A New Day

Charles Wright

A New Day

(Fiction)

"I am caught. Between the devil and the deep blue sea.” Lee Mosely laughed and made a V for victory sign and closed the front door against a potpourri of family voices, shouting good wishes and tokens of warning.

The late, sharp March air was refreshing and helped cool his nervous excitement but his large hands were tight fists in his raincoat pockets. All morning he had been socking one fist into the other, running around the crowded, small living room like an impatient man waiting for a train, and had even screamed at his mother, who had recoiled as if he had sliced her heart with a knife. Andy, his brother-in-law, with his whine of advice. “Consider Brother...”

Consider your five stair-step children. Consider the sweet, brown babe switching down the subway steps ahead of me. What would she say? Lee wondered.

Of course, deep down in his heart, he wanted the job, wanted it desperately. The job seemed to hold so much promise, and really he was getting nowhere fast, not a God damn place in the year and seven weeks that he had been shipping clerk at French-American Hats. But that job, too, in the beginning had held such promise. He remembered how everyone had been proud of him. Lee Mosely was a twenty-five-year-old Negro, whose greatest achievement had been the fact that he had graduated twenty-fourth in his high school class of one hundred and twenty-seven,

This new job that he was applying for promised the world, at least as much of the world as he expected to get in one hustling lifetime. But he wouldn’t wear his Ivy League suits and unloosen his tie at ten in the morning for coffee and doughnuts. He would have to wear a uniform, and mouth a grave Yes mam and No mam. What was worse, his future boss was a Southern white woman, and he had never said one word to a Southern white woman in his life, had never expected to either.

“It’s honest work, ain’t it?” his mother had said. “Mrs. Davies ain’t exactly a stranger. All our people down home worked for her people. They were mighty good to us and you should be proud to work for her. Why, you'll even be going overseas and none of us ain’t been overseas except Joe and that was during the big war. Lord knows, Mrs. Davies pays well.”

Lee had seen her picture once in the Daily News, leaving the opera, furred and bejeweled, a waxen little woman with huge, gleaming eyes, who faced the camera with pouting lips as if she were on the verge of spitting. He had laughed because it seemed strange to see a society woman posing as if she were on her way to jail.

Remembering, he laughed now and rushed up the subway steps at Columbus Circle.

Mrs. Maude T. Davies had taken a suite in a hotel on Central Park South for the spring, a spring that might well be two weeks or a year. Lee’s Aunt Ella in South Carolina had arranged the job, a very easy job. Morning and afternoon drives around Central Park. The hotel’s room service would supply the meals, and Lee would personally serve them. The salary was one hundred and fifty dollars a week, and it was understood that Lee could have the old, custom-built Packard on days off.

“Lord,” Lee moaned audibly and sprinted into the servant’s entrance of the hotel.

Before ringing the doorbell, he carefully wiped his face with a handkerchief that his mother had ironed last night and inspected his fingernails, cleared his throat, and stole a quick glance around the silent, silk-walled corridor.

He rang the doorbell, whispered “damnit,” because the buzzing . sound seemed as loud as the sea in his ears.

“Come in,” a husky female voice shouted and Lee’s heart exploded in his ears. His armpits began to drip.

But he opened the door manfully, and entered like a boy who was reluctant to accept a gift, his highly polished black shoes sinking into layers of apple-green carpet.

He raised his head slowly and saw Mrs. Davies sitting in a yellow satin wing chair, bundled in a mink coat and wearing white ie A flowered scarf was tied neatly around her small, oval ead.

“I'm Lee Mosely. Sarah’s boy. I came to see about a job.”

Mrs. Davies looked at him coldly and then turned toward the bedroom.

“Mufhe,” she called, and then sat up stiffly, clasping her gloved hands. “You go down to the garage and get the car. Muffie and I will meet you in the lobby.”

“Yes mam,” Lee said, executing a nod that he prayed would serve as a polite bow. He turned smartly like a soldier and started for the door.

Mufhe, a Yorkshire terrier bowed in yellow satin, trotted from the bedroom and darted between Lee’s legs. His bark was like an old man coughing. Lee moaned, “Lord,” and noiselessly closed the door.

He parked the beige Packard ever so carefully and hopped out of the car as Mrs. Davies emerged from the hotel lobby. Extending his arm, he assisted Mrs. Davies from the curb.

“Thank you,” she said sweetly. “Now, I expect you to open and close the car door but I’m no invalid. Do you understand?”

“Yes mam. I’m sorry.”

“Drive me through the park.”

Muffie barked. Lee closed the door and then they drove off as the sun skirted from behind dark clouds. There were many people in the park and it was like a spring day except for the chilled air.

“We haven’t had any snow in a long time,” Lee said, making conversation. “Guess spring’s just around the comer.”

“I know that,” Mrs. Davies said curtly.

And that was the end of their conversation until they returned to the hotel, twenty minutes later.

“Put the car away,” Mrs. Davies commanded. “Don’t linger in the garage. The waiter will bring up lunch shortly and you must receive him.”

Would the waiter ever come? Lee wondered, pacing the yellow and white tiled serving pantry. Should he or Mrs. Davies phone down to the restaurant? The silence and waiting was unbearable.

Even Muffie seemed to be barking impatiently.

The servant entrance bell rang and Mrs. Davies screamed, “Lee!” and he opened the door quickly and smiled at the pale, blue-veined waiter, who did not return the smile. He had eyes like a dead fish, Lee thought, rolling in the white covered tables. There was a hastily scrawled note which read: “Miss Davies food on top. Yours on bottom.”

Grinning, Lee took his tray from under the bottom shelf, and was surprised to see two bottles of German beer. He set his tray on the pantry counter and took a quick peep at Mrs. Davies’s tossed salad, one baby lamp chop. There was a split of champagne in a small iced bucket.

“Lord,” he marveled, and rolled the white covered table into the living room.

“Where are you eating, mam?” Lee asked, pleased because his voice sounded so professional.

“Where?” Mrs. Davies boomed. “In this room, boy!”

“But don’t you have a special place?” Lee asked, relieved to see a faint smile on the thin lips.

“Over by the window. I like the view. It’s almost as pretty as South Carolina, Put the yellow wing over there too. I shall always dine by the window unless I decide otherwise. Understand?”

“Yes mam.” Lee bowed and rolled the table in front of the floor-to-ceiling wall of windows. Then he rushed over and picked up the wing chair as if it were a loaf of bread.

He seated Mrs. Davies and asked gravely: “Will that be all, mam?”

“Of course!”

Exiting quickly, Lee remembered what his uncle Joe had said about V-day. “Man. When they tell us the war is over, I just sat down in the foxhole and shook my head.”

And Lee Mosely shook his head and entered the serving pantry, took a deep breath of relief which might well have been a prayer. He pulled up a leather-covered fruitwood stool to the pantry counter and began eating his lunch of fried chicken, mashed potatoes, gravy and tossed salad. He marveled at the silver domes covering the hot, tasty food, amused at his distorted reflection in the domes. He thanked God for the food and the good job. True,

Mrs. Davies was sharp-tongued, a little funny, but she was nothing like the Southern women he had seen in the movies and on television and had read about in magazines and newspapers. She was not a part of Negro legends, of plots, deeds, and mockery. She was a wealthy woman named Mrs. Maude T. Davies. Yeah, that’s it, Lee mused in the quiet and luxury and warmth of the serving pantry.

He bit into a succulent chicken leg and took a long drink of the rich, clear-tasting German beer. And then he belched. Mrs. Maude T. Davies screamed: “Nigger!”

I still have half a chicken leg left, Lee thought. He continued eating, chewing very slowly, but it was difficult to swallow. The chicken seemed to set on the valley of his tongue like glue. So there was not only the pain of digesting but the quicksand sense of rage and frustration, and something else, a nameless something that had always started ruefully at the top of his skull like a windmill.

He knew he had heard that word, although the second lever of his mind kept insisting loudly that he was mistaken. So he continued eating with difficulty his good lunch.

“Nigger boy!” Mrs. Davies repeated, a shrill command, strangely hot and tingling like the telephone wire of the imagination, the words entering through the paneled pantry door like a human being.

Lee Mosely sweated very hard summer and winter. Now, he felt his blood congeal, freeze, although his anger, hot and dry came bubbling to the surface. Saliva doubled in his mouth and his eyes smarted. The soggy chicken was still wedged on his tongue and he couldn’t swallow it nor spit it out. He had never cried since becoming a man and thought very little of men who cried. But for the love of God, what could he do to check his rage, helplessness?

“Nigger!’”’ Mrs. Davies screamed again, and he knew that some evil, white trick had come at last to castrate him. He had lived with this feeling for a long time and it was only natural that his stomach and bowels grumbled as if in protest.

And then like the clammy fear that evaporates at the crack of day, Lee’s trembling left hand picked up the bottle of beer and he brought it to his lips and drank. He sopped the bread in the cold gravy. He lit a cigarette and drank the other bottle of German beer.

A few minutes later, he got up and went into the living room.

Mrs. Davies was sitting very erect and elegant in the satin chair, and had that snotty Daily News photograph expression, Lee thought bitterly.

“Mrs. Davies,” he said politely, clearly, “did you call me?”

“Yes,” Mrs. Maude T. Davies replied, like a jaded, professional actress. Her smile was warm, pleased, amused. “Lee, you and I are going to get along very well together. I like people who think before they answer.”