Harlem Shuffle(49)
John’s wailing greeted him at home. According to May, John had stuck the hand of her Raggedy Ann doll into his mouth so she grabbed it away, and he was overcome by loss. Elizabeth rocked the boy and in a gesture of hubris Carney took him from her arms. Which made him cry more. Which made Carney give him back. He retreated to the hall to hang up his jacket.
Dinner was finishing off last night’s roast beef and potatoes. Since he sacked out early these days, he was not staying late at the store, which meant that for most of the summer the four of them had dinner together. It was a pleasant development, and probably why Elizabeth didn’t get on his case about his odd sleeping hours. In late July, he realized it was the longest stretch of family dinners he’d ever had. Before his mother’s death, his father had rarely been around at meal time, and after that, scarcer still. Dorvay was a period of focused rage; its counterweight was dinnertime, delighting in his wife and kids.
He liked to stare at their faces when he could, and he kept wondering, how can someone you love seem so strange? When John was born, he had Carney’s nose and eyes—they say nature plans it that way. So the father knows the baby’s his, Certificate of Authenticity. Almost two years on, Carney wasn’t so sure anymore if his son looked much like him. May, for her part, still had Elizabeth’s graceful features and keen gaze. But John was already going his own way, and he could barely speak. Who will he be twenty years from now, how close or how far from the blueprint? Will there be some of Carney in there? Carney, on the other hand, hewed to Big Mike more and more all the time. No, he wasn’t smacking tire irons on kneecaps, but the original foundation held him up, unseen in the dirt.
Putting John and May to bed left Elizabeth depleted, so meals were a chance to catch up before she got too beat. Work was picking up, which suited her fine. Idle hours killed her. Sitting around the office with nothing to do but stick your face in the fan. With the summer travel season winding down, Black Star was in the midst of fall and winter travel, booking a lot of conventions. American Association of Negro Funeral Directors, National Association of Negro Dentists. Puerto Rico was big this year, thanks to the new brochures, followed by Miami. Some of the groups they’d handled last year, the Negro Lawyers, the Negro Accountants, had told their friends. They were getting a lot of word of mouth.
“We should go this year,” Elizabeth said, referring to Miami, which she had been lobbying for. “There are some new hotels going after the Negro market.”
“We’ll see. I’d like to,” Carney said. Christmas was busy, with people spending end-of-year money on practical items they’d put off. He was trying out I’d like to as a response to put her off, as opposed to the customary I wish we could.
Elizabeth took it as a yes and said she’d find the perfect place. “I had to give my father an earful today,” she told him.
Leland had been visiting a client near the Black Star office on Broadway and stopped in to say hello. He mentioned, among other things, that he was investing in Liberty National, and compared it to getting a tip on a winning horse. As if he’d do something as common as bet on a horse race. She hadn’t brought up the Dumas Club thing with him but he provoked her. “I asked him why he’d give money to the man who had humiliated his son-in-law—”
“I wouldn’t say—”
“Treat his family so shabby. And you know what he said? ‘The Dumas Club has a reputation.’ So I let him have it.”
“Okay.”
“I kicked him out of the office I was so mad. Mommy called me to smooth it over but I was mad all day.”
Carney told his wife it was nice of her to go to bat for him, but he didn’t need it. He changed the subject: “It tastes better the next day.” He’d allowed that Leland had taken a small delight on hearing of his rug-peddler son-in-law’s rejection, but he had refused to admit the obvious—that his wife’s father had actively undermined him. To permit that thought was to accept that Leland would never be his father-in-law in any other sense than a legal one.
Elizabeth cleared the table, a signal that she was going to get the kids ready for bed. He told them to hold on a minute: It was time to finally try out the Polaroid.
He’d snuck a peek inside the box a few times and retreated; the instructions were daunting. But he’d put off talking to Munson and that had gone as well as it could, so why not go for a streak? John reached for the Polaroid when Carney set it on the coffee table and he told the boy to stop in a voice so sharp it made them both flinch. It wasn’t cheap, the camera.
He opened the back of the Polaroid and slid in the roll of film while his family arranged themselves on the Argent sofa. The upholstery was the color of faded mint, a fine setting for their brown skin, but the camera only took black-and-white photos. John on Elizabeth’s lap, May beside them. May didn’t know how to smile yet—all instructions to do so summoned an unsettling, gum-heavy display that would not have been out of place on a Bowery bum sleeping it off in a vestibule. “Sit still,” Elizabeth said.
“I can ask Rusty to take one of all four of us,” Carney said. On 125th Street, with the store behind them, classy. He also wanted one of the store. Get a nice frame for it and put it on the wall of his office. They looked good, the three of them sitting there. A wave of worthlessness sent him sagging. It was good he wasn’t going to be in the picture because he didn’t deserve them. Aunt Millie had a few of the pictures of his mother, he remembered. Carney didn’t have a single one—his father had taken them, who knew where they’d ended up when he died—and lately his mother’s face withdrew into shadow in his memory. Next time he was at his aunt’s, he’d ask if she could spare one.