The Chaperone (19 page)

They were both still reading when someone tapped Cora’s shoulder. She looked up to see a tall colored man in a three-piece suit.

“Pardon us,” he said.

Behind him stood a woman, also colored, and wearing an organdy silk dress and pearls.

Cora stared up at them, uncertain. She didn’t want any trouble.

“Cora.” Louise laughed, nudging her arm. She was already standing. “They need to get to their seats.”

Cora’s gaze moved over the other seats. She saw now that at least four colored people were sitting in the orchestra pit, closer to the stage than she was.

“Oh yes, of course,” she said, standing quickly. Her seat sprang up behind her. “Sorry,” she said, glancing at the couple. She leaned back to give them space. After they passed, she sat slowly, her eyes moving side to side. She wasn’t sure what was happening, if this was some sort of protest or instigation. A few years ago in Wichita, a group of colored men had tried to sit on the ground floor of a theater, but they’d been arrested before the show began.

But no one here, black or white, seemed at all distressed.

She looked at her program. The drawing on the cover was innocuous, just the legs of a few men and women in a row, their upper bodies obscured by the title. She opened the program and looked at the cast list, the names of the characters.
Syncopating Sunflower. Happy Honeysuckle. Jazz Jasmine.

She swallowed and touched Louise’s arm.

“Louise,” she whispered. “What kind of show is this?”

Louise looked up, her expression both blank and annoyed, as if she didn’t know what Cora was asking, as if nothing were out of the ordinary, which was just maddening, because of course colored people taking seats on the main floor of a theater
was
out of the ordinary, even for New York. At the New Amsterdam, colored people had sat up in the balcony, just as they did in every theater Cora had ever been to. She’d never heard of anyplace, anywhere in the country, where things were different.

“It’s supposed to be a very good show,” Louise said, looking back down at her book. She waved her hand at the seats in front of them. “It’s obviously very popular.”

Cora’s gaze moved over the seats, then back down to her program. The fact that there was a character named “Jazz” seemed especially worrisome. Was it a jazz show? A radical one with mixed seating? She wasn’t much of a chaperone, sitting there passively with Louise, waiting for the music to start. Just the year before, there’d been an article in
Ladies’ Home Journal
that warned that the new jazz craze was a real threat to young people, as it regularly led to a base form of dancing that stirred up the lower nature. Even just hearing jazz was bad, the article said: its primitive rhythms and moaning saxophones were purposefully sensuous, and capable of hypnotizing young people. Cora knew that Viola had told her daughters in no uncertain terms that they were not to listen to jazz music, ever.

“Louise. I think we should go.”

“I’m not going anywhere.” She didn’t even look up.

Cora might have insisted, or tried to insist, but just then, a colored woman took the seat to her right. Cora glanced up, and the woman, who had bobbed hair with a Marcel wave, smiled briefly before she looked up at the curtained stage. A skinny colored boy of about twelve sat on her other side, his program rolled like a telescope against one of his eyes. Cora, her heart pounding, folded her program in half, and then in quarters. They couldn’t get up and leave now—not without giving the impression that they were fleeing from the proximity of this woman and the boy, that they were somehow personally offended by them, which wasn’t the case at all. Cora had no problem with colored people. She liked Della, for example, very much. She made a point of telling her how much she valued her as a talented housekeeper and cook. She was the one who had told Alan they should give Della a raise last year, and she’d always tried to be understanding and gracious when Della had to stay home with one of her own children.

She’d just never expected to sit next to a colored person at a theater. She’d always heard that colored people, unless they were troublemakers or communists, preferred to have their own space up in the balcony, and that most of them weren’t interested in theater anyway.

She had just managed to calm herself when the orchestra walked out into the pit. She stared. The musicians were colored, not white musicians in blackface, but actual colored musicians. All of them. Back home, she’d seen colored pianists at minstrel shows, goofing and grinning, their faces further darkened with grease paint or burnt cork. But this was clearly something else. She had never seen a show with colored violinists and colored oboists and colored saxophonists, and she had certainly never seen a colored conductor looking relaxed in a three-piece suit and shined shoes. Her eyes slid to her left. Louise. Louise must have known that this was not a regular Broadway show. Did she think this was some kind of joke, having Cora buy them tickets for this? Was getting the housewife from Kansas to a radical theater some kind of hilarious trick?

What Cora didn’t know was that she wasn’t alone: although the theatergoers around her were playing it cool, much of New York had been similarly taken aback by
Shuffle Along
. Before the show opened in 1921, no one believed a white audience would pay to see a musical that was written, produced, directed, and performed solely by black people. The producers took the hall on Sixty-third Street because it was the only venue they could get, but after opening, the show proceeded to fill the seats with an enamored, cheering audience—both black and white—for over five hundred nights.

The show made all kinds of history. Some fifty years later, when Cora’s godson, the dentist, who was born in Wichita the very summer Cora was in New York with Louise, and who at the age of twenty had fought under General Eisenhower in North Africa during World War II, discovered that his old godmother had seen the 1922 Broadway production of
Shuffle Along
, he asked her if she had any memory of a beautiful black girl, who certainly would have stolen the show, the same girl who would go on to become Josephine Baker, or the most gorgeous woman in the world, so insanely popular in her adopted France that even the occupying Nazis were afraid to touch her, the same girl who would become the Bronze Venus, or the Black Pearl, or just La Baker, as she was called when she performed for the Allied troops and whipped Cora’s young godson into such an obsessive frenzy that when he came home from the war he read everything in print about La Baker, as if that would improve his chances with her if she ever decided to leave France and return to America, and maybe someday happen into Wichita, where she might develop a toothache, sashay into his practice, so he could forsake his wife and proclaim his enduring love.

No, Cora had to say, sorry to disappoint him. She didn’t remember a particular girl. The godson looked disappointed only for a moment before he tapped his own head and said, of course, of course, Josephine Baker had auditioned for
Shuffle Along
on Broadway, but they’d rejected her at first, saying she was too skinny and too dark for the stage. They let her work backstage as dresser, helping the stars with costume changes, secretly memorizing the lines and routines. Months later, when a chorus girl had to leave, Josephine Baker would step into her role like the natural she was, like the legend she would become, and show them all. But the night Cora and Louise went to see
Shuffle Along
, Josephine Baker, born the same year as Louise, was still backstage, just a costume girl, unseen and simmering.

Was that what was in the air that July? All that talent and ambition and yearning so close that Cora couldn’t help but breathe it in? Because even so many years later, she would remember how on that warm evening on Sixty-third Street, despite all her discomfort and fear, she had at some point stopped worrying, stopped silently raging at Louise, and started to enjoy the show, her shoe-cramped toes tapping to the syncopated rhythms, and her eyes tearing up at the end of the slow ballad “Love Will Find a Way.” That had surprised her. She’d never seen a real love story between colored people, and the very idea of it had seemed so odd and silly to her, but by the end of the song, it didn’t.

Cora would be in her early seventies when a group of young black people in Wichita decided to sit at the counter of Dockum Drugs every day, from open till close, until they were served. They endured cursing, threats, and boredom, but after a month, Dockum’s owner, tired of losing frightened or displaced customers, finally relented and served the protesters at the counter. Plenty of white people in Wichita believed they had cause for concern, because now that Dockum was serving colored people, they might think they were welcome anywhere. Cora, if she were honest, would have to admit she might have been one of them had it not been for that night back in 1922 when she sat between Louise and the black woman with the Marcel wave, and she watched a black man conduct a black orchestra while black men and women talked and danced and sang “I’m Just Wild About Harry,” and black and white people applauded them together, and nothing terrible happened. In fact, even though she’d gone into the theater with her own troubles and sadness that night, she’d had a wonderful evening, as she would later assure the frightened ladies in her circle, many of whom, in 1958, were far younger than she was. An integrated lunch counter, Cora would tell them, was not the end of civilization, and integrated schools and theaters wouldn’t be the end, either. It would be fine, she assured friends, thinking back to that night in New York. Really. It would be more than fine.

She would owe this understanding to her time in New York, and even more to Louise. That’s what spending time with the young can do—it’s the big payoff for all the pain. The young can exasperate, of course, and frighten, and condescend, and insult, and cut you with their still unrounded edges. But they can also drag you, as you protest and scold and try to pull away, right up to the window of the future, and even push you through.

She read the postcard
the next afternoon, while Louise was in the bath. She didn’t mean to read it. She’d never scavenged through her sons’ rooms, even when she’d been tempted, and she’d learned not to look through Alan’s things. But Louise’s postcard had fallen from the writing table to the floor of the front room, and Cora, while sweeping, had crouched down to pick it up, and her eye went to her own name in Louise’s compact but readable script.

… Cora Carlisle is such a flat tire, and quite the rube. And she has a rich, handsome husband, which makes absolutely no sense. I keep wishing she’d fall into the Hudson or get hit by a trolley or something, but every day, she …

Cora put the postcard down, writing side down, so she could only see the back, a picture of Charlie Chaplin. She looked at the yellow walls, and the painting of the Siamese cat. It didn’t matter. She was fine. She wasn’t concerned with what a fifteen-year-old snob thought of her. And anyway, she shouldn’t have read it, even the bit that she had. She crossed her arms, looking down at the postcard. Had she written that to her mother? It was too awful to consider, Louise writing such cruelties to Myra. Cora circled the table once, and then again, before reaching to retrieve the postcard.

Dear Theo Darling,

Cora put the card down. Theo was the brother. Not the older brother Louise had fought with, but the younger one, who’d wanted to play badminton by himself. It didn’t matter. If Louise had written the same to Myra, so what? So what. She wasn’t going to look at the other postcards. She didn’t care. She moved away from the table.

She went into the kitchen and poured herself a glass of milk. She sipped it slowly, listening to the steady drip of melting ice in the ice box. On the other side of the wall, the tub was draining, and she heard Louise humming a languid version of “Ain’t We Got Fun?” She put down the glass and tapped her fingertips on the stovetop. That Louise had called her a bore and a rube wasn’t such a surprise. The girl said as much with her eyes and tone of voice almost every time they spoke; Cora could hardly call her dishonest. What hurt her, what felt like a physical blow to Cora’s chest, was the girl’s cruel but astute observation about Alan, about how mismatched they seemed. It was too bad that Cora had not known Louise the summer Cora was married, when she perhaps could have used an acquaintance with such brutal honesty.

Louise walked into the kitchen wearing a pink wrap, her hair slicked back and wet. Her forehead was wide and prominent, Cora noticed, almost protruding. She wasn’t as striking without the bangs. She still looked young and pretty, but not uncommonly so.

“Oh my God, that bath was wonderful.” She tilted her head from side to side. “But I’ve been out for exactly three minutes, and I’m already sweating. The theater tonight had better be ice-cooled.”

Cora nodded and sipped her milk.

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing.” Cora looked at her and smiled. “You’re right. It does seem warmer today.”

Louise stretched her arms up with an exaggerated yawn, and started talking about
Blossom Time
, and how she hoped it would be as good as the reviewers said. Cora leaned against the stove and listened with an interested, pleasant expression. There was no point in bringing up the postcard or what Louise had written about Alan, and there never would be. So even while the hurt was still there, a heaviness in her mind and heart, she acted as if nothing were amiss, and of course, Louise believed her. The girl may have sworn off fake smiles, but Cora knew how necessary they could be, and hers was well-practiced and convincing.

ELEVEN

Mr. Alan Carlisle of Wichita and Miss Cora Kaufmann of McPherson were united in marriage yesterday under a canopy of white roses and carnations outside the boathouse of Riverside Park, with Pastor John Harsen of the First Presbyterian Church of Wichita presiding. The ceremony was immediately followed by a grand and festive reception at the Eaton Hotel, where over a hundred guests dined on generous portions of roast beef, sweet potato croquettes, assorted cheeses, fruits and vegetables, and a multi-tiered wedding cake. A small orchestra accompanied the happy couple as they danced a graceful waltz, and family and friends soon joined them on the floor.