Tiger Rag (17 page)

They were greeted by a balding young man with a paunch, a slouch, and a slack jaw. He was wearing a cheap brown suit and brown tie to match. That his brown eyes, beneath heavy lids, were sharply alert made the rest of him seem all the more sluggish.

He introduced himself as Emmett Browne’s assistant. “Fallon,” he said in a gravelly voice which Devon recognized as the one that answered her second phone call.

They followed Fallon through two rooms, the first filled with boxes, crates, and all the paraphernalia of a mailroom, the second nearly empty apart from a framed photograph of a bald, bearded man of the nineteenth century. Then Fallon opened a door padded in green leather and ushered them into a huge inner office.

Emmett Browne was sitting behind his desk in a circle of blue light by the far wall. Fine yellow dust filled the air. Except for a brass lamp and a marble statuette, the desk was bare. An inkwell, manual typewriter, rotary phone, and two stacks of books and papers were arranged on an identical desk behind him. He was in an electric wheelchair, his bony fingers hovering over a control panel on the arm.

The office was a maze of tables, cabinets, and display cases cluttered with carefully labeled memorabilia. Devon grew increasingly excited as she and Ruby wended their way to Browne’s desk, passing an original flat-top Victrola, a Scott Joplin player piano roll, Gene Krupa’s black drumsticks, Duke Ellington’s top hat, Benny Goodman’s spectacles, Gene Autry’s ukulele, Django Reinhardt’s lion-headed cane, and a music box that once belonged to Amelia Earhart. There was a vibraphone Lionel Hampton played at the Cotton Club and a silver dobro an admirer had sent to Hank Williams. Except for a stretch of
floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, the walls were hung with every imaginable instrument: trombones, saxophones, flutes, banjos, mandolins, fiddles, and even a washboard used in Bill Monroe’s first bluegrass band. These were the “vintage instruments and musical rarities” Browne advertised on his calling card, and they were rare indeed.

“Look,” Devon whispered excitedly as she and Ruby came upon a pair of of Artie Shaw’s clarinets on a small table. She wanted to reach out and touch them. “I’d give anything to have one of those.”

But Ruby wasn’t interested. She had taken off her glasses and was peering at Emmett Browne. He was in his eighties, clean-shaven, with a full head of white hair and clear blue eyes. With her trained eye, she saw at once that he was suffering from MS—at least twenty years into the disease, with two years left to him, tops. His neural circuits had been misfiring for so long that when they fizzled out, it would happen fast. She knew this meant his legs had turned to matchsticks, his olfactory system was gone, and he was short of breath. She imagined he had been a tall, dapper man before his disease began eating away at him. His nose was long and thin, his lips pursed. He was wearing a black suit with pink pinstripes, a pink shirt, and a wide black-and-red-striped tie.

Browne kept a private investigator named Nate Kane on retainer. After reading Kane’s report about Ruby Cardillo and her daughter, Browne had expected the musician daughter to be a flamboyant dresser and the physician mother to look straitlaced. Instead, the mother had on an electric-blue coat, purple cashmere sweater, gold pants, and gold boots, while the daughter was wearing a black turtleneck, jeans, and black boots.

“Good afternoon,” Browne greeted them. “Dr. Cardillo, Ms. Sheresky, I’m Emmett Browne. Welcome.”

As she and Ruby sat down in a pair of chairs before the desk, Devon admired the marble statuette. It was a young woman playing a lyre, her long hair and the folds of her gown so lifelike they seemed to be stirring in a breeze.

“Terpsichore, the muse of dance and song,” Browne said to her. “I found her in a pawnshop in Montreal.”

Ruby put her glasses back on. Browne’s easy, courtly manner, Devon thought, was in contrast to his clipped voice on the phone.

“Thank you for coming,” he said. “Again, my condolences on your mother’s passing. I will discuss with both of you what I would have discussed with her and hope that, indeed, it will turn out to be mutually profitable. But, first, I want to tell you about myself. I have been a collector and dealer for fifty-three years. I search out rare items for my clients, buying and selling on commission. I guarantee the authenticity of every item I handle. I don’t travel anymore. My agents travel for me. I enjoy working in this office. I have been here since 1958. This building has special meaning for me. It was posthumously named for James Garfield after being constructed in its entirety during the six months of his presidency.”

Devon realized the bearded man in the photograph must be President Garfield.

“Do you know anything about James Garfield?” Browne asked.

Ruby just stared at him, but Devon replied, “I know he was assassinated.”

“In 1881. He was the twentieth president, the only one ever elected straight from the House of Representatives. A war
hero, an inspired mathematician, he had unusual talents outside of politics. Most interesting to me is the fact he was the only ambidextrous president. When posed a question in English, he could simultaneously write his answer in Latin with one hand and Greek with the other. And the year he died was palindromic, which happens only once a century. Just four months after his inauguration, a madman named Charles Guiteau shot him in a railroad station. Afterward, surgeons couldn’t locate the bullet, which was lodged in his spine. They scanned his torso with a metal detector specially invented by Alexander Graham Bell. When it failed, the surgeons probed the wound with unsterilized instruments, causing a fatal infection.”

Ruby was thinking, Why are you telling us this?

“He was my great-grandfather,” Browne said. “On my mother’s side. Her father was Abram Garfield, the president’s sixth child. He was a violinist, as was my mother. She attended the Boston Conservatory. Then she eloped with my father, a sailor named Julian Browne. Her family disowned her. A friend took my father into his business, importing European wines. He began collecting wine himself and started his own business. My mother introduced me to music. I had no musical talent myself. But I knew something about collecting. What you see all around you: that’s been my life. I never married, I have no children.”

Devon was enthralled with the artifacts and fascinated by Browne himself. But Ruby was growing impatient, and he sensed it.

“Now, let’s get to Valentine Owen,” he said, “and my long-standing unfinished business with him. Messy business,
I’m sorry to say. What do you know about your father’s musical career, Dr. Cardillo?”

“Not much. I’m here because my daughter’s interested. You should tell her.”

“Do you know about his life in New York?”

“I know he was born here,” Ruby said.

“No, his later life.”

“Look, I know very little about his life, period.”

“I thought that might be so.”

“How do you know anything about us? How did you know I was a physician?”

If he was taken aback, he didn’t show it. “Research is a crucial part of my business.”

“You mean, you check people out?”

“Sometimes. Objects, rare and otherwise, belong to people. And it’s people who determine what happens to them: they change hands, they’re lost, and sometimes,” he paused for emphasis, “they’re stolen. I’m not a voyeur. And rest assured, I did not invite you here to mystify you. Quite the opposite.”

Ruby wasn’t satisfied. “Meaning?”

Devon was surprised. Her mother was seldom rude. “Why don’t we hear what Mr. Browne has to say,” she said gently, “and take it from there.”

Ruby sat back with a sigh. “Fine.”

Browne nodded. “Please bear with me. Devon—may I call you Devon?—you’ve heard of Buddy Bolden?”

“Of course.”

“Who?” Ruby asked.

“In 1900 Charles Bolden was the greatest cornet player alive. He was the father of all jazz trumpeters, including your
father, and he changed the course of American music. I’ll tell you some things about Bolden that only a few people know. And some things about your father, Dr. Cardillo, that nobody knows. Fallon!”

Fallon reappeared, laid a trumpet and a cornet on Browne’s desk, and left the room again.

“The differences between the two instruments are often blurred,” Browne said. “You see that the trumpet is larger. By 1930, jazz musicians preferred it to the cornet. The cornet possesses a mellower tone, but the trumpet has greater range, a crisper timbre, more subtlety.” He tapped the stem of the trumpet. “The key is here, in the vibrating tube. In the trumpet the tube is cylindrical. In the cornet it’s partly conical and much thicker. The cornet also has a deeper mouthpiece. It’s pitched in B-flat, with a practical range of three octaves—four for virtuosos like Bolden. At twenty-nine, Bolden was declared insane and institutionalized. Today they would say he was schizophrenic and treat him with drugs. Back then, they just locked him away. While many early jazzmen cut wax cylinders, for decades it was an accepted fact that Bolden had left behind no recordings. Rumors sprang up occasionally—a New Orleans gangster owned a cylinder, or a collector in Chicago, or a distant relative in Florida—but they were always debunked. However, the truth is often embedded in rumors, in small details that overlap. There were enough of these to convince me that Bolden and his band had produced a recording. At least two musicians who played with Bolden attested to it: Alphonse Picou, the clarinetist, and more significantly, Willie Cornish, Bolden’s trombonist and also his closest friend and confidant. And there was Picou’s brother, Cyrus, who claimed to know the engineer who had made the recording.” Browne leaned forward.
“If it existed, I had to have it. It would be rarer and more important than anything in this room. So I started looking for answers. I’m a patient man. I followed dozens of false leads. I came up against a lot of walls. But I got lucky, too, and discovered that in 1904 the Bolden Band produced three Edison cylinders. Actually laying my hands on them would be more difficult. I gained access to the National Phonograph Company archives in a warehouse in Orange, New Jersey, but the earliest files had turned to dust. I paid researchers in New Orleans to scour public records and newspaper morgues. I tracked down the widows and children of various musicians. I interviewed archivists. I pored over memorabilia collections and searched the stacks at LSU and Tulane. I paid bribes, put out feelers, you name it, and I came up empty. What evidence I uncovered indicated that the three cylinders had only been in the same place together once—the day they were recorded—and afterward were each apparently destroyed in different ways. I couldn’t be sure, because when it comes to Bolden, basic facts are in short supply, distortions are plentiful. For example, of more than sixty musicians who claimed to have played with Bolden, at least forty never even met him. Such ‘witnesses’ spun a lot of tales. A whole mythology grew up around Bolden. Everything was a mystery. It felt as if the more you knew, the less you understood. After coming very close to finding one of the cylinders in 1981, only to learn it had been destroyed, I gave up. I just couldn’t go any further. Then, in 1983, I met your father, Dr. Cardillo, and though he lied to me more than anyone else, it was through Valentine Owen that I learned the truth.”

He walked along the colonnade, touching the columns one by one. Starlings swooped by. A chicken hawk was cutting circles in the sky. A patient named Mister Henry, who had fat hands, told him starlings sound like children because they were humans in another life. He wanted to reply that if there was another life there wouldn’t be people in it. But he couldn’t speak. He stopped trying after he realized that another patient, Deaf Al, was teaching him sign language from afar. That must be how you learn it best, he thought, so he never allowed himself to get close enough to Deaf Al to discover that he wasn’t deaf at all and that his name wasn’t Al, it was Ray
.

He crossed the lawn toward the bandstand. The black trees behind it turned bright green as he approached. The air was humming with bees and flies. Mosquitoes that he waved away. If the grass was allowed to grow another inch, it would catch fire. The fire would spread. The buildings would empty. Some
patients would drop to their knees, others would try to scale the wall. To run where? Often his vision was blurred, but not today. And for the first time in weeks his head didn’t hurt—a crackling pain so constant it took him a while to realize it had lifted
.

One of the nurses wore a canary-colored smock. White stockings. Gloves. She had long legs. Her brown hair was knotted in a bun. She was carrying a pitcher of ice water to a table beneath the trees. Some guards were sitting, smoking. Only guards and doctors were allowed to smoke. Wooden chairs had been set in rows before the bandstand. Seven rows, sixteen to a row. Who had known there would be someone for each chair and no one left standing?

There were men like him, but not like him, waiting to sit. They all wore baggy blue pants and blue shirts. Five buttons on the shirts. No pockets. The women from the women’s building over the hill wore yellow gowns. He didn’t like to look at those women. It was bad luck. Once he talked to the doctors about girls he’d known:
They betrayed me by letting me lie to them.
But that was maybe one hundred twenty years ago and now some of those girls were looking down on him from heaven and most were looking up from hell. He wouldn’t know them anymore because in hell they take away your name and give you a new face. Like this place. No names. And somebody else’s face in the mirror. Ella was in heaven, eighteen years old, wrapped in a yellow sheet. He would know her face. One hundred eighteen years ago he lay beside her in a silent room. Her breathing soft. Her perfume a cloud of spices
.

People took their seats. Doctors in front. Then patients. In the back row: orderlies, nurses, groundskeepers, cooks. The cooks had sawdust on their shoes, like Manny. The sun was
beating down. The air green with pollen. Clouds sailing overhead, like ships. He sat in the sixth row, on the end. So he could leave when he liked. The fellow next to him was wringing his hands, wheezing, front teeth gone. He himself still had all his teeth. Every night he rubbed his gums with salt
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