Now, he was on his way to Germany to see another woman.
As he turned toward the band, Wolfe saw a huge light-skinned black man with a pencil-thin mustache sitting at a table near the front, deep in conversation with two other Negroes.
It was then that Wolfe realized how unobservant he had become. The last thing he would have thought was that the T.W. Waller on the passenger list was Fats.
Wolfe had seen him many times before. He dimly remembered trips to Harlem in the late twenties when he had still been an English instructor at Washington Square College. They’d gone to Connie’s Club, where Waller was playing to packed houses. He’d had quite a following among the jazz-mad students. One night Wolfe had been surprised to hear Waller on the radio, singing some novelty tune. Then suddenly, he had been everywhere. While Wolfe had been struggling to be a playwright, Waller had three or four revues or musicals running in the late twenties—and unlike other songwriters and composers, Fats had been right there every night playing the piano for the shows.
Wolfe had seen both movies Waller had made in the thirties. He lit another cigarette, signaled for another drink. The band finished its number, “Nagasaki,” a corny tribute to the land they’d just left.
The bandleader—surprisingly, the banjo player—stepped up to the star-webbed microphone (there were loudspeaker boxes at the rear of the salon so people there could hear as well as those up front) and said, “Thank you, thank you,” to polite applause. “We’re the Band in the Stars, and we’ll be with you for the whole voyage. But enough about us—” the drummer hit his tom-tom thunp! “Tonight, we’re honored—we really are—gee whiz! —to have a special appearance, a special guest, one of your fellow passengers—I think he’ll be with us to France—” There was a yell from the audience, “England!” “—England, but he says he needs some sleep, so, tonight only, he’ll be sitting in—er, ladies and gentlemen, the Band in the Stars, and the Ticonderoga, are proud—well, here he is, the one, the only, Mr. Fats Waller!”
Some people were taken aback—there were gasps and oohs—as the huge man stood up at his table. Waller was dressed in a black pin-striped double-breasted suit with a black vest, white shirt and a flamingo-pink tie, wide as a normal person’s leg. He waved to the crowd. He would have seemed incredibly round, except that he was so tall, he seemed only plump. He walked to the grey piano—like all huge men he had a smooth grace about him, not as if he were moving in slow motion, just that thin people moved too fast; his motions reminded Wolfe of Oliver Hardy’s.
“Thank you, thank you,” he said, pulling out the piano bench. “I never played on an al-loomin-eum piano before. Let’s see—” he ran his fingers over the keys, “my, my, that’s sweet. I see it’s tuned in the key of R. Well—” Blang! he hit the keys. “Here I am, one night only, ’cause gee I’m tired.” The man at the table with him brought a full gin bottle and a glass and set them on the piano. “Oh, suddenly I ain’t so tired any more!” He took a drink straight from the bottle. “Wow! That’s the stuff. Now I feel like I can play till we hit an iceberg!”
The passengers laughed.
“All right. Here I am, Mrs. Waller’s Harmful Little Armful, Mr. Fats himself. Let’s go. One two three—” he pointed at the band, who had no idea what was coming, so waited. He broke into a medium stride measure, his left hand covering ten keys between notes, his right way down at the other end, and he began “The Joint is Jumpin’,” and the Band in the Stars jumped in right behind him.
As he sang, Fats noticed a great big galoot watching him from the bar with his eyes all bugged out.
The audience roared when they finished the song. Fats drank more gin and leaned back, making tiddling noises with his fingers on the keys.
“Ain’t this band sharp?” he asked the audience. “Dressed like that, you’d think the only song they knew was ‘Penguins on Parade,’ wouldn’t you? And me as the walrus. Haha.”
Then he struck up “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love,” and the bandleader and he did sotto voice repartee over it, making fun of the lyrics, themselves, the passengers. It was totally unrehearsed, so it worked.
“Like working with Charlie McCarthy,” said Fats, when it was over. “’Cept he always brings that guy Bergen along. I don’t know why he don’t split up the act. We know who’s got all the talent in that team, don’t we?
“I worked with everybody,” said Fats. “’Bout the only two I ain’t performed with is Donald Duck and Goofy, and I hear tell Disney’s trying to book me with them three weeks at the Apollo next year!”
There was laughter and more applause.
“Next thing you know, ol’ Fats will be selling U.S. shares and singing on the floor of the Stock Exchange with Ferdinand the Bull! That’d be a tough act to follow, wouldn’t it?”
He took a drink. “Well, we gonna hafta do it sooner or later before drunks start yelling for it, so we might as well give Hoagy his two cents now.”
Then they did “Stardust” and the cornet man took a surprisingly good solo, for someone in a ship’s band.
“Most beautiful music this side of the Monongahela!” said Waller as they ended the song. “I can say that without fear of oblooquy.”
They went into a medley of five of Fats’ songs, the band shifting tempo and lyrics with him as soon as they heard a few notes; these guys, they shouldn’t just be playing here.
When Waller looked up again, wiping the sweat from his mustache, reaching for the bottle, he noticed that the big guy at the bar was gone.
Wolfe crossed the promenade deck and turned starboard. He went out to the observation area, with its open louvered windows and its delicate decorated aluminum railings.
They were steering west-southwest, so there was still the last vestige of a late summer sunset out the windows. A slight breeze blew in, but much less than Wolfe had expected. He barely felt it in his thinning hair. There was also a hum, like the wind, barely noticeable.
The western sky, over the South China Sea, looked like a peeled pink Crayola left forgotten to melt against a dark blue windowpane. There were stars out up from the horizon. Wolfe looked down at the sea. It was like a flat sheet of dark leaded glass full of the dot and wink of stars, merging with pale red where it met the afterglow.
He heard people passing by toward the salon behind him and the subdued music. Part of him wanted to stay here, watching full night come on, the farthest from home he’d ever traveled. The other half wanted to drink in every note from the piano. There would always be beautiful evenings somewhere in the world; there might not always be a Fats Waller.
With a last puff, he took his cigarette from between his lips, gripped it between thumb and back-curled middle finger, and with a former paperboy’s sure aim, flipped it far out away from the window railings.
He watched the orange dot blinking in a long arc; leaning closer to the window he saw it part of its way down the three thousand feet where it would land in the dark, star-pinned sea.
Looking up and out, he could see one of the ten Maybach twenty-cylinder engines that pushed the U.S.I.A.S. Ticonderoga through the cloudless sky. He imagined, as he looked at the propellers, that the hum in the air was louder, but it wasn’t.
He turned and headed back down the promenade.
Ain’t Misbehavin’
He finished “Honeysuckle Rose,” the fingers of his left hand splayed far across the keys between each bass note. The right hand came down in another triplet, and the salon was still. Then the roar was deafening.
“My, my, yes,” he said. He smiled at the crowd. “You better stay awake, because as soon as Fats is through, he’s gonna be asleep for the entire rest of this trip. Them Japanese people done partied me for a week.
“What’ll we do next, boys?” he asked the band. “Maybe we could do something I played with the Little Chocolate Dandies? Or McKenzie’
s Mound City Blue Blowers? How ’bout the ‘West India Blues’ I did with the Jamaica Jazzers?”
“We don’t know that!” the band yelled back.
“Well, I could do something I learned from James P. Johnson. That’s how I learned piano, you know, listening to his piano rolls. I used to turn the drum one note at a time, put my hand on the keys when they went down. Seemed like the only way to learn music to me.” He grinned at the passengers. “’Course I was only about nine years old then.
“I went in and auditioned for Willie ‘The Lion’ Smith—he needed a piano player for when he was taking a break. I was ’bout twelve years old, corner of Lexington and 114th, went down there and played for him. He pretended he wasn’t even listening. I got through and says, ‘What you think, Mr. Lion?’ and he says, ‘No pissant gonna play intermission piano for me in shorts’ and he marched me next door and bought me my first pair of long pants.
“Well, enough of this frothy badinage, let’s get busy, boys! Hang on!”
He made a run, the bandleader started snapping along with his fingers, pulled his banjo up, and the band joined in on “(You’re Just a) Square from Delaware.”
Fats looked up as they played. “Uh. You know that, huh?” he said over the music. “Looka that man with the horn. Blow the end off it, Lips! Oh. Here comes that hard part again. There it comes. Think I got it. Yes, yes! Let’s see if we can’t get the last eight bars in six!” The music got faster, lost nothing. “O-Kay!” he said, as they slammed to a finish. During the clapping, Fats reached out and shook the bandleader’s hand, nodded to the others.
Then they did “Abercrombie had a Zombie,” something Waller had recorded a few months before, which had become, for some obscure reason, a dance-band standard the world over.
“You boys take a little break if you want to,” said Fats. “I’ll doodle around on this tin box till you get back, and then we’ll see if we can’t blow all the rubber off this balloon.”
The band rushed for the bar.
Fats straightened himself in his suit.
“You probably wonderin’ what I was doing in Japan,” he said to the audience. “I woke up yesterday wonderin’ the same thing. No, no, don’t get me wrong. I been good lately.”
Then he did an instrumental version of “Ain’t Misbehavin’.”
He stood up when he was through. “Y’all mind if Fats takes off his coat?” They yelled approval.
Two huge wet circles plastered his shirt under the arms. “Y’all tell me the second I begin to perspire, will you?” he asked.
He leaned forward, his hands only a fraction of an inch above the keys, and he played a Bach partita.
Until the Real Thing Comes Along
It had been the Olympics that brought him back, in many ways.
In those strange first days in Johns Hopkins, when he was meeting his mother and sisters and friends, for the second time, snatches of his former self would come to him unbidden, but isolated, with no indication which memory came first, or how far apart they were.
Then, like Faulkner’s Benjy, things had quit spinning around and settled into a smoothness. The chronology sorted itself. First, he must have done this. This before that, this memory goes somewhere between here and there.
Still, there had been no linchpin holding it together, no relation to the “me” he was.
It was in November, two months after the operation. He was still in Baltimore, in a hotel-apartment, looked after by his mother and sister.
“Well, Thomas,” said his sister. “I’ll be expecting you’ll be wanting to see that film about the Olympic Games, especially since it’s by that German woman.”
“Whatever do you mean?” he’d asked from the couch.
“Well, you were there. It’s all you talked about or wrote home about for six months.”
“That’s right,” said his mother from the kitchen, where she was shelling butterbeans she’d somehow found for supper in November.
He had a dim memory of crowds, moving colors, events of some kind. What he remembered mostly was a pretty woman’s face. Who was she?
His mother wiped her hands on her apron, stood in the doorway.
“Don’t tell me you forgot that, too? You were over there for two solid months, both sides of the Games. Then you upped over to Austria and back to Holland, and who-knows-where-else you didn’t tell us about.”
“There are so many things, Mama. So many trips. They all run together. If you hadn’t shown me the postcards, I wouldn’t even have known I’d ever been in Seattle.”
“Well, you went everywhere, and you was at the Olympics two years ago, and now there’s a film about it,” said his sister.
“I can’t believe I did that and can’t remember it,” said Tom.
So they’d gone to the movie later that week. It was almost a mistake from the start. It was four hours long, and the first part of it was full of naked people throwing things around and running with torches with their willies out. Tom’s sister covered her eyes when there were naked people up there. His mother kidded her about it.
Then the film switched to the ’36 Olympics: the opening parade, the torch, events with shooting and horses, then the track and field. Lots of it was in slow motion, or from above or under the ground. Tom knew it was a great film, but he still had no sense of being there. Maybe he’d gone to Europe on a two-month bender and made up all the postcards?
Suddenly there was a Negro on the screen, getting down into starting blocks. Then a long shot of the race ready to begin. The camera lingered over the German entrant. You would think they would show more of the Negro man. Tom was irritated. The cameras panned over to the Chan-cellor’s box. There was a shot of a fat man and a small man with a mustache. Get the camera off them, thought Tom, and back on the track. (It’s a film, he reminded himself. These things are not happening right now.) Then the gun went off, and in slow-and-normal motion, the Negro man flew down the cinders, getting to the tape three steps ahead of the German and the rest.
There was a shot of the small man with the mustache turning his head sharply to the left, as did the others in the box, toward some commotion up and behind them.
Of course, thought Tom, that’s when I yelled so loud for Jesse Owens from the American ambassador’s box where I was sitting with Martha Dodd, that even Hitler was annoyed. Göring too.
“Why, Tom,” asked his mother, “what’s the matter?”
He was sitting still, tears running down his cheeks.
“I remember now, Mama,” he said. “I was there.”
And the pretty woman’s name had been Thea Voelker.
“Mr. Wolfe?” asked a young male voice at his side.
“Yes?”
“I’m the social director on this trip,” said the thin young man with black hair in a blue suit, holding out his hand. “Call me Jerry.”
They shook hands.
“I’m not very sociable right now,” said Wolfe. “What can I do for you?”
“Well, I have to ask you the usual questions and all. Like what do you like to do on trips like these?”
“Sleep and write. And drink.”
“Hmmm. Mostly what I’ve got here is people who play checkers, chess, bridge, table tennis, the kinds of things young matrons—there are a few on this trip—like to do. There’s skeet shooting tomorrow morning on the port side. Of course, you’re welcome to come down to the activity room anytime—I see you’re with us to Germany—to look over the stuff for the costume ball two nights from now. Lots of masks and things—I doubt we have any whole costumes themselves that will fit, but . . . we just might rig up something to make you very mysterioso . . .”
“Who’s not going to know it’s me?” asked Wolfe, quite seriously, then smiled.
The Jerry guy laughed. “I see what you m
ean. You’re even bigger than your pictures make you look. And I saw the one of you with a German policeman under each arm.”
“Really?” asked Wolfe. “Did that make the American papers?”
“I don’t know. I was the games instructor on the Bremerhaven then. ’37. When the chance came last year to sign on the Ti, I took it. Some way to travel, huh?”
Wolfe looked out over the dark ocean, heard the hum of the ten engines pushing them gently through the night sky at ninety miles per hour.
“It really is,” he said. “My first time on an airship.”
“We have tours tomorrow, eleven a.m. and three p.m. ship’s time.”
“I could maybe make the late one.” Wolfe nodded toward the ballroom. “I’m going to watch him play till one of us drops.”
“He’s pretty good, isn’t he? I’m not a boogie-woogie man myself,” said Jerry, “but he sure beats . . .” he looked around conspiratorially, “. . . any of those guys in the ship’s band.”
Other Worlds, Better Lives, A Howard Waldrop Reader Selected Long Fiction 1989-2003 Page 17