Dewey didn’t call the sheriff.
Even stronger words were leveled against Joanna, who sat on the sofa in the front room of the simple stone house looking very much like Joanna of Arc but looking not saintly at all.
“We told you that if you cut off your hair we’d have to punish you,” said Dewey. Florence nodded. It had been a long time since the two had been in full agreement about anything.
“But I didn’t cut off my hair,” said Joanna matter-of-factly. “Mr. Talbot did it. You didn’t say that I couldn’t have someone else do it.”
“But you knew the intent of our warning!” screamed Florence.
“Yet that isn’t what you said. You should really try to be more specific in the future, Mother.”
Florence Hurd wasn’t accustomed to such insolence from her daughter. For a moment she said nothing in response. Then through growing tears: “Just look at yourself. How in the world can we let you go to school on Monday looking like that?”
“You made your bed,” said Joanna in a low, severe voice.
The next night, after Mr. and Mrs. Hurd had had time to think and had time to talk with one another in this brief holiday from mutual hatred — to examine their feelings and actions toward one another and how these actions had affected their now embittered, bald-headed daughter — they sat the sixteen-year-old again upon the sofa to take up the matter, this time in softer, more conciliatory tones. Joanna wore a scarf, which had the effect of making her parents feel strange and guiltier still. Dewey spoke first. “We’ve decided not to punish you, because if taken to the letter of what we said to you, you didn’t cut off your long, lovely hair. Instead, you asked someone else to do it, and Talbot, the son of a bitch, has obliged you.”
Now Florence Hurd spoke. “But let us be clear from this point forward, darling girl — and especially after your hair has grown out and you begin to resemble our beloved daughter again, and not some mannish aviatrix — that you are forbidden ever again not only to cut off your hair while still beneath the roof of this house, but to ask anyone else to do it for you.”
Joanna nodded. It was a simple request and one that she vowed to keep.
There was peace of a sort in the house for several months thereafter — all the time that Joanna’s tawny locks were growing by leaps and bounds from living on a farm and ingesting ample protein and other healthful nutrients at every meal. When the circumstantial truce inevitably ended and Mother and Father were back at each other’s throats with a vengeance that made up for lost time, Joanna once again weighed her options.
There was a lice epidemic in the grammar school, and great platoons of young schoolchildren were being sent home to have their hair shorn and pediculicides applied. She could easily find a little boy who could rub his pretreated head against hers. She would not have to ask anyone to cut her hair; it would simply be done as a part of prescribed medical procedure.
She had also heard of a female worker at one of the Chillicothe shoe factories who had gotten her hair caught in a leather strip-cutting machine and was thoroughly scalped. Should Joanna take this course, it would be the machine itself — a non-human entity — that would do the deed. Scalping seemed an extreme measure for Joanna’s purpose, but she remained open to the idea of it.
Joanna Hurd had become a determined young woman.
1938 JIVING IN NEBRASKA
Dear Miss Allie (Gator):
Greetings from the great American plains, where it might be cold but boy are these cats playing hot! Goodman’s Carnegie gig beat it down, and the jitterbugs at Harvest Moon kept me swing-happy for days, but it ain’t just New York and L.A. where the cats are sending and the jitterbugs are flittercutting, and it ain’t just New York and L.A. where you and me and the rest of the whackies can watch all those boys and girls posing and pecking and grinding the apple. They’re sending here too, Allie. Right here in North Omaha.
There’s a place here called the Dreamland Ballroom and they’ve got this cat, Lloyd Hunter, who formed his own band back in the mid-twenties, and this kid saxophonist Preston Love who lets it ride — oh my good woman, does he LET IT RIDE! And weekends, Allie, this joint is one o’clock, two o’clock, three o’clock jumpin’! Makes me a little ambivalent about coming back to New York, when everything I need is right here.
Which is what we’ve got to talk about. The old man’s after me to hire on with the company he works for. He’s an insurance man with Mutual Benefit Health and Accident Company. Pop’s wacky for the insurance game but I never gave it much thought. Me, your favorite alligator, pushing a pencil all the livelong day? I guess it beats pushing a broom, not that pushing a broom’s an easy thing to do from a wheelchair. The old man’s laid down the law, though. His crippled son’s got to start pulling his own weight. The years of me living off Daddy’s dough in my ground-floor Greenwich Village rabbit warren have come to an abrupt end.
I’m going to call you long distance on Sunday night and you be close to the phone, ya hear? You remember that question I popped a few weeks before I headed west to spend some time with the folks? Remember how I wouldn’t take your answer without giving you some time to think it over? Well, Allie, your Icky’s going to ask it again and now I need to know where you stand. Could you possibly see your way to spending the rest of your life with a hopelessly lovestruck one-legged future pencil-pusher here among the cornhuskers and the insurance actuaries and all of Father Flanagan’s orphaned delinquents? (You saw Boy’s Town with Mickey Rooney and Spencer Tracy last month? Flanagan’s place is right down the road. My parents always threatened to send me there if I didn’t keep my nose clean.)
If your answer is yes, you’ll make me the happiest man on one leg. If your answer is no, Allie, and it’s maybe because you could never imagine yourself living anywhere but Swing Town, U.S.A., then I’ll just give the old man the brush-off (I’ve done it plenty of times before) and figure out some way to pull down a few simoleons of my own in the Big Apple. I don’t want you to have to support the two of us on your stenographer’s paycheck. It’s not that your Icky don’t got a head on his shoulders, right? And who knows just what might turn up?
But I do think you could really like it here. The first night I got up the nerve to take myself up to the colored part of town (I like the chance to get out of the wheelchair and back on the crutches now and then), I could hear the Ballroom jump-jivin’ all the way down 24th Street. I thought I’d just stand out there on the sidewalk and let the music groove ’round my eardrums, but this colored cat, he taps me on the shoulder and asks if I want to come up. (Dreamland’s on the second floor.) So jive on this, baby: the guy carries me all the way up the stairs — just lifts me up like I was a sack of potatoes or something, with some other fella minding my crutches.
I was the only white face in the joint, but that was copacetic. I get set up at a table, baby, and Basie and Goodman and all the rest of them New York cats, why, they got nothing on Omaha. These fellas rode me right out of this world, and Allie, honey, you have never seen such dancing — not at Roseland — maybe, just maybe at the Savoy. The band played hot all night and the jitterbugs were organ-grinding, Susie Q’ing, shagging and truckin’. They were peeling the apple like Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers, and the whole room, it was airborne, baby!
Now, I’m not saying this is the only reason you ought to be here in Omaha, but what I AM saying is we don’t have to give up why it was the two of us whackies got together in the first place. And sooner or later the whole country’s bound to go jitterbuggy, so I figure Omaha’s just as good a place as any to get swing, swang, swung.