Quickly, Scott got up to open the parlor windows so the room could air out. Lottie shouldn’t have to tolerate the smell of a stranger’s blood in her home. But Lottie didn’t complain.
“Well, my, my, my,” Lottie said. She had changed into her flannel gown, her slippers flapping on the wooden floor. “This could be another line of income for you, Scotty boy. You’re a mess in that blood, but your piano’s pretty as a new bride.”
Lottie was right. The piano that had seemed so ominous to him in the alley looked nothing less than splendid now, with its engraved wreath across the cabinet’s breast and the ornamentation carved up and down both legs. It wasn’t his Steinway, but it would do until he could afford it. The freshly scrubbed ivory keys shone like precious stones in the lamplight.
“What are you waiting on?” Lottie said. “Let me hear how it sounds.”
Scott rested his foot on the sustaining pedal, testing its spring. The pedal was responsive, like new. “What should I play?”
“That one you just wrote. It sure gets my foot to tapping.”
Despite its ordeal, impossibly, the piano was reasonably tuned. But Scott expected that, because there was nothing ordinary about this Rosenkranz.
Scott played the delicate introduction of the piece he’d been working on, one Lottie said he should call simply “Scott Joplin’s New Rag.” It was a fitting name, since he’d been so busy with Treemonisha that he hadn’t written many others. He didn’t know where he would sell it, except that it wouldn’t go to John Stark. John wasn’t offering royalties for new pieces, and Scott’s patience with him was done anyway. Just because Stark had published “Maple Leaf Rag” a lifetime ago didn’t mean Scott owed him his life that remained.
But Scott had barely begun his piece’s merrily circus-styled A section when a sharp cramp shot from his knuckles to his elbow, nearly taking his breath. The pain startled Scott so much, he stopped playing. The room went silent.
You gonna lose them fingers, too. Time comes, you won’t be able to hold yo’ own dick to take a piss. The memory of the conjurer’s words raked Scott’s spine.
“What is it, baby?” Lottie said, her hands on his shoulders. Her skin smelled like rosewater, a welcome departure from the smell of blood, but then the irony struck him: Lottie smelled like Rose, the octoroon from St. Louis whose company he and Louis had shared.
“I don’t feel much like playing,” Scott said, realizing how rarely he’d uttered those words. Any other time, he could play even when he could do nothing else.
“You don’t have to. Play it tomorrow.”
“The show’s off in Atlantic City.” He hated to tell Lottie more than the cast, even.
“I know, baby. Sam told me. It’ll all be fine. Come on to bed, Scotty.”
Scott blinked, thinking of Freddie’s slim, youthful nakedness with a pang. He almost never thought about Freddie when he was with Lottie, something he was proud of. He wanted to do right by Lottie. She knew he’d been married twice before, but the first night she invited him to dinner at her apartment, she’d told him plainly that she didn’t want to know about the women in his past, and he wasn’t to ask about the men in hers. That agreement between them might be the cornerstone of their tranquility. He only wished he were still man enough to please her the way she deserved. Like Freddie, Lottie was not the kind of woman who would consider relations with her husband a duty. When he was able, Lottie cherished relations with him.
“You go on. I think I’ll stay up for a while,” Scott said.
As always, Lottie’s kiss to his lips was soft and loving. Lottie’s kisses sustained him. She had given him his life again when he’d wondered if he had any left. Scott knew he would cherish her the rest of his days. “I sho’ ’nuff loves ya, Scott,” Lottie said, imitating Bert Williams’s vaudevillian minstrel style.
“I sho’ ’nuff loves ya back, Lottie.”
With Lottie gone, Scott sat rubbing his cramped knuckle. All that labor, and he’d barely been able to play a note. “You owe me better than that,” Scott said to the piano. Louis had addressed his pianos frequently, but Scott had never taken up the habit, until now. “You can see what I did for you. You’re mine now, so what will you do for me?”
It was an inspiring idea, like the tale from Arabian Nights. What would he ask for, if Aladdin’s fabled Jinni appeared to grant a wish? Scott knew the answer in a heartbeat.
“Immortality.” He spoke the word aloud, a confession to no one but himself.
That was the truth of it. He wanted to spread the gospel of education in Treemonisha, but didn’t he also want to be recognized? Didn’t he want to prove that Negroes were artists, not just showmen? Didn’t he crave assurance that the music God gave him would not be ignored? Sam was fooling himself if he didn’t think all artists wanted to be remembered.
Maybe Sam was too young to think of such things, unchained by thoughts of death. What a blissful luxury! Scott could think of hardly anything except death. When Freddie died, Scott’s hopes for progeny had died with her—and with no children to bequeath his memory to, only his music would remain. Lottie kept every scrap of paper he sketched a tune on, but that was not enough. Just as Jim Europe and Will Marion Cook were ignoring him, so might the world, and forever. How could Sam claim that Music itself didn’t starve without an audience to hear it? Scott had sacrificed poor Freddie on the altar of his music, dragging her with him from town to town to scrape a few pennies together—and for what?
He might never have immortality without Treemonisha. With the flood of awful music and bawdy lyrics to poison the name of ragtime, Scott felt more certain every day that the public would not take wider notice of his rags. No one except Lottie, perhaps, and a handful of artists like James Scott and white composer Joseph Lamb, who had both sought him out—men who understood that lasting art was born of fine composition and thoughtful execution. Ragtime was treated like a greater scourge each year, and he’d been called its king.
And what would you render for immortality, Scott?
The question came to his head as if it had flown in through the open window, whispered in a voice that was not his, that was not the voice of anyone he knew—a voice, in fact, that wasn’t from anyone or anything in particular as much as it was a rustle nearly shrouded in the silence.
“Anything,” Scott whispered, a tear rolling from his chin to further wash the keys he had scrubbed lovingly with his failing hand. “I would render everything.”
That night, for the first time in years, Scott dreamed about Freddie.
Having a piano in the apartment renewed Scott’s spirit.
The next morning, he set out right away to plan a performance of Treemonisha on his own, without backers. He found his luck at last when he turned a corner and ran into a friend from Harlem who offered to try and convince a theater owner to rent Scott his stage on West 135th Street at a lower price on Sunday afternoon, when the doors were usually closed. By the next day, Scott had his answer: The stage is yours.
But the offer was for Sunday and that Sunday only, which meant Scott had only two days to prepare. He would have no time to post notices or place an ad in New York Age, even if he could have afforded the expense. He and Sam wouldn’t have time to finish the orchestrations, much less cobble together an orchestra. Two days meant no sets and no costumes, since the cast would have enough work bringing their voices up to the opera’s demands.
Still, it was something, and they all knew it.
The cast members were excited, letting out such a cheer at his announcement that they might have thought they were singing in full costume at the Metropolitan Opera instead of in their own clothes at the Lincoln Theatre near Lenox Avenue in Harlem. They improvised dance steps in their basement rehearsals, but agreed to save their most ambitious dances for the scottische, dude walk and slow drag at the finale.
During those two days, the air was crisper and Scott felt a snap to his step. He had his stage, and that was enough. Sally would be his Treemonisha, a
nd he would invite as many influential people as he could to the two-hundred-seat theater, so his opera could fly free into the world. Freddie would live again. He would see to it.
But Sunday arrived with all the promise of storm clouds. First, the performance was delayed a half hour because the employee who was supposed to come with the keys to the theater was nowhere to be found. He finally ambled up to their waiting huddle with a flask of whiskey, claiming he’d just come back from services at Abyssinian Baptist Church.
The electricity wasn’t working properly, flowing to a few lamps but no footlights, so the theater was nearly dark except for whatever light could force its way past the screened windows. The theater’s piano was also alarmingly out of tune, something Scott had forgotten to check beforehand. He would never have made such an oversight if he’d been at his best! After his warm-up scales, the cast assured him that the piano sounded fine, but they were lying to themselves. Still, the piano hardly mattered, in the end.
“Ladies and gentlemen—Treemonisha,” Scott said with all the heart he could command.
At the piano, Scott’s hands ached during the overture and never stopped. Sally sang like a warrior, but just when Scott was telling himself it might turn out fine after all, confusion reigned at the beginning of the second act, when an epidemic of forgetfulness ran through the cast. Without costumes, the “Frolic of the Bears” was nonsensical, even embarrassing. The finale was the saving grace: The dance numbers looked as well as they might have in Atlantic City, with everyone remembering their steps and lyrics, but by then Scott was nearly in tears because his unsteady hands were in mutiny and he missed note after note.
Scott was relieved when a lukewarm dribbling of applause signaled that he had survived the ordeal. The cast was happy with itself, each of them silently noting their personal triumphs as they took their bows, but there were more than twice the number of people crowding the stage than there were sitting in the audience. Only seventeen people had witnessed the opera’s performance, and Scott was glad there hadn’t been more.
It’s only a start, he told himself, but he didn’t believe it. That doubt made him a prophet.
It was the only production of Treemonisha Scott Joplin would live to see.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Be quiet Be quiet Be quiet
One hour to rest—only sixty minutes—and someone was playing piano music so loudly through her hotel room wall that Phoenix couldn’t sleep. For FUCK’S sake, SHUT UP.
The day had been torture from the time she’d opened her eyes. She wished she had listened to Carlos’s warning not to stay up writing two nights straight, or that she could have listened. Last night, after a day of interviews and rehearsals, Phoenix had dropped into bed nearly unconscious by ten, and she’d still felt like a rag doll all day, her eyes only painted open.
And the Osiris show was today.
At the theater early with Serena, Arturo and the others for a three-hour rehearsal they were lucky to get, Phoenix had liberated herself by wearing her Moog Liberation shoulder synth. She’d brought it with her to New York, for once, so Arturo had to help her modify her dance steps so she could keep up with the choreography of “Party Patrol.” No small feat wearing a fourteen-pound synth, but she had done it, and behind Arturo’s lead, they finally looked like a unit. And since she’d complained about the canned sound of the background vocal tracks on “Love the One You’re With,” yesterday, Sarge had rounded up a dozen kids from a teen choir in Harlem willing to sing for a small contribution to their church. The extra singers were a logistical nightmare (and the groggy sound man had glared at Phoenix for the last-hour change), but the kids sounded great, especially with Serena belting the more aggressive power notes. Manny had nearly wet himself when he heard their last take at sound check. Damn, Phoenix, what do you think this is, the Grammys? Her crew was ready.
But Phoenix wasn’t. She’d sung in a whisper at most of the rehearsal, trying to save her voice, and she hoped that would be enough to get her through the show. One hour. That was all the time she had for a nap. In one hour, she had to get up so Serena could fix her hair and makeup. The concert started at seven, and she was the opener, so Sarge said she had to arrive at the Osiris no later than six. One hour.
Majestic, self-important piano music thumped through her wall, relentless. Who the fuck was playing a piano on this floor? The music was so loud, it sounded like it was in her ear.
BE QUIET
“Babe, can you please call the front desk and complain about this effing noise?” Phoenix mumbled to Carlos, who had curled beside her to guard her from interruptions.
Carlos didn’t answer, and his silence set off a domino effect of enlightenment in Phoenix’s mind. Shit. Why would there be a piano on this floor? There wasn’t, of course. She must be dreaming the music, then. Phoenix refused to open her eyes, trying to wish the dream away.
I can’t do this now, Scott. Please let me rest. Come back tomorrow, after the show.
This piano music sounded like Treemonisha—she’d listened to the opera’s CD enough to recognize it—but some of the passages sounded different, veering out of place. Van Milton had told her Scott was revising his opera at the end of this life, but those pages had been lost with so many others. Phoenix felt herself sob inside. She had never been this tired, not ever. She couldn’t let Scott rob her of her last nap before her show. Too many people were counting on her, including twelve kids from Harlem.
I can’t fix everything, Scott. It’s not my fault it’s gone. Please let me rest, just once.
The music grew louder, willful. A growling run in the lowest octave shook her teeth.
When Phoenix gave up and opened her eyes, she saw that she wasn’t in her king-sized bed in a midtown–New York hotel room. No panoramic view of the city waited for her now. Carlos, the bed and her room were gone. Yes, this was a dream, like the others.
Except that she also wasn’t in Solomon Dixon’s boardinghouse lying in Freddie Alexander’s deathbed. Instead, she was outside in a field, curled on the ground, penned in by green stalks. Sitting up, Phoenix realized she was surrounded by ripening plants in an endless cornfield. The sky was dark except for a stifled glow, pinks and grays. Sunrise or dusk.
Phoenix was relieved she had learned how to tell the difference between her waking and dreaming lives. Her dreams had very few smells, for one thing. When she grabbed a clump of damp, moist soil and raised it to her nose, she didn’t smell a thing. Images shifted very quickly in her dreams, too. She saw a scarecrow not too far from her, and she was almost sure it hadn’t been there when she first opened her eyes. The scarecrow was erected on a pole, its straw arms outstretched, Christlike, while six black crows sat across its arms in a row, one atop the scarecrow’s dangling head. The way the figure hung, listing to one side, it looked more like a man than clothes stuffed with straw. Phoenix was afraid it would move, but it didn’t. She looked away from it quickly.
The music played on, sounding very close to her, hidden beyond the stalks of corn. Scott is here, she remembered. Scott hadn’t invited himself into her sleep in a long time, and now that he was here, she was excited to see him.
What was I so worried about? What could be more important than seeing Scott?
Following the stirring strains from “A Real Slow Drag,” Phoenix walked until the forest of corn thinned, and she saw a clearing ahead where ten or twelve men and women sat over straw baskets, shucking the corn with disciplined snatches. They worked diligently, and Phoenix thought their arms might be moving in synchronization to the music.
A horn pealed from somewhere. The sound reminded Phoenix of the shofar the rabbi blew at her mother’s temple on Yom Kippur, one of two High Holy Days her mother observed. The corn-shuckers stopped working when they heard the horn, standing up to stretch their legs and backs, groaning and arching toward the sky. One by one, they took their baskets and disappeared into the cornstalks. The clearing was now empty except for a man in a white shirt playing a piano
, his back facing her. Somehow, she hadn’t seen him before. His arms stretched from one end of the keyboard to the other as he played in a frenzy.
Phoenix’s heart swelled, and light brightened the sky. “Scott?” she said.
Scott stopped playing and turned around. His face, usually so somber, gave way to a joyous grin that seemed more heartbreaking, somehow. “Freddie?” he said. He looked like he couldn’t believe he was seeing her, as if he were the one waking inside a dream.
The instant she thought about moving closer, she was standing beside him, moving in a way only dreams allowed. She dropped her hand to his shoulder, gently kneading his muscles. Touching him broke her heart. “I’ve missed you,” she said.
“No, dear heart, I’ve missed you,” he said, his eyes brimming. “Where have you been?”
“Where I’ve always been,” she said.
He stood up to face her, bringing his chest against hers, and she noticed for the first time that they were almost the exact height, although her hair made her taller. Her hair was wrapped in a tall mound atop her head, the way she’d worn it when she went to Liberty Park Hall to hear him—the way she’d worn her hair in the photograph Scott used on the cover sheet of “Bethena,” the song he wrote for her. Was that really me in Sedalia? Was it me in Scott’s arms all along?
Scott suddenly clamped his palms to her cheeks, holding her so tightly that she felt her face pucker. Her cheeks vibrated, as if they could absorb his flesh into hers. “Don’t leave me again, Freddie,” Scott whispered. “You promised.”
“I…” Had she promised him? “I…didn’t want to leave.”
“Then why?” Scott said. “I looked away a minute, and you were gone.”
She didn’t know why she had left him, or how anyone could. She couldn’t speak.
Scott smiled again. “I wrote another opera. The girl in it, Treemonisha, has your soul.”
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