Body & Soul

by Frank Conroy

  "Holy shit," Al said when he'd finished.

  "It's a really good piano." Claude played some boogie-woogie, throwing himself into it, showing off.

  "Where'd you learn that, child? That's Meade Lux Lewis you playing."

  "I've got the music at home."

  "You mean you read it off the paper? How'd you learn to do that?"

  "Mr. Weisfeld taught me. He's my teacher."

  Al sat down on an old trunk, rested his forearms on his thighs, and slowly shook his head.

  "So is it okay if I come and play? Mr. Weisfeld says he's going to find a place to move it but it might take a while and I want to keep on doing scales and I could play right here."

  "Yeah, it's okay," Al said. "You do what you want. This is my territory down here. Nobody gonna say nothing. You need to play, you just go ahead and play."

  A week later, in the basement of Weisfeld's Music Store, Claude held the end of a tape measure as Weisfeld walked behind stacks of boxes, crates, furniture, books, file cabinets, and old trunks.

  "Hold it up," Weisfeld shouted. "Hold it high."

  Claude obeyed while his teacher rummaged around, and then returned winding the reel of the tape measure.

  "There is room," he said. "We can make room."

  "Can they get it down here?" Claude asked.

  "The freight elevator under those plates in the sidewalk. I measured it. Just barely." He sat down on an old display case and looked around. "Most of this is junk anyway. Amazing how it piles up. I'll take the files upstairs to my rooms. Mrs. Keller next door says she can give me some space in her basement for the other things. It will work."

  "I can practice here."

  "The acoustics might be strange, but the piano will be safe. Good storage, actually. Steady humidity, gradual temperature changes. And no neighbors to complain about noise. We better get upstairs. There might be a customer."

  The day before the piano was to be moved, Claude went over to Park Avenue to practice for the last time in storage room B. He went through the back entrance and was surprised to find Al sitting at the old card table with another man, a stocky, well-dressed Negro smoking a cigar.

  "Claude, this is Mr. Oliver. He's an old friend of mine."

  Claude nodded, and Mr. Oliver made a saluting gesture, the cigar trailing smoke in the air. "Al and me came up from Georgia together many years ago," he said, "in a first-class boxcar."

  "That's right," Al said. "And look at you now."

  Mr. Oliver hunched up his shoulders in a silent laugh.

  "I want to show him the piano," Al said.

  "Sure."

  They went into the storage room. "It's all wrapped up," Claude said, opening the keyboard. "It sounds better when it's open." He played some chords in the bass, a little fugue he had memorized, and a tune called "Sugar" he'd found in the racks at Weisfeld's.

  "That sounds good," Mr. Oliver said. "Looks like you've got a jump on things."

  "Mr. Oliver plays," Al said. "He got records."

  Claude got up immediately.

  Mr. Oliver looked around for someplace to put his cigar. Al took it and said, "You through?" When Mr. Oliver nodded, Al dropped the cigar and stepped on it.

  Mr. Oliver sat down, stared at the keys for a moment, shot his cuffs, and began to play, making a low grumbling noise deep in his throat and chewing his lower lip, like a man in pain. He played uninterrupted stride and boogie for more than half an hour, his hands darting, arms pumping, but his head and torso remained motionless. After a while a faint sheen of perspiration glowed on his brow. It was a blizzard of notes, and Claude watched with fascination as the man's arms crossed, uncrossed, moved together and apart, his fingers working with unbelievable speed, plucking out clear themes from the almost overwhelming swell of music.

  "It sounds like a whole orchestra," Claude said when he'd stopped.

  "You think so?" Oliver smiled.

  "Like on the radio."

  "Well, look here. Al says you play the blues. Why don't you sit down here"—he patted the treble side of the bench—"and I'll show you a few things."

  They would not sit. The older man stood under the fan-shaped window with his hands behind his back. The two younger men, neatly turned out in dark suits and somber ties, flanked her at a respectful distance from the armchair. She hadn't even had time to get a beer.

  "This isn't a good time," she said. "I don't want to leave the boy alone in the house."

  Claude wondered if they knew what a howler that was.

  The older man said, "Agent Burdick will remain here until we bring you back from the interview."

  "That's right," said Agent Burdick. Crew cut, vaguely military, he gave Claude a quick wink.

  "If you have questions," she said, "why don't you just go ahead and ask them?"

  "I'm afraid we can't do that, Mrs. Rawlings," the older man said. "Interviews are conducted at headquarters. That's the policy."

  "Are you arresting me?"

  "Certainly not. Why would we arrest you?" The man spoke in an almost perfect monotone. "It's just that we feel you can help us. There's a gentleman from Washington back at the office and he thinks you can help us. We'd be very grateful."

  Claude could tell she was frightened. He didn't know how or why, but he could tell. He took a step forward. "Is this about the piano?" he asked.

  The older man shifted his head slightly to look at him. "No, son," he said after a moment. Then he looked back at Emma. "Shall we go?"

  Eventually she rose. "Might as well get it over with."

  "That's the ticket," he said, moving away from the window. "The car is right outside."

  5

  CLAUDE WANTED TO KNOW what was going on, but she wouldn't tell him. That first night he had tried to pump Agent Burdick for a while.

  "What does that mean, 'Agent'? He called you Agent Burdick."

  "That's right. That's my title. I work for the FBI."

  "What do they want to talk to her about?"

  "I wouldn't know, son. They don't tell me things like that."

  "He said questions. What kind of questions?"

  Burdick smiled and shrugged his shoulders. It was more than two hours before his mother came back. She went directly to her room The next day she would not respond to Claude's questions, snapped at him and went to work.

  During the next few weeks she seemed to close down coming and going without a word, jumpy and abstracted. She stopped drinking entirely. There was beer and whiskey in the house, but she didn't touch it. The telephone was entirely. There was beer and whiskey in the house, but she didn't touch it. The telephone was removed, and then, after a few days, mysteriously reinstalled.

  Late one afternoon, after a long lesson on the Bechstein in Weisfeld's basement, he came home to find the apartment completely changed, the few pieces of furniture rearranged, the kitchenette cleaned up, floor swept, windows washed. Bewildered, he found her in the bathroom, on her hands and knees, washing the floor. He was too stunned to frame a question. As she turned her head to look at him, he realized he was afraid. She shifted onto her rump and leaned against the shower stall.

  "They came and searched the place," she said. "A whole bunch of them. Hours. They took all my trip cards. A lot of books. They kept looking for letters, but I don't have any letters. They took boxes of stuff. Stuff from your room, too. Old papers. I don't know."

  "Why? Why would they do that?"

  She stared at the toilet. "So I thought, what the hell, I'll clean the place up." Her big round face began to undergo a spooky metamorphosis, a kind of wrinkling, while her features seemed to move toward the center, nose, eyes, and mouth gathering together. He realized she was about to cry and he didn't know what to do. "They've got me," she said. "They can take the hack license anytime they want to." Her face returned to normal. A spasm, it had lasted only an instant. "Butter wouldn't melt in their mouths, those guys."

  "What do you mean they've got you? What do they... ?"

  "Forget it."
She waved her arm. "It's too complicated."

  "All you did was drive him around," Claude said.

  She raised her huge body from the floor, threw the rag into the sink, and left the room.

  Now when the phone rang at night it was them, telling her to come to headquarters immediately (only a short distance away on Sixty-ninth Street) or at a specific time the next day. Over the months it became a pattern. More calls, but a routine similar to the old one. She said nothing about it to Claude, her words in the bathroom having been her last words on the matter.

  He became aware that she was changing, and with a rapidity that made him nervous, as if she were becoming an unknown person. The drinking stopped, and she never seemed to eat breakfast anymore. She began to lose weight, gradually, though she still carried a lot of hard fat. She spoke very little, stopped reading and listening to the radio. She seemed drained of emotion, and moved through the days like an automaton. She put in long hours driving the cab, and Claude would often not see her for days at a time.

  He'd been working the warm summer evenings at the southeast corner of Lexington and Eighty-sixth for five or six weeks. Al had scrounged up a padded folding chair from the basement and Claude had bought the box, with its brass footrest, from another kid. His spot was near the newsstand, and most of his customers would sit down with a late edition while he worked on their shoes. He didn't need to hawk. They would drift over, flipping pages, barely glancing at him, and go to the chair.

  First the liquid cleaner, brushed in and wiped down. Then two applications of wax—either black, brown, or neutral—a brisk brushing, a final touch with a pop rag, and they would give him a quarter and tell him to keep the change. They always said it that way. "Keep the change." And he could hear a certain mild satisfaction in their voices. Most evenings he made three or four dollars and then went to the cafeteria with a newspaper of his own. The dinner special was usually eighty or ninety cents, with dessert. Then he'd go home and practice, or read.

  As the summer deepened a great heat wave struck the city, and the newspapers made much of it. Week after week the sun beat down and the nights were utterly still, breathless. Claude could feel radiant heat against his cheeks from the sides of buildings when he walked near them. The asphalt in the streets softened, and a peculiar stillness overcame the neighborhood.

  In the general torpor specific noises stood out in high relief—the wheezing of a bus, the clacking, rattling rush of the el, angry voices from inside a tenement, the crash of a storefront grate—thick sounds rising with an eerie clarity against the unnatural silence. On an empty street he might watch his own feet, as if to reassure himself that he was not dreaming. He might wipe the sweat from his face with the back of his hand and then look at the back of his hand. He was often dizzy.

  When he passed under the marquee of the RKO Eighty-sixth Street, he sometimes felt a waft of cool air as someone pulled open a door from the lobby. AIR CONDITIONED said a sign over the box office, the letters dripping with painted icicles. One particularly hot day he joined a line of kids, bought a ticket for twenty cents, and went inside. He followed them through the marble-floored lobby, released into the light comfortable air, past the bright candy stand dense with color, and into the darkness of the auditorium. There was a matron dressed in white shining a small flashlight down the side aisle toward the children's section. He took a seat and stared at the theater curtains looming in the darkness right in front of him.

  The boys and girls around him were fidgeting, talking, moving around, exchanging seats, giggling, sending somebody back for candy, whistling in their impatience for the show to begin. The matron would flash her light over the section when things got too noisy and the kids would immediately quiet down. Claude watched them with a certain detachment. He was no longer afraid of them, as he had been when he'd started school. They were, he realized, just kids, but there was something about them—their easy spontaneity, their recklessness, their almost manic self-absorption, the way in which they seemed completely taken up in the present moment—that made him uneasy. He did not for an instant think of himself as one of them. He sat with them only because the rules forced him to. In an odd way he felt like an impostor.

  There was a tremendous burst of music as light streamed from the distant projection box. On the theater curtains a highly distorted image of the American flag appeared—pulled, rolled, squashed, smeared, ballooned, and edgeless in the thick folds. As the curtains parted the image grew from the center out, crisp, bright, and perfectly focused. Old Glory against the sky. Everyone stood and sang the national anthem, following the bouncing ball at the foot of the screen. Claude found a peculiar fascination in the bouncing ball. It seemed a persona, jumping deftly from syllable to syllable. The music was loud and satisfying.

  Cartoons! Followed by a newsreel, the narrator's voice both urgent and important, sounding over the flash of images. And then the first feature, about a tough sailor who marries a librarian but doesn't take life seriously until they have a baby. The second feature described the adventures of a boy who could talk to horses. Claude watched them all with total attention, so captivated that it was a shock when the movies ended, as if his soul had been flying around in the dark and had now slammed back into his body. Outside, the unnaturally still street and the implacable heat seemed to claim him, to smother the quicksilver emotions of the films and flatten him in his contemplation of the meaningless, eternal, disinterested reality of the street, of its enduring drabness and familiarity. To come out of the RKO was to come down, and he rushed home to the safety and company of the piano.

  But on that hot day he had discovered, by accident, staring up at the ethereal brightness of the screen, a force that would gently press its weightless light upon him through the years of his growth, becoming finally a part of him, as if he carried the memories of a thousand lives he had never led, of lives, indeed, no one had ever led, but which seemed nonetheless real.

  Weisfeld sat on a tall stool behind Claude's right shoulder, so that he could see both the music and the boy's hands. Most sessions followed a loose structure. A review of old stuff. A review of the last lesson. New stuff, and finally nonstop sight-reading (or as close to nonstop as the boy could manage) through different manuscripts, selected by Weisfeld, that Claude had never seen before. This last was the most fun—the payoff, as it were, for getting through the slower work. Sometimes the unseen Weisfeld voice—which for all its nearness and intimacy became more and more disembodied as the lesson progressed—would abruptly pose a series of questions. Claude would take his hands off the keys and answer, staring straight ahead.

  "Relative minor of G?"

  "E."

  "Relative minor of E?"

  "C-sharp."

  "Relative major of C?"

  "E-flat." Claude smiled when he knew Weisfeld was being easy.

  "Subdominant of D?"

  "G."

  "Dominant of A?"

  "E."

  "Of A major or A minor?"

  "Both."

  "Four flats is...?"

  "A-flat major or F minor."

  "Five sharps is...?"

  "B major or G-sharp minor."

  "Good," said Weisfeld, his arm appearing over Claude's shoulder, his finger tapping the page. "Play this again for me please, and watch the fingering in the fifth bar."

  "Was it wrong?"

  "Indeed it was. Like everybody else, you want to avoid your fourth finger."

  "I hate that finger. It feels like a hot dog."

  Weisfeld laughed. "That's good! Splendid. You know, Schumann built this cockamamie machine with strings and pulleys to strengthen his fourth finger. He'd play like that, his finger pulling the weight, making it harder to hit the notes. Poor soul."

  "What happened?"

  "He wound up worse than when he started. He wound up with a hot dog bun. Well, there are no shortcuts, my friend." Weisfeld got up and put a pile of manuscripts on the piano. Claude took the first one, opened it, and set it on
the stand, quickly checking the key signature, the time signature, flipping the pages looking for any changes, clef displacements, or special kinds of notation. Only then would he go back to the beginning and start to play.

  Unbeknownst to Claude, Weisfeld put a good deal of thought into the music he selected for this part of the lesson. He considered degrees of difficulty of execution, varieties of style, mood, and period. He drew from the sixteenth century to Tin Pan Alley and jazz. He included, but rarely, atonal music (of which Claude was not fond), in order to train the boy to sight-read music that was idiomatically unfamiliar to him and to develop his ability to hear the music written on the page. He wrote out little pieces of his own containing jokes, musical barbarisms, satires of famous composers, and takeoffs of popular music, and was inevitably delighted at Claude's relish in playing these. The boy was spookily sophisticated in this regard and would sometimes laugh so hard, so explosively, he would have to stop playing. He begged Weisfeld for more of these, and copied them out in his laborious child's hand to take home. (It was a quiet, slightly guilty pleasure for Weisfeld to see the boy's notation evolve away from the attempt to imitate printed music toward an echo of Weisfeld's own handwriting.)

  As Claude struggled through a not particularly difficult piece of Beethoven, Weisfeld pondered once again the surprising fact that sight-reading was hard for the boy, and progress slower than average. His own dead daughter had moved twice as fast at a younger age. It was puzzling.

  "That's a dotted half note," he broke in. "Why are you holding it so long?"

  "I'm sorry."

  "You do that a lot, you know. Hold on, or interrupt the flow."

  The boy looked down at his lap.

  "Are you aware of it?"

  "I guess so." He paused. "But usually it's after. I mean it's after, so it's too late."

  Weisfeld stroked his mustache. "After what?"