The Ways of White Folks Read online

  Lesche taught her to swim. After that she was less unhappy. She began a new study in the painting class. She painted a circle and called it her impression of Lesche. It was hard to get it just right, so she asked him to do some extra posing for her in the late afternoons. And she paid him very well.

  But summers end. Seasonal art classes too, and Mrs. Willis went back East.

  Lesche worked in the movies as an extra. He played football for football pictures. Played gigolos for society films. Played a sailor, a cave man, a cop. He studied tap dancing. He did pretty well as far as earning money went, had lots of time for cocktails, parties, and books. Met lots of women.

  He liked to read. He’d been a bright boy in high school back home in South Bend. And now at teas out Wilshire way he learned what one ought to read, and what one ought to have read. He spent money on books. Women spent money on him. He swam enough to keep a good body. Drank enough to be a good fellow, and acted well enough to have a job at the studios occasionally. He got married twice, but the other women were jealous, so divorces followed.

  Then his friend Sol Blum had an idea. Sol ran a gym for the Hollywood elite. He had a newly opened swimming pool that wasn’t doing so well. He asked Lesche if he would take charge of the lessons.

  “Don’t hurt yourself working, you know. Just swim around a little and show ’em that it looks easy. And be nice to the women,” Sol said.

  The swimming courses boomed. The fees went up. Sol and Lesche made money. (Lesche got a percentage cut.) He swam more and drank less. His body was swell, even if licker and women, parties and studio lights had made his face a little hard.

  “But he’s so damn nice,” the women would say—who took swimming lessons for no good reason but to be held up by the black-haired Lesche.

  Then one summer Lesche and Sol closed the gym and went to Paris. They drank an awful lot of licker at Harry’s bar. And at Bricktop’s they met an American woman who was giving a farewell party. She was Mrs. Oscar Willis, the artist—again—a long way from California.

  “What’s the idea?” said Lesche. “Are you committing suicide, Mrs. Willis, or going home, or what? Why a farewell party?”

  “I am retiring from life,” said Mrs. Willis, shouting above the frenzy of the Negro band. “I’m giving up art. I’m going to look for happiness. I’m going into the colony near Digne.”

  “Whose colony?” said Lesche. He remembered how much colonies cost, thinking of the art group.

  “Mogador Bonatz’s colony,” said Mrs. Willis. “He’s a very great Slav who can do so much for the soul. (Art does nothing.) Only one must agree to stay there six months when one goes.”

  “Is it expensive?” Lesche asked delicately. “I’m feeling awfully tired, too.”

  “Only $30 a day,” said Mrs. Willis. “Have a drink?”

  They drank a lot of champagne and said farewell to Mrs. Willis while the jazz band boomed and Bricktop shouted an occasional blues. Then Sol had an idea. After all, he was tired of gyms—why not start a colony? He mentioned it to Lesche when they got out into the open air.

  “Hell, yes,” said Lesche as they crossed Pigalle. “Let’s start a colony.”

  From then on in Paris, Sol and Lesche studied soul cults. By night they went to Montmartre. By day they read occult books and thought how much people needed to retire and find beauty—and pay for it. By night they danced to the Negro jazz bands. And all the time they thought how greatly they needed a colony.

  “You see how much people pay that guy Bonatz?” said Sol.

  “Um-huh!” said Lesche, drinking from a tall glass at Josephine’s. “And you see how much they’ll spend on Harlem jazz, even in Paris?”

  “Yeah,” said Sol, “we’re spending it ourselves. But what’s that got to do with colonies?”

  “Looks like to me,” said Lesche, “a sure way to make money would be, combine a jazz band and a soul colony, and let it roll from there—black rhythm and happy souls.”

  “I see,” said Sol. “That’s not as silly as it sounds.”

  “Let ’em be mystic and have fun, too,” said Lesche.

  “What do you mean, mystic?” asked Sol.

  “High brow fun,” said Lesche. “Like they get from Bonatz. What do you suppose he’s got we can’t get?”

  “Nothing,” said Sol, who learned to sell ideas in Hollywood. “Now, you got the personality. With me for manager, a jazz band for background, and a little showmanship, it could be a riot.”

  “A riot is right,” said Lesche.

  When they returned to America, they stayed in New York. Sol got hold of a secretary who knew a lot of rich addresses and some rich people. Together they got hold of a smart young man from Yale who prepared a program of action for a high brow cult of joy—featuring the primitive. Then they got ready to open a Colony.

  They cabled Mrs. Willis at Digne for the names of some of her friends who might need their souls fixed up—in America. They sent out a little folder. And they had the young Yale man write a few articles on Contentment and Aboriginal Rhythms for Lesche to try on the high brow magazines.

  They really had a lot of nerve.

  Lesche learned his lectures by heart that the college boy wrote. Then, he improvised, added variations of his own, made them personal, and bought a morning coat. Nightly he went to Harlem, brushing up on the newer rhythms. In November, they opened cold in the grand ballroom of the hotel facing the Park, without even a try-out elsewhere: Six lectures by Eugene Lesche on Joy in Relation to the Mind, Body, and Soul.

  “Might as well take a big chance,” said Sol. “Win or lose.”

  They won. In Sol’s language, they wowed ’em. When the Friday Morning Series began, the ballroom was half full. When it ended, it was crowded and Sol had already signed the lease for the old Westchester estate.

  So many people were in need of rejuvenating their souls and could seemingly still afford to pay for it that Sol gave up the idea for returning immediately to his gym in Hollywood. Souls seemed more important than bodies.

  “How about it, Lesche?”

  The intelligentsia dubbed their highly publicized efforts neo-paganism; others called it one more return to the primitive; others said out loud, it was a gyp game. Some said the world was turning passionate and spiritual; some said it was merely a sign of the decadence of the times. But everybody talked about it. The papers began to write about it. And the magazines that winter, from the Junior League Bulletin to the Nation, even the New Masses, remarked—usually snootily—but nevertheless remarked—about this Cult of Joy. (Harlem Hedonism, the Forum called it.) Lesche’s publicity men who’d started it all, demanded higher wages, so Sol fired them. The thing went rolling of its own accord. The world was aware—of Joy! The Westchester Colony prospered.

  Ten days before the January opening of the Colony, the huge mansion of the once aristocratic estate hummed with activity. It looked like a Broadway theatre before a première. Decorators were working for big effects. (They hoped House And Garden, Vogue, or Vanity Fair would picturize their super-modernistic results.) The house manager, a former hotel-head out of work, was busy getting his staff together—trying to keep them French—for the swank of it.

  The bed-rooms were receiving special attention. At Lesche’s, sleep also was to be a joy. And each private bathroom was being fitted with those special apparatus at colonies necessary for the cleansing of the body—for Sol and Lesche had hired a doctor to tell them what the best cults used.

  “Body and soul,” said Sol. “Body and soul.”

  “Gimme the body,” said Lesche, “and let the Yale man take care of the soul.”

  Occult assistants, chefs and waitresses, masseurs and hairdressers, began to arrive—for the house was to be fully staffed. And there were plenty of first-class people out of work and willing to take a chance, too.

  Upstairs in a third floor room, Lesche, like an actor preparing for a role, studied his lectures word for word. His former wife listened to him daily, reciting them b
y heart, puzzling over their allusions.

  In another room, the Yale man, surrounded by books on primitive art, spiritual guidance, Negro jazz, German eurythmics, psychoanalysis, Yogi philosophy, all of Krishnamurti, half of Havelock Ellis, and most of Freud, besides piles of spirituals, jazz records, Paul Robeson, and Ethel Waters, and in the midst of all this—a typewriter. There sat the Yale man creating lectures—preparing, for a month in advance, twenty-minute daily talks for the great Lesche.

  On the day when the Negroes arrived for their rehearsals, just prior to the opening of the place, Sol gave them a lecture. “Fellows,” he said, addressing the band, “and Miss Lucas,” to the blues-singing little coal-black dancer, “listen! Now I want to tell you about this place. This will not be no night club. Nor will it be a dance hall. This place is more like a church. It’s for the rebuilding of souls—and bodies. It’s for helping people. People who are wore out and tired, sick and bored, ennui-ed in other words, will come here for treatments, the kind of treatments, that Mr. Lesche and I have devised, which includes music, the best music, jazz, real primitive jazz out of Africa (you know, Harlem) to help ’em learn to move, to walk, to live in harmony with their times and themselves. Now, I want you all to be ladies and gentlemen (I know you are), to play with abandon, to give ’em all you got, but don’t treat this like a rough house, nor like the Moon Club either. We allow only champagne drinkers here, cultured ladies, nice gentlemen, the best, the very best. Park Avenue. You know what I mean.… Now this is the order of the day. In the morning at eleven, Mr. Lesche will lecture in the Palm Garden, glass-enclosed, on the Art of Motion and Rhythm. You, Miss Tulane Lucas, and you two tap dancers there, will illustrate. You will show grace in modern movements, aliveness, the beat of Africa as expressed through the body. Mr. Lesche will illustrate, too. He’s one of Bill Robinson’s disciples, you know! You all know how tap-dancing has preserved Bill. A man of his age, past fifty! Well, we want to show our clients how it can preserve them. But don’t do no stunts now, just easy rhythm stuff. We got to start ’em off slow. Some of ’em is old. And I expect some is Christian Scientists.… Then in the late afternoon, we will have tea-dancing, just for pleasure. We want to give ’em plenty of exercise, so they won’t be bored. And so they will eat. We expect to make money on our table, and on massages, too. In the evening for one hour, put on the best show you got, singing and dancing—every week we gonna bring up new specialities—send ’em to bed feeling happy, before Mr. Lesche gives his goodnight and sweet dreams talk.… Now, you boys understand, you’ll be off early here, by ten or eleven. Not like at the Club. You got your own cottage here on the estate to live in, you got your cars. Don’t mind you driving to town, if you want to, but I want you back here for the eleven o’clock services in the morning. And I don’t want you sleepy, either. This house is dedicated to Joy, and all who work here have got to be bright and snappy. That’s what our people are paying for.… Lesche! Where is Lesche, Miss Boxall?”

  The secretary looked startled. “He was in the halls talking to the new French maids.”

  “Well, get him in here. Tell him to explain to these boys how he wants to fix up his routine for his lectures. Let’s get down to business now.”

  “What kind of clothes you want us to wear?” Happy Lane, the Negro leader, asked.

  “Red,” said Sol. “Red is the color of Joy.”

  “Lord!” said the blues singer, “I’m too dark to wear red!”

  “That’s what we want,” said Sol, “darkness and light! We want to show ’em how much light there is in darkness.”

  “Now, here!” said the blues singer to herself, “I don’t like no white folks talkin’ ’bout me being dark.”

  “Lesche,” Sol called to his partner strolling in through the door, “let’s get going.”

  “O. K.,” Lesche said. “Where’s my boy?” meaning the Yale man.

  “Right here, Gene.”

  “Now, how does that first lecture go?”

  “My Gawd!” said Sol.

  The Yale man referred to his notes. “Joy,” he read, “Joy, springing from the dark rhythm of the primitive.…”

  “Oh, yes,” said Lesche, turning to the band. “Now for that, give me Mood Indigo, you know, soft and syncopated, moan it soft and low. Then you, Miss Lucas,” to the dancer, “you come gliding on. Give it plenty hip movement. I want ’em to learn to use their life-center. Then I’m gonna say … what’s that boy-friend?” to the Yale man.

  “See how the …”

  “Oh, yes … See how the Negroes live, dark as the earth, the primitive earth, swaying like trees, rooted in the deepest source of life.… Then I’m gonna have ’em all rise and sway, like Miss Lucas here.… That ought to keep ’em from being bored until lunch time.”

  “Lawd,” said Miss Lucas, muttering to herself, “what is this, a dancing school or a Sunday school?” And louder, “All right, Mr. Lesche, sounds like it might be a good act.”

  “Act, nothing,” said Sol. “This is the art of life.”

  “Must be, if you say so,” said Miss Lucas.

  “Well, let’s go,” commanded the great Lesche. “Let’s rehearse this first lecture now. Come on, boys.”

  The jazz band began to cry Mood Indigo in the best manner of the immortal Duke Ellington. Lesche began to speak in his great soft voice. Bushy-haired Tulane Lucas began to glide across the floor.

  “Goddamn!” said Sol, “It’s worth the money!”

  “Hey! Hey!” said Miss Lucas.

  “Sh-ss-ss-s!” said Lesche. “Be dignified … rooted in the deepest source of life … er-r-r?”

  “… O, early soul in motion …” prompted the Yale man.

  “O, early soul …” intoned Lesche.

  The amazing collection of people gathered together in the Colony of Joy astounded even Lesche, whose very blasé-ness was what really made him appear so fresh. His thirty-seven clients in residence came almost all from families high in the Social Register, and equally high in the financial world. When Mrs. Carlos Gleed’s check of entrance came in, Sol said, “Boy, we’re made … for of society there could be no higher—blue blood straight out of Back Bay.

  The opening of the Colony created a furor among all the smart neurasthenics from Park Avenue right on up to New England. Dozens applied too late, and failed to get in. Others drove up daily for the lectures.

  Of those who came, some had belonged formerly to the self-denial cults; others to Gurdijief; others had been analyzed in Paris, Berlin, Vienna; had consulted Adler, Hirschfeld, Freud. Some had studied under famous Yogi. Others had been at Nyack. Now they had come to the Colony of Joy.

  Up and down Park Avenue miraculous gossip flew.

  Why, Mrs. Charles Duveen Althouse of Newport and Paris—feeling bad for years—is said to look like a cherub since she’s gone into the Colony.… My dear, the famous Oriental fan-painter, Vankulmer Jones—he’s another man these days. The rhythms, he says, the rhythms have worked wonders! And just the very presence of Lesche … Nothing America has ever known—rumor flew about the penthouses of the East River—nothing is equal to it.… The Baroness Langstrund gasped in a letter to a talkative friend, “My God, it’s marvellous!”

  Far better than Indian thought, Miss Joan Reeves, the heiress of Meadow Brook, was said to have said by her best friends. “The movement is amazing.”

  Almost all of them had belonged to cults before—cults that had never satisfied. Some had even been injured by them. To a cult that based the soul-search on self-denial—deny what you like best, have it around you all the time, but never touch it, never—then you will be strong—Mrs. Duveen Althouse had belonged. She denied chocolates for a whole year; kept fresh candy sitting in each corner of her boudoir—resisted with all her soul—and at the end of a year was a wreck.

  Mr. Jones, the fan-painter, had belonged to a group on Cape Cod that believed in change through change: that is, whatever you want to be, you can. And all the members, after they had paid their fees, were tol
d by the Mystic Master to change their names to whatever they most wished to be, or whoever, past or present, they admired. Some, without much depth, chose Napoleon or Cleopatra. But others, Daphne or Zeus or Merry del Val. Mr. Jones chose Horse. He’d always wanted to be an animal, to possess their strength and calm, their vigor, their ways. But after a whole summer at the Cape he was even less of a horse than before. And greatly mosquito bitten.

  Mrs. Ken Prather, II, a member of Lesche’s group, had once spent months entire kneeling holding her big toes behind her, deep in contemplation. A most handsome Indian came once a week to her home on East 64th, for an enormous consideration, and gave her lessons in silence, and in positions of thought. But finally she just couldn’t stand it any more.

  Others of the Colony of Joy had been Scientists in their youth. Others had wandered, disappointed, the ways of spiritualism, never finding soul-mates; still others had gazed solemnly into crystals, but had seen nothing but darkness; now, they had come to Joy!

  How did it happen that nobody before had ever offered them Rejuvenation through Joy? Why, that was what they had been looking for all these years! And who would have thought it might come through the amusing and delightful rhythms of Negroes?

  Nobody but Lesche.

  In the warm glass-enclosed Palm Garden that winter, where the cupid fountain had been replaced by an enlargement of an African plastic and where a jazz band played soft and low behind the hedges, they felt (those who were there by virtue of their check books) all a-tremble in the depths of their souls after they had done their African exercises looking at Lesche—those slow, slightly grotesque, center-swaying exercises that he and Tulane Lucas from the Moon Club had devised. When they had finished, the movement, the music, and Lesche’s voice, made them feel all warm and close to the earth, and as though they never wanted to leave the Colony of Joy or to be away from their great leader again.