by Shelby Foote
“Play it soft?”
“Yes, kid, background it. Tacet.”
“All right, Rex.”
He tried to do as he was told, but two days later Ingersoll spoke to him again about it. “We’ve got to take out some of the blare,” he said. “Not that it’s not great. It’s really great. But you know, kid, we got to keep the icks happy, not go breaking their eardrums.”
Duff tried this time, too. He kept on trying, right up to the day when he couldnt even try any longer; he had to give it up. Later he explained it this way:
“He told me to hold back on it, and I tried. But I couldnt. So Rex put a mute in the horn and hung a derby over the bell. That was all right, then — Rex said it was fine.” Duff wagged his head. “Maybe it was, to listen to, but my wind backed up on me. What was suppose to be coming out the other end got choked back down my throat. I like to bust. Rex said it was great, kid, great, but it got me so wrought-up I couldnt sleep. I’d sit up mornings, trying to woodshed it out of me, but that didnt help any whole lot. So finally one night I stayed home.
“Next afternoon when Rex come round I told him how it was. ‘I cant,’ I told him. But he said I was wrong. He said music wasnt only for the ones that played it; it was for the ones that listened to it, too. He said it was up to us to give it to them the way they wanted it, and let the longhairs take care of the other and go hungry.” Duff nodded gravely. “That sounded reasonable, you know. I figured he was right, being top man in the big time and all that. I figured he wasnt clearing any hundred thousand a year without knowing what he was talking about. And Lord knows I wanted to stay. All that money and high living, fine clothes and good food and smooth women — I like it well as the next man, all of it. But I couldnt; I couldnt even go back and try any more. I would have if I could have but I couldnt.”
The following day a drummer he had worked with in New Orleans came to see him. The drummer said, “I heard you took off from Rex. What you planning now?”
“I dont know. Go back home, I reckon.”
“Aint no sense to that, man; you just got here. Look. This friend of mine is opening a place right here in Harlem — a gin mill affair, nothing special; youd be playing for cakes at first. But come on in with us and we’ll make us some music the way it ought to be made.”
“I dont know, Juny. Seems like my horn dont suit this town. Rex ought to know.”
“Itll suit this place. Come on.”
There were no tin derbies at the Black Cat, no mutes, no music stands spelling R E X in blinking neon; there were no music stands at all, in fact. Opening night, the following Saturday, everything that had been pent up inside him for the past ten days came out loud and clear. From that first night it got better. Six months later he hit his stride.
“I dont know how it happened,” he told Harry Van afterward, looking back. “It seem like the horn kind of opened up and everything I ever learnt come sailing out.”
Harry Van had never heard jazz before, to listen to. It was something he accepted much as a person might accept Joyce or Brancusi, admitting there might be something there and even admitting it was probably sincere, but never caring to study it or give it any real attention. Van was twenty-seven, only beginning to compose the things he had always worked toward, music that was intellectual in concept and highly organized, with a good deal more stress on form than content. There were plenty of interesting ways to put notes together, and this way was the safest — meaning that it was the one least likely to lead to disappointment; the less you ventured, emotionally, the less you stood to lose. He was aware of the shortcomings of this approach but he excused them on the grounds that what he had done so far was student work, preparation; he was learning his craft, one of the most difficult in the world, and when the time came for what he called the breakthrough (he was anti-romantic, but he was romantic enough to believe in this) he believed he would find his material proceeding naturally from his studies; that is, he would find ‘himself,’ as so many others had done before him. After all, he told himself, there were plenty of interesting ways to put notes together if ‘themes’ were what you were after. Nothing had interrupted or even disturbed this belief until the night his harmony instructor took him to a Harlem nightclub.
Over the doorway there was an arched cat with green electric eyes and a bristling tail. The instructor rapped and a panel opened inward upon a face so black that the eyeballs glistened unbelievably white. The Negro showed an even row of gold teeth when he recognized the harmony instructor. “Evening, professor,” he said, and the door swung open, revealing a dingy anteroom and another door. From beyond it came a pulse of music, like something under pressure in a bell jar. When this second door was opened they were struck by a violent wave of sound, the ride-out finish of China Boy, followed by one thump of the drum and an abrupt cessation, a silence so empty that, in its turn, it too seemed to strike them across their faces like an open palm, a slap.
On a low dais in the opposite corner there was a five-man group — drums, piano, cornet, trombone, clarinet — seen dimly through smoke that hung like cotton batting, acrid and motionless except when it divided to let waiters through and closed again immediately behind them as they moved among the small round tables where people sat drinking from undersized glasses. Van looked for other instruments, unable to believe that all that sound had come from five musicians. As he and the instructor were being seated the drum set a new beat, pulsing unvaried; the clarinet began to squeal, trilling arpeggios with the frantic hysteria of a just-castrated pig; the trombone growled; the cornet uttered tentative notes; the piano brought out One Hour for sixteen bars (Van knew it as If I Could Be With You, from college dances) and subsided into a general rhythm of sustained chords. Then it happened.
The cornet man, whose skin had the reddish tint of cocoa, took a chorus alone. Wearing a pale blue polo shirt, highwaisted light tan trousers, and shoes with the fronts hewn out to expose white cotton socks, he sat with his legs crossed, the snub horn bunched against his face. His eyes were closed and he held his head so determinedly down that through the early measures he appeared to be blowing the notes deliberately into the floor, driving them there like so many silver nails, a lick to each. His playing was restrained; it sounded almost effortless; but, seeing him, Van got an impression that the cornetist was generating a tremendous pressure only to release a small part of it. Apparently this was the case, for near the end of the chorus, as if the pressure had reached that point he was building toward, the player lifted his head, the cornet rising above his face, and the leashed energy seemed to turn loose all at once, riding powerfully over what had gone before. It approached the limit at which hearing would renege, that farthest boundary of the realm of sound, soaring proud and unvanquishable beyond the restraint of all the music Van had ever known. “No! No!” and “Hey!” people cried from adjoining tables. Van just sat there looking, knowing that his life had reached a turning.
The harmony instructor left soon after midnight but Van was there when dawn began to pale the hanging smoke. He left when the musicians did. He went home, ate breakfast, walked the early morning streets for an hour, and went to class. Afterwards, looking back, it seemed to him that this day had the unreal quality of a dream not quite remembered, partly no doubt because of the lack of sleep (he had always followed a healthy regimen) but mostly because of his state of mind, his reaction to what he had heard. He was confused. Something had happened beyond his will, and he could not call it back or comprehend. It was not until three hours after dark, after a restless four-hour sleep, when he passed through the tandem doors of the Black Cat for the second time, that the dream state ended and he returned to the actual living world.
Knowing nothing of the schedule, he was early. The tables were empty and last night’s smoke had dispersed. Four of the musicians were there, two of them with their instrument cases, cornet and trombone, on the floor beside their chairs. The crowd began to arrive. Presently, when the room was about one-third filled, the pi
anist mounted the dais and took his seat. Again it was like no music Van had ever heard; again it was without melody or, seemingly, even tempo — a vague tinkling in which the black keys seemed to predominate, a strumming such as might have been done by a performing animal, ape or seal, except that there was a certain intelligence to the touch, a tonal sentience beyond Van’s comprehension. Then the clarinetist arrived. White, about forty, with a neat pale tonsure exposed when he removed his Homburg, he resembled a successful dentist or a haberdasher’s clerk. As he crossed the room, the air already beginning to thicken with smoke, he took the instrument from the flat, booksized case beneath his arm and began assembling its five sections. He stepped onto the rostrum without breaking his stride, halted at the far end of the piano — an upright with its front removed to show the busy hammers capped with felt — and began to play the shrill, sliding runs of the night before. The other three members came forward together, as if this were some sort of muster signal, and during the trombone break Van recognized the melody and realized that he had been hearing it all along. It was I Never Knew, which had been popular at dances in his Yale undergraduate days.
He was there for the closing this second night as well, sitting alone at one of the back tables, the steel-gray smoke matting thicker and thicker between him and the bandstand. The following day he cut classes, but he stayed away from the Black Cat that night. He was dazed, like a survivor of some disaster, a dancehall fire or a steamboat explosion. ‘All I have done adds up to nothing,’ he told himself as he lay in bed unable to sleep after the day’s idleness; ‘now I’ll have to start all over again.’ He kept remembering the tone of the cornet, recalling whole passages of improvisation by the cocoa-colored Negro. ‘Maybe he cant even read music,’ Van thought. ‘Maybe he came here from a cornfield somewhere, dropped the hoe and took up the horn and played what his grandfathers played in the jungle a hundred years ago.’
The following night he found that some of this was wrong. The cornetist could read notes, for one thing, anyhow after a fashion. His name was Conway; he had come up from New Orleans two years before and had already made a name for himself. Van learned all this from an enthusiastic young man who sat at an adjoining table. He wore a crew haircut and a hound’s tooth jacket and explained off-hand, though with an edge of pride, that he was a writer for Platter, a trade magazine published by a record manufacturer. “Thats the most horn in the world,” he said. “I thought everybody interested in music knew Duff Conway.” He spoke a racy jargon which Van could not always follow, and he had a habit of pacing the music by patting the table with his palms and humming du-duh du-duh through his teeth with a rhythm which Van, at any rate, thought did not always conform to that of the musicians on the bandstand. The gold-toothed manager seemed impressed, however; he kept dropping by to ask how things were going and sent the writer a fresh drink every fifteen minutes without charge.
During a break the young man brought the cornetist to Van’s table. “You been asking so I thought I’d bring him round,” he said by way of introduction. He spread his arms and put his head back like a prize-ring announcer. “Comb them all — 52nd Street, the Loop, 12th Street in K.C., anywhere — you wont find a horn like this one. Mind what I’m telling you.”
“I’m pleased to meet you,” Van said.
“How do,” Duff said, shaking hands.
He was twenty-four that month. His manner with strangers was nearly always awkward, but soon after meeting Harry Van he lost this awkwardness, at least in Van’s direction. They became friends and were seen together in such diverse places as Swing Row and Carnegie Hall, the Village and the Metropolitan — one the son of a New England choir master and a sea captain’s daughter, advanced student at one of the nation’s leading music institutions, already composing music which even the conservative officials of the school called “promising” with considerable more enthusiasm than usually hid behind the word; the other the son of an itinerant guitarist and a Mississippi servant girl, horn man in a Harlem gin-mill, whose name spoken casually was enough to evoke superlatives from his followers and whose recordings were beginning to be collectors’ items. For two years this relationship grew, Van being drawn steadily away from the music he had known and into the orbit — or maybe vortex — of the music Duff represented, until finally he was composing things like those he formerly had believed were without melody or harmony or sometimes even rhythm. At first his friends at the institute talked against it; it didnt make sense, they said. But now he seldom saw them. He was at work on a four-part composition made up of jazz themes with variations based on Duff’s improvisations. Later he was to abandon this. Indeed, the jazz influence is hardly apparent in his work today. But he had got what he wanted by then; he had made the breakthrough, and the influence remained, if not the signs. What he wanted was an approach, and jazz had shown him that. An inferior art by virtue of its limitations, it involved great drive and marvelous technique and little else; but jazz men — anyhow the good ones, and where the emotions were so naked, thrown out in such a spendthrift fashion, it was obvious from the outset which were good and which were not — never let technique be anything but a means to an end. This was what he mainly got; this was what had struck him that first night in Harlem (though he did not know it then, or at least could not identify it) and this was what stayed with him after he left jazz behind.
Van had completed about two-thirds of this four-part composition, almost as far as he was to go with it, when Duff began to admit a weariness in his arms and legs. He had felt it for some time, but now he began to admit it, at least to himself; he had lost weight, and some nights he was so tired he could barely hold the horn up to his face. So he began drinking to fight it, keeping a waiter on the move between the bandstand and the bar. This took away some of the weariness, or seemed to. But toward the middle of August, 1939, something happened.
It was near closing time and he was just entering the chorus of Body and Soul, one of his best numbers. As the horn mounted toward the final, unbelievable note he felt something rise at the back of his throat, an insistent tickling like a feather against his pharynx. He fell off the note. There was a moment of flat silence; waiters froze in midstride, and here and there about the smoky room people sat with glasses halfway raised. “Fluffed,” someone said, dismayed and loud against the sudden quiet. Duff coughed and there was a taste of salt at the base of his tongue. He stood there on the platform, looking over the cornet at the crowd, and wiped his mouth with the back of one hand, still holding the horn. When he saw the darker red against the flesh he coughed again, harder, and a bright bubble of blood broke from his lips, running down his chin, onto the horn and onto the front of his shirt.
Van took him home and sat feeding him cracked ice until morning. At the clinic, when the examination was over and the x-ray had been taken, the doctor said: “Come back at five and we’ll see what there is to this. Go back to bed till then.”
He was a mild, gray-haired man with beautifully laundered cuffs and a collar like mother-of-pearl; he prided himself on never being hurried. When Duff and Van returned, late afternoon sunlight lay in soft yellow bars across the doctor’s desk, filtered through a slatted blind. The doctor held the negative against the light. “Here you are,” he said, indicating the x-ray like a portrait at a private showing, himself the painter.
At first Duff could not see what he meant. Then, as the doctor’s finger moved among the smoky branches of the ribs, he discerned a gray smudge about the size and color of a tarnished silver dollar. He had been watching it for a good while before he became conscious that the doctor was still speaking.
“… prescribe in a case like this. What you need is bed rest. I cannot tell how long it will take to cure you, if at all, but I can tell you anyhow it will take less than six months to kill you if you stay in that airtight smoke-filled room blowing your lungs out on a trumpet every night.”
“It’s a cornet,” Duff told him.
“Cornet, then. Isnt that worse?” D
uff did not answer. The doctor said, “Do you want me to arrange accommodations at a sanitorium for you?”
“No, thank you, doctor.” Duff rose, holding his hat, and Van rose with him. “I’m going home.”
Every morning, on her way out, Nora would set the pitcher of milk and the glass on the bedside table. Duff would lie there watching them through the long quiet day. Just before sundown he would tilt an inch of milk into the glass, sloshing it around to stain the glass to the brim. When he had drunk it — painfully, sip by finicky sip — he would set the glass back on the table, take the still-full pitcher to the kitchen, and being careful not to spatter any drops his mother might discover on the sink, pour the remainder down the drain. Then he would compose himself in bed for her return.
He took the inactivity fairly well. Some days, however, a speculative expression would come on his face as he lay there, and after a while he would get up and cross the room to the bureau. The cornet lay in the drawer beside Nora’s pistol. He would not touch it; sometimes he would not even open the drawer, for he could see it clearly in his mind, thus juxtaposed, the dull shadowed gleam of gold beside the brighter glint of nickel. He had been in the room for three months now, hearing newsboy voices cry Hitler and the ruin of Poland while the tree outside the window, like something in a hackneyed movie interlude, turned from dusty green to the hectic flare of Indian summer and then stood leafless in the steady rain of late November; winter came early that first war year. Christmas Day he took up the horn for the first time since he put it away, four months ago. He carried it back to bed with him and played it for an hour as a sort of self-given Christmas present, holding the quilt over the bell to deaden the sound.