The City
The City
Dean Koontz
No.1 New York Times bestselling author Dean Koontz is at the peak of his storytelling powers with this major new novel – a rich, multi-layered story that moves back and forth across decades and generations as a gifted musician relates the ‘terrible and wonderful’ events that began in his city in 1967, when he was ten.THIS IS THE STORY OF A BOY AND A CITY…Jonah Kirk’s childhood has been punctuated by extraordinary moments – like the time a generous stranger helped him realize his dream of learning the piano. Nothing is more important to him than his family and friends, and the electrifying power of music.But now Jonah has a terrifying secret. And it sets him on a collision course with a group of dangerous people who will change his life forever.For one bright morning, a single earth-shattering event will show Jonah that in his city, good is entwined with malice, and sometimes the dark side of humanity triumphs. But it will also teach him that courage and honour are found in the most unexpected places, and the way forward lies buried deep inside the heart.If he can just survive to find it…
THE CITY
DEAN KOONTZ
Copyright (#ulink_44023c49-4efa-544c-8299-5f7592d0f98a)
Harper
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2014
First published in the USA in 2014 by Bantam Books,
an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group,
A division of Random House, Inc., New York.
Copyright © Dean Koontz 2014
Cover design layout © HarperCollinsPublishers 2014
Cover photographs © Mark Mahaney / Plainpicture (tower); Andy Roberts / Getty Images (feather); Shutterstock.com (http://www.shutterstock.com) (moon)
Dean Koontz asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
Text design by Virginia Norey
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007520282
Ebook Edition © July 2014 ISBN: 9780007520275
Version: 2015-12-31
Dedication (#ulink_2104c267-6dea-5981-aa87-02cebbaae60f)
This novel is dedicated,
with affection and gratitude,
to Jane Johnson,
who is one continent
and one sea away.
And to Florence Koontz
and Mildred Stefko,
who are one world away.
Hold every moment sacred. Give each clarity and meaning, each the weight of thine awareness, each its true and due fulfillment.
—Thomas Mann, The Beloved Returns
Contents
Cover (#u9bfd1782-978d-5ca8-be1e-f72c8f78d503)
Title Page (#u7f5f3e4d-144d-563a-b3c6-6114e253dae9)
Copyright (#u5180f224-0b46-5ca3-aa62-7aa6317f5431)
Dedication (#u36db6b5a-b8c8-5e15-a8f5-1e9de215a7c8)
Epigraph (#u6b3bf1c8-4a17-5fe8-9d4d-0f8b80eede74)
Prelude (#uf1e759ee-1f9c-587d-9073-a328d85b839a)
Chapter 1 (#u98c90a83-3aab-5245-b42e-b0bf118883b3)
Chapter 2 (#u2eabd28c-eba9-5b48-b4c7-27a1fb1668b4)
Chapter 3 (#u5e827bfc-164f-530b-9b46-794e6cfdaa6a)
Chapter 4 (#ud398e82d-bad9-53d7-9a57-fc79155d2479)
Chapter 5 (#u4d4bd3e2-bf97-5791-9a59-69ffe18a9cd1)
Chapter 6 (#u0cfff204-fa7f-53c5-9c68-0f421c02bdee)
Chapter 7 (#u2fe7fbb0-28b6-59f4-9dab-e7bdfdd629c8)
Chapter 8 (#u3d4059cb-c65c-5ffd-a687-f8327690f289)
Chapter 9 (#uf26c4956-b172-584f-aeee-4326851fc24f)
Chapter 10 (#u14ab53dd-68e6-597d-a953-3725ec999439)
Chapter 11 (#u261a4662-9ab5-5791-b32b-3f13212eaf88)
Chapter 12 (#ua3384965-8390-5543-b5bf-85a4662b1927)
Chapter 13 (#u9b73fdb6-1659-5619-977a-6b1f92893977)
Chapter 14 (#u7881be9b-7f70-55fc-b9ee-26234e5bdbe5)
Chapter 15 (#u380ace20-0873-52ca-a3ff-f08d4252ef2d)
Chapter 16 (#uea7bd516-bfdb-55fe-a15a-3fcab948c9a4)
Chapter 17 (#uca6bda38-dbae-5f1e-af5f-ff60c77d9de2)
Chapter 18 (#u236fe859-40ca-5aa5-a09f-b071257be1cf)
Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 25 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 26 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 27 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 28 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 29 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 30 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 31 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 32 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 33 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 34 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 35 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 36 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 37 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 38 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 39 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 40 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 41 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 42 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 43 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 44 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 45 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 46 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 47 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 48 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 49 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 50 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 51 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 52 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 53 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 54 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 55 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 56 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 57 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 58 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 59 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 60 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 61 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 62 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 63 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 64 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 65 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 66 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 67 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 68 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 69 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 70 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 71 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 72 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 73 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 74 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 75 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 76 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 77 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 78 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 79 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 80 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 81 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 82 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 83 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 84 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 85 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 86 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 87 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 88 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 89 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 90 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 91 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 92 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 93 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 94 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 95 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 96 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 97 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 98 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 99 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 100 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 101 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 102 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 103 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 104 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 105 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 106 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 107 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 108 (#litres_trial_promo)
About Dean Koontz (#litres_trial_promo)
By Dean Koontz (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Prelude (#ulink_09118102-f1ab-5975-9a02-c2d9fc817cae)
Malcolm gives me a tape recorder.
He says, “You’ve got to talk your life.”
“I’d rather live the now than talk about the was.”
Malcolm says, “Not all of it. Just the … you know.”
“I’m to talk about the you know?”
Malcolm says, “People need to hear it.”
“What people?”
Malcolm says, “Everybody. These are sad times.”
“I can’t change the times.”
Malcolm says, “It’s a sad world. Lift it a little.”
“You want me to leave out all the dark stuff?”
Malcolm says, “No, man. You need the dark stuff.”
“Oh, I don’t need it. Not me.”
Malcolm says, “The dark makes the light stuff brighter.”
“So when I’m done talking about the you know—then what?”
Malcolm says, “You make it a book.”
“You going to read this book?”
Malcolm says, “Mostly. Parts of it I wouldn’t be able to see clear enough to read.”
“What if I read those parts to you?”
Malcolm says, “If you’re able to see the words, I’d listen.”
“By then I’ll be able. Talking it the first time is what will kill me.”
1 (#ulink_775d66a3-c798-52f4-9f89-6ecbb4e6e979)
My name is Jonah Ellington Basie Hines Eldridge Wilson Hampton Armstrong Kirk. From as young as I can remember, I loved the city. Mine is a story of love reciprocated. It is the story of loss and hope, and of the strangeness that lies just beneath the surface tension of daily life, a strangeness infinite fathoms in depth.
The streets of the city weren’t paved with gold, as some immigrants were told before they traveled half the world to come there. Not all the young singers or actors, or authors, became stars soon after leaving their small towns for the bright lights, as perhaps they thought they would. Death dwelt in the metropolis, as it dwelt everywhere, and there were more murders there than in a quiet hamlet, much tragedy, and moments of terror. But the city was as well a place of wonder, of magic dark and light, magic of which in my eventful life I had much experience, including one night when I died and woke and lived again.
2 (#ulink_774cfdcb-b3ce-58a4-a497-980e435f82d5)
When I was eight, I would meet the woman who claimed she was the city, though she wouldn’t make that assertion for two more years. She said that more than anything, cities are people. Sure, you need to have the office buildings and the parks and the nightclubs and the museums and all the rest of it, but in the end it’s the people—and the kind of people they are—who make a city great or not. And if a city is great, it has a soul of its own, one spun up from the threads of the millions of souls who have lived there in the past and live there now.
The woman said this city had an especially sensitive soul and that for a long time it had wondered what life must be like for the people who lived in it. The city worried that in spite of all it had to offer its citizens, it might be failing too many of them. The city knew itself better than any person could know himself, knew all of its sights and smells and sounds and textures and secrets, but it didn’t know what it felt like to be human and live in those thousands of miles of streets. And so, the woman said, the soul of the city took human form to live among its people, and the form it took was her.
The woman who was the city changed my life and showed me that the world is a more mysterious place than you would imagine if your understanding of it was formed only or even largely by newspapers and magazines and TV—or now the Internet. I need to tell you about her and some terrible things and wonderful things and amazing things that happened, related to her, and how I am still haunted by them.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. I tend to do that. Any life isn’t just one story; it’s thousands of them. So when I try to tell one of my own, I sometimes go down an alleyway when I should take the main street, or if the story is fourteen blocks long, I sometimes start on block four and have to backtrack to make sense.
Also, I’m not tapping this out on a keyboard, and I tend to ramble when I talk, like now into this recorder. My friend Malcolm says not to call it rambling, to call it oral history. That sounds pretentious, as though I’m as certain as certain can be that I’ve achieved things that ensure I’ll go down in history. Nevertheless, maybe that’s the best term. Oral history. As long as you understand it just means I’m sitting here shooting off my mouth. When someone types it out from the tapes, then I’ll edit to spare the reader all the you-knows and uhs and dead-end sentences, also to make myself sound smarter than I really am. Anyway, I must talk instead of type, because I have the start of arthritis in my fingers, nothing serious yet, but since I’m a piano man and nothing else, I have to save my knuckles for music.
Malcolm says I must be a closet pessimist, the way I so often say, “Nothing serious yet.” If I feel a phantom pain in one leg or the other and Malcolm asks why I keep massaging my calf, I’ll say, “Just this weird thing, nothing serious yet.” He thinks I’m convinced it’s a deep-vein blood clot that’ll break loose and blow out my lungs or brain later in the day, though that never crossed my mind. I just say those three words to reassure my friends, those people I worry about when they have the flu or a dizzy spell or a pain in the calf, because I’d feel relieved if they reassured me by saying, “Nothing serious yet.”
The last thing I am is a closet pessimist. I’m an optimist and always have been. Life’s given me no reason to expect the worst. As long as I’ve loved the city, which is as long as I can remember, I have been an optimist.
I was already an optimist when all this happened that I’m telling you about. Although I’ll reverse myself now and then to give you some background, this particular story really starts rolling in 1967, when I was ten, the year the woman said she was the city. By June of that year, I had moved with my mom into Grandpa’s house. My mother, whose name was Sylvia, was a singer. Grandpa’s name was Teddy Bledsoe, never just Ted, rarely Theodore. Grandpa Teddy was a piano man, my inspiration.
The house was a good place, with four rooms downstairs and four up, one and three-quarter baths. The piano stood in the big front room, and Grandpa played it every day, even though he performed four nights a week at the hotel and did background music three afternoons at the department store, in their fanciest couture department, where a dress might cost as much as he earned in a month at both jobs and a fur coat might be priced as much as a new Chevy. He said he always took pleasure in playing, but when he played at home, it was only for pleasure.
“If you’re going to keep the music in you, Jonah, you’ve got to play a little bit every day purely for pleasure. Otherwise, you’ll lose the joy of it, and if you lose the joy, you won’t sound good to those who know piano—or to yourself.”
Outside, behind the house, a concrete patio bordered a small yard, and in the front, a porch overlooked a smaller yard, where this enormous maple tree turned as red as fire in the autumn. And when the leaves fell, they were like enormous glowing embers on the grass. You might say it was a lower-middle-class neighborhood, I guess, although I never thought in such terms back then and still don’t. Grandpa Teddy didn’t believe in categorizing, in labeling, in dividing people with words, and neither do I.
The world was changing in 1967, though of course it always does. Once the neighborhood was Jewish, and then it went Polish Catholic. Mr. and Mrs. Stein, who had moved from the house but still owned it, rented to my grandparents in 1963, when I was six, and sold it to them two years later. They were the first black people to live in that neighborhood. He said there were problems at the start, of the kind you might expect, but it never got so bad they wanted to move.
Grandpa attributed their staying power to three things. First, they kept to themselves unless invited. Second, he played piano free for some events at Saint Stanislaus Hall, next to the church where many in the neighborhood attended Mass. Third, my grandma, Anita, was secretary to Monsignor McCarthy.
Grandpa was modest, but I won’t be modest on his behalf. He and Grandma didn’t have much trouble also because they had about them an air of royalty. She was tall, and he was taller, and they carried themselves with quiet pride. I used to like to watch them, how they walked, how they moved with such grace, how he helped her into her coat and opened doors for her and how she always thanked him. They dressed well, too. Even at home, Grandpa wore suit pants and a white shirt and suspenders, and when he played the piano or sat down for dinner, he always wore a tie. When I was with them, they were as warm and amusing and loving as any grandparents ever, but I was at all times aware, with each of them, that I was in a Presence.
In April 1967, my grandma fell dead at work from a cerebral embolism. She was just fifty-two. She was so vibrant, I never imagined that she could die. I don’t think anyone else did, either. When she passed away suddenly, those who knew her were grief-stricken but also shocked. They harbored unexpressed anxiety, as if the sun had risen in the west and set in the east, suggesting a potential apocalypse if anyone dared to make reference to that development, as if the world would go on safely turning only if everyone conspired not to remark upon its revolutionary change.
At the time, my mom and I were living in an apartment downtown, a fourth-floor walk-up with two street-facing windows in the living room; in the kitchen and my little bedroom, there were views only of the sooty brick wall of the adjacent building, crowding close. She had a gig singing three nights a week in a blues club and worked the lunch counter at Woolworth’s five days, waiting for her big break. I was almost ten and not without some street smarts, but I must admit that for a time, I thought that she would be equally happy if things broke either way—a gig singing in bigger and better joints or a job as a waitress in a high-end steakhouse, whichever came first.
We went to stay with Grandpa for the funeral and a few days after, so he wouldn’t be alone. Until then, I’d never seen him cry. He took off work for a week, and he kept mostly to his bedroom. But I sometimes found him sitting in the window seat at the end of the second-floor hallway, just staring out at the street, or in his armchair in the living room, an unread newspaper folded on the lamp table beside him.
When I tried to talk to him, he would lift me into his lap and say, “Let’s just be quiet now, Jonah. We’ll have years to talk over everything.”
I was small for my age and thin, and he was a big man, but I felt greatly gentled in those moments. The quiet was different from other silences, deep and sweet and peaceful even if sad. A few times, with my head resting against his broad chest, listening to his heart, I fell asleep, though I was past the age for regular naps.
He wept that week only when he played the piano in the front room. He didn’t make any sounds in his weeping; I guess he was too dignified for sobbing, but the tears started with the first notes and kept coming as long as he played, whether ten minutes or an hour.
While I’m still giving you background here, I should tell you about his musicianship. He played with good taste and distinction, and he had a tremendous left hand, the best I’ve ever heard. In the hotel where he worked, there were two dining rooms. One was French and formal and featured a harpist, and the décor either made you feel elegant or made you ill. The second was an Art Deco jewel in shades of blue and silver with lots of glossy-black granite and black lacquer, more of a supper club, where the food was solidly American. Grandpa played the Deco room, providing background piano between seven and nine o’clock, mostly American-standard ballads and some friskier Cole Porter numbers; between nine and midnight, three sidemen joined him, and the combo pumped it up to dance music from the 1930s and ’40s. Grandpa Teddy sure could swing the keyboard.
Those days right after his Anita died, he played music I’d never heard before, and to this day I don’t know the names of any of those numbers. They made me cry, and I went to other rooms and tried not to listen, but you couldn’t stop listening because those melodies were so mesmerizing, melancholy but irresistible.
After a week, Grandpa returned to work, and my mom and I went home to the downtown walk-up. Two months later, in June, when my mom’s life blew up, we went to live with Grandpa Teddy full-time.
3 (#ulink_9bacf370-2f05-5160-b662-74220869fa6b)
Sylvia Kirk, my mother, was twenty-nine when her life blew up, and it wasn’t the first time. Back then, I could see that she was pretty, but I didn’t realize how young she was. Only ten myself, I felt anyone over twenty must be ancient, I guess, or I just didn’t think about it at all. To have your life blow up four times before you’re thirty would take something out of anyone, and I think it drained from my mom just enough hope that she never quite built her confidence back to what it once had been.
When it happened, school had been out for weeks. Sunday was the only day that the community center didn’t have summer programs for kids, and I was staying with Mrs. Lorenzo that late afternoon and evening. Mrs. Lorenzo, once thin, was now a merry tub of a woman and a fabulous cook. She lived on the second floor and accepted a little money to look after me when there were no other options, primarily when my mom sang at Slinky’s, the blues joint, three nights a week. Sunday wasn’t one of those three, but Mom had gone to a big-money neighborhood for a celebration dinner, where she was going to sign a contract to sing five nights a week at what she described as “a major venue,” a swanky nightclub that no one would ever have called a joint. The club owner, William Murkett, had contacts in the recording industry, too, and there was talk about putting together a three-girl backup group to work with her on some numbers at the club and to cut a demo or two at a studio. It looked like the big break wouldn’t be a steakhouse waitress job.
We expected her to come for me after eleven o’clock, but it was only seven when she rang Mrs. Lorenzo’s bell. I could tell right off that something must be wrong, and Mrs. Lorenzo could, too. But my mom always said she didn’t wash her laundry in public, and she was dead serious about that. When I was little, I didn’t understand what she meant, because she did, too, wash her laundry in the communal laundry room in the basement, which had to be as public as you could wash it, except maybe right out in the street. That night, she said a migraine had just about knocked her flat, though I’d never heard of her having one before. She said that she hadn’t been able to stay for the dinner with her new boss. While she paid Mrs. Lorenzo, her lips were pressed tight, and there was an intensity, a power, in her eyes, so that I thought she might set anything ablaze just by staring at it too long.
When we got up to our apartment and she closed the door to the public hall, she said, “We’re going to pack up all our things, our clothes and things. Daddy’s coming for us, and we’re going to live with him from now on. Won’t you like living with your grandpa?”
His house was nicer than our apartment, and I said so. At ten, I had no control of my tongue, and I also said, “Why’re we moving? Is Grandpa too sad to be alone? Do you really have a migraine?”
Instead of answering me, she said, “Come on, honey, I’ll help you pack your things, make sure nothing’s left behind.”
I had my own bright-green pressboard suitcase that pretty much held all my clothes, though we needed to use a plastic department store shopping bag for the overflow.
As we were packing, she said, “Don’t be half a man when you grow up, Jonah. Be a good man like your grandpa.”
“Well, that’s who I want to be. Who else would I want to be but like Grandpa?”
Not daring to put it more directly, what I meant was that I had no desire to grow up to be like my father. He walked out on us when I was eight months old, and he came back when I was eight years old, but then he walked out on us again before my ninth birthday. The man didn’t have a commitment problem; the word wasn’t in his vocabulary. In those days, I worried he might come back again, which would have been a calamity, considering all his problems. Among other things, he wasn’t able to love anyone but himself.
Still, Mom had a weak spot for him. If he showed up, she might go with him again, which is why I didn’t say what was in my heart.
“You’ve met Harmon Jessup,” she said. “You remember?”
“Sure. He owns Slinky’s, where you sing.”
“You know I quit there for this other job. But I don’t want you thinking your mother’s flaky.”
“Well, you’re not, so how could I think it?”
Folding my T-shirts into the shopping bag, she said, “I want you to know I quit for another reason, too, and a good one. Harmon just kept getting … way too close. He wanted more from me than just my singing.” She put away the last T-shirt and looked at me. “You know what I mean, Jonah?”
“I think I know.”
“I think you do, and I’m sorry you do. Anyway, if he didn’t get what he wanted, I wasn’t going to have a job there anymore.”
Never in my life, child or man, have I been hotheaded. I think I have more of my mother’s genes than my father’s, probably because he was too incomplete a person to have enough to give. But that night in my room, I got very angry, very fast, and I said, “I hate Harmon. If I was bigger, I’d go hurt him.”
“No, you wouldn’t.”
“I darn sure would.”
“Hush yourself, sweetie.”
“I’d shoot him dead.”
“Don’t say such a thing.”
“I’d cut his damn throat and shoot him dead.”
She came to me and stood looking down, and I figured she must be deciding on my punishment for talking such trash. The Bledsoes didn’t tolerate street talk or jive talk, or trash talk. Grandpa Teddy often said, “In the beginning was the word. Before all else, the word. So we speak as if words matter, because they do.” Anyway, my mom stood there, frowning down at me, but then her expression changed and all the hard edges sort of melted from her face. She dropped to her knees and put her arms around me and held me tight.
I felt awkward and embarrassed that I had been talking tough when we both knew that if skinny little me went gunning for Harmon Jessup, he’d blow me off my feet just by laughing in my face. I felt embarrassed for her, too, because she didn’t have anyone better than me to watch over her.
She looked me in the eye and said, “What would the sisters think of all this talk about cutting throats and shooting?”
Because Grandma worked in Monsignor McCarthy’s office, I was fortunate to be able to attend Saint Scholastica School for a third the usual tuition, and the nuns who ran it were tough ladies. If anyone could teach Harmon a lesson he’d never forget, it was Sister Agnes or Sister Catherine.
I said, “You won’t tell them, will you?”
“Well, I really should. And I should tell your grandpa.”
Grandpa’s father had been a barber, and Grandpa’s mother had been a beautician, and they had run their house according to a long set of rules. When their children occasionally decided that those rules were really nothing more than suggestions, my great-grandfather demonstrated a second use for the strap of leather that he used to strop his straight razors. Grandpa Teddy didn’t resort to corporal punishment, as his father did, but his look of extreme disappointment stung bad enough.
“I won’t tell them,” my mother said, “because you’re such a good kid. You’ve built up a lot of credit at the First Bank of Mom.”
After she kissed my forehead and got up, we went into her room to continue packing. The apartment came furnished, and it included a bedroom vanity with a three-part mirror. She trusted me to take everything out of the many little drawers and put all of it in this small square carrier that she called a train case, while she packed her clothes in two large suitcases and three shopping bags.
She wasn’t finished explaining why we had to move. I realized many years later that she always felt she had to justify herself to me. She never did need to do that, because I always knew her heart, how good it was, and I loved her so much that sometimes it hurt when I’d lie awake at night worrying about her.
Anyway, she said, “Honey, don’t you ever get to thinking that one kind of people is better than another kind. Harmon Jessup is rich compared to me, but he’s poor compared to William Murkett.”
In addition to owning the glitzy nightclub where she’d been offered five nights a week, Murkett had several other enterprises.
“Harmon is black,” she continued, “Murkett is white. Harmon had nearly no school. Murkett went to some upper-crust university. Harmon is a dirty old tomcat and proud of it. Murkett, he’s married with kids of his own and he’s got a good reputation. But under all those differences, there’s no difference. They’re the same. Each of them is just half a man. Don’t you ever be just half a man, Jonah.”
“No, ma’am. I won’t be.”
“You be true to people.”
“I will.”
“You’ll be tempted.”
“I won’t.”
“You will. Everyone is.”
“You aren’t,” I said.
“I was. I am.”
She finished packing, and I said, “I guess then you don’t have a job, that’s why we’re going to Grandpa’s.”
“I’ve still got Woolworth’s, baby.”
I knew there were times when she cried, but she never did in front of me. Right then, her eyes were as clear and direct and as certain as Sister Agnes’s eyes. In fact, she was a lot like Sister Agnes, except that Sister Agnes couldn’t sing a note and my mom was way prettier.
She said, “I’ve got Woolworth’s and a good voice and time. And I’ve got you. I’ve got everything I need.”
I thought of my father then, how he kept leaving us, how we wouldn’t have been in that fix if he’d kept even half his promises, but I couldn’t vent. My mom had never dealt out as much punishment as the one time I said that I hated him, and though I didn’t think I should be ashamed for having said it, I was ashamed just the same.
The day would come when despising him would be the least of it, when he would flat-out terrify me.
We had no sooner finished packing than the doorbell rang, and it was Grandpa Teddy, come to take us home with him.
4 (#ulink_4ee29e9c-0685-58d1-9310-6ddc07000a0d)
The first time my mother’s life fell apart was when she found out that she was pregnant with me. She’d been accepted into the music program at Oberlin, and she had nearly a full scholarship; but before she could even start her first year, she learned I was on the way. She said she really didn’t want to go to Oberlin, that it was her parents’ idea, that she wanted to fly on what talent she had, not on a lot of music theory that might stifle her. She wanted instead to work her way from one dinky club to another less dinky and steadily up, up, up, getting experience. She claimed I came along just in time to save her from Oberlin, and maybe I believed that when I was a kid.
She’d taken a year off between high school and college, and her father had used a connection to get her an age exemption and a gig in a piano bar, because she was a piano man, too. In fact, she was good on saxophone, primo on clarinet, and learning guitar fast. When God ladled out talent, He spilled the whole bucket on Sylvia Bledsoe. The bar was also a restaurant, and the cook—not the chef, the cook—was Tilton Kirk. He was twenty-four, six years her senior, and each time she took a break, he was right there with the charm, which, as far as I’m concerned, he got from a different source than the one that gave my mom her talent.
He was a handsome man and articulate, and as sure as he knew his name, he knew that he was going places in this world. All you had to do was say hello, and he’d tell you where he was going: first from cook to chef, and then into a restaurant of his own by thirty, and then two or three restaurants by the time he was forty, however many he wanted. He was a gifted cook, and he gave young Sylvia Bledsoe all kinds of tasty dishes refined to what he called the Kirk style. He gave her me, too, though it turned out that taking care of children wasn’t part of the Kirk style.
To be fair, he knew she’d have the baby, that the Bledsoes would not tolerate anything else. He did the right thing, he married her, and after that he pretty reliably did the wrong thing.
I was born on June 15, 1957, which was when the Count Basie band became the first Negro band ever to perform in the Starlight Room of the Waldorf-Astoria hotel in New York City. Negro was the word in those days. On July 6, tennis star Althea Gibson, another Negro, won the All-England title at Wimbledon, also a first. And on August 29, the Civil Rights Act, proposed by President Eisenhower the previous year, was finally voted into law by the congress; soon thereafter, Ike would start using the national guard to desegregate schools. By comparison, my entrance into the world wasn’t big news, except to my mom and me.
Trying to ingratiate himself with Sylvia’s parents, well aware of Grandpa Teddy’s musical heroes, my father chose to name me Jonah Ellington Basie Hines Eldridge Wilson Hampton Armstrong Kirk. Even all these years later, almost everyone has heard of Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Earl “Fatha” Hines, Lionel Hampton, and Louis Armstrong. Time doesn’t treat all talent equally, however, and Roy Eldridge is known these days pretty much only to aficionados of big band music. He was one of the greatest trumpeters of all time. Electrifying. He played with Gene Krupa’s legendary band through the early war years, when Anita O’Day was changing what everyone thought a girl singer ought to be. The Wilson in my name is for Teddy Wilson, whom Benny Goodman called the greatest musician in dance music of the day. He played with Goodman, then started his own band, which didn’t last long, and then he played largely in a sextet. If you can find any of the twenty sides that he recorded with his band, you’ll hear a piano man of incomparable elegance.
With all those names to live up to, I sometimes wished I’d been born just Jonah Kirk. But I guess because I was half Bledsoe, anyone who ever admired my grandpa—which was everyone who knew him—would have looked at me with some doubt that I could ever shape myself into a man like him.
The day I was born, Grandpa Teddy and Grandma Anita came to the hospital to see me first through a window in the nursery and then in my mother’s arms when I was brought to her room. My father was there, as well, and eager to tell Grandpa my full name. Although I was the center of attention, I have no memory of the moment, maybe because I was already impatient to start piano lessons.
According to my mom, the revelation of my many names didn’t go quite like my father intended. Grandpa Teddy stood bedside, nodding in recognition each time Tilton—who was cautious enough to keep the bed between them—revealed a name. But when the final name had been spoken, Grandpa traded glances with Grandma, and then he frowned and stared at the floor as if he noticed something offensive down there that didn’t belong in a hospital.
Now, you should know Grandpa had a smile that could melt an ice block and leave the water steaming. And even when he wasn’t smiling, his face was so pleasant that the shyest of children often grinned on first sight of him and walked right up to him, a stranger, to say hello to this friendly giant. But when he frowned and when you knew that you might be the reason he frowned, his face made you think of judgment day and of whatever pathetic good deeds you might be able to cite to balance the offenses you had committed. He didn’t look furious, didn’t even scowl, merely frowned, and at once an uneasy silence fell upon the room. No one feared Grandpa Teddy’s anger, because few people if any had ever seen it. If you evoked that frown, what you feared was his disapproval, and when you learned that you had disappointed him, you realized that you needed his approval no less than you needed air, water, and food.
Although Grandpa never put it in words for me, one thing I learned from him was that being admired gives you more power than being feared.
Anyway, there in the hospital room, Grandpa Teddy frowned at the floor so long, my father reached out for my mother’s hand, and she let him hold it while she cradled me in one arm.
Finally Grandpa looked up, considered his son-in-law, and said quietly, “There were so many big bands, swing bands, scores of them, maybe hundreds, no two alike. So much energy, so much great music. Some people might say it was swing music as much as anything that kept this country in a winning mood during the war. You know, back then I played with a couple of the biggest and best, also with a couple not as big but good. So many memories, so many people, quite a time. I did admire all those names between Jonah and Kirk, I did very much admire them. I loved them. But Benny Goodman, he was as good as any and a stand-up guy. Charlie Barnet, Woody Herman, Harry James, Glenn Miller. Artie Shaw, for Heaven’s sake. The Artie Shaw. ‘Begin the Beguine,’ ‘Indian Love Call,’ ‘Back Bay Shuffle.’ There are so many names to reckon with from those days, this poor child would need the entire sheet of stationery just for his letterhead.”
My mom got the point, but my father didn’t. “But, Teddy, sir, all those names—they aren’t our kind.”
“Well, yes,” Grandpa said, “they’re not directly in the bar and restaurant business, like you are, but their work has put so many people in the mood to celebrate that they’ve had an impact on your trade. And they most surely are my kind and Sylvia’s kind, aren’t they, Anita?”
Grandma said, “Oh, yes. They’re my kind, too. I love musicians. I married one. I gave birth to one. And, dear, you forgot the Dorsey brothers.”
“I didn’t forget them,” Grandpa said. “My mouth just went dry from naming all those names. Freddy Martin, too.”
“That tenor sax of his, the sweetest tone ever,” Grandma said.
“Claude Thornhill.”
“The best of the best bands,” she declared. “And he was one funny man, Claude was.”
By then, my father got the message, but he didn’t want to hear it. He had a big chip on his shoulder about race, and he probably had good reason, probably a list of good reasons. Nevertheless, for the sake of family harmony, maybe he should at least have added Thornhill and Goodman to my name, but he couldn’t bring himself to do that.
He said, “Hey, look at the time. Gotta get to the restaurant.” After he kissed my mom and kissed me, he hugged Anita, nodded at Grandpa Teddy, said, “Sir,” and skedaddled.
So that was my first family gathering on my first day in the world. A little tense.
The second time that my mother’s life fell apart was eight months later, when my father walked out on us. He said that he needed to focus on his career. He couldn’t sleep with a crying baby in the next room. He claimed to have a potential backer for a restaurant, so he might be able to go from cook to chef in his own place, and even if it would be a hole in the wall, he would be moving up faster than originally planned. He really needed to stay focused, do his work at the restaurant and pursue this new opportunity. He promised he’d be back. He didn’t say when. He told her he loved us. It was always surprisingly easy for him to say that. He promised to send money every week. He kept that promise for four weeks. By then, my mom had gotten the job at Woolworth’s lunch counter and her first singing gig at a dump called the Jazz Cave, so it was a difficult time, but only difficult, nothing serious yet.
5 (#ulink_b9f2ded8-0e6f-54ef-964e-db0fea4f7f07)
I’m not going to be able to talk my life month by month, year by year. Instead, I’ll have to use this recorder as if it were a time machine, hop around, back and forth, so maybe you’ll see the uncanny way that things connected, which wasn’t apparent to me as I came to my future one day at a time.
Here is where I should tell you a little about the woman who kept showing up in my life at key moments. I never once saw her coming. She was just always there like sudden sunshine breaking through clouds. The first time was a day in April 1966, when I tried to hate the piano because I thought I’d never get to be a piano man.
I was nearly nine, and Grandma Anita still had a year to live. The previous December, my father had come back to stay with us again in the walk-up. Mom never divorced him. She considered it, even though she knew—and believed—that marriage was a sacrament. But she claimed that when she sang in places like the Jazz Cave and Brass Tacks and Slinky’s, she could more successfully discourage come-ons from customers and employees if she could honestly say, “I’ve got a husband, a baby boy, and Jesus. So as handsome as you are, I’m sure you can see I have no need of another man in my life.” According to Mom, just husband or child or Jesus alone wouldn’t have kept the most determined suitors at bay; with them, she needed the three-punch.
In the nearly eight years he’d been gone, Tilton Kirk hadn’t found a backer, hadn’t opened his own place, but he had left the restaurant where he worked as a cook to take the chef position in a somewhat higher-class joint. He was earning less because every year the owner compensated him also with five percent of the stock in the business, so that once he had accumulated thirty-five percent, he could buy the other sixty-five at an already agreed-upon price, using his stock to swing the bank loan.
With him at home again, my mom was more happy than not, but I was all kinds of miserable. The man really didn’t know how to be a dad. Sometimes he was a hard-nosed disciplinarian dealing out a lot more punishment than I deserved. At other times he’d want to be my best pal ever, hang out together, except that he didn’t know what kind of hanging out kids think is cool. Strolling the aisles of a restaurant-supply store, obsessing over different kinds of potato peelers and pâté molds, just doesn’t thrill a child. Neither does sitting on a barstool sipping a Coke while your old man drinks beer and swaps nagging-wife jokes with a stranger.
The worst was that by then I wanted to take piano lessons, and my father refused to let it happen. I had noodled the keyboard at Grandpa Teddy’s house, and I understood the layout on a gut level, the way Jackie Robinson could read a ball in flight. But Tilton said I was too little yet, my hands too small, and when my mom disagreed and said I was big enough, Tilton said we couldn’t afford the lessons yet. Soon but not yet, which meant never.
Grandpa offered to drive me over to his place and back a few times a week and give me lessons himself. But my father said, “It’s too far to run a little kid back and forth all the time, Syl. And we don’t have a piano here for him to practice between lessons. We’ll get a house soon, and then he can have a piano, and it’ll all make sense. Anyway, honey, you know I’m not your old man’s favorite human being. It breaks my heart how maybe he’ll poison the boy’s mind against me. I know Teddy wouldn’t do it on purpose, Syl, he’s not a mean man, but he’ll be poisoning without even knowing it. Soon we’ll rent a house, soon, and then it’ll make sense.”
So I was sitting on the stoop in front of our building, such a sullen look on my face that most passersby glanced at me and at once away, as though I, only eight, might try to stomp them in a fit of mean. It was an unseasonably warm day for April, the air so still and humid that a feather, cast off by a bird in flight, sank like a stone in water to the pavement in front of me. As sudden as it was brief, a wind came along, lifted the feather, spun dust and litter out of the gutter, and whirled all of it up the steps and over me. I sneezed and spat away the feather that stuck to my lips.
As I wiped at my eyes, I heard a woman say, “Hey, Ducks, how’s the world treating you?”
My mom had a couple of friends who were professional dancers in musicals that were always being talked about by people who loved the theater, and though this woman didn’t look like any of them, she did look like a dancer. Tall and slim and leggy, with smooth mahogany skin, she came up the steps so easy, with so little movement, you’d have thought she must be on an escalator. She wore a primrose-pink lightweight suit, a white blouse, and a pink pillbox hat with a fan of gray feathers along one side, as though dressed for lunch in some place where the waiters wore tuxedos.
In spite of her fine outfit and air of elegance, she sat beside me on the stoop. “Ducks, it’s rude not to answer when spoken to, and you look like a young man who’d rather poke himself in the eye than be rude.”
“The world stinks,” I declared.
“Certain things in the world stink, Ducks, but not the whole world. In fact, most of it smells wonderfully sweet. You yourself smell a little like limes and salt, which reminds me of a margarita, which isn’t a bad thing. Do you like my perfume? It’s French and expensive.”
The sweet-rose fragrance was subtle. “It’s all right, I guess.”
“Well, Ducks, if you don’t like it, I’ll go straight home this minute and take the bottle off my dresser and throw it out a window and let the alley reek until the next rain.”
“My name isn’t Ducks.”
“I’d be stunned if it was, Ducks. Parents saddle their children with things like Hortense and Percival, but I’ve never known one to name them after waterfowl.”
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“What do you think it is, Ducks?”
“Don’t you know your own name?”
“I just sometimes wonder what name I look like, so I ask.”
She was pretty. Even an eight-year-old boy knows a pretty girl when he sees her, and beauty lifts the heart no matter what your age. Her perfume smelled all right, too.
I said, “Well, I saw this movie on TV about these guys chasing after a treasure down in the Caribbean. This was way back when there were pirates. What they all wanted was this special pearl, see. Three things made it really, really special. It was large, like as big as a plum. And it wasn’t white or cream-colored or pink, like other pearls. It was black, pure shiny black, but it still had depth like the best pearls all do, so you could see into it, and it was very beautiful. So maybe I think the name you look like is Pearl.”
She cocked her head and sort of smirked at me. “Young man, if you are already this smooth with the ladies, won’t a one of us be safe when you’re all grown up. I am Pearl. There’s no other name I’d want to be. You call me Pearl, Jonah.”
Only hours later would I realize that I’d never told her my name.
“You said there were three special things about this pearl in the movie. Its size and its color and …?”
“Oh, yeah. Well, they said whoever possessed it could never die. It was the secret to immortality.”
“Black, beautiful, and magical. I love being Pearl.”
Two years would pass before she told me that she was the soul of the city made flesh.
“So there you sit, Jonah, as gloomy as if you’re still in the belly of the whale, when in fact it’s a fine spring day. You aren’t being digested by stomach acid, and you don’t need a candle to find your way back up the gullet. Don’t waste a fine spring day, Jonah. There’s not as many of them in a lifetime as you think there will be. What’s dropped your heart into your shoes?”
Maybe she was easy to talk to because she talked so easy. Next thing I knew, I heard myself say, “I want to be a piano man, but it won’t ever happen.”
“If you want to be a piano man, why aren’t you at a piano right this minute, pounding the keys?”
“I don’t have one.”
“That community center you go to when your folks are working and Donata isn’t available—they have a piano.”
Donata was the first name of Mrs. Lorenzo, my sometimes babysitter, so I figured Miss Pearl knew her and was coming to visit.
“I never saw any piano at the community center.”
“Why, sure there is. For a while this man was in charge down there, he didn’t have an ear for piano, it was all just noise to him. He didn’t like loud birds, either, or a certain shade of blue, or the number nine, or Christmas. He put the Christmas tree up on December twenty-fourth and took it down the morning of the twenty-sixth, and the only decoration he’d allow on it was a Santa Claus doll hung by the neck where a star or angel should have been at the top of the tree. He took the nine out of the address above the front door and just left a space between the eight and the four, repainted all the blue rooms, moved the piano down to the basement. Some say he killed and ate Petey, the parrot that used to be in a cage in the card room. But he’s gone now. He didn’t last long. He was run down by a city bus when he jaywalked, but in a short time he did a lot of damage to the center. They can bring the piano up in the freight elevator.”
Loud and belching fumes, a bus went by, and I wondered if it might be the one that ran down the parrot-eater.
When the street grew quieter, I said, “They won’t bring up the piano for a kid like me. Anyway, it’s no good without a teacher.”
“There’ll be a teacher. You go in there tomorrow morning, soon after they open, and see for yourself. Well, this glorious day is slipping away, and I am all dressed up with someplace to go, so I better get there.”
She rose from the stoop and went down the stairs, her high heels making no more noise than a pair of slippers.
I called after her: “I thought you came to visit Mrs. Lorenzo.”
Looking back, Miss Pearl said, “I came to visit you, Ducks.”
She walked away, and I went down to the sidewalk to watch her. With those slim hips and long legs, so tall in all that pink, she resembled a bird herself—not a parrot, an elegant flamingo. I waited for her to glance over her shoulder, and I meant to wave, but she never looked back. She turned left at the corner and was gone.
I raised my hands to my face and sniffed them and detected the faint scent of the lemons that earlier I had helped my mom squeeze for lemonade. I’d been sitting in the sun, and the film of sweat on my arms tasted of salt when I licked, but I couldn’t smell salt.
In the years to come, I would encounter Miss Pearl on several occasions. Now that I’m fifty-seven and looking back, I can see that my life would have been far different—and shorter—if she hadn’t taken an interest in me.
The next morning at the community center, the piano was in the Abigail Louise Thomas Room, which had been named after someone who’d done some good deed for the center back before I was even a gleam in Tilton’s eye. The Steinway was polished and tuned, even prettier than the woman in pink.
One of the center staff, Mrs. Mary O’Toole, was playing Hoagy Carmichael’s “Stardust,” and just then it was the loveliest melody I’d ever heard. She was a nice lady with lively blue eyes, freckles that she said had come all the way from Dublin to decorate her face, and a pageboy cap of red hair shot through with white that an unskilled friend chopped for her, as she disdained beauty parlors. She smiled at me and nodded to the bench, and I sat beside her.
When she finished the piece, she sighed and said, “Isn’t this a hoot, Jonah? Someone took away the spavined old piano in the basement and gave us this brand-spanking-new one and did it all on the sly. I can’t imagine how.”
“Isn’t it the same piano?”
“Oh, it couldn’t be. The lid was warped on that old one, the felt on the hammers moth-eaten, some of the strings broken, others missing. The sostenuto pedal was frozen. It was a fabulous mess. Some awfully clever philanthropist has been at work. I only wish I knew who to thank.”
I didn’t tell her about Miss Pearl. I meant to explain, and I started to speak. Then I thought, if I mentioned the name, it would be a spell-breaker. Come the next day, the Steinway would be back in the basement, as broken down as before, and Mrs. O’Toole would have no memory of playing “Stardust” in the Abigail Louise Thomas Room.
That day I started formal lessons.
6 (#ulink_201ed979-a897-5cbd-8653-63a6752755c5)
That same night, as I lay sleeping in my small room, someone sat on the edge of the bed, and the mattress sagged, and the box springs creaked, and I came half awake, wondering why my mother would visit me at that hour. Before I could fully sit up in the dark, a hand gently pressed me down, and a familiar voice said softly, “Go to sleep, Ducks. Go to sleep now. I have a name for you, a name and a face and a dream. The name is Lucas Drackman and the face is his.”
Strange as the moment was, I nevertheless settled to my pillow and closed my eyes and drifted down through fathoms of sleep. Out of the depths floated a young man’s face, eerily up-lit and starkly shadowed. He was maybe sixteen, seventeen. Hair disarranged, forehead beetling over deep-set eyes open wide and wild in character, hawkish nose, a ripe and almost girlish mouth, blunt chin, pale skin glazed with sweat … Never before and only once again in all my life was a face in a dream so vivid and detailed. Lucas had an air of urgency and anger, but at first there was no nightmare quality to the moment. As a full scene formed around him, I saw his features were revealed by the backwash from a flashlight held low and forward. Lucas took necklaces and brooches and bracelets and rings from a jewelry box, diamonds and pearls, and dropped them into a cloth sack that might have been a pillowcase. In one of those fluid transitions common to dreams, he was no longer at a jewelry box, but in a walk-in closet, stripping currency and a credit card from a wallet that had been left there on a shelf. The Diner’s Club card had been issued to ROBERT W DRACKMAN. Then Lucas was bedside, playing the flashlight beam over the body of a man who apparently had been shot to death in his sleep. Still, I was not afraid. Instead, a deep sadness overcame me. To the dead man, Lucas said, “Hey there, Bob. What’s it like in Hell, Bob? You think now maybe sending me away to a freakin’ military academy was really stupid, Bob? You ignorant, self-righteous son of a bitch.” The flashlight beam found a forty-something woman who must have been awakened by the first rounds that Lucas fired. His mother. She could be no one else, for the possibility of Lucas’s face could be seen in hers. She’d thrown aside the covers and sat up, whereupon she had been shot once in the chest and once in the throat. She’d fallen back against the headboard, blue eyes wide but blind now, mouth hanging open, though she’d probably never had a chance to scream. Lucas called her a vile name, a single word that I have never used and won’t repeat here. A hallway. He walked away, and I did not follow. The light dwindled with him, dwindled and faded, and then a desolate darkness prevailed, and a sadness so keen that tears filled my eyes. She who had conjured a piano into the Abigail Louise Thomas Room spoke again: “Remember him, Ducks. Remember his face and his hateful words. Keep the dream to yourself, don’t tell others who might question or even mock it and lead you to doubt, but always remember it.”
I think I was awake when she spoke those words, but I can’t swear to that. I might have been asleep through all of it, might have dreamed everything, including her entrance into my room, her weight on the edge of the bed, the mattress sagging, the springs creaking. In the darkness, I felt a hand on my brow, such a tender touch. She whispered, “Sleep, you lovely child,” and either I continued sleeping or fell asleep once more.
When I woke with dawn light at my window, I felt that the dream hadn’t been just a fantasy, that it had shown me true things, murders that already had been committed somewhere, at some point in the past. Lying there as the morning brightened, I wondered and doubted and then banished doubt only to embrace it again. But for all of my wondering, I couldn’t answer even one of the many questions with which the experience had left me.
At last, getting out of bed, for a moment I smelled a certain sweetness of roses, identical to Miss Pearl’s perfume, which she had been wearing when she sat beside me on the stoop. But after three breaths, that, too, faded beyond detection, as though I must have imagined it.
7 (#ulink_599b1382-a6c6-591c-a709-13b7d2f98ce8)
The next bit of my story is part hearsay, but I’m sure this is how it went down. My mother would fib to help a child hold on to his innocence, as you’ll see, but I never knew her to tell a serious lie.
I was just over a week away from my ninth birthday, and Grandma Anita had ten months to live. I’d begun piano lessons thanks to Miss Pearl, and my father had been back with us about six months when he messed up big-time. We were still in that fourth-floor walk-up, and he wasn’t bringing home much money because he was getting part of his salary in stock.
Mrs. Lorenzo lived on the second floor, but Mr. Lorenzo hadn’t yet died, and Mrs. Lorenzo was thin and “as pretty as Anna Maria Alberghetti.” Anna Maria was a greatly gifted singer and a misused actress in films and eventually a Broadway star, petite and very beautiful. She won a Tony for Carnival! and played Maria in West Side Story. Although Anna Maria wasn’t as well known as other performers of Italian descent, anytime my mother meant to convey how lovely some Italian woman was, she compared her to Anna Maria Alberghetti. If she thought a man with Italian looks was especially attractive, she always said he was as handsome as Marcello Mastroianni. Anna Maria, yes, but I never understood the Mastroianni business. Anyway, Mr. Lorenzo didn’t want his wife to work, wanted her to raise children, but it turned out he couldn’t father any. So Mrs. Lorenzo ran a sort of unlicensed day care out of their apartment, looking after three little kids at a time, and on occasion me, too, as I’ve said.
When it happened, noonish on the first Tuesday in June, I was at Saint Scholastica, on the last day of the school year, being educated by nuns but dreaming of becoming a piano man.
My mom had left for Woolworth’s lunch counter at 10:30. When she got there, she discovered there had been a small kitchen fire during the breakfast shift. They were shutting down for two days, until repairs could be completed. She came home four hours early.
Because my father worked late nights at the restaurant, he slept from 3:00 A.M. until 11:00. She expected to find him still asleep or at breakfast. But he had showered and gone. She made the bed, and as she was changing from her waitress uniform, she heard Miss Delvane rehearsing her rodeo act up in Apartment 5-B.
Miss Delvane—blond, attractive, a free spirit—had lived above us for three years. She earned a living as a freelance writer of magazine articles and was working on a novel. Sometimes, from her apartment would arise a rhythmic knocking, maybe a little bit like horses’ hooves, gradually escalating in a crescendo, as well as voices muffled and wordless but urgent. On previous occasions, when I wondered about it, my mom said Miss Delvane was practicing her rodeo act. According to my mother, Miss Delvane’s first novel was going to be set in the rodeo, and because she planned eventually to ride in the rodeo as research, she kept a mechanical horse in her apartment to practice. I was five years old when Miss Delvane moved in and only eight when my mom came home from Woolworth’s early, and although I had doubts that a rodeo act was the full explanation, I accepted the basic premise. When I asked about the low groans, my mom always said it was a recording of a bull, because you had to lasso bulls or even wrestle them if you were in a rodeo, and Miss Delvane played the record to put her in the mood when she rode her mechanical horse. I had more questions than a quiz show, but I never asked Miss Delvane one of them, because Mom said the poor woman was embarrassed about how long it was taking her to get her rodeo act together.
Miss Delvane lived above us from mid-1963 through 1966, and though people in those days had a considerable interest in sex, the country hadn’t yet become one gigantic porn theater. Parents could protect you and allow you to have a childhood, and even if you might have vague suspicions of forbidden secrets, you couldn’t switch on a computer and go to a thousand websites to learn that … Well, that Bambi hadn’t been wished into existence by his mother, and neither had you.
So there was my mom, changing out of her uniform, listening to the rodeo act overhead, and it seemed to her that the groans and the trumpetings of the recorded bull were familiar. During the more than seven years when Tilton hadn’t lived with us, Mom had seen him from time to time, and she had stayed married to him, and when he wanted to come back, she’d taken him. Now she didn’t want to believe that it had been a mistake to let him through the door again. She told herself that all men sounded the same when playing the bull, when their cries of pleasure were filtered through an apartment ceiling. She told herself that it might even be Miss Delvane, whose voice had considerable range and could lower all the way to husky. By then, however, life had dealt Sylvia Bledsoe Kirk numerous jokers in a game where they weren’t wild cards, where they counted for nothing, and she knew this joker because he had ruined her hand before.
She threw his clothes and toiletries into his two suitcases and carried them out of the apartment. The building had front and back staircases, the second narrower and grubbier than the first. My mom knew that, by his nature, Tilton would be prone to slipping out the back, even though he had no reason to think he’d be seen descending from the fifth instead of the fourth floor or that the significance of that extra story would be obvious to anyone.
That day, Mom had decided that Tilton wasn’t just a skirt-chaser and a pathological liar and a narcissist and a self-deluded fool as regarded his career. He was all those things because he was a coward who couldn’t look at life head-on and face it and make a right way through it, regardless of the obstacles. He had to lie to himself about life, pretend it was less hard than it really was, and then press forward by one slippery means or another, all the while deluding himself into believing that he was conquering the world. My mother would never have called herself a hero, although of course she was, but she knew she wasn’t a coward, never had been and never would be, and she couldn’t stand to live with one.
She set the suitcases on the cracked and edge-curled linoleum on the back-stairs landing between the fifth and fourth floors, and she sat a couple of steps lower, with her back to them. She had to wait for a while, and with every minute that passed, she had less sympathy for the devil. Eventually she heard a door close somewhere above and a man slow-whistling “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’,” which had been a hit for the Righteous Brothers back in February.
Tilton was crazy about the tune and whistled it that afternoon without any sense of irony, although later he might have realized it wasn’t the perfect track for that particular scene in the music score for the movie of his life.
He opened the stairwell door and started down and stopped whistling when he recognized his suitcases. The man was an excuse machine, and I imagine at least three marginally believable and a dozen preposterous excuses flew through his mind before he continued to the landing. Of course, when he discovered my mom sitting a few steps down on the next flight, he stopped again and stood there, not sure what to do. He had always been quick with words and especially with justifications, but not that day. He was apparently unnerved by the way she sat in silence, her back turned to him. If she’d made accusations or started crying, he might have dared a lie, pretended he was innocent, but she merely sat there ready to bear witness to his departure. Maybe he thought she had a knife and would stab him in the back when he squeezed past her, encumbered by the suitcases. For whatever reason, Tilton picked up the two bags and, instead of continuing down with them, he returned to the fifth floor.
Sylvia got up from the step and followed. At the fifth-floor landing, when my father glanced back and saw her coming slowly after him, he grew alarmed and stumbled over the threshold, knocking the luggage against the jamb and the door, against his legs, like those old-time movie guys, Laurel and Hardy, trying to maneuver a jumbo packing crate through an opening too small for it. As he hurried along the hallway, my mom followed, saying nothing, not closing on him but not losing ground, either. At the head of the front stairs, he lost his grip on one of the bags, and it tumbled down the steps, and he almost fell after it in his eagerness to retrieve it and get out of there. Expressionless, never taking her eyes off her errant husband, Sylvia followed flight by flight, and Tilton’s hands were apparently so slick with sweat that the suitcases kept getting away from him, thudding against the walls. Because he couldn’t resist glancing back in anticipation of the nonexistent but expected knife, he misstepped a few times and careened from wall to wall as if the bags he carried were filled with bottles of whiskey that he’d spent the past few hours sampling.
At the landing between the third and second floors, pursued and pursuer encountered Mr. Yoshioka, a polite and shy man, an impeccably dressed tailor of great skill. He lived alone in an apartment on the fifth floor, and everyone believed that this gentle man had some dark or tragic secret, that perhaps he’d lost his family in Hiroshima. When Mr. Yoshioka saw my father ricocheting downward with reckless disregard for the geometry of a staircase and for the law of gravity, when then he saw my stone-faced mother in unhurried but implacable pursuit, he said, “Thank you very much,” and turned and plunged two steps at a time to the ground floor, to wait in the foyer with his back against the mailboxes, hoping that he had removed himself from the trajectory of whatever violence was about to be committed.
Tilton exploded through the front door, as though the building itself had come alive and ejected him. One of the abused suitcases fell open on the stoop, and he frantically stuffed clothing back into it. My mom watched through the window in the door until he repacked and departed. Then she said, “Lovin’ feelin’, my ass,” and turned and was surprised to see poor Mr. Yoshioka still there with his back against the mailboxes.
He smiled and nodded and said, “I should like to ascend now.”
She said, “I’m so sorry, Mr. Yoshioka.”
“The sorrow is all mine,” he said, and then he went up the stairs two at a time.
The event as I have just described it was the version that my mom told me years later. After school that day, I walked to the community center to practice piano. When I got home, all she said was, “Your father’s no longer living here. He went upstairs to help Miss Delvane with her rodeo act, and I wasn’t having any of that.”
Too young to sift the true meaning of her words, I found the idea of a mechanical horse more fascinating than ever and hoped I might one day see it. My mother’s Reader’s Digest condensation of my father’s leaving didn’t satisfy my curiosity. I had many questions, but I refrained from asking them. Truth is, I was so happy that I would never again have to sit in a barroom listening to nagging-wife stories, I couldn’t conceal my delight.
Right then I told Mom the secret I couldn’t have revealed when Tilton lived with us, that I had been taking piano lessons from Mrs. O’Toole for more than two months. She hugged me and got teary and apologized, and I didn’t understand what she was apologizing for. She said it didn’t matter if I understood, all that mattered was that she would never again allow anyone or anything to get between me and a piano or between me and any other dream I might have.
“Hey, sweetheart, let’s toast our freedom with some Co-Cola.”
We sat at the kitchen table and toasted with Coca-Cola and with slices of chocolate cake before dinner, and all these years later, I can relive that moment vividly in my mind. She had moved on from Brass Tacks to Slinky’s by then; but that wasn’t a night when she performed, so I had her all to myself. We talked about all kinds of things, including the Beatles, who’d hit number one on the U.S. charts just two years earlier with “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and “She Loves You” and four others. Four more chart-topping songs followed in ’65. Already in 1966, they’d had another tune reach number one. My mom liked the Beatles, but she said jazz was her thing, especially swing, and she talked about the big-band singers from Grandpa Teddy’s day. She knew all their work and could imitate a lot of them, and it was as if we had them right there in our kitchen. She showed me a book about that time, with pictures of those girls. Kay Davis and Maria Ellington, who sang with the Duke. Billie Holiday with Basie. They were all pretty and some of them beautiful. Sarah Vaughan, Helen Forrest, Doris Day, Harriet Clark, Lena Horne, Martha Tilton, Peggy Lee. Maybe the most beautiful of them all was Dale Evans when she was in her twenties, the same one who later married Roy Rogers, who had a real horse, but even the young Dale Evans wasn’t as pretty as Sylvia Bledsoe Kirk. And my mom could do Ella. She could scat so you thought for sure it was Ella and your eyes were deceiving you. We made Campbell’s tomato soup and grilled-cheese sandwiches, and we played 500 rummy. Years later, I realized that was the third time when my mother’s life fell apart, but in the moment, I didn’t see it that way. When I went to bed, I thought that had been the best day of my life to date.
The next day was better—magical, one of those days that my friend Malcolm calls a butter-side-up day. Trouble was coming, sure, but it’s always coming, and meanwhile it’s best to live with a smile.
8 (#ulink_941bba21-2c9a-5f74-b1e3-7deb929cf560)
A butter-side-up day …
Let’s take a little detour here called Malcolm Pomerantz. He’s a first-rate musician. He blows the tenor sax. He’s something of a genius who, even at fifty-nine, can still play an entire tone scale.
He’s crazy, too, but mostly harmless. He’s so superstitious, he’d rather break his back than break a mirror. And though he’s not so much of an obsessive-compulsive that he needs to spend a few hours a week on a shrink’s couch, he has routines that would make you crazy if you didn’t love him.
For one thing, he has to wash his hands five times—not four, not six—just before he joins the band onstage. And after his nimble fingers are clean enough to play, he won’t touch anything with his bare hands except his saxophone because, if he does, he’ll have to wash them five times again. The cleanliness of his hands doesn’t concern him when he practices, only when he performs. If he wasn’t such a superb musician and likable guy, he wouldn’t have a career.
Malcolm reads the newspaper every day but Tuesday. He will not buy a Tuesday newspaper, nor will he borrow one. He won’t watch TV news or listen to a radio on Tuesdays. He believes that if he dares to take in the news on any Tuesday, his heart will turn to dust.
He won’t eat mushrooms either raw or cooked, not in any sauce, even though he loves mushrooms. He won’t eat any rounded cookie that reminds him of a mushroom cap. In a market, he avoids that end of the produce section where the mushrooms are offered for sale. And if the market is new to him, he avoids the produce section altogether, out of fear that he’ll have a sudden fungal encounter.
As for the butter-side-up day: Each morning, he makes one extra slice of toast with breakfast, lays it on his kitchen table, and in a contrived-casual way, he knocks it to the floor. If it lands butter side up, he eats it with pleasure, confident that the day will be good from end to end. If it lands butter side down, however, Malcolm throws the toast away, wipes up the butter, and goes about his day with heightened awareness of potential danger.
On the first night of every full moon, Malcolm makes his way to the nearest Catholic church, puts seventeen dollars in the poor box, and lights seventeen votive candles. He claims not to know why, that it’s just a compulsion like the others with which he’s afflicted. I am inclined to think that he really doesn’t know the reason, that the seventeen candles are a way of keeping his pain at bay, and that if he allowed himself to understand his motivation, the pain could no longer be relieved. For most of us, the wounds that life inflicts are slowly healed, and we’re left only with scars, but maybe Malcolm is too sensitive to let the wounds fully close; maybe his obsessive-compulsive little rituals are like bandages that keep his unhealed wounds clean and staunch the bleeding.
Although I can’t explain all of Malcolm’s quirks, I know why never mushrooms and why always full-moon candles and why never the news on Tuesday. We have been friends since I was ten. Back then, he was not as he is now. His sweet kind of craziness evolved over the years. Malcolm is white, and I am black. We aren’t brothers bonded by blood, but we’re as close as brothers, bonded by the same devastating losses. I respect his ways, odd as they are, of dealing with his enduring pain, and I will never explain to him the meaning of his rituals, because that might deny him the relief he gets from them.
On one terrible day, each of us lost someone whom he loved as much as life itself. And some years later, again on the same day, we once more lost someone beloved, and yet again after that. I’m still an optimist, but Malcolm is not. Sometimes I worry about what might happen to him if I were to die first, because I suspect that his eccentricities will metastasize, and in spite of his talent, he will not be able to go on working. The work is his salvation, because every song he plays, he plays for those whom he loved and lost.
9 (#ulink_578c20af-f7b9-5986-9e16-7e83f8284701)
Because Woolworth’s was still cleaning up from the kitchen fire, my mother didn’t have to work the lunch shift. She wanted to come with me to the community center, to hear what I’d learned of the piano, which I worried wouldn’t be impressive to someone who could sing like Ella. You should have seen her that day. She dressed as though it must be an occasion, as if she were accompanying me to some concert hall where two thousand people were waiting to hear me play. She wore a yellow dress with a pleated skirt and with black piping at the cuffs and collar, a black belt, and black high-heeled shoes. We walked the block and a half, and she was so gorgeous that people turned to look at her, men and women alike, as if a goddess had come down to Earth to walk this skinny boy someplace special for some reason too amazing to imagine.
Mrs. O’Toole was there, and I introduced them, and it turned out they had something in common: Grandpa Teddy. Mary O’Toole said, “My first husband played tenor sax with Shep Fields in ’41. Shep’s band was heavy with saxes—one bass, one baritone, six tenors, and four altos—and Teddy Bledsoe was the piano man part of that year, before moving on to Goodman.” Mary looked at me in a new way when she knew I was Teddy Bledsoe’s grandson. She said, “Bless you, child, now it makes perfect sense how you could come along so fast on the ivories.”
I had progressed quickly through the lessons, but what had excited Mrs. O’Toole was that recently I’d gotten to the place where I could listen to a piece of music and sit down and play it right away, insofar as my arms could reach and my fingers could spread. I had an eidetic memory for music, which is the equivalent of reading a novel once and being able to recite it word for word. If I was alone at the keyboard, I was able to play just about anything, regardless of the complexity or tempo, not a fraction as well as Grandpa Teddy could have played it, but still so you’d recognize the tune. I needed to have the bench to myself because I had developed this butt-slide technique, polishing the bench with the seat of my pants, slipping left, right, left as required without bumping my elbows or disturbing my finger placement, so I had good reach for a kid my age and size.
My mom stood listening to me play, and I didn’t dare look at her. I didn’t want her to make nice and pretend I was better than I truly was, but I didn’t want to see her trying to keep from wincing, either. The second thing I played was a favorite of hers, an old Anita O’Day hit, “And Her Tears Flowed Like Wine.” I was but three bars into it when Mom started to sing. Oh, man. Community center acoustics don’t measure up, but maybe that was still what those lyrics sounded like at the Paramount Theater or the Hotel Pennsylvania, back when O’Day was with Stan Kenton and was better than the band, before I was born.
I became aware that people were crowding into the Abigail Louise Thomas Room, drawn by my mom’s singing. I was so proud of her and embarrassed that she had no one more accomplished than me to accompany her. We were rolling toward the end, and she was better than great, her tone and her phrasing, and just then, among the little crowd, I saw Miss Pearl.
She wore the same pink outfit with the feathered hat that she had been wearing almost three months earlier when she sat on the stoop with me and called me Ducks. She wiggled her fingers at me, and I smiled.
I couldn’t wait to introduce Miss Pearl to Mrs. O’Toole, so that our benefactor could be thanked for the piano. I figured the shiny-as-new Steinway had been there too long suddenly to be dilapidated and in the basement again, with nobody to remember that it had been restored or replaced, which was the fear that had kept me from mentioning Miss Pearl on the first day I’d seen the piano glossy and black and beautiful. There you have the magical thinking of an eight-year-old boy: that when the miraculous happens, it soon can be undone by the whim of God, but if it isn’t undone in a day or a week or a month, then it becomes permanent, and even God doesn’t have the power to take it away.
The truth is, to this day I still pretty much operate under that assumption. If chaos plagues the world—and it does—and if there’s any benign power that wants the world to survive, then stability will be encouraged and rewarded. Maybe not all the time. But most of the time.
Anyway, we came to the end of “And Her Tears Flowed Like Wine,” when I stupidly added a concluding flourish that wasn’t part of the number. Fortunately, the crowd of community-center staff and patrons knew the song was over when my mom hit the last word, and they broke into applause that saved me from the embarrassment of them having heard the unnecessary flourish. A lot of the people who came there to play cards and socialize were older than Grandpa Teddy, and they knew the old tunes so well that they might have sung along if they hadn’t wanted to hear Sylvia Bledsoe solo. They called for more, and I looked at Mom, and she nodded.
The community center had some old records, and only a couple of days before, I’d heard “It All Begins and Ends with You,” sung by Mildred Bailey backed by the Red Norvo band. Without thinking to ask if my mom knew it, I ham-handed my way into it, and she sang along so beautifully that I sounded way better than I was. When I noticed that some of the gray-haired ladies had tears in their eyes, I understood for the first time why music matters so much, how it reminds us of who we are and where we came from, of all the good times and the sadness, too.
When we finished, everyone wanted to talk to us. I didn’t have much to say except “Thank you,” and they really had more interest in Mom than in me. They wanted to know where she performed. When she told them Slinky’s, many hadn’t heard of the place, and those who had heard of it looked disappointed for her.
While they gathered around my mom, I went looking for Miss Pearl, but I couldn’t find her anywhere. I asked several people if they’d seen this tall woman in a pink suit and feathered hat, but no one remembered her.
From the center, my mother and I walked to the nearest park, which was her idea. It wasn’t much of a park, some trees and benches and a bronze statue of some former mayor or someone who would have been embarrassed to have his image in a park that had gone as crummy as that one, except that he was probably dead. There had been a plaque under the statue, telling who the bronze man had been, but vandals had cut it off the granite base. There were bare patches in the grass, and the trees weren’t properly trimmed, and the trash baskets overflowed. My mom remembered a vendor’s shack where you could buy newspapers and snacks and packets of little crackers to throw down for the pigeons, but it wasn’t there anymore, and what pigeons still hung around looked too red-eyed and kind of strange.
“What the heck,” she said. “Why not.”
“Why not what?”
“Why not make a day of it? Just you and me on a date.”
“What would we do?”
“Anything we want. Starting with a better park.”
We walked out to the main avenue, and we stood by the curb, looking for a taxi. She hailed a couple, and finally one stopped, and a man named Albert Solomon Gluck drove us to a better park, to Riverside Commons. In those days, there weren’t Plexiglas shields between the front and back seats, because no one yet imagined a time when drivers would be in danger from some of their passengers. Mr. Gluck entertained us with imitations of Jackie Gleason and Fred Flintstone and Ernest Borgnine, who were all big on TV back then, and he said he could do Lucille Ball, too, but he made her sound just like Ernest Borgnine, which really made me laugh. He wanted to be in show business, and one joke after another flew from him. I had my mom write down his name, so when he became famous, I would remember meeting him. Years later, I had reason to track him down, and though he didn’t become famous, I’ll never forget the first or the second time we met.
At Riverside Commons, he pulled to the curb and, before Mom could pay him, he said, “Wait, wait,” and got out of the taxi and came around to the rear curbside door and made a production out of opening it for us and presenting the park with a sweep of his hand, as if he had prepared it just for us. He was a portly man with bushy eyebrows and a rubbery face made for comedy, and everything about him suggested fun, except that I noticed his fingernails were bitten to the quick.
When we were on the sidewalk and Mom paid him, he took the fare but refused the tip. “Sometimes the quality of the passengers is the gratuity. But here’s something I want you and your boy to have.” From a pocket he took a pendant on a chain. When my mom tried to refuse it, he said, “If you don’t take it, I’m going to yell ‘Help, police’ until they come running, and I’ll make the most outrageous charges, and by the time we resolve the matter down at police headquarters, it’ll be too late to have your day in the park.”
Sylvia laughed, shook her head, and said, “But I can’t accept—”
“It was given to me by a passenger six months ago, and she told me she wanted me to give it to someone, and I asked who, and she said I would know when I met the person, but now it turns out to be two people, you and your boy. It’s luck on a chain. It’s good luck. And if you don’t take it, then it’s bad luck for me. Good luck for you, bad luck for me. What—you want to ruin my life? Were my jokes that terrible? Have a heart, lady, give me a break, take it, take it, before I scream for the city’s finest.”
There was no refusing him. After he drove away, we found a bench and sat there to examine the pendant. It had been fashioned from two pieces of Lucite glued together and shaped into a heart roughly the size of a silver dollar. Within the heart was a small white feather. It must have been glued there, but such an excellent job had been made of it that the feather looked fluffy, as though it would flutter inside the heart if you blew on the Lucite. A small silver eyehook, screwed into the top of the heart, received a silver chain.
“It must be really valuable,” I said.
“Well, sweetie, it’s not Tiffany. But it is pretty, isn’t it?”
“Why did he give it to you?”
“I don’t really know. He seemed to be a nice man.”
“I think he likes you,” I said.
“Actually, Jonah, I believe he gave it to me to give to you.”
With something like awe, I took the pendant from her when she held it out to me. “You really think so?”
“I’m sure of it.”
When I held the chain and allowed the dangling heart to turn back and forth, the polished Lucite looked almost liquid in the sunlight, as if the feather floated in a great drop of water that cohered magically to the eyehook. Or in a tear.
“What bird do you think it’s from?” I asked. “A pigeon?”
“Oh, I expect it’s from something more grand than a pigeon. Don’t you think it must be from some kind of songbird, one with a particularly sweet voice? I do. That’s what I think.”
“Then it must be,” I said. “But what’ll I do with it? It’s a heart, it’s like a girl’s jewelry.”
“And you can’t be seen wearing a girl’s jewelry—is that it?”
“I already get teased about being skinny.”
“You’re not skinny. You’re lean.” She elbowed me in the side. “You’re a lean, mean music machine.”
She always made me feel like more and better than I knew myself to be. I thought then that lifting a child’s spirits was something every mother did effortlessly. But as the years passed, I saw the world more clearly and knew how fortunate I was to have been brought to life by the grace of Sylvia Bledsoe.
There on the park bench, I said, “Mr. Gluck said it’ll bring good luck.”
“Never hurts to have some.”
“He didn’t say you could make a wish on it.”
“That’s easy luck, Jonah. Easy luck always turns bad. You want the kind of luck you have to earn.”
“Maybe it’ll be okay if I carry it in my pocket—you know, instead of wearing it.”
“I’m sure that’s fine. Or keep it in a nightstand drawer. The important thing is to keep it safe. When someone gives you a special gift, never treat it lightly. If you treat it like a treasure, then it’ll be one.”
When, years later, I learned who had given it to the cabbie and what it meant, the pendant would indeed prove to be a treasure.
10 (#ulink_204aab4a-0251-523e-883a-ef599fc930b2)
With the pendant in my pocket, it seemed that the cloud-free summer sky blazed bluer than ever. The day was warm, and this part of the city looked cleaner than the part that we’d come from. As noon approached, the trunk shadows shrank toward the trees, and the web of branch shadows spread equally in all directions as if spooled out by spiders. The sun spangled the big pond, and through the quivers of light, we watched scores of fat koi that swam there from spring through autumn before being moved to indoor aquariums. Mom bought a twenty-five-cent bag of bread cubes, and the fish ventured right up to us, fins wimpling, mouths working, and we fed them.
I felt the most unexpected tenderness toward those koi, because they were so beautiful and colorful and, I don’t know, like music made flesh. My mom kept pointing to this one and that one—how red, how orange, how yellow, how golden—and suddenly I couldn’t talk about them because my throat grew tight. I knew if I talked about them, my voice would tremble, and I might even tear up. I wondered what was wrong with me. They were just fish. Maybe I was turning sissy, but at least I fed the last of the bread to them without embarrassing myself.
Almost half a century later, I feel that same tenderness toward nearly everything that swims and flies and walks on all fours, and I’m not embarrassed. Creation moves and astonishes if you let it. When I realize how unlikely it is that anything at all should live on this world spun together from dust and hot gases, that creatures of almost infinite variety should at night look up at the stars, I know that it’s all more fragile than it appears, and I think maybe the only thing that keeps the Earth alive and turning is our love for it.
That day in the park, after the koi, we walked the paths through the groves of trees and through the picnic grounds and around the baseball field. There weren’t as many people as I expected, probably because it was a workday. But when we started to talk about lunch, two guys, maybe sixteen or seventeen, fell in behind us, walking close to us, moving faster if we moved faster, slowing when we did. They were talking about girls they dated the night before, how hot the girls were and things they did to them. They wanted my mother to hear. I didn’t know all the words they used, didn’t understand everything they were bragging about having done, but I knew they were being rotten. That kind of thing didn’t happen often back then. It just didn’t. People wouldn’t tolerate it. People weren’t so afraid in those days. I threw the two trash talkers a couple of mean looks, and my mother said, “No, Jonah,” and kept walking toward the Kellogg Parkway exit from the Commons. But the braggarts talked filthier and started to comment on my mother’s shapeliness.
Finally she stopped and turned to them, one hand in her purse, and said, “Back off.”
One of them was a white kid, the other a mulatto, which was a word we used back then, meaning half black, half white. They were cocky and grinning, hoping to terrify her a little if nothing else.
The white one raised his eyebrows. “Back off? This here’s a public park, sugar. Ain’t it a public park, bro?”
His friend said, “It’s damn sure public. Man, the front view’s even more righteous than her ass.”
My mom raised her purse, her hand buried in it, and said, “You have a death wish?”
The white guy’s grin went from Cheshire to shark. “Sugar, there ain’t hardly any legal guns in this city, so what you’ve got in that purse is just a tampon.”
She stared at him as if he were a cockroach with pretensions, standing upright and talking, but a cockroach nonetheless. “Listen, shithead, do I look like some schoolteacher who cares what the law says? Look at me. You think I’m some hotel maid or dime-store clerk? Is that really what I look like to you, asshole? What I’ve got is a drop gun, no history to it. I kill you both, throw down the piece, and when the jackboots show up, I tell ’em you pulled the heat, it was robbery, but you fumbled, dropped it, I snatched it, thought you might have another one, so I used it. Either you walk away or we do it now, I don’t care which.”
All the wicked fun had gone out of their grins. They looked now as if they were wincing in pain, though there was cold fury in their eyes. I didn’t know how it might go, even in bright sunshine with other strollers in view, but my fear was exceeded by an exhilarating amazement. Sylvia’s performance had been so convincing that she almost seemed to be someone other than my mom, who never used bad language and who was as likely to be carrying a gun as I was likely to have earned a black belt in karate.
The two creeps salvaged their pride by insulting her—“Bitch” and “Skank” and worse—but they backed off and turned away. We stood watching them until we were certain they wouldn’t come back.
My mother said, “Just because you heard me use a couple of nasty words doesn’t mean you ever can.”
I was speechless, but for different reasons from the one that had rendered me silent by the koi pond.
“Jonah? Did you hear me?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Then tell me what I said.”
“Not to use nasty words.”
“Do you understand why I used them?”
“You faked out those guys.”
“I did, didn’t I?”
“You faked them out big-time.”
She smiled and took her hand out of her purse and zippered the purse shut and said, “How do you feel about lunch?”
“I’d like some.”
Surrounding Riverside Commons were fancy homes, but we had to walk only ten minutes or so to some shops and other businesses.
We had gone about a block when I asked, “What’s a tampon? That guy said you didn’t have a gun, all you had was a tampon.”
“It’s nothing, just a kind of sponge.”
“You mean like the one on the kitchen-sink drainboard?”
“Not exactly like that.”
“Like the ones they use at the car wash over on Seventh Street?”
“No, not that big.”
“Why would he think you had a sponge in your purse?”
“Well, because I do. Women do.”
“Why do you carry a sponge in your purse?”
“I like to be prepared.”
“Prepared for what? You mean like if you spill something?”
“That’s right.”
“Have you ever needed it?”
“Sometimes.”
“You’re a very neat person,” I said. “I try to be neat, too.”
We were passing a bus stop, and she said she needed to sit down on the bench, and when she sat there, she started laughing so that tears came to her eyes.
Sitting beside her, looking around but seeing nothing hilarious, I said, “What’s so funny?”
She shook her head and took a Kleenex from her purse and blotted her eyes. She tried to stop laughing but couldn’t, and finally she said, “I was just thinking about those two idiot delinquents.”
“They weren’t funny, Mom. They were scary.”
“They were scary,” she agreed. “But silly, too, in a way. Maybe I’m just laughing with relief, neither of us hurt.”
“Boy, you sure faked them out.”
She said, “And you kept your cool.”
When she finished blotting her eyes and blowing her nose, she tossed the Kleenex in a waste can beside the bench.
I said, “Are you sometimes able to fool idiots like them because the tampon sponge is shaped like a gun?”
That started her laughing again. I decided she had a case of the giggles, like when something strikes you a lot funnier than it really is but then for some reason everything seems funny until finally the giggles go away, sort of like hiccups.
Between giggles she said, “Honey … tampon isn’t … a nasty word. But you … shouldn’t use it anyway.”
“I shouldn’t? Why?”
“It’s not a word … little boys … should use.”
“How old do I have to be to use it?”
“Twenty-five,” she said, and just the number made her laugh harder.
“Okay, but is it still all right to say sponge?”
And there she went again.
Soon some people came along who were waiting for the bus, and we got up and let them have the bench and continued toward the shops. Walking seemed to cure my mom, and I was glad for that. I’d worried that the two delinquents might show up, because I was certain Mom wouldn’t fake them out again if she was unable to stop giggling.
We couldn’t afford to dine out often, and when we did dine out, we always went to the lunch counter in Woolworth’s, because as an employee Sylvia got a discount. That day, however, we went to a real restaurant, which she said was French, and I was relieved when it turned out they spoke English. The place had a holding bar with a scalloped canopy and a big mirror at the back, a black-and-white checkerboard floor, black tables and chairs with white tablecloths, and black booths with black-vinyl cushions and white cloths. The salt and pepper shakers were heavy and looked like crystal, and I was afraid to use them because if I broke one it would probably cost a fortune.
They had a few items for kids, including a cheeseburger, so of course I ordered that with fries and Coca-Cola. My mom had a green salad with sliced chicken breast on top and a glass of Chardonnay, and then we had what I called the best pudding in the history of the world and what Mom called crème brûlée.
We were waiting for that dessert when I leaned across the table and whispered, “How can we afford this?”
She whispered, “We can’t. We aren’t paying.”
Clutching the edge of the table, I said, “What’ll they do to us when they find out?”
“We’re not paying, your father is.”
Alarmed, I said, “He’s not coming back?”
“You know that quart mayonnaise jar he puts his pocket change in every night? When I packed his things for him, I didn’t pack that.”
“Maybe he’ll come back for it.”
“He won’t,” she said with conviction.
“But isn’t it wrong to take his money?”
“No, it’s his security deposit.”
“His what?”
“Landlords make you put down a security deposit, some hard cash, when you move in, so if you damage the apartment before you move out, they already have the money to cover it and don’t have to chase you for it. Your father never paid his share of rent since he moved back in, and he did some damage yesterday. He sure did some damage. So I kept his jar of change as a security deposit, and now he’s buying us a fancy good-bye lunch.”
Years would pass before I had crème brûlée again and could learn if it really was the best pudding in history or if it just tasted so good because of the circumstances. Nothing could have been better, after all, than the gift of an expensive good-bye lunch from my father without him there to ruin it.
That afternoon, we saw a funny movie starring Peter Sellers, and that evening I spent with Mr. and Mrs. Lorenzo, where I fell asleep on their sofa with Mr. Gluck’s pendant held tightly in my right hand. Sometimes I half woke and thought I could feel the feather fluttering softly. When my mother came home after midnight, following a four-hour set at Slinky’s, Mr. Lorenzo carried me up to our apartment, and I was so sleepy that Mom tucked me in bed in my underwear rather than make me get into pajamas. She wanted to put the pendant safely in a nightstand drawer, but I held fast to it.
I dreamed of a great white bird as big as an airplane, and I rode on its back with no fear of falling, the world sparkling below, forests and fields and mountains and valleys and seas where ships sailed, and then the city, our city. People looked up and they pointed and waved, and I waved back at them, and it was only when the bird began to sing that I realized it wasn’t as big as an airplane anymore and wasn’t in fact a bird anymore, but was instead my mother dressed all in flowing white silk, with wings more beautiful than those of a swan. Carried safely upon her back, I could feel her heart beating, her pure heart beating so steady and strong.
11 (#ulink_5fa3fab6-99df-5550-b3b2-55b4b4e258b5)
The following Sunday, June 12, Grandpa and Grandma drove downtown in their 1946 black Cadillac Series 62 Club Coupe, which they’d bought nineteen years earlier and which Grandpa had maintained in as-new condition. It was a big boat of a car yet sleek, with enormous bullet-shaped fenders front and back and fastback rooflines. Cadillac never made a car as cool thereafter, especially not when they went finny. Teddy and Anita took us to their place for an early celebration of my birthday, which turned out to be memorable.
They were amazed by my eidetic memory for music, which matured in me only as I had learned the piano from Mrs. O’Toole. On his piano in the front room, Grandpa Teddy played a number he was sure that I couldn’t have heard before, “Deep in a Dream,” written by Will Hudson and Eddie DeLange, who had a band together for a few years in the 1930s. He played it superbly, and when he finished, I played it with my limited skills and strained reach, but though I could hear the difference between us, I was thrilled to be able to follow him at all. He tested me with a couple of other pieces, and then we sat to play together. He took the left hand of the board plus the pedals, and I took the right, which was a trick but one that worked, and we ran through a tune I already had heard often, Hudson and DeLange’s “Moonglow,” and didn’t make one mistake in tempo or chords or melody, sweet and smooth to the end.
We might have sat there for hours, but what I think happened is that I was preening too much, and nobody wanted to indulge me if healthy pride in accomplishment might be souring into conceit. My grandparents had taught my mother—and she had taught me—that when you did anything you should do it well, not for praise but for the personal satisfaction of striving to be the best. I was young and only now discovering my talent, and I was exhilarated and prideful and probably getting obnoxious.
Grandpa Teddy abruptly stood up from the piano and said, “Enough. It’s my day off. Jonah and I are going for a little walk before lunch.”
The day was warm but not suffocating. The street maples, which would be scarlet by October, were green now, and a faint breeze trembled the leaves, so that on the sidewalk, patterns of light and shadow quivered like dark fish schooling in sun-spangled water, reminding me of the koi in Riverside Commons.
Grandpa Teddy towered over me, and he had a deep voice that made me sound like a chipmunk. He was as stately in his bearing as a grand ocean liner, while I was a bouncing little boat with a buzzing outboard motor, but he always made me feel that I belonged with him, that there was nowhere else he would rather be. We talked about all kinds of things as we walked, but the purpose of that stroll was what Grandpa Teddy had to say about my father.
“Your mother gave you a new apartment key.”
“Yes, sir. She did.” I took it from a pants pocket and dangled it, sunlight winking off the bright brass.
“Do you know why the locks were changed?”
“Tilton.”
“You shouldn’t call your father by his first name. Say, ‘My father.’”
“Well, but it doesn’t feel that way.”
“What way doesn’t it feel?”
“I mean, it doesn’t feel like he’s my father.”
“But he is, and you owe him some respect.”
“You feel more like my father.”
“That’s sweet, Jonah. And I give thanks every day that you’re in my life.”
“Me, too. I mean, that you’re my grandfather.”
“Your father isn’t the easiest man to keep your equilibrium with. You know equilibrium?”
“Yes, sir. Like balance.”
“It isn’t easy to keep your balance with him, but you always have to walk a line of respect because he’s your father.”
As we progressed, we passed people sitting on their porches, and they all called out to Grandpa Teddy, and he called back to them and waved. Sometimes drivers of passing cars tooted their horns or passengers shouted his name, and he waved to them, and we met a few people walking their dogs or just out for some fresh air, and they had to talk with him and he with them. In spite of all that, he kept coming back to the subject at hand.
“You have to walk a line of respect, Jonah, but you also have to be cautious. What I’m going to say to you isn’t meant to make you think any less of your father. I would feel terrible if it did. But I would feel even worse if I didn’t say this—and then had reason to regret holding my tongue.”
I understood that whatever he told me would be something I must take as seriously as anything that I heard in church. That’s what it felt like—as if Grandpa was churching me not on the meaning of a psalm or the story of Bethlehem, but on the subject of my father.
“Your mother is a wonderful woman, Jonah.”
“She’s perfect.”
“She just about is. None of us is absolutely perfect in this world, but she’s but a breath away from it. She and I were once miles apart in our estimation of your father, but now it’s an inch or two. But it’s an important inch or two.”
He stopped and looked up into a tree for a long moment, and I looked up, too, but I couldn’t see what interested him. There wasn’t a squirrel up there or any bird, or anything.
When we started walking again, he said, “I hope this is the right way to say it. Your mother’s current assessment of your father is that he’s basically a good man, means well, wants to do what’s right, but he’s damaged by some bad things that happened to him as a child, and he’s weak. I agree with the weak part. There’s no way to know if what he says happened to him as a boy actually happened. But even if it did, bad things happen to all of us, and that doesn’t mean we can hurt others just because we ourselves have been hurt. Are you with me so far?”
“Yes, sir. I think so.”
“Your father’s going to divorce your mother.”
I almost broke into a dance. “Good. That’s good.”
“No, son. Divorce is never good. It’s sad. Sometimes it might be necessary, but never good.”
“Well, if you say so.”
“I do. And these days it’s no-fault. If there’s no property to split—and there isn’t—and if he doesn’t want custody of you or even visitation rights—which he doesn’t—then it’s not even necessary for your mother to agree.”
“She should agree.”
“It’ll happen just the same. Anyway, when marriages fall apart, some people sometimes get bitter, they get very angry.”
“Not my mom.”
“No, not her. But sometimes people can get so angry, they do foolish things. Sometimes the fight in court is about the children, one of them trying to punish the other by taking away the children.”
Alarmed, I halted. “But you said he doesn’t want me. And if he does, he can’t have me. I won’t go. Never.”
Grandpa Teddy put a hand on my shoulder. “Don’t worry, son. No judge in this city would take you away from a woman like Sylvia and give you to your father.”
“Really? You’re sure?”
“I’m sure. And he says he doesn’t want you, but he’s a man who says all kinds of things he doesn’t entirely mean. Sometimes people do reckless things, Jonah, they don’t want to leave it to a court, they take matters into their own hands.”
“Could he do that? How would he do that?”
We had walked almost to Saint Stanislaus, and Grandpa said, “Let’s rest a bit on the church steps there.”
We sat side by side on the steps, and he took a pack of Juicy Fruit gum from a pocket and offered me a stick, but I was too scared to want any. Maybe he was a little scared, too, because he didn’t want any chewing gum, either, and he returned the pack to his pocket.
“Let’s say you’re walking home from the community center one day, and your father pulls to the curb in a car and wants to take you somewhere. What should you do?”
“Where would he want to take me?”
“Let’s say it was somewhere you’d like to go, maybe to a movie or for a milk shake.”
“He wouldn’t take me anywhere like that. He never did before.”
“Well, maybe he wants to make things right with you, apologize for things he’s done by taking you out for some fun.”
“Would he? I don’t think he would.”
“He might. He might even have a present for you, wrapped and on the passenger seat. You’d just have to get in the car and unwrap it while you go to the movie or for that milk shake.”
The air was warm and the steps were warm from the sun, but I was cold. “I’ve got to walk the line you talked about, give him respect.”
“So what should you do?”
“Well … I’d have to ask Mom, was it all right to go with him.”
“But your mother isn’t there.”
“Then he’d have to come back later, after I talked to her, but even if Mom said it was all right, I wouldn’t want to go.”
Three crows landed on the sidewalk and hopped along, pecking at grains of rice from a wedding the day before, each of them studying us warily with glistening black eyes.
We watched them for a while, and then I said, “Would Tilton … would my father ever hurt me?”
“I don’t believe he would, Jonah. There’s an emptiness in him, a hollow place where there shouldn’t be, but I don’t think he’d hurt a child. It’s your mother he might hurt by taking you away from her.”
“I won’t let that happen. I just won’t.”
“That’s why I wanted us to talk, so you wouldn’t let it happen.”
I thought about the two trash-talking delinquents in Riverside Commons a few days earlier. “Boy, it’s always something, isn’t it?”
“That’s life. Always something, more good than bad, but always interesting if you’re paying attention.”
He offered me the gum again, and I took a stick, and so did he. He took the paper and foil from me, and he folded them with his paper and foil, and he put them in his shirt pocket.
After we chewed the Juicy Fruit for a minute or two and watched the crows at the rice, I thought of Mr. Gluck’s pendant and took it from my pocket and showed it to Grandpa.
“Isn’t that a marvelous piece of work.” He took the pendant and dangled it in the sunlight and asked where I’d gotten it. When I told him, he said, “Son, that is a classic story of the city if I ever heard one. Just classic. You’ve got a lasting conversation piece.”
“What kind of feather do you think it is, Grandpa?”
He gently twisted the chain between his fingers, so that the Lucite heart turned back and forth. “I’m no expert on feathers, but there’s one thing I can say with complete confidence.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s not an ordinary feather. It’s extraordinary. Otherwise no one would’ve gone to the trouble of sealing it in Lucite and shaping the Lucite into a heart.” He frowned at the pendant for a moment, then smiled. “I feel comfortable saying it’s not a bit of juju.”
“What’s juju?”
“A religion in West Africa, full of charms and curses and lots of gods, good ones and bad ones. In the Caribbean, they mix it up with some Catholic bits and call it voodoo.”
“I saw this old voodoo movie on TV. It scared me, so I had to turn it off.”
“Nothing to be scared about, because none of it’s true.”
“In the movie, the voodoo wasn’t on some island somewhere, it was right in the city.”
“Don’t give it a thought, Jonah. This piece the taxi driver gave you, it’s too well meant to be anything dark and dangerous. Whatever feather this might be, you should figure it was so important to someone that they preserved it. You should keep good care of it.”
“I will, Grandpa.”
Returning the pendant to me, he said, “I know you will.”
We got up, and the crows squawked into flight, and we walked back to the house, where lunch would soon be ready.
“The little talk we had about your father is just between you and me, Jonah.”
“Sure. We don’t want to worry Mom.”
“You’re a good boy.”
“Well, I don’t know.”
“I do. And if you stay humble about it and remember talent is a gift you didn’t earn, then you’re going to be a great piano man. If that’s what you want to be.”
“It’s all I want to be.”
Under the maples, the black-and-white patterns of leaf shadow and sunlight didn’t remind me of schooling fish in bright water, as before. They sort of looked like piano keys, not all lined up in the usual order but instead intersecting at crazy angles and shimmering with that kind of music that makes the air sparkle, what Malcolm calls banish-the-devil music.
12 (#ulink_b998cf81-3a4b-5a14-b052-e8ae79edf3e1)
During his off-the-rails period, when Malcolm was twenty-two, he lost his way in grief. He began secretly using drugs. He withdrew into himself and went away and didn’t tell anyone where he was going. Later, I learned that he had left the city, which was a mistake for a young man so suited to its streets. He had enough money for a year, and he rented a cabin by a lake upstate.
He smoked pot and did a little cocaine and sat on the porch to stare at the lake for hours at a time. He drank, too, whiskey and beer, and ate mostly junk food. He read books about revolutionary politics and suicide. He read novels, as well, but only those full of violence and vengeance and existential despair, and he sometimes was surprised to rise out of a kind of stupor, bitterly cursing the day he was born and the life in which he found himself.
One night, he woke past one o’clock in the morning, at once aware that he had been talking in his sleep, angry and cursing. A moment later, he realized that he wasn’t alone. Although faint, a foul odor filled him with revulsion, and he heard the floorboards creak as something moved restlessly back and forth.
He had fallen asleep half drunk and had left the bedside lamp set low. When he rolled off his side and sat up, he saw a shadowy form on the farther side of the room, a thing that, to this day, he will not more fully describe than to say that it had yellow eyes, that it wasn’t any child of Nature, and that it was no hallucination.
Although Malcolm is superstitious, neurotic in a charming sort of way, and undeniably eccentric, he recounts this incident with such solemnity, with such disquiet, that I’ve never doubted the truth of it. And I can’t hope to convey it as chillingly as he does.
Anyway, he knew that his visitor was demonic and that he had drawn it to him by the acidic quality of his anger and by his deep despair. He realized that he was in grave danger, that death might be the least he had to fear. He threw back the covers and got out of bed in his underwear, and before he realized what he was doing, he went to a nearby armchair and picked up his saxophone, where he had left it earlier. He says that his sister spoke to him, though she was not there with him, spoke in his mind. He can’t recall her exact words. All he remembers is that she urged him to play songs that lifted the heart and to play them with all the passion he could summon—music that made the air sparkle.
With the unwanted visitor circling him, Malcolm played for two hours, at first a lot of doo-wop but then also many numbers written long before the rock ’n’ roll period. Isham Jones tunes like “It Had to Be You” and “Swinging Down the Lane.” Loesser and Carmichael’s “Heart and Soul.” Watson and Monroe’s “Racing with the Moon.” Marks and Simons’s “All of Me.” Glenn Miller’s “In the Mood.” He looked only indirectly at the yellow-eyed presence, afraid that a direct look would encourage it, and after an hour of music, it slowly began to fade. By the end of the second hour, it had been dispelled, but Malcolm continued to play, played passionately and to exhaustion, until his lips were sore and his jaws ached, until he was dripping perspiration and his nose was running nonstop and his vision was blurred by sweat and tears.
Banish-the-devil music. If only it had worked as well on my father—and those with whom he eventually became associated—as it did on that yellow-eyed fiend in the lakeside cabin.
13 (#ulink_32fde657-49ff-52e1-b96d-2a5d79a44333)
We heard the siren, but there were always sirens in the city, police zooming this way and that, weaving through traffic in their cruisers, more sirens every year—so my mom said—as if something was going wrong with the country just when so many things had been going right. The worst thing to do when you hear a siren is to go see what it’s about, because the next thing you know, part of what it’s about might be you.
It was Monday evening, eight days after the talk I had with Grandpa Teddy. My mom didn’t work Monday nights, and we were playing checkers at the kitchen table when the siren swelled loud and then wound down somewhere in our block. We stayed at the game, talking about just everything, so I don’t know how long it was until the knock came at our door, maybe twenty minutes. We had forgotten the siren by then. There was a bell, but this caller rapped so lightly we wouldn’t have heard it if our apartment hadn’t been so small. We went into the living room, and the rapping came again, hesitant and timid, and Mom looked through the fish-eye lens and said, “It’s Donata.”
Mrs. Lorenzo stood at our threshold, as pretty as Anna Maria Alberghetti and as pale as Wonder Bread, her hair disarranged, face glistening even though the evening was mild for late June. Body rigid, hands fisted and arms crossed over her breasts, she stood as though she had turned to stone the moment she’d finished knocking. Her face, her eyes were those of a woman lost, struck senseless and uncomprehending by some shock. She spoke as though bewildered, “I don’t know where to go.”
“What’s wrong, Donata, what’s happened?”
“I don’t know where to go. There’s nowhere for me to go.”
My mother took her by one arm and said, “Honey, you’re like ice.” The glaze on the woman was sweat, but cold sweat.
Mom drew her into the apartment, and in a voice colored less by grief than by bewilderment, Mrs. Lorenzo said, “Tony is dead, he stood up from dinner, stood up and got this terrible look and fell down, fell dead in the kitchen.” When my mother put her arms around Mrs. Lorenzo, the woman sagged against her, but her voice remained as before. “They’re taking him now, they say, taking him for an autopsy, I don’t know where. He was only thirty-six, so they have to … they have to … they have to cut him open and find was it a heart attack or what. There’s nowhere I can go, he was all I had, and I don’t know where to go.”
Maybe she hadn’t cried until then, maybe the shock and terror had numbed her, but now the tears came in great wrenching sobs, pent up but released in a flood. She was racked by the kind of grief that is part horror, when the mourner suddenly knows death to be not just a profound loss but also an abomination, and the wretched sounds that came from her made me tremble and raised in me a feeling of absolute helplessness and uselessness unlike anything I’d felt before.
As usual, my mother coped. She brought Mrs. Lorenzo into our kitchen and settled her in a chair at the table and pushed aside the checkerboard. She insisted that Mrs. Lorenzo had to drink something warm, and she set about making tea, all the while commiserating not in a phony way but with the right words that I could never have found and with tears of her own.
Mrs. Lorenzo was gentle and kind, and I couldn’t stand watching her coming apart like that or the thought of her widowed so young. I went to a living-room window and looked out and saw the ambulance still at the curb in the crimson twilight.
I had to get out of the apartment. I don’t entirely know why, but I felt that, were I to stay there, I’d start crying, too, and not just for Mrs. Lorenzo or Mr. Lorenzo, but for my father, of all people, because he had that awful emptiness inside himself, and for myself, too, because my father couldn’t ever be a father. Grandma Anita was still alive, and I’d never known anyone who died. Mr. Lorenzo had been a waiter; he often got home late, and he sometimes carried me up to our apartment when I was asleep and my mom returned from work at the club, and now he was dead. I was glad my father moved out, but this was like two deaths close to each other, one the death of a neighbor, the other the death of my father-son dream, which I would have denied having, if you’d asked me, but to which just then I realized I’d still been clinging. I ran out of the apartment and down six flights of stairs to the foyer and outside to the stoop and down more stairs to the sidewalk.
The paramedics were loading the body into the back of the van ambulance. A sheet covered Mr. Lorenzo or maybe he was in a body bag, but I couldn’t see him, only the shape of him. Across the street, a crowd of twenty or thirty had gathered, probably people who lived in the apartment houses over there, and they were watching Mr. Lorenzo being taken away. Some kids were over there, too, my age and younger. They chased around and danced and acted silly, as if the flashing beacons of the ambulance were holiday fireworks. Maybe if the death had occurred on the other side of the street, I’d be watching from here with different kids, acting as foolish. Maybe the difference between horror and holiday was just the width of an ordinary street.
At nine I knew about death, of course, but not as an intimate truth, rather as something that happened out there in the world, in other families, nothing for me to worry about for a long time yet. But now people I knew were going away forever. If two could go in just two weeks, three others could go in just three more—Grandpa, Grandma, and my mother—and I would be like Mrs. Lorenzo, alone and with nowhere that I belonged anymore. It was crazy, a little-kid panic, but it grew out of the undeniable realization that we’re all so fragile.
I thought that I should do something for Mr. Lorenzo, that if I did something for him, God would see and approve and not take anyone from me until I was much older. I guess if I hadn’t been so crazy afraid, I might have gone to church and lit a candle for him and said a few prayers. Instead I thought that I should play the piano for him, one of his favorite songs that he listened to on his stereo.
The community center stayed open until 10:30 on Monday because it was bingo night. As one paramedic closed the rear doors of the ambulance and the other started the engine, I turned away and headed toward the Abigail Louise Thomas Room.
Perhaps in my peripheral vision, I saw him moving, paralleling me. But as long as I live, I will credit luck and the feather pendant in my pocket, because I was in a distraught emotional state that made it unlikely that I would have picked up on clues glimpsed from the corner of my eye. My father must have been among the crowd across the street, because now he paced me. When he realized that I had seen him, he didn’t call out to me or wave, which would have been much less creepy. He only walked faster when I did and broke into a run when I ran.
If I made it to the community center, he might come in after me. No one there knew that my mother had thrown him out or that divorce was imminent. Sylvia didn’t wash her dirty laundry in public. They knew me at the center, and they didn’t know him, and if I caused enough of an uproar, they would surely call my mom.
But then I saw that he was glancing both ways along the street as he ran, checking on the traffic, looking for an opening, ready to dash across all three lanes at the first opportunity. The center was still more than a block away. His legs were longer than mine. I’d never make it there before he caught me. He wouldn’t hurt me. I was his son. Grandpa Teddy said Tilton wouldn’t harm me. Might snatch me and take me away. But wouldn’t harm me. To snatch me, he needed a car, surely a car. You didn’t absolutely need a car in the city; and Tilton hadn’t owned one. Maybe he owned one now, but he would have to drag me to it, and I’d fight all the way, and he wouldn’t want that. So maybe he meant to hurt me, after all.
At the corner, one-third of the way to the community center, I turned left, heading for the alleyway behind our building. I glanced over my shoulder and saw Tilton crossing the street, dodging cars as the drivers pounded their horns and brakes squealed. He looked wild. I wouldn’t make it into the back street and half a block to the rear entrance of our building before he overtook me.
Twilight slanted through the streets, fiery in the windows and painting emberglow across tenement walls, purple shadows swelling, but night already claimed the narrow alley. Not all the buildings had back entrances; some had switchback fire escapes, and where there was rear access, the security lamps above the doors were often broken. On both sides, Dumpsters rose, hulking shapes in the gloom, some lids up, some down, some stuck halfway. I climbed the side of a Dumpster where the lids were open and dropped inside, landing on slippery piles of plastic garbage bags, in a stink of rotting vegetables and God knew what else.
I knelt with my back pressed to the metal wall, trying to be still, cupping both hands over my nose and mouth, not because of the stench but to soften the sound of my breathing. His shoes slapped loud on the blacktop and on the bricks where the blacktop had worn off, and as he passed me, he was panting louder than I was. He came to a halt about where I figured the back door to our building must have been, and I listened to him muttering in frustration and making small noises for which I couldn’t account.
I began to wonder if I had done the right thing by fleeing from him. He was my father, after all, not a good one but my father nonetheless. Maybe I’d misjudged his mood and was mistaken about his intentions.
When he began to curse and when my name proved to be part of it, I stopped worrying that I’d been unfair. He rattled the knob and kicked the door hard. I didn’t understand what had foiled him. The superintendent had cut new keys to our apartment; but Tilton still possessed the other key, the one to the back stairs, which unlike the front entrance was kept locked. He became increasingly agitated, cursing explosively, and when he repeatedly kicked a Dumpster—not mine but one nearby—I figured he’d been drinking. The big trash bin gave off hollow drumlike beats that echoed along the alleyway—boom,boom, boom. A man shouted from a high window, “Knock it off!” Tilton shouted back at him, cursed him out, and the man said as if he meant it, “I’m comin’ down there, you bastard.” My father hurried away then, but no one came down to look for him. Comparative quiet settled over the alleyway, disturbed only by the muffled sounds of traffic out on the main street and by music and voices from a TV channeled through an open window overhead.
Suspicious, I waited a few minutes. But I couldn’t spend the night in the Dumpster, and finally I climbed out. I half expected a shadowy figure to break from cover and rush at me, but if there were rats in the alley, they were genuine rodents, nothing more.
Above the rear door to our building, the lamp protected by a wire cage had not been broken, and by its light I saw the bent key protruding from the deadbolt lock. In his eagerness to nab me before I got back to the apartment, my father evidently had inserted the wrong key, and when it wouldn’t turn, he forced it, nearly breaking it off in the lock. I wiggled it, trying to extract it from the keyway. The key was bent not just at the shoulder, but also along the blade, and its serrations were wedged in the pin tumblers. In the morning, the superintendent would need to take the lock apart to remedy the situation. In the meantime, I could return to the building only by the front entrance.
The blush of twilight had faded to maroon, but the streetlamps hadn’t yet brightened. Shadows filled doorways. The headlights of passing vehicles flared off the parked cars, revealing or conjuring sinister figures inside them; it was impossible to tell which. I expected my father to throw open a car door and scramble after me or to rise up from between cars, but I made it to our building and pelted up the steps and into the foyer, almost knocking down Mr. Yoshioka.
He said, “Is it true, is the poor man dead? It cannot be true, so young.”
For a moment, I thought he was referring to my father, but then I remembered, and I assured him that Mr. Lorenzo had died.
“I am so entirely sorry. He was a nice man. Thank you very much.”
I said he was welcome, although I didn’t know what he might be thanking me for, and I ascended six flights to the fourth floor. I didn’t dare to race up because maybe my father was waiting for me around one turn or another, but neither did I proceed slowly, because maybe he would suddenly appear on the stairs behind me.
14 (#ulink_eeeebecc-677e-5082-b0bd-6246fc7898cd)
When I let myself into the apartment and closed the door and engaged both deadbolts, I’d been gone no more than ten minutes. Mrs. Lorenzo still sat at the kitchen table with my mother, and she still wept, though the wrenching sobs had passed for now. Neither of them knew that I’d gone out.
At one of the living-room windows, I peered down at the swarming street as light bloomed in the frosted glass of the lamps, and they seemed to float like aligned and miniature moons in the early dark. Every pedestrian interested me, every driver of every vehicle, and though none of them proved to be my father, I didn’t grow bored with sentry duty. If he had come back once, he would come back again, as though a bad-juju penny rattled within the hollow space inside him, a penny with two heads and both of them my face, by its every clink and spin reminding him of me and of how my mother would be devastated if she lost me.
After a while, my mom came to me and put a hand on my shoulder and said, “Are you all right, Jonah?”
That didn’t seem to be the best time to tell her about Tilton. Mrs. Lorenzo needed her.
“Yeah, I’m okay. It’s awful, though. How’s Mrs. Lorenzo?”
“Not good. Tony was an immigrant. He has no family in America. Donata’s father died when she was young, and she has no brothers or sisters, and I gather her mother’s … well, difficult. There’s nowhere she can go but back to their apartment, and she can’t face that right now. Maybe tomorrow. I’ve asked her to stay the night with us. She can have your bed, and you can sleep in mine.”
I looked out at the street and then at the sofa, to which I pointed. “Can I sleep there?”
“The bed would be more comfortable.”
“Well, sleeping with your parents, a parent, whatever, it’s for scared little kids, it’s little-kid stuff.”
“When did it become little-kid stuff?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. A while ago, weeks ago maybe. I mean, I’m nine.”
Sometimes it seemed that she could look right into my head and read my thoughts, as if my forehead were glass and my brain a neatly printed scroll. “Are you sure you’re all right, sweetie?”
She never lied to me, but I didn’t always measure up to her when it came to truth-telling, although this wasn’t lying, not really. I intended just to withhold the truth from her for a few hours, until Mrs. Lorenzo gathered the courage to go downstairs to her apartment in the morning.
“See, the sofa is … cool. Not kid stuff.” I sounded so lame, and I could feel the blush burning in my cheeks, but one of the benefits of dark skin is that a blush can’t give you away even to your perhaps psychically gifted mother. “The sofa is like an adventure. You know? The sofa is righteous.”
“All right, Mr. Jonah Kirk. You may sleep on the sofa, and I’ll lie awake all night worrying about how soon you’ll want to drive a car and date grown women and go away to war.”
I hugged her. “I’m never going away anywhere.”
“You go strip your bed and put on clean sheets for Donata. I’ve got to dash downstairs and get her pajamas and some other things she needs. She just falls to pieces at the thought of going back there even if I’m with her.”
Here at the front of the building, they hadn’t heard the ruckus in the alleyway, Tilton kicking the Dumpster and cursing.
“You shouldn’t go there alone.” When she gave me an odd look, I said, “I mean, not this late.”
“Late? It’s twenty past nine and it’s just downstairs. If this was a work night, sweetie, I’d be coming home alone hours later, just me with a pretend gun in my purse.”
“Well, but Mr. Lorenzo died down there.”
Although we were speaking softly, she glanced toward the kitchen and lowered her voice further. “He didn’t die of disease or anything, Jonah. And in this family, we believe there’s only one ghost this side of Heaven, and it’s the holy one.”
Having committed myself to withholding the news of my father’s return until Mrs. Lorenzo was able to go home, I felt that the manly thing would be to stay the course and not complicate the situation by dumping my fears onto my mom when she still had to help Mrs. Lorenzo get through the shock of being widowed. It made sense at the time. A great many things make sense when you’re nine years old that appear senseless years later. As justification, I can only say that during the eventful summer of 1966, I became concerned for the first time about behaving in a manly fashion, no doubt out of fear that if I didn’t discipline myself, I might wind up like my father, a perpetual adolescent.
“Now go change those sheets,” Mom said, “and I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
She left the front door ajar, and I ran to it and listened to her going down the stairs. When I heard her cross the first landing, I eased the door shut and, just in case Tilton was out there, locked it to prevent him from coming in behind my back. I hurried into my bedroom and tore the sheets off the bed and carried them to the hall closet where the laundry basket was kept and grabbed the spare set of sheets and raced back to my bedroom and made the bed. I returned to the front door and stood on my toes and barely managed to look through the fish-eye lens—nobody out there—and opened the door and stood on the threshold and waited for my mom.
She seemed to be taking forever. I didn’t believe there was a ghost in the Lorenzo apartment. And they had taken away the body, so there couldn’t be a zombie like in the voodoo-in-the-city TV movie that I’d had to turn off. But Mrs. Lorenzo, confused and hurting, might have left her door unlocked, and maybe my father had gone in there for God knows what reason, and then my mother had walked in on him. The rest would be total horror movie.
Maybe the manly thing would be to grab a butcher knife from the kitchen and go down to the second floor to check on my mother, but I couldn’t imagine what I’d say to Mrs. Lorenzo, who was in the kitchen crying again, when I burst in there and snatched the butcher knife out of the drawer. She might think I’d gone mad and meant to kill her, and that would be one shock too many, and she’d have a stroke, and then they’d haul me off to prison or the nuthatch or wherever they took crazed and dangerous boys.
I heard footsteps ascending. They sounded like the footsteps of one person, and they didn’t seem to be those of someone with a gun to her head or a knife to her throat. I stepped inside, eased the door almost shut, as my mother had left it, and hurried to the window.
When Mom came through the door, she had a little travel case in which she had packed Mrs. Lorenzo’s things. She closed the door and locked both deadbolts. She said, “You better put on your peejays and brush your teeth, honey. It’s getting late.”
“Okay, Mom.”
“You’ll need a blanket for the sofa.”
“It’s warm enough.”
“To protect the upholstery.”
“Oh, yeah. Got it.”
Minutes later, I was lying on a blanket, on the sofa, in my pajamas, with one of the pillows from my mother’s bed. The front windows remained open because we didn’t have air-conditioning, and traffic noise rose from the street. I could hear my mom and Mrs. Lorenzo talking in the kitchen, but I couldn’t catch enough words to make sense of what they were saying. They were taking a long time, longer than I expected, and I grew anxious about not being able to keep a watch on the street. Later, I would learn that Mom gave Mrs. Lorenzo a few Benadryl and then insisted that they each have a large glass of red wine, which I guess seemed just the right thing to an Italian lady like the widow. When they finally left the kitchen, I pretended to be sleeping, and I pretended all the time that they used the bathroom and dressed for bed. When my mother came to the sofa and whispered good-night and kissed me on the cheek, I lay there with my mouth open, breathing through it, making a soft snoring sound. Before she turned away and switched off the lights and went to her bedroom, she said, “My angel,” which made me feel lowly and deceitful and the very spawn of Tilton Kirk, even though I knew that my motives were good and my heart sincere.
Lying there in the dark, with the glow of the city invoking ghostly shapes from the familiar objects in the living room, I waited until I thought Mom and the widow might be asleep before I got off the couch and felt my way to one of the windows. The flow of traffic had diminished, and there were fewer pedestrians, as well. I didn’t see my father, but the longer I knelt at the window, with my arms folded on the sill, the more it seemed to me that of the people who walked past or drove by, every one of them appeared suspicious. More than suspicious. There had been another old movie I’d watched about two-thirds of before turning it off. Instead of zombies, the bad guys had been seed-pod people from another world, and they had duplicated real people and had taken their place; you couldn’t tell them from the people they imitated except that they had no real emotions.
15 (#ulink_ab61243d-6614-5dd7-a6bc-4e2229b76b10)
Eventually I returned to the sofa, too exhausted to stand an entire night watch. I dropped into a deep well of sleep and floated there until, after a while, the dream began in a pitch-black place with the sound of rushing water all around, as if I must be aboard a boat on a river in the rain.
I was lying on my left side, in the fetal position, on an uncomfortable surface, clutching something in my right fist, holding it so tightly that my fingers ached. A great fear overcame me, but of what I couldn’t say, a blind terror in the blind dark of the dream, and my heart was as loud as a felt hammer on a timpani skin, beat and backbeat all but simultaneous. The object in my hand was a penlight.
Later, I would realize that no previous dream had ever included a fragrance or a flavor, but in this one I tasted blood. My lower lip was swollen, throbbing. When I licked, it stung where split.
I was holding a penlight, for what reason I don’t know, as I never had possessed one in real life. Still lying on my side, I cried out, startled, when the beam revealed a face directly in front of mine, less than a foot away, a girl perhaps in her early twenties, dark hair wet with rain and pasted to her face, eyes seeming to swell from their sockets, strangled to death with a man’s necktie that still cinched her throat.
Thrusting up from the darkness of the dream into the lesser darkness of our living room, I came off the sofa and onto my feet, breathless for a moment, and then inhaled with a gasp. I shuddered and put a hand to my mouth, expecting my lower lip to be split and bleeding, but it was not. Because my legs were weak, I sat down at once, grateful that I hadn’t cried out in my sleep as I had done in the nightmare, hadn’t awakened my mother or the widow Lorenzo.
In my mind’s eye, I could still see the dead girl as clearly as I had seen her in sleep—and as in the dream about Lucas Drackman, a few months earlier, she wasn’t a half-imagined phantom, but instead as vividly detailed as a portrait by Norman Rockwell. Wet hair thick and glistening with rain. Blue eyes shading toward purple, the pupils wide in death. Delicate features, pert nose formed to the perfection of the finest porcelain figurine. Generous mouth. Smooth creamy skin unmarred except for a small beauty mark at the high point of the left cheekbone.
When I’d awakened from the dream of Lucas Drackman, I had known that he murdered his parents sometime in the past, that what I’d seen wasn’t prophetic, but instead a done deed. In this case, I suspected that I’d been given a predictive vision while asleep, that a day would come when I would find myself surrounded by the sounds of rushing water, enclosed in darkness with a corpse.
As I sat there on the edge of the sofa, I caught the faint scent of roses and came to my feet. Turning, I saw a woman’s silhouette at one of the front windows, backlit by the night glow of the city. She was too tall to be either Mrs. Lorenzo or my mother. She said softly, “Fiona Cassidy,” and I knew that she had just given me the name of the dead girl in my dream.
She moved away from the window, vanishing into shadows. When I switched on the lamp beside the sofa, I found myself alone in the living room. If she had really been there, she could not have exited so quickly. Yet I had seen her silhouette, had heard her voice. I had no doubt that she’d been present, although in what sense and to what extent I couldn’t say. She wasn’t a ghost, but she was something more than I had taken her to be on the day when she had first appeared to me, dressed all in pink and promising a piano.
16 (#ulink_2e41a8fc-6aad-5854-9bdf-2ca41cc20cc7)
I should have told my mother about Tilton chasing me into the alleyway, but for the next two days, she occupied herself with Mrs. Lorenzo, helping the widow to arrange the funeral, contacting the life-insurance company regarding Tony’s small policy, which would give the widow only a few years of security, and packing the deceased’s clothes to take them to the Salvation Army because Mrs. Lorenzo had no heart for the job. At the end of each day, Mom was tired and sad, and I didn’t want to burden her with my worries.
By the time we returned to our usual schedule, I was hesitant to tell her what Tilton had done. By delaying, I had to some extent deceived her, which I had never done before, at least not about anything serious. Although my reason for doing so was honorable, I was concerned that she would in the future wonder what else I might be withholding from her, that this would in some way permanently change our relationship.
Of course, I was keeping another secret: Miss Pearl, my guide through dreams of terrors both past and pending. The mysterious woman had instructed me to tell no one of Lucas Drackman, and I understood intuitively that the same discretion was required of me regarding Fiona Cassidy. Honoring Miss Pearl’s instructions meant being less than entirely forthcoming with my mother, and though that wasn’t the same thing as lying, it was not worthy of a well-churched boy. Miss Pearl had given me a piano, yes, but my mother had given me life.
I adored my mother and hoped that she would always trust me. And so, having delayed telling her about my father’s pursuit of me, I made the further mistake of deciding to remain silent on the subject. Most nine-year-old boys want to be seen as more grown up than they are. Considering that I was now the man in the house, I convinced myself that I alone should deal with Tilton if he came around again, that I could deal with him, and that in this troubled time, I needed to spare my mother from unnecessary anxiety.
The nation seemed to be sliding toward one existential crisis or another. Growing casualties in Vietnam spawned street demonstrations against the war, and a seventy-two-year-old woman named Alice Herz had even set fire to herself in protest. The previous year, during Martin Luther King’s march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, marchers were beaten and trampled by horses ridden by state troopers, and a shocked nation watched it all on television. Malcolm X was assassinated, not by racist whites but by other blacks, probably Black Muslims, and everywhere you looked, there was discontent and anger, envy and loathing. Respect for authority was down, crime was up, and illegal drugs were being peddled as never before. Not in our neighborhood but in another part of the city, there had been race riots, as there had also been in Watts, a Negro section of Los Angeles, in which thirty-four people died and whole blocks were burned to the ground. And this summer was no less violent than the last one. A couple of times, I’d overheard Mom worrying about the future with Grandpa and Grandma, not about her prospects as a singer but about my safety and about the war and about what might be in store for all of us. By comparison, my father seemed to be more of a nuisance than a threat.
The summer wore on, hot and humid and eventful. Search-and-destroy missions in the Mekong Delta of Vietnam led to nightly death tolls reported on the evening news. In July, in Chicago, Richard Speck stabbed and strangled eight student nurses in their dormitory. On the first day of August, an honor student named Charles Whitman climbed to the top of the twenty-seven-story University of Texas tower and with a rifle killed sixteen and wounded thirty, an unprecedented slaughter that alarmed the nation because it felt not like an aberration but like the start of something new.
Mom came home from her job at Woolworth’s one afternoon and found that I, having returned early from the community center, sat mesmerized by TV-news film of the war and the raging riots. I was only nine, but I think even before I started to recognize the tumult in the world, I already had an awareness of how unstable life could be, born in part from my father’s inconstancy but also from the fact that, in spite of my mother’s undeniable talent and drive, her quest for a career as a singer encountered setback after setback. The L.A. fires, the explosions in Vietnam, the gunfire in both places, the dead bodies in streets foreign and domestic, the crimes of Lucas Drackman and the death-to-come of a girl named Fiona Cassidy, Mr. Lorenzo standing up from the dinner table and dropping dead of a heart attack, the two trash-talking thugs who followed Mom and me through the park earlier in the summer, Speck, Whitman: All of it came together like many different winds joining forces and spinning into one tornado, so that, sitting there in front of the television, I suddenly felt that everything I knew and loved might be blown away, leaving me alone and vulnerable to threats beyond counting.
Riveted by the spectacle of destruction on the screen, I said, “Everybody’s killing everybody.”
Mother stood watching the TV for a moment and then switched it off. She sat beside me on the sofa. “You okay?”
“Yeah. I’m all right.”
“You sure?”
“It’s just … You know. All this stuff.”
“Bad news.”
“Real bad.”
“So don’t watch it.”
“Yeah, but it’s still happening.”
“And what can you do about it?”
“What do you mean?”
“The war, the riots, the rest of it.”
“I’m just a kid.”
“I’m not a kid,” she said, “and I can’t do anything about it, except sit here and watch it.”
“But you turned it off.”
“Because there’s something else I can do something about.”
“What?”
“Mrs. Lorenzo’s all alone, so I asked her to dinner.”
I shrugged. “That’s nice.”
She turned on the TV but muted the sound. People were looting an electronics store, taking TVs and stereos.
“There’s something you need to understand, Jonah. For every person who’s stealing and setting fires and turning over police cars, there are three or four others in the same neighborhood who want no part of it, who’re more afraid of lawbreakers than they are of the law.”
“Doesn’t look that way.”
“Because the TV only shows you the ones who’re doing it. The news isn’t all the news, Jonah. Not by a long shot. It’s just what reporters want to tell you about. Riots come and go, wars come and go, but under the tumult, day after day, century after century, millions of people are doing nice things for one another, making sacrifices, mostly small things, but it’s all those little kindnesses that hold civilization together, all those people who live quiet lives and never make the news.”
On the silent TV, as the face of an anchorman replaced the riots, I said, “I don’t know about that.”
“Well, I do.”
The anchorman was replaced by a wind-whipped rain-lashed town over which towered a giant funnel cloud that tore a house apart in an instant and sucked the ruins off the face of the Earth.
“When weather’s big news,” my mother said, “it’s a hurricane, a tornado, a tidal wave. Ninety-nine-point-nine percent of the time, Mother Nature isn’t destroying things, she’s nurturing us, but that’s not what gets ratings or sells papers.” She switched off the TV again. “What do you want to be, Jonah—news or nice?”
“Nice, I guess.”
She smiled and pulled me against her and kissed the top of my head. “Then help me get ready for Mrs. Lorenzo. You can start by setting the table for dinner.”
A few minutes later, in the kitchen, as I was putting the plates on the place mats, I said, “Sooner or later, do you think my dad’s going to be news?”
She recognized the implication that I thought him incapable of being nice. “Be respectful, Jonah.”
I figured she knew the answer as well as I did.
17 (#ulink_970cee5e-7b01-59f4-95a8-2131b19c178e)
The following morning, after Mom had left for Woolworth’s, I carried the kitchen trash bag to the alleyway behind the apartment building. The sky had lowered, as smooth and gray as concrete, as if the entire city had been roofed over and enclosed in a structure of fantastical dimensions. The air was still when I stepped outside, but as I tossed away the trash and turned from the Dumpster, a cat’s paw of wind came along the center of the littered alley, leaving most debris undisturbed, batting before it only a sphere about the size of a golf ball. It rolled to a stop in front of me, as the breeze died, and I saw that it was an eyeball. Not a real eye, this was one that might have once been sewn to a stuffed toy.
The orb looked up at me from the pavement. I didn’t remember bending down to retrieve it, but the next thing I knew, I held the object in my right hand. It was made of neatly stitched furry fabric and filled with some spongy material, overall beige, though affixed to it was a circle of white felt that bore a small blue disc at its center. Beige threads, with which it had been attached to some plush toy, trailed from it.
Perhaps because of the recent strange events and disturbing dreams, I was disposed to regard the eye as if it were not merely litter, as if it must have some ominous significance. As it gazed at me from the cupped palm of my right hand, I didn’t realize that the sounds of the city were diminishing, until suddenly I became aware that a profound silence had fallen over the alleyway. For an instant, I thought that I had gone deaf, but then I heard myself say, “What’s happening?” The silence was real, not a failure of perception, as though the metropolis had never been a human habitat, as if it were instead a vast clockwork mechanism that, after centuries of reliable performance, had exhausted the tension of its mainspring.
I glanced toward one end of the alleyway, then toward the other, wondering at the absence of traffic. In the warm August morning, many windows were open in the surrounding apartment buildings, though no voices issued from them, no music, no sounds of activity whatsoever. From the sky: no jet roar, no chatter of police helicopters.
When I turned my attention once more to the faux eye in my hand, I could not dismiss the ludicrous conviction that it could see me. It was inert materials, crafted by human hands, just fabric and thread and a bit of colored plastic, and yet I felt watched—and not just watched but also pondered and analyzed and judged—as if every detail this eye beheld was transmitted to some remote and highly curious entity that, but for me, was the only living creature still afoot in this silent city of stilled pendulums and frozen gears.
As I recount this, at the age of fifty-seven, I remain full of childlike wonder, arising every day to the expectation of mysteries and miracles. When I was nine years old, I wasn’t such an unflagging romantic and delighted believer as I have now become, but that boy possessed the capacity for enchantment and awe that made it possible for time and experience to mold him into me.
I swear that when I closed my fist around that fabric eye, I felt it roll from side to side, as though seeking some gap between my clenched fingers that would provide it with at least a narrow view of me. As if my spinal fluid had been replaced with a refrigerant, a chill climbed vertebra to vertebra from the small of my back to the base of my skull.
Moving toward the nearest Dumpster, remembering what Grandpa Teddy had said about juju, I intended to throw the eye into the trash, but before I could fling it away, I realized that the wiser course might be to retain possession of the thing, so that I would always know its whereabouts and could keep it in a container to ensure it remained blind to my activities. If memory serves me well, this bizarre notion came to me less as a thought than as whispered words in the vaguely familiar voice of a woman, a voice hardly louder than a breath in the inexplicable stillness of the city.
Among the debris in the alleyway lay a discarded empty pint of whiskey and the brown-paper bag in which it was now only partially concealed. I left the bottle, replaced it with the eye, and twisted shut the neck of the bag.
Sound quickly returned to the world, faint at first, but within a few seconds rising to the usual level of a metropolis populated by industrious—or at least restless and bustling—citizens. I stood there for a minute, listening, wondering, no longer chilled but mystified and wary.
After using a key to let myself in through the alley entrance of the apartment building, I decided not to use the back stairs, because I half expected to find Tilton waiting for me on the landing where Mom had put his packed suitcases back in June. I imagined that he might have with him a chloroform-soaked rag with which to subdue me and a steamer trunk in which he would take me away forever.
I followed the first-floor hall to the front stairs and, having totally spooked myself, sprinted two flights before discovering a woman who was halfway up the third flight. She was dressed all in black, her long hair black as well. On the handrail, her pale left hand appeared as well formed as the finest porcelain.
She heard me, paused, and looked back. Blue eyes shading to purple. Pert nose formed to perfection. Generous mouth. Small beauty mark at the high point of the left cheekbone. Here stood the dead girl from my dream, still alive, no throttling necktie cinched around her throat. Fiona Cassidy.
In my surprise, I merely gaped at her, holding the twisted neck of the paper bag as if I might offer her the contents, and no doubt I appeared simpleminded. She neither smiled nor frowned, and without a word, she continued climbing the stairs.
I left the stairwell then, hoping she wouldn’t suspect that I was especially interested in her. I didn’t allow the door to close entirely, but stood in the second-floor hallway, listening to her ascend, and when I thought she had passed the third floor and had continued toward the fourth, I returned to the stairs to follow her as stealthily as possible.
18 (#ulink_020d455d-08c1-51bc-b3a0-d1000597f4bd)
Fiona Cassidy went past the fourth floor, on which I lived with my mother, went past the fifth, where Miss Delvane wrote her magazine articles and researched her rodeo novel, where also Mr. Yoshioka led his quiet and perhaps tragic life in Apartment 5-C. She continued to the sixth and highest floor.
Each floor of our building offered three apartments. Two were of the size in which Mom and I lived. The third offered twice as many square feet as those smaller units and was better suited to families with more than a single child, although they were far from spacious. The superintendent, Mr. Reginald Smaller, occupied an apartment on the ground floor, leaving seventeen available for paying tenants.
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Dean Koontz
No.1 New York Times bestselling author Dean Koontz is at the peak of his storytelling powers with this major new novel – a rich, multi-layered story that moves back and forth across decades and generations as a gifted musician relates the ‘terrible and wonderful’ events that began in his city in 1967, when he was ten.THIS IS THE STORY OF A BOY AND A CITY…Jonah Kirk’s childhood has been punctuated by extraordinary moments – like the time a generous stranger helped him realize his dream of learning the piano. Nothing is more important to him than his family and friends, and the electrifying power of music.But now Jonah has a terrifying secret. And it sets him on a collision course with a group of dangerous people who will change his life forever.For one bright morning, a single earth-shattering event will show Jonah that in his city, good is entwined with malice, and sometimes the dark side of humanity triumphs. But it will also teach him that courage and honour are found in the most unexpected places, and the way forward lies buried deep inside the heart.If he can just survive to find it…
THE CITY
DEAN KOONTZ
Copyright (#ulink_44023c49-4efa-544c-8299-5f7592d0f98a)
Harper
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2014
First published in the USA in 2014 by Bantam Books,
an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group,
A division of Random House, Inc., New York.
Copyright © Dean Koontz 2014
Cover design layout © HarperCollinsPublishers 2014
Cover photographs © Mark Mahaney / Plainpicture (tower); Andy Roberts / Getty Images (feather); Shutterstock.com (http://www.shutterstock.com) (moon)
Dean Koontz asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
Text design by Virginia Norey
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Source ISBN: 9780007520282
Ebook Edition © July 2014 ISBN: 9780007520275
Version: 2015-12-31
Dedication (#ulink_2104c267-6dea-5981-aa87-02cebbaae60f)
This novel is dedicated,
with affection and gratitude,
to Jane Johnson,
who is one continent
and one sea away.
And to Florence Koontz
and Mildred Stefko,
who are one world away.
Hold every moment sacred. Give each clarity and meaning, each the weight of thine awareness, each its true and due fulfillment.
—Thomas Mann, The Beloved Returns
Contents
Cover (#u9bfd1782-978d-5ca8-be1e-f72c8f78d503)
Title Page (#u7f5f3e4d-144d-563a-b3c6-6114e253dae9)
Copyright (#u5180f224-0b46-5ca3-aa62-7aa6317f5431)
Dedication (#u36db6b5a-b8c8-5e15-a8f5-1e9de215a7c8)
Epigraph (#u6b3bf1c8-4a17-5fe8-9d4d-0f8b80eede74)
Prelude (#uf1e759ee-1f9c-587d-9073-a328d85b839a)
Chapter 1 (#u98c90a83-3aab-5245-b42e-b0bf118883b3)
Chapter 2 (#u2eabd28c-eba9-5b48-b4c7-27a1fb1668b4)
Chapter 3 (#u5e827bfc-164f-530b-9b46-794e6cfdaa6a)
Chapter 4 (#ud398e82d-bad9-53d7-9a57-fc79155d2479)
Chapter 5 (#u4d4bd3e2-bf97-5791-9a59-69ffe18a9cd1)
Chapter 6 (#u0cfff204-fa7f-53c5-9c68-0f421c02bdee)
Chapter 7 (#u2fe7fbb0-28b6-59f4-9dab-e7bdfdd629c8)
Chapter 8 (#u3d4059cb-c65c-5ffd-a687-f8327690f289)
Chapter 9 (#uf26c4956-b172-584f-aeee-4326851fc24f)
Chapter 10 (#u14ab53dd-68e6-597d-a953-3725ec999439)
Chapter 11 (#u261a4662-9ab5-5791-b32b-3f13212eaf88)
Chapter 12 (#ua3384965-8390-5543-b5bf-85a4662b1927)
Chapter 13 (#u9b73fdb6-1659-5619-977a-6b1f92893977)
Chapter 14 (#u7881be9b-7f70-55fc-b9ee-26234e5bdbe5)
Chapter 15 (#u380ace20-0873-52ca-a3ff-f08d4252ef2d)
Chapter 16 (#uea7bd516-bfdb-55fe-a15a-3fcab948c9a4)
Chapter 17 (#uca6bda38-dbae-5f1e-af5f-ff60c77d9de2)
Chapter 18 (#u236fe859-40ca-5aa5-a09f-b071257be1cf)
Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 25 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 26 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 27 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 28 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 29 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 30 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 31 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 32 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 33 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 34 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 35 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 36 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 37 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 38 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 39 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 40 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 41 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 42 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 43 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 44 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 45 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 46 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 47 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 48 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 49 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 50 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 51 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 52 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 53 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 54 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 55 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 56 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 57 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 58 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 59 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 60 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 61 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 62 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 63 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 64 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 65 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 66 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 67 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 68 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 69 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 70 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 71 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 72 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 73 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 74 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 75 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 76 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 77 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 78 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 79 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 80 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 81 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 82 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 83 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 84 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 85 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 86 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 87 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 88 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 89 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 90 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 91 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 92 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 93 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 94 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 95 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 96 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 97 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 98 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 99 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 100 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 101 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 102 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 103 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 104 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 105 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 106 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 107 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 108 (#litres_trial_promo)
About Dean Koontz (#litres_trial_promo)
By Dean Koontz (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Prelude (#ulink_09118102-f1ab-5975-9a02-c2d9fc817cae)
Malcolm gives me a tape recorder.
He says, “You’ve got to talk your life.”
“I’d rather live the now than talk about the was.”
Malcolm says, “Not all of it. Just the … you know.”
“I’m to talk about the you know?”
Malcolm says, “People need to hear it.”
“What people?”
Malcolm says, “Everybody. These are sad times.”
“I can’t change the times.”
Malcolm says, “It’s a sad world. Lift it a little.”
“You want me to leave out all the dark stuff?”
Malcolm says, “No, man. You need the dark stuff.”
“Oh, I don’t need it. Not me.”
Malcolm says, “The dark makes the light stuff brighter.”
“So when I’m done talking about the you know—then what?”
Malcolm says, “You make it a book.”
“You going to read this book?”
Malcolm says, “Mostly. Parts of it I wouldn’t be able to see clear enough to read.”
“What if I read those parts to you?”
Malcolm says, “If you’re able to see the words, I’d listen.”
“By then I’ll be able. Talking it the first time is what will kill me.”
1 (#ulink_775d66a3-c798-52f4-9f89-6ecbb4e6e979)
My name is Jonah Ellington Basie Hines Eldridge Wilson Hampton Armstrong Kirk. From as young as I can remember, I loved the city. Mine is a story of love reciprocated. It is the story of loss and hope, and of the strangeness that lies just beneath the surface tension of daily life, a strangeness infinite fathoms in depth.
The streets of the city weren’t paved with gold, as some immigrants were told before they traveled half the world to come there. Not all the young singers or actors, or authors, became stars soon after leaving their small towns for the bright lights, as perhaps they thought they would. Death dwelt in the metropolis, as it dwelt everywhere, and there were more murders there than in a quiet hamlet, much tragedy, and moments of terror. But the city was as well a place of wonder, of magic dark and light, magic of which in my eventful life I had much experience, including one night when I died and woke and lived again.
2 (#ulink_774cfdcb-b3ce-58a4-a497-980e435f82d5)
When I was eight, I would meet the woman who claimed she was the city, though she wouldn’t make that assertion for two more years. She said that more than anything, cities are people. Sure, you need to have the office buildings and the parks and the nightclubs and the museums and all the rest of it, but in the end it’s the people—and the kind of people they are—who make a city great or not. And if a city is great, it has a soul of its own, one spun up from the threads of the millions of souls who have lived there in the past and live there now.
The woman said this city had an especially sensitive soul and that for a long time it had wondered what life must be like for the people who lived in it. The city worried that in spite of all it had to offer its citizens, it might be failing too many of them. The city knew itself better than any person could know himself, knew all of its sights and smells and sounds and textures and secrets, but it didn’t know what it felt like to be human and live in those thousands of miles of streets. And so, the woman said, the soul of the city took human form to live among its people, and the form it took was her.
The woman who was the city changed my life and showed me that the world is a more mysterious place than you would imagine if your understanding of it was formed only or even largely by newspapers and magazines and TV—or now the Internet. I need to tell you about her and some terrible things and wonderful things and amazing things that happened, related to her, and how I am still haunted by them.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. I tend to do that. Any life isn’t just one story; it’s thousands of them. So when I try to tell one of my own, I sometimes go down an alleyway when I should take the main street, or if the story is fourteen blocks long, I sometimes start on block four and have to backtrack to make sense.
Also, I’m not tapping this out on a keyboard, and I tend to ramble when I talk, like now into this recorder. My friend Malcolm says not to call it rambling, to call it oral history. That sounds pretentious, as though I’m as certain as certain can be that I’ve achieved things that ensure I’ll go down in history. Nevertheless, maybe that’s the best term. Oral history. As long as you understand it just means I’m sitting here shooting off my mouth. When someone types it out from the tapes, then I’ll edit to spare the reader all the you-knows and uhs and dead-end sentences, also to make myself sound smarter than I really am. Anyway, I must talk instead of type, because I have the start of arthritis in my fingers, nothing serious yet, but since I’m a piano man and nothing else, I have to save my knuckles for music.
Malcolm says I must be a closet pessimist, the way I so often say, “Nothing serious yet.” If I feel a phantom pain in one leg or the other and Malcolm asks why I keep massaging my calf, I’ll say, “Just this weird thing, nothing serious yet.” He thinks I’m convinced it’s a deep-vein blood clot that’ll break loose and blow out my lungs or brain later in the day, though that never crossed my mind. I just say those three words to reassure my friends, those people I worry about when they have the flu or a dizzy spell or a pain in the calf, because I’d feel relieved if they reassured me by saying, “Nothing serious yet.”
The last thing I am is a closet pessimist. I’m an optimist and always have been. Life’s given me no reason to expect the worst. As long as I’ve loved the city, which is as long as I can remember, I have been an optimist.
I was already an optimist when all this happened that I’m telling you about. Although I’ll reverse myself now and then to give you some background, this particular story really starts rolling in 1967, when I was ten, the year the woman said she was the city. By June of that year, I had moved with my mom into Grandpa’s house. My mother, whose name was Sylvia, was a singer. Grandpa’s name was Teddy Bledsoe, never just Ted, rarely Theodore. Grandpa Teddy was a piano man, my inspiration.
The house was a good place, with four rooms downstairs and four up, one and three-quarter baths. The piano stood in the big front room, and Grandpa played it every day, even though he performed four nights a week at the hotel and did background music three afternoons at the department store, in their fanciest couture department, where a dress might cost as much as he earned in a month at both jobs and a fur coat might be priced as much as a new Chevy. He said he always took pleasure in playing, but when he played at home, it was only for pleasure.
“If you’re going to keep the music in you, Jonah, you’ve got to play a little bit every day purely for pleasure. Otherwise, you’ll lose the joy of it, and if you lose the joy, you won’t sound good to those who know piano—or to yourself.”
Outside, behind the house, a concrete patio bordered a small yard, and in the front, a porch overlooked a smaller yard, where this enormous maple tree turned as red as fire in the autumn. And when the leaves fell, they were like enormous glowing embers on the grass. You might say it was a lower-middle-class neighborhood, I guess, although I never thought in such terms back then and still don’t. Grandpa Teddy didn’t believe in categorizing, in labeling, in dividing people with words, and neither do I.
The world was changing in 1967, though of course it always does. Once the neighborhood was Jewish, and then it went Polish Catholic. Mr. and Mrs. Stein, who had moved from the house but still owned it, rented to my grandparents in 1963, when I was six, and sold it to them two years later. They were the first black people to live in that neighborhood. He said there were problems at the start, of the kind you might expect, but it never got so bad they wanted to move.
Grandpa attributed their staying power to three things. First, they kept to themselves unless invited. Second, he played piano free for some events at Saint Stanislaus Hall, next to the church where many in the neighborhood attended Mass. Third, my grandma, Anita, was secretary to Monsignor McCarthy.
Grandpa was modest, but I won’t be modest on his behalf. He and Grandma didn’t have much trouble also because they had about them an air of royalty. She was tall, and he was taller, and they carried themselves with quiet pride. I used to like to watch them, how they walked, how they moved with such grace, how he helped her into her coat and opened doors for her and how she always thanked him. They dressed well, too. Even at home, Grandpa wore suit pants and a white shirt and suspenders, and when he played the piano or sat down for dinner, he always wore a tie. When I was with them, they were as warm and amusing and loving as any grandparents ever, but I was at all times aware, with each of them, that I was in a Presence.
In April 1967, my grandma fell dead at work from a cerebral embolism. She was just fifty-two. She was so vibrant, I never imagined that she could die. I don’t think anyone else did, either. When she passed away suddenly, those who knew her were grief-stricken but also shocked. They harbored unexpressed anxiety, as if the sun had risen in the west and set in the east, suggesting a potential apocalypse if anyone dared to make reference to that development, as if the world would go on safely turning only if everyone conspired not to remark upon its revolutionary change.
At the time, my mom and I were living in an apartment downtown, a fourth-floor walk-up with two street-facing windows in the living room; in the kitchen and my little bedroom, there were views only of the sooty brick wall of the adjacent building, crowding close. She had a gig singing three nights a week in a blues club and worked the lunch counter at Woolworth’s five days, waiting for her big break. I was almost ten and not without some street smarts, but I must admit that for a time, I thought that she would be equally happy if things broke either way—a gig singing in bigger and better joints or a job as a waitress in a high-end steakhouse, whichever came first.
We went to stay with Grandpa for the funeral and a few days after, so he wouldn’t be alone. Until then, I’d never seen him cry. He took off work for a week, and he kept mostly to his bedroom. But I sometimes found him sitting in the window seat at the end of the second-floor hallway, just staring out at the street, or in his armchair in the living room, an unread newspaper folded on the lamp table beside him.
When I tried to talk to him, he would lift me into his lap and say, “Let’s just be quiet now, Jonah. We’ll have years to talk over everything.”
I was small for my age and thin, and he was a big man, but I felt greatly gentled in those moments. The quiet was different from other silences, deep and sweet and peaceful even if sad. A few times, with my head resting against his broad chest, listening to his heart, I fell asleep, though I was past the age for regular naps.
He wept that week only when he played the piano in the front room. He didn’t make any sounds in his weeping; I guess he was too dignified for sobbing, but the tears started with the first notes and kept coming as long as he played, whether ten minutes or an hour.
While I’m still giving you background here, I should tell you about his musicianship. He played with good taste and distinction, and he had a tremendous left hand, the best I’ve ever heard. In the hotel where he worked, there were two dining rooms. One was French and formal and featured a harpist, and the décor either made you feel elegant or made you ill. The second was an Art Deco jewel in shades of blue and silver with lots of glossy-black granite and black lacquer, more of a supper club, where the food was solidly American. Grandpa played the Deco room, providing background piano between seven and nine o’clock, mostly American-standard ballads and some friskier Cole Porter numbers; between nine and midnight, three sidemen joined him, and the combo pumped it up to dance music from the 1930s and ’40s. Grandpa Teddy sure could swing the keyboard.
Those days right after his Anita died, he played music I’d never heard before, and to this day I don’t know the names of any of those numbers. They made me cry, and I went to other rooms and tried not to listen, but you couldn’t stop listening because those melodies were so mesmerizing, melancholy but irresistible.
After a week, Grandpa returned to work, and my mom and I went home to the downtown walk-up. Two months later, in June, when my mom’s life blew up, we went to live with Grandpa Teddy full-time.
3 (#ulink_9bacf370-2f05-5160-b662-74220869fa6b)
Sylvia Kirk, my mother, was twenty-nine when her life blew up, and it wasn’t the first time. Back then, I could see that she was pretty, but I didn’t realize how young she was. Only ten myself, I felt anyone over twenty must be ancient, I guess, or I just didn’t think about it at all. To have your life blow up four times before you’re thirty would take something out of anyone, and I think it drained from my mom just enough hope that she never quite built her confidence back to what it once had been.
When it happened, school had been out for weeks. Sunday was the only day that the community center didn’t have summer programs for kids, and I was staying with Mrs. Lorenzo that late afternoon and evening. Mrs. Lorenzo, once thin, was now a merry tub of a woman and a fabulous cook. She lived on the second floor and accepted a little money to look after me when there were no other options, primarily when my mom sang at Slinky’s, the blues joint, three nights a week. Sunday wasn’t one of those three, but Mom had gone to a big-money neighborhood for a celebration dinner, where she was going to sign a contract to sing five nights a week at what she described as “a major venue,” a swanky nightclub that no one would ever have called a joint. The club owner, William Murkett, had contacts in the recording industry, too, and there was talk about putting together a three-girl backup group to work with her on some numbers at the club and to cut a demo or two at a studio. It looked like the big break wouldn’t be a steakhouse waitress job.
We expected her to come for me after eleven o’clock, but it was only seven when she rang Mrs. Lorenzo’s bell. I could tell right off that something must be wrong, and Mrs. Lorenzo could, too. But my mom always said she didn’t wash her laundry in public, and she was dead serious about that. When I was little, I didn’t understand what she meant, because she did, too, wash her laundry in the communal laundry room in the basement, which had to be as public as you could wash it, except maybe right out in the street. That night, she said a migraine had just about knocked her flat, though I’d never heard of her having one before. She said that she hadn’t been able to stay for the dinner with her new boss. While she paid Mrs. Lorenzo, her lips were pressed tight, and there was an intensity, a power, in her eyes, so that I thought she might set anything ablaze just by staring at it too long.
When we got up to our apartment and she closed the door to the public hall, she said, “We’re going to pack up all our things, our clothes and things. Daddy’s coming for us, and we’re going to live with him from now on. Won’t you like living with your grandpa?”
His house was nicer than our apartment, and I said so. At ten, I had no control of my tongue, and I also said, “Why’re we moving? Is Grandpa too sad to be alone? Do you really have a migraine?”
Instead of answering me, she said, “Come on, honey, I’ll help you pack your things, make sure nothing’s left behind.”
I had my own bright-green pressboard suitcase that pretty much held all my clothes, though we needed to use a plastic department store shopping bag for the overflow.
As we were packing, she said, “Don’t be half a man when you grow up, Jonah. Be a good man like your grandpa.”
“Well, that’s who I want to be. Who else would I want to be but like Grandpa?”
Not daring to put it more directly, what I meant was that I had no desire to grow up to be like my father. He walked out on us when I was eight months old, and he came back when I was eight years old, but then he walked out on us again before my ninth birthday. The man didn’t have a commitment problem; the word wasn’t in his vocabulary. In those days, I worried he might come back again, which would have been a calamity, considering all his problems. Among other things, he wasn’t able to love anyone but himself.
Still, Mom had a weak spot for him. If he showed up, she might go with him again, which is why I didn’t say what was in my heart.
“You’ve met Harmon Jessup,” she said. “You remember?”
“Sure. He owns Slinky’s, where you sing.”
“You know I quit there for this other job. But I don’t want you thinking your mother’s flaky.”
“Well, you’re not, so how could I think it?”
Folding my T-shirts into the shopping bag, she said, “I want you to know I quit for another reason, too, and a good one. Harmon just kept getting … way too close. He wanted more from me than just my singing.” She put away the last T-shirt and looked at me. “You know what I mean, Jonah?”
“I think I know.”
“I think you do, and I’m sorry you do. Anyway, if he didn’t get what he wanted, I wasn’t going to have a job there anymore.”
Never in my life, child or man, have I been hotheaded. I think I have more of my mother’s genes than my father’s, probably because he was too incomplete a person to have enough to give. But that night in my room, I got very angry, very fast, and I said, “I hate Harmon. If I was bigger, I’d go hurt him.”
“No, you wouldn’t.”
“I darn sure would.”
“Hush yourself, sweetie.”
“I’d shoot him dead.”
“Don’t say such a thing.”
“I’d cut his damn throat and shoot him dead.”
She came to me and stood looking down, and I figured she must be deciding on my punishment for talking such trash. The Bledsoes didn’t tolerate street talk or jive talk, or trash talk. Grandpa Teddy often said, “In the beginning was the word. Before all else, the word. So we speak as if words matter, because they do.” Anyway, my mom stood there, frowning down at me, but then her expression changed and all the hard edges sort of melted from her face. She dropped to her knees and put her arms around me and held me tight.
I felt awkward and embarrassed that I had been talking tough when we both knew that if skinny little me went gunning for Harmon Jessup, he’d blow me off my feet just by laughing in my face. I felt embarrassed for her, too, because she didn’t have anyone better than me to watch over her.
She looked me in the eye and said, “What would the sisters think of all this talk about cutting throats and shooting?”
Because Grandma worked in Monsignor McCarthy’s office, I was fortunate to be able to attend Saint Scholastica School for a third the usual tuition, and the nuns who ran it were tough ladies. If anyone could teach Harmon a lesson he’d never forget, it was Sister Agnes or Sister Catherine.
I said, “You won’t tell them, will you?”
“Well, I really should. And I should tell your grandpa.”
Grandpa’s father had been a barber, and Grandpa’s mother had been a beautician, and they had run their house according to a long set of rules. When their children occasionally decided that those rules were really nothing more than suggestions, my great-grandfather demonstrated a second use for the strap of leather that he used to strop his straight razors. Grandpa Teddy didn’t resort to corporal punishment, as his father did, but his look of extreme disappointment stung bad enough.
“I won’t tell them,” my mother said, “because you’re such a good kid. You’ve built up a lot of credit at the First Bank of Mom.”
After she kissed my forehead and got up, we went into her room to continue packing. The apartment came furnished, and it included a bedroom vanity with a three-part mirror. She trusted me to take everything out of the many little drawers and put all of it in this small square carrier that she called a train case, while she packed her clothes in two large suitcases and three shopping bags.
She wasn’t finished explaining why we had to move. I realized many years later that she always felt she had to justify herself to me. She never did need to do that, because I always knew her heart, how good it was, and I loved her so much that sometimes it hurt when I’d lie awake at night worrying about her.
Anyway, she said, “Honey, don’t you ever get to thinking that one kind of people is better than another kind. Harmon Jessup is rich compared to me, but he’s poor compared to William Murkett.”
In addition to owning the glitzy nightclub where she’d been offered five nights a week, Murkett had several other enterprises.
“Harmon is black,” she continued, “Murkett is white. Harmon had nearly no school. Murkett went to some upper-crust university. Harmon is a dirty old tomcat and proud of it. Murkett, he’s married with kids of his own and he’s got a good reputation. But under all those differences, there’s no difference. They’re the same. Each of them is just half a man. Don’t you ever be just half a man, Jonah.”
“No, ma’am. I won’t be.”
“You be true to people.”
“I will.”
“You’ll be tempted.”
“I won’t.”
“You will. Everyone is.”
“You aren’t,” I said.
“I was. I am.”
She finished packing, and I said, “I guess then you don’t have a job, that’s why we’re going to Grandpa’s.”
“I’ve still got Woolworth’s, baby.”
I knew there were times when she cried, but she never did in front of me. Right then, her eyes were as clear and direct and as certain as Sister Agnes’s eyes. In fact, she was a lot like Sister Agnes, except that Sister Agnes couldn’t sing a note and my mom was way prettier.
She said, “I’ve got Woolworth’s and a good voice and time. And I’ve got you. I’ve got everything I need.”
I thought of my father then, how he kept leaving us, how we wouldn’t have been in that fix if he’d kept even half his promises, but I couldn’t vent. My mom had never dealt out as much punishment as the one time I said that I hated him, and though I didn’t think I should be ashamed for having said it, I was ashamed just the same.
The day would come when despising him would be the least of it, when he would flat-out terrify me.
We had no sooner finished packing than the doorbell rang, and it was Grandpa Teddy, come to take us home with him.
4 (#ulink_4ee29e9c-0685-58d1-9310-6ddc07000a0d)
The first time my mother’s life fell apart was when she found out that she was pregnant with me. She’d been accepted into the music program at Oberlin, and she had nearly a full scholarship; but before she could even start her first year, she learned I was on the way. She said she really didn’t want to go to Oberlin, that it was her parents’ idea, that she wanted to fly on what talent she had, not on a lot of music theory that might stifle her. She wanted instead to work her way from one dinky club to another less dinky and steadily up, up, up, getting experience. She claimed I came along just in time to save her from Oberlin, and maybe I believed that when I was a kid.
She’d taken a year off between high school and college, and her father had used a connection to get her an age exemption and a gig in a piano bar, because she was a piano man, too. In fact, she was good on saxophone, primo on clarinet, and learning guitar fast. When God ladled out talent, He spilled the whole bucket on Sylvia Bledsoe. The bar was also a restaurant, and the cook—not the chef, the cook—was Tilton Kirk. He was twenty-four, six years her senior, and each time she took a break, he was right there with the charm, which, as far as I’m concerned, he got from a different source than the one that gave my mom her talent.
He was a handsome man and articulate, and as sure as he knew his name, he knew that he was going places in this world. All you had to do was say hello, and he’d tell you where he was going: first from cook to chef, and then into a restaurant of his own by thirty, and then two or three restaurants by the time he was forty, however many he wanted. He was a gifted cook, and he gave young Sylvia Bledsoe all kinds of tasty dishes refined to what he called the Kirk style. He gave her me, too, though it turned out that taking care of children wasn’t part of the Kirk style.
To be fair, he knew she’d have the baby, that the Bledsoes would not tolerate anything else. He did the right thing, he married her, and after that he pretty reliably did the wrong thing.
I was born on June 15, 1957, which was when the Count Basie band became the first Negro band ever to perform in the Starlight Room of the Waldorf-Astoria hotel in New York City. Negro was the word in those days. On July 6, tennis star Althea Gibson, another Negro, won the All-England title at Wimbledon, also a first. And on August 29, the Civil Rights Act, proposed by President Eisenhower the previous year, was finally voted into law by the congress; soon thereafter, Ike would start using the national guard to desegregate schools. By comparison, my entrance into the world wasn’t big news, except to my mom and me.
Trying to ingratiate himself with Sylvia’s parents, well aware of Grandpa Teddy’s musical heroes, my father chose to name me Jonah Ellington Basie Hines Eldridge Wilson Hampton Armstrong Kirk. Even all these years later, almost everyone has heard of Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Earl “Fatha” Hines, Lionel Hampton, and Louis Armstrong. Time doesn’t treat all talent equally, however, and Roy Eldridge is known these days pretty much only to aficionados of big band music. He was one of the greatest trumpeters of all time. Electrifying. He played with Gene Krupa’s legendary band through the early war years, when Anita O’Day was changing what everyone thought a girl singer ought to be. The Wilson in my name is for Teddy Wilson, whom Benny Goodman called the greatest musician in dance music of the day. He played with Goodman, then started his own band, which didn’t last long, and then he played largely in a sextet. If you can find any of the twenty sides that he recorded with his band, you’ll hear a piano man of incomparable elegance.
With all those names to live up to, I sometimes wished I’d been born just Jonah Kirk. But I guess because I was half Bledsoe, anyone who ever admired my grandpa—which was everyone who knew him—would have looked at me with some doubt that I could ever shape myself into a man like him.
The day I was born, Grandpa Teddy and Grandma Anita came to the hospital to see me first through a window in the nursery and then in my mother’s arms when I was brought to her room. My father was there, as well, and eager to tell Grandpa my full name. Although I was the center of attention, I have no memory of the moment, maybe because I was already impatient to start piano lessons.
According to my mom, the revelation of my many names didn’t go quite like my father intended. Grandpa Teddy stood bedside, nodding in recognition each time Tilton—who was cautious enough to keep the bed between them—revealed a name. But when the final name had been spoken, Grandpa traded glances with Grandma, and then he frowned and stared at the floor as if he noticed something offensive down there that didn’t belong in a hospital.
Now, you should know Grandpa had a smile that could melt an ice block and leave the water steaming. And even when he wasn’t smiling, his face was so pleasant that the shyest of children often grinned on first sight of him and walked right up to him, a stranger, to say hello to this friendly giant. But when he frowned and when you knew that you might be the reason he frowned, his face made you think of judgment day and of whatever pathetic good deeds you might be able to cite to balance the offenses you had committed. He didn’t look furious, didn’t even scowl, merely frowned, and at once an uneasy silence fell upon the room. No one feared Grandpa Teddy’s anger, because few people if any had ever seen it. If you evoked that frown, what you feared was his disapproval, and when you learned that you had disappointed him, you realized that you needed his approval no less than you needed air, water, and food.
Although Grandpa never put it in words for me, one thing I learned from him was that being admired gives you more power than being feared.
Anyway, there in the hospital room, Grandpa Teddy frowned at the floor so long, my father reached out for my mother’s hand, and she let him hold it while she cradled me in one arm.
Finally Grandpa looked up, considered his son-in-law, and said quietly, “There were so many big bands, swing bands, scores of them, maybe hundreds, no two alike. So much energy, so much great music. Some people might say it was swing music as much as anything that kept this country in a winning mood during the war. You know, back then I played with a couple of the biggest and best, also with a couple not as big but good. So many memories, so many people, quite a time. I did admire all those names between Jonah and Kirk, I did very much admire them. I loved them. But Benny Goodman, he was as good as any and a stand-up guy. Charlie Barnet, Woody Herman, Harry James, Glenn Miller. Artie Shaw, for Heaven’s sake. The Artie Shaw. ‘Begin the Beguine,’ ‘Indian Love Call,’ ‘Back Bay Shuffle.’ There are so many names to reckon with from those days, this poor child would need the entire sheet of stationery just for his letterhead.”
My mom got the point, but my father didn’t. “But, Teddy, sir, all those names—they aren’t our kind.”
“Well, yes,” Grandpa said, “they’re not directly in the bar and restaurant business, like you are, but their work has put so many people in the mood to celebrate that they’ve had an impact on your trade. And they most surely are my kind and Sylvia’s kind, aren’t they, Anita?”
Grandma said, “Oh, yes. They’re my kind, too. I love musicians. I married one. I gave birth to one. And, dear, you forgot the Dorsey brothers.”
“I didn’t forget them,” Grandpa said. “My mouth just went dry from naming all those names. Freddy Martin, too.”
“That tenor sax of his, the sweetest tone ever,” Grandma said.
“Claude Thornhill.”
“The best of the best bands,” she declared. “And he was one funny man, Claude was.”
By then, my father got the message, but he didn’t want to hear it. He had a big chip on his shoulder about race, and he probably had good reason, probably a list of good reasons. Nevertheless, for the sake of family harmony, maybe he should at least have added Thornhill and Goodman to my name, but he couldn’t bring himself to do that.
He said, “Hey, look at the time. Gotta get to the restaurant.” After he kissed my mom and kissed me, he hugged Anita, nodded at Grandpa Teddy, said, “Sir,” and skedaddled.
So that was my first family gathering on my first day in the world. A little tense.
The second time that my mother’s life fell apart was eight months later, when my father walked out on us. He said that he needed to focus on his career. He couldn’t sleep with a crying baby in the next room. He claimed to have a potential backer for a restaurant, so he might be able to go from cook to chef in his own place, and even if it would be a hole in the wall, he would be moving up faster than originally planned. He really needed to stay focused, do his work at the restaurant and pursue this new opportunity. He promised he’d be back. He didn’t say when. He told her he loved us. It was always surprisingly easy for him to say that. He promised to send money every week. He kept that promise for four weeks. By then, my mom had gotten the job at Woolworth’s lunch counter and her first singing gig at a dump called the Jazz Cave, so it was a difficult time, but only difficult, nothing serious yet.
5 (#ulink_b9f2ded8-0e6f-54ef-964e-db0fea4f7f07)
I’m not going to be able to talk my life month by month, year by year. Instead, I’ll have to use this recorder as if it were a time machine, hop around, back and forth, so maybe you’ll see the uncanny way that things connected, which wasn’t apparent to me as I came to my future one day at a time.
Here is where I should tell you a little about the woman who kept showing up in my life at key moments. I never once saw her coming. She was just always there like sudden sunshine breaking through clouds. The first time was a day in April 1966, when I tried to hate the piano because I thought I’d never get to be a piano man.
I was nearly nine, and Grandma Anita still had a year to live. The previous December, my father had come back to stay with us again in the walk-up. Mom never divorced him. She considered it, even though she knew—and believed—that marriage was a sacrament. But she claimed that when she sang in places like the Jazz Cave and Brass Tacks and Slinky’s, she could more successfully discourage come-ons from customers and employees if she could honestly say, “I’ve got a husband, a baby boy, and Jesus. So as handsome as you are, I’m sure you can see I have no need of another man in my life.” According to Mom, just husband or child or Jesus alone wouldn’t have kept the most determined suitors at bay; with them, she needed the three-punch.
In the nearly eight years he’d been gone, Tilton Kirk hadn’t found a backer, hadn’t opened his own place, but he had left the restaurant where he worked as a cook to take the chef position in a somewhat higher-class joint. He was earning less because every year the owner compensated him also with five percent of the stock in the business, so that once he had accumulated thirty-five percent, he could buy the other sixty-five at an already agreed-upon price, using his stock to swing the bank loan.
With him at home again, my mom was more happy than not, but I was all kinds of miserable. The man really didn’t know how to be a dad. Sometimes he was a hard-nosed disciplinarian dealing out a lot more punishment than I deserved. At other times he’d want to be my best pal ever, hang out together, except that he didn’t know what kind of hanging out kids think is cool. Strolling the aisles of a restaurant-supply store, obsessing over different kinds of potato peelers and pâté molds, just doesn’t thrill a child. Neither does sitting on a barstool sipping a Coke while your old man drinks beer and swaps nagging-wife jokes with a stranger.
The worst was that by then I wanted to take piano lessons, and my father refused to let it happen. I had noodled the keyboard at Grandpa Teddy’s house, and I understood the layout on a gut level, the way Jackie Robinson could read a ball in flight. But Tilton said I was too little yet, my hands too small, and when my mom disagreed and said I was big enough, Tilton said we couldn’t afford the lessons yet. Soon but not yet, which meant never.
Grandpa offered to drive me over to his place and back a few times a week and give me lessons himself. But my father said, “It’s too far to run a little kid back and forth all the time, Syl. And we don’t have a piano here for him to practice between lessons. We’ll get a house soon, and then he can have a piano, and it’ll all make sense. Anyway, honey, you know I’m not your old man’s favorite human being. It breaks my heart how maybe he’ll poison the boy’s mind against me. I know Teddy wouldn’t do it on purpose, Syl, he’s not a mean man, but he’ll be poisoning without even knowing it. Soon we’ll rent a house, soon, and then it’ll make sense.”
So I was sitting on the stoop in front of our building, such a sullen look on my face that most passersby glanced at me and at once away, as though I, only eight, might try to stomp them in a fit of mean. It was an unseasonably warm day for April, the air so still and humid that a feather, cast off by a bird in flight, sank like a stone in water to the pavement in front of me. As sudden as it was brief, a wind came along, lifted the feather, spun dust and litter out of the gutter, and whirled all of it up the steps and over me. I sneezed and spat away the feather that stuck to my lips.
As I wiped at my eyes, I heard a woman say, “Hey, Ducks, how’s the world treating you?”
My mom had a couple of friends who were professional dancers in musicals that were always being talked about by people who loved the theater, and though this woman didn’t look like any of them, she did look like a dancer. Tall and slim and leggy, with smooth mahogany skin, she came up the steps so easy, with so little movement, you’d have thought she must be on an escalator. She wore a primrose-pink lightweight suit, a white blouse, and a pink pillbox hat with a fan of gray feathers along one side, as though dressed for lunch in some place where the waiters wore tuxedos.
In spite of her fine outfit and air of elegance, she sat beside me on the stoop. “Ducks, it’s rude not to answer when spoken to, and you look like a young man who’d rather poke himself in the eye than be rude.”
“The world stinks,” I declared.
“Certain things in the world stink, Ducks, but not the whole world. In fact, most of it smells wonderfully sweet. You yourself smell a little like limes and salt, which reminds me of a margarita, which isn’t a bad thing. Do you like my perfume? It’s French and expensive.”
The sweet-rose fragrance was subtle. “It’s all right, I guess.”
“Well, Ducks, if you don’t like it, I’ll go straight home this minute and take the bottle off my dresser and throw it out a window and let the alley reek until the next rain.”
“My name isn’t Ducks.”
“I’d be stunned if it was, Ducks. Parents saddle their children with things like Hortense and Percival, but I’ve never known one to name them after waterfowl.”
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“What do you think it is, Ducks?”
“Don’t you know your own name?”
“I just sometimes wonder what name I look like, so I ask.”
She was pretty. Even an eight-year-old boy knows a pretty girl when he sees her, and beauty lifts the heart no matter what your age. Her perfume smelled all right, too.
I said, “Well, I saw this movie on TV about these guys chasing after a treasure down in the Caribbean. This was way back when there were pirates. What they all wanted was this special pearl, see. Three things made it really, really special. It was large, like as big as a plum. And it wasn’t white or cream-colored or pink, like other pearls. It was black, pure shiny black, but it still had depth like the best pearls all do, so you could see into it, and it was very beautiful. So maybe I think the name you look like is Pearl.”
She cocked her head and sort of smirked at me. “Young man, if you are already this smooth with the ladies, won’t a one of us be safe when you’re all grown up. I am Pearl. There’s no other name I’d want to be. You call me Pearl, Jonah.”
Only hours later would I realize that I’d never told her my name.
“You said there were three special things about this pearl in the movie. Its size and its color and …?”
“Oh, yeah. Well, they said whoever possessed it could never die. It was the secret to immortality.”
“Black, beautiful, and magical. I love being Pearl.”
Two years would pass before she told me that she was the soul of the city made flesh.
“So there you sit, Jonah, as gloomy as if you’re still in the belly of the whale, when in fact it’s a fine spring day. You aren’t being digested by stomach acid, and you don’t need a candle to find your way back up the gullet. Don’t waste a fine spring day, Jonah. There’s not as many of them in a lifetime as you think there will be. What’s dropped your heart into your shoes?”
Maybe she was easy to talk to because she talked so easy. Next thing I knew, I heard myself say, “I want to be a piano man, but it won’t ever happen.”
“If you want to be a piano man, why aren’t you at a piano right this minute, pounding the keys?”
“I don’t have one.”
“That community center you go to when your folks are working and Donata isn’t available—they have a piano.”
Donata was the first name of Mrs. Lorenzo, my sometimes babysitter, so I figured Miss Pearl knew her and was coming to visit.
“I never saw any piano at the community center.”
“Why, sure there is. For a while this man was in charge down there, he didn’t have an ear for piano, it was all just noise to him. He didn’t like loud birds, either, or a certain shade of blue, or the number nine, or Christmas. He put the Christmas tree up on December twenty-fourth and took it down the morning of the twenty-sixth, and the only decoration he’d allow on it was a Santa Claus doll hung by the neck where a star or angel should have been at the top of the tree. He took the nine out of the address above the front door and just left a space between the eight and the four, repainted all the blue rooms, moved the piano down to the basement. Some say he killed and ate Petey, the parrot that used to be in a cage in the card room. But he’s gone now. He didn’t last long. He was run down by a city bus when he jaywalked, but in a short time he did a lot of damage to the center. They can bring the piano up in the freight elevator.”
Loud and belching fumes, a bus went by, and I wondered if it might be the one that ran down the parrot-eater.
When the street grew quieter, I said, “They won’t bring up the piano for a kid like me. Anyway, it’s no good without a teacher.”
“There’ll be a teacher. You go in there tomorrow morning, soon after they open, and see for yourself. Well, this glorious day is slipping away, and I am all dressed up with someplace to go, so I better get there.”
She rose from the stoop and went down the stairs, her high heels making no more noise than a pair of slippers.
I called after her: “I thought you came to visit Mrs. Lorenzo.”
Looking back, Miss Pearl said, “I came to visit you, Ducks.”
She walked away, and I went down to the sidewalk to watch her. With those slim hips and long legs, so tall in all that pink, she resembled a bird herself—not a parrot, an elegant flamingo. I waited for her to glance over her shoulder, and I meant to wave, but she never looked back. She turned left at the corner and was gone.
I raised my hands to my face and sniffed them and detected the faint scent of the lemons that earlier I had helped my mom squeeze for lemonade. I’d been sitting in the sun, and the film of sweat on my arms tasted of salt when I licked, but I couldn’t smell salt.
In the years to come, I would encounter Miss Pearl on several occasions. Now that I’m fifty-seven and looking back, I can see that my life would have been far different—and shorter—if she hadn’t taken an interest in me.
The next morning at the community center, the piano was in the Abigail Louise Thomas Room, which had been named after someone who’d done some good deed for the center back before I was even a gleam in Tilton’s eye. The Steinway was polished and tuned, even prettier than the woman in pink.
One of the center staff, Mrs. Mary O’Toole, was playing Hoagy Carmichael’s “Stardust,” and just then it was the loveliest melody I’d ever heard. She was a nice lady with lively blue eyes, freckles that she said had come all the way from Dublin to decorate her face, and a pageboy cap of red hair shot through with white that an unskilled friend chopped for her, as she disdained beauty parlors. She smiled at me and nodded to the bench, and I sat beside her.
When she finished the piece, she sighed and said, “Isn’t this a hoot, Jonah? Someone took away the spavined old piano in the basement and gave us this brand-spanking-new one and did it all on the sly. I can’t imagine how.”
“Isn’t it the same piano?”
“Oh, it couldn’t be. The lid was warped on that old one, the felt on the hammers moth-eaten, some of the strings broken, others missing. The sostenuto pedal was frozen. It was a fabulous mess. Some awfully clever philanthropist has been at work. I only wish I knew who to thank.”
I didn’t tell her about Miss Pearl. I meant to explain, and I started to speak. Then I thought, if I mentioned the name, it would be a spell-breaker. Come the next day, the Steinway would be back in the basement, as broken down as before, and Mrs. O’Toole would have no memory of playing “Stardust” in the Abigail Louise Thomas Room.
That day I started formal lessons.
6 (#ulink_201ed979-a897-5cbd-8653-63a6752755c5)
That same night, as I lay sleeping in my small room, someone sat on the edge of the bed, and the mattress sagged, and the box springs creaked, and I came half awake, wondering why my mother would visit me at that hour. Before I could fully sit up in the dark, a hand gently pressed me down, and a familiar voice said softly, “Go to sleep, Ducks. Go to sleep now. I have a name for you, a name and a face and a dream. The name is Lucas Drackman and the face is his.”
Strange as the moment was, I nevertheless settled to my pillow and closed my eyes and drifted down through fathoms of sleep. Out of the depths floated a young man’s face, eerily up-lit and starkly shadowed. He was maybe sixteen, seventeen. Hair disarranged, forehead beetling over deep-set eyes open wide and wild in character, hawkish nose, a ripe and almost girlish mouth, blunt chin, pale skin glazed with sweat … Never before and only once again in all my life was a face in a dream so vivid and detailed. Lucas had an air of urgency and anger, but at first there was no nightmare quality to the moment. As a full scene formed around him, I saw his features were revealed by the backwash from a flashlight held low and forward. Lucas took necklaces and brooches and bracelets and rings from a jewelry box, diamonds and pearls, and dropped them into a cloth sack that might have been a pillowcase. In one of those fluid transitions common to dreams, he was no longer at a jewelry box, but in a walk-in closet, stripping currency and a credit card from a wallet that had been left there on a shelf. The Diner’s Club card had been issued to ROBERT W DRACKMAN. Then Lucas was bedside, playing the flashlight beam over the body of a man who apparently had been shot to death in his sleep. Still, I was not afraid. Instead, a deep sadness overcame me. To the dead man, Lucas said, “Hey there, Bob. What’s it like in Hell, Bob? You think now maybe sending me away to a freakin’ military academy was really stupid, Bob? You ignorant, self-righteous son of a bitch.” The flashlight beam found a forty-something woman who must have been awakened by the first rounds that Lucas fired. His mother. She could be no one else, for the possibility of Lucas’s face could be seen in hers. She’d thrown aside the covers and sat up, whereupon she had been shot once in the chest and once in the throat. She’d fallen back against the headboard, blue eyes wide but blind now, mouth hanging open, though she’d probably never had a chance to scream. Lucas called her a vile name, a single word that I have never used and won’t repeat here. A hallway. He walked away, and I did not follow. The light dwindled with him, dwindled and faded, and then a desolate darkness prevailed, and a sadness so keen that tears filled my eyes. She who had conjured a piano into the Abigail Louise Thomas Room spoke again: “Remember him, Ducks. Remember his face and his hateful words. Keep the dream to yourself, don’t tell others who might question or even mock it and lead you to doubt, but always remember it.”
I think I was awake when she spoke those words, but I can’t swear to that. I might have been asleep through all of it, might have dreamed everything, including her entrance into my room, her weight on the edge of the bed, the mattress sagging, the springs creaking. In the darkness, I felt a hand on my brow, such a tender touch. She whispered, “Sleep, you lovely child,” and either I continued sleeping or fell asleep once more.
When I woke with dawn light at my window, I felt that the dream hadn’t been just a fantasy, that it had shown me true things, murders that already had been committed somewhere, at some point in the past. Lying there as the morning brightened, I wondered and doubted and then banished doubt only to embrace it again. But for all of my wondering, I couldn’t answer even one of the many questions with which the experience had left me.
At last, getting out of bed, for a moment I smelled a certain sweetness of roses, identical to Miss Pearl’s perfume, which she had been wearing when she sat beside me on the stoop. But after three breaths, that, too, faded beyond detection, as though I must have imagined it.
7 (#ulink_599b1382-a6c6-591c-a709-13b7d2f98ce8)
The next bit of my story is part hearsay, but I’m sure this is how it went down. My mother would fib to help a child hold on to his innocence, as you’ll see, but I never knew her to tell a serious lie.
I was just over a week away from my ninth birthday, and Grandma Anita had ten months to live. I’d begun piano lessons thanks to Miss Pearl, and my father had been back with us about six months when he messed up big-time. We were still in that fourth-floor walk-up, and he wasn’t bringing home much money because he was getting part of his salary in stock.
Mrs. Lorenzo lived on the second floor, but Mr. Lorenzo hadn’t yet died, and Mrs. Lorenzo was thin and “as pretty as Anna Maria Alberghetti.” Anna Maria was a greatly gifted singer and a misused actress in films and eventually a Broadway star, petite and very beautiful. She won a Tony for Carnival! and played Maria in West Side Story. Although Anna Maria wasn’t as well known as other performers of Italian descent, anytime my mother meant to convey how lovely some Italian woman was, she compared her to Anna Maria Alberghetti. If she thought a man with Italian looks was especially attractive, she always said he was as handsome as Marcello Mastroianni. Anna Maria, yes, but I never understood the Mastroianni business. Anyway, Mr. Lorenzo didn’t want his wife to work, wanted her to raise children, but it turned out he couldn’t father any. So Mrs. Lorenzo ran a sort of unlicensed day care out of their apartment, looking after three little kids at a time, and on occasion me, too, as I’ve said.
When it happened, noonish on the first Tuesday in June, I was at Saint Scholastica, on the last day of the school year, being educated by nuns but dreaming of becoming a piano man.
My mom had left for Woolworth’s lunch counter at 10:30. When she got there, she discovered there had been a small kitchen fire during the breakfast shift. They were shutting down for two days, until repairs could be completed. She came home four hours early.
Because my father worked late nights at the restaurant, he slept from 3:00 A.M. until 11:00. She expected to find him still asleep or at breakfast. But he had showered and gone. She made the bed, and as she was changing from her waitress uniform, she heard Miss Delvane rehearsing her rodeo act up in Apartment 5-B.
Miss Delvane—blond, attractive, a free spirit—had lived above us for three years. She earned a living as a freelance writer of magazine articles and was working on a novel. Sometimes, from her apartment would arise a rhythmic knocking, maybe a little bit like horses’ hooves, gradually escalating in a crescendo, as well as voices muffled and wordless but urgent. On previous occasions, when I wondered about it, my mom said Miss Delvane was practicing her rodeo act. According to my mother, Miss Delvane’s first novel was going to be set in the rodeo, and because she planned eventually to ride in the rodeo as research, she kept a mechanical horse in her apartment to practice. I was five years old when Miss Delvane moved in and only eight when my mom came home from Woolworth’s early, and although I had doubts that a rodeo act was the full explanation, I accepted the basic premise. When I asked about the low groans, my mom always said it was a recording of a bull, because you had to lasso bulls or even wrestle them if you were in a rodeo, and Miss Delvane played the record to put her in the mood when she rode her mechanical horse. I had more questions than a quiz show, but I never asked Miss Delvane one of them, because Mom said the poor woman was embarrassed about how long it was taking her to get her rodeo act together.
Miss Delvane lived above us from mid-1963 through 1966, and though people in those days had a considerable interest in sex, the country hadn’t yet become one gigantic porn theater. Parents could protect you and allow you to have a childhood, and even if you might have vague suspicions of forbidden secrets, you couldn’t switch on a computer and go to a thousand websites to learn that … Well, that Bambi hadn’t been wished into existence by his mother, and neither had you.
So there was my mom, changing out of her uniform, listening to the rodeo act overhead, and it seemed to her that the groans and the trumpetings of the recorded bull were familiar. During the more than seven years when Tilton hadn’t lived with us, Mom had seen him from time to time, and she had stayed married to him, and when he wanted to come back, she’d taken him. Now she didn’t want to believe that it had been a mistake to let him through the door again. She told herself that all men sounded the same when playing the bull, when their cries of pleasure were filtered through an apartment ceiling. She told herself that it might even be Miss Delvane, whose voice had considerable range and could lower all the way to husky. By then, however, life had dealt Sylvia Bledsoe Kirk numerous jokers in a game where they weren’t wild cards, where they counted for nothing, and she knew this joker because he had ruined her hand before.
She threw his clothes and toiletries into his two suitcases and carried them out of the apartment. The building had front and back staircases, the second narrower and grubbier than the first. My mom knew that, by his nature, Tilton would be prone to slipping out the back, even though he had no reason to think he’d be seen descending from the fifth instead of the fourth floor or that the significance of that extra story would be obvious to anyone.
That day, Mom had decided that Tilton wasn’t just a skirt-chaser and a pathological liar and a narcissist and a self-deluded fool as regarded his career. He was all those things because he was a coward who couldn’t look at life head-on and face it and make a right way through it, regardless of the obstacles. He had to lie to himself about life, pretend it was less hard than it really was, and then press forward by one slippery means or another, all the while deluding himself into believing that he was conquering the world. My mother would never have called herself a hero, although of course she was, but she knew she wasn’t a coward, never had been and never would be, and she couldn’t stand to live with one.
She set the suitcases on the cracked and edge-curled linoleum on the back-stairs landing between the fifth and fourth floors, and she sat a couple of steps lower, with her back to them. She had to wait for a while, and with every minute that passed, she had less sympathy for the devil. Eventually she heard a door close somewhere above and a man slow-whistling “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’,” which had been a hit for the Righteous Brothers back in February.
Tilton was crazy about the tune and whistled it that afternoon without any sense of irony, although later he might have realized it wasn’t the perfect track for that particular scene in the music score for the movie of his life.
He opened the stairwell door and started down and stopped whistling when he recognized his suitcases. The man was an excuse machine, and I imagine at least three marginally believable and a dozen preposterous excuses flew through his mind before he continued to the landing. Of course, when he discovered my mom sitting a few steps down on the next flight, he stopped again and stood there, not sure what to do. He had always been quick with words and especially with justifications, but not that day. He was apparently unnerved by the way she sat in silence, her back turned to him. If she’d made accusations or started crying, he might have dared a lie, pretended he was innocent, but she merely sat there ready to bear witness to his departure. Maybe he thought she had a knife and would stab him in the back when he squeezed past her, encumbered by the suitcases. For whatever reason, Tilton picked up the two bags and, instead of continuing down with them, he returned to the fifth floor.
Sylvia got up from the step and followed. At the fifth-floor landing, when my father glanced back and saw her coming slowly after him, he grew alarmed and stumbled over the threshold, knocking the luggage against the jamb and the door, against his legs, like those old-time movie guys, Laurel and Hardy, trying to maneuver a jumbo packing crate through an opening too small for it. As he hurried along the hallway, my mom followed, saying nothing, not closing on him but not losing ground, either. At the head of the front stairs, he lost his grip on one of the bags, and it tumbled down the steps, and he almost fell after it in his eagerness to retrieve it and get out of there. Expressionless, never taking her eyes off her errant husband, Sylvia followed flight by flight, and Tilton’s hands were apparently so slick with sweat that the suitcases kept getting away from him, thudding against the walls. Because he couldn’t resist glancing back in anticipation of the nonexistent but expected knife, he misstepped a few times and careened from wall to wall as if the bags he carried were filled with bottles of whiskey that he’d spent the past few hours sampling.
At the landing between the third and second floors, pursued and pursuer encountered Mr. Yoshioka, a polite and shy man, an impeccably dressed tailor of great skill. He lived alone in an apartment on the fifth floor, and everyone believed that this gentle man had some dark or tragic secret, that perhaps he’d lost his family in Hiroshima. When Mr. Yoshioka saw my father ricocheting downward with reckless disregard for the geometry of a staircase and for the law of gravity, when then he saw my stone-faced mother in unhurried but implacable pursuit, he said, “Thank you very much,” and turned and plunged two steps at a time to the ground floor, to wait in the foyer with his back against the mailboxes, hoping that he had removed himself from the trajectory of whatever violence was about to be committed.
Tilton exploded through the front door, as though the building itself had come alive and ejected him. One of the abused suitcases fell open on the stoop, and he frantically stuffed clothing back into it. My mom watched through the window in the door until he repacked and departed. Then she said, “Lovin’ feelin’, my ass,” and turned and was surprised to see poor Mr. Yoshioka still there with his back against the mailboxes.
He smiled and nodded and said, “I should like to ascend now.”
She said, “I’m so sorry, Mr. Yoshioka.”
“The sorrow is all mine,” he said, and then he went up the stairs two at a time.
The event as I have just described it was the version that my mom told me years later. After school that day, I walked to the community center to practice piano. When I got home, all she said was, “Your father’s no longer living here. He went upstairs to help Miss Delvane with her rodeo act, and I wasn’t having any of that.”
Too young to sift the true meaning of her words, I found the idea of a mechanical horse more fascinating than ever and hoped I might one day see it. My mother’s Reader’s Digest condensation of my father’s leaving didn’t satisfy my curiosity. I had many questions, but I refrained from asking them. Truth is, I was so happy that I would never again have to sit in a barroom listening to nagging-wife stories, I couldn’t conceal my delight.
Right then I told Mom the secret I couldn’t have revealed when Tilton lived with us, that I had been taking piano lessons from Mrs. O’Toole for more than two months. She hugged me and got teary and apologized, and I didn’t understand what she was apologizing for. She said it didn’t matter if I understood, all that mattered was that she would never again allow anyone or anything to get between me and a piano or between me and any other dream I might have.
“Hey, sweetheart, let’s toast our freedom with some Co-Cola.”
We sat at the kitchen table and toasted with Coca-Cola and with slices of chocolate cake before dinner, and all these years later, I can relive that moment vividly in my mind. She had moved on from Brass Tacks to Slinky’s by then; but that wasn’t a night when she performed, so I had her all to myself. We talked about all kinds of things, including the Beatles, who’d hit number one on the U.S. charts just two years earlier with “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and “She Loves You” and four others. Four more chart-topping songs followed in ’65. Already in 1966, they’d had another tune reach number one. My mom liked the Beatles, but she said jazz was her thing, especially swing, and she talked about the big-band singers from Grandpa Teddy’s day. She knew all their work and could imitate a lot of them, and it was as if we had them right there in our kitchen. She showed me a book about that time, with pictures of those girls. Kay Davis and Maria Ellington, who sang with the Duke. Billie Holiday with Basie. They were all pretty and some of them beautiful. Sarah Vaughan, Helen Forrest, Doris Day, Harriet Clark, Lena Horne, Martha Tilton, Peggy Lee. Maybe the most beautiful of them all was Dale Evans when she was in her twenties, the same one who later married Roy Rogers, who had a real horse, but even the young Dale Evans wasn’t as pretty as Sylvia Bledsoe Kirk. And my mom could do Ella. She could scat so you thought for sure it was Ella and your eyes were deceiving you. We made Campbell’s tomato soup and grilled-cheese sandwiches, and we played 500 rummy. Years later, I realized that was the third time when my mother’s life fell apart, but in the moment, I didn’t see it that way. When I went to bed, I thought that had been the best day of my life to date.
The next day was better—magical, one of those days that my friend Malcolm calls a butter-side-up day. Trouble was coming, sure, but it’s always coming, and meanwhile it’s best to live with a smile.
8 (#ulink_941bba21-2c9a-5f74-b1e3-7deb929cf560)
A butter-side-up day …
Let’s take a little detour here called Malcolm Pomerantz. He’s a first-rate musician. He blows the tenor sax. He’s something of a genius who, even at fifty-nine, can still play an entire tone scale.
He’s crazy, too, but mostly harmless. He’s so superstitious, he’d rather break his back than break a mirror. And though he’s not so much of an obsessive-compulsive that he needs to spend a few hours a week on a shrink’s couch, he has routines that would make you crazy if you didn’t love him.
For one thing, he has to wash his hands five times—not four, not six—just before he joins the band onstage. And after his nimble fingers are clean enough to play, he won’t touch anything with his bare hands except his saxophone because, if he does, he’ll have to wash them five times again. The cleanliness of his hands doesn’t concern him when he practices, only when he performs. If he wasn’t such a superb musician and likable guy, he wouldn’t have a career.
Malcolm reads the newspaper every day but Tuesday. He will not buy a Tuesday newspaper, nor will he borrow one. He won’t watch TV news or listen to a radio on Tuesdays. He believes that if he dares to take in the news on any Tuesday, his heart will turn to dust.
He won’t eat mushrooms either raw or cooked, not in any sauce, even though he loves mushrooms. He won’t eat any rounded cookie that reminds him of a mushroom cap. In a market, he avoids that end of the produce section where the mushrooms are offered for sale. And if the market is new to him, he avoids the produce section altogether, out of fear that he’ll have a sudden fungal encounter.
As for the butter-side-up day: Each morning, he makes one extra slice of toast with breakfast, lays it on his kitchen table, and in a contrived-casual way, he knocks it to the floor. If it lands butter side up, he eats it with pleasure, confident that the day will be good from end to end. If it lands butter side down, however, Malcolm throws the toast away, wipes up the butter, and goes about his day with heightened awareness of potential danger.
On the first night of every full moon, Malcolm makes his way to the nearest Catholic church, puts seventeen dollars in the poor box, and lights seventeen votive candles. He claims not to know why, that it’s just a compulsion like the others with which he’s afflicted. I am inclined to think that he really doesn’t know the reason, that the seventeen candles are a way of keeping his pain at bay, and that if he allowed himself to understand his motivation, the pain could no longer be relieved. For most of us, the wounds that life inflicts are slowly healed, and we’re left only with scars, but maybe Malcolm is too sensitive to let the wounds fully close; maybe his obsessive-compulsive little rituals are like bandages that keep his unhealed wounds clean and staunch the bleeding.
Although I can’t explain all of Malcolm’s quirks, I know why never mushrooms and why always full-moon candles and why never the news on Tuesday. We have been friends since I was ten. Back then, he was not as he is now. His sweet kind of craziness evolved over the years. Malcolm is white, and I am black. We aren’t brothers bonded by blood, but we’re as close as brothers, bonded by the same devastating losses. I respect his ways, odd as they are, of dealing with his enduring pain, and I will never explain to him the meaning of his rituals, because that might deny him the relief he gets from them.
On one terrible day, each of us lost someone whom he loved as much as life itself. And some years later, again on the same day, we once more lost someone beloved, and yet again after that. I’m still an optimist, but Malcolm is not. Sometimes I worry about what might happen to him if I were to die first, because I suspect that his eccentricities will metastasize, and in spite of his talent, he will not be able to go on working. The work is his salvation, because every song he plays, he plays for those whom he loved and lost.
9 (#ulink_578c20af-f7b9-5986-9e16-7e83f8284701)
Because Woolworth’s was still cleaning up from the kitchen fire, my mother didn’t have to work the lunch shift. She wanted to come with me to the community center, to hear what I’d learned of the piano, which I worried wouldn’t be impressive to someone who could sing like Ella. You should have seen her that day. She dressed as though it must be an occasion, as if she were accompanying me to some concert hall where two thousand people were waiting to hear me play. She wore a yellow dress with a pleated skirt and with black piping at the cuffs and collar, a black belt, and black high-heeled shoes. We walked the block and a half, and she was so gorgeous that people turned to look at her, men and women alike, as if a goddess had come down to Earth to walk this skinny boy someplace special for some reason too amazing to imagine.
Mrs. O’Toole was there, and I introduced them, and it turned out they had something in common: Grandpa Teddy. Mary O’Toole said, “My first husband played tenor sax with Shep Fields in ’41. Shep’s band was heavy with saxes—one bass, one baritone, six tenors, and four altos—and Teddy Bledsoe was the piano man part of that year, before moving on to Goodman.” Mary looked at me in a new way when she knew I was Teddy Bledsoe’s grandson. She said, “Bless you, child, now it makes perfect sense how you could come along so fast on the ivories.”
I had progressed quickly through the lessons, but what had excited Mrs. O’Toole was that recently I’d gotten to the place where I could listen to a piece of music and sit down and play it right away, insofar as my arms could reach and my fingers could spread. I had an eidetic memory for music, which is the equivalent of reading a novel once and being able to recite it word for word. If I was alone at the keyboard, I was able to play just about anything, regardless of the complexity or tempo, not a fraction as well as Grandpa Teddy could have played it, but still so you’d recognize the tune. I needed to have the bench to myself because I had developed this butt-slide technique, polishing the bench with the seat of my pants, slipping left, right, left as required without bumping my elbows or disturbing my finger placement, so I had good reach for a kid my age and size.
My mom stood listening to me play, and I didn’t dare look at her. I didn’t want her to make nice and pretend I was better than I truly was, but I didn’t want to see her trying to keep from wincing, either. The second thing I played was a favorite of hers, an old Anita O’Day hit, “And Her Tears Flowed Like Wine.” I was but three bars into it when Mom started to sing. Oh, man. Community center acoustics don’t measure up, but maybe that was still what those lyrics sounded like at the Paramount Theater or the Hotel Pennsylvania, back when O’Day was with Stan Kenton and was better than the band, before I was born.
I became aware that people were crowding into the Abigail Louise Thomas Room, drawn by my mom’s singing. I was so proud of her and embarrassed that she had no one more accomplished than me to accompany her. We were rolling toward the end, and she was better than great, her tone and her phrasing, and just then, among the little crowd, I saw Miss Pearl.
She wore the same pink outfit with the feathered hat that she had been wearing almost three months earlier when she sat on the stoop with me and called me Ducks. She wiggled her fingers at me, and I smiled.
I couldn’t wait to introduce Miss Pearl to Mrs. O’Toole, so that our benefactor could be thanked for the piano. I figured the shiny-as-new Steinway had been there too long suddenly to be dilapidated and in the basement again, with nobody to remember that it had been restored or replaced, which was the fear that had kept me from mentioning Miss Pearl on the first day I’d seen the piano glossy and black and beautiful. There you have the magical thinking of an eight-year-old boy: that when the miraculous happens, it soon can be undone by the whim of God, but if it isn’t undone in a day or a week or a month, then it becomes permanent, and even God doesn’t have the power to take it away.
The truth is, to this day I still pretty much operate under that assumption. If chaos plagues the world—and it does—and if there’s any benign power that wants the world to survive, then stability will be encouraged and rewarded. Maybe not all the time. But most of the time.
Anyway, we came to the end of “And Her Tears Flowed Like Wine,” when I stupidly added a concluding flourish that wasn’t part of the number. Fortunately, the crowd of community-center staff and patrons knew the song was over when my mom hit the last word, and they broke into applause that saved me from the embarrassment of them having heard the unnecessary flourish. A lot of the people who came there to play cards and socialize were older than Grandpa Teddy, and they knew the old tunes so well that they might have sung along if they hadn’t wanted to hear Sylvia Bledsoe solo. They called for more, and I looked at Mom, and she nodded.
The community center had some old records, and only a couple of days before, I’d heard “It All Begins and Ends with You,” sung by Mildred Bailey backed by the Red Norvo band. Without thinking to ask if my mom knew it, I ham-handed my way into it, and she sang along so beautifully that I sounded way better than I was. When I noticed that some of the gray-haired ladies had tears in their eyes, I understood for the first time why music matters so much, how it reminds us of who we are and where we came from, of all the good times and the sadness, too.
When we finished, everyone wanted to talk to us. I didn’t have much to say except “Thank you,” and they really had more interest in Mom than in me. They wanted to know where she performed. When she told them Slinky’s, many hadn’t heard of the place, and those who had heard of it looked disappointed for her.
While they gathered around my mom, I went looking for Miss Pearl, but I couldn’t find her anywhere. I asked several people if they’d seen this tall woman in a pink suit and feathered hat, but no one remembered her.
From the center, my mother and I walked to the nearest park, which was her idea. It wasn’t much of a park, some trees and benches and a bronze statue of some former mayor or someone who would have been embarrassed to have his image in a park that had gone as crummy as that one, except that he was probably dead. There had been a plaque under the statue, telling who the bronze man had been, but vandals had cut it off the granite base. There were bare patches in the grass, and the trees weren’t properly trimmed, and the trash baskets overflowed. My mom remembered a vendor’s shack where you could buy newspapers and snacks and packets of little crackers to throw down for the pigeons, but it wasn’t there anymore, and what pigeons still hung around looked too red-eyed and kind of strange.
“What the heck,” she said. “Why not.”
“Why not what?”
“Why not make a day of it? Just you and me on a date.”
“What would we do?”
“Anything we want. Starting with a better park.”
We walked out to the main avenue, and we stood by the curb, looking for a taxi. She hailed a couple, and finally one stopped, and a man named Albert Solomon Gluck drove us to a better park, to Riverside Commons. In those days, there weren’t Plexiglas shields between the front and back seats, because no one yet imagined a time when drivers would be in danger from some of their passengers. Mr. Gluck entertained us with imitations of Jackie Gleason and Fred Flintstone and Ernest Borgnine, who were all big on TV back then, and he said he could do Lucille Ball, too, but he made her sound just like Ernest Borgnine, which really made me laugh. He wanted to be in show business, and one joke after another flew from him. I had my mom write down his name, so when he became famous, I would remember meeting him. Years later, I had reason to track him down, and though he didn’t become famous, I’ll never forget the first or the second time we met.
At Riverside Commons, he pulled to the curb and, before Mom could pay him, he said, “Wait, wait,” and got out of the taxi and came around to the rear curbside door and made a production out of opening it for us and presenting the park with a sweep of his hand, as if he had prepared it just for us. He was a portly man with bushy eyebrows and a rubbery face made for comedy, and everything about him suggested fun, except that I noticed his fingernails were bitten to the quick.
When we were on the sidewalk and Mom paid him, he took the fare but refused the tip. “Sometimes the quality of the passengers is the gratuity. But here’s something I want you and your boy to have.” From a pocket he took a pendant on a chain. When my mom tried to refuse it, he said, “If you don’t take it, I’m going to yell ‘Help, police’ until they come running, and I’ll make the most outrageous charges, and by the time we resolve the matter down at police headquarters, it’ll be too late to have your day in the park.”
Sylvia laughed, shook her head, and said, “But I can’t accept—”
“It was given to me by a passenger six months ago, and she told me she wanted me to give it to someone, and I asked who, and she said I would know when I met the person, but now it turns out to be two people, you and your boy. It’s luck on a chain. It’s good luck. And if you don’t take it, then it’s bad luck for me. Good luck for you, bad luck for me. What—you want to ruin my life? Were my jokes that terrible? Have a heart, lady, give me a break, take it, take it, before I scream for the city’s finest.”
There was no refusing him. After he drove away, we found a bench and sat there to examine the pendant. It had been fashioned from two pieces of Lucite glued together and shaped into a heart roughly the size of a silver dollar. Within the heart was a small white feather. It must have been glued there, but such an excellent job had been made of it that the feather looked fluffy, as though it would flutter inside the heart if you blew on the Lucite. A small silver eyehook, screwed into the top of the heart, received a silver chain.
“It must be really valuable,” I said.
“Well, sweetie, it’s not Tiffany. But it is pretty, isn’t it?”
“Why did he give it to you?”
“I don’t really know. He seemed to be a nice man.”
“I think he likes you,” I said.
“Actually, Jonah, I believe he gave it to me to give to you.”
With something like awe, I took the pendant from her when she held it out to me. “You really think so?”
“I’m sure of it.”
When I held the chain and allowed the dangling heart to turn back and forth, the polished Lucite looked almost liquid in the sunlight, as if the feather floated in a great drop of water that cohered magically to the eyehook. Or in a tear.
“What bird do you think it’s from?” I asked. “A pigeon?”
“Oh, I expect it’s from something more grand than a pigeon. Don’t you think it must be from some kind of songbird, one with a particularly sweet voice? I do. That’s what I think.”
“Then it must be,” I said. “But what’ll I do with it? It’s a heart, it’s like a girl’s jewelry.”
“And you can’t be seen wearing a girl’s jewelry—is that it?”
“I already get teased about being skinny.”
“You’re not skinny. You’re lean.” She elbowed me in the side. “You’re a lean, mean music machine.”
She always made me feel like more and better than I knew myself to be. I thought then that lifting a child’s spirits was something every mother did effortlessly. But as the years passed, I saw the world more clearly and knew how fortunate I was to have been brought to life by the grace of Sylvia Bledsoe.
There on the park bench, I said, “Mr. Gluck said it’ll bring good luck.”
“Never hurts to have some.”
“He didn’t say you could make a wish on it.”
“That’s easy luck, Jonah. Easy luck always turns bad. You want the kind of luck you have to earn.”
“Maybe it’ll be okay if I carry it in my pocket—you know, instead of wearing it.”
“I’m sure that’s fine. Or keep it in a nightstand drawer. The important thing is to keep it safe. When someone gives you a special gift, never treat it lightly. If you treat it like a treasure, then it’ll be one.”
When, years later, I learned who had given it to the cabbie and what it meant, the pendant would indeed prove to be a treasure.
10 (#ulink_204aab4a-0251-523e-883a-ef599fc930b2)
With the pendant in my pocket, it seemed that the cloud-free summer sky blazed bluer than ever. The day was warm, and this part of the city looked cleaner than the part that we’d come from. As noon approached, the trunk shadows shrank toward the trees, and the web of branch shadows spread equally in all directions as if spooled out by spiders. The sun spangled the big pond, and through the quivers of light, we watched scores of fat koi that swam there from spring through autumn before being moved to indoor aquariums. Mom bought a twenty-five-cent bag of bread cubes, and the fish ventured right up to us, fins wimpling, mouths working, and we fed them.
I felt the most unexpected tenderness toward those koi, because they were so beautiful and colorful and, I don’t know, like music made flesh. My mom kept pointing to this one and that one—how red, how orange, how yellow, how golden—and suddenly I couldn’t talk about them because my throat grew tight. I knew if I talked about them, my voice would tremble, and I might even tear up. I wondered what was wrong with me. They were just fish. Maybe I was turning sissy, but at least I fed the last of the bread to them without embarrassing myself.
Almost half a century later, I feel that same tenderness toward nearly everything that swims and flies and walks on all fours, and I’m not embarrassed. Creation moves and astonishes if you let it. When I realize how unlikely it is that anything at all should live on this world spun together from dust and hot gases, that creatures of almost infinite variety should at night look up at the stars, I know that it’s all more fragile than it appears, and I think maybe the only thing that keeps the Earth alive and turning is our love for it.
That day in the park, after the koi, we walked the paths through the groves of trees and through the picnic grounds and around the baseball field. There weren’t as many people as I expected, probably because it was a workday. But when we started to talk about lunch, two guys, maybe sixteen or seventeen, fell in behind us, walking close to us, moving faster if we moved faster, slowing when we did. They were talking about girls they dated the night before, how hot the girls were and things they did to them. They wanted my mother to hear. I didn’t know all the words they used, didn’t understand everything they were bragging about having done, but I knew they were being rotten. That kind of thing didn’t happen often back then. It just didn’t. People wouldn’t tolerate it. People weren’t so afraid in those days. I threw the two trash talkers a couple of mean looks, and my mother said, “No, Jonah,” and kept walking toward the Kellogg Parkway exit from the Commons. But the braggarts talked filthier and started to comment on my mother’s shapeliness.
Finally she stopped and turned to them, one hand in her purse, and said, “Back off.”
One of them was a white kid, the other a mulatto, which was a word we used back then, meaning half black, half white. They were cocky and grinning, hoping to terrify her a little if nothing else.
The white one raised his eyebrows. “Back off? This here’s a public park, sugar. Ain’t it a public park, bro?”
His friend said, “It’s damn sure public. Man, the front view’s even more righteous than her ass.”
My mom raised her purse, her hand buried in it, and said, “You have a death wish?”
The white guy’s grin went from Cheshire to shark. “Sugar, there ain’t hardly any legal guns in this city, so what you’ve got in that purse is just a tampon.”
She stared at him as if he were a cockroach with pretensions, standing upright and talking, but a cockroach nonetheless. “Listen, shithead, do I look like some schoolteacher who cares what the law says? Look at me. You think I’m some hotel maid or dime-store clerk? Is that really what I look like to you, asshole? What I’ve got is a drop gun, no history to it. I kill you both, throw down the piece, and when the jackboots show up, I tell ’em you pulled the heat, it was robbery, but you fumbled, dropped it, I snatched it, thought you might have another one, so I used it. Either you walk away or we do it now, I don’t care which.”
All the wicked fun had gone out of their grins. They looked now as if they were wincing in pain, though there was cold fury in their eyes. I didn’t know how it might go, even in bright sunshine with other strollers in view, but my fear was exceeded by an exhilarating amazement. Sylvia’s performance had been so convincing that she almost seemed to be someone other than my mom, who never used bad language and who was as likely to be carrying a gun as I was likely to have earned a black belt in karate.
The two creeps salvaged their pride by insulting her—“Bitch” and “Skank” and worse—but they backed off and turned away. We stood watching them until we were certain they wouldn’t come back.
My mother said, “Just because you heard me use a couple of nasty words doesn’t mean you ever can.”
I was speechless, but for different reasons from the one that had rendered me silent by the koi pond.
“Jonah? Did you hear me?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Then tell me what I said.”
“Not to use nasty words.”
“Do you understand why I used them?”
“You faked out those guys.”
“I did, didn’t I?”
“You faked them out big-time.”
She smiled and took her hand out of her purse and zippered the purse shut and said, “How do you feel about lunch?”
“I’d like some.”
Surrounding Riverside Commons were fancy homes, but we had to walk only ten minutes or so to some shops and other businesses.
We had gone about a block when I asked, “What’s a tampon? That guy said you didn’t have a gun, all you had was a tampon.”
“It’s nothing, just a kind of sponge.”
“You mean like the one on the kitchen-sink drainboard?”
“Not exactly like that.”
“Like the ones they use at the car wash over on Seventh Street?”
“No, not that big.”
“Why would he think you had a sponge in your purse?”
“Well, because I do. Women do.”
“Why do you carry a sponge in your purse?”
“I like to be prepared.”
“Prepared for what? You mean like if you spill something?”
“That’s right.”
“Have you ever needed it?”
“Sometimes.”
“You’re a very neat person,” I said. “I try to be neat, too.”
We were passing a bus stop, and she said she needed to sit down on the bench, and when she sat there, she started laughing so that tears came to her eyes.
Sitting beside her, looking around but seeing nothing hilarious, I said, “What’s so funny?”
She shook her head and took a Kleenex from her purse and blotted her eyes. She tried to stop laughing but couldn’t, and finally she said, “I was just thinking about those two idiot delinquents.”
“They weren’t funny, Mom. They were scary.”
“They were scary,” she agreed. “But silly, too, in a way. Maybe I’m just laughing with relief, neither of us hurt.”
“Boy, you sure faked them out.”
She said, “And you kept your cool.”
When she finished blotting her eyes and blowing her nose, she tossed the Kleenex in a waste can beside the bench.
I said, “Are you sometimes able to fool idiots like them because the tampon sponge is shaped like a gun?”
That started her laughing again. I decided she had a case of the giggles, like when something strikes you a lot funnier than it really is but then for some reason everything seems funny until finally the giggles go away, sort of like hiccups.
Between giggles she said, “Honey … tampon isn’t … a nasty word. But you … shouldn’t use it anyway.”
“I shouldn’t? Why?”
“It’s not a word … little boys … should use.”
“How old do I have to be to use it?”
“Twenty-five,” she said, and just the number made her laugh harder.
“Okay, but is it still all right to say sponge?”
And there she went again.
Soon some people came along who were waiting for the bus, and we got up and let them have the bench and continued toward the shops. Walking seemed to cure my mom, and I was glad for that. I’d worried that the two delinquents might show up, because I was certain Mom wouldn’t fake them out again if she was unable to stop giggling.
We couldn’t afford to dine out often, and when we did dine out, we always went to the lunch counter in Woolworth’s, because as an employee Sylvia got a discount. That day, however, we went to a real restaurant, which she said was French, and I was relieved when it turned out they spoke English. The place had a holding bar with a scalloped canopy and a big mirror at the back, a black-and-white checkerboard floor, black tables and chairs with white tablecloths, and black booths with black-vinyl cushions and white cloths. The salt and pepper shakers were heavy and looked like crystal, and I was afraid to use them because if I broke one it would probably cost a fortune.
They had a few items for kids, including a cheeseburger, so of course I ordered that with fries and Coca-Cola. My mom had a green salad with sliced chicken breast on top and a glass of Chardonnay, and then we had what I called the best pudding in the history of the world and what Mom called crème brûlée.
We were waiting for that dessert when I leaned across the table and whispered, “How can we afford this?”
She whispered, “We can’t. We aren’t paying.”
Clutching the edge of the table, I said, “What’ll they do to us when they find out?”
“We’re not paying, your father is.”
Alarmed, I said, “He’s not coming back?”
“You know that quart mayonnaise jar he puts his pocket change in every night? When I packed his things for him, I didn’t pack that.”
“Maybe he’ll come back for it.”
“He won’t,” she said with conviction.
“But isn’t it wrong to take his money?”
“No, it’s his security deposit.”
“His what?”
“Landlords make you put down a security deposit, some hard cash, when you move in, so if you damage the apartment before you move out, they already have the money to cover it and don’t have to chase you for it. Your father never paid his share of rent since he moved back in, and he did some damage yesterday. He sure did some damage. So I kept his jar of change as a security deposit, and now he’s buying us a fancy good-bye lunch.”
Years would pass before I had crème brûlée again and could learn if it really was the best pudding in history or if it just tasted so good because of the circumstances. Nothing could have been better, after all, than the gift of an expensive good-bye lunch from my father without him there to ruin it.
That afternoon, we saw a funny movie starring Peter Sellers, and that evening I spent with Mr. and Mrs. Lorenzo, where I fell asleep on their sofa with Mr. Gluck’s pendant held tightly in my right hand. Sometimes I half woke and thought I could feel the feather fluttering softly. When my mother came home after midnight, following a four-hour set at Slinky’s, Mr. Lorenzo carried me up to our apartment, and I was so sleepy that Mom tucked me in bed in my underwear rather than make me get into pajamas. She wanted to put the pendant safely in a nightstand drawer, but I held fast to it.
I dreamed of a great white bird as big as an airplane, and I rode on its back with no fear of falling, the world sparkling below, forests and fields and mountains and valleys and seas where ships sailed, and then the city, our city. People looked up and they pointed and waved, and I waved back at them, and it was only when the bird began to sing that I realized it wasn’t as big as an airplane anymore and wasn’t in fact a bird anymore, but was instead my mother dressed all in flowing white silk, with wings more beautiful than those of a swan. Carried safely upon her back, I could feel her heart beating, her pure heart beating so steady and strong.
11 (#ulink_5fa3fab6-99df-5550-b3b2-55b4b4e258b5)
The following Sunday, June 12, Grandpa and Grandma drove downtown in their 1946 black Cadillac Series 62 Club Coupe, which they’d bought nineteen years earlier and which Grandpa had maintained in as-new condition. It was a big boat of a car yet sleek, with enormous bullet-shaped fenders front and back and fastback rooflines. Cadillac never made a car as cool thereafter, especially not when they went finny. Teddy and Anita took us to their place for an early celebration of my birthday, which turned out to be memorable.
They were amazed by my eidetic memory for music, which matured in me only as I had learned the piano from Mrs. O’Toole. On his piano in the front room, Grandpa Teddy played a number he was sure that I couldn’t have heard before, “Deep in a Dream,” written by Will Hudson and Eddie DeLange, who had a band together for a few years in the 1930s. He played it superbly, and when he finished, I played it with my limited skills and strained reach, but though I could hear the difference between us, I was thrilled to be able to follow him at all. He tested me with a couple of other pieces, and then we sat to play together. He took the left hand of the board plus the pedals, and I took the right, which was a trick but one that worked, and we ran through a tune I already had heard often, Hudson and DeLange’s “Moonglow,” and didn’t make one mistake in tempo or chords or melody, sweet and smooth to the end.
We might have sat there for hours, but what I think happened is that I was preening too much, and nobody wanted to indulge me if healthy pride in accomplishment might be souring into conceit. My grandparents had taught my mother—and she had taught me—that when you did anything you should do it well, not for praise but for the personal satisfaction of striving to be the best. I was young and only now discovering my talent, and I was exhilarated and prideful and probably getting obnoxious.
Grandpa Teddy abruptly stood up from the piano and said, “Enough. It’s my day off. Jonah and I are going for a little walk before lunch.”
The day was warm but not suffocating. The street maples, which would be scarlet by October, were green now, and a faint breeze trembled the leaves, so that on the sidewalk, patterns of light and shadow quivered like dark fish schooling in sun-spangled water, reminding me of the koi in Riverside Commons.
Grandpa Teddy towered over me, and he had a deep voice that made me sound like a chipmunk. He was as stately in his bearing as a grand ocean liner, while I was a bouncing little boat with a buzzing outboard motor, but he always made me feel that I belonged with him, that there was nowhere else he would rather be. We talked about all kinds of things as we walked, but the purpose of that stroll was what Grandpa Teddy had to say about my father.
“Your mother gave you a new apartment key.”
“Yes, sir. She did.” I took it from a pants pocket and dangled it, sunlight winking off the bright brass.
“Do you know why the locks were changed?”
“Tilton.”
“You shouldn’t call your father by his first name. Say, ‘My father.’”
“Well, but it doesn’t feel that way.”
“What way doesn’t it feel?”
“I mean, it doesn’t feel like he’s my father.”
“But he is, and you owe him some respect.”
“You feel more like my father.”
“That’s sweet, Jonah. And I give thanks every day that you’re in my life.”
“Me, too. I mean, that you’re my grandfather.”
“Your father isn’t the easiest man to keep your equilibrium with. You know equilibrium?”
“Yes, sir. Like balance.”
“It isn’t easy to keep your balance with him, but you always have to walk a line of respect because he’s your father.”
As we progressed, we passed people sitting on their porches, and they all called out to Grandpa Teddy, and he called back to them and waved. Sometimes drivers of passing cars tooted their horns or passengers shouted his name, and he waved to them, and we met a few people walking their dogs or just out for some fresh air, and they had to talk with him and he with them. In spite of all that, he kept coming back to the subject at hand.
“You have to walk a line of respect, Jonah, but you also have to be cautious. What I’m going to say to you isn’t meant to make you think any less of your father. I would feel terrible if it did. But I would feel even worse if I didn’t say this—and then had reason to regret holding my tongue.”
I understood that whatever he told me would be something I must take as seriously as anything that I heard in church. That’s what it felt like—as if Grandpa was churching me not on the meaning of a psalm or the story of Bethlehem, but on the subject of my father.
“Your mother is a wonderful woman, Jonah.”
“She’s perfect.”
“She just about is. None of us is absolutely perfect in this world, but she’s but a breath away from it. She and I were once miles apart in our estimation of your father, but now it’s an inch or two. But it’s an important inch or two.”
He stopped and looked up into a tree for a long moment, and I looked up, too, but I couldn’t see what interested him. There wasn’t a squirrel up there or any bird, or anything.
When we started walking again, he said, “I hope this is the right way to say it. Your mother’s current assessment of your father is that he’s basically a good man, means well, wants to do what’s right, but he’s damaged by some bad things that happened to him as a child, and he’s weak. I agree with the weak part. There’s no way to know if what he says happened to him as a boy actually happened. But even if it did, bad things happen to all of us, and that doesn’t mean we can hurt others just because we ourselves have been hurt. Are you with me so far?”
“Yes, sir. I think so.”
“Your father’s going to divorce your mother.”
I almost broke into a dance. “Good. That’s good.”
“No, son. Divorce is never good. It’s sad. Sometimes it might be necessary, but never good.”
“Well, if you say so.”
“I do. And these days it’s no-fault. If there’s no property to split—and there isn’t—and if he doesn’t want custody of you or even visitation rights—which he doesn’t—then it’s not even necessary for your mother to agree.”
“She should agree.”
“It’ll happen just the same. Anyway, when marriages fall apart, some people sometimes get bitter, they get very angry.”
“Not my mom.”
“No, not her. But sometimes people can get so angry, they do foolish things. Sometimes the fight in court is about the children, one of them trying to punish the other by taking away the children.”
Alarmed, I halted. “But you said he doesn’t want me. And if he does, he can’t have me. I won’t go. Never.”
Grandpa Teddy put a hand on my shoulder. “Don’t worry, son. No judge in this city would take you away from a woman like Sylvia and give you to your father.”
“Really? You’re sure?”
“I’m sure. And he says he doesn’t want you, but he’s a man who says all kinds of things he doesn’t entirely mean. Sometimes people do reckless things, Jonah, they don’t want to leave it to a court, they take matters into their own hands.”
“Could he do that? How would he do that?”
We had walked almost to Saint Stanislaus, and Grandpa said, “Let’s rest a bit on the church steps there.”
We sat side by side on the steps, and he took a pack of Juicy Fruit gum from a pocket and offered me a stick, but I was too scared to want any. Maybe he was a little scared, too, because he didn’t want any chewing gum, either, and he returned the pack to his pocket.
“Let’s say you’re walking home from the community center one day, and your father pulls to the curb in a car and wants to take you somewhere. What should you do?”
“Where would he want to take me?”
“Let’s say it was somewhere you’d like to go, maybe to a movie or for a milk shake.”
“He wouldn’t take me anywhere like that. He never did before.”
“Well, maybe he wants to make things right with you, apologize for things he’s done by taking you out for some fun.”
“Would he? I don’t think he would.”
“He might. He might even have a present for you, wrapped and on the passenger seat. You’d just have to get in the car and unwrap it while you go to the movie or for that milk shake.”
The air was warm and the steps were warm from the sun, but I was cold. “I’ve got to walk the line you talked about, give him respect.”
“So what should you do?”
“Well … I’d have to ask Mom, was it all right to go with him.”
“But your mother isn’t there.”
“Then he’d have to come back later, after I talked to her, but even if Mom said it was all right, I wouldn’t want to go.”
Three crows landed on the sidewalk and hopped along, pecking at grains of rice from a wedding the day before, each of them studying us warily with glistening black eyes.
We watched them for a while, and then I said, “Would Tilton … would my father ever hurt me?”
“I don’t believe he would, Jonah. There’s an emptiness in him, a hollow place where there shouldn’t be, but I don’t think he’d hurt a child. It’s your mother he might hurt by taking you away from her.”
“I won’t let that happen. I just won’t.”
“That’s why I wanted us to talk, so you wouldn’t let it happen.”
I thought about the two trash-talking delinquents in Riverside Commons a few days earlier. “Boy, it’s always something, isn’t it?”
“That’s life. Always something, more good than bad, but always interesting if you’re paying attention.”
He offered me the gum again, and I took a stick, and so did he. He took the paper and foil from me, and he folded them with his paper and foil, and he put them in his shirt pocket.
After we chewed the Juicy Fruit for a minute or two and watched the crows at the rice, I thought of Mr. Gluck’s pendant and took it from my pocket and showed it to Grandpa.
“Isn’t that a marvelous piece of work.” He took the pendant and dangled it in the sunlight and asked where I’d gotten it. When I told him, he said, “Son, that is a classic story of the city if I ever heard one. Just classic. You’ve got a lasting conversation piece.”
“What kind of feather do you think it is, Grandpa?”
He gently twisted the chain between his fingers, so that the Lucite heart turned back and forth. “I’m no expert on feathers, but there’s one thing I can say with complete confidence.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s not an ordinary feather. It’s extraordinary. Otherwise no one would’ve gone to the trouble of sealing it in Lucite and shaping the Lucite into a heart.” He frowned at the pendant for a moment, then smiled. “I feel comfortable saying it’s not a bit of juju.”
“What’s juju?”
“A religion in West Africa, full of charms and curses and lots of gods, good ones and bad ones. In the Caribbean, they mix it up with some Catholic bits and call it voodoo.”
“I saw this old voodoo movie on TV. It scared me, so I had to turn it off.”
“Nothing to be scared about, because none of it’s true.”
“In the movie, the voodoo wasn’t on some island somewhere, it was right in the city.”
“Don’t give it a thought, Jonah. This piece the taxi driver gave you, it’s too well meant to be anything dark and dangerous. Whatever feather this might be, you should figure it was so important to someone that they preserved it. You should keep good care of it.”
“I will, Grandpa.”
Returning the pendant to me, he said, “I know you will.”
We got up, and the crows squawked into flight, and we walked back to the house, where lunch would soon be ready.
“The little talk we had about your father is just between you and me, Jonah.”
“Sure. We don’t want to worry Mom.”
“You’re a good boy.”
“Well, I don’t know.”
“I do. And if you stay humble about it and remember talent is a gift you didn’t earn, then you’re going to be a great piano man. If that’s what you want to be.”
“It’s all I want to be.”
Under the maples, the black-and-white patterns of leaf shadow and sunlight didn’t remind me of schooling fish in bright water, as before. They sort of looked like piano keys, not all lined up in the usual order but instead intersecting at crazy angles and shimmering with that kind of music that makes the air sparkle, what Malcolm calls banish-the-devil music.
12 (#ulink_b998cf81-3a4b-5a14-b052-e8ae79edf3e1)
During his off-the-rails period, when Malcolm was twenty-two, he lost his way in grief. He began secretly using drugs. He withdrew into himself and went away and didn’t tell anyone where he was going. Later, I learned that he had left the city, which was a mistake for a young man so suited to its streets. He had enough money for a year, and he rented a cabin by a lake upstate.
He smoked pot and did a little cocaine and sat on the porch to stare at the lake for hours at a time. He drank, too, whiskey and beer, and ate mostly junk food. He read books about revolutionary politics and suicide. He read novels, as well, but only those full of violence and vengeance and existential despair, and he sometimes was surprised to rise out of a kind of stupor, bitterly cursing the day he was born and the life in which he found himself.
One night, he woke past one o’clock in the morning, at once aware that he had been talking in his sleep, angry and cursing. A moment later, he realized that he wasn’t alone. Although faint, a foul odor filled him with revulsion, and he heard the floorboards creak as something moved restlessly back and forth.
He had fallen asleep half drunk and had left the bedside lamp set low. When he rolled off his side and sat up, he saw a shadowy form on the farther side of the room, a thing that, to this day, he will not more fully describe than to say that it had yellow eyes, that it wasn’t any child of Nature, and that it was no hallucination.
Although Malcolm is superstitious, neurotic in a charming sort of way, and undeniably eccentric, he recounts this incident with such solemnity, with such disquiet, that I’ve never doubted the truth of it. And I can’t hope to convey it as chillingly as he does.
Anyway, he knew that his visitor was demonic and that he had drawn it to him by the acidic quality of his anger and by his deep despair. He realized that he was in grave danger, that death might be the least he had to fear. He threw back the covers and got out of bed in his underwear, and before he realized what he was doing, he went to a nearby armchair and picked up his saxophone, where he had left it earlier. He says that his sister spoke to him, though she was not there with him, spoke in his mind. He can’t recall her exact words. All he remembers is that she urged him to play songs that lifted the heart and to play them with all the passion he could summon—music that made the air sparkle.
With the unwanted visitor circling him, Malcolm played for two hours, at first a lot of doo-wop but then also many numbers written long before the rock ’n’ roll period. Isham Jones tunes like “It Had to Be You” and “Swinging Down the Lane.” Loesser and Carmichael’s “Heart and Soul.” Watson and Monroe’s “Racing with the Moon.” Marks and Simons’s “All of Me.” Glenn Miller’s “In the Mood.” He looked only indirectly at the yellow-eyed presence, afraid that a direct look would encourage it, and after an hour of music, it slowly began to fade. By the end of the second hour, it had been dispelled, but Malcolm continued to play, played passionately and to exhaustion, until his lips were sore and his jaws ached, until he was dripping perspiration and his nose was running nonstop and his vision was blurred by sweat and tears.
Banish-the-devil music. If only it had worked as well on my father—and those with whom he eventually became associated—as it did on that yellow-eyed fiend in the lakeside cabin.
13 (#ulink_32fde657-49ff-52e1-b96d-2a5d79a44333)
We heard the siren, but there were always sirens in the city, police zooming this way and that, weaving through traffic in their cruisers, more sirens every year—so my mom said—as if something was going wrong with the country just when so many things had been going right. The worst thing to do when you hear a siren is to go see what it’s about, because the next thing you know, part of what it’s about might be you.
It was Monday evening, eight days after the talk I had with Grandpa Teddy. My mom didn’t work Monday nights, and we were playing checkers at the kitchen table when the siren swelled loud and then wound down somewhere in our block. We stayed at the game, talking about just everything, so I don’t know how long it was until the knock came at our door, maybe twenty minutes. We had forgotten the siren by then. There was a bell, but this caller rapped so lightly we wouldn’t have heard it if our apartment hadn’t been so small. We went into the living room, and the rapping came again, hesitant and timid, and Mom looked through the fish-eye lens and said, “It’s Donata.”
Mrs. Lorenzo stood at our threshold, as pretty as Anna Maria Alberghetti and as pale as Wonder Bread, her hair disarranged, face glistening even though the evening was mild for late June. Body rigid, hands fisted and arms crossed over her breasts, she stood as though she had turned to stone the moment she’d finished knocking. Her face, her eyes were those of a woman lost, struck senseless and uncomprehending by some shock. She spoke as though bewildered, “I don’t know where to go.”
“What’s wrong, Donata, what’s happened?”
“I don’t know where to go. There’s nowhere for me to go.”
My mother took her by one arm and said, “Honey, you’re like ice.” The glaze on the woman was sweat, but cold sweat.
Mom drew her into the apartment, and in a voice colored less by grief than by bewilderment, Mrs. Lorenzo said, “Tony is dead, he stood up from dinner, stood up and got this terrible look and fell down, fell dead in the kitchen.” When my mother put her arms around Mrs. Lorenzo, the woman sagged against her, but her voice remained as before. “They’re taking him now, they say, taking him for an autopsy, I don’t know where. He was only thirty-six, so they have to … they have to … they have to cut him open and find was it a heart attack or what. There’s nowhere I can go, he was all I had, and I don’t know where to go.”
Maybe she hadn’t cried until then, maybe the shock and terror had numbed her, but now the tears came in great wrenching sobs, pent up but released in a flood. She was racked by the kind of grief that is part horror, when the mourner suddenly knows death to be not just a profound loss but also an abomination, and the wretched sounds that came from her made me tremble and raised in me a feeling of absolute helplessness and uselessness unlike anything I’d felt before.
As usual, my mother coped. She brought Mrs. Lorenzo into our kitchen and settled her in a chair at the table and pushed aside the checkerboard. She insisted that Mrs. Lorenzo had to drink something warm, and she set about making tea, all the while commiserating not in a phony way but with the right words that I could never have found and with tears of her own.
Mrs. Lorenzo was gentle and kind, and I couldn’t stand watching her coming apart like that or the thought of her widowed so young. I went to a living-room window and looked out and saw the ambulance still at the curb in the crimson twilight.
I had to get out of the apartment. I don’t entirely know why, but I felt that, were I to stay there, I’d start crying, too, and not just for Mrs. Lorenzo or Mr. Lorenzo, but for my father, of all people, because he had that awful emptiness inside himself, and for myself, too, because my father couldn’t ever be a father. Grandma Anita was still alive, and I’d never known anyone who died. Mr. Lorenzo had been a waiter; he often got home late, and he sometimes carried me up to our apartment when I was asleep and my mom returned from work at the club, and now he was dead. I was glad my father moved out, but this was like two deaths close to each other, one the death of a neighbor, the other the death of my father-son dream, which I would have denied having, if you’d asked me, but to which just then I realized I’d still been clinging. I ran out of the apartment and down six flights of stairs to the foyer and outside to the stoop and down more stairs to the sidewalk.
The paramedics were loading the body into the back of the van ambulance. A sheet covered Mr. Lorenzo or maybe he was in a body bag, but I couldn’t see him, only the shape of him. Across the street, a crowd of twenty or thirty had gathered, probably people who lived in the apartment houses over there, and they were watching Mr. Lorenzo being taken away. Some kids were over there, too, my age and younger. They chased around and danced and acted silly, as if the flashing beacons of the ambulance were holiday fireworks. Maybe if the death had occurred on the other side of the street, I’d be watching from here with different kids, acting as foolish. Maybe the difference between horror and holiday was just the width of an ordinary street.
At nine I knew about death, of course, but not as an intimate truth, rather as something that happened out there in the world, in other families, nothing for me to worry about for a long time yet. But now people I knew were going away forever. If two could go in just two weeks, three others could go in just three more—Grandpa, Grandma, and my mother—and I would be like Mrs. Lorenzo, alone and with nowhere that I belonged anymore. It was crazy, a little-kid panic, but it grew out of the undeniable realization that we’re all so fragile.
I thought that I should do something for Mr. Lorenzo, that if I did something for him, God would see and approve and not take anyone from me until I was much older. I guess if I hadn’t been so crazy afraid, I might have gone to church and lit a candle for him and said a few prayers. Instead I thought that I should play the piano for him, one of his favorite songs that he listened to on his stereo.
The community center stayed open until 10:30 on Monday because it was bingo night. As one paramedic closed the rear doors of the ambulance and the other started the engine, I turned away and headed toward the Abigail Louise Thomas Room.
Perhaps in my peripheral vision, I saw him moving, paralleling me. But as long as I live, I will credit luck and the feather pendant in my pocket, because I was in a distraught emotional state that made it unlikely that I would have picked up on clues glimpsed from the corner of my eye. My father must have been among the crowd across the street, because now he paced me. When he realized that I had seen him, he didn’t call out to me or wave, which would have been much less creepy. He only walked faster when I did and broke into a run when I ran.
If I made it to the community center, he might come in after me. No one there knew that my mother had thrown him out or that divorce was imminent. Sylvia didn’t wash her dirty laundry in public. They knew me at the center, and they didn’t know him, and if I caused enough of an uproar, they would surely call my mom.
But then I saw that he was glancing both ways along the street as he ran, checking on the traffic, looking for an opening, ready to dash across all three lanes at the first opportunity. The center was still more than a block away. His legs were longer than mine. I’d never make it there before he caught me. He wouldn’t hurt me. I was his son. Grandpa Teddy said Tilton wouldn’t harm me. Might snatch me and take me away. But wouldn’t harm me. To snatch me, he needed a car, surely a car. You didn’t absolutely need a car in the city; and Tilton hadn’t owned one. Maybe he owned one now, but he would have to drag me to it, and I’d fight all the way, and he wouldn’t want that. So maybe he meant to hurt me, after all.
At the corner, one-third of the way to the community center, I turned left, heading for the alleyway behind our building. I glanced over my shoulder and saw Tilton crossing the street, dodging cars as the drivers pounded their horns and brakes squealed. He looked wild. I wouldn’t make it into the back street and half a block to the rear entrance of our building before he overtook me.
Twilight slanted through the streets, fiery in the windows and painting emberglow across tenement walls, purple shadows swelling, but night already claimed the narrow alley. Not all the buildings had back entrances; some had switchback fire escapes, and where there was rear access, the security lamps above the doors were often broken. On both sides, Dumpsters rose, hulking shapes in the gloom, some lids up, some down, some stuck halfway. I climbed the side of a Dumpster where the lids were open and dropped inside, landing on slippery piles of plastic garbage bags, in a stink of rotting vegetables and God knew what else.
I knelt with my back pressed to the metal wall, trying to be still, cupping both hands over my nose and mouth, not because of the stench but to soften the sound of my breathing. His shoes slapped loud on the blacktop and on the bricks where the blacktop had worn off, and as he passed me, he was panting louder than I was. He came to a halt about where I figured the back door to our building must have been, and I listened to him muttering in frustration and making small noises for which I couldn’t account.
I began to wonder if I had done the right thing by fleeing from him. He was my father, after all, not a good one but my father nonetheless. Maybe I’d misjudged his mood and was mistaken about his intentions.
When he began to curse and when my name proved to be part of it, I stopped worrying that I’d been unfair. He rattled the knob and kicked the door hard. I didn’t understand what had foiled him. The superintendent had cut new keys to our apartment; but Tilton still possessed the other key, the one to the back stairs, which unlike the front entrance was kept locked. He became increasingly agitated, cursing explosively, and when he repeatedly kicked a Dumpster—not mine but one nearby—I figured he’d been drinking. The big trash bin gave off hollow drumlike beats that echoed along the alleyway—boom,boom, boom. A man shouted from a high window, “Knock it off!” Tilton shouted back at him, cursed him out, and the man said as if he meant it, “I’m comin’ down there, you bastard.” My father hurried away then, but no one came down to look for him. Comparative quiet settled over the alleyway, disturbed only by the muffled sounds of traffic out on the main street and by music and voices from a TV channeled through an open window overhead.
Suspicious, I waited a few minutes. But I couldn’t spend the night in the Dumpster, and finally I climbed out. I half expected a shadowy figure to break from cover and rush at me, but if there were rats in the alley, they were genuine rodents, nothing more.
Above the rear door to our building, the lamp protected by a wire cage had not been broken, and by its light I saw the bent key protruding from the deadbolt lock. In his eagerness to nab me before I got back to the apartment, my father evidently had inserted the wrong key, and when it wouldn’t turn, he forced it, nearly breaking it off in the lock. I wiggled it, trying to extract it from the keyway. The key was bent not just at the shoulder, but also along the blade, and its serrations were wedged in the pin tumblers. In the morning, the superintendent would need to take the lock apart to remedy the situation. In the meantime, I could return to the building only by the front entrance.
The blush of twilight had faded to maroon, but the streetlamps hadn’t yet brightened. Shadows filled doorways. The headlights of passing vehicles flared off the parked cars, revealing or conjuring sinister figures inside them; it was impossible to tell which. I expected my father to throw open a car door and scramble after me or to rise up from between cars, but I made it to our building and pelted up the steps and into the foyer, almost knocking down Mr. Yoshioka.
He said, “Is it true, is the poor man dead? It cannot be true, so young.”
For a moment, I thought he was referring to my father, but then I remembered, and I assured him that Mr. Lorenzo had died.
“I am so entirely sorry. He was a nice man. Thank you very much.”
I said he was welcome, although I didn’t know what he might be thanking me for, and I ascended six flights to the fourth floor. I didn’t dare to race up because maybe my father was waiting for me around one turn or another, but neither did I proceed slowly, because maybe he would suddenly appear on the stairs behind me.
14 (#ulink_eeeebecc-677e-5082-b0bd-6246fc7898cd)
When I let myself into the apartment and closed the door and engaged both deadbolts, I’d been gone no more than ten minutes. Mrs. Lorenzo still sat at the kitchen table with my mother, and she still wept, though the wrenching sobs had passed for now. Neither of them knew that I’d gone out.
At one of the living-room windows, I peered down at the swarming street as light bloomed in the frosted glass of the lamps, and they seemed to float like aligned and miniature moons in the early dark. Every pedestrian interested me, every driver of every vehicle, and though none of them proved to be my father, I didn’t grow bored with sentry duty. If he had come back once, he would come back again, as though a bad-juju penny rattled within the hollow space inside him, a penny with two heads and both of them my face, by its every clink and spin reminding him of me and of how my mother would be devastated if she lost me.
After a while, my mom came to me and put a hand on my shoulder and said, “Are you all right, Jonah?”
That didn’t seem to be the best time to tell her about Tilton. Mrs. Lorenzo needed her.
“Yeah, I’m okay. It’s awful, though. How’s Mrs. Lorenzo?”
“Not good. Tony was an immigrant. He has no family in America. Donata’s father died when she was young, and she has no brothers or sisters, and I gather her mother’s … well, difficult. There’s nowhere she can go but back to their apartment, and she can’t face that right now. Maybe tomorrow. I’ve asked her to stay the night with us. She can have your bed, and you can sleep in mine.”
I looked out at the street and then at the sofa, to which I pointed. “Can I sleep there?”
“The bed would be more comfortable.”
“Well, sleeping with your parents, a parent, whatever, it’s for scared little kids, it’s little-kid stuff.”
“When did it become little-kid stuff?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. A while ago, weeks ago maybe. I mean, I’m nine.”
Sometimes it seemed that she could look right into my head and read my thoughts, as if my forehead were glass and my brain a neatly printed scroll. “Are you sure you’re all right, sweetie?”
She never lied to me, but I didn’t always measure up to her when it came to truth-telling, although this wasn’t lying, not really. I intended just to withhold the truth from her for a few hours, until Mrs. Lorenzo gathered the courage to go downstairs to her apartment in the morning.
“See, the sofa is … cool. Not kid stuff.” I sounded so lame, and I could feel the blush burning in my cheeks, but one of the benefits of dark skin is that a blush can’t give you away even to your perhaps psychically gifted mother. “The sofa is like an adventure. You know? The sofa is righteous.”
“All right, Mr. Jonah Kirk. You may sleep on the sofa, and I’ll lie awake all night worrying about how soon you’ll want to drive a car and date grown women and go away to war.”
I hugged her. “I’m never going away anywhere.”
“You go strip your bed and put on clean sheets for Donata. I’ve got to dash downstairs and get her pajamas and some other things she needs. She just falls to pieces at the thought of going back there even if I’m with her.”
Here at the front of the building, they hadn’t heard the ruckus in the alleyway, Tilton kicking the Dumpster and cursing.
“You shouldn’t go there alone.” When she gave me an odd look, I said, “I mean, not this late.”
“Late? It’s twenty past nine and it’s just downstairs. If this was a work night, sweetie, I’d be coming home alone hours later, just me with a pretend gun in my purse.”
“Well, but Mr. Lorenzo died down there.”
Although we were speaking softly, she glanced toward the kitchen and lowered her voice further. “He didn’t die of disease or anything, Jonah. And in this family, we believe there’s only one ghost this side of Heaven, and it’s the holy one.”
Having committed myself to withholding the news of my father’s return until Mrs. Lorenzo was able to go home, I felt that the manly thing would be to stay the course and not complicate the situation by dumping my fears onto my mom when she still had to help Mrs. Lorenzo get through the shock of being widowed. It made sense at the time. A great many things make sense when you’re nine years old that appear senseless years later. As justification, I can only say that during the eventful summer of 1966, I became concerned for the first time about behaving in a manly fashion, no doubt out of fear that if I didn’t discipline myself, I might wind up like my father, a perpetual adolescent.
“Now go change those sheets,” Mom said, “and I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
She left the front door ajar, and I ran to it and listened to her going down the stairs. When I heard her cross the first landing, I eased the door shut and, just in case Tilton was out there, locked it to prevent him from coming in behind my back. I hurried into my bedroom and tore the sheets off the bed and carried them to the hall closet where the laundry basket was kept and grabbed the spare set of sheets and raced back to my bedroom and made the bed. I returned to the front door and stood on my toes and barely managed to look through the fish-eye lens—nobody out there—and opened the door and stood on the threshold and waited for my mom.
She seemed to be taking forever. I didn’t believe there was a ghost in the Lorenzo apartment. And they had taken away the body, so there couldn’t be a zombie like in the voodoo-in-the-city TV movie that I’d had to turn off. But Mrs. Lorenzo, confused and hurting, might have left her door unlocked, and maybe my father had gone in there for God knows what reason, and then my mother had walked in on him. The rest would be total horror movie.
Maybe the manly thing would be to grab a butcher knife from the kitchen and go down to the second floor to check on my mother, but I couldn’t imagine what I’d say to Mrs. Lorenzo, who was in the kitchen crying again, when I burst in there and snatched the butcher knife out of the drawer. She might think I’d gone mad and meant to kill her, and that would be one shock too many, and she’d have a stroke, and then they’d haul me off to prison or the nuthatch or wherever they took crazed and dangerous boys.
I heard footsteps ascending. They sounded like the footsteps of one person, and they didn’t seem to be those of someone with a gun to her head or a knife to her throat. I stepped inside, eased the door almost shut, as my mother had left it, and hurried to the window.
When Mom came through the door, she had a little travel case in which she had packed Mrs. Lorenzo’s things. She closed the door and locked both deadbolts. She said, “You better put on your peejays and brush your teeth, honey. It’s getting late.”
“Okay, Mom.”
“You’ll need a blanket for the sofa.”
“It’s warm enough.”
“To protect the upholstery.”
“Oh, yeah. Got it.”
Minutes later, I was lying on a blanket, on the sofa, in my pajamas, with one of the pillows from my mother’s bed. The front windows remained open because we didn’t have air-conditioning, and traffic noise rose from the street. I could hear my mom and Mrs. Lorenzo talking in the kitchen, but I couldn’t catch enough words to make sense of what they were saying. They were taking a long time, longer than I expected, and I grew anxious about not being able to keep a watch on the street. Later, I would learn that Mom gave Mrs. Lorenzo a few Benadryl and then insisted that they each have a large glass of red wine, which I guess seemed just the right thing to an Italian lady like the widow. When they finally left the kitchen, I pretended to be sleeping, and I pretended all the time that they used the bathroom and dressed for bed. When my mother came to the sofa and whispered good-night and kissed me on the cheek, I lay there with my mouth open, breathing through it, making a soft snoring sound. Before she turned away and switched off the lights and went to her bedroom, she said, “My angel,” which made me feel lowly and deceitful and the very spawn of Tilton Kirk, even though I knew that my motives were good and my heart sincere.
Lying there in the dark, with the glow of the city invoking ghostly shapes from the familiar objects in the living room, I waited until I thought Mom and the widow might be asleep before I got off the couch and felt my way to one of the windows. The flow of traffic had diminished, and there were fewer pedestrians, as well. I didn’t see my father, but the longer I knelt at the window, with my arms folded on the sill, the more it seemed to me that of the people who walked past or drove by, every one of them appeared suspicious. More than suspicious. There had been another old movie I’d watched about two-thirds of before turning it off. Instead of zombies, the bad guys had been seed-pod people from another world, and they had duplicated real people and had taken their place; you couldn’t tell them from the people they imitated except that they had no real emotions.
15 (#ulink_ab61243d-6614-5dd7-a6bc-4e2229b76b10)
Eventually I returned to the sofa, too exhausted to stand an entire night watch. I dropped into a deep well of sleep and floated there until, after a while, the dream began in a pitch-black place with the sound of rushing water all around, as if I must be aboard a boat on a river in the rain.
I was lying on my left side, in the fetal position, on an uncomfortable surface, clutching something in my right fist, holding it so tightly that my fingers ached. A great fear overcame me, but of what I couldn’t say, a blind terror in the blind dark of the dream, and my heart was as loud as a felt hammer on a timpani skin, beat and backbeat all but simultaneous. The object in my hand was a penlight.
Later, I would realize that no previous dream had ever included a fragrance or a flavor, but in this one I tasted blood. My lower lip was swollen, throbbing. When I licked, it stung where split.
I was holding a penlight, for what reason I don’t know, as I never had possessed one in real life. Still lying on my side, I cried out, startled, when the beam revealed a face directly in front of mine, less than a foot away, a girl perhaps in her early twenties, dark hair wet with rain and pasted to her face, eyes seeming to swell from their sockets, strangled to death with a man’s necktie that still cinched her throat.
Thrusting up from the darkness of the dream into the lesser darkness of our living room, I came off the sofa and onto my feet, breathless for a moment, and then inhaled with a gasp. I shuddered and put a hand to my mouth, expecting my lower lip to be split and bleeding, but it was not. Because my legs were weak, I sat down at once, grateful that I hadn’t cried out in my sleep as I had done in the nightmare, hadn’t awakened my mother or the widow Lorenzo.
In my mind’s eye, I could still see the dead girl as clearly as I had seen her in sleep—and as in the dream about Lucas Drackman, a few months earlier, she wasn’t a half-imagined phantom, but instead as vividly detailed as a portrait by Norman Rockwell. Wet hair thick and glistening with rain. Blue eyes shading toward purple, the pupils wide in death. Delicate features, pert nose formed to the perfection of the finest porcelain figurine. Generous mouth. Smooth creamy skin unmarred except for a small beauty mark at the high point of the left cheekbone.
When I’d awakened from the dream of Lucas Drackman, I had known that he murdered his parents sometime in the past, that what I’d seen wasn’t prophetic, but instead a done deed. In this case, I suspected that I’d been given a predictive vision while asleep, that a day would come when I would find myself surrounded by the sounds of rushing water, enclosed in darkness with a corpse.
As I sat there on the edge of the sofa, I caught the faint scent of roses and came to my feet. Turning, I saw a woman’s silhouette at one of the front windows, backlit by the night glow of the city. She was too tall to be either Mrs. Lorenzo or my mother. She said softly, “Fiona Cassidy,” and I knew that she had just given me the name of the dead girl in my dream.
She moved away from the window, vanishing into shadows. When I switched on the lamp beside the sofa, I found myself alone in the living room. If she had really been there, she could not have exited so quickly. Yet I had seen her silhouette, had heard her voice. I had no doubt that she’d been present, although in what sense and to what extent I couldn’t say. She wasn’t a ghost, but she was something more than I had taken her to be on the day when she had first appeared to me, dressed all in pink and promising a piano.
16 (#ulink_2e41a8fc-6aad-5854-9bdf-2ca41cc20cc7)
I should have told my mother about Tilton chasing me into the alleyway, but for the next two days, she occupied herself with Mrs. Lorenzo, helping the widow to arrange the funeral, contacting the life-insurance company regarding Tony’s small policy, which would give the widow only a few years of security, and packing the deceased’s clothes to take them to the Salvation Army because Mrs. Lorenzo had no heart for the job. At the end of each day, Mom was tired and sad, and I didn’t want to burden her with my worries.
By the time we returned to our usual schedule, I was hesitant to tell her what Tilton had done. By delaying, I had to some extent deceived her, which I had never done before, at least not about anything serious. Although my reason for doing so was honorable, I was concerned that she would in the future wonder what else I might be withholding from her, that this would in some way permanently change our relationship.
Of course, I was keeping another secret: Miss Pearl, my guide through dreams of terrors both past and pending. The mysterious woman had instructed me to tell no one of Lucas Drackman, and I understood intuitively that the same discretion was required of me regarding Fiona Cassidy. Honoring Miss Pearl’s instructions meant being less than entirely forthcoming with my mother, and though that wasn’t the same thing as lying, it was not worthy of a well-churched boy. Miss Pearl had given me a piano, yes, but my mother had given me life.
I adored my mother and hoped that she would always trust me. And so, having delayed telling her about my father’s pursuit of me, I made the further mistake of deciding to remain silent on the subject. Most nine-year-old boys want to be seen as more grown up than they are. Considering that I was now the man in the house, I convinced myself that I alone should deal with Tilton if he came around again, that I could deal with him, and that in this troubled time, I needed to spare my mother from unnecessary anxiety.
The nation seemed to be sliding toward one existential crisis or another. Growing casualties in Vietnam spawned street demonstrations against the war, and a seventy-two-year-old woman named Alice Herz had even set fire to herself in protest. The previous year, during Martin Luther King’s march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, marchers were beaten and trampled by horses ridden by state troopers, and a shocked nation watched it all on television. Malcolm X was assassinated, not by racist whites but by other blacks, probably Black Muslims, and everywhere you looked, there was discontent and anger, envy and loathing. Respect for authority was down, crime was up, and illegal drugs were being peddled as never before. Not in our neighborhood but in another part of the city, there had been race riots, as there had also been in Watts, a Negro section of Los Angeles, in which thirty-four people died and whole blocks were burned to the ground. And this summer was no less violent than the last one. A couple of times, I’d overheard Mom worrying about the future with Grandpa and Grandma, not about her prospects as a singer but about my safety and about the war and about what might be in store for all of us. By comparison, my father seemed to be more of a nuisance than a threat.
The summer wore on, hot and humid and eventful. Search-and-destroy missions in the Mekong Delta of Vietnam led to nightly death tolls reported on the evening news. In July, in Chicago, Richard Speck stabbed and strangled eight student nurses in their dormitory. On the first day of August, an honor student named Charles Whitman climbed to the top of the twenty-seven-story University of Texas tower and with a rifle killed sixteen and wounded thirty, an unprecedented slaughter that alarmed the nation because it felt not like an aberration but like the start of something new.
Mom came home from her job at Woolworth’s one afternoon and found that I, having returned early from the community center, sat mesmerized by TV-news film of the war and the raging riots. I was only nine, but I think even before I started to recognize the tumult in the world, I already had an awareness of how unstable life could be, born in part from my father’s inconstancy but also from the fact that, in spite of my mother’s undeniable talent and drive, her quest for a career as a singer encountered setback after setback. The L.A. fires, the explosions in Vietnam, the gunfire in both places, the dead bodies in streets foreign and domestic, the crimes of Lucas Drackman and the death-to-come of a girl named Fiona Cassidy, Mr. Lorenzo standing up from the dinner table and dropping dead of a heart attack, the two trash-talking thugs who followed Mom and me through the park earlier in the summer, Speck, Whitman: All of it came together like many different winds joining forces and spinning into one tornado, so that, sitting there in front of the television, I suddenly felt that everything I knew and loved might be blown away, leaving me alone and vulnerable to threats beyond counting.
Riveted by the spectacle of destruction on the screen, I said, “Everybody’s killing everybody.”
Mother stood watching the TV for a moment and then switched it off. She sat beside me on the sofa. “You okay?”
“Yeah. I’m all right.”
“You sure?”
“It’s just … You know. All this stuff.”
“Bad news.”
“Real bad.”
“So don’t watch it.”
“Yeah, but it’s still happening.”
“And what can you do about it?”
“What do you mean?”
“The war, the riots, the rest of it.”
“I’m just a kid.”
“I’m not a kid,” she said, “and I can’t do anything about it, except sit here and watch it.”
“But you turned it off.”
“Because there’s something else I can do something about.”
“What?”
“Mrs. Lorenzo’s all alone, so I asked her to dinner.”
I shrugged. “That’s nice.”
She turned on the TV but muted the sound. People were looting an electronics store, taking TVs and stereos.
“There’s something you need to understand, Jonah. For every person who’s stealing and setting fires and turning over police cars, there are three or four others in the same neighborhood who want no part of it, who’re more afraid of lawbreakers than they are of the law.”
“Doesn’t look that way.”
“Because the TV only shows you the ones who’re doing it. The news isn’t all the news, Jonah. Not by a long shot. It’s just what reporters want to tell you about. Riots come and go, wars come and go, but under the tumult, day after day, century after century, millions of people are doing nice things for one another, making sacrifices, mostly small things, but it’s all those little kindnesses that hold civilization together, all those people who live quiet lives and never make the news.”
On the silent TV, as the face of an anchorman replaced the riots, I said, “I don’t know about that.”
“Well, I do.”
The anchorman was replaced by a wind-whipped rain-lashed town over which towered a giant funnel cloud that tore a house apart in an instant and sucked the ruins off the face of the Earth.
“When weather’s big news,” my mother said, “it’s a hurricane, a tornado, a tidal wave. Ninety-nine-point-nine percent of the time, Mother Nature isn’t destroying things, she’s nurturing us, but that’s not what gets ratings or sells papers.” She switched off the TV again. “What do you want to be, Jonah—news or nice?”
“Nice, I guess.”
She smiled and pulled me against her and kissed the top of my head. “Then help me get ready for Mrs. Lorenzo. You can start by setting the table for dinner.”
A few minutes later, in the kitchen, as I was putting the plates on the place mats, I said, “Sooner or later, do you think my dad’s going to be news?”
She recognized the implication that I thought him incapable of being nice. “Be respectful, Jonah.”
I figured she knew the answer as well as I did.
17 (#ulink_970cee5e-7b01-59f4-95a8-2131b19c178e)
The following morning, after Mom had left for Woolworth’s, I carried the kitchen trash bag to the alleyway behind the apartment building. The sky had lowered, as smooth and gray as concrete, as if the entire city had been roofed over and enclosed in a structure of fantastical dimensions. The air was still when I stepped outside, but as I tossed away the trash and turned from the Dumpster, a cat’s paw of wind came along the center of the littered alley, leaving most debris undisturbed, batting before it only a sphere about the size of a golf ball. It rolled to a stop in front of me, as the breeze died, and I saw that it was an eyeball. Not a real eye, this was one that might have once been sewn to a stuffed toy.
The orb looked up at me from the pavement. I didn’t remember bending down to retrieve it, but the next thing I knew, I held the object in my right hand. It was made of neatly stitched furry fabric and filled with some spongy material, overall beige, though affixed to it was a circle of white felt that bore a small blue disc at its center. Beige threads, with which it had been attached to some plush toy, trailed from it.
Perhaps because of the recent strange events and disturbing dreams, I was disposed to regard the eye as if it were not merely litter, as if it must have some ominous significance. As it gazed at me from the cupped palm of my right hand, I didn’t realize that the sounds of the city were diminishing, until suddenly I became aware that a profound silence had fallen over the alleyway. For an instant, I thought that I had gone deaf, but then I heard myself say, “What’s happening?” The silence was real, not a failure of perception, as though the metropolis had never been a human habitat, as if it were instead a vast clockwork mechanism that, after centuries of reliable performance, had exhausted the tension of its mainspring.
I glanced toward one end of the alleyway, then toward the other, wondering at the absence of traffic. In the warm August morning, many windows were open in the surrounding apartment buildings, though no voices issued from them, no music, no sounds of activity whatsoever. From the sky: no jet roar, no chatter of police helicopters.
When I turned my attention once more to the faux eye in my hand, I could not dismiss the ludicrous conviction that it could see me. It was inert materials, crafted by human hands, just fabric and thread and a bit of colored plastic, and yet I felt watched—and not just watched but also pondered and analyzed and judged—as if every detail this eye beheld was transmitted to some remote and highly curious entity that, but for me, was the only living creature still afoot in this silent city of stilled pendulums and frozen gears.
As I recount this, at the age of fifty-seven, I remain full of childlike wonder, arising every day to the expectation of mysteries and miracles. When I was nine years old, I wasn’t such an unflagging romantic and delighted believer as I have now become, but that boy possessed the capacity for enchantment and awe that made it possible for time and experience to mold him into me.
I swear that when I closed my fist around that fabric eye, I felt it roll from side to side, as though seeking some gap between my clenched fingers that would provide it with at least a narrow view of me. As if my spinal fluid had been replaced with a refrigerant, a chill climbed vertebra to vertebra from the small of my back to the base of my skull.
Moving toward the nearest Dumpster, remembering what Grandpa Teddy had said about juju, I intended to throw the eye into the trash, but before I could fling it away, I realized that the wiser course might be to retain possession of the thing, so that I would always know its whereabouts and could keep it in a container to ensure it remained blind to my activities. If memory serves me well, this bizarre notion came to me less as a thought than as whispered words in the vaguely familiar voice of a woman, a voice hardly louder than a breath in the inexplicable stillness of the city.
Among the debris in the alleyway lay a discarded empty pint of whiskey and the brown-paper bag in which it was now only partially concealed. I left the bottle, replaced it with the eye, and twisted shut the neck of the bag.
Sound quickly returned to the world, faint at first, but within a few seconds rising to the usual level of a metropolis populated by industrious—or at least restless and bustling—citizens. I stood there for a minute, listening, wondering, no longer chilled but mystified and wary.
After using a key to let myself in through the alley entrance of the apartment building, I decided not to use the back stairs, because I half expected to find Tilton waiting for me on the landing where Mom had put his packed suitcases back in June. I imagined that he might have with him a chloroform-soaked rag with which to subdue me and a steamer trunk in which he would take me away forever.
I followed the first-floor hall to the front stairs and, having totally spooked myself, sprinted two flights before discovering a woman who was halfway up the third flight. She was dressed all in black, her long hair black as well. On the handrail, her pale left hand appeared as well formed as the finest porcelain.
She heard me, paused, and looked back. Blue eyes shading to purple. Pert nose formed to perfection. Generous mouth. Small beauty mark at the high point of the left cheekbone. Here stood the dead girl from my dream, still alive, no throttling necktie cinched around her throat. Fiona Cassidy.
In my surprise, I merely gaped at her, holding the twisted neck of the paper bag as if I might offer her the contents, and no doubt I appeared simpleminded. She neither smiled nor frowned, and without a word, she continued climbing the stairs.
I left the stairwell then, hoping she wouldn’t suspect that I was especially interested in her. I didn’t allow the door to close entirely, but stood in the second-floor hallway, listening to her ascend, and when I thought she had passed the third floor and had continued toward the fourth, I returned to the stairs to follow her as stealthily as possible.
18 (#ulink_020d455d-08c1-51bc-b3a0-d1000597f4bd)
Fiona Cassidy went past the fourth floor, on which I lived with my mother, went past the fifth, where Miss Delvane wrote her magazine articles and researched her rodeo novel, where also Mr. Yoshioka led his quiet and perhaps tragic life in Apartment 5-C. She continued to the sixth and highest floor.
Each floor of our building offered three apartments. Two were of the size in which Mom and I lived. The third offered twice as many square feet as those smaller units and was better suited to families with more than a single child, although they were far from spacious. The superintendent, Mr. Reginald Smaller, occupied an apartment on the ground floor, leaving seventeen available for paying tenants.
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Dean Koontz
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: No.1 New York Times bestselling author Dean Koontz is at the peak of his storytelling powers with this major new novel – a rich, multi-layered story that moves back and forth across decades and generations as a gifted musician relates the ‘terrible and wonderful’ events that began in his city in 1967, when he was ten.THIS IS THE STORY OF A BOY AND A CITY…Jonah Kirk’s childhood has been punctuated by extraordinary moments – like the time a generous stranger helped him realize his dream of learning the piano. Nothing is more important to him than his family and friends, and the electrifying power of music.But now Jonah has a terrifying secret. And it sets him on a collision course with a group of dangerous people who will change his life forever.For one bright morning, a single earth-shattering event will show Jonah that in his city, good is entwined with malice, and sometimes the dark side of humanity triumphs. But it will also teach him that courage and honour are found in the most unexpected places, and the way forward lies buried deep inside the heart.If he can just survive to find it…