Body & Soul (39 page)

"This is my friend Claude Rawlings," Lady said.

Senator Barnes shook hands. It was clear he didn't remember Claude. "Cadbury man, are you? Fine school. Spoke there some years ago."

Claude decided to plunge ahead. "I believe we've met before, sir. Very briefly, years ago, at the Fisks'."

"At Dewman's?" The old man tilted back his head to look through the bottom of his glasses.

Lady looked at Claude in amazement.

"Yes," Claude said lightly. "I was the piano player accompanying Peter when he played the violin at a big dinner party there. Balanchine was a guest, and the mayor."

"By George," Barnes cried, "that was the night Catherine surprised Dewman with a crown of weeds. She was hell on wheels, that girl." He turned to Lady. "Where is she? Still in Australia?"

"I don't know. They don't talk about her." She was still looking at Claude. "This is strange."

"I guess so." Claude shrugged. "It was a long time ago."

Senator Barnes took her arm. "Let's find Mater and Pater, Lady, before these blue-haired women get their hooks into me. I can feel it building."

Frowning, Lady led them both across the lawn.

Ted and Linda Powers made a handsome couple, standing just outside the tent under a large elm. She was a small, trim woman with delicate features and a vaguely flapper cut to her graying hair. She smiled when she caught sight of her father and daughter. Ted Powers was tall, square-jawed, and solid—something like a darker version of Randolph Scott, Claude thought, although without facial mobility, which gave him a guarded look. He wore a three-piece suit and a striped tie.

"You were both wonderful." Linda stepped forward to give them each a peck on the cheek. She fluttered between them. Ted nodded and stared out over the crowd.

Lady made an attempt to introduce Claude, but was cut off by the arrival of some people eager to shake the senator's hand. Claude felt Ted and Linda Powers's eyes lock on to his own for the briefest possible instant. Linda turned to talk to an elderly woman. Ted pulled out his pocket watch and pondered the time.

"Let's go," Lady whispered in his ear. "I want to get that picture out of my room before somebody pinches it."

As they walked to Chesterton, Claude expected Lady to question him, but she did not.

"I'm going to miss Hollifield," she said. "I'm going to miss it a lot."

"These places are like heaven on earth," Claude replied. "We've been lucky." He did a spontaneous cartwheel and brushed the grass from his palms. "But on the other hand, the world awaits."

"For you, maybe. You know what you want to do."

"So will you. It'll come."

She sighed. "I know what I
don't
want to do, which is go back to Seventy-third Street with my parents. But that's what I'm doing."

"Come live in a garret with me," he said, "if you can stand listening to the piano four hours a day."

She stopped and looked at him. "You'd do it, too."

"Of course!" He smiled. "Why not?"

They continued walking. For a dreadful moment he considered himself to be entirely false—smiles, cartwheels, bravado, when in fact he felt confusion. He sensed it would be dangerous to admit any sort of weakness to Lady, who spoke often of her own ambivalence, which she hated, and of his apparent certitude, directness, and faith in himself, which she loved. But as graduation approached he had felt his own past coming up behind him. During all the years of strolling across green lawns to ivy-covered buildings, of easy fraternity with his classmates, of being part of the benevolent Quaker world, of wearing button-down shirts, he had deliberately put his origins at a distance. An occasional remark about having been a shoeshine boy, delivered casually, may have passed his lips, as if he had no fear of those memories. But to no one, and certainly not Lady, had he ever mentioned the nausea, the sense of being invisible, the loneliness and misery of his childhood. He had been entirely helpless, and of that he was ashamed.
With the possible exception of Weisfeld, no one knew that music had saved him, allowed him, as it were, to squeak through. Cadbury graduate or no, he knew that, thus far, without music he was nothing. Without music he would be that vague, weak child again, as insubstantial as a wisp of smoke. Sometimes, playing chamber music in a drawing room, or accompanying a singer in a hotel ballroom, he felt like an impostor. He knew he was a good player, and yet at some deeper level he was amazed to be getting away with it.

Lady's room evoked, as always, an erotic thrill. The angling light, the faint scent of her, the very walls bringing up countless hours of afternoon lovemaking. Even with her things gone, the mattress bare in the tiny bedroom, her books, clothes, and knickknacks boxed up and taken away, even in the startling emptiness he felt his body quicken.

"Good," she said, looking at the lithograph. "Could you take it down?"

It was a Braque, but not cubist. A young girl sitting at a windowsill, her hair to her waist, her small breasts partially exposed. Her expression was one of resigned sadness, and of innocence. Lady had bought it one summer on a trip to Pans. Claude stood on the bed and gently lifted it from the wall.

"She knows some secrets," Lady said.

"You can say that again." He got down from the bed and impulsively gave the girl in the picture a soft kiss.

"Lady?" It was the voice of Ted Powers at the threshold. "We're ready."

With Claude carrying the lithograph, they followed him through the hall, out the main door, through the arch, and out to the street. Ted went to the driver's side of the station wagon, reached in, and got the keys. He opened the tailgate and said, "Put it in there, on top." Claude obeyed, and Ted closed the gate and went behind the wheel without looking at Claude.

Behind the station wagon was a large black limousine. Claude turned to see Lady taking a last look at the dorm. Her mother rolled down the station wagon window. "Will the back seat be all right, dear?"

"Sure." She looked at Claude, who came forward.

"Well," he said.

"You'll call me tonight?"

"Yes."

From inside the station wagon her father had reached over the seat and opened the rear door. Lady got in, started to pull the door shut, and then paused. Through the glass Claude could see her face, the look of vexation. He was backing away when she suddenly popped out of the car, skipped over, and threw her arms around his neck. "Give me a kiss," she said, moving her face close to his. "A long one."

He did so, feeling the soft press of her belly.

When she broke away he saw the stunned, immobile faces of her parents. She got in and the station wagon pulled rapidly from the curb. Then came the limousine, Senator Barnes alone in back smoking a cigar. The old man gave Claude a barely perceptible nod as he passed.

A
T HIS ACCUSTOMED PLACE
behind the counter, Mr. Weisfeld coughed leaned back on his stool and turned a page of the
Herald Tribune
leaned back on his stool, and turned a page of the "It says here they're thinking about tearing down the el."

Claude, having replenished the stock of number 3 valve oil, slid the drawer shut. "The Third Avenue el?"

"It's getting old, apparently."

Claude turned to look out the front window. "It's hard to imagine what it would look like." He picked up a broom and began sweeping the back aisle.

"Stop with the make-work," Weisfeld said. "Sit for a minute. You're making me nervous."

Claude obeyed, taking his stool by the harmonica case. "There'd be more sun."

"After all these years I wouldn't be able to go to sleep at night
without the trains." Weisfeld folded the paper. "You're jumpy. You've
been jumpy for weeks. What's up?"

"Jumpy? Really?"

"How's it going with the song cycle?"

Claude was composing a set of songs based on Blake's
Innocence
and
Experience
. "I got past a big problem this morning. I wish I knew more about the human voice as an instrument, though."

"Don't worry. These days they can sing anything. Just keep going. What about the girlfriend?" For some reason Weisfeld rarely referred to Lady by name. Claude thought he was merely teasing.

"Terrific," Claude said. "I'm going out to their house on Long Island this weekend."

"Don't forget to bring a house present for the momma." Weisfeld yawned. "Something tasteful. A little different. A can of matrons glaces maybe. Gristede's has them."

Claude remembered his first visit to the townhouse on Seventy-third Street. A brownstone. He'd gone down three steps from the sidewalk and pressed the bell. Through the heavy wrought-iron door and the glass behind it he saw, as the lights went on, a tiny room with a floor of veined marble. A sort of lobby, empty except for a gold-framed mirror on the wall, a small half table below it, and a coat rack. A second door, six feet away, opened and Lady emerged, shooing back a uniformed maid even as she smiled through the wrought iron at Claude. She pulled open the heavy door and Claude entered.

"Now don't be put off by all this grandeur," she said. "It doesn't mean a thing. Believe me."

They went through the second door. He sensed the kitchen to the rear. Heavy, dark oak door frames, doors with polished brass fixtures leading to unseen rooms off to the left. Straight ahead, the staircase, deep maroon runner, a brass strip gleaming on every step. A heavy silence as he followed her up, dark portraits lining the wall, her ankles glinting.

At the top they turned onto the landing. Oriental rugs. An antique chair and desk with a telephone, a few leather books, a brass lamp, and a copy of the Social Register. A series of small oil landscapes in elaborate gilt frames. Lady strode forward and opened the door to the brightness of the living room.

As she stepped aside he saw French windows. Ted Powers was seated in an armchair beside the couch, reading the paper, a drink at his elbow and a tan cocker spaniel at his feet, and Linda Powers sat at a small antique secretary with her back to him, writing a letter. There was a feeling of stasis, as if the room and everything in it were a painting, or a stage set five seconds before the curtain.

"Here's Claude," Lady said cheerfully.

Their white faces turned.

"What is marrons glacés?" Claude asked Weisfeld.

"Chestnuts. Candied chestnuts. Very fancy."

Earlier that summer, in fact at the very first opportunity, Claude had brought Lady to the store, to meet Weisfeld and to show her the studio. Weisfeld had donuts and coffee ready.

"I've heard a great deal about you, Mr. Weisfeld," Lady had said. "Claude says he owes everything to you."

Weisfeld smiled and patted her arm. "Claude is of course wrong. He owes maybe to God, but not to me. But he was right about you. I can tell that already."

Weisfeld had given her a rather longer than necessary tour of the shop, chatting easily about the instruments, his customers (some of them famous!), and throwing in an occasional humorous anecdote. Claude went along behind him, moved by Weisfeld's politeness and solicitude. He'd been nervous, for no reason he could name, about their meeting.

"I like him," Lady had said downstairs in the studio. "He's sweet."

Claude could not really fault her for this banality. Weisfeld had in fact seemed somewhat guarded to Claude, falling back on the humble but sophisticated European Jewish shopkeeper role that had served him so well with his Park Avenue clientele, and about which Claude and Weisfeld had sometimes joked.

"He's...," Claude struggled. "He's complicated. The war..." It was too much to explain. "He's a wonderful teacher. I wish you could know how good."

"I believe you," she'd said.

Now, Weisfeld got up and took the keys from the shelf under the register. "So, should we take a look?"

He and Claude left the store, locked up, and walked to the corner. It was a hot afternoon, and beads of perspiration formed on Weisfeld's brow almost immediately. He looked up at the el.

"I bet they'll do it," he said. "The street is wide, you know, wider than it looks. They'll take up the cobblestones and pave it over." He wiped his head with a handkerchief. "May be good for business."

They walked west on Eighty-fourth Street past a couple of buildings to number 186, an old tenement. Weisfeld climbed the stoop and paused at the top, breathing heavily, coughing into his handkerchief. "Mrs. Keller told me about this. Mr. Obromowitz—I've seen him around—anyway he's got bad rheumatism or something, so he went out to Arizona someplace because it's supposed to be good for rheumatism. People will believe anything."

They entered, went past the mailboxes, and unlocked the inner entry door. "So he's going to try it, but he doesn't want to let go of his room
in case Arizona doesn't work out. We're talking a month-to-month sublease, off the books." With the same key he opened Obromowitz's door. "Not bad. First floor, in front, at least."

It was very simple—a bed, bureau, table, two chairs by the front window, a hot plate and half refrigerator against the rear wall, and a small bathroom in back. The room was dominated by an entire wall of books, floor to ceiling. Thousands of books.

"Wow," said Claude, moving forward. He saw fiction, history, biography, philosophy, poetry, art books. Complete sets of Dickens, Conrad, and the
Encyclopaedia Britannica.
Books in German, French, and Hebrew. "What does Mr. Obromowitz do?"

"He was a lens grinder, I believe," Weisfeld said. "Before the rheumatism."

The place was scrupulously clean. "This is perfect," Claude said. "I'll tell Mrs. Keller right away."

Weisfeld nodded. "Thirty-five dollars a month. It's a steal."

The Chinese waiter smiled and made a little dipping motion before clearing away the plates and bowls—an astounding number of them, and all of them empty.

Emma burped quietly into her napkin. "Excuse me."

"Well
I
sure ain't gonna be hungry in an hour," Al said. "Mercy!"

"So how did it happen?" Claude asked.

"You remember Mullins? The doorman?"

Claude nodded.