Joplin's Ghost (32 page)

Silence waited inside the car. Sarge was already sitting far across the vehicle’s U-shaped expanse of leather seats, staring outside his tinted window at anything but her. Phoenix didn’t have the strength to sit anywhere except by her door, so Trey, Serena and Gloria climbed over her. A whiff of cologne filled Phoenix with hope, made her look outside again.

Carlos leaned toward the car’s open doorway, a bidden mirage. Carlos was winded, his face solemn with concern. Phoenix wanted to climb out and let him hug her, but she couldn’t move again, even to touch his offered hand.

“Llamame,”
Carlos said, the last thing she heard before her chauffeur closed the door.

Sedalia, Missouri
July 1904

H
ow in Heaven did this happen?”

Scott peered out from behind the brocaded curtain backstage, assessing the audience as it streamed into Liberty Park Hall, filling the large room with a din of conversation. He’d worked hard to plan this event, so he’d expected to be thrilled by the assemblage of ladies in summer wraps and ostrich-plumed hats, and men in their linen suits, white straw boaters and canes. There must be close to two hundred here already, and more arriving, but there wasn’t a single Negro face among them. Not one.
We can get everyone to come but our own,
he thought.

“What you expect, Scotty?” said Hortense Cook, the barrel-chested tenor sharing the program with him. Like Scott, Cook was dressed in a smart black suit and tie, his shoes at a high shine for the show. Cook cleared his throat, spitting into his handkerchief. “Your ad said
whites only,
and seems like the correction you put in the paper ain’t out in time. You know how folks is. Nobody wants to fly hot and get bumptious just to get in the door. White folks’ twenty-five cent is as good as anybody else’s.”

Attendance was improving, thank goodness, but he hadn’t ignited the excitement among Negro concertgoers he’d hoped for since he’d been back to Sedalia. For tonight’s show, he’d tried to encourage a larger audience by specifying in his advertising that “white friends” were welcome, but maybe that had been foolish. He wouldn’t be surprised if the newspaper’s mistake wasn’t a mistake at all. Mixed crowds had been decried in St. Louis, mostly relegated to the sporting district, and there were plenty in Sedalia who would rather keep their pleasures separate, too. But what a shame! Here they were at the fringes of Liberty Park, where Sedalia’s Negroes would celebrate Emancipation Day in only weeks. Emancipation wasn’t enough, by far.

“You wanna see more colored folks, make the concerts free,” Cook joked.

“If I could afford that, we’d all be happy.”

“Ain’t
that
the truth?” Cook patted Scott between his shoulder blades. “I think there’s one niglet in the woodpile you’ll be happy to see, Scotty. Take a look.” He pointed, grinning.

At first, Scott thought his wife must have a twin. He had left Freddie at home in their bed this afternoon, where she spent more and more of her days with a new book in her hands. Her cold had steadily worsened. Each time he and the Dixons were sure Freddie was improving, her illness took a new turn, and she’d been all but bedridden for weeks. Hortense Cook was one of his few friends who had met his wife since he’d been back.

Freddie
couldn’t
be here, yet she was front row center in her gay Sunday best, fanning herself with a lace fan that matched her soft pink summer gown, her hair wound atop her head in a style more becoming than any she had worn since their wedding day. Nothing in her appearance betrayed his wife’s frailty.

“What in blazes does she thinks she’s doing?” Scott said. “She’s too ill to be here.”

“Scotty, if that was my woman, I’d be happy to see her any time she showed her face, sunup to sundown. Now wave to your wife.”

Even if he went down to order Freddie back to bed, she would only laugh at him, or else sulk like the child she almost was. This girl had her own mind, and she considered Scott’s demands only suggestions at best. She purposely hadn’t told him she planned to come so she wouldn’t hear his arguments against it. There was no time to caution her about the danger of an unexpected night chill. Perhaps he worried too much, but Freddie should have recovered three times over, yet she had not. Dr. Walden had no good advice for them, except bed rest and a cure to prevent consumption Freddie claimed tasted like rotten eggs and apparently had little effect to boot.
God in Heaven, what if I lose her, too?
Scott tried to shutter that thought away, but it sent stony dread through his veins.

Scott stepped from behind the curtain, revealing himself, and Freddie’s searching eyes found him. She grinned, waving her fan, and he sternly shook his finger at her in return. Predictably, Freddie laughed. It
was
good to see her laugh. A girl so full of life would surely be well one day soon. He had to believe that, or else he had nothing to believe in.

He was glad she had come. Freddie hadn’t seen a single Sedalia concert yet, and he would make sure this was one to remember.

“Showtime,” Cook said, and Scott saw Artie taking center stage.

No one could ask for a better master of ceremonies than Artie Barnes, who was a ship captain at his helm whenever he set foot on a stage. His hair was greased back in stylish waves, glistening in the electric stage lights like his gold pocket-watch chain. Artie didn’t play or sing, but he loved performers, and his basso voice made audiences squirm with anticipation.

Scott felt his heartbeat speeding, and he wiped his damp palms on his trousers. No matter how many times he prepared to face an audience, he was still beset by the nerves he’d felt when he and his brother Robert asked their neighbors to join them in a quartet to sing at the First Baptist Church social in Texarkana when he was sixteen. If he could make enough of a living from composing and royalties, he thought, he might never visit a stage again. He didn’t live for the stage like Louis, who lived for nothing else.

“Fair Sedalians, as we all know, there is one performer here tonight of national repute. He’s been away in the big city making his name and fortune, and now he has come back to join us with his lovely wife, where our ears can delight again and again to the splendiferous artistry that is unique to his talented fingertips. This is no mere performer, ladies and gentlemen, but a composer of a national order. Back in the Queen City for your own personal enjoyment, please welcome first to our stage…the composer of the song that is the biggest hit of the St. Louis World’s Fair, ‘The Cascades’…the composer of such classic rags as ‘Elite Syncopations’ and ‘The Entertainer’…the composer of ‘The Augustan Club Waltz’ in honor of the social club to which many of you fine gentlemen in attendance tonight can boast membership…”

“Is this my introduction or my eulogy?” Scott muttered, and Cook chuckled beside him.

“…and, of course, ladies and gentlemen, immortalizing our very own Maple Leaf Club, none other than the
one and only
composer of ‘The Maple Leaf Rag’…
Mister
…
Scott
…
Joplin
!”

The amplitude of the audience’s reaction nearly halted Scott in midstep as he strode toward the grand piano at the center of the stage. A legion of two hundred people clapped and shouted. It was not the unrestrained love of the Rosebud Bar among those who saw their own futures reflected in his face, but it was a hero’s homecoming nonetheless. These people did not see a Negro, he realized. They saw a
man
.

Standing beside the piano, Scott bent his elbow across his stomach in a gentleman’s posture, met his wife’s smiling eyes, and bowed low. His bow elicited more applause, nearly a frenzy. And he had yet to take the piano bench!

When Scott sat at his piano, a blanket of silence fell across the hall, save a single man’s coughing near the back, muffled behind his hand. The audience must have believed Artie’s hyperbole, and they expected to hear greatness tonight. Scott glanced at Freddie again, and his dear wife was clutching her fan to her chin, her mouth slightly agape as if he were illusionist and had transformed himself into a giant twenty feet high.

He would be a giant for her, Scott vowed as he played the gentle opening of “The Cascades,” his homage to the World Fair’s display of fountains that had looked like a creation from Freddie’s beloved Wonderland itself. He would play the ambitious bass runs in the C section so well that his fingers would ache. He would play himself to exhaustion.

Every note from his piano tonight would be for Freddie, his audience of one.

F
reddie had coughed for an hour before she finally quieted. She lay on her customary side of their brass bed against a bank of pillows, her eyes and face red from her ordeal.

“Promise me,” Scott said, “you’ll never do that again.”

“I just promised God the same thing, if only He’d let me have rest,” she wheezed, taking the glass of water he offered her. When her first two sips eased her coughing, she emptied her glass as if she had been thirsty all day.

All playfulness and merriment were gone from Freddie. Her hair was still beautifully styled from her evening out, but Freddie looked weary and broken. The sight of his wife alarmed Scott anew each morning, when sunlight showed him the gray craters beneath her pretty eyes and her cracked lips that were no longer ruby but a fading pink. He couldn’t see all of her illnesses’s ravages in the gentle kerosene lamp on her nightstand, but morning would come soon enough.

“What were you thinking, to sneak out that way? The Dixons are mortified. They think I’ve married Harry Houdini.”

“Stop, Scott. My poor lungs have scolded me enough. I wanted to see you play.”

This had become their most common meeting place: Freddie in the bed, and Scott beside her in the rattan window chair he’d arranged within arm’s reach. In his lap, Scott balanced the Dixons’ sterling silver serving tray he used when he fed Freddie her breakfast, and sometimes her lunch and dinner, too. He was a musician in his spare time, but his new occupation was Freddie’s caretaker.
If I could only serve her better,
he thought,
Freddie might become well.

“Now you know you’re not missing anything,” he said.

She smiled, touching his cheek. “Just the opposite. You were wonderful, and now I’m more frustrated than before. I broke my rule for you tonight. No one guessed I was a Negro, except maybe the biddy next to me who kept staring. And I was so angry, thinking of all the colored ladies who could have enjoyed your concert, too.”

“You didn’t break your rule. Any other Negro could have come.”

“They love you, Scott, but they can claim Dvo
ák and Wagner and all the rest. They don’t need you the way our people do. You see?” A pitiable urgency came to her face.

“Darling, of course,” he laughed. “Do you think I plan to bar Negroes from my concerts? Don’t worry, I’ll still have plenty of opportunities to save our race. They’ll dance themselves senseless on Emancipation Day.”

She folded her arms, angling away from him. “You’re teasing me.”

“Yes I am, but I also love you. And of course I was upset about the mistake at the hall tonight. I promise it won’t happen again, not by my doing.” He stroked her forehead, which was never cool enough to satisfy him. “Artie mentioned the waltz I composed for the Augustain Club, remember? It’s a very exclusive club, and I was honored to be asked, so I labored on it a month, trying to perfect every note. But when it was time for the performance, they wouldn’t let me play because I’m a Negro. They hired white musicians instead. I was good enough to compose it, but not good enough to set foot in the door. I have a hundred stories like it, Freddie. You think I don’t despise this, too? My publisher’s daughter plays ragtime as well as any Negro. Music doesn’t have a skin color! But I have to confess, I was much more upset tonight when I saw my ailing wife out alone at night, away from her bed. That I won’t tolerate, Freddie.”

“Yes, sir,” she said, without sarcasm or irony. He almost hated to hear her so yielding, because it made her seem weaker than she should be.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if you’ve set yourself back.”

“How can I, when I’ve never gone forward? Sometimes I think I’ll never be well.”

Neither of them had dared say it aloud, until now. Scott held her clammy hand. “You will. You have to learn patience. That’s what my friends always tell me.”

“This room is a prison.”

It was hard to admit to himself, but Scott had come to look forward to his gigs if only for liberation from their room. Upon their arrival, the room had suited their needs perfectly. It was one of the largest rooms in the house, easily the size of two bedrooms, with smoothly finished wooden floors and a decor to match that of a fine hotel: a fireplace with an attractive clock on the mantel depicting angels blowing their heavenly trumpets; Irish Point lace curtains in the windows; bookshelves brimming with books; an oak bureau and mirror; attractive woodland prints on the walls; and a tea table and rattan rocker by the large window, facing Olivia Dixon’s flower garden.