Anise had come to Harlem and deposited the money her former mistress had supplied her with in the postal savings. She wouldn’t hear to placing it in any other depository. Banks had a curious and discomforting habit of closing their doors without warning, and without the foresight to provide their patrons with another nest egg. If banks in Virginia went broke, those in wicked New York would surely do so. Now, Uncle Sam had the whole country behind him, and everybody knew that the United States was the most wealthy of the world’s nations. Therefore, what safer place than the post office for one’s bank account?
Anise got a job, too, almost immediately. Her former mistress had given her a letter to a friend of hers on Park Avenue, and this friend had another friend who had a sister who wanted a stock girl in her exclusive modiste shop. Anise was the type to grace such an establishment as this person owned, just the right size to create a smart uniform for, and shapely enough to allow the creator of the uniform ample latitude for bizarre experimentation. Most important of all, her skin, the color of beaten brass with copper overtones, synchronized with the gray plaster walls, dark hardwood furniture and powder blue rugs on the Maison Quantrelle.
Anise soon had any number of “boyfriends,” with whom she had varying relations. But she willingly dropped them all for Braxton, and, simple village girl that she was, expected him to do likewise with his “girlfriends.” She had heard much about the “two-timing sugar daddies” in Harlem, and while she was well versed in the art herself, having never been particularly true to her male employer, she did think that this sort of thing was different, and that any time she was willing to play fair, her consort should do likewise.
Alva was proud of himself when he noticed how rapidly things progressed between Anise and Braxton. They were together constantly, and Anise, not unused to giving her hometown “boyfriends” some of “Mister Bossman’s bounty,” was soon slipping Braxton spare change to live on. Then she undertook to pay his half of the room rent, and finally, within three weeks, was, as Alva phrased it, “treating Braxton royally.”
But as ever, he was insistent upon being perverse. His old swank and swagger was much in evidence. With most of his clothing out of the pawnshop, he attempted to dazzle the Avenue when he paraded its length, the alluring Anise, attired in clothes borrowed from her employer’s stockroom, beside him. The bronze replica of Rudolph Valentino was, in the argot of Harlem’s pool hall Johnnies, “out the barrel.” The world was his. He had in it a bottle, and he need only make it secure by corking. But Braxton was never the person to make anything secure. He might manage to capture the entire universe, but he could never keep it pent up, for he would soon let it alone to look for two more like it. It was to be expected, then, that Braxton would lose his head. He did, deliberately and diabolically. Because Anise was so madly in love with him, he imagined that all other women should do as she had done, and how much more delightful and profitable it would be to have two or three Anises instead of one. So he began a crusade, spending much of Anise’s money for campaign funds. Alva quarrelled, and Anise threatened, but Braxton continued to explore and expend.
Anise finally revolted when Braxton took another girl to a dance on her money. He had done this many times before, but she hadn’t known about it. She wouldn’t have known about it this time if he hadn’t told her. He often did things like that. Thought it made him more desirable. Despite her simple-mindedness, Anise had spunk. She didn’t like to quarrel, but she wasn’t going to let anyone make a fool out of her, so, the next week after the heartbreaking incident, she had moved and left no forwarding address. It was presumed that she had gone downtown to live in the apartment of the woman for whom she worked. Braxton seemed unconcerned about her disappearance, and continued his peacock-like march for some time, with feathers unruffled, even by frequent trips to the pawnshop. But a peacock can hardly preen an unplumaged body, and, though Braxton continued to strut, in a few weeks after the break, he was only a sad semblance of his former self.
Alva nagged at him continually. “Damned if I’m going to carry you.” Braxton would remain silent. “You’re the most no-count nigger I know. If you can’t do anything else, why in the hell don’t you get a job?” “I don’t see you working,” Braxton would answer.
“And you don’t see me starving, either,” would be the comeback.
“Oh, jost ’cause you got that little black wench …”
“That’s all right about the little black wench. She’s forty with me, and I know how to treat her. I bet you couldn’t get five cents out of her.”
“I wouldn’t try.”
“Hell, if you tried it wouldn’t make no difference. There’s a gal ready to pay to have a man, and there are lots more like her. You couldn’t even keep a good-looking gold mine like Anise. Wish I could find her.”
Braxton would sulk a while, thinking that his silence would discourage Alva, but Alva was not to be shut up. He was truly outraged. He felt that he was being imposed upon, being used by someone who thought himself superior to him. He would admit that he wasn’t as handsome as Braxton, but he certainly had more common sense. The next Monday Braxton moved.
Alva was to take Emma Lou to the midnight show at the Lafayette Theater. He met her as she left work and they had taken the subway uptown. On the train they began to talk, shouting into one another’s ears, trying to make their voices heard above the roar of the underground tube.
“Do you like
