The Jazz Palace by Mary Morris

Benny searched for a spoon and gave her the syrup that she took without making a face. After a few moments her cough seemed to lessen. There was even some color in her cheeks when she handed Benny a book. At last the girl spoke. “Would you read me a story?” Then she took his hand and led him to the couch.
    He read her a story about a brother and sister who spend a day skating on a pond. Benny kept expecting something to happen—one of the children falling through the ice, a bad man coming. It wasn’t much of a story really. Still it made Benny wish he could take the child skating. He wondered if she even knew what skating was. He imagined himself, gliding back and forth with her and the child laughing, a muffler around her neck.
    He stayed with the girl until the early evening when it was already dark. Marta should have been home by now. Benny wondered if he should wait. But the girl had been alone when Benny got there. Surely she could spend time alone until her mother arrived. His own mother might be worried, but he couldn’t help himself. There was a pot of soup on the stove. It was a watery bean soup with grease floating on the top. He wanted to taste it, but feared it was seasoned with lard or salt pork—meat that had never touched his lips. He heated the soup and fed it to the child who ate with a loud slurping noise. Then she lay down to rest. Benny did the dishes. He washed whatever was in the sink.
    When he left, he put his hand on her feverish brow and kissed her on the cheek, and she smiled. He made his way down the dark stairwell. At the tram stop Benny gazed up and saw the child in a top floor window. He waved and she waved back. When the tram pulled away, the girl was still there.
    Benny was planning on going home. He had every intention,but he couldn’t. He couldn’t go back to that dreary apartment. He couldn’t go back to his mother with her silent anguish and his father with those judgmental eyes. Or the brothers who acted as if he wasn’t there. He’d tried, but he couldn’t live up to what they wanted. He thought, I should go home. Instead he transferred to the streetcar heading east, then south, and hopped off at Twenty-Seventh Street. Music came from behind every door as Benny roamed, popping his head into clubs. Girls beckoned from alleys. He was tempted by “the white plague” as it was called down here. Women selling their bodies to satisfy white men’s yearnings.
    He listened for a piano player with his ear to the door. If he liked what he heard, he talked the bouncer into letting him in. It was easy because they didn’t see many white boys in that part of town. He peeked into the Firefly Lounge where he heard a good stride piano and bribed the bouncer. The Firefly had tiny white lights flickering over the ceiling and the walls, blinking from under the dance floor. Benny had never seen fireflies, but in school he’d read about insects that illumined meadows and forests on a summer’s night. This must be what a field of them looked like.
    It was a mostly black crowd. Women in short dresses with fishnet stockings kicked their legs, shook their backsides, dancing the Slim Betty. They swayed as arms flew in the air. Nobody seemed to mind that a white boy stood in their midst. A good band was playing—a few horns, drums, piano, and bass. They were from down south and there was Dixieland in their beat. Benny listened, but he couldn’t get the girl with her sallow skin and deep cough out of his mind. The band grated on him now. It was playing honky-tonk too loud and the air was thick with smoke and laughter. He left in the middle of the set and kept going south.
    On the Stroll the lights were bright, and black men in shiny suits and spats ambled with pale-skinned women in furs, cloche hats pinned to their heads. He paused at the Lincoln Gardens where King Oliver had just opened for a three-month gig, and they were playing up a storm. But he wasn’t in the mood for that up-tempo. He cut