Rising Tides (11 page)

Her hand went to her throat. The locket was under her dress. “I don’t have much of a past. No roots. No family. That’s why I always wear the locket.” She held out her hand. “And this ring. My father gave it to me. It only fits my little finger now, but it’s all I’ve got of him.”

“You’ve been living with me for weeks now, and you’re just getting around to telling me?”

“You’re the only person I’ve ever told.”

“Poor little colored girl.” He touched her cheek. “Hardly colored at all, but you’ve got the white man after you.”

“I’m as colored as you are, even if your skin’s darker. Any colored’s colored enough, and you know it. But I don’t think the white man’s after me, not in the way you mean. I’ve got as many white friends as Negroes. If any thing, we’re appreciated for our skin color here. It gives us an edge.”

“You’ve got it wrong. White man, even the French white man, looks at you he sees a good nigger, one who just about looks like him, talks like him, acts like him. You’re like a dolly he can play with and take out in public for other white men to admire. Then he can stick you off in some dusty corner the minute you get a little dusty, too, or a little pushy, or start acting white.”

“Are we talking about me or you, Gerard? Because I’m nobody’s dolly.”

His tone softened. He put his arms around her again. “You’re my doll.”

In a moment of intimacy, she had shared her greatest secret. Now she felt as if he had turned it against her. She pulled away. The arm with the new bracelet hung heavily at her side. “Just don’t forget. You can’t play with me. I’m real.”

He played with her that night, though, ignoring her, then smothering her with attention. At dinner he told funny stories about her to the Trumbles and later to the others who joined their party at Le Dôme. He left their table once to sit with Cloudy, who had just returned from England. And when he returned he drank heavily, and the more he drank, the more jovial he became, until the very end of the evening.

They were at a small nightclub in Montmartre, one of Les Américains’s less-able competitors. The room was dingier, smaller and darker, and the dance floor too small for more than a couple or two to maneuver. Nicky knew the musicians, two tired old men who had sunk to this place because little else was available at summer’s end. When one of them asked her to do a number, Gerard urged her on.

“Show your legs and wiggle your hips,” he said, slur ring his words. “That’s what you do best.”

Nicky considered abandoning him and going home, but she
thought better of it. She wasn’t sure he could find his way back to the apartment. She was even less sure he would choose to. There was a challenge in his alcohol-blurred eyes. She stood and went to the piano.

“Hey, glad you’re gonna do it, peaches,” Pancho Smith, an old friend of Clarence’s, said. “Maybe we can liven up this joint after all.”

“I’m not in the mood to liven up anything,” she said. She conferred with him. At first he looked unsure when she told him what she wanted. “What’s it matter?” she asked. “Hardly anybody’s here to hear us. Even the manager’s gone.”

He shrugged. “Give it all you’ve got.”

She patted his shoulder. Then she turned and waited as he played the introduction. She put her hands on her hips and stepped forward.

“Don’t ever let no one man worry your mind…”

She took another step forward and lifted a hand as she repeated the line. The song was “Every Woman’s Blues,” a favorite of hers, from a recent recording by a South Carolina singer named Clara Smith. The message was too clear to miss. A smart woman never counted on just one man. She kept a couple around, in case that first man failed her—which he was sure enough bound to do. It didn’t matter if her man was smarter than she was, or if his education was better. Her mind was her own, and she could do what she wanted.

It was a song that Clarence never would have agreed to let her sing, soulful, sensual, packed with emotion. She swung it a little, contrary to traditional blues style. She wasn’t sad so much as sexy and sassy. But she didn’t smile. She lifted her eyebrows arrogantly as she belted it out.

And she sang like she’d been born to sing. Without a dance step. Without a wink or a shimmy. The moment belonged to
her and to Clara Smith’s music, and she let her voice communicate exactly what she was feeling.

She saw some people come in to stand in the door way, and she knew that her voice had brought them there. She smiled lazily as Pancho played the closing bars, then she turned to him. “Again,” she said. “And this time let’s pick it up.”

He knew exactly what she wanted. He took the key up a third to cater to her mobile range and jazzed up the tempo. She liked what she heard, and told him so. Then she started again, snappier, but still not bouncy. She played with the motifs, letting Pancho carry the melody while she experimented with rhythm and harmony. All the while, she never took her eyes off Gerard.

When she had finished, the room resounded with applause. She made a graceful curtsy. Then she thanked Pancho and the drummer before she went back to her table.

Gerard was starting a fresh drink, and he didn’t look at her. But the others raved on and on about her talent. “You have the voice of your people,” Amy Trumble said. Like Gerard, she’d had entirely too much champagne. Now her eyes filled with tears. “What we’ve done to you. What we’ve done.”

“Sorry, but you can’t do anything about it tonight, Amy.” Nicky willed Gerard to look at her. His eyes flicked to hers. His mouth was drawn in a sullen line. “Did you like that, Gerard? I sang it just for you.”

He didn’t answer, but he stared at her as he downed his drink. She didn’t know what she had done at the be ginning of the night to anger him; much worse, she suspected she had done nothing at all. She stood.

“I’m really not feeling well. I think I’m going back to the apartment.” She wasn’t just making an excuse. She really didn’t feel well. She had expected her period for days, and now she
suspected it must be on its way. Her head ached, and she felt vaguely nauseated. “Are you coming, Gerard?”

He didn’t respond. She said good-night to the others, then crossed to the door to find a taxi. A man standing in the doorway stopped her before she could pass.

“You sing at Les Américains, don’t you?” His English was pleasantly accented, but nothing else about him was pleasant. He had a boxer’s build, and a long scar zigzagging across one cheek. His eyes were small and narrow, and the scar drew one side of his mouth into a permanent sneer. Paris had its criminal element; Clarence sometimes carried a gun.

“That’s right.” She tried to pass, but he took her arm.

“I’ve heard you there. I liked you better here.”

“Thank you.” She didn’t try to pull away. She knew better.

He dropped her arm. “You wear something sexier, cut low, like this…” He touched her chest, just about her breasts. You wiggle a little, sing different songs, sexy songs, you can be like Josephine Baker.”

“Sure. And if I take off most of my clothes and dance in a banana skirt I can be even more like her. But I’m me.” She stared straight at him. “May I leave now?”

“If you change your mind, come and see me.” He pulled out a piece of paper. He scribbled his name and a phone number on it.

“Sure.” She stuffed the number in her bag.

“You’ll come. Americans, they’re not so popular here anymore. You understand? They make too much trouble, throw too much money around. You don’t care about little people.”

“I
am
a little people. I have no money to throw around.”

“The rich white Americans?” He gave a very Gallic shrug.
“They’ll go back home. Who’ll come to Les Américains then? But there’ll still be jobs here for you, if you give the French what the French want.”

“Thank you.” Her voice held no gratitude. “I’ll certainly remember all this.”

“I hope you do.” He smiled and bowed.

In the taxi on the way home, she thought about tearing up his phone number, but it was too dark to find it among the other papers in her handbag.

N
icky was three months pregnant before she found the courage to see a doctor, and four months before she found the courage to tell Gerard.

She told Clarence first, in the Montmartre apartment they had shared. The apartment wasn’t large, but Clarence had made it a home with comfortable furniture and flea-market art. He had chosen a location not far from a small park, so that when she wasn’t in school, she would have a place to play. No true grandfather could have been kinder or more concerned about her.

She couldn’t look at him as she spoke, so she stared out the window. The day was gray, and the cobblestone streets were glazed with ice. The domed spire of Sacré-Coeur was just visible now that the limbs of the tree across the street were bare.

“I’m going to have a baby, Clarence.”

“I know.”

“You do? You can tell already?” She still didn’t turn.

“I can tell.”

She wondered if Gerard, who knew her body best of all,
also suspected. “I didn’t want to believe it. Can you believe I was that stupid?”

Clarence didn’t answer.

“I want you to know, I was trying to prevent it.” She was embarrassed to speak so frankly to him, but she didn’t want him to think she had done this on purpose. “I guess I didn’t try hard enough. I guess I didn’t know what to do until it was already too late. It happened…right away.”

“What you planning to do about it, Nickel?”

“There isn’t anything
to
do. I’m going to have it.”

“I know that. Where you plannin’ to live?”

For a moment she thought he was telling her that she was no longer welcome to share a home with him. Then she realized what he was really asking. “You mean, am I going to live with Gerard? I haven’t told him, but he won’t want the baby.” She swallowed, but the words still tasted bad. “And he doesn’t want me. Not anymore. He sleeps away from the apartment as often as he sleeps there. He’s got another woman. Julia St. Cloud.”

She turned. She saw nothing but pain on his face. “She’s white. He hates white people, and the part of
me
that’s white. But he sleeps with Cloudy because she doles out a little money so he can keep writing. She calls herself his patron.”

“And what are you, Nickel?”

“I’m the fool who loves him.” She didn’t cry, al though she had shed a thousand tears and probably would shed more. “You know what’s worse? I think he loves me, too. As much as he can. But he’s twisted by things he won’t even talk about.”

“Lotta Negro men have things they don’t want to talk about,” Clarence said. “Lotta us do.”

“He tells stories about his childhood, but they don’t add up. One time he’s a sharecropper’s son from Georgia. The next
time he talks about seeing his father lynched in South Carolina for looking a white woman in the eye. I don’t think he even remembers which one is true. I looked at that poem he’s been working on since summer. I found the key to his desk and I looked at that poem. And it’s never going to sell, because it’s so filled with rage. So filled…” She couldn’t go on.

He came to her and took her in his arms. He smelled like cheap tobacco and bay rum, and for the first time in a month, she was comforted. “It’s okay. We’ll be okay.”

“Can I come home, Clarence?”

“You still got that key, don’t you? It still fits the lock?”

Her laugh was pathetic.

“Then you can come home. As long as I’m livin’, you can still come home.”

“I’m so, so sorry.” She was crying now, but the tears didn’t scald as harshly as they had.

“Don’t be. You’re gonna have a baby, and you’re gonna bring him up right, the way I tried to bring you up. The way your papa tried. Ain’t nothing wrong with having a baby, but there’s something wrong about not lovin’ him. Be sure you love him.”

She hugged Clarence hard and hoped her child would not be born with its father’s rage.

She waited a week, then another, before she told Gerard. She chose her moment carefully. His behavior had grown more erratic as the weather grew colder. She couldn’t tell, from one hour to the next, which Gerard she would see. One was still kind and solicitous, the gentle lover who made her feel cared-for and thoroughly alive. This was the man she had known first, the man she had fallen in love with and still loved. The other Gerard taunted her for the color of her skin and the texture of her hair. That Gerard could accuse her of sins
against her race with nothing more than his eyes and tightly drawn lips.

She bided her time, waiting for the best part of him to emerge. She didn’t want to tell him after lovemaking, but she didn’t want to tell him on a wave of anger, either. So she waited until one evening after they had eaten a rare dinner at home alone. Gerard had smiled and complimented her over the meal. He had spent the past three nights with her, and she knew, from other sources, that Cloudy had gone to Spain for Christmas. They were alone, with no one else to interfere.

She brought him coffee laced with brandy and watched as he sipped it. There was coal burning in the small fireplace, and the room was as warm as any room in an old building in Paris. Snow was falling outside the window, scattered flakes that melted before they touched the ground.

The scene was so warmly domestic, that Nicky could almost have believed that things were right between them. But living with Gerard had taught her not to delude herself. She had packed her final suitcase to take to Clarence’s.

She slid into the corner of the seat, far enough away from him that she could see him clearly. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to talk to you.”

“I want to talk to you, too.”

“I’m going to have a baby.”

He continued to sip his coffee. He didn’t look at her.

“I didn’t plan it,” she continued. “But it happened. I’m moving back in with Clarence. He’s going to help me.”

“I’m leaving Paris.” He spoke as if he hadn’t heard her.

She told herself disinterest was better than a scene. “Are you?”

“Yeah. Next week. I’m going to travel with…friends. Paris has nothing to offer. Everyone thinks it’s the place to work.
They sit in their grimy cafés and pretend they know everything about literature, but they don’t know anything.”

She recognized the beginning of a tirade and tried to turn the tide. “You have to do what’s right. I have to do the same.”

“You’ve never understood, have you?”

“Understood what?”

“What it means to be me. What I have to say. What I feel.” He pounded his chest.

Nicky had never been frightened of Gerard. Even in his worst moods, he had never lifted his hand against her. Now, for the first time, she was afraid, but not be cause she thought he might strike her. Gerard really wasn’t completely sane.

“I’ve tried to understand,” she said, keeping her voice low and soothing. “But no one can really understand someone else. I’m not you. I’m just the woman who loves you.”

“Love!” He stood and began to pace. “There is no such thing! It’s just a word people use. The white master loved his colored slaves, loved them so much he took their women and gave them babies. Abolitionist loved his colored people, too, loved them so much he set them free so they could grub around in somebody else’s dirt till the dirt couldn’t give any more crops. Then he packed them into cities, twelve to a room, with no jobs and no hope of finding any.”

“Gerard. We aren’t talking about the master or the abolitionist. We’re talking about you and me.”

“You don’t know, because your skin’s not black!” He surprised her by grabbing her arm. “Look at you! You’re nothing! You’re not white, you’re not black! Nothing!”

She jerked her arm from his grasp. “Your child will be darker than me and lighter than you! Will that make
him
nothing, too?” Anger brought her to her feet. She had taken his abuse for too long, hoping, cringing. Now the fury surging through
her was cleansing. “If our child is nothing, it’s because his father is nothing! But luckily, that’s not the way things work. He’ll be something because I’m going to raise him to be something!”

“So what? You want applause?”

“I want you to move out of the way so I can leave.”

His expression softened. He moved a step closer. “You don’t have to go. I’ll be here another week. And I’ve paid for the apartment till the end of the month.”

“Get out of my way, Gerard.”

He smiled warmly, and the smile frightened her more than his tantrum. This Gerard had risen from the ashes of the other. She closed her eyes and remembered what his face had looked like only moments before. The face of a man slowly losing his mind. She had to leave be fore she lost hers.

She pushed past him, shaking off his hands when he tried to hold her there. In the bedroom she took her suit case from the closet; then she started toward the front door. He was waiting.

“And what will you tell our child about me?” he asked.

She realized this was Gerard’s only acknowledgment of the news that he was going to be a father. “I’ll tell him whatever good things I can remember.”

“Tell him he’ll have to be strong if he wants to survive.”

“He’ll know that firsthand, from watching me.”

“Then tell him his father tried to make the world understand.”

“I can tell him that. I can also tell him his father didn’t understand a lot of things that really mattered, but I won’t.”

“You’ve never known what it’s like to be me.”

“That’s where you’re wrong, Gerard. I’ve come way too close to knowing.” She opened the door. She felt a hand on her shoulder, a warm, comforting hand. A farmer’s hand. She
allowed him that last farewell. Then she went out into the hall and closed the door behind her.

Phillip Gerard Benedict was born in a Paris spring, a long, thin baby who wailed at regular intervals like Buddy Bolden blowing his famous “Funky Butt” blues. The final color of his eyes and skin was unresolved, but Nicky was sure both were going to be dark, like his father’s. From the moment he could focus, Phillip stared at her as if searching for reassurance. He seemed to sense, with some fledgling instinct, that life for the two of them was never going to be easy.

She had been afraid that her bitterness toward Gerard might taint her love for her child. But the first time Nicky held Phillip, she knew how foolish her fears had been.

Clarence passed out cigars at Les Américains and promised the management that Nicky would return as hostess soon. He helped her find a woman who was willing to care for Phillip at night when Nicky had to be at the club. Nicky knew Clarence had never been good at saving money, and because she hadn’t been able to work for the last months of her pregnancy, her savings were gone, too. She was anxious to go back to work so that Clarence wouldn’t have to carry the whole burden for the three of them.

The night she returned was a festive one. Clarence was in rare form, playing complicated rhythms and melodies with power and style. She danced, sang and grinned, but the thrill of entertaining was gone. Her body, still recovering from childbirth, ached as she flung it from side to side. Her breasts were heavy with milk, despite the fact that she had nursed Phillip just before leaving. Worst of all, she resented playing the sassy “It girl” when she felt like anything but.

Night dissolved into morning, and the music, along with
the air, got smokier and more imbued with melancholy. The Bobs had come to welcome her back, and she’d made a rare exception to her rule of not drinking with the customers. She sat at their table and finished a champagne cocktail, languidly tapping her foot to Clarence’s rhythms.

Bob One had grown a pencil-thin mustache that cavorted when he smiled, like the tail of Mickey Mouse in “Steamboat Willie.” He argued the merits of Al Smith and Herbert Hoover with Bob Two, but not with enthusiasm. The two presidential candidates seemed inter changeable, even if Smith was a Catholic.

“Just think,” she said, when there was a lull in their discussion. “If a Catholic can become president, how long before a Negro makes it to the top?”

Silence fell. “Never,” Bob One said at last. “You’ve been away too long, Nicky.”

“You’re saying my son can never run for president?”

“I’m saying your son wouldn’t have a chance. Not in a million years.”

“Then maybe I’ll have to stay here forever. Maybe he’ll have to grow up speaking French and thinking like a Frenchman.”

Bob Two’s response was lost in a crash from the front. Nicky looked up, but for a moment she failed to see where the noise had come from. Then she realized that the music had stopped, and the musicians had gathered around the piano.

She leaped to her feet and started forward.

Clarence was lying on the floor when she reached him. Someone in the band raised his head and held it; someone else loosened his bow tie and collar. Nicky knelt beside him and watched him gasping for breath. “Somebody get a doctor!”

“Yernaux’s gone for one,” one of the men said.

“What happened?”

“Don’t know. He just fell over.”

“Clarence!” She patted his face. “Can you hear me?”

He turned his head a little so that he was looking right at her. Something like a smile passed over his face. Then his jaw drooped and he no longer saw her. He no longer saw or heard anything.

Monsieur Yernaux, owner-manager of Les Américains was sorry; without Clarence, there was no place for Nicky at the club. It was time to refurbish, to bring in new talent and ideas. He might change the name of his establishment. He wanted to appeal to his country men now. He thought he might hire some pretty girls to entice the customers. Did she understand what he meant?

Clarence’s band broke up, not immediately, and not all at once. But one by one they began to drift back to the States. None of the new pianists they had auditioned possessed Clarence’s talents.

Clarence had never trusted banks. The day after his death, Nicky found a nearly illegible letter addressed to her in the humidor where he had always hidden his cash. He wanted her to have everything. He had been out of touch with his few relatives for so many years that he didn’t know where they were and didn’t much care.