Read Online Downtown Strut: An Edna Ferber Mystery (Edna Ferber Mysteries) by Ed Ifkovic - Free Book Online Page A

this group, had little desire to spend an afternoon among my bourgeois though cherished trappings. How could he possibly tell his friends he spent an afternoon surrounded by my sumptuous lemon yellow curtains made from French-glazed chintz with the fire-red taffeta bunting?
    “How do you know Freddy?”
    Harriet jumped, surprised that I’d addressed a question to her.
    “High school.” Just two words, blunt, a student’s reluctant response to an annoying teacher.
    Harriet also cultivated a rebel’s look with her tattered jacket, the sleeves frayed and stained. She struck me as a peculiar contrast to the others, who looked like the educated middle-class offspring of respectable, if struggling, families, the sons and daughters of barbers, teachers, store clerks. Perhaps behind the working-class Trotskyite pose, Harriet possessed a father who was a doctor or lawyer, a parent startled by the revolutionary spirit suddenly appearing nightly at the supper table. No, I remembered that Roddy said Harriet’s father was the super at his apartment building. I wondered how Harriet—and the absent Freddy—fit into this loose-jointed budding writer’s group.
    Rebecca announced that lunch was ready. She stood there beaming, proud, this slender woman with the full, generous mouth and small, warm eyes. I noticed that she wore a new dress, a prim lilac-colored creation I’d never seen before. She looked…well, happy.
    She served a lunch of chicken salad, creamy with dill and horseradish; fluffy winter potatoes slathered in butter; and some exotic green vegetable I knew she’d picked up in Chinatown. She served steaming coffee, licorice flavored, followed by an apple Betty that reeked of clove and cinnamon. Waters scurried around, helping his mother serve, and glowing as his friends gobbled—there was no other word—the sumptuous feast. The chatty crowd, separated from their books and manuscripts, ate in monastic silence, absorbed in the rich bounty; any random remark by me was met by monosyllabic agreement. Smiling, content, I let them eat in peace.
    But as the last of the coffee was poured, I looked at Harriet. “Roddy got you into this group?”
    She took a long time answering, as though I were posing a trick question. She glanced at Roddy and finally pointed a finger at him. He answered for her. “Waters had told me that he heard her read at the Y. Then we met at a poetry reading at the Salem Methodist Church, and she learned that Lawson and I had just rented an apartment in the building where her father is the super. Harriet lives in the first apartment. We live just feet away in the back apartment. Weird, no?”
    “ When I live there,” she added. “I didn’t even know Pop had new tenants back there.”
    Roddy bit his lip. “Harriet and her father don’t get along that great.”
    She smiled. “There’s just the two of us now, and he wants me to go to some low-rent beauty school to be a hairdresser to all of Harlem. Making a living straightening hair and getting rich like A’Lelia Walker.” She groaned. “That’s when he’s not quoting Jesus to me about my bad behavior. Jesus has a lot to say about my behavior, Miss Ferber.” A shrug. “I want to write. And maybe to paint. I also want to work with political groups on behalf of the enslaved Negro.” She held my eye, challenging. “We’re not all brawling in alleys with razor blades or shooting craps while strung out on gin. ‘Keep your mouth shut, girl,’ Pop warns me. He thinks I’m gonna get arrested. I don’t know why. But the NAACP frightens Pop who’s happy shuffling along in white America, Bible in one hand, bottle of gin in the other.”
    She watched me closely.
    “Good for you,” I responded and she looked to see whether I was serious. “The artist is always an outsider and a colored artist…” I stopped, swallowed my words. “I don’t need to lecture all of you.”
    Anger in her voice. “There are real Negroes outside”—she actually