Joplin's Ghost

  Still, it was the finest home he had ever had, and Louis knew it. It was a long way from the packed-dirt floors of his youth, and music lived in the very walls. Scott awoke each morning with the memory of a new tune from the previous night’s dreams. Da-daa-da-daaa-da-daaa. Even now, a worrying musical strain cried for attention in Scott’s head. He would rush Louis home after dinner so he could begin capturing it.

  “We’re doing fine,” Scott said. He’d learned never to discuss money with Louis unless he wanted his affairs made public. The first two years had been slow, but last week John had told him that John Stark & Son could barely keep pace with the orders for “Maple Leaf Rag.” Already, ragtime brought out something in him like nothing else in all his years performing, and no one expected him to blacken his face. It was a small miracle, and getting bigger.

  “Whatever you’re doing, it ain’t what Mother’s paying,” Louis said. “Folks are comin’ from Kansas City and everywhere else to hear those cuttin’ contests.”

  Yes, but I don’t have to spend my nights in a whorehouse trying to convince myself I’m in Heaven, Scott thought. He almost uttered it aloud, but decided if he was going to say anything, he might as well say the thing that was most true. “Cutting contests aren’t for me anymore,” Scott said. “I don’t play like I need to.”

  Louis half shrugged, but Louis, of all people, couldn’t argue. The last time Scott had tried to compete, Mo the Show had shamed him with “Maple Leaf Rag,” no less, dressing his own child with needless embellishments and turning it against him.

  “I’ll give you lessons cheap,” Louis said.

  Scott chuckled. Louis was joking, but he might need lessons if he ever hoped to play the wild piece that kept chattering in his head, one he hadn’t had time to chase with his pen yet. Not that he would ever take lessons from Louis, who had been only seventeen when they met. “What you’ve got can’t be taught, youngster.”

  “I gotta agree with you on that one, professor.”

  Louis looked like a new man by the time he’d washed, shaved, and buttoned his clean shirt. Scott handed him a spare tie to finish his transformation.

  “What the hell is this?” Louis said.

  “A tie. It’s Sunday dinner.”

  Louis muttered curses as he whipped the tie around his neck. “If you got to wear a tie to eat in your own house, Scotty, then you ain’t home.”

  But Louis was wrong: For the first time in his life, he was home. And it was a proper home on his own terms, not in any white man’s cornfield or cotton patches, kitchen or railroad yard. He didn’t play a fiddle for the pleasure of his master, like his father. And he didn’t play in a whorehouse, not anymore. Scott knew musicians who played pianos by peepholes in brothels so they could improvise music to match the ardor in the bedroom!

  Money wasn’t enough to lure him back to that. It was bad enough that so many white men John and Nellie introduced him to raised their voices and spoke to him in simplified language, as if addressing a deaf foreigner, or a child. He couldn’t have them thinking he worked in a bawdy house, too. Stupid and bestial, they would say. Scott Joplin did not work in a brothel. He worked in his home. A gentleman’s vocation.

  Scott gazed at his new bedroom, where the fireplace glowed, lighting the room. His window’s view was confined to the patterns of bricks from the building next door, but he had memories enough of open fields and oak trees. The quilt from Belle’s grandmother lay snugly across their mattress, as it always did, her anchor to the family she missed so much that she’d cried every day their first two weeks in St. Louis. The braided rug from the Starks, their wedding gift, covered the length of the bedroom; he and Belle had discussed using it in the parlor instead, but they agreed they didn’t want to expose the handsome rug to visitors, especially with so many students in and out. In the bedroom, the rug was theirs alone, a private luxury to keep their bare feet warm when they first climbed out of bed.

  Scott realized he had never been happier. He was thirty-three, but he might as well be as young as Louis. He might be overshadowed as a musician, but he was a composer now. Music and royalties lived for years. Forever, sometimes. And Alfred Ernst, the director of the St. Louis Choral Symphony, seemed determined to take him to Germany next summer. Ernst had been kind enough to allow him to hear rehearsals for a striking opera called Tannhäuser by German composer Richard Wagner, and Ernst insisted an American composer might also gain notice in Germany—even if he was a Negro. Scott would have considered Europe beyond his reach a few years ago, when bawdy houses and cakewalk contests were his mainstay, but things were different now. Everything was different. Even Louis had to know that, whether or not he could admit it. Life as a married man was only one thing that had changed about Scott’s prospects.

  “Belle is sensitive, so don’t be a nuisance tonight,” Scott said.

  “Your wife likes me fine. If I was you, I’d be worried she’ll shine to me too much.”

  “I’m not worried.”

  They ate in the kitchen at the table barely big enough for three. Through Louis’s eyes, Scott saw the absurdity of formal dress in such cramped quarters, but Belle had always dressed up for Sunday dinner as a child in Sedalia, and Scott enjoyed the ritual. Scott sat in the chair nearest the coal stove, where the persistent heat baked his back, but he didn’t mind. He and his wife—soon to be the mother of his first child, if Belle’s female instincts were right—were entertaining one of his friends in his home, the finest musician Scott knew. This might seem a simple pleasure to some, but not long ago, he had feared he would live his life from a trunk, counting his pennies from one gig to another, with no hope for a true home.

  He would have a dining room like John Stark’s at his next house, he decided. Meals warranted their own room. He and Belle would entertain composers, scholars and musicians at their table. He would teach Belle the violin, and she would amuse their guests. Scott tutored her, of course. She had never played a note. One day, he and the children would form a quartet. They could play the way he and his family played in Texarkana; his father on his fiddle, his mother on the banjo, Robert on cornet, Will singing strong, and him on the piano his mother had bought him when he was thirteen. And none of his children would wear burnt cork as minstrels, or dream of it. They would keep their own faces.

  Belle was uncharacteristically shy in Louis’s presence at dinner, answering everything with pretty good. She thought their flat was pretty good. She liked this neighborhood pretty good. St. Louis was pretty good, as crowded cities went. Across the table, Scott could see Louis’s eyes turning muddy while he tried to engage himself in conversation with her.

  “Mr. Joplin’s a big man since that ‘Maple Leaf Rag,’” Louis said. “He’s caused such a stir the white folks put an article about him in their paper. They say he’s gonna tour in Germany next year. First we got Booker T. Washington eating lunch at the White House, and then our own Scott Joplin playing ragtime over in Europe. Won’t that be something?”

  “Scott loves his music pretty good,” Belle said.

  “Enough about me, Louis,” Scott said.

  But Louis wasn’t finished with Belle. “Won’t that be something, though?” This time, oddly, Scott heard no sarcasm from Louis. Louis stared at Belle intently, waiting.

  Belle shrugged, an unattractive gesture that made Scott cringe. “I’m not much for music,” Belle said. “But Scott makes a pretty good living with it.”

  Louis’s eyes went to Scott’s and held them. For the first time, he looked entirely sober.

  The habañera Louis was playing at the parlor piano cascaded like a melodic waterfall, and it was only a piffle to him. His fingers flounced carelessly across the keys, the way a child might play with a toy. Yet, it was breathtaking. Each time Scott heard Louis play, he cursed Louis’s lack of discipline. What if Chopin had only tossed his creations to the wind? Louis had an enviable singing voice, too, like a cherub’s, and his dancing was dizzying. He was a born performer. A lesser man would loathe
him, Scott thought. The piano, a black Kohler & Campbell upright grand, had come with the apartment and was worth the monthly rent now that Scott had heard Louis make it sing.

  Scott walked to the parlor window, staring down. Outside, gas lamps were an exhibition of bright white light, rows of full moons on poles. Wet snow fell gracelessly from the darkening sky. Even with his window closed, Scott heard a passing woman’s ribald laughter below.

  “Belle is Scott Hayden’s sister-in-law? I can’t believe it,” Louis said as he played. “She’s a bore. No wonder her first husband dropped over dead. She don’t like music? Dog my cats, old man. That’s like Joseph married to Mary, saying he don’t much like Jesus.”

  “I wish you’d lower your voice.”

  Louis only played more loudly, changing to the key of G. Lovely. “We ain’t all whisperers like you, Scotty. Why’d you have to marry such an old lady? You could have your pick of those young ones. Shit, any one of Mother’s girls would make you a better wife. That new singer at the Rosebud, Leola, keeps askin’ after you.”

  Scott felt blood rush to his face, although he tried to hold his expression fixed. A drink and conversation two weeks ago with the comely nineteen-year-old singer from Kansas City had turned into an offer to walk her home, and he’d found himself kissing her in the shadows of her doorway. She had taken his hands and guided them across her pliant bust. Despite being a widow, Belle behaved like a virgin, always expecting to be led, and she had never once guided his hands that way. Scott thought about Leola more than he wanted to. Competition at the cutting contests wasn’t the only reason he had been avoiding Tom’s Rosebud Café these days.

  “Men don’t trade wives like you trade beds,” Scott said. “No more on this subject, Louis. Belle’s an upright woman. She’s made me a good home.”

  “Well, don’t that sound like true love?”

  “I’d hate to meet the fool who’d take advice on true love from Louis Chauvin.”

  Louis laughed. “Yeah, well, you right about that, old man. You right about that,” he said, crossing his arms in a rapid arpeggio that ended sweetly on high G.

  That finished, Louis stood up abruptly, sighing. He joined Scott at the window, staring at the falling snow. In the silence, Scott heard the memory of Louis’s striking improvisation. He would sit this boy down and force him to learn notation even if it was at knife-point. Louis’s laziness was criminal!

  “So what you scribblin’ on nowadays?” Louis said.

  “I’m going to write an opera. I mean to call it An Honored Guest, or A Guest of Honor.”

  Scott had never spoken of his aspiration, even to Belle, but the thought had been in his head for some years now. Opera was the most sublime form of music, or so Julian Weiss in Texarkana and his music teachers at George R. Smith College in Sedalia had believed. The music of Tannhäuser had strengthened his resolve. He had only lacked a subject from Negro life he could translate to such an epic form, until now.

  A week ago, Scott had found his answer in the pages of the St. Louis Palladium: Booker T. Washington’s lunch with President Roosevelt! Scott couldn’t wait to see his father and hear what Giles Joplin thought of a Negro dining with the president. But Booker T. Washington was no ordinary man. Scott hadn’t yet read Washington’s new book Up from Slavery, but he could guess at the man’s beginnings from his father’s stories of bare feet and lash marks. Any man who could rise from slavery to the president of a college, then to the White House, in one lifetime was worthy of an operatic tribute, indeed.

  “Say which? An opera?” Louis said. “Oh, you’ll be an apple in the white folks’ yard after that. They’ll give you honorary membership, blue-black as you is. You already talk like ’em.”

  “You know that’s not why I’m doing it.”

  “Ain’t it?” Louis said, gazing at him askance with a crooked smile.

  “How did you become such a cynic? You’re not nearly old enough.”

  Louis shrugged. “Just seems funny, a ragtimer writing opera. Or ain’t you the same Scott Joplin writing my favorite new coon song?” He sang, raising sad eyes skyward while he clutched his hat mawkishly to his breast: “I am think-ing…of my pick-a-ninny days…” Louis must have seen the score he was writing for the lyrics his friend Henry in Sedalia had sent him.

  “There’s no harm in earning a few bits,” Scott said. The public’s fascination with coon songs about the joys of plantation life was endless, and if Negroes didn’t write them, white composers would. “I’m talking about a different style altogether, a ragtime opera. I’ll write my own music and lyrics.”

  Scott felt his neck warming as his imagination simmered. One of the opera’s pieces could underscore Negro patriotism—a lively two-step called “Patriotic Patrol,” perhaps. He could open with an Emancipation Day cakewalk and end at a grand luncheon scene, with a portly, fair-skinned actor dressed like President Roosevelt; moustache, spectacles, cane and all. Scott could almost hear the production: rolling baritones, a libretto of pure poetry.

  “When this opera’s on the stage, no one will believe all those folks shying bricks at ragtime, saying it brings American music down low. Or else saying Negroes are too ignorant to create art,” Scott said. “You can be my tenor.”

  Louis chuckled. “One thing about you, Scotty, your problem ain’t lack of imagination.”

  “Tom says I never learned how to be satisfied. He’s the same sort.”

  “He’s right about that. You listen to Tom, he thinks he can be mayor of St. Louis. Between you, Tom and good ol’ Booker T., I guess it won’t be long ’til a Negro’s voted president.” Louis suddenly shook his injured hand, as if playing had aggravated it. His eyes drifted back to the window.

  “Another razor fight planned for later?” Scott said.

  Louis shook his head. He took a long time to speak, unusual for him; and when he did, his voice carried a weight Scott had never heard before, as if the boy had aged by many years. “I got somethin’ to say to you, and after tonight we ain’t gonna speak of it,” Louis said.

  The lack of jest startled Scott. “Agreed.”

  “I got the dog, Scotty.” Louis didn’t look at him as he said it, still staring out of the window. The room suddenly felt chilled despite the fireplace.

  “Of course you don’t,” Scott said, although he couldn’t dismiss the idea completely, with Louis’s habits. “You might get sores, but it isn’t always…”

  “The sores are long gone, but it ain’t just that. I heard it from the doc. Anyway, I knew ’fore he told me.” He held his hands out, palms downward: Scott saw an unmistakable trembling in his fingers, more severe in his right hand than his left, but visible all the same.

  The breath left Scott’s mouth. “Lord Jesus,” he whispered.

  “I ain’t told nobody but you, so leave it quiet.”

  “Of course.” Scott blinked, and his eyes prickled, already gathering tears as he realized how trivial his earlier concern about Louis’s razor fight was. Syphilis could permanently disable him! Scott moved toward Louis to hug him, but the smaller man pushed him back.

  “Hey, hey, watch out,” Louis said. “I ain’t your candy man. And don’t bury me yet.”

  Despite his worry, Scott chuckled. “You can’t hear it in your playing,” he assured him.

  “Damn right. And when you do, that’s the day you better shoot me as dead as Stack Lee shot Billy Lyons down at the Curtis Saloon.”

  “You’re being treated?”

  Louis sucked his teeth, which made him sound petulant, all the more boyish. “Mercury makes my breath stink, and I hear it turns your teeth black. You know I can’t muss these pretty teeth. ’Sides, I felt sicker with that shit than without it. They say mercury don’t do nothin’ ’cept make you feel like you doin’ something. Ain’t no real doctor’s cure for the dog, Scotty. I found me a hoochie-coochie man from New Orleans, though. He say somebody underworlded me with a spell, all right, but he’s fixin’ me up.”

  “For pity’s s
ake…You should hear how you sound. That’s silly superstition.”

  “You’ll see your way ’round to hoodoo one day, Scotty.”

  “And that’s the day you shoot me. Take my advice: Listen to your doctor.”

  “That doctor’s tryin’ to put me in the ground ’fore I’m twenty-five, by what he says.”

  Scott didn’t dare ask if Louis was exaggerating. His dinner had turned to stone in his stomach. Syphilis was a horrible death, the musician’s plague. And no wonder, with so many sweet-faced angels of death within such easy reach.

  Louis kneaded his hands together, as if he felt the cold, too. “Anyway, I didn’t tell you so you could give me that sad-eyed look…”

  “I’m sorry,” Scott said. “I only—”

  “Don’t you worry about me. I got bags of luck to spare, an’ I’m burnin’ so many candles I’ll set my bed on fire. There’s more to it than what I’ve said, and there’s a reason I said it to you.” Louis’s eyes gazed at him so solemnly that Scott felt his throat constrict with dread, expecting worse news. Still, he couldn’t have imagined Louis’s next words: “It’s Rose that gave it to me. I guess I don’t know that for a fact, but she took sick. She’s got it, too.”

  Scott’s skin turned to ice. He wrapped his arms around himself, stunned silent.

  Rose was a beautiful octoroon with hair hanging past her waist who’d worked for Mother when Scott first met Louis. Louis had bragged that she was the best lay in Chestnut Valley, and she’d blushed at the compliment, her gold eyes flashing like a firefly’s. True to Louis’s promise, she had been a gifted and imaginative lover. After their first time, Rose refused money for her company, asking to see him after her working hours were done. Scott had visited her at least four times when he was in St. Louis, entertaining fantasies of taking the lovely prize as his bride—before common sense sent him to Belle instead. Scott didn’t even know the woman’s real name, since “Rose” was surely a diminutive, after the rosewater fragrance she doused across her shoulders and neck. Scott hadn’t thought about Rose in more than a year.