Dreams Bigger Than the Night (20 page)

“If it’s the Lord you’re hearing,” said Jay, “better armed than not.”

They bumped along the rutted road for a minute until they heard a gunshot. Then Jay hit the gas, eliciting from T the comment, “Who do you think you are, Barney Oldfield?”

They pulled up a short distance from Leonora’s house just as a man bolted out the front door and made for the Packard. He shielded his face with one hand and brandished a pistol with the other. Jay yelled out the window for the man to stop. A bullet pierced the windshield between Jay and T. They rolled from the car into the cover of the tall grass. Another shot hit the grille. Obviously the man was trying to disable the Ford.

It was then that T-Bone, still holding the shotgun, let loose a blast, which brought myriad birds out of the trees, squawking and screeching as they flapped their wings taking flight. Jay could see a spot of red on the man’s cheek. Clambering into the Packard, the man caromed down the Indian path, kicking up a cloud of dust, as T-Bone unleashed a second shot at the vanishing car.

Finding Leonora dead, the two men, according to their separate beliefs, said a prayer over her body, telephoned the police, and debated whether to bury her. T-Bone spoke for them both. “With a killer out there, I think the sooner we hit the road and find the folks we’re lookin’ for, the better.”

On the two-lane road to Cape May, Jay and T-Bone thanked their good luck and the car’s sturdiness for surviving the assault. They stopped at a gas station, had the windshield replaced, picked up a few noshes, and asked the garage man if he sold shotgun shells. He did not. They asked for permission to use the privy out back.

“It’s a two-seater,” said the garage man, eyeing T suspiciously.

“Our sitting here side by side, bare-assed, could get us killed,” said Jay. “You know that, don’t you?”

T thought a moment. “When I die, I pray that you’re as close as we are now.” He then guffawed.

As they continued their drive, T-Bone remarked casually, “Two grand total. Isn’t that what you said Longie gave you for expenses? And you gave me five hundred of it. When we return with the Maglioccos, maybe he’ll let us keep what’s left. And then, if you ain’t got no objection to splittin’ it up . . . I’ll have a lot of money.”

Jay began to consider what a thousand dollars would mean to T: a chance to start his own checker parlor, or travel, or even buy a small house. The one time Jay had come to his apartment, T had said he’d give his left arm to have his own place.

“Sure thing,” Jay replied.

A famous gingerbread town of once brightly painted Victorian houses, Cape May had, like every other resort in America, suffered from the ravages of the Depression. As a child, Jay had seen it when colorful tents lined the beach and all the honky-tonk concessions exuded a raucous energy. But with revelers long since gone, the few people on the streets walked listlessly, and the once bright life of the waterfront attracted only a downcast population. The city seemed sunk in hebetude. Those stores not boarded up offered sales of 50 percent off, and those hotels not left to die in the salt air and the rain were renting rooms for three dollars a week. You would have thought that with business so poor, Jay and T could have had their choice of places to stay. Not so. They faced the usual racial prejudice.

In the rental section of a local newspaper, Jay saw an ad that offered a bed and three meals a day. No mention was made of Negroes, Jews, or Catholics. Located on Franklin Street, a low-lying area called Frog Hollow because it frequently flooded during heavy rains, the boardinghouse was owned and administered by a Miss Sue Patulous, a comely woman with black hair and a shapely figure whose skin looked as if it had been bleached bone white, except for an occasional brown splotch. She reminded Jay of an albino woman his father had once employed. Miss Patulous’s house had two floors: downstairs, a comfortable parlor with a card table holding an unfinished jigsaw puzzle, a dining area off the kitchen, and a small solarium for plants; upstairs, four small guest bedrooms and a larger one in which she slept. At the end of the hall stood a bathroom. To the delight of Miss Patulous, T and Jay took separate digs; instead of making seventy-five cents for a room with twin beds, she earned fifty cents apiece.

“You gentlemen in Cape May for some special reason?”

“Actually we’ve come to visit a friend.”

Asking Miss Patulous how to find the address that Leonora had provided, they made straight for the rooming house and asked for the Clarks, only to learn they had left the day before. Their departure convinced Jay they had decamped for Wildwood and Aunt Amalie’s house, which Longie had traced through her telephone number. So the two men backtracked to Wildwood, where they easily found Dune Drive, near the ocean, and Aunt Amalie’s Queen Anne house with a wraparound porch and a mailbox with the name “Holz.” When they came up the steps to the front door, their hearts sank. The place was closed for the season. Apparently, Aunt Amalie spent the fall and winter in another location. But where?

Desolate, they drove back to the Patulous boardinghouse, where they retired to the parlor. Jay sat down at the table on which Miss Patulous had spread her jigsaw puzzle, about half of which she had completed, no mean feat given that the box indicated the number of pieces at 5,012. Studying the cover picture, a Dutch landscape of a field in Holland, he quickly realized that the predominance of yellow from the sun and hay made it almost impossible to discern patterns and to identify the subtle shifts in shades.

“I belong to a club.” Miss Patulous had come up behind him. “We exchange puzzles. It takes me about two weeks to complete one.”

“It would take me forever. I could figure out the edges but nothing else.”

“Color’s the main thing. You isolate them and then see how one tint shades into the next. Of course, the shape matters too. If you have an eye for geometry—I was always better at algebra—you can see at a glance what the next piece has to look like. Here, for example, you can tell that you need a yellow piece with five prongs, two of them thin, three of them fat.”

T rose from a parlor chair and came over to look. Miss Patulous reached for a piece and started to put it into the yellow field, when T said, “I think you’d be better off with this one,” leaned over, and put another in its place. The next thing Jay knew, T and Miss Patulous were seated side by side whipping through that puzzle like nobody’s business. Her genuine kindliness toward T impressed Jay for its uniqueness and courage: a white woman in a southern-like society befriending a Negro. You really had to admire her.

After Miss Patulous served a dinner of roast chicken with mashed potatoes and peas, and refused to let them wash the dishes, she changed her clothes and led them down to the massive U-shaped Admiral Hotel, said to be the largest in America. She thought they’d like the architecture. Remembering Arietta’s postcard, Jay was keen to see it. Perhaps she and her father were staying there. As they neared the Beaux-Arts style building, they found themselves in a crowd and were swept up the steps to a front plaza, which they crossed to reach the elegant archway and the grand lobby featuring large columns, marble floors, a glass-domed Tiffany ceiling, and a staircase bending in two directions to the upper levels and the hundreds of rooms. The crowd flowed into a dining room rearranged to serve as a lecture hall, with hundreds of folding chairs. They followed. Besides T, Jay saw about a dozen other Negroes, all of whom looked like liveried servants attending patrons, a scene that must have made T feel like a freak. Sue whispered that this hotel attracted a wealthy clientele who came here by train from Philadelphia and New York City and seemed untouched by the stock-market crash. Jay looked around but did not see Arietta and her dad.

A stand at the front of the room held a conspicuous white placard with black lettering: “Bishop Alma White, God’s Emissary on Earth.”

A plain-looking woman in a baggy white blouse and a drab, brown, ankle-length skirt, Bishop Alma White had a flat, broad, unflinching face. Her stern eyes made Jay think of a generation of weather-hardened midwestern settlers. From her chair, she looked over the faithful as she waited for a local preacher to celebrate her “struggle with Satan and the Scarlet Mother,” the Catholic Church. Although no Gerald L. K. Smith, or Huey Long, or Father Coughlin, she could still rattle the rafters. Grabbing the sides of the dais as if preparing to climb a ladder to heaven, she spoke without notes and was repeatedly interrupted with applause.

“Our religious and political foes are within our gates,” she began,

coming by the hundreds of thousands from the chaos and ruin of old European and Asiatic countries to un-Americanize and destroy our nation, and to make it serve the purposes of the Pope in his aspirations for world supremacy. The “Scarlet Mother” wants to destroy all the God-given rights of a free and liberty-loving people. For reasons heretofore mysterious, the Jews have made common cause with the “Scarlet Mother,” enabling her with Jewish wealth to menace our civil liberties and institutions.

This unlikely marriage between Jew and Catholic has much to do with the former’s adamantine behavior. I call your attention to the story of Jonah and the whale and ask you to think of the whale as Protestantism. After three days there was not a bone in Jonah’s body broken, for he had successfully resisted the powerful digestive machinery in the stomach of the monster. What an illustration we have here of the Jew! For the past two thousand years, the Gentile powers have been unable to digest or assimilate him or break his solidarity or make him disavow the old doctrines as they were when he rejected the Messiah.

She took a sip of water and continued. “Now the Jews are telling us to boycott the Olympics.” The crowd hissed at the very suggestion. “In the Olympics we will see German Protestantism at its best. Only a Jew could object.”

She concluded with the ominous suggestion that “a great force was now gathering in Europe that would purify the race and protect the faith.”

T whispered, “I don’t suppose she’s gonna lead us to the promised land.”

“The only place she’s leading me to is the door,” Jay replied and started for the boardinghouse in high dudgeon. Miss Patulous and T followed. Outside the hotel, she touched Jay’s arm and effusively apologized for having led them to the Admiral Hotel and to that “hateful woman.”

“You didn’t know,” he said, “it’s not your fault. But just for the record, I’m Jewish. And personally, I don’t think her kind of religion leads to the salvation road.”

She looked ashen and led them back to Franklin Street. At the house, he felt obliged to say to Miss Patulous, “If you’d like us to leave, I’ll pay for our rooms even though we haven’t slept in them.”

“No, please stay.”

Jay could see that she was wrestling with some troubling idea, so he asked rhetorically, “Surely, you don’t countenance anti-Semitism? Your newspaper ad is free of discrimination.”

“It’s easy enough for me to ignore what the bishop said. But then I wonder: Is my religion really of that kind?”

“Not if you live up to your name.”

She looked puzzled. “I don’t follow.”

“Open, flowering.”

“I never knew my name had a meaning.”

“All names do, literally or figuratively.”

Before they retired for the night, Miss Patulous served them some cheesecake and freshly brewed coffee. Jay had the feeling she wanted to show them that, unlike her friends, she had an open, spreading nature. In the morning, they awoke late and puttered around the house, helped her fix her lawn mower, and changed a washer in a leaky faucet. T volunteered to cut the grass, but Miss Patulous told him the weed patch was not worth it because she planned, just as soon as she could afford it, to plant some trees and shrubs that would survive in the salt air.

That afternoon, they started cruising the streets of Cape May and local townships looking for a 1929 Waterhouse parked outside a rooming house. When that search proved fruitless, they started grasping at straws. Talk about setbacks, false leads, reversals, and all the other stage machinery of mystery stories . . . they encountered them all. They sought aid from the police, firemen, hotels, boardinghouses, restaurants, fraternal clubs, churches, community houses, soup kitchens, charities, rental agencies, garages, green grocers, drug stores, hospitals, banks, and newspapers. From time to time, Jay had the feeling they were being followed, but he could never confirm his suspicions. One late afternoon, after deciding that their search was a lost cause, he suggested they go to the local shooting range, which was tucked away in the pine trees. He had remembered that Arietta liked pistol shooting, but the place was deserted. In the distance, he saw several wicker chairs and a dozen large berms. The sole building on the property, a locked shed, probably held the targets. A closer look at the berms bore out his guess that they either held the targets or served as a backup to arrest the bullets. T and Jay started to leave just as a decrepit truck pulled up, discharging a fellow in overalls and a long white beard, who removed from the flatbed a scythe. Old Man Time, Jay thought, and chuckled.