Brother Carnival

by Dennis Must

  “How are you sure, Mr. Prioletti?”

  “Che Guevara and the Holy Mother appeared to me in my dreams last night. It’s Leonard—the priest masquerading as a revolutionary.”

  But Leonard Hart was holed up in a single-room tenancy on 114th Street in Manhattan, one block off Broadway and near Columbia University. He worked replenishing shelves in a Times Square bookstore, and periodically sold his blood to make ends meet—five dollars for the first pint, seven dollars thereafter. Only once had he encountered someone he knew from Hebron—Gertrude Eckstrom, his high school drama coach. Engrossed in reading a copy of Billboard, she’d taken a seat opposite him at the Horn and Hardart Automat. Leonard fled, leaving his soup and Parker House rolls untouched.

  His attire he acquired at a Goodwill thrift shop on East 57th Street. Preferring Brooks Brothers suits, he owned one chalk-striped blue serge and a cocoa-brown three-piece worsted. His recycled shoes were cordovan, and he saved a vintage forties camel-hair topcoat for special occasions. The closet in his SRO was not much larger than a broom stand.

  “At least I’ve made it to Manhattan,” he thought, and did avail himself of its art museums, especially the Frick; the public library reading room on 42nd Street; and an occasional subway ride to Greenwich Village. There he’d sit in the corner of the White Horse Tavern and read Thomas Wolfe, his Chesterfield draped over an empty café chair.

  When Columbia was in session, Leonard attended the Saturday night socials sponsored by the university YWCA for its unattached women. A shot of scotch at the West End Bar on Broadway (the ghosts of Merton, Ginsberg, Kerouac, and Lucien Carr pettifogged in the corner booth) helped gel his courage to approach a stranger. To an uncritical eye, Leonard Hart in the blue serge and bluchers looked as if he might be the scion of an upper-class family, residents of the Mystic coastline . . .

  The uncles’—Stephen and Felix—repeated appearance confirmed Westley’s preoccupation with those professed opposites. In one story the main character is the barker outside the midway’s Ten-in-One, and then several narratives later, he reappears in a cowl of undyed wool. Westley penned exacting descriptions of the contrasting pageantry and rites in which each man engaged. Moreover, no one story featured the influence of one uncle to the absolute exclusion of the other. Where this all led, I wasn’t certain, but I had no reason to believe that when he wasn’t writing, his absorption with these diverse life styles and commitment would cease.

  But the excerpt from “Masquerading as a Revolutionary” offered an address of sorts, one far beyond our birthplace of Hebron. Reference to the infamous West End Bar near Columbia University had occurred elsewhere. He described bookstore employment and an attraction to wearing secondhand bespoke suits. It was a paltry assemblage of evidence to set out on, but the prospect of encountering my raison d’être in a sibling I never knew existed yet who understood the import of little green lights in jelly jars on bridge parapets . . . was, for the time being, adequate to dispel my five-days-earlier dark resolve.

  I boarded an express Greyhound bus to New York City late that Saturday evening.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  NEW YORK CITY

  Crossing the Pennsylvania Turnpike in a torrential downfall, I thought about the many nights as a boy when lying in my bed I’d turn to my imaginary brother and talk until sleep came. With him I could be myself and not fear retribution for having failed to live up to the impossible. But come morning I rarely sought his presence as long as I was around others. It was easier being a true believer in the daylight.

  Yet here I was on an urgent quest to seek out my actual brother when it struck me: Were Westley’s stories his way of saying, “Find me, Ethan”? What had he learned about me? And why had he sent them back home if he knew our father seldom opened a book to read?

  The rain never let up over that long bus ride, plus I hadn’t slept. Arriving at daybreak at the Port Authority complex, I now surmised that Westley and I were in fact looking for each other . . . but not for the same ends.

  HOTEL RIVERSIDE SUITES (excerpt)

  The room had one window, a metal cot, a lime-green chest of drawers, and a mirror that hung on the backside of the shellacked door. The distance between the bureau and the bed was the width of a heavyset man. Twelve pairs of shoes placed toe to heel, its length.

  Each morning an attendant in an electric-blue cotton uniform knocked. Did he want his bed made?

  Muller always said no.

  A portable Royal typewriter sat on the bureau alongside a comb and a straight razor.

  Tenants stole each other’s rations. Over the weeks of his stay, he cinched his belt tighter, taking secret pleasure in returning to the weight he’d held as a young man. On his trips to the single-room occupancy’s bathroom, he’d open the bare communal refrigerator and laugh to himself. A second mirror.

  It’d been one week since the trace of onion juice and ground meat had all but disappeared from his clothes. But so had most of the wages he’d earned on the grill. When hunger began to threaten his concentration, he’d lie down upon the cot, look up at the cracked ceiling, and visualize lemon meringue pie—the White Tower specialty. Methodically he’d cut himself a wedge and then, savoring each bite, even the ceiling crumbs, he’d devour the memory.

  The lunch surfeit would carry him through to the evening meal at Horn and Hardart. These latter days, it consisted of a serving of Parker House rolls and a glass of milk. He’d pocket packets of sugar cubes to melt in a hot-water drink for bedtime.

  Muller had no clock. The thread from morning to half-light or darkness was the clacking of his typewriter. After dressing and splashing cold water on his face each dawn, he’d lift the instrument off the bureau, pull the window blind down so that the room was in virtual blackness, and sit on the bed to begin working with his back against the wall.

  He typed for hours, interrupted only by the ceiling repast. When his output was niggardly, he’d punish himself.

  “I can’t look at the pastry,” he’d cry, staring vacantly into the darkness. Even the sugar tea was off limits.

  Muller had no idea what he was writing, for that was the presumption. “If I know what I’m about to compose, then what is its value?” Better to absent oneself as the machine clacked, one page of text followed by another, all hammered onto the white rice paper in darkness. Prior to turning in each night, he’d gather the pages in sequence and resist reading them under the overhead light.

  Actually, there was somebody else inside his room.

  A genius of a writer, Muller believed—for whom he was the designated medium.

  “Talk to me,” he’d urge. “I’ll get it all down.”

  In the early days of their tenancy, it would take hours for the guest to break his reticence. As noontime approached—bodies shuffled in the hallway, a sign they were traveling to the empty refrigerator—Muller grew increasingly anxious. The Riverside Suites tenants passing his door in midafternoon could hear him utter, “Please.”

  Westley had roomed in Riverside Suites while working midnight to 8:00 a.m. at various White Tower establishments as a short-order cook. He’d return to the room, sleep for a few hours, then write until it was time to return to work. It was all recorded in “Hotel Riverside Suites.”

  But the SRO no longer existed.

  After a full day wandering about the neighborhood, I returned to my hotel that evening and began to seriously question what it was I hoped to discover. Did I honestly believe that by some stroke of good fortune I’d meet someone who knew him? I had visited the West End, nursing a couple of bourbons . . . but why?

  You could have put your time to a more rational use by lying in bed and staring at the lemon meringue pie on the ceiling, I mused.

  Moreover, even if I truly believed Westley wished to establish contact with me, he would not make it easy. If I was unable to demonstrate a high degree of single-mindedness and imagination to seek him out, I’d be of no use to him. His stories made that clear. The quest was, in essence, a te
st for me.

  There was a gentleman seated two tables away from mine, reading my every move, whom I guessed was about Westley’s age yet bore no physical resemblance to anyone in our family, but what did that mean? I decided that I’d return to the West End the following day. If he was there, I’d approach, saying I was looking for my brother, Westley Mueller. “You wouldn’t happen to know him, would you?”

  Then I ceased to get carried away.

  Was I writing his stories?

  That night, I began sorting the manuscripts according to where they took place and ascertained that New York City figured prominently. One told of a father taking his fifteen-year-old son to Manhattan by train from a small burg in Pennsylvania, describing how they dropped coins in little glass compartments to eat at the automat, before climbing a flight of stairs off Broadway to taxi-dance with Gotham women in their embrace.

  That had to be Westley and our father.

  Visiting a club in Greenwich Village, they were joined at their table by two young women. The father bought drinks, announcing, “We’re staying at the Statler,” and coaxed the less attractive of the pair to “Cozy up to my young friend.” The boy recoiled when she clutched his thigh under the tablecloth, hoarsely whispering, “You got the looks to be in show business, honey.”

  The narrative concluded in the hotel room with the father chastising him for “wimping out on a night you’d never forget. You come to New York City to grow up, son!” Except the boy assumed he had, by witnessing two men in drag dupe his father. Yet he was smitten by the “show business” remark.

  If this had truly happened to Westley, I begrudged him the experience, having enjoyed no such introductions to manhood. Were the pair more like two friends than like father and son?

  Or was it Westley’s way of explaining what had gone on before me, suggesting that I shouldn’t lament what I’d ostensibly missed?

  It’s as if he’s letting me know what it would have been like if I’d been there.

  As I lay in bed with the manuscripts strewn about and listened to a roomer talking to himself as he lumbered past my door to the only bathroom on the floor, an unsettling thought caused me to get up and begin pacing the floor. In an effort to ignore it, I began counting the windows in the apartment building facing my hotel.

  But, like a neon sign in a derelict saloon, What if, it flashed, you were in fact the other little man? I shuddered at the notion.

  Maybe Westley did have a younger brother . . . and it was you, Ethan.

  All those references in the stories to Jeremiah?

  The prospect was so disturbing that I became nauseous.

  And the voice in my head bantered:

  It’s the meringue pie.

  In a state of dread mirroring the night his persona drove back and forth across the bridge, each pass within a hair’s breadth of grazing the acid-green lights in jelly jars, I began trembling. The hotel room had no telephone. But who would I call? And what would he tell me this time when I said that I might be the Jeremiah in Westley’s stories?

  “Is there any truth to that, Papa? For Chrissake, you must tell me. Were you not man enough to say? Is that why I’m seeking out my brother, one I never knew existed—or did I?—to help me back?

  “And back from where, Papa?

  “Did I stand on a stool in front of a four-way mirror in the haberdashery and be fitted like Westley for an Easter suit? Did Westley and I share a bed all those years?”

  I stepped out into the hallway and found the lavatory door unlocked. Inside, I bent over the porcelain toilet and began heaving, all the time holding one hand under the running faucet, trying to get a grip on myself.

  Your imagination is getting the best of you, Ethan. Straighten up.

  There is nothing wrong with you.

  I stood up, splashed cold water on my face, and glanced in the mirror, which had lost much of its silver backing. Shards of my face. But it was enough to help settle me.

  I had no idea who Jeremiah was. He was Westley’s imaginary brother.

  How could he be me?

  And I began laughing, mocking my reflection: “Jesus Christ, Ethan, you’ve been so engrossed in your sibling’s yarns that you’re damn well getting lost inside them. Where do you think you are? In that room in Riverside Suites?”

  I could not let myself be sucked into the vortex of unreality.

  Westley had struggled with that.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  REVELATION?

  Cajoling sleep, I lay back down and concentrated on lights from the street chasing each other across the ceiling. A radio played across the hall. Its dial was being spun, and the discordant sounds complemented the illuminations overhead. But then the roomer settled on a Billie Holiday recording of “Don’t Explain.”

  I thought about Westley’s story of the father-son pilgrimage to Manhattan and the boy’s heralding “the most incredible music” emanating from a 52nd Street jazz club called Birdland. I turned on the light and began rifling through the manuscripts on and about the bed. Somewhere in the pages, Westley, as an adult, had revisited that scene in some detail.

  I located the passage in a lengthy work that I took to be an unfinished novel.

  As if he’d lost his way.

  By now, Lady Day was caroling “Willow Weep for Me.” The volume cranked up as if she stood outside my doorway.

  NOVEL EXCERPT

  At his urging we walked up to 52nd Street, “The Street of Jazz,” and paid the cover to a downstairs club called Birdland.

  “There’s Bird,” he whispered. Charlie Parker was the mythical jazzman he couldn’t quite believe ever existed anyplace except inside one’s head. Charles Mingus was on double bass, Bud Powell at the piano, and a young trumpet player, Miles Davis—all on the stand.

  A dwarfish black man introduced the group. Bird, for some mysterious reason, grew belligerent and began harassing the announcer, tauntingly calling him “Shorty,” while the target of his mockery hollered from the back of the room for Bird to “get on with the damn set.” Whereupon the saxophonist seized the stand-alone microphone and pitched it out into the audience . . . before he began to blow.

  We couldn’t take our eyes off Powell, who soloed with his eyes closed. The pianist struck a simple melody that, at first, repeated itself in single-voice hornlike lines mildly embroidered at different octaves. When he introduced a driving left-hand chord accompaniment, it seemed as if the Steinway grand would levitate. The tempo of the notes had ratcheted up, and the lines had become so extended and harmonically complex that the once simple refrain of “You Go to My Head” had been transformed into a raging dialogue only Bud Powell could “sing.”

  Then the room fell nearly silent—no other sound whatsoever except the drone of the club’s air handler. The players, with their eyes shut and their heads resting on their chests, were concentrating on Powell cascading through the tune’s chord changes—but he wasn’t actually playing. He continued soloing, except he wasn’t. His fingers flew over the keyboard—but never lit on any of the ivories. The lines were all occurring inside his head, and he was “singing.” Straining, we could hear a high-pitched nasal drone. His fellow musicians periodically broke out in wide grins.

  “Let’s check out Harlem,” Mr. Willard exclaimed as we exited Birdland. He flashed Billy a wide grin as if he knew what was on my friend’s mind.

  We rode the A train to 125th Street and found it as bustlingly alive as downtown Manhattan. Nearby, tucked inside a hotel, was an intimate jazz club called Minton’s Playhouse. On the bandstand, a musician wearing a beret, horn-rimmed glasses, and a goatee and holding a bent-bell trumpet intoned a scat phrase over and over.

  “I can’t believe it,” Mr. Willard whispered, transfixed.

  The place was packed with white and colored folks, and many of them accompanied the Diz under their breaths as he chanted his “Salt Peanuts” tune . . . and then, as he began blowing, they bobbed to the rapid beat of the radically different, undanceable “new jazz�
�� whose melody became the stepping-off place for each musician’s improvised score . . .

  Behind Gillespie and his quintet stood a giant mural of four jazzmen—guitarist, drummer, trumpeter, and clarinetist—alongside a woman in a red dress lying facedown on a bed. Our friend, whose mood quickly mellowed, had been eyeing it closely.

  “Honor, that be Lady Day up there in that brass bed sleepin’ off a drunk. She break your heart so bad when she sings ‘Fine and Mellow,’ you understand why love is same as a faucet. You able to turn it off and on.”

  Next day we took the subway to the south pier to catch a glimpse out in New York Harbor of Miss Liberty, looking resplendent in the morning sun.

  “Jesus Christ, she’s green!” our friend crowed.

  Yet when I read what immediately followed, everything else of his seemed to pale in comparison. Sleep would not come easily.

  That very night after we turned in at a seedy hotel off the Bowery, I waited until Billy and Mr. Willard had settled in, then slipped out of the room and descended the three urine-scented flights to the dank lobby. When we’d entered earlier, I could see right off that some rooms weren’t used for sleeping. A sign at the check-in desk advertised ACCOMMODATIONS BY THE HOUR.

  A willowy brunette, her magenta lipstick a dramatic foil to her milky cast, sat in a dark corner, impassively smoking a cigarillo; her legs were crossed, one of them counting out seconds.

  I slid alongside her.

  After taking a studied drag, she icily remarked, “I don’t do wemen, honey.”