Young Man With a Horn (21 page)

‘Yes, Mr. Morrison,’ Rick said, and he took his place beside Harry Cromwell, the hot man of the vocal trio. Smoke and Jeff sat down in a corner.

The light came on. Phil Morrison waved his stick and the trio started to sing, backed only by piano and drums, and at the end of their chorus Rick broke through, out in front of the full orchestra for a chorus that was as reckless a piece of trumpet playing as any the Grandbranch Building ever contained. He was Orpheus on the loose for thirty-two bars. At one point Smoke couldn’t contain himself: he said Oh Oh right out loud, and you can still hear it on the record, if you listen closely. At the end of the solo Rick dropped back for the saxophone figures and worked in the background, but after that he couldn’t be heard at all; he kept his trumpet up to his mouth but he didn’t play.

He looked fine on ‘Wistful and Blue,’ not so mad, not so rash, but better, somehow, more intelligent and sensitive. It was the best record Morrison ever put out—a good melody, arranged not as a succession of solo choruses with varied rhythmic accompaniments, but as a beautifully developed series of variations on a clean tune. It began with a brief ensemble introduction, followed by an equally brief passage from Rick’s trumpet; and the rest was a matter of fine balance, one instrument coming up to show against the background and then dropping back to let another one in. It was a pretty performance on all sides.

They didn’t finish the four tunes until ten minutes after eleven, and when they opened the door, Josephine Jordan was waiting in the hall with Matthew Brown, and she was on the point of getting temperamental.

‘What’s the good of using another studio?’ she was saying. ‘What’s the good of using another room, when all my accompanying artists are in here, in this one, making records for Phil Morrison?’

Smoke went toward her. ‘We ain’t making a record, honey,’ he said; ‘we’re just listening to Rick make one.’

And then Josephine, who was as big a name as New York could offer in that season, wanted to know just why in hell was it that her accompanying artists would rather loll around listening to a bunch of mugs making a record than make one themselves. Which thing, she wanted to know, was more important? She tapped a patent-leather slipper, fast, while waiting for her answer. Her head was up and there was fire in her eye.

‘How could we be on time to make a record with you, when Rick’s going to play on it too and he had to make four for Morrison first? That’s why. We’re just waiting around for Rick to get through with this one, so he can work on yours.’

That brought a snort but nothing else. Rick came up to them with his trumpet under his arm. Josephine looked at him. She was open-mouthed with surprise for a moment, and then she broke into the Jordan laugh, a well-tempered version of the old Hi-Yi.

‘Wait till Amy gets a look at that shiner!’ Rick felt the side of his face. There was a lump on his temple where he’d struck it when he fainted.

‘No shiner; it’s a bump. I was in an accident.’

‘Yah,’ Jeff said, ‘he was in an accident. It was almost pretty bad.’

‘Looks bad enough to me the way it is,’ Josephine said. ‘It looks terrible. What are you going to tell Amy? She was burnt up anyway the way you ran out on her party last night.’

‘I didn’t run out. I just didn’t show up. You go?’

‘Sure thing, I went. You missed something, running out that way. That boy Jay’s a kick; you want to watch him.’

‘Who else was there?’

Nobody else, according to Josephine. Nobody else except Jay and Amy and that girl Maude, Amy’s friend. Maude Petersen, enough like Amy to be her twin—walked like Amy, talked like Amy, dressed like Amy. The only difference was that Maude, if you wanted Josephine’s opinion, was a little off in the head, just slightly off her nut. She’d sit and stare and stare and then say she was a negro-what’s-it, a negrophile, said it twenty times, couldn’t seem to get it off her mind.

‘And if she’s any part, I’m a Hindu,’ Josephine said. ‘Do you know her?’

‘No,’ Rick said. ‘I’ve only heard her name.’

‘She’s all right, but whatever she’s got it’s got her worried, poor devil. She’d keep telling me she’s one of these. Nothing
I
could do about it, give her another drink. She got pretty tight. We all did.’

‘How was Amy?’

‘Swell, same as always. Sore at you, though. She was counting on you to bring Dan and Jeff and have them play. She said you said you would. I think she was pretty sort of put out.’

‘We played somewhere else,’ Rick said. ‘What are we going to make?’

‘I told you twice last week. “Mama Goes Where Papa Goes,” and “Sam, the Old Accordion Man.”’

‘Nice pair,’ Rick said. ‘It ought to sell.’

Morrison’s boys were getting out; the studio was almost empty. Phil came up to Rick and told him to get some beefsteak on that as soon as he could.

‘Don’t he look like hell, for a fact?’ Josephine said. ‘Dan and Jeff look all right, but look at
him!
’

‘All three of them look like hell to me,’ Phil said, and he meant it. He turned back to Rick and said, ‘Another thing, they want me to make up a band for a college shindig in Boston next Friday night and they want you in it.’

‘Too far,’ Rick said. ‘I wouldn’t go to Boston if they gave it to me.’

‘That’s what I told them, but they won’t take anybody but you, and they seemed to want you bad. Two hundred and a quarter.’

‘I’ll have to think it over,’ Rick said. ‘Boston’s a hell of a ways. Tell them to have it down here and I’ll play. I like to stay in town.’

‘They want you there. Two and a quarter and transportation.’

‘I’ll think.’

Phil started to leave, but he turned at the door to come back and say, ‘Get your hair cut, too; you look like a Greek.’

It was almost eleven-thirty. Rick looked at his trumpet, Josephine took off her coat, and Jeff sat down at the piano. Smoke began to assemble his drums and the four of them got their signals together: for ‘Sam, the Old Accordion Man,’ it was to be a lead-off by Jeff, then verse with voice, piano and drums, then chorus with Rick playing a running obbligato, then trumpet solo for the first section of the second chorus with Josephine coming in at the mid-section to finish it up. It was the stock arrangement for vocal records. Same thing for ‘Mama Goes Where Papa Goes’ except for trumpet in the lead-off and two bars of vamp-till-ready to build up Josephine’s entrance.

Everything was set. The light came on and they started with Sam. Josephine was in form; she was always in form, anytime, day or night. Her voice was rich and rough singing

Rick stood right beside her and played obliquely out from every note she sang. Among them, they made a good thing of it, Josephine and Rick lifting the melody and Smoke and Jeff weaving it tight with rhythm. Josephine came through in the fine wild way she had; she was the star, it was her record, but Rick could never play anything without lighting up a little on his own.

They did ‘Mama Goes’ next, and it was in that one that the unheard-of happened. It went beautifully almost to the end. Josephine sang verse and chorus, Rick played the first eight bars of the second chorus, Josephine took it from there, and then, for a finish, they went into half-time together for a short coda that built up from the tonic note higher and higher and wilder and wilder until Josephine held it and Rick pushed it on, staggered up and down the scale with it until he hit his note, and then slid up to catch it once and for all—and he fluffed. No doubt about it, it went wrong. It would have been a killer, but it missed.

Nobody said a word. Rick held onto his trumpet and stared straight ahead of him. Smoke and Jeff got up and moved a step or two toward him and stopped. Then he raised his arm and they had to grab him to keep him from throwing the horn against the wall. Smoke took it away from him, and he sank into a chair, put his hands over his face, and stayed there that way.

‘The record’s all right,’ Jeff said to him, quietly. ‘They can polish off those last ribs, nothing to it.’

Matthew Brown said, ‘Of course.’

Smoke put the trumpet in the case, got Rick’s coat and his own and said, ‘Let’s get out. We’re through,’ and when Rick just sat there without moving, Josephine leaned down and kissed him lightly on the side of the head. ‘Go ahead, baby lamb,’ she said, ‘and get some steak for that. The record’s wonderful.’

Rick stood up, felt in his pockets until he found a cigarette, and lighted it. He took his coat from Smoke, put it on, took his trumpet case, and went out the door without saying anything.

‘Whyn’t you go with him?’ Jeff said to Smoke.

‘He don’t want me; I can tell.’

Jeff and Smoke and Josephine and Matthew Brown stood around for a while, thinking about it, and then Jeff said: ‘He hasn’t got any call to take it so hard. We can do it over.’

They waited a minute, and Jeff went on almost as if he were talking to himself: ‘I don’t know what the hell that boy thinks a trumpet will do. That note he was going for, that thing he was trying for—there isn’t any such thing. Not on a horn.’

Word gets around. Smoke and Jeff didn’t say anything, but Josephine was female and Matthew Brown was there, and within a week it was all over town that Rick Martin had spoiled a record for Josie Jordan.

Narration varies with the narrators. The thing began, no doubt, with Matthew Brown telling someone that the record had to be scrapped, or with Josephine telling someone that Rick ran out on his wife’s party and turned up next day at the studio with a blue eye. Simple statements, but a simple statement that runs the gauntlet can take a serious beating. All kinds of things were said, but the essence of all the tales was that the great Rick Martin was played out, the skids were under him, it wouldn’t be long now; too bad, too; he used to be the fair-haired boy of lot until he got to tearing around with the Harlem crowd. Niggers can stand that stuff, but a white man can’t.

There was a variant that started the same way but ended by laying the blame on his having married a rich society girl and having gone soft on her old man’s money. Poor bastard, he was all set to climb into the social register when the girl threw him out on his ear.

No one ever said that he was the one that did the leaving, that he left the girl because he knew, without even thinking the words, that she wasn’t good enough for him. That wouldn’t have occurred to anyone. And it didn’t occur to anyone that the reason he stayed with the Harlem crowd was that they were his rightful friends, they were closer to the music than any of the white men were; they were close to it in the same way he was.

And finally it never occurred to anyone that he really wasn’t slipping, he wasn’t played out; he was only getting so good that he couldn’t contain it. Nobody but Jeff Williams realized why he’d mugged up the record.

There wasn’t much fuss about his leaving Amy. She was in trouble of her own and she scarcely knew when it happened. The morning Rick went back to the apartment to get his clothes, a week or so after the session at Silver’s, he found her asleep on the sofa with her coat on. He’d gone in thinking she’d be away at school, but there she was asleep in the living-room with a long green dress on, and silver sandals, and a fur coat, and she started up, scared, when he came in.

‘Oh, you,’ she said. She didn’t ask him where he’d been; he didn’t ask her where she’d been. She looked around for something to say, and said: ‘You’ll have to pardon the condition of the house. Ramundo’s taking finals.’

He looked down at her for a moment. She looked tired out.

‘Don’t you go to school any more?’ he said.

‘Me?’ she said, surprised. ‘Oh, yes, I go to school; I was just on my way now.’

It was all right. Neither of them cared what either of them said. It was simply a question of holding up the exterior, making speech and gesture to prove that they were of this world, human beings on the face of the earth.

‘I’d like to get some things,’ Rick said.

‘Right,’ Amy said, and he went into the hall and came back with six suits and dumped them on a chair and went out the front door and came back in five minutes with a taxi-driver. ‘Those,’ he said, and the driver picked up the suits and took them out. Rick went back to the hall and brought out other suits and overcoats and hats and shoes, and the driver came back and took them, while Rick packed a bag of shirts and socks and those things. Amy didn’t get up from the sofa all the while he was there. She just lay there looking tired and glazed and beautiful.

When Rick came back into the studio with his bag, she said, ‘It didn’t work out, did it?’ ‘What?’ Rick said, and she said: ‘The thing with us. It
was
a flop, wasn’t it?’

Rick stood by a moment, not looking at her, and then he said, ‘Yes, something was wrong.’

‘Yes,’ Amy said. ‘Something always seems to be. Get your records before you tell me good-bye.’

‘Keep them. I don’t need them.’

‘Neither do I.’ Amy turned and looked up at him, with the old, curious look. ‘Kiss me before you go,’ she said.

Rick bent down and kissed her, but even so he left.

It wasn’t so simple when he left Phil, because Phil didn’t want him to go, and he really didn’t want to go either. It was just one of those false plays, and it got out of both their hands, so that what happened was that Phil fired Rick and Rick quit at the same moment. Phil only meant to ask him if he didn’t want to take a vacation, get some rest, but he had a nasty nature, and first thing he knew he was telling Rick either to quit drinking on the job or get out. And Rick, who had built up a taste for adulation and had never even smelled any criticism, flared like a torch and asked what it was, anyhow, a Salvation Army Band? Then he liked the sound of that and he went on to say that, come to think of it, it did sound like one; it was a foul band, a terrible band, and no wonder he got tight on the stand, sitting in there listening to it every night of his life. Either get tight or go nuts.

‘So my band’s foul?’ Phil said.

‘It’s terrible,’ Rick said. ‘It’s awful. Who’ve you got besides me? The trio’s good, but they can’t sing
all
the time. If you had enough ear to hear Jeff Williams’s band just once, you’d shoot yourself.’