El liked to start the night with vulgarity and end it with sincerity. A successful combination that made her more than just a novelty act and kept people coming back for more.
Horace cast an anxious look at the long line.
Dash said, “I know, it’ll cause a little trouble for you, but it’s urgent. I wouldn’t ask otherwise.”
Horace sighed. “She’s about to do her last number. You get on in there. But hurry out, you hear?”
Dash thanked him, slipped a bill into his hand, and started towards the speak’s entrance.
The irate man in line said, “Oh hell no. Did you see that? Did you just see that? This is our neighborhood and we still get put second. Now tell me, y’all, why can’t ofay wait? Huh? Why can’t ofay wait? Why can’t ofay wait?”
The man got other people in line to chant along with him.
Horace said, “He’s not seeing the show, he’s dropping off a message.”
“Bullshit!”
“Hey! You know what? He paid me money, too. Y’all want in early? Pay the doorman. Otherwise, hush your mouths!”
To the chant of “Why can’t ofay wait?” Dash entered the club just as El was introducing her last song.
El said to the crowd, “This next one comes straight out of N’awlins. Nobody knows who wrote it and nobody cares, ’cause it’s like the truth of the heart, folks. And in a world of lies and disguises”—she paused to thump the brim of her top hat—“when someone tells you the truth, it doesn’t matter who said it first. Just as long as it keeps getting said.”
Dash found an open space about halfway down the bar. He ordered a Gin Rickey as she began playing the minor chords of a mournful ballad and sang in that deep, expansive voice of hers:
I went down to the infirmary
Saw my sweetheart there
And they had her stretched out on the table
Poor child, so white, so pale, so bare
Soon they’ll be sixteen coal-black horses
All hitched to a rubber-tired hearse
There’ll be seven gals goin’ to the graveyard
But I'm ’fraid only six of ’em is coming back
As she mourned the death of her lover, Dash sat transfixed, filled with emotion. It wasn’t sadness, per se. It was loss, a feeling he had more and more of these days. Was this what getting older meant? Dealing with increasing amounts of loss? He’d already lost his family, as they’d disowned him when they discovered why he spent so much time down in Greenwich Village.
Filthy, his mother had called him.
His father had called him something worse.
His older brother Max refused to call him anything at all.
Only his younger sister Sarah knew the truth before the rest of them. “I see you looking at Victor,” she wrote in a letter as she lay in quarantine, dying from the influenza. “I see the way he looks at you. Promise me, Dash, you’ll live your life your way. It’s too damned short to live otherwise.”
But how? Dash had asked himself at her funeral, fingering the letter’s pages in his pocket. It’s not possible. It’s not even legal.
He tried though. Escaped to the Village, to Victor, who left him in the end. Now all Dash had was Victor’s tailor shop and too many memories he tried to cover up with jazz and clinking glasses.
El sang on.
Now, when I die, I just want you to bury me
With a box-back coat and a high roller hat
And put a twenty-dollar gold piece on my watch chain
So that the boys’ll know that I am standing pat
Then there was the loss of Karl, the loss of a friendship that might’ve been. Death—for Dash could no longer deny that Walter was telling the truth about his brother—had ended the possibility with cold, cruel finality. And the guilt of not having protected the kid made Dash’s head feel as heavy as the weariness in El’s song.
And I want six crapshooters for my pallbearers
And of course girlies sing me a red-hot song
And put a jazz band on ahead of my hearse
And let ’em raise hell as they roll along
Beyond that, Dash felt the loss of friends. Many died in the War, that bloody pointless conflict in Europe, the supposed War-To-End-All-Wars he had managed to escape because of his father’s social and financial position. Young lives were ripped apart by shells or burned from the inside out by mustard gas, destroying families in the aftermath.
Now, in a different kind of war, friends were lost over arguments about the state of the country. Disputes over immigrants (let them in? keep them out?), workers’ rights (an American value? Bolshevik anarchy?), the role of women (in the workforce and independent? married and at home?), and race (equal? separate?).
Life is filled with loss, El’s voice seemed to say on the stage tonight, the blue notes bending and curling over and under themselves. And Dash—as well as the rest of the room—breathed in the melody and the words in a reverent silence.
And, now, my good friends, since you’ve heard my story
Mister Bartender, I’ll take another shot of that booze
Oh, I guess I’ll be on my way
I've got those gambler’s blues
One could’ve heard a pin drop during the final note. When the concluding chord finally faded away, the room exploded into applause. A few shouted “Yes, girl!” “Sing it!” “Tell the truth, now!”
Something warm landed on Dash’s face. He thought it was an errant drop of liquor from a bartender’s shaker, maybe even a squirt of fruit from the makings of a cocktail. When he reached up with his hand to wipe it away, he was surprised to discover it was his own tears. Guess he couldn’t stop them after all. He joined in the applause, crying as he clapped and cheered.
El walked off the stage, not appearing to see him. He finished his drink, went to Leslie Charles’s office door, and knocked. He expected the black man with the sapphire eyes to open the door, but instead, it was El.
When she saw him, she said, “Les is going to hit the roof when he sees you.
