Tiger Rag

  “Where are we going?” Devon asked.

  “I have some errands uptown.”

  “Remember, we only have an hour before our appointment with Browne.”

  “Plenty of time. Pull over, please,” Ruby ordered Kenji as they crossed Sixty-second Street. “Come,” she said, taking Devon’s hand and leading her into the Hermès boutique.

  It took Ruby five minutes to choose a purple silk scarf with green zodiacal symbols, a lizard handbag dyed purple, and a purple belt with an eighteen-karat gold buckle. The tab was seven thousand dollars and change. The cute French salesgirl had unfolded and laid out an assortment of scarves on the glass counter, and when she turned around and bent low to pick another off the shelf, Devon realized she could have pocketed any one of them in a flash, with no one the wiser. What’s worse, she asked herself: blowing seven grand or swiping something worth a few hundred dollars? Pretending she didn’t know the answer, even for a few seconds, made her queasy.

  They drove another three blocks, to Valentino’s.

  “I’ll wait here,” Devon said, breaking off a cluster of grapes.

  Ruby returned after ten minutes with a pair of purple patent leather heels. They rode up to the corner.

  “Stop here, please,” Ruby said. “I need your opinion this time, Devon.”

  They got out of the limo and went into Armani.

  “I need a new outfit for tomorrow,” Ruby said. “I don’t like the one I brought from Miami. It doesn’t feel right anymore.”

  A smiling salesgirl approached them, her heels clicking rhythmically.

  “Let me guess,” Devon said. “You want a purple dress.”

  “No. A pantsuit.” Ruby shrugged. “Professional concession.”

  Devon knew she wasn’t joking. “How can you be sure they carry purple pantsuits?”

  “Because I called ahead. And they have one in a six.”

  When Ruby stepped out of the changing room, Devon nodded. “Looks great.”

  And it did: a sleek fit, meticulously tailored, in the deepest purple Devon had ever seen.

  “They call it Tyrian,” Ruby said.

  “Because the finest purple dye was produced by sea snails in ancient Tyre,” the salesgirl chimed in, pronouncing it Ty-ah.

  “Good to know,” Devon said.

  Ruby studied herself in the three-way mirror while the fitter pinned the cuffs on the pants and jacket. Then the salesgirl took her Amex card.

  “Send it to the Pierre by tonight,” Ruby said. “Suite 16-02.”

  Next she bought a box of chocolates at Neuhaus on Seventy-third Street, then directed Kenji four blocks north, to Alain Mikli. “Last store, Devon. These sunglasses are giving me a migraine.”

  Devon remained in the limo and watched a stream of pedestrians duck into the icy wind, slipping and sliding. Their hats were pulled low so as not to blow away. Some had scarves knotted over their faces, like bandits. The engine purring, the windshield wipers ticking, Devon put away Ruby’s empty champagne glass and made a mental note to hit a meeting ASAP. It had already been too long, and spending all this time around her mother made it feel even longer.

  When Ruby emerged from the optician’s shop, Kenji jumped out and took her arm on the slippery sidewalk. She was wearing her new glasses: retro purple frames, wraparounds, with lavender lenses.

  “Ready to go?” she said to Devon.

  They continued up Madison another dozen blocks, and following Ruby’s directions, turned east on Eighty-sixth Street, went up Park, and turned left on Eighty-seventh.

  When they were halfway up the block, Ruby leaned forward. “Stop here, on the left.”

  They were in front of the Park Avenue Synagogue, a high building of ochre stone.

  Ruby took a deep breath. “Wait here.”

  What now? Devon thought.

  Stepping out of the limo, Ruby was buffeted by the wind as she walked up the broad steps to a pair of enormous doors. She didn’t attempt to open them. Snowflakes swirled around her. First she bowed her head to the temple. Then she reached into her handbag and took out a leather pouch. She squatted and poured the contents into a nook beside the door frame untouched by snow and shielded the spot with her back. Cupping her hands, she struck a match and lit what Devon recognized was a ball of skullcap.

  “Jesus,” Devon muttered.

  Kenji was intrigued. “Incense?” he asked politely.

  “Yes, incense.”

  The skullcap flared and burned quickly and the wind swept up the ashes. Ruby stood there for nearly a minute, the snow collecting on her shoulders. Finally she returned to the limo, trailing a wave of frigid air. She brushed away the snow, but smoke clung to her coat.

  “This is where your father and I were married,” Ruby said. “That was the last of the skullcap.” She leaned back against the leather headrest and closed her eyes as they drove downtown to meet Emmett Browne. “And that was my errand.”

  BATON ROUGE—MAY 12, 1930

  When he discovered he had lung cancer in the summer of 1919, Oscar Zahn and his family returned to Louisiana. Their years in Kansas City had been hard on them. His job as a nightclub manager hadn’t panned out. Booking bands, handling staff, tracking receipts, dealing with an often raucous public—it wasn’t for him. The worst part was the commotion: he was a recording engineer, accustomed to nuanced work in soundproof rooms. A clamorous saloon was the last place he wanted to be.

  He stuck it out until he found a job selling men’s shirts at the Parrish Department Store. His wife worked part-time as a waitress, to make ends meet. They felt crushed by money worries. They could barely afford proper clothes for their daughter. He himself simply did without—and that included proper medical care. A heavy smoker, he endured two bouts of pneumonia and developed a hacking cough. He began drinking on the sly. He toyed with taking his family to Chicago or Detroit, but with the Depression taking hold, he couldn’t see how his prospects would improve in those cities. Finally, after years of trying, he landed a job as an assistant engineer at the Mirabell recording studio. The big drawback was that he was given no autonomy. The chief engineer was covetous of his turf and preferred cowboy bands to jazz. By the time the chief engineer moved on and Zahn was offered a shot at his job, his health was failing.

  Zahn’s brother took him to a doctor in Baton Rouge who confirmed the cancer diagnosis and told him he had a month, maybe two, to live. Wrapped in a blanket in eighty-degree heat, Zahn spent the next five weeks and four days rocking on his brother’s front porch, watching shadows cross the lawn, humming tunes. His wife recognized the tune he had been humming the afternoon she found him slumped over in his chair. It was “Tiger Rag.” After his funeral, she and her daughter set out for Colorado, where she had family. All she took of her husband’s were the few keepsakes he had refused to hock when their money ran out: a pair of pearl cuff links, a Hohner harmonica, and his father’s pocket watch. The Edison cylinders remained in his brother’s barn where he had left them nine years earlier. They were still there when his brother died in 1930 and his sister-in-law moved to a retirement home in St. Petersburg, Florida. Her daughter, Bennie, Oscar Zahn’s niece, sold the farm, and with her new husband, a doctor, bought a house in Baton Rouge. They had three acres, a separate two-car garage, and a storage shed in which Bennie placed certain keepsakes from her family’s farm.

  By then, the same journalists and critics who had dubbed the previous decade the Jazz Age were starting to write about the actual music and the men who invented it. Early jazz historians like Bill Russell interviewed Louis Armstrong and Earl Hines, Johnny Dodds and Jimmie Noone. Scholars from LSU recorded the oral histories of famous musicians like Jelly Roll Morton and failing ones like Bunk Johnson. One name kept cropping up, a murky figure who had influenced all of them, lost his mind, and disappeared. Few of his contemporaries knew that Buddy Bolden was still alive, and fewer still that he was in his twenty-third year as a patient in the East Louisiana State Asylum. They tried to describe to critics Bo
lden’s explosive sound, the lightning riffs that ignited crowds and the slow smoldering numbers that made women cry out to him as they danced. They tried to explain how Bolden invented the cornet as a solo instrument. How he had been inspired—by whom or what no one knew—to merge ragtime, blues, Cuban rumba, and the jagged African rhythms that freed slaves once played in Congo Square on drums, stringed gourds, and hand-carved flutes. Archimedes Robinson, a florid young writer from Parade magazine, called this amalgam a “Delta confluence,” a musical stew that Bolden was the first to serve up. Robinson titled his article on Bolden “Whiskey, Women, and Wild Nights,” but the facts of Bolden’s personal life were still so scarce that the article never lived up to its title. Robinson found only a single fleeting reference to Bolden in the newspapers of his day: in March 1906, the crime blotters of the Daily Picayune and the New Orleans Item reported that Charles Bolden had attacked his mother-in-law and was locked up in the House of Detention. That was it.

  Not surprisingly, the more frustrating the search for clues, the more curiosity Bolden aroused. In one short year, he went from forgotten man to mystery man. Later critics, aided by technology, filled in some of the blanks in his personal history. But despite extensive searches in libraries and archives, no one could locate a single recording of Bolden’s band. A lost, undamaged Edison cylinder was rumored to exist, and a handful of true believers searched for it in vain. In 1977, an established music dealer who had been searching for years discovered that a man named Oscar Zahn had engineered Bolden’s one recording. The dealer even knew the time and place of the recording session. He tracked down Zahn’s only living relative in Louisiana, Bennie Jay Zahn, and explained to her what he was looking for.

  Throwing up her hands, she replied that she would not be able to help him. Over the years, she explained, as she and her husband prospered and raised three children, they expanded their home. They added two wings and built a solarium. In June 1967, they decided to level the yard and put in a swimming pool for their grandchildren. Their old storage shed was demolished. Before the workmen started in with their sledgehammers and bulldozer, Bennie removed her father’s tools, her mother’s Singer sewing machine, a Royal typewriter, and her Uncle Oscar’s Edison phonograph. She realized later that she had forgotten all about the two boxes of her uncle’s Edison cylinders, which had been placed in a crate atop a high shelf.

  They were surely destroyed and carted away with the rest of the rubble, she told the dealer, and I’m sorry for that.

  The dealer sat down in her yard, tapping the ashes from his meerschaum pipe, and drank the iced tea she served him. He looked as disappointed as a man could be, she thought, and she felt bad about it. But he recovered quickly and surprised her, offering two hundred dollars for the Edison phonograph.

  She hesitated, saying it was all she had left of her uncle’s.

  He upped his offer to five hundred, just like that. I promise you, that’s top dollar, he told her. I wouldn’t cheat you.

  His name was Emmett Browne, and he traveled all the way down from New York City, she told her husband when he came home from the office that night. She spread out the ten crisp fifty-dollar bills on the kitchen table. How Uncle Oscar could’ve used this, she added, shaking her head.

  NEW YORK CITY—DECEMBER 22, 2:10 P.M.

  One hundred sixty-seven Madison Avenue was a gloomy brown building, twelve stories high, with a copper roof. Its name was carved on a marble slab over the entrance: THE GARFIELD BUILDING.

  Before getting out of the limo, Ruby said to Kenji, “We shouldn’t be here long.”

  Ruby had fallen silent during the drive downtown. Except for the lavender glasses, she seemed to have lost interest in her purchases, piled helter-skelter at her feet. When they were stuck in traffic at Fifty-ninth Street, she opened her window and breathed in the icy air. She watched the Christmas shoppers laden with packages lurching out of Bloomingdale’s. On the corner, the Salvation Army Santa was ringing his bell. A pretzel vendor with fingerless gloves was stamping his feet. Snow blew through the window and melted in Ruby’s hair. She fixed her gaze on a woman in a fur coat and hat. The woman had stepped from a taxi and turned up Lexington Avenue, walking purposefully, sure of herself in the snow.

  “Marvin’s mother,” Ruby said matter-of-factly.

  “What?” Devon strained to look out the rear window, but saw only the woman’s back.

  “That’s the way she walked. Ahead of everyone else. It could have been her. That’s happened to me a few times lately, seeing people who are so much like people I once knew. If you let your eye go, you pick up on them.”

  A lane opened and Kenji nosed the limo forward.

  Ruby shut her window and again lapsed into silence. Devon had grown accustomed to her withdrawing abruptly. What baffled her was that Ruby, an empiricist who had always been so grounded, could now slip in and out of different worlds with such ease. Nothing seemed alien to her, nothing surprised her. And this made Devon uneasy. That’s what it was like when I was high, she thought. Personally and professionally Ruby had always been fiercely focused, viewing reality through clear lenses, assessing it with precision instruments. The kaleidoscope was not one of them.

  In the manual elevator of the Garfield Building, the cage door rattled and the ceiling light flickered. The stooped operator and his uniform had over time undergone osmosis until they were the same pale gray. He resembled one of those fully attired, semitransparent ghosts in an old movie. Ruby removed her gloves and ran a comb through her hair.

  On the eleventh floor they walked down a dim hallway, past the darkened offices of the Franco-Bulgarian Chess Association and an outfit called Narzowski & Wu, Cartographers, to a black door with a plaque that read EMMETT BROWNE COMPANY .

  They were greeted by a balding young man with a paunch, a slouch, and a slack jaw. He was wearing a cheap brown suit and brown tie to match. That his brown eyes, beneath heavy lids, were sharply alert made the rest of him seem all the more sluggish.

  He introduced himself as Emmett Browne’s assistant. “Fallon,” he said in a gravelly voice which Devon recognized as the one that answered her second phone call.

  They followed Fallon through two rooms, the first filled with boxes, crates, and all the paraphernalia of a mailroom, the second nearly empty apart from a framed photograph of a bald, bearded man of the nineteenth century. Then Fallon opened a door padded in green leather and ushered them into a huge inner office.

  Emmett Browne was sitting behind his desk in a circle of blue light by the far wall. Fine yellow dust filled the air. Except for a brass lamp and a marble statuette, the desk was bare. An inkwell, manual typewriter, rotary phone, and two stacks of books and papers were arranged on an identical desk behind him. He was in an electric wheelchair, his bony fingers hovering over a control panel on the arm.

  The office was a maze of tables, cabinets, and display cases cluttered with carefully labeled memorabilia. Devon grew increasingly excited as she and Ruby wended their way to Browne’s desk, passing an original flat-top Victrola, a Scott Joplin player piano roll, Gene Krupa’s black drumsticks, Duke Ellington’s top hat, Benny Goodman’s spectacles, Gene Autry’s ukulele, Django Reinhardt’s lion-headed cane, and a music box that once belonged to Amelia Earhart. There was a vibraphone Lionel Hampton played at the Cotton Club and a silver dobro an admirer had sent to Hank Williams. Except for a stretch of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, the walls were hung with every imaginable instrument: trombones, saxophones, flutes, banjos, mandolins, fiddles, and even a washboard used in Bill Monroe’s first bluegrass band. These were the “vintage instruments and musical rarities” Browne advertised on his calling card, and they were rare indeed.

  “Look,” Devon whispered excitedly as she and Ruby came upon a pair of of Artie Shaw’s clarinets on a small table. She wanted to reach out and touch them. “I’d give anything to have one of those.”

  But Ruby wasn’t interested. She had taken off her glasses and was peering at Emmett Browne. He
was in his eighties, clean-shaven, with a full head of white hair and clear blue eyes. With her trained eye, she saw at once that he was suffering from MS—at least twenty years into the disease, with two years left to him, tops. His neural circuits had been misfiring for so long that when they fizzled out, it would happen fast. She knew this meant his legs had turned to matchsticks, his olfactory system was gone, and he was short of breath. She imagined he had been a tall, dapper man before his disease began eating away at him. His nose was long and thin, his lips pursed. He was wearing a black suit with pink pinstripes, a pink shirt, and a wide black-and-red-striped tie.

  Browne kept a private investigator named Nate Kane on retainer. After reading Kane’s report about Ruby Cardillo and her daughter, Browne had expected the musician daughter to be a flamboyant dresser and the physician mother to look straitlaced. Instead, the mother had on an electric-blue coat, purple cashmere sweater, gold pants, and gold boots, while the daughter was wearing a black turtleneck, jeans, and black boots.

  “Good afternoon,” Browne greeted them. “Dr. Cardillo, Ms. Sheresky, I’m Emmett Browne. Welcome.”

  As she and Ruby sat down in a pair of chairs before the desk, Devon admired the marble statuette. It was a young woman playing a lyre, her long hair and the folds of her gown so lifelike they seemed to be stirring in a breeze.

  “Terpsichore, the muse of dance and song,” Browne said to her. “I found her in a pawnshop in Montreal.”

  Ruby put her glasses back on. Browne’s easy, courtly manner, Devon thought, was in contrast to his clipped voice on the phone.

  “Thank you for coming,” he said. “Again, my condolences on your mother’s passing. I will discuss with both of you what I would have discussed with her and hope that, indeed, it will turn out to be mutually profitable. But, first, I want to tell you about myself. I have been a collector and dealer for fifty-three years. I search out rare items for my clients, buying and selling on commission. I guarantee the authenticity of every item I handle. I don’t travel anymore. My agents travel for me. I enjoy working in this office. I have been here since 1958. This building has special meaning for me. It was posthumously named for James Garfield after being constructed in its entirety during the six months of his presidency.”