The Sound of Thunder

by Taylor Caldwell

  A bell clanged from the depths of the rich-smelling house. “Ah, that is my wonderful Antonia. I believe it is veal cacciatore tonight, and a rosa wine to embellish it.” He took David’s arm like a grandfather. “And there is another thing, my child. Do not deprecate man’s nobility, nor must you underestimate his villainy. You stare. You do not understand, but there will be a bitter morning when you will see.”

  With this mysterious remark, he piloted David out of the room and down the dark and curving stairway. They passed a large oval niche in the wall. A candle burned there under an alabaster statue of the Virgin. The old man crossed himself reverently. “One wonders what she thought,” he said. “It is recorded that she pondered. When man knows those ponderings he will know the whole world!”

  It was Edward who had taken over the management of what he sometimes, and bitterly, stigmatized, to himself, as the Fund for Fools. It was he who decided how much should be spent for his brothers’ and sister’s clothing, and their tuition, except where there were fixed fees. Now that David was in New York, his music fees and board provided, it was necessary, according to Edward, that he dress the part. Therefore, David had a good if limited wardrobe, Edward instinctively understanding that a poorly dressed man is handicapped. Too, Edward had a secret but powerful pride, daily growing more obsessive, and as David was an Enger, and a student of a famous teacher, Edward wished him to surpass the other students in dress, thus impressing upon teacher, acquaintances, possible “interests,” and students, that here was an important personage. But pocket money, “for foolishness,” was strictly doled out.

  “What do you need a lot of money for?” Edward had demanded of David. “You have good clothing, better than I have or ever will have, an apartment, a piano, your fees paid, your music bought, concert tickets provided whenever you want them, opera tickets, money for books. Besides, you’ll be studying and practicing most of the time. So where, and when, could you spend a lot of money? I’m not working my head off so you can swagger around. New York like a millionaire.”

  So David, affluent in every other way, was miserably circumscribed in any spending for pure pleasure, and this to a young man going on twenty-one was intolerable. There were little cabarets in the Village, little restaurants, which he would have liked to visit. There were a few young “serious” ladies also studying art in the neighborhood of West Fourth Street whom he would have liked to have known, and to have treated to an opera or concert they could not afford. At first, he was so happy to be away from the crowded household in Waterford that he rejoiced in his solitary life under the eaves of the Autori home and hardly stirred from the house at all except for a short walk at night. But as he was young and, under his irritability and arrogance, of an intense if reserved temperament, he soon began to explore the neighborhood with increasing pleasure and interest. The lack of money stood in his way, however, so far as the intimate pleasures of the area were concerned. He began to think of his brother with ire and resentment, and his compunction, born on a Christmas Eve nearly five years ago, withered and twisted and became pity for himself, and humiliation.

  His conversation with Professor Autori this afternoon had stirred him deeply. He was unusually quiet during the boisterous and argumentative dinner that night. He was not a favorite among his fellow students in that house, who thought him haughty and supercilious, and who envied his natural tall elegance and gentlemanly dignity. They also envied his musical ability. One or two had heard him ragtiming classics when he thought the house was empty and the Autoris asleep in their little bedroom behind the dining rooms. This was blasphemy, according to the students, who were fascinated by the rollicking and somewhat ribald parodies. They reported the matter to the professor, who solemnly shook his head and promised to halt such obscenity. He never spoke of it to David, however, and sometimes listened with smiling pleasure. “Who would dream,” he would murmur to his wife, “that under that Florentine composure there is a diabolical vein of fire and the sound of dancing in the streets?” The old man was intrigued by the effects that David contrived on the piano, an incredible slurring of some notes, a rapid syncopation here and there, the condensation of a lofty phrase. The piano laughs and sings with him, thought the professor. It, too, is making fun of too much gravity. Or, is it rebelling with him? It is the melody of youth.

  David ate little tonight. He was somewhat moody and restless. The soft and sooty rain had stopped, and there was a quickening movement in the spring night, a promise that danced over brick and concrete and brightened the yellow street lamps. David decided that the house was unbearable, and that he must walk endlessly. He had received his monthly check today from his brother, and recklessly he considered spending most of it if the opportunity offered.

  He put on his short but costly broadcloth overcoat with its narrow velvet collar over his well-cut black suit, and adjusted his glimmering derby hat. He put on pearl-gray spats over his polished boots and drew on pearl-gray gloves, and took up a small and shining black cane with an ivory head. He looked at himself in the old Venetian mirror and was pleased. He had little personal vanity, for, though he was unusually handsome now, he was strangely indifferent to the fact. Perhaps it was because he had never needed to contrive an effect laboriously and carefully. Then he set off with a feeling of excitement.

  He glanced with covert eagerness at some of the girls who passed him in the mild March night. But he was disappointed to see that they were not the kind he had seen before. Most of them were dowdy and preoccupied, their skirts not lifted in a gloved hand but dragging on the damp pavements. Their faces were white and worried and plain, under wide felt hats of the poorest quality, and their coats and suits were frowsy. They looked furtively, and with admiration, at David, but he looked away. Working girls, seamstresses or office girls, on the way home from work. David had had enough drabness in his life to be repelled by it now. Perhaps if he went by the Brevoort or Lafayette Hotels he would encounter more appetizing specimens.

  Most of those who lived in the neighborhood were at supper, and David soon found himself practically alone in the narrow and winding streets, whose lamps reflected back from the wet cobblestones. He heard the distant rumbling of traffic, but here it was quiet. Now he was coming to the neighborhood of the little restaurants and cabarets, and he walked with more intensification of his mysterious excitement. He imagined he felt hungry. He would find a restaurant, dark and small and lighted with candles, where he would treat himself to an exotic dish and a bottle of expensive French wine. He would sit among “people,” and watch, and think of himself as a man of the world, a suave and polished stranger, condescending to visit the Village. A Frenchman, perhaps. Or a French-Italian. Better the Italian; he knew that language more fluently.

  He found a restaurant he had never seen before, and he stopped on the sidewalk to study its exterior, thoughtfully twirling his cane. The curtains were drawn across the steamed windows, but it had a respectable look slyly hinting of raffishness, like a well-bred girl who could be naughty. There was a poster on one of the windows, a noisy poster lettered in green and red: “Prince Emory! Two weeks’ engagement! Just Returned from the Mardi Gras in New Orleans! New Music, New Rhythms, Extraordinary Effects from Dixie! From Ten to Two!”

  David glanced at his pocket watch. It was hardly nine. He hesitated. The restaurant would be empty. But he knew that it was open, for there were shadows on the curtains moving rapidly back and forth. Then he heard music, the sudden brilliant flare of a trumpet, like a joyful cry of delight, the sudden clamor of a piano, the sudden ripple of a drum, teasing and audacious. He had never heard such music before, and his flesh tingled ecstatically. The music stopped. They were practicing, apparently. Then a violin sang alone, with a voice and with music which sounded like a dusky girl on some hot mountain with hibiscus in her hair, her skirts flashing and whirling. David was enchanted; he breathed lightly, so as not to miss that wild singing that cried of palm trees and shining Southern oceans and islands, green as jade, ha
loed in warm golden beaches, and people who lived to love and to laugh, far from concrete and gaslights.

  David pushed open the door. As he suspected, there were no customers in the restaurant, which was not very large but was very intimate, with bare wooden tables and candles stuck in wine bottles, and with a bare floor. The candlelight flickered on wooden walls on which were tacked small samples of local artists’ work, fierce blues and reds and yellows and clamoring blacks. On a dais, against one wall in the middle of the restaurant, two young Negroes were practicing at a piano and at a drum while two others stood near them, one with a violin, one with a silver trumpet. They turned their heads, startled, as David entered, and one of them said in a liquid and courteous voice, “Not open yet, Mister. Not till ten.” Their eyes were curious, roaming over his clothing and face, and their expressions took on constraint.

  “That’s all right,” said David. He stood near the door. There was not a waiter in sight. He hesitated. “I think I’ll sit down anyway, and wait, and listen to you practice.” He felt exposed and annoyed as they merely looked at him in silence. “No harm in my listening, is there? I’m a—a musician myself and I heard you practicing, outside.” He tried to smile in a friendly fashion but only succeeded in looking haughty and patronizing. The young Negroes glanced at each other, shrugged, and turned back to their instruments. David seated himself at a table near them. He brought out a package of cigarettes and lit one, and though he did not know it, his every gesture was that of a grand seigneur, and antagonizing.

  Then one of the young Negroes, exceptionally handsome and tall and slight, and possessing a smooth face the color and texture of finely polished bronze, and with features of unusual clarity, suddenly swung about and stared intently at David. David was pretending, in his shyness, to be absorbed in intellectual thought, and he studied the burning end of his cigarette with an aloof expression. He was deciding to be a Fifth Avenue gentleman waiting for a mysterious feminine companion. The companion would not come; he would sit alone. But he would be interesting.

  The young Negro who was staring at him lifted a hand to silence the other musicians, and put his silver trumpet on the top of the piano. He stepped down from the dais, and his companions watched with curiosity, their hands on their instruments. He walked with a feline grace to David, who had now definitely decided on impersonating a young man from Fifth Avenue, a lonely and haunted young man seeking forgetfulness. He started when a shadow fell across his table, and he looked up, the clear whites of his vehement eyes shining like porcelain in the candlelight.

  “Excuse me,” said the young Negro, and his beautiful voice trembled a little. “I kind of thought I knew you from somewhere. I’m Prince Emory, and this is my band, a new kind of band, just come from N’Orleans.”

  David colored with embarrassment; then he said awkwardly, “Sit down, Mr.—Emory. Guess we can have some wine if we can find a waiter. I don’t seem to know you. Who did you think I was?”

  Prince Emory sat down after a brief hesitation. He studied David earnestly, moving his head to catch a different angle of David’s warm face. Then, to David’s astonishment, those soft brown eyes filled with tears, and he smiled tremulously. “I know you!” he said gently. “You’re Dave Enger!” He, too, was astonished. “I’d know you anywhere! Dave Enger!” Now his eyes shone with happiness.

  “Yes, I’m Dave Enger,” David replied. “But I don’t seem to—” Then he stared fixedly, and slowly he smiled, a young and touchingly inhibited smile. “Why, for God’s sake, you’re Billy Russell from Waterford! Ed said you’d gone to New Orleans years ago.” He stretched out his hand enthusiastically to Billy, and Billy, after another brief hesitation, took it and shook it with delight.

  “What do you know?” marveled David, suddenly at ease at finding someone who knew him in this enormous city where he was so lonely. “Prince Emory! What’ve you been doing all this time, Billy?”

  “I’ve been in N’Orleans,” said Billy, accepting one of David’s cigarettes. “Learning. New music, wonderful music. I’m making money,” he added proudly. “Lots of money. I guess you could call me rich now. I get five hundred a week anywhere I go; can keep half of it for myself, the rest goes to the other fellows.”

  “Honestly?” said David, incredulous. He looked about the small and somewhat dank little restaurant. “Here, too? Five hundred dollars a week!”

  “Sure,” said Billy with a contented smile. “Don’t let this place fool you, Dave. All the rich folks from uptown come to this restaurant all the time; you can’t get in, even on Monday nights. And it’s been crowded every night I have been here. This is my second week. I got notices in the big newspapers in New York; theatrical fellows been here almost every night. One’s a music publisher; he’s going to publish some of my music. We’re a sensation, first time they ever heard our kind of music in New York.” He flourished the cigarette with an air of modest pride and assurance.

  Then he said, “What’re you doing in New York, Dave?” His astute eye had noticed the expensive clothing, the elegance, the watch chain.

  “I’m studying with Professor Autori. Piano. I’ve been here almost a year. Concert music. I live on West Fourth Street, an apartment of my own. We’re doing very well in Waterford, Billy,” and his mouth, suddenly expressive, jerked a little.

  A small silence fell between them. They were remembering the very young Edward of almost five years ago, who had struck Billy and who had upbraided and denounced his brother.

  “Professor Autori,” said Billy in an awed voice. He had never heard of Professor Autori, but he was too natively polite to reveal that fact. “A real genius. You’re lucky.” Then they both thought of how David has played the piano in the hot little parlor in the house on School Street, and of how Billy had spontaneously accompanied him. Billy’s eyes flinched with pain. “You’ll be a concert pianist, too, I guess. One of these days. Not my kind of music, though. Mine’s special.”

  “I like it,” said David, gloomily. He shifted on his wooden chair. He said, “I like it a damned lot better than I do mine! I understand it. I—” And he was silent.

  An elderly waiter in a long white apron appeared from the rear shadows of the empty restaurant. He came to the table and looked at “Prince Emory” with an expression of mixed superiority and resentful respect. “Want something, Prince?” he asked.

  “Yes.” Billy regarded David’s drooping face acutely. “No wine. Maybe two ryes and water. Not the water in the same glass with the whisky, Hugo.” The waiter sniffed antagonistically and trundled away. It sure was funny, he thought, how the tony upper crust hobnobbed with that nigger, sitting down at the same table with him, like he was as good as anybody, while they were mighty careful, mighty careful, yes sir, about their tips! The waiter, who was a Socialist, spent his free hours in Union Park, listening to rabid speakers on soap boxes, and cheered for “the rights of man” and the “oppressed masses” and the equality of mankind.

  “If you don’t watch them,” said Billy, “they’ll put a quarter inch of whisky in the bottom of the glass and fill it way up with water.” He was concerned that David appeared to have sunken into brooding gloom. When he was like this, he resembled Edward, and Billy sighed. He did not want to be the first to mention his old friend, for the memory of that last night was still like a wound in him.

  “I suppose so,” said David, absently.

  Billy was silently praying that David would speak of Edward, so he adroitly led the conversation in that direction. “Why shouldn’t you like my kind of music, Dave? What’s wrong with it? I tell you, you’ve got to be just as much of a genius to play it as you have to be to play your kind.” He paused. “Or, maybe it isn’t your kind. Remember how you played—that night—and I came in with my harmonica and pitched right in with you? Man, we made it roll!”

  David moved uneasily. He lit another cigarette. Billy put his hand in the rear pocket of his trousers—he was in shirtsleeves, rolled to the elbow—and placed Edward’s harmonica
on the table between himself and David. The two young men gazed at it with sadness. It was worn, at the mouthpiece, down to the underlying brass. “I carry it with me all the time,” said Billy gently. “It’s my luck piece. I play it; I can still make it sing like all get-out. Tried other harmonicas, costing, up to a hundred dollars, but this here thing runs away from ’em.” He paused again. “Ed gave it to me.”

  “I know,” said David. He glanced up at Billy, and his eyes were vivid. “Poor Ed. He wanted Pa’s flute, but Pa wouldn’t let him have it, so he bought the harmonica for two dollars. Nobody ever heard him play it except me. He wasn’t allowed to practice in the house. You see, he wasn’t a genius.” David smiled wryly.

  He folded his thin arms on the bare table, and Billy admiringly noticed that the sleek broadcloth fell back from his wrists in perfect lines, revealing stiff white cuffs with real gold cuff links, a present from his father. He said musingly, “It’s funny but I’ve remembered something. It was a long time ago, when Ed was about fourteen. Maybe thirteen. We’d all gone to the park on a Sunday for a picnic, and Ed had to stay at home to open and run the store at six o’clock. My mother asked me to stop in on the way back and pick up some sliced boiled ham. The door of the shop was open, and Ed was all alone in it, sitting on the counter, with his back to the door. And he was playing the harmonica.”

  He snuffed out his cigarette with a strong and twisting movement. “Well, I stood there in the doorway and listened, and it was like a little organ, that harmonica. Ed was improvising on a theme he had heard me play on the piano. A phrase from Beethoven’s Fifth. I couldn’t believe it, Billy! It seemed impossible to believe it myself. And would you believe this?” He looked at Billy with gleaming self-contempt and regret. “I was angry. I was the musical genius. I felt that Ed was insulting me! I didn’t know at the time that he could play circles around me. He’s the genius of the family. The rest of us are just fakes.” He laughed shortly and bitterly. “Fakes! Farces! Oh, I’m not saying we don’t have—something, but I’ve got the idea it’s mediocre and that what we are really fitted for is the thing we are not learning. We’re caught on something, like an insane carousel that never stops and which won’t let us off, and it’s not Ed’s fault. It’s ours.”