by Stuart Dybek
How would it look to some stranger who had crept to the window and seen a boy and his gran carrying on as if they’d both been miraculously cured of the croup, doing the hokeypokey face-to-face with the babushka between their teeth?
It would have looked the way it appears to him now, peering in at the memory, like a stranger through a blurred window, straining to hear the beat of pots and the faint, off-key rendition of a vaguely familiar song.
And how would it look to the boy and his gran if they were peering in on him now, watching at the window while an unshaven stranger with a blue note on his shoulder worriedly paces in his dirty underwear, in the dead of night, to the sickly wheeze of a concertina? For a moment, Lefty almost expects to see their faces at the window, though the window is four stories up. He almost feels more like the boy staring in than the unshaven man who is pacing the floor. The boy and his gran seem more real to him than his room in the present. Suddenly, it’s clear to him that memory is the channel by which the past conducts its powerful energy; it’s how the past continues to love.
He moves directly to the suitcase buried in the back of the closet and rummages through it until he finds a scarf. It’s not the old scarf of maroon-and-pea-green plaid anchored with a safety pin; this scarf is navy blue. Nor is it redolent of camphor and Vicks; this scarf smells of mothballs. But it’s woolly and warm and will have to do. He gently wraps the scarf about the concertina, and immediately her labored wheezing softens and is muffled.
He doesn’t own enough pots to constitute a drum set, or to occupy all four burners, but he fills the single pot he has and, with the fanfare of a cymbal crash, he sets it to boil.
He doesn’t know about the concertina, but as the water rumbles into steam, he’s feeling a little better already—less anxious. He’s been worried about the concertina, and his worries have made him feel helpless. He should at least have recognized that something was wrong before it came to this. The concertina has been in a minor mood lately, one that Lefty’s found contagious—wistful, pensive, melancholy, heartsick by turns—a mood that, for lack of perfect pitch, words can’t exactly convey. Even music can only approximate—a G minor from a Chopin nocturne, perhaps; or the D minor of a Schubert quartet, the one called “Death and the Maiden”; or, at times, an airy, disorganized noodling in no discernible key at all, like an orchestra tuning up; or a squeal like a bagpipe with a stomachache; or a drone as if the concertina were dreaming in a scale that only a sitar would find familiar. She’s been in a minor mood that turns a polka into the blues, a jig into a dirge, a tarantella into a requiem. And a tango—how long has it been since he’s heard her slink into the stylized passion of a tango?
Polka, jig, tarantella, tango … wistful, pensive, melancholy, heartsick … menthol, eucalyptus, camphor, lemon. He’s found a mantra on which to meditate, a talismanic spell to chant.
He rifles through the cupboard, but he’s out of honey. Not out, exactly; the fact is that he’s never owned a jar of honey in his life. He opens the arctically austere cell of his refrigerator: a bottle of catsup, a jar of pickles, a couple containers of Chinese takeout that need to be pitched, but no lemon, not even a plastic citrus fruit ripening in there.
Fortunately, he does possess a shot glass and a bottle of whiskey—not Beam—but memory is, at best, approximate, and he bets Old Guckenheimer will do the trick. In honor and imitation of his gran, he belts down a couple quick doses to test its efficacy, and a couple more for the sake of fluids.
There’s that fiery perfume!
Now it’s the concertina’s turn. Even distressed, the concertina looks lovely in the navy blue scarf. It heightens her complexion of mother-of-pearl. Oh, he thinks, little beauty, sweet companion, the one I didn’t realize I was searching for, who almost came to me too late; little squeeze box who taught my fingers to sing, who taught me how to close my eyes and let the music flow.
He loves her pliant fit between his palms, and the way her body stretches as she yawns rhapsodically. He loves to feel the pumping of her breath. It’s like a summer breeze warmed by the bellows of her heart—although bellows has never seemed to him a word suited to her. There’s nothing bellowy about her, no puffed-up sentiments, no martial clamor that might accompany the lockstep or goose step of a march, no anthems for football halftimes, or for saluting flags while windbags swell with their own rhetoric; and though, a few times in her company, he’s heard angelic whispers—an echo of some great medieval organ—no hymns. Hers has always been a song of earth, of olive trees, vineyards, blossoming orchards melodic with bees.
Na zdrowie, little squeeze box.
He watches as, delicately, she inhales the fumes of whiskey-tiny sips starting at do and slowly ascending through re, mi, fa, sol, to a tremulous la-ti. And after the shot glass has been drained repeatedly, he lifts her gently from the bed and they begin to dance to a tune they play together, a tune whose seesaw rhythm is like the panting of lovers. Not a polka, jig, tarantella, or even a tango. They dance to a dance they’ve just invented, an ancient dance they’ve just recalled.
If there are strangers on the street at this late hour, they’ve stopped to listen as if, like dogs, they can cock their ears. They listen, inhaling the cool air, with their heads thrown back against the night. Their breaths plume; their eyes are locked on the faint wisps of dissolving constellations. And though it’s a dark, American city street on which they’ve stopped, they know there isn’t the need to feel afraid because, instead of danger, tonight the air carries music.
Na zdrowie, strangers.
Na zdrowie, music.
Then, in the long diminuendo of a sigh, the concertina folds up quietly, peacefully, exhaling a sweet, whiskey breath, and Lefty lies down on the pillow beside her, covers them both with a bedspread, and closes his eyes.
Sleep, like a barcarole, carries him away.
Je Reviens
The woman had stopped to browse at the perfume counter. It was Christmas season, Marshall Field’s was mobbed with shoppers, and the counter was a clutter of opened samples—exquisite bottles of myriad shapes and colors. She sorted through them without stopping for so much as a sniff until she found what she was looking for and, raising an atomizer, sprayed a poof into her brunette hair. Then she glanced around to see if anyone was watching, and I pretended to be studying the display of pearl earrings at the jewelry counter so that she wouldn’t catch me staring. Not that if she caught me she would have noticed. Even dressed as I was, in a suit and tie under the old tweed topcoat imported from England that had belonged to my uncle Lefty, I still would have looked like a kid to someone like her.
When I looked up again, she was unbuttoning her coat. She was dressed like a clarinet, reedy thin in a black dress with silver buttons, a silver belt, and a matching necklace. She sprayed one wrist, inhaled the fragrance, then glanced around again, almost furtively, and the thought suddenly occurred to me that this elegantly beautiful woman was about to shoplift a bottle of perfume. Witnessing her theft would make me an accomplice, a partner in crime she didn’t know she had. I found the thought exciting. The two saleswomen in the perfume section were on the opposite side of the counter, busy with customers. It was the perfect moment for the woman to slip the bottle under her coat. Instead, she opened two buttons on her dress, exposing a flash of cleavage and black lace, and quickly sprayed a puff over her breasts. Then, just as quickly, she buttoned up and turned away from the counter into the flow of shoppers.
As soon as she left, I stepped to the spot where she’d been standing. The atmosphere around the perfume counter was heady and thick, all the competing scents merging into a single fragrance that permeated the store. One could smell it immediately upon coming in from the cold through the revolving door. It was like an antidote to the clouds of incense in the church that I’d fled earlier in the day, when the smell of the requiem mass for my uncle Lefty grew suddenly nauseating. I’d left the church in the middle of the service, on the verge of a gagging fit that made my eyes tear. I’
d been sitting by myself toward the rear of the church, so neither my mother nor any of the other relatives saw me leave, and if they had they would probably have figured that I needed to get back to my high school classes. The only person who noticed was a middle-aged black woman standing in the vestibule, looking in on the service. She was wearing sunglasses and a filmy black scarf over what may have been a wig. If it was her hair, then she’d dyed it a metallic color that brought out the bronze of her skin. Her fur coat, the kind my mother called Persian lamb, nearly matched the shade of her hair. I’d never seen her before, but as I went past she removed her sunglasses to catch my eye. Her eyes were green, not brown, and she smiled as if she knew me.
“That sharp topcoat don’t quite fit you in the shoulders yet,” she said in a husky voice.
“I guess” was all I could stammer.
“You take care now, Perry,” she said, calling me by name.
Then I was out the huge, ornate door into the blast of frigid downtown air, feeling the exhilaration of an escapee, but at the same time feeling as if I was running out on Uncle Lefty, leaving him to the stink of incense and the insipid organ music he would have despised, and to the sentimental tributes he would have ridiculed. When the head of the local VFW, decked out in his ribbons and medals, and repeatedly referring to Lefty as Louis-a name Lefty hated—called him a war hero and a belated casualty of Korea, Lefty would have countered with his standard line that he was just a guy unlucky enough to get sunk in crap up to his neck and lucky enough not to drown.
I picked up the atomizer the woman had been holding. It was cobalt blue, and I could only imagine the color of the liquid inside. I pumped a blast into my cupped palm, inhaled, and the profusion of fragrances hovering over the perfume counter retreated. Its scent was powdery, not heavy, but deep as the fragrance of vanilla is deep, and it had a quality that couldn’t be described simply in terms of smell, something that evoked the mysterious manner of the woman I’d just seen. I glanced around as the woman had in order to see if anyone was watching, and then, as she had not, I slipped a turquoise-and-gold box of Je Reviens—surprisingly expensive, though not much larger than a cigarette pack—from the display behind the cobalt atomizer into my topcoat and hurried off to follow the woman through the crowd.
Perhaps from the moment I went into Marshall Field’s I was looking for something to steal. Not that it was a conscious intention. I hadn’t even planned to end up in the store. I’d merely intended to walk around the block to clear the incense and testimonials out of my head. Laddy Bruscziec, the Bruiser as people called him, who was the drummer in the Polka Gents, a band in which Lefty made his comeback, was giving a eulogy when I left. Instead of talking about Lefty in a way that made him not quite recognizable, as a corpse in a casket is not quite recognizable, the Bruiser told a little story about a phrase that Lefty had a habit of using: “I’ll never forget you for that.” It was something I heard Lefty say plenty of times myself. Lefty might be in a greasy spoon, flirting with a waitress as usual, and when she’d bring him a refill for his coffee, he’d look up at her with his hooded eyes somewhere between dreamy and sad, and he’d point at her and say, “Thanks, I’ll never forget you for that.” It was a wisecrack, but Lefty could make it sound like he meant it.
After telling his Lefty story, the Bruiser stood at the pulpit for what seemed a long time, silently gazing down at the casket draped with the American flag. The family had got a good deal on a used metal casket, my aunt Zena had proudly confided to me at the wake. It was dented, she said, but with the flag over it, nobody would see. I thought of asking her if used meant that they’d dug it up and in the process maybe dinged it with the shovel, but I didn’t. The casket rested in the center aisle of the church. Tall candles stood at attention on both its sides; at its foot, an altar boy waved a censer, and the church filled with the smoke of incense as if someone had uncorked the breath of the Dark Ages.
“Lefty, old bud,” the Bruiser finally said, jabbing a finger toward the casket, “I’ll never forget you for that.”
His voice broke, and I was up and out of my pew, feeling sick, my eyes burning.
If the funeral mass had been held where it should have been, at St. Procopius on the South Side, where Lefty had grown up, I’m sure that after a walk around the block I would have gone back to the church. But the old neighborhood was getting rougher. The stained-glass windows were pocked with bullet holes, gang graffiti were spray-painted along the church walls, and besides, most of the family had moved out to the burbs, so the requiem mass was held at St. Peter’s, the fancy downtown church. Once I was out the door that opened onto Madison, locked in step with the bustle of Christmas shoppers along streets lined with holiday lights and giant candy canes and Santas ringing bells, I just kept walking.
I walked thinking about Uncle Lefty, my godfather. When I was little and he was just back from the POW camp in Korea, he used to take me along on his rounds of the neighborhood taverns. I was considered good therapy for him back then. Later, after he started playing in public again, I’d sometimes go to hear the Gents play wedding receptions held in the back halls of corner taverns. I’d wait for that moment when Lefty switched from his cheap metal clarinet to the tarnished tenor sax that had spent the evening on the bandstand, armed with a number Rico reed and draped with a white towel Lefty called his spit rag. Swaying drunkenly at the edge of the bandstand, Lefty would launch into a solo with the Bruiser behind him slamming the foot pedal of the bass drum as if flooring the gas and driving his red sparkle Ludwig kit over the edge of the stage, taking the rest of the Gents with him. The dancers whooped and whirled and stomped, but finally were defeated by the tempo and stood on the dance floor gaping and panting while the bridesmaids stumbled dizzily in their disheveled taffeta like deposed prom queens. Lefty blew, possessed and oblivious to the rising imprecations of the wedding guests, who stood on their folding chairs shouting for dance music. Even the pleas of his fellow Gents, all of whom with the exception of the Bruiser had stopped playing, couldn’t silence him, leaving them no recourse but to drag Lefty, still wailing on his horn, off the stage.
In his sober interludes back then, Lefty tried, mostly unsuccessfully, to teach me to play the saxophone. After he died, besides his English topcoat, I inherited his tarnished Martin tenor sax. He’d owned an alto, too, but they couldn’t find it or the metal clarinet, and figured he must have pawned them, though the pawn tickets never surfaced amid his mess of papers.
He was the only guy I knew who patronized pawnshops. A few times he took me pawnshopping with him. Once he bought a pair of teardrop-shaped green and violet earrings.
“Who are they for?” I asked.
“For good dreams,” Uncle Lefty said. “Touch them to your eyelids before you go to sleep and no nightmares.”
“Are those emeralds?” I wanted to know.
“Peridots from Africa and amethysts from the Amazon,” the pawnbroker answered. He had unfolded a black velvet cloth on the counter, arranged the earrings on it, and was squinting at them through a jeweler’s loupe.
“If you look up my butt with that maybe you’ll discover the Hope diamond, too,” Lefty told him.
The pawnbroker didn’t seem offended, and I listened as they dickered back and forth until Lefty got him down to the price he wanted.
“I’m letting you steal from the mouths of my children,” the pawnbroker complained.
“Yeah, thanks,” Lefty said. “I’ll never forget you for that.”
As long as Lefty was dealing, I tried to talk him into buying something for me: a switchblade with a bone handle from a menacing display of knives and bayonets. Instead, he bought me a harmonica—a mouth harp, he called it.
“Perry, you take care of this,” Lefty told me, “and it will be a better friend to you than a goddamn blade.”
After I rinsed it out under the hot-water faucet about a hundred times in order to kill the germs of whatever degenerate had pawned it, I found that I actually had a knack fo
r playing it that I lacked for a real horn.
Sometimes we went to Sportsman’s Park, as we had when I was little. Lefty would stake me so that I could bet on the sulkies. Stuffed in the inside pocket of his English topcoat, I found a roll of seventy-two dollars, mostly in the crisp two-dollar bills bearing Jefferson’s picture that I saw only at the track. I hadn’t mentioned finding the roll to anyone. Besides the money there were stubs of old racing tickets on which Lefty had tried to hit trifectas, the kind of bet he’d always taught me was for suckers.
As his drinking got heavier, I saw less of him. He was in and out of VA hospitals, though for what specific ailment no one seemed to know. He went out to California and returned sporting an eighth note tattooed in blue on his shoulder and a Vandyke beard that gave him a beatnik look.
The first time he was committed was after he fell out of the bleachers at Wrigley Field while trying to welcome Willie Mays to Chicago by handing down a Hamm’s beer. He’d galloped like a broken-field runner across the outfield grass, fighting off the ushers and cops who’d rushed to cart him out of the ballpark, and was sent to a psychiatric hospital on the far Northwest Side.
Each time he was committed my mother and I took a two-hour ride by El and bus and visited him. The hospital, which Lefty insisted we refer to as the Booby Hatch, was surrounded by a high, spiked iron fence painted a fir-tree green as if it were a natural feature of the wide expanse of lawn. Lefty referred to himself as a POD, Prisoner of Doctors, and I remember thinking that he’d been a POW in Korea, dreaming of escape and all the things he would do if he ever made it back to the States, little things like going to a ball game or buying himself a warm winter coat, and now he was home and imprisoned again.