“I didn’t steal it,” I said. “I worked for it. It’s yours—but I need something in return. I can’t wake up in the mornings. Get me up with you everyday, will you? But it’s a secret, the money. You can’t tell anyone, especially Stella.”
Earl started taking me into East Chester with him most mornings. The women thought Earl had a job at the newspaper. He didn’t. We loitered at the back of the railroad station, slapping our cold limbs.
“Why do you do it?” I asked one particularly bitter morning.
“I love fresh air, pissant.”
“No, really.”
“Really?” Earl’s cap was pulled down over his eyes. Only his nose and lips showed. “I don’t always like what I see, pissant.”
I panicked when Earl totally escaped Grayson House, joining the army. I kept seeing Lothian eyeing me, licking her lips. I couldn’t sleep at night, afraid I’d oversleep, afraid Lothian would come for me. By four most mornings I was already tip-toeing down the corridor to the door at the end of the hallway that opened onto a staircase that ran down the outside of Grayson House. Then I wandered until it was time for school. No one ever saw me.
Grandmother was the first to comment on my wan appearance, and Mother said if I didn’t start looking better I could start going straight to bed after dinner. Amazingly, she also said a real treat was in store. I was ten years old the evening Mother drove me into East Chester to watch Mr. Madsen do his “Folks At Home” radio show. It was 1938.
I hadn’t realized how huge a celebrity Mr. Madsen actually was—I’d had to see for myself. I sat openmouthed as he played the fiddle and told jokes, splicing in gossip and tidbits of local history. He joined the Delaware Boys in two songs, “The Good Ship Lollipop” and “Take Me Back to My Boots and Saddle.”
The Delaware Boys, five of them that night, were on sax, trombone, clarinet, cornet and drums. They were the cream of Mr. Madsen’s crop, ranging in age from fourteen to eighteen, carefully culled from classrooms past and present. There was actually a total of forty Delaware Boys who took turns playing for Mr. Madsen’s radio show. They also marched in parades across the state and headlined Festival every year. I watched those five that first night enthralled, knowing what I wanted for the rest of my life. I wanted to be a Delaware Boy.
Mother and I went up to the bandstand after the show.
“I want to learn another instrument,” I said to Mr. Madsen, jockeying for a position next to him. The Delaware Boys were packing up instruments. Mr. Madsen was distracted.
“Bands don’t have pianists,” I said, tugging on his sleeve. He glanced over his shoulder and something flickered in his eyes, seeing Mother.
He nodded and said, “Magdalene,” then seemed to go to great lengths to make himself look even busier, though by then most of the Delaware Boys were leaving. “Some bands do have pianists. But since when are you interested in playing anything, Francis? You don’t practice the piano as it is.”
“Since deciding I need to play something besides piano. I need something … portable. I’d really like to be in your band, Mr. Madsen. I’d really like to be a Delaware Boy.” I had a sudden inspiration: “I want to play swing, not just listen to it.”
“I don’t do swing, thank you very much, and besides you’re not old enough for this band. You have to be fourteen. I make an exception for you, I have to do the same for every other Tom, Dick and Harry.”
“Please,” I pleaded.
“Sorry.”
I began to itch up and down my arms, the back of my neck. “Please,” I begged.
Mother surprised me, saying, “He’s overtired,” which got all of Mr. Madsen’s attention, because he suddenly gave Mother a long, searching look, which I couldn’t read, but which she seemed to do fine with, because she offered Mr. Madsen a lift back home to Washington’s Headquarters.
“You want to play clarinet?” was what Mr. Madsen said, getting out of the car.
“There’s only one Benny Goodman,” I answered.
Mother and I went inside Washington’s Headquarters. Mr. Madsen took a trumpet from his music chest and handed it over. “Okay, smarty-pants. Make loud.” I blew into the trumpet’s mouthpiece. My breath, hollow-sounding, came out the bell. “Lips together,” Mr. Madsen instructed. “Like you’re turning them against your teeth. Now make like a buzz.”
I made a buzz. It was feeble. I spat, then buzzed some more, trying time and again, until when, finally, there was one rich note: golden, true, loud and all mine.
My long fingers reached for the horn’s valves. They were home.
The sore on my upper lip grew to the size of a pea. Soft, it busted open repeatedly, oozed, then crusted over, until two years later my mouth was nearly impenetrable, hard and sturdy enough to withstand the friction, or embouchure, of lips pursed firm against mouthpiece for extended periods of time.
“Don’t push it,” Aidan cautioned. He’d given me permission to use his first name on weekends. “Go easy on that lip.”
I’d pushed it, forgetting Matthew Waterston and the plan to cure women. Or that my mother had ever been famous. Dreaming instead of making the most heathen music ever, of being the greatest swing-master ever, off for the orchard by dawn most mornings, armed with my pipe dream and golden horn, fooling Lothian, fooling them all, reaching, always reaching for that one note that touched the sky and the moon. Winning the game against everyone who’d ever been mean to me. Striving to be better, blaring my horn at their profound ordinariness.
And Lothian heard me. Oh, but she heard me loud and clear. “Damn fool boy’s going to blow his head off,” she griped.
Mother told Lothian to shut up, but Grandmother said it was heathen, the very idea of anyone blowing a horn in the dead of night. Mother subsequently told Grandmother, who didn’t drive, that it was a long walk into town for that cold cream she set so much store by, and Stella wrapped herself in blankets and followed me out to the orchard where she whisked a basting brush back and forth against the bottom of a pot, keeping time to my music. A variety of kitchen accoutrements followed the basting brush, all producing different tones, and all of which annoyed me to no end. But Stella was fascinated by the sounds she could make.
“Louder, Francis,” she demanded, sitting on a tree stump, banging furiously on a pot. “And faster. Make my arms hurt.”
I took to running back and forth to school and Washington’s Headquarters, and as a result I could hold my breath well over two minutes. Summers, I practiced the horn until my lip gave out, which was sometimes all day, and I continued working my way through Aidan’s ever-growing record collection while straightening the Washington’s Headquarters museum, becoming particularly enamored of Glenn Miller, of his “Bugle Call Rag,” and of trumpeter Harry James, admiring his high-pitched trills, attempting to make the same sounds. And of course there was Bunny Berrigan, the ultimate master. His version of “I Can’t Get Started With You,” those pure high notes and trills, gave me chills.
“No trying trills,” Aidan said firmly when I asked him to show me how they were done. “And when you sit in with the Delaware Boys, no improvising, Francis. We’re a company, not a one-man show. We play by my rules, and I’m doing you a favor even letting you sit—”
“Just tell me how to do trills,” I begged. “I want to be like Berrigan.”
“If I could do a trill, I might. Maybe.”
“You don’t know how?”
“Look, Francis, I don’t know everything. Trills are physically demanding, I know that much … they’re work. They’re controlled almost completely by extremely powerful lip muscles and a strong diaphragm. Forcing a trumpet, say, on a high C, to go up a third to high G, then back down to high C, again and again, oscillating many times a second, is tremendously hard. It requires a very developed embouchure and lots of lessons.”
“But that’s what I have you for,” I said, accepting that trills were just one more thing I’d have to teach myself. “Lessons. And I’m not afraid of work.”
I raised the bar on my training, doing 350 sit-ups a night, until my abdomen rippled. I added pushups for good measure, and my shoulders broadened.
I took some of the money I’d earned and bought a lock for my bedroom door, wondering why I hadn’t thought of that sooner.
I locked myself in my room and slept like the dead.
“Damn war overseas,” Aidan sighed one early Saturday morning in 1942. He sat at the table, newspaper before him, forehead in his hands. I ran a dust rag over the tops of the showcases, preparing for the onslaught of museum visitors. “Damn Germans. Will the bloody fools never learn? Will we never learn?”
Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor had barely fazed me, and I didn’t even try keeping up with what the Germans were doing. I was only fourteen and I’d just been made an official Delaware Boy. And I’d also made a friend, my first ever, a trombonist named Buster Carlyle, two years older than I was, and also a Delaware Boy. Somehow Buster’s shiftless sometimes-farming family had managed to make itself even more outcast than mine, wearing older-than-God clothes and living in what was worse than a shanty on the outskirts of town. Buster seemed overwhelmed with surprise and gratitude the first time I’d suggested we go into town together, to the five and dime after jamming at Washington’s Headquarters, to listen to Goodman’s “At The Downtown Strutter’s Ball” on someone else’s nickel. I wasn’t concerned with struggles overseas. I was concerned with being a hepcat, with incorporating the masters’ techniques into a repertoire of my own. I was concerned with getting Aidan to let me solo at Festival that summer. I was “knocked-out,” to use swing slang, so engrossed in swing I was oblivious to everything else. I was glib.
“War’s a long way away. May I use the phonograph now?”
“No, Francis, you may not.” Aidan’s voice rose. “Have you nothing else in your head but that goddamn swing?”
“But—”
“You any idea where Earl is overseas?”
“He never writes, not sure he even knows how,” I quipped.
Aidan stood and slapped his newspaper against the table, looking like he wanted to hit me with it, like it was all my fault Earl didn’t write. “Oh, he can write,” he shot back.
I’d never felt annoyed with Aidan before. I didn’t know what to do with the feeling.
Aidan looked down. “Sorry. Not you, Francis. I’ve said these very same things about war before—to your mother, as a matter of fact. When she was my student, back before the start of the Great War. But I was wrong. Consolidated policy could’ve saved Europe and us today’s tragedy, or at least the scope of what it’s become, if we’d taken our lessons and committed them to practice. I … no, we’ve paid dearly for this isolationism, and now, despite everything we’ve been through, it looks as if we’re to pay more.”
His voice turned urgent. “Now listen to me, Francis: nothing is very far from us. Certainly not truth, and there’s no such thing as keeping distance. Guaranteed, the truth will find you. It’ll bite you on the ass at the end. The sooner you understand this, the better off you’re going to be. I learned it the hard way, Francis. And that’s why I’m writing everything down for you—your history, all of it, in my journal, in the hopes it will help cushion—”
I didn’t hear the rest. I’d tuned him out. Of course I knew Aidan was worried about Earl. Why, I didn’t know. Earl could take care of himself. But I was preoccupied with swing, my attention span solidly selective; I’d no empathy for anything or anyone else. Though I’d have asked like a house afire had I realized, then, the twists and turns that war and truth and distance would provide in shaping my brilliant career.
Shortly after my fifteenth birthday, four things happened. The first and the second were normal for a boy my age. But the third was as close to murder as anyone could get and live to tell about it.
The fourth, on its heels, marked the fork in the road on the way to my destiny.
“I don’t know why you made me wait so long,” I said when Aidan told me I could solo at Festival. I punched his arm, loving him. He swatted me back.
“Because you’re a smarty-pants and I don’t trust you. So keep it straight. No fancy trills. They’re not in the play book. We’re a company. Showmanship is only half of being a band musician, Francis. Sportsmanship is the other.”
When I told Stella I was going to be a soloist at Festival and also slated to play at the Washington’s Headquarters dance afterwards, Mother got wind and hightailed me into East Chester to get a suit.
“Inseam, 36 inches,” the tailor said. He barely looked at Mother. I hated him for that.
“Francis,” Mother gasped. “I’d no idea. What have you been wearing?”
I’d no idea, either. “Stuff of Aidan’s, I guess.” I took her aside. “Mother, we can’t afford a new suit. I have the uniform for the parade and Aidan can lend me something for the dance—”
“Hush, are you taller than me?” she demanded to know. “Stand up here next to me. Sweet Jesus, you are taller! Inches taller!”
I saw myself through her eyes. Five-eleven at least, and lean. The cut of the gray suit showed broad shoulders. The face was lean too, features chiseled: strong chin, straight nose, blue eyes. There was black hair, thick, and full, finely-shaped lips. I allowed them to curve upward. Only the scarred ear took away.
“A new white shirt,” Mother said firmly. She looked down. “And we’re going to need shoes. Good ones. Gentlemen always wear nice shoes. Remember that, Francis. The measure of a man is in the shine of his shoes.”
The morning of Festival I grabbed my trumpet case and duffel bag containing my new clothes and loped full-steam down Grayson Hill to Washington’s Headquarters. I slowed, awe-struck, just as I had for the nine years I’d had to watch preparations from the sidelines. But this year I wasn’t on the sidelines. This year I was a soloist for Festival’s parade in East Chester, and later, after the exhibits, Buster and I’d play for the dance at Washington’s Headquarters.
The pavilion was up and workers were putting down the dance floor, planting tables in the grass, hauling things into Washington’s Headquarters, hanging banners, running wiring, stringing lights. Aidan greeted me at the door in uniform. He offered me coffee, dodged the volunteers in the kitchen, then escorted me to the room where I’d change. It was a room I’d stayed in many times. Furnished simply: a narrow bed, a side table with a bowl and pitcher on it, a small watercolor on one wall, in browns and greens, of a rustic house with a water mill behind it. My uniform lay on the bed. My eyes caressed it. It was wondrous; deep purple with gold epaulets at the shoulders, like Aidan’s.
“Trousers are a little short,” Aidan said when I reappeared in the front room. “But you’ll pass.”
“Why don’t you get a car?” I asked for the umpteenth time, trekking into East Chester with him on foot. Aidan carried his fiddle case and mace. My horn was nestled in worn red velvet inside its shabby case. Aidan had bought it for a couple hundred dollars at a second-hand store in Philly. He’d also given me a raise to a dollar a week. I planned on paying Aidan back for the trumpet, then to start saving money for New York, where I’d audition for one of the big swing bands. That was the next rung on my ladder: New York.
“Don’t need a car,” Aidan answered. “Got legs.”
That was another thing: I was definitely getting a car. The hell with walking.
Buster punched my arm. “You gonna do it?”
I squinted against the sun, at the knots of spectators lining the parade route.
Buster wiped the sweat from his upper lip and whistled under his breath. “You’re either stupider than shit, Francis, or you’ve got more moxie than anyone I know. My vote’s for stupid. No doubt about it: Madsen’s going to kill you.”
We took our places in formation at the foot of Broad Street. Lower brass, trombones
, baritones, mellophones stood in front, then trumpets, followed by percussion, woodwinds, and sousaphone. Aidan raised his mace, blew his whistle, and we marched silently. Then Aidan blew his whistle again, the signal for the downbeat to “Pennsylvania Polka,” and the crowd roared. I nearly lost my bearings when we marched beneath the banner proclaiming, “The East Chester and Chadds Ford Waterston Art Festival, 1943,” in honor of Matthew Waterston. At the top of Broad Street, where a gazebo had been erected, I broke rank and climbed its steps, as choreographed. I put the trumpet back to my lips. My long fingers fluttered the valves. The first notes were mellow, even reverent. Somewhere in the back of my brain I registered the lyrics: Oh, say can you see! I leaned back and tightened my diaphragm—and the horn soared through a change in octave, sweet and strong. And the rockets red glare, the bombs bursting in air … A perfect high C—followed by gasps and murmurs from the audience.
I had them on the strength of a perfect high C. They were mine.
And the home of the brave … Those were the notes I held, letting them glide downward, oh so slowly. And then I started over before I could change my mind. From the top, changing tempo, hard and fast. My lips buzzed, my fingers fluttered, switching pitch, and the trumpet sang, handing out a hint of a trill, flitting up and down the scale, hardly finishing one note before starting another. I was unaware of my gyrations, the sweat pouring off my face, the ache in my back, in my gut, the pull in my neck. I only knew that the thing attached to my lips and hands was ripping out a red-hot rendition of “The Star Spangled Banner” I’d never even heard before.
And the home of the brave!
I lowered my horn, bowed my head. My pulse pounded. Someone whistled, and there it was: overwhelming, glorious clapping lifting me higher, up to where the stars surely were at least. I raised my head. My eyes met Aidan’s, but I couldn’t read what was to come, he looked so stunned. I decided the moon would have to wait. Had to deal with Aidan first.
The Angry Woman Suite Page 9