End of the Jews (3 page)

The band does not pause between songs to share the titles, just swings into the next tune, as if playing only for itself. Pendergast is right: this man is something special. Tristan knows only a thimbleful about jazz music, but that only fortifies his certainty. He's heard Benny Goodman on the radio—a Jew, a Jew, the Bronx jumps to its feet—and seen Louis Armstrong's impossibly white teeth glinting from advertisement posters. His high school band played an arrangement of a Fats Waller novelty hit once. But this is nothing like any of that.

Even the Benny Goodman stuff, nobody's all that affected by it. Music isn't so important, unless it's the cantor singing in shul.
Such a voice
, the women say, touching their fingertips to sternums. Plenty of kids suffer through piano lessons, but only about three adults in the whole neighborhood play instruments, guitars and bugles. Whenever the bugler tries to practice, he is shouted into silence within minutes, from four directions. Tristan imagines living in a neighborhood where music thrives, where men like these emerge from their apartments at night and stand on the corners playing songs instead of craps.

The whole room flares into applause when the band calls it quits, and Lady Les and his partners bow and step offstage, still unintroduced. Pendergast cautions his brood that class is far from over, that they will reconvene in five minutes and discuss the aims of fiction, and he leaps up from his chair to follow Lady Les backstage and wring his hand some more.

Tristan, too, would like to speak to Lady Les, or any one of the musicians, if only so he doesn't have to sit there like a fan. The drummer is onstage still, packing his trap set into its cases. Tristan stands, pockets his hands, and ambles over.

“Thank you.”

The drummer glances up from the leather strap he's fastening across the top of the bass drum's box. “Our pleasure.” He is a small, lithe-limbed fellow, perhaps twenty-five, with skin the color of teak and a long scar over his left eye.

“They make you pack the drums?” Tristan asks, bracing to be indignant.

The drummer chuckles. “They're my drums. I gotta haul 'em uptown now, to play a rent party.”

“Y'all”—Tristan tries to say the word sharp and quick like Lady Les did, but his tongue can't make it work—“y'all are playing again?”

“Yessir. This was just to warm up.”

“What's the name of the place?”

“Ain't no name. We play and the cat who owns the pad charges some bread at the door so he can pay his house note. We jam as long as folks wanna dance. His wife be cookin' up a hurricane, too, man. Plenty of food, plenty of liquor, plenty of women.”

“Are you leaving right now?”

“Soon as I can. Matter fact, if you want to tag along, we can split a taxi. The cats always stiff me, 'cause with these drums there's only room for one more in the car. They split a cab three ways and leave me dangling. Never no girls left neither by the time I pack up. I'm telling you, I'm gonna do like Lester did and switch over to horn. I already got a tenor I been practicing on. So what do you say?”

Tristan fingers the change in his pocket, yesterday's craps profits, and wonders what the ride will cost. “I'm with you—as far as thirty cents will get me.”

The drummer flashes him a smile, hands over a case. The cavemen gaze at Tristan as he walks past them, as though he is carrying the choicest slab of flame-charred mastodon on which they have ever laid eyes. Not until he's clear of the table does one of them pipe up, a prodigiously nosed fellow who might be Sammy Fischer's older brother.

“Dropping out to join the band?” he calls.

Tristan spins, heat rising to his face, and almost floors a passing waitress with the snare. The cavemen are all smiles, and it takes Tristan a moment to understand that the attention is friendly.

He sets down the drum case, lifts a hand to his upper lip, and smoothes the tips of an imaginary mustache. “I am inflamed,” Tristan declares. “By men and women, drink and song.” The cavemen erupt in laughter. The sound is loud enough to dominate the room, and all around Oswald's, heads turn.

“Godspeed,” says Fischer's double, and Tristan nods and hefts his parcel. The troll opens the door for him, and Tristan exits the club and stands on the corner, guarding the drum. The name stenciled in white on the black box reads
Albert Van Horn.

“So why is the saxophone player called Lady Les?” Tristan asks him when they're both wedged into the cab, drum cases atop and between their knees.

Albert shrugs. “Just Lesterese. He calls everybody Lady. Reefer is ettuce, like
lettuce
without the
l,
cops are Bob Crosbys, the bridge to a tune is a George Washington, anything depressing is a Von Hangman. Just keeping up with his jive is a job in itself. Sometimes I be figuring junk out weeks late. Les always used to talk about his people after a gig, like ‘Boy, my people were smooth tonight.' One time, I said to Paul, ‘I didn't see Les talking to anybody. What's all this about his people?' Paul told me, ‘Man, his people is what Lester calls his finger pedals.'”

Albert shakes his head. Tristan stares out the window, turning over the idioms of Lesterese in his mind and enjoying the ride. He's been in a cab only once before, the time his brother broke a wrist playing street football and had to be rushed to the hospital.
Medical bills are a luxury this family cannot afford,
Jacob had lectured the kids afterward, pacing back and forth before the dinner table with the hospital release form rolled in his hand like a diploma.
From now on, I expect all you kids to be more careful.

Harlem slides by outside the dirty windows, block after block of artful brownstones, snatches of angry noise and melody, dark liquid silhouettes. Albert taps his hands against the flat top of the drum case on his lap, reprising the rhythm of the set's last tune.

“So can you dance?” he asks.

“No, but I can eat.” The cab pulls up to a four-story building on a leafy residential street, a block down from the bright commercial strip. The third-floor windows are a shadow theater of backlit bodies, and as he steps from the cab, Tristan can already hear a thump piano, the clamor of conversation.

Between the two of them, he and Albert manage to haul the trap set up the bald-carpeted stairs. A man with shoulder muscles that must earn him his living greets them at the top of the third landing. The sleeves of his white crewneck are pushed to the elbows, and one of his leather suspender straps keeps slipping down his arm. He holds a floppy newsboy hat in one hand, a wax-paper cup swishing with some kind of liquor in the other. “Al Van!” he says, draining the cup and donning the hat. “Our prayers have been answered!” He relieves Albert of his burdens, leads the way inside.

Tristan follows, lugging the snare and the leather cymbal bag, and finds himself in a small living room dense with people. An L-shaped sofa beneath the front windows is crammed tight with couples leaning forward to talk over the notes and voices. Two tired-looking women, one old and one young, bookend the couch, fanning themselves against the rising body heat. The old woman uses her hat, the young one her hand.

Plates, drinks, and the ghosts of drinks litter the coffee table, and everything jumps when the portly, sweat-soaked man sitting at the piano by the opposite wall, a personal cemetery of crushed paper cups and empty plates around his own feet, digs in and starts swinging fast and loose and the dancing picks up. Young men in their shirtsleeves stand close to women, whether dancing or just talking, and everyone is shouting and drinking and half-hearing one another. Gumbo and bottled beer and cayenne pepper and fried chicken and whiskey and gin and cologne and sweat and almond cake and cigarette smoke funky up the hot air but the smell is good.

A big woman is jitterbugging to the music as Tristan struggles through the room, toward the alcove where Albert is unpacking the drums. “Uh-oh,” and “Watch out,” people exclaim, stepping back as much as they can to make room as the heavy dame and the pianist lock eyes and he ratchets the tempo skyward. Tristan has never seen such a large woman move so well. There are plenty of them in his neighborhood, his mother being one, but they all walk arthritically and act as if they went to grade school with Methuselah, and he can't picture any of them cutting loose.

Tristan mutters a stream of
excuse me
s as he walks, but after the first few fellows hear him, an awareness ripples through the crowd and folks clear a path, smiling and nodding and lifting their drinks as he passes, saying, “Right this way” and “All right, now.”

Tristan smiles back. Beneath the fear and excitement of being here—alone, alive, half-drunk, useful, unique—there lies, in the pit of his stomach, an unprovable suspicion that these people are like him, or like he wants to be. He feels a wrenching lust for a life like theirs, a life lived in the present moment, an American life. The Bronx shadows Tristan, staggering like a golem, a motley amalgam of old customs, new realities, the bargains and concessions forged between the two. The people here stand with both feet in the here and now—for horrible reasons, to be sure, but it is brave and wonderful. Or perhaps, Tristan thinks, recoiling from his own certainty, that's a load of bullshit and there is no freedom here in which to immerse himself, and this kind of broad fantasy is just what a writer must reject. Or both.

Albert takes the drums from Tristan, sets them down, shows him how to undo the taut leather cords. Tristan fumbles at the task, his awkwardness becoming harder to bear.

“Hey,” says the drummer, “meet Charles, our host. Charles, Tristan.” Albert winks. “My valet.”

“Pleased to meet you.” The man who let them in pumps Tristan's hand. “I'll set 'em up if you please, Al. You know I know how. You fellows go grab yourselves a plate and a drink.”

“Don't forget a woman,” says Albert, and strolls off toward the brightly lit kitchen. Tristan stays where he is, hunched over the equipment, hoping he can continue to look useful for a moment longer.

“You a musician, too?” Charles speaks over his shoulder, unfolding the tripod legs of Albert's cymbal stand.

“No,” Tristan says, apologetic. “I'm in school.” A pause, and then he summons the courage to add, “I'd like to be a writer.”

Charles steals a backward glance at him. “Yeah? Good for you. You know who was up in here last month? Langston Hughes. I know you've read some Langston. No? Man, before you leave, remind me to show you one of his books.”

The drums are ready to be played. Charles folds his arms, surveys the room. “Never know who's gonna show up here,” he says. “Wouldn't surprise me none if I looked up and saw Joe Stalin standing in my living room, holding a plate of pigs' feet and doing the shake with Miz Clarke.” He points at the big woman with his chin, then shoots Tristan a look that seems intended to put him at ease, and thus doesn't. “That's why I didn't bat an eye when I saw you comin' up my stairs.” He chuckles. “Who knows, maybe you'll write about me someday.”

Tristan smiles for as long as Charles does, then says, “I think I'll get something to eat.”

“Sure. Go on in and fix yourself a plate. Don't be shy. Have a drink, too. No Bob Crosbys here.”

The pale green kitchen is full of people, mostly women. The window is open to the fire escape, where three men in suits are standing and passing something back and forth, and the room is cooler by far than the other. In the center squats a card table like the Brodskys', every inch covered with serving trays and pots, ladles and tongs. Albert strolls over from across the room, where he's been leaning up against the counter, ankles crossed, chatting up two pretty young things. He corrals Tristan and walks him through the menu as if his charge has never eaten before. Soon Tristan's paper plate is buckling beneath the weight of all the chicken, macaroni and cheese, heavy-dressed salad, buttered corn, and string beans Albert has piled on “for starters.” The girls watch the whole thing, shaking their heads as the heap of food grows.

“Now honey, you ain't got to eat all that,” the taller of the two assures Tristan when Albert finally hands the plate over.

“But if you don't,” warns Albert, “no dessert.” The four of them laugh, and Tristan freezes the moment in his mind, breaks it apart. They are all laughing for different and numerous reasons, he thinks, thrilled that he notices. The girls' laughter is hospitable, but also mocking; they are in on the joke of his oddness, getting a kick out of how a misfit makes them feel more vibrantly themselves. Albert—whose laugh is wild-eyed, raucous, leaves the rest of them behind—is showing off for the girls. Tristan is his pet and he knows he must strike the proper balance between care and disregard; too much of either will make him appear unmanly. Tristan, for his part, laughs to please and to connect, to communicate his willingness to play his role and because he is relaxed and tense and wildly delighted.

Albert snaps his fingers and takes Tristan's elbow. “I got somebody I want you to meet,” he says, lifting the plate from Tristan's hands and setting it down atop the stove.

“You better let that child eat,” the shorter girl protests.

“Got to work up an appetite first,” Albert calls back, leading Tristan down the dark hall that connects the kitchen to the rest of the apartment. “Down here is the card game,” he explains as they near a doorway, but Tristan doesn't need to be told. Gambling sounds the same in Harlem as it does in the Bronx.

The air above the table is blue-gray with smoke. Three of the five players grip plump cigars with their teeth, the other two puff cigarettes. On couches in the dim recesses of the room lounge others, studying the game and waiting for a vacant chair. A serene girl who could be Tristan's age sits on a stool in the far corner, next to a makeshift bar. No one looks up from the cards for longer than a second when Albert and Tristan enter.