minded people,” she whispered, maybe not realizing what she was saying.
“Wasn't even thinking of that. I need a shave.”
“Oh, forget that. Are you coming?”
“Okay.” If I expected Robbens to make contacts for me on Madison Avenue, I'd have to keep in close touch with her.
Outside, without thinking, I looked around for a barbershop. The only one I saw was closed, not that it would have mattered if it had been open. When I was nineteen I was downtown when I heard that a tobacco company was hiring Negro salesmen for summer jobs. I couldn't get a shave downtown, and by the time I went up to Harlem and back the jobs were filled. I bought a razor and blades in the cigar store, rode a bus up to Penn Station, shaved in the men's room. In the car crosstown to Miss Robbens' place on Thirty-seventh street, I jotted down the cab fare, and as an afterthought threw in the buck I'd spent for the razor.
She lived in a remodeled brownstone, and, judging by the number of them, fixing up brownstones must be the major industry in New York City. When she buzzed the door open I took a tiny elevator I could just about get into to the third floor. Kay was waiting at the door in tight buckskin pants, a dark blue turtle-neck sweater that did a lot for her figure and set off her neat face and copper hair. She had a silver coin belt around her waist and odd leather slippers with tiny bells on them. She led me into a large living room done in Swedish modern, including a working fireplace, and a crazy kind of wallpaper that seemed patches of violent colours.
There was a couple on the floor before the fireplace, a guy sprawled on the couch, and a woman making a shaker of cocktails. They all stared at me with studied interest, as if they'd been boring each other before and behold, a conversation piece enters. I wondered which of the men was her husband. After she hung up my coat and hat, Kay introduced me around. The couple on the floor were man and wife and he was a writer. He was also toasting slivers of potato in the fire, using a long wooden stick, and carefully eating each sliver himself as he took it out of the flames. His name was Hank. I never did get his wife's name. The guy on the couch was named Steve McDonald and Kay said, “Steve is the current white-haired boy at Central. He originated a new show I'm doing publicity for. And last, but by no means least, this is Barbara—we share this coop.”
Steve was one of these long drinks of water, with the slim build of a distance runner, and hair crew-cut so short it seemed to be painted on his narrow head. He had a habit, I saw later, of opening his eyes wide to emphasize whatever he was saying. Anyway he wasn't worrying about wrinkling his thick striped sport coat and flannel pants, lying in them.
Barbara was a trim babe with a young figure but her face looked washed out and tired and her carefully brushed hair was a silky gray all over, so it probably was a dye job. It was all wrong for her face. She said, “Hello, Touie, Kay has told me about you. Want Scotch or a hot buttered rum?”
Before I could answer Kay said, “Touie must try the rum.”
“As you wish,” Barbara said, pouring rum into a thick cup, then a slab of butter, a shake of some kind of spices. Walking to the fireplace, she knelt over Hank and swung a small copper teakettle around, poured some hot water into the cup. She was wearing a plain print dress and when she bent over her hips were lovely and full. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Steve, the couchboy, watching her hips. Then he popped his eyes at me and grinned.
I took the hot drink and Hank patted the rug beside him as he said, “Sit down. It isn't every night one can race back into history and drink with General Toussaint.”
“We were in Haiti last year,” his wife said.
“I'll try this,” I said, sitting on a pigskin hassock.
Everybody stared at me, with friendly curiosity. I sipped my drink, which tasted like soup with a kick. Kay announced, “Touie was a captain in the army. Has medals to prove it.”
“My press agent,” I said, wishing she'd shut up.
Steve raised himself on one elbow, gave me a mock salute, said, “Captain, suh, the troops are in the sun. How would you like them, rare, medium, or well done?”
“You trite bastard,” Barbara said.
Steve made big eyes at her. “I don't know, I thought it was pretty funny. Didn't you, Louie?”
“Not bad,” I said, taking another sip of the junk in my cup.
“The name is Touie, as you very well know,” Barbara said, carrying on some fight of her own with this Steve. “Like the hot rum?”
“Yeah,” I lied. “I've had them before, in Paris,” I added, to get in the conversational trend.
“We were in Paris in '53,” the writer's wife said, turning on the floor to face me.
There was a hi-fi phonograph set in a bookcase with a neat purring jazz record on. The writer's wife licked her lips, as if she were about to take a bite out of me, kicked the ball off with “I simply love Bessie Smith records, but they were so badly pressed; all the scratches come through on our hi-fi.”
As Kay lit her pipe and sat on the floor, the writer nibbled at a blackened bit of potato and said, “I can't bear to listen to her because it galls me to remember how she died, bleeding to death and they wouldn't take her in a white hospital. I can feel the pain in her voice.”
“Her voice gets to know you,” Steve said.
So then I knew they were going to bat “that boy” around, as one Negro writer calls this parlor game. I mean there's a certain type of white who loves to get going on the Negro “question” or “problem,” in fact feels he must break out into a discussion whenever he's around Negroes. I suppose talking about it is better than the attitude of most ofays who try to forget we're alive. But it had been a long long time since I'd been in this type of bull session.
Hank's wife started it by saying the Negro should migrate en masse from the South so we could use our “consolidated voting power,” whatever that is.
Steve and Kay immediately jumped into the water, then Hank and Barbara wet their feet. I finished my drink, managed to make myself a plain shot instead of the warm slop I'd been sipping. I was a very quiet and polite “problem,” and thought how Sybil would love this kind of b.s. As a matter of fact, they were talking so much they forgot about me—except for Barbara, who would glance at me now and then, as if watching me. Finally, as Kay finished a speech and stopped to pack her pipe, Steve popped his eyes at me and asked, “Touie, don't you believe the Negro would do better with a complete population transfer to the North?”
“I don't know,” I said, which seemed to annoy everybody: I was supposed to be an expert on race relations, I guess.
Kay said, “Certainly, despite the various forms of discrimination found up here, the Negro would have a better chance, a legal chance, to fight for his rights.”
“I've never been in the deep South,” I said, picking my words, careful not to talk myself out of a client, “but for one thing, I doubt if the average Southern Negro has the money to move his family anyplace.”
“Nonsense,” Hank's wife said, her voice almost angry. “If they really wanted to, they could get away—somehow.”
Kay said, “The entire history of the U.S. would have been different if the Negro had moved West right after the Civil War.”
“No,” Hank said, “they were promised forty acres and a mule, why should they have moved? Trouble was, the Republicans sold them out and screwed up Reconstruction.”
There was another battle of words and then Kay asked, “Touie, what do you think?”
I had to get off the fence, so I asked, “Why not a mass migration of Southern whites and leave the Negroes down in their homes? Be easier; there's less whites.”
Steve said that was nonsense and Hank and his wife weren't sure if I was pulling their leg. Kay laughed and winked at me. Barbara noticed it, bit her lip.
They batted it around again, off on another tack—that the white race was a minority in the world—and then the conversation died, or maybe they were just tired. Hank's wife jumped up—she had a cute figure standing—and said, “Damn, it's eleven. Our baby sitter is a high school kid and can't stay up late.” She nudged Hank with her toe. “Come on, hack, you said you were going to work tonight. Honest, I don't know how he does it, but he'll work till early in the morning.”
Steve made his big eyes as he said, “Perhaps the early-morning hours put him in an eerie mood. Someday I'd like to try a TV play of your last mystery. Have to water the sex, but I liked the plot gimmick.”
Hank got up and shook himself, belched, rubbed his belly and said, “Those damn potatoes. Try it soon, Stevie, I can use the money. I'm working on one now that ought to go over on TV. Deals with the numbers racket.” He looked at me, as if I was Mr. Digit himself.
Barbara said, “Touie should be a gold mine of information for you, Hank; he's a detective.”
The silence was like a fog in the room, everybody staring at me with renewed interest, except Kay, who sent a furious glance at Barbara.
“Well, the black eye!” Steve said, popping his eyes. “No offense, old man.”
“Say, are you a cop?” Hank asked.
“No. I—eh—well, I work in the post office but do some guard work on the side. Bouncer at dances, stuff like that.”
“Yes,” Kay put in quickly, “Touie used to be a football player.”
Steve yawned. “Maybe we ought to have lunch someday. I'm working on a factual crime series.”
“Only a matter of picking up an extra buck for me. Tell you the truth, I haven't worked at it in months,” I said, hoping that I was lying smoothly.
While Kay got their coats, Hank and his wife had one for the road. I took a shot of straight rum and Steve lit a cigar and walked around the room. Up close, he looked older than I first thought. His teeth were brownish and there were tired lines around his eyes. He could easily have been forty.
When Hank and his wife left, I moved over to the couch and Kay sat beside me. Barbara changed records on the hi-fi. Steve paced the room, puffing on
