Lazaretto (12 page)

“Lord Jesus,” Nola said. “Is this about that white boy what assaulted the man in the orphanage. I saw a posting of it. I truly wish I did know of his whereabouts as certain as I could use the reward money.”

“Yeah, to buy a new door.”

Miss Ma had come in—Linc and Bram could tell by the whistling, howling sounds of her laughter.

“What's so funny, you loony wench? What? Is this funny?”

“Leave her be, please, she has a condition—”

“Well, make her shut up, crazy loony wench, put her in the fucking circus, but tell me where the fuck he is.”

Their voices rose and fell as they moved through the house, up the stairs, then back down, through the kitchen, the shed, the whole time spewing profanity and insults and threats.

Linc and Bram stopped breathing as they felt, more than heard, the cellar door being flung open. Footsteps rushing down, to the front, to the rear, to the corner where the closet was. The door opening, opening, opening, in slow motion it seemed, the sounds of its creaking like their own chests cracking. The boxes kicked at, pushed aside, like thunder blasts in their own heads. Muttered complaints, cursing, and cursing some more. And then a slow, slow silence snaked in; they couldn't trust the silence, so they remained as they were, crouched in the hole, blackness all around them. Bram's head was in his hands, and Linc reached out and pushed at Bram's hand. “Did he?” he whispered to Bram, hoping with everything in him that Bram would reply,
Did who? Did what?
But Bram's response was first a sniffing sound, as if his nose was filled with liquid and he was trying to hold it in, to keep it from running down his face, to keep it from showing. “He promised he would return our rings,” he said then. And the impenetrable darkness all around them got blacker still.

THEY WOULD GO
to Yonkers in New York, where Nola had a cousin who worked at the new Glenview mansion. On the morning they were to leave, the iceman came at the usual time, but today his mare was hitched to a carriage where Linc and Bram would hide until they reached the ferry that they would take to Trenton, and then the train to New York. They stood in front of Buddy with their shoulders squared like grown men and thanked him for saving them from years on the chain gangs, or worse. They bowed and kissed Nola's hands and Linc said that if fortune favored him, he should land a miss as perfect as her with whom to share his life.

Buddy laughed. “You been 'round me too long, 'cause you even picking up my lines.”

They went out into the backyard to wait for the iceman. They both wished for Meda, even as they understood that she could not arrive there so early in the morning. But there she was anyhow, sitting next to the iceman as he stopped the carriage in the alleyway at the entrance to Buddy's backyard. As contained as Linc and Bram had been with Buddy, they spilled all out of themselves with Meda, as they both ran to her, and practically knocked her over, tussling to hug her first.

She squeezed them hard and then they climbed into the back of the carriage, and she covered them over with a blanket to hide them. As she covered them she thought of how she'd covered them
that night she'd first met them, when their skin was new and they did not yet have names. She stood there remembering the feel of Linc's head as it found the crook in her neck, how Bram had not cried at all that night, how she'd had the deepest, purest sleep as she'd rocked Linc to settle him. The remembering fell over her and held her motionless by the carriage. Then Buddy called to her from his perch on the back steps. “Let them go, Sister,” he said.

“I will, I already have,” she called back, a defiance running through her tone as the iceman whispered something to his horse and it turned its head around and looked at Meda, a longing in its eyes as if it was giving a look by proxy on behalf of Linc and Bram.

After Linc and Bram hugged Meda goodbye, they took a slow boat to Trenton, and after that a train to the Island of Manhattan, which was denser than Philadelphia; dirtier, too; louder, livelier, more corrupt, more options, lonelier, sadder, more sensual.

They were met by Black Mary, Nola's cousin, and they accompanied her on a Ferry ride along the Hudson to the majestic Glenview mansion.

“I was expecting colored,” said the one doing the hiring, who had a bulbous red nose and breasts like a woman. “But Black Mary say you got good words put out for you, and that you know hows to plant a tree and prune a bush, and keep the grass even. And come snow, you gotta keep that cleared.”

They nodded enthusiastically as he continued to list their duties. They were only thirteen, though they claimed to be sixteen. They settled into the routine of it. They worked hard, and ate well at the end of the day. They began to relax about being found. But after a year, they felt a snaking misery working its way to their bones, killing them: boredom.

They wound their way back to New York City to the growing Italian district of Greenwich Village. “We could be Italian for all
we know,” Linc said. Bram agreed as they picked up the accents and replicated them and gave themselves Italian surnames and invented pasts of having watched their parents die on the voyage over from a plague that killed half of the adults but seemed to spare all of the children. They made no mention of having ever lived in Philadelphia. They picked up odd jobs selling newspapers, working at fruit and vegetable stalls, even shining shoes. They missed Meda with an ache that neither expressed. They sent letters back and forth addressed to Miss Ma to avoid the law tracking them through their correspondence. They were kept up to date of the happenings in Philadelphia. And then they received a post that contained the very sad news that Nola had succumbed to a lung illness. Meda cautioned them not to try to return to Philadelphia, as she knew they would certainly want to pay proper respects to Buddy. But Robinson's condition had not improved, nor had he died, which meant that his family's thirst for revenge had not died either, and they would surely be nabbed if they were to try and return. She would come to them, she promised.

In the meantime Linc could not contain his desire for the tables. And Bram said that his fingers were itching for the feel of piano keys. They made their way farther uptown to the Tenderloin district and the area dubbed Satan's Circus.

The area fit its name and Linc found a proliferation of card games and made some income at the tables, and supplemented it with work in the building trades. Bram played at any of an array of the music halls and concert saloons frequented by the inebriated rich, and the pay was decent and the tips even better. On more sedate evenings, he'd sit in for pianists at the upscale Fifth Avenue hotels, such as the Brunswick. On Sunday mornings, he played at Episcopal churches, where they paid nicely for his talent.

Occasionally, on Sunday mornings, Linc would fall in on one of those church services on his way home from an all-night
card game. He'd ease into a pew that felt unyieldingly hard, and the imposing structures, with their mile-high cathedral ceilings, made him feel small and disconnected, and he'd think that if he had to get beyond those ceilings to get to God they'd never make each other's acquaintance. But then Bram would play, and the sounds of the piano would fill in the void created by those soaring vaults. When Bram saw Linc sitting there, he'd start to improvise. He'd go off music and the young chap sitting next to him turning the pages would look at Bram as if to say, Where are you? What are you playing? I am lost about when to turn the page.

The improvisation would transport Linc to his childhood and the way, when Mrs. Benin wasn't around, Bram would go up-tempo with the hymns he played to suit Meda's ear. He'd allow the music at the church to move through him then. He'd pick up Bram's eyes and nod, thanking him for the music, and for evoking the memory. Bram would extend his elbow out, symbolically, saying, “Anything for you, Brother.”

OVER THE NEXT
several years they lived relatively wild but honest lives, falling in and out of favor with one woman or another. They eventually moved to separate houses within a block of each other. They were still close, convening most nights after Bram performed. They talked loud and laughed hard and swore and smoked hemp and drank rye with the rest of the band.

One night they were in a back room at Koster and Bial's Music Hall, passing around a pipe jammed with hashish; it was potent and went straight to Bram's head after only one inhalation, stunning him, stunning all of them. They laughed in slow motion and cursed about how good it was. The pipe seemed not to be lit when it got back around to Bram. He reached for the brass holder where the taper candle blazed on its thick wick. He put the pipe to his mouth and leaned the candle in to reignite the hashish. He
sucked in hard and the smoke swam around in his brain and he said, “Uh,
shit
,” not realizing at first that his bangs had gotten in on the act, that the hungry flame was devouring his hair. The bass player sitting across from Bram was the first to notice, and he grabbed a container that he thought to be water and threw the liquid at Bram's head to douse the flames. Except that it was lamp oil, and Bram felt the sudden heat as his hair raged and he shouted out in pain and it took time for them all to realize that he was on fire, their reaction slowed by the hashish. Linc noticed first. He ran to Bram and started beating the flames with his hands as he yelled for a blanket; someone threw him a topcoat and he covered Bram's head and snuffed the fire, and he could smell the burnt flesh even through the coat.

Bram's recuperation was tough as gristle. After weeks at Bellevue Hospital, Linc moved him into his room because he still needed constant watching. He slept on the floor so Bram could have the bed. At points he'd have to tie Bram's hands down because he would rage with fits of delirium and try to tear off the bandages.

Meda traveled to New York and bought a room for a week in a tidy neighborhood that was a short walk to the blocks where Bram and Linc kept rooms. She moved the picture of Abraham Lincoln that she'd given to Linc from the space over his desk to the wall at eye level opposite from where Bram lay. When Bram would wake and yell out in pain-fueled hysteria, and converse with people in the room only he could see, Meda wondered if Abraham Lincoln was talking to Bram the way he'd talked to her the morning her baby died. She put cool compresses around his wrists and whispered to him the way she did when he was an infant, and it seemed to calm him.

After what felt like an eternity, Bram grew clearheaded again. It was the day before Meda was to return to Philadelphia and Linc
brought in a banquet-sized breakfast of corn muffins and fried fish and tomatoes. He pulled his desk to the center of the room and borrowed two more plates and utensils from boarders down the hall. He spread a freshly laundered tablecloth over the desk and set a bouquet of flowers in the center. He held Meda's chair out for her, said, “My favorite lady, please have a seat.” Meda giggled the way she used to when they were young boys and had done some silly thing. Bram took halting steps to the table and sat, and laughed, too, as he watched Linc push Meda's chair in and lean down to smooch her cheek. Bram was facing the window, and the sun had miraculously found a way to slant between the adjacent brick structures and steal into the room. He realized, just as he had every Saturday during the years when he'd remained at the Benins' while Meda and Linc left to visit her brother, that he had never been as close to Meda as Linc had been. The sun made his eyes water and Linc asked if he was all right and Meda told Linc to pull the shade down, that the sun was making Bram squint, and that it likely hurt to squint, given that squinting involved the forehead, where new skin was still trying to come together.

“Ah, Meda,” Bram said, “I would wink at you right now, but that hurts, too. You are my favorite lady,” he said, and then felt shy after he'd said it, so he bit into a corn muffin so he could look away. The muffin was still warm and had been saturated with butter, softening it on the inside, so it went down easy.

Meda chatted on about the recent happenings at Buddy's house. Told them that the one who'd played the harmonica at all of the gatherings at Buddy's had died.

“The one called Harmon?” Bram asked.

“That's the one.”

“There goes a loss, the way he pushed those notes out, his tempo, his precision. The man had talent.”

Linc put another corn muffin on Bram's plate and passed
around the tomatoes as he described how the music would drift down to the cellar when they were hiding out at Buddy's and he could tell that Bram was itching to go upstairs and be a part of it.

“Buddy took his passing hard,” Meda said, as she bit into the fish, and her eyes shot way open in that way that signaled she was enjoying something intensely. That had been one of Bram's greatest rewards for enduring those grueling piano-practice sessions, watching what Meda's eyes did when he played for her. “But Buddy being Buddy,” Meda continued with her story, “he extended use of his house for Harmon's wake. Miss Ma attended, and she laughed the entire time, which was not out of custom for her, but it did spur a bit of a kerfuffle because Harmon's family was not acquainted with Miss Ma's propensity for laughter, and considering the occasion, Harmon's widow took exception and told Miss Ma to quell her laughter or else.”

“And she laughed even louder?” Bram asked.

“She did indeed. But not only that, her granddaughter, Nevada, had accompanied her, and Nevada did not take so kindly to witnessing her grandmother being berated.”

“Oh no,” Bram said, as he swallowed another bite of the muffin.

“Oh no indeed,” Meda went on, “because Nevada and Harmon's widow got into quite a spat, and Buddy leaned on the side of Nevada, because I do believe Buddy is sweet on Nevada, which I am happy to see because she brightens his mood since Nola's passing. And Harmon's wife said that she would not remain in such a place and be disrespected, nor would Harmon. So she gathered her people, including a couple of her strapping nephews, and prepared to leave and told the nephews to bring Harmon, too. So the nephews started to lift the coffin, and then Buddy says that he bought and paid for that coffin, so the coffin stays.”

“They carried him out with no coffin?” Linc asked, incredulous.

“Yes they did. One of them slung Harmon over his back, and
the—excuse me for saying this—but the, the pants they'd dressed Harmon in were oversized, and they came slipping down, exposing poor Harmon in a most unimaginably dreadful way, and then the nephew tripped over the pants and he fell over backwards, and poor exposed Harmon landed on top of him—” Meda stopped and dabbed her lips with her napkin. “I have never in my life seen such a sight.” Her eyes watered and her voice cracked and she could no longer contain herself and she laughed. Then Linc laughed, too. Bram sat back and closed his eyes and listened to them laugh: Meda's soprano; Linc's deep bellowing; their pauses and breaths in a lively counterpoint; their laughter was beautiful with its blend of pitches, its starts and stops. Bram hated to say what he was about to say.

“I have quit the piano,” he blurted, and his words got in between their laughter and tripped it up, and they both turned and looked at him with their faces wrinkled with confusion.

“What did you say?” Linc asked.

“I do believe I have misheard,” Meda said.

“I had visitors—”

“What
visitors
?” Linc asked. “I been with you, there was nobody else here—”

“I been visited,” Bram said again as he left the table and stretched out on the bed. “I been visited by the dead.”