Joplin's Ghost

If at night while passin’ a graveyard

You shake with fear the most,

Just step a little faster forward,

Before you see a ghost.

S
COTT
J
OPLIN
,
Treemonisha

“We often dream

without the least suspicion of unreality:

‘Sleep hath its own world,’

and it is often as lifelike as the other.”

D
IARY OF
L
EWIS
C
ARROLL

What we play is life.

L
OUIS
A
RMSTRONG

1917

The new arrival wheeled himself through the day room of Manhattan State Hospital on Ward’s Island, whispering to his dead wife, who always walked beside him. The man had outlived one wife and his baby girl—
pure bad luck,
his first wife had called him. His second wife, Freddie, was the only one of the dead who still enjoyed his company.

He was talking to her, as he often did, about the stage set he was going to build as soon as he was able: murals of cloud banks, majestic live oaks and a sea of ripening cornstalks. Talking to Freddie was like walking onto the stage itself, standing in the stare of a footlight. The light filled him with wonder, and wonder was hard to come by these days.

But Freddie’s voice interrupted him so loudly that he wondered why the droop-jawed attendant in the doorway didn’t call for them to hush that racket near so many insane and dying.

There it is, Scott,
Freddie said, quivering his ear.
There—do you see?

Scott Joplin gazed around the room, where the streaked windows invited in an awful dead winter sun that stole more than it gave. Institutional wooden chairs circled a scuffed old table that offered two checkerboards but no checkers, beside a Graphophone with a working motor but no needle to play the cylinders. A sobbing younger man sat cross-legged on the floor, his nest of privates in plain view from a hollow in his thin, urine-stained gown. Why would Freddie wrest him away from his beautiful setting to bring him back to this lunatic’s meeting hall?

Do you see it?
Freddie, as always, was persistent.

Then, he did see it: An upright piano stood against the far wall. Scott’s eyes had missed it before because it was in a shadowed corner, nearly invisible in the room’s bland light. It was his rosewood Rosenkranz, the piano he had found in the alleyway when he could still stand and walk. The piano he had played for Freddie during her dying days. Scott blinked, sure it was a trick of his imagination. One always must be on guard against one’s imagination, he remembered. “Did you do this somehow, Freddie?” Scott said. At Bellevue, his last home, he’d been forced to live without a piano within reach for the first time in memory. But here he was in a new place—a worse place, one step closer to oblivion—and his own piano was waiting for him.

Another hallucination, then. It wasn’t the first, and wouldn’t be his last, or so his doctors said. Every day held another bizarre surprise. But this hallucination was more stubborn than most. Scott flopped his arms against the wheels of his wheelchair, making slow progress across the room, and the piano remained in place. Closer, now. And closer again.

“I’ll be damned,” he said, panting from his effort.

Scott reached out his trembling hand. Although his wrist dangled as if it were broken, he was able to press a single key. High G. No hallucination could sound so sweet.

The single, delicate note awoke the memory of being at Lessie Mae’s on Main Street in Sedalia, waiting quietly in the wings while Happy Eddie or Mo the Show clowned on the piano with acrobatic fervor for the hooting crowd. Those boys played like carnival performers, drawing men’s purposeful eyes away from bold cleavage and half-empty glasses of whiskey. When it was Scott’s turn to play, Lessie Mae always waved at him with her damp pink handkerchief from behind the cash register, her mark of approval.
Go on, Scotty—TEACH ’em, professor!

When he played, the carnival ended. A concert began.

“Music’s swell. You play?” the sanitarium attendant said to Scott.

Scott nodded slowly. He did everything slowly now. “Used to,” he said. His voice was a sick old man’s, and he wasn’t yet forty-nine. He couldn’t always remember his age, but the sight of the burnished piano had brightened his mind. Brightened every part of him.

“Go on ahead and take five minutes, then. They say a lady donated it to the hospital in a patient’s name. Mind you don’t break it.”

Break it! That was a stupid thing to say.
The woman who sent it was my wife, you fool. Don’t you know who I am?
Scott thought. But that was the point, wasn’t it? He was the only one who knew, and the occasional ability to forget was the only part of his illness he enjoyed. Lottie
had
said she’d have a surprise for him when she came to see him this Friday, but she’d never said she was sending the piano after him. God bless Lottie again.

But this piano would have followed you whether Lottie sent it or not,
Scott thought, and such thoughts didn’t disturb him the way they used to. Accepting the state of things had made his days easier. The Rosenkranz would follow him anywhere he went. He had found the Rosenkranz in the alley and wiped it clean with his own hands, and the Rosenkranz wouldn’t forget.

“I think I will play,” Scott said. His tongue was no longer useful, and his words had sounded like
ayethinnniwillplayyyy,
a mouthful of oatmeal.

He hadn’t let anybody except Lottie hear him play a piano in two years, since that show in D.C. where they had practically pushed him on the stage. What could he have done?
Sounded like a little child
. That’s what he heard Eubie Blake said.

“Yeah—I’ll p-play.” He was excited now.

Scott’s wheelchair was too low for him to reach the keyboard comfortably, so he hoisted himself into the mismatched chair at the piano’s knees, another labor that took his breath. The attendant steadied him, but Scott had moved out of his chair by himself, so he
wasn’t
helpless. For a moment, Scott felt bewildered as he stared at his hands, shivering claws against the keys. His skin didn’t smell right either—urine and talcum and something else buried beneath it all, something sickly that could only be Death. That smell was everywhere here.

“Do you know ‘I’m in Love with the Mother of My Best Girl’?” the attendant said. “I love that one. It’s a hoot.”

Scott nodded, but only to silence him. Anything he played was sure to be unrecognizable. The Rosenkranz was not a forgiving piano; he’d learned that the first night they were reunited. But he would play, if only because Lottie wanted him to. Small solace was better than none at all.

Habit took Scott’s hands to a natural pose, and his fingers plunged, striking the opening notes. The music plodded like old honey hugging the bottom of the jar, but he was shocked his fingers remembered how to move at his bidding at all.
Maybe I CAN play a tune or two—

Scott’s middle finger slipped, curdling the melody with a B-natural in the second measure. He cringed, playing on, but his piano didn’t offer him any music—only awful, mind-rending noise.

You coldhearted trickster,
Scott thought, remembering the old conjurer from the train who had celebrated the chance to curse him with his fate all those years ago.
Are you and your master happy with what you’ve reduced me to?

Scott let out a soundless moan, suddenly striking his hand against the keys so hard that the ragged edge of a keytop snagged his pinky, biting into his tender flesh. Droplets of Scott’s warm, runny blood marked the piano keys with red fingerprints. Scott was so consumed in pain—most of it in places people couldn’t see—that he had no senses left to notice something so trifling as torn skin.
But you don’t mind, do you? You know the taste of blood already, don’t you, my old friend?
The Rosenkranz had been soiled with blood the day he found it in the alley. If only he had recognized a bad omen when he saw one, he thought. He had been cursed all along!

Scott’s lips parted to release a moan. His head drooped, suddenly too heavy to carry, and tears splashed from the tip of his nose to the piano keys, seeping between them, turning his blood pink and dampening his useless fingers. If he could choose his time and place to die, he had found it.
Take me, whatever your price, and let my soul rest here.
He prayed to anyone who would hear him.

Something made Scott look up, interrupting his tears. His tall, lovely girl-bride stood beside him, half-shrouded in misty light. Freddie had not shown herself to him since his confinement to this wretched place. My God! Could she be an emissary from the Hereafter? Was his prayer answered so quickly?

“Freddie?” he said, peering more closely at his beloved. Freddie’s face was always dreamlike to him, in the way his dreams were often spare of details. Scott felt her spirit near him, yet he could not quite see the woman he remembered hidden in the light.

“I’m here, Scott.” Her voice was not in his ear, this time, but from her lips.

“T-Take me with you.” He couldn’t even climb to his feet to go to her. She would have to carry him wherever he was going next.

“I’m sorry, Scott. I can’t,” she said. After all these years, now it was Freddie who sounded reasonable, and he had become rash. Freddie glided closer, until she stood directly over him. His nostrils longed for her scent, and he thought he smelled chrysanthemums. He tried to reach for her, but his arms failed to move, useless.

“Who’re you talkin’ to, Uncle?” the attendant called from across the room, where he was pushing a mop in halfhearted circles. “If you’re not gonna treat that piano with respect, don’t play it at all. Bang on it again like that, and you’re goin’ to your room.”

Do you see what it’s come to, Freddie? I’m treated like a child, as if I’ve never lived in the world. I’ve vanished before my eyes. How can any man endure this curse of obsolescence?

“F-Freddie…” he begged, struggling to be understood. “Take me.”

Freddie’s head shook back and forth, kind but firm. “Do you want me to help you play?”

“Yes,” he said, relieved. Death was best, but playing would give him a moment’s respite. “Yes, I w-want to play.”

Freddie leaned over him, her gentle warmth draping his shoulder. She took one of his gnarled hands into hers, then the other, and raised them back to their berth on the piano keys. When she touched him with those light, cool hands, Scott felt an ugly premonition seize his frame, a future memory that made him pull his hands away. Freddie was visiting him from somewhere so far away that he couldn’t calculate what or where it might be—but Freddie was only meant to visit. Mingling their hands on this bloodied piano would be a terrible burden on her soul, imprisoning her here. His dear girl deserved to be free.

“Freddie…wait,” he said, the most selfless words he had ever spoken.

“Shhhh,”
Freddie said, and her fingers slipped inside of his as if he were a hollow glove. The power of her youth coursed through him, electric. “Play, Scott. Use my hands to play.”

Before Scott’s amazed eyes, his fingers webbed apart, stretching. He wiggled them all, witnessing the return of an amazing limberness he had forgotten in these years of horror. Scott gasped, tears springing. “Dear heart…how…?”

“Play, Scott.
Play
.” Her urgency told him he didn’t have much time. Already, Freddie’s voice was more coarse than he remembered, someone else’s altogether.

Scott played.

The first piece that came to his eager fingers was the one he composed for Freddie in his worst hours of mourning, his dignified waltz in a flowing
cantabile
that captured his heart’s song like no other. Her offered it to Freddie again now, with exaltation instead of grief.

“That one’s my favorite, Scott,” Freddie whispered, as he had hoped she would.

Scott hated to rush through the waltz’s
andante
finale, but so many pieces awaited! How could he forsake his dearest and most loathsome child? Perspiration sprang to Scott’s forehead as he played “Maple Leaf Rag” in the manner it deserved, crowning himself the song’s master again for the first time in years. His joy made him breathless. His heart, which he thought had died, raced to the syncopated melodies cascading like fall leaves from his nimble fingers. The piece made his feet twitch, longing to dance. “Maple Leaf” erased his sorrow, even now.

He would have this played at his funeral! He would make Lottie promise.

“That’s
old
. I’m tired of that one, Uncle,” the attendant said.

When Scott finished “Maple Leaf,” he played the Overture from
Treemonisha
next—leaping from his most overly praised creation to his most ignored. This time, the effect upon him was even greater: Scott’s daydreams sprang to life in the music. Suddenly, he and Freddie were in his cornfield, beneath an infinite afternoon sky, with merry circles of dancers. So many familiar faces! Here was dear Louis, in his Parisian coat and white Stetson. And his brother Will, stepping higher than the rest. Around and around they danced.

“I’ll be back soon, Scott,” Freddie said.

When Scott looked toward the voice, Freddie was gone.

No, Freddie. Don’t leave me yet. Not again.

Scott’s right hand jerked, slapping
Treemonisha
to a halt with four noisy, uninvited tones. He was exhausted suddenly, sagging, all but paralyzed. How had he ever sat upright? The piano’s last note stayed suspended in the air for a time, then floated down to silence, nothing.