Body & Soul

by Frank Conroy

  During the encores Frescobaldi became exceptionally frisky. With the serious stuff out of the way—four beautiful sonatas in the bank, as it were—he let himself go with the flashy miniatures, showboating, adding some tricks and bravura effects just for the hell of it, out of high spirits.

  He could hardly wait to get out of the wings for the last encore. "Let's do that thing of yours," he said abruptly.

  "What?" Claude's mind began to spin.

  "Those songs. Let's do number three."

  "But we only played it once!" Had Frescobaldi suggested they ride out on the stage on bicycles, Claude could not have been more astonished. "It's too dangerous."

  "Nonsense." The big man walked into the light.

  Claude went instantly to the piano, stared down at the keys, and unconsciously covered his mouth with both hands.

  "Ladies and gentlemen!" Frescobaldi shouted at the front of the stage. "For our last encore a charming little piece from a work in progress by my accompanist, Claude Rawlings." A large sweep of the arm and a short bow to Claude.

  Applause.

  Frescobaldi near him. "Remember the tempo?"

  Claude nodded.

  He played it almost without knowing what was happening. In Weis-feld's basement Frescobaldi had shown him some violin variations on the original melody, but now he left the melody almost entirely—swooping, skittering, looping around, throwing a spray of spiccato, flying staccato, and ricochet in all directions. He bowed near the bridge, he bowed over the fingerboard. He struck the strings with the stick. He made dozens of different sounds—from flute to banjo to something that actually sounded like the bleat of a lamb—all of it fitting together in a piece of musical architecture that dropped over the piano part as neatly as a cup on a saucer. Claude was astounded. It took him several moments to rise to the roar from the audience.

  "For you, caro," Frescobaldi said. "Forgive the liberties."

  "It was incredible," Claude said. "Magic."

  They took bows. They took many bows.

  "This is real applause," Frescobaldi said in the wings. "They know when I say the last encore, I mean it."

  Claude made his way to his dressing room, ambling almost, his jacket over his shoulder. He opened the door to see Weisfeld sitting on a folding chair, forearms on his knees, staring at the floor. Claude was about to say something, but then Weisfeld looked up, tears in his eyes.

  "I was thinking back," Weisfeld said. He rose, averting his face. "Thinking back."

  Claude dropped his jacket, took three steps forward, and embraced him, hugging hard.

  "You played so beautifully," Weisfeld said. "It was splendid, splendid."

  Holding him close, feeling Weisfeld's hands patting his back and then the back of his head, Claude said, "Aaron ... Aaron." Breaking away, Weisfeld coughed into his fist and adopted a firmer tone. "I'm proud of you."

  "And I'm proud of you," Claude said.

  "So we're a couple of terrific guys."

  "That's right."

  "Toast of the town."

  "Absolutely."

  Weisfeld laughed. "Okay. I don't see a shower around here. Believe me, I'll be talking to the management." He pointed to the sink. "Wash the whole top of your body. Everything you can reach. You've been working hard and you are somewhat aromatic, if you don't mind my saying."

  "Yes, sir."

  Weisfeld went to the door. "Don't hurry," he said as he left, "they'll wait."

  In the pandemonium of the green room Claude found Lady, her back against the wall, surveying the scene.

  "Come with me," he said. "I'll get you some wine."

  "God, it's loud in here." She wore a simple black silk dress, pearls, and pearl earrings. There was a natural flush of red on each of her high cheekbones.

  Lady took a glass of white wine and Claude asked for ginger ale, drinking two of them straight down. "Did your parents come?"

  "Mummy," Lady said, nodding to indicate Mrs. Powers across the room, in conversation with Anson Roeg. "Dear old Dad couldn't make it."

  A stream of people came to shake Claude's hand, smile at Lady, and exchange a few words. The slender, graceful figure of Fredericks appeared. "Well done," he said, smiling. "Well done indeed. The Prokofiev was a particular treat." He turned to Lady. "So few pianists really bear Prokofiev."

  Claude made the introductions, aware of Fredericks discreetly sizing her up, aware of his approval.

  "Are you a musician, Miss Powers?"

  "No, I'm afraid not." She gave a small laugh. "I don't think I quite am anything yet."

  "On a quest, then," he said gently.

  "Yes. That's it."

  Claude had the feeling that something had transpired, but too quickly for him to catch.

  Frescobaldi called from the center of the room. Time for photographs. The violinist kept talking to half a dozen people while the flashbulbs snapped. He held Claude against his broad hip, giving him a little shake now and then. "Smile," he whispered.

  The crowd in front of them parted for a moment and Claude could see an open door, some people down a short corridor swaying back and forth. As his eyes adjusted from the dazzle, he could see Al standing in the crowd, waving his program to get Claude's attention.

  "Sorry," Claude said, breaking away. He went straight through the door, ignoring the smattering of applause as he entered the corridor, and saw the look of relief on Al's face as he came to the velvet rope. Claude started to unhook it.

  "She won't come back here." Al stayed Claude's hand. "She wants to go home, but I said it would hurt your feelings. Can you come out for just a second?"

  "Didn't you get the passes?"

  "Sure we did. But she ain't coming, Claude."

  Claude was suddenly aware that everyone in the corridor was watching them, listening to their words, still as mice. He reached for the brass hook, but the usher beat him to it.

  "That was mighty fine music," Al said as they went out into the orchestra. "I sure did enjoy it."

  Emma was standing at the side of the front entrance. A few stragglers turned to look at Claude, one of them even stumbling on the steps to the lobby. Emma clapped her hands lightly as Claude approached.

  "I heard everything, every note," she said. "It was terrific."

  "Won't you come back and meet everybody?"

  "Can't do it," she said. "Got to go home. Now, you know that fiddler upstaged you. Nice to see a big man that graceful, but he got to move around with that fancy stuff while you're stuck at the piano."

  Claude smiled. "Nothing I can do about that."

  "Your bows were good. Just like we did it in vaudeville." She reached for Al's arm. "We gotta go."

  "All right, then," Al said. "Mighty fine music."

  "Thanks for coming," Claude called as they descended to the sidewalk and disappeared.

  The concert in Boston had gone well. Perhaps with not quite the same degree of verve as Philadelphia and New York, Claude thought, but the reviews had been no less enthusiastic. After a morning of interviews, including one for radio, Claude and Frescobaldi sat in the lounge at Logan airport, waiting for the violinist's flight to London to be called. A bottle of red wine (Mouton-Rothschild) stood on the table between them. It was the second. Frescobaldi, having been in a melancholy mood, had polished off the first almost singlehanded.

  "That is a wonderful American expression," the big man said. "Being blue, having the blues. I get like that sometimes after a tour. Even a little one like this. Blue."

  "It's a twelve-bar jazz form too. One, four, one five, four, one."

  "The strength of simplicity." Frescobaldi looked out at the wide gray expanse, the airplanes moving, small figures making hand signals. "I love music, but sometimes I worry it is not enough."

  "Not enough for what?" Claude asked.

  "The violin is part of me. It grows out of my fingers." He wiggled his left hand. "I make music, and sometimes I think, oh, they give me tricks, they give me very hard tricks and I do them and everybody
goes crazy. I love it when I do it, but when I get blue I worry." He drank some wine. "When I get very dark blue I think, well, it is just notes. Notes, lines, fancy patterns—like a game. A big game for grownups." He shook his head.

  "You sure don't play that way," Claude said. "I can feel the inside of you when you play."

  "That is nice, very nice."

  "It's true!"

  Frescobaldi rubbed his face. "Maybe I play too much the same things. They make you do it when you are famous. Years and years the same things, it gets harder." He looked up sharply. "Next time I will insist! I will insist! What can they do?"

  "That sounds like a good idea." Claude spoke softly, aware of the oddness of the situation—himself appearing to give any advice at all to this great man—and yet deeply flattered by the intimacy.

  "Basta," Frescobaldi said, pulling at his collar. "You are good to come out here with me."

  "My train doesn't leave for hours."

  "Dio mio," Frescobaldi murmured as a tall oriental girl walked by. "Visto che casce."

  "I can't thank you enough," Claude said. "I know you took a risk with me. You could have gotten anybody."

  "Not so big," Frescobaldi said. "After the first day I knew we were sympathetic as players, with the music. So it was just were you strong enough for the pressure. Fredericks said yes, and he was right. Ah! They are calling my plane."

  They walked to the gate, Frescobaldi carrying his violin case. When he reached into his breast pocket for his ticket another piece of paper fluttered to the floor. Claude picked it up and held it out.

  "That is for you," Frescobaldi said. "I notated all that stuff I did with your little piece. Good tricks for you to remember when you write for strings. Don't forget to send me the others."

  "Thank you, sir."

  Frescobaldi shook his hand. "We will play again." Then he walked through the gate and was gone.

  Claude got into New York at nine that night. He took a cab and asked the driver to drop him off at the corner of Eighty-fourth and Third. Walking up the street, he thought he saw a figure on the stoop of his building—a motionless shape under the streetlight. As he approached the shape became human, a woman, carved in stone, half her face in deep shadow. He was three steps away when the head turned.

  "Lady!" he cried.

  "There you are at last," she said, her eyes glassy.

  "What's wrong?" He sat beside her—noticing as he put down his suitcase that she had one, too—and put his arm over her shoulders. "How long have you been here?"

  "I don't know. A while." She didn't respond to his hug, but sat stiffly, looking at the sidewalk.

  "Are you okay?" He felt a slight thrill of fear.

  "Not really." She stood up abruptly. "We better go inside."

  Mystified, he worked the locks and got her and the suitcases into the room. She went to the single armchair and sat down. He stood in the middle of the room trying, without success, to read her expression.

  "What's happened?" Claude asked. "Something's happened."

  "Can I stay here?"

  "Can you—yes, of course. Of course you can. What is this?"

  "As I walked out the door I vowed to myself I would never set foot in that house again. And I won't."

  "Okay." He sat on the edge of the bed. "It sounds extreme, but okay. Are you going to tell me?"

  "Mummy was trying to help. I really think she was. It was in the living room. She'd talked about the concert, and meeting everybody—especially that woman with the funny name, the writer—and he just drank his Scotch as always, but I could see his face was getting redder than usual. She said you'd played very well, and everybody thought so, even Muffy Peters, who only goes to those things because she's on some board or something."

  "When was this? Tonight?"

  She nodded. "Mummy always clips things out of the papers, you know. Stuff from the society page, or gardening tips, menus. Sometimes she reads them aloud. It's one of the rituals after dinner, when they're in the living room and she's at that little secretary and can't even see him. So she starts reading a review of the concert from the New York Times, picking out nice things about you, and I even tried to interrupt her because he was squirming around. When she started in on the Herald Tribune review he just exploded out of his chair and stormed out. He practically ran up the stairs and the dog started barking, and Mummy was all in a dither."

  "Well, so what?" he said, exasperated. "I mean, so he storms out. It's his house."

  "No it isn't, actually," she said. "But that wasn't it. He came down again."

  At this point she stopped, her body taking on that odd stiffness again. She looked out the window.

  Claude waited.

  She sighed. "He had a file. Pretty thick." Again she paused. "You see, what he did was, he hired a firm of private investigators." She turned to look at him.

  "What for?" he asked.

  "To find out about you."

  He had no reaction at first except one of surprise. " Me ?" He gave an incredulous laugh. "Me?"

  "We were both so stunned we just sat there and he read aloud, the way Mummy had from the papers. He skipped around and it didn't make a lot of sense until he got to the analysis part. 'Analysis and Conclusions.' "

  A worm of nausea seemed to waken in his gut, to waken and slowly move through his body. He wanted to run from the room, run from the building before she could say another word, but he did not move.

  "How he could do something so sneaky and shameful..." She shook her head, words failing.

  "A report on me," he said, his voice neutral.

  "Well, sort of. I assume they couldn't find anything bad about you or he would have read it. It was more background. Your mother—they use legal language, police language—cohabiting with a Negro male, Al Johnson, born 1911, that kind of thing."

  "You knew that," he said.

  "Yes, but I never told them, obviously."

  "You didn't?"

  "Al Johnson having fled the state of Georgia in 1934 to escape an indictment on a charge of assault and battery. Warrant no longer valid, statute of limitations." Her usual soft, throaty voice underwent a change as she quoted the language, becoming brittle with scorn, and Claude could suddenly hear both her father and her own disdain for her father. The information about Al did not particularly surprise him.

  "Emma Rawlings," she went on, "under investigation by the House Un-American Activities Committee for Communist ties. Uncooperative. Known associate of Gerhardt Eisler. Something about an assault-and-battery charge against her too, dropped after three days served in jail."

  "Jesus," he said, and then began to feel himself go numb—a contraction of his senses, the room growing dimmer, her voice more distant—as he sensed what was coming.

  "Oh, Claude." She rose from the chair, came over, and knelt at his feet. "It said there was no record of your birth, or any marriage, or your father's identity."

  "I see."

  "And my father said—"

  "Let's stop now." Claude touched his head reflexively. "I don't want to hear anymore right now."

  "I feel so ashamed," she said, her forehead on his knees.

  "Let's just wait for a while."

  Nothing more was said, and eventually they went to bed, moving like sleepwalkers. Lady was exhausted and went to sleep as her head hit the pillow. Claude stared at the ceiling, heart pounding, inundated by a swirl of conflicting emotions throwing him this way and that like a leaf in the wind. He tried to calm himself by thinking how well he had done on the tour, but then the worm would move, the old worm of nausea that had been there forever, now reasserting itself. It was not that he thought the question of his possible illegitimacy was all-important—he knew that many great men had been born out of wedlock—but rather a sense of shame that he didn't know the truth. He felt hemmed in by his ignorance. He experienced flashes of fear, even of terror, as the night spun on, that what he did not know about himself (the very state of not knowing) might overpower what he did k
now, that his identity might be stripped away in the process.

  And down there with the worm was a strange desire to embrace the worst. The old man was stupid but he was right: Claude was an impostor, dishonest, shameful, his ignorance an elaborate device to give him the freedom to lie, to pretend he was like everyone else. He writhed in Obromowitz's bed until dawn, when he got up, dressed, and went out.

  He ran the few blocks to the old apartment, made a tremendous racket going down the iron stairs, and pounded on the door with his fist. He waited. He kicked the door and pounded again. The very familiarity of his immediate surroundings—the chipped bricks, the drain under his feet, the heavy door only now touched by a stray ray of feeble sunlight, the damp, musky smell, the grime on every surface—all this for some reason infuriated him. He pounded until the door opened and there was Al, in shorts and a sleeveless undershirt, his face puffy with sleep. His jaw dropped in astonishment as Claude pushed past him.

  "Where is she?"

  Al looked at him for a moment and then called out. "Emma, it's Claude."

  Claude watched the bedroom door until it slowly opened and Emma emerged, her large body wrapped in a plaid bathrobe. She did not look at Claude, but first moved to the kitchenette and got behind the counter. Her expression, when she raised her eyes, seemed a mixture of pain, sadness, and a kind of stoic resolve. He had the eerie feeling that she'd known he was coming.

  They stood frozen in their places for some time. Claude's heavy breathing gradually subsided.

  "No more bullshit, now," he said. "I want the truth."