Jordan County (7 page)

He was there for the closing this second night as well, sitting alone at one of the back tables, the steel-gray smoke matting thicker and thicker between him and the bandstand. The following day he cut classes, but he stayed away from the Black Cat that night. He was dazed, like a survivor of some disaster, a dancehall fire or a steamboat explosion. ‘All I have done adds up to nothing,’ he told himself as he lay in bed unable to sleep after the day’s idleness; ‘now I’ll have to start all over again.’ He kept remembering the tone of the cornet, recalling whole passages of improvisation by the cocoa-colored Negro. ‘Maybe he cant even read music,’ Van thought. ‘Maybe he came here from a cornfield somewhere, dropped the hoe and took up the horn and played what his grandfathers played in the jungle a hundred years ago.’

The following night he found that some of this was wrong. The cornetist could read notes, for one thing, anyhow after a fashion. His name was Conway; he had come up from New Orleans two years before and had already made a name for himself. Van learned all this from an enthusiastic young man who sat at an adjoining table. He wore a crew haircut and a hound’s tooth jacket and explained off-hand, though with an edge of pride, that he was a writer for
Platter
, a trade magazine published by a record manufacturer. “Thats the most horn in the world,” he said. “I thought everybody interested in music knew Duff Conway.” He spoke a racy jargon which Van could not always follow, and he had a habit of pacing the music by patting the table with his palms and humming du-duh du-duh through his teeth with a rhythm which Van, at any rate, thought did not always conform to that of the musicians
on the bandstand. The gold-toothed manager seemed impressed, however; he kept dropping by to ask how things were going and sent the writer a fresh drink every fifteen minutes without charge.

During a break the young man brought the cornetist to Van’s table. “You been asking so I thought I’d bring him round,” he said by way of introduction. He spread his arms and put his head back like a prize-ring announcer. “Comb them all — 52nd Street, the Loop, 12th Street in K.C., anywhere — you wont find a horn like this one. Mind what I’m telling you.”

“I’m pleased to meet you,” Van said.

“How do,” Duff said, shaking hands.

He was twenty-four that month. His manner with strangers was nearly always awkward, but soon after meeting Harry Van he lost this awkwardness, at least in Van’s direction. They became friends and were seen together in such diverse places as Swing Row and Carnegie Hall, the Village and the Metropolitan — one the son of a New England choir master and a sea captain’s daughter, advanced student at one of the nation’s leading music institutions, already composing music which even the conservative officials of the school called “promising” with considerable more enthusiasm than usually hid behind the word; the other the son of an itinerant guitarist and a Mississippi servant girl, horn man in a Harlem gin-mill, whose name spoken casually was enough to evoke superlatives from his followers and whose recordings were beginning to be collectors’ items. For two years this relationship grew, Van being drawn steadily away from the music he had known and into the orbit — or maybe vortex — of the music Duff represented, until finally he was composing things like those he formerly had believed were without melody or harmony or sometimes even rhythm. At first his friends at the institute talked against it; it didnt make sense, they said. But now he seldom saw them. He was at work on a four-part composition made up of jazz themes with variations based on Duff’s improvisations. Later he was to abandon this. Indeed, the jazz influence is
hardly apparent in his work today. But he had got what he wanted by then; he had made the breakthrough, and the influence remained, if not the signs. What he wanted was an approach, and jazz had shown him that. An inferior art by virtue of its limitations, it involved great drive and marvelous technique and little else; but jazz men — anyhow the good ones, and where the emotions were so naked, thrown out in such a spendthrift fashion, it was obvious from the outset which were good and which were not — never let technique be anything but a means to an end. This was what he mainly got; this was what had struck him that first night in Harlem (though he did not know it then, or at least could not identify it) and this was what stayed with him after he left jazz behind.

Van had completed about two-thirds of this four-part composition, almost as far as he was to go with it, when Duff began to admit a weariness in his arms and legs. He had felt it for some time, but now he began to admit it, at least to himself; he had lost weight, and some nights he was so tired he could barely hold the horn up to his face. So he began drinking to fight it, keeping a waiter on the move between the bandstand and the bar. This took away some of the weariness, or seemed to. But toward the middle of August, 1939, something happened.

It was near closing time and he was just entering the chorus of Body and Soul, one of his best numbers. As the horn mounted toward the final, unbelievable note he felt something rise at the back of his throat, an insistent tickling like a feather against his pharynx. He fell off the note. There was a moment of flat silence; waiters froze in midstride, and here and there about the smoky room people sat with glasses halfway raised. “Fluffed,” someone said, dismayed and loud against the sudden quiet. Duff coughed and there was a taste of salt at the base of his tongue. He stood there on the platform, looking over the cornet at the crowd, and wiped his mouth with the back of one hand, still holding the horn. When he saw the darker red against the flesh he coughed again, harder, and a bright
bubble of blood broke from his lips, running down his chin, onto the horn and onto the front of his shirt.

Van took him home and sat feeding him cracked ice until morning. At the clinic, when the examination was over and the x-ray had been taken, the doctor said: “Come back at five and we’ll see what there is to this. Go back to bed till then.”

He was a mild, gray-haired man with beautifully laundered cuffs and a collar like mother-of-pearl; he prided himself on never being hurried. When Duff and Van returned, late afternoon sunlight lay in soft yellow bars across the doctor’s desk, filtered through a slatted blind. The doctor held the negative against the light. “Here you are,” he said, indicating the x-ray like a portrait at a private showing, himself the painter.

At first Duff could not see what he meant. Then, as the doctor’s finger moved among the smoky branches of the ribs, he discerned a gray smudge about the size and color of a tarnished silver dollar. He had been watching it for a good while before he became conscious that the doctor was still speaking.

“… prescribe in a case like this. What you need is bed rest. I cannot tell how long it will take to cure you, if at all, but I can tell you anyhow it will take less than six months to kill you if you stay in that airtight smoke-filled room blowing your lungs out on a trumpet every night.”

“It’s a cornet,” Duff told him.

“Cornet, then. Isnt that worse?” Duff did not answer. The doctor said, “Do you want me to arrange accommodations at a sanitorium for you?”

“No, thank you, doctor.” Duff rose, holding his hat, and Van rose with him. “I’m going home.”

Every morning, on her way out, Nora would set the pitcher of milk and the glass on the bedside table. Duff would lie there
watching them through the long quiet day. Just before sundown he would tilt an inch of milk into the glass, sloshing it around to stain the glass to the brim. When he had drunk it — painfully, sip by finicky sip — he would set the glass back on the table, take the still-full pitcher to the kitchen, and being careful not to spatter any drops his mother might discover on the sink, pour the remainder down the drain. Then he would compose himself in bed for her return.

He took the inactivity fairly well. Some days, however, a speculative expression would come on his face as he lay there, and after a while he would get up and cross the room to the bureau. The cornet lay in the drawer beside Nora’s pistol. He would not touch it; sometimes he would not even open the drawer, for he could see it clearly in his mind, thus juxtaposed, the dull shadowed gleam of gold beside the brighter glint of nickel. He had been in the room for three months now, hearing newsboy voices cry Hitler and the ruin of Poland while the tree outside the window, like something in a hackneyed movie interlude, turned from dusty green to the hectic flare of Indian summer and then stood leafless in the steady rain of late November; winter came early that first war year. Christmas Day he took up the horn for the first time since he put it away, four months ago. He carried it back to bed with him and played it for an hour as a sort of self-given Christmas present, holding the quilt over the bell to deaden the sound.

After that he began to play it for an hour every afternoon, and by the end of January he was playing it mornings too, without the quilt. But it was March, the tree budding in the abrupt Mississippi springtime, before he left the cabin with the horn. Except that now he left by the front door — Nora slept on the cot in the kitchen, having surrendered the front-room bed to Duff — it was like the nights a dozen years ago, when he would steal away to hear forbidden music on Bantam Street.

That was where he went, this time, too. As he walked up the steps of the Mansion House he heard the piano going strong on
Deed I Do
. Looking across the dance room, through the smoke and around the heads and shoulders of the dancers, he saw Blind Bailey’s broad blue back and his gray head bobbing in time to the music. A young man in overalls sat wooden-faced beside him, strumming a guitar. Duff crossed the room and stood behind the piano, watching the heavy hands move over the keyboard. Some of the keys were dead or badly out of tune, from stretched strings or missing hammers, but Blind Bailey knew how to avoid them; he only struck them for special effects. Duff raised the cornet, waiting, then came in on the beat, carrying it wide open for sixteen bars before fading for the piano break, and they took it together for a ride-out finish, the guitarist straggling along as best he could.

“Lord, Lord, Duff, it’s good to hear you,” Blind Bailey said, lifting his head. The spectacle lenses were blue disks, flat and opaque as target centers in the glare of the lightbulb. “How you been so long?”

“Fine as fine,” Duff told him, smiling. “Just you play me some more of that mean piano.”

At the cabin four hours later the lamp was burning and Nora was waiting. This was like the old days too. As was her custom, she had got up in the night to see if there was anything he needed. Finding the bed empty, she dressed and went straight to Bantam Street. From the sidewalk outside the Mansion House, along with a crowd of others who could not afford the twenty cents admission, she heard the cornet. Then she came home, lighted the lamp, and waited.

When Duff had closed the door and turned to face her with the horn in his hands, she said calmly: “I aint going to try and reason with you, because you grown now and besides I learnt better long ago. But aint you got no more sense than to be at that place, blowing that thing with them wore-out lungs that the doctor his own self’s done told you wouldnt last a half a year that way?” She waited for him to answer, then said again, “Aint you?”

“Noam.”

“All right. Go on to bed. Satan can call you his own where I’m concerned.”

At first he went to the Mansion House twice a week, rationing his pleasure. By the middle of April he was there every other night, and before the end of May he was not missing a session. But by that time, with spring an actuality, not a promise, and the long hot days of summer drawing in, the trees and flowers in full leaf and bloom before the press of heat made them wilt, there was more to draw him than the music. There was a girl.

Her name was Julia, a light brown girl with a wide mouth, sloe eyes, and a boisterous manner. She had the loveliest laugh he’d ever heard. Nineteen, slim, high-bosomed, she had come to Bristol from Vicksburg when her parents opened a café on Bantam Street; their name was Kinship. She had her faults and Duff saw them from the beginning — a capacity for cruelty, for example, in any connection that clashed with her self-interest — but they were the faults of youth and were therefore not only correctible but were also as charming as her virtues, at least in his eyes. With his New York clothes and haircut and his aura of fame, Duff attracted her from the start, but the first time he noticed her was one night when he had just finished a fast chorus of
Wish I Could Shimmy
. She was wearing a knee-length red silk dress and suddenly, out of nowhere, she leaned forward and threw her arms around his neck.

“Oh people, people!” she cried. “Look here at my horn-blowing man!”

“Back up, gal,” Duff told her, almost gruffly. “Back up and I’ll blow one just for you.”

This kind of thing had happened before—on the river, in New Orleans, and up in Harlem — but this time something in him answered. He played the Corn Crib Blues, and for the rest of the night, on into morning, whenever he looked out over the dance floor he saw Julia either watching him or performing for him, switching the red dress and preening like a
bird. When the last number was over and the room emptied, she was waiting for him. After coffee at the All Nite Café he walked her home, and from the porch swing they watched the dawn come through. There appeared to be two sources of light, one descending from the sky, one rising from the earth; when they touched, joined, it was broad open daylight. He had never noticed this before.