Streets of Gold (61 page)

“Wassa time I tink
Ma che?
I’m spose to make this place my home? Issa no gold here. Ignazio?”

“Yes, Grandpa.”

“I’ma verra rich man, I have good life here. Wassa true what Bardoni told me in Fiormonte.
Le strade qui sono veramente lastricate d’oro.
”

He died in the next instant. A massive hemorrhage exploded somewhere inside his brain and killed him at once.

Head and out.

I can do it on a piano. But there’s no tying up half a lifetime with a bright yellow ribbon, there’s no taking it home. I spend a lot of time wondering about it, but so far there’ve been no moments of truth, no dazzling revelations. Maybe those moments come only to people who can see. Or maybe it’s enough to recognize the lies; maybe the truth will come in its own good time.

My son, Andrew, when he was in elementary school and kids were asking him what religion he was, used to answer, “I’m nothing.” Then, when he grew weary of the response “You have to be
something,
” he took to saying, “I’m a gorilla.” When I asked him what that meant, he said, “It means the same thing; it means I’m nothing. Only this way, I don’t have to explain.”

I would like to explain. I owe an explanation. I’ve kept you here for hours now, and probably haven’t entertained you at all. Anyway, my bag of tricks is running out, I haven’t a fresh triplet in my head. So let me explain. Pretend you’re a movie producer for a moment. Just read the synopsis, and forget the rest. It’s the chord chart that matters, anyway, and not the geography of the performance.

I still try to link them together all the time — the failure of my marriage, and the failure of the myth. I try to find a connection, but each time I think I’ve obviated my guilt by blaming the divorce on a success that could only have happened in America, I recognize I’m only telling myself another lie. I try not to lie to myself these days. So, for whatever it’s worth (Rebecca, friends, enemies, relatives), 
I
was the one who eroded the marriage,
I 
was the one who left wife and family,
I 
was the one who done us in. The butler is innocent. I’m the culprit. So much for that.

As for the rest...

Once upon a time, I wanted to be an American. I wanted to do all the things Americans in the movies did, especially if they could see. I wanted to come off my yacht and stroll up the dock wearing a blue blazer with a family crest stitched to the breast pocket. I wanted to come off the tennis courts after a vigorous set, I wanted to visit my polo ponies in the stables, and ski dangerous mountain slopes, and tell hair-raising tales in the lodge afterward while I sipped mulled wine or buttered rum. I wanted to throw enormous lawn parties, I wanted my wife to sit in a wide-brimmed floppy hat, gin and tonic in a pale white hand, children shouting in the distance as a governess discreetly cautioned silence, my beloved bride kissing one or another of her short-pantsed, knee-socksed darlings when he ran up to her, laughing him away with a “Run along now, dearest, Mummy’s talking.” I wanted family to be family, and friends to be friends, and friends to be family, and immigrants to be Wasps, and Wasps to be all those people who lived and loved within a six-mile radius of the luxurious house I had built of solid gold mined in the streets.

And I
became
American, more or less, though I never did any of the things sighted people can do, but that was hoping for much too much, really, wasn’t it? Even this land of the free and home of the brave can do nothing for the congenitally blind, although it can come a long way toward helping them to realize dreams. My own dream was vague but nonetheless glowing, and whereas I realize now it was
only
a dream, there were times when I thought it had leaped that uncertain line between illusion and reality to become a joyous fact. When I first heard “Ballad for Americans” in 1940, for example, it seemed to me the exultant, triumphant cry of a people who had finally come through. Even the “Czech and double-check” was an echo of an “Amos ’n’ Andy” catch phrase. We had made it, I believed; we were ready to fulfill our promise of greatness; we were at last a true family. From that moment on, the grandsons of Russians would dance
la cucaracha
with the granddaughters of Norwegians; Negroes would sing the
Marseillaise
on Saint Patrick’s Day as they marched up Fifth Avenue side by side with Swedes; on Columbus Day, in the bars along Third Avenue, Germans and Finns would toast the Year of the Butterfly, and croon gypsy lullabies; and on Christmas Day, Jews and Seventh-Day Adventists would give praise to Buddha, while atheists and agnostics carried gifts to the altar.

Dreams are lies.

If the gold Bardoni was talking about was merely an element whose atomic number is 79, atomic weight 196.967, melting point 1063.0 degrees centigrade, and so on — why, yes,
certainly
it was here in the streets to be scooped up in both hands. It’s
still
here, in fact. Jazz, as you probably know, is enjoying a tremendous resurgence. Even Earl Hines is making a comeback, and if I chose to come out of what I prefer to call semiretirement, I’m sure I could get some good gigs, I’m sure I could start earning the big buck again. Somehow, the big buck doesn’t matter to me anymore. Somehow, the joy of playing jazz disappeared the day The Beast tapped me on the shoulder, and advised me to pick up a shovel and start digging. But if Bardoni was talking about
another
kind of gold, a gold that is corrosion-resistant and malleable, you will not find it here, friends, you will not find it in the debris of the shattered American myth. Moreover, you are a fool to search for it; it is only pyrite.

Sometimes, when I walk the main street of Rowayton, tapping my careful way back to the old wooden house on the water, I think of all those black (
or
 white; it doesn’t make a damn bit of difference) people out there who are America’s huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of
our
teeming shore, tired, poor, and hungry, fighting off rats with one hand while filling out correspondence-course lessons with the other, and I realize they are exactly what I
used
to be, back then in the thirties, when I was running through the guinea ghetto with my hand in my brother’s. And I realize further (and this is what frightens me and causes me to stop short in the middle of the pavement) that what they want to be, what they are striving to become — is
me
. Dwight Jamison. And I do not exist. I am a figment of the American imagination. I am the realization of a myth that told us we were all equal, but forgot to mention we were also all separate.

The person I became was someone I did not know. No matter how many times I passed my hands over his face, I could not construct a mental image of who he was. I’m still trying to find out. I do not have the truth yet. But I know that when I said to my grandfather on his dying bed, “You’re the connection,” I was speaking something very close to the truth, unless I was merely denying the lie. He was the connection. He remains the connection between whatever I am and whatever I used to be. At the hospital, when I went back to pick up my grandfather’s death certificate, one of the nurses asked me for my autograph. We began talking, and I recognized that voice, I recognized those cadences, and when she told me she was Irish, I was not surprised. She was twenty-three year old, and had been born in the Bronx — but she was Irish. Well, what
else
could she claim to be? American? Who or what is that?

An American is not the man I embrace in greeting at the cocktail parties I infrequently attend, but neither is he my Uncle Matt, eager to take me anywhere in his taxicab, for which he still does not have his own medallion. And where is Wonder Woman’s cousin, the Wasp Woman I conjured as a child? She’s not the art director’s wife (is she?), chirpily telling her assembled guests, with appropriate innuendo, that her husband misses the 6:05 from New York too often for comfort. But neither is she my Aunt Cristie, offering me some nice fresh lemonade she squeezed herself. Where are the
real
Dwight Jamisons? Where, for that matter, are the
real
Jerzy Trzebiatowskis?

And yet, my grandfather, just before he died, told me he was a rich man, and I know he wasn’t talking about material wealth. Sometimes, in my house on the water, sitting before a blazing fire the housekeeper has started for me, I listen to the crackling wood, and remember the fire Francesco Luigi Di Lorenzo made on Christmas Day in the year 1900, when he decided to come to this country. And I think of what he said to me just before he died - “The streets here are truly paved with gold.”

And I wonder anew.

Although much of the preceding narrative is written in what might be called “first-person personal,” it, too, is a lie. The characters, the events, and even some of the places are fictitious. And whereas the words attributed to
real
jazz musicians were actually spoken by them at one time or another, they certainly were never said to the fictitious character called Dwight Jamison. Marian McPartland, for one example,
did
make the comment about disappearing drummers — but it was an aside to an audience who’d come to hear her play jazz at the John Drew Theater in East Hampton in the summer of 1973.

Evan Hunter