Body & Soul

by Frank Conroy

  Claude sensed it was better to remain silent about this strange action. Both of them behaved as if nothing of importance had happened. Vinnie sipped the coffee and then poured in some sugar and stirred it again. He pressed the cotton against the side of the cup with the spoon, released it, pressed, and released it. He drank some more. "You know Bird's changes to the blues?"

  Claude had no idea what he was talking about. Birdchanges? "No."

  "The bebop changes."

  Bebop? He shook his head.

  Vinnie pulled the New York Post across to his side. "You got a pencil?"

  Claude patted his pockets. "No."

  "Go get one."

  Claude went to one of the windows at the central change kiosk and asked the lady for a pencil. She gave him one and made him promise to give it back.

  For all his strange talk, Vinnie seemed more normal as Claude returned. His eyes no longer had that sleepy look, and his movements were crisper. He took the pencil and wrote in the margin of one of the pages of newspaper. He tore it off, folded it, and handed it to Claude. "Put this in your pocket."

  Claude obeyed.

  "Look at it next time you play." He drained his coffee and placed the cup in its saucer with exaggerated care. "Look sharp, feel sharp, be sharp," he said. "Bong!"

  "I better go," Claude said.

  "Yeah, sure. In a minute, in a minute. Tony's coming back." His face seemed paler now than before. "What can I tell you? Make sure you listen to Art Tatum. Fast, fast, fast, and he swings. Hands like snakes, you know? They open up like that, like when a snake opens its mouth, you know, wide, and then wider, like it's so wide it's impossible." He began to drum his fingers on the saxophone case in his lap. "Go up to Minton's and listen to—" He stopped abruptly, his mouth open.

  Claude's peripheral vision seemed to close down until all he could see was the man's frozen face.

  "Oh. Oh. Oh." Vinnie's hands went to his chest.

  Claude didn't know what was happening, but the hair rose on the back of his neck. Vinnie's eyes were locked, staring into his own, and the boy saw the change, the instantaneous transformation as life left them. Even before the man fell forward, his head sending a spoon end over end to the floor, before the saxophone case slid sideways, before the faint tang of shit in the air, Claude knew he was dead. Unbelievably but entirely dead.

  There was complete silence, but everything was going on as before—people eating, getting change, carrying their trays. A woman with a plate of pie walked by the table without noticing anything.

  Claude understood that he had just witnessed an event of profound importance, utterly off the scale of his own experience or knowledge, but somehow he could not bring himself into focus. His mind seemed to be swimming aimlessly in the silence, going around in circles. As he got to his feet he stumbled, and held on to his chair for a moment. He glanced at Vinnie—whose skin had gone gray, the color of cement, his body still beyond stillness—and backed away a few steps.

  Now, suddenly, as if a switch had been thrown, he could hear the sounds of the vast, open room. The low burble of a hundred voices, the clinking of plates, the sighing of coins falling down the chutes at the cashier's window. He saw the yellow pencil next to Vinnie's hand, moved forward to get it, and went to the kiosk.

  He put the pencil on the counter.

  "That man just died," he said to the woman, and pointed to the table. "He's dead."

  The woman looked at Claude, at the table, and then back to Claude. "Dead drunk," she said. "I saw him come in."

  "No. Really."

  She cracked a roll of dimes on the edge of the counter and fed them into the change machine. "I'll take care of it."

  The boy stood, waiting. Her maddening casualness suggested that something was slipping away. In his encounters with adults he was used to being barely visible, to being beneath notice—it was the way of things—but surely this situation was different. The very magnitude of the event ought to have ensured that he would be taken seriously. But, indeed, whatever dignity or power he might have gained from witnessing Vinnie's death was slipping away instant by instant. He felt cheated.

  "You can go," she said. "I'll take care of it."

  He walked toward the revolving door. A policeman entered and took off his cap. Claude pointed back to the table.

  "That man there," he said. "I was sitting there and he died and fell over like that. I told the woman in the change booth but she didn't believe me."

  The cop didn't speak at first. He was heavyset, with a square, weather-beaten face. His gray eyebrows rose and then came down as he looked across the room. "Okay. Wait here."

  As he watched the cop go to Vinnie, Claude felt the first stirrings of fear. Very rapidly he no longer cared about being taken seriously. The cop half knelt at the table, reached out to take Vinnie's pulse, and gently turned the dead man's head. Claude saw the fixed eyes, and saw the cop close them, one at a time, with his thumb. As the cop rose and looked back at Claude, the boy felt a wave of warmth and he heard a sound like the ocean in his ears. He backed away to the revolving door. The cop motioned him forward with his arm, but Claude turned, pushed the brass bar, and ran out into the street.

  The black topcoat was right in front of him. Big. Getting bigger. Impossibly, the dead man was about to fold him into darkness. Claude veered and bounced off his hip.

  "Hey! Take it easy," Tony said. "What's the rush?"

  Claude kept running, weaving through the people, who seemed to him like mannequins frozen on the sidewalk. What he had heard the black topcoat say was Come Claude, come Claude in a soft, intimate, all-pervasive voice.

  When he reached the northeast corner of Lexington, with the insulation of the crowd behind him, he got control of himself and ducked into the subway arcade. He sat in the doorway of a vacant shop and waited for the storm in his body to subside. He understood that the voice he had heard was both real, because he had heard it, and unreal, because it was clearly impossible. It had not been Vinnie's voice, but a voice of pure authority, from some other realm. Whatever threat it might have represented was now gone. For a moment he had been at the threshold of an immense black void, the voice calling him, but it had only been a moment, and it was over.

  The wind had picked up. It blew through the tunnel of the arcade with a hollow moan, pulling at the sleeves of his army-surplus jacket. He heard the Lexington Avenue express screeching to a stop down below. As the people came up the stairs, he got to his feet and went out with them. Dodging buses, cars, cabs, and a speeding, rattling newspaper truck, he crossed over to the southeast corner. A small crowd had gathered near the spot where he'd once shined shoes.

  His mother, standing on a box, her back to the wall, was addressing the crowd. She held a thick bundle of leaflets under her arm and passed them out as she spoke. He saw her great jaw moving, and the flash of her teeth, but in the wind he could not hear what she was saying until he elbowed his way in.

  "...being bled by corruption. Oh sure, the building inspectors, the fire inspectors, the cops, the sanitation workers, we all know about that. You'd have to be deaf, dumb, and blind not to know about that." Her face was blotched in various shades of red, and her eyes bulged. She spoke in a strong voice and threw some spittle. "But City Hall gets away with murder. The mayor is a jumped-up crook. Here are the facts, here are the names, the dates, and the places of just a few of the recent outrages." She offered the sheets of paper. A couple of people took them, one man without even looking as he strode past, but most did not. Some pages blew loose and rose in ever-ascending arcs out over the avenue. "Kickbacks from asphalt dealers. Illegal bids from favored service companies. Payoffs from gambling and prostitution direct to the mayor's office. It's all here." It began to rain. A cloudburst, sudden and heavy. People moved away. "Tampering with voting machines in four districts, and that's from the Herald Tribune," she shouted. "Judges bought and paid for, all over this city. Contracts auctioned off in the political clubs. It's all here." She held out leaflet
s, but the people were gone, and those moving by with their coat collars turned up were almost running. She was wet, her hair plastered down and water running over her face. She held out a limp leaflet to Claude. "It's all here. Take it."

  Claude moved forward. "It's me."

  She looked at him, but she didn't see him. It was like the moment before she had turned on the man at the Hack Bureau. "Unless the people act to stop—"

  "It's me!" he shouted. "It's me!"

  She looked at him, and then very quickly to the left and the right. She stepped down from the box and picked it up. "You take the flag."

  There was a small, cheap American flag beside her, leaning against the wall. The gold paint on the pointed arrow on top of the dowel had started to run. He picked up the flag. "What's this? Where'd you get this?"

  "City ordinance," she said. "You need a flag."

  She mumbled to herself as they walked through the rain. He offered to take the leaflets, but she pulled them against her breast. Her behavior had grown increasingly strange over the past few months, but now, at this particular moment, he was calmed by the sight of her—a big, strong woman completely absorbed in her crazed mission, doomed to failure, and yet powerful in her single-mindedness. She seemed indestructible.

  "Benzedrine," said Mr. Weisfeld. "I talked to Mr. Kaminsky, the pharmacist at Whelan's. That's what's in some of those inhalers. So if you put all of it in your coffee and drink it down like that, it can stop your heart. Just like that your heart stops. It was an accident."

  "But why did he do it? Why did he drink it?"

  "He thought it would wake him up. Benzedrine is a stimulant. He had a bad heart, probably."

  Claude had been terribly worried for days about running away from the scene. He'd hidden in the back room for a while, convinced that the police were looking for him, perhaps in concert with the FBI (Mr. Burdick knew all about him). So filled with guilt and mounting dread that he couldn't practice, couldn't sleep, and could barely eat, he'd finally gone to Weisfeld and confessed.

  "Look," Weisfeld said now, as they sat at the counter sorting out cellophane packets of guitar strings. "I called them, I talked to them."

  "Who?"

  "The Eighty-third Precinct. The police. Sergeant Boyle, a nice man, very understanding. They don't need to talk to you. They're not looking for you. I explained you got scared and just ran. You know what he said? He said in your shoes he would have done the same thing. A dead person is scary."

  Claude felt a flush of relief, as if constricted valves hidden away deep in his body had suddenly opened all at once and he was back to sweet normalcy. "I wasn't scared of him."

  "They said he was a drug addict."

  "It wasn't him. He was just dead and it wasn't scary like in the movies when they—he just stopped," Claude said, interrupting himself. "Like a puppet, and you cut all the strings, and it falls. It was later, when I was watching from the door, everything got weird. I don't know."

  Weisfeld nodded. "You had a shock. It was so fast it took you a little while to catch up with it. I know about this." He paused, tilted his head back, and closed his eyes. "Somebody dies. We want to think it means something. We insist that it means something. But essentially it doesn't. It's meaningless, a meaningless mystery. You put it well. The strings are cut. That's it. The end."

  "He was right in the middle of saying something."

  "Deathbed speeches in novels. The soprano bares her soul and collapses on the divan. Citizen Kane and his Rosebud. That's what we want, I guess. Some message, some meaning expressed in the last moments. What better time for it all to make sense than at the end? But it doesn't make sense." He opened his eyes. "The last moments are the same as any other moments. There is no special wisdom." He looked at Claude with a faint smile. "That's what you saw in the Automat."

  "When I try to remember what it felt like—it got sort of dark—it was me that did it, it was really me. The weird feeling."

  "Sure," Weisfeld said.

  "So he's just dead and that's all there is to it."

  "Correct."

  "He shouldn't have put that stuff in his coffee." In a moment of daring, Claude said, "You've seen people die."

  "Oh, yes. Quite a few. But we'll talk about that another time. What did your mother say?"

  "I was going to tell her. I started to, but she was mad about something. She's acting awfully strange. She doesn't seem to hear when you tell her something, like she's listening to something else."

  "That's interesting." He stroked his mustache. "Give me a for instance."

  He had not seen Mr. Fredericks for some months when he received a letter of invitation (mailed to him in care of Weisfeld's Music Store) for the evening of the fifteenth. He had never received a letter before. A large square envelope of heavy cream-colored paper, and inside a single sheet of paper, folded once, on which Fredericks had written with a thick-nibbed pen. Claude was to wear his best suit and wait outside the shop, where he would be picked up at seven o'clock for "an evening of adventure."

  The boy posted himself fifteen minutes early, standing with his hands in his pockets, shifting his weight from one foot to the other in his excitement. The columns of the elevated obscured his view of the avenue, so that the cars and taxis emerged suddenly, lights blazing, to rush past. Mr. Bergman closed and locked the gates of his pawn shop, shaking them to make sure they were secure. An old man bent over with asthma, he sometimes came in to gossip with Weisfeld or to get an opinion on an instrument.

  "So what's this?" he said when he saw Claude. "It can't be a funeral this time of day. Maybe the Stork Club?"

  "I don't know where I'm going."

  "But fancy, whatever it is."

  "They're taking me someplace."

  Wheezing, the old man glanced up at the windows above the music store, where Weisfeld lived in an apartment Claude had never seen. "Aaron?"

  "No. One of my other teachers."

  "Aaron should get out more. He's still young enough. It's not healthy." He walked away.

  From the darkness under the el a white cat streaked onto the sidewalk and disappeared into a pile of crates in front of D'Agostino's Fruits and Vegetables.

  The car was suddenly there at the curb. For all its size—wide, tall, with enormous headlights and a massive grille topped by a Winged Victory—it had arrived without a sound. The chauffeur emerged, came around the front of the car, and touched the brim of his cap.

  "Good evening, Master Rawlings."

  "It's you."

  "Yes. I do the driving, usually." He reached out and opened the rear door of the car. Claude entered, and the moment it closed behind him with a soft click he was enveloped in silence, the scent of leather, tobacco, and perfume. The compartment was so large it felt like a room. Mr. Fredericks and the woman from the balcony sat deep in the rear seat. They were dressed in identical clothes, something like the tuxedos of the men in the Automat, but simpler. Fredericks nodded and Claude sat on an upholstered bench, facing them.

  "Claude," Fredericks said, "this is my dear friend Anson Roeg. She is a writer." His arm was extended across the back of the seat, and he lowered his hand to touch her shoulder. "This is Claude Rawlings, my dear, the best pupil I've ever had. Un enfant, mais quant a la musique il a une connaissance extraordinaire."

  Claude felt a flush of pleasure at Fredericks's praise. As the woman leaned forward, her long pale face came into the light, serene and beautiful. He thought, as she reached out, that she wanted to shake hands, and so he moved forward and reached out himself, but she cocked her wrist upward and presented her palm. He automatically followed her gesture and their hands came together, palm to palm, finger to finger.

  "We are the same size," she said, then broke contact and leaned back. At that moment he felt the car begin to move. Her hand had been soft, the gesture itself abruptly intimate.

  "I'm delighted you could come," Fredericks said. "I've missed you. My eight o'clock is now a certain Mr. Du Pont, who plays like a typis
t. It's no way to start the day, I can tell you."

  "That exercise for jumps really works," Claude said. "I wanted to tell you."

  "What exercise is that?" she asked.

  "Take any two-part counterpoint from Bach," the boy said, "and play it in octaves, in both hands."

  "At the original tempo," Fredericks added. "You are continuing theory and harmony with Mr. Weisfeld, I presume? Give him my regards."

  "Composition too," Claude said.

  "Ah, composition. Yes, of course."

  Bars of light drifted across the ceiling of the compartment, sometimes angling down briefly to catch one or the other of them in the back seat. Claude looked out the window and realized they were driving down Fifth Avenue. "Where are we going?"

  "Carnegie Hall," Fredericks answered.

  On Fifty-seventh Street they joined a line of limousines and taxicabs, moving forward bit by bit until they pulled to the curb in front of the hall. The driver got out.

  "Well, I know Wolff is good," Anson Roeg said, "but what about the music? Is he going to play anything?"

  "The 'Hammerklavier,'" Fredericks said.

  The door opened and suddenly it was bright and noisy. Claude hopped onto the sidewalk. People streamed out of the night toward the broad steps, ticket scalpers shouted, small groups of elegantly dressed men and women gathered at the columns, looking out through the floodlit air at the converging crowd. Anson Roeg stepped from the car, followed by Mr. Fredericks, who said something to the driver and then walked quickly, almost running, to the entrance. Claude was instantly aware of people looking at Fredericks, their faces turning to watch him. A large woman in a cape and tiara nudged her companion. Someone waved. Two or three people even started to approach him, but he was too swift, making directly for the central doors. Roeg was right behind him. Startled, Claude ran after them, not catching up until he was inside, past the ticket taker, who nodded as he went by.