Goodbye Without Leaving Read online

  Goodbye Without Leaving

  A Novel

  Laurie Colwin

  To Juris and Rosa

  and in memory of

  Leo Frischauer

  Americans leave without saying goodbye,

  Refugees say goodbye without leaving.

  Oh, such a tidy world.

  Seeing the April blossoms, my eyes water

  Just for the sake of anything that works.

  from Walking Home

  BY JONATHAN ALDRICH

  PART ONE

  I’ve Got What It Takes But It Breaks My Heart to Give It Away

  1

  During my career as a backup singer with Vernon and Ruby Shakely and the Shakettes, it often occurred to me that this was not a lifetime occupation and that someday I would have to figure out my rightful place in society.

  I did not want to think about these things: I wanted to get out on stage and dance. The Shakelys thought it was cool to hire a white Shakette every once in a while, and for a while I was it. Previous to that I had been a graduate student, sitting in the library at the University of Chicago getting older and older, trying to think of a topic for my doctoral dissertation and, once having found the topic, trying to write about it. I was an English major and I intended to write something that would turn into a book entitled Jane Austen and the War of the Sexes. Another thing I did not like to think about was how much I did not want to write about this or any other thing.

  Once in a while I would take a part-time job to see if some other calling was calling to me, but I did not enjoy work in a bookshop or a restaurant. I did not want to put on adult clothes and go into the Loop and get a job in advertising. Actually, I was and had always been a rock and roll addict. You can hardly admit this to the college adviser of your high school, but what led me to the University of Chicago in the first place was the large number of local blues and jazz clubs as well as a substantial rock and roll scene. I spent my undergraduate years in and out of these clubs, and in the privacy of my room I practiced routines in front of the mirror. At the drop of a hat I could have stood in for a Chiffon, Shirelle, or Marvelette, and I could do a fine imitation of Brenda and the Tabulations.

  It is painful to think about those days. It is like yearning for a lover you will never see again and to whom you never got to say goodbye.

  Everyone was either startled or horrified when I decided on this line of work. Wasn’t I supposed to spend the golden years of my youth in Regenstein Library like the rest of my friends? To be a Shakette had in fact been the burning desire of my heart since puberty, but I had shared this secret with only one person in the world, my college roommate Mary Abbott. She was a sober, contemplative person—a Catholic from Connecticut who leaned more toward Jerry “The Ice Man” Butler and Jackie “Lonely Teardrops” Wilson.

  She had been assigned as my freshman roommate and I loved her at once. She had lugged from Connecticut to Chicago a large wooden box containing over seven hundred and fifty choice and vintage 45’s. Second of all, her new wardrobe hung in the closet week after week with the price tags still on, while Mary wore her real clothes—the ones she had rolled up in a duffel bag—day after day. To go to church she wore the things her mother had bought her, with the price tags tucked into the sleeves.

  It did not take us long to discover that what we liked to do best was to sit endlessly talking and listening to the same record over and over again. One particularly grim winter weekend, we played “I Love You Eddie” (the flip side of the Crystals’ major hit “He’s a Rebel”) all weekend until our dorm-mates felt we had wigged out.

  Mary admired the early Ruby whose hits included “Jump for Cover,” “Man He’s Mine,” “Shake and Boogie” and the immortal “Love Me All Night Long.” When the time came for me to go on the road, Mary did not entirely approve of my decision, which she felt was my way of staving off real life. While this was true, it was also true that never again in my life would someone say, “Hey, Geraldine, wanna wear a Day-Glo dress with fringe, smoke a lot of reefer and dance as a backup to a rock and roll star?”

  Mary was my closest friend and in fact my favorite person. I deeply admired her devotion to religion and, when she took me to church with her, I found myself close to tears. I come from a family of relentlessly assimilated Jews and my experience of ritual and observance was minimal. It was Mary who dragged me to ecumenical meetings at Friendship House in which Christians and Jews discussed their similarities. How I wished I had it in me to believe! But just as I had not fit in in high school, and just as I was a misfit as a graduate student in the English department, I felt I also did not have an allotted place in the angelic order.

  But these issues were temporarily swept away when I got my big break, which came, in fact, after the High Holy Days. In a fit of longing, I had gotten dressed up and crept into the back of a Conservative synagogue, where I sat and stood, prayer book in hand, not understanding most of what was said, and staring at the Hebrew I could not read. To ease my soul, I went on a kind of rock and roll binge and, finally, my dream came true.

  It happened this way. For more years than I cared to think about, I had been a regular at any number of clubs: Billy’s Blues Box, the Rib Cage, Bob Hayes’ Trapp Club and Pete’s Sweet Potato. I had seen just about every bluesman alive, and by the time I joined Ruby a lot of them were dead. I liked sitting in a dark place blue with smoke, drinking a warm beer and watching Mississippi Fred McDowell singing “Good Morning Little Schoolgirl.” It was not unusual for the stray white rhythm-and-blues addict to find his or her lonely way to these places, but it was unusual for them to hang around for so many years. At first I was known by face and then I was known by name, and finally I became accustomed to sitting at the owner’s table.

  My favorite was the Rock and Roll Pavillion, an enormous place where fledgling acts got their start and then came back to pay their respects after they had made it in the big time. I was very tight with the owner, since I used to drop by in the afternoon and watch rehearsals. One day I was told that Marvin Delton was in town but that one of the Deltrons was sick. I did not even have to offer myself. I was offered personally to Marvin Delton by Mack Witherspoon, the Pavillion’s owner, who said, in my very presence, “Here’s a boss white chick who knows all your routines and she can move.”

  Marvin looked me up and down, giving me an insight into the feelings of female slaves about to be auctioned. Apparently he found this idea very wiggy. He hauled out the sick Deltron’s dance dress and told me to go put it on. I looked it over and knew it would fit. It was a sign.

  Mack threw on an old Deltron hit, “Bad Baby Mine.” I got out on the dance floor and did my thing and was hired on the spot. I was not a bit afraid, except of how much I loved what I was doing. The other Deltrons were not thrilled to see me but I was only hired for a couple of nights.

  Then Mack told me that the Shakelys were coming to town. His brother was their drummer and he said that their white Shakette had been fired and they were looking around for someone to replace her. A quick audition was arranged at the Pavillion and I was instantly taken on. I replaced someone called Pixie Lehar who danced under the name of Venus Cupid and was said to be a junkie.

  I had one week to sublet my apartment, tell my department chairman and fly east to break the news to my parents. No one took it very well.

  2

  My mother was a portrait painter—portraits of children—and an occasional children’s book illustrator, Gertrude Coleshares. Locally, she was famous: head of the county art center, sponsor and star of its annual show, creator of “Portrait Art in School,” a project for ten-year-olds. Each year the art center had a show of my mother’s work, and it was years before strangers stopped accosting
me at the town grocery and telling me how familiar I looked: as a child, I was my mother’s favorite model.

  Deep in her heart, and evident in her work, my mother believed that children should look and behave as they had in Victorian England. Her work was full of long-legged little girls wearing black or white stockings, hair ribbons and white pinafores. She did not, of course, dress me this way, but she came close. She kept a tight rein on what I did wear. People like Mary Abbott, my contemplative roommate, believed that part of my decision to run off and join Ruby was my long-cherished desire to wear something in public my mother would truly hate. This may be true, but it hardly matters.

  My father was like a cloud, a fog, a mist. He ran an import and export business and thus had good times and bad, but the household power was held by my mother, who ruled majestically. My constant memory is of her wearing a majestic violet and black tweed suit and carrying an alligator bag.

  My mother had high hopes for me: I disappointed her daily. I suffered at ballet class, and after a few years my teacher threw up her hands and told my mother to take me off to a modern dance class. This, to my mother, was like being told that I was mentally retarded. My mother had never seen a performance of modern dance and did not like it when she finally did. I liked it quite well and it stood me in good stead when I went to work for Ruby.

  My mother hoped I might have some artistic talent. In fact, I had not a scrap. I could draw boxes in three dimensions, and a thing that looked like a person—sticks and circles. Generally, I was hopeless. I did not have an art gene. This confounded my mother, who could not believe that the rich blood of her talent did not flow in my veins. She thought I might be a writer, but I gave no promise of that. Actually, I was crazy about music, but my mother knew nothing at all about it and therefore never gave it a thought. She went to the opera with my father as a social event unconnected to the music, through which she sat thinking her own thoughts or sketching the costumes with her little gold pencil.

  Against this family tapestry I stood foursquare to announce my plans.

  “Who are these people?” my mother demanded.

  “There’s no point discussing it,” I said. “They are rock and roll performers. They have made a lot of records. I have been dying to do this. It was my childhood dream.”

  “It was not!” shouted my mother. “This is the first I have heard of this.”

  “You think this music is the raving of crazed jigaboos!” I screamed. My father sat in a chair. He looked like a pillow with the stuffing half out. It was clear he was very tired. Any minute one or the other of them would tell me that this ridiculous plan of mine would kill one or the other of them. I said: “I am an over-the-hill graduate student. I am not going to write my dissertation. I have studied and I have even taught. This is what I really want to do. I have given it a lot of thought. If I don’t do it now, I never will. I am not doing this to hurt you.”

  When it was clear that I would never have their blessing—how could I have been so dim?—I called the suburban cab service, rode to the airport and flew back to my Chicago apartment to get my life in order. I said goodbye to that fine, fine, superfine (as the song goes), intellectually challenging university. I had lunch with all my friends and arranged with Mary Abbott, who was going to New York to do her doctoral work, that she would move my things with hers. She was my best friend, and since I did not have a home, she would be my home. Then I flew to New Orleans, the Shakely group’s headquarters. Ruby’s brother, Fordyce, who drove the tour bus and carried a gun, met me at the airport and took me to the Mille Fleur Motel, where I joined my future dance mates, Grace Bettes and Ivy Vines (not her real name).

  Within three days I had claimed the dream of my childhood.

  3

  Vernon and Ruby were the color of café au lait. Vernon was lean, mean and dirty-looking, with an evil little line for a moustache and that soft, poreless skin that looks like glove leather. Ruby looked very much like him, with high cheekbones and slightly slanted eyes. She wore a series of elaborate and expensive wigs. Her own hair was done in the kind of little braids very young black girls often wear. Many people believed that she and Vernon were brother and sister. It was hard to tell how old they were, but their son was twenty-three and their daughter was twenty-one. It was also said that Ruby had had her first child at twelve.

  In the tour bus, on which we all spent a lot of time, Vernon and Ruby sat up front with their accountant or Ike Miles, their musical director. We sat in the back of the bus, blowing reefer and playing cards.

  We liked reefer and the band liked speed. Vernon himself took a very hard line against heroin, which he pronounced “hair-oyne,” but he did not mind reefer or bennies, without which no one would have set foot on his bus. His hatred of smack and alcohol was made clear to me when I was hired. Vernon said he treated his people like family and encouraged us all to drink iced tea and ginger ale, which he called “Virginia ale.”

  Our end of the bus—mine and Ivy’s and Grace’s—was a haze of cigarette and reefer smoke and nail polish remover. My thrall to rock and roll made it possible for me to endure the sort of tedium that might otherwise have driven me insane.

  We practiced our routines over and over and over, and then we learned new ones. We rubbed each other’s feet, or soaked them in portable bidets on the bus. We read fashion and romance magazines which featured such articles as “Color: What Speaks for You?” or “What I Found in My Husband’s Pocket Made Our Marriage a Nightmare.” Every now and again, to entertain Grace and Ivy, I would read one of these features in the voice of Dame Edith Sitwell. This was a big hit and proved to them, as nothing else, how wiggy college girls could be.

  My university years had taught me nothing whatsoever about manicuring but, because of the fabulous shock absorbers on Ruby’s bus, it was possible to gloss one’s nails with sparkling Merry Berry or Poison Grape. Oh, the hours of boredom! The inferior reefer!

  A backup singer’s life was not an easy one, what with trying to find entertaining and not terribly toxic ways of passing the time on that humid bus. We spent hours listening to Vernon on the issues of the day, and there were certainly a lot of these. For example, civil rights. Ruby’s husband opined, “It is my civil right to make a lot of bread and I intend to.” And of the war in Vietnam he said, “The white honky devil is practicing on them before starting on us.” Vernon was no friend of the white man, but I was so marginal a person that I hardly counted and was the white Shakette in the way of, say, an odd purple sock. Besides, I felt he was right.

  However, no one gave these things all that much thought. Our destination was not some town or city but always “the Auditorium.”

  Being on stage made up for everything: the exhaustion, the greasy food, the boredom. It was an addiction. I loved it. I loved our dance dresses and our luminescent shoes. I loved to shake and sweat in front of those gigantic speakers. At concerts the audiences—black, white and mixed—threw us flowers, beads, gumdrops. When Ruby sang “Let Us Be Joined,” which was taken for a song about integration when it was in fact a song about sex, the audience screamed, cheered and threw confetti made out of their shredded Ruby Shakely Souvenir Programs. It is hard to recapture the hokey fervor of those times.

  It seemed to me like a fever dream, or even better, one of those sweet dreams from which you wake up and find that it was real. After years of being a sullen, uncooperative ballet student, of not truly understanding deconstructionist criticism, of living with the constant suspicion that I was not in fact a graduate student but an indeterminate person walking around a university campus dressed as a graduate student, I was suddenly an authentic thing.

  To be effortlessly yourself is a blessing, an ambrosia. It is like a few tiny little puffs of opium which lift you ever so slightly off the hard surface of the world.

  Yes, I was myself. I was not black, I was not from the South, I was not funky and I was not engaged to my high school boyfriend, who was now in the Marine Corps. I was not a Ph.D. cand
idate and I didn’t care. I was a Shakette, and I knew my time had come.

  4

  Every week, in order to perform my imitation of a good daughter, I wrote my parents a respectful, generally untruthful letter from wherever we happened to be: Demopolis, Alabama. Dear Mother and Daddy. What an interesting part of the world this is. Last night the band was invited to an authentic barbecue. I noticed squirrel on the menu of the local restaurant, with eggs and grits. A journalist from some national magazine is traveling with us, but don’t worry—he did not bring a photographer. I am very happy and very well. I do love traveling and I do miss you.

  In reality, traveling involved looking out the window at a thruway, and these are all the same, probably the world over. I was happy and well, and a guy from a magazine had been on the bus one day but it was unclear if he was going to write about Ruby or go off with Martha and the Vandellas, who were enjoying a string of hits. I did not miss my parents one whit.

  Once a month I called my father at his office to check in. A normal person would do this, I felt.

  “Hi, Daddy! I’m in Lansing, Michigan.”

  “Your mother is very worried about you.”

  “I’m fine, Daddy, I’m having a lovely time.”

  “She worries about drugs.”

  “Oh, drugs,” I said. “There’s nothing to worry about. Vernon doesn’t allow them. Besides, these people are straight as arrows. They go to church every Sunday.”

  Strangely enough, this was not a lie. Every Sunday morning Ruby, Vernon, Grace, Ivy and some of the band went to the local Baptist church, wherever that happened to be. Donald “Doo-Wah” Banks, the band’s saxophonist, was an Episcopalian, and said his mother was very High Church—she was from Trinidad and liked a good deal of incense in her service.