* * *
MY THREE KIDS and Clarice’s four, who Barbara Jean and I had summoned from their beds, were with me when I opened the door to the Catalpa Ballroom again. Our seven adult children proceeded to sit cross-legged in a circle around the piano, just the way they used to when they were small and Clarice would serenade them off to sleep at naptime.
Barbara Jean and I walked up to the piano bench and stood on either side of Clarice. Barbara Jean said, “Shame on you, Clarice. You know better than to think you’re alone.”
I said, “Play for the kids tonight and play for them tomorrow. You won’t fail.” Then, though we knew our knees would punish us for it the next day, Barbara Jean and I joined the circle on the floor around our friend.
Clarice didn’t stop crying, but she took a deep breath, let it out, and played for us. Under the ballroom’s glittering chandelier, she reminded herself and a ring of her most devoted fans that she was capable of creating something beautiful.
CHAPTER 35
The last two patrons to leave the Blues Pot after El and Lily’s performance had also been the first customers to arrive that day. “It’s four in the mornin’. Y’all don’t have to stop drinkin’. But you can’t drink any more here,” Harold said to Perry and Jerome, who sat ignoring each other atop the same corner barstools they had occupied all day.
With the place finally empty, Harold switched off the bright light above the sign over the entrance. Then he made his way around the room, wiping down the tables with a soiled towel. It wouldn’t do to leave the sticky-sweet residue of cocktails to air-dry all night. That was an easy way to guarantee pests of all sorts and the extermination bills that came with them. After the tables, he cleaned the bar. There was a mountain of glassware still to be washed, but he left it in a sink full of sudsy disinfectant. He and Lily would get to that before opening time the next afternoon. Harold turned off the struggling air-conditioning unit and the ventilation fans that had inefficiently blown tobacco smoke out of the club all night.
The chore that Harold forgot was to turn off and unplug the Blues Pot’s ancient sound system. It was an understandable mistake. There hadn’t been a live performance there in years, so that task wasn’t part of his routine. With all that Harold had on his mind, some detail was bound to slip.
The show hadn’t gone at all the way he’d imagined it would. When El had shuffled into the tavern on Wednesday, Harold had thought it was a miracle. After he’d come to believe that he’d missed any opportunity for revenge against the man who had disrupted his life from boyhood onward, his lifelong enemy had been delivered to him, wounded and in a pitiful state. Harold had been given one last chance to get payback for those beatings El should have taken. He was going to watch El on that stage and have the memory of his mother calling out for El and his guitar when she was sick wiped away at last.
But the show hadn’t been a humiliation for El, or a lesson for Lily. She’d been rusty and El had looked decrepit, but Harold had forgotten how brightly they could shine. That special, unnameable quality they’d had when they were together decades ago hadn’t died. It had been on full display.
His chance to claim a final victory wouldn’t be entirely lost, though. He could take some consolation in the money he’d made over the course of a wildly busy night. Then in the morning, he’d have the pleasure of tossing El out onto the street. That was one treat he could still enjoy. He doused the lights inside the Blues Pot, locked the door from the outside, and walked the few steps to his and Lily’s home next door.
* * *
THE FIRE BEGAN just below the front right corner of the stage, in a tangle of cords running from the soundboard to the speakers. Areas of bare wire long ago stripped of insulation by gnawing mice had made contact throughout the evening, scattering hot, silver sparks in an ever-widening arc under the stage. No one saw the tiny bursts of light exploding beneath the floorboards during El and Lily’s performance. But now, hours later, the sparks found purchase on a decaying cardboard box and became little licks of flame. That box contained twelve bottles of cheap liquor, as did the six boxes next to it and the fifty or so that, in flagrant violation of the fire codes, were stacked behind the blue curtains, against the surrounding walls.
* * *
IN A BEDROOM half a flight upstairs from the Blues Pot’s stage, Lily spun in a slow circle. “I can’t stop dancing, El. We were good, weren’t we?”
“Damn good,” El said. He had to speak loudly to be heard above the ceiling fan that cranked away at its highest setting in a futile attempt to force the cigarette smoke–filled air out the open window.
El sat on a low chaise lounge with cracked brown leather upholstery that crunched whenever he moved. He smiled up at her. They were both a little drunk from celebratory shots of whiskey and dizzy from lack of sleep. The sun was coming up, and they were still reliving their accomplishment.
“I can’t believe all those folks came. There haven’t been that many people inside this place in years. Did you see that Darius and Benny were there? If I’d known they were here in Chicago, I would have called them up and told them to bring their instruments. To tell you the truth, I’d have sworn they were both dead.”
El said, “I bet they’d have said the same about us.” He had his guitar on his lap, strumming as they talked. He knew that the show had contained some rough spots and that they owed a good part of the success of the evening to the novelty of such old folks just being able to make it through two long sets without keeling over. But it was wonderful to see Lily like this.
“I couldn’t believe all those young folks showed up. They all knew you, El. They knew every cut on that album you made.”
“Yeah, they tell me that old album keeps poppin’ up on the bootlegged-blues charts. I’d probably have me some real cash if even half the college kids who’ve got my record had actually paid for it.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Lily said. “The important thing is that they know you, and they’ll come see you again. I bet they never heard blues like you sang for ’em tonight. You showed ’em how it’s done.”
“We showed ’em,” El corrected.
A cluster of scarves, shawls, bandannas, belts, and stoles hung over the door of a wooden wardrobe. Lily reached deep into the tangle and pulled out a blue feather boa. Wrapping it around her neck, she spun the ends of the boa in circles with her fingertips as she swayed from side to side. Tiny blue feathers floated through the air as the aged boa shed.
“You know who gave me this?”
“Who?”
“Loretta Perdue. You know what we should do? We should go back to Plainview and see Loretta. Wouldn’t that be fun?” Lily caught herself then and said, “I meant to say that it was fun back then. I know Loretta’s gone.”
El began to play the opening of “Blues in the Night.” Lily hummed along and tossed the feather boa onto the chaise next to El, where it joined a pile of scarves and shawls she had tried on and discarded during the hours they had spent together since their final set ended. This, she’d told him, was where she kept all of her old things. More often than not, she spent her nights here, among her memories.
As Lily sang, “My mama done told me,” she reached again into the twisted mass of accessories on the wardrobe. The item she pulled out this time was instantly familiar to El. The sheer gold-and-black leopard-spotted scarf he had given her a lifetime ago fluttered like a flag in the fan-driven air as she tugged it away from the braided jumble and draped it over her shoulders. In freeing the scarf from the mound on the wardrobe door, she upset the equilibrium of the entire heap, and everything fell to the floor. The door, which had been only slightly ajar, swung open.
Lily stopped singing and froze where she stood.
With the layers of fabric that had been obscuring it gone, the mirror on the inside of the wardrobe was exposed. Lily pushed the door open as far as it would go, so she could see both herself and El in the full-length mirror. She stared with her mouth agape, her vitality and h
appiness gone.
So quietly he could barely hear her, she said, “Look at us. What happened?”
“We got old, Lily.”
“I don’t understand. How did it happen so fast?”
El thought for a moment about how to respond, but he didn’t have to answer her. He was interrupted by the sound of something shattering downstairs. In the same instant, he smelled smoke and saw thin curls of it snaking up from the floor vents, into the room.
“We’ve gotta get out of here,” El said as he realized there was a fire below.
Lily remained transfixed by the pallid old woman in the mirror, her expression suggesting that she didn’t recognize her.
“There’s a fire, Lily,” El said. “We’ve gotta get out.”
She looked at him with a wide grin. “If there’s a fire, Marjorie will just piss it out.”
“We’ve gotta go, Lily,” El said, louder this time. He put Ruthie back into her case and looked around, searching for his prosthesis. It was an ungainly thing that fastened to his lower leg and continued all the way up to his knee. El had stripped off the painful contraption as soon as he and Lily had entered the room. Now it lay on the floor just on the other side of where the mound of accessories from the wardrobe had fallen.
“Hand me my foot, okay?” he asked, his eyes beginning to sting.
Still moving slowly, Lily picked up the prosthesis and brought it to him. Then she walked across the room to the door that led downstairs. She opened the door and then shut it. With an unnatural calm, she said, “The smoke’s pretty bad.”
“Is there another way out?” El shouted as he struggled to secure his prosthetic foot.
Lily coughed several times and then came to sit next to him on the chaise. “Let’s just stay here and sing. Remember when you said that to me that last night at the Pink Slipper? I got it wrong back then, but we can do it now.” Lily reached for his guitar. She opened the case and said, “Please, brother, stay here and sing with me.”
Smoke seeped in through the seams around the door, and they both began to cough. Maybe she was right. El hadn’t planned to leave Chicago anyway, and his boy had seen the best of him now. He’d had a different plan for how he would leave things with James, but he’d gotten good at scaling back dreams. Maybe having one incredible night was enough. El looked into Lily’s gray eyes, watery from tears and from the fumes filling the room around them. “Yeah, let’s sing.”
He took Ruthie from her. “‘Happy Heartache’?”
“Did you need to ask?”
El wiped a tear from his sister’s cheek and then began to strum the strings of his guitar.
Just before the electricity cut out, the last gusts from the ceiling fan lifted the leopard scarf from Lily’s shoulders. El watched as it danced in the air for a moment and then waved at him as it escaped through the open window.
CHAPTER 36
The walk from Clarice’s dressing room to the piano bench on the Millennium Park stage was seventy-one steps long. Down a short hallway. Across a rehearsal room. Through the wings. Onto the stage. She knew the exact number of steps because she had counted them the previous day as she’d tried to empty her mind and center herself before her rehearsal. Now, though, as she rose from her bow and sat at the piano, she couldn’t remember anything between the knock on her dressing room door announcing that it was time to begin and her arrival onstage. She was aware only of her pounding heart, her trembling hands, and all the people.
They sat, clapping appreciatively, in rows of seats near the stage. They lay sipping wine atop quilts on the dark green, sloping lawn beyond the pavilion. Hundreds more stood off to the sides of the lawn, forming a human wall that seemed to stretch on for blocks. How on earth, she thought, could there be so many people?
She sat at the piano. Breathe. In and out. Relax. She recalled all the calming words she had repeated to herself at countless concerts, all the things she had told hundreds of jittery students. But with every deafening beat of her heart, she felt more panicked and more alone. Clarice thought again of the seventy-one steps. She imagined standing up and running that number of strides back to the safety of her dressing room.
She remembered then that just last night Odette and Barbara Jean had assured her that she was not alone. When she risked a glance to her right, she saw that she had company. Her twins, Carolyn and Carl, two years old, stared up at her from the wooden stage floor with wide, expectant eyes. Their older brothers, Ricky and Abe, were there, too, sitting cross-legged beside Odette’s Jimmy, Eric, and Denise. Barbara Jean’s lovely Adam completed the circle.
Clarice’s heart continued to thump. But as thoughts of the crowd beyond the stage faded away, she brought her steadied hands to the keys and played for the imaginary children surrounding her. As she’d done so many times before, she entertained them with Beethoven—her first true love, her only faithful partner, her baby before she had babies.
That day in the park, it all worked. Each piece was truly hers. She took risks. She stretched tempos and arched her phrases until they nearly broke. She remembered every note. To amuse, surprise, calm, and impress the children she imagined were onstage with her, she performed the way she had, lately, been able to play only for her living room walls.
Soon it was all over. Three sonatas, three warhorses of the repertoire, performed as well as she could play them, exactly as she heard them in her head. The critics could love it or hate it, she thought. This had been her Beethoven and no one else’s.
The roar from the audience when Clarice finished made the applause she’d received at the top of the concert seem like a polite smattering at a ladies’ tea party. What she heard as she rose from the piano bench sounded more like a scream than an ovation. When the crowd leapt to its feet, the commotion grew even louder.
Clarice’s children, the Supremes, and all of the Plainview folks were standing, waving at her from the front row. Even Veronica and her husband, Clement, stood shouting and whistling. Her grandson and granddaughter hopped and clapped alongside Odette’s grandchildren. Wendell Albertson, her manager, grinned and gave her a double thumbs-up.
Richmond—who, five years earlier, had put all of this in motion by sending those recordings to Albertson without Clarice’s knowledge—stood next to Beatrice, his faced buried in his hands. Odette, on Richmond’s other side, patted the big man’s back as he shook with sobs.
Clarice saw Terry Robinson and dozens of other current and former piano students in the audience. On some other occasion, the sight of them en masse, many of them sprouting gray hair and in the company of their adult children, would have made her feel ancient. Today, she couldn’t feel anything other than a heady combination of joy, relief, pride, and gratitude.
If Clarice hadn’t known better, she’d have sworn that she saw her father, Abraham Jordan, in the rear of the pavilion. He was whooping it up, whistling and leaping as high as her grandchildren, just the way he had done when he was alive.
She bowed and left the stage. When she was out of sight of the audience, she wanted to fall to her knees—in exhaustion or prayer, she wasn’t quite sure which. But the festival organizer was there in the wings, clapping and saying something Clarice couldn’t hear above the crowd’s ovation. The organizer put her hands on Clarice’s shoulders, spun her around, and pushed her back toward the piano.
As Clarice walked out for her second bow, the crowd seemed to grow even louder. The third time she returned, she was greeted by rhythmic clapping and the stamping of feet. To further cheers, Clarice sat at the piano for an encore. She turned to the audience and said, “Variations on ‘The Happy Heartache Blues,’ by El Walker.”
Clarice had added to the arrangement since playing it at her Plainview recital. Her variations on this love song that wasn’t really a love song were a little happier, slightly sadder, more insistent, and more rhapsodic now that closer study had brought her to a new understanding of the song.
The reaction to her encore was something she had never imag
ined. The roar from the people in the seats and on the lawn hit her with the force of thunder and kept coming. They stood again, and shock waves from the din they made repeatedly pushed against her.
Between the third and fourth times she was shoved back out toward the piano to take yet another bow, Clarice knew that she would never again be allowed to end a performance without playing that encore. She looked for El in the audience to have him take a bow with her, but she couldn’t find him. I’ll thank him in Plainview tomorrow.
She closed her eyes and listened to the applause and the cries of “Bravo!” She inhaled the aroma of summer grass and the scent of the Lake Michigan breeze, hoping to squeeze even more memories from the day. She silently thanked the invisible youngsters who danced in a circle around her, and she whispered prayers of gratitude for the Supremes who had brought the children to her when she’d needed them.
CHAPTER 37
James and I met up with Terry in the lobby of our hotel at eight-thirty on Sunday morning. Our plan, worked out at Clarice’s concert the day before, was to pick up El at the Blues Pot at nine and then drive to Plainview for Wayne Robinson’s funeral. The service wasn’t until late that afternoon, but James said he wanted to have some extra time to play with in case we ran into traffic. I suspected, though, that James really wanted to ensure that he had an additional hour or two to play the role of the angel on Terry’s shoulder in the event that Terry showed up at the hotel outfitted to take his revenge. Terry walked into the hotel wearing a conservative black suit so oversized that it nearly swallowed him up and a pair of worn but spotlessly shined oxfords. His long braids were pulled back into a tidy ponytail. With his somber expression and his backpack slung over his shoulder, he looked like a mortuary school graduate heading to his first day on the job.
The Supremes Sing the Happy Heartache Blues Page 26