American Music (6 page)

CHAPTER SEVEN

T
hey lived happily ever after. Anna gave birth to a baby girl at the tender age of seventeen and it was the beginning of a great love story. She had never known such joy. The round head burst forth from her like a marvelous idea. Her body shook with the revelation of new life. Her family, however, did not share the same attitude, and so the baby was taken from her and given to a respectable and grateful couple who were waiting anxiously outside the delivery room. It seemed that everything was right again with the world, except to Anna. Her father and mother handed the child over with a mixture of pride and revulsion. Pride and revulsion were popular sentiments in the late twentieth century. Ronald Reagan was president. For years, people had believed in believing in things, and when they went as planned the entire nation took credit; when they didn’t, the country blamed someone else. But ever since the Vietnam War some people had started blaming themselves for things that did not go right, and because it was so unlike the national character to do so, an element of self-hatred had crept into the culture. On the streets you saw young people with hairstyles like a crown of fangs. The music blaring from enormous boxes sounded menacing and deranged. A lot of people wore black. It was also a very innocent time. Telephones were heavy and stayed at home. Sometimes they had buttons. Girls waited by the phone, literally. Boys did not dream of owning their own jet. Women who were not even old looked old. There was plenty of drug addiction, but not a lot of rehab. There was no Ecstasy. There were no antidepressants. There was no global village. There was no Internet. On the day that Anna gave birth to her daughter the sun was shining. Out the hospital window the East River flowed past like one long silver muscle, the way it had when Walt Whitman had mused over it in the preceding century, and like it would look to the passengers of a plane flying low over the city in the next century. Anna cried. She was too young and inexperienced to have truly maternal feelings yet, but the emotion she felt for her new baby was an uplifting, cosmic, unbounded passion. Her father, a surgeon, tried to explain to her that her feelings were largely hormonal, a result of chemicals released during pregnancy, labor, and delivery, and that eventually, rather quickly even, they would pass and she might think about the child wistfully from time to time but that she would not regret her decision. She argued, through her tears, that it had not exactly been her decision. Her father gave up and left the room. Her mother, a woman at this point in her life too vain and too horrified by the idea of becoming a grandmother to entertain the thought that her daughter might actually keep the baby, emphasized how much work it was to raise a child, and how much early adulthood of her own Anna had left ahead of her, too much to derail or squander on an infant. She herself had had an abortion before she had gotten married, she reminded Anna, and to this day she rarely thought about it. (This was not entirely accurate: her own parents had wasted no opportunity to make her feel terrible about the scandal, and every subsequent decision in her life had flowed from that experience of profound shame.) She had not made her own daughter feel ashamed about getting pregnant; on the contrary, she felt modern and compassionate for having accepted Anna’s determined stance against having an abortion, although it could be surmised that this was in no small part because it was so late in the pregnancy when Anna had revealed the state of things. Now the sun was setting somewhere on the other side of the city, and the light was fading over the river. This was the time in American history when photographers were discovering new lenses and filters and retouching techniques that gave the glossy images in magazines a burnished, affluent glow. This was the glow that was spreading across the sky right now, a sheen that gave the river a metallic, artificial magic and glimmered bewitchingly on the buildings and highways. Anna’s mother did not leave the room. She sat in the silence. She observed an orange triangle of light reflected from the window onto the blank television screen suspended from the ceiling. Had Anna turned on the television she might have heard about the death earlier that day of Count Basie, the celebrated bandleader whose music had captured the romance and optimism of another era. Or she might have caught a glimpse of a new form of entertainment called a music video, on a new channel known as MTV. But Anna did not turn on the television, and she did not respond to her mother. She was unmoved by her parents’ arguments, unruly in her devotion to her infant daughter, and unhinged by the possibility that she might never hold her baby in her arms. She screamed. She screamed until the nurses and orderlies had to medicate away the screams. A doctor spoke to Anna’s parents and wrote a prescription. Evidently there
were
antidepressants. They had not yet been perfected, however, and so Anna’s screams continued long after her parents had brought her home. Finally, after two weeks of uninterrupted screams, it was arranged for the respectable and now ungrateful couple who had been waiting outside the delivery room to adopt a different baby. Their new baby was also American, not a Chinese or African baby. There really was no global village. It was 1984. When Anna finally had her beloved back in her arms, she gazed into her daughter’s eyes for a long time. Then she looked up at her parents, whose own expressions were no longer able to conceal their disappointment and disgrace, shook the bangs from her eyes, and deadened her gaze somewhat before breaking into a smile. Then she said:

I’m going to name her Honor.

Anna’s mother, in spite of herself, fell deeply in love with the child. She had imbued the drama of her only daughter’s illegitimate pregnancy with all of the pathos and regret that she felt about her own marriage and divorce and therefore once the baby was born believed strongly that this child in possession of a single teenage mother must be in need of toys. She thought about her granddaughter all the time, took care of her while Anna finished high school, and was heartbroken when Anna took Honor with her to college. Her apartment was covered in pictures of the little girl. Most of these showed Honor staring into the camera, a profusion of curls dancing around her head, one hand reaching out to touch the lens. Her eyes were a startling, electric blue. Her nose a squat pug. Her neck thin like the stick of a lollipop. Her mouth curved in a mature amusement beyond her years. She had caused the ruination of one life, so her grandmother believed, and resuscitated another, and from this the woman deduced that the child was destined for calamity and splendor.

The afternoon was a cloudy haze. The branches of the trees in the park trembled like etchings come momentarily to life. The little girl, just walking, bent down and found a penny on the path that encircled the toy-boat pond.

It was a dirty copper specimen bent slightly at one edge and embossed upon it was the date 1923. What the little girl did on that cloudy day with the March wind tossing her curls into her face was to lift the penny to her lips, put it on her tongue, taste its cold filthy sweetness, and swallow it. Pigeons sailed overhead, their shadows skating on the pond, and in front of the little girl, out of the sleeve of a wool coat, a gloved hand emerged and pulled her toward home.

Over the years the little girl had moments of sudden restlessness when she would begin to feel the quickening motion of the globe as well as her own small self delicately balanced on the spinning ball. She sensed the rapid palpitations of her heart. She was aware of her blood pulsing through her limbs. She had reached an age when her young mother felt that she could leave her alone without worrying, and consequently Honor was deeply acquainted with solitude. She read early and often and was currently, at the age of eight, inhaling, if not actually comprehending,
Gone with the Wind
and the complete works of Agatha Christie. She felt that her tenuous circumstances—the two of them lived now in a college town while her mother was in graduate school, with only minimal support from Honor’s grandparents, who were upset by Anna’s refusal to return to New York—created an uncertain, wavering, and often wondrous atmosphere around their daily life which was not at all like the concrete, material world she read about in the newspapers, or even novels. The days seemed to float along without any tether to the organized rituals she observed at friends’ houses: dinnertimes, bath-times, bedtimes. In her house, time was a fluid, untamable vapor and anything, Honor felt, could happen.

It was in this spirit of anticipation that she would look out the window of their second-floor apartment waiting for her mother to return from a class or a cup of coffee with a friend, and would try to commit the street scene to memory in case she was called upon by the police to make a report in the event of her mother’s disappearance. Her powers of concentration and observation were absurd. She accepted this burden as perfectly normal. She never questioned that it was necessary for her to exert such mental discipline, just as she never questioned why she lived with the expectation that one day her mother would not come home. She took note of the colors of the cars as they drove by and the order in which they drove past. She watched the rain fall and studied the patterns of the drops on the window, the rhythmic timing with which one lone raindrop would slide down from the top to the bottom, snaking through the freckled surface of the glass, giving the impression that the window itself, overcome with emotion, had begun to cry. She memorized the look of the leaves as they waved back and forth to one another from the trees, and she envied their casual relationships. She memorized the clothes on the people who occasionally walked past the little house on the quiet street. She remembered their postures of worry or calm and she thought she could read entire lifetimes into the slope of a shoulder or the back of a head. Her memory was mystifying because she didn’t appear to be thinking or even exerting the slightest effort as she took in so acutely the world. If a hand had been waved in front of her face while she was looking she would have registered it, but her eyes would have acknowledged not a flicker of awareness.

The young girl sat in front of the window and fixed her gaze on an insect traversing the glass in such a way that it appeared to be climbing up the side of the house across the street. The insect flew away. A man was sitting on the roof of the house across the street. Honor did not recognize him. She saw that he was wearing a blue windbreaker and khaki pants. His face was turned to his left as if he were waiting for someone and gazing across the rooftops for their arrival. His legs dangled down. The building was three stories high. Honor had never seen anybody up there before and now she stared with amazement as the man, who appeared to be anywhere from fifty to seventy years old, turned his head to look in the opposite direction. The young girl opened her mouth to call out to her mother but her mother was not home. She continued to stare at the man who had stood up and had put his hands in his pockets. Then he took his hands from his pockets, stretched his arms above his head as if he were about to perform a salutation to the sun, and as he lifted his arms two enormous dove-colored wings unfurled on either side of him. The young girl opened her mouth to exclaim, even though her mother was not home, but this time there was no sound because her powers of speech had been eclipsed by fear. The man stood on the roof with his wings outstretched for some time. They were the size of American flags and their feathers looked thick and soft from a distance. They did not appear to be shadows or a mirage. The man was wearing sneakers. He folded back his wings, and the space around him returned to its usual emptiness.

There was no one walking down the quiet street. Honor, as if instructed by some higher self, left the house and called up to the man. He was friendly and unthreatening and he climbed down from the roof, wingless, and accepted her invitation inside. He was an angel. He was thinking of working in the neighborhood. He subverted her expectation of those in his profession with his plain, almost bland demeanor. He seemed sad. He was an average height, medium-build man, handsome in his youth obviously, with a healthy complexion and a muscular torso that moved gracefully within the confines of his blue windbreaker. He had a full head of graying hair that was ruffled from the wind and clear green eyes that took in everything. He was very polite to the little girl and asked her questions about herself. This struck her as appropriate. She answered him. Then they went into the kitchen and she poured iced tea from a pitcher in the refrigerator because it was the kind of thing that she had seen her mother do for guests. They sat down on the sofa in the living room and he drank his tea heartily. The room was neat and sparsely decorated mainly with bookshelves, in a typical graduate student style. The angel scanned the shelves. He noticed many books about music. In response to his question about them Honor explained that her mother was studying musicology. Did she have any instruments in the house, he wondered. Honor stood up and brought in a weathered black saxophone case. It was heavy for her and she swayed backwards as she carried it, relieved when she handed it to him. The angel relaxed and leaned back into the sofa. He opened the case. He smiled at the unpolished instrument. He stood up and began to play. He was not without talent. He closed his eyes. Honor listened to him and didn’t bother about remembering the music. He spent a while playing something slow and swinging, like a sultry lullaby, for the little girl. When it was time for him to leave she saw him to the door. She shook his hand, because she had also seen her mother do that, but she wasn’t really ready to say good-bye and so she followed behind him for a bit as he walked down the center of the empty street. Then she turned around and went back into the house in time to look out the window and see his blue shape diminishing into the distance. She put the saxophone away and waited for her mother to come home.

CHAPTER EIGHT

2005

H
onor stood up in the subway car where she had been sitting and looked out into the darkness. Her stop was coming and she liked the moment before the light broke through the window. There was her reflection in the glass, a ghost with a shifting skeleton and a visible heartbeat as the columns and dim lights that made up the architecture of this underworld scrolled through her body rapid-fire in the blackness. Then she disappeared into the light. She turned toward the doors. She adjusted the strap of the bag slung across her chest and quickly stepped onto the platform.

It was raining softly when she emerged onto the street. She seemed to be looking through a scrim as she made her way along the sidewalk. From a distance, she appeared to be almost marching, silently, through the mist. With her steady gaze and long coat, her faded satchel and heavy boots, she looked both present and ancient. She looked like some beautiful soldier arrived from history.

You’re here, she said.

I’m here, he said.

That’s something, she said.

It is.

They had called her and told her he was ready to see her again. It had been several months. At night, she had dreamt about him over and over. At night, she had read his bones. Now back in the hospital she was afraid to look at him, afraid to remind him that she knew him, afraid she might lose him again. He didn’t say much. He didn’t talk about what had happened. It went on this way for weeks, as if nothing had ever happened between them. Then one day when she came in he was sitting in his wheelchair, not on the table. The nurse had gone.

He said: So what do you think was going on with that woman who lied her way into the photographer’s apartment?

The one whose husband was court-martialed? The pregnant one?

She’s not pregnant when she goes into the apartment.

I know.

So who is she? What does she want in there?

She looked around the room. Can I take off my coat?

No. He was smiling.

Okay.

She sat on the table. She took off her bag and put it down next to her. She fiddled with a string she had tied around her wrist. She hadn’t realized until now that she was nervous.

He stared at her, not fully believing that she was back. He blinked. He was bouncing his foot.

So, he said. The woman’s pregnant, he said. Her husband’s court-martialed, then a couple of years later, because that’s what it seemed like to me, she basically breaks into this older woman’s apartment. What’s going on?

You got me.

He looked down. She could sense his expression change without seeing his face. She saw it in the line of his shoulders, the top of his head.

I tried to hurt myself while you were gone, he said.

They told me, she said. I’m glad you’re okay. I’m glad you’re still here.

Then he looked back up.

Don’t leave again.

I didn’t leave. You wouldn’t see me.

You can’t listen to me. You can’t listen to them. If I say that again, don’t listen.

What should I do?

Find me. Come here anyway.

All right. I will.

He looked at her like he knew she was going to save him.

Then he said: So what happens next?

She shrugged her shoulders. Her hair lifted up and down.

Only one way to find out.

1936

Joe was driving along a curving parkway, heading north. A white sign with green lettering said Entering Massachusetts. Vivian sat next to him reading from a piece of paper covered with a scrawl of directions. It began to rain. Light steady rain dotted the air in quick flashes, hyphenating the atmosphere, making dashes of white against the dark brown trees. November, and a silver sky was throwing out this water, indifferent to the cars, the lives, the minor tragedies and great loves below, an oblivious sky. Vivian thought they might be lost but Joe said how could they be they were supposed to be in Massachusetts and here they were. He looked over at her and smiled and the furrow in her brow melted but still she had been short with him. She had not promised anything. The trip had been his idea and she had agreed to go but she had not promised it would be easy. She went back to studying the piece of paper. She exuded always a sense that they were in the wrong. He could feel it in her hesitation. She waited a moment before answering him. She picked up one topic, then put it down before it went too far and chose another. She put her hand on his arm and then took it away, as if he were a sculpture in a museum that she had momentarily been driven to touch. He was flattered that she tried at all, that she was here at all, and he respected her wary conscience. It relieved him of the need to have much of one himself. It made it possible for him to put his energy toward persuading her and reassuring her and comforting her.

But he was also aware that this was wrong. It was just that he could not possibly stop himself. His being in this car with Vivian was as inevitable as this silver rain that kept falling. He loved her and they were having an adventure that felt as new as the trees wet and slick with fresh cold rain. Their time together felt as sad as it was exciting but it would never have made any sense to him to think that this feeling was simply him, that it was the feeling that he had been carrying around for many years and now with her it had found its perfect expression. It was not in his repertoire of ideas to consider that his feelings were not a result of what was going on around him but that his feelings actually existed somewhere inside. He was not fortunate or unfortunate enough to know that he was the source of the feeling. That was something he could not possibly have known.

When they found their way to a part of Quincy, Massachusetts, called Norfolk Downs to see the factory of the world’s greatest cymbal maker, the rain disappeared and the sky surged with blue and the air turned their faces bright and red and their eyes were clear.

2005

They put Milo in a different room. They had thought he was getting better and then when it had become clear that although his legs were improving his mind was not, they had kept him under closer observation. He was not allowed anything that could be used as rope. They kept his clothes in a separate place. He had tied several T-shirts together and when they’d asked him about it he had said he was making a scarf. For a while he had wanted to forget her and he tried but then the stories kept coming back even when she wasn’t there. Not new stories, just the same images haunting him and pulling him back into wondering, wanting to know. When he’d said he needed to see her again and they’d asked him why he’d said: Because I want to know what happens. They had no idea what he meant but they’d taken it as a good sign.

They had let him keep the same bed, although the sheets were different. Just a kind of sleeping bag that he couldn’t twist into anything. He didn’t want to anyway.

He wanted to unravel the story instead. What did the story of the photographer have to do with Joe? Who was the pregnant woman? At first Joe had seemed like a fraud to him, some wannabe artist dreaming of romance. And Vivian too, what a poseur. With her airs and so aloof. Pearl had seemed like the only real one, the only sympathetic figure. And here they were, taking this long-suffering woman for granted, ruining her life. But then he’d begun to realize what Pearl and Joe had been through and he felt sorry for them both, not just her. He could see how Joe might need some escape. He was a kind of idiot, Milo thought, but an understandable idiot. Someone he could recognize and if not forgive then at least accept. And Vivian, he began to see her too as more confused than aloof, more defensive than pretentious. And she really did care about music and art more than just about anything. He was starting to believe that. And now here she had a chance for some love. He didn’t know why she had never had any before but he knew this to be true. He could see them all from a great distance as though they were jewels in his hand, crystals that split the light into different colors and directions depending on which way they fell in his palm, where they landed, the time it took for light to land on them. He held them in his hand like tears that had spilled there and turned to gems and he watched their facets shift and their hues change and he felt no judgment and no anger toward them and no sorrow for them either. Only a pity that was more like interest, a deep concern. He wanted to know what would happen to them. He wanted to know who they really were.

Of course who could they possibly be if not some part of him, Milo Hatch, a wounded soldier living in a VA hospital? But he could not think of any way in which they were connected to him. His family had lived for generations in Maine, and their history had its own, utterly different, story. No, this story had nothing literally to do with him. It must have something to tell him, but it was not his story.

So, Joe wasn’t a fraud exactly and Honor hadn’t disappeared. Those mysteries were solved. But what about the woman breaking into the apartment? Milo thought about her and her story. She had been shaken by the verdict, her husband’s dismissal from the army. Would it ruin his career? Would the trauma hurt her pregnancy? And what did the photographer have to do with any of this? He couldn’t think of any clues other than the wedding photograph of Pearl and Joe. But that didn’t tell him much. His only hope was Honor.

He thought of her and the gems in his palm melted back into tears and the tears went flying up to his eyes and moved through him and settled back into his chest and returned to being what they had originally been, those burning embers. He hated that he couldn’t figure this out alone. He hated that the story wouldn’t move forward without Honor. Then he realized that this feeling toward her was like Joe’s feeling toward Vivian, that he needed her, or Joe’s feeling for Pearl, that she was somehow in his way. Milo recognized that neither view was fair to Honor. She was a person. She was trying to help. Then he saw her too from a distance and she was a jewel in his hand. She was like a jewel in a story that when placed in the proper location would unlock the treasure chest, the trapdoor, the secret wall. The story could not go on without her. He could not go on without her. And the light moved through her and she was strange to him, and radiant.

Honor

As it happened the man in the blue windbreaker never returned to Honor’s street. There was no sign that her existence would be anything but ordinary. She grew up. As the years passed and the time to earn her own living approached, she waited for a sign that she might have a calling. She knew that she possessed an uncommon discipline of mind and a fierce sensitivity to the physical world but she did not know what to do with these endowments. She was a slender girl with a strong body and a desire to express herself through movement, but she appreciated the difficulty of economic survival and was aware that she might not be able to make money by becoming a dancer, which was her dream. Her interest in reading had not declined, but she had seen how little books had to do with her strange world and she felt too vibrantly alive for their dry pages. In the meantime, her mother drifted from low-paying employment to low-paying employment. Creditors would have to be assuaged, arrangements were always pending, logistics seemed to consume her existence. Anna lifted the papers on her desk and rearranged them. The headstrong young girl who had bravely taken on the challenge of motherhood had, in spite of her wish to take care of her daughter, grown up into a confused and distracted woman. Neither mother nor daughter was unmindful of the dangers that they chronically encountered through the annoying encroachment of real life and its responsibilities and demands. Yet they were united in their bafflement as to how to respond to them. Their little family unit seemed to thrive in a state of extended crisis. But one day Honor knocked a spoon off the table at dinner and when she bent down to pick it up she caught sight of her concave reflection in the oval of tarnished silver and saw that she was no longer a little girl. When she emerged in the upright position she had decided to change her personality. She would be courageous and independent as befitted a young woman at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Anna stood up to get something and, having forgotten what it was, sat down again. Honor looked at her mother across the table and a hitherto undiscovered reservoir of compassion rocked like an ocean in her chest. She swayed slightly from the waves of feeling. The next day she left home and found work as a dancer.

1936

The factory was located on Fayette Street. It appeared to Joe to be nothing more than a series of sheds and was in fact formerly a garage. It had been chosen by Aram because of its proximity to the ocean, for tempering cymbals in sea water, and resembled his centuries-old factory in Istanbul as closely as possible. Aram had come from Turkey to teach his nephew the art of making cymbals. It was the family profession and required the use of a secret formula that Aram had come to impart in person. He was an upright gentleman with an old-country demeanor. He could be found sitting out in front of the factory and striking gleaming metal discs with his felt-covered hammer. The chimes could be heard high above the noises of the alley.

They made the cymbals the way they had always been made, the way Aram’s ancestors had made them in Turkey. There was a secret unwritten formula that only the family knew. A copper alloy was mixed and shaped into a molten pancake and fired until it glowed orange in the depths of a gigantic furnace. The cymbal makers did this again and again until the metal hardened into a thin black disk. Then they stamped the center of the cup by machine and returned it to the oven yet again to add a sweet lightness, Aram told them, to the tone of the cymbal. After this the inchoate instrument was hammered for hours by hand and then left to season. For two weeks it went untouched. Then it was tested every other day over the course of two more weeks until it was deemed ready. Each shining cymbal required one month of labor to be born.

When Vivian and Joe pulled up, Aram greeted Vivian with a smile. He welcomed them inside. She had met him in one of the clubs in Harlem where he had gone to meet with drummers to learn their language and find out how to make better cymbals for them. Vivian had known some drummers back then, she explained quietly. Aram invited them in and made tea. Vivian’s eyes shone with a curiosity and excitement Joe had rarely seen. Then Aram began to tell stories about Gene Krupa and Jo Jones and Chick Webb and Joe listened with his hat in his hand. Aram talked about how Gene wanted his cymbals to be thinner and thinner. He talked about the Hi-Hat, or sock cymbal, and how it had helped change the character of American music because it had changed the way drummers kept time—before the Hi-Hat most drummers used press rolls on the snare drum or cowbells, woodblocks, and other percussion to keep time. When they began keeping time with the cymbals, that was the beginning of swing.