Jack of Diamonds (55 page)

I recall asking him how come his cousin was called Sam Schischka. ‘That’s Polish, isn’t it?’

He sighed. ‘My old man’s sister married a fuckin’ Polack. Never did work out any good. Useless fuck! We got only Sicilian blood in our family since fuckin’ Noah. Then he come and contaminate. But she brought Sam up I-talian, he got the dark eyes and hair, so that’s okay. Now he included in the family.’

At first I thought he was simply being nice about my coming to Nevada, but he persisted until I was forced to say, ‘Lenny, when we’re demobbed I’m thinking of taking a scholarship from the Department of Veteran Affairs to study medicine.’

I recall his look of alarm. ‘Shit, man, you goin’ back to school? Whaffor? Medicine? Hey, Jack, what you saying to me? You kiddin’ me or somethin’? What kinda bullshit is this? Goddamned doctor can mend a broken body. Jazz pianist good as you can mend a broken heart!’ He pointed to my big hands. ‘God, don’t go put no surgeon’s knife in your hands. Nosirree, no way! Them fingers meant for one thing, for playin’ fuckin’ piano like a fuckin’ angel, man!’ He’d laughed. ‘Also,’ he pointed upwards, ‘the Big Man gives you good poker hands real regular and that ain’t just luck, buddy.’ He tapped the side of his head. ‘You got it, man. In Vegas you gonna be a big hit, Jack. You can play two ways, piano and poker. Where I hail from, that combination’s just about the most perfect a man can get himself.’

And so I eventually played my final piano note in London some time after the war in Europe came to an end in May 1945. The Japs were still fighting in the Far East but this too came to an abrupt halt in August when the US dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and then on Nagasaki. If these so-called atomic bombs brought hostilities to a sudden end they didn’t affect the Entertainment Unit. There were still tens of thousands of our guys milling around England waiting for a ship to take them home and they needed entertaining. So it was business as usual for us. Finally most of the Entertainment Unit was repatriated, but Horatio John Purdy hadn’t forgiven my intransigence and set up a series of solo concerts for me, so that I was among the very last of the musicians to be demobbed, arriving back in Toronto in March 1946, ten months after VE Day.

Lenny Giancana was right. It was freezing in Toronto.

PART THREE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

THE GOOD PART OF
returning to Toronto was finding the now Mrs Gertrude Reed settled in and a very happy woman. There was no doubt Nick Reed was being loved to bits, and he seemed calmly content – in his world of burn victims I guess normalcy was a blessing. My mother looked splendid and seemed to have gained in confidence. Under the guidance of Miss Frostbite, she had learned how to behave in company, and, in her stylish new clothes, she looked the part of a top surgeon’s wife. In fact, she confessed to me that, after all the years of hand-me-downs, the most difficult part of becoming Nick’s wife hadn’t been the novel sensation of conjugal bliss or sharing a double bed again but the seemingly simply act of going into a dress shop to purchase something off the rack for herself.

‘Miss Frostbite took me into Eaton’s to buy a dress to wear to a fundraising do at Nick’s hospital,’ she recalled not long after I had returned to Toronto. ‘I didn’t sleep a wink the night before, and that’s not an exaggeration. When we got off the trolley car outside the shop I froze, absolutely terrified. Miss Frostbite took me by the arm and urged me on but I couldn’t, for the life of me, budge. It was like I’d been cemented in, Jack.’

I laughed. ‘When was the last time you’d been to Eaton’s?’

‘Oh my, let me think . . . 1929 . . . just before the Wall Street Crash. Miss Frostbite wanted to buy new shoes as well, but that was going too far; I had the shoes Miss Bates gave me, which were still good, the ones I wore to all your concerts, and the fashions haven’t really changed all that much. The lovely new dress she made me buy was all that was needed and I felt very smart.’

I grinned. ‘She finally got you into the shop then?’

‘Yes, but the worst part was that I felt so guilty.’

‘Guilty? What for, spending money or for creating a scene on the pavement?’

‘Yes, both, but mainly for not going to Mrs Sopworth at the Presbyterian Clothing Depot! All those years she’d keep an eye out for me, dropping me notes:
Gertrude, I have a little something I think you’re going to like.
Or she’d say, “My dear, I have some good practical delicates”, meaning of course, undies.’ She smiled. ‘She was generally right, too, about me liking it.’

Miss Frostbite had also made her change her hairstyle. ‘“Gertrude, you have lovely hair but that long, straight look just has to go, it’s much too plain. Nice, but rather too predictable,” that’s what she said to me. I nearly died at the very thought. All those bitter nights when you soaked my chilblains and then brushed my hair – they’re among my most treasured memories, Jack.’ She smiled rather sadly. ‘“No, it
mustn’t
be cut, I
can’t
have it cut,” I’d insisted. “Cut?” she said. “Who mentioned anything about cutting? It’s beautiful, my dear. I thought just a bit of a wave,
a la
Veronica Lake.” Can you imagine, Jack? At my age, with hair like a film star . . .’

I looked more closely at her hair. She still wore it down to her shoulders but sort of softly curled, falling across her right eyebrow. It looked very glam and its blue-black gloss was still as deep as ever. Gosh, she was pretty, and with her straight nose and her new-found happiness, the new, improved Gertrude Reed was even more of a pleasure to be around.

While she and Nick were both keen for me to share their house, I knew my stay would be a short one. In fact, if I hadn’t thought she’d be terribly upset if I didn’t, I probably wouldn’t have stayed with my mother in the first instance. She and Nick needed time alone together, not a great lump of a returning soldier landing on their doorstep and messing up her neat-as-a-pin home. If I was going to stay in Toronto, which in my mind seemed increasingly unlikely, I’d get a place of my own.

The little house was everything she could have wished for, small and cosy and not all that different on the outside from our original Cabbagetown home. The big difference was that it was in a nice downtown neighbourhood and she and Nick owned it outright. Despite the post-war shortages it was nicely appointed, with a parlour (now referred to as the lounge room) featuring Mac’s wedding present, a second-hand chaise longue he’d found somewhere, and repaired and freshly varnished and upholstered in Miss Frostbite purple. With his penchant for hoarding I have no doubt the purple velvet was left over from a past Jazz Warehouse foyer job.

The post-war Mac was happy as a pig in a wallow, with plenty of work to keep him out and about. When he was home he spent all his time in his workshop in the backyard. He’d had heating and electric lighting installed so he could spend his evenings there safe from Dolly’s acerbic tongue, her presence restricted to the evening meal and a goodnight grunt. He’d taken to making guitars as a hobby. ‘Just you wait, Jack, jazz soloists – just a singer on guitar – are gonna be the next big thing and they’ll all want custom-made guitars.’

‘Sing while playing the guitar? Yeah, blues maybe, but jazz? I’ve heard Django Reinhardt, but he doesn’t sing and he often plays with a jazz violinist – Stéphane Grappelli. They set up the Quintet of the Hot Club of France,’ I said, showing off a little. ‘Even then, I don’t think you’re going to get too many imitators. Solo guitarists? I can’t see it, Mac.’

‘Mark my words, Jack, the jazz singer guitarist – solo – will be the next big thing.’

‘Cost a bit to set up, won’t it?’ I asked.

‘Jack, that’s the nice part, the twins are backing me, anything I want.’

Mac loved jazz and as a craftsman he never cut corners, so a handmade Mac guitar would be a nice thing to possess. He seemed pretty certain about what he was saying, but I wasn’t going to hold my breath waiting for his prediction to come true. In the meantime, Mac was enjoying himself, and it was long overdue. I was happy for him.

The twins were well on their way to making their mark in respectable financial and property circles, backed, as I mentioned, by the advice and financial help of Mr Logical and the services of his bank. Whether they continued to provide their unique services to him as part of the deal I shall never know, but it looked as though they were destined to become very wealthy, their past as high-class whores soon forgotten. It was as if the trauma of war and the euphoria of a lasting peace had expunged any dubious aspects of their pre-war past. There would always be a few old families whose doors would remain firmly shut to post-war upstarts such as the twins, but new money had a way of overcoming most obstacles, providing one behaved oneself, and if Mommy and Daddy were not up to the mark, you kept them out of sight, used your knife and fork correctly, voted for the right party and donated to the right charities.

For her part, Dolly was now established as the ‘Queen of Quilt’, having won a blue ribbon at ‘The Ex’ (Canadian National Exhibition) in the last show before Canada got serious about the war. She had set up the Dolly McClymont School of Quilting, also financed by the twins, in a new shopping centre they partly owned together with Mr Logical and his bank. According to Mac, she was becoming very popular. It seemed her forthright, no-nonsense style was proving to be an asset. ‘She gets results. People say she’s the best in the biz,’ Mac claimed, not entirely without a sense of pride in his churlish spouse, who, though I found it hard to believe, may well have softened now that she was financially independent and free of Cabbagetown and the constant grind of poverty.

As for my own post-war life, I found myself in somewhat of a dilemma, with a contest between the head and the heart. Dr Reed, now my stepfather, was convinced I’d make an excellent doctor after my work with him as a medic during the war, and was anxious that I apply for a veteran’s scholarship to study medicine. My mom was quite overcome by the notion that her precious son might someday be a doctor. In her eyes there could be no more worthy vocation – this was the top of the Christmas tree. A jazz musician was something, but an MD was something else; in one generation the family would have leapt from poverty and obscurity to the pinnacle of social success.

I’d sent in my application and subsequently attended the first two interviews with the War Veterans Department, armed with all the correct references from the relevant top army medical brass, organised by Nick. My medal as a medic in the battlefield didn’t do any harm either. I felt I’d gone well in both interviews, and was yet to undergo a third and final one in front of army and civilian medical men and a solitary woman, a professor of something at McGill University in Montreal, before being accepted. Nick assured me that it was pretty much a rubber-stamp process.

I tried to convince myself that I could continue with jazz as an amateur and that being an MD would somehow compensate me for staying in my homeland. I’d had my fun in the Army Entertainment Corps, sowing my wild oats with some generous English girls who had allowed me to put Juicy Fruit’s lessons to excellent use, so maybe it was time to settle down. But in my heart I knew these attempts to convince myself weren’t succeeding.

During the war I’d developed into a reasonable poker player, skilled enough to take my place confidently at almost any card table, provided I had the appropriate stake. You grow up fast at a poker table, but now I found myself in Toronto, a town of Scots Presbyterians, which, despite a burst of post-war activity, continued to progress slowly and cautiously. Like a lot of veterans I felt unsettled and out of place among those who had stayed at home during the war, so the prospect of settling down again to study to become an MD, so I could write prescriptions for cough mixture and play the odd bracket at the Jazz Warehouse on weekends, seemed a little too much like crawling backwards into the future. War and travel change a young guy more than he realises, until he returns to his old environment. Or, as Joe put it, ‘Jazzboy, I guess you jes forced to grow up some in a hurry, son. You gone put new footprints in da old ones ain’t gunna help none.’

To add to my discomfort, I learned that a highly exaggerated version of my war experiences was circulating, recounted in hushed tones when I wasn’t around to set the record straight. If you left out the details it reeled off the teller’s tongue very neatly – I was a young lad whose manhood had been forged in the heat of fierce combat. As I gathered from Mac, my battle experience now featured men dropping like ninepins around me while I tended the wounded, despite being severely wounded myself. The most colourful version was that a German sniper’s bullet had removed my ear and gouged a ditch in my skull. The most heroic was that I’d personally rescued several men who were wounded and unable to reach the landing craft, throwing myself into the sea and heaving them out before they drowned. If I protested that the sea was sufficiently shallow to stand in and that I’d merely yanked a few wounded men aboard, my listeners glanced at each other in a knowing way.