Don't Worry About the Kids

by Jay Neugeboren

  Bien entendu, mon vieux. Ne t’inquiète pas trop. Ton frère t’aime, malgré tout…

  He spoke to himself in French. Detached in this way, his words and thoughts seemed more precise. Jimmy savored clarity. In his music, there was no mud: no false notes, no shortcuts, no old man’s tricks.

  Because, he asserted, I have been there and it is so. If you blindfold a group of knowledgeable musicians and have a series of black and white pianists play, the musicians cannot determine if the music emanates from black fingers or white.

  Jimmy thought of the blind pianists he’d known: George Shearing, Ray Charles, Watertown Willie. Let the blind judge the blind, Jimmy thought. Let skeptics choose any of the others: Nichols or Tatum or Evans, Lewis or McKenna or Peterson or Tristano or Price or Jimmy Wilson himself. Mister Jimmy Wilson.

  Nous vous présentons, Mister Jimmy Wilson…

  Jimmy saw himself step into the lights and the applause, incline his head. When he finished the first number, he spoke to the audience, his voice rolling at them like warm water over loose gravel. If they were blindfolded, these elegant French, would they guess the nationality, much less the color, of the man addressing them? Jimmy’s accent was impeccable. When asked if he’d fought with the French in the war, if he’d been raised in one of the colonies, if he’d attended French schools as a child, he smiled. He loved to speak French, to turn his mouth around the liquid sounds. The French! The arrogant French, never showing their feelings or their souls, never giving away anything. He loved the idea that he could sometimes speak French better than they. Here, he could tell Eddie, was a new cutting contest.

  And you’re winning, right?

  Right, Jimmy said.

  Well, my brother always did love to win.

  Won’t you tell him please to put on some speed—follow my lead—oh, how I need—someone to watch over me.…

  Was he inside the music or was the music inside him?

  The young woman had asked a question about ragtime, about its origins, about African polyrhythms. Was she flirting, showing off? She let him know she was on her junior year abroad, studying at the university in Aix-en-Provence. She was blonde, pretty, a long, thick braid down her back. Her face was boyish, handsome, her lips full, her teeth clean and straight, like those of all the young Americans. She had done her homework, he thought. He gave her that. But she was not, she admitted, a musician. Nor, he wanted to add, are you black or in exile.

  Her very forthrightness angered him—the freedom she had to approach him with such openness in her eyes, such unabashed enthusiasm? Her eyes were a pale, marbled green, he recalled: like the eyes of his cat. He’d had the urge, he realized now, to strike her—to somehow blast the innocence from those eyes, to put the red mark of his hand on her smooth, fair-skinned cheeks. Instead, without looking directly at her, he’d given her a speech he’d made many times before: Racists of all colors will try to tell you differently, he stated, but I have seen it happen and it is so. Melanin and the blues are not linked eternally in some perverse biological bondage. Rhythm, harmony, and melody are the property of all men, individual talent the property of some, genius the property of few. The particular music that I play—that derives from our heritage as Africans and as slaves—the gift we have made ours and given to the world, is not particular because a minuscule portion of recombinant DNA has within it both the cause of pigmentation and of jazz but because of history, culture, and individual talent. With enough time and practice, I can appreciate and reproduce Mozart, Bach, and Chopin as naturally as you, had you my gifts, could produce Waller, Monk, and Ellington.…

  Thank you, she said, her eyes downcast. She held an album under her arm but did not ask him to autograph it.

  Oh, you’re a bad man, Jimmy Wilson, ain’t you now? Takes a bad man to beat on a young white bitch that way.

  You would have done the same.

  Wouldn’t have had the words. Only, tell me, brother—when’d you give that speech before? Ain’t one I ever heard.

  In my mind, Jimmy said. Many times. I gave her the abridged version.

  Yeah. So I wouldn’t think you really cruel, right?

  Jimmy strode across the Pont Marie, toward the Îie Saint Louis. He was alone, between the worlds he loved—his working life and his home—living within his favored hour, knowing his wife and son would be safely in their beds, lost and found in their separate dreams, when he arrived.

  God bless the child. God bless the child that’s got his own.…

  Jimmy was in Paris and Jimmy was in Brooklyn and in both places the music was the same, although it was night here and morning there. Against probability, Jimmy had made the life that gave him his freedom. Monique sometimes accused Jimmy of being distant, of cutting himself off from his past too utterly. But Monique did not walk with him between midnight and dawn. Monique was not inside him when he played, riding the currents that flowed from his brain to his fingers.

  When he spoke French, he translated still—he searched for the correct word, for equivalents. His skill with language was acquired, and he worked to master the deep, rolling consonants, the mannered cadences. But when he made music, there was no translation, no shadow needing shape, no darkness needing light. He worked hard, studied hard, drove himself toward perfection. Of course. But when he was ready, he was ready. When his practicing and rehearsals were done and he sat down to perform the music he loved, then all hesitation was gone—then he did not need to search for phrasings or notes, words or feelings. Everything was there, without translation, and he was neither inside nor outside. But how could anyone else understand what he felt, unless they were there too, with him?

  He walked next to the Jardin des Plantes, along Rue Cuvier. To his right was the Universite Pierre et Marie Curie. He glanced at signs plastered to the walls, urging this or that cause. He did not concern himself with French politics. It all seemed like so much squabbling. Even the Communists and anarchists seemed to him, in this beautiful and civilized city, to be working to advance privilege.

  He imagined Eddie coming toward him, the young American woman walking beside Eddie, her hands deep in the pockets of her raincoat. He felt his heart bump down slightly and he did not deny what he felt: that he wanted to be there, in one of those pockets, safe within the hollow of the young woman’s warm hand. He saw himself greeting Eddie, kissing his brother on both cheeks. The girl was gone, Eddie was smiling.

  It had been too long. Many thousands gone, he thought, and no auction block upon which he could stand with Eddie so that they could, at least, experience the wild pain of being severed from each other forever, of being sold, of being had.

  He turned the corner, saw French workers hosing down the sidewalks, sweeping the cobblestones with a small motorized sweeper. “COMMENT NE PAS VOTER IDIOT.“ He smiled at the poster—his favorite—mocked himself for the foolishness of his imagination. It was easy to be sentimental about Eddie, easier still to chastise himself for being so. For the price of a single airline ticket he could eliminate such fancies. With a persistence he found irritating, Monique kept urging him to do so—to buy the ticket, to invite Eddie to visit. She wanted to know his brother, she said, and she believed it was time Jimmy allowed himself that pleasure too.

  He could talk with Eddie about Henri’s condition—about the operation the doctor was recommending: an experimental implant that would connect an amplifier directly to the auditory nerve. Jimmy could tell him about the first time, three years before, he’d accompanied Monique and Henri to the doctor and had looked through to where the light shone, to where the swirling gas of tissue and blood strained against the film of skin. He had been frightened the ear would explode.

  Jimmy had been angrier with the boy than he’d intended to be. The boy’s wailing had kept him awake for two days and nights, not for the first time, and nothing Jimmy did or said had helped. When he tried to hold his son, to rock him gently against his shoulder, the boy pushed Jimmy away, screamed that he wanted his mother. Maman…Maman…<
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  Punctured, Jimmy declared. The eardrum is punctured. The boy punctured it because that is the kind of boy he is.

  The doctor told Jimmy to look into Henri’s good ear. Jimmy touched Henri’s hair, held the doctor’s otoscope, put his eye to the lens. To his surprise, the light revealed a still world that was as calm as any Jimmy had ever seen, all pearl-gray and silent.

  The drawing was of a smiling black man at a piano, his fingers larger than the piano keys, his face the color of Baker’s chocolate. In the upper-left-hand corner, in purple, Henri had crayoned “Mon Beau Daddy.” Henri loved to draw, to write his name in script: Henri Evers Wilson. Jimmy recalled sharpening crayons in his bedroom, brushing the shavings into a cigar box, saving them, imagining—believing!—that he was creating real gold and silver. He recalled coming home from school—he was in second grade, Eddie not yet in kindergarten—to discover that Eddie had taken the box, spilled the powder. Jimmy had found his brother hiding on the fire escape and had dragged him in through the window, had beat him mercilessly, pounding his open hand against his brother’s face again and again.

  Jimmy poured himself a glass of Courvoisier, turned off the small light on the piano stand, sat in the corner easy chair of his living room. Who would have dreamed, even a decade ago, that he would be able to walk across the city of Paris six nights a week and arrive at a handsome and well-appointed home in which he was loved and honored? He had, as a boy growing up in Brooklyn, taught himself to believe that he would live his life through without ever having a family of his own.

  He sat in the darkness, let the sweet liquor warm his chest. The only thing he loved as much as music, he knew, was a moment like this, when the absence of sound could give him the peace and comfort he loved so dearly.

  He took his glass with him to his study, lifted the telephone receiver, dialed the operator, gave her Eddie’s telephone number. She told him that he could now dial directly if he wished. She gave him the necessary code numbers. Merci bien, madame. Jimmy hung up, lifted the receiver, dialed again. This time a recorded voice came on, telling him that the number he had reached had been disconnected and was no longer in service.

  Same as last year, brother. You getting old, forgetting things like that. You lost, man.

  Surely one of us is.

  Maybe. Only difference is, I can always find you if I want.

  Do you—do you want to?

  Maybe. If I find you, though, what I get?

  When her hand touched his shoulder, Jimmy turned on her as if she were an assailant. Come to bed, Monique said. Her eyes showed no alarm. His own hand, he saw, was still on the telephone. He imagined that she knew exactly what he’d been doing and why.

  Only after she left him did he realize that Henri had woken up again, in pain. Jimmy walked to the boy’s bedroom. Henri was shrieking, one hand covering his right ear. Jimmy stayed in the doorway and watched Monique tend to him. She talked to the boy in French, but so rapidly that Jimmy could not understand what it was she was saying. He was better at speaking French than he was at understanding it. The reason this was so, he knew, was that when he spoke, he could prepare his words in advance.

  Monique reached to the boy’s night table, took out a small brown bottle, measured liquid into an eyedropper. Henri turned onto his side but did not stop crying. Monique put the drops into the boy’s ear. Then Henri clung to her, wept. He looked past his mother’s shoulder, to Jimmy. Jimmy did not move. Henri held more tightly to his mother and spoke quickly, gasping as he did. Monique kissed the boy, spoke to him softly. Jimmy wanted to ask them both to speak more slowly, so he could understand what exactly it was they were saying, but he was afraid that if he did they might mock him for his ignorance. What they didn’t know, he decided, would not hurt them. By remaining silent, he could be more certain they would not, in the future, join together to use his lack of knowledge against him.

  Fixer’s Home

  TROUBLE IS, I still keep thinking too much about what was. You ever pick a dime off the top of a backboard? You do that, you got it made, man. In the pros, there’s guys can do it now—Dr. J, he’s the best—but back then, only a few could get up there, most of them 6-10 or over. In the schoolyard—I wasn’t even out of high school yet, still had all these scouts and coaches buggin’ me—I did it the first time. They boosted Big Ed up on someone’s shoulders to put it there, then all the guys cheered me on. Took me three shots, but I made it. I was king then. I mean, you make it big time—high school, college, pro, I don’t care where, it never compares with being king of your own schoolyard. You can take all the fame and shove it.

  I walk through the gates and the guys sitting along the fence, younger guys, they looking at me the way I look at Big Ed when I was their age, and they say, “Hi, Mack!” or “Hey, Mack, babe—you want nexts with me?” and I see this look in their eyes like they’d give their right arm to be me—man, that was all I needed then. I was home free. Big Ed, he was the one who got me into the fixes, first time. He once got a ladder before we played Duke, in the old Garden on 50th Street, he put a dime up and in the stands, thousands of them, they went out of their boxes when I aced up and snatched the mother. But it still didn’t compare with being king of your own schoolyard.

  I figured that out a long time ago. You get out there when you’re young, on a sunny day, and you listen to the older guys gas with each other about who’s got what shots and what moves and who can fake who out of whose jock, and you just ache to have them talk to you. Hell, you get brought up in a white boy’s schoolyard, hear them argue for years about every ballplayer ever was, you can’t help let it get to you. You play out there, you’re real loose. When I sail up there and snatch that dime that first time—man, that was the high spot. If I died right then, I die happy. I think about that lots.

  Still go down to the schoolyard on weekends, my age, find we got some other dumb old men like to drag their asses around the court. Mostly we sit along the fence, between games, watching the new kids play. No white boys here anymore. A few years back, they said this was a neighborhood in transition. I liked that. Only what I say now to the guys, I tell them I call it a neighborhood that already transished, and they all laugh, tell me I got a way with words. The white boys, they all gone to live on Long Island and New Jersey, they all doctors and lawyers and teachers. The kids I play with now, I was playing high school and college, most of them weren’t born.

  Oh yeah, one of them says to me once, he hears us talking about how things were back then. How much you make then?

  I too embarrassed to tell him, the pennies I sold out for. So I just look at him hard, say he better mind his own business. Back then, though, anybody mention the fixes, it was like somebody’s mother got cancer, things got so quiet. All these white guys always kissing my ass cause I had such a great jump shot, cause I come from their neighborhood, none of them ever man enough to come up to me and ask me to my face why I did it. Or how I felt after. Except this one time, some little kid named Izzie, about 12 years old, he picked me for nexts like he always did. He says to me if you’re so good, what college you play for?

  So I say back I don’t play for no college.

  How come? he asks me.

  Cause I was in the fixes, I say.

  Everything goes quiet then, and I look around and ask the guys on the court how come they stop playing. They start right back in. Nobody like to mess with me in those days. Oh yeah. I’m the big man, real mean. You mean to be mean, Mack, the guys used to say. But his kid Izzie, he asks me what I do if I don’t play ball and I tell him I work at the Minit-Wash, washing down cars, you know? That’s how come I got such clean hands. Yeah, me, I got the cleanest hands of any fixer around. After that, nobody ever asks me about the fixes.

  In the papers, though, these reporters, they get all preachy about us guys who shave points, want to know why we did it. Most of the players, they go to court with me, they get the same Holy Joe voices and tell the Judge they’re real sorry they let everybody down and
fixed games, but when it comes my turn, I’m the only guy who don’t say he’s sorry. The only thing I’m sorry about, I say, is when they turn the money off.

  All these guys always wanting to know why I did it. I tell this one reporter, Gross, from the old New York Post, they give me a pain. I did it for money, what they think? The college paid me, I did what they wanted. Gamblers paid, I work for them. Bookies paid more than gamblers, I signed up with them. Nobody giving me an education cause they like my looks…

  Sometimes, sitting out there on a nice warm day, my ass on concrete, my back up against the wire fence, drinking a cold Coke and letting the sweat dry under my T-shirt, I can’t figure how all that happened 30 years ago. Where you been since then, I want to ask. Where you been? Sometimes when I chug through a bunch of bodies and feel my feet lift off the ground without weights in them, feel myself move like somebody I used to know real well—sometimes when that ball moves off my fingertips and hits that metal backboard in just the right spot and goes through that net swish like you know what, it all seems gone, like nothing bad ever happened.

  But it ain’t so, and when I get down to the schoolyard this last time, and I’m warming up between games, pumping in some jumpers from around the circle, listening to the guys tease me about my pot belly and my bald dome, I hear them saying there’s this new set of fixes. Oh yeah? I ask. Who they say done it?

  Some Catholic kids, one of the guys says, and I got to laugh, them getting only guys from a Catholic school this time. My day, this real powerhouse, he got the Catholic boys off free. Oh yeah, everybody in the schoolyard knew that. Those Catholic players, they shaving points and rigging games along with the rest of us, but when the D. A. Hogan, he gets his lists ready and calls us all in, all you got in that room with Hogan were Jews and blacks. You don’t take my word for it, you go look at the names some time. Me, I got their names down in my head like the lineup from the ’51 Dodgers, like all those other fixers were brothers who lost the same stuff I did. Oh yeah, Herb Cohen and Fats Roth and Irwin Dambrot and Connie Schaff and Eddie Roman and Leroy Smith and Floyd Layne and Sherm White and Ed Warner, they all still there in my head, floating around our own schoolyard. White and Warner, they the best—I had to go some to keep up with them.