Authors: Frank Conroy
Claude shook her hand, struck by the nervousness in her brown, downcast eyes.
"Have some champagne," Caroline said. "Patrick brought up a case, but most of them are drinking beer, for some reason."
Clusters of antique furniture lined the walls. They sat at the nearest group of chairs. The rest were empty. The music came from an old leather-cased portable phonograph set on top of a grand piano.
"Cheers," said Lady, lifting her glass. "Is there an occasion?"
"No," Caroline said. "I just thought..." Her voice trailed off. She sipped her drink. "A lot of them are down at the boathouse."
"Where's Buzz?"
"He drifted off somewhere."
Lady watched Caroline for a moment, then turned to Claude. "Get us a bottle, would you? Something to nibble on as well?" A fast wink. Then she moved her head closer to Caroline and began to talk.
Claude understood. He got up and walked out onto the balcony.
The people who had been there had moved down to the end, in the direction of the boathouse. He saw a flare as someone lighted a cigarette. He heard a splash, and some muted cheers and laughter from the pier. As he went back inside something landed on his wrist, and he felt a sting at precisely the moment he slapped at it. A small insect, and a tiny smear of blood. With a nod to the old bartender, he took a bottle of champagne and small bowl of pistachios and carried them over to Lady and Caroline, whose heads were still bent in conversation. He put the bottle and the bowl on the table and backed away as Caroline, oblivious, wiped a tear from her eye.
The phonograph played Nat King Cole, and the dancers continued to shuffle, each couple in a different part of the room. Claude moved to the bar. He picked up a glass of champagne. "Do you know what kind of piano that is?"
The bartender leaned forward and placed his gnarled fingers on the ivory linen. He had narrow shoulders and a thin face blotched with broken veins. "A Steinway, sir. I remember the day it was delivered. Spring of 1925."
"It's a concert grand," Claude said, unable to keep a touch of reproach from his tone. He was sure no one played it.
"They ordered it for the first big party of the season."
"For a party?"
"Oh, yes. They took their parties very seriously back in those days, if I may say so." His milky blue eyes took on a spark of mischief. "Wild and woolly, sir. Quite a treat for me, just off the boat. Very entertaining once I got used to it."
Claude laughed. "I bet!"
"Hundreds of people," he said, looking out across the nearly empty room. "Bless me if they didn't drink. Cocktails of every description. Very popular at the time, cocktails. We had a staff of nineteen, and four of us could make any cocktail they might nameâthe sidecar, rob roy, gin fizz, Manhattan. The sazerack with absinthe, and stingers. There were dozens of them. Very pretty, too, with the different colors. The ladies in particular seemed to enjoy the colors."
"What's a stinger?" Claude asked.
"Ah, well," the old man said with enthusiasm, and quickly reached under the table for two bottles. Claude watched as he deftly iced a glass, mixed the drink in another, poured, and served. "Brandy and creme de menthe, sir. Very smooth."
Claude tasted. "This is good. I like it."
The old man glanced at Lady and Caroline, and then, not bothering to ice a glass this time, made one for himself. He sipped it with a bulbous pinkie in the air, and then placed it on the bar. "They were wild. Do you see those chandeliers, sir? I remember a party with a young lady swinging on one and two gentlemen on the other. It was a contest, and believe it or not the young lady lasted the longest."
"Up there? How'd they get up there?"
"Human pyramid. Drunk as lords, every one of them. The pyramids kept breaking down and they'd all land in a pile, screaming and laughing." He drank some of his stinger. "Funny how they were ... very formal in some ways, with team captains and a timekeeper, and yet there she was up there, buck naked."
"What?" Claude was shocked.
"Always something new. You never knew what to expect. Once at a tea dance a bunch of them rode right in here asking for mint juleps. We kept horses then. Came through the French doors clippety-clop. Stayed in the saddle, drank them down, and rode right out again. That was a big hit. Care for another, sir?"
Claude had finished his drink almost without noticing it. He held his glass out, feeling a slow flush of warmth spreading from his upper chest. The old man made two more stingers.
"They were like children, in a way," he said. "Very excitable, running every which way, throwing themselves into things. Wonderful spirit, really. Out there on the great lawn at two o'clock in the morning playing croquet. We had to follow them around with lanterns. Oh, yes, it was quite different being in service in those days."
The mint was smooth on Claude's tongue. "But didn't it, wasn't it, I mean, suppose you just wanted to sleep, and then you had toâ" He broke off, waving his glass.
The old man frowned and looked down, pursing his mouth as if considering the question. Then he sampled his drink. "Oh, they knew who was up for it, sir. I was young, and to tell you the truth I enjoyed myself. It was just so wonderfully silly sometimes. You know, they'd press-gang us into the teams when they needed people. All those games, I didn't understand the rules half the time but it didn't seem to matter. I had to spend half an hour in a linen closet with a movie star one time before they found us. I can't remember her name, but we
split a bottle of Dom Perignon sitting on the floor. I remember her perfume."
Suddenly the old man's lively eyes went flat. He half turned and busied himself rearranging glasses at precisely the moment that Lady came up and touched Claude's shoulder. "This is terrible," she whispered, steering him to the end of the bar. "It's so sad. Practically everyone's down at the boathouse. People haven't even said hello to her. They're just floating around. Half of them are townies, I bet. Caroline may be a little odd, but she deserves better than this. What's that you're drinking?"
"A stinger," he said, and finished it.
"Watch it. They pack a wallop."
"I'm beginning to see that," he said. "What does Caroline think?"
"Oh, she doesn't know what to think, poor thing. Or what to do, for that matter."
"What would
you
do?"
"I don't know. Pack it in, I suppose."
Claude felt a pleasant, warm humming in his blood. He stared up at the chandeliers.
"What are you looking at?" Lady asked.
"The chandeliers," he said abstractedly and moved forward.
The phonograph hissed emptily. He picked it up with both arms and lowered it to the floor. He opened the top of the Steinway to the second position and swung up the stick. At the keyboard he played a series of barely audible fifths and then sat down at the bench. The instrument was in good tune, with a heavy action. He thought for a moment, extended his arms, and played the last section of
Rhapsody in Blue.
The piano had a big tone, the notes tightly focused from the hardness of the hammer felts, and when Claude leaned into the fortes the entire ballroom was filled with sound. People began to drift toward him.
He was determined to be as flashy as possible and to play loud enough for the sound to bounce off the French doors in the direction of the boathouse. When he'd finished the Gershwin he launched without pause into James P. Johnson's "Carolina Shout," tearing off the left-hand stride leaps at a dangerously quick tempo. He could feel energy radiating in all directions, as if the piano had become incandescent. More people moved toward him, and he was dimly aware of people coming in from outside. He played "Ripples of the Nile," an old stride barnburner by Lucky Roberts he'd first heard as a child when Al's
friend Mr. Oliver had played it in the Park Avenue basement. The texture of the keys began to change very slightly as the dry ivory absorbed the sweat from his fingertips.
Now, in the grip of a reckless exhilaration, he embraced every stride tune he could think of, keeping up the pulse, playing through mistakes as if they'd never happened, faking bridges when he had to, his hands flying, his body moving like a warm, oiled machine. He became aware that people were dancing, and he began blending Art Tatum into Fats Waller into Jelly Roll Morton in a continuous avalanche of jazz. He rocked back and forth and poured it on, his mind now empty of everything but the music. He felt he could play forever, but the sweat got in his eyes and he stopped after an elaborate up-tempo arrangement of "Is You Is or Is You Ain't my Baby?"
The entire room, crowded now with forty or fifty people, burst into applause, whistles, and shouts. "More, more!" they cried, and Claude waved acknowledgment with one arm while trying to clear his eyes with the other. Lady and Caroline came up over his right shoulder.
"It's so great!" Caroline said, kneeling at the end of the bench. "It's just fantastic. Everybody's dancing and having..." She seemed to lose her breath. "Please, please play some more." Lady smiled beside her.
Claude nodded.
From his left, a white towel was thrust into his hands and he saw the bartender placing first a napkin and then a rather large glass on the corner of the piano. "First rate, sir. Absolutely first rate. I took the liberty of making you another." He gave a brief nod and withdrew. Claude wiped his face and neck, took a sip of the stinger, slipped off his jacket, and to a general roar of approval, rolled up his sleeves. Then he began to play some serious boogie-woogie.
As Lady pulled away from the mansion, Claude gave a great, shuddering yawn and leaned his head back on the seat. The cool air was delicious against his body, which felt supple and entirely relaxed, as if he'd been playing full-out basketball for hours. "It must be late," he said.
"It is," she said.
"I shouldn't have done it, but it was fun."
"Why? Why shouldn't you?" She sounded almost aggrieved.
"Performing is serious, it's serious business, you don't just..." He waved a hand in the air. "I wasn't prepared. I horsed around. When they started calling out tunes I just faked the harmonies. I was being silly."
"But it was a
wonderful
thing to do," Lady protested. "It saved everything. Caroline was ecstatic."
"Well, that's nice, anyway."
"People loved it."
"Good." He wanted to drop the matter.
As if catching his tone, she said, "Well, I can't understand why you'd regret doing something like that. As if you were some kind of a snob or something."
"It's hard to explain," he said. "It's not that big a deal, really, it's just hard to explain to people. Forget it, it's nothing."
They drove the rest of the way home in silence. When Lady pulled into the driveway and saw that the lights were on downstairs, she murmured, "Uh-oh."
"What's the matter?"
"I don't like those lights."
"Why not?"
"It's not in the pattern," she said. "The pattern is one Scotch and soda for her, two for him, and then upstairs with ginger ale to their respective bedrooms. It never varies."
"Separate bedrooms?" Claude knew of such arrangements from the movies, but that was usually for older people, or people living in castles or great mansions like the one they'd just come from.
She'd gone quite still, sitting up straight, staring at the house. "Oh, yes," she sighed, and then, bitterly, "He came down one night about fifteen years ago and caught her making out on the couch with John O'Hara. I don't think they've touched each other since."
"Holy shit," he said, stunned both by the information and the fact that she would tell him.
She shrugged.
"You mean John O'Hara the writer?" he asked stupidly.
The front door opened and they could see the silhouetted figure of Mrs. Powers, her back bent slightly, her body moving with a jittery energy, holding the door frame and looking out at them. She turned away and retreated into the living room.
"Oh, Christ," Lady said, getting out of the car.
Claude followed her into the house. As soon as Lady appeared at the threshold of the living room, there was a muted keening sound from her mother, who was pacing back and forth, one hand at her chest and the other fluttering around her head. "Oh, God, God. Where have you been? We've been frantic, absolutely frantic."
Lady started to speak, but then simply looked down at the floor and slowly shook her head.
"Your father's been calling the hospitals. He's been so terribly worried. Practically out of his mind with worry. That fast car you insist on driving doesn't even have a roof. I tell you we've been frantic, not knowing what to do. It's almost three o'clock in the morning!" She turned away as if to sob.
Somehow, instantly Claude knew that the entire performance was fraudulent. Something had been going on in the house for quite a while, and the woman had worked herself into such a state she no longer knew what she felt, so intent was she on acting out the role of a distraught mother. Moreover, he sensed that she knew this but didn't really care, intoxicated as she was by her own histrionics. She wiped nonexistent tears from her cheek, lifted her head stoically, and seemed to plead with soft eyes. Initially alarmed, Claude was now only stunned by this weirdly unapologetic dishonesty. It was almost as if the woman expected applause, eerily reminiscent of Mr. Powers's expectation of a response after one of his gaffes.
"Where were you?" Mrs. Powers asked again, sounding exhausted.
"Caroline Howard gave a party," Lady said.
"Well, you could have called. You could have given some thought to us, after all." Mrs. Powers had not looked at Claude once. "It wouldn't haveâ" She broke off, lowering her forehead into her palm.
"All right, Mother." Lady turned and froze.
Claude followed her gaze. A man's legs, waist, silver belt buckle, arm, hand, and fingers (holding a glass of amber-colored liquid) were visible on the stairs. The rest of Mr. Powers's motionless body was hidden by the ceiling. He had presumably heard everything.
"Are you coming down, Father?"
There was a long silence. Mrs. Powers sat down in the living room. Claude watched Mr. Powers's legs. Finally they moved.