Bix took out his horn. Oliver whispered to the musicians that they would play Bix’s composition “In a Mist.” The tune started up. The audience applauded. The three men stood and menaced their way toward the bandstand. One of them, obviously the leader, drew a pistol. The other two pulled long wooden clubs out of their trouser legs.
Armstrong saw the men coming. He understood what was about to happen. He’d seen those kinds of men dozens of times in the rougher dance halls in New Orleans. He stood up and abruptly interrupted Bix’s solo by playing a loud chorus of “Muskrat Ramble.” Everybody in the band knew something was wrong, and when Armstrong rolled his eyes in the direction of the unholy trio, Bix was the first to react. He kicked the air, his shoe flew off, and it knocked the gun out of the leader’s hand. T-Bone pulled his own pistol out of his pocket and shot another man’s hat off. That got the crowd’s attention and they swarmed the three troublemakers, surrounding them and containing them. At Lincoln Gardens no one bothered the band. And during the entire fracas, the band never stopped playing.
The leader of the three strange men, restrained by very polite bouncers, began to scream at the top of his lungs. “I know who you are, T-Bone Morton. You killed Chester! We’ll kill you soon enough, even if it’s not tonight! And we’ll kill your little mongrel daughter, too!”
The police appeared relatively quickly and whisked the three assailants away, but not before one of the policemen identified them to King Oliver, confidentially, as members of the Illinois Ku Klux Klan. It was the nation’s second largest chapter of that organization, after Indiana’s. Oliver nodded. The band took a break. Everyone in the group gathered around T-Bone. T-Bone wasn’t worried for his own life. He was still mourning the loss of his wife, Lisa. He wouldn’t have minded dying himself, but he was concerned about his baby daughter.
“You’ve got to get you out of town,” Oliver is reported to have told him.
After some consideration on everybody’s part, Armstrong said he had connections with some shady characters in New Orleans who might just kill the three men, but it was decided that the suggestion wouldn’t really solve the larger problem. If the Klan were involved, they’d keep after T-Bone no matter what.
Then Bix suggested that if the Klan was the problem, then a more Caucasian solution might be in order. Someone pointed out that appearances made it clear that T-Bone had some white heritage, and if his wife had also been white, maybe the daughter might pass. T-Bone instantly objected to this solution in a very loud voice. Passing for anything was out of the question.
Oliver told T-Bone that he couldn’t play with the band for a while, because the band didn’t need trouble with the Klan. He also observed that it might be easier for T-Bone to separate from his daughter for a short while. If someone would take care of the baby, T-Bone might have a chance to slip out of Chicago unnoticed.
T-Bone hated the idea, but he saw the wisdom of it. He began, however, to reiterate his insistence that neither he nor his daughter would ever attempt to pass for white. Ever.
Bix saved the day, supposedly, by wondering out loud why it would be necessary to say anything about anybody’s race at all. He then made a suggestion that would alter the course of the Devilin family. T-Bone would hand over his daughter to Bix, who would give her to a Caucasian New Orleans family he knew. That’s all. The less said, the better. T-Bone could get himself out of town and collect his daughter in Louisiana when things cooled off—maybe in a month or two.
The family that Bix had in mind was named Newcomb. T-Bone and Lisa’s daughter would be given to Tubby Newcomb, who would soon, unfortunately and unbeknownst to anyone on the planet at that moment, be headed out of New Orleans. He would move quite suddenly, for reasons of his own, to a hidden place in the Appalachian Mountains that would one day be called Blue Mountain.
7.
The hospital smell woke me up, that combination of disinfectant, medicine, and angst. I opened my eyes. It was nighttime. I was alone in the room. Someone had brought a television into my room, and it was tuned in to PBS. They were playing a documentary about jazz. The narrator was talking about Lincoln Gardens in Chicago. Originally known as the Royal Gardens, the name had been changed in 1921, I was told, for unclear reasons.
Then, the narrator continued, in late February of 1924, the hall was burned, reportedly by the Chicago chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. Their complaint was that the room had become a cesspool of race mixing. Rebuilt in 1925, the name was changed to the New Charleston Café, but that only irritated the Klan, or maybe the Mob, the narrator was uncertain. In June 1927 it was bombed and closed its doors as a jazz center for the nation.
I thought then that the show’s presence in my room explained the strange dream I’d been having. Later I would discover, of course, that a stranger coincidence had prevailed, but that only deepened the surreal quality of subsequent events.
I was quickly roused from my half-conscious state by an orderly bringing me something to drink. The room was dark. This orderly was not the one who’d been told to bring me soup. This was an older man, with a much more sophisticated approach to things.
“Drink it quickly,” he whispered in a heavy, unfamiliar accent. “It’s a very healthy green tea, loaded with polyphenols, and some extra herbal ingredients. I brewed it myself. You should be able to stay awake for a while after you get it down.”
He handed me a hot white porcelain cup.
“What happened to that kid with my soup?” I rasped.
“Albert?” the old man said. “He doesn’t work here anymore. And you don’t want his soup, you want my tea.”
Without another word, he snapped off the television and was gone.
The tea was supernaturally effective. My mind cleared and my thoughts arranged themselves in a surprisingly coherent fashion. I was able to consider, among other things, my fate.
I had gone to bed in December. Someone had shot me—killed me, in fact—maybe stolen a tin box from my house. Then Lucinda had appeared on the scene, packed me in snow, and saved my life. I’d lain in a coma for months. I’d awakened in almost-spring. Skidmore had been investigating the crime but had gotten nowhere.
My path was clear. I had to get up out of my hospital bed, go home, and solve my own murder. That was obvious to me, as was the fact that my assailant had some reason for stealing the tin box, an item of surpassing albeit antiquated mystery for me. All I had to do was ascertain the meaning of the items in the box, and my inquiries would be on their way.
If only I could remember what those items were.
Papers, letters, photographs, poems, a ring of some sort, four silver dollars—was there a pair of glasses? Or was I remembering some of the items in my mother’s ancient hiding place in her room?
My mother had created many odd hiding places in and around our house, partly because she wanted to hide items she considered treasures, partly because she was possessed of a severely damaged paranoid personality. She had somehow made a fairly large chamber in one of the walls of her room at our home, the entrance to which was, cleverly, a very tight-fitting windowsill. If you lifted the sill, you’d have access to some of her treasures. I’d found the place when I was a boy and my parents were away, as they were for weeks at a time, with their traveling show. From time to time I’d opened it up, hoping to find clues as to who my mother really was. The contents of the hiding place changed often, but the effect those contents had on me was always the same. I sorted through them, never understanding their true significance, and always came away with a melancholy bordering on the suicidal.
No, I decided, the glasses were something I’d found in her hiding place, not in the tin box. My mother never wore glasses, but there you were: nothing that she held dear to herself ever made any sense to me.
I did remember that on the night I’d found the box in question, I’d also had some sort of strange experience, something I’d interpreted then as an angelic encounter. I’d later come to believe that I’d seen my own reflection in the wind
ow and imagined the rest. At any rate, my mother had fetched a letter not contained in the box, something she’d apparently kept for some time. It was addressed to me but unsigned.
I suddenly realized that I had dreamed about that night, dreams of such clarity that I’d remembered every word of the letter. Although I could not recall the exact words sitting there in the hospital bed, I felt I could grasp the gist. I was to find out who the woman was in a certain photograph that was in the tin box, but if I did, my life would change.
That’s why I’d been dreaming about the people and events revealed to me in the box.
Before I could collect my thoughts any further on the subject, the telephone rang. I picked it up before I had a chance to wonder who would be calling me.
“Hello?” I said into the phone.
“Who is this?”
“Why are you asking that?” I said slowly. “You’re the one who called.”
“Earl?”
“Whom are you calling?”
The phone went dead. For a moment I listened to the dial tone.
I had a sudden, rising panic. How many films or television programs, I thought, used the cliché of calling someone in order to see if they might have the assurance that their prey was available. Someone had called me to see if I was in the room, then hung up when my presence had been confirmed. And there I was, trapped in the hospital room, hooked up to machines, unable to escape.
I first had the impulse to hide in another hospital room, but I was still hooked up to machines and bottles. I sat up. It took forever and required the same amount of energy that I used to need to climb a mountain.
Then, of course, I thought of the nurse’s call button.
I looked around and felt around in the bed until I found it. I grabbed it up and pressed it over and over again. Seconds later I could hear someone coming down the hall.
Nurse Chambers appeared in my doorway.
“Awake?” she cooed.
“I just got a phone call.” I could hear the uneasiness in my voice; I assumed she heard it too.
“Who’d be calling you?” She stepped into the room. “Everybody knows you’re in a coma.”
“What time is it?”
She glanced at her watch. “Not quite ten o’clock. Why you sound so worried?”
“You said it: who would be calling me?”
“Right,” she agreed. “Hang on.”
She turned and vanished out the door before I could stop her. I didn’t know what to do. I thought about calling Skidmore, but what would I say? That I’d gotten a phone call?
As the seconds turned into minutes, I realized that I was sweating. My fists were clenching the bedsheets. I had a sinking terror in the hollow of my chest that seemed disproportionate to my situation.
When my hands began to twitch, it hit me. I’d been poisoned. The tea from the strange orderly had contained something deadly. I grabbed the nurse’s call button again, fumbled it, and held it down. I felt my throat closing up and my entire head began to throb.
“Stacey!” I croaked.
Nothing.
My breathing was becoming shallow and more difficult. I was drenched in sweat. The poison was filling me up. My hands and feet were ice cold, going numb, tingling slightly.
I realized that I hadn’t been pressing the call button and began stabbing it with my thumb constantly. No result.
Just as I was licking my lips and trying to take a deep enough breath to call out again, Stacey flew into the room.
“What is it, Fever?” She stopped dead still a few feet from the bed. “Oh, my God. What the hell is the matter with you?”
“I’ve been poisoned,” I managed to tell her. “There!”
I pointed to the empty porcelain cup.
She took two speedy steps toward the bed, put one hand on my head and took my wrist with her other.
“Your pulse is racing and your head is burning up.”
“Shouldn’t you call a doctor?”
“What makes you think you’ve been poisoned?” she asked briskly.
“A strange orderly gave me tea. In that cup. That’s why I’m pointing at it.”
She glanced at the cup. “That’s from the cafeteria.”
“How do you know?” I growled.
She picked up the cup and showed me the seal on the bottom. It said Hospital in bold black letters.
“That doesn’t mean anything!” I insisted, barely able to whisper.
“Can I tell you, sugar, that it’s more likely you’re having a panic attack than a poison tea reaction?” she said sweetly.
“Panic attack?”
“You’d have rapid heartbeat, pounding heart, sweating, shaking, choking, shortness of breath, chest pain, chills—”
“Stop,” I conceded.
“You’ve got those symptoms?”
“Every single one of them.” I exhaled. “Panic attack.”
“Also weird paranoia?”
“Check,” I agreed.
“Happens to some coma patients when they wake up,” she said, all business. “Very common. Still, I’ll find out what was in the cup.”
“Thanks.” But I felt very foolish.
“As to your phone call,” she said, patting my shoulder, “I checked with the switchboard. You got a call from inside the hospital, from another room. Probably a wrong number.”
“The call was from inside this hospital?” I blinked.
“Uh-huh,” she said distractedly, checking my IV.
“What year is this?”
Her head snapped in my direction and I could hear the concern in her voice. “Fever?”
But, naturally, I couldn’t answer her because I fell asleep again.
8.
Lisa Simard refused to go to the hospital. Her pregnancy was causing her a great deal of pain, but she didn’t like doctors telling her what to do. She and T-Bone had argued until it was obvious that nothing could dissuade a mother whose mind is made up. During the day T-Bone was helping his friend Sylvia at her new bookstore, Shakespeare and Company, around the corner to the rue de l’Odeon. Sylvia wanted his opinion of a manuscript, a new book called Ulysses by a funny little man in glasses. Sylvia was going to publish it herself, since no one else would.
At night T-Bone kept the club going. But one evening Sylvia invited T-Bone to the Paris Opera’s production of Die Walküre. It was the first Wagnerian opera staged since before the war, and Parisians were flocking.
When he came home, he sat on the bed, and Lisa woke up.
“Well, how was the opera? What did you think?”
He shook his head. “Maybe I just don’t like opera.”
“You love The Magic Flute.”
“Maybe I just don’t like German opera.”
Lisa took his hand. “The Magic Flute is a German opera, but I’m with you anyway.”
“That’s right.” He squeezed her hand. “You don’t like anything German.”
Her brow wrinkled. “Their food smells terrible, their wine’s weak, their language sounds like a man with tuberculosis clearing his throat.”
He laughed.
“They’re horrible people.”
“Can anything good,” T-Bone agreed, “come from a people who invented the word fart?”
She nodded very seriously. “My point exactly.”
“So I didn’t like the opera.” T-Bone lay down beside his wife. “How can it be great if it doesn’t syncopate?”
Lisa closed her eyes. “Le Jazz.”
“Oh, you can put a le in front of it all you want,” he teased softly, “it’s still going to be a one hundred percent American invention.”
“Is that so?”
“Oh—it’s very so. You can’t get something as hot as jazz without mixing it up and melting it in a pot. And what do you think America is?”
“A big mess?”
“Very funny. You can’t have jazz without African music but I’ll admit you also need Irish melody and a little Jewish clarinet.”
<
br /> “And a French something,” Lisa warned.
“I was getting to that,” T-Bone said quickly. “French gypsy violins. They’re hot.”
Lisa sighed. The night was warm and the moon was full. It poured into their little bedroom through blinds that cut the light into neat white stripes. “Jazz must be just about the most significant thing in the twentieth century.”
T-Bone nodded. “It is.”
“Of course,” Lisa mumbled, just about to fall asleep, “you’d have to say something about the end of war. We did that too.”
“We did that too,” T-Bone agreed very softly, brushing the hair from her face, petting her head. “No more war.”
“I love you,” she murmured. And then she fell asleep.
“Je t’aime you too, sweetheart,” he whispered.
He looked down at her and wondered what he would ever do if anything happened to her. It was the end of November 1923, and Lisa would not live out the year.
In that same year Europe would first celebrate Mother’s Day. Also the value of the German mark dropped to a rate of four million to one American dollar. Hitler’s “Beer Hall Putsch” failed. A tri-state meeting of the Ku Klux Klan was held in Kokomo, Indiana; two hundred thousand people attended. “Yes! We Have No Bananas” was the most popular song in the world.
And in that same year the poet e. e. cummings published a book called Tulips and Chimneys in which there was a poem called “somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond.” T-Bone had read the manuscript before it was published while he was sitting in Shakespeare and Company. It contained the first words that T-Bone said to his newborn daughter. “Something in me understands the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses; nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands.”
T-Bone did not speak nor read anything at Lisa’s funeral. Some things are too vast—even for poetry.
* * *
I awoke with a start, sitting up. I nearly pulled one of the IV needles out of my right arm. I was alone in the hospital room with the sound of “Yes! We Have No Bananas” ringing in my ears and a great, leaping sadness that someone named Lisa was dead.
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