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 t
wo 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.
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, dra
wn 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.