The Loved and the Lost Page 10

  “And I did, too, and my father was even more disarming than Mr. Eldrich. He wondered why a smart girl like Sophie would want to bother with anything as tedious as nursing, but he was sympathetic, and then he retired to his study – to meditate, I suppose; and soon he had a caller. Mr. Eldrich joined my father in the study, and Sophie and I waited; and I remember the way she kept watching me. When Mr. Eldrich left, my father called me into the study. The poor man had evidently had a rough time. He said, ‘If only Sophie were a light mulatto – if only she weren’t coal-black!’ and then he talked about the little compromises that had to be made for the sake of harmony in the flock.

  “Sophie was waiting for me, and I said, ‘You’re just too black, Sophie.’ It was a cruel thing to say; but I felt cruel, and I was sure it was the way Sophie wanted me to feel. I remember how she looked at me before she hurried away. I watched her running away down the street.

  “I went out and walked around myself,” she said. There was a curious hardness in her voice, and sometimes she glanced at McAlpine, wondering why she felt compelled to tell these things. “It was raining, and I stayed out and caught a chill, and I got a fever that lasted three days; and when my head cleared my father was sitting beside the bed. Sitting with his eyes closed and he head bowed. ‘Were you praying for me?’ I asked, not meaning to hurt him, but because I thought I saw his lips moving. ‘Why did you say that?’ he said, and he looked haggard and miserable, and he started to cry. It’s awful to see your own father cry. I felt so sorry for him. For some reason I remembered how he used to fumble with his watch chain. I wanted to comfort him. ‘I can’t pray,’ he said. And then he choked a little and said, ‘I haven’t believed in God for years.’

  “He knew what he was and knew how he had been corrupted and – well, we shared the understanding. I knew I could only make him more unhappy by staying at home and reminding him of things. Then it happened; while I was hating his respectable world for what it had done to him, I felt this lightness of spirit; I felt myself whirling away from things he had wanted, whirling in an entirely different direction. I left him. It was right. I’ve always trusted that feeling, and I’ve got it now that I’m down in that factory. Do you see what I mean, Jim?”

  “The Johnsons,” he said softly, as if he hadn’t heard her question. “That tumble-down house. I guess I understand.” And he pictured the bare house in the field, heard the laughter of the Johnson children in the flow of their unpredictable, disorderly happiness. “Peggy,” he said, “all this makes you sound pretty much alone, but Foley tells me you had a – that there’s a fellow in love with you. A Henry Jackson or something like that.”

  “That’s right. And I don’t think you’d like Henry.”

  “No?”

  “You probably like people who like you, and Henry would not like you, Jim. By the way, he left New York last night. He’s a commercial artist. Very intellectual.”

  “Does he object to your Negro friends?”

  “Henry is very emancipated,” she said, smiling.

  “If I could only prove to you it won’t work out, Peggy! A good heart can’t smash a brick wall. This false idealism—”

  “It’s working out fine,” she said, cutting him off. “And, anyway, there are a lot of things I have to see for myself.”

  “Peggy,” he said, taking her hand, “in all of this I’m a stranger, more and more of a stranger; but in another way you’re a stranger, too, if you’d only see it. When I’m with you I feel – well, I feel that neither of us should be here at all.”

  “At least I shouldn’t be here.” She stood up. “I should be on my way to work. I’ll be ten minutes late, and they’ll dock me about thirty cents.” She got her snow boots and put them on, and then a short dark blue jacket, and a handkerchief around her head, and started toward the door. “Come on. Let’s go.”

  Outside, the cold wind blew the snow against their faces. Taking a last puff at her cigarette, she flicked it neatly out on the road about twenty feet away.

  “Can you do it that far every time?” he asked solemnly.

  “I can flick it ten feet farther than that,” she said.

  He nodded. “Well, I’ll be seeing you, Peggy.”

  “Sure, I’ll be seeing you,” she said.

  She went down the street toward St. Catherine looking like an inconspicuous factory worker in her blue overalls and yellow bandanna handkerchief; and McAlpine, deeply discontented, watched her go. He stood there, frowning, close to an insight; then he got it. The little Negro section in Montreal had become for her the happy and fabulous Johnson family; and if the Johnsons, knowing her, could love and respect her, why shouldn’t the Negroes down on St. Antoine? If only he could talk with some of them! Perhaps he could get Foley’s friend to go down there with him…

  THIRTEEN

  Milton Rogers, the big jovial apple-cheeked photographer, lived in an apartment on the corner of Hope and Dorchester a hundred yards from a monastery whose tolling bells woke him every morning at five o’clock. He was married to a big-boned, dark-eyed girl, a painter, and he liked wearing loose tweed jackets and slacks and shirts with lowcut collars. He had the air of a rich man, but he couldn’t save any money. At forty-two he had the best collection of jazz records in Montreal and a social conscience he was proud of; but it didn’t prevent him from having a good time: he could go to the most expensive nightclubs and look around and say, “Isn’t all this lousy! But it’s the system, and I’m just caught in the system.” He acted as a one-man reception committee for distinguished Negro musicians who came to Montreal.

  Late that night when McAlpine called at his apartment, he was drinking Irish whisky with two friends who shared his political convictions, two newspapermen in double-breasted brown suits. They looked alike and were both exuberant. McAlpine had to have a drink before Rogers would leave with him, taking a taxi down to St. Antoine. The café manager, who knew Rogers, took them to a small table at the side of the dance floor. Peggy wasn’t in the café. It was about half past one, the floor show had begun, and McAlpine, watching the performers, tried to discover in them an attractiveness, a magic warmth that might have appealed to her. He couldn’t do it; it hurt him to think of her smiling at the coarse jokes.

  “Do you know Peggy Sanderson?” he asked.

  “Oh, sure,” Rogers said without taking his eyes off the mulatto singer. “She comes around here a lot.”

  “What do you make of her?”

  “I dislike her,” he said. “I dislike her attitude. I can’t talk to her any more. I think she’s ignorant. A person should have some scientific understanding of the Negro’s lot in America. It’s economics or it’s nothing. It’s a matter of jobs. Only certain kinds of jobs are available to Negroes. They can’t get their share of jobs. They’re in an economic ghetto, which of course forces them to live in some cheap section. But if the jobs were open to them – I despise this kissing the leper stuff. It messes up the whole situation. Fundamentally, it’s harmful. What good is it going to do the Negroes to have this Peggy come along and say, ‘Everything I have is yours.’ Particularly when she has only one thing. I no longer go for little Peggy myself,” he said in a fine impersonal tone. “In fact I could slap her. Besides, she goes for Negroes, and God knows how many! I’d be scared to sleep with her myself.”

  “Would you?” McAlpine asked. “Are you sure she’s not just – well, a friend of all of them – like you?”

  “I don’t get from them what she gets,” Rogers said coarsely. “For another thing they still like to have me around here. And they don’t like having her around.”

  “I think you’re mistaken.”

  “Am I?” Rogers looked surprised. “Well, the show’s over. Why don’t we ask the band leader to sit down with us? You’ll like him, Elton Wagstaffe. A great guy. Ask him what he thinks. He’s got a great little band there. He’s been right through the mill. Played with Eddie Condon and Ellington and probably knew Bix too.” Calling a waiter, he asked him to spea
k to the band leader; and in a few minutes, Wagstaffe came to the table and sat down with them.

  Wagstaffe was a quiet, patient, dark-skinned man who would never be surprised at anything that happened in a nightclub. For years in the good jazz days he had worked in Memphis, St. Louis, and Chicago; now he wandered around picking up a living in these small Negro nightclubs and hoping for a jazz revival. Polite and rather indifferent, he obviously felt friendly and close to Rogers.

  He joked about how the band was developing and they agreed that no one would get rich these days playing jazz. McAlpine waited anxiously for Rogers to mention Peggy Sanderson. Instead, Rogers said, “Elton, my friend here was eyeing your canary.”

  “Me?” McAlpine asked, looking startled. “Well, under the spotlight she looked golden. Her shoulders looked golden.”

  “A pretty kid, yes,” the band leader said. Standing up, he beckoned to the singer, who was going toward the bar.

  McAlpine quickly ordered a drink for her. Without the yellow glare of the spotlight, her skin was greyer, the golden lustre of the flesh all gone. He praised her voice. He wanted to create for himself the feeling Peggy might have had for a Negro. The girl began to answer his questions in a thin dainty voice. She was very polite and sounded like an unprotected, helpless little girl. Gradually her brown softness and the richness of her skin began to charm him. Yes, I could get used to her, he admitted to himself. I’d always feel strange with her, but it would be a novel sensation. That soft shadowed flesh. And the charm of novelty… My God – if that’s the appeal for Peggy!

  The little mulatto said that she was leaving in the morning for Chicago: one splendid engagement after another awaited her. Even Café Society in New York had beckoned to her. But in the meantime she had an engagement with a gentleman at the bar. Rising, she shook hands with McAlpine and thanked him sincerely, though she didn’t know why she was thanking him. When she had gone, the band leader said amiably, “You’ve come a couple of nights too late, my friend… She’s on her way tomorrow. If you had come a couple of nights ago you might have made time.”

  “Oh, I see,” McAlpine said. Even this quiet Negro band leader couldn’t believe a man would be interested only in being friendly with a pretty mulatto – he would want to sleep with her. The normal supposition, McAlpine supposed, just as everyone assumed that Peggy wanted to sleep with her Negro friends. “I merely thought she sang very well,” he said uncomfortably.

  “McAlpine’s a friend of Peggy Sanderson’s,” Rogers said.

  “Is that a fact?” the band leader asked, his eyes no longer amiable. “A pretty kid, isn’t she? You get along good with her, eh?”

  “I think so. She has a lot of admiration – and real sympathy – for your race, Mr. Wagstaffe. I’ve never met anyone who’s a better friend.”

  “Yeah, a friend,” the band leader admitted. The word “friend,” which was used by the Negroes to describe a sympathetic white person, had worried him. Usually he had a soft, easy flow of words. Now the right words wouldn’t come. A little beer had been spilled on the table. Beckoning to the waiter, he had him come and wipe it up carefully. The glossy black-topped table had to be dry and spotless before he could choose the right words. “It’s a fact, Mr. McAlpine, that my race needs all its friends,” he said. “Rogers here is a real friend. Yes, maybe that little girl, Peggy, is a friend, too. Now I don’t know what to say.”

  Not wanting to offend McAlpine, he sized him up carefully. While he was doing so McAlpine thought, When he suggested that I might be successful with his little singer it didn’t matter whether I was a friend or not.

  “Quiet and like a little lady, the way Peggy sits, eh?” Wagstaffe murmured, half to himself. “All by herself she sits, mister. At a table over there by the corner, sweet and round and eager like a flower somebody ought to pick. I mean just waiting to be picked. All alone and yet not so far away. Very still and yet kind of jumping right at you, eh, Mr. McAlpine? She don’t get drunk, she don’t even dance, she don’t even clap her hands loud. She’s just here like that with us. But all my boys knows she’s here and kind of waiting. Yes, kind of quiet and waiting – for what?”

  “I saw you sitting with her one night,” McAlpine said.

  “Yes, I guess you did.”

  “I noticed something else that night, Mr. Wagstaffe. You saw her sitting there and you looked as if you didn’t want to sit with her, something was bothering you, and then you joined her and then – well, you felt good. Is that right?”

  “He’s got the big eye, eh?” Wagstaffe said to Rogers. “What did you say he did for a living?”

  “I couldn’t help noting it,” McAlpine said.

  “Well, it’s a fact,” Wagstaffe said reluctantly. “But I’ve made up my mind now and I don’t sit with her no more.”

  “Oh? Why?”

  “She’s lousing up my band. Sooner or later she’ll make trouble.”

  “It’s not putting her in a very good light, is it, Mr. Wagstaffe?”

  “No? Well, listen.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “I’m a Negro musician. I’ve been around a lot in my good days. Lots of little white girls have come my way.” He frowned; the words wouldn’t come easily, his thoughts turning inward as he groped to get his feeling right, not only for McAlpine, but for himself.

  As a rule, he said, the white girls who came his way were not hard to place, for the obvious ones were crazy about jazz music and thought they couldn’t understand it unless they got close to the Negro, and with most of them it was just mental. You didn’t get excited about them any more than you did about those white girls with sympathy for the race who wanted to hold discussions and do field work like social service workers; and if they were real friends you liked them, and if they didn’t make trouble you liked them anyway. You had nothing to lose liking them. Same with the white girls who were all political conviction and full of the class war and wanted to marry a Negro to make a point to satisfy themselves it could be done and the workers of the world could unite. But the white girls you had to watch were the odd ones who were restless and good-looking, tired of something and wanting something new that looked different and out of line. A coloured man watched himself with these women and was always suspicious, asking himself what they were after and waiting for them to make the nasty little break. With such girls, if the relationship gets intimate, you still watch, hiding the old fear, the knowledge, for even if she rolls an eye and you move in she’s apt to squawk loud and outraged, and you want to run fast and break something, and you feel lonely and crazy. They were a nuisance because they were only fooling around like kids at a circus, and they hurt you deep inside; like the time when he was in Paris with a jazz band and the band was taken up by some rich people and they were at this party with these white girls, and he had played his horn a little and they were coaxing him to play some more, but he had a blister on his lip, and he was sitting cross-legged on the floor, and this little blonde came over kneeling beside him, coaxing him. “Oh, come on, Smokey Joe,” she said, and she gave him a slap on the forehead. Well, he could have bust her, he was so mad. “Look out: you’re not in the United States now, you’re in Paris!” he said. She had made him feel like a dog, like an ape; he wanted to bust her, but instead the party broke up. It was not like that, of course, with those little white girls who came around like stuffing on a plate. They were ignorant. You tell them love is a pork chop and they eat it, and nobody gives a damn. But Montreal was a good town; things weren’t so bad in Montreal, and the Brooklyn ball team made no mistake when they first broke in their coloured ball players with the Montreal team. It was important that they picked on Montreal. It’s a town where there are a lot of minorities, but the French like the Negro ball players and give them a hand, and if a coloured boy kept his head, and kept his eyes closed a little and didn’t want to go to too many places he didn’t get into any trouble. The eyes didn’t have to be closed too tight and the Negro ball players swinging around the circuit with th
e team were glad to get back to Montreal.

  Then he smiled to himself, reflecting. He was quiet, patient and wonderfully unhurried. He would shrug with his left shoulder, and now that he had in his mind some sardonic thought his tone, when he spoke, was still mild and uncomplaining.

  Maybe a girl like Peggy thought she was doing something all by herself, he said. Not that a girl couldn’t do something all by herself, he grinned, enjoying his own sense of irony. Did they know Jill? Oh, sure, they must know Jill. Well, Rogers knew Jill even if McAlpine didn’t. A mulatto floating around the night spots near Peel and St, Catherine, really good-looking, tall and silky and well spoken and not ignorant, a semipro. Well, the business manager of one of the visiting ball teams made a play for Jill and so he stayed a couple of nights with her and thought she was terrific and got hilarious and phoned all around saying he made a mistake opposing the clubs’ using coloured ball players. “From now on he’s all for them. Sure, one person can do big things, eh?” he asked cynically. “Poor little Jill. Maybe she lays down her golden body like one of those martyrs, bringing the races together; but the trouble is, Jill’s golden body is like a race track.” He laughed, but his laughter didn’t put Peggy out of his mind.