The Jazz Palace (10 page)

The piano came in slowly. He was striding with his left hand while the right found a melody, just one note at a time. Then the beat picked up and the trumpet came back in louder and more sure. They were talking to each other. Looking up, he saw the cock's comb, blinking red. He'd heard that trumpet before. This wasn't the first time he'd stopped here to listen. He was drawn to the lilting horn and the easy pace of the piano. The huge bouncer in a red coat with gold buttons was only letting blacks in. Benny waited for him to make eye contact. He rolled up his sleeve. “Hey, look, I'm black.”

The bouncer laughed, but still ignored him. Benny held out fifty cents, but the bouncer still acted as if Benny wasn't there. Finally he pulled out a dollar. The enormous man looked at it disdainfully. “Time for your music lesson, son?” he asked.

Humiliated, Benny put his money away. But the bouncer opened the door anyway, and when Benny just stood there, he said, “You see me holding this door open for someone else?” Benny shook his head. “Now gimme that dollar.”

Benny thrust it into the outstretched fist and rushed down a narrow corridor, painted black with almost no light at the end of it. The corridor led into a smoky, gin-soaked room with black walls, a single amber light above the bandstand. Waiters in white shirts carried trays with drinks and sandwiches. Black men in gray fedoras and women in sequined dresses with feathered hats drank whiskey and tapped their cigarette holders to the beat.

Benny stood in the back for the first set, but he wanted to see. During the break he elbowed his way to the bandstand, and when the trumpeter came back on, he glanced at Benny, who hunched down. The piano player was off-beat and didn't do quite what he was supposed to do. Benny listened as the left hand wandered up and down the keys. The right hand held the melody but in a strange way, sometimes smashing down two keys next to each other. Benny liked the fact that he didn't know where the piano was going to take him.

The trumpeter was a fat man who could blow. He picked up on
the piano's tune, then went off on his own. He puffed up his cheeks, pursed his lips, and stretched for some high notes Benny didn't know existed. Benny didn't understand how so much sound could come out of three valves. He closed his eyes and listened as the trumpeter bent notes, then reached for a sad sound. Empty rooms, lost dogs, late-night bars all came into his mind.

But then the music seemed to go off and laugh at itself as if it had all been some big joke. It honked and oinked. Screeched as if cops were on your tail or you'd fallen down drunk. There was always something to laugh about. He reached for another high note, flubbed it. Then just to let you know he'd done it on purpose, hit it dead center like a bull's-eye.

Even though Benny was jostled from side to side, he stared up at the bandstand as if nailed to the spot. Everything he'd ever known about the world—that gravity holds you down and mothers are there when you get home, that baseball has nine innings, and sleep awaits you at the end of the day—was turned upside down. He forgot about his brother lost in the snow and the dead girl he'd danced with when the
Eastland
went down. He forgot about Marta's child, home alone and sick. He even forgot he was a person in a crowd, not a very old person at that, just a boy. His arms and legs all melted into one. He wasn't anywhere but inside the music he was hearing. It took him to where he wanted to be. On a train, heading out of town. Away; that's where it took him. He went away.

When the knocking began, Pearl was sweeping the floor. She was making a dust pile in the center of the room. She enjoyed helping her brothers in the saloon after school, washing glasses, polishing the bar. As she dusted and swept, she hummed the refrain Napoleon said he was writing for her. For the past two years he'd had been coming to the bar on Monday nights with a piano or bass player. He arrived like clockwork at eight o'clock and stayed until midnight, when he packed it up and headed back to the South Side to jam with his friends. At Chimbrova's he tried out a lot of his jazzy numbers. But he was writing his “Night Owl Blues” for her. It was a variation on the tune he'd played to lure her down the stairs when she was afraid to sleep in her own bed, and she sang it to herself as she swept, dancing with her broom.

The saloon didn't open until four, but the banging persisted. At last when Pearl cracked the door, Gwendolyn Walenski, the butcher's wife, stormed in. Half a dozen other women followed. They were her neighbors, and she greeted them even as they rushed past her, kicking up the dust pile she'd just made. They knelt in the middle of the saloon floor in their gray wool dresses, opened their tattered black Bibles, and began to beat their breasts in prayer. Though she asked politely, Pearl could not get them to leave.

Anna was beginning the arduous task of cleaning the house with
a feather for Passover when Pearl came up to tell her that the praying women were back. Pearl had never actually seen them before. They had stayed away for months after her father died. His death remained a mystery. The police claimed he was drunk and stumbled in front of an oncoming car, but Anna swore he never touched a drop. Few Jewish
randars
did. That's what made Jews good saloonkeepers. But no one could explain how he'd fallen behind the garbage cans. Or why a shiny nickel was pressed into the palm of his right hand.

After the
Eastland
the praying women seemed to drift off for good, but now they were back. “They won't leave,” Pearl said.

“We'll see about that,” Anna replied, racing downstairs where Gwendolyn Walenski and her followers were on their knees, Bibles raised in clenched fists. “I need you to move out of the way, Gwendolyn,” Anna said, “so our customers can come into the bar.” Gwendolyn Walenski knelt in the center of the saloon, shaking her Bible and praying that the Chimbrova family would accept the drys—despite the threats by Anna's older boys that they'd lift Gwendolyn Walenski up and remove her back to the street.

But the round, squashed-looking woman, refused to budge. She'd had her own share of grief. A drunk for a husband, a half-dozen children who hadn't survived past the age of five, though she still had as many at home. “When we get the vote,” she threatened Anna from the floor in her plain gray frock, “the first thing women will do is abolish the liquor that takes our men into the bars.”

“Well, you should know, Gwendolyn,” Anna said, taunting her with the fact that her fat, blood-soaked husband, the butcher, was a regular at the saloon. “Maybe if you kept your husband happy, he wouldn't have to come here.” But the woman wouldn't get up. As Anna looked at her neighbor on her knees, pounding her Bible, she grabbed Pearl by the shoulders and pulled her to her chest. “Here, Gwendolyn,” Anna said, giving Pearl a shake. “If your work is charity, then why don't you take a few of these home?”

Her mother's fingers dug into her flesh. Anna held Pearl out for the butcher's wife to see. As Gwendolyn Walenski looked her up and down, Pearl trembled, thinking she would die if this woman offered to take her home. But the butcher's wife rose and they all left.

A
fraid she would be sent away, Pearl grew more restless. The memory of her mother, dragging her along the shore, had never left her, but it had never been articulated either. It was like a dream, something she couldn't be sure of, but she knew. It was true. It shaped itself inside of her into a round, brown nut, a stone that took the form of silence.

At times she seemed to drift to the brink of despair, and her sisters nudged her, asking what was wrong. At night Ruby prodded. “Tell me, Pearly. Something is bothering you.” Though Ruby tried, night after night, Pearl had developed a stubborn streak. She could not, or would not, say what she feared. Who would believe her anyway? She had learned to keep this to herself. And many more things.

Though she was on the brink of adolescence Pearl acted like a child. She clung to Anna, terrified that her mother would get rid of her as she'd tried once before. She would make her live with the butcher's wife. The smell of red meat sickened Pearl. Anna had to pry the girl's fingers off of her in order to get any work done. Pearl took to hiding in closets, avoiding her mother's gaze, thinking that perhaps it would be best, instead of making her presence felt, to make her mother forget about her altogether.

Anna was too distracted by the costs of keeping the family intact to notice what was happening with Pearl. She tried to send the girl out to play, to wrest her off her arm when she clung, to scold her for spending her time hiding in the cedar closet. One day, exasperated, Anna turned to Jonah, “Why don't you take her to the beach?”

But Jonah had never gotten over his fear of water. “Ask Moss,” he said. And Moss, who spent his nights pouring drinks at the saloon but had little to occupy himself during the day, said he would. Now Pearl was all the more frightened. The last place she wanted to go was to the shore, but Moss agreed to take his restless sister to the lake for a swim. Maybe a trip to the beach, it was reasoned, would calm her down.

Pearl liked her brother Moss. He had a big smile with white teeth that were very straight and a nice square jaw. In winter he took her
for sleigh rides without her having to ask. He was handsome, the way a tree trunk is handsome, sturdy and straight, and Pearl felt she could count on him. Yet she panicked at the thought of Moss taking her alone. Was he part of some secret plan to forget her? To leave her there? Or worse. Pearl was plagued by a memory that felt more like a nightmare. Of her feet at the shore's edge and her mother's hand resting on the small of her back.

Perhaps Anna had decided it was time to let some of the children go. Pearl had heard stories of families with too many children who left one on a streetcar or in an amusement park. Recently identical twins were found in a trash can with a note pinned to their shirts. Other mothers had drowned their children in basins like kittens. And Moss was the perfect one to take her, wasn't he? The gentle Moss whom she trusted above all the others, not like Jonah who had slept in that morning as his brothers drowned. He would be the one to leave her there. Pearl pleaded with her mother not to send her. “What a stupid girl,” Anna said, shaking her head. “She doesn't want to go for a swim.”

Anna suggested Moss take Opal and Ruby as well—an idea that immediately made Pearl feel relieved, for surely her mother wouldn't try to get rid of all three of them at once. And even if she did, the gem sisters could fend for themselves. But Ruby, who had begun painting small canvases of bowls of fruit and landscapes of forests with strange beasts, didn't want to go, and Anna had second thoughts that the sun would burn Opal's fair skin or darken it with freckles. So Pearl borrowed a bathing costume from Ruby, and Moss took her alone.

They rode the streetcar from Douglass Park to the Twenty-Fifth Street Beach. From time to time Moss glanced at Pearl with her eyes closed, her head down. “Pearly,” he'd say, pointing out the window, “look at that policeman with his funny cap.” But Pearl would not lift her head or open her eyes. She rode with the same sobriety and resignation as someone heading to her own demise.

The lake wasn't far, just a streetcar ride and a transfer away, but Pearl had never really seen it, except on her birthday, that day when the
Eastland
went down—a day she preferred not to recall. Except for that day, Pearl had never been more than a few blocks from
home. Nor had she wanted to. Now the streetcar rocked back and forth, and she grasped the armrest as Moss, having given up trying to make conversation with his sullen sister, rode silently beside her. There was a sandbox in the middle of the car that children played in. Whenever someone threw up, the conductor took a scoop of sand and tossed it on the vomit.

When they reached the lake, Pearl stopped on the sidewalk, stunned. The morning when her mother had dragged her to the shore, the lake had been gray, and her eyes had been fixed on her mother's mad stare. Now it was a sunny day and the water was the color of marbles. The world had turned itself upside down and heaven was on the ground. She could not believe the expanse of blue, the mirror-like surface of the inland sea that stretched before her. Pearl kicked off her shoes and ran across the sand. Her feet burned as she raced toward the water. “Pearl, wait,” Moss shouted, panicked that she'd dive in and drown. He ran to catch up, grabbing her just as she was about to fling herself into the breaking waves. He took her by the hand.

The sandy bottom gave way under her feet. For a moment she was afraid she would sink. She clutched his arm, but Moss held her firmly, guiding her into the water. He splashed water on her face and she splashed him back. Then he held out his arms and tilted her back. He kept a hand cupped beneath her head as he moved her through the water and glided her across the surface of the lake. She stared up at the clouds, and beneath her the water seemed like an enormous cool bed, one she'd never have to share.

That night Pearl slept as she hadn't in years—as smooth and untroubled a sleep as the water where she swam. She slept with her legs straight, her arms stretched out, nestled between her sisters, floating as Moss had taught her. Every day after that Pearl begged Moss to take her again to the lake, and Anna told him he should because it made her sleepy. But Moss had to tend the saloon and promised to take her again on Friday if it didn't rain.

On Friday Pearl was up early, dressed in her bathing clothes and towel. “Please, Moss. Let's go.” She tugged at him to hurry and polished the bar and stacked glasses on the shelves to help him. They
took the same streetcars they had earlier in the week, and this time Pearl memorized the route. It was the last time she'd need someone to take her. Once again Pearl raced to the water, but now Moss was at her side.

He taught her to put her face in the water and blow bubbles as he counted to ten. He helped her lie on her stomach and do the dead man's float. He kept her from sinking. Then Moss dove and disappeared. Pearl screamed with glee when he threw himself up out of the water like a giant fish. He showed her how to blow bubbles and breathe until she ran out of breath. The first time she found herself underwater, Pearl came up gagging, but Moss told her to keep her mouth closed and her eyes shut. She pinched her nose with her fingers. Something was different, but she couldn't explain. She dove again and for a moment did not breathe. This time she opened her eyes. Everything was blue. She dove once more, now without her fingers on her nose, her eyes wide open. There in the water, before she came up coughing, Pearl found what had been eluding her for so long.

She plunged deep, her hands dipping into the silty bottom, and stayed under until Moss began flailing about, searching for her. She rose up, laughing, water splashing everywhere. From then on, whenever she could, Pearl went to the lake whose steely blue-gray had frightened her so long ago. Except when ice floes clinked on the surface, Pearl dove into the chilly waters of the inland sea. She found what she had been searching for in closets, under beds, and the bar beneath the stairs. In the cold and turbulent waters of Lake Michigan, Pearl discovered the absence of sound.