Young Man With a Horn

by Dorothy Baker

  The orchestra played from seven until one, but from seven until nine it was just Phil and enough of the boys to play for the dinner crowd. Rick never went to work until nine, when the serious dining was over and night life was about to begin. Then he played for four hours, almost without a break, because he worked in all the intermissions laying down backgrounds for the trio doing odd jobs, playing straight solos. At one they quit for the night, and he was always just hitting his stride, so he went somewhere else. He lived his life after hours. After his good work was done he did better work.

  It was at Louie Galba’s one night at about two-thirty that he met Amy North. She and Josephine Jordan came in together. Rick and Louie Galba and Jimmy Snowden and Milt Barrow, who played clarinet in Johnny Deane’s band, were all sitting on the edge of the little platform jamming away four at a time on an old tune that didn’t mind being slapped around, didn’t mind being unrecognizable. Jeff was playing piano for them and Smoke was playing drums. And right in the middle of it, the door opened and in came these two, apparently sober and in their right minds. Josephine, wearing a long blue dress and a squirrel coat, automatically flashed a smile around the room and then went to a little table back in a corner. The white girl followed her. She was wearing a rain coat and a black felt riding hat turned down all the way around. She took the hat off while she was crossing the room and brushed the rain from it. Her hair was light, nearly red, and she wore it parted on one side and brushed back sleek and straight behind her ears and knotted at the back of her neck. She looked like an English girl about to go out for a day’s shooting, but she was American, and I don’t think it was very clear to her then what she was out to do.

  A waiter came up to their table. The girl talked it over with Josephine and gave the order, and when they had their drinks they touched glasses lightly and drank to something or other in all seriousness. To crime, possibly; or to success, or to interracial understanding. Mud in your eye, in one form or another—I give you Josephine Jordan and Amy North, the heathen and the English-looking.

  There were about thirty people left at Galba’s, and six of them were making music for the other twenty-four to listen to, just playing for fun. Galba’s was almost wholly a musicians’ hang-out by that time of night. There were always a lot of women around, but even so, the place had a kind of inner-sanctum air. When the music stopped and Rick put his horn under his arm and went back to his table to get a drink, the rest of them followed; then somebody over on the far side of the room yelled Jo, and then somebody else yelled Jo, and in a minute the room was full of it.

  ‘I guess that’s my ticket,’ Josephine said. ‘I guess I’ve got to go sing. We should have known better than to come here.’ But she didn’t hang back. She slipped the squirrel coat from her shoulders and stood forth in her long blue dress, and there was a great shout for her. She motioned to Jeff as she crossed the room.

  Amy North drank off her drink, called the waiter, and moved to the other side of the table, facing the music. There are various ways of showing off, and one of them is not to show off. You couldn’t tell about Amy North; she sat there, both hands on the table, not moving a muscle, only watching Josephine as if she were a horse she’d just put her last cent on.

  There was a conference in front of the platform, Josephine talking it over with Jeff and Louie Galba; then something was decided and Jeff jumped up on the platform and held his hand out to Josephine while she climbed the two steps, and Louie Galba silenced the people, saying, ‘Ladies and Gentlemen...’ (Applause.) ‘We are about to hear the song “I’m in Big Trouble,” sung by the star of the show Big Trouble, Miss... Josephine... Jordan.’ (Applause.)

  Jeff, sitting very straight at the piano, played out a slow introduction; Josephine, standing at the edge of the platform, swayed slightly, closed her eyes halfway, and began her song:

  This room is cold

  And I’m in trouble.

  She sang it quietly, and you could hear every word as if she were close to you, talking to you. She stood, swaying in her long blue dress, sleek and tall, her bare brown arms slightly raised from her sides in a way they’d taught her. But they hadn’t taught her to do what she was doing with the song, they hadn’t taught her to sing The room is cold, the streets are wet, I’m here alone, babe, did you forget? and make it stand for all the trust and all the betrayals of all time. It was the true, tragic thing, from her mouth, and to hear it was to know it.

  She bowed when it was over, ducking slightly at the knees three times, left, center, right, and then she turned around and thanked Jeff and started to go down the steps. But they didn’t want her to, the customers made an awful commotion. Josephine went back and made bows again, and smiled directly at Amy North. Then she turned around and conferred with Jeff, and in a moment he motioned to Rick, who was sitting with Milt Barrow and Smoke. There was another conference, very short, and Louie Galba told the customers that Jeff Williams and Josephine Jordan and Rick Martin were going to try to remember how they did their last record and do it that way again. ‘Four or Five Times’ was the title, an Orpheum Record released this week; Josephine Jordan and Her Play Boys; and incidentally it won’t make Miss Jordan sore if you rush right out and buy this one. (Laughter.)

  They played that and three more, and then Josephine said she’d had enough, whether anybody else had or not; what she needed was a drink with a lot of gin in it. ‘Get Danny and come over to my table,’ she said halfway between Jeff and Rick. Jeff went back with her and Rick went to get Smoke.

  When Rick and Smoke came back, the table was being reorganized, going into a merger with another one to make room. The white girl between Jeff and Josephine had taken off her coat.

  ‘This is my brother, Dan Jordan,’ Josephine said to Amy. ‘And this is Professor Martin, Doctor North.’ Amy smiled at Smoke, and then turned to Rick and said, ‘I’m charmed, Professor,’ and Rick said something or other, nothing much, in return. He was looking back at the platform, watching Milt Barrow and Louie and a couple of men from Freeman’s getting ready to play. ‘Who’s the guy with the sax?’ he said to Smoke, and Smoke said some friend of Abe’s, just in from Chicago and supposed to be good.

  Everybody sat down then and ordered. Rick seemed to feel that the evening was over; he yawned, stretched his legs under the table until they got tangled with Amy North’s feet; then he sat up straight again, lighted a cigarette, and had the package back in his pocket when he saw that Amy North had the look of wanting a cigarette. So he fetched out the package again and held it out to her.

  Jeff and Amy were on one side of the table, Rick and Josephine across from them, and Smoke at the end next to Rick.

  ‘Remember Ferry, used to play piano for Valentine?’ Rick said to Smoke. ‘He’s dead.’ And when Smoke asked how and when, Rick said: ‘Last week sometime. He quit Lee and bought a car and he was driving out to California with the top down and a train hit him. Somewhere in Kansas. Only way they’re sure it was him, they found his union card.’

  ‘I’ll be damned,’ Smoke said, and Josephine said, ‘Was he the good-looking one that played with Valentine, or the other one?’

  ‘The other one,’ Rick said. ‘Ferry was a funny-looking guy, and crazy as hell, too. He used to walk everywhere, couldn’t stand to be in the back of a taxi; if he had to take one he’d always sit up front with the driver, it drove him nuts in back; and he used to walk up to the eighth floor of the hotel all the time, because he didn’t like elevators. The bars, or something. Once we took him home drunk and put him in the elevator and he opened his eyes just as the door closed and he made a terrible squawk. We had to hold him until we got to his floor. And he’d always get somebody else to go in a phone booth and phone for him. God, I’ve made some silly calls for that guy in my time.’

  ‘Did he like to be in any room at all?’ Amy North asked. Her voice was mid-register, and she used just enough of it to make herself heard.

  ‘No, he didn’t,’ Rick said, ‘much. He used to sit in the park
quite a lot.’

  ‘Claustrophobia,’ the girl pronounced it.

  ‘What did you say?’ Rick said, and all of them looked at her.

  ‘It’s rather a common thing,’ said Amy North looking down into her glass. ‘I don’t like telephone booths much, myself. I always get the feeling when I’m in one that it might fall down, and there I’d be, flat on my back in a telephone booth. They’re too narrow; you can’t raise your arms straight out.’

  ‘Oh, well,’ Josephine said, ‘you can always phone in them, and that’s all they’re supposed to be for.’ She looked around the table and said: ‘This is the way she gets when she remembers she’s a doctor. Sometimes she’s nice.’

  The two of them exchanged a look, and Amy said, ‘It’s big of you to say so.’

  ‘Are you a doctor?’ Rick said.

  ‘No,’ Amy said. ‘I’m not.’

  ‘Well, she’s going to be,’ Josephine said. ‘Aren’t you? Or what

  was it?’

  ‘I wrote it down for you only yesterday.’

  ‘Well, anyhow, she’s going to hypnotize people and get them to say what balled them up when they were kids. Isn’t that it?’

  They looked at each other and laughed as if Josephine had said something pretty funny; Rick and Smoke and Jeff sat there looking troubled.

  ‘Maybe we need a drink,’ Rick said. He called the waiter.

  ‘Once I saw a man hypnotize a woman in the window of Rogers’ Dollar Store,’ Smoke said. ‘They left her in there two days and nights, asleep on a couch in there, and she stayed asleep the whole time, because my brother Nathan set the alarm for two o’clock one night and went down to see if it was a fake or not, and she was in there asleep, all right. Then the next afternoon the guy that did it stepped into the window and snapped his fingers in front of her teeth and she sat right up and smiled.’

  ‘There used to be an act that went on just before us, when we were on tour,’ Rick said. ‘This fellow got people to come up out of the audience and then he’d make them do all kinds of things. I got to know him on the train; he’d been to school in Austria and studied psychology, but something went wrong and he ended up with this act. He took morphine; he was sick once and he had me get some for him. He didn’t want anybody to find it out; but he just took a chance on me.’

  ‘And so you sit here and tell everybody,’ Amy North said. ‘Nice fellow.’

  ‘It’s all right now,’ Rick said. ‘He’s been dead for a year and a half.’

  ‘That’s a strange thing, too,’ Amy North said. ‘To worm confidences out of people and wait around until they die, and then tell.’ She was looking into her glass all the time, and whenever she spoke she got an oracular quality into her voice. ‘Very strange,’ she said.

  She was good-looking, like the line drawings of girls in advertisements for too-expensive sweaters. She was wearing one of those very sweaters, in fact, a gray-blue one that looked as if it would feel like suds under the hand. It made her look as if she’d got into the wrong room. She was twenty-four and pretty well used to being in the wrong.

  She looked across at Josephine and said: ‘Now Josephine’s not that way; if she knew I took morphine—if she knew anything about me—she wouldn’t tell it either now or after I’m dead. I’m sure of that.’

  She looked away. Everybody sat still. Then Rick said: ‘Hell, lady, I don’t know what I said wrong. Everybody knew this fellow took morphine anyhow; he just liked to think nobody did. See one of his legs you’d know.’

  Smoke broke in to say, ‘He didn’t say what the guy’s name was, even; we were only talking about hypnotizing.’

  Amy looked at Rick and said, ‘You’re slightly on the literal-minded side, aren’t you, Professor? Don’t take me seriously. I was just making talk.’ She smiled at him, a pleasant smile, direct and candid. Her teeth were white and her mouth was clean. She stretched a hand toward him across the table.

  Rick took it and said: ‘I’m sorry. I really thought you meant it. I thought I gave you the idea that I went around making up lies about people and spreading them around.’

  ‘Oh,’ Amy said, ‘then this man really didn’t take morphine; you just made that up?’

  ‘No,’ Rick began, and then he pressed his lips together as if he couldn’t make up his mind whether to hit her or not. ‘Where’s this getting us?’ he said.

  The girl looked at him closely again and said, ‘I hadn’t thought of that.’ She gazed deep into her glass, thinking of it.

  ‘When you get through having your fight,’ Josephine said, ‘I wish somebody around here would be man enough to order a drink.’

  Jeff Williams was man enough to order one around and then go home. And then Smoke dropped out and Amy and Josephine and Rick were in a taxi, and then it was just Amy and Rick in a taxi and the rain was smashing in tubfuls against the glass trying to get at them.

  But they were unassailable. The earth was turning well off center, so that time was forever and not made of minutes. The real world (the street lights, the flask, Rick’s trumpet case) was as vague as the sound of tires whirling through water beneath them, but even then it seemed that the mind could slice like a knife through all the knots of syntax to make anything probable and everything communicable. And while this extraordinary lucidity held up, Amy North had things to communicate.

  She sat holding Rick’s silver flask in one hand and her hat in the other. When a light flashed up, Rick could see her head, disengaged from the rest of her and set in the bowl of her upturned coat collar. A strange girl with things on her mind. She was telling him now that thought is what matters, or thinking; the mind, in any event, is what matters. The world is in men’s minds, and whoever can find the spring and discover the process, the method, the workings, will know everything. Who finds this out will have the world in a jug, Richard, do you know that? Who picks this out of the crannies will know what God and man is.

  She stopped to think that one over, and Rick said quietly, ‘Go on,’ and she went on, spinning the three-thread twist of her thoughts and fallacies and counter-rationalizations out and out, her clear voice making smooth alcoholic periods.

  She felt up to saying that she herself might be the one to find it if she worked as hard and with as much imagination as she intended to work. She’d go through with an M.D. simply in order to be in a position to tell them all to go to hell, in general, and her father in particular. That would be one reason, but another would be that brain surgery might be a way of getting to the bottom of things. She’d get all the psychiatrical training there was in the world, had most of it already, as far as that went, and back it up with an M.D. just in case; then she’d wrap it all up in a sheepskin and toss it out the window and rely wholly on her own imagination. That’s the only guide. You can’t know anything unless you’ve got the kind of hands that can feel it, unless you’ve got the kind of eyes that never see the outside of anything, just cut straight down under. The surface is forever a hoax, a commonplace, uninteresting thing for kids to waste time on. ‘But,’ she said, ‘I digress. After all, this is your flask I’m holding, and this is your gin in it, and it’s strictly within the law for you to have a turn, unless I wanted to be unkind and tell you that alcoholic beverage is prohibitive, pardon, prohibited, in this land, and more than that, that possession is nine points of the law even if it is illegal. There’s an interesting point in law, or, if you wish, an interesting case in point.’

  Rick took the flask and drank and handed it to her. ‘Go on,’ he said. There was a rough spot in her voice, and he liked to listen to it.

  In college, she said, she wanted to be a writer—you know how kids always want to grow up and be something—fireman, engineer, interior decorator, aviator, actress? She wrote white-hot lyrics heavily inspired from Baudelaire, but always going his Pièces Condamnées one or two better. Wrong approach, I guess. But the college literary magazine wouldn’t print any except the ones that were so symbolic that nobody could see through them, and the mood pas
sed when The Dial gave her a blanket rejection on fifty-nine poems. Good thing, too, a very most fortunate thing to have happened, because you don’t find out anything about what’s true by lolling around in a girls’ school writing what you think might be. You find it by going to disordered minds, looking deep into them. Disorders that result in claustrophobia in that musician or in morphinomania in the vaudeville fellow. Start with that and work back from effects to causes. Master the disorders and you’re practically there. Dear God, so many things to learn, and the rain tearing down all the time.

  She tilted the flask all the way up and said, ‘It’s empty.’

  Rick set about to master the system of his overcoat, and when he had it beat he found another flask, a leather one, in a hip pocket. There you are. Be prepared, and you’ll never be caught unprepared.

  ‘There’s a lot to that, you know,’ she said. ‘It was my guiding principle all through school, but I lost it in college some place, and now I’m never prepared.’

  And while she was threading it out, letting the words weave a senseless pattern all their own, she let go the whole way and showed cause why she should hate her father;—no, not hate, you can’t hate pure stupidity; yes, you can, if it’s done up in a leather case of pompous, pretentious, pedantic, what-all—too bad that went down on me, she said; I really had it going there for a minute.—Hate was the word, after all. She’d hated her father in a nice neat way ever since her mother did away with herself. He was, her father was, a doctor in Cleveland, one of those stupid country doctors that doesn’t know a speculum from a stethoscope, but he had a tremendous practice and he was well thought of in the profession, as thoughts go in the profession. Her mother, as she remembered her, was something else again, something pretty wonderful. ‘—I used to go completely to pieces when she told me my handwriting was improving, I thought so highly of that lady.—Funny, when I think about her now all I can get is that she smelled like something I’ve never been able to find since. I’ve sniffed perfume stoppers until I was blue in the face, but I’ve never found it.’ And when Amy was twelve, this lovely lady, Amy said, started having headaches that nearly drove her mad, and that fool doctor, her husband, probably gave her aspirin if anything. At last, when he knew it was serious, he bethought himself and diagnosed the thing as a brain tumor, which it might well have been, and nobody knew but that he might have tried to cure it with a poultice. He never got anybody on the case that knew anything, and one night his wife didn’t want any more of it and she jumped from the window and dropped to the forecourt of the hospital.