Jack of Diamonds

by Bryce Courtenay

  I told my mom about my feelings on one of our Sunday walks in the park. We’d just heard massed military bands playing in Queen’s Park, then a politician had spoken to the crowd about how war in Europe in the coming months was almost a certainty. His final words were ‘If you’re a man over eighteen and under forty, Canada will expect you to do your bit on behalf of the British Empire!’ Everywhere you went people were talking about the coming war and that Canada must be involved. Lots of the older final-year guys at school said they’d be joining up for sure, but I’d be too young if it came in the next few months. I was still in year eleven, and you had to be eighteen to enlist. But if war was declared and continued into late 1941, I’d certainly join up. It wasn’t the reason I didn’t want to go to the conservatory and study classical music, but it was certainly a good reason for not going. I pointed to a park bench. ‘Mom, I have something to tell you. Why don’t we sit down for a moment.’

  ‘Oh, Jack, it’s not about joining up and going to the war when you leave school, is it?’ she asked, clearly worried.

  ‘Mom, I’d be too young. It will probably be over by the time I turn eighteen.’ I then proceeded to tell her that I’d decided I didn’t want to go to the conservatory and that I wanted to become a professional jazz pianist.

  ‘Oh, dear. Jack, what will Miss Frostbite and Miss Bates say?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t suppose they’re going to be happy. But I wanted to talk to you first.’

  ‘Oh, deary me, however shall we pay her back the money she’s spent on you?’ she said, clearly distressed.

  ‘Mom, I’ll find a way, I promise.’

  ‘I’ll work as her housekeeper forever,’ she said firmly. ‘That way we can eventually pay the money back.’

  ‘Mom, I told you I’d find a way and I will, I promise. But how do you feel about it? I mean, are you angry?’

  ‘No, Jack, just very shocked and sad. Everyone had such high hopes for you.’

  ‘You mean I’ve failed you?’

  My mom looked at me tearfully. ‘Jack, you’ve never failed me for one minute of your life. It’s . . . it’s just that it comes as a tremendous shock.’ She brushed her eyes with the back of her hand. ‘One thing I know for sure, you’ll become a very good jazz pianist and that’s all that matters.’

  ‘Mom, I haven’t wasted my time. Almost everything I’ve learned from Miss Bates can be adapted to the jazz piano. Miss Frostbite once said an education in classical music was the very best training a jazz musician could have. Mom, jazz is the coming music, it’s not as though I’ll be going backwards. Bands like Count Basie’s, Louis Armstrong’s, Cab Calloway’s and Duke Ellington’s are leading the way. I can spend the next five years at the conservatory or learn my trade as a jazz musician. I’ll be scuffing – I mean, earning very little – but it will be better than the nothing I’m earning now.’

  ‘Oh, Jack, you won’t be leaving your school as well, will you?’

  ‘No, of course not. I think I can get an A-grade pass that would allow me to get into university.’

  She looked relieved. ‘Maybe you could study something else as well, Jack?’

  With only a year to go at school, I knew I also needed to tell Miss Frostbite about how I felt. I was scared stiff. After all, she’d been the one who’d paid for my lessons all these years and she’d never once mentioned that she hoped I’d turn back to jazz one day. Though jazz was gaining in popularity, it still wasn’t what talented young white musicians were expected to choose. Even though I knew Miss Frostbite loved jazz, it would probably still come as a big and unpleasant surprise. I plucked up sufficient courage after four days of rehearsing what I was going to say, then one afternoon after school, instead of going directly to her piano room to practise, I knocked on her office door.

  ‘Come in!’ she called.

  ‘It’s me, Jack, Miss Frostbite. May I see you, please?’

  She had her back to the door. ‘In the lounge, two minutes, be right there. Just completing a schedule for the club,’ she answered.

  We sat opposite each other on the yellow couches, just like the first time.

  ‘What is it, Jack?’ she asked.

  ‘Ah, hmm, er . . . I wanted to ask your advice, Miss Frostbite.’

  ‘Oh, that’s nice, Jack. Nothing bad, I hope?’

  ‘I don’t know, I hope not,’ I replied.

  ‘Well, go ahead. In my experience most things can be worked out.’

  This was when I was supposed to launch into my prepared speech, but all that came out was, ‘Miss Frostbite, I don’t want to be a classical musician.’

  ‘Oh, Jack, you’re not thinking of giving up music?’ she exclaimed, plainly shocked.

  ‘No, of course not,’ I hastened to assure her, ‘I could never do that! Just classical music. I want to play jazz piano when I leave school.’

  She put her hand up to her breast and sighed deeply and then took a deep breath. ‘My goodness, for a moment there I thought I was about to have a heart attack.’ Then she laughed. ‘Jack, I can’t say I’m not surprised. You’re doing so well and we are all so very proud of you. Next year you complete high school, and then, of course, we all took it for granted you’d attend the conservatory. But you’re old enough to know your own mind. However, you should be aware that making a living as a jazz musician, unless you’re at the very top, isn’t going to be easy. Most of the band here are scuffing and would be out of work if we didn’t have the club, and goodness knows how long this Depression will continue. But I respect your decision and, as you know, I’m a jazz fanatic.’ She laughed. ‘I ask you, why else would a well-bred gal from Burlington run a place like this?’

  ‘I can’t say, Miss Frostbite, but Miss Bates said you always did exactly as you wanted and were stubborn as a mule, even as a young girl.’

  ‘Oh, did she now! I must say, that’s a clear case of the pot calling the kettle black. She expects to get her own way as much as I do.’ Her lips puckered and then she said crisply, ‘Although, she usually goes about it less pleasantly. By the way, have you told her about your decision?’

  ‘No, I wanted to tell you first, to see how you felt. Then, if you weren’t very angry, I wanted to ask for your advice.’

  ‘Thank you, Jack, that’s nice and I appreciate it. No, I’m not angry, but I am surprised. As for telling Mona Bates, I suggest you don’t . . . well, not for the time being, anyhow. She’s likely to have a conniption!’ (Another word I had to look up.)

  ‘I thought you’d be very angry with me, Miss Frostbite. What I mean is, you giving me such a wonderful chance in life and then me not wanting to go on to the conservatory. I thought I should tell you now because if you kicked me out, then I could concentrate on schoolwork and getting into university.’

  Miss Frostbite leaned back and smiled. ‘If you’re going to be a jazz musician, it’s always as well to have a contingency plan, Jack. I know your music takes up all your available time but do try to do well at school.’

  ‘Even if I did go to university, or if there is a war and it’s still on in 1941, I’d still want to play jazz piano.’

  ‘We probably have a great deal more in common than you may think, Jack. I suspect I know just how you feel. While we are from different backgrounds, I felt the same about being a popular singer when I was eighteen and had just left school. I’d studied piano and voice at school and privately, like every well-bred Burlington gal. I was even considered quite promising, though I admit I was no Mona Bates, who everyone knew even then was going places. My parents wanted me to study for the opera because I had a pleasant contralto voice. But I wanted to sing ragtime and the blues and be an entertainer. In those days singing in men’s clubs, taverns or music halls was considered wicked and probably regarded in much the same way as becoming a prostitute. Besides, you did what you were told, and so I dutifully studied classical singing, as my teacher called it. It was excellent voice training, just as classical music is wonderful music training for you, Jack.
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  ‘But when I was twenty-one and free to leave home, the war broke out and I flew the coop and came to Toronto. My father never spoke to me again. He wrote to me to say that, as far as he was concerned, I was dead and he had instructed my mother to accept this notion. He was a dreadful old curmudgeon and I was glad to be free of him. But I missed my mother desperately. In those times a man’s wife was expected to obey his wishes.’ She paused and smiled. ‘So you see, Jack, we are not all that different.’

  I was becoming increasingly amazed at Miss Frostbite’s story. It seemed that bad things could also happen to the rich and not just to poor people.

  Miss Frostbite continued. ‘I had been singing blues and ragtime in my spare time, as well as playing the piano, for four years without my parents’ permission, so I wasn’t wholly unprepared for what awaited me in Toronto. But I got lucky: I did an audition for a nightclub and I got the job. By the end of the war I guess I was pretty famous among the troops. It was the soldiers who gave me the sobriquet Miss Fairy Floss.’

  She smiled. ‘The club owner, Wayne McCarthy, would hand out photographs of me in a slinky evening gown to all the soldiers. I thought the way he’d made me pose was a bit risqué.’ She laughed. ‘But compared to the evening gowns I now wear, the photograph was the very soul of modesty.’

  ‘I bet you looked really pretty, Miss Frostbite,’ I said.

  ‘Why, thank you, Jack. Wayne McCarthy would often say, “Floss, you weren’t much good when I hired you, but you turned out to be the best investment I ever made.”

  ‘The Mail and Empire newspaper wrote an article about Miss Fairy Floss, the “It” girl, in which they said that a lonely serviceman needed a dream, and that my picture could be found in the wallets of Canadian soldiers and sailors wherever they were posted in Canada or overseas.’

  ‘I didn’t know you sing as well as play the piano with Uncle Joe,’ I said.

  ‘Alas, Jack, I don’t. On a club tour to Alaska in 1924 we got caught in a blizzard when our motorcar got stuck. I contracted pleurisy and then a severe dose of pneumonia that wasn’t treated properly and I lost my singing voice.’ She laughed brightly. ‘I sound worse than Joe these days, my dear. My career was effectively over, for while my piano wasn’t bad, it was only an accompaniment for my voice, and so I was down and broke when I met a gentleman and we fell in love. He was a local politician and before that a real-estate developer, but a Catholic and married, so that was that.’ She hesitated, then continued a moment later. ‘I became his mistress.’ She paused again. ‘You’re old enough to know what that means, are you not, Jack?’

  I nodded. ‘Yes, of course, it’s very hard when people are in love,’ I said, trying to sound sophisticated. I’d read words somewhat like that in a book and was paraphrasing, because I knew very little about loving a girl. I’d only just begun to have problems ‘down there’ when I woke up, which was a pretty late puberty, I guess. I no longer shared a bedroom with my mom, thank goodness, but had a bed under the outside stairs. Someone had built in the space under the stairs to make a real big cupboard, and there was a door to it from inside our house. You could fit a narrow bed into that cupboard, but we took the door off to let air in, otherwise I’d have suffocated. The only trouble was that lying directly under the stairs I could hear everyone coming and going.

  Miss Frostbite continued. ‘Well, I lived in an apartment he owned, and he encouraged me to take up piano and forget about singing. It wasn’t a great success, but then in 1928 I met Joe, who was American and trying hard to get a basement jazz group going but without much success. At the time two-piano acts were just beginning to become popular and so we teamed up with some small success.

  ‘My father died in 1926 and I was reconnected with my mother, which was wonderful. It turned out she was rather proud of me breaking away from “the old curmudgeon” – her name for him, not mine. Then the crash came. My gentleman had a lot of money invested, and when the stock exchange collapsed in New York, he had a heart attack and tragically died. As it wasn’t polite in my family to ever talk about money I assumed that my father’s considerable fortune had also suffered in the crash. My mother had previously sold the big house in Burlington to move to Toronto, where she bought an apartment so that she could be closer to me. After the crash she seemed to manage quite well and so I never asked about her assets. My gentleman had left me my small apartment and an old warehouse on Dundas Street. I sold the apartment and Joe and I, perhaps very stupidly, decided to open the Jazz Warehouse on the smell of an oily rag. We both slept in two tiny offices at opposite ends of the original warehouse for a year while we built the club and got it going. My mother was unaware of this or she would have insisted I stay with her. But I guess I’d been independent for too long.’ She looked up at me. ‘Jack, don’t ever think I don’t admire your mother’s self-respect and her stubborn belief in paying her way.’

  I grinned at her.

  ‘You have a very precious mom, Jack,’ she said, then went on with her story. ‘Well, we soon discovered that Toronto wasn’t quite ready for us, that is to say, for a nightclub that played only jazz. Still isn’t. So we went back to the dual piano act, but developed it into the showbiz affair it has become, using mirrored illusions, costume changes and elaborate popular music arrangements. Thank God I have kept a reasonable figure, and Joe in his blue satin tails and top hat looks the part and is a real character, so our act can hold the attention of an audience that’s usually “well oiled” for an hour-and-a-half twice nightly.

  ‘However, Joe and I still wanted our jazz dream, hence the band. We may not feature Scott Joplin, Duke Ellington or Louis Armstrong, but it’s jazz, and with the money I inherited when my mother passed away last year, we can now afford a visiting American instrumentalist every once in a while. It turned out that my father’s estate didn’t go down in the crash. He was a rotten old grump but evidently had been a very canny one. It’s very good for the boys to work with a top-notch jazz and blues musician. They do their best, and that’s pretty good, and this is their reward. It’s very good for Toronto, too. It gives Joe and me great encouragement when the young people stand outside for the afternoon jam sessions and they have the privilege of hearing someone very special playing.’

  ‘I’m glad you’re not angry with me for giving up classical music,’ I said, relieved.

  ‘Miss Bates believes you could have a concert career ahead of you, but I would be a hypocrite if I tried to persuade you against turning back to jazz. But, if you’ll take my advice, sit for the conservatory entrance examination and that way she will know she’s done her job. Then I shall inform her that I am no longer willing to pay for your tuition, that now it’s up to the conservatory to grant you a bursary. That will be the time to tell her you want a career in jazz. She’ll be absolutely furious, of course, but as she herself gave up her concert career when she was at the height of her powers, she may understand. It won’t be easy, Jack, but it’s your life.’

  ‘And you? I mean you’ve been paying for my tuition.’

  ‘Jack, let’s hope you turn out to be an exceptional jazz musician and I will have been more than compensated. Besides, your mother has paid your tuition fees by cleaning my house all these years.’

  It wasn’t true, of course. Four mornings a week as a cleaner wouldn’t have come near covering my tuition with Mona Bates, but my mom and Miss Frostbite seemed to have become good friends and she was very proud of making a contribution to my career.

  War broke out that September, a fortnight after I turned sixteen. The whole eligible male population of Cabbagetown rushed to join up. Toronto was full of men in uniform. If nothing else, war heralded the end of the Depression for the working class. There was talk of factories reopening, and going to war meant a weekly salary coming in for men as well as women; it was the promise of regular work. War was a tragedy for people in Europe and Russia, but in Canada it was seen as a return to the good times.

  A year later, in June, I took my grade twelve
exams at UTS, two months before my seventeenth birthday, and while I got an A grade, which meant that I could go on to university if I wanted to, it wasn’t the most brilliant result and I only just scraped in. But when you play piano three hours every school day, something has to give. I had all but completed eighth grade when I sat for the entrance exam for the conservatory. I played Beethoven’s Pastoral Sonata in D major and the G major Prelude from Bach’s Well-tempered Clavier, Book Two. It was stretching it a fair bit, but I worked my ass off and Mona Bates was fairly certain I could manage both pieces.

  She had miscalculated: I failed to impress with the Beethoven. I will never know what happened but I just fell apart on the day. I was devastated, and Mona Bates was furious with me. ‘Jack, what on earth happened?’ she cried. ‘I was confident that you knew the sonata and we’d done the work. Stupid boy! You got it wrong, wrong, wrong and wrong again!’

  We were both bitterly disappointed, but mostly my disappointment was for her. I hadn’t yet told her I wasn’t going to go to the conservatory. Mona Bates’s students didn’t fail; I’d been the first to do so and I believed I had thoroughly disgraced her.

  But then a week later we got a letter from the chief examiner, and in it he said that attempting to play that movement of the Pastoral was more than they required for eighth grade, and as I was only being examined to enter at that level, they had decided to give me another opportunity because I had played the G major Prelude with assurance. Miss Bates was still angry with me and felt that I’d let her down, but this time around I played a study from Clementi’s Gradus ad Parnassum that I had worked on for ages and The Tempest, Beethoven’s sonata in D minor. After it was over, the chief examiner, Mr Hogan, told Mona Bates that not only had I passed but I had done so with flying colours, and that they greatly looked forward to welcoming me into the 1940 conservatory year, beginning in August.