He felt himself a cad for agreeing with her. “It’s too bad I have to go now, but I’ve got to read over some notes with Morgan. So this is goodbye for the present. Aren’t you going to kiss me, Maggie?”
She held up her face for her dutiful kiss.
XXIV
Joanna stood on the steps of the New York Public Library, gazing at the paralysis of traffic which at the bidding of an autocratic policeman had fallen on the massed ranks of vehicles. Subconsciously she thought of a German story, “Germelshausen,” in which all the life of the village suddenly ceased, leaving the people statues of flesh and blood. Fifth Avenue coming to life again, she fell quite consciously to wondering where she could get a good dinner. All about her flashed the lights of restaurants, but she was not sure of their reception of colored patrons and being in a slightly irritable mood, she wanted consciously to spare herself any contact which would be more annoying. She needed more than the cup of chocolate and sandwich which she might easily have had at one of the two drug stores near by. And of course she could get something expensive, but satisfying, in the station which towered not far away. But of late the restaurant management in that particular station had shown a tendency to place its colored patrons in remote and isolated corners.
Joanna had spent the morning shopping. In one of the more exclusive stores on Forty-fourth Street she had asked to look at coats. The saleswoman had been very pleasant, but she had seated Joanna well in the rear of the store quite away from the lighted front windows and the mirrors which were so adjusted as to give all possible views of the figure.
Joanna had not noticed this at first but when she did she proposed going toward the front of the store “where there was more light.”
“Why not come this way?” proposed the still affable saleswoman, pointing to the windows in the rear wall which also let in daylight. Yet when Joanna without answering had walked on to the front, she offered no further comment.
The incident was a slight one, possessing possibly no significance, but Joanna had walked out of the store hot and raging, the more so because she was not completely sure whether the slight was intentional or not. It had not helped her frame of mind to purchase a less becoming coat in a department store where she was known and liked by one of the salesgirls. Gradually she worked herself into a state of contemptuous indifference, but she meant to be careful in selecting a place in which to get her dinner. She had to work too hard these days to bring on her good spirits, she was not going to have them dissipated by galling if petty discriminations.
Well, there was no help for it, she would have to go over to the Pennsylvania station at Thirty-third Street. She was sure of pleasant treatment there. After this solid afternoon of work in the gloomy library, the walk would do her good.
A hand fell on her shoulder, and she turned to find beside her Vera Manning, one of the members of her old dancing-class. This surprised her, for of late hardly any one of Joanna’s group had seen Vera. The report in Harlem was that she was passing for white and had no desire to be recognized by her colored acquaintances.
“It’s been ages since I’ve seen you, Joanna,” Vera began confidently. “I was sitting in the library waiting for a ‘date’—doesn’t that sound awful?—and then all of a sudden I thought, ‘pshaw, I don’t want to be bothered!’ Just then you hove on the scene. Where you going?”
“Some place to get a good dinner,” Joanna told her, wondering why she looked different from the Vera Manning she used to know. Her clothes showed her usual careful, even modish taste, but her face looked hard—“reckless”—Joanna suddenly decided; that was the word. She went on quickly: “See here, you work somewhere down in this neighborhood, don’t you? Where do you suppose I can get something to eat, without walking a thousand miles for it?”
Vera frowned thoughtfully. “You see, I’m ‘passing’ just now—I know you’ve heard of it—and so I go into any of these places around here, but I never see any colored people. Of course you could try the Automat.”
But Joanna didn’t want that.
“Their food’s all right when you feel like eating it, but I want a regular dinner-waiter, service, and all the rest of it. Pick out a good place for me and I’ll take you to dinner, too. Nothing could be fairer than that.”
Vera agreed smilingly that it couldn’t. “There’s a place over on Forty-second Street. I remember now I have seen some colored people in there and they get decent treatment. We could go there—” she checked herself a moment. “Oh, no, I forgot.”
“Forgot what?”
“Look here, Janna, I might as well be frank, we were all of us children together—doesn’t it seem ages ago? You know I wouldn’t ever try to fool you. But the truth of it is I go to that particular restaurant often with the other girls in my office and of course the restaurant people think I’m—I’m white. See? I don’t know just what they’d think if they saw me with you—someone who definitely showed color—or what might come of it. You don’t think I’m a pig, Joanna?”
“I think I’d be a pig if I did think so,” Joanna told her heartily. “Come on and take dinner with me over at the Pennsy station. It’ll be nice to have a talk.”
The two girls moved down Fortieth Street in the direction of Seventh Avenue.
“You’d understand it better if you worked among them—white people you know,” Vera told her seriously. “Of course I suppose there must be some decent ones, not the highbrow philanthropists and all that crowd, but
