Body & Soul (2 page)

"Yes?" Miss Costigan tilted back her head.

"Your hands."

"Why?"

"Because then your hands are clean, so you can wash your face with
them." This was pure mentation, since Claude seldom washed at all, was, in fact, slovenly and far beyond such niceties of personal hygiene. He hated the dark, fusty-smelling shower stall in the back of the apartment.

"Correct." For a split second through her pince-nez, Miss Costigan held him in her gaze. Claude flushed and looked down. He was pleased with himself and hoped she would go on asking trick questions, but she did not. She began the lesson, which he heard with half an ear while returning his attention to the pigeon.

In the schoolyard at recess and lunchtime the boys played war games. Nazis and GIs. Capture the spy. Sergeants and privates. They marched in columns, saluted each other, and carried toy guns in their pockets or the belts of their pants. The girls carried books of Victory Stamps and showed them to one another, or brought in balls of tinfoil for the war effort.

"Are you Italian?" an older boy asked him as they waited to play off-the-point.

"I'm American." Claude had black curly hair, brown eyes, and slightly olive skin. He was small for his age, and thin.

"You look Italian. What do you think of Mussolini?"

"Mussolini stinks."

"Well, okay then," the older boy said. "Let's play."

When it became clear to Claude—from reading the papers and listening to the radio—that the war was almost over, he realized with a start that this great historic event might have some bearing on his life. He timed his question. It was always better and safer to talk to her in the early evening when she came in from work, between the first and the second quart. She sometimes paid attention then. In the morning she ignored him or, if he was insistent, had a tendency to snap, or slap.

"You said my father was a soldier," he said.

She continued stacking coins.

"So what's going to happen? Will he come back?"

"He shipped out a long time ago, before you were born," she said. "He could be dead for all I know."

"But I thought—"

"Forget about it. When you were a baby I told you baby stories. If anybody asks, tell them he died in the war."

Claude stood silently for a moment, then moved a step closer. "But if he died, wouldn't they have told you?"

She looked up. "They? Who is they?
They
don't know anything about me. Or you, for that matter. Now shut up with this stuff."

He went into the back room and played scales over and over again, until dinner.

On V-E Day, late in the afternoon, he went to Lexington Avenue and Eighty-sixth Street—the center of the neighborhood, with a newsstand at every corner to service the crowds pouring in and out of the IRT subway. Five movie theaters, restaurants (Nedicks for hot dogs, Prexy's for hamburgers), coffee shops, cigar stores, Florsheim shoes, beer halls, clothing stores, drugstores, were all brightly lit in the gathering twilight,
VICTORY
was spelled out on the marquee of the RKO theater in oversized letters. Thousands of people gathered on the sidewalks, spilled out onto the streets where the cabs and trucks moved slowly. A sign outside McCabe's Bar said, "Free Beer for Anyone in Uniform," and a dozen young soldiers stood outside, some of them dancing with girls while others sang accompaniment.

"We're going to Times Square," a soldier said, slipping his arm around the waist of a woman trying to weave her way through with a bag of groceries. "Want to come?"

"No thanks," Claude heard her answer. "But here's a kiss for you." She leaned forward, kissed him full on the mouth to the cheers of the crowd, and broke away. The sailor threw up his arms and turned in place to acknowledge the applause.

Down the street, in the bright light spilling from Loew's Orpheum, a small Salvation Army band played "America the Beautiful" and people threw coins onto a blanket in front of them—a continuous rain of coins glinting in the air. Everywhere people smiled, laughed, slapped each other on the back. Claude noticed an old man sitting on a car fender, tears shining on his cheeks. Somebody's dog had broken loose and ran through the crowd, leash trailing, jumping on its hind legs every now and then.

Dizzied by the excitement, Claude wrapped his arms around a lamppost and moved his head from one side to the other watching the action. An American flag was unfurled from the second-story window of a pool hall. A man with a gray beard halfway down his chest stood on a box in front of a candy store, shouting words Claude could not make out, his arms jerking as if pulled by strings. Horns blared on the street. The subway rumbled underneath.

Claude realized that all these strangers were caught up in something together, that an unseen force had wiped out all differences between them and made them one. They were joined, and as he clung tighter to the lamppost he felt his own tears starting because he felt entirely alone, entirely apart, and knew that nothing could happen to change it.

W
ITH A NICKEL
he'd stolen from his mother's change maker the night before—deftly pressing the lever, his heart racing, while she stared into the refrigerator—he walked into the Optimo store at the corner of Lexington and Eighty-sixth and bought a pack of Beeman's pepsin chewing gum. He tore off half a stick, put it in his mouth, and stepped out into the bright sunshine. It was necessary to chew for a long time, long past the point when the flavor had gone, in order to get the right consistency. He sat on a brass standpipe and watched the street. Thus far there were no other kids working the subway grates, which was good, since the other kids were invariably big, and usually tough. Getting chased off was humiliating. He would burn with shame for hours, hating his thin arms, his weakness.

When the gum felt sufficiently tacky he moved to the edge of the sidewalk and lay down on the subway grate, cupping his hands over his brow to gaze down into the dimness. Soot, small bits of paper, candy wrappers, cigarette butts, anonymous trash. He inched forward on his belly, concentrating, looking for the gleam of coins. Pedestrians walked around him. He was barely aware of the enormous tire of a bus as it pulled up a few inches from his head, or the hiss of the pneumatic doors. When a train approached underground, causing an updraft, he would simply close his eyes, wait it out, and then resume crawling. He spotted a dime lying in the gloom and raised himself to his knees. From his pocket he took a length of string and a piece of wood roughly the size and shape of a small cigar. He tied the string on one end, removed
the gum from his mouth, and pressed it carefully to the other end. After a moment of study he picked a square through which to lower the block of wood. Then he lay down again, payed out the string very slowly, keeping the wood as stable as he could during its descent. He was lucky, having picked the right square on his first attempt. The wood was directly and precisely over the dime. Sensing the tension of the string with the tips of his fingers, he allowed most of the weight of the wood to press down on the coin. Holding his breath, he gradually pulled up string, wood, tacky gum, and dime. Exquisite care was necessary at the end, slipping the block back up through the square as smoothly as possible. He raised himself to his knees once more and removed the dime.

It took him a couple of hours—sometimes swinging the wood, gumless, back and forth through the trash to uncover hidden coins—to make thirty-two cents. By then a big kid was on the grate across the street, glancing up now and then, and Claude decided to quit and avoid a confrontation.

Once a well-dressed man had stopped to watch. This was unusual, since adults paid no attention to him, seemed not to see him even as they stepped over him, their heavy bodies hurrying along with mysterious urgency.

"What are you doing?"

"Dipping for coins."

The man stepped closer and peered down. "Dipping?"

He took out a quarter and flipped it with the back of his thumb. It clanked through the grate and fell. "Can you get that?"

The coin had landed on a ledge halfway down and was easy to retrieve. The man hunkered beside Claude—who caught the faint spicy odor of his body—and watched every move. Claude took the quarter off the gum and held it out.

"It's yours," the man said, standing up. "Keep it." He tapped his lips with his forefinger for a moment as if considering something, turned abruptly, and walked away.

Claude looked at the quarter. It lacked the magic quality of the coins he truly found, coins that seemed to have sprung into existence out of nothing under his eye, orphan coins, but it was a lot of money. He went into Nedicks for a hot dog and a small orange drink. He got ten cents in change, which he decided to save. He liked always to have one or two coins in his pocket. It was reassuring.

***

The piano was a puzzle. Why were there black keys, and why were they laid out like that, in groups of twos and threes? How come if you played the white notes from C to C (although he did not know the names of the notes, or even the fact that they had names) it sounded right, but if you played the white notes from E to E it sounded wrong? He sat at the bench and played the C scale over and over again—one octave, two octaves, up and down, in the bass, in the treble—experiencing a curious sense of satisfaction. The sound itself seemed to wrap him in a kind of protective cloak, to encase him in a bubble of invisible energy.

There were times, for instance, lying on his cot with the radio off or sitting on the floor motionless, staring into space, when he would become sharply aware of his own existence and the fact that he was alone. Either the basement apartment was empty, his mother out to work or her discussion meeting, or she was holed up in her room. The sense of being alone would come over him, causing not so much fear as uneasiness. He would go to the piano, make noise, and slip into the protective bubble. He would forget about himself. Many months passed this way.

One day as he sat fooling with a single note—playing it loud, then as soft as he could, then somewhere in the middle—he suddenly wondered what was inside the piano. He got up and examined the instrument. He cleared the stacks of old newspapers, trip cards, and magazines from the top of the case, opened the hinged lid, and looked down. An impression of density, and of order. The strings angled down toward darkness. He reached in and turned first one wooden latch and then another, barely catching the mirrored front of the case as it surprised him by falling away. Now he could see the felt hammers, the pins, levers, and tiny leather strips of the action.

He returned to the bench and played the single note again, watching the hammer fly forward to strike the string. Moving up until his nose was almost touching the mechanism, he pressed the key again and again, trying to understand the forces at work between the key and the hammer. Slots. Little brass pins. Felt pads. Small rods. It was a discontinuous mechanism and extremely complicated, with tiny springs and screws whose function he could not guess at, but after a while, playing now soft and now loud, he came to a rough understanding of how it worked. He tried one key after another, mesmerized. He touched the strings and felt them vibrate.

In the bench he found some sheet music. There was a neatness to the lines and mysterious symbols that reminded him of the inside of the piano. There was a connection, surely, and he knew where to go to find out exactly what it was.

The icy tinkle of the bell as he entered. The shop was empty of customers but filled with musical instruments hanging on the walls, displayed in showcases, lined up in rows—guitars, trombones, clarinets, trumpets, accordions, oboes, violins, ukuleles, saxophones, all meticulously arranged. Mr. Weisfeld, a small, rotund man with sharp black eyes and a thin mustache, sat behind a counter.

"So, finally you come in," he said. "I've seen you out there with your nose on the window." He closed his newspaper and set it aside. "What can I do for you?"

Claude put the sheet music on the counter. "What is this? I found it in the piano."

"You have a piano? You must be rich." Weisfeld opened the music. "You don't look rich."

"A white piano. With a mirror. It's in my room."

"Well, that's good. A piano is a nice thing to have in your room." He tapped with his finger. "This is the sheet music to 'Honeysuckle Rose,' written by Fats Waller."

Claude reached up to point. "But what are those, those things?"

"Those things? They're notes. Those are the notes." He looked at Claude, who suddenly turned the music around and studied it with a slight frown. Weisfeld got up and came around a tall glass case filled with harmonicas. He picked up the music. "Here. I'll show you." He led the way to the back of the room and the upright piano.

"That's big," Claude said. "That's much bigger than the one in my room."

"It's a Steinway. Old, but good." He sat down on the bench and spread out the sheet music. "You see this note printed here? The one with the line through it? That's middle C. A good name for it because it's in the middle, between the treble clef up here and the bass clef down here. You can come down the treble and that's middle C, or you can come up the bass and that's middle C. Are you listening? This is important. They're both the same note—middle C—even though one is printed a little bit lower than the other. Both the same." He glanced at Claude. "You understand?"

"Yes. But why do they put that one there and that one there if they're the same thing?"

"An excellent question. It goes back to the old days. They didn't have clefs in the old days, they just had ten lines, or twelve, or sixteen. But then they found out it was easier to read if they split it apart, so they split it apart, five lines up here and five lines down here, and they print it this way, in clefs." He held his forefinger in the air and then played a single note on the piano. "This is middle C on the piano. This key. This note. See how it's in the middle of the keyboard?" He played it again. "So this"—with his free hand he pointed at his forefinger on the key—"is what that"—he pointed at the printed note on the music—"means. All these notes are about all these keys. They are, in fact, symbols."