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

pointed out my noontime window—“and they got a story to tell.”
    Waters jumped in. “Miss Edna tells me I need to tell that story.”
    “You all do,” I emphasized.
    Harriet’s look suggested I’d somehow usurped her vision, a coolness filling her eyes.
    Quietly, Roddy whispered, “We all love Langston Hughes and Claude McKay, Miss Ferber. We carry around Hughes’ The Weary Blues in our back pockets. Our Bible. My only Bible. They promise a new world, these writers up in Harlem.” His voice got louder and he looked at Harriet. “Miss Ferber met…talked to Langston Hughes at a party.”
    “Really?” Doubt in Harriet’s voice, a little disrespectful, and I could see Waters and Roddy—and even the aloof Ellie—breathing in, unhappy.
    “You know,” I went on, deliberately now, “he confided that when he was a young boy in Cleveland, he’d hide in the public library and read magazines for hours. He told me he read my early short stories in American Magazine and Everybody’s , stories of Americans struggling to survive—workers in factories, in the stockyards, women as maids, as shop girls. Folks unsung.” I stopped and shook my head. “Enough.” It was a vainglorious moment, this crowing, and uncalled for. “Let’s talk of your writing.” I stood up. “I want to hear your work.”
    Everyone nodded and looked relieved. As they filed back into the living room, I noticed Roddy saying something into Harriet’s ear—and she didn’t looked pleased. She shrugged him off, her head tilted. His eyes followed her, angry.
    ***
    Lawson arrived as we settled into the living room. He made no apology for being late, for missing lunch, but, bounding into the room and sitting in the center of the sofa, his lap covered with notebooks and typed sheets, he did what I expected him to do: he refocused the energy of the room, realigning the planets of his solar system so that, perforce, he was the blazing sun. A raw power, that, and practiced seamlessly. His looks helped, of course—the tan-colored skin taut over high cheekbones and the rigid jaw, the deep-set black eyes with a hint of violet that were almost too large for him, the slender though muscular body evident through the snug dapper-Dan suit he wore, and the blazing cerise necktie appropriated from a page in a fashion magazine. A stunner, this lad. The last to arrive, he was the first to speak, assuming the role of moderator, the teacher calling on students.
    “Do your stuff, my hero,” Harriet muttered in a barely audible voice.
    For the next hour, as we sipped new coffee, I reveled in the verve and spirit of these young writers, exhilarated by the sudden intensity swelling in the room. The petty tensions I sensed among them—yes, Bella and Ellie cast curt glances at each other every so often, and Harriet seemed unable to let go of her simmering distrust of me—now evaporated as each in turn, following Lawson’s presumptuous direction, read a short poem or a paragraph of a story or a snippet of stage dialogue. Ellie, at my request, reprised her summer sonnet about the saxophone player, and Lawson and Harriet got into a short debate about the use of traditional literary form to capture Negro street life.
    “Read Langston,” Harriet said to Ellie. “Not Countee Cullen. Iambic pentameter is real bogus. Read Langston, his jazz and blues stuff. Nobody rhymes any more.”
    Ellie waited for the others to defend her, but no one did.
    Bella read a few paragraphs from a short story she was working on, the opening scene taking place in a jazz club like Small’s Paradise. Her prose was purposely choppy, rhythmic, poetic, Gatlin-gun rat-a-tat; and, surprisingly, she read her words in a lilting, affectionate voice at variance with her usual hard-boiled timbre. “He was a gambler at heart,” she read her last line, “and a sweet-talking honey man, but he threw the best rent parties in the neighborhood.” When she finished, Roddy and Waters clapped. Roddy