Tiger Rag (13 page)

“Hard for me to imagine.”

“That’s why I’m telling you.”

“Did you ever tell Dad?”

“Not about Marielle. But I told him some of the rest. It embarrassed him. He had known I was poor, of course, but in a respectable sort of way. My official history, which began with
my grandmother, was okay. But my real past was something else. And it sure didn’t help any the second time my father popped up in my life. It was the spring of 1983. You were a few months old. Your father was doing a residency at San Francisco General, and I had taken a leave from med school. We only lived out there for a year, but I liked it. We rented an apartment in an old townhouse near the bay. It was a nice neighborhood. There was a yard in back. We could smell the ocean. Marvin used to play tennis every morning at a nearby court. One afternoon I had a lot of errands downtown, so I hired a babysitter. When I got home, I noticed someone was sitting in a car across the street. Then the babysitter told me a man had phoned twice, asking for me, but wouldn’t leave his name. By the time I saw her to the door, the car was gone. The next afternoon I came outside and a man got out of that same car, up the street, and called my name. There were people around, a neighbor on his porch, a woman raking her lawn. I didn’t feel in danger, but my first instinct was to go back in the house. Then I recognized him, walking toward me with a hitch, wearing a shabby suit and a jaunty Panama hat that didn’t fit the rest of the picture. I couldn’t believe he was there. He looked old now, pale and drawn.

“ ‘I’ve been sick,’ he said, shuffling up to me. ‘I wanted to see you.’

“ ‘How did you find me here?’

“ ‘I live in L.A.,’ he replied, as if that was an answer. ‘Ruby—’

“ ‘Don’t say my name again. Just go away.’

“ ‘Maybe you could forgive me long enough to hear me out.’

“ ‘I can’t believe this,’ I said.

“His tone shifted. ‘All right. I’ll tell you straight out: I need money. Don’t look so surprised.’ He pointed at the house. ‘You’ve done well. I didn’t have anywhere else to go.’

“ ‘Actually, you can go to hell.’

“I went into my house and slammed the door. I was shaking. When your father came home, I didn’t tell him what had happened. The next day, I answered the phone, and it was him again. His message had gotten even simpler.

“ ‘I need five thousand dollars. That’s not a lot for you. I’ve checked out who your husband is, what kind of family he comes from. A bunch of rich doctors. Give it to me, and you’ll never hear from me again, if that’s the way you want it.’

“ ‘This is bullshit. I’m not giving you anything.’

“He was unfazed. He had his talking points. ‘Your husband comes from money,’ he said. ‘If you don’t give me the cash, I’m going to tell them who you really are and where you came from.’

“ ‘My husband knows who I am. And he knows what a bastard you are.’

“That night I told Marvin what happened. He was very cool. He didn’t ask me any questions. He thought it through, then told me to ask my father to come over the next day.

“ ‘Tell him you’ll be alone and he’ll get his money. Don’t say anything else. I’ll take care of the rest.’

“I was worried Marvin would go after him—he always had a hot temper—and I didn’t want him to get into trouble. But he was too smart for that. My father arrived, and when I led him into the kitchen, he found Marvin waiting for him. Marvin lifted the telephone receiver.

“ ‘I understand you want to speak to my mother,’ he said.

“My father started back toward the door, but Marvin blocked his way.

“He dialed his mother’s number in Connecticut. ‘Her name is Estelle Sheresky. Tell her anything you like about Ruby. Hello, Mother. I have someone here who wants to speak with you.’ He held out the receiver. ‘Take it,’ he said through his teeth.

“I could hear his mother on the line.
Marvin? Marvin, are you there?

“ ‘Come on,’ Marvin said to my father.

“But he wouldn’t take the phone.

“Marvin waited another few seconds, then said, ‘I’ll call you back, Mother.’

“He hung up and took my father’s arm, not very gently, and walked him out the front door and all the way to his car. ‘If you ever bother Ruby again,’ he said, ‘I’ll break your neck.’ ”

Ruby had pulled in to a gas station and removed her sunglasses. They were waiting for the attendant to come out of the office.

“I’ve never been prouder of your father than I was at that moment. Not when we dined with the governor, or attended award ceremonies, not even when he went into the ER and saved a kid the ER surgeons had given up on. When we first separated, I asked myself how the man who stood up for me like that could have betrayed me so badly. The only mystery is why I was so clueless as to consider the two things incompatible.”

Willie Cornish walked out of his house on Erato Street wearing a white suit and a Panama hat. A yellow handkerchief was forked into his jacket pocket. His brown boots were freshly polished. He was carrying a small suitcase. At the Illinois Central station, he boarded the seven
A.M
. local for Jackson. It was crowded and hot and it made all thirty-five stops on the line: Frenier, Manchac, Alligator, Ponchatoula, Arcola, Beauregard, Crystal Springs … The trip took four and a half hours. Cornish felt cramped on the hard straw seat, stretching his long legs into the aisle. In Jackson it was 94 degrees. At a stand-up bar outside the station he ate a chicken sandwich and drank a glass of beer. Then he set out along the road that led to the East Louisiana State Asylum, the fields crackling with insects and dust catching in his throat
.

Willie Cornish first met Buddy Bolden in October 1894, leaving Louis Jones’s barbershop with a cornet under his arm
.
Just turned seventeen, Bolden was slender and quick, wearing a black fedora, a checkered suit, and two-tone shoes. Cornish himself was only twenty, but to Bolden he seemed much older. Bolden had just had a haircut and shave and paid extra for one of Louis’s imported colognes. Even in those days, when he was on the make, he was careless with a dollar. A professional for only two years, he’d already built up a reputation and was becoming better known than the bandleaders who hired him, which didn’t always sit well. Cornish had become a member of the Superior Orchestra the previous year. He and Bolden hit it off at once. They started playing the same gigs, and afterward drinking and talking music into the night. When Bolden formed his own band the following January, Cornish left the Superior and become Bolden’s trombonist and general enforcer, collecting fees from hard-assed promoters and keeping the rest of the band in line
.

By the time he arrived in Jackson that day, Willie Cornish had known plenty of crazy people, some driven mad by drink and despair, some just broken inside, but he had never been inside an asylum. He imagined a hospital that was run like a jail. He had only been locked up once, for disorderly conduct, in a stinking cell at the Michaud Street Jail. In the army he had been in a field hospital outside Santa Clara, Cuba, for a week, lying in the darkness listening to other soldiers scream through the chloroform as doctors removed shrapnel and sawed off limbs. They operated by lantern light, and he never forgot that smell of blood and kerosene
.

When Cornish caught sight of the State Asylum, it confirmed his fears: a forbidding monolith with Greek columns, the main building was ringed by smaller ones, including two grim dormitories, one for white, one for colored. Weeping willows
dotted the broad lawn. There was a gazebo and a bandstand in a shady corner. On Saturdays chairs were brought out and either a band of visiting musicians or the patients’ own band played ragtime for the other patients and the staff
.

In his pocket Cornish had the official response to the letter his wife Bella had sent the superintendent, requesting permission for William Cornish to visit his friend and former colleague, Charles Joseph Bolden
.

Cross out “former,”
Cornish had chided her
. You don’t know that we’re not gonna play together again.

Bella crossed it out, but she knew better. She had talked to Bolden’s mother Alice and sister Cora, whom Bolden had barely recognized when they visited him the previous winter
.

Cornish was admitted to the colored dormitory after presenting the superintendent’s letter to the uniformed guards. A sullen orderly led him down a corridor of blue doors to No. 495, unlocked it, and ushered him into a dim, low-ceilinged room with four steel beds, four wall lockers, four stools, and a sink. An old man in a tattered robe was curled up asleep on one of the beds. Another man, wearing a blue hospital gown and canvas slippers, was standing at the barred window, staring out. He was counting aloud softly
, 1-2-3-4-5.
Cornish realized he was counting the sparrows on a wire fence
. 1-2-3-4-5 … 
The man’s shoulders were slumped, his arms hanging down as if his hands were iron weights
.

Charley,
the orderly called out
.

After a long moment, Bolden turned. His sunken eyes were dull. His head was shaved. In four years, the handsome face Cornish remembered had become swollen and slack
.

Bolden looked right through Cornish, then glanced back outside as two of the sparrows flew off
. 1-2-3,
he murmured
.

Charles,
Cornish said
.

Bolden took Cornish in, but with no sign of recognition, just the tacit acknowledgment that someone was occupying that portion of space. Wearing white. Carrying a bag. The doctors who examined him wore white. They carried bags. How many of them had there been over the years? And for how many years? It didn’t matter, because they spoke a different language that he didn’t understand—not English or Creole, but with some English words
.

It was Bolden’s thirty-fourth birthday. That was why Cornish had chosen this date to visit. He looks closer to fifty, Cornish thought
.

It’s me. Willie.

Cornish remembered how, even when he was still playing well, Bolden would abruptly wander from one room to another. It seemed as if he was a thousand miles away. Now it was as if he had walked into one of those rooms and just kept going. The silence in that small space was more painful to Cornish than the bedlam he had feared. Seeing Bolden, of all people, rendered mute made him feel helpless in a way he hadn’t felt since the war
.

Cornish took off his hat and sat down on one of the stools. The orderly remained at the door. Bolden looked blankly from Cornish to the orderly. Cornish was wondering if this hadn’t been a mistake after all. Bella had tried to warn him
.

You’re not going to find the man you played music with. He’s going to be a stranger. It’s not even like your father drinking himself to death, because this isn’t just about drink, it’s about crazy. Buddy hasn’t had a drink in four years and every year they say he’s gotten crazier.

None of this was news to Cornish, but a part of him resisted it. He told himself he must try to get through to Bolden. Charles would’ve done it for me, he thought. So he made a plan
.

The particulars of Bolden’s commitment—the police hauling him to the House of Detention, his mother petitioning the court, a judge signing the order, the deputy sheriff transporting him—had been scrambled by the time they reached Cornish second- and thirdhand. But one fact had stood out and bothered him no end: that Bolden, who for years carried his cornet at all times, eating drinking sleeping fucking, had not taken it with him when he left New Orleans. Bella had told him that Cora said Bolden was afraid of his horn, but Cornish didn’t believe her
.

After a long silence, Cornish said
, I saw the bandstand here, Charles. You ever play?

Bolden just stared at him
.

Play what?
the orderly interjected
.

Cornish looked at him in astonishment
. Do you know who this is?
He snapped opened the suitcase
. Look what I brought you, Charles.
He took out Bolden’s Conn cornet
.

Did you clear this with the superintendent?
the orderly said
.

Everything about Bolden was slowed down, leaden, but not his reaction to the cornet. He recoiled, shaking his head vigorously
. No no no,
he said, and hearing it for the first time, Cornish didn’t recognize his voice, high and shaky, not the baritone he remembered
. No!
Bolden repeated, his face contorted, and that knocked the wind out of Cornish
.

Charles, it’s okay, you don’t have to take it,
Cornish said, putting the cornet back into the suitcase
.

Bolden had backed into the corner. With his right hand he
touched the wall on his left, the wall on his right, the sink, the thin bar of soap. Then his left hand touched each thing again, in reverse order. And he closed his eyes
.

Don’t do that again,
the orderly drawled
.

No, sir, I won’t,
Cornish said
.

Bolden opened his eyes but wouldn’t look at Cornish. He walked back to the window. The sparrows were gone
.

Charles, is there anything I can get you?
Cornish asked
.

Bolden started humming, not music, just a steady mechanical hum
.

You better go now,
the orderly said
.

Cornish stood up. He took two steps toward Bolden, then stopped
. I’m leaving, Charles.

Bolden kept humming, but turned around. Still not making eye contact, just staring at Cornish’s chest. Then nodding
.

It took Cornish a moment to understand. He pointed at his yellow handkerchief
. You want this?

Bolden didn’t speak, didn’t nod again, but he stopped humming
.

That okay?
Cornish said to the orderly, who shrugged
.

Cornish held out the handkerchief and Bolden took it and turned back to the window
.