The City Read online

  I was nearly nine, and Grandma Anita still had a year to live. The previous December, my father had come back to stay with us again in the walk-up. Mom never divorced him. She considered it, even though she knew—and believed—that marriage was a sacrament. But she claimed that when she sang in places like the Jazz Cave and Brass Tacks and Slinky’s, she could more successfully discourage come-ons from customers and employees if she could honestly say, “I’ve got a husband, a baby boy, and Jesus. So as handsome as you are, I’m sure you can see I have no need of another man in my life.” According to Mom, just husband or child or Jesus alone wouldn’t have kept the most determined suitors at bay; with them, she needed the three-punch.

  In the nearly eight years he’d been gone, Tilton Kirk hadn’t found a backer, hadn’t opened his own place, but he had left the restaurant where he worked as a cook to take the chef position in a somewhat higher-class joint. He was earning less because every year the owner compensated him also with five percent of the stock in the business, so that once he had accumulated thirty-five percent, he could buy the other sixty-five at an already agreed-upon price, using his stock to swing the bank loan.

  With him at home again, my mom was more happy than not, but I was all kinds of miserable. The man really didn’t know how to be a dad. Sometimes he was a hard-nosed disciplinarian dealing out a lot more punishment than I deserved. At other times he’d want to be my best pal ever, hang out together, except that he didn’t know what kind of hanging out kids think is cool. Strolling the aisles of a restaurant-supply store, obsessing over different kinds of potato peelers and pâté molds, just doesn’t thrill a child. Neither does sitting on a barstool sipping a Coke while your old man drinks beer and swaps nagging-wife jokes with a stranger.

  The worst was that by then I wanted to take piano lessons, and my father refused to let it happen. I had noodled the keyboard at Grandpa Teddy’s house, and I understood the layout on a gut level, the way Jackie Robinson could read a ball in flight. But Tilton said I was too little yet, my hands too small, and when my mom disagreed and said I was big enough, Tilton said we couldn’t afford the lessons yet. Soon but not yet, which meant never.

  Grandpa offered to drive me over to his place and back a few times a week and give me lessons himself. But my father said, “It’s too far to run a little kid back and forth all the time, Syl. And we don’t have a piano here for him to practice between lessons. We’ll get a house soon, and then he can have a piano, and it’ll all make sense. Anyway, honey, you know I’m not your old man’s favorite human being. It breaks my heart how maybe he’ll poison the boy’s mind against me. I know Teddy wouldn’t do it on purpose, Syl, he’s not a mean man, but he’ll be poisoning without even knowing it. Soon we’ll rent a house, soon, and then it’ll make sense.”

  So I was sitting on the stoop in front of our building, such a sullen look on my face that most passersby glanced at me and at once away, as though I, only eight, might try to stomp them in a fit of mean. It was an unseasonably warm day for April, the air so still and humid that a feather, cast off by a bird in flight, sank like a stone in water to the pavement in front of me. As sudden as it was brief, a wind came along, lifted the feather, spun dust and litter out of the gutter, and whirled all of it up the steps and over me. I sneezed and spat away the feather that stuck to my lips.

  As I wiped at my eyes, I heard a woman say, “Hey, Ducks, how’s the world treating you?”

  My mom had a couple of friends who were professional dancers in musicals that were always being talked about by people who loved the theater, and though this woman didn’t look like any of them, she did look like a dancer. Tall and slim and leggy, with smooth mahogany skin, she came up the steps so easy, with so little movement, you’d have thought she must be on an escalator. She wore a primrose-pink lightweight suit, a white blouse, and a pink pillbox hat with a fan of gray feathers along one side, as though dressed for lunch in some place where the waiters wore tuxedos.

  In spite of her fine outfit and air of elegance, she sat beside me on the stoop. “Ducks, it’s rude not to answer when spoken to, and you look like a young man who’d rather poke himself in the eye than be rude.”

  “The world stinks,” I declared.

  “Certain things in the world stink, Ducks, but not the whole world. In fact, most of it smells wonderfully sweet. You yourself smell a little like limes and salt, which reminds me of a margarita, which isn’t a bad thing. Do you like my perfume? It’s French and expensive.”

  The sweet-rose fragrance was subtle. “It’s all right, I guess.”

  “Well, Ducks, if you don’t like it, I’ll go straight home this minute and take the bottle off my dresser and throw it out a window and let the alley reek until the next rain.”

  “My name isn’t Ducks.”

  “I’d be stunned if it was, Ducks. Parents saddle their children with things like Hortense and Percival, but I’ve never known one to name them after waterfowl.”

  “What’s your name?” I asked.

  “What do you think it is, Ducks?”

  “Don’t you know your own name?”

  “I just sometimes wonder what name I look like, so I ask.”

  She was pretty. Even an eight-year-old boy knows a pretty girl when he sees her, and beauty lifts the heart no matter what your age. Her perfume smelled all right, too.

  I said, “Well, I saw this movie on TV about these guys chasing after a treasure down in the Caribbean. This was way back when there were pirates. What they all wanted was this special pearl, see. Three things made it really, really special. It was large, like as big as a plum. And it wasn’t white or cream-colored or pink, like other pearls. It was black, pure shiny black, but it still had depth like the best pearls all do, so you could see into it, and it was very beautiful. So maybe I think the name you look like is Pearl.”

  She cocked her head and sort of smirked at me. “Young man, if you are already this smooth with the ladies, won’t a one of us be safe when you’re all grown up. I am Pearl. There’s no other name I’d want to be. You call me Pearl, Jonah.”

  Only hours later would I realize that I’d never told her my name.

  “You said there were three special things about this pearl in the movie. Its size and its color and …?”

  “Oh, yeah. Well, they said whoever possessed it could never die. It was the secret to immortality.”

  “Black, beautiful, and magical. I love being Pearl.”

  Two years would pass before she told me that she was the soul of the city made flesh.

  “So there you sit, Jonah, as gloomy as if you’re still in the belly of the whale, when in fact it’s a fine spring day. You aren’t being digested by stomach acid, and you don’t need a candle to find your way back up the gullet. Don’t waste a fine spring day, Jonah. There’s not as many of them in a lifetime as you think there will be. What’s dropped your heart into your shoes?”

  Maybe she was easy to talk to because she talked so easy. Next thing I knew, I heard myself say, “I want to be a piano man, but it won’t ever happen.”

  “If you want to be a piano man, why aren’t you at a piano right this minute, pounding the keys?”

  “I don’t have one.”

  “That community center you go to when your folks are working and Donata isn’t available—they have a piano.”

  Donata was the first name of Mrs. Lorenzo, my sometimes babysitter, so I figured Miss Pearl knew her and was coming to visit.

  “I never saw any piano at the community center.”

  “Why, sure there is. For a while this man was in charge down there, he didn’t have an ear for piano, it was all just noise to him. He didn’t like loud birds, either, or a certain shade of blue, or the number nine, or Christmas. He put the Christmas tree up on December twenty-fourth and took it down the morning of the twenty-sixth, and the only decoration he’d allow on it was a Santa Claus doll hung by the neck where a star or angel should have been at the top of the tree. He took the nine out
of the address above the front door and just left a space between the eight and the four, repainted all the blue rooms, moved the piano down to the basement. Some say he killed and ate Petey, the parrot that used to be in a cage in the card room. But he’s gone now. He didn’t last long. He was run down by a city bus when he jaywalked, but in a short time he did a lot of damage to the center. They can bring the piano up in the freight elevator.”

  Loud and belching fumes, a bus went by, and I wondered if it might be the one that ran down the parrot-eater.

  When the street grew quieter, I said, “They won’t bring up the piano for a kid like me. Anyway, it’s no good without a teacher.”

  “There’ll be a teacher. You go in there tomorrow morning, soon after they open, and see for yourself. Well, this glorious day is slipping away, and I am all dressed up with someplace to go, so I better get there.”

  She rose from the stoop and went down the stairs, her high heels making no more noise than a pair of slippers.

  I called after her: “I thought you came to visit Mrs. Lorenzo.”

  Looking back, Miss Pearl said, “I came to visit you, Ducks.”

  She walked away, and I went down to the sidewalk to watch her. With those slim hips and long legs, so tall in all that pink, she resembled a bird herself—not a parrot, an elegant flamingo. I waited for her to glance over her shoulder, and I meant to wave, but she never looked back. She turned left at the corner and was gone.

  I raised my hands to my face and sniffed them and detected the faint scent of the lemons that earlier I had helped my mom squeeze for lemonade. I’d been sitting in the sun, and the film of sweat on my arms tasted of salt when I licked, but I couldn’t smell salt.

  In the years to come, I would encounter Miss Pearl on several occasions. Now that I’m fifty-seven and looking back, I can see that my life would have been far different—and shorter—if she hadn’t taken an interest in me.

  The next morning at the community center, the piano was in the Abigail Louise Thomas Room, which had been named after someone who’d done some good deed for the center back before I was even a gleam in Tilton’s eye. The Steinway was polished and tuned, even prettier than the woman in pink.

  One of the center staff, Mrs. Mary O’Toole, was playing Hoagy Carmichael’s “Stardust,” and just then it was the loveliest melody I’d ever heard. She was a nice lady with lively blue eyes, freckles that she said had come all the way from Dublin to decorate her face, and a pageboy cap of red hair shot through with white that an unskilled friend chopped for her, as she disdained beauty parlors. She smiled at me and nodded to the bench, and I sat beside her.

  When she finished the piece, she sighed and said, “Isn’t this a hoot, Jonah? Someone took away the spavined old piano in the basement and gave us this brand-spanking-new one and did it all on the sly. I can’t imagine how.”

  “Isn’t it the same piano?”

  “Oh, it couldn’t be. The lid was warped on that old one, the felt on the hammers moth-eaten, some of the strings broken, others missing. The sostenuto pedal was frozen. It was a fabulous mess. Some awfully clever philanthropist has been at work. I only wish I knew who to thank.”

  I didn’t tell her about Miss Pearl. I meant to explain, and I started to speak. Then I thought, if I mentioned the name, it would be a spell-breaker. Come the next day, the Steinway would be back in the basement, as broken down as before, and Mrs. O’Toole would have no memory of playing “Stardust” in the Abigail Louise Thomas Room.

  That day I started formal lessons.

  6

  That same night, as I lay sleeping in my small room, someone sat on the edge of the bed, and the mattress sagged, and the box springs creaked, and I came half awake, wondering why my mother would visit me at that hour. Before I could fully sit up in the dark, a hand gently pressed me down, and a familiar voice said softly, “Go to sleep, Ducks. Go to sleep now. I have a name for you, a name and a face and a dream. The name is Lucas Drackman and the face is his.”

  Strange as the moment was, I nevertheless settled to my pillow and closed my eyes and drifted down through fathoms of sleep. Out of the depths floated a young man’s face, eerily up-lit and starkly shadowed. He was maybe sixteen, seventeen. Hair disarranged, forehead beetling over deep-set eyes open wide and wild in character, hawkish nose, a ripe and almost girlish mouth, blunt chin, pale skin glazed with sweat … Never before and only once again in all my life was a face in a dream so vivid and detailed. Lucas had an air of urgency and anger, but at first there was no nightmare quality to the moment. As a full scene formed around him, I saw his features were revealed by the backwash from a flashlight held low and forward. Lucas took necklaces and brooches and bracelets and rings from a jewelry box, diamonds and pearls, and dropped them into a cloth sack that might have been a pillowcase. In one of those fluid transitions common to dreams, he was no longer at a jewelry box, but in a walk-in closet, stripping currency and a credit card from a wallet that had been left there on a shelf. The Diner’s Club card had been issued to ROBERT W DRACKMAN. Then Lucas was bedside, playing the flashlight beam over the body of a man who apparently had been shot to death in his sleep. Still, I was not afraid. Instead, a deep sadness overcame me. To the dead man, Lucas said, “Hey there, Bob. What’s it like in Hell, Bob? You think now maybe sending me away to a freakin’ military academy was really stupid, Bob? You ignorant, self-righteous son of a bitch.” The flashlight beam found a forty-something woman who must have been awakened by the first rounds that Lucas fired. His mother. She could be no one else, for the possibility of Lucas’s face could be seen in hers. She’d thrown aside the covers and sat up, whereupon she had been shot once in the chest and once in the throat. She’d fallen back against the headboard, blue eyes wide but blind now, mouth hanging open, though she’d probably never had a chance to scream. Lucas called her a vile name, a single word that I have never used and won’t repeat here. A hallway. He walked away, and I did not follow. The light dwindled with him, dwindled and faded, and then a desolate darkness prevailed, and a sadness so keen that tears filled my eyes. She who had conjured a piano into the Abigail Louise Thomas Room spoke again: “Remember him, Ducks. Remember his face and his hateful words. Keep the dream to yourself, don’t tell others who might question or even mock it and lead you to doubt, but always remember it.”

  I think I was awake when she spoke those words, but I can’t swear to that. I might have been asleep through all of it, might have dreamed everything, including her entrance into my room, her weight on the edge of the bed, the mattress sagging, the springs creaking. In the darkness, I felt a hand on my brow, such a tender touch. She whispered, “Sleep, you lovely child,” and either I continued sleeping or fell asleep once more.

  When I woke with dawn light at my window, I felt that the dream hadn’t been just a fantasy, that it had shown me true things, murders that already had been committed somewhere, at some point in the past. Lying there as the morning brightened, I wondered and doubted and then banished doubt only to embrace it again. But for all of my wondering, I couldn’t answer even one of the many questions with which the experience had left me.

  At last, getting out of bed, for a moment I smelled a certain sweetness of roses, identical to Miss Pearl’s perfume, which she had been wearing when she sat beside me on the stoop. But after three breaths, that, too, faded beyond detection, as though I must have imagined it.

  7

  The next bit of my story is part hearsay, but I’m sure this is how it went down. My mother would fib to help a child hold on to his innocence, as you’ll see, but I never knew her to tell a serious lie.

  I was just over a week away from my ninth birthday, and Grandma Anita had ten months to live. I’d begun piano lessons thanks to Miss Pearl, and my father had been back with us about six months when he messed up big-time. We were still in that fourth-floor walk-up, and he wasn’t bringing home much money because he was getting part of his salary in stock.

  Mrs. Lorenzo lived on the se
cond floor, but Mr. Lorenzo hadn’t yet died, and Mrs. Lorenzo was thin and “as pretty as Anna Maria Alberghetti.” Anna Maria was a greatly gifted singer and a misused actress in films and eventually a Broadway star, petite and very beautiful. She won a Tony for Carnival! and played Maria in West Side Story. Although Anna Maria wasn’t as well known as other performers of Italian descent, anytime my mother meant to convey how lovely some Italian woman was, she compared her to Anna Maria Alberghetti. If she thought a man with Italian looks was especially attractive, she always said he was as handsome as Marcello Mastroianni. Anna Maria, yes, but I never understood the Mastroianni business. Anyway, Mr. Lorenzo didn’t want his wife to work, wanted her to raise children, but it turned out he couldn’t father any. So Mrs. Lorenzo ran a sort of unlicensed day care out of their apartment, looking after three little kids at a time, and on occasion me, too, as I’ve said.

  When it happened, noonish on the first Tuesday in June, I was at Saint Scholastica, on the last day of the school year, being educated by nuns but dreaming of becoming a piano man.

  My mom had left for Woolworth’s lunch counter at 10:30. When she got there, she discovered there had been a small kitchen fire during the breakfast shift. They were shutting down for two days, until repairs could be completed. She came home four hours early.

  Because my father worked late nights at the restaurant, he slept from 3:00 A.M. until 11:00. She expected to find him still asleep or at breakfast. But he had showered and gone. She made the bed, and as she was changing from her waitress uniform, she heard Miss Delvane rehearsing her rodeo act up in Apartment 5-B.

  Miss Delvane—blond, attractive, a free spirit—had lived above us for three years. She earned a living as a freelance writer of magazine articles and was working on a novel. Sometimes, from her apartment would arise a rhythmic knocking, maybe a little bit like horses’ hooves, gradually escalating in a crescendo, as well as voices muffled and wordless but urgent. On previous occasions, when I wondered about it, my mom said Miss Delvane was practicing her rodeo act. According to my mother, Miss Delvane’s first novel was going to be set in the rodeo, and because she planned eventually to ride in the rodeo as research, she kept a mechanical horse in her apartment to practice. I was five years old when Miss Delvane moved in and only eight when my mom came home from Woolworth’s early, and although I had doubts that a rodeo act was the full explanation, I accepted the basic premise. When I asked about the low groans, my mom always said it was a recording of a bull, because you had to lasso bulls or even wrestle them if you were in a rodeo, and Miss Delvane played the record to put her in the mood when she rode her mechanical horse. I had more questions than a quiz show, but I never asked Miss Delvane one of them, because Mom said the poor woman was embarrassed about how long it was taking her to get her rodeo act together.