Streets of Gold (30 page)

“But what? Is that Bach he played, or is it Rachmaninoff? How dare he add counterpoint to the Prelude? A giant, yes, but what was Bach, a midget? There is a style to Bach that cannot be tampered with, I don’t
care
about pianistic effectiveness, is this a circus sideshow? This is
Bach
, and he does not need contrapuntal embroidery, nor does he need what Rachmaninoff did with the Gavotte, those harmonies and figurations, what were those? Those were unforgivable lapses of taste. Beethoven, all right, I can understand. He has
never
played a Beethoven sonata well in his life. Good phrasing, enormous charm, but no
feeling
, and what is Beethoven if not feeling? The Adagio movement, especially, did you hear it? Why, why,
why
did he play it allegretto? He made it sound like a Field nocturne; what is the
matter
with that man?

“Speed, speed, all was speed, he was running a foot race. Even the Chopin was played too rapidly, although, yes, I hope you noticed the way he played the F-Sharp Nocturne, did you hear those lovely, lovely details, yes, that was good, that was magnificent, that is the Rachmaninoff I took you to hear. But the Polonaise? Too fast. And the F-Minor Ballade? Why did he choose to turn its beautiful theme into a sickening little waltz, and then accentuate it on the off beat when it entered again later, in the bass? The Scherzo? Too fast. Chopin did not intend it to be played so fast, that was not his meaning. The Liszt, of course, well, what can one say about Rachmaninoff’s Liszt? His Liszt has always been magic, and today, yes, I suppose, yes, perhaps. Perhaps
there
and in the Chopin nocturne, you heard the real Rachmaninoff. But the rest? Ah, forgive me, Iggie, eh? I wanted more for you. I wanted you to hear more.”

As for me, I’d heard more than enough.

In fact, I didn’t know what Passaro was talking about. I had been overwhelmed by Rachmaninoff’s mastery of the instrument, his dazzling speed, the brilliance of the tones he coaxed, whipped, snapped, teased, demanded from the piano, the soaring giddiness of his invention, the breadth and depth of his interpretations. Stunned and speechless, I’d sat through the entire performance scarcely breathing for fear he would somehow miss the trapeze, falter in the midst of his aerial keyboard acrobatics and tumble to the sawdust below.

When we left Carnegie Hall, I was crushed.

For despite Passaro’s wild promises of prizes to be won and accolades to follow, I knew for certain on that dismal November day that I would never in a million years be able to play the way that man up there on the concert stage had played.

On the sixth day of July in the year 1943, four days before General Patton’s Seventh Army invaded the island of Sicily, my brother Tony wrote a letter to my grandfather. It was a very brief letter, and it was written entirely in Italian, which Tony had tried to learn at Evander Childs High School.

Roughly translated, my brother had written:

My grandmother called the day they received the letter. I answered the telephone, and she told me first that they’d heard from Tony, and then she read the letter to me in Italian, and then translated it. She told me his Italian wasn’t really too bad, and she wondered why he had apologized for it. Then she asked me how the piano was coming along, and finally told me to put my mother on. That was on July 12, six days after my brother had mailed the letter. We later figured it had been posted from North Africa, where Patton’s invasion force was massed for the strike at what Winston Churchill called the “soft underbelly” of Europe.

Eight days later, on the twentieth, my brother was killed in the vicinity of Porto Empedocle, on the western coast of Sicily. The War Department telegram arrived on the twenty-first, and a letter from Tony’s lieutenant, a man named Arthur G. Rowles, arrived two weeks later. There wasn’t much Rowles could say. He wrote that my brother had fought bravely and well. He reported that he had been killed by an Italian soldier who, in the midst of what appeared to be a headlong, disorganized retreat, had suddenly whirled, raised his rifle, and fired blindly and erratically at the advancing squad. Only one of his bullets struck home, the one that killed Tony — “instantly and mercifully, he did not suffer,” the lieutenant wrote. Why the Italian had not surrendered, as his comrades were doing everywhere around him, was a mystery to the lieutenant. He wrote, too, that a heavy artillery attack, German or American, began almost the moment my brother fell to the ground. The man who had slain him threw his rifle down and began running up the road to Porto Empedocle as it erupted in blossoms of earth and boulders and hot flying shrapnel. He was still running, still on his feet, apparently unscathed, as he disappeared into the dust.

We did not tell my grandfather that an Italian had killed Tony.

I went into his room.

It was raining. The rain lashed the room’s single window, which opened on a potholed driveway that ran steeply from the street to the small porch outside the kitchen. We usually came in through the kitchen door, Tony and I.

I sat on his bed.

I listened to the rain in the gutters and the drainpipes and against the windowpanes. There was undirected anger in my grief. I was angry at General Patton, who had sent my brother into combat. I was angry at my grandfather, who had refused to let Tony fly, and angry at my mother, who had steadfastly upheld his greaseball decision. And I was angry at Tony, for letting himself get killed. What the hell was the matter with him, getting killed like that? And I began to cry again.

I played his records because I was angry and grief-stricken. I played them in defiance of his privacy and his secrecy, played them in a futile attempt to find him again, to share with him something he had loved, to make his records and therefore himself an ineradicable part of
me
. I found them on the shelves above the record player my parents had given him for his thirteenth birthday. I selected one at random, put it on the turntable, and turned the volume control up full. When my mother heard the music blaring, she came into the room.

“Iggie?” she said. Her voice was tremulous. She had not stopped crying since the telegram arrived. “What are you doing, baby?” she asked, and sat beside me, and gently passed her hand over my forehead, brushing back my hair.

“Listening,” I said.

I listened all that night. There were 347 records in his collection. He had taken very good care of them, but he had also played them often and they were badly worn. The sound sputtered and crackled from the speaker, the needle caught in tired grooves and endlessly repeated notes or full measures, skipped over hairline cracks, skimmed the shellacked surfaces of the 78s. I had heard some of the tunes before, on the radio. But the others, the ones I had
not
heard...

You can believe this or not. I have known jazz musicians for the better part of my life, I have played with them and rapped with them, and suffered with them, and I can tell you that my experience was not unique. Anyway, I don’t care what you think; this is the way it happened. I could not read the labels on the records, and to me the ten-inch disks all felt the same. I recognized some of the tunes, but I did not know who was playing them. I kept pulling the records from the shelves and removing them from their protective sleeves and putting them on the turntable haphazardly, mixing swing with ragtime with boogie-woogie with Dixieland with barrelhouse with stride with blues, big bands and small ensembles, vocalists and soloists, a hopeless melange of chronology and style.

I called my mother into the room. It was three o’clock in the morning. She had been lying awake, I realized, because she came to me instantly.

“Who’s this?” I asked, and handed her the record I had just heard.

“Just a minute,” she said. “Let me put on a light.”

I heard the click of the floor lamp alongside Tony’s bed.

“Let me see,” my mother said, and took the record from my hand. “Art Tatum,” she said. She pronounced his name “Tattum.”

“Are there any more of his?” I asked.

“What?”

“On the shelf.”

“Iggie, it’s late. Can’t you...?”

“Mom,
please
. Are there any more records by him?”

“Just a minute,” she said. I heard her rummaging around. “Iggie, I need my glasses,” she said.

I waited. When she came back, she said, “Tony loved these records.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Do you like them, Iggie?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Tch,” she said, and in that single meeting of tongue with gum ridge, she came to terms with my brother’s death. The click that resonated into the silence of Tony’s room was desolate and forlorn; it echoed a Neapolitan acceptance of the inevitability of fate. As she looked through the records on his shelves, she spoke to me and to herself in disconnected phrases and sentences separated by long silences and the crackle of the stiff paper sleeves on my brother’s records. “Uncle Dominick used to take him to Yankee Stadium,” or “Seven pounds, six ounces; a very big baby,” or “Always good to you,” or “Do you remember when he sat on Pino’s cigar?” or “Loved that girl so much,” or “Lou Gehrig, it was,” or as she searched, “Tattum, Tattum,” and finally, “He died for America, Igg.”

She handed me the records she had found.

“Can you listen to them in the morning?” she asked. “Your father has to go to work. You’re keeping him up, Iggie.”

“I’ll play them very low,” I said.

“Did you love him, Igg?”

“I loved him,” I said.

“He’s dead.”

“Yes, Mama.”

“He’s dead,” she said, and went out of the room.

I listened to Tatum.

And first I thought That’s
it
. That’s how I want to play.

And then I thought 
I
can do that.
I
can play that.

I listened again. I played the records again and again. And I became more and more convinced that I could do it, I could actually
do
it. I sat trembling with discovery, each brimming chord, each gliding arpeggio absorbed by my very skin, penetrating, vibrating within me as though some secret unborn self were augmenting the sound, the music threatening to explode from my dead eyes and my shaking hands, lift off the top of my skull, flow ceilingward in a dizzying fireworks display of sharps and flats and triplets and thirty-second notes. I must have made my decision at once, long before I’d heard all the Tatum records, long before I’d run them through the machine a second, third, and fourth time; I probably had made the decision even before I’d called my mother into the room to identify this man who was playing piano as I’d never heard it played before. It was that sudden, it was that simple, I make no apologies. It happened that way. I heard jazz for the first time in my life, played by a giant, on
my
instrument, and I v knew at once that this was the way the piano was meant to be played, and this was the way I was going to play it from that moment on.

Stultifyingly ignorant — I could read in Braille only the language of classical music, and had no concept of this new language — blissfully naive as to its complexity, desperately hungry to get to the piano and
try
it, try to
play
it, waiting for my father’s alarm to go off at a quarter to five, soaringly optimistic, knowing that once I got my hands on the keyboard, the music would leap magically from my fingers, I lay on my brother’s bed and stared sightlessly at the ceiling and contemplated a journey to a land more alien than any I might have imagined in my most fantastic dreams.

As my grandfather had done in 1900, I decided firmly and irrevocably to chance the voyage.

It remained only to discuss the matter with Federico Passaro.

He listened in silence to the records I had brought with me.

He listened while Tatum played “Rosetta” and “St. Louis Blues” and “Moonglow” and part of “Begin the Beguine,” and then he abruptly lifted the needle from the player.

“Yes?” he said. “You wanted me to listen. I listened.”

I took a deep breath. “I want to play like that,” I said.

“Like what?”

“Like what you just heard.”

“What
is
that?” he said. “Jazz.”

“Ah, yes. Jazz.”

“It’s what I want to play.”

“What do you mean?” he said. “For fun? For amusement?”

“Mr. Passaro...”

“Well, I can see no real harm in it,” he said, surprising me; I had expected a tantrum similar to the one I’d provoked with my request for “You Turned the Tables on Me.” But Passaro actually chuckled, and then said, “In fact, the man has good technique. Has he had classical training?”

“I don’t know anything about him.”

“What is he playing in the bass clef? Tenths? They sound like tenths to me. And not
open
tenths, either. You may find the stretch difficult. Well, try it, I don’t think it can hurt you.”

“I’ve already tried it,” I said.

“Ah? And can you reach those chords?”

“I have to stretch for them, you’re right.”

“Well, that won’t hurt you. His arpeggios are very clean, too; he
must
have had classical training. I’m not familiar with all the chords he played in the twelve-bar piece. What were those chords?”