The Color of Family (28 page)

By the time Clayton had gotten to Mount Vernon Place, it
occurred to him that he didn't have a clear destination in mind—until he had reached the Peabody Conservatory.

He parked in front of one of the prewar buildings along the square, and it only served to make him reflective over this little quaint gem of the city, with its cobblestone streets, that Gothic-style church, and the red-brick apartment buildings that somehow blended in an esoteric enough way with the gray-stoned buildings of an olden era, and the Washington Monument—the original one with a statue of the man himself right on top. Nothing like the giant inverted writing utensil that Clayton had never seen as a fitting monument to the nation's first president. To that degree, that gray pencil with its point to the sky over in Washington fell upon his sensibility in the same way as did modern art—he simply didn't understand such a contemporary tribute to an early man any more than he could regard paint dripped, flung, and splattered on a canvas as art.

So now he was out of his car and walking, gawking, remembering, wishing he had thought to move back to this place that suckled him when he was fresh out of Louisiana. There was something about the cobblestones or the old-world ornamentation adorning the buildings ringing the monument that somehow made him feel as if he hadn't left New Orleans at all. Maybe, he thought, it was the charm of another more genteel time that did it.

When he got to the door, he paused before grasping the handle that he had opened every day at one point in his life. But he resisted the urge to stand and meditate on the sentimentality of a door handle—which he couldn't help but notice had not changed in all these years. Once he stepped inside, he faced a guard who sat at a desk just on the other side of the vestibule, his features illuminated by fluorescent light.

“May I help you, sir?” the man asked.

Clayton smiled, thinking it would illicit the same, and said, “Oh, hello sir. I used to be a student here. I just thought I'd come by and take a look around. Maybe go down to one of the practice rooms.”

“Well, most of these practice rooms are reserved. You can't just pop into any one,” the man said, as if he took his responsibility quite seriously.

“Oh, yes sir, I know that,” Clayton said contritely. “I remember
the policy very well. What I was wondering was if there might be one that hasn't been reserved tonight. Any one will do, because I had practiced in them all.” But what he didn't go on to say, for fear the man would consider him a kook, was that each practice room held some sort of specific memory for him.

The guard flipped through pages until he stopped at one, and once he finished studying it, offered, “Okay, well tonight, you can have practice-room five. But first, you have to show me an alumni card, or something.”

“Certainly,” Clayton said as he went immediately into his wallet to pull out the card that he couldn't even begin to understand why he carried around with him. “Here you are, sir. You see there? I was in the class of seventy-nine.”

“So I see,” he said, as he scribbled something onto a pass. Then, handing it to Clayton with the alumni card and a pen, he said, “Just sign in right here in the book, and you can have two hours down there. If you need more time, you can come up and ask for it, but just keep in mind that the building closes at eleven.”

“Thank you, kind sir,” Clayton said as he handed the man back his pen. And as he started on his way, he noticed a question in the man's eyes. So he asked, “Is there a problem, sir?”

“Well, naw, except that I was wondering where your books are. You don't have any music books with you.”

Clayton smiled, touched his fingers to his temple and replied, “It's all up here.”

Heading down the hall and down the stairs, Clayton found his way to the practice rooms. There were the sounds of muffled pianos, four, five, maybe ten all going at once. So now, just as then, it made him think of Liszt, frenetic, with an energetic insanity that he really had to listen carefully to, and become one with, before it could become sane and coherent in a theoretical way that could prophesy life. In fact, he thought he just might play Liszt once he sat down at this piano of his youth. But when he finally got to practice-room five and opened the door, and saw that baby grand standing alone in the room, he could think of only one thing to play.

So he closed the door behind him, peeled off his coat, and dropped it on a chair next to the door. He sat at the piano and played the first chord, and before he knew it, he'd launched into
“Baby Grand.” He hummed as he played, and he made it more bluesy than its original, feeling the power of his connection as deeply as those words. Then, right there in his head, was Ray Charles and his voice of a life lived in the lyrics of songs. Minor keys, Clayton thought as he played and rocked with an uncanny likeness to Ray Charles when the words and notes mingled in his soul and became electric; songs in minor keys like this one could always cause a rumbling in a man's foundation. The keys of the blues. Beethoven, Rachmaninoff, Berlioz, even Bach; all those guys, he mused, wrote the blues before its time.

When he'd tinkled the last keys of the song, he stopped and considered the music. Maybe it was the soundproofing that created a particular acoustic to the room, or maybe it was a fluke of the moment, but without one doubt he believed that he'd played just like Ray Charles.

As his fingers crawled across the keys, playing nothing in particular but beginnings of this and phrases of that, he felt as if he were being watched. Not as if there were some kind of spy camera trained on him, but watched by actual eyes in faces that he'd be able to meet. So as he continued to play, he looked up to the most likely place they'd be—the square window set into the door. And there they were, two pair of gawking smiling eyes. How in the world did they know I was here? he thought, trailing his mind back along the path he took without finding a soul, other than the guard, who would have known him. And even the guard didn't know him from the man who empties the garbage pails.

So he got up and crossed the room to open the door. When he got it open, to his astonishment, there were no less than ten others standing there waiting their turn to view him. “Hello, how are you all?” he said with the distracted smile he'd become accustomed to slipping on whenever adoring fans occupied his privacy.

“Hey, man!” yelped an excited long-hair who looked to have just crossed the bridge into adulthood. “What're you doing here practicing?”

And just as Clayton was about to answer, he looked up to find, in the very back of the pack, Larson Fletcher, the man who had taken the fear of God out of him and made him, as much as taught him, how to soar. So as if he were seeing him in a dream, Clayton
said softly and with the awe he thought the man was due, “Professor Fletcher!”

“Clayton,” Professor Fletcher said, returning the reverence. “I can't believe how much of your boyhood looks you've actually maintained.” He made his way through the small crowd of fans, and when he reached Clayton, he turned to the crowd and said in an unyielding professor's voice, “Go back to your practice rooms. Some of you are playing for me in the morning and I expect brilliance.”

And Clayton smiled as he watched them, with only that one command and the unspoken threat of the consequences for playing without brilliance. He remembered that unspoken threat, knowing he wouldn't get throttled, or even berated, but would receive the lecture. If he was the same Professor Fletcher, which he seemed to be, then those students would do all that was within their physical ability, and then count on anything divine, to play brilliantly and avoid the lecture. And the lectures were never the same twice.

So Clayton backed up as Professor Fletcher moved into the room and closed the door. Clayton embraced him with all his fond memories, then said, “I can't tell you how good it is to see you, Professor Fletcher.”

“Well, I was giving you enough time to settle in before calling on you. It was my surprise when I heard a few of the kids upstairs whispering like the groupies of a rock star that Clayton Cannon had signed in to practice-room five.”

“Ah,” Clayton said, nodding his head with the mystery solved. “So that's how they knew I was here. Because the guard didn't have the foggiest idea who I was, which is just fine by me.”

Professor Fletcher took Clayton's coat from the chair and laid it on top of the piano. He pulled the chair closer to the piano, sat and crossed his legs, then said with a broad grin, “So, how's life, Clayton?”

“Well, it's impossible to complain about anything, Professor Fletcher. I mean, I've got a wonderful wife, two beautiful sons, a career that's inaccessible to most people with equal talent. How do I complain about that?”

Professor Fletcher uncrossed his legs, then with a flourish crossed them the opposite way, threw his hands in the air to bring
them to rest in a clasp on his knee, and said, “Well, there are two things here. First, when does one of the best pianists in the world stop calling me Professor Fletcher and begin calling me Lars? I mean, I do appreciate the deference from someone of your stature, but I no longer hold your fate, in any small way, in my hands. The other thing is, the trappings of a good life do not grant anyone an exemption from being able to complain.”

Clayton chuckled lightly at the way in which this man, who had unknowingly been his greatest influence in his life, still experienced every aspect of life fully without exception or explanation. So it was no wonder that he knew Professor Fletcher would consider him harshly if he were to realize that Clayton still bore the mass of his deepest consternation. As his smile dissolved like water into vapor, he looked at Professor Fletcher directly and knew that in spite of how this man might view him, this was the best place to lay it all bare. “Well, there's still the matter of that dream,” and he knew he needn't say another word.

Professor Fletcher glared at Clayton. “The dream from when you were twelve?”

“Yes, that's the one,” Clayton said, hanging his head ashamedly.

Professor Fletcher stood and walked to the far edge of the piano, shaking his head as he walked. Then, he finally said, “Clayton, you must know that there isn't a time that I don't think of you when that dream you told me about doesn't cross my mind right along with you. But I was certain you had addressed it and worked it all out by now, either with your mother or in therapy. Something.”

“I haven't even mentioned it to my wife, and I've known her since I was nearly twelve, you remember.”

“Clayton, when I met you, you were that far removed from twelve. You were eighteen years old and as unsure about who you were as you must be now.”

“I've learned to live with it.”

“Live with what? Half of yourself.” Professor Fletcher went closer to where Clayton sat at the piano, then leaned in closer to him and said, “Clayton, don't you see? If this dream is still with you after all these years, then there's something to it. Maybe it's
not a dream. A dream would have long since faded, don't you think?”

“I guess it would depend on the power of the dream.” Clayton let his fingers mindlessly crawl up and down an arpeggio as he pondered over whether to say what he was thinking. And when he realized that he simply had to put it in the safest place he knew, he said, “Besides, since the dream, there've been little things that add up to nothing but more mystery.”

“Like?”

“Well, like a few weeks ago, I found a torn-up letter that had been addressed to my mother from someone here in Baltimore, only whoever sent it, sent it to her in New Orleans. Yet my mother brought it all the way here to Baltimore, then ripped it up and threw it out. Who is this person, and why is she writing to my mother, and how does she even know my mother?” He launched into the energetic staccato rhythm of Liszt's
Mephisto Waltz,
then turned to Professor Fletcher and out of nowhere said, “I'm thinking I'll close with this one when I play here in Baltimore. I don't really know why, except that it just makes me think of a jaunty dance with the devil, and that's what I feel like I did in some of my most melancholy moments in that dream when I was here in Baltimore another lifetime ago.” And as he lavished his attention on the melodic, rhapsodic midsection, he let his head drop back, and moaned, “And now the seduction. The devil's seduction.”

Professor Fletcher asked quietly, “And how did the devil seduce you?”

“He brought me back here, didn't he? And I don't know why, but I think my answers are back here.” But what he didn't go further to say, and what he'd never even said in his earlier years of taking Professor Fletcher into his confidence, were the calls from his mother, every day, wanting to know if he'd met anyone today, or if he'd heard from anyone today. Those calls made no more sense now than they did then, and to admit them out loud would probably make them sound even more absurd and devoid of context. “Something drew me here, Professor Fletcher…Lars. Why did I choose Peabody over Juilliard or the Curtis? I got into all those schools, but why did I come here?”

“You always said it was because of André Watts. You said, and I remember, ‘I always wanted to study in the place where he honed his brilliance.'”

“Maybe,” he said as he brought the
Mephisto Waltz
down to its dramatic end. Then he looked up at Professor Fletcher and smiled ironically. “And so why André Watts, when there were a plethora of giant footsteps to follow at the other schools?”

“I can't answer that for you, Clayton. And I don't know if you noticed it or not, but that dance with the devil you just played, ended with a somewhat dissonant crash of a chord.”

Clayton laughed out loud and with an intensity that came from a place that had never before sent forth laughter. He looked squarely at Professor Fletcher so that there would be no mistaking his words, and said, “And maybe that's how this whole torment will end for me. In one loud, dissonant, resounding crash.” And the drollness of the previous seconds was wiped clean from his face by the sobering thought of possibly learning in Baltimore that he should have left sleeping dogs lying in the blissful ignorance of their slumber.