There Is Confusion/Chapter 24

Joanna stood on the steps of the New York Public Library, gazing at the paralysis of traffic which at the bidding of an autocratic policeman had fallen on the massed ranks of vehicles. Subconsciously she thought of a German story, "Germelshausen," in which all the life of the village suddenly ceased, leaving the people statues of flesh and blood. Fifth Avenue coming to life again, she fell quite consciously to wondering where she could get a good dinner. All about her flashed the lights of restaurants, but she was not sure of their reception of colored patrons and being in a slightly irritable mood, she wanted consciously to spare herself any contact which would be more annoying. She needed more than the cup of chocolate and sandwich which she might easily have had at one of the two drug stores near by. And of course she could get something expensive, but satisfying, in the station which towered not far away. But of late the restaurant management in that particular station had shown a tendency to place its colored patrons in remote and isolated corners.

Joanna had spent the morning shopping. In one of the more exclusive stores on Forty-fourth Street she had asked to look at coats. The saleswoman had been very pleasant, but she had seated Joanna well in the rear of the store quite away from the lighted front windows and the mirrors which were so adjusted as to give all possible views of the figure.

Joanna had not noticed this at first but when she did she proposed going toward the front of the store "where there was more light."

​"Why not come this way?" proposed the still affable saleswoman, pointing to the windows in the rear wall which also let in daylight. Yet when Joanna without answering had walked on to the front, she offered no further comment.

The incident was a slight one, possessing possibly no significance, but Joanna had walked out of the store hot and raging, the more so because she was not completely sure whether the slight was intentional or not. It had not helped her frame of mind to purchase a less becoming coat in a department store where she was known and liked by one of the salesgirls. Gradually she worked herself into a state of contemptuous indifference, but she meant to be careful in selecting a place in which to get her dinner. She had to work too hard these days to bring on her good spirits, she was not going to have them dissipated by galling if petty discriminations.

Well, there was no help for it, she would have to go over to the Pennsylvania station at Thirty-third Street. She was sure of pleasant treatment there. After this solid afternoon of work in the gloomy library, the walk would do her good.

A hand fell on her shoulder, and she turned to find beside her Vera Manning, one of the members of her old dancing-class. This surprised her, for of late hardly any one of Joanna's group had seen Vera. The report in Harlem was that she was passing for white and had no desire to be recognized by her colored acquaintances.

"It's been ages since I've seen you, Joanna," Vera began confidently. "I was sitting in the library waiting for a 'date'—doesn't that sound awful?—and then all of a sudden I thought, 'pshaw, I don't want to be bothered!' Just then you hove on the scene. Where you going?"

"Some place to get a good dinner," Joanna told her, wondering why she looked different from the Vera Manning she used to know. Her clothes showed her usual careful, even modish taste, but her face looked hard—"reckless"—Joanna ​suddenly decided; that was the word. She went on quickly: "See here, you work somewhere down in this neighborhood, don't you? Where do you suppose I can get something to eat, without walking a thousand miles for it?"

Vera frowned thoughtfully. "You see, I'm 'passing' just now—I know you've heard of it—and so I go into any of these places around here, but I never see any colored people. Of course you could try the Automat."

But Joanna didn't want that.

"Their food's all right when you feel like eating it, but I want a regular dinner-waiter, service, and all the rest of it. Pick out a good place for me and I'll take you to dinner, too. Nothing could be fairer than that."

Vera agreed smilingly that it couldn't. "There's a place over on Forty-second Street. I remember now I have seen some colored people in there and they get decent treatment. We could go there—" she checked herself a moment. "Oh, no, I forgot."

"Forgot what?"

"Look here, Janna, I might as well be frank, we were all of us children together—doesn't it seem ages ago? You know I wouldn't ever try to fool you. But the truth of it is I go to that particular restaurant often with the other girls in my office and of course the restaurant people think I'm—I'm white. See? I don't know just what they'd think if they saw me with you—some one who definitely showed color—or what might come of it. You don't think I'm a pig, Joanna?"

"I think I'd be a pig if I did think so," Joanna told her heartily. "Come on and take dinner with me over at the Pennsy station. It'll be nice to have a talk."

The two girls moved down Fortieth Street in the direction of Seventh Avenue.

"You'd understand it better if you worked among them—white people you know," Vera told her seriously. "Of course ​I suppose there must be some decent ones, not the high-brow philanthropists and all that crowd, but people who have too much breeding, too much innate—well, niceness, I guess you'd call it, to make light of folks just because they're different. But that crowd in my office, they never think of being courteous to a colored person. If they want the janitor it's 'Where's that darky?' or 'I saw a coon in the subway this morning wearing a red tie, made me think of Jim here,' always something like that. Of course they don't say it to the man's face. There'd be a fight if they did."

"I don't see how you stand it," Joanna puzzled. "What put it in your head to work with white people, anyhow?"

"Oh, to get away from everybody and everything I'd ever known." They were at the table in the dining-room now and Vera was making criss-cross marks with her fork on the white cloth, frowning absorbedly.

"You know, Joanna, I wasn't like you—not one of us girls was. I was more like Sylvia, I wanted a good time, but most of all I wanted, I expected to marry. You remember Harley Alexander?"

Joanna did remember him, indeed, a tall personable youth about her own color, a companion of Harry Portor, Brian Spencer, and to a less degree of her own brother Alec. But what she especially remembered was that he had been the constant shadow of Vera Manning.

"Of course I remember him, Vera. He's a dentist now, isn't he? Didn't he graduate the same year as Harry Portor?"

"Yes, that's the fellow. Joanna, we really loved each other, and we planned even before he went to college to get married as soon as he came out. But as soon as my mother—you know how color-struck she is—realized we were in earnest, up she went in the air. None of her children should marry a dark man. It only meant unhappiness. If Harley and I ​should have children they'd be brown and would have to be humiliated like all other colored children."

She fell to drawing more designs.

"We had a terrible time. I was completely alone in my fight. Father always follows mother's lead. Brother Tom refused to commit himself. Alice is just like mother—she really liked, I'm sure of it, John Hamilton, but because he was dark, she let him go for Howard Morris, whom I can't stand. For a long time I managed to keep it from Harley but the Christmas of his last year in college, mother told him she didn't favor his attentions to me, and told him why."

"Goodness," Joanna breathed, "that must have been awful."

"Awful! It was unspeakable. And nothing I could say to Harley could destroy the effect of what she said. She must have put it up to him as to whether he thought he could compensate a wife for the estrangement of her family. You know how Harley was. We had always been a remarkably united family up to that time. He said: 'If your mother objected to my being poor I could tell her that I could change that, but when it comes to my color, I can't do anything with that and, by God, I wouldn't if I could.'

"So that," Vera ended wryly, "was the end of my young romance."

Bit by bit she made Joanna see the picture of her life since her break with her lover. Before then she had worked in her father's office, but now she was secretary to one of the heads of a big advertising agency. As she was an unusually swift stenographer and had a level head, she was getting along famously.

"Of course they think I'm white. There are a lot of young men in the office and I flirt with them outrageously. At first I did it only to annoy mother, she hated it so. You know, the funny thing is she doesn't like white people any better than ​I do—she just didn't want me to marry a dark man because, she says, in this country a white skin is such an asset."

"Do you enjoy yourself going about?"

"Yes and no. When I began I did immensely. You can't imagine—I couldn't—the almost unlimited opportunities that those people have for work, for pleasure, for anything. As a white girl I've seen sights and places, yes, and eaten food that never even knew about when I used to go out with Harley. And then, too, Jan, you can't imagine the blessedness of no longer being uncertain whether you can enter such and such a hotel, or of getting a decent berth if you're going traveling or of little things like that, the sudden removal of thousands of pin-pricks, not only that, of inconveniences."

"You must be very happy," Joanna said wistfully.

"No, I'm not. They aren't, either. That's the funny part. Oh, of course I suppose nobody is actually happy, but I do think that colored people, when they're let alone long enough to have a good time, know how to enjoy themselves better than any other people in the world. It's a gift."

"I should think you'd drop it all, Vera."

"I would if it weren't for the sense of freedom. It's wonderful to be able to do as you like. Sometimes I think I will drop it, then I think: 'Oh, pshaw, what difference does it make?' Without Harley I'm bound to be unhappy, anyway, even if I do go back to my own. Since I can't have happiness I might just as well take up my abode where I can have the most fun and comfort even though it's making me—well, no saint, I can tell you." She laughed recklessly. "I wish I were like you, Joanna."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, you know—here ever since you were little you've had Peter Bye right at your beck and call—you must have loved him, Jan, he was so everlastingly good-looking, and charming, too, we all thought. I remember he took me to a ​movie one Christmas. Then you fussed with him or something—some of your high-brow stuff I suppose—and you send him off without winking an eyelash. How do you stand it?"

Joanna was cautious. "Of course I have my work. I do miss Peter though—sometimes."

"Sometimes! Girl, you aren't human. Well, being heartless isn't bad! What do you want to do, go to the 'Dance of The Nations' down at the District Line Theater?"

But Joanna wanted a chance to think, so on the pretext of having to return to the Library, she left Vera. She realized the tragedy of her friend's case, the awful emptiness that had come into her life. Hadn't her own life been affected in the same way?

A bus stopped before her and she mounted it, her thoughts weaving mechanically. She did not blame Vera at all for the change in her mode of living. In those first few months after Peter had left her she had wondered often how she could go on with life. For a long while she had existed simply from day to day, paying an exaggerated attention to small happenings, making engagements with people whom she had scarcely noticed before, doing anything to get away from the weariness of her thoughts. Many a night she had spent meditating on some coup, some reckless expenditure of energy and interest no matter how silly, how scandalous, so long as it took her out of herself.

She had even tried flirting, a field hitherto unthought of. As it was she had been too kind to Harry Portor; of late she had consciously avoided him because she knew only too well what he meant to ask of her the next time they were alone. She hated to hurt him but that seemed inevitable, for her heart held not the slightest fraction of love for him.

Oh, Peter! Peter!

As she rode up Fifth Avenue under the starry reaches of the sky, beneath the tender budding of April trees, her desper​ate longing quickened to a sudden resolve. She would write to Maggie—Maggie, who could not possibly love Peter. And even if she did, she could not love him as she—Joanna—loved him. Why, there had been Philip once, and then Henderson Neal!— Whereas Peter had been the only love of her own life.

She would write to Maggie, very clearly, very frankly and she would beg her to let him go. It all seemed simple enough. And then she and Peter would be happy. She would make him love her again, worship her. And "Peter," she would tell him, "never another unkind word, I'll be a new Joanna, darling."

Her father's house, its windows darkened, loomed up before her. Straight up to her own room she sped, not stopping to enter Sylvia's apartments, although the sound of laughing voices penetrated to her.

Alone at the little flat-topped desk, she took out pen and paper and began the letter—"Dear Maggie"— But that was what she had done years ago,—written to Maggie to give up Philip. That was in the unconscious selfishness of youth. Now was she to write her again to give up Peter? Her courage oozed away, left her helpless. She looked at the pen, put it carefully away on the rack, slipped the sheet of paper back in the pigeonhole. She might go down to Philadelphia to visit Alice Talbert. Yes, she would do that very soon. And then maybe she would see Maggie Ellersley—on the street, or even go and call on her. Undoubtedly it was better to discuss such personal matters face to face.