October Suite

by Maxine Clair

  While they waited to order, Leon told her he’d already been over to the college to “scope out” the situation and he wouldn’t be at Cora’s long. One or two well-paid gigs, and he’d be fixed. And what about her and her new house? Living high on the hog?

  “It was a dream come true,” she told him.

  They ordered and food came.

  “I know a little something about dreams,” Leon said. She, for one, knew that about him.

  “As long as you’ve got one, you know where you’re going. Nothing to do but get there.”

  That was the Leon she remembered, bragging about the big time. He had gotten there, too, hadn’t he?

  He cut into his steak. “If we were in the city, I’d take you to Wells Famous Chicken and Waffles, the best restaurant in Harlem.”

  “Don’t tell me you’re missing New York already.”

  “Not really,” he said.

  “I’ve never seen New York.”

  “You’ve never been to the city? Nobody can tell you about it. No other place under the sun is like it, including Europe.”

  His horn had taken him all over the world, of course.

  “Everybody everywhere understands jazz,” he told her.

  She thought about thousands of people adoring him in a foreign language.

  “It has its downside, too,” Leon said.

  They skipped dessert, got more coffee.

  Leon took a sip and slid into his storytelling voice. “When I was sixteen I wanted to be just like every jazz player I had ever heard of. I wanted to work those after-sundown hours while the world was sleeping. And while I was at it, I wanted to stay up and get in just one more little lick, you know? Follow that gypsy life. I wanted to be it, the hottest saxophone player who ever walked.”

  He sat back a little from the table, and she could see that he was nervous or worried or whatever made him keep up the jitters with his leg.

  “Short of that,” he said, “I wanted to be ace devotee to Bird, the guru, you know? I wanted to play boss horn and record with Blue Note for long bread, see my name in Downbeat on a regular basis. I’d get me a fox—you know what I mean—a real-hammer chick with a little bit of money to be my cheerleader.”

  October laughed.

  He laughed too. “What can I say? I was sixteen. What did I know?”

  It sounded like the faintest ring of regret to her. He was leaving something out. Something had happened to him, she could tell. He was thirty-nine, pushing forty. Was his dream over already?

  For the fourth of July holiday, Cora and Ed invited October to come watch Ed do his first hickory-smoke thing in the pit he had built around back. They’d gotten fireworks, and Leon had company in town. They wanted to make it into a party.

  As it turned out, the day belonged to Leon and his musician friend, Kenny Clarke—Leon called him “Klook”—a jazz drummer. He smoked a pipe and looked to October like the father type. She found out that he did have children, in France. From what she could tell, he’d left Harlem right after Charlie Parker died.

  They had all stuffed themselves and were sitting on Ed’s handmade benches in the backyard. October sat on the steps to the back porch and listened. Wherever two musicians were gathered, Bird’s name was bound to come up. Ed, though, opened the gates by reminding Leon of the first time they had seen Charlie Parker, wearing two overcoats, and how they had asked him if he was Bird, and he had just said, “Yeah, how you doin?” Bigger than life, Ed said.

  And that led to Kenny Clarke’s telling about the last time he had seen Bird, coming out of Birdland, the club named for him. How the midget emcee had held the door for Bird, and when Kenny Clarke had passed Bird on the steps to the club, he had seen tears streaming down Bird’s face. His little girl had died.

  And that story led to Leon’s telling about his last time seeing Bird alive, down at Birdland, too. And Bird was drunk.

  “I did not want to see that,” Leon said. “Bird drunk.” He shook his bowed head, like somebody had just shined a cold light on his busted balloon. October could feel that side of him, the side that had had a very human hero.

  Leon went on telling how Bird had cursed out the musicians like they had peed on the stage, and how he—Leon—wished he had gone up on that stage and got Bird before he just fell down in a chair and went to sleep. As October listened to Leon talk about the jones on Bird’s back, she wondered about Leon—had he, too, had a jones on his back?

  Cora had already clued her in on bits and pieces. Ed had told Cora that Leon had trampled all over some decent woman in New York. Treated her like dirt. Ed didn’t give Cora the details, except to say that the wrath of God had come down on Leon’s head. He hadn’t been able to cut a single track on a single record in over a year, and all his big-time gigs started drying up.

  “No wonder he wanted to come here,” she had told October. “You know what they say about—pardon my language—shittin where you eat.” And Cora had added that it was a good thing all the way around. Leon and Ed back together and all.

  Storytellers. Leon and Kenny Clarke told about the funeral.

  “Man, it was hard,” Kenny Clarke said.

  “I didn’t go,” Leon said.

  “Stitt did ‘My Buddy,’ and everybody broke up.”

  October watched Leon shake his head again in that sad way. “Foots tried to get me to go with him, but I couldn’t,” Leon said. “Me and Foots went down to Abyssinian and saw the crowd, saw Dizzy passing out white gloves to everybody, I saw that long black hearse and saw that casket all polished and piled high with flowers and the women all bent and crying, and I couldn’t go. Foots didn’t even know I left. I just split. Went home and blew some coke and tried to forget it.”

  The jones thing she had wondered about. And the old man manager, too. October wondered what had happened to him.

  “No matter how you live, or who you are, or what you’ve done,” Kenny said, “someday you just up and die.”

  “Yeah,” Leon said.

  “Yeah,” Ed said.

  October wondered how—and if— Leon had gotten over his jones. He looked sober and sane enough to her.

  More stories. Pieces of Leon’s perfect-pitch-from-age-four story, and how Ed had to give up music lessons because Leon had natural talent. The two of them told it with plenty of laughs, but October knew what could be underneath all that ha-ha-ha.

  She listened to Leon’s funny stories about traveling with Lionel Hampton in Europe, and opening for Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie in the Bronx, and how awful he had been, then. And all the big gigs he and Klook had played with the Jazz Messengers.

  All afternoon she listened. At one point, Kenny Clarke said, “I heard about what happened to Foots—his leg.”

  And Leon said, “Yeah, he was scared to go under the knife, but it didn’t take him no time to be back out in the streets on that jack leg.”

  So the manager-man had lost a leg.

  And at another point Kenny Clarke asked Leon, “Whatever happened to Ramona Jacobs?”

  October listened closely for the rest of the story, but Leon wasn’t saying much.

  “She did okay, got a part in Porgy and Bess. I think she’s in California now, married,” Leon said.

  Sounded to October like a happy ending. When she got to know Leon better, she thought she might get the whole story.

  A week or two later, when Leon moved into his own apartment, October went over to help Cora help Ed and Leon christen the place. Two rooms, a table and four chairs, a bed, and a lamp. But hundreds of records, and turntables and amplifiers and speakers everywhere. And lots of bottles. A pretty collection of liquor bottles lined up on the kitchen counter.

  Leon had bought rib sandwiches and coleslaw. Cora had provided the rest, including the paper plates and lemonade. As soon as everythi
ng was laid out, Leon pulled two of the chairs away from the table and sat October and Cora down in them, asked them to name a record they wanted to hear, to which they both said, “Anything.”

  Leon took out one of his LPs and put it on the turntable. “There’s a cut on here that all the ladies like,” he said. “Miles doing ‘Someday My Prince Will Come.’” October recognized it was from the album called Porgy and Bess and wondered about the Ramona woman.

  Leon wanted to fix them pink ladies. October didn’t want one.

  “Help me out,” Leon said. “I’m trying to create a little atmosphere before the surprise.”

  “What surprise?” Cora and October asked at the same time.

  He made the pink drinks, sat them on the floor beside their chairs and told them to enjoy Miles Davis. “Don’t go nowhere,” he said, and went to join Ed in the other room.

  “What are they doing?” October asked Cora. Cora didn’t know, but she said, “It better not be anything raunchy.”

  Both the men came out carrying horns. Leon had his saxophone, Ed had a trumpet. Cora’s mouth flew open, but Ed hushed her up. “Don’t say anything.”

  Leon turned off Porgy and Bess and turned on his huge reel-to-reel tape player. A piano began playing a slow, soft introduction to something. Then the drum came in with a nice rhythm.

  Leon—sling around his neck, mouthpiece jammed between his lips—nodded to Ed, and they began blowing. “Body and Soul,” it was. “Body and Soul”—they played it again, all the way through. “Body and Soul.”

  October sat back and watched the two brothers straining to make music, struggling to stay together, keep the same rhythm, even though Leon could have run away with it each letting the other take his own kind of solo and then coming back to playing together, patching up whatever had been torn between them. She and Vergie didn’t have the rhythm down pat. Their solos, even, were pitiful.

  Misty-eyed, Cora kept her fingers up to her mouth the whole time, and when they finished, and slapped hands, Cora leaped up and ran to Ed. He hugged her.

  “Don’t cry, baby,” he said. “We’re just messin around.”

  “I know,” Cora said.

  October thought, What a nice thing it is to be included.

  They ate and toasted Leon’s new place and Cora broke out a deck of cards, threatening to make Ed learn to play bridge, once and for all. To which Ed said he’d rather play bid whist—same difference—to which Leon said he’d rather play chess. October sided with Cora. And so they tried bridge.

  In the middle of Cora’s play-by-play about bidding, Leon said he thought that bridge was harder than chess, and Ed said he really, really wanted to learn how to play chess.

  “Say no more, brother man,” Leon said. “You’re looking at the master.”

  “Since when did you learn chess?” Ed asked him.

  And Leon said it was a long story.

  “You sure do have a lot of stories,” Cora said. “Let’s hear it.”

  Leon said, “Wait,” and went to the closet, brought out a box of carved chess pieces and a board, told them it used to belong to a friend of his, a master.

  Ed picked up a carved-stone king. “Nice.”

  “I used to see a woman who liked chess,” Leon said. Get ready for a story. “Like I said, this musician friend of mine could do two things better than anybody else—blow his horn and play chess. If he had lived, he would’ve been on top of all the trumpet players.”

  “Clifford Brown,” he said to Ed.

  Ed nodded—“Right.”

  October couldn’t say she had heard him play, but the name had floated around her from time to time. Leon went on with his story about his woman who wanted the trumpet player to teach Leon how to play chess. But Leon hadn’t wanted Clifford Brown to teach him anything.

  “So how did you learn?” Cora asked.

  “Clifford got killed,” Leon said. He placed the rest of the pieces on the chess board.

  Ed chimed in, “On the Jersey turnpike, right? Him and Richie Powell.”

  Leon nodded, and ended his story. “Right after he died, Mona sat me down and taught me how to play,” he said.

  “That was your girlfriend?” Cora asked, so October didn’t have to.

  “Yeah,” Leon said. “I was late. Clifford had a lot of chess sets. His wife gave me this one.”

  “Your friend Clifford would be smiling right now,” Cora said.

  Leon said to Ed, “You can learn this in a couple of days. All you have to do is concentrate. Say when, and I’ll bring it over.”

  October said, “I thought we were teaching you bridge.”

  Leon looked at her, and his whole face smiled, especially his eyes. It made her smile back.

  “You can teach me,” he said. “What say we do them both? Chess next time, then bridge the next okay?”

  “Okay,” Cora said.

  “I’ll play whenever I’m around,” October said. “Remember, I’m a working girl.” That look from Leon had gotten her off track just a little.

  The next time she saw him, they were both at Safeway. She saw the measly bread and bologna and bananas and soda pop in his basket and thought she ought to cook him something sometime.

  They said, How’re you doing and Fine, and he said, “Remind me why I said I wanted to teach music to knuckleheads.”

  He had been giving master classes for the summer session at the college, and: “They think they know so much. When I was their age, I ate and slept with my horn. I’d practice sometimes ten, twelve hours a day. I never came up short.”

  She laughed. “Get ready. September is coming.” She had heard from Donetta that Leon was doing well, that students were lining up to take his classes in the fall.

  Leon told her, “My man Foots used to tell me that when you use hundred-dollar words, they hear, but when you play real music, they listen, eat it up.”

  “Then the lazybones will fall by the wayside, won’t they?”

  Leon said yeah, but he’d rather not have to bother with them. Said he hoped most of them would be serious.

  And then he just opened his mouth, and “You can play cards with me—I won’t bite, you know,” just fell out.

  Took her by surprise. So did her smile back at him. “Okay,” she said. “But I’m still busy a lot.”

  “You can be busy,” he said, “but you have to eat sometime, don’t you? Sometimes when you feel like hanging loose, we’ll play bridge or chess and drink pink ladies. Besides”—and he chuckled—“maybe you can introduce me to some of your girlfriends.”

  Was he trying to be funny?

  So this was the way the Saturday night thing got started. Ed and Cora, October and Leon—usually at Cora and Ed’s, because of Eddy Junior, but sometimes at October’s, where Eddy could go to sleep on the cot in David’s room. A little supper, any music anybody wanted to hear, a halfhearted start at bridge or chess, and a lot of shuckin-and-jivin fun.

  And what else that July? Days at Macy’s, basting and cutting and stitching and sneezing cloth dust. But, too, making cookies and hamburger patties and putting them in the freezer for August. Jotting down David-maybe sizes and marking the Sears catalogue.

  Nothing from Vergie, though. At the end of July, the twenty-eighth, October had been antsy for days. Should she call? Would she have to do what she had told Vergie she would do—just go to Chillicothe? She could see herself showing up and Vergie having to let her in.

  Then on the twenty-eighth, the mailman came, bringing the water bill and a letter. From Vergie.

  Dear October,

  It didn’t surprise me to get a letter from you. I’ve been taking my time, thinking about all that you said.

  Here’s what is wrong. You had a baby once. You didn’t want him, or you couldn’t love him, I don’t know wh
ich. But you gave him away. You gave him up. The problem was that you gave him to me and I’m your sister. If it’d been anybody else, there wouldn’t be all this. I’m coming back to it later in the letter, but I have to tell you this first.

  As long as I live, I will never tell David or let anybody else tell him. I am his mother. I decide. David’s got me and Gene. It’s all he knows and all he needs to know. Suppose our mother had just walked away and given us to Auntie and Aunt Maude. It would have felt a lot worse knowing she didn’t want us.

  I don’t want that for David. I love him. I’ve raised him. He’s all I’ve got. I hope someday you’ll understand, but that’s up to you. I can’t do anything about that.

  If David lived with anybody else, you would have forgotten all about him. But you see him all the time, and you can’t let go. And so I’m telling you that I think it would be good for everybody if you just stay away for a while. Get married and have some babies of your own. David is ours. Maybe someday you’ll understand.

  We’ll be gone in August anyway. Me and Gene are taking him on a train trip. Gene’s cousin in Oklahoma invited us.

  Yours truly,

  Vergie

  My two daughters. Blood sisters. Both so strong. Neither of them making room for the other one. Trying their best to be through for good.

  chapter 22

  Lonoke. From the train Vergie could see the kettle water tower lit in the night, announcing another tiny Arkansas town. L-o-n-o-k-e. She spelled it out to herself, just like she would have to David if he’d been awake. On into the countryside, black trees flew against a star-speckled sky. Two women in the rear of the train laughed and said something, but she couldn’t make out their conversation. Across the aisle, Gene purred like a new car idling, dozing again. David—bless his heart—had given in and sprawled all over her, head in her lap, sound asleep, like most of the passengers.

  The night train cut the time in two, and by sunup they would be halfway across Kentucky, almost home. Amos, Gene’s cousin, and his wife, Helen, had put themselves out for her and Gene and David—fed them like prize pigs, let them have their bedroom with a high bed like the one Frances once had, took them fishing and to a real Indian corn dance and to honest-to-goodness church. One week was enough, though, especially since school was already bearing down on David again.