Club Storyville (24 page)

When another sound came, though, it wasn’t from the courtyard, but from the door beside us. Ariel’s hand turning firmer on my shoulder, she held me in place as she looked back to watch the door open and the light spill from the doorway, turning the woman who stood there into a shadow as frightening as the others.

Surprised as the light revealed Ariel and I hiding behind the cold stone of the statue, the woman just stared at us for a moment, her lined face coming into clearer view, but making her no less menacing.

I was sure she would tell us to go, that she would call for the shadows with their weapons to come and collect us. Then, a beam of light hit the woman straight on, and she looked frightened herself as her eyes swung to the person who stood in the archway, so close to finding us, I could see the black toe of his shoe jutting out from behind the base of the statue.

“Back inside,” he gruffly ordered, and, as the woman in the doorway numbly nodded, I tried not to breathe.

Watching the woman start to pull the door shut as the light from the shadow's flashlight swung back out to the courtyard, I expected him to come back, to realize he hadn't looked behind the statue, and to drag Ariel away from me.

The door not fully closed before it pushed back open slightly, though, I glanced toward the woman as she risked herself to gesture us inside.

“Hurry,” she whispered, but I didn't have the chance to even register the command before Ariel was tugging me toward our only chance at escaping the shadows unscathed.

Just before she pulled me through the cracked door to relative safety, I thought to look back, and there was just enough light to see the outline of the statue that had protected us.

It was a weeping angel.

T
hrough another labyrinth, I tried to find my footing, but it was only Ariel's hand in mine that felt at all real, and it was as if I was being pulled on the air behind her.

Passing signs of life, rooms that held tables and books and children's toys, we followed the woman down a hallway, which seemed as if it might never come to an end, before at last going through a door and emerging into a chapel that was nothing but white walls and wood. The floor, the beams, the choir loft, even the organ with its pipes stretching into the top of the alcove behind the altar.

It was woodworker's dream.

A graying man, in the church to pray, looked up for a moment before returning to the task at hand, and, aside from the occasional sound from outside, there was nothing to indicate anything bad was happening.

“You'll be safe here,” the woman said, and I wondered if she knew where we had come from, how we had poured out of the darkness below ground to end up in the darkness of the courtyard. Would she still have given us sanctuary, I wondered, if she did? Or would she walk us to the door and hand us over to the shadows?

Seeing a white man appear from the hallway with a colored lady a moment later, I realized the church attendant must have left the door unlocked for others to find their own way. Which meant she didn't care where we had come from, or what we had been doing there. As for sides, it seemed, the church lady was simply on the side of not seeing people beaten in the streets. “Just wait a while,” she said to all of us together. “They'll go eventually.”

“Shouldn't we call the police?” I asked, and when they looked to me, the man finally huffing a breath as he smiled an unamused smile and shook his head at the floor, Ariel's hands came to my shoulders and I turned at her urging.

“Elizabeth,” she uttered, her eyes moving over me in the way I was so tired of them seeing me, like I was too young and too naïve and too fragile. “Those were the police.”

“Of course, they were,” I realized in a whisper. Who else would they be? What we were doing in the club beneath Café Beni was against the law. Who else would enforce it?

I just hadn't expected the police to break so many laws to do it. Beating people to stop them from dancing with the wrong people seemed a very strange way of keeping the peace.

‘Killing to stop killing doesn’t make good sense,’ Nan would say.

Killing to stop killing doesn’t make good sense.

When Ariel reached for me, her hand shook on my wrist, and I realized, with some amazement, she was scared too, as she pulled me into a pew and I sunk down beside her.

Looking around at the usual components - the carved crosses, the worn hymnals, the sacred altar - I expected the feeling to come, to overtake both the good and bad I had just been through, that feeling I had no place in a house of God, as I had felt every time I sat down the row from Ariel in church after the garden, like a sinner whose will to change simply wasn't strong enough to be worthy of forgiveness.

I thought I knew what I deserved when I thought I knew what my sins were, but, if the people in that club were sinning, they were doing so inwardly, doing no wrong to anyone but themselves. It was the fixers, the people who were trying to stop the sins, who brought weapons.

Feeling Ariel's hand on the pew between us, I reached for it, because God in all His infinite glory had never once brought me the comfort she did, and, if that was wrong, I didn’t care. I was willing to accept whatever punishment. Just not man's punishment, because, suddenly, I felt blessed and cursed by a deeper understanding of just how many things men had wrong.

All I wanted was to love Ariel, and to love my family, and to love God, for things to stop changing in my world, and for the world to be the way it could be, and none of it seemed to go together.

“I lost my sweater,” the thought occurred to me suddenly, and, for some reason, it felt like the worst thing that had happened all night.

Ariel's arm sliding around my shoulders, I broke down in tears at her touch, turning into her and clutching helplessly as I felt her lips press to my forehead. And, even right there in His house, with all the scripture and penance at the ready, God had nothing to say about it.

Chapter Twenty-Three

A
riel didn't tell me I had to let go, so I didn't. As we waited in the church for the streets to be free enough to walk, I clung to her, releasing her only as long as it took to climb into the car of the parishioner the church lady called to pick us up, before grabbing her hand once more as I rode in silence between her and the colored lady in the backseat.

“Was it worth it?” the parishioner wasn't as forgiving as the church lady, or God, had been. “Your night of sin?”

It was, actually, I realized. So many of my deepest questions had been answered in the underground below Café Beni, more than I could have dared hope, it was hard to recall a night of greater value in my life.

Of course, it was hard to know if I would feel the same had I been the one at the end of some policeman's bully club.

The man not really wanting an answer, though, but wanting only to moralize to the three women caught in something they couldn't get out of on their own, none of us felt the need to answer him.

Daddy would be the same way, I knew. Called to the church to do the Lord’s errand, he would feel the need to give a sermon too. That was the way wasn’t it, when one didn’t know? To strongly defend what one believed he knew? To censure what fault he found in others? Knowing Daddy, though, it was easier to recognize the man’s morality as based more in being woken in the middle of the night and inconvenienced than as a desire to save anyone else's soul.

W
hen the parishioner dropped the colored lady off first, on the sidewalk in front of rows and rows of matching brick buildings, I wondered which door she would go through, but the man didn't stick around long enough to see her safely inside. The car pulling off as soon as she was on the sidewalk, we drove once more through the streets, and I breathed relief as the names became familiar. In spite of his Christian credentials, there was something unsettling about the moralizer that made me feel as if he too was just waiting to pull a weapon to teach someone the right way, and I could tell by the way Ariel watched him she felt it too.

“Well, you girls are all sorts of places you don't belong tonight,” the moralizer said as he pulled to a stop in front of Buddy’s, and I could tell Ariel had just about reached the limit of how long she could hold her tongue as she yanked the handle, pulling me with her as she got out of the beige, four-door sedan.

“Thank you so much for your kindness,” she returned, and it was only her cloying tone that gave away her true sentiment. “I'm sure God will exalt you.”

Pushing the door shut, Ariel’s hand curved around my hip, forcing me backward a step as if she anticipated the man pulling away in a huff, which he did with a squeal of tires and smell of burning rubber I was surprised didn’t bring the residents running to their windows.

Hours since I had last seen a clock, I had no way of knowing exactly how late it was as we walked into the boarding house, but I knew it was far from respectable, closer to waking time for most people than bedtime.

“My, oh my…” Reggie said, his eyes going instantly to the dark wood clock above the desk, and, following them, I discovered the uncivilized hour was almost three a.m. “You ladies must have had a serious night on the town. You know, they say three o’clock is the devil’s hour…” Raw from the evil I had seen with my own eyes, I flinched at the term, wondering if it was true. “You made it back just in…” Turning to us with a bright smile, Reggie’s face fell instantly to concern when he saw we couldn’t play along. “Is everything all right?”

“Everything is fine,” Ariel told him, but, looking to me, she seemed to realize how obvious it was everything wasn't. “We just had a run-in with some men,” she provided some explanation, and it was close enough to the truth.

“Do you need me to do something?” Reggie came out from behind the desk, looking as if he was gearing up to perform some chivalrous act on our behalf, and, not sure what he thought he might do, I felt my lip twitch up, wishing I could get the feeling to spread throughout the rest of me.

“No. It’s all over now,” Ariel responded, and I wasn't sure if she was telling him or assuring me when her fingers squeezed my arm in gentle emphasis. “Goodnight, Reggie.”

“Goodnight, Ladies,” he said, and, feeling Ariel's hand slide across my back to coax me up the steps as Reggie kept watch at ground level, I almost felt safe again.

U
p the stairs, our room waited just as it had been, untouched in our absence. In some ways, I wished I could say the same for us.

“You should take a shower,” I heard Ariel say, but the suggestion was indistinguishable from all the other words of comfort she’d said to me over the past hours. “Elizabeth,” her hands were suddenly on my cheeks, forcing me to look at her, and a whimper escaped me at the feel of the real comforts she could give me. “Go take a shower,” she said. “You’ll feel better.”

For once, I was surprised to realize, Ariel didn't know better than I did. It was going to take more than a shower to make me feel anything close to normal again, and nothing close to normal to make me feel better. I knew exactly what it would take, could imagine it vividly, the feel of her overtaking me, her hands and lips going places I had yearned so long for them to go.

I was about to convince her, or to try at least, that there was a way to better for both of us, when Ariel let me go. “Take a shower and get ready for bed,” she said, and it sounded more like motherly advice than what I wanted it to be.

Feeling the sting of rejection, though I had done nothing for her to reject, I gathered my nightgown and toiletries and went to do as I was told.

Alone in the bathroom a few minutes later, I discovered Ariel had sent me to shower, not as a means of recovery, but because I was dirty. I had picked up so much grit from the wall of the church, the dirty gray marks set firmly into the cream fabric of the dress she had gifted me, and I figured, with a feeling of defeat, they would never come out.

Turning in the mirror, I marveled at how the dark marks had gotten even to places on my skin that should have been covered. The second glances I’d gotten from everyone making sudden sense, I wondered what it would be like to have such coloring all the time, everywhere, to be covered in something so much of the world viewed unfavorably, but that couldn’t be concealed or washed away. Feeling the tears at my eyes again, I knew wondering was doing me no favors, and I forced my mind blank as I stepped into the shower beneath the warm water, letting it anoint my skin.

“A
re you going to be okay while I'm gone?” Ariel asked when I made it back to the room and saw she hadn't yet changed for bed. Seeing no signs of our night on her clothes or skin, I assumed she must feel them anyway as I watched her gather her soap with the rest of her things. “I won't be long,” she said when I nodded, and I knew she would be longer than usual as I crawled into the bed.

Left alone to the silence of the room as the door clicked softly closed at Ariel’s back, sounds and visions from the night snuck back in, giving me a feeling like I was still there, trapped behind the stone angel as she wept, so petrified that, left long enough, I might have turned to stone with her.

Though I could feel the pillow in my hand, clean and soft and far from the courtyard, I couldn’t see the room laid out in front of me, my mind filled as it was with snippets from the night that merged into terrible visions – the expression in Ariel’s eyes as we danced warping to terror as a shadow closed in on us – and I couldn't stop the shaking, which felt as if it came from somewhere deep, like a volatile fault line ran right through the middle of me.

Nan was right, I realized. She did say one day I would tear myself in two.

T
he door at last opening, I listened as Ariel came back in, locking the door quietly behind her, as if she thought I could possibly be asleep, that I could recognize my own exhaustion, that I could stop the tremors long enough to feel anything but unstable. Recognizing each sound as she returned her toiletries to their places, I didn't bother to look for her, knowing she would get to me eventually, and, when she did, she would know I was a mess, a fragile, inadequate creature who crumbled every time something bad happened.