Streets of Gold (54 page)

“Hello, Ike,” she said, and I knew instantly that something was wrong. My mother’s voice is a delicate instrument. It can promise the hyacinths of spring or the gardenias of death in a single breath.

“What’s the matter?” I said.

“Nothing.”

“Is Grandpa all right?”

“Yes, fine.”

“Then what is it?”

“Nothing,” she said. “Are you all packed for your trip?”

“Yes, Mom. Mom...”

“Is Sophie there?”

“She arrived last Thursday.”

“Give her my regards.”

“I will. Mom, is anybody sick or anything?”

“No, no.” She hesitated, and then said, “Aunt Cristie came to see me this morning. She came all the way from Massapequa.”

“What is it?”

“Nothing,” my mother said, but she was weakening, I was beginning to reach her, not for nothing was I her son, not for nothing had I listened to countless interrogations and cross-examinations conducted by Stella Di Palermo, Mr. District Attorney, in various kitchens I had known.

“Is Uncle Matt okay?”

“Yes, he’s fine.”

“Then what is it, Mom?”

“Your aunt wanted to talk to me,” my mother said, and sighed.

“What about?”

“Nothing.”

“Mom, she didn’t come all the way from Massapequa to talk about nothing. Now what the hell is it?”

She hesitated for a long time. Static crackled on the telephone wires. Then she sighed again, and said, “It’s Luke.”

“What about Luke?”

“He drinks,” she said, and fell silent again. “Do you know what I mean? He’s a
drunk
,” she said. “My brother.”

I waited. I could hear the electric clock humming on my desk. My hand inside the plaster cast felt suddenly confined.

“I can’t understand it,” my mother said. “I just can’t understand it, Ike. We used to have such fun together, Luke and me. We used to go to the movies together every week, oh, we saw everything, all the big stars, all the pictures, we had such fun. Just Luke and me. My father wouldn’t let Dom go till he was older, and Cristie was too tiny, it was just Luke and me, he was so much fun, he was such a good brother. He used to have this very high, silly laugh, Dee. When Charlie Chaplin or Fatty Arbuckle came on, Luke used to bust out laughing, oh, what a laugh he had, and all the kids began laughing the minute they heard him, they knew it was him, they recognized that laugh of his. He was funnier than the movie, I swear to God, it makes me want to laugh just thinking of those Saturdays when we... when we...”

My mother sighed, and fell silent. I waited.

“I couldn’t believe Cristie,” she said at last. “When she told me, I just couldn’t believe it. Luke? I said. Are you talking about
Luke
? Are you telling me Luke is a drunk? Yes, she said, yes, Stella. But, Cristie, I said, are you sure this isn’t something like... like once at a party or... or with the boys or...”

She stopped talking. For a moment, I thought the connection had been broken. Then she said, “Always be a good boy, Ike. Luke was always a good boy, I can’t understand it. Cristie told me he’s so drunk sometimes he can’t even stand up at the pressing machine. Do you know the big iron Grandpa has, the one he uses for hand pressing? Luke left it on a pair of pants the other day and burned a hole in the leg and almost started a fire in the shop. I don’t know what to do. Grandpa will kill him if he finds out”

“No,” I said, “he won’t kill him.”

“You don’t know Grandpa,” she said.

“I know him,” I said.

“Oh, what are we going to do?” she said. “What are we going to do?”

I did not know what to tell her. Our plane was leaving for Rome early the next morning. I finally suggested that she contact my Uncle Dominick, and asked her to please write me, she had the itinerary.

On our third night in Rome, Rebecca and I looked up an Italian saxophone player with whom I’d been corresponding over the years. He was playing in a nightclub on the Via Emilia. He recognized me the moment I came through the door, even though we’d never met. He introduced me to his sidemen and they played a set in my honor, starting it with “The Man I Love.” They were not very good jazz musicians. I was discovering that hardly anyone in Italy played good jazz. But they were overwhelmed by my presence, and they tried hard. At the end of the set, they came to our table. One of them had a cousin in Chicago, and wanted to know all about Chicago. I had played there frequently, of course, but Rebecca had never been to Chicago. She became restless as we chatted in Italian, a language she found impossible to grasp, though it was simpler than the French she’d studied at Barnard.

They began asking me questions about famous American jazzmen, and since I’d played with many of them, including some of the old-timers, I was able to relate inside anecdotes, which they listened to intently. They were cautious about my blindness until I told them a story about Charlie Mingus and Lennie Tristano, who is a blind piano player, and a damn good one. Mingus and Tristano had got into an argument one night, and Mingus had said, “If you don’t shut up, Lennie, I’m going to turn out the lights and beat hell out of you.” The Italian musicians hesitated a moment in puzzlement. It was the saxophone player who burst into laughter, and then explained the anecdote to the others —
“Tristano è un cieco, eh? Dunque, quando Mingus...”
They, too, began laughing. Rebecca was bored. She had heard all my stories a hundred times before, and was getting a headache from all the Italian babbling. She excused herself at 2 A.M. and took a taxi back to the Hassler. When I came into the room at four, she was still awake.

“Do you really want to go to Saint Peter’s tomorrow?” she asked. “Frankly, I don’t care if I ever see another church as long as I live.”

“What would you like to do instead?”

“You’re the big wop,” she said. “You tell me.”

I hired a chauffeured car to take us to Villa d’Este the next day. Rebecca told me that the hundreds of fountains there only made her want to pee, and she spent half the day searching for ladies’ rooms. She could not get the word
gabinetto
straight. I told her to think of “cabinet.” She answered that a cabinet was in her mind something very far removed from a toilet. “Then ask for the
pissoir
,” I said. “Everybody knows what a
pissoir
is.”

“Don’t be so smart,” she said. “If I can’t understand the language, I can’t understand it.”

“You should have gone to Berlitz. You had plenty of time to go to Berlitz.”

“What were
you
doing while I
planned
this trip?” she asked. “Besides getting your hand broken?”

“I was sitting around thinking how nice it would be to get away alone with you.”

That night, we made love together. In the shuttered room overlooking the Spanish Steps, the sounds of cats and taxi drivers filtering up from the Piazza Trinità dei Monti below, we copulated on the oversized bed, and when I asked, “Did you come?” Rebecca testily replied, “Of
course
I came! Will you please shut up?”

We left Rome in a rented Fiat. Rebecca, of course, did the driving. She found it exhilarating at first, but long before we reached Florence, she was complaining that we should have spent the extra money for a chauffeur-driven automobile, which we could most certainly have afforded. I explained to her that having a chauffeur along would be identical to sharing the trip with a stranger. She made no comment. In Florence, there was a letter from my mother. She told us that Dominick had spoken to Luke about going to Bellevue for a voluntary drying out, but Luke had refused. That evening we had dinner in a hotel outside the city. We ate outdoors on a terrace above the Arno.

“Do you remember the night we met? I asked her. “In that Staten Island toilet? You were with someone named Martin....”

“Marvin,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Yes, I remember,” she said.

We stayed at the Excelsior Palace in Venice, at the beach, but it was still too chilly to swim. Rebecca bought little glass animals to take home to the children. I learned that
melanzana
was the proper way to say “eggplant” in Italian, and not
muligniana
, the Neapolitan pronunciation I had learned as a boy in Harlem. We bought a ring for Rebecca. We visited the lace factory. We sat in San Marco’s and listened to outdoor concerts. We drank a lot. On a gondola ride, we heard rats splashing into the canal.

In Stresa, there was another letter from my mother. Rebecca recognized the handwriting at once, impatiently said, “Your mother again,” and tore open the flap. I waited anxiously while she unfolded the letter. My grandfather had found out about Luke, as of course had been inevitable. He had personally taken him to two meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous, and Luke seemed to be responding well, intent on curing himself, grateful for all the familial attention that was being lavished upon him. “I hope he gets better,” my mother wrote. “I love him so.”

“I wish she’d stop about Luke already,” Rebecca said. “There isn’t a word here about how the kids are.” To the desk clerk she said, “Is that all the mail?”

“Sì signora, è tutto,”
he answered.

“I told my mother to make sure they wrote,” Rebecca said to me. “They have the itinerary, we should have at
least
got a card by now.” Her voice turned away. “The five bags there,” she said. “The
green
ones. No, the green ones.”

“Le cinque valigie verdi,”
I said.

“Grazie, signore,”
the bellhop answered.

In the evening dusk, we sat sipping cocktails outdoors as Rebecca outlined the next day’s journey. A road map was spread on the table before her, I could hear it crackling as she nervously traced out the route. She was fearful of driving through the Alps and the Brig Pass. A man’s voice apologetically intruded. He said he couldn’t help overhearing our conversation, and offered the advice that we could put the car on a train at Domodossola, if we liked, and then take it off again at Brig, though actually at this time of year, mountain driving wasn’t all that bad. Rebecca invited him and his wife to join us. His wife said very little at first, she smelled of bath oil, and I envisioned her as small and dark. The man was a stockbroker. Rebecca immediately informed him that I was a jazz pianist, and though he had already heard my name in introduction, he asked again what it was, and I said, “Dwight Jamison,” and he was silent for a moment, and then said, “You’re
kidding!
Honey, this is Dwight Jamison! Jesus, I have all your records going back to the original quintet! Jesus, this is a real honor! Dwight Jamison! Jesus!” Beside him, his wife quietly said, “I love your records, too.”

In the evening after dinner, we strolled beside the lake together, the man walking up ahead with Rebecca, the wife by my side. She told me she was unhappily married. She told me she had a lover. She told me she missed him terribly, and wished he were here with her, instead of her stockbroker husband.

“Are you and Rebecca happy?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said, “we’re very happy.”

“I can tell,” she whispered, and then sighed.

The bed in our room was a huge
letto matrimoniale
. I awakened in the middle of a nightmare, groping for Rebecca. I was shouting, “You can give it right back to the Indians!”

“Give what back?” she asked sleepily.

“Italy,” I said.

On the drive through the Alps, Rebecca kept cursing the stockbroker for telling her there was nothing to worry about this time of year. She also confided that he’d put his hand on her ass while we were walking the town the night before.

“What did
you
do?” I asked.

“What do you care what I did? You probably had
your
hand on Miss Bryn Mawr’s ass.”

“No, Rebecca, I didn’t.”

“Sure,” Rebecca said.

In Interlaken, we ate trout caught fresh from the river running beside the hotel, and Rebecca described to me the distant shrouded beauty of the Jungfrau. In Lausanne, there were hastily written notes from the boys, enclosed in a letter from Sophie. Rebecca read them to me as we sat on the terrace at breakfast in the morning sun, and flies buzzed around the jam pots. It was almost the end of May, the breeze was balmy. In the distance I could hear the delighted cries of children pedaling boats on the lake, and suddenly I missed my sons terribly.

“They seem to be fine,” Rebecca said.

“What?”

“The children.”

“Yes,” I said.

The last letter from my mother was waiting for us at the Meurice in Paris. As we stood by the desk, Rebecca read it aloud to me. My mother informed us that Luke had disappeared. My grandfather had hired private detectives, and Uncle Matt had asked all his friends to be on the lookout. “I hope we can find him,” she wrote. “I worry about him, Iggie.” This was the first time she’d called me Iggie in years.

That afternoon, when Rebecca went to have her hair done, I took a taxi into Pigalle and wandered the streets alone, and at last stopped at a small bar, and ordered a double Scotch on the rocks, and sat sipping at it. The girl who took the stool beside me reeked of perfume reminiscent of what Poots had been wearing the night I first sat in with a band and was told to chop off my left hand.
“Vous désirez, monsieur?”
she asked, and immediately rested her hand on my knee. We chatted for a while, my Santa Lucia French was clumsy, she switched in desperation to English as we settled upon a price.

At the hotel she led me to, she whispered discreetly that the concierge expected a
pourboire
, and I fumbled in my wallet for the unfamiliar bills, and was not quite certain how much I handed her. In America, I carried only tens, and I took my change in singles, and kept the smaller bills in a separate section of my wallet. There were days when I came home with as much as fifty dollars in singles. Now I blindly paid the concierge, and then the girl, and she led me to a bidet in one corner of the room, where she washed first me and then herself. The bed was narrow and set against the wall. I touched the wall with the spread fingers of my right hand, and realized there was a mirror fastened to it beside the bed. I told the girl I wanted only
soixante-neuf
. She worked long and hard, she was a thorough professional, but at last she straddled me and brought me to reluctant climax inside her. I was vaguely dissatisfied when she left me on the street outside the hotel. I lifted the lid of my Braille watch. It was still early. Rebecca would be busy at the hairdresser for at least another hour.