She wore a long jersey swathe striped black and white, with a turtle neck which accentuated the Ubangi length of her neck, and black tights which gave her the air of a medieval page.
When she finished her song, she rushed to embrace Renate:
“You didn’t recognize me! I’m Leontine!”
“You’ve changed so much!” said Renate.
“Do you remember the first time we met?”
“Of course I remember. It was at Canada Lee’s New Year’s party. You were fifteen years old. You had a humorous, turned up nose…”
“I changed that, for the photographers,” said Leontine.
“I remember you danced Haitian dances. It was my first year in America. I did not feel at home yet. It was my first meeting with the dead pan faces of New York City, a Greek play with masks, and all the dead pans seemed to say: ‘We don’t know you. We don’t see you. We don’t like you.’ This New Year’s party was my first one in New York, and when Canada Lee greeted me at the door with his warm melting voice and his joyous smile and said: ‘Come in, hang up your coat’ as if he meant it and were addressing me personally, I wept. It was my first personal, intimate, friendly welcome. And then you came and put your arms around me, and took me to meet your father. But he was formal and impressive, as if carved of wood. He had all the Haitian dignity and formality. His stiff silver-gray hair was cut short like the bristle of a hard brush. Immediately he began to tell me a story I never forgot.”
“It was always the same story,” said Leontine. “About his youth in Haiti and his revolutionary activities, how he was sentenced to life imprisonment and sent to Guiana. How he was tied by a chain to another prisoner.
“The unendurable heat, the sadism of the guards. The same place and the same conditions as for Dreyfus. He was only seventeen and condemned for life. I forgot how they managed to escape.
“They worked at it "o years. They planned well, and found themselves in the jungle, miles from the sea where a boat with friends awaited them. They fed on fruit, and slept in caves, or inside dead trees. They were bitten by insects. The chain binding their arms made walking difficult. They had no way to cut the chain. It was too heavy to wear down by scraping against a stone. On the third day my father’s companion drank polluted water and on the fourth day he died. And my father was chained to a dead man.”
“At this point I told your father I did not want to hear any more. His story and the gaiety of the New Year’s party all around us was too violent a contrast. I covered my ears. The room was filled with laughter and jazz dancing. The New Year was being greeted with firecrackers and shouts and kisses. Your father sat impervious, unmoved by all the agitation and continued his story. How he had freed himself by cutting the arm off at the shoulder with a small knife. But he had to carry the dead man all the way to the boat.”
“Covered with ants,” said Leontine. “I’m sorry if I sound callous, Renate, but my father told this story so many times that I couldn’t feel any emotion any more.”
“You were dancing Haitian dances. Don’t you dance any more?”
“I was too lazy to be a dancer. I hated rehearsals. I took up singing instead, which came naturally to me. It didn’t require so much discipline.”
“And what happened to all the wishes you made? You wanted a life like Josephine Baker’s. You wanted to live in France, and marry a French count and have a palace in Marrakesh.”
“I did travel with Catherine Dunham. I did get to France, and I did find my French count. He was not handsome, but he was tall and blond. He thought I was not intelligent and so he invented a language for me, half-baby-talk, half monkey-chatter, which he thought I would understand better. He had a sadistic sense of humor. Once he called for me at the Hotel de Crillon in an Arab costume, a poor soiled one, as if he had slept in it for weeks. The manager was entertaining Arab royalty. The secret service men wanted to arrest him. Then they found out he was the son of a deputy. Another time he rented a beautiful apartment for me but gave me no furniture. Then he gave a party for me. We entertained in leotards and jewelry. The fabulous jewelry he had ‘borrowed’ from his mother who alerted the police.
“He never told me where it came from and I wore it at the night club and the same secret service men came to my dressingroom. He had to explain where it came from. Another time we sat for hours in a crowded cafe and insulted each other. People who were concerned over the racial equality were so shocked by what he said they wanted to interfere, until they heard what I was saying to him. Another time he told me to wear my loveliest dress, we were going to Maxim’s. He left me sitting at our table and went to the coat room to leave his overcoat. He was wearing the jacket of his formal suit over leotards. He insisted on taking me out to dance. Because his father was a deputy, no one interfered with him. Another time I had a jealous tantrum at the Ritz bar, and I began to break glasses. My Count calmly called the headwaiter and said: ‘Bring me a tray with a dozen of your best glasses. If Madame feels like breaking glasses she must have the best.’ This embarrassed me so much I left the place. He always wanted the upper hand; he always won and I enjoyed that. He spread the rumor that I had a neurotic fear of automobiles and made me go about in a horse and carriage, and insisted I ride in it dressed in jeans. That was the time a man stopped the carriage and said to me: ‘You must be Leontine. I am Cocteau.’ With my Count, it was not so much a physical fascination as a mental one. We were both absurd. No, he never did marry me, and I never did live in a palace in Marrakesh, but he made me laugh for three and a half years.”
“I remember your mother too,” said Renate. “She worked in a factory stuffing woolly animals with sawdust. She smuggled out the best ones for you, bears, camels, donkeys. Your mother was very worried about your infatuation for your cousin, who was much whiter than you. She was afraid he would take advantage of you and then not marry you. She asked me to find out how things were, and I didn’t want to pry. So I invented a charade in which you had to act a woman being made love to, and the cooing, dove sounds you made were so realistic I knew your mother’s fears were justified.”
“I remember the day I came to get you to go to the beach. I found you bathing in tea, you were ashamed of being so white.”
“I also remember the day you mentioned a Haitian national party you were going to and I said I would love to come, too, and you looked at me wistfully and said: ‘Renate, white people are not invited.’”
Leontine laughed, and her long gold earrings tinkled, and her bracelets tinkled, and her long chain of beads, and the spotlight found her lighting up her eyes and smile. She went back to the piano to sing for Renate, and Renate could find no trace of the little girl with tight curls and a turned up nose who played in the streets of Brooklyn with lions, kangaroos and monkeys stuffed and sewn by her mother in a nearby factory which looked like a prison.
HENRI THE CHEF WAS THE ADOPTED SON of the famous Escoffier. No one knew why he had settled in Paradise Inn, in a kitchen where his historic copper pans and kettles looked like those of a giant. He had hung them all on the wall and kept the copper shining like mirrors in which he could read of his past splendors and victories.
Henri was tall, but with his chef’s bonnet he seemed to touch the ceiling. He was also sumptuously upholstered by rich eating, and when he moved between the carving board and the stove, he had to pull in his vast stomach.
When he had finished cooking, the guests wanted to hear his anecdotes. Late in the evening he would bring small roses to the ladies and a profusion of biographical stories.