8

On the fall of 1953 Mary Anne Reynolds lived in a small apartment with a girl named Phyllis Squire. Phyllis was a waitress at the Golden State lunch counter, which was next door to the Lazy Wren, and Carleton Tweany himself had selected her. Thereby he had solved, in his own mind, Mary Anne's problems. He did not now have much to do with her. For Mary Anne there was little more than the passage of his presence; back and forth, not stopping, he went by and beyond her.

The telephone company job she had taken required her to work a split shift. At twelve-thirty at night she reached the apartment, and ate, and changed her clothes. As she changed, her roommate, in bed, read aloud from a copy of the sermons of Fulton Sheen.

"What's the trouble?" Phyllis asked, her mouth full of apple. In the corner, her white-enamel radio played a Perez Prado mambo. "You're not listening."

Ignoring her, Mary Anne slipped into her red culottes, stuffed in the tails of her shirt, and went to the door. "Don't go blind," she said over her shoulder, and closed the door behind her.

Noise and the movement of people flashed out into the dark street as she entered the Wren. Tables crowded with people, the line of men squeezed together at the bar ... but Tweany was not singing. She was aware of it instantly. The upraised platform in the center was bare; he was nowhere in sight, and even Paul Nitz was absent.

"Hey," Taft Eaton said from behind the bar. "You get out of here; I'm not serving you."

Avoiding him, she began threading among the tables, searching for a place to sit.

"I mean it. You're a minor; you're not supposed to be in here. What do you want, you want me to lose my license?"

His voice faded as she reached the platform. Slouched at a table was Paul Nitz, conversing with a pair of patrons. He had apparently left his piano to talk to them; straddling a chair, leaning his bony chin against his arms, he was orating. "... but you have to make a distinction between folk songs and folk-type songs. Like jazz, and music in the jazz idiom."

The couple glanced up as she brought over a chair and seated herself. Nitz broke off what he was saying long enough to greet her. "How are you?"

"Fine," she said, "where's Tweany?"

"He just sang. He'll be back."

She felt a surge of tension. "Is he in the rear?"

"He probably is, but you can't go back there. Eaton'll throw you out on your ear."

At the side of the table appeared Taft Eaton, still fuming. "Goddamn it, Mary, I can't serve you. If the cops find you in here they'll close the Wren."

"Say I came in to use the john," she murmured. Pretending to ignore him, she began sliding out of her coat.

Eaton glowered at Nitz, who sat picking a bit of thread from his sleeve. "Don't you buy her anything. Contributing to the delinquency of minors-you and Carleton. You ought to be in jail." Taking her by the scruff of the neck, he said in her ear, "You ought to stay with your own race, where you belong."

Then he was gone, leaving Mary Anne to massage the back of her neck. "Drop dead," she muttered. It hurt, and she felt humiliated. But then, gradually, the pain left; and the need of Tweany resumed its usual dominance. "I'm going back and see if he's there."

"He'll be out," Nitz assured her. "Sit still ... you and your hurry. Relax."

"I've got things to do. Where was he last night?"

"He was here."

"I don't mean here; I mean afterward. I went over to his pad at two-thirty and he wasn't home. He was out."

"Maybe so." Nitz dragged his chair around and returned to the listening couple. "Look at it this way, lady," he said, addressing the woman, a plump, somewhat pretty blonde. "Would you call Stephen Foster's stuff folk music?"

The blonde considered at excessive length. "No, I guess not. But it was based on folk themes."

"That's my point. Folk music is not what you have, but how you go about it. Nobody can plop himself down and write a folk song; and nobody can get up in white tie and tails in some plush cocktail lounge and sing a folk song."

"Does anybody sing folk music, then?"

"Not now. But they did, once. They sang, they added verses, they put together new material constantly."

She became aware of the nature of their discussion. It had to do with Tweany, and they were attacking him. "Don't you think he's a great folksinger?" she demanded, addressing the blonde. In her world, loyalty was a vital pillar. She could not understand this veiled undercutting of a friend; it seemed her responsibility to defend him. "What's wrong with him?"

"I've never heard him. We're still waiting."

"I'm not talking about Tweany," Nitz said, evidently aware of his moral lapse. "Not particularly, I mean. I'm talking about folk music in general."

"But this Tweany is a folksinger," the blonde said. "So where does he stand?"

Nitz uneasily sipped his drink. "It's hard to say. I'm just the intermission pianist ... a mortal."

"You don't like his stuff," the blonde's companion said with a knowing wink.

"I'm a bop player." Nitz reddened and avoided the girl's accusing glare. "To me, folk music is like Dixie: a dead horse. It stopped growing back in the days of James Merritt Ives. Show me a folk song that's come down since then."

She was quite angry now; the need to defend Tweany, to keep the greatness of him intact, made her bristle and say: "What about 'Ol' Man River'?" Tweany sang "O1' Man River" at least once a night, and it was one of her favorites.

At that, Nitz grinned. "See what I mean? 'Ol' Man River' was written by Jerome Kern."

He broke off, because at that moment there was applause, and Carleton Tweany appeared on the raised platform. Instantly, the girl forgot Nitz, forgot the blonde and everything else. The conversation fell into a vacuum.

"Excuse me," Nitz murmured. He crawled back to his piano, dwarfed, she observed, by the huge figure of Tweany.

"For my first number," Tweany rumbled in his furry singsong, "I will sing a work that expresses the bitter terror of the Negro people in their ages of bondage. You may have heard it before." He paused. " 'Strange Fruit.' "

A flutter of excitement stirred the room as Nitz picked out a few opening chords. And then, his arms folded, his head down, forehead wrinkled in contemplation, Tweany began. He did not raise his voice or shout; he did not bellow or snarl or shake his fist. Thoughtful, deeply moved, he spoke directly to the people around him; it was a highly personal communication and not a concert rendition.

When he had finished telling them the story of life in the South, there was silence. Nobody clapped; the people clustered around waited with fearful expectancy, as Tweany considered his next communication.

"My people," he murmured, "have suffered greatly in their chains and tribulations. Their lot has not been a happy one. But the Negro can sing about his privations. This is a song from the heart of the Negro people. In it he expresses his deeply felt sufferings, but, at the same time, his genuine humor. He is, innately, a happy person. What he wants is the simple things of life. Enough to eat, a place to sleep, and most important, a woman."

Carleton Tweany thereupon sang "Got Grasshoppers in My Pillow, Baby, Got Crickets All in My Meal."

Mary Anne listened tensely, following every word, her eyes on the man a few feet from her. In the last months she had not been close to Tweany; except for these public moments, she had seen little of him She wondered if he was singing to her; she tried to find in his words some special reference to herself and things they had done together. Bland and withdrawn, Tweany continued to sing, not noticing her, apparently unaware of her.