The City

9

Because Woolworth’s was still cleaning up from the kitchen fire, my mother didn’t have to work the lunch shift. She wanted to come with me to the community center, to hear what I’d learned of the piano, which I worried wouldn’t be impressive to someone who could sing like Ella. You should have seen her that day. She dressed as though it must be an occasion, as if she were accompanying me to some concert hall where two thousand people were waiting to hear me play. She wore a yellow dress with a pleated skirt and with black piping at the cuffs and collar, a black belt, and black high-heeled shoes. We walked the block and a half, and she was so gorgeous that people turned to look at her, men and women alike, as if a goddess had come down to Earth to walk this skinny boy someplace special for some reason too amazing to imagine.

Mrs. O’Toole was there, and I introduced them, and it turned out they had something in common: Grandpa Teddy. Mary O’Toole said, “My first husband played tenor sax with Shep Fields in ’41. Shep’s band was heavy with saxes—one bass, one baritone, six tenors, and four altos—and Teddy Bledsoe was the piano man part of that year, before moving on to Goodman.” Mary looked at me in a new way when she knew I was Teddy Bledsoe’s grandson. She said, “Bless you, child, now it makes perfect sense how you could come along so fast on the ivories.”

I had progressed quickly through the lessons, but what had excited Mrs. O’Toole was that recently I’d gotten to the place where I could listen to a piece of music and sit down and play it right away, insofar as my arms could reach and my fingers could spread. I had an eidetic memory for music, which is the equivalent of reading a novel once and being able to recite it word for word. If I was alone at the keyboard, I was able to play just about anything, regardless of the complexity or tempo, not a fraction as well as Grandpa Teddy could have played it, but still so you’d recognize the tune. I needed to have the bench to myself because I had developed this butt-slide technique, polishing the bench with the seat of my pants, slipping left, right, left as required without bumping my elbows or disturbing my finger placement, so I had good reach for a kid my age and size.

My mom stood listening to me play, and I didn’t dare look at her. I didn’t want her to make nice and pretend I was better than I truly was, but I didn’t want to see her trying to keep from wincing, either. The second thing I played was a favorite of hers, an old Anita O’Day hit, “And Her Tears Flowed Like Wine.” I was but three bars into it when Mom started to sing. Oh, man. Community center acoustics don’t measure up, but maybe that was still what those lyrics sounded like at the Paramount Theater or the Hotel Pennsylvania, back when O’Day was with Stan Kenton and was better than the band, before I was born.

I became aware that people were crowding into the Abigail Louise Thomas Room, drawn by my mom’s singing. I was so proud of her and embarrassed that she had no one more accomplished than me to accompany her. We were rolling toward the end, and she was better than great, her tone and her phrasing, and just then, among the little crowd, I saw Miss Pearl.

She wore the same pink outfit with the feathered hat that she had been wearing almost three months earlier when she sat on the stoop with me and called me Ducks. She wiggled her fingers at me, and I smiled.

I couldn’t wait to introduce Miss Pearl to Mrs. O’Toole, so that our benefactor could be thanked for the piano. I figured the shiny-as-new Steinway had been there too long suddenly to be dilapidated and in the basement again, with nobody to remember that it had been restored or replaced, which was the fear that had kept me from mentioning Miss Pearl on the first day I’d seen the piano glossy and black and beautiful. There you have the magical thinking of an eight-year-old boy: that when the miraculous happens, it soon can be undone by the whim of God, but if it isn’t undone in a day or a week or a month, then it becomes permanent, and even God doesn’t have the power to take it away.

The truth is, to this day I still pretty much operate under that assumption. If chaos plagues the world—and it does—and if there’s any benign power that wants the world to survive, then stability will be encouraged and rewarded. Maybe not all the time. But most of the time.

Anyway, we came to the end of “And Her Tears Flowed Like Wine,” when I stupidly added a concluding flourish that wasn’t part of the number. Fortunately, the crowd of community-center staff and patrons knew the song was over when my mom hit the last word, and they broke into applause that saved me from the embarrassment of them having heard the unnecessary flourish. A lot of the people who came there to play cards and socialize were older than Grandpa Teddy, and they knew the old tunes so well that they might have sung along if they hadn’t wanted to hear Sylvia Bledsoe solo. They called for more, and I looked at Mom, and she nodded.

The community center had some old records, and only a couple of days before, I’d heard “It All Begins and Ends with You,” sung by Mildred Bailey backed by the Red Norvo band. Without thinking to ask if my mom knew it, I ham-handed my way into it, and she sang along so beautifully that I sounded way better than I was. When I noticed that some of the gray-haired ladies had tears in their eyes, I understood for the first time why music matters so much, how it reminds us of who we are and where we came from, of all the good times and the sadness, too.

When we finished, everyone wanted to talk to us. I didn’t have much to say except “Thank you,” and they really had more interest in Mom than in me. They wanted to know where she performed. When she told them Slinky’s, many hadn’t heard of the place, and those who had heard of it looked disappointed for her.

While they gathered around my mom, I went looking for Miss Pearl, but I couldn’t find her anywhere. I asked several people if they’d seen this tall woman in a pink suit and feathered hat, but no one remembered her.

From the center, my mother and I walked to the nearest park, which was her idea. It wasn’t much of a park, some trees and benches and a bronze statue of some former mayor or someone who would have been embarrassed to have his image in a park that had gone as crummy as that one, except that he was probably dead. There had been a plaque under the statue, telling who the bronze man had been, but vandals had cut it off the granite base. There were bare patches in the grass, and the trees weren’t properly trimmed, and the trash baskets overflowed. My mom remembered a vendor’s shack where you could buy newspapers and snacks and packets of little crackers to throw down for the pigeons, but it wasn’t there anymore, and what pigeons still hung around looked too red-eyed and kind of strange.

“What the heck,” she said. “Why not.”

“Why not what?”

“Why not make a day of it? Just you and me on a date.”

“What would we do?”

“Anything we want. Starting with a better park.”

We walked out to the main avenue, and we stood by the curb, looking for a taxi. She hailed a couple, and finally one stopped, and a man named Albert Solomon Gluck drove us to a better park, to Riverside Commons. In those days, there weren’t Plexiglas shields between the front and back seats, because no one yet imagined a time when drivers would be in danger from some of their passengers. Mr. Gluck entertained us with imitations of Jackie Gleason and Fred Flintstone and Ernest Borgnine, who were all big on TV back then, and he said he could do Lucille Ball, too, but he made her sound just like Ernest Borgnine, which really made me laugh. He wanted to be in show business, and one joke after another flew from him. I had my mom write down his name, so when he became famous, I would remember meeting him. Years later, I had reason to track him down, and though he didn’t become famous, I’ll never forget the first or the second time we met.

At Riverside Commons, he pulled to the curb and, before Mom could pay him, he said, “Wait, wait,” and got out of the taxi and came around to the rear curbside door and made a production out of opening it for us and presenting the park with a sweep of his hand, as if he had prepared it just for us. He was a portly man with bushy eyebrows and a rubbery face made for comedy, and everything about him suggested fun, except that I noticed his fingernails were bitten to the quick.

When we were on the sidewalk and Mom paid him, he took the fare but refused the tip. “Sometimes the quality of the passengers is the gratuity. But here’s something I want you and your boy to have.” From a pocket he took a pendant on a chain. When my mom tried to refuse it, he said, “If you don’t take it, I’m going to yell ‘Help, police’ until they come running, and I’ll make the most outrageous charges, and by the time we resolve the matter down at police headquarters, it’ll be too late to have your day in the park.”

Sylvia laughed, shook her head, and said, “But I can’t accept—”

“It was given to me by a passenger six months ago, and she told me she wanted me to give it to someone, and I asked who, and she said I would know when I met the person, but now it turns out to be two people, you and your boy. It’s luck on a chain. It’s good luck. And if you don’t take it, then it’s bad luck for me. Good luck for you, bad luck for me. What—you want to ruin my life? Were my jokes that terrible? Have a heart, lady, give me a break, take it, take it, before I scream for the city’s finest.”

There was no refusing him. After he drove away, we found a bench and sat there to examine the pendant. It had been fashioned from two pieces of Lucite glued together and shaped into a heart roughly the size of a silver dollar. Within the heart was a small white feather. It must have been glued there, but such an excellent job had been made of it that the feather looked fluffy, as though it would flutter inside the heart if you blew on the Lucite. A small silver eyehook, screwed into the top of the heart, received a silver chain.

“It must be really valuable,” I said.

“Well, sweetie, it’s not Tiffany. But it is pretty, isn’t it?”

“Why did he give it to you?”

“I don’t really know. He seemed to be a nice man.”

“I think he likes you,” I said.

“Actually, Jonah, I believe he gave it to me to give to you.”

With something like awe, I took the pendant from her when she held it out to me. “You really think so?”

“I’m sure of it.”

When I held the chain and allowed the dangling heart to turn back and forth, the polished Lucite looked almost liquid in the sunlight, as if the feather floated in a great drop of water that cohered magically to the eyehook. Or in a tear.

“What bird do you think it’s from?” I asked. “A pigeon?”

“Oh, I expect it’s from something more grand than a pigeon. Don’t you think it must be from some kind of songbird, one with a particularly sweet voice? I do. That’s what I think.”

“Then it must be,” I said. “But what’ll I do with it? It’s a heart, it’s like a girl’s jewelry.”

“And you can’t be seen wearing a girl’s jewelry—is that it?”

“I already get teased about being skinny.”

“You’re not skinny. You’re lean.” She elbowed me in the side. “You’re a lean, mean music machine.”

She always made me feel like more and better than I knew myself to be. I thought then that lifting a child’s spirits was something every mother did effortlessly. But as the years passed, I saw the world more clearly and knew how fortunate I was to have been brought to life by the grace of Sylvia Bledsoe.

There on the park bench, I said, “Mr. Gluck said it’ll bring good luck.”

“Never hurts to have some.”

“He didn’t say you could make a wish on it.”

“That’s easy luck, Jonah. Easy luck always turns bad. You want the kind of luck you have to earn.”

“Maybe it’ll be okay if I carry it in my pocket—you know, instead of wearing it.”

“I’m sure that’s fine. Or keep it in a nightstand drawer. The important thing is to keep it safe. When someone gives you a special gift, never treat it lightly. If you treat it like a treasure, then it’ll be one.”

When, years later, I learned who had given it to the cabbie and what it meant, the pendant would indeed prove to be a treasure.

10

With the pendant in my pocket, it seemed that the cloud-free summer sky blazed bluer than ever. The day was warm, and this part of the city looked cleaner than the part that we’d come from. As noon approached, the trunk shadows shrank toward the trees, and the web of branch shadows spread equally in all directions as if spooled out by spiders. The sun spangled the big pond, and through the quivers of light, we watched scores of fat koi that swam there from spring through autumn before being moved to indoor aquariums. Mom bought a twenty-five-cent bag of bread cubes, and the fish ventured right up to us, fins wimpling, mouths working, and we fed them.

I felt the most unexpected tenderness toward those koi, because they were so beautiful and colorful and, I don’t know, like music made flesh. My mom kept pointing to this one and that one—how red, how orange, how yellow, how golden—and suddenly I couldn’t talk about them because my throat grew tight. I knew if I talked about them, my voice would tremble, and I might even tear up. I wondered what was wrong with me. They were just fish. Maybe I was turning sissy, but at least I fed the last of the bread to them without embarrassing myself.

Almost half a century later, I feel that same tenderness toward nearly everything that swims and flies and walks on all fours, and I’m not embarrassed. Creation moves and astonishes if you let it. When I realize how unlikely it is that anything at all should live on this world spun together from dust and hot gases, that creatures of almost infinite variety should at night look up at the stars, I know that it’s all more fragile than it appears, and I think maybe the only thing that keeps the Earth alive and turning is our love for it.

That day in the park, after the koi, we walked the paths through the groves of trees and through the picnic grounds and around the baseball field. There weren’t as many people as I expected, probably because it was a workday. But when we started to talk about lunch, two guys, maybe sixteen or seventeen, fell in behind us, walking close to us, moving faster if we moved faster, slowing when we did. They were talking about girls they dated the night before, how hot the girls were and things they did to them. They wanted my mother to hear. I didn’t know all the words they used, didn’t understand everything they were bragging about having done, but I knew they were being rotten. That kind of thing didn’t happen often back then. It just didn’t. People wouldn’t tolerate it. People weren’t so afraid in those days. I threw the two trash talkers a couple of mean looks, and my mother said, “No, Jonah,” and kept walking toward the Kellogg Parkway exit from the Commons. But the braggarts talked filthier and started to comment on my mother’s shapeliness.

Finally she stopped and turned to them, one hand in her purse, and said, “Back off.”

One of them was a white kid, the other a mulatto, which was a word we used back then, meaning half black, half white. They were cocky and grinning, hoping to terrify her a little if nothing else.

The white one raised his eyebrows. “Back off? This here’s a public park, sugar. Ain’t it a public park, bro?”

His friend said, “It’s damn sure public. Man, the front view’s even more righteous than her ass.”

My mom raised her purse, her hand buried in it, and said, “You have a death wish?”

The white guy’s grin went from Cheshire to shark. “Sugar, there ain’t hardly any legal guns in this city, so what you’ve got in that purse is just a tampon.”

She stared at him as if he were a cockroach with pretensions, standing upright and talking, but a cockroach nonetheless. “Listen, shithead, do I look like some schoolteacher who cares what the law says? Look at me. You think I’m some hotel maid or dime-store clerk? Is that really what I look like to you, asshole? What I’ve got is a drop gun, no history to it. I kill you both, throw down the piece, and when the jackboots show up, I tell ’em you pulled the heat, it was robbery, but you fumbled, dropped it, I snatched it, thought you might have another one, so I used it. Either you walk away or we do it now, I don’t care which.”

All the wicked fun had gone out of their grins. They looked now as if they were wincing in pain, though there was cold fury in their eyes. I didn’t know how it might go, even in bright sunshine with other strollers in view, but my fear was exceeded by an exhilarating amazement. Sylvia’s performance had been so convincing that she almost seemed to be someone other than my mom, who never used bad language and who was as likely to be carrying a gun as I was likely to have earned a black belt in karate.

The two creeps salvaged their pride by insulting her—“Bitch” and “Skank” and worse—but they backed off and turned away. We stood watching them until we were certain they wouldn’t come back.

My mother said, “Just because you heard me use a couple of nasty words doesn’t mean you ever can.”

I was speechless, but for different reasons from the one that had rendered me silent by the koi pond.

“Jonah? Did you hear me?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Then tell me what I said.”

“Not to use nasty words.”

“Do you understand why I used them?”

“You faked out those guys.”

“I did, didn’t I?”

“You faked them out big-time.”

She smiled and took her hand out of her purse and zippered the purse shut and said, “How do you feel about lunch?”

“I’d like some.”

Surrounding Riverside Commons were fancy homes, but we had to walk only ten minutes or so to some shops and other businesses.

We had gone about a block when I asked, “What’s a tampon? That guy said you didn’t have a gun, all you had was a tampon.”

“It’s nothing, just a kind of sponge.”

“You mean like the one on the kitchen-sink drainboard?”

“Not exactly like that.”

“Like the ones they use at the car wash over on Seventh Street?”

“No, not that big.”

“Why would he think you had a sponge in your purse?”

“Well, because I do. Women do.”

“Why do you carry a sponge in your purse?”

“I like to be prepared.”

“Prepared for what? You mean like if you spill something?”

“That’s right.”

“Have you ever needed it?”

“Sometimes.”

“You’re a very neat person,” I said. “I try to be neat, too.”

We were passing a bus stop, and she said she needed to sit down on the bench, and when she sat there, she started laughing so that tears came to her eyes.

Sitting beside her, looking around but seeing nothing hilarious, I said, “What’s so funny?”

She shook her head and took a Kleenex from her purse and blotted her eyes. She tried to stop laughing but couldn’t, and finally she said, “I was just thinking about those two idiot delinquents.”

“They weren’t funny, Mom. They were scary.”

“They were scary,” she agreed. “But silly, too, in a way. Maybe I’m just laughing with relief, neither of us hurt.”

“Boy, you sure faked them out.”

She said, “And you kept your cool.”

When she finished blotting her eyes and blowing her nose, she tossed the Kleenex in a waste can beside the bench.

I said, “Are you sometimes able to fool idiots like them because the tampon sponge is shaped like a gun?”

That started her laughing again. I decided she had a case of the giggles, like when something strikes you a lot funnier than it really is but then for some reason everything seems funny until finally the giggles go away, sort of like hiccups.

Between giggles she said, “Honey … tampon isn’t … a nasty word. But you … shouldn’t use it anyway.”

“I shouldn’t? Why?”

“It’s not a word … little boys … should use.”

“How old do I have to be to use it?”

“Twenty-five,” she said, and just the number made her laugh harder.

“Okay, but is it still all right to say sponge?”

And there she went again.

Soon some people came along who were waiting for the bus, and we got up and let them have the bench and continued toward the shops. Walking seemed to cure my mom, and I was glad for that. I’d worried that the two delinquents might show up, because I was certain Mom wouldn’t fake them out again if she was unable to stop giggling.

We couldn’t afford to dine out often, and when we did dine out, we always went to the lunch counter in Woolworth’s, because as an employee Sylvia got a discount. That day, however, we went to a real restaurant, which she said was French, and I was relieved when it turned out they spoke English. The place had a holding bar with a scalloped canopy and a big mirror at the back, a black-and-white checkerboard floor, black tables and chairs with white tablecloths, and black booths with black-vinyl cushions and white cloths. The salt and pepper shakers were heavy and looked like crystal, and I was afraid to use them because if I broke one it would probably cost a fortune.

They had a few items for kids, including a cheeseburger, so of course I ordered that with fries and Coca-Cola. My mom had a green salad with sliced chicken breast on top and a glass of Chardonnay, and then we had what I called the best pudding in the history of the world and what Mom called crème brûlée.

We were waiting for that dessert when I leaned across the table and whispered, “How can we afford this?”

She whispered, “We can’t. We aren’t paying.”

Clutching the edge of the table, I said, “What’ll they do to us when they find out?”

“We’re not paying, your father is.”

Alarmed, I said, “He’s not coming back?”

“You know that quart mayonnaise jar he puts his pocket change in every night? When I packed his things for him, I didn’t pack that.”

“Maybe he’ll come back for it.”

“He won’t,” she said with conviction.

“But isn’t it wrong to take his money?”

“No, it’s his security deposit.”

“His what?”

“Landlords make you put down a security deposit, some hard cash, when you move in, so if you damage the apartment before you move out, they already have the money to cover it and don’t have to chase you for it. Your father never paid his share of rent since he moved back in, and he did some damage yesterday. He sure did some damage. So I kept his jar of change as a security deposit, and now he’s buying us a fancy good-bye lunch.”

Years would pass before I had crème brûlée again and could learn if it really was the best pudding in history or if it just tasted so good because of the circumstances. Nothing could have been better, after all, than the gift of an expensive good-bye lunch from my father without him there to ruin it.

That afternoon, we saw a funny movie starring Peter Sellers, and that evening I spent with Mr. and Mrs. Lorenzo, where I fell asleep on their sofa with Mr. Gluck’s pendant held tightly in my right hand. Sometimes I half woke and thought I could feel the feather fluttering softly. When my mother came home after midnight, following a four-hour set at Slinky’s, Mr. Lorenzo carried me up to our apartment, and I was so sleepy that Mom tucked me in bed in my underwear rather than make me get into pajamas. She wanted to put the pendant safely in a nightstand drawer, but I held fast to it.

I dreamed of a great white bird as big as an airplane, and I rode on its back with no fear of falling, the world sparkling below, forests and fields and mountains and valleys and seas where ships sailed, and then the city, our city. People looked up and they pointed and waved, and I waved back at them, and it was only when the bird began to sing that I realized it wasn’t as big as an airplane anymore and wasn’t in fact a bird anymore, but was instead my mother dressed all in flowing white silk, with wings more beautiful than those of a swan. Carried safely upon her back, I could feel her heart beating, her pure heart beating so steady and strong.