Jack of Diamonds

by Bryce Courtenay

  ‘But wouldn’t that be stealing?’ I asked.

  ‘Nah, it’s all junk now, Jack. Hey, they ain’t never gonna bring those bells back to life.’

  Carting useful bits of junk from an abandoned factory was so common that most people never regarded it as stealing. If the factory didn’t have a guard, then this indicated that the owners didn’t consider what was left as worth saving. I felt sure Sergeant Crosby, who was in charge of the Cabbagetown police station, would see it the same way. People in the Depression needed bits and pieces to repair their homes or make something, and there was no place else they could get the raw materials without paying for them. Many of the abandoned factory windowpanes and inside doors had been carefully removed to help fix houses.

  ‘And you’ll be able to hear music? I mean, properly, just like from a radio?’

  ‘Yeah, CBS and all the New York radio stations. Maybe even Chicago. But listen to this will’ya, Jack,’ he said, grabbing my shoulder. ‘The best part is the earphones. No one else hears it except you and you can choose your own stuff to listen to, private like. So, you see, it’s almost better than a big radio blaring stuff out to everyone and his dog who maybe don’t want to listen. You can just sit in bed and jam all you like.’

  I imagined myself sitting up in bed late at night hearing jazz played from New York, right under my dad’s nose, jazz blaring in my ears and him none the wiser.

  Two days before Christmas Mac presented me with the crystal set. ‘I couldn’t give it to you on Christmas Day because everyone will be home.’ Mac wasn’t just the best buddy a boy could have, he was like a proper dad. It seemed so unfair: he had Dolly and my mom had my dad and everyone was unhappy and the good guys got beaten up. But, like I said before, I don’t suppose Dolly would have done a swap. She was big, but my dad was even bigger, and with his fierce backhand her nose would soon have looked like my mom’s, never mind her teeth. Dolly with two black eyes, a broken nose and no front teeth would be a sight to behold, all right. I think my mom had once been pretty but I doubt that this was true of Dolly McClymont. She had these small pale blue eyes, big jowls and a downturned mouth with a large nose that turned up at the end, so she looked a bit like a rhinoceros wearing a red wig. The twins must have got their looks from Mac, who, if he wasn’t so little and didn’t have a broken nose (it wasn’t hard to guess how he got it) would have been quite a nice-looking guy.

  My mom had saved up and we had a meat stew for Christmas and I got a new shirt. I’d saved the money left over from my dollar streetcar fare and bought her a washcloth, some perfumed soap and a tiny bottle of scent, all in the same box with a pink ribbon and cellophane.

  The new year was the first of my childhood to be thoroughly organised and timetabled. Everything had to be planned around piano lessons; you couldn’t just expect to have time when you suddenly wanted to do something. Music and the piano, or, as Miss Bates called it, ‘the pianoforte’, had become everything from the moment I woke up to the moment I fell asleep at night. I learned to read music in a month and by the end of the first year I was pretty competent at sight-reading. But that was like learning stuff at school; the piano was an altogether different matter. Practice, practice, practice! Scales, scales, scales! Studies and exercises until they seemed to almost spill over the keyboard onto the floor! Then just a bit more practice. It was never enough and seemed as endless as the Depression itself, although more enjoyable.

  It wasn’t that bad, but because of Saturday and Sunday practice, I had to give up shinny in winter. I still had time to read, and I played harmonica and listened to the brilliant jazz coming from New York and Chicago. Every once in a while you’d get Art Tatum on the piano – oh, man, that was something else! I’d be swaying and bumping up and down in bed with a big grin on my face, and my mom would nudge me and say, ‘Jack, I’m trying to get to sleep!’

  Mona Bates would say, ‘Jack, the pianoforte is judged by degrees of competence. There’s never an end point, even if you are Sergei Rachmaninoff.’ As I grew older she would sometimes look at my hands. They were going to be like my father’s, big as dinner plates, and were already real big for a kid my age. ‘With a bit of luck they’ll continue to grow, Jack. Rachmaninoff’s hands were ridiculously large, which allowed him to stretch huge distances across the keyboard.’ Not that I could ever be like Rachmaninoff, but it was nice to think that big hands might one day create something beautiful instead of being used to bash people’s faces in. But, big hands or not, my tone was far from even.

  I mentioned scales before, but I was to learn that scales are not just scales, they are like musical mountains, each one in a different key. Having a good ear didn’t help if your technique let you down every time. Scales were supposed to help me develop strength, control and freedom of movement in all my fingers so that I could produce an even tone, but if I wasn’t forgetting a sharp or a flat, I was playing unevenly or varying the volume or speed. ‘Jack, stupid boy!’ Miss Bates would yell. ‘Wrong, wrong, wrong and wrong again!’ It was her favourite comment. Even if you made only one small error, you got a ‘stupid boy’ and four wrongs. I tried and practised and struggled and got yelled at. To use Uncle Joe’s un-word, there wasn’t much conversating going on, just arpeggios and yelling, and contrary motion and yelling, and staccato exercises and yelling, exercises in thirds, double thirds, trills, octaves and studies, all accompanied by sighs, clucks, and several ‘stupid boys’ and sets of four ‘wrongs’.

  In among the yelling I learned to play pieces by Czerny, Scarlatti, Heller and – listen to this! – stuff Mozart wrote when he was only six years old. Can you imagine, what he wrote as a little kid took me ages to learn to play and Miss Bates would listen and, when I got a bit better, sigh, and say, ‘For goodness sake, slur those notes, Jack! In these bars I want a nice bell sound!’ They got the spelling of her first name wrong; it should have been Miss ‘Moaner’ Bates.

  I must have done okay because after the first year and a half I’d passed the second-grade examination and was halfway into third grade. Miss Bates entered me into my first piano competition – the prizes were not about degrees of difficulty but about how well a piece of music was played on its individual merits.

  Before each player performed they announced how long the student had been playing piano. Then the competitor was called onto the stage with their parents and introduced to the audience, so that the parents as well as the performer could be acknowledged. Most parents give up a lot so their talented children can learn piano, and it was like the concert organisers were saying thank you to them. Even though I had no chance of winning, I was dead proud of having my mom standing beside me.

  Once or twice during the school vacation she’d come with me in the morning to the Jazz Warehouse, where I’d play for her on Miss Frostbite’s piano, but this was the first time I’d played or done anything else in public. I can tell you now it was the big time for both of us.

  We got her good shoes out of the box and her mothballed yellow dress and brushed her hair until it shone so that you practically had to squint your eyes. She looked lovely, and she even wore a bit of red lipstick. She’d borrowed a tube from one of the women at work, who offered it when she heard my mom speak about going to the swanky piano concert.

  When Miss Bates turned up, lots of people crowded around and made a big fuss of her because she was still very famous from her concert career. We didn’t sit with her because of all the people, presumably friends, anxious to be near her. Miss Frostbite couldn’t come because it was a Saturday night and she had to work, doing her dual piano act with Joe Hockey.

  Well, to cut a long story short, I came third and Miss Bates said she was happy because the other performers had studied at least two years longer than I had. She came over especially, and I introduced her to my mom and she said, ‘Mrs Spayd, we both have every reason to be proud of Jack’s performance. Considering he’s been studying piano for less than two years and he’s the youngest in the competition, it is a remarkable ach
ievement. As you will have heard, most of the competitors have had at least five full years at the piano.’ It was the first time she’d praised me since she started teaching me.

  ‘That can only be because of his teacher, Miss Bates. Jack and me are very grateful,’ my mom replied.

  ‘How very gracious of you, but I cannot accept the credit. Well, not all of it, anyway. Jack has achieved a great deal through diligent practice. Both Mozart pieces he played with beautiful tone and expression, showing an understanding of the composer’s intentions.’

  I could see my mom was very proud, even if she didn’t understand all of it. Then, a little while later, just when we were about to leave to take the streetcar home, she excused herself to go to the ladies room. She looked a bit upset when she returned and on the streetcar she was very quiet, when I’d expected her to . . . well, to be honest, now that we were on our own, to tell me how proud she felt of me. But she barely said a word and when I asked her what was wrong, she looked out of the streetcar window and said, ‘Nothing, Jack. Just something that happened.’ But her voice wasn’t normal and I knew it was something bad. Then, when she got home, she burst into tears.

  ‘Mom, what happened?’ I asked, alarmed. But she just kept on sobbing. So I sat and held her hand and then made her a cup of tea, and I could see she was shaking when she took the King George.

  Eventually she looked up and sniffed and brushed the tears from her eyes, which had gone all red, and told me what had happened. ‘Jack, when I went into the ladies room there were two women doing their make-up at the mirror and so they probably didn’t see me,’ she explained. ‘Then, when I closed the toilet door, I heard one of them say, “The young lad who came third is very talented.”

  ‘Then the other one said something like, “The early Mozart minuets? Yes, he already has a nice sound.”’ She mimicked the two voices, making them sound very lah-de-dah. ‘“But then, he is taught by Mona Bates; that does make a tremendous difference.”

  ‘I was so proud, Jack,’ my mom said, her voice still a bit tearful. But then she started to sob again and choked out, ‘Then . . . one of them said – sob – “Did you see his frightful mother?” Sob. “Most of her teeth missing, broken nose, and that ridiculous chartreuse dress and truly awful shoes. She looked like a down-and-out whore a drunken sailor might pick up on the docks!”’

  My mom looked up at me, fresh tears beginning to well. ‘Then the first woman said, “If she’s seen with him as he gets older and begins to perform in important competitions, it will seriously affect the poor boy’s career.”’ Then my mom started to wail.

  That first concert taught me a sad lesson. Classical music isn’t meant for poor people, and the parents and audiences were not from places like Cabbagetown.

  The following Monday at Jarvis Street I was playing for Miss Bates when she suddenly called out, ‘Stop! Stop at once! What on earth has come over you, Jack?’

  ‘Nothing, Miss Bates,’ I replied.

  ‘Oh, nothing, is it? Well, your playing is good for nothing! Has coming third on Saturday night gone to your head? Stupid, stupid boy!’

  I could see this wasn’t make-believe and she was truly furious. Sometimes she would give me a meaningful look when I goofed a piece real bad and say something like, ‘Jack, I am in the fortunate situation of being able to choose the cream of the crop, and, I should remind you, I also have the luxury of weeding out those who don’t perform. So far, since I opened the studio, I’ve never experienced the disappointment of a student failing the conservatory entrance examination. But one or two have been sent packing along the way.’ I guess this was meant as a warning to me not to let her down. This time she sounded really angry. So I blurted out, ‘I don’t care about the concert. Those people hated my mom, Miss Bates.’ And then I just couldn’t help it, I started to sniff and I could feel the tears running down my cheeks.

  ‘Hated her? On the contrary, I found your mother perfectly charming and I can see the two of you are very close. Now tell me what happened at once, Jack,’ she demanded.

  I sniffed away my tears and told her the whole story exactly as my mom had told me, my own sniffs replacing her sobs. When I’d finished, Miss Bates was all red in the face and even more furious. ‘Jack, I wish I’d been there to give them what-for! What I would have said to them would have made the front page of all the newspapers. No, on second thoughts, it would have been unprintable. How dare they! That’s simply too awful for words. They’re not just the worst type of snob, they’re thoroughly nasty pieces of work!’ I could see she was genuinely upset. ‘You tell your mother that from now on she always sits with me. Tell her she has nothing whatsoever to be ashamed of, and I’d be proud to have her at my side at every recital and concert we do together.’ She looked at me sternly, ‘Now, you promise to do that, Jack?’

  I guess Miss Bates must have told Miss Frostbite, who didn’t say anything to me, but the next Monday as I was practising, she came into the piano room and said, ‘Jack, we’re short-staffed in the club at the moment with one of the kitchen hands off with pleurisy. The generous promise your mother made about cleaning for us in the club kitchen, do you think I could see her about it tomorrow or the next day?’

  My mom was overjoyed! She went on her own to the Jazz Warehouse the following day while I was at school. I only heard the result of it that night and it was 100 per cent Miss Frostbite getting her own way as always. My mom explained what had happened in Miss Frostbite’s own words. ‘“Gertrude, we need a morning cleaner now that Lily is sick – she has a chronically bad chest and may not be returning to work. I must warn you, it’s not very nice work. The kitchen is always cleaned at night, but the heavy-duty cleaning is left for the following day, ovens, floors, grease traps . . . ”

  ‘“Oh, I don’t mind, Miss Byatt, I’m used to hard work,” I told her.

  ‘“But we’ll have to pay you, of course . . . by the way, please call me Floss, as I said, or Miss Frostbite, if you prefer.”

  ‘“Of course, Miss Frostbite,” I said.’

  Now there was work involved, I don’t think she was prepared to call Miss Frostbite by her first name.

  ‘“I can’t take any money. I just want to pay you back a bit for Jack.”

  ‘“Pay me back for Jack! Why, Gertrude, the boy pays me back every day with his practice and nice manners, and I’m like a mother when I see him eating his dinner with the musicians. I assure you, I’m already emotionally well compensated.”’

  My mom told me all this because I could see she was proud. ‘But, Jack, I wouldn’t hear of it and I insisted that I work for free.’

  ‘“Oh, dear, that’s difficult, my dear. You see I’ve always run my business along union lines, and it goes against my principles to have someone work for nothing.”’

  My mom looked up. ‘I felt like laughing. She was just trying to be kind. Everyone knows the unions have lost their power because of the Depression and nobody takes any notice of the rules. But I wouldn’t have it, she’d been kind enough, it was time I did something in return. “You can pay me and then Jack can give the money back to you the next day,” I suggested. “I honestly couldn’t take it, Miss Frostbite,” I told her.’

  My mother then said Miss Frostbite put her middle finger to her cheek and tilted her head to one side. I laughed because it was a sure sign of danger I’d long since learned to recognise. ‘“Quit pro something,” she said.’

  ‘Quid pro quo,’ I said, interrupting. ‘It means you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours, like a favour returned.’ It was an expression I knew because Miss Bates used it once in ‘conversating’ with me. This had now become my favourite un-word, borrowed from Uncle Joe, even though it wasn’t in the dictionary. But when I looked up quid pro quo, it was a real expression and it was Latin.

  ‘Oh, that explains it, Jack. I didn’t want to ask her what it meant. Then she removed her finger from her cheek and her head jerked up. “Teeth!” she said suddenly. Just like that, “Teeth!”


  ‘“Eh?” I said. I know it wasn’t very ladylike, but I didn’t know what she meant by the quit pro stuff and all. Now, teeth! I mean, what on earth was she carrying on about?

  ‘Then she said, “You shall have a set of teeth, Gertrude.”’

  I now need to explain that it was only several years later that my mom told me this next part of their conversation. I’d always thought that the quid pro quo part meant Miss Frostbite paid for my mom’s teeth in return for an extra two mornings’ work, making it four mornings a week altogether, but that’s not how it was at all.

  When I was old enough my mom explained what had actually happened, prefacing her explanation with these words: ‘After paying for your lessons, Jack, I could never ever have accepted her paying for my false teeth as well. Miss Frostbite told me, “Gertrude, when you run a nightclub you get to know a lot of people, some good, some not so good, and they sometimes get a little sozzled at the club, or arrive that way from a late dinner and get steadily worse. After Joe and I finish our performance, I mix with the audience while the jazz band plays. You get to hear a fair bit and see a bit, sometimes from the most unexpected quarters – men who are important, politicians, professionals, big wheels in the Toronto business scene. We observe a three-monkeys policy here at the Jazz Warehouse, because men, even married men, are sometimes lonely and arrive with a gal on their arm who probably ought not to be there. I mean, the kind of girl we would normally not permit to come in on her own. But if she accompanies a guest, then that’s entirely his business. If someone questions who was with whom on a particular night, we simply say we haven’t the faintest idea or if, as sometimes happens, a patron suggests to us that he spent the evening here on his own, we simply do as he asks, unless it is a serious police matter. This is a nightclub after all and not the courthouse.” She smiled. “I’m a compulsive note maker. I have a whole filing cabinet full of silly notes. In fact, I’m addicted. I make notes and I have schedules for everything. Jack will have told you about his strict piano schedules.