Some Sing, Some Cry

  Taratata . . . It was Baker . . .

  As he leaned to put his mute away, his bandmate Preach teased from up front, “Buckwheat cakes with blueberries, like Grandma used to make for us, buttermilk oven-warm pound cake with a delicate, toasted French-made crush. Better watch out, Junior. That’s a whole lotta woman there.”

  Cinn found Baker in her bedroom, looking over her father’s charts with a cigarette in his hand. “Say, these look interesting,” thinking, Overlapping influences—club scene, Grandma’s spirituals. Textural interplay of sounds. Modern composition. He had changed his hair and grown a beard, a chiseled stripe on his chin.

  “It’s called a goatee.”

  “I know what it is,” she said as she took the charts from him. “They’re my father’s. I’ve been using them for inspiration.” She stiffened. “Baker, I don’t know what my cousin told you, but you cannot stay here. You can’t be here. I’m sorry.”

  She resisted her desire to fall into his arms while he stood there with all of his gentlemanly grace. “You need to relax,” he said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Your shoulders. You’re trapping the sound. May I?” He turned her to face away from him, then began kneading her back muscles between her shoulders. “I learned this technique while I was in Hong Kong.” She could feel the knots popping loose under the firm steady pressure of his fingers and thumb. His deep baritone voice with a slight gravel whispered in her ear, “Only thing I ever regret leavin’ was you.”

  He worked up her neck to the base of her hairline, his touch so gently cradling her skull. “See, that’s not so bad—touching.”

  “Yes, that’s delightful.” She turned, momentarily recovering her composure, and faced him, their noses almost touching, “But you still have to . . .”

  Blouse, skirt, tie, shirt, pants, shoes flew away from them and they fell onto her bed, impatient with passion. Garter belt unsnapped, she caught his hand at her hip. She was no easy thing, this soprano. She was complicated. He liked that. They moved like music, a comic duet. Flirting, wrestling, arousing. What she lacked in experience, she made up for in ardor, a complete surrender until he got to the bra snap or the edge of her panties. Enraptured, her body vibrated, the sensation of him thrilled her all over. Even the simulation was rapture. Melody filled her, all the movements of a song. Even through her underwear, she found her first notion of sex totally captivating. This is why they call it forbidden. They fell back from each other. He had come in his shorts. Laughed. Not since high school. She was quiet, glistening, her eyes fixed on him, adoring. She played notes on his chest with her left hand, caressed his brow with the fingertips of her right. From the placement of her fingers he could hear the melody and chord changes. They rolled over each other dragging the bedclothes right onto the floor, laughing and loving, finally falling asleep. When they awoke, the apartment was quiet. They were alone, the two of them, in that room, just the two of them in the world. He kissed one breast, which she gingerly put back in her bra.

  “I’ll get it off eventually.”

  Their lips met again, entwined like a couple of clef notes.

  Later when they emerged from her room, they discovered the party had pared down to Baker’s small combo of friends. Reno on sax, Waxby the drummer, Inglewood on bass, and Preach on stride, a new set of musicians who were edgier, rough-cuts of his former swing band comrades. Preach rubbed the tips of his fingers together, flexed, sat forward, and sprinkled some dewy green grains of marijuana over fresh tobacco and rolled a new joint. In between hits they had been regaling Memphis with tales from the road. Baker and Cinn rejoined the set, with Cinn trailing in a wobbling two-step behind him. Miss Tavineer had long ago passed out on the couch. Not wanting to compromise her mood, Cinn scurried around the apartment opening the windows.

  Preach observed the young couple and mused, “S’wonderful. S’marvelous. S’got to be volatile.” Both looked stunned, Baker even more than Cinn. Nothing like that had ever happened to him. He had been with the bandstand girls, townies, and background singers before. He had seduced band leaders and record producers with his virtuosity, gangsters, pushers, and narco cops with fast talk. He had many a hallway roster of women, and here he had only kissed the girl and made out like a teenager. Sensing the change in status, the inner sanctum of the round table all rose when the black prince and his lady entered, but they weren’t going to let the youngblood bask too long. Waxby was practicing paradiddles with his hands. “Hey, Baker,” he said without breaking the rhythm of the slap and slide of his palms, “they talkin’ bout you bad, man.”

  Inglewood continued his anecdote. “Youngblood comes to the club. Winter. Kansas City. Two degrees. Freezing like uh— We got uh old broke-down, beat-up bus. It’s two degrees inside the club, and he come wantin’ uh cuttin contest. Introduces himself as uh Baker Johnson Junior.” Inglewood manipulated his voice to be a perfect parody of his friend’s accentless Midwestern English. The elder band members laughed.

  Preach stuck out his tongue and patted his toes with glee. “Ask him, ask him ain’t, ain’t he, ain’t his real name uh Bubbuh or somethin’ like that.”

  Baker wanted to respond with a clever, poetic remark. He wanted to control the situation, to impress her. This was his band. Junior or not, he was making a name for himself. “So he got up on the bandstand with all this flourish,” Waxby picked up, “fingered the pedals, jerked his shoulders, Preach playin’ a furious medley of notes, finding every change within the melody, flyin! And here come Baker up underneath, ‘Beep, beep-deep.’ No vibrato, no nothing, but three little notes with a mute. Little did we know, nigguh was inventin’ a whole new style.” The entire combo broke into spasms of laughter.

  Baker smiled and continued rubbing down his horn. “S’ cool, man. Cool. Less is more. I’m just gettin’ started.”

  The paradox: As much as she irritated him, Cinn had shown him somethin’, challenged him. Because of her focus and the clarity of her pursuit, he demanded of himself, “How true are you to what you hear? How true are you to what you’ve been called to do?” Talkin’ through the mute, notes falling like dew onto petals, a flower by her ear, his solo came up beneath her. What’s the good of me all by myself? Though they had collided over the music, their heartstrings were still perfectly attuned. They fit, the harmony so close it hurt. Snatches of melody, strange groaning harmonies, rhythms delicate as wings breaking toward a headwind.

  They came to a truce on the music. He saw her between gigs, cramping her into his already heavy schedule, doubling his own drive. “Baby . . . What is happening is happening out here in the world, not in some class. We don’t need anybody else’s validation. We’re the only original sound in America,” he said. He took all of his old charts, threw them away, and started anew. He never wanted to sleep. Something was happening. “A leap in the music,” he said. She heard it in Baker’s voice, sensing the surge, the urgency. The Baker Johnson Quintet of trumpet, sax, piano, bass, and drums was a lean machine, playing the smaller clubs that dotted midtown Manhattan’s 52nd Street. Mixed crowds. No trouble. No dancing. It was all about the sound. People come to listen to the music.

  Cinn, for her part, surprised herself. Taratata! After her travails at school, she bore Baker a new respect for striking out on his own. Since discovering her father’s charts, she had developed a new interest in music theory and composition. Haltingly she had even begun writing some original compositions of her own. Her first sonata . . . she couldn’t wait to tell him. After class, she took the A train down to the Village, where he kept a little basement studio apartment. As she came up the subway stairs, she almost decided to turn back, then ran toward his block, singing, slipping like a schoolgirl on the wet cobblestones. The spring rain was banished, the sun was bright. Peering into his window, she shielded her eyes, squinting to adjust her view. Beyond the window’s half-shade, Baker was embracing a woman on the bed. Memphis.

  He ran after her and grabbed at her. She pushed him away and unleashed a
fury, the volume knocking him back—in the middle of the street, passersby making way for her bleeding rage. Waves of pain and tumultuous tears ricocheted through her body. Baker became the jazz life—the bandstand girls, the disrespect, cigarette smoke scratching her eyes and throat, the leers, bandmates’ hands slipping middle fingers down her palm, the women again, the secret society of drugs—the sound itself, its lack of boundaries, its insulated indifference to all but itself!

  “You must think you’re my woman!” he shouted back in assault and defense.

  She ran until she couldn’t hear him anymore—“Cinn, Cinn, I didn’t mean . . .” and disappeared down the subway stairs.

  A mask of tears, she rode around in that car for hours. How stupid! How stupid could you be! Regardless of who got on or off, she cried hysterical crazy chords. Mama El’s caution, “Never let a man come between you and your sister,” seized through her brain. “She’s not my sister!” she shrieked, her voice reduced to rasps. “If it weren’t for me, she wouldn’t even exist! Argh! How could I be so stupid?!” She finally got off at 145th Street, headed blindly toward her empty apartment. She wound up sitting outside Deacon’s mid-Harlem office.

  He couldn’t believe Cinn had caught them. She had been to his apartment all of twice. To top it off, Baker actually had been telling Memphis that there was no hope for them because he was in love with Cinn. Memphis was a kid, but she loved the pants off of him. He was just setting her straight, letting her down easy. Now Cinn never wanted to see him again, wouldn’t return his calls. Well to hell with her! Dames! But he was missin’ her already. Hoping to console himself with a little pick-up purchase between sets, he patrolled the alley behind the club. “Doc, that choo?”

  A large square-shouldered man stepped from the shadows, accompanied by two associates. “Yeah, we makin’ a house call,” he said. “I knew a trumpet player once. Had uh accident. Broke all the fingers in his hand.”

  “Tsk, tsk,” said a voice from behind, “imagine ’at.”

  “Is that supposed to scare me?” Baker quipped coolly, his knees buckling beneath him.

  With lightning speed, a boulder struck his rib cage, pressed through his stomach, and rattled his spine, folding him in half. “I got a crystal ball to the future, and I don’t see you in it.”

  Just then, Preach bounced through the narrow walkway, tiptoes scraping the uneven brick, balancing a flattened brown bag and a new pork pie hat. “Oh, sideeze, excuse me please. Can I interest anyone in some Parn Bhaju?” He held the bag in the air and sniffed with delight.

  “You are an occasional pop-the-cork junkie on his way to a slide,” the menace whispered in Baker’s ear. “Git your narruh black ass outta town. Tonight.” The man straightened his coat, cracked his neck, then disappeared. The trio of footsteps echoed down the alley.

  Baker told Reno to get him a piece. “A piece of what?” the tenor laughed. “Don’t need a piece, baby boy. That’s Deacon Holstein’s niece and heir?! You need to get you some exit capital. Just a chick. Get over it. Live to fight another day.”

  Baker left on the midnight Chicago Limited, bound for Kansas City and points west.

  Cinn sat in her apartment for three days. “Snap out of it,” she told herself. “Exams begin tomorrow. You’ve worked too hard for this recital review. Pull yourself together.” She plunged her face in ice to reduce the mottling and swelling, dressed, and headed for the subway. The day was gray with a light drizzle, threatening to become rain. The sky rumbled ominously. She had forgotten both raincoat and umbrella. She bought a newspaper to shield her hair and froze upon reading the headline. “German Troops Advance, Holland Falls, Paris Orders Evacuation.”

  26

  In the spring of 1940, under the weight of a massive German invasion, the nation of France collapsed like a child’s toy box. The French army retreated in disorganized scampering bands and the government fled the capital, leaving two million Parisians in its wake. In less than a month, Nazi troops overran Paris. The newly installed rulers wasted no time in dividing the country into a Gestapo-run northern sector with Paris as its center and a “Free France” southern zone overseen by a puppet regime holed up in the former resort town of Vichy. With some bread and cheese slung over his shoulder, Mitch managed to pedal a broken bicycle to the southern border and slip across the Pyrenees to the Spanish frontier. From there he made his way to Madrid to petition the American consulate to get his family out and to sign up with the Free French army in exile, which galvanized around the tall, implacably patrician General Charles de Gaulle. With every crooked pump of the one pedal he had, Mitch cursed his crazy wife Genya, who had resisted his pleas to leave for a year. “France will never surrender!” she said. At least, they agreed on one thing, to hide their two black Arab Jewish girls in a local Catholic convent.

  German street signs replaced the French. For the citizens of Paris who remained, every imaginable commodity became scarce. No butter, no milk, no sugar or petrol. Bicycles converted to taxis, one half a car chassis attached to the back. To feed the German homeland and support their war effort on multiple fronts, the Nazis commandeered French produce, manufactured goods, machinery, and labor and deflected them north. Yet Paris was spared the crushing assault experienced by Warsaw, the relentless bombing of London. Paris, it seemed, the Reich desired not to destroy, but to possess. Paris, the white slave, the comfort woman. Preaching Aryan purity and austerity at home, in Paris, the occupiers daily displayed their excess. Rare cheeses, fine wines, vintage champagne, prostitutes in silk stockings, cigarettes, and chocolate were plentiful for officers. The city was the furlough destination of choice for the troops. Meanwhile, ordinary Parisians were issued ration cards for bread, meat, and milk. Thinking her two girls safely hidden away in convent school, Genya turned her organizing efforts entirely toward the Resistance.

  The Banana Club remained open. Lizzie survived through the patronage of an SS official who had admired her when her show played Berlin. Karl Von Arendt, a decorated officer in the omnipresent black-shirted Gestapo, had a secret love of jazz and a secret passion for Mayfield Turner’s bronze flesh. Before the war, Von Arendt was a modernist and a well-connected socialite. During the war, he turned pragmatist and used his pedigree to secure the plum assignment of commandant to Montmartre. While the official Gestapo headquarters were on Avenue Foch off the magisterial Champs d’Elysées, Von Arendt’s undocumented office was just off the scruffy Rue Pigalle, specifically the corner table by the bandstand. The general often used the club to entertain emissaries from the Italian consulate and to vet potential turncoats from Britain and other mangled nations. Most Parisian nightlife performers were banned from working. Mayfield Turner’s little underground spot was just about the only place one could get a taste of the once infamous and now forbidden demimonde. It was the last place anyone would think a hotspot of the underground.

  While Lizzie entertained her commandant, her girls, under the tutelage of Farid, gathered bits of information from the soldiers they picked up. In the attic, above Genya’s old flat, the perpetual doctoral student pieced together the strands of idle conversation into intelligible information—troop movements, naval schemes, aerial strategies, supply schedules, prisoner records, travel patterns, odd habits and proclivities. Using her own urine as a cheap and accessible form of invisible ink, Genya would then transcribe the notes onto the back pages of sheet music. A little heat to the tune and the message could be relayed by radio or courier. Lizzie told Von Arendt that she had to keep her show fresh. She changed her musical numbers often, ensuring that as her musicians left for the night, they carried a steady flow of information to the Allied forces.

  She suffered the silent watch of women and old men. Mothers gathered their children and crossed the street to avoid her. She met their stares without apology. She did what she had to do. She ventured out less and less. Her caramel complexion began to fade, even her freckles. Her hair had gotten used to the damp, cool climate of France. She wore it short. It curled a
round her face like young Octavian’s. When she gazed in the mirror, she didn’t look so colored anymore, but downright Mediterranean. Who the hell are you?

  The spying arrangement had worked successfully for almost a year when Genya’s daughter Bruria came running to Lizzie. Genya and Rachel had been arrested.

  Lizzie sat outside the SS office. She hated enclosed spaces. She didn’t know why Genya had been arrested or if her own position had been compromised. She had been waiting for two hours. Her anxiety was not eased by Von Arendt’s arrival. When he came to her club, he most often appeared in civilian dress. He stood before her in his field gray uniform of the Schutzstaffel. His eyes darted about with concern, his posture the soldier and enemy. “Mayfield, you should go. You cannot get involved. These people are foreign nationals and they are Jews.”

  “Their grandfather was Jewish, their mother’s Arab,” she argued. “Their father’s—”

  “I can release the girl for now, but you should go south to the free zone. I have a place near Marseilles.”

  “But—wh—”

  “Lizzie, the woman is dead. Your friend is dead.”

  Lizzie sat down, immobilized, unable to process the casualness of his comment. Von Arendt gripped her by the arm and pulled her close to him, his intonation unchanged. “It is not safe for you to remain in Paris. You I can protect. They are foreign nationals and they are Jews.”

  That night she took the girls through a basement passageway that Farid had used for years in his black market enterprise to a nearby house, out the skylight into a neighbor’s balcony window, onto a back street, down to the sewers beneath the streets. The trio made their way to the outskirts of west Paris to La Ronde, the ancient ring of gypsy wagons, always poised to flee. “Gypsies . . . loyal to nothing but their freedom,” she said. She found Farid among them. With conditions increasingly precarious for foreign nationals, the Romani were already planning to head south. Farid convinced them that Lizzie’s papers from Von Arendt would help. The caravan became her company of players. Farid was silent on the death of his sister Genya. But for his ashen pallor and black arcs beneath his eyes, he exhibited no grief.