The King of Ragtime

by Larry Karp

  Stark thought to mention the hefty serving of biscuits and gravy he’d recently packed away, but caught himself. He gazed around the parlor, a good-sized room with an old green easy chair and matching hassock, a brown overstuffed wingback chair, a green upholstered love seat, and a long sofa, covered in green and white striped ticking. Every armrest sported a precisely-set white lace antimacassar. Against the far wall stood a writing desk; beneath a window looking out on the street, a little Victrola sat on a square oak table. Not showy, but comfortable. An attractive house in a nice neighborhood. Where was the money coming from? Joplin wouldn’t be bringing in much from teaching piano, and the semiannual royalty checks from Stark Music Company, along with whatever might be coming in from other publishers, couldn’t possibly account for this standard of living. Besides which, hadn’t the man damn near bankrupted himself the past few years, trying to get Treemonisha produced and performed?

  Lottie interrupted Stark’s musings as she sidestepped through the doorway, carrying a huge silver tray with a full coffee service, a sliced coffee cake, and plates. She motioned her guest to the wingback chair, set a plate with a double-slice of cake into his hands, then settled into the easy chair, and leaned forward. “Mr. Stark, I just gotta say again, it is so good of you to come out here now, ’specially after all the ruckus Scott made. I told that man, with all you done for him, if you said you was strapped and couldn’t give royalties to no composer, white or colored, then he oughta believe you. I never did stop trying to get Scott to patch it up, but…” She held out her hands, palms up, surrender.

  “I know,” Stark said quietly. “And I was very touched by the kind note you sent after my wife died.” His voice went gravelly. “Particularly, considering we’d never met.”

  “But I felt like I knew you. Nell never does stop talking about you.”

  Stark smiled. “Well, I’m here, Lottie, and if I can help, I’ll be glad of it.” He waved his hand. “You’ve got a lovely home. I’m glad to see Mr. Joplin has been so well looked-after.”

  Lottie blew out a loud snort. “I’m goin’ to tell you, Mr. Stark, it has taken some hard looking-after. Scott is a great composer, a great man. But there ain’t one inch of room in his head for nothing but music.”

  “Never was.”

  “No. But I got me a good head for business, and Scott’ll listen to me, on those things anyways. I made him write me in as managing partner in the Scott Joplin Music Company. I told him, Scott, you write the music, and I’ll keep the books, pay the accounts, handle the money.”

  “Looks as if it’s worked well,” said Stark.

  Lottie nodded. “It’s a blessing I thought to do it, the way Scott’s sickness has messed up his mind.”

  A couple walked past the door, laughing. “See you, Lottie” the woman called into the parlor.

  Lottie paused long enough to say, “My sister. Not three days up from Virginny, and she’s already found her a New York man to court her.”

  Stark’s attention blew to flinders. ‘Court her!’ Sunday afternoons in the Widow Casey’s tiny home in New Orleans, the living room with no more furnishings than a Kelly-green couch behind a rickety wooden table, and a few shabby armchairs. The Widow (as she always called herself) and Sarah’s younger sister Theresa and little brother John, always careful to take the chairs, leaving the couch to Sarah, in a modest gingham dress, and her scrubbed, starched suitor, so awkward in his Union uniform. Polite conversation. All present trusted the war would soon be over. The Widow would put on a sly smile, and say, “If you young people think you can do without me for a few minutes, I’ll make some tea and get a pile of my molasses cookies together.” Walks on warm afternoons, Sarah’s hand carefully tucked into the crook of John’s arm… Stark’s eyes filled, damn! He fought to pull himself together.

  Lottie didn’t seem to notice. “It was only just a couple weeks ago that I found out what Scott’s been workin’ on lately. He been writin’ a musical play.”

  Stark nodded. “I’ve heard. And it doesn’t make sense. Joplin always talked as if a musical theater-piece was beneath him. It was always opera, opera, opera.”

  “Oh, why don’t you just go and tell me about that.” Lottie rolled her eyes. “Close on to five years, now, it’s been Treemonisha, Treemonisha, Treemonisha. But then, all of a sudden I don’t hear nothing no more about Treemonisha. Scott say he workin’ on something brand-new, something different. And that was all he would tell me. Day and night he locked himself up in that room.” Lottie gestured with her head toward the back of the house. “Finally, one day, maybe two weeks ago, out he comes and says it’s done, and it’s gonna be the savior of us all. ‘Make us rich, Lottie. Put my name right up there with Victor Herbert and George M. Cohan and Jerome Kern. Up there above them, in fact.’”

  Stark frowned. “Joplin’s always had a good opinion of his music, but I never heard him try to put himself above another composer.”

  “Well, to hear him tell it now, he’s the greatest composer ever lived,” Lottie said. “Next thing, he’s gonna work on his Symphony Number One, and I should just wait and see, all the big city orchestras gonna fight over who get to play the premiere. And after that, it’s gonna be an opera, a new one. Bigger than anything Wagner ever wrote.”

  Stark shook his head. “He’s always admired Wagner—not that Wagner would ever have returned the compliment. But what about this musical play of his? If?”

  “That’s what he call it. If.”

  Did he tell you anything about it? Play any of it for you?”

  “Just a little. He sat down at the piano, played a little this, little that, and it was lovely. But his music always sound lovely.”

  “And that’s all you know?”

  “That’s it, Mr. Stark. Except I wisht that boy Martin hadn’t went and talked Scott into giving his manuscript to Irving Berlin. For the life of me, I can’t figure how Scott agreed to do that. After what happened with ‘Alexander’s’? That was when I knew he was for sure out of his mind.”

  Stark ground his teeth as he remembered a visit a few years back from Joplin’s friend, Sam Patterson. On his way through St. Louis, Patterson dropped in at Stark Music, and told a dreadful story. When Joplin first heard “Alexander’s,” he burst into tears and cried “That’s my tune.” Sobbing all the while, he sang a couple of lines from Treemonisha: “Marching onward, marching onward. Marching to that lovely tune.” Then he sang the beginning measures of “Alexander’s Ragtime Band:” “Oh, ma honey, oh, ma honey. Better hurry and let’s meander.” Note for note, the same. According to Patterson, Joplin had left the score of Treemonisha with Berlin, but the publisher told Joplin he couldn’t use it. “He couldn’t use it with my name on it,” Joplin howled. And then, Patterson said, before Joplin could publish his opera, he had to change his own tune.

  “I sure hope Berlin doesn’t get away with it this time,” Lottie said. “Just because Berlin be white and Scott, black—”

  “It’s not that,” Stark said quietly. “Color doesn’t matter on Tin Pan Alley. They steal from each other all day long to make new trash out of old garbage.” He drew a deep breath. “I need to find out more about this musical play. Can I have a look inside that room of his?

  Lottie shook her head. “Oh, I don’t know about that. Just thinkin’ about it makes me all cold and sweaty. If Scott ever find out…”

  Stark nodded, then set his coffee cup onto the little table next to his chair. “I understand. But it might really help. Let’s say there’s another copy of If—”

  “There ain’t. Just can’t be. It’d take a passel of time to copy it out, and who do you know who ever do that? Why, nobody in their right mind…”

  Lottie stopped as if she’d been poleaxed, then got to her feet, and walked from the room. She was back almost instantly, a ring of keys in her left hand. She gestured with her head toward the hall.

  Stark stood by degrees. The chair was lumpy, and his sciatica was shooting burst
s of electricity down his right leg. But Lottie looked to be even more in pain. Stark put an arm around her shoulders. “Don’t worry—we’ll get this thing sorted out.” Softly, as if reassuring a child after a nightmare. Stark knew about nightmares.

  Down the hall, Lottie picked out a key, turned it in the lock, opened the door, then stood aside to let Stark enter first. The shade was down over the only window in the room, and the heavy air smelled like urine and rancid oil. Stark wrinkled his nose, felt embarrassed when Lottie picked up on him. “Scott can go days without washin’, an’ he keep a bottle in here so he don’t have to stop composin’ to walk on down the hall.”

  Stark made a face as sour as the air. “He’s a sick man. Let’s see what we can find that might help us to help him.” He pulled a string; an unshaded bulb on a fixture just inside the door sent light and shadows into play around the room.

  The rack on the piano was empty, so they began by looking through a few loose pages of music on the bench. Just exercises for piano students. The scarred wooden bookshelf opposite the piano took some time, but in the end yielded up nothing but sheet music, folios, and several dirty, tattered biographies of famous musicians. Stark noticed notes scribbled into margins, a word here, three there. Passages were underlined: Schubert was said to have slept with his spectacles on, so he would not need to take time in the morning to put them on before resuming his work. Stark shook out each book, peered behind them on the shelves, but found nothing secreted away. “Lottie…”

  She looked at him, waited.

  “Are the records for the Scott Joplin Publishing Company in here? Or the stock?”

  She shook her head vigorously. “I keep all that stuff in the basement, where Scott ain’t gonna find it and get any funny notions. You want to see it?”

  Stark shook his head. “Not so long as you’re the only one who’s been into it.”

  “I makes very sure of that.”

  “Fine.”

  Stark walked to the desk under the shaded window, beside the piano. The oak surface was scraped and chipped, with cigarette burns scattered across its surface like blemishes on the face of a teenager. Stark thought the few music sheets there probably represented false starts. As long as he’d known Joplin, the man was forever scribbling tune fragments onto pieces of paper; he said he had to get them down before he forgot them. Some, he’d developed into full-length ragtime compositions, often years after they’d first seen daylight. But there were no extended pieces of music anywhere, certainly nothing resembling the score of a musical drama.

  But in the middle drawer of the desk, Stark saw a file folder, creased and ink-smeared, with music papers sticking out, fanlike, from within. He picked it up, tapped the papers back inside, then opened it. At the top of the first page, Symphony Number One was printed in block letters, ink smudged in a northwesterly direction from the One. By Scott Joplin. Stark held the folder out toward Lottie. “Looks like he is working on a symphony.”

  “Hmmm.” Her eyes followed the pages as Stark turned them, six in all. “Can you tell if it be any good?”

  “Not much to judge by, and in any case, I’d have to hear it. But there’s a good deal of ragtime expression.” He smiled. “A symphony in syncopation. That’s certainly different.”

  He started to replace the folder, but as he did, he noticed the edge of another sheet of paper at the back of the drawer. He lifted it out, then he and Lottie studied the few lines of cramped script, relieved by flourishes on S’s and F’s, all overlaid with the squiggles of a tremulous hand. “If is the most important word in the dictionary of a man’s life,” Joplin had written. “Every day it’s If, morning till night, a hundred, a thousand times. If a man gets up out of bed and thinks about all the Ifs, with all their consequences, that will come his way before he gets back into bed that night, he would just stay forever with the covers pulled up tight over his head. But you can’t see those Ifs coming. They’re upon you before you are ever aware of them. The Ifs that have defined the life of Scott Joplin make up the story Scott Joplin must now tell.”

  Lottie scratched her head. “That’s it?”

  Stark pulled the drawer all the way out, but it was empty. He practically dived into the three drawers down the left side of the desk, but all he found were a few pencils, a box of paperclips, and reams of blank music paper. He muttered a soft “Damn and blast,” then, still holding the handwritten page, he strode across the room and pulled open the door to the closet. But that space held only a couple of pairs of well-worn shoes, a pair of dark trousers, and a jacket hanging on a rack; all pockets were empty.

  As he closed the door, Lottie said, “Mr. Stark, I’m gettin’ too nervous ‘bout bein’ here. There ain’t no way Scott’s gonna get outa Mr. Lamb’s place again, is there?”

  “I really don’t think so.” Stark’s words carried more conviction than he felt. “But all right. I think we’ve been through everything. I’ll make sure we leave the desk just the way we left it.”

  As Lottie shifted and shuffled in the doorway, Stark went back to the desk, rearranged the music sheets on top, then slid the folder with Joplin’s First Symphony into the drawer, taking pains to fan out the papers. Then he bent into the drawer, and with his back to Lottie, folded Joplin’s summary of If and slid it behind his vest, into his shirt pocket.

  Out in the hall, as Lottie locked the door and checked the knob, she said, “Well, that wasn’t worth nothin’, was it?

  “Maybe, maybe not. You never know.” Stark tried to ignore the voice in his head, telling him how ashamed he ought to feel.

  ***

  Nell paced slowly back and forth across the sidewalk in front of Schneider’s Deli. For what seemed like the hundredth time, she looked at the window display: sliced salamis, juicy red sirloins of beef, pastramis, glassy-eyed whitefish laid out in neat rows. Twelve-thirty, and she had to be at Berlin’s apartment by one. She noticed a man staring at her, a Broadway sharpie, she thought, judging by that red and green sport coat, and the rakish tilt of his hat. He caught her looking, grinned, and walked over. “Hey, good-lookin’”. He tipped the Panama. “If who you’re waitin’ for ain’t showin’, maybe I could do for you.”

  “I don’t think so,” Nell said. “Go away.”

  “You gonna call a cop?”

  She gave him the hardest eye she could manage. “I won’t need a cop to take care of the likes of you. Now, beat it.”

  He laughed, then stepped toward her. People walked past, no one noticing anything out of order. Nell brought her right foot down hard, spiked heel first, onto the top of the man’s left foot. He howled, fell into a crouch. Nell turned, walked quickly into the deli, directly into the telephone booth inside the door, and read a number to the operator from a slip of paper in her purse. When she heard, “Waterson, Berlin, and Snyder, Music Publishers,” she asked for Birdie Kuminsky.

  “I’m sorry,” the receptionist said. “Miss Kuminsky did not come in to work today.”

  Nell thanked the woman, hung up the receiver, shook her head. She checked her watch, twenty minutes to one. If she was lucky, she’d make it to Berlin’s by one o’clock. After the interview, she’d have to see what was up with Birdie.

  Chapter Nine

  Manhattan

  Thursday, August 24

  Early afternoon

  Berlin jumped off the piano bench, slammed both palms to his forehead, then glared at his office manager. “God damn it, Tabor! What the hell are you doing, bothering me at my house again? Didn’t I tell you I’d call you about those figures?”

  Cliff Hess scrambled off the piano bench. “I’m going to get a glass of water.” He walked very quickly out of the study.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Berlin,” said Tabor. “But this seems so important, I thought I should, well, keep after you a little. I have solid evidence that Mr. Waterson is regularly raking off profits. Isn’t that something that needs your immediate attention?”

  Berlin rolled his eyes.
One reason he’d opened his own firm was to safeguard his money from Waterson’s sticky fingers. Irving Berlin was not about to go down with Henry Waterson’s ship, but neither did he want to blow that particular boat out of the water right then. There was already too much distracting his mind from Ziegfeld’s show. “I already know about Henry, I have for a while.” Berlin spoke softly, but his tone was ominous. He picked up the manila folder from the floor next to the piano bench, thrust it at the manager. “Put these in a blind file and ignore them. When I’m ready, I’ll decide what I’m gonna do. Can I make it any plainer than—”

  He swung around as Robert Miras materialized at his side. “Sorry to interrupt, Mr. Berlin, but the reporter from the Dramatic Mirror has been waiting for fifteen minutes.”

  “Great.” Izzy groaned. “I can just see the credits. ‘The Century Girl. Music by Victor Herbert. Useless palaver by Irving Berlin.’”

  “All right, Robert,” said Berlin. “Tell him I’ll be right with him.”

  “Her, Mr. Berlin. It’s a woman reporter.”

  “Fine. Him, her, whoever.”

  As the butler walked out, Berlin worked Tabor toward the open doorway. “Listen, Bart, I don’t want to hear another word about Waterson. Go on back to the office and manage it. I need to get rid of that damn reporter so maybe I can write a tune today.”

  Tabor executed a bow of acquiescence. “I guess I’d better find us another bookkeeper before the numbers get so tangled up that Mr. Waterson can just walk away with the building and everything in it.” He executed a brisk turn, then stamped out of the room and down the hall, not even glancing at Robert Miras or the woman reporter, waiting her turn with his boss.