Dance on saturday, p.27
Dance on Saturday, page 27
Sara never got such a lesson, because even the doctor loved her black curls and intuitive eyes. The dimples in her cheeks like thumbprints in toffee fudge. Sometimes he took her in his study to sit his “little dove” on his lap, and the cruelty would dissolve from his face until he looked almost kindly. Watching them through his open door, Mary would tremble at the hulking man’s enjoyment of her sister.
Whether Sara was born an Esther, or Jane, or Eulabell, nobody knew, her birth name collecting dust in a ledger while everyone from Dr. Chambers to the cleaning woman called her “String,” inspired by her twig body and runt status in the orphan hierarchy, a name she grew to hate as the years went by. Shortly before her seventh birthday, when she stood on the precipice overlooking the rest of her life, and, perhaps seeing the prospect of journeying that unknown country with String around her neck, she chose a name for a beautiful light-skinned girl. She would be Sara like the impossibly kind, impeccably cultured, gothically suffering heroine of A Little Princess.
This marked a change in the universe that took the other orphans some getting used to. Imperious Sadie—who thought herself better than the others because she knew her parents—saw opportunity for cruelty. “Hurry up, String. What? You don’t like your name, String?”
“She said her name’s Sara,” Mary remembered a boy chastising. “Call her Sara, maybe she’ll hurry up.”
That boy was Cedric October, a handsome child the color of maple sap. The strongest and most respected boy—“lawdly,” they called him. In the end, his admonishment failed to stop Sadie. It took Mary’s offer to push her down two flights of stairs to make her learn the name. A few more well-intentioned threats and String became a relic of the past.
Ever playful, Sara came up with Pioneer Girls. In the enclosed garden behind the asylum, she and five others would pretend they were a family of Kansas settlers baking bread and fortifying for Indian attack. Mary would play the pioneer man who mined gold every day. Eventually the pioneers took a transatlantic steamer, then a train from London to Paris, then a hot air balloon that had Sara climbing to the highest boughs of the oak, where she encouraged the others to follow, until the laughter of March and February and July lit up the canopy. Then one day the visiting nurse, having found no books to read to them after their checkups, read from an old Barnum & Bailey program, and the Pioneer Girls became cartwheeling Circus Girls. Sara’s stories had no end, only and then, and then, and then . . .
Often Mary wondered: Was it possible that the Queen of Sheba’s enemies kidnapped her daughter and hid her in the Tenderloin? Or, while on a steamer to New York, the Pharaoh’s newborn was swept away in a thunderstorm and washed ashore? Sometimes she thought of herself as the mother and Sara the child, this beautiful and helpless creature bestowed on her by Heaven, a duty she took with stern seriousness and doubt in her ability to fulfill such a charge.
These memories she treasured, a handful of silver coins, and it seemed that every day she spent one, while the others faded, turning from silver to copper to brass to buttons.
After an hour spent riding the backboard of a streetcar to the Tenderloin, the three runaways climbed a fire escape to the water tower they’d been camping under for two weeks. Sara fell asleep having successfully hidden the book from Cedric. In the dark, Mary helped him build a fire from sticks and newspaper, the hum of Herald Square still in her ears. “West Indian owe me good now,” he muttered. “No more scrapin’ for Cedric, no sir. That Frenchy nigger gone give me work.” The looseness of his overalls and increasingly skull-like aspect of his face caused her to mourn his lost beauty. After they had finished, he rolled up in a horse-hair blanket and fell asleep without a word of thanks.
Glad to take the weight off her heels, both of them ashen and hard like the rims of ceramic mugs, she held the ends of her blanket tight around her shoulders and lay close to the flames. Across the fire, Sara appeared warm under her filthy woolen rug; still, Mary noted the hollowness of her cheeks, the thinness in her lips. Hopefully she dreamt of Nesbitt, not of hunger. Mary searched for a memory to lull her mind, but couldn’t sleep with Dr. Chambers crouching over Sara, a ghost made of soot and smoke. One perfumed hand dangled between his knees, the other held the handkerchief to his nose. However she called him a figment, he seemed real enough, perched to claim Mary’s most precious thing when she closed her eyes.
So it wasn’t pleasant memories, but tears, that carried her to that elastic reality Little Nemo discovered under his white bedsheets. She found herself in front of the Herald Building. With a sound of grinding metal, the statue of the white man on the fountain pedestal came to life, shook the pigeons off his shoulders, and stepped heavily into the snow. Minerva came alive on the rooftop and scaled down the face of the Herald like a spider, followed by the two tough little men who swung sledgehammers to ring the hour. With a bird’s eye, Mary saw bronze lions come roaring to life; William Tecumseh Sherman trotted his metal horse down the sidewalk; Lady Liberty herself ambled neck-deep through New York Harbor. Upon reaching the teeming streets, the statues shrank to human size, although they retained the bronze hue on their metal skin. Mary saw ghostly spirits rise from buildings across the city to mist through New York like low-hanging clouds. From livery-stables and blacksmith shops, from newspaper offices and operas, the buildings sent their spirits into the statues. Blushing with vitality, the concrete forefathers took on the aspects of those buildings: for those bearing older spirits, they grew beards of thatch and reddish skin like brick, and donned stained glass eyewear. Meanwhile, the younger spirits stood tall, very tall, with limestone skin, their eyes shaped like the gothic buttresses popular in newer architecture. In basalt boots they strolled the nighttime streets, men in stovepipe hats, women in straw hats plumed with tiny American flags. Soon the theaters, dance-halls, and saloons resounded with their crass ballads. Excited, the spirits said winter the way others might say Christmas.
A booming voice shook the stars from the sky: “Wake up!”
At the edge of thought, she heard their voices: like cracking frost, like burning coal, like the sound of skin unsticking from metal.
“Wake up!” said Cedric.
Blinking the sleep away, she saw a fresh coat of sparkling powder piled into a two-foot wall around the support beams; smooth and even, it made her yearn for a fleece blanket. No sooner did she sit up than hunger hit her belly. She thought it would eat a hole right through her.
A foot away from her knelt Cedric, and he had the unwrapped Baum book raised above his head like he intended to swat a fly with it. “Where did you get this?” he said accusingly.
She grabbed for it, but he held it out of reach.
“Where’d you get this?” he repeated. His New York accent was being replaced with a Southern drawl like the other street boys.
“I . . . I . . .” She thought quick. “I stole it. From somebody’s bag.”
The roughness with which he flipped through the pages alarmed her, like watching him pet a kitten too hard. “If you was gonna steal something,” he said, “why a damn book? Why not some money?”
“I just wanted something to read to Sara. You know she love books.”
Reminded of Sara, he glared at the sleeping nymph as if disappointed to discover her still there. “Yeah, I know. She love books and that doll. We should sell ’em both.”
“No,” Mary said. “We won’t.”
“She don’t do shit and I’m sick of it. Sun’s out, so why’s she sleeping?”
“She shouldn’t be sleeping.” Sunlight off the snow illuminated the girl’s prone from. Protruding from the rug was Sara-the-doll’s porcelain head like a living baby atop a pile of rags. Fear rained from Mary’s stomach to her feet. So great a panic that she not only pushed aside Cedric to reach her sister but swatted the sunlight as if beating away Jesus’s hands. Gently, she lifted the girl’s arm to pick up the doll and place it on the concrete. The movement made Sara-the-doll bat her eyelids. Mary lifted Sara’s chin and gazed on her, quite like a doll herself. Pink coloring rimmed her wide nostrils, the skin beneath damp from sniffling. Mary put a hand under her nose and heartened to feel warm breaths. She breathed a silent thank-you to God.
Sara coughed, woke with a shiver, greeted Mary with a thoughtful expression that invigorated the big sister like hot coffee. Immediately Sara’s countenance changed to one of horror.
“Gimme my book back!” she yelled.
“Go get it,” Cedric said with a bored tone, and tossed it in the snow.
Heedless of the cold, Sara ran after it, and her arms and legs vanished as she clambered up the white hill. Mary lunged at Cedric’s throat with her hands. They grappled, equally matched in strength, before he employed his long legs to kick the rear of her knee and drop her on her back.
“The hell’s wrong with you? Is you crazy?” He cocked his fist. Even as she waited for the blow, she thought, He look pitiful. The effort of holding up his arm tired him.
Sara returned with her book, which looked minimally damaged. Sara, on the other hand, had the aspect of an explorer just returned from the arctic, snow-clotted and beleaguered, her dilated nostrils sizzling with angry breaths. “Get away from her!” she shouted.
The anger-born strength seemed to melt from Cedric, and he collapsed onto his rump. “Frig it,” he said. “Let’s just go. We gotta get the West Indian his money.”
Mary waited for her heart to stop racing. “We can’t bring that book,” she told Sara. “Other kids’ll try to take it.”
She gave the would-be bibliophile a look that would tolerate no argument. Sara started to cry but nonetheless concealed the book under her rug. She lifted the doll to signal that she was ready. Morning sounds could be heard from the streets:
“Laces! Gotcha buttons and shoelaces!—Gotcha milk, here!—Pork, beef, chicken!—Siga! Siga pou vann!—Coal and firewood! Warm your apartment!”
And the time for dreaming had ended.
Instead of a hand to help her up, Cedric offered Mary his whisky. She took a long drought that burned down her throat and dropped into her belly like a stone. So warm, so glorious. Like invisible hands cracking open her ribcage to build a campfire from the bone shards.
Stick to the streets you know, Cedric often said, a maxim he’d borrowed from a beggar on 40th who’d lost both legs to “a yellow monkey with a machete” while on duty in the Philippines. Negroes lived on 25th through 58th Street, between 6th and 9th Avenues. Between 26th and 58th were barbershops, groceries, and restaurants. Cafes were on 37th, pimps and dope pushers on 41st. Fifty-third was home to Bohemians looking for sex and music, and the theaters that catered to both. There were churches to go for food and forgiveness, saloons for odd jobs. Go too deep in the 50s and the micks’ll get you. The coppers are micks too, so don’t trust ’em. The black Spaniards on San Juan Hill will beat you bad as a mick.
Like a prey animal, Mary March had to stay keen of her environment. Keep one eye on the man in the soiled coat spouting Bible verses. Keep another eye on the two beggars pretending to be blind and lame. Keep a third eye on Sara so she kept up. Don’t call too much attention to yo’self was another Cedric maxim. It seemed that Sara remembered this because she took glee in breaking the rule with a relentless torrent of jibber-jabber.
“Is we there yet?” she asked on their way down the street.
Mary held a rag over her nose. Awful and awfuller smells kept threatening to make her throw up. “Girl, you quit with that sass mouth. You wasn’t never so sassy back at the asylum.”
“We ain’t at the asylum no more.”
“Ooh, I’m sick o’ you.”
“You ain’t sick o’ me!”
“Shut up,” Cedric called back.
“Hi!” Sara called to a homeless tramp, who waved back. To Mary, “How come in ‘The Twelve Days o’ Christmas’ the one person keep giving the other person birds?”
“’Cause birds is sacred to white folks,” Mary said with a solemn tone, to hide her amusement.
“How come the foreign man who sell bread got them curls on his hat?”
“He Jew.”
“What’s Jew?”
“Them’s funny immigrants. They dress like that ’cause they like playing dress-up.”
Cedric grunted. “Y’all both some yappin’ bitches.”
“Why can’t we live with the Kentucky lady?” Sara asked.
The question gave Mary pause. The Kentucky woman on 50th Street had let them stay at her apartment awhile. “’Cause she got enough kids and she don’t want no more,” she finally said with nostalgia for those days.
“I wanna have lots o’ kids,” said Sara.
“Wonderful. You can get on charity too. And having kids ain’t like taking care o’ no doll.” She pointed at Sara-the-doll’s dirty coat. “That doll getting nasty. If the relief people saw her, they’d say, ‘That girl Sara’s an unfit mother. She must be idle, letting her daughter get dirty like that.’ Then they’d throw you in jail and put your doll in an asylum.”
Suddenly upset, Sara hugged the doll to her chest. “I wouldn’t let ’em put her in the asylum.” She brightened. “Maybe Kentucky lady’ll take us in if we talk like we from Kentucky.”
“You just being stupid now.”
“Ah kin toke lahk dis, if yew wont,” Sara said. “I mean, if yew all wont. Yewwwww alllllll. Yyyyyy’allllllll.”
“You sound just like Doctor Chambers,” said Cedric. At the poorly concealed pain in his voice, Mary felt a twinge of sympathy.
Sara said, “Yew sow’n jus’ lahk Doctuh Chambuhs.”
“Enough!” he roared.
By then they’d reached Cedric’s crew, who called themselves the Seventh Street Gang, though they qualified as a gang by the loosest standard, only five scab-kneed, worn-shooed, bloody-knuckled, dull-eyed, big-headed boys with names like Bruiser and Half-Dollar, who all dreamed of someday being “toughs” for the West Indian. For now, it was scavenging and petty crime. When Cedric showed them the money from last night’s sale, they cheered him like a conquering hero.
“Didn’t we really do that?” Sara asked Mary with theatrical innocence. “He must have trouble with his memory.”
The kids made their way across unshoveled streets to the West Indian’s saloon. Called the Merry Maiden, it sat on the bottom floor of a two-story brick edifice that, due to a poor foundation, leaned to the side like the drunks who would stumble out the weatherbeaten door at dawn. The first floor hosted rags and gambling, the upper floor reserved for the West Indian’s “girls.” At night, sounds of sin and tragedy blared from the walls.
At the moment it stood mute, an altogether sad-looking place. When they’d first come to the streets, Mary feared to go there because the Lord cast judgment on drunks and gamblers. That was in October, when she was a leaf fallen from the orphanage window. Winter came and put ice in her veins. Leaning one shoulder on the sodden wall, she bemusedly watched Cedric strut to the doorman, a tall and broad-shouldered islander in a peacoat, who accepted the three dollars.
“Ya be wantin’ any more jobs,” said the doorman, “wait awhile in de alley.”
So they did. Mary’s job was to sit at the bottom of the rickety wooden stair leading to the West Indian’s second floor office and watch the door while Cedric played dice with the boys. She became aware of how she stank, wished more than anything for a bath. As she smoked a cigarette, she listened to the boys’ frost-thickened, stuttering conversation about Wild West cowboys and the gruesome, romantic ways they died. Did you know Jesse James was shot in the back of the head by his own flunky? Did y’all niggers know Billy the Kid took a bullet outta Joe Grant’s gun to win their shootout?
Mary felt like she’d lived this day before; all that changed was she grew hungrier and her feet grew sorer. Looking to the sky, she longed for the sun: the nappy-haired gentleman who warmed her face, now shorn of his red-gold locks, his smile hidden behind dismal clouds. The blue realm he reigned over bleached gray. Come spring, she might tie ribbons in her hair and turn a somersault to celebrate, damn what Cedric had to say about it.
She was distracted by the high, henlike chatter of three “charity girls,” twelve- and thirteen-year-old hussies who came around the Seventh Street Gang looking for a date. Under the excuse of running errands for their mothers, they would smile at Cedric and talk about dresses they couldn’t afford. Since she was Cedric’s girl, they hated her, not like she cared. Her concern was her sister might fall under their vapid influence, so she felt grateful they paid her no mind. Probably felt threatened by her beauty. Unvexed, Sara made her own company. She poured a bowl of water on the cobblestones and watched it freeze, and in that moment Mary admired how the soot that marked them all seemed like ground-up black diamonds on her skin. Once the water hardened, Sara waltzed with her doll on their private ice pond.
“What is going on, Ozma?” she said to it. “Snow in Munchkin Country? Who ever heard of such a thing?”
Mary felt herself smile. Sara played Dorothy, Sara-the-doll was Ozma, and they were on a journey to see the Scarecrow. Again, Mary was struck by her strangeness. She seemed older than she was, mentally attuned to a neverending stream of tales. Sara slipped and fell on her butt. Instantly Mary rose, then paused, because Sara didn’t cry. Yes, her eyes grew dewy, but instead of bawling she drew into herself, staring bewilderedly on the wide and cold world like a yellow squirrel. Clutching the doll to her chest, she whispered something in its porcelain ear.
That wasn’t good. Jim Douglass the dope fiend used to talk to people who weren’t there. Last month, he got into such a heated argument with himself he lost attention and stepped in front of a horse-drawn wagon. He didn’t have much of a head at all, after that. Mary wondered if it wouldn’t be kinder to flag down the visiting teacher, a weary-looking woman who visited Negro houses to check on truant children, and ask her to return Sara to the asylum. Dr. Chambers would be furious, but he loved her in his own way. He only hit her the one time.
