surprised that I’d come. Tall, gawky, eyeglasses slipping off his nose, his hair a jumble of electric current, he stood there, puzzled. “I thought you said that…” He smiled. “Come in.”

But the party was a mistake, I immediately realized, because there was nowhere to hide. Jammed with frisky, tipsy men and women, all bubbly with holiday zest and bonhomie, they jostled and backslapped and humored. I recognized faces: Marc Connelly, Peggy Wood, Neysa McMein. But I wanted to talk to no one. Dorothy Parker was on her soapbox, and rightly so, about the Sacco and Vanzetti miscarriage of justice, and Aleck Woollcott, who avoided me, was praising Charles Lindbergh, whom he’d just lunched with. George himself, dressed in a foppish tuxedo and holding a champagne glass at a dangerous angle, kept dragging a slender, emaciated young man to each pocket of guests, declaring the skittish young man a rising star in the world of art. I never caught his name—perhaps George forgot it himself—but I overheard snatches of chatter that suggested he’d returned from France where he knew Picasso and had cheese and wine with Natalia Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov. I had no idea who they were, but supposed them exiled Russians who painted oils of dark windswept steppes with borzois and white birch forests. The young man did nothing but grin and scratch an unkempt beard unfortunately speckled with bits of caviar, and I defined him an idiot. George kept leaning into the shorter man’s neck, as though to whisper a forbidden tidbit; but then, throwing back his head, bursting into artificial laughter.

A voice spoke from behind me. “We have to stop meeting like this.” Hearing the slight laughter, I turned. “I’ve been moving across two rooms to get to you. I meet you twice in a couple days, Miss Ferber.”

I faced Langston Hughes, and smiled. “I’m bored here.”

“But this is the most exciting party in Manhattan.” A voice soft and low. “I’ve just started getting invited to such…events.” Then he leaned in, confidentially. “I’m still visiting from Pennsylvania. I’m forced to wear the same suit to them all. I hope no one notices.”

“They won’t. Then you’d better keep the secret to yourself.”

He laughed. “I’m happy to be invited.” He pointed to the crowd. “Famous people here. It’s exciting.”

“This? Exciting? Then we are indeed at the end of American civilization.”

“I hadn’t known it had arrived yet.”

“Clever.”

“Not my line. I stole it from someone.”

“Then you must be a successful writer.”

Another chuckle. “There I go again, confessing my secrets.”

I turned away. “But I need to leave. This”—I waved my hand across the room, filled with laughter and the tinkle of glass—“this is not good for me today.”

He held up a hand, his look anxious. Suddenly, unexpectedly, he recited verbatim a paragraph from my short story “Blue Blood,” which took place in the Chicago stockyards. It had been published in
Cosmopolitan
just months earlier. He recited in an assured, dreamy voice meant for me alone: “‘You saw a giant Negro, a magnificent ebony creature with great prehensile arms, and a round head, a flat stomach, flat hips, an amazing breadth between his shoulders. From chest to ankles he narrowed down like an inverted pyramid. He raised those arms that were like flexible bronze, and effortlessly, almost languidly, as you would cut through a pat of soft butter, they descended in a splendid arc.’” When he was finished, a little out of breath, he half-bowed.

I breathed in, thrilled. “You are amazing, Mr. Hughes.”

But now he looked embarrassed, as if he’d violated some moment, overstepped a line into indiscretion. But that hesitancy passed, and his eyes twinkled. “I’ve been savoring that passage, which I love. And I wanted to impress…”

“Which you do anyway,” I broke in. “But,” I grinned, “such theatrics, while touching, shall not keep me from my own quiet apartment this Christmas night.”

Again, the hand in the air. “You sent me some chapters of Lawson Hicks’ novel
Hell Fighters
.”

The smile disappeared from my face. “And?”

Perhaps unwisely, I’d sent him the first few chapters by messenger, addressed to him at his publisher’s office. Afterwards I’d thought my action rash and probably a little unethical. After all, Lawson had told me he was not interested in publishing, and then he’d walked out. “It’s not ready.” That’s what he said—emphatic. And I’d violated those words. Yet I had such faith in the novel, and I thought that Langston Hughes was the person to look at the chapters.

“I read the pages you sent me,” he began, “and they are a marvel. If he can keep up the tempo—the power—beyond what I’ve read, then, well, it needs to be out there.” A pause. “Thank you for sending it. Young Negro writers, you know…” His voice trailed off. “But I was caught by something else. I wanted to ask you about the murdered boy, Roddy. Lawson, I noticed, dedicated his novel to that sad young man and quoted a few lines of his verse, after the dedication. I got to wondering about
his
unpublished work. What was left behind?”

I described the stack of typed sheets and the notebooks sitting on a side table in my workroom. “His friends want some posthumous publication.”

“I’ll tell you, Miss Ferber, I felt some…pulse, in the Lawson quote of Roddy’s verse. Just a few lines, out of context.” And then he quoted them from memory:

“‘Saturday morning Harlem says nothing at all

Yet the hum and whisper of night lingers

The echo of a midnight saxophone

The jazz poet sits in shadows

And waits for Truth…’”
He stopped. “Are there more like this?”

I was nodding furiously. “I’ve been meaning to…”

“Perhaps we can work together. After New Year’s, maybe.”

He walked me to the door and we shook hands. “You are a Christmas surprise.” I held his hand in both of mine.

My remark obviously amused him because he stepped back, threw back his head and laughed, choking out, “The surprise is that you and I find ourselves chatting together in this doorway.”

“Is it untoward?”

“It would have been impossible just decades ago.”

“Perhaps the world is finally changing.”

“So slowly, Miss Ferber. So slowly.”

***

Back home, content now to sit in the quiet rooms, I found myself pleased at Langston Hughes’ reaction to Lawson’s novel, but more so to his eagerness to review Roddy’s untouched work. Those few lines of poetry, quoted by Lawson, seemed a gateway into Roddy’s imagination. Something good had to come from this nightmare—for Lawson
and
Roddy. I played the lines over and over in my head until, perforce, the words became a melody that seemed set against a jazz piano.

I remembered the night Jerome Kern stopped at my apartment, the newly penned score of
Show Boat
in hand, and quietly, with his usual humility, he played his music. Despite his toneless voice, the words soared. “Ol’ Man River” and “Only Make Believe” and “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man” filled the room. My spine tingled, and I wept. Now, repeating Roddy’s few lines of verse—that I paid little mind to until Langston Hughes quoted them to me against a backdrop of tinkling champagne glasses and cigarette smoke—I fairly lost my breath. I lamented the loss of that young talent.

The words filled my apartment. I
felt
Harlem, still the outsider perhaps but somehow, through Langston Hughes’ smooth and rich recitation, I became privy to a world I never understood…nor could, really. I walked to my windows, the huge eight windows that gave me a breathtaking panorama of Central Park and the taxi-jammed streets below. There was a different rhythm here than that of Harlem, this rich man’s elegant stomping ground. What music was here? I wondered. I thought of Browning:
What of soul was left, I wonder, when the kissing had to stop?

In the kitchen I brewed a pot of strong tea and then sat by the windows, my mind drifting. I thought of Rebecca, away for the evening, celebrating the holiday with her family, and with my family gone, I was glad to have the place to myself. I changed into my robe and slippers and then tucked myself into bed, but not before I’d carried the ungainly mass of Roddy’s work to the nightstand. I contemplated the shifting heap of manuscript, previously so uninviting, but now, as though by magic, illuminated by a magician’s powerful wand. Reaching into the nightstand, I withdrew a pack of cigarettes, a forbidden and infrequent pleasure. Now, inhaling the slightly stale Camel, I felt a little dizzy, suppressed a cough, but watched, enthralled, as the wisp of blue-gray smoke drifted upward. It took me, that image, to Small’s Paradise where the blue velvety clouds hovered over the packed tables.

I started reading the folder of poems Roddy had organized, caught now by Langston Hughes’ contagion, moving through the twenty or so poems, a tapestry of Harlem vignettes. A
Spoon River Anthology
for Harlem, miniature portraits of life: street vendors hawking peanuts, nightclubs decorated in jungle or plantation motifs, street crooners raggin’, folks at rent parties dancing to the Texas Tommy, crapshooters at the subway stops, Madame Rosa’s brothel, a pimp crowing from a cruising Duesenberg, an ode to Florence Mills, imagined afternoons with the writers at the Niggerati Manor on 136th Street, echoes of an Old South he didn’t know but had heard so much about, a bitter lyric about a lynching in Tennessee. Each poem moved seamlessly into the next, a weaving in and out of mood, emotion, color. A glimpse of a corner cigar store moved quickly into a night poem—a jazz club. A run of jazz lyrics, fragmented lines, broken images, wailing words that dipped and shimmered on the page. When he described a young Negro flapper reaching for a cigarette, her red-painted lips quivering, I found myself doing the same, so appealing was his imagery, so authentic the moment.

Roddy had obviously culled the poems from his writings, for the larger stack of notes consisted of crude earlier versions of the poetry, jottings, scribblings. But there was also a folder of first drafts, tentative poems or paragraphs, wide-ranging in theme. He’d jotted down notes about the history of the Negro, some lines about slavery, about the power of Negro spirituals. A number of lines dealt with the Civil War and the idea that the horrific war had stunned the black man forever—and, he noted, the white man, as well. Tucked into the paper was his library card for the Harlem branch of the New York Public Library on Lenox Avenue, frayed and bent and obviously much used. Some lines caught my eye:
They gave us a violent past, so the modern Negro expects violence. Our father…give us our daily violence.