Body & Soul

by Frank Conroy

  "No thanks," Claude heard her answer. "But here's a kiss for you." She leaned forward, kissed him full on the mouth to the cheers of the crowd, and broke away. The sailor threw up his arms and turned in place to acknowledge the applause.

  Down the street, in the bright light spilling from Loew's Orpheum, a small Salvation Army band played "America the Beautiful" and people threw coins onto a blanket in front of them—a continuous rain of coins glinting in the air. Everywhere people smiled, laughed, slapped each other on the back. Claude noticed an old man sitting on a car fender, tears shining on his cheeks. Somebody's dog had broken loose and ran through the crowd, leash trailing, jumping on its hind legs every now and then.

  Dizzied by the excitement, Claude wrapped his arms around a lamppost and moved his head from one side to the other watching the action. An American flag was unfurled from the second-story window of a pool hall. A man with a gray beard halfway down his chest stood on a box in front of a candy store, shouting words Claude could not make out, his arms jerking as if pulled by strings. Horns blared on the street. The subway rumbled underneath.

  Claude realized that all these strangers were caught up in something together, that an unseen force had wiped out all differences between them and made them one. They were joined, and as he clung tighter to the lamppost he felt his own tears starting because he felt entirely alone, entirely apart, and knew that nothing could happen to change it.

  2

  WITH A NICKEL he'd stolen from his mother's change maker the night before—deftly pressing the lever, his heart racing, while she stared into the refrigerator—he walked into the Optimo store at the corner of Lexington and Eighty-sixth and bought a pack of Beeman's pepsin chewing gum. He tore off half a stick, put it in his mouth, and stepped out into the bright sunshine. It was necessary to chew for a long time, long past the point when the flavor had gone, in order to get the right consistency. He sat on a brass standpipe and watched the street. Thus far there were no other kids working the subway grates, which was good, since the other kids were invariably big, and usually tough. Getting chased off was humiliating. He would burn with shame for hours, hating his thin arms, his weakness.

  When the gum felt sufficiently tacky he moved to the edge of the sidewalk and lay down on the subway grate, cupping his hands over his brow to gaze down into the dimness. Soot, small bits of paper, candy wrappers, cigarette butts, anonymous trash. He inched forward on his belly, concentrating, looking for the gleam of coins. Pedestrians walked around him. He was barely aware of the enormous tire of a bus as it pulled up a few inches from his head, or the hiss of the pneumatic doors. When a train approached underground, causing an updraft, he would simply close his eyes, wait it out, and then resume crawling. He spotted a dime lying in the gloom and raised himself to his knees. From his pocket he took a length of string and a piece of wood roughly the size and shape of a small cigar. He tied the string on one end, removed the gum from his mouth, and pressed it carefully to the other end. After a moment of study he picked a square through which to lower the block of wood. Then he lay down again, payed out the string very slowly, keeping the wood as stable as he could during its descent. He was lucky, having picked the right square on his first attempt. The wood was directly and precisely over the dime. Sensing the tension of the string with the tips of his fingers, he allowed most of the weight of the wood to press down on the coin. Holding his breath, he gradually pulled up string, wood, tacky gum, and dime. Exquisite care was necessary at the end, slipping the block back up through the square as smoothly as possible. He raised himself to his knees once more and removed the dime.

  It took him a couple of hours—sometimes swinging the wood, gumless, back and forth through the trash to uncover hidden coins—to make thirty-two cents. By then a big kid was on the grate across the street, glancing up now and then, and Claude decided to quit and avoid a confrontation.

  Once a well-dressed man had stopped to watch. This was unusual, since adults paid no attention to him, seemed not to see him even as they stepped over him, their heavy bodies hurrying along with mysterious urgency.

  "What are you doing?"

  "Dipping for coins."

  The man stepped closer and peered down. "Dipping?"

  He took out a quarter and flipped it with the back of his thumb. It clanked through the grate and fell. "Can you get that?"

  The coin had landed on a ledge halfway down and was easy to retrieve. The man hunkered beside Claude—who caught the faint spicy odor of his body—and watched every move. Claude took the quarter off the gum and held it out.

  "It's yours," the man said, standing up. "Keep it." He tapped his lips with his forefinger for a moment as if considering something, turned abruptly, and walked away.

  Claude looked at the quarter. It lacked the magic quality of the coins he truly found, coins that seemed to have sprung into existence out of nothing under his eye, orphan coins, but it was a lot of money. He went into Nedicks for a hot dog and a small orange drink. He got ten cents in change, which he decided to save. He liked always to have one or two coins in his pocket. It was reassuring.

  ***

  The piano was a puzzle. Why were there black keys, and why were they laid out like that, in groups of twos and threes? How come if you played the white notes from C to C (although he did not know the names of the notes, or even the fact that they had names) it sounded right, but if you played the white notes from E to E it sounded wrong? He sat at the bench and played the C scale over and over again—one octave, two octaves, up and down, in the bass, in the treble—experiencing a curious sense of satisfaction. The sound itself seemed to wrap him in a kind of protective cloak, to encase him in a bubble of invisible energy.

  There were times, for instance, lying on his cot with the radio off or sitting on the floor motionless, staring into space, when he would become sharply aware of his own existence and the fact that he was alone. Either the basement apartment was empty, his mother out to work or her discussion meeting, or she was holed up in her room. The sense of being alone would come over him, causing not so much fear as uneasiness. He would go to the piano, make noise, and slip into the protective bubble. He would forget about himself. Many months passed this way.

  One day as he sat fooling with a single note—playing it loud, then as soft as he could, then somewhere in the middle—he suddenly wondered what was inside the piano. He got up and examined the instrument. He cleared the stacks of old newspapers, trip cards, and magazines from the top of the case, opened the hinged lid, and looked down. An impression of density, and of order. The strings angled down toward darkness. He reached in and turned first one wooden latch and then another, barely catching the mirrored front of the case as it surprised him by falling away. Now he could see the felt hammers, the pins, levers, and tiny leather strips of the action.

  He returned to the bench and played the single note again, watching the hammer fly forward to strike the string. Moving up until his nose was almost touching the mechanism, he pressed the key again and again, trying to understand the forces at work between the key and the hammer. Slots. Little brass pins. Felt pads. Small rods. It was a discontinuous mechanism and extremely complicated, with tiny springs and screws whose function he could not guess at, but after a while, playing now soft and now loud, he came to a rough understanding of how it worked. He tried one key after another, mesmerized. He touched the strings and felt them vibrate.

  In the bench he found some sheet music. There was a neatness to the lines and mysterious symbols that reminded him of the inside of the piano. There was a connection, surely, and he knew where to go to find out exactly what it was.

  The icy tinkle of the bell as he entered. The shop was empty of customers but filled with musical instruments hanging on the walls, displayed in showcases, lined up in rows—guitars, trombones, clarinets, trumpets, accordions, oboes, violins, ukuleles, saxophones, all meticulously arranged. Mr. Weisfeld, a small, rotund man with sharp black eyes and a thin mustache, sat beh
ind a counter.

  "So, finally you come in," he said. "I've seen you out there with your nose on the window." He closed his newspaper and set it aside. "What can I do for you?"

  Claude put the sheet music on the counter. "What is this? I found it in the piano."

  "You have a piano? You must be rich." Weisfeld opened the music. "You don't look rich."

  "A white piano. With a mirror. It's in my room."

  "Well, that's good. A piano is a nice thing to have in your room." He tapped with his finger. "This is the sheet music to 'Honeysuckle Rose,' written by Fats Waller."

  Claude reached up to point. "But what are those, those things?"

  "Those things? They're notes. Those are the notes." He looked at Claude, who suddenly turned the music around and studied it with a slight frown. Weisfeld got up and came around a tall glass case filled with harmonicas. He picked up the music. "Here. I'll show you." He led the way to the back of the room and the upright piano.

  "That's big," Claude said. "That's much bigger than the one in my room."

  "It's a Steinway. Old, but good." He sat down on the bench and spread out the sheet music. "You see this note printed here? The one with the line through it? That's middle C. A good name for it because it's in the middle, between the treble clef up here and the bass clef down here. You can come down the treble and that's middle C, or you can come up the bass and that's middle C. Are you listening? This is important. They're both the same note—middle C—even though one is printed a little bit lower than the other. Both the same." He glanced at Claude. "You understand?"

  "Yes. But why do they put that one there and that one there if they're the same thing?"

  "An excellent question. It goes back to the old days. They didn't have clefs in the old days, they just had ten lines, or twelve, or sixteen. But then they found out it was easier to read if they split it apart, so they split it apart, five lines up here and five lines down here, and they print it this way, in clefs." He held his forefinger in the air and then played a single note on the piano. "This is middle C on the piano. This key. This note. See how it's in the middle of the keyboard?" He played it again. "So this"—with his free hand he pointed at his forefinger on the key—"is what that"—he pointed at the printed note on the music—"means. All these notes are about all these keys. They are, in fact, symbols."

  Claude looked at the sheet music, down at the keys, and back up at the sheet music.

  "Okay," Mr. Weisfeld said. "I'll start at the beginning. See? Here is the first bar, which is four beats in this case. I'll just play the keys the printed notes refer to." He began playing the tune with both hands at a moderate tempo, his fingers moving with apparent ease. "When I'm taking sips," he sang in a scratchy voice, "from your tasty lips, I'm in heaven goodness knows. Honeysuckle Rose." The sound of the piano filled the shop. He let the last chord die in the air and shifted slightly in his seat.

  "So it tells you," Claude whispered. Their heads were on exactly the same level, only a few inches apart.

  "Yes." Weisfeld stared curiously into the boy's enormous brown eyes. "It tells you."

  Claude pressed down a note and held it until the sound disappeared. An odd sensation came over him, as if he had lived through this before, as if he had somehow slipped out of time, as if he were simultaneously in his body and out of it, floating around somewhere looking down on himself. The scene began to darken and he felt his knees begin to give way. Suddenly he was aware of Weisfeld's hands on his shoulders, holding him firmly, supporting him.

  "What's the matter?" Weisfeld asked. "What's wrong?"

  "Nothing." Claude stepped back. It seemed of no importance. His mind was racing now with the significance of Weisfeld's demonstration.

  "Are you sure? Does that happen to you often?"

  "How can I learn that?" Claude asked, nodding at the piano. "To do that, the way you did."

  Weisfeld watched the boy for a moment to reassure himself that he had indeed returned to normal. "How come you're so thin? Do you get enough to eat? When did you eat last?"

  "I have to learn how to do that, with the music."

  "You have to?" Weisfeld looked away. "He has to?" His tone was not mocking but ruminative, as if trying to sense the implications of the boy's seriousness.

  "Please."

  Weisfeld listened to the word fade into silence, as Claude had listened to the note. He stood up and looked down at the boy. "Of course," he said.

  Back behind the counter, Weisfeld pulled a thin paper-covered book from the shelf. "I happen to have a used copy of The Blue Book for Beginners. Marked down to thirty cents."

  "I only have a dime," Claude said. "But I can get more."

  Weisfeld considered the matter, his plump hands holding the primer. Claude's eyes were locked on the book. "Considering you live in the neighborhood," Weisfeld said, "maybe we can work something out. Let's say you give me a dime today, a dime in a week, and another dime in two weeks."

  "Okay. Good." Claude got out his dime and reached for the book. "What day is it?"

  "It's Monday." Weisfeld's eyebrows went up. "The first day of the school week. Don't you go to school?"

  "Sometimes."

  "Can you read? Words, I mean. This isn't going to do you any good if you can't read."

  "I can read. I read all the time."

  "All the time," Weisfeld repeated. "That's good. So, tell me, what do you read?"

  "The newspaper. Sometimes she brings Life magazine or the Reader's Digest. I read books, too."

  "Books! Excellent." Weisfeld handed him The Blue Book for Beginners. "If you get stuck someplace, let me know. Otherwise I'll see you Monday." He reached over the counter to shake hands.

  "I could read when I was four," Claude said.

  ***

  He kept his eyes open for bottles. You got two cents deposit for the small ones, and five cents for the large. He ranged through the neighborhood, up and down Third Avenue and the side streets, checking garbage cans, alleyways, and gutters. If he saw someone on a step drinking a Coke, he might loiter inconspicuously on the opposite side of the street. He was almost always disappointed. It was a tenement neighborhood, and people were careful with money.

  Eventually he left his familiar environs and explored to the west, across Lexington to Park and Madison avenues. Here the streets were clean, the buildings were tall and guarded by uniformed doormen, and the comparatively few pedestrians were well dressed. People got out of big yellow De Soto taxicabs, crossed the sidewalk under canopies, and disappeared inside. There were no subway grates, no visible clutter, and initially it seemed hopeless. But one day he noticed a delivery boy from a grocery store pulling up his three-wheeled bike near a small side entrance to one of the fanciest buildings on that particular block. The boy opened the big wooden box between the front wheels, removed a bag of groceries, closed and locked the box, and went into the building. As Claude approached, he saw a discreet sign that read SERVICE ENTRANCE. Stairs led down to a doorway. Claude retreated and waited ten minutes, until the delivery boy reappeared and rode away. Then he descended the stairs, paused a moment, and pushed through the door.

  A maze of pipes—great thick tubes hanging from the ceiling, running in all directions, vertical stands studded with valves, elbow joints, and connectors. He moved cautiously through the gloom, following the occasional bare light bulb, each one casting a weak nimbus of light over a boiler, a bank of fuse boxes, a set of pressure gauges, an open doorway. The sudden clanking and groaning of machinery startled him as he passed the closed doors of the service elevator. Nervously, he started down a corridor that seemed to lead back in the direction from which he had come. After several turns to the left and then to the right he realized he was lost. He stepped through a doorway and immediately bumped into a large ashcan. He was surrounded by ashcans. The faint glow of light from yet another doorway beckoned him. He threaded his way through the cans and peered into the room.

  Claude saw a tall black man in an undershirt work
ing the ropes of a dumbwaiter, sweat glistening on the back of his neck. He pulled hand over hand until there was a dull thump. Then he reached into the darkness and lifted out cans of garbage, which he emptied into larger cans. When he heard the clink of bottles he would retrieve them and place them on the floor against the wall. There were more than a dozen, and as Claude watched, the black man added two large Canada Drys.

  Claude moved behind a stack of wooden crates, stepped on an ashcan lid in the darkness, and froze. The black man turned around and stood for a moment, his head cocked, listening. He reached into his back pocket and drew out a small, shiny revolver. He held it loosely before him, aimed at the floor, and moved forward slowly. Claude felt warmth flooding his body. The black man approached the crates, and then suddenly stepped around and stared down at the boy.

  "Stand up," the man said. "Come out here."

  Claude obeyed, moving into the light, his eyes shifting back and forth from the man's narrow fox-like face to the revolver at his side.

  "I know every kid in this building," the man said, returning the gun to his pocket, "and you ain't one of them."

  "I just came down the, I saw the grocery boy and I thought I'd see if I could, then I couldn't find the—"

  "Hold on a minute, now. Just slow down." The man hunkered down, reached forward, and slipped two fingers behind Claude's belt buckle and pulled the boy forward until their faces were only inches apart. "What you doing here?"

  "Bottles. Looking for bottles. For the store."

  After a moment the man released him, but neither of them moved. Claude felt his legs shaking.

  "You telling me you in here looking for deposit bottles? In my building, looking for my bottles?"

  "I'm sorry. I didn't know."