Streets of Gold (51 page)

But I could not help secretly wondering what the blonde had meant when she’d whispered, “Hope is the thing with feathers.”

And at the piano, I feel that way. Always. I jump in with a four-bar intro, jump into water that’s icy cold and deep, and instantly hear around me the vastness of the ocean closing over my head, darkness meeting darkness, the steady secret pulse of the bass and the high chinging tinkle of the cymbals, deeper and deeper until I know if I don’t surface soon, my lungs will burst; there is terror in this knowledge, and exhilaration, and a sense of omnipotent control — I simply will not drown. Working against the water, and with the water, the water moving gelidly through my fingers, the steady reassuring life-line pulse of the bass thrumming in my ears, I glide in silvery ease to the surface high above, and explode from it in a dazzle of conflicting tactile sensations, sunshine shattering on my upturned face, frigid water sliding in rivulets from my naked body. Arching, hanging between sky and water for a weightless instant, I hold, I hold, and fall again. A bass drum explosion erupts in the deeps, and a flute is suddenly upon me, it glides wantonly by my side, we touch, we move apart, we touch again, the ocean yields to our deeper dive.

The sound of the cymbals trembles over the blackness, the pulse of the bass echoes somewhere very far above. There is limitless freedom in this void, nothing here to stumble upon, nothing to grope for, nothing to obstruct the abandon of our swift, clean descent. The flute has become my guide, and I follow fearlessly and trustingly, uttering small cries of encouragement and approval, marveling at the pure cold logic of our plunge through uncharted waters, delighting in the sheer beauty of the graceful acrobatics we perform together in this fathomless abyss. There are no restraints upon us, we breathe here more deeply than we did on the surface, and the mix we take into our lungs is pristine, a cleaning jolt that suffuses our slippery bodies and propels them recklessly toward the black sands below. At breakneck speed, we glide an inch above the ocean floor on wings of resonating sound. From above, we can hear the nervous consternation of the snare, the imploring whisper of the high-hat cymbals, the relentless bass fiddle pulse, as insistent as the tremor of the ocean itself.

There is no slow, steady, careful ascent, we have no fear of the bends. An instant before, we were enveloped by deepest black, but now we are on the surface, in sunshine, and the muted trumpet lazily lobs fat globules of sound toward us as we skim the surface waves. Like playful and skittish children, we splash through the intricate bubble patterns the trumpet floats before us and behind, the ocean splintering as we dip below its cresting waves to surface again not three feet away, and dip again, and surface again. Dizzily we dive deep below the horizon and burst from the water in surprise. There is the scent of jasmine wafting from a distant shore, the sound of surf tumbling undiscovered sands. Twilight is falling, the trumpet exhales a brassy threnody, a bass string solo ripples the calm surface of the sea. Cool, the night winds are cool. The drum erupts in raucous exuberance, the flute soars upward into the sky like a startled shrieking gull. I follow, I follow and am suddenly alone, swimming in the blackness of a wheeling sky, falling again in headlong descent to the still water below, piercing the surface clean and straight and true, crashing jubilantly into the sea, and appearing magically on the shore not an instant later.

I am breathing hard, and sweating — but I am grinning. Beside me, the flute player says, “
Yeah
, man!” and I answer simply, “Yeah!”

My grandfather was seventy-seven years old when he came to see my new house in Talmadge, Connecticut. I sent a Carey Cadillac to pick up him and my grandmother in Harlem. They were living on the corner of 120th and First Avenue, just across the street from the
pasticceria
. My grandmother wasn’t feeling well; she was having trouble with her legs. She sat in the kitchen with Rebecca, sipping tea, while I showed my grandfather through the house. I knew every inch of that house by heart. I still know it. It is embossed upon my memory like the dots on a Braille sheet of music. I showed my grandfather the huge playroom, where special tables had been constructed for Andrew’s electric train layout, and Michael’s model raceway, and David’s battlefield — he collects soldiers, I told my grandfather, he has these full-scale wars with them all the time.

“
Come tu,
Ignazio,” my grandfather said, and chuckled. “Remember when you were small? Your soldiers?”

I took him into the living room, with the massive stone fireplace rising in the center of it, Thermopane sliding glass windows opening onto a terrace and gardens designed by a Japanese landscape architect. He was standing beside me, considering the fireplace.

“It’s crooked,” he said.
“Il camino è storto.”

“It’s supposed to be that way, Grandpa,” I said. “The architect wanted one side of it straight and the other slanting.”

“Ah?” he said.
“Sì? È vero?”

As we climbed the stairs to the master bedroom, I said, “How’s Aunt Cristie? Does she like the house in Massapequa?”

“Ah,
sì,
it’s a very nice house, Ignazio. Not like this, but very nice. He’s a hard worker, your Uncle Matt.”

“And Uncle Dominick?”

“He’s all right,” my grandfather said. “You should call him. He was in the hospital a long time, you know. You never called him.”

“I’ve been busy, Grandpa.”

“Ah,
sì,
we are all busy,” he said. “But your uncle had a heart attack, and you should have called.”

“I meant to,” I said. “This is our bedroom. The Franklin stove was a gift. The builder gave it to us.”

“It’s very nice,” my grandfather said.

“Grandpa,” I said, “is Aunt Bianca all right?”

“Yes, yes, she’s fine. She gives me a headache, but she’s fine. She said to send you her regards.”

“When I saw her at Pino’s funeral...”

“Ah,
sì.
”

“... she seemed so frail,” I said.

“Well, she’s not a young woman anymore.”

“Did you want to look at the boys’ room, Grandpa? Or shall we go outside to my studio?”

“Where you work? Yes, I want to see that.”

We put on our topcoats; this was October, and there was an early briskness in the air. As we walked down the slope behind the house toward where the studio was set in a copse of birch trees, I began telling him about the town of Talmadge, Connecticut, which he was not to confuse with Talmadge Hill, a nice small suburb of Stamford. “This is woodsy,
exclusive
Talmadge,” I said, and smiled.

“Cosa?”
he asked.

“That’s what
Time
magazine called it when they were doing a cover story on one of our famous writers. ‘Woodsy, exclusive Talmadge.’ ”

“What does that mean?” my grandfather asked.

“Probably nothing,” I said. I went on to tell him there were two writers living in Talmadge, each more famous than the other, and both pains in the ass. “Why do writers want to talk about writing all the time?” I asked him.

“Who knows?” he said. “I don’t know any writers.”

I told him there were two of everything in Talmadge, it was like Noat’s Ark, with everything that could walk, crawl, or fly being summoned to...

“What do you mean?” he said.

“Well,” I said, “in addition to the two writers, we’ve also got a pair of aging actresses. One of them is dying of throat cancer and is supposed to be a dyke. She lives with a twenty...”

“A what?” my grandfather said.

“Una lesbica,”
I said.

“
Sì? Una lesbica? Dove?
In this town?”

“Yes,” I said. “They say she’s living with a twenty-year-old girl, a Vassar...”

“Che vergogna,”
my grandfather said, and clucked his tongue. “What else do you have two of?”

“Well,” I said, “we have two interior decorators, and two art directors who win medals every year, and two ...”

“For what?” my grandfather said.

“For art direction.”

“What’s that?” he said.

“They work for advertising agencies,” I said.

“Ah,” he said.

I was suddenly glad I had not mentioned that the two interior decorators were fags. One of them was named Theodore and the other Thomas, but they were called Tweedledum and Tweedledee behind their backs, or on occasion the Good Fairy and the Bad Fairy, though everyone kept forgetting which was which. A favorite party game in Talmadge was trying to figure out who was doing what to whom. Was Tweedledum the male in the marriage, or was it Tweedledee? All the women staunchly maintained, that Tweedledee was bisexual. If not, why did he dance so close? “Does he dance close when he dances with you?” I once asked Rebecca.

“Of course,” she replied. “He dances close with all the women.”

“Does he get a hard-on?”

“No, Ike,” she said. “Only
you
get hard-ons.”

“And what else?” my grandfather asked.

“Well, there are also two theatrical producers,” I said, and went on to tell him about a Sunday-afternoon visit from one of them, a thirty-three-year-old
pisher
...

“A what?”

“Pisciasotto,”
I translated.

“Ah.”

. . . who was enjoying the success of a long-run musical comedy, his first hit in years. He had told me in all seriousness that he had done everything there was to be done with musical comedy (his last four shows had been total disasters), that this show of his, this magnificent entertainment he had conceived, and put together with the right people, and lavishly produced (“I don’t produce cheap, Ike”), was the supreme realization of an art form that was distinctly American, and now it was time to be moving on to more ambitious projects, though America would keenly feel the loss since he and Hal Prince were probably the only true “creative” producers in the country, which by extension meant in the
world
, since nobody could do musicals like Americans, not even the English. He was thinking of running for the United States Senate. I listened to him, and wondered if he would ever become President of the United States, this thirty-three-year-old
pisher
stinking up my living room with the smell of his expensive panatelas. He asked me if he could sit in with the quintet one night. We were earning five thousand dollars a week at the time, and every record we made automatically hit the charts; the
pisher
had once played saxophone and clarinet in a dance band at Yale, and he wanted to sit in with us. “I haven’t played in years, Ike,” he confided. “Do me good to get the old embouchure in shape again.” I told him the band’s instrumentation was set (that distinctive Dwight Jamison sound, you know), and did not include a saxophone or clarinet. But I assured him I would most certainly vote for him when he ran for the Senate.

I laughed when I told this story to my grandfather, but he did not laugh with me.

“Well, here’s the studio,” I said, and I opened the door for him and showed him my record collection (“The ones on this shelf were Tony’s,” I said), and the new grand piano we had purchased, and my recording equipment (I explained that the entire place was soundproofed), and my Braille library, and he stood beside me silently, and then said, “It’s very nice, Ignazio,” and we went outside again.

We stood in the birch forest. He must have been looking up at the house commanding the slope, the house that had cost two hundred and fifty thousand dollars to build, the house of glass and stone and wood, the house I now called home.

“È precisamente come la casa del padrone,”
he said. “In Fiormonte,” he said. “Don Leonardo. 
Il padrone.
He had a big stone house on top of the hill, just like this.”

He was silent for several moments. I could hear the sound of falling leaves in the woods. He put his arm around my shoulder, and hugged me to him, and said, “So, Ignazio, you are a success now, eh?”

Let me tell you about success. The two are inextricably linked, America and success, the left hand playing that inexorable chord chart, the right hand inventing melodies. I once asked a noted jazz critic, a man who’d written dozens of books on the subject, whether or not he related the improvisational line to the chord chart when he listened to jazz. He pondered this question gravely for a moment, and then replied, “No, no, I’m interested only in contours and shapes, the geography of the performance.” I respectfully submitted that he was perhaps missing the point. I opened at a Los Angeles club the following week, and the critic respectfully submitted that I played lousy jazz. I try to stay very far away from music critics. But if any of you out there are “interested only in contours and shapes, the geography of the performance,” then I respectfully submit that you are missing the point as well.

I reached the pinnacle of my success in 1960, when I recorded an album titled
Dwight’s Blues
(Victor LPT-X3017). Its popularity was well deserved; the recording session had been inspired, and the quintet never played better. I don’t know why a blues album caught on in 1960; maybe the country was bored to death and needed something to weep about, if only an LP record. The sound as it had been successfully defined on our first record (you do not mess with either Mother Nature
or
success) spotlighted piano and flute, with muted trumpet and rhythm section in the background. I had changed my personnel again just before we cut the record. On flute, I was using a twenty-two-year-old girl named Alice Keating, whom I’d hired straight out of the New England Conservatory of Music. On trumpet, I was using an old black jazzman named Sonny Soames. I’d had a lot of trouble keeping trumpet players. Their solos in my band were rare, and nobody likes doing donkey work. (A very well-known trumpet player once sat in with the quintet, and said to me afterward, “Well, Ike, it sure was nice not playing with you.”)