The year after my father died, my family moved to Italy. For a month, we lived in a pensione by the Arno with palladium windows and ceilings painted in pastoral Tuscan scenes. At breakfast, we were served crusty rolls with curls of butter and pots of jam, and bowls of pasta and salad at midday. Everything about our life was charming and new.
We moved from the pensione into an apartment along the river a few doors from the Ponte Vecchio. Mother (with aspirations of an artist) enrolled at the Academia to study painting. My brother, Daniel, attended the city’s American high school. I was left to roam around with other young foreigners whom I met in classes at the language school for stranieri.
There was a young German girl, Eva, a handsome Egyptian Jew, Jean-Paul, a tortured Irish novelist, Bobby, and a Canadian race-car driver (who frequently treated us to fabulous dinners at Sabatini’s), and my thirty-year old French boyfriend, Michel. Michel usually resided in Majorca or the Azores, plying various tourist trades (in other words, a pretty hustler).
We were a semi-jolly group of expatriates who communicated mostly in English. We all liked to dance and smoke and sit in coffee bars. Otherwise, I visited the Uffizi on my own (sometimes everyday for weeks). I read (books were plentiful at the English bookshops and library). I incidently learned a little Italian. Our family took a couple of excursions (Venice and Capri).
In February, Eva invited us to Munich to celebrate Fasching. We were more than a half-dozen, each of us a different nationality, riding the train all night through the bright, snow-lit mountains, north into Bavaria.
In Munich, Michel and I booked a room at a cheap hotel. Eva and her boyfriend, Jean-Paul, stayed at her mother’s apartment. The others lodged with friends. I never saw Germany by day. Every night, we toured the city’s phantasmagoric balls, staying up until dawn, sleeping past afternoon. By the time we rose, bathed, dressed, it was dark.
Before going out, we gathered at the apartment of Eva’s mother for a light dinner of bread and soup. There was nothing in her surroundings to suggest beauty or grace except the occupant herself. While Eva was thin, wan, childlike, and overwrought, her mother was dazzling, probably only sixteen years older than Eva herself.
Her mother envied our freedom, wishing she could stay out all night. However, she worked days at a winter sports shop, and as young and beautiful as she was, she was Eva’s mother.
Our last night in Munich, she asked us to stay an extra hour and keep her company. When we agreed, she excused herself to change into something more comfortable. Barefoot, she returned to the living room dressed in a shiny, one-piece, form-fitting black unitard, her platinum hair piled like merengue in soft peaks on her head. She carried a tray with scotch, ice, and glasses which she put next to the stack of her LPs (Nat King Cole, Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett). She turned off the lights and lit a few candles.
Dumbstruck, we sat on the lumpy sofa and mismatched chairs. The records turned. We didn’t want to dance to that music. With Eva’s prompting, Jean-Paul invited her mother onto the small rectangle of hardwood floor.
At first, he held her at an awkward distance, arm’s length.
Fly me to the moon and let me play among the stars . . .
“Relax,” she teased him, winking at us.
As the song played on, their bodies (Jean-Paul’s and Eva’s mother) moved closer until the space between them disappeared altogether.
You are all I long for, all I worship and adore . . .
They had melted into one form. The song ended, but their electric connectivity crackled through the apartment.
“Are you coming out?” we asked.
Eva looked at Jean-Paul. He said nothing. Her mother shrugged as if it weren’t her problem.
“We’re leaving,” we said. “Are you coming?”
“I guess so,” Eva mumbled, getting her purse.
Jean-Paul was not going out, that was clear. He had a headache. He was weary of large costume balls. He needed to lie down.
“Wait,” Eva’s mother said, running to the hall. “Take my new coat.” She draped a fur-lined overcoat around the girl’s shrunken shoulders. “It will keep you warm.”
College boys were different. They were from out of town. From fast places like Miami and Long Island with the expectations of young men. They had their own cars, their own bedrooms in fraternity houses. They were older with sophisticated taste. They wore cologne and liked jazz. They liked to go out to hear jazz, especially at Paschal’s La Carrousel.
Peggy and I were often asked to go to La Carrousel, an elegant black club on the south side of Atlanta where jazz legends played. On Saturday nights, we sat with our dates at small oval tables lit by soft romantic lamps. Our tables were near the bar on the upper level while most of the black patrons sat near the musicians below.
When the musicians played, everyone was quiet. Everyone listened. The only people who talked were waitresses, taking drink orders. And they whispered. Our dates ordered mixed drinks like Singapore Slings and Rusty Nails. They sipped their drinks and listened. It was extremely adult. The elegant atmosphere, the combinations of alcohol, the beautiful brown women, the music, especially the music.
We sat and listened to Horace Silver. We listened to Ramsey Lewis. We learned it was important to pay attention. When we listened to jazz, we really tried to listen, but sometimes it was hard. Sometimes, the music got beyond us.
I had a black crepe cocktail dress with a low back and flounce skirt that I wore whenever I went to La Carrousel. At La Carrousel, you had to be twenty-one to get in. Twenty-one was the legal age to go to bars and clubs in Georgia, but it didn’t matter. Peggy and I both had fake ID. We had fake driver’s licenses from the state. They were easy to get. We typed out the information ourselves on a blank form, and a friend pressed them with a seal. We could go anywhere.
The first time I went to La Carrousel, the hostess inspected my ID and asked if I was Eddie Breen’s daughter. When she asked, I was shocked. Then, she said she knew my daddy. I was shocked again. She said I was welcome at La Carrousel anytime.
I couldn’t wait to ask daddy. “Is it true?”
He said he didn’t want to talk about it.
Mother overheard us. Mother ran into the room. “Are you discussing Negroes?” She made it sound like a crime.
“You should go over there with daddy,” I told her.
“So I can gawk?” she cried.
Daddy’s head shook desperately. There was no reasoning with my mother.
“You can go where you don’t belong. You can pretend to fit in. But, I think it’s disrespectful. To go where they go, isn’t that disrespect?”
I never asked my father again about La Carrousel. I understood it was his secret.
La Carrousel was elegant and safe, but Peggy and I preferred The Royal Peacock, a large, dimly lit hall at the top of a narrow staircase that featured the geniuses of R&B: Jackie Wilson, Sam Cook, Jerry Butler, Ray Charles. At one end, a stage jutted into the room, surrounded on three sides by long tables. There was no dancing at The Peacock, only music and drink. The management sold set-ups and ice. Our dates brought booze (rum or Jack Daniels) in flasks.
Once inside, we sat as close as possible to the stage. We sat beside strangers. We mingled with strangers. The Peacock was always packed with strangers who were all black. For Peggy and me, this was our first experience of integration. We had no qualms or fears. Unlike our mothers, we were glad to mingle. We were curious about mingling. We thought it was about time.
Before the music, there was always a stripper, usually plump and toffee-colored, a little older and a little tired. She performed a slow, undulating dance. Slowly, she removed her clothes. She removed them as if there was nothing to it. She made me see there was nothing to it. I never took my eyes off the stripper. I couldn’t help but watch. It was the most fascinating thing I had ever seen. I tried to catch whatever expression was on her face. I tried to read whatever was in her eyes. I tried to see signs of enjoyment, but she always looked indifferent.
One Saturday night, the couple next to me got into a fight. When they first began, I didn’t take it seriously. With the volume of the music, I hardly noticed. Then, they started to shout and push each other around. I leaned the other way. They pushed so hard, they rolled off their chairs and onto the floor. Once on the floor, they continued to roll around until they were underneath the table. When I looked under the table, the woman was on top of the man. The man was yelling for help because the woman was trying to strangle him. She had her hands around his neck, squeezing as hard as she could. I could plainly see she wanted to kill him.
Two bouncers maneuvered in between the tables, picked the couple off the floor (like litter), and threw them out.
The Peacock was as far from my daily experience as I ever went. I had already figured out that it was the real world, and I lived in a fantasy. I had already figured out I wanted to be where it was real.
A couple of months into freshman year, an attractive senior at MIT called me (sight unseen) to invite me to a dance. Informers must have told him I was a pretty girl from Georgia, suggesting someone raw and easy. During our get-acquainted phone conversation, he took it upon himself to coach me in the fundamentals of social success.
“No green,” he said. “I hate green, but maybe red. Can you wear red? No prints.”
Was he joking?
All week, I scurried from dorm to dorm. I found a scary green satin skirt ensemble with dyed-to-match green heels and a cape. Under the cape would go a hideous print corduroy shirt. Make-up would be heavy, stockings dark. The final touch was a dozen bangles over long black gloves that stretched from hand to elbow.
I talked my friend, Natalie, into wearing this extravaganza. Natalie was game.
A word about Natalie. Handsome and humorous, a Yankee girl with a prim exterior (her Liberty collars always pressed, her knee socks never slouched). I learned young not to be deceived by conventional demeanor. Natalie was a girl who once invited a fireman into her bedroom while her prep school burned.
“Larry Singer,” the receptionist announced.
Natalie wobbled into the dormitory lobby.
“Larry?” She giggled to disguise her phony Southern drawl.
Larry Singer, dressed in a tuxedo and holding a corsage, was puzzled but polite. Here was an apparition beyond bad taste.
Meanwhile, I waited on the stairs, peeping over the bannister, preparing for my stylish entrance. The entrance was aborted. I became convulsed with laughter and wet my pants as I watched Larry Singer seize Natalie’s bedizened arm and march her outside.
“Can we walk slower?” She panicked as he opened the door to his idling sports car.
When a girl attired in a sleek black cocktail dress appeared at the end of the block, Natalie pointed, “I’m not your date! I’m not your date!”
For a moment, Larry was confused and ultimately disappointed. He liked the gaudy outfit and the spunky girl with the ridiculous hair switch in the middle of her forehead.
As for me, my wits had been poured into my alter ego. In person, I was shy and reserved, intimidated by MIT upperclassman, Larry Singer. Our minute of fun was over before we began.
Off and on, I had boyfriends, but Natalie was ever faithful to one, her high school sweetheart who lived back in Rhode Island, troubled and wild.
“I love him,” she declared ardently. I didn’t doubt it, even after she divulged that he had slept with all her friends. I was the only girl in the world she trusted.
Predictably, the next year a pregnant Natalie left college, married Phillip, and moved to an apartment in Englewood, New Jersey. Whenever I passed through New York, I stopped to visit her and the baby.
The following summer, a sales conference brought Phillip to Atlanta. His first evening in town he called me. “Come meet me for dinner,” he pleaded.
I didn’t hesitate. After all, we were friends, too. I looked forward to recent news and photos of the baby.
I put on my black cocktail dress and joined Phillip in the bar of his downtown hotel. Dinner for him was peanuts and drink. After watching him get smashed and learning that the dining room had closed, I rose to go.
Apologetic, he walked me to the parking lot. He asked that I not mention his drinking to Natalie. As I leaned forward to give him a friendly hug, Phillip leaned, too. He groped my breast, toppled to the ground, and cut his face.
“Fuck!” he moaned and threw up.
I helped straighten him to standing. I found a tissue to press against his cut. I offered to take him to the hospital.
“Get!” he shouted furiously, yanking the spaghetti strap of my dress and ripping it from the seam. “Get out of here!”
My next letter to Natalie was cautious. Her response, distant and cool. I wrote again. No answer. I sent a birthday present to the baby. No thank-you note. I attempted contact until two years later, my Christmas card was returned with no forwarding address.
I blamed it on the dress.