The man turned awkwardly to see Clayton over one thick broad shoulder and said in the simplest, most monotonous tone of the disinterested, “Yeah, I am.”
“Clayton Cannon,” Clayton said, sticking out his hand for a shake with the overexcitement of a little leaguer, hoping for the majors one day. “I’ve seen you play in New York. I just moved from there,” Clayton noted as the elevator doors opened to the lobby.
The man stepped out, and turned halfway to face Clayton and said with only a modicum of sincerity, “Good to see you.”
“You too,” Clayton said as he stepped into the lobby. “Take it easy,” and he watched as the man, more the height of a basketball player than a baseball slugger, went on his way without thanking Clayton for the good wishes. Then he remembered that he had one more level down to go to get to the garage and his car, so he turned swiftly, certain the elevator had taken another trip to collect others. But it was there, the door wide open. He got back on with one fleet step and rode it down.
When he stepped off the elevator, he ran headlong into the garage attendant, all pink acne, crooked teeth and bubble gum, who was just standing there with the biggest Cheshire grin on his face that put a start of fear for the briefest second into Clayton. It was as if this young man had just seen whatever object of his fascination that someone his age, just barely sprung from high school, might worship. But Clayton knew it couldn’t be him that this young man held in adulation, so he decided the young man was touched in the same divine way as simpletons and only smiled thinly, saying, “Good evening, young fellow. Thank you so much,” and Clayton slipped a five-dollar bill into the attendant’s hand, then went to step around him to get to his car that sat idling off to the side.
“Yes sir. Thank you, sir. But I also wanted to tell ya that I’m from Louisiana, too. I’ve been a fan of yours since forever.”
“Really?” Clayton said, scarcely able to stop looking at the young man’s overgrown teeth that went this way and that, but mostly stunned by this unlikely fan.
“I sure have been. My ma and daddy, too.”
“Well, how do you like that?” Clayton said through a stupefied laugh.
“Oh, yes sir. Matter of fact, I’ve been up here for two years tryin’ to get into the Peabody. I audition every year, and every year I get turned away. But I ain’t gonna give up. I want to do just what you did. I only got two heroes—you and Harry Connick, Jr. What y’all do to the piano, I’ll tell you, that’s what I wanna do,” the young man said as he stood there shaking his head in his own private reflection. Then he perked up. “Say, do you know him? Harry Connick, Jr.?”
“Sorry, never met him,” Clayton said, trying not to let his utter sadness for this young man’s life be heard in his voice. But then again, he thought, who’s to say? Who’s to say that rejections from a conservatory of music has necessarily written the epitaph on this young man’s dreams? Far stranger things have happened in the world of music.
“I guess you two travel in different circles, huh?”
“Something like that” was all Clayton said with a thin smile.
“Well, I ain’t gonna be crazy about this, you know. I’m gonna audition two more times, and if I still don’t make it, I’m goin’ back to New Orleans ’cause I ain’t tryin’ to make Baltimore my home, you know what I mean. I mean, it’s nice here and all, but I ain’t gonna give up my citizenship down in Louisiana. I just needed to give it a shot.”
“Well, you should go for it, that’s what I say. And it’s good that you’ve got a job.”
“Oh yeah! That’s the first thing I did when I got here. It don’t pay much, you know, but in this building I sure as heck do get to meet a lot of good and important people. Like you! And you know, some Orioles and Ravens live here too?”
Clayton only smiled at the sheer irony that he could be celebrated in the same light as an Oriole and a Raven in the mind of this pimply-faced car-parker who, at first glance, looked to Clayton as if his only other talent just might be picking beans in a ripe field. So he chuckled, partly from the thought, but mostly with the young man’s characterization of Louisiana as an entirely different country to which one had to claim or denounce citizenship. “By the way, son,” he said, “though I’m sure sometimes it doesn’t seem that way down there, Louisiana is still a part of the United States, so you don’t have to worry about giving up your citizenship just by moving up here.”
“Ah, yes sir. I know that,” the young man said through shy laughter. “By the way, my name is DeWitt. DeWitt Dilly. Anything you ever need, sir, you just come right on down here and ask DeWitt Dilly. I’m at your service.”
“Well, that’s good to know, DeWitt,” Clayton said, extending his hand to shake DeWitt’s. “And I want you to call me Clayton. It’s kind of good to know that I have such a big fan working right downstairs. I’ll see you later, DeWitt.” Clayton went to his car and opened the door, and just before getting in, he turned to take DeWitt in one more time, smiling at how simple life can truly be with young dreams.
“Bye now, Clayton,” DeWitt said with a proud smile.
Clayton slid behind the steering wheel of his car and closed himself in, then pulled out of the garage wondering if, in the spaces between words, DeWitt could hear the speciousness that contradicted his encouragement. And it got him thinking about just what he might have done if he had camped out in a town auditioning for only one school of music, only to be turned down time after time. He believed, with everything in him, that he’d go back to New Orleans and play honky-tonk in saloons. It was respectable enough and came with its own adulation, he supposed, in its way. Yet whatever it was he said, it made DeWitt Dilly feel that he was right on with fighting his good fight; and what’s the matter with that? he thought. So whether it was sincere or fraught with doubt, it didn’t come from an altogether bad place.
So he drove along Light Street until he reached the light at Pratt. It was amazing to him how much he remembered and how much he’d forgotten in the twenty-three years he’d been away. But what crept up on him from some abandoned corner of his memory was the thought of the News American newspaper that had been gone from Baltimore for at least twenty years, but he remembered it; and remembered that the building had been right over there where Stouffers and the Galleria now stood.
By the time Clayton had gotten to Mount Vernon Place, it occurred to him that he didn’t have a clear destination in mind—until he had reached the Peabody Conservatory.
He parked in front of one of the prewar buildings along the square, and it only served to make him reflective over this little quaint gem of the city, with its cobblestone streets, that Gothic-style church, and the red-brick apartment buildings that somehow blended in an esoteric enough way with the gray-stoned buildings of an olden era, and the Washington Monument—the original one with a statue of the man himself right on top. Nothing like the giant inverted writing utensil that Clayton had never seen as a fitting monument to the nation’s first president. To that degree, that gray pencil with its point to the sky over in Washington fell upon his sensibility in the same way as did modern art—he simply didn’t understand such a contemporary tribute to an early man any more than he could regard paint dripped, flung, and splattered on a canvas as art.
So now he was out of his car and walking, gawking, remembering, wishing he had thought to move back to this place that suckled him when he was fresh out of Louisiana. There was something about the cobblestones or the old-world ornamentation adorning the buildings ringing the monument that somehow made him feel as if he hadn’t left New Orleans at all. Maybe, he thought, it was the charm of another more genteel time that did it.
When he got to the door, he paused before grasping the handle that he had opened every day at one point in his life. But he resisted the urge to stand and meditate on the sentimentality of a door handle—which he couldn’t help but notice had not changed in all these years. Once he stepped inside, he faced a guard who sat at a desk just on the other side of the vestib
ule, his features illuminated by fluorescent light.
“May I help you, sir?” the man asked.
Clayton smiled, thinking it would illicit the same, and said, “Oh, hello sir. I used to be a student here. I just thought I’d come by and take a look around. Maybe go down to one of the practice rooms.”
“Well, most of these practice rooms are reserved. You can’t just pop into any one,” the man said, as if he took his responsibility quite seriously.
“Oh, yes sir, I know that,” Clayton said contritely. “I remember the policy very well. What I was wondering was if there might be one that hasn’t been reserved tonight. Any one will do, because I had practiced in them all.” But what he didn’t go on to say, for fear the man would consider him a kook, was that each practice room held some sort of specific memory for him.
The guard flipped through pages until he stopped at one, and once he finished studying it, offered, “Okay, well tonight, you can have practice-room five. But first, you have to show me an alumni card, or something.”
“Certainly,” Clayton said as he went immediately into his wallet to pull out the card that he couldn’t even begin to understand why he carried around with him. “Here you are, sir. You see there? I was in the class of seventy-nine.”
“So I see,” he said, as he scribbled something onto a pass. Then, handing it to Clayton with the alumni card and a pen, he said, “Just sign in right here in the book, and you can have two hours down there. If you need more time, you can come up and ask for it, but just keep in mind that the building closes at eleven.”
“Thank you, kind sir,” Clayton said as he handed the man back his pen. And as he started on his way, he noticed a question in the man’s eyes. So he asked, “Is there a problem, sir?”
“Well, naw, except that I was wondering where your books are. You don’t have any music books with you.”
Clayton smiled, touched his fingers to his temple and replied, “It’s all up here.”
Heading down the hall and down the stairs, Clayton found his way to the practice rooms. There were the sounds of muffled pianos, four, five, maybe ten all going at once. So now, just as then, it made him think of Liszt, frenetic, with an energetic insanity that he really had to listen carefully to, and become one with, before it could become sane and coherent in a theoretical way that could prophesy life. In fact, he thought he just might play Liszt once he sat down at this piano of his youth. But when he finally got to practice-room five and opened the door, and saw that baby grand standing alone in the room, he could think of only one thing to play.
So he closed the door behind him, peeled off his coat, and dropped it on a chair next to the door. He sat at the piano and played the first chord, and before he knew it, he’d launched into “Baby Grand.” He hummed as he played, and he made it more bluesy than its original, feeling the power of his connection as deeply as those words. Then, right there in his head, was Ray Charles and his voice of a life lived in the lyrics of songs. Minor keys, Clayton thought as he played and rocked with an uncanny likeness to Ray Charles when the words and notes mingled in his soul and became electric; songs in minor keys like this one could always cause a rumbling in a man’s foundation. The keys of the blues. Beethoven, Rachmaninoff, Berlioz, even Bach; all those guys, he mused, wrote the blues before its time.
When he’d tinkled the last keys of the song, he stopped and considered the music. Maybe it was the soundproofing that created a particular acoustic to the room, or maybe it was a fluke of the moment, but without one doubt he believed that he’d played just like Ray Charles.
As his fingers crawled across the keys, playing nothing in particular but beginnings of this and phrases of that, he felt as if he were being watched. Not as if there were some kind of spy camera trained on him, but watched by actual eyes in faces that he’d be able to meet. So as he continued to play, he looked up to the most likely place they’d be—the square window set into the door. And there they were, two pair of gawking smiling eyes. How in the world did they know I was here? he thought, trailing his mind back along the path he took without finding a soul, other than the guard, who would have known him. And even the guard didn’t know him from the man who empties the garbage pails.
So he got up and crossed the room to open the door. When he got it open, to his astonishment, there were no less than ten others standing there waiting their turn to view him. “Hello, how are you all?” he said with the distracted smile he’d become accustomed to slipping on whenever adoring fans occupied his privacy.
“Hey, man!” yelped an excited long-hair who looked to have just crossed the bridge into adulthood. “What’re you doing here practicing?”
And just as Clayton was about to answer, he looked up to find, in the very back of the pack, Larson Fletcher, the man who had taken the fear of God out of him and made him, as much as taught him, how to soar. So as if he were seeing him in a dream, Clayton said softly and with the awe he thought the man was due, “Professor Fletcher!”
“Clayton,” Professor Fletcher said, returning the reverence. “I can’t believe how much of your boyhood looks you’ve actually maintained.” He made his way through the small crowd of fans, and when he reached Clayton, he turned to the crowd and said in an unyielding professor’s voice, “Go back to your practice rooms. Some of you are playing for me in the morning and I expect brilliance.”
And Clayton smiled as he watched them, with only that one command and the unspoken threat of the consequences for playing without brilliance. He remembered that unspoken threat, knowing he wouldn’t get throttled, or even berated, but would receive the lecture. If he was the same Professor Fletcher, which he seemed to be, then those students would do all that was within their physical ability, and then count on anything divine, to play brilliantly and avoid the lecture. And the lectures were never the same twice.
So Clayton backed up as Professor Fletcher moved into the room and closed the door. Clayton embraced him with all his fond memories, then said, “I can’t tell you how good it is to see you, Professor Fletcher.”
“Well, I was giving you enough time to settle in before calling on you. It was my surprise when I heard a few of the kids upstairs whispering like the groupies of a rock star that Clayton Cannon had signed in to practice-room five.”
“Ah,” Clayton said, nodding his head with the mystery solved. “So that’s how they knew I was here. Because the guard didn’t have the foggiest idea who I was, which is just fine by me.”
Professor Fletcher took Clayton’s coat from the chair and laid it on top of the piano. He pulled the chair closer to the piano, sat and crossed his legs, then said with a broad grin, “So, how’s life, Clayton?”
“Well, it’s impossible to complain about anything, Professor Fletcher. I mean, I’ve got a wonderful wife, two beautiful sons, a career that’s inaccessible to most people with equal talent. How do I complain about that?”
Professor Fletcher uncrossed his legs, then with a flourish crossed them the opposite way, threw his hands in the air to bring them to rest in a clasp on his knee, and said, “Well, there are two things here. First, when does one of the best pianists in the world stop calling me Professor Fletcher and begin calling me Lars? I mean, I do appreciate the deference from someone of your stature, but I no longer hold your fate, in any small way, in my hands. The other thing is, the trappings of a good life do not grant anyone an exemption from being able to complain.”
Clayton chuckled lightly at the way in which this man, who had unknowingly been his greatest influence in his life, still experienced every aspect of life fully without exception or explanation. So it was no wonder that he knew Professor Fletcher would consider him harshly if he were to realize that Clayton still bore the mass of his deepest consternation. As his smile dissolved like water into vapor, he looked at Professor Fletcher directly and knew that in spite of how this man might view him, this was the best place to lay it all bare. “Well, there’s still the matter of that dream,” and he knew he needn�
��t say another word.
Professor Fletcher glared at Clayton. “The dream from when you were twelve?”
“Yes, that’s the one,” Clayton said, hanging his head ashamedly.
Professor Fletcher stood and walked to the far edge of the piano, shaking his head as he walked. Then, he finally said, “Clayton, you must know that there isn’t a time that I don’t think of you when that dream you told me about doesn’t cross my mind right along with you. But I was certain you had addressed it and worked it all out by now, either with your mother or in therapy. Something.”
“I haven’t even mentioned it to my wife, and I’ve known her since I was nearly twelve, you remember.”
“Clayton, when I met you, you were that far removed from twelve. You were eighteen years old and as unsure about who you were as you must be now.”
“I’ve learned to live with it.”
“Live with what? Half of yourself.” Professor Fletcher went closer to where Clayton sat at the piano, then leaned in closer to him and said, “Clayton, don’t you see? If this dream is still with you after all these years, then there’s something to it. Maybe it’s not a dream. A dream would have long since faded, don’t you think?”
“I guess it would depend on the power of the dream.” Clayton let his fingers mindlessly crawl up and down an arpeggio as he pondered over whether to say what he was thinking. And when he realized that he simply had to put it in the safest place he knew, he said, “Besides, since the dream, there’ve been little things that add up to nothing but more mystery.”
The Color of Family Page 25
