Bessie Smith

It’s been years since I read the story below in its vintage format, a nicotine-yellowed Cosmopolitan magazine from 1948, from the Special Collections Department in the Thomas Cooper Library at the University of South Carolina, which I frequently visited as an ILL tech. One of its greatest patrons and denizens, my favorite Interlibrary Loan customer, recently passed away. The obits don’t adequately describe just the way Matthew J. Bruccoli, grouchy in his seersuckers and focused on some apocryphal mission would skid his rag top Mercedes into the parking lot and harumph upstairs to wreak havoc in Special Collections… His special collections–he’d sold them most of it, which includes many Salinger, Fitzgerald and Heller manuscripts, the typewriter on which Catch 22 was written, and many, many F. Scott Fitzgerald whiskey flasks, to the university for something like 2 million dollars, but continued to visit it almost daily. Bruccoli and those special collections were solidly connected to that Golden Age of the American Short Story, the first half of the last century.

Anyway, I’ve been struggling a lot with some sad sack attempts at short stories recently, and my struggles took me back to Blue Melody, from which the title of this post hales. I am convinced if this one doesn’t make you shed a tear or two, you’re deader than dead inside.

J. D. Salinger
Blue Melody
Cosmopolitan, September 1948, pages 50-51, 112-119

A saga of Lida Louise who sang the blues as they have never been sung before or since

In mid-winter of 1944 I was given a lift in the back of an overcrowded GI truck, going from Luxembourg City to the front at Halzhoffen, Germany—a distance of four flat tires, three (reported) cases of frozen feet, and at least one case of incipient pneumonia.

The forty-odd men jammed in the truck were nearly all infantry replacements. Many of them had just got out of hospitals in England, where they had been treated for wounds received in action somewhat earlier in the war. Ostensibly rehabilitated, they were on their way to join rifle companies of a certain infantry division which, I happened to know, was commanded by a brigadier general who seldom stepped into his command car without wearing a Luger and a photographer, one on each side; a fighting man with a special gift for writing crisp, quotable little go-to-hell notes to the enemy, invariably when outnumbered or surrounded by the latter. I rode for hours and hours without looking anybody in the truck very straight in the eye.

During daylight hours the men made an all-out effort to suppress or divert their eagerness to get another crack at the enemy. Charade groups were formed at either end of the truck. Favorite statesmen were elaborately discussed. Songs were started up—spirited war songs, chiefly, composed by patriotic Broadway song writers who, through some melancholy, perhaps permanently embittering turn of the wheel of fortune, had been disqualified from taking their places at the front. In short, the truck fairly rocked with persiflage and melody, until night abruptly fell and the black-out curtains were attached. Then all the men seemed to go to sleep or freeze to death, except the original narrator of the following story and myself. He had the cigarettes, and I had the ears.

This is all I know about the man who told me the story:

His first name was Rudford. He had a very slight Southern accent and a chronic, foxhole cough. The bars and red cross of a captain in the medics were painted, as fashion had it, on his helmet.

And that’s all I know about him except for what comes naturally out of his story. So please don’t anybody write in for additional information—I don’t even know if the man is alive today. This request applies particularly to readers who may sooner or later think that this story is a slam against one section of this country.

It isn’t a slam against anybody or anything. It’s just a simple little story of Mom’s apple pie, ice-cold beer, the Brooklyn Dodgers, and the Lux Theater of the Air—the things we fought for, in short. You can’t miss it, really.

Rudford came from a place called Agersburg, Tennessee. He said it was about an hour’s drive from Memphis. It sounded to me like a pretty little town. For one thing, it had a street called Miss Packer’s Street. Not just Packer Street or Packer’s Street, but Miss Packer’s Street. Miss Packer had been an Agersburg schoolteacher who, during the Civil War, had taken a few pot shots at some passing Union troops, from the window of the principal’s office. None of this flag-waving, Barbara Fritchie stuff for Miss Packer. She had just taken aim and let go, knocking off five of the boys in blue before anybody could get to her with an axe. She was then nineteen.

Rudford’s father originally had been a Bostonian, a salesman for a Boston typewriter company. On a business trip to Agersburg, just before the first World War, he had met—and within two weeks married—a well-heeled local girl. He never returned either to the home office or to Boston, apparently X-ing both out of his life without a jot of regret. He was quite a number altogether. Less than an hour after his wife died giving birth to Rudford, he got on a trolley going to the outskirts of Agersburg and bought out a rocky, but reputable, publishing house. Six months later he published a book he had written himself, entitled, “Civics for Americans.” It was followed, over a period of a few years, by a highly successful series of highly unreadable textbooks known—only too widely, even today—as the Intelligence Series for Progressive High School Students of America. I certainly know for a fact that his “Science for Americans” paid the public high schools of Philadelphia a visit around 1932. The book was rich with baffling little diagrams of simple little fulcrums.

The boy Rudford’s early home life was unique. His father evidently detested people who just read his books. He grilled and quizzed the boy even at the height of marble season. He held him up on the staircase for a definition of a chromosome. He passed him the lima beans on condition that the planets were named—in order of size. He gave the boy his ten-cent weekly allowance in return for the date of some historical personage’s birth or death or defeat. To be brief, at the age of eleven Rudford knew just about as much, academically, as the average high-school freshman. And in an extracurricular sense, more. The average high-school freshman doesn’t know how to sleep on a cellar floor without using a pillow or blankets.

There were, however, two important footnotes in Rudford’s boyhood. They weren’t in his father’s books, but they were close enough to make a little quick sense in an emergency. One of them was a man named Black Charles, and the other was a little girl named Peggy Moore.

Peggy was in Rudford’s class at school. For more than a year, though, he had taken little notice of her beyond the fact that she was usually the first one eliminated in a spelling bee. He didn’t begin to assess Peggy’s true value until one day he saw her, across the aisle from him, insert her chewing gum into the hollow of her neck. It struck Rudford as a very attractive thing for anybody to do—even a girl. Doubling up under his desk, pretending to pick up something from the floor, he whispered to Peggy, “Hey! That where you put your gum?”

Turning, her lips ajar, the young lady with the gum in her neck nodded. She was flattered. It was the first time Rudford had spoken to her out of the line of duty.

Rudford felt around the floor for a nonexistent ink eraser. “Listen. You wanna meet a friend of mine after school?”

Peggy put a hand over her mouth and pretended to cough. “Who?” she asked.

“Black Charles.”

“Who’s he?”

“He’s a fella. Plays the piano on Willard Street. He’s a friend of mine.”

“I’m not allowed on Willard Street.”

“Oh!”

“When are you going?”

“Right after she lets us out. She’s not gonna keep us in today. She’s too bored…Okay?”

“Okay”

That afternoon the two children went down to Willard Street, and Peggy met Black Charles and Black Charles met Peggy.

Black Charles’s café was a hole-in-the-wall hamburger joint, a major eyesore on a street that was regularly torn down, on paper, whenever Civic Council convened. It was, perhaps, the paragon of all restaurants classified by parents—usually through the side window of the family car—as unsanitary-looking. It was a swell place to go, in short. Moreover, it is very doubtful if any of Black Charles’s young patrons had ever got sick from any of the delicious, greasy hamburgers he served. Anyway, almost nobody went to Black Charles’s to eat. You ate after you got there, naturally, but that wasn’t why you went.

You went there because Black Charles played the piano like somebody from Memphis—maybe even better. He played hot or straight, and he was always at the piano when you came in, and he was always there when you had to go home. But not only that. (After all, it stood to reason that Black Charles, being a wonderful piano player, would be wonderfully indefatigable.) He was something else—something few white piano players are. He was kind and interested when young people came up to the piano to ask him to play something, or just to talk to him. He looked at you. He listened.

Until Rudford started bringing Peggy with him he was probably the youngest habitué of Black Charles’s café. For over two years he had been going there alone two or three afternoons a week; never at night, for the very good reason that he wasn’t allowed out at night. He missed out on the noise and smoke and jump indigenous to Black Charles’s place after dark, but he got something, afternoons, equally or more desirable. He had the privilege of hearing Charles play all the best numbers without interruption. All he had to do to get in on this deal was to wake the artist up. That was the catch. Black Charles slept in the afternoon, and he slept like a dead man.

Going down to Willard Street to hear Black Charles play was even better with Peggy along, Rudford found out. She was not only somebody good to sit on the floor with; she was somebody good to listen with. Rudford liked the way she drew up her racy, usually bruised legs and locked her fingers around her ankles. He liked the way she set her mouth hard against her knees, leaving teeth marks, while Charles was playing. And the way she walked home afterwards; not talking, just now and then kicking at a stone or a tin can, or reflectively cutting a cigar butt in two with her heel. She was just right, though, of course, Rudford didn’t tell her so. She had an alarming tendency to get lovey-dovey, with or without provocation.

You had to hand it to her, though. She even learned how to wake Black Charles up.

One three-thirtyish afternoon, just after the two children had let themselves in, Peggy said, “Can I wake him up this time? Huh, Rudford?”

“Sure. Go ahead. If you can.”

Black Charles slept, fully dressed except for his shoes, on a bumpy, ratty-looking settee, a few stacked tables away from his beloved piano.

Peggy circled the problem academically.

“Well, go ahead and do it,” Rudford said.

“I’m fixin’ to; I’m fixin’ to. Go away.”

Rudford watched her a trifle smugly. “Naa. You can’t just shove him around and get anywhere. You’ve seen me,” he said. “You gotta really haul off. Get him right under the kidneys. You’ve seen me.”

“Here?” said Peggy. She had her finger on the little island of nerves set off by the dorsal fork of Charles’s lavender suspenders.

“Go ahead.”

Peggy wound up and delivered.

Black Charles stirred slightly, but slept on without even seriously changing his position.

“You missed. You gotta hit him harder than that anyway.”

The aspirant tried to make a more formidable weapon of her right hand. She sandwiched her thumb between her fist and second fingers, held it away from her and looked at it admiringly.

“You’ll break your thumb that way. Get your thumb out of—”

“Oh, be quiet,” said Peggy, and let go with a haymaker.

It worked. Black Charles let out an awful yell, and went all of two feet up in the stale, café air. As he came down, Peggy put in a request: “Charles, will you play ‘Lady, Lady’ for me, please?”

Charles scratched his head, swung his immense, stockinged feet to the cigarette-butt-specked floor, and squinted. “That you, Margar-reet?”

“Yes. We just got here. The whole class was kept in,” she explained. “Would you please play ‘Lady, Lady,’ Charles?”

“Summer vacation starts Monday,” Rudford enthusiastically put in. “We can come around every afternoon.”

“My, my! Ain’t that fine!” Charles said—and meant it. He got to his feet, a gentle giant of a man, towing a hook-and-ladder gin hang-over. He began to move in the general direction of his piano.

“We’ll come earlier, too,” Peggy promised.

“Ain’t that fine!” Charles responded.

“This way, Charles,” Rudford said. “You’re going right into the ladies’ room.”

“He’s still sort of asleep. Hit him just once, Rudford…”

I guess it was a good summer—the days full of Charles’s piano—but I can’t say for sure. Rudford told me a story; he didn’t give me his autobiography.

He told me next about a day in November. It was still a Coolidge year, but which one I don’t know exactly. I don’t think those Coolidge years come apart anyway.

It was afternoon. A half hour after the pupils of the Agersburg Elementary School had pushed and shoved and punched their way out of the exit doors. Rudford and Peggy were sitting high in the rafters of the new house that was being built on Miss Packer’s Street. There wasn’t a carpenter in sight. The highest, narrowest, weakest beam in the house was theirs to straddle without annoying interference.

Sitting on a beauty, a story above the ground, they talked about the things that counted: the smell of gasoline, Robert Hermanson’s ears, Alice Caldwell’s teeth, rocks that were all right to throw at somebody, Milton Sills, how to make cigarette smoke come out your nose, men and ladies who had bad breath, the best size knife to kill somebody with.

They exchanged ambitions. Peggy decided that when she grew up she would be a war nurse. Also a movie actress. Also a piano player. Also a crook—one that swiped a lot of diamonds and stuff, but gave some of it to poor people; very poor people. Rudford said he only wanted to be a piano player. In his spare time, maybe, he’d be an auto racer—he already had a pretty good pair of goggles.

A spitting contest followed, at a heated moment of which the losing side dropped a valuable, mirrorless powder compact out of her cardigan pocket. She started to climb down to retrieve it, but lost her balance and fell about a quarter story. She landed with a horrible thud on the new, white pine floor.

“You okay?” her companion inquired, not budging from the rafters.

“My head. Rudford, I’m dyin’!”

“Naa, you’re not.”

“I am, too. Feel.”

“I’m not comin’ all the way down just to feel.”

“Please,” the lady entreated.

Muttering cynical little observations about people who don’t watch where they’re even going, Rudford climbed down.

He pushed back a hank or two of the patient’s lovely black-Irish hair. “Where’s it hurt?” he demanded.

“All over…”

“Well, I don’t see anything. There isn’t any abrasion at all.”

“Isn’t any what?”

“Abrasion. Blood or anything. There isn’t even any swelling.” The examiner drew back suspiciously. “I don’t even think you fell on your head.”

“Well, I did. Keep looking…There. Right where your hand—”

“I don’t see a thing. I’m going back up.”

“Wait!” said Peggy. “Kiss it first. Here. Right here.”

“I’m not gonna kiss your old head. Wuddaya think I am?”

“Please! Just right here.” Peggy pointed to her cheek.

Bored and enormously philanthropic, Rudford got it over with.

A rather sneaky announcement followed: “Now we’re engaged.”

“Like fun we are!…I’m leaving. I’m going down to old Charles’s.”

“You can’t. He said not to come today. He said he was gonna have a guest today.”

“He won’t care. Anyway, I’m not gonna stay here with you. You can’t spit. You can’t even sit still. And when I feel sorry for you or something, you try to get lovey-dovey.”

“I don’t get lovey-dovey much.”

“So long,” Rudford said.

“I’ll go with you!”

They left the sweet smelling empty house and moped along the four-o’clock autumn streets toward Black Charles’s. On Spruce Street they stopped for fifteen minutes to watch two irate firemen trying to get a young cat out of a tree. A woman wearing a Japanese kimono directed the operations, in an unpleasant, importunate voice. The two children listened to her, watched the firemen, and silently pulled for the cat. She didn’t let them down. Suddenly she leaped from the high branch, landing on the hat of one of the firemen, and springboarded instantly into an adjacent tree. Rudford and Peggy moved on, reflective and permanently changed. The afternoon now contained forever, however suspensory, one red and gold tree, one fireman’s hat and one cat that really knew how to jump.

“We’ll ring the bell when we get there. We won’t just walk right in,” Rudford said.

“Okay.”

When Rudford had rung the bell, Black Charles himself, not only awake but shaven, answered the door. Peggy immediately reported to him, “You said for us not to come today, but Rudford wanted to.”

“Y’all come on in,” Black Charles invited cordially. He wasn’t sore at them.

Rudford and Peggy followed him self-consciously, looking for the guest.

“I got my sister’s chile here,” Black Charles said. “Her and her mammy just come up from ‘gator country.”

“She play the piano?” Rudford asked.

“She a singer, boy. She a singer.”

“Why are the shades down?” Peggy asked. “Why don’t you have the shades up, Charles?”

“I was cookin’ in the kitchen. You chillern can he’p me pull ‘em up,” Black Charles said, and went out to the kitchen.

The two children each took a side of the room and began to let daylight in. They both felt more relaxed. The Guest discomfort was over. If there were somebody strange, some non-member, hovering about Black Charles’s place, it was only his sister’s child—practically nobody.

But Rudford, over on the piano side of the café, suddenly took in his breath. Somebody was sitting at the piano, watching him. He let go the blind string in his hand, and the blind snapped to the top; it slattered noisily for a moment, then came to a stop.

“ ‘And the Lord said, Let there be light’,” said a grown-up girl as black as Charles, sitting in Charles’s place at the piano. “Yeah, man,” she added moderately. She was wearing a yellow dress and a yellow ribbon in her hair. The sunshine that Rudford had let in fell across her left hand; with it she was tapping out something slow and personal on the wood of Charles’s piano. In her other hand, between long, elegant fingers, she had a burning stub of a cigarette. She wasn’t a pretty girl.

“I was just pulling up the shades,” Rudford said finally.

“I see that,” said the girl. “You do it good.” She smiled as she said it.

Peggy had come over. “Hello,” she said, and put her hands behind her back.

“Hello y’self,” said the girl. Her foot was tapping, too, Rudford noticed.

“We come here a lot,” Peggy said. “We’re Charles’s best friends.”

“Well, ain’t that glad news!” said the girl, winking at Rudford.

Black Charles came in from the kitchen, drying his huge, slender hands on a towel.

“Lida Louise,” he said, “these here’s my friends, Mr. Rudford and Miss Margar-reet.” He turned to the children. “This here’s my sister’s chile, Miss Lida Louise Jones.”

“We met,” said his niece. “We all met at Lord Plushbottom’s last fortnight.” She pointed at Rudford. “Him and me was playin’ mahjong out on the piazza.”

“How ‘bout you singin’ somethin’ for these here chillern?” Black Charles suggested.

Lida Louise passed over it. She was looking at Peggy. “You and him sweeties?” she asked her.

Rudford said quickly, “No.”

“Yes,” said Peggy.

“Why you like this little ole boy like you do?” Lida Louise asked Peggy.

“I don’t know,” Peggy said. “I like the way he stands at the blackboard.”

Rudford considered the remark disgusting, but Lida Louise’s threnodic eyes picked it up and looked away with it. She said to Black Charles, “Uncle, you hear what this little ole Margar-reet say?”

“No. What she say?” said Black Charles. He had the cover of his piano raised and was looking for something in the strings—a cigarette butt, perhaps, or the top of a catsup bottle.

“She say she like this ole boy on accounta the way he stands at the blackboard.”

“That right?” said Black Charles, taking his head out of the piano. “You sing somethin’ for these here chillern Lida Louise,” he said.

“Okay. What song they like?…Who stole my cigarettes? I had ‘em right here by my side.”

“You smoke too much. You a too-much gal. Sing,” said her uncle. He sat down at his piano. “Sing ‘Nobody Good Around.’ ”

“That ain’t no song for kiddies.”

“These here kiddies like that kinda song real good.”

“Okay,” said Lida Louise. She stood up, in close to the piano. She was a very tall girl. Rudford and Peggy, already sitting on the floor, had to look way up at her.

“What key you want it?”

Lida Louise shrugged. “A, B, C, D, E, F, F,” she said and winked at the children. “Who cares? Gimme a green one. Gotta match my shoes.”

Black Charles struck a chord, and his niece’s voice slipped into it. She sang “Nobody Good Around.” When she was finished, Rudford had gooseflesh from his neck to his waist. Peggy’s fist was in his coat pocket. He hadn’t felt it go in, and he didn’t make her take it out.

Now, years later, Rudford was making a great point of explaining to me that Lida Louise’s voice can’t be described, until I told him that I happened to own most of her records and knew what he meant. Actually, though, a fair attempt to describe Lida Louise’s voice can be made. She had a powerful, soft voice. Every note she sang was detonated individually. She blasted you tenderly to pieces. In saying her voice can’t be described, Rudford probably meant that it can’t be classified. And that’s true.

Finished with “Nobody Good Around,” Lida Louise stooped over and picked up her cigarettes from under her uncle’s bench. “Where you been?” she asked them, and lit one. The two children didn’t take their eyes off her.

Black Charles stood up. “I got spareribs,” he announced. “Who want some?”

During Christmas week Lida Louise began singing nights at her Uncle Charles’s. Rudford and Peggy both got permission, on her opening night, to attend a hygiene lecture at school. So they were there. Black Charles gave them the table nearest the piano and put two bottles of sarsaparilla on it, but they were both too excited to drink. Peggy nervously tapped the mouth of her bottle against her front teeth; Rudford didn’t even pick his bottle up. Some of the high-school and college crowd thought the children were cute. They were dealt with. Around nine o’clock, when the place was packed, Black Charles suddenly stood up from his piano and raised a hand. The gesture, however, had no effect on the noisy, home-for-Christmas crowd, so Peggy turned around in her seat and, never a lady, yelled at them, “Y’all be quiet!” and finally the room quieted down. Charles’s announcement was to the point. “I got my sister’s chile, Lida Louise, here t’night and she gonna sing for you.” Then he sat down and Lida Louise came out, in her yellow dress, and walked up to her uncle’s piano. The crowd applauded politely, but clearly expected nothing special. Lida Louise bent over Rudford and Peggy’s table, snapped her finger against Rudford’s ear, and asked, “Nobody Good Around?” They both answered, “Yes!”

Lida Louise sang that, and turned the place upside down. Peggy started to cry so hard that when Rudford had asked her, “What’s the matter?” and she had sobbed back, “I don’t know,” he suddenly assured her, himself transported, “I love you good, Peggy!” which made the child cry so uncontrollably he had to take her home.

Lida Louise sang nights at Black Charles’s for about six months straight. Then, inevitably, Lewis Harold Meadows heard her and took her back to Memphis with him. She went without being perceptively thrilled over the Great Opportunity. She went without being visibly impressed by the sacred words, “Beale Street.” But she went. In Rudford’s opinion, she went because she was looking for somebody, or because she wanted somebody to find her. It sounds very reasonable to me.

But as long as Agersburg could hold her, she was adored, deified, by the young people there. They knew, most of them, just how good she was, and those who didn’t know pretended to. They brought their friends home for the week end to have a look at her. The ones who wrote for their college papers sanctified her in glorious prose. Others grew smug or blasé when foreigners turned dormitory conversation around to Violet Henry or Alice Mae Starbuck or Priscella Jordan, blues singers who were killing other foreigners in Harlem or New Orleans or Chicago. If you didn’t have Lida Louise, where you lived, you didn’t have anybody. What’s more, you were a bore.

In return for all this love and deification, Lida Louise was very, very good with the Agersburg kids. No matter what they asked her to sing, or how many times they asked her to sing it, she gave them what there was of her smile, said, “Nice tune,” and gave.

One very interesting Saturday night a college boy in a Tuxedo—somebody said he was a visiting Yale man—came rather big-time-ily up to the piano and asked Lida Louise, “Do you know ‘Slow Train to Jacksonville,’ by any chance?”

Lida Louise looked at the boy quickly, then carefully, and answered, “Where you hear that song, boy?”

The boy who was supposed to be a visiting Yale man said, “A fella in New York played it for me.”

Lida Louise asked him, “Colored man?”

The boy nodded impatiently.

Lida Louise asked, “His name Endicott Wilson? You know?”

The boy answered, “I don’t know. Little guy. Had a mustache.”

Lida Louise nodded. “He in New York now?” she asked.

The boy answered, “Well, I don’t know if he’s there now. I guess so…How ‘bout singin’ it if you know it?”

Lida Louise nodded and sat down at the piano herself. She played and sang “Slow Train to Jacksonville.”

According to those who heard it, it was a very good number, original at least in melody, about an unfortunate man with the wrong shade of lipstick on his collar. She sang it through once and, so far as Rudford or I know, never again. Nor has the number ever been recorded by anybody, to my knowledge.

Here we go into jazz history just a little bit. Lida Louise sang at Lewis Harold Meadows’s famous Jazz Emporium, on Beale Street in Memphis, for not quite four months. (She started there in late May of 1927 and quit early in September of the same year.) But time, or the lack of it, like everything else, depends entirely upon who’s using it. Lida Louise hadn’t been singing on Beale Street more than two weeks before the customers started lining up outside Meadows’s an hour before Lida Louise went on. Record companies got after her almost immediately. A month after she had hit Beale Street she had made eighteen sides, including “Smile Town,” “Brown Gal Blues,” “Rainy Day Boy,” “Nobody Good Around” and “Seems Like Home.”

Everybody who had anything to do with jazz—anything straight, that is—somehow got to hear her while she was there. Russel Hopton, John Raymond Jewel, Izzie Feld, Louis Armstrong, Much McNeill, Freddie Jenks, Jack Teagarden, Bernie and Mortie Gold, Willie Fuchs, Goodman, Beiderbecke, Johnson, Earl Slagle—all the boys.

One Saturday night a big sedan from Chicago, pulled up in front of Meadows’s. Among those who piled out of it were Joe and Sonny Varioni. They didn’t go back with the others, the next morning. They stayed at the Peabody for two nights, writing a song. Before they went back to Chicago they gave Lida Louise “Soupy Peggy.” It was about a sentimental little girl who falls in love with a little boy standing at the blackboard in school. (You can’t buy a copy of Lida Louise’s record of “Soupy Peggy” today, for any price. The other side of it had a fault, and the record company only turned out a very few copies.)

Nobody knew for certain why Lida Louise quit Meadows’s and left Memphis. Rudford and a few others reasonably suspected that her quitting had something—or everything—to do with the corner-of-Beale-Street incident.

Around noon on the day she quit Meadows’s, Lida Louise was seen talking in the street with a rather short well-dressed colored man. Whoever he was, she suddenly hit him full in the face with her handbag. Then she ran into Meadows’s, whizzed past a crew of waiters and orchestra boys, and slammed her dressing room door behind her. An hour later she was packed and ready to go.

She went back to Agersburg. She didn’t go back with a new, flossy wardrobe, and she and her mother didn’t move into a bigger and better apartment. She just went back.

On the afternoon of her return she wrote a note to Rudford and Peggy. Probably on Black Charles’s say-so—like everybody else in Agersburg, he was terrified of Rudford’s father—she sent the note around to Peggy’s house. It read:

Dear kittys

I am back and got some real nice new songs for you so you come around quick and see me.

Yours sincerely,

(Miss) Lida Louise Jones

The same September that Lida Louise returned to Agersburg, Rudford was sent away to boarding school. Before he left, Black Charles, Lida Louise, Lida Louise’s mother and Peggy gave him a farewell picnic.

Rudford called for Peggy around eleven on a Saturday morning. They were picked up in Black Charles’s bashed-in old car and driven out to a place called Tuckett’s Creek.

Black Charles, with a fascinating knife, cut the strings on all the wonderful-looking boxes. Peggy was a specialist on cold spareribs. Rudford was more of a fried-chicken man. Lida Louise was one of those people who take two bites out of a drumstick, then light a cigarette.

The children ate until the ants got all over everything, then Black Charles, keeping out a last spare rib for Peggy and a last wing for Rudford, neatly retied all the boxes.

Mrs. Jones stretched out on the grass and went to sleep. Black Charles and Lida Louise began to play casino. Peggy had with her some sun-pictures of people like Richard Barthelmess and Richard Dix and Reginald Denny. She propped them up against a tree in the bright light and watched possessively over them.

Rudford lay on his back in the grass and watched great cotton clouds slip through the sky. Peculiarly, he shut his eyes when the sun was momentarily clouded out; opened them when the sun returned scarlet against his eyelids. The trouble was, the world might end while his eyes were shut.

It did. His world, in any case.

He suddenly heard a brief, terrible, woman’s scream behind him. Jerking his head around, he saw Lida Louise writhing in the grass. She was holding her flat, small stomach. Black Charles was trying awkwardly to turn her toward him, to get her somehow out of the frightening, queer position her body had assumed in its apparent agony. His face was gray.

Rudford and Peggy both reached the terrible spot at the same time.

“What she et? What she done et?” Mrs. Jones demanded hysterically of her brother.

“Nothin’! She done et hardly nothin’,” Black Charles answered, miserable. He was still trying to do something constructive with Lida Louise’s twisting body.

Something came to Rudford’s head, something out of his father’s “First Aid for Americans.” Nervously he dropped to his knees and pressed Lida Louise’s abdomen with two fingers. Lida Louise responded with a curdling scream.

“It’s her appendix. She’s busted her appendix. Or it’s gonna bust,” Rudford wildly informed Black Charles. “We gotta get her to a hospital.”

Understanding, at least in part, Black Charles nodded. “You take her foots,” he directed his sister.

Mrs. Jones, however, dropped her end of the burden on the way to the car. Rudford and Peggy each grabbed a leg, and with their help Black Charles hoisted the moaning girl into the front seat. Rudford and Peggy also climbed in the front. Peggy held Lida Louise’s head. Mrs. Jones was obliged to sit alone in the back. She was making far more anguished sounds than those coming from her daughter.

“Take her to Samaritan. On Benton Street,” Rudford told Black Charles.

Black Charles’s hands were shaking so violently he couldn’t get the car going. Rudford pushed his hand through the spokes of the driver’s wheel and turned on the ignition. The car started up.

“That there Samaritan’s a private hospital,” Black Charles said, grinding his gears.

“What’s the difference? Hurry up. Hurry up, Charles,” Rudford said, and he told the older man when to shift into second and when into third. Charles knew enough, though, to make good, unlawful time.

Peggy stroked Lida Louise’s forehead. Rudford watched the road. Mrs. Jones, in the back, whimpered unceasingly. Lida Louise lay across the children’s laps with her eyes shut, moaning intermittently. The car finally reached Samaritan Hospital, about a mile and a half away.

“Go in the front way,” Rudford prompted.

Black Charles looked at him. “The front way, boy?” he said.

“The front way, the front way,” Rudford said, and excitedly punched the older man on the knee.

Black Charles obediently semicircled the gravel driveway and pulled up in front of the great white entrance.

Rudford jumped out of the car without opening the door, and rushed into the hospital.

At the reception desk a nurse sat with earphones on her head.

“Lida Louise is outside, and she’s dying,” Rudford said to her. “She’s gotta have her appendix out right away.”

“Shhh,” said the nurse, listening to her earphones.

“Please. She’s dying, I tellya.”

“Shhh,” said the nurse, listening to her earphones.

Rudford pulled them off her head. “Please,” he said. “You’ve gotta get a guy to help us get her in and everything. She’s dying.”

“The singer?” said the nurse.

“Yes! Lida Louise!” said the boy, almost happy and making it strong.

“I’m sorry, but the rules of the hospital do not permit Negro patients. I’m very sorry.”

Rudford stood for a moment with his mouth open.

“Will you please let go of my phones?” the nurse said quietly. A woman who controlled herself under all circumstances.

Rudford let go of her phones, turned, and ran out of the building.

He climbed back into the car, ordering, “Go to Jefferson. Spruce and Fenton.”

Black Charles said nothing. He started up the motor—he had turned it off—and jerked the car to a fast start.

“What’s the matter with Samaritan? That’s a good hospital,” Peggy said, stroking Lida Louise’s forehead.

“No, it isn’t,” Rudford said, looking straight ahead, warding off any possible side glance from Black Charles.

The car turned into Fenton Street and pulled up in front of Jefferson Memorial Hospital. Rudford jumped out again, followed this time by Peggy.

There was the same kind of reception desk inside, but there was a man instead of a nurse sitting at it—an attendant in a white duck suit. He was reading a newspaper.

“Please. Hurry. We got a lady outside in the car that’s dying. Her appendix is busted or something. Hurry, willya?”

The attendant jumped to his feet, his newspaper falling on the floor. He followed right on Rudford’s heels.

Rudford opened the front door of the car, and stood away. The attendant looked in at Lida Louise, pale and in agony, lying across the front seat with her head on Black Charles’s head.

“Oh. Well, I’m not a doctor myself. Wait just a second.”

“Help us carry her in!” Rudford yelled.

“Just be a minute,” the attendant said. “I’ll call the resident surgeon.” He walked off, entering the hospital with one hand in his pocket—for poise.

Rudford and Peggy let go of the awkward carry-hold they already had on Lida Louise. Rudford leading, they both ran after the attendant. They reached him just as he got to his switchboard. Two nurses were standing around, and a woman with a boy who was wearing a mastoid dressing.

“Listen. I know you. You don’t wanna take her. Isn’t that right?”

“Wait just a min-ute, now. I’m callin’ up the resident surgeon…Let go of my coat, please. This is a hospital, sonny.”

“Don’t call him up,” Rudford said through his teeth. “Don’t call up anybody. We’re gonna take her to a good hospital. In Memphis.” Half-blinded, Rudford swung crazily around. “C’mon, Peggy.”

But Peggy stood some ground, for a moment. Shaking violently, she addressed everybody in the reception lobby: “Damn you! Damn you all!”

Then she ran after Rudford.

The car started up again. But it never reached Memphis. Nor even halfway to Memphis.

It was like this: Lida Louise’s head was on Rudford’s lap. So long as the car kept moving, her eyes were shut.

Then abruptly, for the first time, Black Charles stopped for a red light. While the car was motionless, Lida Louise opened her eyes and looked up at Rudford. “Endicott?” she said.

The boy looked down at her and answered, almost at the top of his voice, “I’m right here, Honey!”

Lida Louise smiled, closed her eyes, and died.

A story never ends. The narrator is usually provided with a nice, artistic spot for his voice to stop, but that’s about all.

Rudford and Peggy attended Lida Louise’s funeral. The following morning Rudford went away to boarding school. He didn’t see Peggy again for fifteen years. During his first year at boarding school, his father moved to San Francisco, re-married and stayed there. Rudford never returned to Agersburg.

He saw Peggy again in early summer of 1942. He had just finished a year of internship in New York. He was waiting to be called into the Army.

One afternoon he was sitting in the Palm Room of the Biltmore Hotel, waiting for his date to show up. Somewhere behind him a girl was very audibly giving away the plot to a Taylor Caldwell novel. The girl’s voice was Southern, but not swampy and not blue-grass and not even particularly drawly. It sounded to Rudford very much like a Tennessee voice. He turned to look. The girl was Peggy. He didn’t even have to take a second look.

He sat for a minute wondering what he would say to her; that is, if he were to get up and go over to her table—a distance of fifteen years. While he was thinking, Peggy spotted him. No planner, she jumped up and went over to his table. “Rudford?”

“Yes…” He stood up.

Without embarrassment, Peggy gave him a warm, if glancing kiss.

They sat down for a minute at Rudford’s table and told each other how incredible it was that they had recognized each other, and how fine they both looked. Then Rudford followed her back to her table. Her husband was sitting there.

Her husband’s name was Richard something, and he was a Navy flier. He was eight feet tall, and he had some theater tickets or flying goggles or a lance in one of his hands. Had Rudford brought a gun along, he would have shot Richard dead on the spot.

They all sat down at an undersized table and Peggy asked ecstatically, “Rudford, do you remember that house on Miss Packer’s Street?”

“I certainly do.”

“Well, who do you think’s living in it now? Iva Hubbel and her husband.”

“Who?” said Rudford.

“Iva Hubbel! You remember her. She was in our class. No chin? Always snitched on everybody?”

“I think I do,” Rudford said. “Fifteen years though,” he added pointedly.

Peggy turned to her husband and lengthily brought him up to date on the house on Miss Packer’s Street. He listened with an iron smile.

“Rudford,” Peggy said suddenly. “What about Lida Louise?”

“How do you mean, Peggy?”

“I don’t know. I think about her all the time.” She didn’t turn to her husband with an explanation. “Do you too?” she asked Rudford.

He nodded. “Sometimes, anyway.”

“I played her records all the time when I was in college. Then some crazy drunk stepped on my ‘Soupy Peggy.’ I cried all night. I met a boy, later, that was in Jack Teagarden’s band, and he had one, but he wouldn’t sell it to me or anything. I didn’t even get to hear it again.”

“I have one.”

“Honey,” Peggy’s husband interrupted softly, “I don’t wanna interrupt, but you know how Eddie gets. I told him we’d be there and all.”

Peggy nodded. “Do you have it with you?” she asked. “In New York?”

“Well, yes, it’s at my aunt’s apartment. Would you like to hear it?”

“When?” Peggy demanded.

“Well, whenever you—”

“Sweetie. Excuse me. Look. It’s three thirty now. I mean—”

“Rudford,” Peggy said, “we have to run. Look. Could you call me tomorrow? We’re staying here at the hotel. Could you? Please,” Peggy implored, slipping into the jacket her husband was crowding around her shoulders.

Rudford left Peggy with a promise to phone her in the morning.

He never phoned her, though, or saw her again.

In the first place, he almost never played the record for anybody in 1942. It was terribly scratchy now. It didn’t even sound like Lida Louise any more.

I’d read and thoroughly enjoyed Brock Clarke’s story collection Carrying the Torch. And so it was with some interest this fall that I purchased for the library An Arsonist’s Guide to New England Writers’ Homes. Talk about a book that needed to be written. It’s all there: the spiritual, existentially depressed vacuum that is the memoir section at Barnes and Nobles, the alcoholism and adultery lurking beneath the polished veneer of academia. And although this book, like its author, will not claim to make you a better person, or really teach you anything, it will probably entertain you and help you to take things that are often taken too seriously less seriously. Fortunately for me, on his blog, Clarke answers the question of whether the character Peter LeClair in the book is in any way connected to Tom LeClair, prodigious fiction professor at the old University of Cincinnati English Department.