No Matter How Much You Promise

by Edgardo Vega

  He set his bag and clarinet case near the barn, went inside, and found an ax handle. His heart pounding and his hands sweating, the cold perspiration making him ill, he went back into the house and let himself into his stepfather’s bedroom, where he slept alone. Taking a deep breath, he raised the ax handle over his head and with all the strength he could muster swung down on the Reverend Lockwood’s head as he snored. All he heard was a groan.

  And then he was gone, walking all night, and toward morning finding the railroad tracks and following them until he crossed into Mississippi. He walked pretty much the entire day, except when he stopped to eat from the cornbread and smoked ham hocks he’d managed to wrap in a kerchief. He chewed on the ham hocks whenever he got hungry, letting the tough skin become soft and pliable before swallowing it. By that time the hunger had passed and he was able to press on. In Biloxi he found the black section of town and was able to buy some crackers and dried meat before going on to the train station, where he purchased a ticket north to Memphis.

  All of that had been such a long time ago. Memphis had been hell at first. He swept floors at a whorehouse and worked for an undertaker, helping the owner pick up the dead, and carrying out the entrails in preparation for the embalmer, the smell of formaldehyde staying on him. There were musical bands but when they asked his age and he told them he was thirteen nobody wanted anything to do with him. A couple of times they wanted a cornet player. It wasn’t until Buck Sanderson found him wandering around Beale Street and took him to Bramwell’s one afternoon that he began playing again.

  By the time Alfred Butterworth had returned to New York after his visit in 1963, you could tell that the president’s death had affected everyone and the country would never be the same again. And now Buck’s grandson, Billy Farrell, was coming to visit him, to look after him. He and Buck Sanderson had been young men together and now his grandson who already had grown children was coming to visit him again after all these years. He didn’t quite know if he was up to it.

  48. Memories

  Alfred Butterworth worked all morning to get the apartment ready for Billy Farrell’s visit, sweeping, dusting, changing the sheets on the bed and generally getting the place spiffed up. He had to work slowly, but the anticipation of Billy coming to see him lessened the pain. It was a three-room railroad apartment with living room, bedroom, bathroom, and kitchen lined up one after the other and a narrow hall running from living room to kitchen, and the bathroom and bedroom off the hall. The apartment was small and neat, a place for everything and everything in its place. Sunlight came in and settled gently on the furniture and walls at different times of the day. But there was a sadness to the rooms, as if everyone who had ever resided in the apartment, who had come and gone, who had made love and cried, who had gorged themselves on food and slept long hours, who had drunk and vomited and eventually died in their sleep or dropped dead from strokes and heart attacks for the hundred years that the building had stood there, beginning with the Irish and Germans and Jews who had come to Harlem before the blacks, had left their pain within the narrow walls of these rooms.

  By the time Alfred Butterworth was done, he was exhausted and the pains came with greater frequency, threatening to choke him. He wanted to lie down but fought the urge and set the kettle on the twoburner electric hot plate. When the water boiled, he poured himself a cup of tea, put lemon and honey in it, and sat back down by the kitchen window, where the sunlight was coming in and the apartment was warmest. He knew the tea would do very little because whatever was ailing him, it wasn’t a cold. It was something awful raking at his throat, and he felt like taking a spoon or a fork to try and extract whatever it was that impeded his swallowing. He’d lost ten pounds and about all that he could eat was a little oatmeal. He’d have to go to the hospital at some point, but he was certain that it was already too late and no treatment would do any good. The time had come for him to go. He was certain of this.

  He guessed he had the same damn thing that Iggy Marginat ended up with. He’d kept in touch with Iggy over the years, but he disappeared and Butterworth stopped seeing him except one time down near Riverside Park. “The Cuban kid,” they called him—a serious, rich Spanish kid who was a very good piano player, classically trained. He lived in a rich man’s house over on Riverside Drive. When things got bad during the Depression, he’d have a bunch of musicians over and feed everybody and then they’d go back to Harlem and jam till all hours of the morning and then Iggy would take them all out to breakfast and tell everybody not to worry because his old man owned over a hundred buildings. He’d talk about taking all of them to Puerto Rico someday, telling them that’s where he was from, but everybody called him “the Cuban kid” because nobody knew much about Puerto Ricans.

  Later on, after things got better, some of them went down and played with bands on the islands. “No big deal,” fellows said. “Easy charts, no problems. Plenty of rum, good-looking women of all colors, and nice friendly people who liked to dance.” He’d gone to Puerto Rico and played with Machito’s band, and spent an entire winter season living in an apartment in Santurce with Brady Rivers, the trumpet player. He’d met a beautiful mulatto girl by the name of Ileana who took him places where all the people were black and they played rhythms he’d never heard before and the people laughed as if their color were not an issue.

  Butterworth sat in the chair by the window, holding the teacup in his two hands, staring out at the garbage-strewn lot below his third-floor apartment. The lot reminded him of his life, as if his life, along with a number of other people’s lives, had been declared worthless and discarded. It didn’t matter what field it was: sports, acting, the law, medicine, and of course music. You reach a certain level and there’s a few that go on but the majority get left behind. For black folks it was worse. It was as if somewhere in that thing called life there was a Harlem, and that Harlem was a huge empty lot full of discarded black people.

  He sipped again and recalled sitting around with Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Monk around the beginning of the Second World War, and Dizzy was saying, “Charles, listen to this,” and then bringing the horn to his lips, puffing out his cheeks and blowing a strange, rapid-fire series of notes that sounded like betupiadippitty, bittibitty, biattibittybop, and Monk laughing up a storm and saying, “Ain’t that a bitch,” and Bird becoming all serious and, hooking up his ax, he blew something very similar, but Diz shook his head and said, “No, no, listen, listen,” and he played it again. Bird got a funny look on his face and said, “Man, what the fuck are you doing? You played that shit backward.” And Diz said, “So what!” And right then Kenny Clarke, who’d been in the bathroom, listening, sits down at the drums and plays something similar on the traps, and Monk hits a hellacious chord on the piano and they all laughed and Diz says, “Let’s do ‘How High the Moon.’” And Bird said, “Come on, Alfred,” and Butterworth picked up his clarinet and Diz counted and they played the tune and then Diz came in blowing some of the weirdest stuff anybody’d ever heard, it sounded all discombobulated, and Monk is chording weirder stuff yet, and then after about eight choruses from Diz, Bird comes in for about ten choruses of even more amazing stuff, everything up-tempo and so fast that Bird’s fingers were a blur, but through it all the beat and harmony intact, and Monk and Oscar Pettiford, if he remembered correctly, staying with Bird as he literally flew through the tune, taking it apart and putting it back together. This happened at Minton’s. It could’ve been Small’s. He couldn’t remember exactly. Time had become a fog.

  And then they looked to him and Butterworth played a simple improvisation of the tune with some flourishes but it sounded totally out of place and Monk finally bailed him out and came in, the music strong and supple, but insinuating rather than actually playing the melody, his time perfect and the music definitely swinging. They were all very understanding but no matter how hard he tried he couldn’t figure out what they were doing. He switched to the alto to see if he could imitate Bird. He watched him
incessantly but couldn’t get it.

  By about 1950, when he’d made sense of what they were doing, what everybody was calling bop, he recognized that not only were they playing in a new way, but that central to it was some extremely fast playing, and he knew there was no way he could keep up with them. He began drifting then. He went on the road for a few years, but whenever he ran into Diz or the others, although they were never disrespectful, you could tell that he’d been left behind. The way they talked with each other, the jokes they shared, the places they’d been—Paris, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Rome, London, Cairo—made them look and feel bigger than they were, and he was just somebody they had known back when they were all starting out. And then younger musicians came around and they dug what was going on. Miles Davis and John Coltrane, and even white cats like Gil Evans and Gerry Mulligan, nineteen and twenty years old, and they knew what Bird was doing and would get up on the bandstand and stay with him, but he couldn’t, and he felt worthless, like whatever his contribution had been to the music, it had meant nothing.

  And then he’d gone up to Buck Sanderson’s in Yonkers whenever the old gang got together for a celebration and had heard Billy play and knew the boy was one of a kind and told Buck he ought to let him study the music. Buck said there was nobody around to teach him. Butterworth suggested Mae Wilkerson.

  Billy was shy, a little withdrawn, but he had great big strong hands. As soon as Mae saw him she took his hands and asked his name.

  “Billy Farrell,” he’d said, almost so you couldn’t hear him.

  “And how old are you, Billy Farrell?”

  “Eleven.”

  “Well, Billy, do you play the piano?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you read music, Billy?”

  Billy nodded and Mae Wilkerson brought him over to an upright and asked him to pick something out from the book. He flipped through a book of 1920s songs sitting up against the stand, found “Ain’t She Sweet,” and played a lilting rendition of it, flipping the pages when it came time without missing a beat or a note. Halfway through the song, Mae was moving and singing along with his playing. When Billy was finished she clapped her hands. “And can you play something from memory?” Mae Wilkerson asked.

  Billy nodded and remembered that there was a song that Bobby Darin had recorded the previous year, “Bill Bailey, Won’t You Please Come Home?” In the middle of it was a lilting piano solo that had kind of a boogie-woogie sound, his grandpa Buck had said. Over a few afternoons of listening to the record, Billy had learned how to play it by ear on the piano and he and his grandfather, on the banjo, would do the tune together. He played it now singing the song to himself as he went, so that he sounded as if he were humming.

  “Looky, looky,” Mae Wilkerson said. “You sure can tickle the ivories, but Mae’s going to teach you to really play. Would you like that?”

  “Yes,” Billy said, his eyes dreamy.

  “You sure like that song, don’t you,” she said.

  Billy nodded, his head down and his hands caressing the keys, hoping they’d ask him to play something else.

  The way Butterworth saw it, for whatever reason, Billy felt comfortable at Mae’s. It was like he was sure enough coming home because that’s where the music was and he was definitely of the music. He always suspected that Billy getting involved with the little whore up at Ruby’s was a culmination of being taught by Mae and having that woman shower all kinds of love on him, as if he were the son she never had.

  The day that Butterworth told her about Billy and how his father had been shot, Mae cried, recalling the loss of her husband, Raymond, who had been a fighter pilot with the Tuskegee airmen. She always talked about General Benjamin Davis, who commanded the 332nd Fighter Group and how brave they all were, fighting for America. Lieutenant Raymond Wilkerson had been her true love and hero and she had a room in the house devoted to his pictures, her husband looking debonair sitting in his airplane, his flight cap on and his goggles perched just above the forehead, a white scarf flying in the wind; or else standing next to his aircraft with his flying buddies, looking like Bill Robinson, but handsomer, so that she could never again see Bojangles Robinson in films or in photographs without being reminded of her husband. She still had his medals and flight jacket and uniforms in the closet of that room and there were also pictures of the two of them, she slim and beautiful and he tall and handsome.

  “He was shot down on a mission over Italy,” Mae Wilkerson once told Butterworth. “When I heard about it we were playing USO dates all over the United States and like a trouper I went on playing, knowing it was going to hit me later on that night. We were someplace in Indiana. Terre Haute. Maybe Gary. I don’t know. We finished the set, packed everything up and headed for the train station, and I was still holding on. All the other girls knew I’d lost my husband and finally on the train outside Kansas City my whole world collapsed, Alfred.”

  It was the name she always used when speaking with him, abhorring the nickname by which Butterworth was known, just as she didn’t like calling her husband Skip, as he was known at home and as the other flyers referred to him. Skip Wilkerson.

  “Kansas City, Missouri. That’s where Raymond was from. I asked the band to replace me and I went and saw Raymond’s mother and stayed there for the next two months or so.”

  Butterworth and Mae Wilkerson tried to keep company in 1949 when she was still young, but she picked up right away on his obsession with Billie Holiday and asked him to get himself straightened out and when he did she’d be more than happy to open her heart to him. He hadn’t been able to get Lady Day out of his mind and had blown his chance of happiness with Mae as well.

  Mae recognized Billy’s grief immediately, but in a way, the solemnity of that room, that museum devoted to her husband’s memory, may later have inspired Billy to the duty he felt he had to fulfill. Mae told Butterworth that when Billy finished his lessons, he’d often go up and sit in the room for hours, and had once told her that he’d built a model P-51, just like the one her husband had flown.

  What a shame it all was, Butterworth thought. It never ended. The pain just kept on coming as if there was an endless supply. It would all be over soon, he thought, and closed his eyes, feeling the warm afternoon sun on his face. But he recalled the tunes all right, so maybe he’d get better and be able to play again. As he dozed off in the sunlight he again saw Billy’s family and the young girl singing while she stood behind the drum, tap-tap-tapping the cymbal.

  Won’t you come home, Bill Bailey,

  Won’t you come home?

  She moans the whole day long.

  I’ll do the cookin’, darling

  I’ll pay the rent.

  I know I’ve done you wrong …

  Bill Bailey won’t you please come home.

  And now he was sitting in his apartment, awaiting Billy’s visit. Maybe he was a sentimental old fool, but he felt as if his own son were about to visit him. He was definitely an old fool, pretending that this white man was his son. That’s how it had felt when the boy had gone off to Vietnam and he couldn’t do anything to stop him. It was like something had been torn from his heart. The feeling of helplessness now was no different than it had been back then. He didn’t know how Billy had found out that he wasn’t feeling well, but he had, and now he was coming uptown to see him. He sounded excited on the phone, showing some of that quiet enthusiasm he’d possessed as a youngster. He had told Butterworth that he was getting a group together to play at the Village Gate in a couple of weeks. At least that part of his life was in order. Somehow, Billy Farrell was going to play the music again. He’d get better and go and see him play.

  He rose with difficulty and walked across the floor to look out the front window of the apartment to make sure Billy made it safely inside. There was no telling what would happen with the crackheads all over the place. What had happened? Cocaine had been a nothing drug back then. He watched for a few minutes, but even though it was summer the apartment was too coo
l and too damp and he returned to the kitchen and the warmth of the sun. He dozed off for about five minutes, until he heard the doorbell and rose to answer it. Alfred Butterworth moved slowly, for the moment unaware of the pain. He threw the door open and for a second didn’t recognize the man standing there, and then he recalled the younger Billy Farrell. He now had a blond mustache and his hair was trimmed.

  Billy, for his part, was saddened by how much Butterworth’s health had deteriorated since he’d last seen him.

  49. A Day in Harlem

  Billy went up to Harlem one Sunday afternoon in mid-August of 1990. He had stopped cleaning out apartments but was still called on to fix broken pipes, repair loose steps on staircases, caulk bathrooms, tar roofs, and putty up windows while the weather was still warm. In the past he’d approached each job with intensity, working diligently and looking forward to nothing more than sitting in the loft, reading the newspapers and magazines that he collected on his rounds. Now he hurried through each repair so that he could return home and go to the sixth floor of the building, where the piano had been moved. Once there he played for long hours, lost in the music until one of the kids came to get him to eat supper. On rehearsal days he returned and continued practicing until the other musicians showed up.

  One afternoon he’d gone by NYU to tell Butterworth about the upcoming gig at the Village Gate and was told that the old man was out sick. Billy called him and Butterworth sounded bad. Billy said he was coming to see him on Sunday. He took the 6 at Spring Street, changed to the shuttle to Times Square, where he had played with the family band during the previous summer, and then took the 2 until he reached 110th Street on the North End of Central Park, worlds apart from Central Park South at the other end, which boasts the St. Moritz Hotel, the New York Athletic Club, and huge, luxurious apartments with breathtaking views of the city. He’d never visited those places but had heard about them from Pop Butterworth who, back when Billy was sixteen, worked for a caterer on weekends and would tell him about the parties, pulling things wrapped in tinfoil out of his pocket and saying, “Try this, son,” his big friendly grin and bright eyes illuminating his life.