Authors: Mary Morris
Pearl took a job at Saks in the lingerie department, where she helped women stuff themselves into corsets and bras. In the evenings if Benny came by, they went to see a show or have dinner. Afterward if the weather was fine they went for walks. Some nights he held her hand. If Benny had the car, they might go and catch a set at the Three Deuces, then drive over to Buckingham Fountain to watch the light show. One evening Benny asked Pearl if she'd like a ride in the mornings to work. “I drive with my father,” he said. “It's not out of our way to pick you up.”
On Monday morning when Benny picked up Pearl, she saw that his father was in the front seat. Leo didn't get out to let her sit in front and merely nodded when Benny introduced them. In the evening he picked her up and his father was still there, staring straight ahead. For weeks it went on like this with Benny picking Pearl up in the morning and driving her home at night and his father sitting in the front seat, staring straight ahead. Some evenings Benny dropped his father off, and he and Pearl went out for dinner and afterward they often took a walk that stretched into the wee hours because neither of them had given up their lifelong habit of being night owls.
One night as they strolled in Lincoln Park, they crossed over to the lake. It was a warm, breezy night as the grip of cold had left the city. Summer was ahead, and Pearl was thinking about taking her first lake swim of the season. As they meandered along the shore, she told Benny how, since she was a girl, she'd been coming down to
the lake. She told him that once her mother had tried to drown her and Opal in the steely-blue waters. It was so long ago, like a distant dream, but she'd been coming to the lake to swim ever since.
The air was fresh and clean as they walked and the moon so bright that it made Pearl wish she could dive into the waters. Benny slipped his hand in hers. His hand was warm, his fingers strong. Though they had promised so many years ago when they'd first met never to talk about this, now she did. It was on her birthday, she told him, July 24, the same day as when her brothers drowned. Benny kept Pearl's hand in his, and she felt him shiver. He grew very quiet and for a long time nothing was said. Around them everything, even the lake, grew still. All they could hear were the waves lapping the shore. He paused and looked at her the way Napoleon told him to. Sideways, not straight on. “I was on the bridge that day,” he told her, “when the ship went down.”
A thin smile crossed Pearl's lips. “You were the boy whose hands couldn't stop moving. You dropped your package into the water.”
Benny stopped and stared into Pearl's eyes. “You knew?”
“Yes.” Pearl nodded. “I've known for a long time.”
Before he left that night, Benny invited Pearl to come to dinner on Friday. “My mother would like to meet you,” he said.
H
annah had no idea what to do. Her son had never brought a woman home for dinner before. Years ago she gave up believing he'd ever settle down. As soon as Benny told her that he was bringing Pearl home, she began cleaning the house. She scrubbed more than she ever had before. She washed all the curtains and dusted all the fixtures. She got on her knees and washed the bathroom floor. Twice she asked Benny what she should make for dinner and twice he told her, “Anything.” There would be noodle soup and salmon mousse. She debated between a lamb stew and chicken with prunes. In the end she decided on the chicken.
When Pearl arrived, Hannah clasped her hands. It occurred to Pearl that Hannah didn't care if she had green skin and antennae
for ears she was so pleased that Benny had, at last, brought a woman home. At the table they talked about their jobs. Pearl asked polite questions about Benny's brothers, and they asked Pearl what it was like to have lived above a saloon. “Oh, I didn't only live above it. I ran it,” is what Pearl said.
On Monday morning when Benny picked Pearl up, Leo got out of the car. He held the door for her and waited until she was comfortable in the front seat. Without a word he got into the back. That weekend Benny and Pearl strolled near Lincoln Park. A chorus of cicadas filled the humid air. They held hands as Benny led her off the trail into a grove of trees where he kissed her. His tongue, his hands surprised her. She had never been kissed before, and yet it seemed as if she had a memory of this kiss.
T
hat year Prohibition was repealed and public drinking resumed. Bartenders noted that more ladies than ever were showing up at the bars. A black man named Teddy Wilson started rehearsing with the Benny Goodman Trio. Al Capone was in jail, and Germany elected an obscure Austrian politician as chancellor. Mayor Cermak of Chicago took a bullet meant for FDR, and a Nash street rod was rattling along a road north. The car rattled so much that Benny wondered if they'd make it to Charlevoix at all, let alone by dark.
It was a hot afternoon. His fingers gripped the wheel as Pearl fanned herself with the sports page of the
Tribune
. Beads of sweat coated her brow, and she kept wiping it with her handkerchief. They had just driven past Union Pier. They would have stopped here, but Jews weren't welcome at these resorts. Pearl didn't mind the long drive. She had never been so far from home. She had never seen this side of the lake.
“It's so blue,” she said.
“Just as blue on the other side,” Benny replied. He was sweating in his shirtsleeves.
“But it seems bluer here.” She wished she could go for a swim.
She longed to dip her feet into the cool water, let the waves lap at her toes. Instead they sipped warm root beer. In the afternoon they stopped in a park near the beach for a picnic. Oaks and elms loomed above them. Pearl lay a blanket on the ground. She took some sandwiches and hard-boiled eggs she'd made from a basket. They ate lazily as the lake churned below and a breeze blew through the canopy of trees.
After lunch Benny got up to stretch his legs. He walked back and forth, then paused beneath some trees. For a long moment, with his head cocked, he stood ever so still. Then his fingers began moving. To anyone else they'd be imperceptible, but Pearl noticed right away. They'd been quiet for so long. They were tapping against his thigh, and, as soon as she saw them, Pearl knew that he was listening again. He was listening to the birds.
They'd been married that morning in a simple ceremony. When the judge pronounced them man and wife, a shock rippled through Pearl. Benny had proposed three weeks before. The Century of Progress had just opened in Grant Park, and Benny invited Pearl to go. Together they'd strolled along the Great Wall of China, past the golden-roofed Lama Temple from Jehol and a teahouse from Japan where kneeling women in silk robes, their faces painted white, served tea the color of grass.
At the nunnery of Uxmal, Benny had asked Pearl if she'd marry him. She was gazing at the ancient Mayan calendar where time went in a circle, not a straight line. Pearl said nothing as they moved on to the bathysphere. It had taken William Beebe twenty-two hundred feet beneath the sea. Benny slipped his hand into hers as they marveled at the aluminum globe in which Auguste Piccard soared fifty-four thousand feet into the stratosphere. They roamed a diamond mine with its million-dollar display of glittering stones and stood before a robot that gave lectures on diet as it explained the workings of its own insides. They gazed at Tom Thumb, the huge engine that pulled. As Sally Rand danced naked behind a pair of ostrich feather fans, Pearl said yes.
The fair was illumined by the rays of a distant star. Arcturus was chosen because its 240 trillion miles to earth most closely corresponded
to forty light-years. The light had left Arcturus in 1893 during the Columbian Exposition. Now it had reached earth. It was harnessed to set aglow miles of incandescent bulbs and colored tubing. As the city sparkled in neon lights, the fate of Chicago was linked to the universe.
Almost two decades ago I asked Stuart Dybek to read a twenty-page memoir piece. Afterward his only comment was that I was writing a saga, not a story, and I should just sit down and write it. So my first thanks go to Stuart. I want to thank my many friends who have been readers and believers including Russell Banks, Jane Bernstein, Barbara Grossman, Rodger Kamenetz, Marc Kaufman, Michael Kimmel, Carina Kolodny, Valerie Martin, Varley O'connor, Peter Orner, Jodi Picoult, Dani Shapiro, and Susan Shreve. Also Christina Baker Kline, who shared many of her insights with me. Thanks to Jane Supino, who was always there when I needed her and whose presence I always feel beside me. And Carmen Corcostegui and Josef Badies, whose generosity provided the perfect writer's retreat in Barcelona in which I was able to complete the final revisions of this novel.
Thanks to my jazz experts, Krin Gabbard and Jamie Katz, who lent me books, spent endless hours answering my questions and pounding out rhythms on restaurant tables; jazz pianist Roberta Piket, who taught me how to play “Blue Monk”; Kevin Kendrick, who imagined some of the tunes; Tim Samuelson, historian with the city of Chicago, Department of Cultural Affairs; and the late Henry Grady Page, who shared with me his music and his stories of Chicago and Forty-Seventh Street. And to my cousin Mike Bell, my
Chicago geography and logistics expert, who showed me where the trams and trolleys didn't go, and who drove me all over the city like a location scout.
Thanks to the Chicago Historical Society, now the Chicago History Museum, for the use of its library and archives, especially its photo collection, and to Sarah Lawrence College, which provided me with assistance from the Ellen Schloss Flamm faculty development fund. My deepest gratitude to the Romare Bearden Foundation for allowing us to use
J Mood
on the jacket of this book and Emily Mahon for her beautiful design. And if one can thank a city, I want to thank my hometown of Chicago for its richness of history, stories, and its wild cast of characters.
While this is a work of the imagination, many books inspired and helped inform this novel. My mother perhaps started me on this journey with her favorite book,
Fabulous Chicago
, by Emmett Dedmon. I am also grateful to William Howland Kenney's
Chicago Jazz
and Laurence Bergreen's excellent biographies of Louis Armstrong and Al Capone. Also Krin Gabbard's outstanding
Hotter than That
, a history of the trumpet. And two brilliant books of Chicago history,
Black Metropolis
, by St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton, and
City of the Century
, by Donald Miller. I am also grateful to the writings of Ben Hecht and Studs Terkel. Mezz Mezzrow's
Really the Blues
helped me sink into the language of the era, and Geoff Dyer's magnificent
But Beautiful
helped me get into the head of jazz musicians.
I don't even know how to begin to thank my wonderful agent and friend, Ellen Levine, who always believed in this book. I know that
The Jazz Palace
would never have seen the light of day if it hadn't been for her loyalty and perseverance. And Nan Talese, who likewise stuck with this novel and whose brilliant edits have made this book so much better.
My late parents Rosalie and Sol Morris, both of whom lived a hundred years, made this era come alive for me with their stories and their music and their colorful expressions whose meaning only became clear to me in the years I spent reading and researching this book. It has been a great pleasure to dip into their world, and I will miss it as I miss them. To my daughter, Kate, whose insights and aerial
vision helped me see the way to making changes I was reluctant to make and who truly shaped the final version of this book. Last, there are no words to express my gratitude to my husband, Larry, who has lived with this book almost as long as he has lived with me. He never told me to give up, and he never stopped listening.
Mary Morris is the author of fourteen booksâseven novels, three collections of short stories, and four travel memoirs. The recipient of the Rome Prize in Literature, Morris teaches creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College. For more information visit her website at
www.marymorris.net
.