Joplin's Ghost (51 page)

Needing to see her safe was the only thing that had kept her father alive.

Harlem
1916

S
inging.

The undulating voice sounded like Lottie’s, although Scott wondered if his ears were trustworthy. He thought he heard singing most nights now, although Lottie said it wasn’t her, and neither of Lottie’s girls would confess to it either. If he was doomed to hear imaginary noises, Scott thought, he could do worse than singing.

Scott’s knees were sore and unsteady against the kitchen’s wood floor, and he knew he couldn’t expect his body to kneel much longer at the cool blue steel door of the stove. Glancing behind him to make sure no one would see, Scott grabbed another handful of papers from the fat stack under his armpit and shoved them beneath the grill. He had collected his scores for days now—from the Steinway’s piano rack, from his drawers, from boxes, from forgotten notebooks. Some pieces were complete, start to finish, and some were ideas that had never found a home, but they were all going home now. Scott buried the ink-splotched pages in ash so Lottie wouldn’t see them when she lit the coals for dinner.
Better to return you to God than see you made bastards, your composer’s name forgotten.

Scott heard Lottie’s singing again, and the gentle voice of a piano as someone accompanied her on the Steinway grand, as perfect as any concert hall, just the way they wanted it. The singer
had
to be Lottie; he wouldn’t tolerate such tone-deafness from an imaginary voice. But Lottie’s sour notes suited “Memphis Blues,” because Lottie sang blues tunes like she owned them. When Lottie got to the part about the sinner on revival day, Scott wondered if she had written those lyrics herself.

The singing made Scott sigh. He still had fifty pages under his arm, but Lottie only had to round the corner from the parlor, and she’d be standing in the kitchen doorway. She would throw her iron skillets at him if she saw what he was doing. Lottie had a temper, too, it turned out.

But this matter didn’t concern Lottie. This was between Scott and God. Well, God or the Devil. Scott had warned both that he would send any new music back, but someone still sent more, even now that the handwriting was illegible even to Scott. And for what? To further torment him? Scott decided he would take his time disposing of the next piece, because his
Symphony No. 1
deserved a reverent cremation. He must mourn the pure scope of its undelivered promise; not only its singular virtues, but those of the pieces that would have followed, a dozen or more.
Symphony No. 1
would have elevated his name to Dvo
ák’s.
But not by a Negro, no. Someone else would have claimed it as his, because surely no Negro is capable of composing such art.

“Ashes to ashes, amen,” Scott muttered, closing the stove door. He wanted to light the flames himself, but Lottie hid the matchbox from him. He would find it, by and by.

Scott groaned, reaching to the tabletop to try to pull himself back up to the kitchen chair. This trusted chair was one of his favorite resting spots, with sturdy wooden armrests to keep him propped upright. Scott could no longer sit at a piano bench comfortably, so he cherished the kitchen chair, the parlor settee and his bed. He was like poor Freddie now, shuttling between the few meager spaces he could master, the bed his last resort.

Lottie would send him away soon. She’d only mentioned it once, almost in passing—
One day I won’t be able to look after you on my own, Scotty
—but Lottie revealed her thoughts only once they were set. Lottie said he should go to Chicago to be with his sister, but if he didn’t hurry, Lottie might change her mind and send him to a hospital instead. Every day, Scott saw Lottie studying him, looking for his weaknesses.

Could he withstand a Chicago winter? Would he survive another winter anywhere?

“What you doin’ hidin’ back here?” Sam said from the doorway.

Scott was so startled, he nearly dropped his pages. “Minding my business,” Scott said. Sam was one of the few people fluent in his mumble.

Sam grabbed half a slice of sweet potato pie from the counter and shoveled it into his mouth in a swoop, talking all the while. “Lottie sent me to fetch you, so come on.” After slapping his hands clean, Sam grabbed Scott beneath his armpits, lifting without a grunt.

Instinct made Scott pull away, mortified. He clung to one armrest so he could reclaim his seat. No one except Lottie helped him walk. “What if I don’t
want
to be fetched?”

“Lottie said to pay your mouth no mind, so hush up and let’s go. If you don’t like it in the parlor, you can come on back in here and hide.” A swing, and Scott was on his feet. He leaned across Sam’s shoulder, and they began to walk. “That new music you got, Scotty?”

Scott pinned the pages beneath his armpit more tightly.
“Treemonisha,”
he lied. As much as he wished he had the heart to destroy his opera, Scott could not. Too much of Freddie lived within its pages. How would she find him without it?

That lie only gained Scott a lecture. “What you still carryin’ that around for? It ain’t natural, Scotty. Louis always said you’d get fixed on something and wouldn’t let it alone.”

“Louis should have been worrying about his own damn problems,” Scott mumbled.

“I didn’t hear all of what you just said, but I’d speak kind of the dead if I was you.”

By leaning most of his weight on Sam, Scott was able to imitate the motion of walking even with limbs that had no interest in obliging him. One foot in front of another. Sam could support more of his weight than Lottie, so Scott didn’t have to stoop so badly. Scott walked into his parlor as a man, not a ward. Lottie was watching, and he smiled at her.
You see, baby? I’m fine after all. No need to consider me a bother.

The parlor was crowded. Parties appeared on their own in Lottie’s parlor, with a quick rap at the door, a call to the window, or a jangle of the telephone in the hall. Then, music and laughter followed without fail, often until after he was in bed. Lottie’s boardinghouse was a gay home for dying.

A young tickler boarding with Lottie from New Orleans named Walter Powell was sitting in Scott’s place at the Steinway, but he moved his hands to his lap when Scott entered the room. Scott saw arched eyebrows, bright eyes and thin smiles that told him all five of them had been talking about him and didn’t want him to know it.

Lottie stood beside the Steinway in a bright blue dress Scott had never seen before. Unhappiness made Lottie visit shop windows, gazing at dresses she couldn’t afford. Her dress of ruffles and taffeta might have cost twelve dollars or more, but how could he object? He hadn’t earned any money since the piano rolls, except the royalties that dribbled in from “Maple Leaf.”
What would I have done without my loyal child?
Their apartment on 138th Street in Harlem was only a block from a row of ornate brownstones that were architectural prizes well out of reach despite their proximity. Lottie planned to buy their entire building, which would be its own triumph, and some days the notion of wealth sitting so close by didn’t bother Scott at all.

“Scotty, what were you doing in the kitchen?” Lottie said.

“He was sittin’ right at the table, Lottie,” Sam said. Sam often answered for him.

Lottie reached for Scott’s music, but he pivoted away from her so quickly that he nearly lost his balance against Sam. While Sam lowered him onto the settee, Scott moved his scores from one underarm to the other, hunched like a crab.

Lottie’s eyes sparked with anger and hurt. She wagged a finger at him. “Unh-hnh. I’ll go see right now. If I find something in my stove shouldn’t be there, it’s gonna be me and you.” Lottie swept past him toward the kitchen, and he almost confessed in case it might spare him some of her anger. It broke his heart to make her angry. He only couldn’t get his mouth to work. Lottie’s outburst had silenced the room, the singing mood gone.

Joseph Lamb, the sole white visitor, pulled the parlor window down in a whimper, since the room was getting cold in the fall chill. It was good to see Lamb. The composer kept to himself and hadn’t been by to visit since he came to show off his girlfriend a while back. Lottie’s new girl, Sadie, sat smoking a cigarette, leaning over the coffee table to look at the pictures in
Harper’s
magazine with such little regard for the position of her cleavage that Joe was red in the face. A drummer named Herbert Wright, an out-of-towner Sam had met at a gig, sat across from Scott in the parlor chair, rattling a pair of dice together in his hand, like bones.

“Lottie
really
don’t want you messing with her stove, huh Joplin? My girl in Boston don’t like my cooking neither, but I see Lottie means business,” Wright said. He pocketed the dice, pulled out his penknife, and sliced away a neat section of the apple in his other hand.

Everyone except Scott laughed louder than the joke deserved, the sound the room needed. “What happened to the music?” Scott said.

“Scotty’s right. Where’d the music go?” Sam said, his translator.

“Somebody play somethin’ we can
dance
to,” Sadie said.

Scott didn’t trust Sadie, who wore a bright red wig and constantly watched her face in the mirror, chronicling time’s insults with pursed, painted lips. Sadie liked to stand over the Steinway reading his pages of music, when he was careless enough to leave them in plain sight. Lottie thought Sadie was only curious, but Scott knew a Tin Pan Alley spy when he saw one.

“Where are those piano rolls you recorded?” Joe said. “Scott recorded ‘Maple Leaf’ for Uni-Record. And didn’t you do some other songs for another company? I forget the name.”

Scott suddenly felt like the guest of honor at an early wake.

“You know better, Joe. Rolls don’t sound good, the way they make those changes,” Scott said. He would have ranted longer if it weren’t so much effort to speak. The music was barely recognizable. Scott could blame his hands, of course, but it was more than that. Mostly he’d done it because he imagined how happy Freddie would be that he’d recorded a piano roll. Her pleas with him to record his music still followed him in his dreams.

Walter Powell tapped the piano keys. “Lemme play ya’ll the blues rag I just wrote.”

“Man, first you wanted to call everything a rag. Now, everything’s blues,” Sam said.

“You want to sell it, you
better
call it blues.”

“That nigger Handy’s makin’ some money, ain’t he?” Wright said. “‘Memphis Blues’ sounds like the same old cakewalk to me. Don’t it? He don’t even know blues, an’ he’s got everybody thinkin’ he did it first. Shit, that nigger ain’t dumb.”

“He got it right in ‘St. Louis Blues,’ though. That’s
blues,
” Sam said.

“You should write a blues number, Mr. Joplin,” Walter Powell said. “We’ll make you the Blues King next.” When the young man had first realized he had moved in with Scott Joplin, he’d been so shocked that he was mute for days. Now, Walter talked to Scott like he owned his own publishing company, like John Stark reborn.

“I wrote a little blues,” Scott said. He had peppered “Magnetic Rag” with enough blues harmonics to make Lottie squeal the first time he played it for her. “Magnetic Rag” was already two years old, and it would be his last publication. He was certain of it.

Lottie’s voice killed the party just as it was waking.

“Yeah, I see you been writing a
lot
of music,” Lottie said, dabbing the ash-covered pages from the cookstove with a white kitchen towel. Lottie’s eyes were accusing, but more weary than angry. “What’s this, Scotty? ‘Scott Joplin’s Blues Rag’? ‘Lenox Avenue Rag’?”

“They’re
mine,
” Scott said, his teeth clenched. He wasn’t mumbling now. “
Not
yours.”

Lottie blinked fast, the woman’s trick of sudden tears. “These belong to the man who wrote them, not to this one who’s half out his mind. When you get your good mind back, I’ll give you Scott Joplin’s music. You got
no right
.”

“And you’re a
fool
. They’re illegible!” Scott said. He and Lottie argued all the time now.

Lottie raised her arms with pages fanned in each hand, a performance that embarrassed him. “See what he’s doin’? I told you, I can’t let my eyes off him a
minute
. This man is
burning
his music and sending it out with the trash every chance he gets. I’ll feed him and wash him—I’ll carry him from one end of this flat to the other—but I will be
goddamned
if I’m gonna watch him burn up what’s left of Scott Joplin. You better talk to him, Sam.”