Lazaretto

by Diane McKinney-Whetstone

  In the meantime Linc could not contain his desire for the tables. And Bram said that his fingers were itching for the feel of piano keys. They made their way farther uptown to the Tenderloin district and the area dubbed Satan’s Circus.

  The area fit its name and Linc found a proliferation of card games and made some income at the tables, and supplemented it with work in the building trades. Bram played at any of an array of the music halls and concert saloons frequented by the inebriated rich, and the pay was decent and the tips even better. On more sedate evenings, he’d sit in for pianists at the upscale Fifth Avenue hotels, such as the Brunswick. On Sunday mornings, he played at Episcopal churches, where they paid nicely for his talent.

  Occasionally, on Sunday mornings, Linc would fall in on one of those church services on his way home from an all-night card game. He’d ease into a pew that felt unyieldingly hard, and the imposing structures, with their mile-high cathedral ceilings, made him feel small and disconnected, and he’d think that if he had to get beyond those ceilings to get to God they’d never make each other’s acquaintance. But then Bram would play, and the sounds of the piano would fill in the void created by those soaring vaults. When Bram saw Linc sitting there, he’d start to improvise. He’d go off music and the young chap sitting next to him turning the pages would look at Bram as if to say, Where are you? What are you playing? I am lost about when to turn the page.

  The improvisation would transport Linc to his childhood and the way, when Mrs. Benin wasn’t around, Bram would go up-tempo with the hymns he played to suit Meda’s ear. He’d allow the music at the church to move through him then. He’d pick up Bram’s eyes and nod, thanking him for the music, and for evoking the memory. Bram would extend his elbow out, symbolically, saying, “Anything for you, Brother.”

  OVER THE NEXT several years they lived relatively wild but honest lives, falling in and out of favor with one woman or another. They eventually moved to separate houses within a block of each other. They were still close, convening most nights after Bram performed. They talked loud and laughed hard and swore and smoked hemp and drank rye with the rest of the band.

  One night they were in a back room at Koster and Bial’s Music Hall, passing around a pipe jammed with hashish; it was potent and went straight to Bram’s head after only one inhalation, stunning him, stunning all of them. They laughed in slow motion and cursed about how good it was. The pipe seemed not to be lit when it got back around to Bram. He reached for the brass holder where the taper candle blazed on its thick wick. He put the pipe to his mouth and leaned the candle in to reignite the hashish. He sucked in hard and the smoke swam around in his brain and he said, “Uh, shit,” not realizing at first that his bangs had gotten in on the act, that the hungry flame was devouring his hair. The bass player sitting across from Bram was the first to notice, and he grabbed a container that he thought to be water and threw the liquid at Bram’s head to douse the flames. Except that it was lamp oil, and Bram felt the sudden heat as his hair raged and he shouted out in pain and it took time for them all to realize that he was on fire, their reaction slowed by the hashish. Linc noticed first. He ran to Bram and started beating the flames with his hands as he yelled for a blanket; someone threw him a topcoat and he covered Bram’s head and snuffed the fire, and he could smell the burnt flesh even through the coat.

  Bram’s recuperation was tough as gristle. After weeks at Bellevue Hospital, Linc moved him into his room because he still needed constant watching. He slept on the floor so Bram could have the bed. At points he’d have to tie Bram’s hands down because he would rage with fits of delirium and try to tear off the bandages.

  Meda traveled to New York and bought a room for a week in a tidy neighborhood that was a short walk to the blocks where Bram and Linc kept rooms. She moved the picture of Abraham Lincoln that she’d given to Linc from the space over his desk to the wall at eye level opposite from where Bram lay. When Bram would wake and yell out in pain-fueled hysteria, and converse with people in the room only he could see, Meda wondered if Abraham Lincoln was talking to Bram the way he’d talked to her the morning her baby died. She put cool compresses around his wrists and whispered to him the way she did when he was an infant, and it seemed to calm him.

  After what felt like an eternity, Bram grew clearheaded again. It was the day before Meda was to return to Philadelphia and Linc brought in a banquet-sized breakfast of corn muffins and fried fish and tomatoes. He pulled his desk to the center of the room and borrowed two more plates and utensils from boarders down the hall. He spread a freshly laundered tablecloth over the desk and set a bouquet of flowers in the center. He held Meda’s chair out for her, said, “My favorite lady, please have a seat.” Meda giggled the way she used to when they were young boys and had done some silly thing. Bram took halting steps to the table and sat, and laughed, too, as he watched Linc push Meda’s chair in and lean down to smooch her cheek. Bram was facing the window, and the sun had miraculously found a way to slant between the adjacent brick structures and steal into the room. He realized, just as he had every Saturday during the years when he’d remained at the Benins’ while Meda and Linc left to visit her brother, that he had never been as close to Meda as Linc had been. The sun made his eyes water and Linc asked if he was all right and Meda told Linc to pull the shade down, that the sun was making Bram squint, and that it likely hurt to squint, given that squinting involved the forehead, where new skin was still trying to come together.

  “Ah, Meda,” Bram said, “I would wink at you right now, but that hurts, too. You are my favorite lady,” he said, and then felt shy after he’d said it, so he bit into a corn muffin so he could look away. The muffin was still warm and had been saturated with butter, softening it on the inside, so it went down easy.

  Meda chatted on about the recent happenings at Buddy’s house. Told them that the one who’d played the harmonica at all of the gatherings at Buddy’s had died.

  “The one called Harmon?” Bram asked.

  “That’s the one.”

  “There goes a loss, the way he pushed those notes out, his tempo, his precision. The man had talent.”

  Linc put another corn muffin on Bram’s plate and passed around the tomatoes as he described how the music would drift down to the cellar when they were hiding out at Buddy’s and he could tell that Bram was itching to go upstairs and be a part of it.

  “Buddy took his passing hard,” Meda said, as she bit into the fish, and her eyes shot way open in that way that signaled she was enjoying something intensely. That had been one of Bram’s greatest rewards for enduring those grueling piano-practice sessions, watching what Meda’s eyes did when he played for her. “But Buddy being Buddy,” Meda continued with her story, “he extended use of his house for Harmon’s wake. Miss Ma attended, and she laughed the entire time, which was not out of custom for her, but it did spur a bit of a kerfuffle because Harmon’s family was not acquainted with Miss Ma’s propensity for laughter, and considering the occasion, Harmon’s widow took exception and told Miss Ma to quell her laughter or else.”

  “And she laughed even louder?” Bram asked.

  “She did indeed. But not only that, her granddaughter, Nevada, had accompanied her, and Nevada did not take so kindly to witnessing her grandmother being berated.”

  “Oh no,” Bram said, as he swallowed another bite of the muffin.

  “Oh no indeed,” Meda went on, “because Nevada and Harmon’s widow got into quite a spat, and Buddy leaned on the side of Nevada, because I do believe Buddy is sweet on Nevada, which I am happy to see because she brightens his mood since Nola’s passing. And Harmon’s wife said that she would not remain in such a place and be disrespected, nor would Harmon. So she gathered her people, including a couple of her strapping nephews, and prepared to leave and told the nephews to bring Harmon, too. So the nephews started to lift the coffin, and then Buddy says that he bought and paid for that coffin, so the coffin stays.”

  “They carried him out with no c
offin?” Linc asked, incredulous.

  “Yes they did. One of them slung Harmon over his back, and the—excuse me for saying this—but the, the pants they’d dressed Harmon in were oversized, and they came slipping down, exposing poor Harmon in a most unimaginably dreadful way, and then the nephew tripped over the pants and he fell over backwards, and poor exposed Harmon landed on top of him—” Meda stopped and dabbed her lips with her napkin. “I have never in my life seen such a sight.” Her eyes watered and her voice cracked and she could no longer contain herself and she laughed. Then Linc laughed, too. Bram sat back and closed his eyes and listened to them laugh: Meda’s soprano; Linc’s deep bellowing; their pauses and breaths in a lively counterpoint; their laughter was beautiful with its blend of pitches, its starts and stops. Bram hated to say what he was about to say.

  “I have quit the piano,” he blurted, and his words got in between their laughter and tripped it up, and they both turned and looked at him with their faces wrinkled with confusion.

  “What did you say?“ Linc asked.

  “I do believe I have misheard,” Meda said.

  “I had visitors—”

  “What visitors?” Linc asked. “I been with you, there was nobody else here—”

  “I been visited,” Bram said again as he left the table and stretched out on the bed. “I been visited by the dead.”

  Linc was speechless. His mouth hung and he looked at Meda. Meda stood and pulled her chair across the room and placed it under the sketch of Abraham Lincoln. She sat and folded her hands in her lap and Bram was struck again by how poised she was with her straight back and graceful way of moving. “And what have the dead said to you during these visits, Bram?” Her voice was soft, almost a whisper.

  “That I was born to be a spiritualist, that I need to be their intermediary. That I must quit the piano.”

  “You cannot!” Linc said, trying not to yell, but yelling nonetheless.

  “I cannot which one?” Bram asked. “Become a medium? Or turn away from the piano?”

  “None of them. You can’t quit your music. Linc stood and walked from one end of the room to the other. “And besides, what does your playing the piano have to do with talking to some dead people. That is not possible, anyhow. Unless you actually die yourself and join them—then you can talk to them, talk to them all you dratted want. But while you are living, you talk to the living, and you play the piano for the living.” Linc had worked himself up to shouting for real. He surprised himself at the desperation he felt over the notion that he might no longer hear Bram play.

  Meda told Linc to lower his voice. “Who has come to you exactly, Bram?” she asked.

  “For starters, my mother.”

  “Truly, Bram,” Linc said on an exasperated breath, “it was the pain, I promise you, Brother, it was. Tell him, Meda. He was close to death. Anything alive will imagine a visit from its mother when it has one foot in the dratted grave—”

  Meda held up a finger to quiet Linc. She herself had thought about her own mother so often of late that it sometimes seemed that her mother was in the room with her. She wondered how close to death she herself was. “How did she appear?” Meda asked Bram. “Your mother. What was she like?”

  “She was”—his voice faltered—“she was beautiful.”

  “And who else has come to you, Bram?”

  “There have been scores of souls, Meda, I promise you there have been.”

  “Have there been babies?” Meda asked. “Infants only minutes old?”

  Bram closed his eyes as if trying to remember. He was hitting on something then, something only he knew from having spent Saturday after long Saturday in the Benin house when Linc and Meda would travel to Buddy’s. The sounds would sift through the walls and he’d hear them between the notes he played. He’d hear Mrs. Benin’s anger, so shrill that it attached itself to her face. And when she’d return to the parlor to take her seat next to him on the piano bench, he found it difficult to look at her, her profile was deafening with its shrill outline. Mr. Benin’s anger bounced rather than sifted. It was concrete and lent itself to words that pushed on through the walls and hung over the piano, where Bram played faster and faster to shorten the silence between the notes so that he couldn’t hear him, but still he did hear him. “I will not tolerate this from you,” Tom Benin’s voice would boom. “I demand that you stop it, stop it right now, once and for always. The baby died. She died.” That argument seemed to replicate itself Saturday after Saturday with different words spoken in a different order, but the essence of it that reached Bram was always the same. Once when Mrs. Benin returned to the parlor, and Bram stole a glance at her, he could see where Tom Benin’s handprint had penetrated the shrillness and bruised her face. He played a long, slow melody then, Stephen Foster’s “Beautiful Dreamer.” He sang the words as he played. It was smooth and uncomplicated, and also soothing. She hugged him afterward. He allowed it, and even hugged her back, though he felt he was betraying Linc and Meda because she was often so wretched to them. It was a brief hug and then she pushed him away and cleared her throat and told him to move on to the Chopin Prelude in D flat major.

  He looked across the room now at Meda. “I don’t recall a infant,” he said. “Though if I knew one to summon, I do believe she would appear.”

  “She?” Meda said, then looked away.

  Bram closed his eyes again. He could hear Linc’s hard breaths, and Meda’s softer ones that were like sighs. He felt the salve oozing under the bandage running toward his eye. Before he could lift his own hand Linc was already standing over him, dabbing the salve away, and Meda was next to him, telling him not to rub too hard because the new skin on his forehead was still forming, still tender, still not healed.

  BRAM WENT ON to make a handsome living as a medium. People trusted him. His eyes were a milky blue, like ink mixed with cream, suggesting childhood and innocence. His manner was easy, patient. And the burn scar only seemed to help. The skin on his forehead was now fused together like hardened spills of melted wax, as if he’d been struck by a lightning bolt of insight that gave him his powers. And he was an honest broker. Even Linc, who could manage no belief in such a thing as talking to the dead, saw how earnest Bram was in his own belief. He’d seen Bram return advances made to him when he’d felt he’d been unable to reach beyond; he knew that Bram was meticulous in the pre-work he conducted before actually trying to hear from the dead. In addition to interviewing the decedent’s family and friends, Bram would study their journals and other documents they’d left. Bram maintained that he enjoyed a level of success that many practicing his discipline in a more haphazard way did not because the dead respected his efforts to know fully who they had been while alive. “That’s all any of us wants”—he’d push his point with Linc—“to be known fully by people who purport to care.” Linc would counter that such a want must happen after death, because from what he could see, most living people put great effort into trying to cloak their true selves, even from themselves, and the behavior of men at the card table—the bluffed expressions to force an opponent’s moves—was a small version of the workings of the world. They’d volley back and forth then the way that close siblings did, critical on the one hand, indulging the other’s hobbyhorse on the other. Bram now protested Linc’s penchant for the card table, yet he’d still advance him money when he ran short; and Linc declined to consider the possibility of communiqués from the dead, yet he’d spend hours listening to Bram’s recounting his spiritual exploits. Though they’d both feared that Bram’s new avocation would prove a wedge between them, their bond was, in fact, strengthened, the way it can be when one person changes profoundly and the other makes a sincere effort to understand, and new circuits are formed between them as a result, reconfigured, firing with possibility.

  Bram began to experience episodic bouts of an unnamed malady where he’d vacillate between fevers and chills. He’d vomit, and at its worst he’d turn yellow with jaundice, sometimes even becoming inco
herent as if suffering from some sort of brain-wasting disease; other times he’d descend into a trancelike state. Linc hammered him to seek medical attention after the first time. But Bram recovered quickly enough, with no apparent lasting effects. Each reoccurrence seemed less drastic, being that much more familiar. And then Bram revealed to Linc that the sudden onset and departure of his mysterious ailment was merely a consequence of his work, and that he chose to see it as a positive benefit. “It means I’ve gotten success, it means they’re inside of me,” he said, referring to the dead. “I know it with the first taste of a dry mouth, a chalky taste, I know then that it’s begun and that I’m reaching them.”

  “Better if you knew the truth, you stupid bloke, that a chalky mouth means a body needs a drink,” Linc said. “You could nip it before you got shitty sick by guzzling water—or, better still, gin.”

  They went back and forth, then, the way they always had with one another: Bram trying to convince Linc of the merits of his new occupation; Linc straining to convince Bram of its folly, hoping to convince Bram to seek help for his medical condition, insisting that if he did not, he would actually be talking to the dead because he would soon be joining them. Bram waved him off, then commenced to detailing his most recent case for Linc. Linc settled in to listen. Not believing in the possibility of it, but listening nonetheless.