I can see her from here….
It’s only for a brief moment. Just until she can figure out how to get to New York.
She’s sitting at one of the round dining tables, wearing a beaded green dress she designed and made. She’s pleasant, a bit aloof, auburn hair in a cloud around her. She has a teaching credential from Arkansas State Teachers College, a job or two, and lives in a boarding house, weighing a life of homemaking, spinsterhood, or …something else.
At this moment, what she’s looking at is off in the distance, beyond her coffee. Past the walls of the dining room in one of Blytheville’s better kept boarding houses. At this moment, she is thinking more about where she is not – she could be sitting in a New York cafe – than where she is – less than 100 miles but a lightyear away from deepest rural Arkansas in the foothills of the Ozarks.
She barely sees tired workers, men mostly, from the town’s steel and textile factories. Her days are spent reading to a blind woman and teaching art in the public school, work that makes her feel both daring and safe. She carries her dreams from the family farm, from the high expectations of the stiff Shaver family…from her Irish/Indian mother’s way of being…of having been… And feels the restless itch the way young people do.
Now she notices a young man sitting across from her, dark, different, affable but apart. Daringly different! She tells him a tiny thing about herself — that she plays piano in a jazz band down the road.
“I love jazz,” he replies. “I play classical violin myself.”
Then she’s gone.
After dinner, he goes upstairs to his room and takes out that violin, tunes it, and plays part of a sonata that fades into the flowered wallpaper. He wraps the violin in chamois, loosens the bow, closes the case. And walks out into the evening past people softening into shadows on their porches.
His stroll seems without purpose, taking in cicada songs, dropping dark green leaves that mask owls, and the bark of a dog somewhere, occasionally a dim streetlight. But he is unconsciously listening for something else as he thinks about Esther’s letter. She writes every week, certain he will return to St Louis when he’s had enough of small town life. She is like him, part of their Jewish orthodox community fast assimilating to American life after several anxious adventures escaping eastern European countries. Her father has a job waiting for him. He should go, soon.
Following the faint sounds of stride jazz, he soon finds himself sitting at a table with other saloon patrons in a half-lit neighborhood joint, holding a beer. The levee and delta towns along the Mississippi are a rolling retinue of pick up jazz bands, and the mood is generally welcoming to anyone who can play and knows the tunes. In the low lit room, the lights are on the band, but all he sees is her – Helen, he now knows her name – at the piano, shoes kicked off, more than holding her own among the men.
His table mates are talking about the economic problems in this long depression, how the local steel and cotton industries are suffering. How their families are doing without. And maybe about local politics and if the fish are biting.
“I’m Julius, nice to meet you,” he introduces himself to others at the table and joins the conversation. Blytheville has a decent sized Jewish community, and perhaps he sees one or two more Jews that evening. Julius works at his Uncle Jake’s dry goods store, stocking and selling the kinds of things people would find years later in a department or variety store – fabric and sewing supplies, ready to wear, sundries.
After the band is finished playing, he hurries over to Helen. She’s putting on her shoes now.
“You are fantastic!” he exclaims. His enthusiasm covers his shyness.
What she is, is capable. And competent. And attractive. Strolling together towards the boarding house, she tells him some of the highlights of growing up on a farm in a remote pocket of the state.
“I had my own horse, Tally Ho,” she says. “I rode bareback and he was my best friend.” She doesn’t mention that when Tally Ho broke a leg while attempting a jump, her father calmly took out his rifle and shot him. Or that her father, the local school teacher and pillar of the community, beat her little brother on occasion, and she would jump in to make him stop.
“Our idea of going into nature in St. Louis is to rent a fire truck for the day, drive around town picking up all the Gildens, and head to Forest Park, for a family picnic,” Julius laughs, having heard only the out loud part of her story. “We call it Cousins’ Day.” He doesn’t add that the dozen or so relatives of his parents’ generation, including his parents, barely speak English. He also doesn’t mention that he spoke only Yiddish until he went to public school at the age of seven, nor that a prime motivation for leaving St Louis was to no longer be pulled from bed at the crack of dawn to be the tenth man in a minyan for daily morning prayers – a serious commitment in his community.
Helen looks at Julius. This man from a big city, this man with crooked teeth and curious blue eyes behind glasses, this man with a high school education but who reads books and newspapers, and who thinks he can do anything, is going to take me to New York, where I will become an artist!
Julius looks at Helen. She rides horses. She plays jazz, and knows about music and art. She has wavy auburn hair and blue-green eyes and big feet, and is fearless. She is nothing like the studious, hardworking, protected community I grew up in. From her, I will learn how to be an American!