Mr. Vertigo (11 page)

The master was twenty-nine years old then, a radiant specimen of manhood sporting a waxed handlebar mustache and an impeccably knotted tie. Mother Sioux joined forces with him that morning, and for the next fifteen years she stuck with him through every twist and turn of his career, raising Aesop as if he were her own. I can’t remember all the places she talked about, but the best stories always seemed to be centered around Chicago, a town they visited often. That was where Mrs. Witherspoon hailed from, and once Mother Sioux got onto that subject, my head started to spin. She gave me only the sketchiest outline, but the bare facts were so curious, so weirdly theatrical, that it wasn’t long before I had embroidered them into a full-blown drama. Marion Witherspoon had married her late husband when she was twenty or twenty-one. He himself had been raised in Kansas, the son of a wealthy family from Wichita who had run off to the big city the moment he came into his inheritance. Mother Sioux described him as a handsome, fun-loving rake, one of those mealy-mouthed charmers who could talk his way into a woman’s skirt in less time than it took Jim Thorpe to tie his shoe. The young couple lived high on the hog for three or four years, but Mr. Witherspoon had a weakness for the ponies, not to speak of a penchant for dabbling in a friendly game of cards some fifteen or twenty nights a month, and since he demonstrated more
enthusiasm than skill at his chosen vices, his once vast fortune shrank to a pittance. Toward the end, the situation became so desperate that it looked as if he and his wife would have to move back to the family home in Wichita and that he, Charlie Witherspoon, the polo-playing gadabout and jokester of the North Side, would actually have to look for nine-to-five employment in some dreary grain-belt insurance company. That was where Master Yehudi entered the picture—in the back room of a Rush Street pool hall at four in the morning with said Mr. Witherspoon and two or three anonymous others, all of them sitting around a green felt table holding cards in their hands. As they say in the funny papers, it wasn’t Charlie’s night, and there he was about to go belly-up, sitting on three jacks and a pair of kings without a dime to throw in the pot. Master Yehudi was the only one left in the game, and since this was clearly the last good chance Charlie would ever have, he decided to go for broke. First he bet his property in Cibola, Kansas (which had once been his grandparents’ farm), signing over the house and the land on a scrap of paper, and then, when Master Yehudi hung in there and raised him, the gentleman signed another scrap of paper whereby he relinquished all claims to his own wife. Master Yehudi was holding four sevens, and since four of a kind always beats a full house, no matter how much royalty is crammed into that house, he won the farm and the woman, and poor, defeated Charlie Witherspoon, at last at his wit’s end, wobbled home at dawn, entered the room where his wife lay asleep, and extracted a revolver from the bedside table, whereupon he blew his brains out right there on the bed.

That was how Master Yehudi came to pitch his tent in Kansas. After years of wandering, he finally had a place to call his own, and while it wasn’t necessarily the place he’d had in mind, he wasn’t about to spurn what those four sevens had given him.
What puzzled me was how Mrs. Witherspoon fit into the setup. If her husband had died broke, from whence had sprung the wherewithal for her to live so comfortably in her Wichita mansion, to pamper herself with fine clothes and emerald-green sedans and still have enough left over to fund Master Yehudi’s projects? Mother Sioux had a ready answer for that one. Because she was smart. Once she caught on to the profligate ways of her husband, Mrs. Witherspoon had begun fiddling with the books, stashing away bits of their monthly income in high-yield investments, stocks, corporate bonds, and other financial transactions. By the time she was widowed, this hanky-panky had produced some robust profits, multiplying her initial outlay by a factor of four, and with this tidy little fortune tucked into her purse, she was more than able to eat, drink, and make merry. But what about Master Yehudi? I asked. He’d won her fair and square in that poker game, and if Mrs. Witherspoon belonged to him, why weren’t they married? Why wasn’t she here with us darning his socks and cooking his grub and carrying his babies in her womb?

Mother Sioux shook her head slowly back and forth. “It’s a new world we’re living in,” she said. “Ain’t nobody can own another’s body no more. A woman ain’t chattel to be bought and sold by men, least of all one of them new women like the master’s lady. They love and hate, they grapple and spoon, they want and don’t want, and as time goes on they each sink deeper under the other’s skin. It’s a real show, patty-cake, the follies and the circus all rolled into one, and dollars to doughnuts it’s going to be like that till the day they die.”

These stories gave me a lot to chew on during the hours I spent alone, but the more I pondered what Mother Sioux had told me, the more twisted and confounding it became. My head grew weary from trying to parse the ins and outs of such complex doings, and at a certain point I just stopped, telling myself I’d
short my brain wires if I kept up all that cogitation. Grown-ups were impenetrable creatures, and if I ever became one myself, I promised to write a letter back to my old self explaining how they got to be that way—but for now I’d had enough. It was a relief to let go like that, but once I abandoned those thoughts, I fell into a boredom so profound, so taxing in its bland and feathery sameness, that I finally went back to work. It wasn’t because I wanted to, it’s just that I couldn’t think of any other way to fill the time.

I locked myself in my room again, and after three days of fruitless endeavor, I discovered what I had been doing wrong. The whole problem lay in my approach. I had somehow gotten it into my head that loft and locomotion could only be achieved through a two-step process. First levitate as high as I could, then push out and go. I had trained myself to do the one thing, and I figured I could accomplish the second thing by grafting it onto the first. But the truth was that the second thing canceled out what came before it. Again and again, I would lift myself into the air according to the old method, but as soon as I started to think about moving forward, I would flutter back to the ground, landing on my feet again before I had a chance to get going. If I failed once, I failed a thousand times, and after a while I felt so disgusted, so bedeviled by my incompetence, that I took to throwing tantrums and pounding my fists on the floor. At last, in the full flush of anger and defeat, I picked myself up and jumped straight into the wall, hoping to smash myself into unconsciousness. I leapt, and for the briefest eyeblink of a second, just before my shoulder thudded against the plaster, I sensed that I was floating—that even as I rushed forward, I was losing touch with gravity, going up with a familiar buoyant surge as I lunged through the air. Before I could grasp what was happening, I had bounced off the wall and was crumpling onto the floor in pain.
My whole left side throbbed from the impact, but I didn’t care. I jumped to my feet and did a little dance around the room, laughing my head off for the next twenty minutes. I had cracked the secret. I understood. Forget right angles, I told myself. Think arc, think trajectory. It wasn’t a matter of first going up and then going out, it was a matter of going up and out at the same time, of launching myself in one smooth, uninterrupted gesture into the arms of the great ambient nothingness.

I worked like a dog over the next eighteen or twenty days, practicing this new technique until it was embedded in my muscles and bones, a reflex action that no longer required the slightest pause for thought. Locomotion was a perfectible skill, a dreamlike walking through air that was essentially no different from walking on the ground, and just as a baby totters and falls with its first steps, I experienced a goodly dose of stumbles and spills when I began to spread my wings. Duration was the abiding issue for me at that point, the question of how long and how far I could keep myself going. The early results varied widely, ranging anywhere from three to fifteen seconds, and since the speed at which I moved was achingly slow, the best I could manage was seven or eight feet, not even the distance from one wall of my room to another. It wasn’t a vigorous, smart-stepping amble, but a kind of shuffling ghost-walk, the way an aerialist advances along a high wire. Still, I kept on working with confidence, no longer subject to swoons of discouragement as I’d been before. I was inching forward now, and nothing was going to stop me. Even if I hadn’t risen higher than my standard six or seven inches, I figured it was best to concentrate on locomotion for the time being. Once I’d achieved some mastery in that area, I would turn my attention to loft and tackle that problem as well. It made sense, and even if I had it to do all over again, I wouldn’t budge from that plan. How could I have known that time was already
running short, that fewer days were left than any of us had imagined?

After Master Yehudi and Aesop returned, spirits in the household percolated as never before. It was the end of an era, and we were all looking ahead to the future now, anticipating the new lives that waited for us beyond the boundaries of the farm. Aesop would be the first to go—off to Yale in September—but if things went according to schedule, the rest of us would be following suit by the turn of the year. Now that I had passed to the next stage of my training, the master calculated that I’d be ready to perform in public in roughly nine months. It was still a long way to go for someone my age, but he talked about it as something real now, and what with his use of words like
bookings, venues
, and
box office net
, he kept me humming in a state of permanent excitement. I wasn’t Walt Rawley anymore, the white trash nobody without a pot to piss in, I was Walt the Wonder Boy, the diminutive daredevil who defied the laws of gravity, the one and only ace of the air. Once we hit the road and let the world see what I could do, I was going to be a sensation, the most talked-about personality in America.

As for Aesop, his tour back East had been an unqualified success. They’d given him special exams, they’d interviewed him, they’d picked and probed the contents of his wooly skull, and to hear the master tell it, he’d knocked the socks off the lot of them. Not a single college had turned him down, but Yale was offering a four-year scholarship—along with food and lodging and a small living allowance—and that had tipped the balance in their favor. Boola boola, bulldogs of the world unite. Recalling these facts now, I understand what an achievement it was for a self-taught black youngster to have scaled the ramparts of those cold-hearted institutions. I knew nothing about books, had no yardstick to measure my friend’s abilities against anyone else’s,
but I took it on blind faith that he was a genius, and the idea that a bunch of sourpusses and stuffed shirts at Yale College should want him as a student struck me as natural, the most fitting thing in the world.

If I was too dumb to grasp the significance of Aesop’s triumph, I was more than bowled over by the new clothes he brought back from his trip. He returned in a raccoon coat and a blue-and-white beanie, and he looked so strange in that getup that I couldn’t help laughing when he walked through the door. The master had had him fitted for two brown tweed suits in Boston, and now that he was home, he took to wearing them around the house instead of his old farm duds, complete with white shirt, stiff collar, necktie, and a pair of gleaming, dung-hued brogans. It was altogether impressive how he carried himself in those threads—as if they made him more erect, more dignified, more aware of his own importance. Even though he didn’t have to, he started shaving every morning, and I would keep him company in the kitchen as he lathered up his mug and dipped his straight-edged razor into the chilly bucket, holding a little mirror for him as he told me about the things he’d seen and done in the big cities along the Atlantic coast. The master had done more than just get him into college, he’d shown him the time of his life, and Aesop remembered every minute of it: the high spots, the low spots, and all the spots in between. He talked about the skyscrapers, the museums, the variety shows, the restaurants, the libraries, the sidewalks thronged with people of every color and description. “Kansas is an illusion,” he said one morning as he scraped away at his invisible beard, “a stopping place on the road to reality.”

“You don’t have to tell me,” I said. “This hole is so backward, the state went dry before they even heard of Prohibition in the rest of the country.”

“I drank a beer in New York City, Walt.”

“Well, I figured you must have done.”

“In a speakeasy. An illegal establishment on MacDougal Street, right in the heart of Greenwich Village. I wish you could have been there with me.”

“I can’t stand the taste of them suds, Aesop. Give me a good stiff bourbon, though, and I’ll drink any man under the table.”

“I’m not saying it tasted good. But it was exciting to be there with all those people, quaffing my drink in a crowded place like that.”

“I’ll bet it wasn’t the only exciting thing you did.”

“No, not by a long shot. It was just one of many.”

“I’ll bet your pecker got some good workouts, too. I’m just making a wild guess, of course, so correct me if I’m wrong.”

Aesop paused with the razor in midair, grew thoughtful for a moment, and then started grinning into the mirror. “Let’s just say it wasn’t neglected, little brother, and we’ll leave it at that.”

“Can you tell me her name? I don’t mean to be pushy, but I’m curious to find out who the lucky girl was.”

“Well, if you must know, her name was Mabel.”

“Mabel. Not bad, all things considered. She sounds like a dolly with some flesh on her bones. Was she old or young?”

“She wasn’t old, and she wasn’t young. But you hit it right about the flesh. Mabel was the fattest, blackest mama you’d ever hope to sink your teeth into. She was so big, I couldn’t tell where she started and where she ended. It was like wrestling with a hippo, Walt. But once you get into the swing of it, the anatomy takes care of itself. You creep into her bed as a boy, and half an hour later you walk out as a man.”