Amy Bloom - Lucky Us

Sometimes, when Clara filled in her face, connecting all the blank seas and inlets of the vitiligo to the smaller and smaller brown islands of her real color, it was hard not to feel that she was impersonating a Negro. The dark, arched eyebrows. Ruby-red lipstick shaping her pale, streaky mouth. Her nose, which was sometimes a contouring challenge when she was white, was a comfort. It was a Negro nose. When she was Negro, she sometimes put a little beige cream down the bridge to broaden it, in case someone failed to notice. Clara understood that race was more than a matter of appearance, but it was also a matter of appearance. Like Rudolph Valentino’s nose. How did people not notice that schnoz everywhere? Clara saw that nose on fancy white men from Philly to Boston. She saw it on half the Italians in New York, every other Tony and Guido. She saw it on almost every handsome colored flying ace, in newsreel after newsreel. That bony arch and hawklike tip. How did people not see that it was the same nose? It was probably the same dick too. Clara knew a girl who had met Errol Flynn in Hollywood and she said it was no longer than your forefinger but as wide around as a biscuit, and Clara had heard the same was true of many Italian men and of the Tuskegee Airmen too.

Pond Road

Great Neck, New York

18 June 1943

Dear Miss Williams,

I am writing to you after an evening at the Nite Cap. I am the chap who bought you a stinger between sets, but you have so many admirers that that description may not help my cause. Your performance tonight was splendid. I think that Lena Horne herself would have applauded your “Stormy Weather,” and your version of “There Are Such Things” was truly beautiful. I will be at the Nite Cap next Sunday. If I may, I will again buy you a drink between sets.

Yours, in admiration,

Edgar V. Acton

Edgar wrote the note ten times. He didn’t write, I am the white man who bought you a drink, because it was possible that there’d been other white men at other shows, although he hadn’t seen any. Edgar felt that the letter had more Jeeves-and-the-country-house than he’d intended. He’d never used the word “chap” in his life, but he was an English butler in a Negro nightclub and he thought that foolishness might be his trump card.

HE HADN’T THOUGHT ABOUT how it would be inside the Nite Cap. He had a free Saturday night, which he rarely did. (Saturday night, the Torellis usually had twenty or thirty relatives over for dinner and Edgar tended bar, served the priests, supervised the buffet, and drove the resentful cousins he had not been able to keep out of Joe Torelli’s Scotch back to the Bronx. “From whence they come,” Joe Torelli said.) The Irish bars of Great Neck were rough and charmless, and Manhattan was a big pond, after Ohio. He wanted a place he could listen to jazz, where no one knew him and no one wanted to. Inside the Nite Cap, Edgar was not invisible. He shone, and not in a good way. The bouncer was Negro, the tall, creamy coat-check girl was Negro, the broad-shouldered, bald-headed bartender and all of the men and women around him were Negro. At Windsor College, he was often the only man in a room full of women and it never bothered him. To be the sole man was not unpleasant; sometimes it was charming. Nice women rarely turn on a man they know, and even if they do, they’re women; their weapons are words. The Nite Cap was filled with tired cleaning ladies and baby nurses who worked hard for their living, and a few working girls and men with nicked, thick hands and cut faces; laborers, cooks, truck drivers, fighters. After Edgar had sat ten minutes at a rickety table, a waiter brought him a gin. He let go of Edgar’s glass reluctantly, not opening his hand until Edgar gave him five dollars and told him to keep it. The waiter moved a little more briskly, as if service could now be expected. Edgar’s first impulse was appeasement. If he knew what would make these men smile, and these women forgive him, he would offer it. He would soft-shoe across the small stage, make fun of his own accent and pallor, demonstrating his essential harmlessness, so he could stay in the Nite Cap, and not get hurt.

Pond Road

Great Neck, New York

1 July 1943

Dear Miss Williams,

It was a pleasure to see you again. I fear that I may have interrupted your conversation with your colleague the drummer, and I apologize. I’m delighted that you remembered encountering me outside the Silver Star Diner. I certainly remembered you. Would you consider joining me for a late supper at Gino’s this coming Wednesday evening? I understand that Mr. Circiello is quite a jazz fan and I’m sure he would be honored to have you at his restaurant.

Yours,

Edgar V. Acton

There would be difficulties in courting Clara. He was almost twenty years older. He was white. He wasn’t rich. He wasn’t certain that even by the standards of a Negro jazz singer on Long Island, he qualified as good enough. He gave a lot of thought to which places would be welcoming to them as a couple and he felt that Greenwich Village was his first choice. From what he’d heard from Earl, the bartender at the Nite Cap, there were a few nightclubs in Harlem that would be a distant second.

Clara, having been born and raised in America, didn’t give it another thought.

“Do you have your own home?” she said.

THEY WALKED DOWN HUDSON Street. It was a cool night and Clara pulled her shawl around her. Dinner at Gino’s was what Edgar had hoped for. The food covered the plate, the tomato sauce was mildly spicy and thick, and one could imagine a warm-hearted, chubby woman, who was not like Edgar’s mother and probably not like Clara’s, stirring a pot in the kitchen, humming some Neapolitan tune. Mr. Circiello didn’t welcome them with any special attention but he didn’t raise an eyebrow and he gave them a good table and he did say, Good night, signorina , good night, signore. It was a tremendous success. They had been seen and served and thanked. Edgar drove them back to the house Clara shared, to the room she rented from a cousin of the drummer. They sat in the car. Edgar put the radio on.

“Like a couple of kids,” Clara said.

“You, of course, are a spring flower,” Edgar said. “I should be bringing you to The Ritz.”

Clara sat still.

“You think if The Ritz was handy, I’d let you take me there?” she said.

Edgar’s sympathies were all with Clara.

“Clara, I’m too old for you and I’m not rich. I want to take you out every evening that we are both free and I want us to go to the best clubs and eat dinner at places like Gino’s, which I can hardly afford on a butler’s salary. If I follow my impulses in this matter, I will have to steal the Torelli silver, pawn it at that place we passed tonight, and, unless I am very clever, spend the rest of my quiet life in the state penitentiary. Breaking rocks.”

“I see that,” Clara said. “I see you on the chain gang. I see you singing ‘In the Jailhouse Now’ from can to can’t.”

“I do know ‘In the Jailhouse Now,’ ” Edgar said.

“You do not.”

“I may struggle with the tune,” he said, and he sang, not badly and in no accent but his own.

He’s in the jailhouse now. He’s in the jailhouse now.

I told him once or twice quit playin’ cards and shootin’ dice.

He’s in the jailhouse now.

Clara smiled and shook her head.

Edgar said, “Oh, I know. I cannot impress you.”

He leaned forward and kissed Clara on her neck and her cheek. He wanted to lick off her makeup, to kiss the perfect, bare Clara underneath.

CLARA THOUGHT THAT IT would be good if he did; it would be cool water on her blistered heart if he did.