Prairie Nocturne

by Ivan Doig

  * * *

  The grand piano at the Brewsters’ had the type of gleam to it that comes from that assiduous polishing agent, old money. Cecil hung around the great dark lustrous instrument looking as pleased as if it was his to take home. Run your hands under hot water before touching it, did you, Cece? Monty stood by, anchoring himself into what seemed the best spot to sing from, watching as Cecil enthroned himself on the piano bench and began manipulating the follow-sheets, and along with them his third beer. Prohibition, in Cecil’s opinion, had made brewing an uncertain art, and as usual he plopped a cough drop into his glass to give the beer some snap.

  J.J. was down at the far end of a living room that at a minimum had to be called sumptuous, making chitchat with the heir to something or other. Monty never liked taking it on himself where Cecil was concerned, but an accompanist who was not up to the mark was the last thing this night needed. He pattycaked a brief drumbeat on the piano top, leaving fingermarks that drew Cecil’s instant attention. “Easy does it, partner,” he issued. “Those cough drops can get you.”

  The pianist glanced up, irked, and just as quickly learned he had better not be. Cowpoke or wrangler or whatever he was, Monty had a set to him that suggested you really ought to start herding yourself in the direction he wanted you to. And he hadn’t come out of that beating any less determined to have performances done his way and no other. Privately Cecil had figured Monty was headed for the scrap heap. But that woman, whatever kind of music witch she was, and him, however they did it, the pair of them had come up with renditions that made his fingers itch, they were so choice.

  “Only oiling up enough to be loose, Monty,” he soothed. “I’ll be right on soon as we start.”

  “That’d be good,” Monty said deadpan.

  He turned away from Cecil and scanned the party-comers as they gathered in flocks of four or six. Pompadoured men and bobbed women, about like the last one of these all those months ago, but none of these evenings quite mirrored any of the others; he was pretty sure that was their point. Costumes, sometimes—once there had been a hat night, with half the crowd in sombreros and hawkshaws and he sang in his tux and Stetson—and more generally some ins and outs to the mix of the invited each time. High society constantly put itself through a strainer, it looked to him like, and keeping track was J.J.’s job and thank heavens not his. He did know that without coming out and saying so J.J. had wanted tonight’s do to be out of Harlem, to see how the resuscitated voice and redone songs went over with white hearers. Got his wish on that, for sure. Tonight’s guest-list sift had shaken out like pure flour. The only dark skins in evidence anywhere in the room were J.J.’s and his and Cecil’s, except of course those of the serving staff, as carefully distant-faced as Eskimos.

  At the point now where his music was ready in him and the waiting had to be got through, Monty occupied himself by watching the faces, all the rituals of expressively widened eyes and laughing lips and butterfly kisses on cheeks. Tonight’s host and hostess were the type who pollinated the party by staying on the move, shunting this famous couple over to meet that notorious one, bringing a hipper-dipper with the ladies over to meet the newspaper versifier who had recently left her husband. Monty knew there were places in the world where people like these would be taken out and shot, but at the moment he found it hard to hold much against anybody whose worst quality—at least out in public—was trying everything in order to have a good time. Quite a few of these, he figured, were the sort of person who would be fun on a picnic, if it was a short enough picnic.

  At last he saw Susan come in, on the much-used arm of Phil Sherman.

  Here we go, hon, his thought cried across the room to her. Someplace we never thought we’d get to, let alone in a bundle.

  * * *

  Two-faced as I have been today, do I have enough left for this?

  Looking at herself in the abstract, which was currently the only way she could stand to, Susan believed herself to be as revealing and moment-by-moment duplicitous as a mirror with multiple panels. The first reflection showed a man her heart went to, across the room there. Somewhere on his way up Park Avenue to join the picture, a man whom every other part of her had been entwined with that very afternoon. As she stepped into the stratospheric evening where they would both be, she had to hope this divided version of herself would not fall apart.

  First of all, though, she had to survive the onslaught of hospitality. “Delighted to make your acquaintance . . . welcome to our little evening,” was luxuriantly drawled at her from both sides before either she or Phil could put a name on herself. When he managed to, the hostess and host beamed expertly while they tried to place it. Even the muscles of their smiles, Susan sensed, had pedigree. Susetta Brewster was of an old Virginia family, Tidewater roots as far back as the first anchor splashes, and slender and decisive as a sceptre. Her husband, older, possessed a high stomach, on the style of a pigeon, and had a way of leaning in on whomever he was talking to as if offering the comfort of that hearty bosom. As the Brewsters’ gracious hovering elongated into hesitation, though, Susan realized that her showing up with Phil Sherman did not fit expectations, rather like a kangaroo print in the snow. She fixed a shielding smile against the determined attention Susetta Brewster was giving her—with just a tiny stitch of wariness at the corner of each eye—as Phil yattered an introduction that didn’t make much sense until he invoked Susan’s work for the Over There Committee.

  At once that pegged her for Susetta: doubtless a war widow, tragic as a mateless eagle from the look of her, most likely an heiress from the West on top of it all or why else would Phil Sherman bother to be convoying her around town? With relief she burst out to her husband: “Oh, then, Howard, you must see to it that she meets Major Williamson.”

  “Shall!” promised Brewster.

  Until that could be made to happen, she and Phil were shooed into action in the crowd. Phil did not abandon her, but in this atmosphere of excess money and women with telltale sidling eyes, he had trolling to do and often worked with his back to her.

  In the course of the evening she jumped whenever Howard Brewster shouted “Sooz!” which each time turned out to be robust abbreviation of his wife rather than the start of summons of herself. Maybe it was the marinade in the Brevoort lamb, but in this gathering Susan felt temporarily French. The slightly wicked but of course apt salon saying over there could just as well have been stenciled on the penthouse wainscoting here: “On the ladder of life one must climb like a parrot, with the help of beak and claws.” Tonight’s rungs were perilously close to the top of New York. She drew on resources she hadn’t used in a dozen years. After all, a certain pang kept reminding her, she had been through this before, in the Village; there had been nights then when she was the one standing ready by the piano. So, tooth and nail, she set to socializing in this altitudinous throng. She had a good pithy conversation with an old growler who had started as a rigger in the Oklahoma oilfields and wildcatted his way next door to the Rockefellers. Next she was trapped in one that spun in circles, with a cottontopped young actress who had been the stand-in for Jeanne Eagels in Rain. Susan politely peppered her with questions, but what she really wanted to know was what it was like to play a role off a piece of paper instead of from the scraps of one’s self.

  * * *

  Wes paused in the doorway. In the bit of time between the butler spiriting his hat from him and Howard Brewster hoving to, he performed a rapid surveillance on the room, best chance to do so on evenings of this sort. Utrecht velvet on the near wall, making that statement in a hurry. The newer decorating touch was paisley shawls adorning the backs of all the furniture, as if peasant women the size of gnomes were stationed throughout the crowd. Over the fireplace blazed one of Nikolai Fechin’s Taos paintings, a pueblo woman in a dress of many colors and holding out a golden peach. The rest of the significant interior decoration was wall-to-wall people. His scan sorted them in a hurry. Half a head taller than nearly all the other women, Susa
n, intently mingling. And poised beside the piano, Monty. Seeing them both here, Wes had a moment of he wasn’t quite sure what: abashed self-congratulation? Then Howard Brewster clamped his arm and swirled him into the party.

  “Wes of the West!” Phil greeted him. “Welcome back to civilization.” Phil was languidly sandwiched between Susan and a flushed woman with a feathery little headpiece in the assisted red of her hair. His practiced hand, Wes noted with due relief, was in the small of her back rather than Susan’s. When presented to each other, once again he and Susan exclaimed for everyone else’s benefit that their families had been acquainted. Brewster hung on with them, proud of his prowess at putting people together, until he could not resist foisting other couples into the conversation.

  Wes took the chance before the impending blizzard of introductions to say in Susan’s ear: “I meant what I said, at dinner. Stay in New York and see the world.”

  Just then the piano announced itself. Not trusting herself to say anything, Susan brushed fingertips across the back of Wes’s hand and slipped off to listen from the far side of the room.

  As he squared up for his opening number, Monty knew the work cut out for him. This wasn’t a particularly hard audience, but not an automatic one either. Gin had made its inroads in attention spans. Right off, he let them know what they were in for with the newly sneaky “End of the Road,” his voice effortlessly peppering the song just enough. He was relieved to see heads begin to bob in rhythm with his sly phrase breaks by the second verse. Song after song caught them by the gills the same way; the crowd seemed to be breathing the music rather than air.

  Listening, watching, exulting, Susan knew with secret pride that he could sing his way to the top of anywhere when his voice was on, the way it was this penthouse night.

  He was happily readying himself for his finale when a hand plucked his sleeve. “Excuse me all to hell, Montgomery,” J.J. whispered, holding on to a tiniest inch of fabric to show he was interrupting only to the absolute minimum. “But I have to hit them with this before the night goes to pieces.”

  Monty backed up, knowing J.J. would not do this if it didn’t count.

  “Good people,” J.J. raised a hand as if swearing an oath, “I need to make an announcement. Would you believe, I get paid to spill the beans and these are some delicious ones. On the eleventh of November, Montgomery and Cecil have another little do.” He gave an indicating nod to one and then the other of them. “They’re hearing about it for the first time along with the rest of you, look at their faces. They know something is up, all right, but they don’t know it’s going to be them. They will be performing that night,” he bulleted the news with pauses, “at a place . . . called . . . Carnegie Hall!”

  An ahhh like an ascending run plucked on a harp zephyred through the room. Skillfully J.J. went on to make the pitch on behalf of the Observance, singling out some in the room who had cut their teeth over there in the trenches—Major Williamson, Phil Sherman, “and for that matter yours truly”—and who now felt prepared for Carnegie Hall. “So come be with us that night, hear? And need I say, bring any money you’re tired of having laying around. Now for another good cause, the way these two are flying high here tonight, back to our music.”

  Monty had barely heard the last of J.J.’s spiel, swept up as he was into the thin air at the peak of the announcement. Carnegie damn Hall, whoo. About the next thing I better do is check myself for nosebleed.

  Instead he squared up again to sing.

  “Forty miles a day . . .”

  Something phantasmal came into the room now with the first words of the Medicine Line song. Wes felt it as a chin-level chill, up around where his officer tabs used to be. Hauntingly, tinged with rhythm beyond mere tune, some note of the ancient fate-haunted trade of being a soldier came through in Monty’s voice when he sang that song now; Homer sang so in his epic lines, and kilted foot-sloggers in accompaniment to bagpipes. Monty’s every previous performance of the ballad, Wes had listened to with something like fascinated reluctance, but never with the thought that “Sergeant Mose and old Black Jack” would force a way into musical canon. But this evening, knowing that his was not the keenest musical ear in the room by far, Wes with a shock understood how the earned magnificence of Monty’s voice elevated the tune from the Fort Assinniboine barracks. Until now, the classic parade song of the prairie wars was that of the Seventh Cavalry, Custer’s outfit, the spirited “Garryowen.” Until now.

  When Monty finished and stepped back with a bow, the applause beat and beat against the walls and city-spangled windows of the penthouse. Then it was time to circulate, take plaudits, make modest conversation. Without seeming to, he managed to work the route around to the vicinity of Susan.

  She had been cornered, no small feat in the middle of a room that size, by the big Dutchman he had been warned about. Artist of some kind, no one seemed quite sure on what basis. The man’s wife was across the room, although her hard dark eyes were not. She watched, Monty watched, as he leaned intently in on Susan. “So you are from the wilds of Montana, ha. Had you heard of this musical gentleman out there? His singing is amazing. So—so natural.”

  Over the man’s shoulder Monty traded a sneaking glance with Susan, knowing she had caught on in the same instant he had as to how close that was in the alphabet of fate to naturally so-so.

  “Only barely,” she answered about Monty’s voice having made its way through the wilds to her, “over the sound of the tom-toms. Wouldn’t you say, Mister Rathbun?” The Dutchman sputtered a laugh and moved on.

  Watching his chance, Monty caught her alone for a minute at the extensive table of food.

  “Carnegie Hall, that’s pretty foxy,” he said low and offhand as though consulting her on whether the Pecorino cheese carried any advantage over the Stilton. “Wonder where the Over Theres might’ve got that idea.”

  “I’ll never tell.”

  “Susan, good God-amighty, you know I’m sort of leery on big audiences yet and you’re going to plop me in front of—”

  “You’ll get over it,” she assured him, confident enough for both of them. “You’ll have to.” She slipped him a smile that went to the heart of things. Love was her silent apology for what she had done this afternoon. It had to be. “Now shush about being leery. Your following wants petting, here come some now. And just so you know—you were everything I could have hoped, tonight.”

  Past one in the morning the evening began to break up, as raggedly and inevitably as floes calving off an iceberg. The noisiest contingent wanted to go up to Harlem. Cecil immediately enlisted as guide. When they swept by Monty he declined by rote, saying the only place up there he wanted to see this time of night had a bedpost in each corner and a pillow to welcome him. From her windowseat Susan sat watching what happens after the finale, content to her core that Monty’s music—their music—had reached this gathering.

  Before long, Phil detoured over and manfully asked her to come along with a bunch he had assembled to go to the Kit Kat Club where the liveliest hoofers from Flapper Revue congregated after the show; there would be dancing—“Phil, I’m sorry, but I don’t flap.” He offered to flag her a taxi for home, and out they went, she once again on his arm, past the indefatigable cordialities of the Brewsters.

  Wes had waited for the party to thin out before going up to Monty.

  “Major, how you doing, how’s the ranch? Hoped we’d have a chance to shoot the breeze,” Monty fended industriously while thinking How over is it with her and him? Susan would do her absolute best, he didn’t dare doubt, but—Williamsons don’t any too often say “uncle.”

  “I’m calling it a night,” Wes surprised him with. “I just wanted to add my bravo to all the rest. You and Susan have done wonders.”

  “She’s one of a kind, for sure,” Monty testified, feeling he could afford to say that much. “The Lord Himself wouldn’t know how to put a price on her, don’t you think?”

  * * *

  J.J. was in a purrin
g mood when he met with Susan to work out the Observance details from his side of things. “The newspapers will lap it up. ‘Negro singer shrugs off Klan beating, reaches heights of Carnegie Hall.’ ”

  “As you say, vitamin P,” she said, meaning the power of push.

  “You know, I can sort of see the audience that night in here,” he palmed his forehead like a phrenologist. “You ever do that?”

  “Only before every time I ever performed.”

  “Then let me tell you the kind of thing I see there in great big gorgeous Carnegie Hall.” He sketched dreamily in the air with his hands. “People dressed to the nines, Vandiver and the Major’s people wearing their money on their backs, they got every right to. Lots of medals catching the light, I may even put on my set. Montgomery and Cecil up there onstage, looking so fine—oh, by the way, since it’s the finale, we’ll hold them to half a dozen songs, tops. Double encore that way, if the whole crowd isn’t out there sitting on their hands.”

  “Right,” Susan muttered, writing down the six-song stipulation on her list.

  “All that, then,” J.J.’s voice pussyfooted on, “I can see just as plain as anything. And all of us of a certain shade up, ever so high, up there in . . . peanut heaven.”

  Susan’s head yanked up. Cinnamon eyes to almond eyes, she and he stared to a draw. After a while she said, “No one has told us the seating has to be that strict.”

  “There is a way to encourage it not to be.”

  “J.J., I’m no good at mind-reading.”

  “Round up the cripples.”

  Susan had to swallow hard. She kept still, so he would go on.

  “Ours and yours both. Crutchers, one-lungers, blind beggars, any of the wounded vets.” He clicked these off like an abacus. “Make them honored guests, put them in the front row, mix them up. Speckle the place with them, that way. How can Carnegie Hall make a fuss about where anybody else sits if those are up there together, I ask you?” He didn’t even stop for breath. “Another thing. Welcoming speech from Major Williamson. Hero and big giver and all, it would be good for the crowd to see him gimp across the stage.”