The Supremes Sing the Happy Heartache Blues

by Edward Kelsey Moore

As James scooted his chair back to rise and greet him, Terry said, “Don’t get up, Mr. Henry.” (Terry had never gotten the hang of calling James by his first name, though James had asked him to years ago.) James stood, and the two of them hugged. James introduced Terry to our children. Terry had heard a lot about my kids, and vice versa, but they’d been a different generation than him and their paths had never crossed in Plainview. Terry had met Barbara Jean. The two kindred spirits started talking fashion even before Terry sat down at the table. He loved her pink-and-white striped dress. She adored his red suede espadrilles. They’d have kept it up all night if I hadn’t interrupted.

  I said, “Terry, when you told me you’d be coming here from work, I was kind of hoping that I’d see you in your work clothes. I was looking forward to meeting Audrey Crawford.”

  Terry ran his hand through his long hair and said, “To tell you the truth, Audrey’s not so different from Terry anymore. You might meet her on Sunday. I’m still going back and forth about that.”

  I didn’t say more about Sunday and the funeral; I didn’t want Barbara Jean and James to start beating the “forgive and forget” drum. And there was already plenty of father-son strife floating around in the air of the Blues Pot. We ordered drinks and waited for the show to begin.

  At ten minutes after nine, the room quieted as Harold Taylor walked onto the stage. He wore a rust-colored three-piece suit that had clearly been manufactured in the 1970s and a toupee that was an identical shade of red. I could almost hear the seams of his suit screaming for mercy as he did a mummy walk to keep from splitting his pants.

  Harold said, “Good evening, everybody. I have the honor of introducing the greatest blues man of our time.” Chuckling, he added, “He’ll tell you that himself.” A few people laughed, and he continued: “The famous El Walker will be joined by my wife, Lily. So put your hands together, folks. This is gonna be something you won’t soon forget.”

  Harold departed, and El and Lily took the stage. El had forgone his walker and was using a cane, but it was clear that walking with the cane took a great amount of effort. Beads of sweat popped up across El’s forehead as he slowly made his way toward his guitar, which was waiting on a stand beside two squat stools. Because of El’s sluggish pace, the applause had ended well before he and Lily were seated, setting up an awkwardness that didn’t bode well for the performance ahead.

  El wore a baggy charcoal suit. Lily was flashier in a beaded black gown with a glittering fringe that hung down just below her knees. El began to play, and the sound system cracked and squealed, causing all of us to plug our ears with our fingers. Soon, though, the young man operating the vintage soundboard had the situation under control, and El could be heard clearly and without distortion throughout the club.

  Lily began to sing. She looked frightened and confused, and her voice sounded weak and tentative. Then, after getting through one line, she and everybody else in the club realized at the same time that she had begun singing the wrong song. El was playing “Blues in the Night.” Lily had started in on “St. Louis Blues.”

  El followed her lead and changed songs, but so did Lily. Pretty soon, they were clashing again. There were murmurs from the audience as Lily and El both stopped.

  El reached out and patted Lily’s hand. Then he began to play again. This time they both sang. They started out quietly, as if they still weren’t quite sure what song they were performing. That lasted for just a minute or so, and soon enough they relaxed. Then, halfway through “Blues in the Night,” Lily reached out and placed her hand on El’s shoulder.

  Later, when I described to Clarice what happened next, I would tell her that an electric current seemed to pass between the two of them. Lily found her pitch and her confidence. El’s voice and his guitar became so connected that they sounded like one instrument.

  Lily stood from her stool and let out a howl that bounced from every surface in the room. Then they were off. They traded verses and sang in unison. Lily arched her back and leaned against El, the two of them singing so loud that the windows vibrated.

  I joined the crowd in cheering and applauding during the song. All around us, people shouted out encouragement. When the second song started and Lily dug her teeth into “St. Louis Blues” with the right accompaniment, the crowd nearly lost its mind.

  I heard a familiar, brash voice holler, “Sing your song, white girl!” and turned to see Aunt Marjorie beside the stage. She was dressed in her clean Sunday overalls and a white T-shirt. She had a book of matches rolled up in one sleeve, and the tip of a fresh cigar stuck out from the breast pocket of her overalls. Aunt Marjorie swayed to the beat of the music next to Eleanor Roosevelt, who shimmied like a showgirl and waved her fox stole in the air as if she were signaling incoming aircraft. Daddy was there, too. I wanted to run up to him and say hi, but he was locked in an embrace with Mama as they danced in front of El. Mama was grinding her hips against Daddy in a manner that I could happily have gone to my grave without ever witnessing.

  Lily was everything El had told me she was. The two of them together were a wonder. The frail, failing figures who had taken the stage disappeared as El and Lily made music. El’s guitar playing was powerful and agile. His voice boomed with authority and passion. A confused old lady just minutes earlier, Lily became vibrant and sexy. One moment she was playful; the next she was beseeching. We fell under a spell cast by two senior citizens blasting out the blues. They might not have been louder than the “L” when it clattered by outside, but it was a sure bet that no one noticed it passing.

  They sang for nearly an hour before El announced that they’d be taking a break. When they left the stage, everyone got to their feet.

  James and I left our friends and family and walked outside to inhale some fresh air. Our lungs were used to a far less urban atmosphere, so what we breathed on that Chicago street barely qualified as air, much less fresh. But it felt good to be outside in the breeze.

  We walked several feet away from the doorway and found a spot where we could lean against the cool stone of a shuttered bank building. As the train rushed past, James and I felt the ground tremble and watched yellow and white sparks fall from the wheels. When the last train car vanished down the tracks and only the traffic noise and the chatter of other club patrons outside for intermission competed to be heard, James spoke.

  “I saw him once after he cut me. I never told you about it, but he came to see me on my fifteenth birthday.”

  I said, “Okay.” Then I moved closer to James, knowing from the sound of his voice that he had something he needed to say and that it wasn’t going to be easy for him.

  “It was like a dream come true for me. He walked in the house like he’d just left the day before. I thought he was the most impressive man I’d ever seen. It was like he’d stepped out of a movie. He was all dressed up, and he claimed he’d just gotten back from California. Of course, later I understood that it being my birthday was likely just a coincidence. That would have been around the time of Forrest Payne’s first wedding, so El was probably in town for that.

  “He asked Mama if he could take me out in his car for a driving lesson to celebrate my birthday. She didn’t want to let me go with him, but I begged until she gave in.

  “It was great. He gave me my first taste of whiskey. He let me drive his car around town until I was too drunk to keep it on the road. He also gave me my first joint. I got so messed up I could hardly walk. We had to stop a couple times for me to throw up. Then I remember him half-carrying me into a strange house.”

  I gripped James’s arm, worried about what might be coming next.

  James said, “He talked to some man at the house, and then El told me, ‘Happy birthday, son,’ and the guy he’d talked to brought me into a room where this woman was waiting. That was my first time, on dirty sheets that smelled like sweat and perfume, with a woman who was twice my age and just as drunk as I was. When I left her room, El was in the kitchen drinking with the woman’s pimp, or boyfriend
, or whatever he was. He hopped up and patted me on the back, congratulating me. I was feeling kind of proud of myself, too, I guess. I was a dumb kid and she was a good-looking woman, even if she was drunk.

  “I felt good until a door in the corner of the kitchen opened up and Barbara Jean walked in the room. She stopped when she saw me, and the two of us stood there staring at each other. We weren’t friends, but I knew her from school. Her mother’s man laughed and said, ‘You can’t have the young one, too, little dude.’ Then Barbara Jean turned and ran out of the room.

  “While El drove me back to Mama’s house, I kept thinking about the way Barbara Jean had looked at me. I’d never felt that low before. The only time I’ve felt that bad since was after I beat that guy at the police station. When we got home, Mama saw me stumble in, and she asked what had happened. I couldn’t talk to her. What was I going to say? Besides, by then I had to vomit again.

  “I stayed in the bathroom for a long time, listening to Mama scream, ‘What have you done to him now, Marcus?! What have you done?!’

  “I’d never heard her yell like that; you remember how quiet she was. It was like I was listening to a stranger. Mama put him out right then, and neither of us ever mentioned that visit again.

  “It was years before I could look Barbara Jean in the eye. Even after we got to be friends and she told me, herself, to forget about it, that half the men and boys in town had come through her house, I still couldn’t erase the look she gave me in her kitchen from my head.

  “When you and me got together, I was afraid to touch you, even though I’d loved you since you ran those bullies off when we were in grade school. I felt like you were this perfect thing and I was rotten. That’s who my father always was to me. He was the man who made me ugly on the outside and then tried to ruin me inside, too.”

  I said, “I’m so sorry. I’d never have brought him in the house if I’d known that. I thought I was doing the right thing, but it was a mistake.”

  James said, “No, that’s not what I’m getting at. What he did then and what he did when I was four years old were just the kind of dumb-ass things drug addicts do. You were right to bring him. I’ve had questions about him my whole life, and now I’ve got the main one answered.”

  He turned away from the elevated tracks that he’d been staring at throughout our talk. Facing me, he said, “Almost as far back as I can remember, I’ve been asking myself what Mama ever saw in him. I wondered what kind of fool she was to be with a man like him. I felt bad about that, like I was blaming her for the things he did. But now, I understand. She was a young girl, just a teenager, and she ran into this boy who could do what we just saw. Even if back then it was half of what he can do now, when he turned that magic on her, of course she fell in love. She didn’t have a choice.

  “I understand now why she never told me he was a musician and why she never played his album for me, even though that was the thing that made my father special. Mama taught me to forgive, and she knew that if I ever heard him sing and play that guitar, I’d want him in my life so bad that I’d let him get away with anything.”

  As I listened to James, I understood something, too. All this time, I’d thought he was just struggling to forgive El and, later, to forgive me. But James had had other things on his mind. Until that moment there on the sidewalk in Chicago, I didn’t see that James had also been searching for a way to forgive his mother and forgive himself. El Walker hadn’t been first or even second on James’s absolution list.

  Deafening screeches announced another “L” train. After that one left, James cleared his throat and said, “It’s nice to finally see that my mother was no fool, you know?”

  I reached out and held him tight, pressing the side of my face against his chest and listening to his heart beat. Then, leaning into each other, we walked back inside the Blues Pot to listen to El and his sister shake the walls as they belted out stories about love.

  CHAPTER 34

  The second set at the Blues Pot was longer than the first, and afterward, none of us wanted to leave. Almost everybody in the club stuck around to congratulate El and Lily. We had to wait in line to add our voices to those of the other admirers. Several people, after overhearing that James was El’s son, stopped by the table to shake James’s hand, as if his father’s triumph had been his as well. I was surprised to see James smile and accept the praise.

  It was nearly two a.m. when we finally left the bar. I couldn’t remember the last time James and I had stayed out that late. Outside, beneath the guitar-shaped sign, we made arrangements with Terry to meet him at our hotel the following afternoon and walk over to the park for Clarice’s concert. We said good-bye to him as he hurried off to board the train. The rest of us piled into two taxicabs and headed downtown toward our beds.

  I was surprised to catch sight of Mama on the main floor of the hotel as I stepped inside the elevator with my sleepy family. She beckoned me toward her with both hands.

  Just as the doors of the elevator began to slide shut, I hopped out. Turning to James, I said, “I’ll be up in just a minute.” A quizzical expression came over his face, but he didn’t rush out of the elevator after me. He was too tired by then and was eager to sleep.

  Mama stood at the end of a long hallway that led to the lobby. As I walked closer to her, I heard familiar music emerging from the last of several sets of wide oak double doors. It was the beginning of the first piece on Clarice’s recital program. I pulled open the heavy door labeled “Catalpa Ballroom” and stepped inside.

  Clarice sat behind a shiny black baby grand piano. She played ten seconds or so of music, stopped, and then repeated the same bars. She did this several times as I slowly walked toward her across the cavernous room. Each repetition of the tune was a bit faster than the one before it. By the time I stood next to her, Clarice was producing a wild blur of sound.

  Finally, she glanced up from the keyboard and saw me standing there. Her eyes were swollen and red. She looked as if she had aged a decade since I had seen her at dinner the previous night.

  I said, “Clarice, what’s going on?”

  She chewed on her lower lip for a moment and then said, “Odette, I’m scared.”

  “It’ll be okay, Clarice. You’re going to play beautifully. You’ve been ready for this … no, you’ve been more than ready for this for forty years.”

  She shook her head. “I haven’t played a decent performance in months, not in front of people at least. I don’t think I know how to do it anymore. I went to the stage at the park today to rehearse, and I could barely get through the pieces. My hands shook most of the time. When they weren’t shaking, I couldn’t remember the notes. I’ve played these pieces a thousand times. I learned each one of them before I was twenty years old. But the notes were just flying out of my head.

  “I hardly slept at all last night, and I’ve been exhausted all day. So I thought that maybe things would be better if I got some rest. But I just lay in bed listening to my heart pound. I finally gave up on sleeping and figured I’d come down here and find a piano to play. That was almost three hours ago, and it’s been getting worse and worse. I can’t think. I can’t sleep. And I can’t play.

  “I keep wondering if maybe I should just go back home. I could tell everybody that I’m sick. At least that way I won’t humiliate myself.”

  I said, “Do you want me to go get Richmond?”

  Clarice made a sound that was halfway between a laugh and a wail. Then she said, “No, that definitely won’t help. I don’t know where he is. I’m not even sure he’s still in the hotel.”

  My mind immediately traveled to where it had traditionally gone over the past decades whenever Clarice said that she didn’t know where Richmond had wandered off to. Within seconds, I was good and mad.

  Clarice must’ve seen the anger on my face, because she quickly added, “It’s not what you’re thinking. He left because I told him I won’t be coming back to live with him. He packed up his things this morning, and
I’m not sure where he went.”

  I wanted to know more, but I didn’t think this was the right time to ask. I sat next to her on the bench and listened.

  She said, “I made up my mind about it at dinner Thursday night, and it seemed like it wouldn’t be right if I waited until after the concert to tell him, not after all he’s done to help me. I would have felt like I used him or tricked him. There’s been enough of that between the two of us.”

  “I guess you’re right,” I said. “But for a while there, Richmond was doing such fine work calming your nerves. It might have been worth a little bit of deception to keep him on the job a couple of extra days.”

  The corners of her mouth curved upward a little, but then she went back to chewing at her lip. She tapped at the keys of the piano as she spoke. “I’ve wanted to make music since I was five years old. Even while I was telling myself that raising the kids and being a good wife and keeping a nice home meant everything to me, I wanted to be on a stage. I could never have said it out loud, but I thought about it every day. Now I’ve got it, and I’m going to fail. After all those years of telling myself that I could do it if it weren’t for Mother, or if it weren’t for Richmond, or if it weren’t for the kids, it turns out the problem was me. Tomorrow I’m going to walk out onto that stage alone and look out at all those people in the park and fail, alone.”

  “You need sleep, Clarice. You’ll feel better in the morning. I’ll stay with you if you want.”

  She dragged the back of her hand beneath her eyes and wiped away tears. She said, “I’m going to play everything through one more time. Then I’ll go upstairs. I’ll be okay.”

  But I knew Clarice as well as I knew James or any of my children. There was nothing “okay” about her that night. As I pushed open the heavy door that led back out to the corridor, I heard her begin that same piece once more.

  When the elevator stopped on my floor, I got out and walked down the hallway. I halted four doors before my own room and tapped on Barbara Jean’s door. Her face was scrubbed clean, and she wore a peach-colored nightgown. Before she could ask why I was there, I said, “We have to do something.”