by Kim Echlin
Ronnie asked, Can you sing?
Harold stood up. Katie, go get me a cup of coffee, will you?
And out in the hall I heard Ronnie say, C’mon, colonel, I didn’t mean nothing.
The group that made the biggest impression on me was a local singing family, the Washington Brothers. Their mother and father stood at the back listening. I used to wish I had parents who would watch me like that. It would be better than being alone with Ma and being half Chinese.
I stopped talking about my Chinese father and I invented a better story. I said, My great-grandfather was a Mohawk Indian chief. They’re from around here, you know. In my mind that sounded good. When I felt like it I would add with tragic eyes, My father disappeared in the war.
I got tired of Ma saying, Your father will come back someday. He had to make sure things were all right in China. I knew Henry Lau was never coming back for me.
That summer hanging around the hotel I taught myself to play piano. There was the big, beautiful grand in the ballroom that I was not allowed to touch. And another in Duke’s Lounge. But in the basement was an old Heintzman, an upright grand with a sound board so dry no one could tune it for fear of the whole thing snapping. In the piano bench was a tattered yellow C.L. Hanon The Virtuoso Pianist. I could not read it but I liked the feeling I had when I stared at the staves covered in notes. Lines. Dots. Treble and bass clefs. Jimmy Alexander, the hotel maintenance man, saw me sitting there with the book of scales and he said, You read music? It was clear I didn’t. He showed me middle C on the keys and where it was on the first line below the staff and how to count the letters up. A lot of people played by ear but I was lucky that he showed me how to read. I memorized the C on paper and the C on the piano. I could figure out where I wanted to go from there. It was like knowing where the mountain was, then looking for the footpath to the top. The notes seemed to pop off the page. I figured out the scales, and then the arpeggios. To this day, when I look at sheet music I feel excited. I like the look of my fingers going up and down the keyboard, up and down, up and down. Sometimes I played the scale one octave, eight notes, sometimes I did it the way the book said, two octaves, sixteen notes, but soon I was playing longer scales, four, five octaves. Sometimes I played the arpeggios two-handed. One afternoon Jimmy Alexander said from the doorway, You want some other music?
No thanks. I like what I’m doing.
He said, You’re stubborn but you sure got a lot outta that middle C.
Yes, I did.
Ma and I had our favourite records. She liked Les Paul and Hank Williams. She liked big band music from the war and she had a record by the International Sweethearts of Rhythm. Someone gave her a Mary Lou Williams album that I liked. She liked Lil Hardin who wrote “Just for a Thrill” and died on stage while she was playing.
That would be a good way to go, said Ma and she held her hands up in the air and lay back as if she was dead.
The first day of my real life was when I heard “Dance of the Infidels.” Jimmy lent me the album, Bud Powell’s Modernists, and I listened to that piece over and over and over and Ma said she was going to have to buy Jimmy another record because I was wearing it out. It was the first time I heard of the Blue Note. Down fell the needle into the groove on the turning black record with its yellow label. I was bouncing with Bud, and bouncing out of the end of my childhood. Nothing else would matter again. No one ever said passion is a good thing but when it happens there is no escaping. I started transcribing Bud Powell. Note by note. It was the hardest thing I ever did. I got Harold to let me use a beat-up old record player sitting in his office. I set it up in the basement as close as I could to the piano. Stopped and started. Dropped that needle down over and over looking for the spot. Writing the note. Listening again. Running to the piano and playing it to see if I got it right. It took me the whole summer and it was a happy summer.
On Ma’s breaks she brought down pie for me and sat smoking in the doorway, reading Prevention magazine, her bony legs crossed, her foot bouncing. I could tell she was impressed that I was teaching myself to play because she listened quietly. Upstairs, she talked all the time and put on a false brightness that amused the other waitresses and the cooks and customers, not me.
Why didn’t the skeleton cross the road?
Because he had no guts.
Everyone in the hotel kitchen loved her jokes, the way she piled her hair up and laughed and ordered them around. But I knew the bus rides home when she was so weary she said, Not now, Katie, and then she would lean her head on the window and sleep.
MAHSA
Before Mor died I got little aching breasts and saw surprising hair. I disliked the string belt she gave me to hold my pads in place, and the flat cotton bra with narrow straps that snapped if you moved your arms too much. Mor tried to make me see advantages to growing up, said, Tonight Abbu and I want to take you for your first time to the Metropole to hear the Xavier Sisters. Would you like to try real stockings now? and I did, of course I did.
I layered on the belts, the first required to hold my pad, the second required to hold my stockings, six strings in all, and I wished it had not happened to me and I was achy and I called, Mor! I feel like a kite fight!
She called back, You will be fine.
I came out in my real silk stockings and my new dancing skirt and I felt a grudging pride at the hidden life beneath my clothes, and Abbu said, I cannot call you Porcupine anymore, Porcupine. You look so grown up.
The Hotel Metropole on Merewether Road filled a whole block, as if an elegant cruise ship with white walls and great rounded corners had run aground in Karachi. On the street level were Pan American’s wide offices selling tickets to the world. Inside was the ballroom with crystal chandeliers sparkling over the polished dancing floor. Elegant waiters in black jackets served tall drinks with umbrellas and small tumblers with ice and tea in tiny china cups. Women wore silk and big clip-on earrings and perfume and men wore Westernstyle suits and shiny leather shoes and narrow ties and there were many languages in the room. My parents danced rockabilly and it was the first time I heard Harlem doo-wopping and “You Belong to Me.”
I needed people to mention them, I needed them to have existed.
When I saw your Mor, Abbu said from the foot of my bed at night, I knew I had found my home.
Mor laughed at him, sitting on my window ledge, and said, He told me that he was my cup of tea.
She looked at him past me on the bed as if I weren’t there. She said, John, why did you come to Afghanistan?
He got up and did a little soft-shoe shuffle to show off to her. I came to find you, Breshna.
Then he said to me, Porcupine, never let anyone tell you that girls do not go to university. It is your ticket out.
And Mor said, My grandmother was illiterate.
They dissolved but Abbu reappeared at the window and took my mother’s hand the way they used to when they came home from the dance school at the Elphinstone ballroom. They demonstrated to me the foxtrot and also the Ramba Samba. I imagined little red foxes dancing and feather steps and telemarks and weaving. Always we were laughing about words.
Abbu used to say in Pashto to me in the morning when I did not want to get out of bed, Aya ghwari chi ma sara gada wokri? It means, Would you like to dance with me? Mor teased him, That is the most unuseful phrase in our whole language and that is the one you chose to learn, and Abbu answered, It was not useless with you, and I can write it too. Then, with the flourish of a boy showing off to please a girl, he wrote it in his childlike script to make us laugh.
I said to ghostly-Mor on the windowsill, Tell Abbu to take us to America.
But she shook her head and said, We are fine where your father is fine. If you do not appreciate the apple, you won’t appreciate the orchard.
I closed my eyes to make them go away. I needed to sleep. I needed to study and please Uncle. I did not need to watch my dead parents dancing all night. I rolled over away from the window. I opened and closed my eye
s again. I promised myself to try to talk to Aunt and to study harder. When Mor was still alive she said, On earth it is hard and heaven is far away.
Sometimes there are not enough words to explain things in English. In Pashto my father was hamsaya which means not from the tribe and in need of protection. In our way of speaking, a boy is called neek sar, good person, and a woman is aajeza, bad-luck person, and a girl can be used to pay off a murder or a man’s gambling debt. Mor’s brothers could not understand how a man could take someone’s favourite daughter and then stay nearby, as if Pakistan were just another American frontier.
KATHERINE
Ma and I liked to listen to Oscar Brand’s Folksong Festival on WNYC every Saturday night. I looked forward to staying up late with her and searching along the dial to tune in the radio show from far away in New York City. She’d make popcorn and we’d listen to Oscar strumming his guitar and I liked being part of the adult night world and feeling as if I were not stuck in some backwater steel town. Ma said every week, Oscar’s from up here, you know. One night a woman with a low voice was singing prison songs from Texas and I was talking and Ma reached over and tapped my leg and said, Shh a minute. That’s Odetta. I want to hear.
Odetta was telling Oscar that society’s foot is on your throat and you can’t get out from under that foot but when you reach a fork in the road you can lie down and die or you can insist upon your life. She said the people who made up the prison songs were the ones who reaffirmed themselves, they didn’t just fall down. Then she said, I call these liberation songs. Oscar asked her to sing something else and she sang “See See Rider” which I did not understand but Ma told me to be quiet and listen.
In those days guys needled girls, even Oscar, but he wasn’t doing that to Odetta. There was something about her voice and the songs she chose that quieted him down. When the show was over Ma did not want to step out and look at the moon the way she sometimes did. She said, I can’t take one more night, and she went to bed. I didn’t pay much attention. I was used to her moods and I was absorbed in the things I liked. I’d learned there was nothing I could do about her problems.
I didn’t think much about her lying around on Sunday, but Monday morning she didn’t get up again and she said, I’m taking the day off.
I went to school and when I came home I was surprised to see her still in bed.
She said, Katie, I can’t help this. She put on her old stained green robe and sat at the kitchen table and smoked. Day after day. Her eyes started to look like marbles in a dish. Lots of times she did not seem to know I was there. She had money hidden in a drawer and she sent me for cigarettes. I counted the money and tried to figure out how long it could last. I found the cheapest food in the corner store, macaroni and white bread. I called her boss and said she had the flu. Finally I went to Nan who was mixing up dried milk for her boys and she gave me a big jar of it and told me she’d come over and see Ma. I dreaded going back into our smoky hole and seeing her sunken, absent eyes. Nan came down, said, You go away now and let us chat a bit.
I sat outside the bedroom door but Nan turned on the radio and all I could hear was Ma crying and then I heard Nan say, Well, if he’s married.
She came out and made some tea and said to me, Give it a few more days.
I got my period when Ma would not leave the basement, and there were no pads and I was too embarrassed to ask Nan. I stole a box from the drugstore because I was worried about money for food. I went to the Saturday morning ballet classes in our school gym and I told them they should hire me to play piano, I was cheap. That was my first job.
All of this is to say that because of Ma getting sick and having to count pennies and make sure she stubbed out her cigarettes before she fell asleep I grew up fast and I missed a lot of the self-consciousness that other girls had.
Ma was getting thinner and coughing all the time so Nan came again and said, Here’s cab fare. Take her to the hospital.
I got her there and we sat with a lot of other beat-uplooking people. Ma was a cowering, skinny thing that smelled of stale smoke. They came to take her for an examination and she said to me, Don’t let them put me away.
I sat alone and prayed which I wasn’t used to doing so I said, Hello God, help her not get put away. I don’t know what I’d do if I get left alone. Thank you. It’s Katie.
A nurse came out and told me Ma was a little low and could I handle helping her take some pills every morning. She told me Ma did not want to get committed.
Hun, that’s a good sign.
A good sign?
Your mom’s real scrappy, said the nurse. But she’s gonna need your help. She handed me a little slip of paper with a public clinic phone number on it. Your mother told me you’ve got plenty of family and friends around to help, she said, but I don’t see anyone.
I brought Ma home on the bus and I borrowed some more money from Nan to buy the pills and she said, I’ll come back later tonight. Mac is bringing a girl to meet us and I have to get dinner ready for them.
I thought those boys were lucky to bring friends home and to have a mother who made dinner for them. I wished Nan would invite me.
Ma did start to pick up a bit. I telephoned Harold at the Connaught because I could not pretend anymore that she had the flu and I told him the truth and he said, Jeez Louise, Mrs. Goodnow. That’s tough. You tell her she’s got a job when she’s ready.
He was good for his word and worked it out with her boss. When she got herself back to work, Ma said to me at our kitchen table, Katie, I’m sorry you had to go through that. Don’t do what I did.
What did you do?
I told you already.
Got pregnant with me.
I was trying to dream up a future that was not a woman lying smoking in a dark basement. Learning music was easier than fixing my mother’s life. I wasn’t going to be like her. I was going to write my own music and say, Take me as I am.
That ballet job got things kick-started. After I discovered I could make money playing piano there was no turning back. By sixteen I was playing blue murder. I found an old bandino hat with a floppy brim and I attached a black net veil to the front of it that covered my face to the bottom of my nose. I had seen Love Me or Leave Me that year, and I got some ideas from Doris Day, but I was more James Dean. At the Sally Ann I found a pair of pointy black high-heeled shoes and a black cocktail dress with a full skirt and cap sleeves. All dressed up like that I thought I looked twenty-five, my eyes behind the net, my painted lips below. I teased up my hair and outlined my almond eyes with kohl. I fixed my second-hand clothes to fit like they were made for me, and I was learning to play standards as if they were my own too. I snuck out regularly to see bands. Mo Billson’s band came to town often and I went to listen to them every chance I could and then I started dreaming of playing with them. It was crazy that a gangly sixteen-year-old girl thought she could play with a jazz band from south of the border.
Then, that amazing first night. Wednesday, February 15, 1956.
I, Katherine Goodnow, stepped out, all dolled up in my black cocktail dress, a big hat and shoes with heels. I took the bus downtown, walked into the Alexandra on James Street South, and when Mo’s band took a break I stepped up on stage, sat down at the piano, leaned in and began to play covers people knew, “The Things We Did Last Summer” and “Autumn Leaves,” and when I felt them digging it I played a bit of Bud.
No one stopped me.
A girl needs to figure out what she wants to do and have some nerve. That’s what happened to me that night. Ma always said, I’d rather try than stay dry. When she was not angry and felt generous she’d say, Katie, I’m rooting for you.
The band came back to the stage, kicked a chair to get my attention, but I already knew they were there. I knew everything. I was taking it all in. Mo said, We got no piano player. You can stay if you can keep up but we got no money.
That was the door cracking open. I played with them every time they came to town. I wasn’t legal ye
t so I had to figure out how to be invisible in plain sight and I got Mo to pay me. I found a wider hat. If a cop came in I let my hair fall forward. In those days guys called out things like, You look good in that dress, you’d look better out of it. One time some smart aleck called, Hey, what’s with the chick? She looks about twelve years old.
Billson’s band had toured the South and played every dive in all the industrial towns along the border. They knew about hotels that paid them to play but would not let them sleep, and had restaurants where they would not be served a cup of coffee and they could not use the restrooms. They had already heard every heckle in the book. Mo liked me. I had a powerful sense of rhythm and I knew my chords and I learned fast as the devil. He said I had uncanny abilities. I was most myself on stage.
What chick? said Mo to the heckler with his smiling charm. I jus’ see a piano player.
We hit the first note of the last set. I played so hard he’d stop thinking about me as a girl and as soon as we were finished I got outta there. I played with Mo off and on for four years every time they came to town. Mo changed the band all the time which made it interesting for me. I guess he didn’t pay very well but that didn’t bother me either. Sometimes there was a new drummer, sometimes a new bass. Near the end of my high school, a tall, sexy sax player who called himself T Minor joined Mo’s band. The night we met he said to me, I’m from Roanoke, Virginia. We call it the Big Lick. All the guys in the band laughed but I was in the habit of not paying attention to how men talked. I just wanted to play. Still, I felt something unfamiliar. T had a way of teasing with his eyes and an intimate way of leaning one shoulder forward.
