The City

I called after her: “I thought you came to visit Mrs. Lorenzo.”

Looking back, Miss Pearl said, “I came to visit you, Ducks.”

She walked away, and I went down to the sidewalk to watch her. With those slim hips and long legs, so tall in all that pink, she resembled a bird herself—not a parrot, an elegant flamingo. I waited for her to glance over her shoulder, and I meant to wave, but she never looked back. She turned left at the corner and was gone.

I raised my hands to my face and sniffed them and detected the faint scent of the lemons that earlier I had helped my mom squeeze for lemonade. I’d been sitting in the sun, and the film of sweat on my arms tasted of salt when I licked, but I couldn’t smell salt.

In the years to come, I would encounter Miss Pearl on several occasions. Now that I’m fifty-seven and looking back, I can see that my life would have been far different—and shorter—if she hadn’t taken an interest in me.

The next morning at the community center, the piano was in the Abigail Louise Thomas Room, which had been named after someone who’d done some good deed for the center back before I was even a gleam in Tilton’s eye. The Steinway was polished and tuned, even prettier than the woman in pink.

One of the center staff, Mrs. Mary O’Toole, was playing Hoagy Carmichael’s “Stardust,” and just then it was the loveliest melody I’d ever heard. She was a nice lady with lively blue eyes, freckles that she said had come all the way from Dublin to decorate her face, and a pageboy cap of red hair shot through with white that an unskilled friend chopped for her, as she disdained beauty parlors. She smiled at me and nodded to the bench, and I sat beside her.

When she finished the piece, she sighed and said, “Isn’t this a hoot, Jonah? Someone took away the spavined old piano in the basement and gave us this brand-spanking-new one and did it all on the sly. I can’t imagine how.”

“Isn’t it the same piano?”

“Oh, it couldn’t be. The lid was warped on that old one, the felt on the hammers moth-eaten, some of the strings broken, others missing. The sostenuto pedal was frozen. It was a fabulous mess. Some awfully clever philanthropist has been at work. I only wish I knew who to thank.”

I didn’t tell her about Miss Pearl. I meant to explain, and I started to speak. Then I thought, if I mentioned the name, it would be a spell-breaker. Come the next day, the Steinway would be back in the basement, as broken down as before, and Mrs. O’Toole would have no memory of playing “Stardust” in the Abigail Louise Thomas Room.

That day I started formal lessons.

6

That same night, as I lay sleeping in my small room, someone sat on the edge of the bed, and the mattress sagged, and the box springs creaked, and I came half awake, wondering why my mother would visit me at that hour. Before I could fully sit up in the dark, a hand gently pressed me down, and a familiar voice said softly, “Go to sleep, Ducks. Go to sleep now. I have a name for you, a name and a face and a dream. The name is Lucas Drackman and the face is his.”

Strange as the moment was, I nevertheless settled to my pillow and closed my eyes and drifted down through fathoms of sleep. Out of the depths floated a young man’s face, eerily up-lit and starkly shadowed. He was maybe sixteen, seventeen. Hair disarranged, forehead beetling over deep-set eyes open wide and wild in character, hawkish nose, a ripe and almost girlish mouth, blunt chin, pale skin glazed with sweat … Never before and only once again in all my life was a face in a dream so vivid and detailed. Lucas had an air of urgency and anger, but at first there was no nightmare quality to the moment. As a full scene formed around him, I saw his features were revealed by the backwash from a flashlight held low and forward. Lucas took necklaces and brooches and bracelets and rings from a jewelry box, diamonds and pearls, and dropped them into a cloth sack that might have been a pillowcase. In one of those fluid transitions common to dreams, he was no longer at a jewelry box, but in a walk-in closet, stripping currency and a credit card from a wallet that had been left there on a shelf. The Diner’s Club card had been issued to ROBERT W DRACKMAN. Then Lucas was bedside, playing the flashlight beam over the body of a man who apparently had been shot to death in his sleep. Still, I was not afraid. Instead, a deep sadness overcame me. To the dead man, Lucas said, “Hey there, Bob. What’s it like in Hell, Bob? You think now maybe sending me away to a freakin’ military academy was really stupid, Bob? You ignorant, self-righteous son of a bitch.” The flashlight beam found a forty-something woman who must have been awakened by the first rounds that Lucas fired. His mother. She could be no one else, for the possibility of Lucas’s face could be seen in hers. She’d thrown aside the covers and sat up, whereupon she had been shot once in the chest and once in the throat. She’d fallen back against the headboard, blue eyes wide but blind now, mouth hanging open, though she’d probably never had a chance to scream. Lucas called her a vile name, a single word that I have never used and won’t repeat here. A hallway. He walked away, and I did not follow. The light dwindled with him, dwindled and faded, and then a desolate darkness prevailed, and a sadness so keen that tears filled my eyes. She who had conjured a piano into the Abigail Louise Thomas Room spoke again: “Remember him, Ducks. Remember his face and his hateful words. Keep the dream to yourself, don’t tell others who might question or even mock it and lead you to doubt, but always remember it.”

I think I was awake when she spoke those words, but I can’t swear to that. I might have been asleep through all of it, might have dreamed everything, including her entrance into my room, her weight on the edge of the bed, the mattress sagging, the springs creaking. In the darkness, I felt a hand on my brow, such a tender touch. She whispered, “Sleep, you lovely child,” and either I continued sleeping or fell asleep once more.

When I woke with dawn light at my window, I felt that the dream hadn’t been just a fantasy, that it had shown me true things, murders that already had been committed somewhere, at some point in the past. Lying there as the morning brightened, I wondered and doubted and then banished doubt only to embrace it again. But for all of my wondering, I couldn’t answer even one of the many questions with which the experience had left me.

At last, getting out of bed, for a moment I smelled a certain sweetness of roses, identical to Miss Pearl’s perfume, which she had been wearing when she sat beside me on the stoop. But after three breaths, that, too, faded beyond detection, as though I must have imagined it.

7

The next bit of my story is part hearsay, but I’m sure this is how it went down. My mother would fib to help a child hold on to his innocence, as you’ll see, but I never knew her to tell a serious lie.

I was just over a week away from my ninth birthday, and Grandma Anita had ten months to live. I’d begun piano lessons thanks to Miss Pearl, and my father had been back with us about six months when he messed up big-time. We were still in that fourth-floor walk-up, and he wasn’t bringing home much money because he was getting part of his salary in stock.

Mrs. Lorenzo lived on the second floor, but Mr. Lorenzo hadn’t yet died, and Mrs. Lorenzo was thin and “as pretty as Anna Maria Alberghetti.” Anna Maria was a greatly gifted singer and a misused actress in films and eventually a Broadway star, petite and very beautiful. She won a Tony for Carnival! and played Maria in West Side Story. Although Anna Maria wasn’t as well known as other performers of Italian descent, anytime my mother meant to convey how lovely some Italian woman was, she compared her to Anna Maria Alberghetti. If she thought a man with Italian looks was especially attractive, she always said he was as handsome as Marcello Mastroianni. Anna Maria, yes, but I never understood the Mastroianni business. Anyway, Mr. Lorenzo didn’t want his wife to work, wanted her to raise children, but it turned out he couldn’t father any. So Mrs. Lorenzo ran a sort of unlicensed day care out of their apartment, looking after three little kids at a time, and on occasion me, too, as I’ve said.

When it happened, noonish on the first Tuesday in June, I was at Saint Scholastica, on the last day of the school year, being educated by nuns but dreaming of becoming a piano man.

My mom had left for Woolworth’s lunch counter at 10:30. When she got there, she discovered there had been a small kitchen fire during the breakfast shift. They were shutting down for two days, until repairs could be completed. She came home four hours early.

Because my father worked late nights at the restaurant, he slept from 3:00 A.M. until 11:00. She expected to find him still asleep or at breakfast. But he had showered and gone. She made the bed, and as she was changing from her waitress uniform, she heard Miss Delvane rehearsing her rodeo act up in Apartment 5-B.

Miss Delvane—blond, attractive, a free spirit—had lived above us for three years. She earned a living as a freelance writer of magazine articles and was working on a novel. Sometimes, from her apartment would arise a rhythmic knocking, maybe a little bit like horses’ hooves, gradually escalating in a crescendo, as well as voices muffled and wordless but urgent. On previous occasions, when I wondered about it, my mom said Miss Delvane was practicing her rodeo act. According to my mother, Miss Delvane’s first novel was going to be set in the rodeo, and because she planned eventually to ride in the rodeo as research, she kept a mechanical horse in her apartment to practice. I was five years old when Miss Delvane moved in and only eight when my mom came home from Woolworth’s early, and although I had doubts that a rodeo act was the full explanation, I accepted the basic premise. When I asked about the low groans, my mom always said it was a recording of a bull, because you had to lasso bulls or even wrestle them if you were in a rodeo, and Miss Delvane played the record to put her in the mood when she rode her mechanical horse. I had more questions than a quiz show, but I never asked Miss Delvane one of them, because Mom said the poor woman was embarrassed about how long it was taking her to get her rodeo act together.

Miss Delvane lived above us from mid-1963 through 1966, and though people in those days had a considerable interest in sex, the country hadn’t yet become one gigantic porn theater. Parents could protect you and allow you to have a childhood, and even if you might have vague suspicions of forbidden secrets, you couldn’t switch on a computer and go to a thousand websites to learn that … Well, that Bambi hadn’t been wished into existence by his mother, and neither had you.

So there was my mom, changing out of her uniform, listening to the rodeo act overhead, and it seemed to her that the groans and the trumpetings of the recorded bull were familiar. During the more than seven years when Tilton hadn’t lived with us, Mom had seen him from time to time, and she had stayed married to him, and when he wanted to come back, she’d taken him. Now she didn’t want to believe that it had been a mistake to let him through the door again. She told herself that all men sounded the same when playing the bull, when their cries of pleasure were filtered through an apartment ceiling. She told herself that it might even be Miss Delvane, whose voice had considerable range and could lower all the way to husky. By then, however, life had dealt Sylvia Bledsoe Kirk numerous jokers in a game where they weren’t wild cards, where they counted for nothing, and she knew this joker because he had ruined her hand before.

She threw his clothes and toiletries into his two suitcases and carried them out of the apartment. The building had front and back staircases, the second narrower and grubbier than the first. My mom knew that, by his nature, Tilton would be prone to slipping out the back, even though he had no reason to think he’d be seen descending from the fifth instead of the fourth floor or that the significance of that extra story would be obvious to anyone.

That day, Mom had decided that Tilton wasn’t just a skirt-chaser and a pathological liar and a narcissist and a self-deluded fool as regarded his career. He was all those things because he was a coward who couldn’t look at life head-on and face it and make a right way through it, regardless of the obstacles. He had to lie to himself about life, pretend it was less hard than it really was, and then press forward by one slippery means or another, all the while deluding himself into believing that he was conquering the world. My mother would never have called herself a hero, although of course she was, but she knew she wasn’t a coward, never had been and never would be, and she couldn’t stand to live with one.

She set the suitcases on the cracked and edge-curled linoleum on the back-stairs landing between the fifth and fourth floors, and she sat a couple of steps lower, with her back to them. She had to wait for a while, and with every minute that passed, she had less sympathy for the devil. Eventually she heard a door close somewhere above and a man slow-whistling “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’,” which had been a hit for the Righteous Brothers back in February.

Tilton was crazy about the tune and whistled it that afternoon without any sense of irony, although later he might have realized it wasn’t the perfect track for that particular scene in the music score for the movie of his life.

He opened the stairwell door and started down and stopped whistling when he recognized his suitcases. The man was an excuse machine, and I imagine at least three marginally believable and a dozen preposterous excuses flew through his mind before he continued to the landing. Of course, when he discovered my mom sitting a few steps down on the next flight, he stopped again and stood there, not sure what to do. He had always been quick with words and especially with justifications, but not that day. He was apparently unnerved by the way she sat in silence, her back turned to him. If she’d made accusations or started crying, he might have dared a lie, pretended he was innocent, but she merely sat there ready to bear witness to his departure. Maybe he thought she had a knife and would stab him in the back when he squeezed past her, encumbered by the suitcases. For whatever reason, Tilton picked up the two bags and, instead of continuing down with them, he returned to the fifth floor.

Sylvia got up from the step and followed. At the fifth-floor landing, when my father glanced back and saw her coming slowly after him, he grew alarmed and stumbled over the threshold, knocking the luggage against the jamb and the door, against his legs, like those old-time movie guys, Laurel and Hardy, trying to maneuver a jumbo packing crate through an opening too small for it. As he hurried along the hallway, my mom followed, saying nothing, not closing on him but not losing ground, either. At the head of the front stairs, he lost his grip on one of the bags, and it tumbled down the steps, and he almost fell after it in his eagerness to retrieve it and get out of there. Expressionless, never taking her eyes off her errant husband, Sylvia followed flight by flight, and Tilton’s hands were apparently so slick with sweat that the suitcases kept getting away from him, thudding against the walls. Because he couldn’t resist glancing back in anticipation of the nonexistent but expected knife, he misstepped a few times and careened from wall to wall as if the bags he carried were filled with bottles of whiskey that he’d spent the past few hours sampling.

At the landing between the third and second floors, pursued and pursuer encountered Mr. Yoshioka, a polite and shy man, an impeccably dressed tailor of great skill. He lived alone in an apartment on the fifth floor, and everyone believed that this gentle man had some dark or tragic secret, that perhaps he’d lost his family in Hiroshima. When Mr. Yoshioka saw my father ricocheting downward with reckless disregard for the geometry of a staircase and for the law of gravity, when then he saw my stone-faced mother in unhurried but implacable pursuit, he said, “Thank you very much,” and turned and plunged two steps at a time to the ground floor, to wait in the foyer with his back against the mailboxes, hoping that he had removed himself from the trajectory of whatever violence was about to be committed.

Tilton exploded through the front door, as though the building itself had come alive and ejected him. One of the abused suitcases fell open on the stoop, and he frantically stuffed clothing back into it. My mom watched through the window in the door until he repacked and departed. Then she said, “Lovin’ feelin’, my ass,” and turned and was surprised to see poor Mr. Yoshioka still there with his back against the mailboxes.

He smiled and nodded and said, “I should like to ascend now.”

She said, “I’m so sorry, Mr. Yoshioka.”

“The sorrow is all mine,” he said, and then he went up the stairs two at a time.

The event as I have just described it was the version that my mom told me years later. After school that day, I walked to the community center to practice piano. When I got home, all she said was, “Your father’s no longer living here. He went upstairs to help Miss Delvane with her rodeo act, and I wasn’t having any of that.”

Too young to sift the true meaning of her words, I found the idea of a mechanical horse more fascinating than ever and hoped I might one day see it. My mother’s Reader’s Digest condensation of my father’s leaving didn’t satisfy my curiosity. I had many questions, but I refrained from asking them. Truth is, I was so happy that I would never again have to sit in a barroom listening to nagging-wife stories, I couldn’t conceal my delight.

Right then I told Mom the secret I couldn’t have revealed when Tilton lived with us, that I had been taking piano lessons from Mrs. O’Toole for more than two months. She hugged me and got teary and apologized, and I didn’t understand what she was apologizing for. She said it didn’t matter if I understood, all that mattered was that she would never again allow anyone or anything to get between me and a piano or between me and any other dream I might have.

“Hey, sweetheart, let’s toast our freedom with some Co-Cola.”

We sat at the kitchen table and toasted with Coca-Cola and with slices of chocolate cake before dinner, and all these years later, I can relive that moment vividly in my mind. She had moved on from Brass Tacks to Slinky’s by then; but that wasn’t a night when she performed, so I had her all to myself. We talked about all kinds of things, including the Beatles, who’d hit number one on the U.S. charts just two years earlier with “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and “She Loves You” and four others. Four more chart-topping songs followed in ’65. Already in 1966, they’d had another tune reach number one. My mom liked the Beatles, but she said jazz was her thing, especially swing, and she talked about the big-band singers from Grandpa Teddy’s day. She knew all their work and could imitate a lot of them, and it was as if we had them right there in our kitchen. She showed me a book about that time, with pictures of those girls. Kay Davis and Maria Ellington, who sang with the Duke. Billie Holiday with Basie. They were all pretty and some of them beautiful. Sarah Vaughan, Helen Forrest, Doris Day, Harriet Clark, Lena Horne, Martha Tilton, Peggy Lee. Maybe the most beautiful of them all was Dale Evans when she was in her twenties, the same one who later married Roy Rogers, who had a real horse, but even the young Dale Evans wasn’t as pretty as Sylvia Bledsoe Kirk. And my mom could do Ella. She could scat so you thought for sure it was Ella and your eyes were deceiving you. We made Campbell’s tomato soup and grilled-cheese sandwiches, and we played 500 rummy. Years later, I realized that was the third time when my mother’s life fell apart, but in the moment, I didn’t see it that way. When I went to bed, I thought that had been the best day of my life to date.

The next day was better—magical, one of those days that my friend Malcolm calls a butter-side-up day. Trouble was coming, sure, but it’s always coming, and meanwhile it’s best to live with a smile.

8

A butter-side-up day …

Let’s take a little detour here called Malcolm Pomerantz. He’s a first-rate musician. He blows the tenor sax. He’s something of a genius who, even at fifty-nine, can still play an entire tone scale.

He’s crazy, too, but mostly harmless. He’s so superstitious, he’d rather break his back than break a mirror. And though he’s not so much of an obsessive-compulsive that he needs to spend a few hours a week on a shrink’s couch, he has routines that would make you crazy if you didn’t love him.

For one thing, he has to wash his hands five times—not four, not six—just before he joins the band onstage. And after his nimble fingers are clean enough to play, he won’t touch anything with his bare hands except his saxophone because, if he does, he’ll have to wash them five times again. The cleanliness of his hands doesn’t concern him when he practices, only when he performs. If he wasn’t such a superb musician and likable guy, he wouldn’t have a career.

Malcolm reads the newspaper every day but Tuesday. He will not buy a Tuesday newspaper, nor will he borrow one. He won’t watch TV news or listen to a radio on Tuesdays. He believes that if he dares to take in the news on any Tuesday, his heart will turn to dust.

He won’t eat mushrooms either raw or cooked, not in any sauce, even though he loves mushrooms. He won’t eat any rounded cookie that reminds him of a mushroom cap. In a market, he avoids that end of the produce section where the mushrooms are offered for sale. And if the market is new to him, he avoids the produce section altogether, out of fear that he’ll have a sudden fungal encounter.

As for the butter-side-up day: Each morning, he makes one extra slice of toast with breakfast, lays it on his kitchen table, and in a contrived-casual way, he knocks it to the floor. If it lands butter side up, he eats it with pleasure, confident that the day will be good from end to end. If it lands butter side down, however, Malcolm throws the toast away, wipes up the butter, and goes about his day with heightened awareness of potential danger.

On the first night of every full moon, Malcolm makes his way to the nearest Catholic church, puts seventeen dollars in the poor box, and lights seventeen votive candles. He claims not to know why, that it’s just a compulsion like the others with which he’s afflicted. I am inclined to think that he really doesn’t know the reason, that the seventeen candles are a way of keeping his pain at bay, and that if he allowed himself to understand his motivation, the pain could no longer be relieved. For most of us, the wounds that life inflicts are slowly healed, and we’re left only with scars, but maybe Malcolm is too sensitive to let the wounds fully close; maybe his obsessive-compulsive little rituals are like bandages that keep his unhealed wounds clean and staunch the bleeding.

Although I can’t explain all of Malcolm’s quirks, I know why never mushrooms and why always full-moon candles and why never the news on Tuesday. We have been friends since I was ten. Back then, he was not as he is now. His sweet kind of craziness evolved over the years. Malcolm is white, and I am black. We aren’t brothers bonded by blood, but we’re as close as brothers, bonded by the same devastating losses. I respect his ways, odd as they are, of dealing with his enduring pain, and I will never explain to him the meaning of his rituals, because that might deny him the relief he gets from them.

On one terrible day, each of us lost someone whom he loved as much as life itself. And some years later, again on the same day, we once more lost someone beloved, and yet again after that. I’m still an optimist, but Malcolm is not. Sometimes I worry about what might happen to him if I were to die first, because I suspect that his eccentricities will metastasize, and in spite of his talent, he will not be able to go on working. The work is his salvation, because every song he plays, he plays for those whom he loved and lost.