ON the night of the dance, Minnie wore her white machine-embroidered dress, from which the yoke had been carefully cut, to reveal her smooth round shoulders and long slender neck. She had bought new white slippers for the occasion, and white cotton lisle stockings. Her hair, elaborately dressed, rather startled Billy at first, though he agreed with Minnie that it did show it off to advantage.
"Oh, my Lord, Billy, what a time I had doin' it! Seventeen puffs if there's a one, and ma's hands so shaky she wasn't a bit o' help."
"I guess she ain't got over Pete's gettin' married."
"Honest, Billy, it would make your heart ache to see how ma cries and cries for Pete. You'd think that he was dead instead o' married. She won't listen when we tell her it might be the best thing that ever happened to him; and the nice kind of a girl that Els is, even if she is as homely as a mud fence."
"I seen Pete in the street the other day and he don't seem any the worse for wear," answered Billy. "He stopped me and told me that Elsie was a damn fine girl and he was out lookin' for a job. He means to support her even if she did have a neat little roll laid away.
"He said that, did he?"—Minnie always clamped her teeth together when she talked about Pete—"The dirty loafer! A lot of jobs he'll get, and Elsie knows it too. But she'd rather have a bum hangin' around her to support than be a decent, self-respectin' old maid."
"She loves him, Min," and Billy sighed so lugubriously that Minnie laughed outright. "When you're dead stuck on somebody else, you're just a mush pot. You ain't responsible. I can't make fun o' Elsie because I'm in the same boat as her."
"Aw, go on, Billy, you're soft as butter."
They were in the subway on their way to the Harlem Dance Hall.
"Jimmy says the decorations at the Hall will knock your eye out. And they've got a nigger band there, twelve pieces and seven drums. My feet are just achin' for a good dance, Billy, so you mustn't get sore if I step out a little bit tonight."
"There you go, Min,"—and the dull, hurt look came into Billy's eyes again. "I thought you said I could have most of your dances if I took you there. Now the first thing you pull on me is that I'm not to be a sorehead while you go off dancin' with everybody else."
Minnie felt the color slowly mount to her temples; a hot resentment flared against this boy who wanted to spoil her whole evening by his selfishness. An overwhelming desire to slap his face, before everybody, possessed her. It seemed, as she looked at him, as if she hated him more than anything else in the world, even more than Pete; that she would scream if he spoke to her or put his clumsy, freckled hand upon her. She sat there, erect, transfixed, her eyes watching his hand as it hovered uncertainly over her knee, threatening to descend at any moment in a familiar possessive caress. Then the hand withdrew to meet his other one and they clasped and unclasped until the palms glistened with sweat. They were still moving restlessly when Billy whispered to her: "I'm sorry if I put a damper on your good time, Min. I take it all back. I don't blame you for wantin' to give me the cold shoulder. I know that I'm a rotten dancer."
"One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street!"
"Here we are! Come on, Billy! Don't sit there gapin' at the signs! Pick up your feet! Can't you look where you're goin'?"
He didn't answer until they were outside and stumbling down the long iron stairway. Then he ventured a protest, though a mild one: "Gee, Min, everybody gave me the horse laugh when you called me for not hurrying. Why a girl always wants to make a fool out of a fellow when he's crazy about her is more than I can understand. But she does. I've noticed lately that the fellows who get by and are shown any respect by girls are the ones that treat 'em like the devil."
"You just try it on me, Billy, and see what a surprise package you get!" And her laughter dinned in his ears until his face was suffused in a deep red glow.
They walked in silence until Minnie exclaimed, "My God, Billy, look at that!"
The Harlem Dance Hall on Second Avenue loomed up before them, its huge doorways festooned in red and blue electric lights. On the sidewalk a crowd of men, women and children pushed close to the swinging doors to catch a glimpse of the festivities within. When a new couple arrived, or when one of the bouncers came storming out, half dragging, half carrying a limp sodden figure which he dumped upon the sidewalk, the crowd sent up clamorous cries of laughter and applause. The swinging doors, opening and closing, disgorged a confusion of sounds, a sudden burst of pounding discordant music. It acted like whips upon the feet of the eager restless crowd outside. They shuffled noisily. A hum rose from a hundred throats.
As Billy shouldered his way through the crowd, Minnie Flynn caught their eye, and a dozen male voices rose above the chorus crying out: "Oh, you chicken! Oh, you cutie cute! Chase me, boys, my hair is red."
"I'd like to smack 'em in the jaw," Billy whispered when they were caught and held in a human pocket, "they're too damn fresh."
"Oh, they ain't so fresh. They don't mean nothin' by it, answered Minnie, smiling to herself as her ears heard only the flash of many compliments. "Don't try to start anything you can't finish, Billy. I'm in no mood for a scrap tonight."
The crowd surged, split like a drilled rock, and Billy and Minnie (Minnie now laughing and kidding the boys) rushed through the swinging doors. There was an annoying pause while Billy struggled to find the tickets, then the doors closed in back of them and they were immersed in another swarming, loud-voiced crowd that filled the entrance hall. What a glare of bright lights, and how hot and feverish the air seemed after the cool of the night! There swirled around the huge chandeliers a filmy gauze of tobacco smoke which was fast lowering in a dense fog.
At every step Minnie's pulses quickened until her tension was almost painful. As she stood in the slow-moving line to check her hat and coat, her eyes peered among the scrambling figures in search of Jimmy. She saw many important looking ushers wearing large red, white and blue badges. The people seemed to respect them, and make way for them. Think of it! Jimmy was an usher. She wondered what he would say when he saw her there. She was certain of one thing: he would be angry because she had cut the yoke out of her dress. Jimmy was a funny kind of a kid, he had queer ideas. He seemed to think sisters had to be regular prudes and old maids.
The wail and the crash of the orchestra! The shuffle of hundreds of feet upon the floor! The hysteria of the voices beat upon Minnie's ears until her senses were deadened to everything but the impulse to spring into the heterogeneous mass and become a part of it.
"Billy, for the love o' Mike, hold me and let's get into the dance. I've never been so excited in all my life. Feel as if I was just goin' to blow up!"
They whirled onto the floor and he swung her around and around in dizzying circles to the pulsing rhythm of a waltz.
The cymbals clashed, the drums beat a furious challenge. Encore. Then a shout and a scramble for the benches slapped up against the sides of the dance hall.
Four hours of this procedure passed before the real adventure of the evening came to Minnie Flynn. She was introduced to Al Kessler by Jimmy. "Al," he whispered, "is a movie actor."
Movie actor!
It seemed to Minnie that when Al shook her hand, holding it in both of his, squeezing it, that every girl in the Harlem Dance Hall was looking at her enviously.
"I am certainly pleased to meet the Kid's little sister. I am certainly pleased to meet her," he was saying.
It wasn't what he said but how he said it that made Minnie's hand tremble in his. He had such a low, well-modulated voice, and he laid such stress upon his inflections that it gave the words a personal, caressing quality.
"And some little peach, if you don't object to me speaking out my mind, Miss Flynn. That's the kind of a fellow I am, little girl, I can't hide anything. Frank and aboveboard, no matter if it gets me into all kinds of hot water. You don't mind, do you, Miss Flynn?"
Minnie couldn't answer. She tried to, but she only moistened her lips with her tongue. She didn't know how to talk to a man who was a movie actor. She felt that he was in a social plane above hers, and for the first time in her life she was unhappily self-conscious. She knew that when she spoke she would lower her voice (it was quite shrill and raucous) until its tones matched the quality in his.
She was also abashed by his style, which was so distinctive that it eclipsed all the varied modes of dress in the dance hall. Al Kessler, not wishing to be mistaken for an usher, had not worn his dinner jacket. (He told this to Minnie five minutes after he met her and she would have given anything to have known what a dinner jacket was. Did he mean a "soup and fish"?) Al wore a black suit, cut with such wide lapels that their tips reached above his shoulders. Instead of the conventional three his coat had one button that was set just four inches below his large cravat pin. Minnie had never seen a collar quite so small as Al's, in girth or height. It wasn't much larger than his green tie, which matched the stripes in his socks. Silk socks! They made Minnie ashamed of her cotton lisle. When Al walked, the skirt of his coat flared out. Sometimes it whipped back and revealed a gray silk lining, the monotone of the gray relieved by a broad green stripe. Even at that hour (it was 2 A. M.) his trousers held their crease. He was tall and slender, and rather well-built, looking for all the world like one of the advertisements for ready-made clothing. His features were clean-cut, and when his face was in repose he gave the impression of being rather a handsome, though commonplace type. It was when he laughed, however, that his eyes narrowed with a glint of cunning and his full lips parted over long narrow teeth which gave his mouth the look of a ferret's. His eyes would have been very attractive had they not been set so close together. Among all the impressions that kaleidoscoped through Minnie's mind as she looked at him the fact stood out that here was a fellow rich enough to have a tailor press his trousers, a gentleman who, one could see at a glance, was entirely too refined to sweat.
What a contrast to Billy MacNally! By twelve o'clock Billy's shirt was wringing wet and his trousers clung to him, limp and creaseless, while he gave out a strong odor of—well, why think of it! Here she was standing face to face with the classiest man in the room. And as she drew in her breath she inhaled the fragrance of heliotrope, Al's favorite perfume, and the acrid odor of bay rum mingled with Sure-Stay pomade.
Al Kessler seemed to sense Minnie's embarrassment and, gentleman that he was, did the talking for her, keeping up a running fire of friendly little compliments. Minnie didn't believe all of them. Only when Al turned to address him were they aware that Jimmy had wandered away from them.
"Well, what do you know about that?" he laughed as he circled her arm, "I guess that shows how interested I am in a certain party, I guess that shows you."
"I'm very pleased to of met you, too." Minnie almost whispered this, her tenseness relaxing as they sauntered toward one of the deserted benches. She looked shyly at him from under her long black lashes. Minnie wished . . . but what was the use? He probably wouldn't even ask her for a dance.
Minnie was afraid that Billy MacNally would spy them out and break in upon this little meeting. Almost as if he divined her thoughts, Al suggested that they wander away from the crowd and into some corner where they could be alone. The hall was getting hot and stuffy, and he had been dancing for three hours until he was worn out. Minnie suffered a pang of disappointment. She would have liked to be seen dancing with Al Kessler!
They found a bench. "Come on, Miss Flynn, let's give the dogs a rest for a while. How about parkin' 'em in this nice cozy kennel? How about it, eh?"
"Dogs?" Minnie smiled in bewilderment.
"Sure, dogs, pedal extremities, violin cases,—in other words, feet!"
Little staccato shrieks from Minnie. "Oh, that's the funniest crack I ever heard. Dogs!" Then she sat down on the bench beside him and relaxed completely. She was no longer embarrassed by Al Kessler, She spoke his language.
They were there an hour before Billy came to take her home. By that time Al called her "honey" whenever he reached over and pinched her cheek, which was his way of emphasizing a particularly merry quip. He told her that she was one of the prettiest girls he had ever met, and scorned the idea that her red hair was a drawback. Some day, when he knew her more intimately, he was going to show her how to fix her hair, after the fashion of one of the movie queens, a particular friend of his, by the way. Minnie was touched by the interest he showed in her, which was more than brotherly, without being the least bit "fresh."
"Puffs, honey," he said as he stroked her head with his long soft white hand, "puffs are a thing of the past. Really, you'd look like a little queen yourself if you'd only fix your hair simple, in two braids around your head. I'll bet you have a sweet little head, honey, I'll bet you have."
Minnie listened breathlessly while Al told about his life on the stage and in the studios. He enjoyed the telling immensely for no one loved to hear Al Kessler talk better than himself. He drew a graphic and fascinating picture of studio life. He told her intimate details of the lives of the motion picture actresses and actors. He made them all beautiful and clever and extremely wicked. He told of his own work, of how he had left a very successful juggling act in vaudeville to go into the movies, not because he could express his talents as well on the screen as on the stage, but because "the great machinery of movieland was grinding out golden coins and showering them over the earth." He repeated this several times because Minnie seemed to find it so clever and original. He was eager to know if Minnie had seen him on the screen and named several pictures. She had seen two or three of them, but dared not tell him, afraid that she would hurt his feelings; she couldn't remember the parts he had played in them. Al was disappointed, but began at once to describe the rôles he had played, and to tell with elaborate detail how cleverly he had put them over. He never spoke of the characters as Sam, or The Weasel, or The Boy from the Country. They were all "Al's." . . . "I come into the room right after the old lady is killed, and I kneel down to see if I can't do something. And the door opens and the cops come in. And there's where I make the big stand and put up the big fight. Gee, honey, what a fight! But of course the story says that I have to go to prison. So I stall along and let up on 'em and they slip the handcuffs onto me. And off to prison I go."
"Oh, how wonderful!" repeated Minnie after everything he told her, "and what happened then?"
"They cut out the best part of the film, that's what they did," answered Al savagely, "they cut out the part where I break down and go all to pieces and cry and hit my head against the side of the cell."
"Oh, how wonderful! How wonderful to have all that happen to you! Imagine livin' a different story every day, instead of the same old grind. I get sick of life sometimes, it's so rotten slow."
"Oh, life isn't so slow," replied Al Kessler, which gave him the opening to tell Minnie all about his own life. First of all, he had a family who didn't understand him and a father who made his life hell on earth, trying to force him to study medicine when he had this great talent for the stage. He was a born actor. He could remember back to the days when he had the whole schoolroom in an uproar every time he pulled off one of his stunts. And he wasn't only a comedian. He could bring tears to his mother's eyes with his recitations. Why, there was one little thing, "God wanted a baby in Heaven, so He took my little one there," that made her break down every time he recited it. He intoned two verses of it to Minnie. His voice was low, and the droning monotone went straight to Minnie's heart. When Al's voice died to a tremulous whisper, and the last eloquent gesture had been made, Minnie turned her head away from him, ashamed of the tears that had come so easily to her eyes.
"What's the matter, honey, didn't you like it?" he asked, and his voice was silken. "Come on now, little girl, don't walk out on me. That's no kind of an audience, you know."
His arm circled her shoulders, then he drew her toward him. "Why, honey!" he said, "your eyes are glistening. You"
His eager pride banished all her embarrassment. "Honest, Mr. Kessler"
"Call me Al, honey."
"Honest, Al, if I could recite that dramatic, I'd leave the place where I work and try for the stage. I've always been just crazy for the stage. But my family's got a lot o' old-fashioned ideas, too. Every time I suggest it they throw cold water on it."
"That's a family all over, honey. But I wouldn't let them worry me if I were you. If you've got talent for the higher art, they can't nag it out of you, or beat it out of you! No, by God, they couldn't out of me, though, honey, you can believe it if you want to or not, but there were times when I was so blue and downhearted that I even tried to kill myself."
Minnie sat spellbound. Her heart beat violently. How strange, she thought, that they, whose lives had been so much alike, should have found each other. Her eyes glowed with interest. Her head arched on her slender neck. Unconsciously she drew back her shoulders, and as she breathed Al noticed the rise and fall of her small, firm breasts.
A change was coming over Minnie. She felt as if she had just awakened from a long sleep. The past, drab and uneventful, seemed far, far behind. Now the road before shone brilliant with promise. Strange new dreams and latent ambitions laid hold of her. Her eyes mirroring the surge of her emotions sparkled and grew lustrous.
Al, not conscious of what produced the change, nevertheless saw it.
"You—you're a little beaut, honey, that's just what you are, a little beaut!"
"Oh, Al, if you talk like that I'll run away from you."
"Try it and I'll chase you to Hell and gone. That's the kind of a fellow I am, persistent. Glue's my middle name, honey. You just try to get away from Al Kessler, and watch him stick. Yep, that's the kind of a fellow I am."
A strange new happiness cast its glow upon Minnie Flynn. It was romance. She said to herself: "I'm stuck on this guy already."
Then the shadow that she had been dreading fell upon them.
How common Billy MacNally looked as he stood there, glowering down at them! His old brown suit was the color of rust, his shoes, with their bull dog toes, were shabby. He wore a frayed brown tie, and a coarse cotton shirt. His hands dangled awkwardly from his sides while the detached cuffs slipping over his wrists added a final touch to his grotesque appearance.
Minnie was confused. "Mr. Kessler," she said, "I'd like to have you meet a friend o' mine, Bil—Mr. MacNally."
"Glad to meet you, MacNally. Won't you join us in a little tête-à-tête?"
"In a what?"
Minnie blushed with mortification. Billy took Al's hand as if it were a shovelful of hot coals.
"Come on, MacNally," Al urged, "Miss Flynn and I have been having a serious little talk here. We need somebody to liven us up a bit. Don't we, honey?" he said turning his back on Billy and winking broadly at Minnie.
"I've been lookin' all over the place for you," Billy said sullenly, 'It's time we was leavin' for home."
"We?" echoed Al with a significant glance from one to the other.
"Yes," Billy was aggressive, "we. Her and I. We come together and we're goin' away together. Now put that in your pipe and smoke it!"
Minnie turned apologetically to Al and her distress was pitiful as she forced a titter into her voice: "Ain't he the scream though, Mr. Kessler? He's always tryin' to kid a fellow, and he don't mean a word of it. Do you, Billy dear?"
The "dear" was like a douche of cold water, laying Billy's fever.
"I guess so," he answered lamely, "I guess I was only kiddin', Kessler. At that, it's time to be goin'."
Minnie's hand reached in back of her and dropped the small knitted bag that held her powder-puff upon the bench. Only Al's shifting eyes saw this move, and he knew at once why Minnie had made it. When she bade him a pleasant, though formal good evening, and Billy had condescended to shake hands again, Al watched them walk away, a confident smile turning up the corners of his mouth. He took out a long near-amber holder and stuck a cigarette in it. Then he lighted it slowly, flicking the match after the retreating figures.
When Minnie came back for the little pink bag, they arranged a meeting for the following evening.
"I'll be in front of my house on Ninth Avenue between Forty-eighth and Forty-ninth Streets at eight o'clock," she whispered to him.
"What's the number of the apartment?" he asked, jotting a memo of the engagement in a small red book.
A lie came swiftly to her lips. "My sister's havin' a bunch of friends to the house tomorrow night," she replied. "If you come up there we'll get dragged into the party, and couldn't get away."
"Then you'd rather see me alone?"
"Yeh, I'd rather see you alone."
"All right, honey girl, how will I know the place when I see it?"
"It's The Central. You'll know the house," said Minnie casually, "by the marble entrance."