Dancers on the Shore by William Melvin Kelley

Author:William Melvin Kelley [Kelley, William Melvin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2020-09-29T00:00:00+00:00

Connie

CLUTCHING A SMALL HANDBAG, Connie Dunford waited for her brother, Peter, under a theater marquee on East Eighty-sixth Street. In the week since she had told him, she had discovered it helped her to keep from crying if she held something, anything tightly. It might be a comb or a coin, a wad of paper or a piece of fruit, some string or a book of matches; she gripped all with equal terror. An hour before, at three, Peter had phoned her at home to tell her to meet him. Now she saw him coming toward her from Park Avenue, tall, gangling, his jacket open and flapping, his face twisted into a scowl.

He grabbed her elbow. “Come on. We can get a cup of coffee. Your appointment isn’t until four forty-five.” He yanked her along. They came to a luncheonette and went in.

She sat across from him, squeezing a salt shaker, studying his face. Peter was the younger of her two older brothers. Chig, her senior by five years, was in Europe now. She missed him, and wished he was with her, making these arrangements. Not that she loved Chig more. It was simply that he was naturally more kind, generous, understanding. Peter, though he was doing everything she asked, was the kind of person who, if you mentioned you owned forty bobby pins, might count them to see if it was true.

He did not speak until the coffee came and the waitress disappeared. “I’m only warning you once. You say a word about this, and this guy goes to jail. Understand?”

She realized she should keep quiet, but could not. “Is he…is he…good?”

“The best.” He breathed through his nose. “You may be a dunce, but I don’t want to see you dead.”

“I’m sorry.”

Without acknowledging her apology, he began to sip his coffee. It was black and the lights of the shop bobbed in it. “He asks plenty—fifteen hundred.”

Her whole body started to sweat. “Peter, where’ll we—”

He locked his jaws. “I borrowed two thousand dollars for you. Going to an Ivy League school is good for something after all.”

He was digging at her, for instead of attending one of the name schools that had admitted her, Connie had decided on a Negro school in the South. She had her reasons. She had graduated third in her class from one of the finest private schools in New York. For twelve years, she had been the only Negro in her class. When time came to choose, she told her parents that what she wanted, even more than a good education, was, for the first time in her life, a normal social life. If she was happy, the education would take care of itself. Peter had never approved. Perhaps he had been right.

“He’s a classmate of mine,” Peter went on. “He won’t need it for a while. He spends that much money on beer every week….You can pay him back anytime in the next fifty years.”

They waited until it was time, then walked

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