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Tuesday afternoon tea dances, we invited people we knew, like friends of our mother and father’s, and whatever members of our own generation they brought with them. Langley and Siobhan converted the dining room, dismantling the dining table that seated eighteen, lining the chairs against the wall, and rolling up the rug. Our parents had hired musicians for their dances—a trio usually of piano, bass, andsnare drum, the drummer using the soft whispery brushes—but we had recorded music, because long before this time of the Great Depression, with so many people out of work, and men in suits and ties standing on line at the soup kitchens, Langley had been collecting phonographs, both the old table models that used steel needles and a voice box at the end of a hollow curved chrome arm, and the more up-to-date electric Victrolas, some of them standing on the floor like pieces of furniture, with speakers hidden behind ribbed panels with cloth webbing.
These first dances were strictly social invitations with no charge. During the breaks people sat in the chairs against the wall and sipped their tea and took cookies from the plate Mrs. Robileaux held in front of them. But of course the word spread and after a couple of weeks people were showing up who had no invitation and we began charging admission at the door. It had worked out just as we’d hoped it would.
I should say here that we were distinguished, we two brothers I mean, in having lost a good deal of our money well before the market crash, either from bad investments or our excessive nightclubbing and other spendthrift habits, though in fact we were far from destitute and things were never as bad for us as for other people. Yet Langley was of a mind to worry about finances even if there was nothing seriously to worry about. I was more relaxed and realistic about our situation but I did not argue when he predicted dire poverty for us as he did when going over the bills each month. It was as if he wanted to be as badly off in the Depression as everyone else. He said, You see,Homer, how in those dance halls they make money from people who don’t have any? We can do that too!
Eventually things were going so well that there were too many dancers for the dining room, and so the drawing room and parlor were similarly stripped. Poor Siobhan was at the end of her endurance, shoving furniture into corners and rolling rugs and lifting hassocks and carrying Tiffany lamps down the basement stairs. Langley had hired men off the street to help out with all this moving, but Siobhan could not let them work unattended—every nick or scrape or floor gouge caused her anguish. To say nothing of the cleaning up and putting everything back afterward.
Langley had gone out and purchased several dozen popular music records so that we would not have to play the same tunes over and over. He had found a music shop over on Sixth Avenue and Forty-third Street, where the Hippodrome theater was located, and the proprietor was a virtual musicologist, with recordings of swing orchestras and crooners and songstresses that no other store had. Our whole idea was to present a dignified social experience for people living hand to mouth. We didn’t charge by the dance but asked for a dollar admission per couple—we only admitted couples, no single men, no riffraff looking for women—and for that they got two hours of dancing, cookies and tea, and, for an extra twenty-five cents, a glass of cream sherry. Langley took up his position at the front door every afternoon a few minutes before four, and left an honor plate in the foyer after about ten minutes when most of the peoplewho were coming had arrived. A dollar was not an insignificant amount of money at this time and our customers, many of whom were our neighbors from the side streets off Fifth Avenue and who had once been well off and knew the value of a dollar, came to the tea dance promptly to get the most for their money.
We used three of our public