No, son, it isn’t, I said. It’s just gonna be hard like I told you, fixating on one of them students like that. On one we’re only ever entrusted with sweeping up after and to serve practically from the get go.
Practically? He was thinking on John Hill Carter, on all the things we’d carried in with him always lighting up another damn cigarette as he watched. Snapping open his silver lighter. Saying his own daddy made this batch just two months before with the niggers on their land still called niggers, working back-breaking in the barns where they kept the crop stored all winter and where you’d a thought the Civil War hadn’t just ended fifty years before to hear them toiling away for all that white man’s business. There’s no practically about it, A.D. said. He burns me. The thought of John Hill standing above me, puffing away with them white perfect circles falling around Ms. Clara May’s face. He burns me to no end.
I know, I said. I know it, because you’re of two worlds now, both of you. But he didn’t listen. He was so far in it already—in his worship of her and his despising of him—that he couldn’t hear me go on about them being so far above us, and even over everyone else we knew, that it was always fire that would end it like that between them. Fire in the belly of man that would flare up when the two worlds met, when they collided. But he didn’t mind me at all. He was fixated on other things. On plans he’d made. On visions he saw set in his mind and revolving. Images even of Runnymede high up in the air. Floating above it all. Floating in the ether.
A birdcage, he finally said, after he’d watched silent and forlorn all week as deliverymen of every variety stopped off with their silver paper weights for Ms. Clara May, and a gold statue of a goose, and a red mahogany table adorned with brass handles and a copper frontispiece with the woodwork of a primitive etched on the side, and a porcelain tea set from Japan, and jade collection of geometries that hung from the wires of a bamboo sculpture that was so wide and unruly that A.D. and I had to take the doors off the hinges in the dormitory just to get it up the staircase because John Hill insisted the little silver screws couldn’t be touched for their perfect escapement and alignment. And of course that had A.D. reeling and red-faced when he saw the final article arrive at the end of this cavalcade on a Sunday, when the high upper windows of the Peabody were thrust open and lovely with voices lilting in the midst of arias and solos as violins lowed softly in the dirty Baltimore dusk.
A birdcage, I said. So where are the birds?
He didn’t say. He touched his mop and then set it down with a wet thump in his bucket. There were voices approaching from a far corner, and as we stepped to the side of the hallway (as Mr. Vickers had advised us in doing, steering clear of the students at all times), Ms. Clara May herself appeared out of a bright slant of sunlight and leaned her delicate little head down as she passed with a gaggle of friends all delighting and giggling in their way. Conversing about their lives as if it couldn’t be more natural to pass two men mopping for all they were worth just for them to step foot on immaculate floors. But I swear—and I swear to this day—I seen her glance at A.D. as he looked at her, focusing like none other on her face. Leaning up closer, she raised her head and blinked at him and said, Thank you, in the sweetest kind voice you ever heard. Then leaning forward in the light, she touched his shoulder, and sort of just kept it there, her perfect hand, because I suppose she’d heard about his singing. Or seen him hauling in all her treasures and trinkets over the last week, and needed him to know she saw him not just as the hired help, but as a man besides. A man to touch. A man to look at and to know, and when he was about to reply, when he’d tilted his head just so and opened his mouth to speak, she was gone, and A.D. stood looking at the space her figure had vacated. Almost as if he couldn’t believe anything else was as purely divine in the whole world.
Did you see it? I said as I stepped closer and nudged him back to the land of the living.
I did, he said, and she was perfect.
No, I said, in her hand, the one at her side. Didn’t you see what she carried?
What?
The answer.
The answer to what?
To all your worries, son. To your mind.
My what?
Why the birdcage, of course? Didn’t you see the canaries?
IV
The giant keychain ~ Crows in the eaves ~ Perfectionists and obsessives all of them ~ Motifs and themes ~ From Morgan Park to Sandtown ~ On picnic tables and chairs ~ The incident in the courtyard ~ A small glinting trophy ~ His great silver lighter ~ The fire
A.D. WENT TO SEE THE CANARIES AT NIGHT. This I know because I seen him and warned him not to. But he did it anyway and couldn’t help himself when it came to her, and besides, he knew her schedule like the back of his hand. She had choir practice Monday and Wednesday afternoons, and then solo rehearsal Thursday nights. And when A.D. wasn’t sitting outside the choir room listening to the thrill of her high-arching soprano, he was sorting through the giant keychain he kept in his pocket as he hurried up the staircase to her room. Mr. Vickers had been so pleased with A.D.’s work he’d promoted him to full janitor after six months. A promotion that brought with it the added responsibility of the keychain and the myriad doorways he could open in that almost full city block of a campus.
He would open her door and step in when she wasn’t there and just stare. I’d crept up to it once, following him, and held my ear to the cold edge listening as he snapped off the white handkerchief she draped over the birdcage so the canaries would sing out as you’d never heard with such a triumph of awakening, I could only imagine A.D.’s face in that moment: the furtive darkness of it lifting, his eyes and ears raised up as if breaching the top of a white cresting wave. He’d told me before about his years spent in the city hovelling in basements, how the crows had cackled in the eaves and he’d thought it the sound of death itself. Death incarnate and black. Death tolling away the hours. But now there were only these bright yellow canaries to consider. They were unlike anything he’d ever seen. As he listened to them, he watched their cage sway as they moved on their thin wooden perch, and something inside him must have moved too. Some sense of life must have lifted above all the darkness always falling around him, because I could hear him singing louder to their call, singing to their sweet voice. But of course when her choir class was almost through, he’d slide her handkerchief back over the cage and glide out into the hall, locking the door, and then smell his hand all the way down into the courtyard because he knew she’d touched the handkerchief too. That she’d held it near her cheek, and that it felt like he was caressing and holding her close. That he was with her. Together.
Surely he said all those words in the darkness of the boiler room as the sounds of tubas and violas echoed down through the ventilation, careening from the lips of some insomniac student practicing for something—an audition, a recital, a solo—practicing habitually as the students there did, perfectionists and obsessives all of them. Sometimes it inspired A.D. to sit up and touch his guitar, gathering it to his chest, before moving his fingers down through a key. His composition class had been going well, and he’d felt in the midst of his studies an idea for words, for a repetition that might approximate the motifs and themes the great composers had woven throughout their music. He was still struggling to write her song though. He hadn’t found the hook yet, as he called it, the theme to wind his words around. O he’d scoured books and books, looking at words, pointing at ideas and characters that might better represent what he had in his mind to say to her. But none of it rang true. None of it was real, he said, and paused on the sensation of saying that word again, for still the elusive nature of the song vexed him.
More and more he went to her room to search for inspiration, an inkling to her life, a knowingness that might inform his music. Even during the daylight hours this persisted, and I worried for him and told him so. But he would not hear me, and only ever offered a low haughty laugh whenever I inquired. Something I’d not heard before, but which gave me pause
and had me wondering that this course could only ever lead to confusion and pain, as far as I was concerned. And to maybe somewheres else that I did not want to go.
It was easy to understand why, of course. It was the music. The heady strains of it were everywhere in the Peabody. The music of great sorrows and tragedies echoed in every hallway and classroom, and for months it was all he heard, and I think it finally enthralled him, or swallowed him up entire. So that when he first saw Ms. Clara May as a flirtation, as a movement in his cold breast toward something warmer after all his years spent wandering and surviving, by the close of spring, the feeling burned into something much brighter that only he could see. Something made real by his persistence to feel something—to feel anything—and in his heady fervor he might have believed she loved him as much as he loved her. I cannot say for sure. But what I can say is that he wasn’t the only one with eyes. Not by a long shot.
I’d seen John Hill Carter on more than one occasion standing idle and inquisitive on a faraway corner when we’d clean the high windows of the director’s office. O we’d sing there, and play back and forth with ideas and lyrics as we watched the water fountain in the park trickle down, and the city’s pigeons bathe their blue- and green-mottled feathers in the clay-rimmed waters, as maybe a mother pushed a sleeping baby past in a rickety pram. But as I noticed John Hill watching us, there was something else in his demeanor, a haughtiness or contempt—even more so than his usual contempt for those around him—that led me to believe he’d been clued into A.D.’s feelings on Ms. Clara May. That he knew.
For seven years I’d been at the Peabody and had done little else than work and send money to the Honorable Reverend Michael Williams at the Faith Baptist Congregation in Bristol, Virginia, where my wife and I’d gone often enough when I was there, and where I still hoped she returned. But I’d also watched the students. I’d studied them as much as they’d studied their music, and I could tell from a hundred yards what they were thinking. Very rarely had I let myself stray to the east and west neighborhoods where my color eased my visits, from Morgan Park to Montebello Terrace, Upton to Sandtown. Or even—in my weakest moments—when thinking on my wife and baby girl had plunged me into fits of drunkeness and dejection, to the Bottom or Mercer’s Row, where the real downhearted colored folks congregated in slums. Drinking poormans in paper sacks. Raising mudcaked hands to fireblackened barrels. Whispering spirituals from time immemorial, from when the blues had been passed down across the cotton, when we’d been scattered as little more than property. The men more so than the women. With the loss of family and dignity our only recompense, of what we could not hope to keep. It was this same indignation I saw on John Hill’s face now whenever he thought on what A.D. represented, with his intentions for Ms. Clara May. So for the next few weeks as A.D. watched Ms. Clara May, I watched John Hill, and the circle repeated itself.
Of course this helped our playing considerable. The more A.D. focused on monitoring Ms. Clara May, the more he dug into his emotions. He still hadn’t written his song yet, but in the chords he played and the notes I sometimes got to string over his progressions, there were a few dizzying moments where there was only the sound of us striving together. Only the sound of our music rising in the stillness of the boiler room, before echoing out into the larger world. Often I’d heard footsteps outside our doorway. When we’d finish a particularly inspired session, one in which the feeling of lifting ourselves into the sound had taken over everything, I’d hear something stir as of a flushed heartbeat or breathing, and it wasn’t mine or A.D.’s. We’d already alighted into the sound, as it sometimes happened, when you’d find yourself floating up from everything you knew, that the music could even do that when it was right, when it wanted to. Of course it never lasted, those heights, and as we descended again to our lives in the boiler room, I’d bring my attention back to the Peabody and its minute movements, as that footstep or heartbeat slunk away. And I’d remember with a dark, heavy heart the course A.D. had set in motion with his behavior.
He’s watching you, I told him, after a particularly inspired night of playing had buoyed our spirits. The winter had given way to April, and in a little less than a month there would be a recital for the students who’d finished their studies, and old John Hill was one of them. The most celebrated, in fact. It was even rumored he’d conduct a sonata he’d penned as part of his final studies, one receiving rave reviews from his professors. The box office had already strung up posters; the excited word had gone out by various newspaper and print outlets. So that A.D. felt a darker burning to complete his song for Ms. Clara May, even though he still hadn’t found the ease of expression he thought would flow from his thinking and feeling on her. O his feeling on her. He found it had only grown the more his lonesomeness persisted. The more it lingered and was enflamed by the music of the place, by the very reverberations of the walls.
Well, I’m watching him, too, he finally said, and blinked his cold blue eyes so I could gauge his seriousness. So I guess that makes the two of us, now don’t it.
I guess it does.
He was jangling his keychain as we sat in the courtyard, out where the students often sprawled on a summer’s day, lounging on picnic tables and folding chairs, singing or huddled in groups with their instruments. A.D. had taken to lingering in the shadows as if completing the sweeping he was meant to do, but I knew he was really only watching for Ms. Clara May. For sure enough, he’d gauged her entrance to the second. As if on cue, she appeared with a sandwich and glassful of milk and sat on a faraway table with her pretty strawberry head buried in her music. She was reading something intently, perfecting each note as she moved her mouth soundlessly to the accents and pitches of the score. And as I turned to A.D., to let him know I was on to what he’d planned, he was already up before I could blink or nod a reproach. Moving across the courtyard, he set his keychain in his back pocket before pulling out a crumpled sheet of notepaper he held now as he sidled up beside her.
Miss? he said, taking a step closer. Ms. Clara May Staunton? whispering her name, as behind him in the daylight a stunning violin echoed his aching approach.
Yes? she said, and though she hadn’t raised her head to see him, she’d raised her white perfect hand as if to stay him, to still his voice. She was still lingering amidst the last notes of a measure that captured her entire, and I’ve often wondered what symphony so gathered her in to remove her bodily from the day and moment—from this moment above any other—after the days and months had spent themselves, clanking away in their calibrations to arrive at this one instant for A.D.
Yet as softly as she’d raised her hand, she let it fall. She’d reached the end of her aria and looked up at him and had to shade her eyes for the sunlight fell at such an angle to leak a spangled aura across his combed brown hair. It was a halo of brightness surely, for she seemed suddenly struck by the thunderbolt of his appearance, and arched her face back as a rosy flush flooded her cheeks. It was obvious to see why. Throughout his time at the Peabody, A.D. had grown considerable. So that his thinness, that defining emblem that had so followed him until that moment—was much leaner and stronger now—as if transforming his body into the kind seen on men of work, with a much hardier disposition, and I don’t believe she mistook it. Not in the least. Maybe she’d noticed it all along? Maybe she looked up at him then and smiled at this boy she’d said thank you to before in the hallway, touching his shoulder. This boy who looked now as if he was composed to raise their earlier flirtation into a higher, singular resonance.
Don’t.
Pardon?
John Hill had appeared at A.D.’s shoulder and with one great hand spun A.D.’s body so that he faced away from Ms. Clara May, who now stood not knowing what to do. Don’t, he said, whatever it is.
I will do it, said A.D., I will, and he shook John Hill’s hand from his shoulder.
You will not, John Hill said and smiled. He took the cigarette from his lips and blew a white smoke ring in A.D.’s face. He w
as shorter than A.D. by a few inches but had sixty pounds on him if an ounce and knew it. Leaning his meaty finger into A.D.’s ribs, he nudged him back. You seem very much like a nigger to me now. Do you know that? he said. In your ignorance you are just like one of them. So why don’t you just go on back to your nigger friend there like a good boy. Go on, John Hill said and shooed at A.D. with his big strong hands, and the courtyard, which was very loud till then, with students singing and playing, had grown quiet as A.D. looked on at Ms. Clara May Staunton, who only touched John Hill’s shoulder and said something so that John Hill smiled as he watched A.D. a moment longer. Go on, he said. Get. Then the two of them, Ms. Clara May, quiet and confused, and John Hill, fulsome and smiling, walked back toward the dorm.
THERE WERE NO WORDS AFTER THAT FROM A.D., for one week, two, three. He’d touch his guitar before setting it down in a huff, and the crumpled paper he’d hoped to read to Ms. Clara May was in pieces. But then he’d pick it up in a rash of pasting and rearranging, before tearing it up again the next instant, so that he was useless in his duties from then on and I had to hide him from Mr. Vickers. Who as far as I could tell, had not heard one word of the incident in the courtyard between A.D. and John Hill. If he had, he hadn’t let on because he was of a mind like me in not caring one ounce for that John Hill Carter who lorded over A.D. now whenever he saw him in the hallways, or in the courtyard, trudging through his duties. It was the damndest thing. John Hill wouldn’t say a word. He’d just smile and open his silver lighter, before clacking it shut with a loud slapping sound, as he watched and waited—for what, I know not—a sign in A.D., a premonition of the rage he’d stirred in him, a conflagration of the strife set in motion now between them?
For his part, A.D. kept his head down throughout all of this and was as dark and foreboding as I could remember. I believe his considerable brain was singularly focused on formulating curses to scald the heavens, and the more I watched him, the more apprehensive I grew. He would pause now in the hallways and touch the posters with John Hill’s name upon them. Mumbling certain invectives, he’d then peel down one of the top corners, and I’d have to shuffle up behind him so he knew I was on to what he meant to do, to tear down each trace of that John Hill Carter for what A.D. believed in his delusion John Hill had taken from him.
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