Sing for Me (20 page)

As soon as I’m home, I give Rob a call.

“Tomorrow night is Tuesday,” I say.

He agrees that it is.

“I’ll meet you at our usual place and time.”

“Is this about your dad, Rose?”

Anger stirs in me. I clench my hand around the receiver, and the anger becomes determination.

“No. This is about me.”

Once more, it’s a cold, stormy night—not snowing this time, but sleeting. Once more, I change clothes in the backseat of Rob’s car.

When we arrive at Calliope’s, Rob makes no mention of valet service. This relieves me, as any sign of levelheadedness on his part always does. He drops me off at the club’s door and then drives off to park. I don’t relish the thought of entering the place on my own, but then I think of Theo and the music, and I step inside.

I come to a dead stop as the door closes behind me. The
place is emptier than I’ve ever seen it. There are men drinking at the bar, talking with the bartenders, and people are gathered at tables. But there’s no press and pull of the crowd, because there’s no crowd. With more than enough room to walk around freely, I can see the stage fine even from way back here.

Perhaps Rob and I got the night or time wrong. Or something has happened—my heart quickens—perhaps to Theo. Only one of the Chess Men stands on the dimly lit stage—the portly white bassist. He draws his bow over a block of rosin. His brow is furrowed; he looks anxious, too.

I don’t know what to do with myself while I wait for Rob. To put it another way: I know what I
don’t
want to do. I don’t want to sidle up to the bar and spend my little bit of spare change on a soda, all the while negotiating the glances and advances of strangers. I don’t want to sit myself down at a table, dreading the moment when the brashest stranger joins me. I don’t want to fend someone off.

I look away from the bar before the men there have a chance to see me looking. There’s a coatroom I’ve never noticed before for the crowd. A girl sits on a stool behind the half-door. Bored, she blows a stream of cigarette smoke at the ceiling.

I go to her, take off my trusty old coat, hold it out. She looks at my coat as she might look at a piece of refuse, drags on her cigarette, then grinds out the lipstick-stained butt in the ashtray on the table beside her. Blowing smoke, she takes my coat and hangs it up. She sits down again and looks off into the distance.

“Hey, you! Blue Dress!”

I turn. From the stage, the bassist is pointing his bow at me.

“It’s about time!”

The bassist is all but shouting. The coat-check girl scrutinizes me. The men at the bar and the bartenders, too.

“Hustle on over here, Blue Dress. Hurry!”

The bassist beckons with his bow. To ignore him would only draw more attention, so I make my way to the stage. This close, I can see the rosin dusting the tips of his calloused fingers. I open my mouth to ask what he wants from me, but before I can say a word, he swings his bow to the side, points behind the red velvet stage curtain.

“This is the quickest way. The others are waiting. Let’s go.”

“But—” I glance quickly around. Still no sign of Rob.

“No ‘buts.’ We expected you two hours ago.” In a mincing, falsetto the bassist says, “ ‘Look for the brown-haired girl in the knockout blue dress.’ ” He scowls. “We’d about given up on getting knocked out, I gotta say. As it is, you may have killed our chances tonight, being so late.”

I gape at him. “I’m not that girl.”

The bassist doesn’t seem to hear. “Lilah said you were good. She also said you could be unreliable.” He regards me from beneath his thick eyebrows, which are as red as his hair. “Not as unreliable as she is, though, since you did ultimately show up, and you appear to be clean and sober.”

I shiver at the memory of the needle and syringe. “Is Miss Buckley all right?”

“She’s safe. Getting help, she says.” He leans down and sniffs my hair. “You
are
clean and sober, right? You look it, you smell it, but like my ma always said, looks and smells can be deceiving.” The bassist beckons again with his bow. “Never mind. Don’t answer. At this point it doesn’t matter, does it? Come on. The others are waiting.”

“ ‘The others’?”

He gives me a hard look. “Listen, either get to work or get lost, Blue Dress. Too much is on the line here to mess around.”

I follow the bassist backstage to where Theo and the rest of the Chess Men sit in a small, cramped room, waiting. Theo looks up from the keyboard he’s chalked onto a tabletop, and his eyes widen at the sight of me in the doorway.

“Better late than never.” The bassist’s voice is grim as he ushers me inside.

The licorice-whip-thin clarinetist looks up from the reed he’s whittling down to size, the bald drummer from the wooden crate against which he’s tapping his sticks. Theo’s hands come down hard on the chalked notes, smudging them.

“Well, if it isn’t the mysterious Elaine.” The clarinetist runs his reed back and forth across his dark cheek as if testing for rough edges.

“I’m not Elaine,” I say.

The bassist turns on me, reminding me of nothing so much as one of Aunt Astrid’s big bulls, suddenly riled. “Why didn’t you say so?”

“I said so,” I say.

Theo stands and goes to the bassist. “Jim.” Theo sets his hand on the bassist’s shoulder. “Calm down. It’ll be all right.”

“It better be,” Jim mutters, shaking off Theo’s hand.

“So.” The drummer taps his sticks lightly, nervously on the crate. “Elaine or not, can you sing? That’s all I care about.”

“Oh, she can sing, all right,” Theo says.

The clarinetist laughs. “Well, well. Get a load of you, my man, going all dreamy-eyed.”

“I didn’t come to sing.” I edge closer to Theo. “I came to listen.”

Theo says, “You came to sing.” His fingers brush against my arm, and I know it’s not an accident. None of this. Not his touch—the warmth of it, radiating so close to where Dad hurt me, soothing that lingering pain. And not my being here, either. “God knows, you came to sing,” Theo says, confirming my thoughts.

“Yes,” I hear myself say.

Theo draws in a deep breath and turns to the other men. “This is Rose Sorensen, fellows.” His hand isn’t touching mine now, but he’s standing so close I can feel the air thrumming warmly between us. We might as well be two magnets. “Now that we’ve taken Miss Sorensen by surprise,” Theo continues, “let’s give her a chance to get comfortable, okay? A few more minutes of waiting won’t hurt anybody. Then we’ll get started. Rose, do you need something? A glass of water?”

“ ‘Get comfortable’?”
Jim slams his block of rosin down on the table. “We got a slim chance here, and the clock is ticking, Theo.”

Theo doesn’t take his eyes from me. “Water?”

I shake my head.

“Anything?”

I shake my head again.

“Okay. You think you can sing for us, then? Any song you want, Rose. You pick.”

I swallow hard. “First tell me what’s going on.”

“I told you!” Jim’s face has turned nearly as red as his hair.

“Tell me again.” I look at Theo. “You tell me.”

So Theo does. They learned early this evening that Lilah was in such a bad way she was unable to perform. She’d found someone to replace her—a real professional who could nail the gig, no problem. Blue dress. Brown hair. Elaine. But Elaine
never showed, even as the crowd gathered, and Calliope’s owner and his backers got madder and madder. “I tried to reason with them,” Theo says, “but they said they were taking a risk on us as it is. ‘Come back when you’ve found your girl,’ they said, and then they docked us our pay and said this was our last chance. And because the crowd wanted something different than we could give—well, a lot of folks went elsewhere, including the boss and his friends.”

“We’re dead in the water,” Jim says grimly.

Theo shakes his head, determined. “Not necessarily. Not if we come back better than before. We won’t get paid tonight, but we can get one last chance.” Theo turns to me, lifts his chalky hands in appeal. “Pretend it’s just me here, Rose. Sing for me.”

Heat creeps up my cheeks.
What’s happening here? Something, everything, anything might happen.

Quickly Theo says, “Or if that doesn’t work, pretend it’s just your family. Sing for them.” He claps his hand to his forehead as if suddenly struck by something. “For pity’s sake, Rose, sing for
yourself
.”

I close my eyes.

Sing for me.

The voice in my head might be Sophy’s, Theo’s, or mine. It might be the voice of God, for the way it works on me. Eyes still closed, a hymn takes me over and I’m singing:

My life flows on in endless song;

Above earth’s lamentation . . .

In my mind’s eye, I see Rob, standing by his father’s casket. Dad, driving away from our house in Oak Park for the last time.
Mother, helping Sophy through one of her seizures. Sophy, crying in the shelter of the gazebo in Garfield Park. Mrs. Chastain and Mary, and the rest of Theo’s family. Theo at the piano. Mahalia Jackson and her choir. I sing on:

All things are mine since I am His—

How can I keep from singing?

When the hymn is finished, I open my eyes to see Theo, his smile like light.

Jim claps his hands together one, two, three times, stirring up a thin cloud of rosin dust. “You’re in, Blue Dress.”

“Where you been hiding, anyway?” the clarinetist asks.

“Does it matter?” The drummer gives a quick roll of his sticks against the crate. “She’s here now.”

Theo beams at us all. “Rose, this is Jim.” The redheaded bassist salutes me with his bow. “Dex.” The clarinetist nods in my direction. “Ira.” The drummer gives me a blue-eyed wink.

I clear my throat. Talking proves suddenly harder than singing, for all the emotions I’m feeling. “Nice to meet you all.”

The Chess Men, in one way or another, say it’s nice to meet me, too.

Theo flexes his fingers, suddenly all business. “Jim’s right. The clock is ticking.” He takes a piece of chalk from his pants pocket and starts marking out a fresh row of keys. “I can’t do much with a tabletop, Rose, but how about if the other fellows accompany you on a quick rendition of ‘Blow the Man Down’?”

I laugh, and the muscles in my throat relax. I’m singing. No one is the worse for it. People are happy. And there’s talk of paychecks in the future if we get tonight right.

The door bangs open. “Rose!”

I turn to see Rob, standing in the doorway, his coat half on, half off.

“I’ve been looking all over for you!” Rob sounds as disgruntled as he looks.

The Chess Men go very quiet and still. Perhaps they think Rob is my boyfriend. Perhaps members of the group have encountered more than a few irate boyfriends in their time. I glance at Theo, whose gaze darts from me to Rob and back again. Last time Theo saw Rob, Rob was about as drunk and unfriendly as Rob gets.

I go to my cousin. “You got your wish.”

Rob raises an eyebrow. “What’s that?”

“You won’t have to climb a fire escape and listen outside my bedroom window to hear me sing tonight.”

“Laerke!” Rob throws his arms around me.

I hug him back, then push him playfully away. His shirt is unbuttoned at his belly again. I button it, adjust his collar. “Why don’t you go freshen up a bit more while I practice?” I say.

He glances down, grimaces at his general disarray, then gives me a swift peck on the cheek and hurries off to get snazzy.

I turn back to the Chess Men. Dex slips the reed into the mouthpiece of his clarinet, blows a few notes, testing, then whips through “Blow the Man Down.” When Theo gives the downbeat, Ira taps out a quirky rhythm on the crate, Jim plucks a few low answering notes on his bass. I join in. I sing the first verse a few times as they work on synchronizing the easy, rocking rhythm. Each time through becomes more playful than the last. Sophy would love this, I think, as we wind down “Blow the
Man Down” and bust out into “The Very Thought of You.” Sophy would kiss the air.

Halfway through our third song, a hollow-chested man in horn-rimmed glasses pokes his head into the room. “What’s the news, fellows?”

Theo proudly introduces me as the new singer and then says, “Rose, this is George, the stage manager.”

George looks me up and down over the rim of his glasses. Seen one vocalist, you seen them all, his expression implies. He turns to Theo. “You want I should go out and find the boss?”

Theo looks at the rest of the Chess Men, who nod.

“We’ll try out a few numbers on the small house. Then, unless we say differently, yes, please do that,” Theo says.

We run through “The Way You Look Tonight” until I’ve got a pretty good sense of the tempo and mood they want to work with. When I forget the words, Theo hands me the sheet music, telling me that this crowd won’t mind. “They’re here for the liquor, not the Chess Men,” he says.

At one point, Dex stops in midsong and lowers his clarinet. “This beats all, Rose.” He snaps his fingers. “Like that, and you’re hep to us. How do you figure?”