The train was slowing down. I saw pretty houses, in pastels, and flat frost-filtered emerald lawns. I was almost home. It was no secret then, was it? I was more like her than I often liked to admit. The force that through her grim life drove her, drove me too, I supposed. I recalled trying to tell her once how much I loved My Antonia. Though she never showed that the books and stories were about anything more than young girls growing up on farms in the Midwest, yet she was the one who first introduced me to Willa Cather. She was the one who gave me My Antonia, which was her favorite book too. I wrote out the sentence I loved, in my notebook, brought it to her, repeated it to myself again and again: Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.
I was crushed, though, when I tried to talk to her of the wonders I’d discovered in it, when I closed my eyes and recited the line. She said nothing back, and so I found myself talking more and more, on and on, about all the parts of the book I’d loved, and asking her which parts she’d loved, but my words all seemed to pass her by.
“Yes,” was all she said, when I was done. “Life was very hard in those days. I’m glad you can see that now.”
How I Became an Orphan in 1947
I WAS FIVE YEARS OLD. We were driving to the country and I sat in the back seat with my mother. My father sat in the front seat with Dave. Dave had a title, in Yiddish—and it meant the-man-who-drives-you-to-the-country. That was who he was: the-man-who-drives-you-to-the-country. He had a fine old black DeSoto, with running boards and a kick seat in the rear that I could rest my feet on. It had once been a taxi. Every summer Dave came and loaded our trunks onto the roof of his DeSoto and drove us to the country, where we stayed with my mother and her family in a large cottage that had a communal kitchen. My mother had four sisters, and they all had husbands and children, and all the husbands stayed away during the week, in the city, working, and drove up by bus and train for the weekends. None of them owned their own cars. That year we never arrived at the cottage. We had a flat tire and while Dave fixed it, my mother leaned against the side of the car and smoked a cigarette. When Dave passed her, she let her hand touch his neck. Dave patted her ass. My father went crazy, screaming that my mother was a cockteasing ballbusting slut. My mother laughed. Dave told my father to calm down—what good was life if you couldn’t flirt with a good-looking dame once in a while? My father attacked, and Dave slammed him across the cheek with the tire iron. My father keeled over and bled on the grass. My mother screamed at my father for acting like an idiot. Dave finished changing the tire, cursing all the while, and then he and my mother dragged my father into the car, and Dave said he would drive us to a hospital. My father lay with his head on the kick seat, dripping blood onto my sneakers. My mother sat in the front seat, staring ahead as if we didn’t exist, telling Dave he had ruined everything, that they had had a good thing going and he had pissed it away. Dave called her the same names my father called her and she laughed and blew smoke in his face. My father didn’t wake up. My mother told me that if ever I told her sisters what I had seen and heard she would kill me. I sat back and stared out the window. Then I looked down. It was the only time I was ever to see my father, in the presence of my mother, with a peaceful expression on his face. The more blood leaked from him, the more peaceful he became. I asked if we could stop for a malted milk. I loved vanilla malteds and would always ask the counterman to put in an extra spoonful of malt for me. My mother told me if I was so damned thirsty I should drink my father’s blood. Dave took the curves of the country road with great speed and my mother yelled at him that he had missed the turn-off for the hospital. What good is a hospital for a dead man? Dave asked. He called my mother a dirty cunt who should strap a mattress to her back. She slapped him. He grabbed her wrists and punched her in the nose and I leapt forward, across my father’s body, and dug my fingers into his eyes. My mother wailed. My father’s head fell off the chair onto the floor and his body twitched. Dave beat at my hands. While we bounced down a hill, my mother opened the car door. There was a splendid red barn on the side of the hill, with a handsome stone foundation, and at the bottom of the hill—across the road—a young girl in pigtails was painting a picture of it, the canvas on an easel, and a man who might have been her father standing next to her, giving her instructions. They looked very happy. Dave was too strong for me and pulled my right hand out of his eye. There was blood and skin under my fingernails. I shoved my freed finger into his ear. My mother threatened to jump. Dave told her to be his guest, but before she could make up her mind, the car turned onto two wheels. Crazy Jewish women! Dave shouted. They’ll kill us all. But he was wrong. She only killed two of them. Dave swerved to avoid the young girl who was painting the picture of the red barn, and in so doing he rammed into a large maple tree, and the steering wheel broke and spiked his head the way a shaved branch pierces a marshmallow. My mother flew through the side door and landed on the grass and fell asleep, her skirt up across her back. Her blue underpants were flecked with blood. I had seen the tree and the girl and her father and the easel speeding toward us, and had lain down on top of my father. The exhaust system twisted up through the floor between my father’s legs, but it didn’t reach me. I went to sleep. When I awoke I was in a hospital, sitting in a chair, reciting the alphabet for two young nurses. They hugged me and kissed me and the younger nurse wept. I recited the two, three, four and five times tables for them and when I told them I was not yet in kindergarten they called me their little Albert Einstein. I said that Albert Einstein lived in New Jersey and that my father kept a photo of him on his desk, where he worked doing income taxes for people. They told me I would play the violin some day and sail the seas on sailing boats, like Professor Einstein. I let them hold me close, so that I could smell their talcummed breasts and starched uniforms. They took me into the room where my mother lay with tubes growing into her and her face bandaged from where they had removed slivers of glass and metal. I sat by her bedside and ate strawberry ice cream. I was unblemished. I was, the nurses declared, a miracle. An elderly doctor, tall and hunched over, his moustache the color of dry spring grass, patted me on the shoulder and told me I was the man of the family now. I nodded. Could I see my father? He didn’t think so. My father was asleep. Was Dave asleep too? Yes, Dave was asleep also. Would my mother wake up? Yes, she would. But my father and Dave were sleeping the sleep of the angels. The doctor took me into his office. He had a voice like warm chocolate. He said that he had telephoned his wife and that I would come to his house for dinner. They closed their eyes and hands before the meal and prayed that Christ would bless their home and food and guest. Their dining table was made of cherry wood that the doctor had milled and joined himself. He gave me a tour of his workshop. He made artificial legs and hands for young children, and showed me his sketches for movable parts of bodies. Prosthesis, he said. It was a new word to me and it made me happy to spell it inside my head. P-r-o-s-t-h-e-s-i-s. I slept in a guest room that had a porcelain washbasin on a corner stand, and I repeated the word until I slept. His wife called me her poor little boy and I told her that it was not so. We had more money than Dave, but he had a car. He had to drive us to the country to earn his living but we got to stay in the country all summer long and he had to return to the city and sweat. I told her that I did not like Dave because whenever he kissed my mother it made her laugh. The doctor’s wife’s mouth went sour, but I didn’t care. She wasn’t my mother. Her mouth was a slit in soft gray stone. Her clothes smelled of camphor. She wouldn’t let me kiss her. The next day my mother woke up. I was there. She told me to get out of her room. She didn’t ever want to see me again. She told me to get out of her life. She blamed me for killing Dave and ruining her face. What man would ever look twice at her again, except to gape at her wounds? The only job she could get now would be in the freak show at Coney Island in the winter. I told my mother I would never stop loving her, but I was lying so that the doctor would be kind to me. He was. He and his wife fed me a
nd played cards with me—Peace and Patience—and he took me in his car on his rounds and asked me if I wanted to be a doctor some day. He told me I had very intelligent eyes. Jews made good city doctors, he said. I said I wanted to live in the country and have children who would have a mother they could love and be loved by. He blushed. I never saw my mother again. I never saw her sisters or their husbands or my cousins again. The doctor said my mother had to go away for a while, where they would cure her by the use of electricity and water from hoses. The doctor and his wife drove me down to New York City and put me in the Home and on the way I asked them if I could be their child. They replied that they would keep me in their prayers and hope that the Lord Jesus Christ would one day enter my heart. If He did, there would be hope for me. But not with them, for they were too old and I was too young. They had made their peace with the Lord, accepting His judgment that they would pass from one eternity to the next without having a child. We were all God’s children. I said it wasn’t so. Some of us were nobody’s children. I never saw them again. I found out where my mother lived by looking it up in the office at the Home, when the secretary was gone. And once on a day off, when I was twelve years old, I walked by the house she lived in, on Howard Avenue in the East New York section of Brooklyn, but I decided not to visit her because I didn’t want to ruin the hatred in my heart, for that hatred was the brightest and purest thing I owned. I held onto that flame of rage, sensing that it would allow me to survive and thrive wherever I might be in the course of this life. I did not want to have to see that my mother was just an ordinary, boring, and lonely woman—a plain aging woman with scars on her face who had once upon a time given away her only son. I thought of the splintered black steering wheel going through Dave’s eye, where my finger had been, and of how I had seen the inside of my father’s nose from where his cheek was split open. When I left the Home at the age of eighteen I found my way to the spot of the accident and saw the red barn, which was freshly painted, as it had been on the day my life changed. I walked through the nearby town, hoping that one of the young women I would pass would be the girl I had not killed—that we would recognize each other and the moment we had shared—and that she might fall in love with me and marry me.
Minor Sixths, Diminished Sevenths
HE WAS THERE and he was not there. His brother Eddie was playing lead guitar, Jimmy backing him on piano, Kinnard on bass, Captain Sammy Barber carrying the four-four time on the snare drum, round and round so that Jimmy felt the wire brushes caress the inner curve of his skull. He drifted toward sleep, floated inside the music, low, then rose through to the surface for air, kept rising, looked below and imagined himself heading downstream, feet first, arms rigid at his side.
There’s a somebody I’m longing to see—I hope that he—turns out to be—someone who’ll watch over me.…
The stream widened, curved gently between lush green banks. An old Philco radio, copper wires unfurling from the rear of its wooden case, sat in the center of a meadow. The song he and Eddie had recorded so many years ago drifted lazily across the grass and wildflowers. Cool, brother. So cool.
Jimmy’s hands moved across the keys, the blocked chords—minor sixths, diminished sevenths—giving Eddie the solid ground he needed. Without that ground, Eddie was lost; with that ground beneath him, Eddie found purchase on this world, could set the music inside him free, could take off in sweet riffs like nobody else. Play it, brother. Play it sweet and blue. Eddie’s left hand was high on the guitar’s throat, his fingers glancing against the frets in a dazzling explosion of harmonics: pure crystal bells. Jimmy watched his own hands navigate the keys—steadily moving north in parallel chords, his left hand doubling the melody in the bass—and he wondered, as ever, how it was they knew where to go. He was not aware of giving them direction.
There and not there. Of course: Eddie was in Brooklyn with his wife and his two boys; Jimmy was in Paris, leaving the nightclub. Le Jardin Noir. Jimmy turned back, said good night to the doorman. Eh bien, M’sieur Jimmy. Bonne nuit.
Now came Jimmy’s favorite time—the long walk home, alone, after a night of making music. I’ve got it all now, brother. Music. Home. Family. I’ve got it all and that ain’t bad.
Jimmy looked up, imagined green and gold clouds of dry ice spinning through the neon script above the nightclub door. The letters circled gracefully and Jimmy cooled himself by riding inside the glass tubes the way he swam inside his music. Let’s ride, brother. Let’s ride this song…
I’m a little lamb who’s lost in the wood—I know I could—always he good—to one who’ll watch over me.…
He was there and he was not there.
He imagined himself brain-dead, his hands locked in position at the wrists, his fingers marching like tired soldiers across yellowed piano keys. He looked down at black sleeves, white cuffs, mother-of-pearl cufflinks. He paid attention to his wrists, his knuckles, his fingers, kept the sound full by adding a sixth note in the left hand, a third below the melody.
Jimmy shook hands with the other musicians. They set down their cases, lit cigarettes, mumbled farewells. Bonne nuit.… Sois sage, Jimmy.… A demain…
Arriving in Paris, emerging from a taxi, Eddie would be impressed by Jimmy’s rap, by how well he spoke the language. Elegance. You always had elegance, man. My big brother got elegance and ain’t that hot shit! Jimmy would laugh, would introduce him all around. They would go back inside, despite the hour, turn on the lights, open their cases, play a set together, then another, then jam until dawn. Jimmy and Eddie would show them. Music alone would live. Sure.
Jimmy heard the melody, the round he and Eddie and the others had sung on their tour: in Mississippi, Georgia, Alabama, South Carolina, Virginia. White and black, rich and poor, young and old—holding hands, the music swelling. New York City, too. Sure. Pete Seeger and Odetta at the microphone, Jimmy and Eddie behind them.
All things shall perish from under the sky.… Music alone shall live.… Music alone shall live.…
They had believed that things might change, that they might yet redeem their native land. We must love one another or die. Seventeen thousand people singing in parts, the minor thirds breaking Jimmy’s heart. He wept without shame. We shall overcome. Madison Square Garden, April the seventeenth, nineteen hundred and sixty-six. Martin King and Bobby Kennedy were still alive. Medgar Evers was in the ground. Twenty-four years. Twenty-four years gone by under the sky.
Deep in my heart, Jimmy thought. Oh, yes. Deep in my heart I need someone who’ll watch over me too. That’s why I’m here, in my new life. That’s why I have Monique and Henri—my wife and my son. Don’t you see?
Jimmy moved forward, separate from the others now, and he imagined he was walking through the streets of Paris with Eddie, talking about music, women, baseball—about the Hollywood Bar, at 133rd Street and Seventh Avenue, the cutting contests Jimmy had been in with other pianists, in the back room, each man showing his stuff, challenging the others to do better, modulating to a key like B or E, doubling the tempo with a strong left hand to make things more interesting for the next man up. Oh, yes. You could get by with all kinds of slop in a rhythm section, but there was no cheating when you played solo. You were the main man then. Jimmy had loved those sessions, had used them to educate himself in styles not his own: stride, boogie, swing, bebop.
It would be wonderful to wander this city late at night with his brother, without fear. What couldn’t they talk about?
I worry about you, though. I worry about you all the time.
Eddie laughed. Well. I worry about you too, man.
When he arrived home, he would telephone, would find out how Eddie was doing. He would ask about Eddie’s wife and sons. The boys—Pete and Mike, twins—would be 15 years old by now. Jimmy had never met them. Nor had Eddie ever met Monique and Henri.
Eddie still played with some of the same old gang: Kinnard, Barber, Carr. If Eddie were short on cash, Jimmy would send money, but only if Eddie asked him to. The important
thing was not to condescend. The important thing, always, was to act as if they were equals—as if it were so—to let Eddie know that Jimmy would come to him in the same way should things turn sour in his own life, should he be needy.
But you never are.
Monique’s tone, calm and knowing, was one Jimmy did not like. What did she know, after all, about what he and Eddie had been through together, about how and why they’d made their choices? She had not been in Mississippi in the summer of 1964. She had not been with them in New York when the noose began to pull tight on the Movement. She had not been with Eddie when the FBI put shotguns to his head and hauled him out of his flat on 139th Street. She had not been with Eddie through the trial, through his four years in prison. She had not been with Jimmy through those years when, though he knew letting Eddie take the rap was the only smart thing to do, he’d burned to change places with his brother. She had never known what it was like to wake up scared and powerless every morning of your life—to wake up with a bucketful of rage and nothing to do with it except swallow.
Earlier in the evening, between sets, a young American woman had approached him, had asked about Eddie, about the albums they’d made together in the Sixties, about their work in the civil-rights movement, about Eddie’s four years in jail, about the years since they had seen each other. Of course. That was why his head was so full—why he was thinking too much of what he usually preferred not to think of: how well he had or had not watched over his brother once upon a time.
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