Jack of Diamonds (18 page)

She smiled. ‘The club owner, Wayne McCarthy, would hand out photographs of me in a slinky evening gown to all the soldiers. I thought the way he’d made me pose was a bit risqué.’ She laughed. ‘But compared to the evening gowns I now wear, the photograph was the very soul of modesty.’

‘I bet you looked really pretty, Miss Frostbite,’ I said.

‘Why, thank you, Jack. Wayne McCarthy would often say, “Floss, you weren’t much good when I hired you, but you turned out to be the best investment I ever made.”

‘The
Mail and Empire
newspaper wrote an article about Miss Fairy Floss, the “It” girl, in which they said that a lonely serviceman needed a dream, and that my picture could be found in the wallets of Canadian soldiers and sailors wherever they were posted in Canada or overseas.’

‘I didn’t know you sing as well as play the piano with Uncle Joe,’ I said.

‘Alas, Jack, I don’t. On a club tour to Alaska in 1924 we got caught in a blizzard when our motorcar got stuck. I contracted pleurisy and then a severe dose of pneumonia that wasn’t treated properly and I lost my singing voice.’ She laughed brightly. ‘I sound worse than Joe these days, my dear. My career was effectively over, for while my piano wasn’t bad, it was only an accompaniment for my voice, and so I was down and broke when I met a gentleman and we fell in love. He was a local politician and before that a real-estate developer, but a Catholic and married, so that was that.’ She hesitated, then continued a moment later. ‘I became his mistress.’ She paused again. ‘You’re old enough to know what that means, are you not, Jack?’

I nodded. ‘Yes, of course, it’s very hard when people are in love,’ I said, trying to sound sophisticated. I’d read words somewhat like that in a book and was paraphrasing, because I knew very little about loving a girl. I’d only just begun to have problems ‘down there’ when I woke up, which was a pretty late puberty, I guess. I no longer shared a bedroom with my mom, thank goodness, but had a bed under the outside stairs. Someone had built in the space under the stairs to make a real big cupboard, and there was a door to it from inside our house. You could fit a narrow bed into that cupboard, but we took the door off to let air in, otherwise I’d have suffocated. The only trouble was that lying directly under the stairs I could hear everyone coming and going.

Miss Frostbite continued. ‘Well, I lived in an apartment he owned, and he encouraged me to take up piano and forget about singing. It wasn’t a great success, but then in 1928 I met Joe, who was American and trying hard to get a basement jazz group going but without much success. At the time two-piano acts were just beginning to become popular and so we teamed up with some small success.

‘My father died in 1926 and I was reconnected with my mother, which was wonderful. It turned out she was rather proud of me breaking away from “the old curmudgeon” – her name for him, not mine. Then the crash came. My gentleman had a lot of money invested, and when the stock exchange collapsed in New York, he had a heart attack and tragically died. As it wasn’t polite in my family to ever talk about money I assumed that my father’s considerable fortune had also suffered in the crash. My mother had previously sold the big house in Burlington to move to Toronto, where she bought an apartment so that she could be closer to me. After the crash she seemed to manage quite well and so I never asked about her assets. My gentleman had left me my small apartment and an old warehouse on Dundas Street. I sold the apartment and Joe and I, perhaps very stupidly, decided to open the Jazz Warehouse on the smell of an oily rag. We both slept in two tiny offices at opposite ends of the original warehouse for a year while we built the club and got it going. My mother was unaware of this or she would have insisted I stay with her. But I guess I’d been independent for too long.’ She looked up at me. ‘Jack, don’t ever think I don’t admire your mother’s self-respect and her stubborn belief in paying her way.’

I grinned at her.

‘You have a very precious mom, Jack,’ she said, then went on with her story. ‘Well, we soon discovered that Toronto wasn’t quite ready for us, that is to say, for a nightclub that played only jazz. Still isn’t. So we went back to the dual piano act, but developed it into the showbiz affair it has become, using mirrored illusions, costume changes and elaborate popular music arrangements. Thank God I have kept a reasonable figure, and Joe in his blue satin tails and top hat looks the part and is a real character, so our act can hold the attention of an audience that’s usually “well oiled” for an hour-and-a-half twice nightly.

‘However, Joe and I still wanted our jazz dream, hence the band. We may not feature Scott Joplin, Duke Ellington or Louis Armstrong, but it’s jazz, and with the money I inherited when my mother passed away last year, we can now afford a visiting American instrumentalist every once in a while. It turned out that my father’s estate didn’t go down in the crash. He was a rotten old grump but evidently had been a very canny one. It’s very good for the boys to work with a top-notch jazz and blues musician. They do their best, and that’s pretty good, and this is their reward. It’s very good for Toronto, too. It gives Joe and me great encouragement when the young people stand outside for the afternoon jam sessions and they have the privilege of hearing someone very special playing.’

‘I’m glad you’re not angry with me for giving up classical music,’ I said, relieved.

‘Miss Bates believes you could have a concert career ahead of you, but I would be a hypocrite if I tried to persuade you against turning back to jazz. But, if you’ll take my advice, sit for the conservatory entrance examination and that way she will know she’s done her job. Then I shall inform her that I am no longer willing to pay for your tuition, that now it’s up to the conservatory to grant you a bursary. That will be the time to tell her you want a career in jazz. She’ll be absolutely furious, of course, but as she herself gave up her concert career when she was at the height of her powers, she may understand. It won’t be easy, Jack, but it’s your life.’

‘And you? I mean you’ve been paying for my tuition.’

‘Jack, let’s hope you turn out to be an exceptional jazz musician and I will have been more than compensated. Besides, your mother has paid your tuition fees by cleaning my house all these years.’

It wasn’t true, of course. Four mornings a week as a cleaner wouldn’t have come near covering my tuition with Mona Bates, but my mom and Miss Frostbite seemed to have become good friends and she was very proud of making a contribution to my career.

War broke out that September, a fortnight after I turned sixteen. The whole eligible male population of Cabbagetown rushed to join up. Toronto was full of men in uniform. If nothing else, war heralded the end of the Depression for the working class. There was talk of factories reopening, and going to war meant a weekly salary coming in for men as well as women; it was the promise of regular work. War was a tragedy for people in Europe and Russia, but in Canada it was seen as a return to the good times.

A year later, in June, I took my grade twelve exams at UTS, two months before my seventeenth birthday, and while I got an A grade, which meant that I could go on to university if I wanted to, it wasn’t the most brilliant result and I only just scraped in. But when you play piano three hours every school day, something has to give. I had all but completed eighth grade when I sat for the entrance exam for the conservatory. I played Beethoven’s
Pastoral Sonata
in D major and the G major Prelude from Bach’s
Well-tempered Clavier, Book Two
. It was stretching it a fair bit, but I worked my ass off and Mona Bates was fairly certain I could manage both pieces.

She had miscalculated: I failed to impress with the Beethoven. I will never know what happened but I just fell apart on the day. I was devastated, and Mona Bates was furious with me. ‘Jack, what on earth happened?’ she cried. ‘I was confident that you knew the sonata and we’d done the work. Stupid boy! You got it wrong, wrong, wrong and wrong again!’

We were both bitterly disappointed, but mostly my disappointment was for her. I hadn’t yet told her I wasn’t going to go to the conservatory. Mona Bates’s students didn’t fail; I’d been the first to do so and I believed I had thoroughly disgraced her.

But then a week later we got a letter from the chief examiner, and in it he said that attempting to play that movement of the
Pastoral
was more than they required for eighth grade, and as I was only being examined to enter at that level, they had decided to give me another opportunity because I had played the G major Prelude with assurance. Miss Bates was still angry with me and felt that I’d let her down, but this time around I played a study from Clementi’s
Gradus ad Parnassum
that I had worked on for ages and
The Tempest
, Beethoven’s sonata in D minor. After it was over, the chief examiner, Mr Hogan, told Mona Bates that not only had I passed but I had done so with flying colours, and that they greatly looked forward to welcoming me into the 1940 conservatory year, beginning in August.

Mona Bates was clearly relieved she had an unblemished record for her students but on the way back to her studio in the streetcar she said, ‘Jack, I can’t help feeling you’ve lost some of your enthusiasm. I know you had to work hard on your final school exams and perhaps that’s it. I hope to continue being your teacher after you enter the conservatory, but you’ll have to buck up, my boy. From now on, if you want a concert career, then you’re going to have to learn what real application and dedication mean.’

Normally I would have continued on in the streetcar after she got off at Jarvis Street, but I asked if I could come back with her to the studio.

She looked surprised. ‘Isn’t this a rare day off for you, Jack? You’ve passed your entrance exam. I don’t expect to see you back until your Monday lesson.’

‘It shouldn’t take long, Miss Bates,’ I replied. I wasn’t a timid small boy any more, but I can tell you I wasn’t looking forward to the next half hour. Mona Bates wasn’t an easy person to confront and I knew she regarded me as one of her star students.

Fortunately the studio wasn’t far from the streetcar stop, and for three weeks there had been guys with jackhammers digging up the road, much to the annoyance of Miss Bates, who complained, ‘While the government invents needless work for the shiftless and the lazy, they’re driving those of us who work for a living to utter distraction.’ She’d called to complain twice and was unimpressed with the response she received, telling them in no uncertain terms that she was Miss Mona Bates and that they hadn’t heard the last of the matter. As she knew everyone of importance in Canada, including the prime minister, Mr Mackenzie King, it wouldn’t have surprised me if she’d called him personally to complain. Now I was glad of the jackhammering, because the noise meant we didn’t have to talk until we were in the privacy of her studio.

‘Well, Jack, what is it?’ She pointed to the lobby couch. ‘Shall we sit?’ It was more a command than a suggestion. She walked ahead of me and sat down. ‘Out with it.’

‘Miss Bates, I don’t want to go to the conservatory,’ I blurted out.

‘Oh?’ I waited for her to say something more but she remained silent.

‘I want to be a jazz musician.’ Then I added, ‘I don’t want to be a classical pianist.’

To my surprise she didn’t explode but remained silent. Finally, she said, ‘That’s why you deliberately messed up the Beethoven, wasn’t it?’

‘No! Not at all, I promise!’ I protested, appalled at her accusation.

‘Well then, you know what you’ve done, don’t you, Jack?’

I’d expected her to be furious and yell at me, so this quiet, even voice she was affecting was disconcerting. ‘No, Miss Bates.’

‘You’ve elected to be a
nobody
when you might have been a
somebody
.’

‘I . . . I don’t see it like that, Miss Bates.’

‘Oh, of course you don’t, you’re still wet behind the ears.’

‘But, Miss Bates —’

‘Don’t be impertinent, Jack! You’re giving up years of study, and for what? To play in some smoke-filled basement with third-rate musicians when perhaps you could have played in the great concert halls of the world – Vienna, Milan, Paris, London, New York . . .’

‘You gave up
your
concert career, Miss Bates.’ I knew I was being provocative, in fact, clearly overstepping the mark.

Then the explosion came. ‘How dare you! You think it was easy . . . a woman alone, lonely, often exhausted, in a hotel room by myself or with some jumped-up impresario trying to get me into bed? I always put my art first. I was dedicated, diligent and I didn’t complain about the pokey changing rooms, bad organisation, arrogant European concert organisers, pedantic and stupid conductors, ignorant audiences!’

I could have said touché, but instead I said, ‘But then you wisely decided to quit. Miss Bates, I don’t want all that. I don’t want to be a concert pianist,’ I pleaded. ‘I want to play jazz piano and what I’ve learned from you will be the best possible training anyone could have.’

‘Balderdash! Don’t patronise me, Jack!’

‘I’ll be eighteen next year and I’ll have to join up. I’d have to leave the conservatory after only one year anyhow.’ It was a futile attempt at amelioration.

‘Oh? That’s your excuse for not continuing, is it?’