Mayra knew how lucky she was to have Mama. Everybody lived with relatives or in hospitals or they had like boarders walking around and grabbing you by the cooze. Mama was a worker because she was proud, and the most Mayra had to do that she didn’t like to do was to stay in the city nursery until she was old enough to go to school, and her Mama worked to get that money to keep her in there so she wasn’t out walking around throwing rocks at rats and playing show-me-what-you-got under the stairs. Mama was somebody to look up to, and they all did just that, because she could throw like Jackie Robinson, hit like Joe Louis and talk two times faster than A. C. Powell. She bore down hard on studying. That’s what she wanted from Mayra. She said the word “Slav” came from the word “slave,” and look where the Jews had got because they studied. They knew. They never stopped, day school and night school, and they were getting someplace, while the black man stayed down resting on the bottom of the barrel because he wouldn’t learn the secret. “We got to be sharper than sharp. We got to be superready, honey, and when that door opens just a crack we got to know how to zip on through, then to stay there when we get there.”
They did all right in the fall, winter, and spring, but they were a little light in summertime, because that’s when Mama mostly got laid off after she quit working for the big case-ace broads. She was a laundress now, because after Miss Mary Lou was murdered she said she’d seen just too much. But being a laundress with steady families downtown meant she had nothing to wash when they all went away for the summer.
Mama and Mayra always counted Emancipation Day from June 1947, no matter what the Republicans claimed. Mayra was fourteen when their manumission came through. It was a little before the end of the school year, and to start to get ready for the August days when The Credit would get on the tight side at Relleh’s, where the food came from, they had moved into a basement flat between Manhattan Avenue and Eighth, which Mama said was a big rat resort for only the snobbiest rats and cockroaches. Rat traps loaded with jack cheese sat in wait and got cleared out every morning. They had a high bed and a good stove.
It was late afternoon. Mayra was doing homework. Mama was ironing and delivering her regular sermon on hustlers as a lesson for Mayra never to be tempted to go into that line of work. She never discoursed on icy-assed spade chicks standing under some lamppost on a winter night. Mama had known the big time up real close. The big big time. When the top white broad she would be working for as maid and pacifier took a pinch and went downtown, or broke her heart on junk or booze, Mama would go back to being a laundress in buildings between Lexington and Fifth in the Sixties until she spotted the wicker basket she’d been looking for, the one that seemed to hold only towels, then she’d find out whose laundry that was and go on upstairs and present herself with her credentials. She had the hard-money credentials because she had worked for Miss Baby, the most ambitious, money-stacking hustler since the Dutch bought New York.
Mama was thirty-four years old in June 1947, and she’d been in the profession for sixteen years before she backed out of it, sliding down her own screams. She knew what she knew and she didn’t hold anything back, because Mayra was growing up to be a beautiful girl. She wanted to prove forevermore that there was absolutely no percentage in turning tricks. She would tell how, at first, when she started with Miss Baby, she had picked up a few case twenties herself when the men would drop in with a big hangover in the afternoons and Miss Baby and her roommate, Jewel, would be sleeping or doing their thing. Miss Baby was an Italian girl like who was so big-time that she had managed a Southern senator into saying, in print, that she was his niece, and right off the bat the going rate to lay that little debutante was like triple. Miss Baby didn’t care if Mama obliged an afternoon customer and turned a trick in the off-hours. Like it kept men from wandering off to somebody else’s pad. But Miss Baby made Mama tell her every time and how much they paid, because if they paid less than twenty she’d have the doorman downstairs bar them from the building. The tips were good. The pay was just about fair, but the tips doubled it, sometimes better, so except for the summer months when the big broads in the business moved out to the Hamptons and to Saratoga, they never had to wrestle for credit at Relleh’s—only in the summertime.
Mama got clothes from Miss Baby that were like new and cold-cream samples from a wholesale druggist customer that kept coming in her name for two years after nobody saw the wholesale druggist anymore. Miss Baby ran a tight ship, but she was always fair. Only she was a real nut about everybody wearing clean underwear. She gave Mama four sets of underwear so it would be clean every day whether anybody was going to see it or not. Miss Baby was in love with this one roommate, Jewel, but when Jewel came out for a party in dirty underwear Miss Baby threw her right out on her ass and she stayed out. Dirty underwear turned Miss Baby off, and she figured it must turn the customers off.
Miss Baby was Mama’s first really big hustler, and the job lasted for almost three years. Then they hit her behind the neck. “I mean money wrecked her, she was so greedy. She found this john she told me was so rich he could like buy her a hook-and-ladder fire engine every day if she wanted some, and he was crazy about her. He got her to close up her business and move to a new pad at Eighty-second and Park. He gave her like a guarantee of more money than she was making free-lance just to be his chick. Now, she must have moonlighted on him. She had to be sneaking other johns in when I wasn’t there, because he come in one night—I was washing underwear—and he beat the living shit outta her. Honey, I mean she was wrecked, with like eleven fractures. And he stayed so crazy mad that he come in and spread me out on the bathroom floor and give it to me, then he beat the living shit out of me, but not so bad, because he was tiring, thank God. Then he went out, and instead of like a couple of ambulances a lot of cops came in, and they booked Miss Baby for running a house of prostitution and trafficking in drugs and fencing stolen goods. I mean, I’m telling you, you never heard of some of the things they dropped on her and I know I’m in real trouble, but a little man comes in and all of a sudden they unbook me and a doctor is handling me right and the man gives me five hundred dollars and says forget it. When they got done with Miss Baby she done nine years and was dead in jail with tuberculosis. I went to see her plenty of times when she was still in Woman’s Detention, and like all her looks was gone. I kept asking her what she did to him to make him so mean and she kept shaking her head. I asked her straight out if she moonlighted on him and she says she never did it. I said maybe that little chick she kept around made him hot. Nobody ever knew, but let me tell you, that’s the worst kind of man—but what I’m saying to you is, she got herself into the worst kind of work. Sure she was taking it in as a free-lance hooker before he got there, but she was paying out to the precinct and the building people that run the house and presents for the roommates and a very expensive horse habit and all that underwear, and when they hit her she had nothing. I want to tell you that in the end, downtown, she looked like one of those chicks who’d do it for an apple. I tell you, Mayra, hustlers have nothing but trouble. The customers turn them off. They’re all dykes, or something’s always going wrong with pimps or cops or clap or junk or booze. The sporting life is full of only bad surprises. There isn’t any way to win.”
Mama said that if she could have stayed thirty years old for like about twenty years she could have made lifetime credit at Relleh’s. She got out for good and stayed with washing clothes for good when Mary Lou Mayberry got herself murdered.
Miss Mary Lou was a show girl who used the shows as an advertising medium to advertise her ass, which made the real money for her. Mama never wanted to talk about coming in and finding what some john had left of Mary Lou Mayberry.
“Losers loaf, winners work,” that was the motto that Mama emblazoned on Mayra, who was going to keep on going to school as long as the credit lasted at Relleh’s, and she was going to learn to type and run an office. And she was going to get into civil service, where the federal laws said they had to treat y
ou right, where nobody could jim-crow you, where no smart-ass could fire you if you did your work according to the clock, and where there was a pension. If Mayra found she didn’t take to working in an office, she’d work in a library or a hospital, and Mama had a list of all the civil service jobs there were from Delehanty’s.
The body hit the courtyard outside their room, which was flush with the areaway, and Mama watched it plummet down for the last twenty feet or so. It didn’t make a sound as it came down. But when it hit, the sound was like a giant melon exploding on the concrete. Mama put the iron down, pushed the ironing board out of the way and rushed to the window, throwing it open. Mayra leaped up and ran after her. The body was about seven feet away and it was leaking blood from the length of its back. Money had shot out of its pockets on the impact; big cartoon rolls and flat packs of bills had whooshed out and were settling on the blood like green boats and barges. Mama climbed out of the window like she was fourteen years old and the house was on fire. “Come on!” she yelled over her shoulder to Mayra. “Pick it up! Get it!” and Mayra dove out the window.
They heard shouts from above. They looked up. Two honkies with gray hats were staring down and yelling from the roof, six stories up. They were yelling that Mama and Mayra should get the hell outta there and keep their hands off that stuff, and it made Mama laugh, but she was busy. She was harvesting on the far side of the body while Mayra worked the near side. They picked up the money like an animated cartoon. Mama kept talking. “I told you, Mayra. I told you. Something always turns up. Here we got Iron Charley Jackson, the Policy King. Wasn’t so iron after all. Straight down from heaven, and they threw him right at us, but they forgot to roll him first. Poor Iron, lucky us.” She piled her crop on top of Mayra’s and said, “Go run and put it in that suitcase.”
Mayra ran to the window, dropped the money over the sill and dove through. Mama bent over Iron Charley while the men still yelled at her from above. She stripped off his watch and rings and lifted a gorgeous cat’s-eye stickpin off his necktie, then streaked back through the open window. They hadn’t been outside more than fifty seconds. Mama put her scrap-book in Mayra’s schoolbag and dropped that on top of the money in the suitcase, slammed the case shut, grabbed Mayra’s arm and they both sprinted out of the door. They went up the back stairs to the street floor, and as they went out the front door they could hear the hoodies pounding down the stairs from above, banging into garbage cans, tripping on roller skates, cursing and shouting about two floors above them, maybe three, making noises like parrots in a pet-shop fire.
Mama and Mayra sailed onto the pavement from the front stoop, ran about eleven yards toward Eighth Avenue, then a cab came along and Mama flagged it down. She threw Mayra and the suitcase into it and jumped in beside them. slamming the door. “The Bronx!” she yelled.
“Where in the Bronx?” the driver quibbled.
“Who cares where in the Bronx?” Mama yelled. “Get outta here! Move it, man!” She threw a five-dollar bill in the driver’s lap and the cab zoomed away. It turned the corner fast at Manhattan Avenue, heading north. Two breathless honkies wearing gray hats whammed out of the front door of the building, looked up and down the street, then grabbed a man who had been sitting on an orange box at the foot of the stoop. “Did two women just come runnin’ outta here?” the smaller man yelled.
“Nobody outta here in more’n a haffa hour.”
“They got to be downstairs still,” the little man said. They ran back into the building, and the street watcher walked rapidly toward Eighth Avenue.
The cab went two blocks uptown, when Mama suddenly told the cab driver to go around the block. The cab turned right to Eighth, went down a block, then turned west on the street just north of and parallel to the street where the men were searching for them, then doubled back up Manhattan Avenue, where Mama had the cab stop in front of Relleh’s. She took off her apron, which had blood on it from where she had wiped her hands, and said, “Always pay off for The Credit.” She went into the store while Mayra waited in the cab. Two men in gray hats went speeding past the cab, heading north on Manhattan Avenue at fifty miles an hour, but Mayra wouldn’t have known them if she had seen them. “I give Relleh an extra five,” Mama said as she came out and got into the cab. “I told him it was on account, but if we don’t get back by winter then to lay out five dollars worth on somebody who needs it.” She told the driver to turn the cab around and take them west to the 103rd Street subway station, up the hill on Broadway.
As the cab made the turn Mama said, “That’s a new specialty they have now, throwing their man off the roof. It started with Abe Reles and they found out it scares hell outta people, so they revive it like now and then for the advertising. A shooter walked right up behind a man on the Gunhill Road on a contract for Lepke and he put the gun right up to the man’s head til it touched and shot it. Bullet went in the back and kept on til it come out between the man’s nose and eye, and the man lived. I mean like he was back at work in a couple of weeks. I got that straight from a police captain who was a freebie on top of Miss Eloise. When they throw off the roof he don’t make a sound coming down because they sap him before they toss him and he’s sitting straight up like he was in a dentist’s chair. I knew what it was before he hit, when I saw him coming down.”
They got out of the cab at 103rd Street and Mama only took three dollars change back out of the five. They walked along the side streets, primly, carrying their proper suitcase for room hunting. Once Mama didn’t want what they had and once the landlady didn’t want Mama. Then they saw the “Rooms” sign in the window of the brownstone on 95th between Columbus and Amsterdam. It was two nice light rooms—no rats, no bugs, no leaks—with a nice little kitchenette and a bath with an inside toilet. Mama paid the lady for three weeks in advance, then she locked the door.
“Wowee-wow,” she said. “It’s come our turn to lead the band. Two more weeks and school is over til Labor Day and we got the whole summer to look for a nice place on the Island or maybe New Rochelle or Mount Vernon.” She sat down and lifted the suitcase up to her’ lap. “Pull down the shades, honey. Then write down the numbers as I call them out.” She handed Mayra the schoolbag when the shades were down. She put the watch, the rings and the cat’s-eye stickpin on the tabletop, then she began to wipe off and flatten out the paper money and sort it into denominational piles. When that was done she counted it slowly and carefully and had Mayra write down the amount after each ten bills. When she finished, Mayra added it up, Mama checked it out, and they found they had come into twenty-one thousand six hundred and eighteen dollars. They were stunned. They were quiet for some time, then Mama said, “Now figure this out. We’re going to live right. Sixty a week. How long will the money last at sixty a week, not counting Iron’s jewelry?” Mayra’s pencil worked over the pad. Her eyes got bigger and bigger. “Just about seven years,” she told her mother.
“Then we got it made,” Mama said. “Seven years and you’ll be in the civil service and safe for life. I go back to work after Labor Day at a dollar and a quarter an hour plus carfare and lunch. That’s ten bucks a day, five days a week. Every week fifty, for forty weeks a year—just like in show business—so we only need to drag down ten from this kitty to make it sixty, then sixty out for the twelve summer weeks. How much time do we buy that way?”
Mayra calculated. “Close to forty years,” she said.
“That’s too much. Makes me nervous. We got to adjust. Well, there’s Christmas and doctors. There’s birthdays and extra shoes and you’ll soon be needing some sharp extra dresses, so let’s cut the extra free time down to twenty-five years. I’ll be fifty-nine when we run out. You’ll be thirty-nine and close to getting your pension and have a husband with a good job, so how can we miss?”
“Thirty-nine?” Mayra said blankly, unable to conceive of such an age.
CHAPTER TWO
At the end of her last year in high school Mayra Ashant was a tall girl who gleamed at the world with skin tha
t was between mulberry and acorn in translucent layers of warm color, soft and luminescent. Her mouth was pink cushions and white tombstone teeth; her eyes melted tar on oyster shells. The nose was too delicately proportioned for the chin and cheekbones—the nose of a Harari woman of Abyssinia, of the incredible beauties bred by crossing Galla, Somali and Arab—but the rest of her face insisted that the nose should have been formed like the noses of the Congo west of the Stanley Pool.
About three months before Iron Charley Jackson had been thrown off the roof Mayra had been having tactical trouble with her art teacher at high school. Mama’s counsel had always been, “Smile when they start to press you. Make them know you admire them for being men and how it could have been a fairy tale of a lay if it wasn’t that you had had your cooze cemented over.” The advice had always worked with the men she had to cope with just by walking along the street, until the middle of the third year of the high school art course, when a scholarship to the Shannon-Phillips Institute of Art somehow got itself involved with Mr. Seligson’s feelings. Mayra wanted the scholarship. Mama wanted Mayra to get the scholarship. Mr. Seligson was in a position to see that she couldn’t get it, and it was one of those things where if a fuss was made over the reasons why Mr. Seligson might stop her from getting it, then everything could get worse than ever.
Just before Christmas, at the end of the year, before graduation time in June, Mr. Seligson asked Mayra to stay after school. He was a light-framed, wiry man who wore glasses and who could speak rapid French with a strong Washington Heights accent. Mr. Seligson had lived and painted in Paris in his student days.
Mayra went to the art classroom at three-ten. Mr. Seligson closed the door carefully and pulled down the shade over its top glass panel. He stared at her and Mayra thought he got very pale. His breathing wasn’t good either, and she knew all the signs. “You wanted to see me, Mr. Seligson?” she asked tentatively, smiling the awful smile she and Mama had worked out. He took both of her hands in his. “I think you have tremendous talent,” he said. “I want to be allowed to build on that talent.” (That night Mama said he meant he wanted to erect on that talent.) “I have a dream for you, Mayra Ashant,” he murmured. (“A wet dream,” Mama commented later.) Mr. Seligson slipped his long, slender arm lightly across Mayra’s shoulders. “Hold your breath, Mayra, and listen.” He gripped her fiercely. “What would you say if I could get you a scholarship at Shannon-Phillips?”