Authors: Frank Conroy
Claude looked at the sheet music, down at the keys, and back up at the sheet music.
"Okay," Mr. Weisfeld said. "I'll start at the beginning. See? Here is the first bar, which is four beats in this case. I'll just play the keys the printed notes refer to." He began playing the tune with both hands at a moderate tempo, his fingers moving with apparent ease. "When I'm taking sips," he sang in a scratchy voice, "from your tasty lips, I'm in heaven goodness knows. Honeysuckle Rose." The sound of the piano filled the shop. He let the last chord die in the air and shifted slightly in his seat.
"So it tells you," Claude whispered. Their heads were on exactly the same level, only a few inches apart.
"Yes." Weisfeld stared curiously into the boy's enormous brown eyes. "It tells you."
Claude pressed down a note and held it until the sound disappeared. An odd sensation came over him, as if he had lived through this before, as if he had somehow slipped out of time, as if he were simultaneously in his body and out of it, floating around somewhere looking down on himself. The scene began to darken and he felt his knees begin to give way. Suddenly he was aware of Weisfeld's hands on his shoulders, holding him firmly, supporting him.
"What's the matter?" Weisfeld asked. "What's wrong?"
"Nothing." Claude stepped back. It seemed of no importance. His mind was racing now with the significance of Weisfeld's demonstration.
"Are you sure? Does that happen to you often?"
"How can I learn that?" Claude asked, nodding at the piano. "To do that, the way you did."
Weisfeld watched the boy for a moment to reassure himself that he had indeed returned to normal. "How come you're so thin? Do you get enough to eat? When did you eat last?"
"I have to learn how to do that, with the music."
"You have to?" Weisfeld looked away. "He has to?" His tone was not mocking but ruminative, as if trying to sense the implications of the boy's seriousness.
"Please."
Weisfeld listened to the word fade into silence, as Claude had listened to the note. He stood up and looked down at the boy. "Of course," he said.
Back behind the counter, Weisfeld pulled a thin paper-covered book from the shelf. "I happen to have a used copy of
The Blue Book for Beginners.
Marked down to thirty cents."
"I only have a dime," Claude said. "But I can get more."
Weisfeld considered the matter, his plump hands holding the primer. Claude's eyes were locked on the book. "Considering you live in the neighborhood," Weisfeld said, "maybe we can work something out. Let's say you give me a dime today, a dime in a week, and another dime in two weeks."
"Okay. Good." Claude got out his dime and reached for the book. "What day is it?"
"It's Monday." Weisfeld's eyebrows went up. "The first day of the school week. Don't you go to school?"
"Sometimes."
"Can you read? Words, I mean. This isn't going to do you any good if you can't read."
"I can read. I read all the time."
"All the time," Weisfeld repeated. "That's good. So, tell me, what do you read?"
"The newspaper. Sometimes she brings
Life
magazine or the
Reader's Digest.
I read books, too."
"Books! Excellent." Weisfeld handed him
The Blue Book for Beginners.
"If you get stuck someplace, let me know. Otherwise I'll see you Monday." He reached over the counter to shake hands.
"I could read when I was four," Claude said.
***
He kept his eyes open for bottles. You got two cents deposit for the small ones, and five cents for the large. He ranged through the neighborhood, up and down Third Avenue and the side streets, checking garbage cans, alleyways, and gutters. If he saw someone on a step drinking a Coke, he might loiter inconspicuously on the opposite side of the street. He was almost always disappointed. It was a tenement neighborhood, and people were careful with money.
Eventually he left his familiar environs and explored to the west, across Lexington to Park and Madison avenues. Here the streets were clean, the buildings were tall and guarded by uniformed doormen, and the comparatively few pedestrians were well dressed. People got out of big yellow De Soto taxicabs, crossed the sidewalk under canopies, and disappeared inside. There were no subway grates, no visible clutter, and initially it seemed hopeless. But one day he noticed a delivery boy from a grocery store pulling up his three-wheeled bike near a small side entrance to one of the fanciest buildings on that particular block. The boy opened the big wooden box between the front wheels, removed a bag of groceries, closed and locked the box, and went into the building. As Claude approached, he saw a discreet sign that read
SERVICE ENTRANCE.
Stairs led down to a doorway. Claude retreated and waited ten minutes, until the delivery boy reappeared and rode away. Then he descended the stairs, paused a moment, and pushed through the door.
A maze of pipesâgreat thick tubes hanging from the ceiling, running in all directions, vertical stands studded with valves, elbow joints, and connectors. He moved cautiously through the gloom, following the occasional bare light bulb, each one casting a weak nimbus of light over a boiler, a bank of fuse boxes, a set of pressure gauges, an open doorway. The sudden clanking and groaning of machinery startled him as he passed the closed doors of the service elevator. Nervously, he started down a corridor that seemed to lead back in the direction from which he had come. After several turns to the left and then to the right he realized he was lost. He stepped through a doorway and immediately bumped into a large ashcan. He was surrounded by ashcans. The faint glow of light from yet another doorway beckoned him. He threaded his way through the cans and peered into the room.
Claude saw a tall black man in an undershirt working the ropes of a dumbwaiter, sweat glistening on the back of his neck. He pulled hand over hand until there was a dull thump. Then he reached into the
darkness and lifted out cans of garbage, which he emptied into larger cans. When he heard the clink of bottles he would retrieve them and place them on the floor against the wall. There were more than a dozen, and as Claude watched, the black man added two large Canada Drys.
Claude moved behind a stack of wooden crates, stepped on an ashcan lid in the darkness, and froze. The black man turned around and stood for a moment, his head cocked, listening. He reached into his back pocket and drew out a small, shiny revolver. He held it loosely before him, aimed at the floor, and moved forward slowly. Claude felt warmth flooding his body. The black man approached the crates, and then suddenly stepped around and stared down at the boy.
"Stand up," the man said. "Come out here."
Claude obeyed, moving into the light, his eyes shifting back and forth from the man's narrow fox-like face to the revolver at his side.
"I know every kid in this building," the man said, returning the gun to his pocket, "and you ain't one of them."
"I just came down the, I saw the grocery boy and I thought I'd see if I could, then I couldn't find theâ"
"Hold on a minute, now. Just slow down." The man hunkered down, reached forward, and slipped two fingers behind Claude's belt buckle and pulled the boy forward until their faces were only inches apart. "What you doing here?"
"Bottles. Looking for bottles. For the store."
After a moment the man released him, but neither of them moved. Claude felt his legs shaking.
"You telling me you in here looking for deposit bottles? In
my
building, looking for
my
bottles?"
"I'm sorry. I didn't know."
"Didn't know what?" His brown eyes were steady.
"I mean your bottles. I just thought..." Claude found himself giving a great shuddering yawn.
"You caught, little man. Couldn't find your way out and now you caught. Ain't that right?"
Claude nodded.
The man seemed to be studying Claude's face. After several moments he sighed and stood up. "All right. We'll talk."
"Which way is out?"
"I say we going to talk." He moved away, back through the doorway to the dumbwaiter. Claude followed. The tall man pointed to his collection. "My bottles," he said. "Sixty-four cents' worth."
"Can I go?"
"Can you go?" The man's voice ascended in an arc of incredulity. "Can you
go?
" He left it hanging there for a moment, then looked down at the floor and shook his head. "What about trespass," he said sadly. "What about unlawful entry."
"I don't know," Claude said. "I don't know about those things."
"I expect you don't." The man nodded. "So maybe I'll give you a break. Give you a chance, even."
"Which way is out?"
The tall man shifted his head and stared into the darkness at the bottom of the dumbwaiter shaft. He raised a finger to his lips in a sign for silence and at the same time pulled out the revolver. He raised it in front of his face, barrel pointed up, and then very slowly unfolded his naked arm to full extension, aiming at the dark shaft. He stood there like a bronze statue for several seconds, and then fired.
Claude felt the explosion in his ears and on the skin of his face. He jumped back involuntarily, and at the same time a rat flew out of the shaft, as if ejected by a spring, and fell twitching on the cement floor. The man stepped forward, examined the animal, picked it up by the tail, and threw it in the garbage. He pocketed the gun and turned to Claude.
"You got to be close," he said. "Ain't like that bullshit in the movies." He scratched his head and went over to the bottles. "Look here. I got a business proposition. I'm a busy man. This is a big building and I got a lot to do. I ain't got time for every little thing. So you take these bottles down to the A & P and get the sixty-four cents. You hear?"
"Yes," Claude said.
"Then right away you bring the money back. You hear?"
"Yes."
"Now once you got the sixty-four cents there's going to be a little voice inside your head telling you to keep the money." Claude started to speak but the man cut him off. "No, no. I know what I'm talking about. Just for a moment you going to think, I don't have to go back to that crazy nigger with the gun. But you are going to come back. You know why? Because when you come back I'm going to give you twenty-four cents." He smiled, his thin face seeming to grow broader. "And what's better than that is we can keep on doing it. Every week or
so I'll give you more bottles for the A & P and you make more money. See what I mean? It's a business proposition."
Claude looked at the bottles and nodded.
The tall man disappeared into the darkness and came back pushing a large perambulator. He snapped the chrome braces and folded down the hood. "Put the bottles in here and I'll show you the back way out."
Claude laid the bottles carefully in the baby carriage. Then he followed the black man along a complicated route to a set of large sliding doors. The sunlight was almost blinding as they opened.
"You know where the A & P is at?"
"Yes."
"Go to the back and ask for George. Tell him Al sent you, he give you the money."
Claude pushed the perambulator into the light and up a long ramp to the sidewalk. He felt a certain excitement, a certain pride, even. The vehicle was heavy, with dark purple sides and spoked rubber wheels, and he imagined people thinking there was a baby inside.
When he returned with the carriage and the money, Al was rolling ashcans into the alley.
"Next time," he said, counting out Claude's share, "come this way and push the bell if the doors are closed. Want to avoid the doormen. They drink down in the front sometimes, and they mean. Come this way it'll be me, you'll be all right."
"George talks funny," Claude said.
"Yeah," Al said, wrestling a can. "He got the sleeping sickness down south. He slow, but he ain't dumb."
Claude considered the exotic idea of sleeping sickness. "I hate to sleep," he said.
Al wiped his brow with the back of his hand and looked at the boy. "Is that a fact?"
"She sleeps all the time," Claude said. "I hate it."
The Blue Book for Beginners
was organized along logical principles that Claude recognized immediatelyâa series of lessons numbered one through twenty, starting easy and getting harder as you went along. The first night he read it over and over again in his cot, skipping the words he didn't understand as he tried to grasp the overall shape. Sometimes the text went into capital letters, which impressed him.
DO NOT SKIP LESSONS. DO THEM IN SEQUENCE. YOU HAVE NOT
FINISHED A LESSON UNTIL YOU HAVE MASTERED ALL OF THE EXERCISES LISTED AT THE END OF THE LESSON. DO NOT SUBSTITUTE YOUR OWN FINGERING FOR THAT INDICATED.
The severe, no-nonsense tone of these admonishments thrilled him. They suggested that the author of the book was aware of Claude, able to predict where he might, in his eagerness, go too fast and get sloppy. He trusted the voice and believed that it sprang from a wisdom that he might someday share. There was a kind of intimacy he had not experienced with anything else he'd read. He slept with the book under his pillow.
Now when he went to the back room after dinner and closed the door, he went with a purpose. Each time he began on page one, playing everything over again, recapitulating the exercises and the scales, faster each time until he reached the place where he had left off. But he never rushed. Even though he knew the early lessons backwards and forwards, could play them without consulting the book, he took pleasure in doing them at a measured pace, concentrating, listening to the sound. When a lesson was completed to his satisfaction, sometimes after many hours, he would not go on immediately to the next, but would create little variations of one kind or another on the lesson he had learned, playing it fast, then slow, loud then soft, or adding notes or phrases that sounded good.
His hands gave him relatively little trouble, although the indicated fingering sometimes seemed to make things more difficult than they had to be. He followed it religiously nonetheless. Meter was another matter, and halfway through the book he knew he was doing something wrong.