The Ivory Grin Read online

  Two privates appeared from nowhere, pale in their uniforms like young ghosts trapped by reality. I got out and followed them across Main and into a magazine shop near the corner. The unlit neon sign of Tom’s Café was almost directly across the street. Beer on Tap. Steam Beer. Try Our Spaghetti Special.

  The soldiers were inspecting a rack of comic books with the air of connoisseurs. They selected half a dozen each, paid for them and left.

  “Milk sops,” the clerk said. He was a gray-headed man with smeared spectacles. “They draft them in didees these days. Cradle to grave in one jump. When I was in the AEF.”

  I grunted, stood by the window looking out. Tom’s Café had a varied clientele. Business suits and overalls, sport shirts and T-shirts and sweaters went in and came out. The women wore gingham dresses, sunsuits with halters, slacks and shirts, light topcoats over faded flowered silk. There were whites among them, but Negro and Mexican heads were in the majority. I didn’t see a black-and-white sharkskin suit.

  “When I was in the AEF,” the clerk said softly and wistfully from behind the counter.

  I picked up a magazine and pretended to read it, watching the changing crowd on the other side of the street. The light danced in standing waves on the car tops.

  The clerk said in a changed tone: “You’re not supposed to read them until you pay for them.”

  I tossed him a quarter, and he was mollified: “You know how it is. Business is business.”

  “Sure.” I said it gruffly, to ward off the AEF.

  Through the dusty window, the people resembled extras in a street scene in very early color. The faces of the buildings were depthless and so ugly that I couldn’t imagine their insides. Tom’s Café was flanked on one side by a pawnshop displaying violins and shotguns in its window, on the other side by a movie house plastered with lurid advertisements for La Liga de Muchachos. The crowd hurried faster, it seemed, and then the scene focused on the double swinging doors of Tom’s Café. A light-skinned Negro girl with short black hair and a black-and-white checked suit came out, paused on the edge of the sidewalk and turned south.

  “You forgot your book,” the clerk called after me.

  I was halfway across the street when she reached the corner of Hidalgo and Main. She turned left, walking quickly with short steps. The sun gleamed on her oiled hair. She passed within three feet of my convertible. I slid behind the wheel and started the engine.

  Lucy carried herself with an air. Her hips swayed pear-like from the narrow stem of her waist, and her stockingless tan legs worked pleasantly below the checked skirt. I let her cover the rest of the block, then followed her by fits and starts from parking place to parking place. In the second block I stopped in front of a frame Buddhist church. In the third, a pool hall where black and Mexican and Asian boys handled cues over green tables. In the fourth, a red-brick school in a yellow desert of playground. Lucy kept on walking due east.

  The road degenerated from broken asphalt to dirt, and the sidewalk ended. She picked her way carefully among the children who ran and squatted and rolled in the dust, past houses with smashed windows patched with cardboard and scarred peeling doors or no doors at all. In the photographic light the wretchedness of the houses had a stern kind of clarity or beauty, like old men’s faces in the sun. Their roofs sagged and their walls leaned with a human resignation, and they had voices: quarreling and gossiping and singing. The children in the dust played fighting games.

  Lucy left Hidalgo Street at the twelfth intersection and headed north along the green board-fence of a baseball park. A block short of the highway she went east again into a different kind of street. It had a paved road and sidewalks, small green lawns in front of small well-kept houses, white frame and stucco. I parked at the corner, half hidden by the clipped eugenia hedge that surrounded the corner lot. The name of the street was stenciled on the curb. Mason Street.

  About the middle of the block, a faded green Ford coupé stood in a driveway under a pepper tree in front of a white bungalow. A Negro boy in yellow swimming trunks was hosing it down. He was very large and strong-looking. At a distance of half a block I could see the muscles shimmering in his wet black arms. The girl crossed the street toward him, walking more slowly and gracefully than she had been.

  When he noticed her he smiled and flicked the spray from the hose in her direction. She dodged and ran toward him, forgetting her dignity. He laughed and shot the water straight up into the tree like a jet of visible laughter that reached me as sound a half second later. Kicking off her shoes, she scampered around the car one step ahead of his miniature rain. He dropped the hose and raced around after her.

  She reappeared on my side and snatched up the nozzle. When he came around the car she turned the white stream full in his face. He came on dripping and laughing, and wrenched the nozzle out of her hands. Their laughter joined.

  Face to face on the green grass, they held each other by the arms. Their laughter ended suddenly. The pepper tree shaded them in green silence. The water from the hose bubbled springlike in the grass.

  A door slammed. I heard its delayed percussion like the sound of a distant ax-blow. The lovers sprang apart. A stout black woman had come out on the porch of the white bungalow. She stood with her hands clasped at her thick aproned waist and looked at them without speaking. At least her lips didn’t move perceptibly.

  The boy picked up a chamois and began to polish the car top like somebody wiping out the sins of the world. The girl stooped for her shoes with an air of earnest concentration, as if she’d been searching high and low for them. She passed the boy without turning her head and disappeared around the side of the bungalow. The stout black woman went back into the house, closing the screen door soundlessly behind her.

  CHAPTER 3: I circled three quarters of the block, left my car short of the intersection, and entered Mason Street from the other end, on foot. Under the pepper tree the Negro boy was still wiping down the Ford. He glanced at me as I crossed the road, but paid me no further attention.

  His house was the fifth on the north side of the street. I opened the white picket-gate of the third house, a stucco cottage wearing a television aerial like a big metal feather in its cap. I knocked on its screen door and took a black notebook and a pencil out of my inside breast pocket.

  The inner door was opened a few inches, the thin yellow face of a middle-aged Negro inserted in the aperture. “What do you want?” When they shut, his lips turned inward over his teeth.

  I opened the notebook and held the pencil poised over it. “My firm is making a national survey.”

  “There’s nothing we need.” The ingrown mouth closed, and the door closed after it.

  The door of the next house was standing open. I could see directly into a living-room crowded with old Grand Rapids furniture. When I knocked on the door, it rattled against the wall.

  The boy under the pepper tree looked up from the fender he was polishing. “Just walk right in. She’ll be glad to see you. Aunty’s glad to see anybody.” He added: “Mister,” as a deliberate afterthought and turned his wedge-shaped back on me.

  The voice of the house spoke up from somewhere in the rear. It was old and faded but it had a carrying quality, like a chant: “Is that you, Holly? No, it wouldn’t be Holly yet. Anyway, come in, whoever you are. You must be one of my friends, and they visit me in my room now, now that I can’t get out. So come on in.”

  The voice went on without a break, the words linked to each other by a pleasant deep-South slurring. I followed it like a thread across the living-room, down a short hallway, through the kitchen to a room that opened from it. “I used to have my visitors in the sitting-room, that wasn’t so long ago. Just lately the doctor told me, you stay in bed now, honey, don’t try to cook any more, let Holly do for you. So here I lie.”

  The room was small and bare, lit and ventilated by a single window, which was open. The source of the voice was a bed beside the window. Propped with pillows against the maple headboard, a
Negro woman smiled from a sunken gray face, with great eyes like dark lanterns. Between the smiling blue lips the thread of talk unwound:

  “It’s a blessing for me, he said, that my joints are frozen solid with the arthritis, because if I tried to run around like I used to, my heart would give out sure. I told him he was a Job’s comforter, what good is keeping my heart going like a watch that won’t tell time if I can’t get up and cook. He said I was one of the stiff-necked generations and I laughed right out in his face, I couldn’t help it. That young doctor’s a good friend of mine, I don’t care what he says. Are you a doctor, son?”

  The great eyes shone on me, and the blue lips smiled. I hated to lie when the human element cut across my work. I lied: “We’re making a survey of radio users in southern California. I see you have a radio.”

  There was a small imitation-ivory table radio between her bed and the wall.

  “I certainly have.” She sounded disappointed. Her gray upper lip, faintly mustached, puckered in many vertical wrinkles.

  “Is it working?”

  “It certainly is working.” The question revived her spirits by giving her a subject for conversation. “I wouldn’t give house-room to a radio that wasn’t working. I listen to it morning, noon and night, just shut it off the minute before you knocked on the door. I’ll turn it on again when you go away. But don’t hurry. Come in and sit down. I like to make new friends.”

  I sat in the room’s only chair, a rocker near the foot of the bed. From there I could see the side of the white bungalow next door, with an open kitchen-window towards the rear.

  “What’s your name now, son?”

  “Lew Archer.”

  “Lew Archer.” She repeated it slowly, as if it were a short, eloquent poem. “Now that’s a pretty name, a very pretty name. My name is Jones, after my last husband. Everybody calls me Aunty. I have three married daughters and four sons in Philadelphia and Chicago. Twelve grandchildren, six great-grandchildren, more on the way. See my pictures?” Above the radio, the wall was studded with thumbtacked snapshots. “It must be relieving to you to get off your feet for a little. This survey job, does it pay much, son?”

  “Not much.”

  “You wear nice clothes, though, that’s a comfort to you.”

  “This job is only temporary. I wanted to ask you, do your neighbors have radios? I couldn’t get an answer out of the man next door.”

  “That Toby man? He’s a surly one. They have radio and television.” Her sigh expressed envy and resignation. “He owns himself a half block of income property down on Hidalgo Street.”

  I made a meaningless entry in my notebook. “What about the other side?”

  “Not Annie Norris. I was as churchy as Annie Norris when I had the free use of my limbs but I was never as stiff-necked as Annie. Never could see the harm in a little radio music. Annie claims that it’s a contraption of the devil, and I told her she’s not moving with the times. She wouldn’t even let that boy of hers go to the moving pictures, and I told her worse things could happen to a boy than a little innocent entertainment. Worse things could and worse things did.” She fell silent. One of her gnarled hands struggled up from where it rested on the sheet that covered her knees. “Speak of the devil. Hear that?”

  With a surge and lunge of her entire body, she turned her face away, towards the window. Behind the walls of the house next door, two female voices were arguing.

  “She’s carrying on with her boarder again. Listen.”

  One voice was a heavy contralto, easily identified with the stout black woman. I caught fragments of what she said: “You listen … out of my house … making eyes at my son … get out … my son.”

  The other voice was soprano, shrill with fear and anger. “I didn’t. It’s a lie. You rented me the room for a month—”

  The heavy voice broke like a wave: “Get out. Pack up and get. You can have your money back for the rest of the time. You’ll be needing it to buy liquor, Miss Champion.”

  The screen door slammed again, and the boy’s voice spoke inside: “What’s going on in here? Mama, you leave Lucy alone.”

  “You stay out of this. It’s none of your affair. Miss Champion is leaving.”

  “You can’t throw her out like this.” The boy’s tones were high and hurt. “She’s paid up to the end of the month.”

  “She’s leaving, irregardless. Alex, you go to your room. What would your father think, he heard you talking to your mother the way you’ve been talking?”

  “You do what your mother tells you,” the girl said. “I wouldn’t stay here anyway, after the insinuations.”

  “Insinuations!” The older woman gave the word a savage satiric twist. “These are facts I’m talking, Miss Champion, and they’re not the only facts. I wouldn’t soil my tongue with the other thing while Alex was listening—”

  “What other thing?”

  “You know what other thing. I didn’t rent my good clean room for any such use as you put it to last evening. You entertained a man in your room last night and don’t try to lie your way out of it.”

  If Lucy made any answer, it was too low to be heard. Mrs. Norris appeared suddenly at the kitchen window. I had no time to move back out of her line of sight, but she didn’t raise her eyes. Her face was stony. She slammed the window down, and jerked the blind down after it.

  Gasping and smiling, the old woman rolled back onto her pillows: “Well! It looks as if Annie’s lost her boarder. I could have told her she was borrowing trouble, renting a room to that young Lucy creature with a grown boy in the house.” She added with the candor of the very old, who have nothing but life to lose: “Shucks, if she really goes, there won’t be no more arguments to listen to.”

  I got up and touched her thin flannelette shoulder. “It was nice to meet you, Aunty.”

  “Same to you, son. I hope you get yourself a better job than that walking job you got. I know what it does to the feet. I cooked all my life in big houses. You take good care of your feet.…” The voice trailed me out like a cobweb spun endlessly into space.

  I went back to my car and drove it forward a few yards into a position from which I could watch the Norris house. My job was a walking job and a driving job, but mainly a sitting and waiting job. It was hot under the top of my car, but I needed it for cover. I took off my coat and sat and waited. The seconds piled up slowly into minutes like rows of hot bright pennies.

  At two by my dashboard clock, which was working, a yellow cab entered Mason Street from the other end. It slowed and honked in front of the Norris house, turned in the driveway behind the Ford coupé, and backed into the curb. Lucy Champion came down the driveway with a suit-box under her arm and a hat on her head. Behind her Alex Norris, fully clothed now, carried a pair of matched gray suitcases. The driver put them in the trunk and Lucy got into the back seat with a reluctant awkwardness. Alex Norris watched the cab out of sight. From the porch, his mother watched him.

  I drove past them with my head averted, and followed the cab to Hidalgo Street, along Hidalgo to Main, then south on Main. The railway station lay in that direction, and I half expected Lucy to take a train. Her cab turned into the circular drive by the station, deposited her and her luggage on the platform. Lucy went into the station. I parked behind it and headed for the back door of the waiting-room. At the same moment, Lucy came out. Her face was heavily powdered, and her hair tucked up under her hat. Without a glance at me, she walked to the taxi rank on the other side of the building and climbed into a black-and-white cab. While its driver was picking up her luggage from the platform, I turned my car.

  The black-and-white cab went north on Main to the highway, then west along the highway for two blocks. It slowed and turned sharp left under a canvas sign stretched between two poles: MOUNTVIEW MOTEL AND TRAILER COURT. I drove by it, U-turned at the next intersection, and came back in time to see the black-and-white cab pull out with its back seat empty.

  I parked short of the canvas sign and slid to t
he other side of the seat. The Mountview Motel and Trailer Court stood in the social badlands between the highway and the railroad tracks. It had a view of the mountains in the sense that every building in Bella City had. Through a wire-net fence to which vines clung halfheartedly, I could see twenty or thirty house-trailers lying like beached whales in the dusty court. Around and under them, children and dogs were playing. The near side of the court was half enclosed by an L-shaped building made of concrete blocks, pierced with twelve windows and twelve doors. The first door was marked Office. Lucy’s suitcases stood on its low concrete stoop.

  Lucy came out, followed by a fat man in a T-shirt. He picked up her suitcases and escorted her to the seventh door, in the corner of the ell. Even at a distance, she looked rigid with strain. The fat man unlocked the door and they went inside.

  I drove into the court and parked in front of the office. It was a dismal cubicle, divided by an unpainted wooden counter. A frayed canvas settee stood by the door. On the other side of the counter there was a rolltop desk stuffed with papers, an unmade studio bed, an electric coffeemaker full of grounds, over all a sour coffee smell. A duty printed card scotch-taped to the top of the counter announced: We Reserve the Right to Choose Our Clientele.

  CHAPTER 4: The fat man came back to the office, his belly rising and falling under the T-shirt. His forearms were marked with blue tattooings like the printing on sides of beef. One on the right arm said: I Love You Ethel. His small eyes said: I love nobody.

  “Any vacancies?”

  “You kidding? Vacancies is what we got plenty of.” He looked around his office as if he suspected something the matter but couldn’t exactly place it. “You want a room?”