Tiger Rag

  “Because eating is sexy.”

  “Since when?”

  Devon realized this was another of those instances when her mother was going to be right, no matter what. In the last week, she had learned to keep her mouth shut when Ruby went on a rant: a chance remark might ignite an entirely new grievance. Her tossing around four-letter words was also something new.

  “Did you see the televisions in that restaurant—and not just in the bar,” Ruby said. “Four flatscreens. You can’t get away from them anymore, on airplanes, in terminals, even in taxis. The other doctors in my wing all have them in their waiting rooms. The other day I was crossing the street and there was a kid wearing a T-shirt that read what the fuck. He was telling passersby, ‘Everybody’s putting thoughts out into the world. So I try to put out good ones.’ Is there a preacher or guru on the planet who can top that? But none of us can compete with the daily avalanche of bullshit. Are you ready for me to take the wheel, dear? You must be tired.”

  “I really haven’t been driving long.” Devon flipped open her cellphone. “I think I’ll try this guy Browne again.”

  “Who?”

  “Emmett Browne. The music dealer.”

  This time a man answered on the second ring. He had a clipped, precise voice that occasionally wavered, as if he were catching his breath.

  “Mr. Browne?”

  “This is Emmett Browne.”

  “My name is Devon Sheresky. My grandmother, Camille Broussard, passed away this month. We found your letter.”

  There was a long silence. “We?” he said finally.

  “My mother and I.”

  “Your mother the doctor.”

  Devon was surprised. “That’s right.”

  “My condolences for your grandmother.”

  “Thank you. Did she respond to you?”

  “No, she never did.”

  “Well, I’m curious about your letter.”

  “I can appreciate that. Your call is very unexpected.”

  “I’m actually driving to New York right now.”

  Another silence. “Even more unexpected.”

  “My mother has business there.”

  “I see.”

  “Can you tell me what the letter is about?”

  “I’d suggest we meet to discuss it. This is very fortuitous. When will you arrive in New York?”

  “In a couple of days.”

  “Can you come by my office then?”

  “I’d like to.”

  “Good.”

  “You said it was something important.”

  “It is. Thank you for calling. Call again when you get into town.” And he hung up.

  “Pretty strange,” Devon said.

  “What did he say?”

  “He knew you were a doctor. How would he know anything about you?”

  “My mother must’ve told him.”

  “He said he never spoke to her.”

  “Who knows?” Ruby said impatiently.

  “He wouldn’t say what the letter was about.”

  “My god, why all the mystery? He’s probably just some creep who was mixed up with my father. You’re still going to meet with him?”

  “I want to know what this is about.”

  Ruby turned away and gazed out the window as a horse farm—thoroughbreds snorting mist, stables, a barn—slid by. “I said I’d go with you. And I will.”

  NEW ORLEANS—SEPTEMBER 3, 1906

  When King Bolden made his last public appearance, Willie Cornish was playing beside him. The Labor Day parade, 1906. The Bolden Band used to lead this parade. Now they were nine bands back, second from last. And that was only because the band behind them, the Plaquemine Brass Band, had shown up without a bass player or a clarinetist. Except for Cornish and Frank Lewis, the Bolden Band had experienced a complete turnover: Mumford, Warner, Johnson, and Tillman either quit or were fired. Frankie Dusen, a fast-talking trombonist who doubled on clarinet and had ingratiated himself with Bolden, was in fact running the band: setting rehearsal times, booking engagements. Cornish thought him dishonest and dirty. To his face he called Dusen a chiseler. “Four-fingered” Henry Zeno was playing drums, and the second clarinetist was a little fellow named Mack Jones whom Cornish had never heard of. Bolden had enlisted him the previous night in a dive on South Ramsay Street, without ever hearing him play.

  You didn’t hear him play because he can’t play, Cornish said to Bolden after listening to Jones tune up at Elks Place that morning. But it didn’t matter anymore. None of it mattered. Bolden hadn’t even remembered who Mack Jones was when Jones showed up in a horseblanket suit, smelling of bourbon. Bolden himself was wearing a rumpled brown suit and a derby. The silk vests were gone, and the bright shirts. For a pair of hobnailed boots he had traded the pocket watch engraved with a mermaid that Nora had given him. He wandered the streets at night, often all night, and the boots were good for that. He would go as far as the city limits, sometimes north, to Spanish Fort, where he gazed at Lake Pontchartrain, a dull green even in the dark. The roads there, around the big houses and hotels, were paved with crushed oyster shells that crackled underfoot—as if he was stepping on firecrackers. Most nights he headed south and rode a ferry across the river, to Gretna, where he had once played before packed houses at the Palm Grove. Sometimes he returned on the ferry, hunched alone in the stern, always looking back to land; sometimes he stayed on that side of the river and found a bench in Marais Park, never sleeping, just staring up at the elm branches swaying.

  One night he went to his mother-in-law’s house on First Street. Nora was waiting tables again, working ten-hour shifts in a dive across town. She was only twenty-six, and though still pretty, looked much older after her years with Bolden. He lurched in carrying a bottle of rye. His hands were shaking, his shirt was soiled. I want to take you to Mexico, he said. Get you anything you want. She replied, I want you gone. He was downing the rye like it was beer. He collapsed onto the sofa, tried to stand up, and passed out. Her mother came home and recoiled at the sight of him. Just until morning, Mama, Nora said. Won’t happen again. At two A.M. Bolden woke with a start, knocked over a chair, and crashed into the table. He clutched his head. His throat was on fire. The two women rushed in. You poisoned me, he shouted at his mother-in-law, but I ain’t dead. He grabbed a pitcher and threw it, grazing her temple. Nora screamed, and he bolted out the door. A policeman arrested him on Jackson Street and booked him at the House of Detention.

  When the Labor Day parade started, people were lining the sidewalk ten deep, waving sparklers, tossing confetti. The air was heavy. Mist was boiling off the river, pinpricked with lights. On poles jutting from buildings, the Stars and Stripes were flapping. Dozens of flags. Twice the band launched into “Sugar Blues” and twice Bolden veered off into jumbled scraps of hymns, the music of his childhood from the Nazareth Church. When the band reached St. Charles, he drifted away without a word, concealing his cornet beneath his coat. Cornish looked around and he was gone. The band hesitated, then kept marching. Bolden melted into the crowd, expecting people to shout King Bolden, play for us! But no one had shouted to him for many months, and no one did now. Men, women, and children seemed to be looking right through him—as if he were already a ghost. Maybe I am, he thought, glancing down at his hand to see if it was transparent. Then he pressed a finger to his chest, because if he was vapor maybe the finger would slide right into his heart. And if that was so, could he just disappear into the mist? Instead he found himself jostled, pressed, in a sea of flesh. A pounding, sweating, full-throated crowd that left him in its wake as it swarmed around the corner, following the parade to South Rampart. The music faded, the shouts died away. He was alone suddenly. All he could hear was those flags flapping. They seemed to have grown bigger than the sails on a schooner. The next morning, he woke up again in a cell in the House of Detention, his right sleeve stiff with dried blood, his pants torn. His Conn cornet was dented and the mouthpiece was missing. He sat on an iron stool staring at t
he cornet for an hour. When a policeman walked down the stone corridor and asked him his name and address, he replied, I’m not from around here anymore.

  Willie Cornish kept the cylinder recording of “Tiger Rag” in his wife’s Indian chest with the maharajah on the lid. Even after National Phonograph and Indestructible settled their suit and new and improved cylinders were being reproduced at the rate of one hundred a day in St. Louis and New Orleans and Chicago, Cornish didn’t think it would be right to give them Bolden’s cylinder. King Bolden had wanted a contract, cash up front and royalties, and he wasn’t in a position to get any of that now. Not in the East Louisiana State Asylum in Jackson.

  It had been one year and four months since a deputy sheriff had transported him there in a dogcart on June 4, 1907, with a commitment order signed by Judge T.W.C. Ellis. It stated that the cause of his insanity was alcohol and noted that Charles Bolden’s own mother and sister had requested his commitment.

  Cornish would not touch that cylinder until Bolden got out of that place. Maybe it would take a few months, maybe a year. But the cylinder would be waiting for him. And maybe then Bolden could get some of that money he was due. Revive his music. Record it. Maybe they could bring him back from the dead in that house of the dead.

  In his heart Cornish wanted to believe that.

  But he knew whiskey had soaked so deep into Bolden’s brain that he was drunk even on days when he didn’t drink. And in the end there weren’t many of those. He had fallen as fast as he had risen. Even faster. And now it was over.

  Cornish and four members of the old Bolden Band joined the Eagle Orchestra. Bunk Johnson’s band. A solid band. They were making good money and getting offered more engagements than they could take. Bunk drank, but not like Bolden. Bunk wanted to be king now that Bolden was gone, but everyone agreed the new king was Freddie Keppard, who could blow hard and sweet and draw the big crowds. He and Bunk were playing the “new” music Bolden had created. Every time they performed, Cornish saw Bunk try to duplicate Bolden’s sound. He couldn’t. Not the slow blues and not the improvisations—Cornish called them “inspirations”—that came out of nowhere and kept on going. Bunk did attract the best musicians, picking them off from the Imperial Band, the Olympia Orchestra, the Peerless Band.

  A couple of months earlier, an ace clarinetist had joined the Eagle Orchestra. He came from a Creole family, the son of a onetime cornetist who had become a shoe manufacturer. He was only eleven years old, a prodigy. He called himself a musicianer. His name was Sidney Bechet.

  WASHINGTON, D.C.—DECEMBER 20, 10:00 P.M.

  Though Ruby wanted to drive straight through to New York, Devon put up a fight and they stopped for the night in D.C. Not on the outskirts, in a motel in Maryland or Virginia; if Ruby was going to stop, it had to be in the city proper, and nothing less than a five-star hotel would do. They had driven into a blizzard in North Carolina, and by the time they reached Newport News, the visibility was two hundred feet. In the capital, the streets were deserted. The Washington Monument was invisible through the swirl of snow.

  Checking in to the Hay-Adams, Ruby was distracted by a man who looked out of place: a salesman, down-at-heels, with a battered suitcase and a rumpled coat. He had been stranded in the neighborhood by the storm, and rather than brave the cold to find a cheaper hotel, he was trying to bargain with the desk clerk for a lower rate. It took Devon a moment to regain Ruby’s attention.

  “Come on, Mom,” she said, leading her to the elevators.

  Their suite was spacious and silent. Pine logs were burning in the fireplace. There was a vase of white roses and a basket of fruit. They were one floor down from the presidential suite, in which the Portuguese ambassador currently resided after a fire in his embassy.

  “Ever been to Lisbon?” Ruby asked Devon, as she picked up the phone for room service. “I went with your father when we were in medical school. We sailed on the Tagus River. We drove into the mountains and drank the wine. I thought I was happy then. I didn’t know anything.”

  The Hay-Adams had a 1988 Chateau Latour on its wine list. Ruby ordered a bottle along with another steak, whipped potatoes, and a double order of lemon Jell-O. She ate only the Jell-O and drank the wine while Devon had an omelette and orange juice.

  “This wine is delicious,” Ruby said. “Like some dessert?”

  “I’m going to shower and turn in, Mom. We were on the road for fourteen hours.”

  When Devon came out of the bathroom twenty minutes later, wrapped in a terrycloth robe, Ruby was sprawled out on the couch, still fully dressed, channel surfing, alternating between a Japanese sitcom and a jai alai match in Brazil, with two announcers shouting in Portuguese.

  “I wonder if the ambassador is watching this,” Ruby said.

  Devon shut the door to her room and put in a pair of earplugs. The sheets were cool. She had been prepared to answer questions about her tattoo, but Ruby had apparently lost interest. Which was fine with Devon. On her back, four inches in diameter, there was a tattoo of Saturn with fiery rings, the outermost ring a serpent with turquoise eyes.

  This was a symbol she had salvaged from a peyote trip and preserved in a sketchpad. It was inked on her by a tattooist in Miami Beach named Ahmed. She had been introduced to Ahmed by her former boyfriend, Josef. Ahmed was from Kashmir. Posters of the Himalayas covered the walls of his parlor. He had a white beard and a ponytail. He wore brightly colored caftans and yellow horn-rimmed glasses. While he applied his needles, his soft voice lulled her to sleep.

  “In the Rig Veda,” he said, “the goddess Night is a tattoo artist, painting stars on her own body as she travels through space. That is why I work at night.”

  Devon met Josef at a club in Miami. Not the place where she tended bar, but a smaller, darker club across town that she frequented. He was thirty years old, compact and wiry, his curly hair prematurely gray. He was sitting at the bar wearing a black T-shirt, his laptop lit up before him. He said he was a cyberspace security expert who encrypted databases and designed firewalls. He lived in Chicago, in a loft by the old stockyards. After drinking shots of tequila, Devon took him back to her apartment. He was good in bed. He had powerful muscles for someone who sat in front of computers all day. They spent the weekend together.

  When she visited him in Chicago two weeks later, she found that his loft was more like an office than a home. There was a kitchenette, a tiny bathroom, and a futon, but the room was dominated by two long tables lined with computers, monitors, and elaborate gadgetry. The small refrigerator contained a dozen cans of Red Bull and a bottle of vodka. There were three cans of soup in the cupboard. “I eat out or order in,” he explained. He took her out for an expensive Japanese dinner. He told her his parents had defected from East Germany. “My mother worked for the Stasi, tapping the phones of Party members. That’s what got me interested in electronic security. Keeping people like her locked out.” The next morning, he asked Devon if she would shave him with a straight-edge razor.

  “I’ve never used one,” she replied.

  “You can do it.” He showed her how to hold the razor and angle the blade, using short, sure strokes. “I’ve never had anyone shave me before.”

  She applied the lather with a soft brush, then shaved him without a nick. The next day, she asked if he would like her to do it again.

  “No, I just wanted to experience it once.”

  She was dubious. “You haven’t had your other girlfriends shave you?”

  “Never.”

  “So this was your way of making me feel special.”

  “Not really.”

  That was Josef. She soon discovered that, like the other guys she had been involved with in recent years—especially the fellow band members she had made the mistake of dating—Josef’s favorite place was inside his own head. For a while, he let you join him there, showed you the sights, took you down some interesting byways. Then one day he stepped back and you realized you, too, had become part of the landscape. This was her
pattern—unbreakable, apparently.

  In her room at the Hay-Adams Devon drifted to sleep. Two hours later, someone shook her shoulder gently. She opened her eyes, and there was Ruby, sitting on the edge of the bed. She was wearing a bathrobe now and her eyelids were heavy, her voice subdued. Her wineglass was on the bedside table.

  “I need to tell you about Dad,” Ruby said.

  Taking out her earplugs, Devon assumed Ruby was referring to her own father, Marvin Sheresky. Until Ruby added, “You said you wanted to know. This would be a good time.”

  Maybe for you, Devon thought, trying to wake up. She reached toward the lamp.

  “No, leave it off. It’s better this way.”

  Devon knew some of the larger story, of course. That Camille Broussard had three childless marriages, but conceived Ruby with a guy she barely knew, a jazz musician named Valentine Owen. That Camille and Ruby became gypsies—Baton Rouge, Gulfport, Mobile were just a few of the pit stops. They lived in crummy apartments with Camille’s various husbands. The Three Stooges, Ruby called them: Number One a drunk, Number Two a letch who hit on her, Number Three a worse drunk.

  Her mother had a thing for truckers and oil riggers—the sort that couldn’t hold their jobs. Valentine Owen was the most dashing man Camille Broussard ever met. She glorified him as she never could her husbands. In reality, their longest stint together was a week, but in her imagination Valentine Owen lived on for years. She constructed a private mythology around him.

  “Supposedly he showed up again when I was born, to name me,” Ruby said. “This was a story my mother made up for herself. When I asked why she could count the number of his visits on one hand, she got all weepy. Instead of answering the question, she said that he burned out young, like so many great musicians. Like who, for instance? I asked, and she couldn’t name one. In fact, he wasn’t so young. And he wasn’t great.”

  Ruby only met her father twice, briefly, the first time ugly, the second unforgivable. For a while, Ruby had bought into the legend her mother had made of Owen. She wasn’t the kind of kid who cried into her pillow at night, but as a teenager she mooned over his photo, feeling sorry for herself. She carried around a shot of him in a white suit and fedora until she was fifteen. Until she met him finally for the first time, on a July night in 1975.