The Freewayfayers' Book of the Dead

by John Okas

  Sarah is forever reminding herself to put into practice what she learns at meetings: to look rather than be looked at, to act rather than be acted upon. Today she catches a glimpse of her own father in the animation of Glory. Old Jeremiah was tall, lean, and sprightly too. Remembering her father, Sarah recalls how in his presence she was careful to behave in a way that camouflaged what was on her mind and in her heart. Having a blood relative around the house puts her ill at ease. Her inner self is something she would rather not share with family members.

  But Gloria is no Jeremiah. Corn Dog’s seed carries his pagan streak of enthusiasm and native intelligence, bold, brisk, and vibrant. Her interior terrain is naturally high, an enchanted soulscape of unforeseen thoughts and feelings. She feels she is made special by a confirmation she can’t even remember. That fateful night, before the buck was taken away by the police, toddler Gloria had a brief moment with him. Although that meeting is gone from her consciousness, the self-assurance is there in her bones, nourishing her spirit, and giving her pride in her healthy body and mind, her wealth of physical and mental beauties. Watch her walk across the great hall to the back parlor and you know she knows she is special. A sense of distinction emanates from her, a quality of self-containment that adds to her stature. Like Corn Dog, she is naturally proud, independent, and has a warrior’s poise. She is normally straightforward but artful when circumstances require. She is vain, but her vanity is not like her mother’s. There is no smog hanging over her. With her goddess-eye view, she takes the action in, and sees people, places, and things, not to possess them, and dissolve them, but to refine them through her imagination. Glory Bee is the great goddess of music. Quite the reverse of the split personality who gave her birth, she is the union of many characters and states of mind. The prenatal ocean is her cradle, the sea of stars is her crown.

  Ever since Gloria can remember, the owlish medium and nutty bunch have come to the museum on Friday nights and taken their strange doings to bed. The dialectics of trial and error in evolution have seen to it that the daughter is the antithesis of the mother. Sarah sees herself outside of God’s Grace, trying to take it in; Gloria is a source of that gift. Going on five, she is a resident of the mystical sphere her mother works so hard to attain and sees her way around the fruited plane more clearly than any Nussbaum irregular. She has the touch with spirit friends. Her inborn demons are domesticated, tame as stuffed animals, and her contact with them is such an ordinary occurrence she can’t understand what all the Friday night fuss is about. Anyway, she’d rather not see how she resembles her mother. Instead, she identifies with the man of the house. She greatly admires and loves Harry Swan, and doesn’t mind taking cues from him on how to act and speak. Like Harry, she considers the meetings in the Homer-built bed bunk. Nevertheless, as Harry sometimes comes down the back stairs to eavesdrop, on occasion sharp-eared, curious kitten Gloria sneaks out of bed and sits on the stairs, training her keen ears to catch what snatch she can of the witches’ brouhaha, but can make neither heads nor tails of what she hears. When she asks Laudette about it the big sitter invariably informs her that it is “none of her beeswax.” Her mother is only a bit more forthcoming. “The circle of women is there to help Mummy channel the Presence of the Lord,” she says but will say no more.

  Sarah arrives in the parlor just as Gloria is looking under the hood, and casting her colorful eyes up and down the keyboard. While some children might be inclined to a random strike, intent, intense Gloria is free not to touch for no reason. Freedom, the Muse knows, is rooted in discipline.

  This afternoon Sarah is restless, tired of leisure, preening and plucking, modulating her voice, and regulating her breathing. This instrument Miss Lord has purchased will provide a rare opportunity for her to try to communicate something of herself to her daughter.

  Only through music, she thinks, can I hope to express the past, the sacrifice I made to raise myself and baby Glory Bee up from hard times to easy street, from jazz rags to the richness of classical music.

  With a brittle smile, Sarah sits down at the piano and begins to play a tune Gloria recognizes from Laudette’s record collection, Red Hot Potato Blues. Gee, she didn’t even know her mother could play, and she thought her mother hated jazz. But Gloria is not too surprised. Weird Mummy might do anything.

  Gloria has been exposed to jazz on records and on the radio. Laudette always has it on. If the radio does not come in clearly or if there are skips, scratches, blips, and bleeps on the recordings she simply makes up her mind to avoid hearing them. Of course, more than anything, she loves the sound of live music: when all friction between her as the listener and the sound is gone. She loves to get it unbesmirched, virgin, from the source: the clean silence, that vibrant and creative emptiness which a muse brings as a field of play. She does not remember consciously but her soul harks back to her early days. Several afternoons a week, when they lived in the Bay Area, Laudette would bring Gloria down the hill to Kane’s Top Hat Club where the Hot Numbers, the fastest, loudest swing band in the west, were rehearsing. Baby Gloria often had the catbird seat: Earl McCoy at the piano would sit her right down in his lap, and the band would surge around her. The memory is there in the form of a preconscious sense of wonder, an identification with the energy of sound, and association that allows her to enjoy listening with all her heart. Of course, in Symphony Hall the music is different. It swells on plan rather than impulse. The excitement is lessened some, but the feeling of order, pageantry, and splendor in, say, a Kreuszer concerto delights her and in no way obscures the love of jazz in her soul.

  The laughing Bee hops around the room on her dancing legs. Seeing Gloria’s enjoyment makes the normally cool, hard Mummy feel a flicker of familial love. Sarah plays a few more old licks. Her sense of rhythm is true, but her hands are clumsy from lack of practice. What she can’t handle, she fakes by whistling, which Gloria hears with delight, for her mother has quite a talent. When she puckers up and pipes a rag which bears a blue thread, Gloria can see the tears well in her mother’s eyes, and hear, in notes bent to heartbreak, a tale that is shreds of memories, tatters of regrets. When Sarah is through she motions Gloria to sit on the bench with her.

  “Would you like to learn piano, Baby?”

  Gloria senses that there is a system to music. “Yes, Mummy, teach me.” Gloria hops up and looks at the keys, ebony and ivory.

  Sarah shows the child a sheet of rags. “All these signs taken together tell you what the sounds will be. These lines here are called a staff and these little black spots on it, they’re notes. This is a blues in C.”

  She shows Gloria a simple progression, easy as A, B flat, C, and within the hour Gloria has her long left hand astride the bass line of the Cotton Ball and Chain Blues, but gives up exhausted trying to put a melody riff in the right place.

  “If you can’t do exactly what it says, you can still play, Baby. You can fake it—Mummy means ‘improvise’—which means you just go along with whatever feeling you have for the music. Mummy used to really enjoy it when she was girl. She had a good ear back then, but she’s afraid it’s gotten tinny from not using it.”

  The past is shadowy, but, if reminded, Gloria vaguely recalls that once upon a time her Mummy was not the sleek, cool beauty she is today, but a blistered, skeletal wreck, skin and bones, suffering from blackouts and cataleptic spells. The child touches the gold drops dripping from the rings in the white ears of Mrs H Thornton Swan Junior. “Tinny, Mummy?” she wonders.

  “Mummy means the sound inside her head is canned, Baby. And she doesn’t always feel she has the concentration she needs in order to be free.”

  “What is ‘concentration’?”

  “It means keeping your mind on what you’re doing and not straying off at every turn.”

  “Oh,” says Gloria and silently gives it some thought.

  The pause causes internal pressure to build inside Sarah as she rehashes her sins for the thousandth time. The boom of her exploding conscience is loud
enough for Gloria to feel the air shake. Sarah sighs, hits a minor chord, and sings, as if out of the blues, “Your grandfather, my father, was a monster man who disowned us.”

  “Huh?”

  Often explanations where none are requested trickle out of Sarah’s mouth. She talks about her own youth, mixing in mismatching patches of fantasy to protect the secret in the family history. Gloria is somewhat confused by all the inconsistencies and contradictions in the accounts, but wise enough to consider the source. Generally Sarah leaves Zion Beehive out of it and maintains they started in a liberal home in the Bay State. Or is it the Bay City? Today, however, instead of characterizing her father as loving and progressive, she speaks of him as he actually was, a man she didn’t like very much, an over-devout cultsman who would throw The Good Book at a defenseless baby for a transgression of her mother’s love.

  Gloria can smell the fear on her mother’s breath, and knows she’s hiding something. She knows she will have to be a little older to be able to tell where the hogwash ends and the truth begins.

  “Yes,” Sarah goes on, bleeding from her holey vein of truth, “my father didn’t like music you could dance to, or listen to just for the fun of it. The truth of it is, Honey Baby, most men think a girl who likes jazz isn’t very much of a lady.”

  The child is hip enough to know her mother is also making some reference to her Daddy-o. She knows her stepfather as a different man than the one her mother tries to make him out to be. Hardly ever the stuffed shirt, he is much more comfortable with the wild element than her mother. True, he regularly exposes Gloria to classical music and they frequently attend concerts, ballets, and operas. But he is also the first one to jive when Laudette plays a record on which the musicians give that rhythm everything they’ve got. Often enough he’s put down his newspaper and done the boogie-woogie, both with Gloria and the lumbering, thunderous Miss Lord. He is obviously quite impressed with the connections the sitter has in the swing world, and several times Gloria has heard him talking with pride about how Earl McCoy came to his wedding. Daddy-o surely doesn’t think less of anyone for enjoying jazz. And yet the Bee is sharp enough to see that because her mother says he does there are more sides to this issue than meet the eye.

  As Sarah seems confused about her stepfather, her stories of Gloria’s real father also seem to have a cast of characters in the title role. Mostly she paints this fictitious Cornelius, or Cornwallis, Duke, as Harry-like: a sportsman, smooth and wealthy, at home on a yacht, a golf course, or a polo pony. Now feeling strong disaffection for her own father, she describes Gloria’s father differently: as a rebel who helped her defy a self-righteous parent and thumb her nose at the religious establishment. “Your father was a real artist in everything he did,” she says with her idiosyncratic assertiveness.

  The child shrugs and is about to give the blues another try, when Harry comes home, carrying two dozen red roses for the white goddess and a box of chocolates for the little brown sweet.

  Gloria hums “thank you” and takes the box with a smile. Sarah accepts the flowers with a look of annoyance that says, “Oh, the nuisance of having to call Mona to put them in water.” If looks could kill, the roses in the vase Mona sets on the table would be dead. The bright Bee can see the pee in her mother’s eye as she looks at the roses. And so can Harry, although it seems to amuse rather than disturb him.

  “Fine looking piano,” he says. “Miss Lord surely has an eye for quality. Does it play well?”

  Sarah sits tightly, clenching her teeth. “Mmmm,” Gloria says, her cheeks chunky with chocolates. Then, swallowing, she says, “Mummy is teaching me the blues. What can you teach me, Daddy-o?”

  “Nothing, Gee Bee, the only thing I know how to play is the phonograph.

  “But say, Cupcake, are you really showing Gloria these old rags? Aren’t you the one who is always saying how dangerous you think contact with these lower forms of music can be for a child? If my memory serves me correctly, you said you thought jazz was depraved, low, and sordid.”

  Harry is ribbing her. He comes up, puts his hands on her shoulders and presses her into a hug. To the extent that his wife has turned over a new leaf in bed, has been reborn as a sex maniac, a nymphy neurotic, he has some compassion for her despair. He does not care what she was before, and sees no reason to pry into whatever tragedy or trauma made her take up the professional life. He knows it was tough enough to cause her madness, and, even now that she has some hope, she still has periods when she hates what she was and feels compelled to behave as she is not. He does not think less of her for her negative emotion. He teases her in the hope of getting her to laugh at herself. And while he would like to see her relaxed and happy, he realizes her eccentricity is the fuel of his passion, the drive of his life force, the reason he loves her so much.

  Gloria sees the twinkling stars in her stepfather’s eyes as he reminds her mother of their first date. “Remember, sweet thing, the first night? You played the Etudes of Pynchon for us …”

  Sarah cracks under Harry’s tender gesture. “How can I enjoy anything when you’re always breathing down my neck?” she snaps, wrestling her shoulders free. “As for popular music, well, I’ve changed my mind about it. A person can do that, can’t she? And I don’t want you forcing that classical stuff on Gloria! Baby,” she turns to Gloria, “don’t let any man tell you a woman’s place is in the classics, or in the choir, or in the chorus, either. Women can play and listen to any kind of music and still be perfectly lovable.”

  The man of the world figures this outburst might have something to do with the way he tickled the piss out of her last night, at least that’s how he understands her uninhibited release. He has never understood women’s conflicts. He knows when they get insistent the safest course is to agree with anything they say. “Of course, of course, of course, Cupcake. Even the roughest and readiest ditty, a field hand’s lament, is like a garden of earthly delights if it comes from you.”

  From where she sits, next to her mother, Gloria can see that Harry is being a good husband, more than willing to wax sentimental with his wife over the old songs. She can see that his irony is gentle, that he teases her in an attempt to loosen her up. What is wrong with his likening a woman to a piece of fine music?

  At any age, the muse can understand the intimations of musical style. Everything in its proper place. She agrees with her Daddy-o that music with Old World manners and craftsmanship seems more appropriate in the circle of rooms, the rich royal inner court, they sleep in. The ornamentation, the depth of harmony in the strings and winds complement those upstairs spaces where angels have satin hearts for buttocks and bosomy nymphs roll their nipples in a cream swirl of deep blue surf and loving cups burst out at you at every turn with bouquets of red roses. In the fancy marches and sugar plum fairy rhapsodies of classical music she sees sissy white lords and prim white ladies having a ball, prancing around, wearing makeup and masks and big white wigs, and making naughty eyes at one another, fully savoring their lives of privilege. At the same time, through jazz, the doors to Gloria’s downstairs perceptions are open. Too young to comprehend it, she can appreciate the democracy in the new world which allows one to sit at the piano at one’s leisure and play what one wants, as free as a bird.

  Gloria would be perfectly content to let her Daddy-o set the tone of her musical education. She knows she never has to assert her will with him and that her own wants will not be challenged. In the museum the only challenge of right and wrong music is in her mother’s split head. She pitches her own head back and smiles at Swan, letting her Daddy-o know she loves him.

  “Cupcake,” Harry apologizes to Sarah, winking at Glory while trying to smooth her mother’s ruffled feathers, “I was only marveling at how much of the magic of the music is in you. You know that all along I’ve been saying how all music is worthwhile. Of course Gee Bee can play whatever she wants, rags to Ricard Zapf.”

  But Gloria is in no great hurry to learn, and would rather sit on Daddy-o’s lap a
nd contemplate the funny pages, while Sarah, feeling her attempt at self-expression defeated by her husband and her father within, goes upstairs with a splitting headache, waiting for the next Friday night.

  Waiving Grade Zero

  As Glory Bee was in the beginning, self-contained to the point where her mother suspected her of being retarded, she is now and ever shall be, naturally introspective. Yet she exhibits anything but slowness when it comes to learning. Her preschool is on Harry’s lap while he reads the papers. She does more than look at pictures. She graduates from the funnies, and goes to the headlines, the names of horses, and the odds on the races. With her musical ear she sounds out words like “unemployment,” “agitator,” and “war machine,” like “Jolly Roger,” “Handiwork” and “Peabody’s Palm” before she has any real idea what they might mean. She learns to write by copying the big print of headlines and advertisements, and adds and subtracts single- and double-digit numbers as well as a third-grader. Born in the last hours of October, Gloria has, by a nose, the age qualifications to go to school in the fall. Certainly she is well beyond kindergarten and scores accordingly on the screening tests of several of the city’s most selective private schools, the ones which demand both brains and money of their students.