Night in Shanghai (2 page)

He never returned to church after the first Sunday of her illness, when the silence of the great pipe organ announced her absence as nothing else could, not even Reverend Martinson leading the congregation in a prayer for her recovery.
Who will play at her service if she passes?
was what he heard in his head during the prayer, a thought that shamed him like a wrong, discordant note.

When he got back that day, the apartment was already filled with food, as friends and neighbors swept in and out with their home-cooked stews and casseroles. She thanked them for coming, her hand light and bony in theirs. They emerged from the bedroom with their reports: “Had a rough night, I see.” Or “Looks worse, maybe the doctor’s right.”

At the end, everyone grew strangely more positive. “Looking peaceful,” said Mrs. Hazell from downstairs, and Reverend Martinson, his mother’s friend and employer for decades, said, “Good Lord’s smiling on her today.”

Thomas was in the small kitchen heating up the meals the women
had brought so he could put them out on the table by the stack of plates. The living room was full of church ladies, trading stories and gossip, passing in and out of the bedroom and telling each other,
She looks more at ease, yes, there’s less pain today. I’m certain of it. Let’s let her sleep
. Then they descended on him like a warm, powdered, half-sour old flock of birds, hugging him and blessing him and saying they would be back to see his mama on the morrow.

And then he was alone with her. He finished the dishes, let the sadness drain through him as he emptied the sink. Though he had been born in these rooms and lived here all his life and knew every floorboard and wallpaper seam, it was over. If she died, he would have to move. Where? A boardinghouse? Out west? People said there was work in Seattle.

He took a deep breath and pushed open her door, braced for the odd, sweet smell of sickness. It was there, and over it another note, perhaps a perfume carried in by one of the day’s visitors. “Mama? How you feeling?”

He paused. Should he let her sleep?

His eyes adjusted to the low light and he saw she was so rested, she looked like she had sunk right down into the bed. “Mama?” he said once more.

He laid a hand on her arm and jumped back as if he had touched a hot stove. Cool. He touched her again, slowly this time, everything breaking inside him.
He’ll come to your house, he won’t stay long
.

“Master?” said Hua, standing impatiently over him.

You look in the bed, find your mother gone
. Right, his clothes. After selling everything, even the piano, he’d had nothing left but these two suits, his shoes, and his leather briefcase which had belonged to his father, stuffed now with his favorite music, his personal canon, his life’s work. “These are all the clothes I have.”

Uncle Hua shook his head. “Tailor come tonight.”

“I don’t have money. I have not been paid yet.”

Hua blinked, exasperated. “Master paycheck fifteen day, tailor chit thirty day due never mind.”

“I see,” said Thomas. His clothes were something he had never been able to worry about before. “All right, I guess so.”

Just as he spoke, Little Kong, the household errand boy and most junior servant, burst into the room with a spatter of Shanghainese. Before anyone could reply, an older fellow sauntered in, at ease with his rolling gait in a way that Thomas, since leaving Seattle, had decided was peculiar to Americans. The man’s hair was a gray grizzle, and his brown-eyed gaze kind and good-humored as he surveyed the dining room. “Well now, aren’t we the grandee?”

“I was thinking the same thing.” He stood and extended a hand. “Thomas Greene.”

“Alonzo Robbins. Bass player. Seeing as today’s your first rehearsal, I came to take you.”

“Thank you.”

“Didn’t want you to have to walk in all cold by yourself.”

“Very kind of you. Den of lions, eh?”

“Oh no.” Alonzo grinned. “’Course not.”

“Breakfast?” Thomas indicated platters, half-demolished.

“Thanks. I’ve eaten.”

“Well.” No more postponing it. He shrugged on his worn light-brown wool, inadequate for the cold and clearly a rag next to Alonzo’s fine topcoat, and picked up the briefcase he took everywhere.

The lane was alive in the winter sunlight. Local women sold food from a cart, and one lifted the lid of a wide shallow pan to show them steam-fragrant rows of dumplings. “Tell me about the Kings,” said Thomas, “where they came from.”

Alonzo nodded. “Well—the first members were some guys who played with Bennie Moten’s gang at the Reno Club in Kansas City. But then last year Bennie died having his tonsils out, and Bill Basie took over—you’ve heard of him, people call him the Count because he carries this card around that says ‘Beware, the Count is here.’ You know the Count?” They had come to the end of the lane and Alonzo raised his hand for a conveyance.

“He brought in new players from back east, like Hershel Evans, so he had to drop some guys too,” said Alonzo, “and those guys joined us, along with a couple of fellows from Walter Page’s old group, the Blue Devils. That’s where the Kings came from. We had been playing together in Kansas City about six months when Mr. Lin showed up and hired us over here.”

“I didn’t know he went as far east as Kansas City, looking.”

“Lucky for us he did, I’ll tell you that. Hell of a place! Where’d he find you?”

“Seattle,” said Thomas. That made it sound simple; it had been anything but. By the time he made it to that mist-shrouded city, he was broke and starving, and when the Blue Rose on Yesler Way offered him janitorial work, he did everything but fall to his knees in gratitude. The jazz club opened every night in the basement, and he cleaned it daily in exchange for meals and a small room at the back.

In the afternoons, his work done, he returned to the now pristine basement and its baby grand. In those last hours before sunset, when weak light slanted in through the dust motes in the air, his piano playing would make the owner, Big Lewis Richardson, along with anyone else who happened to be in the house, stop what they were doing and drift down the stairs to listen.

He understood that they were not used to hearing this kind of music in the house, read from the page, at this level of difficulty. “It’s a
commitment
,” his mother used to say, with a hush, as if art stood above all else. But what had this commitment brought him? Two dollars a night if he was a colored man, five if he was not.

She had not minded about him passing, but she was always afraid he would be distracted by the sounds of stride and Dixieland. “You’re not playing that Saturday night music, are you?” she would say. “Put that sound right out your mind.” She didn’t even like it when he embellished his classical pieces with extra ornaments, or a little too much rubato. “Don’t doctor it up,” she would tell him. “You think you know better than Mendelssohn?”

But when it came to jazz, she need not have feared, since he could not play it. He had heard it sure enough, wailing underground in clubs and speakeasies, all through Prohibition, hot, polyphonic, toe-tapping, full of syncopated rhythms and bent, naughty notes—perfect for small and secret spaces. Now that alcohol was legal again, the music was changing, along with the very character of the night itself. Swanky clubs and ballrooms opened, featuring larger, dancehall-type orchestras. With so many more instruments, especially on top in the reeds and the brass, songs had to be tightly arranged, by skilled bandleaders. This meant work, and it was considerably closer to Thomas’s own playing than the exuberant Dixie-style polyphony of the ’twenties had been—but still out of reach.

This was clear to him after he heard the top bandleaders like Henderson and Ellington, who played whole orchestras like instruments. Thomas could play, but they were titans, and there was never a moment when he did not know the difference.

Big Lewis certainly knew. “You play nice,” he said, that first week in Seattle. “But where you going to get work playing like that?”

“That’s the problem,” said Thomas.

“What you need is to learn the standards, with a little swing.” Big Lewis launched into singing “About a Quarter to Nine,” a popular song from the film
42nd Street.
“Go on!” He waved toward the keys.

Thomas shrank, humiliated. “I can’t play that way. Reading is all I can do.”

“You serious? That’s it?”

“Yes. If it’s written, I can play it. Let me get the music for that one and look at it.” So Big Lewis advanced him five cents, and Thomas went down to Jackson Street for the sheet music, came back, and read it through. When he did, it was so simple he was embarrassed. In playing it for Big Lewis, he did his best to embellish it so it would sound more presentable.

But the older man was unimpressed. “Swing the rhythm! Let it go!”

Thomas started again.

“No! You turned the beat around again. Where are you, in church?” Big Lewis gave a slam to the nearest tabletop and scuffed off.

Each night Thomas listened closely to the jazz in the basement, especially the piano work of Julian Henson, which was tightly controlled even when he improvised. There was restraint to it, a kind of glassy hardness.
If I could play jazz, I would play like this fellow
. But when he tried it at the piano the next day, it still eluded him.

Big Lewis heard. “You’re trying too hard. It’s variations on a song. Think of it like that, a song.” He showed Thomas how to use the blues scale to force what he called the worried notes, especially the flatted third and seventh, over a major chord progression. When Thomas could not hear how to layer these up with counter-rhythms, or how to build chords from dissonant intervals, the older man sang him through it and showed him, using his voice, how to dance around his improvisations and get off them as quick as a grace note. By the end of that week Thomas could play at least a few of the popular ballroom numbers, like “Body and Soul” and “I Can’t Get Started,” and his renditions sounded respectable, if not exactly right.

“Will I get by?” he asked Big Lewis.

“No. Not around here—too many good musicians. Now, in a small town, I ’spect your sound could get over. You want that to happen, you got to work, and work hard.”

So Thomas threw himself into practicing dance numbers every afternoon, and though he got better, he knew he was still well shy of the mark when Big Lewis pulled him aside one night at closing time and told him there was an agent in the house, a man from China, who needed a piano player.

“To play in
China?
”

“Shanghai. I’ve heard tell of it—fellows get recruited.”

Thomas stared. Shanghai! It was alluring, dangerous; there were songs about it. “Is that him?” he said of the tall, rangy fellow who was the only Asian man left in the place now that it had emptied out. He had a narrow face, doorknob cheekbones jutting beneath his long, dark eyes. Thomas noticed his hair was combed straight back and pomaded down, while his suit still showed creases from the steamer trunk. He dressed like a gentleman, which struck Thomas as a promising chord of commonality.

“Go talk to him,” Big Lewis said.

“What if he—”

“Say you’re a pianist, then just play. Don’t say anything else.”

He looked down at his overalls. Maybe it was a good thing, a lucky thing, the way he was dressed. “Play what?” he said nervously.

“The
Rhapsody
.”

Thomas closed his eyes for a second; yes, genius, Big Lewis was right.
Rhapsody in Blue
was the one piece he had memorized which was flat-out impressive and also danced at least a little bit close to the music he had to pretend to know. So he crossed the floor, still littered and sticky, and set his mop and bucket down with a neat slosh. “Name’s Thomas Greene,” he said. “My boss tells me you’re looking.”

And now he was in Shanghai, beside Alonzo, coming to the end of the lane, to Rue Lafayette, where they paused before turning. Thomas studied the older man’s face. “You look like you like it here.”

“Best thing ever happened to me. All my life I knew what I deserved, but Shanghai is the only place I ever got it. You’ll see.” With those words, Alonzo raised a casually crooked finger, and a panting coolie ran up with a rickshaw. Alonzo climbed up onto the rattan seat and slid over, making room for Thomas, who stood frozen. The older man had been here a year and knew all the holes and corners, sure, but should they really be pulled along by a poor, unfortunate man in a harness? Even the slaves had not done work like this. But the bare-armed coolie stamped impatiently, slick with sweat in the cold air, his sinews ropy, his legs strong. He wanted to resume running.

Alonzo was looking down with compassion, and Thomas understood that he too must have crossed this particular threshold on arrival. The city was cruel. Maybe all cities were cruel.

“You know what?” Alonzo said to him. “Man’s got a right to choose his master.” He patted the seat.

And Thomas climbed up beside him.

They swayed and jostled down the street, the gasping, heaving coolie pulling them at a steady rhythmic lope. Thomas felt almost sick, sweat popping out, though whether it was his discomfort with the coolie or the rocking motion roiling his overambitious breakfast, he was not sure. Alonzo seemed wholly undisturbed, placid almost, as he gazed down at the traffic, so Thomas forced his mind off the rickshaw puller, instead ranging back over what other musicians had told him about Shanghai before he left Seattle.

“Freest place on earth,” Roger Felton had said. “Pleasure every damn place you look, and your money just as good as any white man’s. Think on
that!
Fellows earn a lot, no two ways about it, but there isn’t a one of them I’ve seen come back with a penny. They spend it all.”

Not I
, had been Thomas’s silent reaction.
I can save money
. He had been much more sobered by what Roger had said when he asked about politics. “Say the Japanese fighting the Chinese, and the Chinese fighting each other. Say gangsters running the city. People disagree, they end up dead, so you best play your music and keep clear of it. Hear?”