“The fox trot,” I offered. “I think people still dance that.”
Mae snorted. “All the fire’s out of it. You should have read what the preachers and the newspapers had to say about it back then. They sure were peeved; but the kids thought it was flossy. It was a way to get their parents’ goat. ‘Bug them,’ I guess you say now.”
“Kids? Isn’t the fox trot a ballroom dance for, well, you know—mature people?”
She made her sour lemon face. “Sure. Now. But today’s old folks were yesterday’s kids. And they still like the music they liked when they were young. Heh-heh. When you’re ninety or a hundred, sonny, you’ll be a-listening to that acid rock stuff and telling your grandkids what hell-raisers you used to be. And they won’t believe you, either. We tote the same bags with us all our lives, doc. The same interests; the same likes and dislikes. Those older’n us and those younger’n us, why, they have their own bags.” A sudden scowl, halfway between fright and puzzlement, passed across her face like the shadow of a cloud. Then she hunched her shoulders. “Me, I’ve got too many bags.”
She’d get no argument from me on that. “Have you heard any other songs?” I asked.
She folded her hands over the knob of her walking stick and rested her chin on them. “Let’s see…Yesterday, I heared, heard Waiting for the Robert E. Lee and A Perfect Day. Those were real popular, once. And lots of Cohan songs. ‘Oh, it was Mary, Mary, long before the fashion changed…’ And Rosie O’Grady. Then there was Memphis Blues. Young folks thought it was ‘hep.’ Even better than ragtime.”
She shook her head. “I never cottoned too well to those kids, though,” she said. “They remind me of the kids nowadays. A little too…What do they say now? ‘Close to the edge.’ Ran wild when they were young ’uns, they did. Hung around barbershops. Hawked papers as newsies. Worked the growler for their old man.”
I looked up from my notes. “Worked the growler?”
“Took the beer bucket to the saloon to get it filled. Imagine sending a child—even girls!—into a saloon! No wonder Carrie and the others wanted to close ’em up. Maybe folks my age were a little too stuck on ourselves, like the younger folks said; but at least we had principles. With us, it wasn’t all just to have a good time. We fought for things worth fighting for. Suffrage. Prohibition. Birth control. Oh, those were times, I tell you. Maggie, making those speeches about birth control and standing up there on the stage that one time with the tape over her mouth, because they wouldn’t let her talk. I helped her open that clinic of hers over in Brooklyn, though I never did care for her attitude about Jews and coloreds. Controlling ‘undesirables’ wasn’t the real reason for birth control, anyway.”
“Mrs. Holloway!”
She looked at me and laughed. “Now, don’t tell me your generation is shocked at such talk!”
“It’s not that. It’s…”
“That old folks wrangled over it, too? Well, folks aren’t born old. We were young, too; and as full of piss and vinegar as anyone else. I read Moral Physiology when it first come out; though Mister did try mightily to discourage me. And, later, there was The Unwelcomed Child. Doc, if men had babies, birth control would never have been a crime.”
Folks aren’t born old…I squared off my deck of index cards. “I suppose not.” My generation had been as strong as any for civil rights and feminism. Certainly stronger than the hard-edged, cynics coming up behind us. It sounded as if Mae had had a similar generational experience. Though, that would put her in the generation before the hell-raising Lost Generation. What was it called? The Missionary Generation? Maybe she was older than she looked; though that hardly seemed possible. “Let’s get back to the songs—” I suggested.
“Yes, the songs,” she said. “The songs. Why, I recollect a man had a right good voice…Now what was his name…? A wonderful dancer, too.”
“Ben Wickham?” I suggested.
“No. No, Ben was later. This was out Pittsburgh way. Joe Paxton. That was it.” She tilted her head back. “He was a barnstormer, Joe was. He knew ’em all. Calbraith Rodgers, Glenn Curtiss, Pancho Barnes, even Wilbur Wright. Took me up oncet, through the Alleghenies. Oh, my, that was something, let me tell you. The wind in your face and the ground drifting by beneath you, and the golden sun peeking between the shoulders of the hills…And you felt you were dancing with the clouds.” She sighed, and the light in her eyes slowly faded. “But he was like all the rest.” Her face closed up; became hard. “I come on him one day packing his valise, and when I asked him why he was cutting out, all he would say was, ‘How old is Ann?’”
“What?”
She blinked and focused moistened eyes on me. Slowly, before they could even fall, her tears vanished into the sand of her soul. “Oh, that’s what everyone said back then. ‘How old is Ann?’ It meant ‘Who knows?’ Came from one of those brain teasers that ran in the New York Press. You know. ‘If Mary is twice as old as Ann was when Mary…’ And it goes through all sorts of contortions and ends up ‘How old is Ann?’ Most folks hadn’t the foggiest notion and didn’t care, so they started saying ‘How old is Ann?’ when they didn’t know the answer to something.” She pushed down on her walking stick and started to rise.
“Wait. I still have a few questions.”
“Well, I don’t have any more answers. Joe…Well, he turned out worthless in the end; but we had some high times together.” Then she sighed and looked off into the distance. “And he did take me flying, once, when flying was more than just a ride.”
As I was walking down the street, down the street, down the street,
A handsome gal I chanced to meet. Oh, she was fair to view.
Lovely Fan’, won’t you come out tonight, come out tonight, come out tonight?
Lovely Fan’, won’t you come out tonight, and dance by the light of the moon?
It was late in the evening—midnight, perhaps—and, dressed in housecoat and slippers, I was frowning over a legal pad and a few dozen index cards, a cup of cold coffee beside me on the kitchen table. I was surrounded by small, sourceless sounds. If you have been in a sleeping building at night, you know what I mean. Creaks and rustlings and the sighs of…What? Spirits? Air circulation vents? The soft groan of settling timbers. The breath of the wind against the windows. The staccato scritching of tiny night creatures dancing across the roof shingles. The distant rumble of a red-eye flight making its descent into the metropolitan area. Among such confused, muttering sounds, who can distinguish the pad of bare feet on the floor?
A gasp, and I turned.
I had never seen Consuela when she was not wearing nurse’s whites. Perhaps once or twice, bundled in a coat as she sought one of her rare nights out; but never in a red and yellow flowing flowered robe. Never with her black hair unfastened and sweeping around her like a raven-feather cape. She stood in the kitchen doorway, clenching the collar in her fist.
“Consuela,” I said.
“I—saw the light on. I thought you had already gone to sleep. So I—” Consuela flustered was a new sight, too. She turned to go. “I did not mean to disturb you.”
“No, no. Stay a while.” I laid my pen down and stretched. “I couldn’t get to sleep, so I came down here to work a while.” When she hesitated, I stood and pulled a chair out for her. She gave me a sidelong look, then bobbed her head once and took a seat. I wondered if she thought I might “try something.” Late at night; wife away; both of us in pajamas, thoughts of bed in our minds. Hell, I wondered if I might try something. Brenda had grown more distant each year since Deirdre’s birth.
But Consuela was not my type. She was too short, too wide, too dark. I studied her covertly while I handled her chair. Well, perhaps not “too.” And she did have a liquid grace to her, like a panther striding through the jungle. Brenda’s grace was of a different sort. Brenda was fireworks arcing and bursting across the night sky. You might get burnt, but never bitten.
“Would you like something to drink?” I asked when she had gotten settled. “Appl
e juice, orange juice.” Too late for coffee; and a liqueur would have been inappropriate.
“Orange juice would be fine, thank you,” she said.
I went to the refrigerator and removed the carafe. Like everyone else, we buy our OJ in wax-coated paperboard containers; but Brenda transferred the milk, the juices, and half a dozen other articles into carafes and canisters and other more appropriate receptacles. Most people shelved their groceries. We repackaged ours.
“Do you remember the old woman I told you about last week?”
“The one who hears music? Yes.”
I brought the glasses to the table. “She’s starting to remember other things, now.” I told her about Mae’s recollections, her consciousness doubling. “I’ve started to keep track of what she sees and hears,” I said, indicating the papers on the table. “And I’ve sent to the military archives to see if they could locate Green Holloway’s service records. Later this week, I plan to go into the City to check the census records at the National Archives.”
Consuela picked up the legal pad and glanced at it. “Why are you doing this thing?”
“For verification. I’m thinking I might write a book.”
She looked at me. “About Mrs. Holloway?”
“Yes. And I think I may have found an angle, too.” I pointed to the pad she held. “That is a list of the songs and events Holloway has rememb-heard.”
After a moment’s hesitation, Consuela read through the list. She shook her head. “You are looking for meaning in this?” Her voice held a twist of skepticism in it. For a moment, I saw how my activities might look from her perspective. Searching for meaning in the remembered songs of a half-senile old woman. What should that be called, senemancy? Melodimancy? What sort of auguries did High Priest Wilkes find, eviscerating this morning’s ditties?
“Not meaning,” I said. “Pattern. Explanation. Some way to make sense of what she is going through.”
Consuela gave me that blank look she liked to affect. “It may not make sense.”
“But it almost does.” I riffed the stack of index cards. Each card held information about a song Mae had heard. The composer, songwriter, performer; the date, the topic, the genre. Whether Mae had liked it or not. “The first time she came to me,” I said, “she was ‘rememb-hearing’ swing tunes from the 1930s. A few days later, it was music of the ‘Roaring Twenties.’ Then the jazz gave way to George M. Cohan and the ‘animal dance’ music of the Mauve Decade. Do you see? The songs keep coming from earlier in her life.”
Memphis Blues, 1912. A Perfect Day, 1910. Mary Took the Calves to the Dairy Show, 1909. Rosie O Grady, 1906. Songs my grandparents heard as children. “East side, west side, All around the town…” I remembered how Granny used to sit my brother and me on her lap, one on each knee, and rock us back and forth while she sang that. I paused and cocked my head, listening into the silence of the night.
But I could hear nothing. I could remember that she sang it; but I could not remember the singing.
“It is a voyage,” I said, loudly, to cover the silence. “A voyage of discovery up the stream of time.”
Consuela shook her head. “Rivers have rapids,” she said, “and falls.”
Hello, my baby, hello, my honey, hello, my ragtime gal…
Send me a kiss by wire,
Baby, my heart’s on fire.
Mae’s morning visits fell into a routine. She settled herself into her chair with an air of proprietorship and croaked out snatches of tunes while I wrote down what I could, recording the rest on a cheap pocket tape recorder I had purchased. She hummed The Maple Leaf Rag and Grace and Beauty and the St. Louis Tickle. I suffered through her renditions of My Gal Sal and The Rosary. (“A big hit,” she assured me, “for over twenty-five years.”) She rememb-heard the bawdy Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight (sounding grotesque on her ancient lips), the raggy You’ve Been a Good Old Wagon, But You’ve Done Broke Down, and the poignant Good-bye, Dolly Gray.
She frowned for a moment. “Or was that ‘Nellie Gray’?” Then she shrugged. “Those were happy songs, mostly,” she said. “Oh, they were such good songs back then. Not like today, all angry and shouting. Even the sad songs were sweet. Like Tell Them That You Saw Me or She’s Only a Bird in a Gilded Cage. And Mister taught me Lorena, once. I wish I could recollect that ’un. And Barbry Ellen. I learned me that ’un when I was knee-high to a grasshopper. Pa told me it was the President’s favorite song. The old President, from when his Pappy fought in the War. I haven’t heard those yet. Or—” She cocked her head to the side. “Well, dad-blast it!”
“What’s wrong, Mrs. Holloway?”
“I’m starting to hear coon songs.”
“Coon songs!”
She shook her head. “Coon songs. They was—were—all the rage. Coon, Coon, Coon and All Coons Look Alike to Me and If the Man in the Moon Were a Coon. Some of them songs were writ by coloreds themselves, because they had to write what was popular if they wanted to make any money.”
“Mrs. Holloway…!”
“Never said I liked ’em,” she snapped back. “I met plenty of coloreds in my time, and there’s some good and some bad, just like any other folks. Will Biddle, he farmed two hollers over from my Pa when I was a sprout, and he worked as hard as any man-jack in the hills, and carried water for no man. My Pa said—My Pa…” She paused, frowned and shook her head. “Pa?”
“What is it?”
“Oh.”
“Mrs. Holloway?”
She spoke in a whisper, not looking at me, not looking at anything I could see. “I remember when my Pa died. Him a-laying on the bed, all wore out by life. Gray and wrinkled and toothless. And, dear Lord, how that ached me. I remember thinking how he’d been such a strong man. Such a strong man.” She sighed. “It’s an old apartment, and the wallpaper is peeling off’n the walls. There’s a big, dark water stain on one wall and the steam radiator is hissing like a cat.”
“You don’t remember where you were…are?” I asked, jotting a few quick notes.
She shook her head. “No. I’m humming In the Good Old Summertime. Or maybe the tune is just running through my head. Pa, he…” A tear formed in the corner of her eye. “He wants me to sing him the song.”
“The song? What song is that?”
“An old, old song he used to love. ‘Sing it to me one last time,’ he says. And I can’t sing at all because my throat’s clenched up so tight. But he asks me again, and…Those eyes of his! How I loved that old man.” Mae’s own eyes had glazed over as she lived the scene again in her mind. She reached out as if clasping another pair of hands in her own and croaked haltingly:
“I gaze on the moon as I tread the drear wild,
And feel that my mother now thinks of her child…
Be it ever so humble…”
She could not finish. For a time, she sobbed softly. Then she brushed her eye with her sleeve and looked past me. “I never knew, doc. I never knew at all what a blessing it was to forget.”
Come and sit by my side if you love me.
Do not hasten to bid me adieu,
But remember the bright Mohawk Valley
And the girl that has loved you so true.
Later that day, as I was leaving the Home, I noticed Mae sitting in the common room and paused a moment to eavesdrop. There were a handful of other residents mouldering in chairs and rockers; but Mae sat singing quietly to herself and I thought what the hell, and pulled out my pocket tape recorder and stepped up quietly beside her.
It was a patriotic hymn. America, the Beautiful. I’m sure you’ve heard it. Even I know the words to that one. Enough to know that Mae had them all wrong. Oh beautiful for halcyon skies? Above the enameled plain? And the choruses…The way Mae sang it, “God shed his grace for thee” sounded more like a plea than a statement.
America! America! God shed his grace for thee
Till selfish gain no longer stain The banner of the free!
The faulty recollection disturbed me. If Mae’
s memories were unreliable, then what of my book? What if my whole rationale turned out wrong?
Her croakings died away and she opened her eyes and spotted me. “Heading home, doc?”
“It’s been a long day,” I said. There was no sign on her face of her earlier melancholy, except that maybe her cheeks sagged a little lower than before, her eyes gazed a little more sadly. She seemed older, somehow; if such a thing were possible.
She patted the chair next to her. “Hot foot it on over,” she said. “You’re just in time for the slapstick.”
She was obviously having another doubling episode and, in some odd way, I was being asked to participate. I looked at my watch, but decided that since our morning session had been cut short, I might as well make the time up now. My next visit was not until Friday. If I waited until then, these memories could be lost.
“Slapstick?” I asked, taking the seat she had offered.
“You never been to the Shows?” She tsk-ed and shook her head. “Well, Jee-whiskers. They been the place to go ever since Tony Pastor got rid of the cootchee-cootchee and cleaned up his acts. A young man can take his steady there now and make goo-goo eyes.” She nudged me with her elbow. “A fellow can be gay with his fairy up in the balcony.”
I pulled away from her. “I beg your pardon?”
“Don’t you want to be gay?” she asked.
“I should hope not! I have a wife, a dau…”
Mae laughed suddenly and capped a gnarled hand over her mouth. So help me, she blushed. “Oh, my goodness, me! I didn’t mean were you a cake-eater. I got all mixed up. I was sitting down front at the burly-Q and I was sitting here in the TV room with you. When we said, ‘be gay,’ we meant let your hair down and relax. And a ‘fairy’ was your girl friend, what they used to call a chicken when I was younger. All the boys wanted to be gay blades, with their starched collars and straw hats and spats. And their moustaches! You never saw such moustaches! Waxed and curled and barbered.” She chuckled to herself. “I was a regular daisy, myself.” She closed her eyes and leaned back.
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