The Jazz Palace (9 page)

“I know that.” Mr. Marcopolis took a last sip, then put his cup down. “Why don't you play for me what is inside your head?” Benny sighed, then shrugged. “As I'm sure you know by now, I won't tell your mother.”

Benny sat down at the keyboard. He roughed out the refrains he'd learned at Honey Boy's door and improvised a few bars before he took off, jumping into the tune. Soon he forgot where he was. He forgot that he was in an apartment in a building and that an old man with aging bowels and unlived dreams was seated beside him with his eyes closed. Benny may as well have been a bird, circling in the sky, or a waking child, opening its eyes. As he played for no one in particular, he lost himself. He didn't notice the deepening shadows of the day or the clang of the trolleys in the street. When he ran out of steam, Benny stopped, and his teacher was silent for a while. When Mr. Marcopolis spoke, Benny was startled, for he'd forgotten that he wasn't alone in that room. “We'll begin with middle C,” Dimitri Marcopolis said. “Do you know why it's called that?”

Benny struck the note. “Because it's in the middle of the keyboard.”

“No,” Mr. Marcopolis said, drawing lines on a sheet of paper. “Because it's in the center of the notations between the bass and treble clef.” His teacher made flourishes, showing Benny the treble and bass clef. Then he drew a circle with a stem like a germinating seed. “That is middle C.” He scribbled in a string of notes along the sides. “You read this upwards and downwards. You will learn the circle of fifths. The circle of fifths is a circle of intervals above middle C that increases, then drops the number of sharps and flats until it returns to middle C which has no flats and sharps.”

Benny looked perplexed. “I don't understand…”

Mr. Marcopolis rose and moved his fingers up and down the keys showing Benny the circle of fifths. “Music isn't just about sound, about pleasure and entertaining. It is also about order.” Mr. Marcopolis slid his fingers through a series of chords, built upon the circle of fifths. “You need to understand how the world started. You see, I believe the universe began with a collection of molecules and into
those molecules a wave came that reverberated like a tone, and that tone set everything in motion. It all began with music.”

Benny shook his head. “I'm not sure what this has to do with what I just played for you.”

His teacher ignored the comment. “That is why when you look at the circle of fifths, you see that music and its harmony comes at perfect intervals, that everything is a circle, that all things go back to the beginning. It starts at middle C, then ripples out from there. The world finds its power in roundness and that roundness”—he drew another circle on the page—“that sense of return began with music. It is the source of the perfect order of the universe.”

His teacher paused, sighing. “It is like religion.” Benny didn't take his eyes off of him. “But somehow you understand this intuitively. It is where your perfect pitch comes from. You know how everything is in order and all things return to where they began.” Benny shook his head. He had no idea what he was supposed to learn here. He was about to ask when Mr. Marcopolis rose and showed him to the door. “That's enough of a lesson for one day.”

I
n the afternoons when he practiced, Benny resisted going into the sewing room for as long as he could. He portioned out his time. If he went right into the room, he'd lose precious moments at the piano. And vice versa. He found himself pulled in these two directions. No matter what he was doing, he had to listen for Hannah's footsteps when she came up the stairs. As soon as he heard her, he had to shift quickly from the blues to Beethoven. Or he'd have to rearrange the basket of scraps on the floor.

Benny noticed that the contents of the basket were dwindling. This was cause for concern. He thought of going to Abramovitch's Dry Goods and buying some fabric, cutting it into squares, but only Hannah would know what kind of cloth she used to make their shirts and pants. More and more Benny tried to stay at the piano and resisted opening the sewing room door. In this way his piano playing improved.

In a jailhouse in New Orleans Joe “King” Oliver was planning ahead. He'd been sitting in a stinking cell for a night and the better part of a day. Because he'd argued with the cops, they'd stuck him all alone. It was Saturday and he was fairly certain that no one would spring him before Monday. So he had plenty of time to think. The night before a fight had broken out in the honky-tonk where he was playing. When the police arrived, they arrested everyone—including the band.

Ever since he returned from Chicago, Joe Oliver had had nothing but trouble. He spent enough nights in jail over the years to know that he didn't want to spend many more. The South wasn't safe for a black man. Train porters brought down copies of the
Chicago Defender
. He'd read of the Mississippi boy whom some white gentlemen had burned at the stake. Another boy who'd had his fingers and toes chopped off. Joe Oliver shook his head as if he could make those thoughts go away.

As he munched on a crust of bread, a mouse scurried into his cell. It came right in front of him and stood on its hind legs. Joe laughed. He held out a few crumbs and the mouse snatched them from Joe's palm and raced away. Joe rubbed his gums and spat onto the floor. Even a mouse wouldn't keep him company. His gums were mushy and in his spit he saw blood. He wanted to get out of the
South while he still had his chops. He was almost forty years old and he didn't know how much time he had. Jazz was migrating. Music was what the black man could do. It was his ticket. He'd go wherever it took him—even years later to Savannah, where he ended up a janitor with a pushcart and broom.

As soon as Joe Oliver got out of jail, he packed up his wife and little girl and headed back to Chicago. His band would come with. Maybe even that street urchin who blew the cornet like he was talking to the angels (or maybe the devil) would join him one of those days. That boy who walked all over him when he let him sit in. King Oliver would form the best band that there ever was. And he'd bring that rascal—the one they called Dippermouth—north with him. Some people have great talent. Others are born to recognize great talent. Joe Oliver had made his peace with the fact that he was the latter. In a few weeks he landed the gig at the Lincoln Gardens. He brought a sound with him that no one had ever heard. And they came from all over to listen.

It wasn't long before Benny was standing outside the Lincoln Gardens, listening to King Oliver's band. He hardly went to school anymore, and when he did, it was mostly to sleep. Benny liked to say that he was going to night school instead. The Stroll was his classroom. And he was studying all the time. Every chance he got, Benny traveled down Satan's Mile. He didn't mind the stench or the grit. He didn't mind being the only white boy for blocks. In fact, he welcomed it. And some even joked that in summer he turned dark enough; he could pass.

During the days in the cutting room Marta stared at him. He tried to avoid her gaze. She looked at him as if she saw right into him. She knew what he thought about her. What he did to her in his mind when he was alone. When she looked at him, he grew hard. He imagined all the ways he would touch her if he could. And now he thought that she might want him to touch her. Perhaps she longed for him the way he longed for her. Then he would have to do something. Something that despite his seventeen years he could only imagine but not quite believe.

He grew more and more shy of her, and the shyer he grew the
more scraps of his mother's cloth he tossed out the window into the garbage cans below until he began to worry that his mother might start to miss them. He began to scrounge around the sewing room, looking for bits of cloth he could throw in. He cut up what he thought was a scrap of denim until Hannah shouted at them in the evening that someone had taken a scissors to Arthur's new jacket. As he watched the scrap basket go down, Benny had no idea what to do.

One day when Benny was going off on a delivery, Marta motioned to him. “Come here,” she whispered through her gold teeth. Her heavy breasts rose and fell. She looked flushed, blotchy. Feverish almost. He trembled. She was going to tell him something. She was going to tell him that she knew. Or perhaps she'd ask him to meet her after work. How old could she be? Twenty-five, thirty at the most.

Perhaps he'd meet her in the alleyway not far from Lehrman's Caps and lift her skirts, crushing her against a wall. Or in a room she stayed in nearby. But when he saw her face, he knew she would not ask him anything of the kind, and yet he also knew that he would do whatever she asked. Her eyes were red and puffy as if she had been crying. Then she asked him, “Can you do something for me?”

“Whatever you want,” Benny said.

“I have a sick child at home,” Marta began, her voice speaking to him for the first time in a barely intelligible English. “And she needs some medicine. She is alone and I am worried about her.” It never occurred to Benny that Marta had a child or that, when she came to work, she worried about her. That those breasts he'd wasted his mother's cloth scraps on had suckled a baby. Though he didn't realize this yet, he would never think of her in the same way again. Whenever he started to imagine her, coupling against a doorway, lying half naked across the sewing bench, he would see the child.

“If you could take her this candy and this syrup.” Marta whispered her request. She gave him the address. “Go to the fifth floor. Knock once. Wait. Then knock three times. This way she'll know I've sent you.” There was a soft, pleading sound to her words. If Benny could just go after his deliveries into the old Slovakian neighborhood on the West Side, until he came to some dilapidated buildings
she described. Hers was the third on the left, then up five flights, just take one transfer, not so far out of his way, really.

She handed him a small sack and a slip of paper with the address. Benny looked at the address. It was far out of his way. And he'd have to take two streetcars home, but Marta had such a worried look on her face. Her eyes begged him to go.

T
he streetcar toward Cicero was packed with women in babushkas who resembled Marta. Some got on with wailing children. Others carried oily fish, wrapped in newspapers. Their long skirts flopped across their wide hips. One woman got on with a squawking chicken. “Hey, lady, no live chickens on this bus,” the driver told her. The woman spoke only Polish. Someone translated for her. With a shrug she snapped the chicken's neck in two.

Benny gazed at uninhabited lots filled with trash and broken glass. Children in rags played barefoot in the ruins. Benny felt the horror of these open spaces. It was in a lot such as these that Harold had disappeared. Some of the children had running sores, snot dripping from their noses. Men sat slumped in the entrances to buildings. When the driver announced his stop, Benny got off. A cold breeze blew across the vacant lots and down the alleyways. Glass shards cracked under his feet. Mangy dogs cowered.

He peered up at a building. Its ground-floor windows were boarded up as if there had been a fire. The façade was crumbling. He walked into the dreary entranceway and climbed up slowly, one step at a time, until he reached the fifth floor. The smells of lard and garlic weren't familiar to him, and his stomach began to turn. When he reached Marta's door, he knocked once as she'd told him to do. Paused, then knocked three times.

A girl opened the door. She had sallow skin, and her eyes were dark pits. When she coughed, he said, “I brought you some things from your mother.” He wished he were on the Stroll, listening to some jass. But when he handed the child the candy, her eyes lit up. She invited him inside. Except for some breakfast dishes, the apartment was neat and clean, but tiny. Damp laundry hung on a line.
There was a cot in the kitchen where the child slept. Another cot sat in a corner of the living room and a curtain divided the space in two. Without going any farther he could see that there was no other room.

Each time the child coughed she clutched her chest. “Here, I brought you some medicine, too.” Benny searched for a spoon and gave her the syrup that she took without making a face. After a few moments her cough seemed to lessen. There was even some color in her cheeks when she handed Benny a book. At last the girl spoke. “Would you read me a story?” Then she took his hand and led him to the couch.

He read her a story about a brother and sister who spend a day skating on a pond. Benny kept expecting something to happen—one of the children falling through the ice, a bad man coming. It wasn't much of a story really. Still it made Benny wish he could take the child skating. He wondered if she even knew what skating was. He imagined himself, gliding back and forth with her and the child laughing, a muffler around her neck.

He stayed with the girl until the early evening when it was already dark. Marta should have been home by now. Benny wondered if he should wait. But the girl had been alone when Benny got there. Surely she could spend time alone until her mother arrived. His own mother might be worried, but he couldn't help himself. There was a pot of soup on the stove. It was a watery bean soup with grease floating on the top. He wanted to taste it, but feared it was seasoned with lard or salt pork—meat that had never touched his lips. He heated the soup and fed it to the child who ate with a loud slurping noise. Then she lay down to rest. Benny did the dishes. He washed whatever was in the sink.

When he left, he put his hand on her feverish brow and kissed her on the cheek, and she smiled. He made his way down the dark stairwell. At the tram stop Benny gazed up and saw the child in a top floor window. He waved and she waved back. When the tram pulled away, the girl was still there.

Benny was planning on going home. He had every intention,
but he couldn't. He couldn't go back to that dreary apartment. He couldn't go back to his mother with her silent anguish and his father with those judgmental eyes. Or the brothers who acted as if he wasn't there. He'd tried, but he couldn't live up to what they wanted. He thought, I should go home. Instead he transferred to the streetcar heading east, then south, and hopped off at Twenty-Seventh Street. Music came from behind every door as Benny roamed, popping his head into clubs. Girls beckoned from alleys. He was tempted by “the white plague” as it was called down here. Women selling their bodies to satisfy white men's yearnings.

He listened for a piano player with his ear to the door. If he liked what he heard, he talked the bouncer into letting him in. It was easy because they didn't see many white boys in that part of town. He peeked into the Firefly Lounge where he heard a good stride piano and bribed the bouncer. The Firefly had tiny white lights flickering over the ceiling and the walls, blinking from under the dance floor. Benny had never seen fireflies, but in school he'd read about insects that illumined meadows and forests on a summer's night. This must be what a field of them looked like.

It was a mostly black crowd. Women in short dresses with fishnet stockings kicked their legs, shook their backsides, dancing the Slim Betty. They swayed as arms flew in the air. Nobody seemed to mind that a white boy stood in their midst. A good band was playing—a few horns, drums, piano, and bass. They were from down south and there was Dixieland in their beat. Benny listened, but he couldn't get the girl with her sallow skin and deep cough out of his mind. The band grated on him now. It was playing honky-tonk too loud and the air was thick with smoke and laughter. He left in the middle of the set and kept going south.

On the Stroll the lights were bright, and black men in shiny suits and spats ambled with pale-skinned women in furs, cloche hats pinned to their heads. He paused at the Lincoln Gardens where King Oliver had just opened for a three-month gig, and they were playing up a storm. But he wasn't in the mood for that up-tempo. He cut down a side street, thinking about where he wanted to go, when
he heard that other horn. It wasn't like the Dixieland he'd listened to at the Firefly or outside the Lincoln Gardens. This was a mournful sound as if somebody was lost and couldn't get back.