Tiger Rag

by Nicholas Christopher

  “I could hear his mother on the line. Marvin? Marvin, are you there?

  “ ‘Come on,’ Marvin said to my father.

  “But he wouldn’t take the phone.

  “Marvin waited another few seconds, then said, ‘I’ll call you back, Mother.’

  “He hung up and took my father’s arm, not very gently, and walked him out the front door and all the way to his car. ‘If you ever bother Ruby again,’ he said, ‘I’ll break your neck.’ ”

  Ruby had pulled in to a gas station and removed her sunglasses. They were waiting for the attendant to come out of the office.

  “I’ve never been prouder of your father than I was at that moment. Not when we dined with the governor, or attended award ceremonies, not even when he went into the ER and saved a kid the ER surgeons had given up on. When we first separated, I asked myself how the man who stood up for me like that could have betrayed me so badly. The only mystery is why I was so clueless as to consider the two things incompatible.”

  JACKSON, LOUISIANA—SEPTEMBER 6, 1911

  Willie Cornish walked out of his house on Erato Street wearing a white suit and a Panama hat. A yellow handkerchief was forked into his jacket pocket. His brown boots were freshly polished. He was carrying a small suitcase. At the Illinois Central station, he boarded the seven A.M. local for Jackson. It was crowded and hot and it made all thirty-five stops on the line: Frenier, Manchac, Alligator, Ponchatoula, Arcola, Beauregard, Crystal Springs … The trip took four and a half hours. Cornish felt cramped on the hard straw seat, stretching his long legs into the aisle. In Jackson it was 94 degrees. At a stand-up bar outside the station he ate a chicken sandwich and drank a glass of beer. Then he set out along the road that led to the East Louisiana State Asylum, the fields crackling with insects and dust catching in his throat.

  Willie Cornish first met Buddy Bolden in October 1894, leaving Louis Jones’s barbershop with a cornet under his arm. Just turned seventeen, Bolden was slender and quick, wearing a black fedora, a checkered suit, and two-tone shoes. Cornish himself was only twenty, but to Bolden he seemed much older. Bolden had just had a haircut and shave and paid extra for one of Louis’s imported colognes. Even in those days, when he was on the make, he was careless with a dollar. A professional for only two years, he’d already built up a reputation and was becoming better known than the bandleaders who hired him, which didn’t always sit well. Cornish had become a member of the Superior Orchestra the previous year. He and Bolden hit it off at once. They started playing the same gigs, and afterward drinking and talking music into the night. When Bolden formed his own band the following January, Cornish left the Superior and become Bolden’s trombonist and general enforcer, collecting fees from hard-assed promoters and keeping the rest of the band in line.

  By the time he arrived in Jackson that day, Willie Cornish had known plenty of crazy people, some driven mad by drink and despair, some just broken inside, but he had never been inside an asylum. He imagined a hospital that was run like a jail. He had only been locked up once, for disorderly conduct, in a stinking cell at the Michaud Street Jail. In the army he had been in a field hospital outside Santa Clara, Cuba, for a week, lying in the darkness listening to other soldiers scream through the chloroform as doctors removed shrapnel and sawed off limbs. They operated by lantern light, and he never forgot that smell of blood and kerosene.

  When Cornish caught sight of the State Asylum, it confirmed his fears: a forbidding monolith with Greek columns, the main building was ringed by smaller ones, including two grim dormitories, one for white, one for colored. Weeping willows dotted the broad lawn. There was a gazebo and a bandstand in a shady corner. On Saturdays chairs were brought out and either a band of visiting musicians or the patients’ own band played ragtime for the other patients and the staff.

  In his pocket Cornish had the official response to the letter his wife Bella had sent the superintendent, requesting permission for William Cornish to visit his friend and former colleague, Charles Joseph Bolden.

  Cross out “former,” Cornish had chided her. You don’t know that we’re not gonna play together again.

  Bella crossed it out, but she knew better. She had talked to Bolden’s mother Alice and sister Cora, whom Bolden had barely recognized when they visited him the previous winter.

  Cornish was admitted to the colored dormitory after presenting the superintendent’s letter to the uniformed guards. A sullen orderly led him down a corridor of blue doors to No. 495, unlocked it, and ushered him into a dim, low-ceilinged room with four steel beds, four wall lockers, four stools, and a sink. An old man in a tattered robe was curled up asleep on one of the beds. Another man, wearing a blue hospital gown and canvas slippers, was standing at the barred window, staring out. He was counting aloud softly, 1-2-3-4-5. Cornish realized he was counting the sparrows on a wire fence. 1-2-3-4-5 … The man’s shoulders were slumped, his arms hanging down as if his hands were iron weights.

  Charley, the orderly called out.

  After a long moment, Bolden turned. His sunken eyes were dull. His head was shaved. In four years, the handsome face Cornish remembered had become swollen and slack.

  Bolden looked right through Cornish, then glanced back outside as two of the sparrows flew off. 1-2-3, he murmured.

  Charles, Cornish said.

  Bolden took Cornish in, but with no sign of recognition, just the tacit acknowledgment that someone was occupying that portion of space. Wearing white. Carrying a bag. The doctors who examined him wore white. They carried bags. How many of them had there been over the years? And for how many years? It didn’t matter, because they spoke a different language that he didn’t understand—not English or Creole, but with some English words.

  It was Bolden’s thirty-fourth birthday. That was why Cornish had chosen this date to visit. He looks closer to fifty, Cornish thought.

  It’s me. Willie.

  Cornish remembered how, even when he was still playing well, Bolden would abruptly wander from one room to another. It seemed as if he was a thousand miles away. Now it was as if he had walked into one of those rooms and just kept going. The silence in that small space was more painful to Cornish than the bedlam he had feared. Seeing Bolden, of all people, rendered mute made him feel helpless in a way he hadn’t felt since the war.

  Cornish took off his hat and sat down on one of the stools. The orderly remained at the door. Bolden looked blankly from Cornish to the orderly. Cornish was wondering if this hadn’t been a mistake after all. Bella had tried to warn him.

  You’re not going to find the man you played music with. He’s going to be a stranger. It’s not even like your father drinking himself to death, because this isn’t just about drink, it’s about crazy. Buddy hasn’t had a drink in four years and every year they say he’s gotten crazier.

  None of this was news to Cornish, but a part of him resisted it. He told himself he must try to get through to Bolden. Charles would’ve done it for me, he thought. So he made a plan.

  The particulars of Bolden’s commitment—the police hauling him to the House of Detention, his mother petitioning the court, a judge signing the order, the deputy sheriff transporting him—had been scrambled by the time they reached Cornish second- and thirdhand. But one fact had stood out and bothered him no end: that Bolden, who for years carried his cornet at all times, eating drinking sleeping fucking, had not taken it with him when he left New Orleans. Bella had told him that Cora said Bolden was afraid of his horn, but Cornish didn’t believe her.

  After a long silence, Cornish said, I saw the bandstand here, Charles. You ever play?

  Bolden just stared at him.

  Play what? the orderly interjected.

  Cornish looked at him in astonishment. Do you know who this is? He snapped opened the suitcase. Look what I brought you, Charles. He took out Bolden’s Conn cornet.

  Did you clear this with the superintendent? the orderly said.

  Everything about Bolden was slowed down, leaden, but not h
is reaction to the cornet. He recoiled, shaking his head vigorously. No no no, he said, and hearing it for the first time, Cornish didn’t recognize his voice, high and shaky, not the baritone he remembered. No! Bolden repeated, his face contorted, and that knocked the wind out of Cornish.

  Charles, it’s okay, you don’t have to take it, Cornish said, putting the cornet back into the suitcase.

  Bolden had backed into the corner. With his right hand he touched the wall on his left, the wall on his right, the sink, the thin bar of soap. Then his left hand touched each thing again, in reverse order. And he closed his eyes.

  Don’t do that again, the orderly drawled.

  No, sir, I won’t, Cornish said.

  Bolden opened his eyes but wouldn’t look at Cornish. He walked back to the window. The sparrows were gone.

  Charles, is there anything I can get you? Cornish asked.

  Bolden started humming, not music, just a steady mechanical hum.

  You better go now, the orderly said.

  Cornish stood up. He took two steps toward Bolden, then stopped. I’m leaving, Charles.

  Bolden kept humming, but turned around. Still not making eye contact, just staring at Cornish’s chest. Then nodding.

  It took Cornish a moment to understand. He pointed at his yellow handkerchief. You want this?

  Bolden didn’t speak, didn’t nod again, but he stopped humming.

  That okay? Cornish said to the orderly, who shrugged.

  Cornish held out the handkerchief and Bolden took it and turned back to the window.

  Come on, Mister, the orderly said.

  Cornish put on his hat. Goodbye, Charles.

  Bolden remained there after Cornish was gone. He strained to look far to the left, at the dormitory’s exit. A few minutes later, Cornish’s white suit flashed in the sunlight and then he was gone.

  Bolden raised the handkerchief to his face. He sniffed it. Ran it along his cheek. Held it up to the light, shifting it this way and that. There were daffodils that sprouted by the main building, and a freshly painted rocking chair outside the showers, and a cat that walked across the lawn one day, but not on them, not anywhere for many years, had Bolden seen a yellow this bright and deep.

  He looked back at the spot where Cornish had passed and clutched the handkerchief tight.

  Willie, he whispered.

  PHILADELPHIA—DECEMBER 21, 12:30 P.M.

  Ruby knew her way around Philadelphia, and they soon reached the Penn campus and turned onto Guardian Street.

  “This is it,” she said, pulling up before the Anatomy-Chemistry Building and opening her door. “Let’s go.”

  “Into the building?”

  “Where else?”

  “Mom, this isn’t a parking space.”

  “Damn it, stop worrying so much.”

  It was a granite building with opaque oblong windows. The glass doors opened automatically. In the vestibule a security guard was sitting beside a turnstile.

  “We don’t have IDs,” Ruby said. “I’m an alumna.”

  “Ma’am—”

  “Call up to the dean’s office. Tell them Dr. Ruby Cardillo is here. I donated fifty thousand dollars this year.”

  Eyeing her outfit, seeing his own image doubled in her sunglasses, calculating the risks he might be running, the guard reluctantly picked up his phone.

  “Is that true?” Devon whispered to Ruby.

  “Of course not. But your father has given them plenty.”

  The guard handed them passes and directed them to the dean’s office on the fourteenth floor.

  In the elevator Ruby pressed the button for the fifth floor. “That’s where I met your father,” she said.

  “Forgive me for asking, but are you really sentimental about this place?”

  “Are you joking?”

  “Then why are we here?” Devon asked, as they stepped onto the fifth floor.

  The air smelled of ammonia and sulfur. The marble tiles shone.

  “Exorcism,” Ruby replied with a grim smile. “There are places I need to revisit firsthand, not just in my head, in order to purge myself of your father. This is one of them.”

  “And you figured that out an hour ago?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “That’s when you first said we were detouring into Philadelphia.”

  “It’s not a detour. I planned it all along.”

  “Really. I wish you’d told me in Washington.”

  Ruby fished a comb from her purse and ran it through her hair. “What difference would it have made?”

  Glass cases lined the long corridor. They were filled with specimen jars containing a variety of animal and human parts: an ox heart, a lemur’s intestines, a human eardrum, a polar bear fetus.

  Devon was transfixed by the conjoined stomachs of Siamese twins until Ruby tugged at her arm. “Not here, dear. We want the lab on the other side of the building.”

  Lab No. 9 had a soundproof door with a circular window at eye level. There was a bench beside the door, where students could wait for their class to begin. The lab was a large room, gleaming with stainless steel and glass. The walls and floor were pale green. A lone student was at work, an Asian girl wearing a brown smock, a surgical mask, and latex gloves. She was bent over a dissection table under stark light.

  “This is where you met Dad?” Devon said in a hushed voice.

  “Early one morning. It was painted blue back then, and the equipment was clunkier.”

  Ruby reached into her handbag and took out a plastic lighter and a roll of incense sticks held together with a rubber band.

  “Skullcap,” she said, responding to Devon’s stare, “is a Caribbean herb that dispels evil spirits and negative energy. You have to dry it out in the sun for three days and then powder it. It cleanses a place, and the people in it.”

  “Like sage,” Devon said. After all these years, she understood the true significance of her mother’s greenhouse.

  “Compared to skullcap, sage is an air freshener.”

  “Marielle taught you this?”

  “Yes.” Ruby counted out six incense sticks and returned the others to her bag. “You wait here.”

  Ruby entered the lab and strode past the Asian student to the main counter. She placed the six incense sticks in a beaker and lighted them. Wisps of smoke rose slowly. The student was startled at the sight of this middle-aged woman in garish colors and oversized sunglasses. Transfixed at the window, Devon could overhear their raised voices.

  “Excuse me,” the student said, “you cannot do that.”

  “You can’t smoke tobacco here,” Ruby replied. “But this is skullcap. It’s far safer than the fumes from the Bunsen burners.”

  “No, you cannot burn it here.”

  As the argument escalated, Devon was about to go in when she heard rapid footsteps approaching. It was another security guard.

  After escorting Devon and Ruby downstairs, the guard threatened to call the Philadelphia police.

  “Go ahead,” Ruby retorted. “Is that supposed to scare me?”

  “There’s no need to call anyone,” Devon said. “We’re leaving as soon as we hit the lobby.”

  “Devon!”

  “We’re leaving, Mom.”

  The guards stood behind the glass doors watching the two women walk to the Mercedes. Ruby snatched the parking ticket from beneath the windshield wiper, crumpled it, and tossed it in the gutter.

  “Why did you undercut me?” she said angrily, making a fast U-turn.

  “I was trying to keep you out of jail.”

  “You can’t even keep yourself out of jail.”

  “Wow. You know what, this is bullshit. You’re out of control.”

  “You’re no judge of that.”

  “That does it. Let me out. I’ll catch the first bus, train, anything, back to Miami.”

  Ruby accelerated through a red light. “Devon—”

  “Slow down! Look, you invited me on this trip. I had some idea of wha
t I was getting into. But I didn’t sign on for these weird detours.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Just let me out.”

  They were approaching the cloverleaf that fed back onto the interstate. Ruby pulled onto the shoulder. She cried out as if she’d been struck and, dropping her chin, began sobbing. “I’m sorry, honey.”

  “Mom.”

  “I really am.”

  Devon squeezed her shoulder.

  “There’s so much shit coming down on me,” Ruby said. “You don’t know.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “It’s not okay.”

  “You’ll get through it. Just try to be cool.”

  Ruby wiped her tears. “Devon, don’t go. If you really want to, I’ll take you to the airport. But don’t, please.”

  “I’m staying. Just let me take the wheel, okay? And let’s not talk for a while.”

  They drove about ten miles in silence. Ruby was quiet, toying with the tanzanite ring that had replaced the wedding band she had flung into Biscayne Bay. Then she sat up with a rueful smile and slid the Joan Jett CD into the stereo. “That girl was dissecting a parrot,” she said. “Beautiful feathers, orange and green. The girl’s karma was so grim. I told her she needed all the skullcap she could get.”

  NEW ORLEANS—SEPTEMBER 6, 1911

  The night he returned from visiting the asylum in Jackson, Willie Cornish sat in his living room and poured himself a shot of rye and lighted an Upmann cigar he bought on the train. Bella was putting the children to bed. Walking home from the station, Cornish had stopped in briefly at the Fayette Bar. He ran into Jimmy Moore, who played with him in the Tuxedo Band. They had steady work, making good money, but Cornish didn’t think much of their sound. Frank Lewis, from the old band, was in the bar too, but Cornish didn’t have the heart to tell him where he’d been or what he’d seen. Frank was among those who assumed Bolden would come back sometime and play again.

  After pouring himself another shot, Cornish unlocked Bella’s Indian chest and dug out the Edison cylinder of “Tiger Rag.” He uncapped the gold tube and slid the cylinder out, turning it in his hand, examining the hair-thin grooves. He and Frank and the others were in there. They were on fire that day, Bolden as close to perfection as he would ever get.