The Jazz Palace (29 page)

Napoleon's world was shrinking. Darkness was descending upon him like a shroud. He didn't need a doctor to tell him that something wasn't right. He had been slipping into a tunnel for some time. Streets were narrowing; rooms were getting small. Soon he feared that all that would be left for him were pinpricks of light. He was memorizing the world around him so that at least for now nobody would know. He counted the steps to the tram, going to the Rooster, and the steps coming home. He learned the bumps of the road, the grade of the curb. He was nocturnal anyway so this would only make it a bit darker than it had always been.

Perhaps this was God's way of punishing him. After all he'd hardly been a good man, though he had been kind to Maddy. He'd never been her lover, but he had been faithful in his heart. Now he was losing his sight, and all he could think was that it was for his sins. And there were too many to count. But then if God really wanted to punish him, wouldn't he take away his hearing instead?

For now he'd just have to listen harder for the clang of the streetcar, for the chimes of a clock. But how bad could it be for a musician to start really listening again? Listening not just to the notes but also to what was happening between them. What was in the pauses when there was no sound? Maybe all of music happened in those
pauses anyway. Maybe all of life did. So he listened more carefully. It wasn't that he'd ever really stopped. It's just that before he could see things, too.

He didn't want anyone to know. Anyway he wasn't blind yet, and he could still see enough to see that something wasn't right. You didn't have to be a genius to figure that out, and you'd have to be really blind—blinder than Napoleon hoped he'd ever be—to miss it. It came to him the minute he laid eyes on Benny. Or rather the minute he heard the flatness in his sound. He'd sensed it the last time he'd seen Benny as well, but he hadn't been able to put his finger on it. It was as if Benny's problem had to do with him. And as his hand went to his throat, he knew.

Napoleon touched his gris-gris bag and held it up to his nose. He sniffed it and cradled it in his palm. Long ago he'd intended to give Benny the gris-gris bag that contained John the Conqueror, the trickster, the one with the sense of humor that would set him free. Instead he'd given him the mandrake root and the skin of the turtle to make women love him. The one his mother had given to him.

Napoleon had had his own share of problems with love. White women who kept his mind racing in the late hours. It was white women he'd risk life and limb for. He was glad he'd left the South. He'd have been lynched for the thought alone. Napoleon had loved the wrong women, too, so why should Benny be any different? Women wanted him. They followed him with their lavender perfume, their powdered skin. They followed him in their silk stockings and dresses that now rose almost to the knee. When he walked down the street, when he walked into a bar, Napoleon could see that they did. Too many loved him and most were the wrong kind. Napoleon had brought the wrong magic into Benny's life. And perhaps he'd brought some of it into his own.

That morning Maddy asked Napoleon as kindly as she'd ask him to take out the trash or pick up a loaf of bread if he would leave. She'd met someone, she told him. He knew he had no right to beg her to change her mind, though he was surprised at how crushed he
felt. The darkness seemed to be sweeping down on him even faster than before, but this he would never tell her. Especially not now. Pity was the last thing he wanted. “I'll have to find a new place,” he told her.

And Maddy patted his hand. “Take your time.”

In October the market crashed. Lines of people waiting for food or jobs cropped up all over the city. Half of Chicago was unemployed. A former banker wore a sign around his neck, offering to do day labor. A woman who'd never ironed a blouse in her life posted a notice that she was taking in wash. In Union Station children slept on beds of cardboard. Tents sprang up all around Lincoln Park. Benny lost his job at the pit. Gigs were scarce, and his money was dwindling. He started going home for meals. His mother, whose eyes were dark and sunken and who had begun to smell of old age, claimed she didn't think she'd make it to Passover. His father's hands trembled as he ate his soup. Despite the fact that Benny was almost thirty years old, he gave up his place above the laundry and moved back into his childhood bedroom.

There was nothing wrong with Hannah that having her son move home wouldn't cure. It wasn't that she hadn't been unwell. She had been weak and sickly, barely eating. Nerves, her doctor said. But one morning she woke up early and began cleaning the house. She put fresh sheets on his bed, and then she went shopping. She was roasting chicken, making broth. “What is it with you?” Leo asked her when he saw her up and about, but she just shook her head.

“Sonny's coming home,” she said. Later that afternoon when Benny knocked on the door, carting all he owned in his red suitcase,
he found his mother, robust, puttering around in the living room, arranging a plate of cookies, looking better than she had in years. He gave his parents a hug and then went into his room where he opened his drawers and put his starched shirts and silk ties away. He emptied the red suitcase, except for the zipper pouch where he kept all the tunes he'd written down. Then he shoved it back under the bed.

At dinner Benny didn't seem so restless anymore. Except for cutting his chicken and moving the fork to his mouth, his big hands were still.
My boy is back
, Hannah thought as she pressed her own hands to her chest. She didn't mean simply that he had moved back home, but rather that whatever it was that had possessed him was gone. The demonic light she'd seen in his eyes had dimmed, and in its place were two dull stones. It didn't occur to Hannah that the life had left her son.

The house depressed him, and he had no idea where he'd find work. There were the old odors of schmaltz and musty air and none of the lilac perfume and cigarettes he had grown used to. Both of his brothers had married and moved into apartments of their own. But he couldn't even afford his rented room. In the room next to his he listened to the steady thrum of his mother's sewing machine, a sound that only served to remind him of his defeat.

After dinner he put on his coat and said he was going for a walk. Hannah didn't argue with him. She knew it would do no good. He headed out into the cool Chicago night. He didn't know where he was going; he just let his feet take him. He walked until he was chilly, then hopped a streetcar and got off at the river where he kept going, hugging the banks.

He came to the Clark Street Bridge. It had been a long time since he'd stood here. If he paused, he could still hear the screams in his head, and he didn't want to listen. He kept going on to the “el,” heading south. He thought of going to the Jazz Palace but decided to stay away. He brought disaster with him wherever he roamed. Children drowned, a girl he loved and a brother he adored had died. He could not inflict himself on anyone who mattered to him anymore. Perhaps if he'd actually written that letter to Pearl, this is what he'd
say. Night after night he wandered the city until the cold made him turn back.

Meanwhile Arthur and Ira had begun to make a success of the factory. At Ira's insistence they'd diversified. “Too many eggs in one basket,” Ira said. It wasn't just caps now. They'd branched out into baseball memorabilia. Key chains and coasters. Now Ira was looking into T-shirts and ashtrays. Arthur, who was the bookkeeper, tried to keep Ira's excessive ideas in check. He balked when Ira suggested that they mail out little catalogs with all their products. “Trust me,” Ira said, “in a few years people are going to be shopping without going to the store.”

When Benny showed up at the factory, he tried not to watch his brothers gloat. But Ira, the entrepreneur who'd grown round and redder and had married a woman with a bronze helmet of hair, saw that Benny could be an asset. No one knew the South Side of Chicago the way his older brother did. Any white person, that is, and he offered Benny what he knew he wouldn't refuse. He gave him all the accounts south of Union Station. Near Comiskey Park small retail concessions were sprouting up, and Ira saw a need. Benny carried a leather satchel that contained samples of the coasters, caps, T-shirts, and ashtrays. He went through the motions of heading down to the South Side where he opened his sample kit and display coasters with images of the White Sox and Cubs, ashtrays where you could flick your ashes onto the face of Dutch Henry or Garland Braxton.

During the days he found himself pounding the pavements, trying to sell his souvenirs.

In the evenings he returned home where he stayed in his room, listening to music, or he snuck down to the bars after dinner to drink. Except for his evening meal he never saw his family. He avoided the Stroll and the Jazz Palace and all his old haunts. Soon he'd have to be making his decision if he was going or staying. No matter what, he couldn't keep working for his brothers. He had to find another job.

Then one afternoon the phone rang. Benny didn't budge until his mother stepped into his room. “It's for you,” she said.

Reluctantly Benny moved into the living room and put the
receiver to his ear. “So, Moon, I heard you moved back home,” Napoleon said.

“Who told you?”

“I ran into that friend of yours. That trombone player. Moe.”

“Yeah, I moved home,” Benny replied. There was a silence between them that had never been there before.

“Well, I've got some sessions work,” Napoleon said at last. “Not much money in it, but it's work and I could sure use you…”

“I'm busy,” Benny said. “I've got a job.” Benny made his excuses.

“Come on, Moon,” Napoleon said, “I need you.”

I
t was the same studio off Forty-Seventh Street where they'd recorded before. Benny took the “el,” then walked along the dark streets of padlocked clubs that would soon be torn down, making room for the projects. The feds had been running raids on the clubs of the North and South sides. They went in and took down the name of every patron. After a raid people tended not to come back again. On these streets where midnight had once been lit up like daylight it was pitch black, and Benny could barely find his way.

The streets known as the Dahomey Stroll were shuttered and silent. No more bluesy notes, no more high Cs were blasting down South State. The maids and delivery boys who put on their fancy duds and strutted out any night of the week were gone. In their place were hungry men, sleeping on the street. Eliot Ness, who would spend his later years drinking himself to death in bars as he recounted his exploits, was on a mission to get Al Capone by enforcing the Volstead Act. Ness and his “Untouchables” decimated the Stroll. The market crashing killed it. Capone would be charged with five thousand violations of the Volstead Act, but he would go to jail for tax evasion instead.

In Chicago the full orchestras that played in the movie theaters were being disbanded. Sound systems for talking pictures were being installed instead. A few musicians formed small combos and roamed the Midwest in crammed cars to play in roadhouses. The tavern where Benny had once stood, listening to Honey Boy, was closed,
and all that was left of the Rooster was the red sign that glowed in the headlights of passing cars.

Benny walked in late, and the musicians were grumbling. It was cold inside, and they were trying to keep warm with their coats and gloves on. Benny didn't know the drummer or the bass player, who didn't even look up. But Moe was there with his slide trombone, and he gave a little wave. “Sorry. I got lost,” Benny said. His breath formed a cloud in front of him.

Napoleon shook his head. “You never used to lie to me, Moon.” Benny shrugged and noodled with the keys, trying to warm up his fingers. Even the keys seemed stiff because of the cold. “You need some time?” Napoleon asked but Benny shook his head.

He'd barely run a scale when Napoleon was snapping out the beat, and they dove into “Flash in the Pan.” It was one of Napoleon's older songs, and Benny knew it well. He'd transcribed it himself a few years back. This was a fast, up-tempo tune, but his heart wasn't in it. He was only going through the motions. It was how things had been with him for a while. That was a song he needed to write. One called “Going Through the Motions.” For now he was just playing to keep time.

His mind drifted to the dark, windblown streets and padlocked doors. Tired people, lining up or wandering the city, looking for jobs. Black eyes staring at him from these streets. He thought of Marta and her little girl and wondered what had become of them. That girl would be how old if she'd lived? She would be almost Opal's age. He envisioned Opal stretched out on his bed with her golden hair. An angel he'd turned his back on, and now she was gone. And Pearl was gone, too. She'd turned her back on him. He was lost in a voice that looped through his mind, and in the final chorus of “Going Through the Motions,” he came in late. There was no mistaking it; he missed his entrance, then rushed to catch up, fumbling on the keys.

The other musicians glanced his way, but Napoleon waved his hand to calm them down. After the take, the drummer wanted to do it over, but Napoleon said they'd keep it. “It's good enough,” Napoleon told them.

“It's a flub,” Benny said. “Anyone can hear it.”

“You'd have to be listening for it,” Napoleon said.

“Well, I hear it.” He lit a cigarette, and walked out of the studio. He stood on the steps, smoking slowly, then walked down the alleyway. He walked to the street. Inside the studio the musicians waited.

Napoleon emptied his spit, then drummed on his valves. “We'll do it without him,” Napoleon said. “He won't be back.”