Good Hope Road: A Novel (31 page)

He held the door open and she brushed against him as she entered. She tossed her hat on the bed, hands on her hips as she looked around. ‘So where . . .’ she began when he pulled her towards him.

‘
This
is the sort of place,’ he said, and staring deep into her eyes all the while, he kissed her, pushing his tongue into her mouth with a passion so naked and heartfelt it took her breath away.

They were there a while. Keen as he was to show her the camp, Jim was content to lie there, head on her breasts, breathing in the musk of her skin. She stretched languorously beneath him. He opened his eyes, watching as she flexed her feet. It was a three-step routine, he knew. First the toes pulled in towards the rest of her body. They held for a couple of seconds before straightening to point at the ceiling. Then the outward tilt, ankles dropped low, the toes curling inward again. ‘Genie shoes,’ she called it, this in and out flex. Hold the genie shoes, for one beat, another, and then the toes turning outward, pulling as far as they could go.

She trailed a hand down his bare back. ‘God, I missed you,’ she repeated softly.

He raised himself on an elbow. Lifting a damp curl of hair away from her cheek, he tucked it behind her ear. ‘Me too.’

They kissed, tenderly. She trailed her fingers lower down his back, the puppet strings inside him that she so effortlessly controlled tightening at once in response, a stiffness beginning to return. He cupped her bottom, and she giggled. Wriggling out from under him, she rolled over and got out of bed.

‘The camp,’ she said, sweeping back her hair. ‘Come on.’

They walked the short distance there. The sun was bright over the slow-rolling river, erupting in shards of shine. She slipped her hand through his, resting her cheek now and then against his arm.

‘They’re close,’ she had observed almost instantly of the veterans. ‘They seem banded together, in a way that doesn’t . . . well you don’t see it too often in the outside world.’

‘Look,’ she said now, gesturing discreetly at a sign in the ground. ‘BARBER SHOP,’ it announced. In a worn but still serviceable barber’s chair, complete with reclining back and slatted footrests, a man was getting a shave.

Jim shrugged. ‘They’re not just veterans, you know. They’ve also been farmers and steelworkers and barbers – so what?’

‘You don’t see it? You don’t even see it! Jim! Look around –
there’s no segregation here
.’

Jim blinked. She was right. He hadn’t even noticed – the barber was black, his patron, white. He looked about him, seeing with new eyes what she’d picked up at once. The group there, over by the camp piano: mixed. The piano was being alternately pounded by a veteran with a Harlem accent, and a ginger-haired Bostonian. Three men housing together, in that shanty over there: again, of mixed colour.

What made it all the more remarkable, Jim knew, was that outside the confines of the camp, Washington was still very much a colour-conscious city. Schools, restaurants, movie theatres – all were segregated. The buses too, including those that plied between the city and the veteran camps, whites travelling separately from blacks.

Here on the Anacostia Flats however, the colour line had vanished. In this crazy-quilt shanty town, where every last piece of junk was picked over, refurbished and put to use, the colour divide was the one thing that had been cast aside as worthless. Black or white, it didn’t matter here. Men eating, walking, marching together with little thought of race or background, recognising a deeper fraternity in all they had gone through together, in the scars, both exposed and hidden, that they bore.

They caught up with the Major at the registration tent. ‘My dear!’ he exclaimed, as Madeleine kissed him on his cheek. ‘Is it possible that you grow more fetching each time this old man lays eyes on you?’

‘It’s the Major who grows more charming each time I lay eyes on
him
,’ she countered, laughing.

‘Well, well, and who is the little lady?’ Connor wanted to know.

‘Madeleine Scott,’ she introduced herself as he vigorously pumped her hand.

‘Michael Connor, and it sure is a pleasure. Say, you folks staying on for the match, I hope? You gotta see these kids. Twins, not more than seven or eight years old I reckon, but scrappy as hell. Their dad organises boxing matches between the two of them and half the camp shows up to watch. There’s one right about now, you gotta come.’

‘Oh, don’t you worry now,’ he assured Madeleine, seeing the dubious expression on her face. ‘Neither of them gets hurt, well, not too badly anyhow,’ he amended. Connor laughed. ‘Those little devils, they’ve been having the time of their lives around here. We even got a school here, y’know,’ he said to her with obvious pride. ‘Some of the wives got together and set it up . . .’ He was still talking as they headed into the camp to pick up Angelo from his coffin.

A crowd was already milling about the boxing ring. An impromptu band, consisting of a veteran on a harmonica, and a couple more on the drums and the trumpet, were setting up. The band too, was of mixed colour, Jim noticed ruefully. Ever since Madeleine had pointed it out, he seemed to find fresh evidence of assimilation everywhere.

Connor looked hopefully around for Rooster Curtis, who it seemed was still missing. ‘Wherever is that darn bird?’ He pointed at the ropes. ‘He’s usually the first to get on there, likes to get right up close and watch. Doesn’t get fazed one bit by all the yelling and cheering that goes on.’ He shook his head fondly. ‘Crazy old Curtis.

‘That ring there was one of the first things to come up around here.’ He grinned. ‘The boys that built it had it up before some of them had even figured out where they were going to sleep.’

‘Speaking of sleep,’ Madeleine turned to Angelo. ‘You don’t actually
live
in the coffin, do you?’

‘Nah,’ Angelo scoffed. ‘Got myself a pup tent.’

‘That’s right,’ Connor said, grinning. ‘Angelo here’s got a tent, I got myself a chicken-wire shack. There’s plenty real estate about, all rent-free. Folks can choose from mountain views,’ – he gestured at the dump that loomed to the rear of the camp – ‘or a plot overlooking a river bank.’ Cue the sewer-filled river. ‘All on swampland generously donated by our grateful Government.’

‘But what about your own homes?’ she pressed, bemused. ‘Don’t you want to get back?’

It was their turn to look surprised. ‘Well, that’s just it,’ Connor said slowly. ‘Most of us don’t have homes to get back to.’

‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ Madeleine stammered, turning scarlet. ‘How naïve of me, I meant no—’

‘I take it these are our little champions?’ The Major gestured at the two mop-headed boys climbing into the ring, in an attempt to change the subject.

Connor nodded, but his mind was elsewhere. ‘Oh, don’t be sorry,’ he said to Madeleine. ‘No, most of us ain’t got much to go back to. Before I got here, to Washington, I’d just put a down payment against a house for my wife and myself. It wasn’t much of a house, and I put in all the dollars I had, but it weren’t enough. When I heard about the BEF and the march to Washington, I told the banker to hang on to that house for me. I’d be returning with my bonus, I said, and he believed me.’ He laughed, but for once, it sounded strained. ‘
I
believed me too. I reckoned they’d pay our bonus for sure this time. Well, wouldn’t you know it, they didn’t.’

A gong sounded, and the match began.

The two boys were fast and lithe. ‘Come on, Nick! Get him, Joe!’ the crowd yelled as they ducked and swung with gusto. Both were determined to win, both equally well matched. They landed punch after punch with their kid-sized gloves, dancing about in their laced shoes, the sweat dripping off their backs. ‘Come on, boys,’ Connor roared, spirits restored.

Half-time was called and the band struck up a lively tune. Connor jumped up to talk with the boys’ father and Jim leaned over to Madeleine. ‘You doing okay?’

She nodded, slipping her fingers into his, watching as a hat was passed around the audience, who tossed in pennies and nickels.

‘How much must they make?’

‘The boys?’ Jim rubbed a thumb against her fingers, struck again by their slenderness. ‘A dollar, maybe two. There’s not much to go around here.’

‘I wish there was more we could do . . .’ She sat up straight and looked at him, her eyes bright. ‘I know. I could dance.’

‘What?’

‘Dance!’ she yelled in his ear. ‘Up there, in the ring. A small piece; the band could play something, and we could pass a hat around.’

‘Don’t be silly,’ he said, startled to see that she was serious.

She started to bristle. ‘What’s so silly about it?’

‘I’m not having you go up there and dance in front of all these men.’

The gong sounded for the second half and she subsided, a mutinous cast to her lip. Jim glanced at her, figuring he ought to say something to mollify her, but she pulled her fingers from his grasp.

The two boys sparred and punched, spurred on by the encouragement of the crowd, until the bout finally ended – as all of them tended to do, Connor admitted – in a draw. The audience broke into a cacophony of clapping and cheering. Jim set his fingers to his mouth in a piercing wolf whistle. Grinning, he idly scanned the crowd, noticing anew the number of faces of colour, when one man in particular caught his eye.

He was standing next to the ring, facing them. He seemed older than most of the veterans here, about the Major’s age, and dressed in a crisp white suit that was all the more striking against his dark skin. One hand rested lightly on the ropes, the other was in his pocket as he stared at their group. Jim frowned, assuming at first that he was staring at Madeleine. When he turned protectively towards her, however, he saw that she’d moved away to speak with Connor. When he looked at the stranger again, he realised it wasn’t Madeleine at all, but the Major who was the focus of his attention.

The Major had seen him too. He leaned heavily on his cane as he stared at the man, face as white as a ghost.

‘Madeleine here says she wants to dance,’ Connor cheerfully butted in just then.

‘What? No. Madeleine—’

Distracted by her wilfulness and preoccupied with dissuading her from dancing on the stage, Jim forgot about the stranger. When he did look back, the man was no longer there. His father, too, was nowhere to be seen.

28 July 1932

raffic was at a standstill all along Constitution Avenue. People started to step from their vehicles, shading their eyes against the sun as they wondered about the delay. All the way up front, a line of policemen moved about the cars.

He should have stayed with his father, Jim thought again. The outing had been Madeleine’s idea. They’d got into an ugly argument the previous evening at the camp. He couldn’t believe she would entertain the idea of dancing up there on the stage; he was controlling and narrow-minded, she accused. The upshot of it all had been her hailing a cab and storming back to her hotel. Angrily, he’d refused to follow. Someone remembered seeing the Major leave the camp a fair while earlier and Jim had stayed on late into the night with Connor and his buddies. When he’d returned to the rooms, his father was already in bed. There were two messages from her, which he ignored.

He awoke this morning to find his father seated in the chair by the window, staring into space.

‘Morning,’ Jim had said, and repeated it twice before the Major heard. The Major turned towards his son and there was something about the unfocused expression and faraway eyes that was deeply troubling. It had something to do with the man by the boxing ring, Jim thought suddenly to himself, although he had nothing to base that conviction on. Just then, the telephone had started to ring downstairs. It was Madeleine again.

‘You didn’t call me back.’

‘Wasn’t anything to say.’

‘Are you always this stubborn? Wait, what am I saying? You’re
always
this stubborn.’

He was silent.

‘Mama agrees with you, by the way. She says it would be a bad idea to dance in the camp – I believe “tasteless” was the exact word she used. Normally, I’d have pooh-poohed her, but since you feel the same way, maybe she has a point.’ She waited for a response. ‘Come on, stubborn, let’s not argue,’ she’d cajoled, laughing. ‘Meet me at the hotel at eleven, I have a surprise for you,’ she said, and hung up.