Five Night Stand: A Novel

by Richard J. Alley

  “It’s why we ain’t got nothin, not shit,” Stanton continues. “Why I’m here in a old-folks home for coloreds. It ain’t changed; it’s segregation, it’s racism, it’s Jim Crow moved into a new century. Shit. I ain’t want their money anyway, but I do want some respect, respect for what we—colored men—gave to the world.”

  By now the people at the other tables are watching and listening to Stanton. Oliver is sure they’ve heard it before, maybe the last time Oliver was there or when Stanton cries out in his sleep. Whether or not they remember his last outburst, he can’t be sure. Oliver figures there must be speeches like this one made on a regular basis—angry retired bus drivers, cooks, maids, deliverymen, foremen, and street sweepers. They just want to talk, but more, they want to be heard. And respected. That ain’t much to ask, Oliver thinks.

  Silence falls again over their game and Stanton’s head nods, exhausted from his tirade and drawing up the past. This is expected as well, and Oliver looks up to the clock mounted on the green cinder-block wall. Three twelve it reads, though who can be sure? He takes the time to consider his friend, his grayed face and patches of white stubble where the nurses had trouble shaving, or didn’t care enough to attend to. Stanton’s nose is wide and flat and runs just a little, his head gleams in the fluorescent lighting, and his ears are enormous. Oliver has trouble remembering what this withered elf looked like back in the day, back when they were young men full of brass and piss who would eat an early dinner of steak and fries before playing and drinking all night long, scooping up women along the way like they were so many wildflowers before calling it a night and trudging back uptown or down into subways full of the pressed suits and creased newspapers of men going to work. The man sitting across from him now doesn’t even have a hint of that young man, and Oliver misses him. He wonders if anyone recognizes Oliver’s younger self, either. Probably not.

  “What you doin up here, Ollie?” Stanton has looked up from his brief nap, unaware that he’d even had one.

  Oliver leans back and mops beneath his hat brim with a handkerchief. “Stanton.” He lets out a long sigh. “Brother Stanton. Afraid I’m leavin these parts.”

  “Leavin, huh? Where you goin to? LA? Gonna cut a record? Make a movie?” He chuckles halfheartedly at his own joke.

  “Naw, shit. Headin south to Memphis, stay with my sister and baby niece.”

  “Memphis? No shit?”

  “No shit, brother.”

  “You remember that time in Memphis when them crackers stopped us to ask what we had in the case? You remember? You was carryin my case and that one old cop says, ‘What you got in that case, boy?’ Remember that?”

  Oliver laughs at the memory. “Yeah, yeah, I remember that.”

  “And you says, ‘I’m a piano player, suh.’” Stanton laughs, baring the five teeth he has left in his mouth—four are yellow and decayed and the fifth is wrapped in gold, his gums run purple to black. But he laughs at his tale and doesn’t care what he looks like. He laughs for all of their times together and for the end itself.

  Oliver laughs as well, but with a pang in his gut, a growing sense of apprehension at moving to the South. That instance was funny and even the cops had laughed as they told the musicians to “get their nigger asses off my street,” but there was plenty that wasn’t funny. The very fact that he has to move so far from his home isn’t funny and neither is his friend finishing a life of music and travel and swinging times in a concrete government-assisted facility that stinks like the bathrooms at Yankee Stadium.

  “Hey, you get to leave here ever?” Oliver says.

  “Can leave anytime I please, I ain’t a caged animal. You see any bars on these windows?”

  Oliver does, in fact, see bars on all the windows and heavy locks on all of the steel doors, but those might be to keep people of the neighborhood out rather than the residents in.

  “Still play piano any?”

  “Sure, got one in the cafeteria. Need tuning, but she still plays. Ain’t got no bass, breaks my heart, not that my arthritis would let me play the damn thing anyways. Why?”

  “If I set you up with teachin lessons, you think you could get there once a week? Maybe twice? Make a little scratch for yourself, get out and take some fresh air.”

  “Lessons? Who?”

  “Boy I know. I can’t teach him, I got to leave, but he wantin to learn somethin fierce. He lives in the apartment above me. His daddy went down in the towers.”

  “That right? Huh. Lessons you say. Yeah, man, yeah, I’ll do it. You tell that boy I’ll start up week after next. Can’t go next week, got my dialysis and I ain’t never know on what day.”

  That settled, the men make a couple more moves on the checkerboard and Stanton asks about Oliver’s recent shows. He wishes aloud that he could’ve gone to one, but they won’t let him out after dark, not to travel the length of Manhattan. Oliver says he understands and wishes Stanton could’ve come, too. Oliver tells him who all has stopped by, lies and tells his old friend that they all asked after him. Before long the nurse comes back down the hall, still pecking at her phone.

  “Hey, baby!” Stanton shouts at her again. “You comin for me?”

  “Here I come, Stanton, keep your pants on.”

  “Come on, baby, and put it in me!”

  Charlene has her father’s depth of skin color but her mother’s long Mediterranean nose and green eyes. She is, quite simply, striking, though it takes some time in her presence to realize this. Her features aren’t conventional, not by any stretch. Frank, sitting at the kitchen table and watching her prepare tea and pour it into two delicate cups, is put in mind not of a typical Park Slope wife and mother but of Madame Fairbanks in a New Orleans he’s never even known.

  “What is it, exactly, that you want with me, Mr. Severs?” she says, placing a cup in front of him and taking the seat opposite for herself.

  “Please, call me Frank. I’m from Memphis, and I’m writing a story on your father and his retirement. I was hoping to get some memories of growing up with him as a father.”

  “I’m not sure how much growing up I did with Oliver. You may want to record the memories of bus drivers or club owners on the other coast.”

  “He wasn’t around much, I take it?”

  “Have you spoken with Oliver yet?”

  “Oh, yes ma’am. I’ve talked with him at length and been to the past two nights of shows. Probably go again tonight.”

  “Well then, you’ve just spent as much time with him as I did collectively as a child.”

  The tension in the room is carried upward on steam from the tea, and despite the heat, Frank sips at it just for something to do. He looks around the well-appointed kitchen with modern appliances, granite, and exposed brick rising from the oven. The hallway he’d entered was gleaming hardwood and he can see it continues into the living area just off the kitchen. “This is a great house. Have you lived here long?”

  “We’ve lived in Park Slope for twenty years. This was our first house and we’ve spent all of those twenty years restoring it to what it is now.”

  “You and your husband?”

  “And our son, Cedric.”

  “Any chance you’ll stop in to hear your father before his five-night stand is over?”

  “I’ve heard Oliver play.”

  There are children outside in the snow—Frank can hear their calls and laughter in the awkward silences that punctuate his conversation with Charlene. What he notices, what’s been nagging at him since he entered the home but he just couldn’t place, is that there is no music. It may be the one place he’s visited in New York that hasn’t had some sort of music in the background. He suddenly wishes he was out there with those children, wishes he were anywhere else but in Charlene’s kitchen in this too-quiet home. Sensing she won’t open up, Frank decides there’s nothing to lose and pushes the issue.

 
; “Mrs. Wilson, Oliver is about to give up his life in New York, the place he’s called home for more than sixty years, to move to Memphis with a sister he hasn’t seen in decades and a niece he’s never met in person. He’s broke and doesn’t want to die alone. Can I ask why you can’t, or won’t, help him in this hour? What is it that happened between you two that you can’t even cross the river to go hear him play one last time?”

  The anger that flashes in those ancestral Italian eyes makes Frank wish he’d kept his mouth shut. Once again he slurps the scalding tea and feels the steam on his skin. Charlene’s upper lip stiffens and he prepares himself to be thrown out of her beautiful home, to be put out with those children building snowmen and throwing snowballs. But then her features soften and he sees some of Oliver’s playfulness come into her eyes.

  “What’s your favorite Oliver Pleasant tune, Frank?”

  He has to think about that, but offers “Blues for Chesca.” He loves the song, but he also thinks it might win some favor with Francesca’s daughter.

  “That’s a lovely song. Would you like to know what my favorite is?”

  “Please.” This is the kind of detail that works so well in stories.

  “My favorite Oliver Pleasant song is ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.’ Have you ever heard him play ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’?”

  “Well . . . no ma’am.”

  “Do you want to know why my favorite song of his is ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’?”

  Frank nods, feeling like a chastened boy in trouble with his mother.

  “Because he only played it for me. Only me. He didn’t record it; he didn’t open a show with it or fit it into a set list. No one in California or Texas or Paris or Memphis, Tennessee, has heard his rendition of ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’ on piano because it is a song that he played for me while I sat on the bench beside him on those nights when he was home. Those very few nights. And on all those nights when Pops wasn’t home, I would step outside our house and look up to those stars and think that he was seeing them, too. He taught me that song, and to this day it’s the only tune I know how to play on piano.”

  Frank wishes again for music, or any distraction at all to come crashing into the room. Charlene’s lip that had revealed such anger only moments earlier now trembles and she stands to retrieve the carafe of hot water, glancing out a window over the sink at the children outside before bringing it back to the table. Neither cup is low enough to need a refill.

  “Has he told you about Hamlet Giraud?”

  “His friend the trombonist? Well, in passing, in stories of the road and gigs.”

  “Sure, sure he did. Did he mention how Hamlet died?” Here, the sadness that had trembled her lip fills her eyes as well, those piercing emeralds going to pools of green in an instant.

  “He died in a car accident, didn’t he? Here in New York?”

  “He did. He died in a car accident while scuttling my father’s mistress away from our house. Away from my mother’s home, Mr. Severs.”

  In all the research he’s done on Oliver that had led to information on Hamlet Giraud, he hasn’t read that story anywhere. There are accounts of Giraud dying young in an early morning wreck on the FDR, and rumors that he was with an unidentified woman—a woman not his wife.

  “Who was she?” Frank’s reporter instincts have taken over and he assumes the crass, blunt questioning reserved for victims’ families.

  “Her name was Marie Broussard, from Paris. I attended Hamlet’s funeral. I was eight at the time and I wondered then why we were there. We weren’t churchgoing people and it was the middle of the week. My mother wore black and my father cried. I’d never seen him cry before then. He played piano and a choir sang. My mother, through it all, stared straight ahead, not even turning to look at my father, who sobbed like a child as he played that slow funeral dirge. Once I put it all together, sometime as a young woman perhaps, if not later that day, I wondered at my mother’s attendance there at all. The circumstances surrounding the day, that week, make me realize just how strong my mother was.” She looks at Frank, the piercing green back again and driving through his brain. “And, Mr. Severs, just how weak Oliver could be.”

  Frank is numb, yet his spine and scalp tingle at the same time. This story is one that’s been speculated on by music historians and pop-culture fanatics for years.

  “I’ve kept it inside all this time. I don’t know why. To protect Oliver? To honor the memory of my mother? Who’s to say? But I know Hamlet’s children; we grew up together. I still see them and the knowledge of it, that it wasn’t their father’s mistress in that car, but my father’s, is something I feel I’m wearing pinned to the front of my coat every time they’re near. They know it, I’m sure of it. I can sense it every time I run across Johnny Giraud in the subway or his sister, Maddie, in the market. Their crowd knew, musicians know, but musicians”—this last word has been spat out—“protect their own. Well, I’m no musician and I ain’t here to protect nobody no more. You dig?”

  She wipes her eyes and jumps up from the table to pour her tepid tea into the sink. She refills her cup with steaming water and places the discarded tea bag back into the cup.

  “This story, Mrs. Wilson . . .”

  “You do with it what you will, Frank Severs. I know why you’re here. I understand what it is you do and I’m telling you that I’m tired of it all. I’m too old now to keep secrets and it’s been too many years of hiding and hating. I told you the story; it’s yours now.”

  “I need to ask you one other thing, if I could.”

  “What else do I have? I’ve given it all, Mr. Severs, every drop.”

  Frank shakes his head slowly. “I don’t mean any disrespect here, Mrs. Wilson. Christ, I never thought things would become so apparent and that the noise could be so loud, considering everybody’s intent to keep so quiet.”

  “What are you getting at, Mr. Severs?”

  “You know about Martin Lucchesi, the bookseller in Greenwich Village? You know about him and your mother, don’t you?”

  When Frank had arrived, Charlene kept him waiting in a paneled study just inside the front door. He’d let his reporter’s eyes—working again and intensely investigative and curious—fall over the decorations, the knickknacks, and the family photos. The Wilsons collect African art and there were tribal masks, small carved idols of female shapes ripe with maternity, and photos of the Serengeti on every wall. He worked his way to the bookshelves and saw contemporary titles and a large selection of African American literature—Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, Alex Haley, Alice Walker, and Zora Neale Hurston, first editions all. Among them were older-looking volumes, the ghost of dust lining the shelves around the spines. He reached up and pulled one down on a hunch and there it was, on the inside cover, a printed “ML” with straight lines made with India ink and the wide nib of a fountain pen. It was bold, not only in its structure but also in the way it flew in the face of a marriage and with the full knowledge of both sides of the story as Frank now knew them. And then, in the back, was Francesca’s scripted, feminine “FP.” It was thin and lovely, almost sad, yet with a curl to the handwriting that evoked fun and a certain playfulness.

  He took down another volume and found the same. Another, and there they were as well. Charlene knows, he’d realized. She’s known for at least as long as her mother has been dead, but how long before that, Frank wondered.

  Charlene stands from the table again and walks to the window, and Frank allows the silence to permeate the room, welcomes it this time. She buries her face in her hands and her shoulders shake and quiver with sobbing. He’s sorry all of this came up, but something in him won’t let the inequality rest. He can’t stand to see Oliver’s side of the scales tip so far with guilt and regret.

  “You know?” she finally says.

  “Yes ma’am. I spoke with Lucchesi yester
day.”

  “And he told you.”

  “He told me he loved your mother very much and that your mother was very lonely. They both were. But it was understood she wouldn’t leave your father, or you and your brothers. Mrs. Wilson, I’m not saying this to defend any of Ollie’s actions. He did what he did and that’s for you and your family to work through. But your mother took comfort elsewhere and I’m just trying to understand how one is better than the other. If it is at all. Your mother was lonely, but your father is lonely now as well. He misses Francesca, and he misses you.”

  Charlene doesn’t move from the window, but Frank feels that whatever anger she might have felt has lessened, has seeped through the chinked caulking around the century-old window and brick and cooled in the snow on the sill there. He stands and thanks Charlene for her time and for the tea. She doesn’t speak but only stares out at the children playing in the street. On his way out, a glance into a sunlit room opposite the study where he’d waited before shows him an old phonograph and a wall of shelves, like Francesca’s wall of books, and Charlene’s now, but filled with record albums. There is a comfortable sitting chair that looks from the window out to the street, where children play. The only other piece of furniture in that room is an antique upright piano that might have, at one time, been covered with handmade quilts and flour sacks, and rolled in place across a floor covered in sawdust.

  Agnes and Frank sit at Oliver’s table and can sense the envy of this seating arrangement coming from the other patrons. Those patrons may even recognize the bottle of Campari that awaits him, or the blue pack of Gitanes and cut-glass ashtray. The couple could also feel the bitterness emanating from the hostess station as Ben bypassed Marcie to show them to this table. They talk about their day, though both hold back, not wanting to reveal their real destinations or purposes. Instead, the talk is a desultory tour of easily recognizable landmarks and sites. It’s idle talk without the telling.

  For Agnes, however, it is mostly true. She’s spent the day alone in this city of millions, walking through the park, window-shopping, dipping into subway stations, not to board a train but to listen to the street musicians. Passing again alongside Mount Sinai, she’d spotted a tall man in a turban and rushed to catch up, but found it wasn’t Dr. Mundra. She wasn’t sure what she would have said, but he was on her mind. He and his offer of respite, or complete failure. The prospect of being healed, even if it’s a short while, is almost too much hope to place on such fragile shoulders. It is easier, she thought as she walked the avenues, to consider the previous night and the option of leaping into the black water of the East River. That is final; that’s a decision made on her own terms.