New York Fantastic

by Paula Guran

  “The second thing that shook me up and proved to me that I didn’t know anything, that I was no better than a blind dog, happened on Thanksgiving day. My daddy played piano in church, and on special days, we played our instruments along with the gospel songs. I got to church early with the rest of my family, and we practiced with the choir. Afterwards, I went to fooling around outside until the people came, and saw a big car come up into the church parking lot. Must have been the biggest, fanciest car I’d ever seen. Miller’s Hill was written all over that vehicle. I couldn’t have told you why, but the sight of it made my heart stop. The front door opened, and out stepped a colored man in a fancy gray uniform with a smart cap. He didn’t so much as dirty his eyes by looking at me, or at the church, or at anything around him. He stepped around the front of the car and opened the rear door on my side. A young woman was in the passenger seat, and when she got out of the car, the sun fell on her blond hair and the little fur jacket she was wearing. I couldn’t see more than the top of her head, her shoulders under the jacket, and her legs. Then she straightened up, and her eyes lighted right on me. She smiled, but I couldn’t smile back. I couldn’t even begin to move.

  “It was Abbey Montgomery, delivering baskets of food to our church, the way she did every Thanksgiving and Christmas. She looked older and thinner than the last time I’d seen her alive—older and thinner, but more than that, like there was no fun at all in her life anymore. She walked to the trunk of the car, and the driver opened it up, leaned in, and brought out a great big basket of food. He took into the church by the back way and came back for another one. Abbey Montgomery just stood still and watched him carry the baskets. She looked—she looked like she was just going through the motions, like going through the motions was all she was ever going to do from now on, and she knew it. Once she smiled at the driver, but the smile was so sad that the driver didn’t even try to smile back. When he was done, he closed the trunk and let her into the passenger seat, got behind the wheel, and drove away.

  “I was thinking, Dee Sparks was right, she was alive all the time. Then I thought, No, Mary Randolph brought her back, too, like she did Eddie Grimes. But it didn’t work right, and only part of her came back.

  “And that’s the whole thing, except that Abbey Montgomery didn’t deliver food to our church, that Christmas—she was traveling out of the country, with her aunt. And she didn’t bring food the next Thanksgiving, either, just sent her driver with the baskets. By that time, we didn’t expect her, because we’d already heard that, soon as she got back to town, Abbey Montgomery stopped leaving her house. That girl shut herself up and never came out. I heard from somebody who probably didn’t know any more than I did that she eventually got so she wouldn’t even leave her room. Five years later, she passed away. Twenty-six years old, and they said she looked to be at least fifty.”

  4

  Hat fell silent, and I sat with my pen ready over the notebook, waiting, for more. When I realized that he had finished, I asked, “What did she die of?”

  “Nobody ever told me.”

  “And nobody ever found who had killed Mary Randolph.”

  The limpid, colorless eyes momentarily rested on me. “Was she killed?”

  “Did you ever become friends with Dee Sparks again? Did you at least talk about it with him?”

  “Surely did not. Nothing to talk about.”

  This was a remarkable statement, considering that for an hour he had done nothing but talk about what had happened to the two of them, but I let it go. Hat was still looking at me with his unreadable eyes. His face had become particularly bland, almost immobile. It was not possible to imagine this man as an active eleven-year-old boy. “Now you heard me out, answer my question,” he said.

  I couldn’t remember the question.

  “Did we find what we were looking for?”

  Scares—that was what they had been looking for. “I think you found a lot more than that,” I said.

  He nodded slowly. “That’s right. It was more.”

  Then I asked him some question about his family’s band, he lubricated himself with another swallow of gin, and the interview returned to more typical matters. But the experience of listening to him had changed. After I had heard the long, unresolved tale of his Halloween night, everything Hat said seemed to have two separate meanings, the daylight meaning created by sequences of ordinary English words, and another, nighttime meaning, far less determined and knowable. He was like a man discoursing with eerie rationality in the midst of a surreal dream—like a man carrying on an ordinary conversation with one foot placed on solid ground and the other suspended above a bottomless abyss. I focused on the rationality, on the foot placed in the context I understood; the rest was unsettling to the point of being frightening. By six-thirty, when he kindly called me “Miss Rosemary” and opened his door, I felt as if I’d spent several weeks, if not whole months, in his room.

  PART THREE

  1

  Although I did get my M.A. at Columbia, I didn’t have enough money to stay on for a Ph.D., so I never became a college professor. I never became a jazz critic, either, or anything else very interesting. For a couple of years after Columbia, I taught English in a high school, until I quit to take the job I have now, which involves a lot of traveling and pays a little bit better than teaching. Maybe even quite a bit better, but that’s not saying much, especially when you consider my expenses. I own a nice little house in the Chicago suburbs, my marriage held up against everything life did to it, and my twenty-two year old son, a young man who never once in his life for the purpose of pleasure read a novel, looked at a painting, visited a museum, or listened to anything but the most readily available music, recently announced to his mother and myself that he has decided to become an artist, actual type of art to be determined later, but probably to include aspects of photography, video tape, and the creation of “installations.” I take this as proof that he was raised in a manner that left his self-esteem intact.

  I no longer provide my life with a perpetual sound track (though my son, who has moved back in with us, does), in part because my income does not permit the purchase of a great many compact discs. (A friend presented me with a CD player on my forty-fifth birthday.) And these days, I’m as interested in classical music as in jazz. Of course, I never go to jazz clubs when I am home. Are there still people, apart from New Yorkers, who patronize jazz nightclubs in their own hometowns? The concept seems faintly retrograde, even somehow illicit. But when I am out on the road, living in airplanes and hotel rooms, I often check the jazz listings in the local papers to see if I can find some way to fill my evenings. Many of the legends of my youth are still out there, in most cases playing at least as well as before. Some months ago, while I was San Francisco, I came across John Hawes’ name in this fashion. He was working in a club so close to my hotel that I could walk to it.

  His appearance in any club at all was surprising. Hawes had ceased performing jazz in public years before. He had earned a great deal of fame (and undoubtedly, a great deal of money) writing film scores, and in the past decade, he had begun to appear in swallow-tail coat and white tie as a conductor of the standard classical repertoire. I believe he had a permanent post in some city like Seattle, or perhaps Salt Lake City. If he was spending a week playing jazz with a trio in San Francisco, it must have been for the sheer pleasure of it.

  I turned up just before the beginning of the first set, and got a table toward the back of the club. Most of the tables were filled—Hawes’ celebrity had guaranteed him a good house. Only a few minutes after the announced time of the first set, Hawes emerged through a door at the front of the club and moved toward the piano, followed by his bassist and drummer. He looked like a more successful version of the younger man I had seen in New York, and the only indications of the extra years were his silvergrey hair, still abundant, and a little paunch. His playing, too, seemed essentially unchanged, but I could not hear it in the way I once had. He was still a good
pianist—no doubt about that—but he seemed to be skating over the surface of the songs he played, using his wonderful technique and good time merely to decorate their melodies. It was the sort of playing that becomes less impressive the more attention you give it—if you were listening with half an ear, it probably sounded like Art Tatum. I wondered if John Hawes had always had this superficial streak in him, or if he had lost a certain necessary passion during his years away from jazz. Certainly he had not sounded superficial when I had heard him with Hat.

  Hawes, too, might have been thinking about his old employer, because in the first set he played “Love Walked In,” “Too Marvelous For Words,” and “Up Jumped Hat.” In the last of these, inner gears seemed to mesh, the rhythm simultaneously relaxed and intensified, and the music turned into real, not imitation, jazz. Hawes looked pleased with himself when he stood up from the piano bench, and half a dozen fans moved to greet him as he stepped off the bandstand. Most of them were carrying old records they wished him to sign.

  A few minutes later, I saw Hawes standing by himself at the end of the bar, drinking what appeared to be club soda, in proximity to his musicians but not actually speaking with them. Wondering if his allusions to Hat had been deliberate, I left my table and walked toward the bar. Hawes watched me approach out of the side of his eye, neither encouraging nor discouraging me. When I introduced myself, he smiled nicely and shook my hand and waited for whatever I wanted to say to him.

  At first, I made some inane comment about the difference between playing in clubs and conducting in concert halls, and he replied with the non-committal and equally banal agreement that yes, the two experiences were very different.

  Then I told him that I had seen him play with Hat all those years ago in New York, and he turned to me with genuine pleasure in his face. “Did you? At that little club on St. Mark’s Place? That sure was fun. I guess I must have been thinking about it, because I played some of those songs we used to do.”

  “That was why I came over,” I said. “I guess that was one of the best musical experiences I ever had.”

  “You and me both.” Hawes smiled to himself. “Sometimes, I just couldn’t believe what he was doing.”

  “It showed,” I said.

  “Well.” His eyes slid away from mine. “Great character. Completely otherworldly.”

  “I saw some of that,” I said. “I did that interview with him that turns up now and then, the one in Downbeat.”

  “Oh!” Hawes gave me his first genuinely interested look so far. “Well, that was him, all right.”

  “Most of it was, anyhow.”

  “You cheated?” Now he was looking even more interested.

  “I had to make it understandable.”

  “Oh, sure. You couldn’t put in all those ding-dings and bells and Bob Crosbys.” These had been elements of Hat’s private code. Hawes laughed at the memory. “When he wanted to play a blues in G, he’d lean over and say, ‘Gs, please.’ ”

  “Did you get to know him at all well, personally?” I asked, thinking that the answer must be that he had not—I didn’t think that anyone had ever really known Hat very well.

  “Pretty well,” Hawes said. “A couple of times, around ’54 and ’55, he invited me home with him, to his parents’ house, I mean. We got to be friends on a Jazz at the Phil tour, and twice when we were in the South, he asked me if I wanted to eat some good home cooking.”

  “You went to his hometown?”

  He nodded. “His parents put me up. They were interesting people. Hat’s father, Red, was about the lightest black man I ever saw, and he could have passed for white anywhere, but I don’t suppose the thought ever occurred to him.”

  “Was the family band still going?”

  “No, to tell you the truth, I don’t think they were getting much work up toward the end of the forties. At the end, they were using a tenor player and a drummer from the high school band. And the church work got more and more demanding for Hat’s father.”

  “His father was a deacon, or something like that?”

  He raised his eyebrows. “No, Red was the Baptist minister. The Reverend. He ran that church. I think he even started it.”

  “Hat told me his father played piano in church, but …”

  “The Reverend would have made a hell of a blues piano player, if he’d ever left his day job.”

  “There must have been another Baptist church in the neighborhood,” I said, thinking this the only explanation for the presence of two Baptist ministers. But why had Hat not mentioned that his own father, like Dee Sparks’s, had been a clergyman?

  “Are you kidding? There was barely enough money in that place to keep one of them going.” He looked at his watch, nodded at me, and began to move closer to his sidemen.

  “Could I ask you one more question?”

  “I suppose so,” he said, almost impatiently.

  “Did Hat strike you as superstitious?”

  Hawes grinned. “Oh, he was superstitious, all right. He told me he never worked on Halloween—he didn’t even want to go out of his room on Halloween. That’s why he left the big band, you know. They were starting a tour on Halloween, and Hat refused to do it. He just quit.” He leaned toward me. “I’ll tell you another funny thing. I always had the feeling that Hat was terrified of his father—I thought he invited me to Hatchville with him so I could be some kind of buffer between him and his father. Never made any sense to me. Red was a big strong old guy, and I’m pretty sure a long time ago he used to mess around with the ladies, Reverend or not, but I couldn’t ever figure out why Hat should be afraid of him. But whenever Red came into the room, Hat shut up. Funny, isn’t it?”

  I must have looked very perplexed. “Hatchville?”

  “Where they lived. Hatchville, Mississippi—not too far from Biloxi.”

  “But he told me—”

  “Hat never gave too many straight answers,” Hawes said. “And he didn’t let the facts get in the way of a good story. When you come to think of it, why should he? He was Hat.”

  After the next set, I walked back uphill to my hotel, wondering again about the long story Hat had told me. Had there been any truth in it at all?

  2

  Three weeks later I found myself released from a meeting at our Midwestern headquarters in downtown Chicago earlier than I had expected, and instead of going to a bar with the other wandering corporate ghosts like myself, made up a story about having to get home for dinner with visiting relatives. I didn’t want to admit to my fellow employees, committed like all male business people to aggressive endeavors such as racquetball, drinking, and the pursuit of women, that I intended to visit the library. Short of a trip to Mississippi, a good periodical room offered the most likely means of finding out once and for all how much truth had been in what Hat had told me.

  I hadn’t forgotten everything I had learned at Columbia—I still knew how to look things up.

  In the main library, a boy set me up with a monitor and spools of microfilm representing the complete contents of the daily newspapers from Biloxi and Hatchville, Mississippi, for Hat’s tenth and eleventh years. That made three papers, two for Biloxi and one for Hatchville, but all I had to examine were the issues dating from the end of October through the middle of November—I was looking for references to Eddie Grimes, Eleanore Monday, Mary Randolph, Abbey Montgomery, Hat’s family, The Backs, and anyone named Sparks.

  The Hatchville Blade, a gossipy daily printed on peach-colored paper, offered plenty of references to each of these names and places, and the papers from Biloxi contained nearly as many—Biloxi could not conceal the delight, disguised as horror, aroused in its collective soul by the unimaginable events taking place in the smaller, supposedly respectable town ten miles west. Biloxi was riveted, Biloxi was superior, Biloxi was virtually intoxicated with dread and outrage. In Hatchville, the press maintained a persistent optimistic dignity: when wickedness had appeared, justice official and unofficial had dealt with it. Hatchville
was shocked but proud (or at least pretended to be proud), and Biloxi all but preened. The Blade printed detailed news stories, but the Biloxi papers suggested implications not allowed by Hatchville’s version of events. I needed Hatchville to confirm or question Hat’s story, but Biloxi gave me at least the beginning of a way to understand it.

  A black ex-convict named Edward Grimes had in some fashion persuaded or coerced Eleanore Monday, a retarded young white woman, to accompany him to an area variously described as “a longstanding local disgrace” (the Blade) and “a haunt of deepest vice” (Biloxi) and after “the perpetration of the most offensive and brutal deeds upon her person” (the Blade) or “acts which the judicious commentator must decline to imagine, much less describe” (Biloxi) murdered her, presumably to ensure her silence, and then buried the body near the “squalid dwelling” where he made and sold illegal liquor. State and local police departments acting in concert had located the body, identified Grimes as the fiend, and, after a search of his house, had tracked him to a warehouse where the murderer was killed in a gun battle. The Blade covered half its front page with a photograph of a gaping double door and a bloodstained wall. All Mississippi, both Hatchville and Biloxi declared, now could breathe more easily.