ANOTHER time Miss Crystal’s boyfriend, Alan, came over in the middle of the day and Mr. Manny caught them kissing in the front hall. Miss Crystal hadn’t seen Alan in such a long time. She had give him up to save her marriage. She give him up the night Mr. Manny came home from his trip to Australia. I came to work one day and there she was, crying her heart out on the hall sofa, curled up in a ball getting the new chintz cover soaking wet. “I gave him up,” she said, standing up, trying to stop the tears. “I did what I had to do.” She lifted her hands and put them on my shoulders. We are eye to eye standing like that, the exact same height. Here’s what she looks like, green eyes, hair like sunlight, something she does with her eyebrows, they come together when she’s thinking, then her voice gets this serious note.
“I did what was best for King,” she said. “I messed him up enough marrying Manny. I can’t change fathers on him again. Could I, Traceleen? The answer’s no, you know it is.”
“You could go on seeing Mr. Alan on the sly,” I said. “You could see him in the afternoons.”
“He won’t see me anymore unless I move out today,” she said. “He said either I pack up Crystal Anne and move to the Pontchartrain or it’s all over. He won’t share me with a husband. He’s got too much pride.”
“He might change his mind,” I said. “When he gets to missing you.”
“He won’t change,” she said. “He told me not to even call him on the phone.”
Three months go by for Miss Crystal. Having to hide a broken heart. Then one day she can’t stand it any longer. Miss Lydia had been here from California for a week, living in the guest room with Mr. Deveraux, the jazz poet, and I guess all that romance was catching. So one morning Miss Crystal call up Alan and he come right over and the minute he step in the front door he throw her down on the floor and start kissing her. In the front hall. Then who should come home from the office for a paper he forgot but Mr. Manny.
About this time here comes Miss Lydia down the stairs wearing a pink satin negligee, carrying half a bottle of wine, and wants to know who wants to go out for brunch at Brennan’s with her.
This is a sample of what it gets like around here. Sometimes my blood’s so high I can’t catch my breath. This particular morning I’m standing in the dining room by the silver service. It’s this silver service Miss Crystal’s mother bring up here from Jackson and set it down on the sideboard and tell me to keep it polished. “This came from Philadelphia, Traceleen,” she said. “It is a symbol of our family.” “Yes, ma’am,” I said. “I’ll keep it shining.” The next week Mr. Manny’s mother come over for a visit and she notice it and that night she bring over a silver loving cup the synagogue give Mr. Manny’s grandfather for being the rabbi and she set it down beside the silver service. The rest of the house is modern things. Miss Crystal she likes the modern world.
Back to what I was telling you. There’s Mr. Alan and Miss Crystal on the floor and Mr. Manny coming in the hall. He was halfway in when I come in and stop by the silver service not knowing what’s going to happen next. Miss Crystal, she’s pretending Alan’s fainted and she’s kneeling over him, saying “Get up, Mr. Dalton, oh, what’s happened to you.” He had on these tennis clothes. That was lucky.
“I played three sets this morning,” he said. “I guess I got dehydrated. Could I have some water? I’ve got to have water.” Mr. Manny was standing about a foot away. He could have kicked in Mr. Alan’s ribs but how was he to know for sure it was the thing to do. He hasn’t ever seen Mr. Alan. He doesn’t know him from Adam. “Good God, Crystal,” he said. “What is going on here?”
Queen Esther saved it. She’s our meter reader, a girl from Alexandria that’s been on our route about a year now. She knocks on the door frame and comes in and stands by Mr. Manny. She’s three inches taller than he is. Watusi blood, like Mark’s mother. I can spot them a block away. It’s the way the shoulders swing up high, like something swaying in the wind. So Queen Esther is there, in her gray uniform, holding her clipboard and Miss Lydia has gone for water and Alan is standing now, shaking his head. There’s enough going on in the hall to last us about a year. “I’m fine,” Alan says, not even taking the water, making his way out between Mr. Manny and Queen Esther. “I’ll call you later about the policy, Mrs. Weiss. Whatever you want to do is fine with me.”
“What’s he selling?” Mr. Manny said, closing the door.
“Oh, some crazy new insurance,” Crystal said. “Imagine the nerve of him, coming over here dressed like that.”
“Is it all right if I go on downstairs?” Queen Esther said. “I’m behind already.”
“Is anybody going to brunch with Peter and me or not?” Miss Lydia said. “I’ve got to call and see if they have a table.”
“What did you come home for?” Miss Crystal said to Mr. Manny. “What do you need?”
“I need to get some papers,” he said. “I left some papers here.”
Then everything settle down like dust on a table and everybody keep their eyes to themselves and it’s so hot that summer I think everybody in town going to melt and my heart beating so fast. Later, I’m riding home on the streetcar thinking about Miss Crystal, when she’s going out to brunch, all dressed up looking so beautiful in a green and white dress and Miss Lydia beside her wearing lavender. Oh, Traceleen, you should have felt that kiss, she said. I can’t live without him but I have to, don’t I?
Here’s what she did to make up for it. Spent half the night in a whorehouse trying to find out if it’s true they rent young boys to homosexuals. I had to piece this story together from things she and Miss Lydia told me and Mr. Deveraux. That was all after the facts had happened.
First the three of them go out and get drunk at Brennan’s and while they are there this writer friend of theirs comes up to their table and he’s mad as he can be because he’s trying to investigate if they are selling young boys to homosexuals from out of town. He thinks the Mafia is doing it. Or else he thinks some bars he is suspicious of are doing it. But he can’t get any evidence. And somebody is making phone calls to him saying they will kill him if he doesn’t stop trying to find out things he doesn’t need to know.
So Miss Crystal volunteers to go to this bordello, that’s what she calls it, and make friends with the owner and pretend she is an old hooker that quit to get married and Mr. Deveraux he is going along to protect her. Miss Lydia is not going to be any use to them because she is too large-boned to ever have been in that kind of business and wears short hair. Nobody would believe she is anything but a schoolteacher which is what she is. She just went along for the ride.
As soon as they get home from Brennan’s they start planning what they’re going to do. The writer has come home with them. He writes things about New Orleans for some newspaper in Philadelphia. He is sitting on the piano bench playing old love songs and talking about how mad he is about people selling anybody’s body for anything, much less a child or a young person. So Miss Crystal, what has she got to lose, she’s got a broken heart anyway, she sits there hugging Crystal Anne and getting madder and madder. “What if it was King,” she says. “If King was poor and black they’d have him for sure, beautiful as he is. No,” she says. “Traceleen, call Mark and tell him you have to stay the night. I’m going down there and put a stop to this if it’s the last thing I ever do.”
That’s how spoiled Miss Crystal is. She thinks she can do anything she wants to. She thinks she is invisible. “I will stay if you won’t drink any more before you go off again,” I said. “I won’t be responsible for you getting killed.”
“Traceleen’s right,” Miss Lydia says. “We can’t go down there drunk.”
“Let’s go to the track and run,” Miss Crystal said. “Let’s go get into shape.” So then they put up all the whiskey and put on their track suits and go over to the track and run until they have ruined their hairdos, then they come home and take a nap and change their clothes and get ready to go. By then Mr. Manny has come home and they tell him all about it and he says they are crazy and then he just gets a sandwich and goes back to his office.
Here is what happened. At nine o’clock they get in the car and go down to the French Quarter to this place called Lucky Andre’s, which is one of the places Mr. Layton, he’s the writer, thinks is where the sales of the boys is going on. He can’t go with them because they know he is investigating them so he is going to be across the street in a hotel room waiting to call the police at a moment’s notice if Miss Crystal and Miss Lydia and Mr. Deveraux don’t come out right away.
Then the three of them go into the piano bar and start ordering drinks and pretending to be drunk and flashing a lot of money around so they will seem like they’re crazy. Mr. Deveraux is supposed to be the one that will pretend he wants to buy a young boy but in the end he couldn’t even pretend like it. He is a poet and too sensitive for this kind of work. They should have taken someone who had a different makeup.
Miss Lydia slipped off back to the room where they are playing Snooker and asked a few questions and found out where the stairs to the bordello was. So she goes back to the piano bar and tells Miss Crystal and Miss Crystal is so mad by then she’s crazy and she says she’s going to the bathroom and just goes right on up those stairs.
When she gets to the top there are two young girls sitting there on a bench talking to each other. Miss Crystal says they couldn’t have been sixteen and she goes over to them and starts asking them questions about where they are from and what they are doing in that place this time of night. And one of them gets mad and socks her in the face.
The manager of the place come along. He’s this big Italian-looking guy and he grabs her under the arms and wants to know what’s going on. “I came here to stop this stuff,” she said. “What do you mean having young girls up here in this dark old nasty place. You ought to be locked up in the jail forever…this place will be closed down…believe me now that I have seen this you will be sorry…this will be stopped.”
She can’t remember what all she told him. So he twists her arm half off, you should see the bruises, not to mention the place where the girl hit her with her fist and then he takes her into this big scary old room with a bed as big as the breakfast room, that’s how she describes it later, and the bed has a velvet cover on it and about thirty pillows and there is a canopy over it. “It was the tackiest place I have ever been,” she says. “Then he held my arms down and wants to know who sent me there and I said no one sent me, any decent person can’t stand by when something like this is going on and he had better be letting me up because I am married to an important man who will have him in jail for life just for touching me.”
But she is locked into that room and the man is big and scary. She says she never thought for a moment he would really hurt her or kill her but she could tell he wanted to. Meanwhile Miss Lydia and Mr. Deveraux have realized she must have gone upstairs and they are terrified and Miss Lydia runs across the street and has Mr. Layton call Mr. Manny and in the end there are policemen everywhere. Mr. Manny has called a judge he knows and there are policemen all over the place and Miss Crystal is let out of the room.
It’s four in the morning when they get home. Mr. Manny has had it with being married to Miss Crystal even if they do have Crystal Anne. He packs him a little bag and goes to live in his summer house in Livingston. “I can’t put up with any more,” he says. “It is like a madhouse.”
Wouldn’t you think Miss Crystal would be just delighted and make up with Alan and have him move in and live happily ever after? No, that is not what happened. All she is interested in now is this whorehouse thing. It has taken up her whole mind. She is going to find out what is going on down there with selling young girls and maybe even children. She is going to find out about it and put a stop to it if it’s the last thing she ever does. That’s where we are now. Whole house has turned into an office. Mr. Manny over in Livingston in his summer house pouting, mad as he can be. Who can blame him? Crystal Anne running around the house in on everything. Almost time for school to start. King’ll be coming home from his daddy’s in Meridian. What will happen next?
Miss Crystal, she’s like a diamond all these different sides to her. Turn her one way you see one thing, turn her another you see something else. Who am I, Traceleen? she said to me the other day. Sometimes I don’t know who I am or why I’m here. Since that is so I might as well go on and fix it so they can’t sell little children to people. Goddammit, I refuse to live in a city where something like that’s going on. It’s about to make a Christian of me. At least they listen when I call them up. Traceleen, do you realize that while I’m talking to you a child is being hurt somewhere. Somewhere in this town a child is suffering. This very minute in this very town!!
Then she gets up and walks around the room and starts talking on the phone again. Yelling at someone named Mr. Maglioso.