The City: A Novel Page 6

  Alarmed, I said, “He’s not coming back?”

  “You know that quart mayonnaise jar he puts his pocket change in every night? When I packed his things for him, I didn’t pack that.”

  “Maybe he’ll come back for it.”

  “He won’t,” she said with conviction.

  “But isn’t it wrong to take his money?”

  “No, it’s his security deposit.”

  “His what?”

  “Landlords make you put down a security deposit, some hard cash, when you move in, so if you damage the apartment before you move out, they already have the money to cover it and don’t have to chase you for it. Your father never paid his share of rent since he moved back in, and he did some damage yesterday. He sure did some damage. So I kept his jar of change as a security deposit, and now he’s buying us a fancy good-bye lunch.”

  Years would pass before I had crème brûlée again and could learn if it really was the best pudding in history or if it just tasted so good because of the circumstances. Nothing could have been better, after all, than the gift of an expensive good-bye lunch from my father without him there to ruin it.

  That afternoon, we saw a funny movie starring Peter Sellers, and that evening I spent with Mr. and Mrs. Lorenzo, where I fell asleep on their sofa with Mr. Gluck’s pendant held tightly in my right hand. Sometimes I half woke and thought I could feel the feather fluttering softly. When my mother came home after midnight, following a four-hour set at Slinky’s, Mr. Lorenzo carried me up to our apartment, and I was so sleepy that Mom tucked me in bed in my underwear rather than make me get into pajamas. She wanted to put the pendant safely in a nightstand drawer, but I held fast to it.

  I dreamed of a great white bird as big as an airplane, and I rode on its back with no fear of falling, the world sparkling below, forests and fields and mountains and valleys and seas where ships sailed, and then the city, our city. People looked up and they pointed and waved, and I waved back at them, and it was only when the bird began to sing that I realized it wasn’t as big as an airplane anymore and wasn’t in fact a bird anymore, but was instead my mother dressed all in flowing white silk, with wings more beautiful than those of a swan. Carried safely upon her back, I could feel her heart beating, her pure heart beating so steady and strong.

  11

  The following Sunday, June 12, Grandpa and Grandma drove downtown in their 1946 black Cadillac Series 62 Club Coupe, which they’d bought nineteen years earlier and which Grandpa had maintained in as-new condition. It was a big boat of a car yet sleek, with enormous bullet-shaped fenders front and back and fastback rooflines. Cadillac never made a car as cool thereafter, especially not when they went finny. Teddy and Anita took us to their place for an early celebration of my birthday, which turned out to be memorable.

  They were amazed by my eidetic memory for music, which matured in me only as I had learned the piano from Mrs. O’Toole. On his piano in the front room, Grandpa Teddy played a number he was sure that I couldn’t have heard before, “Deep in a Dream,” written by Will Hudson and Eddie DeLange, who had a band together for a few years in the 1930s. He played it superbly, and when he finished, I played it with my limited skills and strained reach, but though I could hear the difference between us, I was thrilled to be able to follow him at all. He tested me with a couple of other pieces, and then we sat to play together. He took the left hand of the board plus the pedals, and I took the right, which was a trick but one that worked, and we ran through a tune I already had heard often, Hudson and DeLange’s “Moonglow,” and didn’t make one mistake in tempo or chords or melody, sweet and smooth to the end.

  We might have sat there for hours, but what I think happened is that I was preening too much, and nobody wanted to indulge me if healthy pride in accomplishment might be souring into conceit. My grandparents had taught my mother—and she had taught me—that when you did anything you should do it well, not for praise but for the personal satisfaction of striving to be the best. I was young and only now discovering my talent, and I was exhilarated and prideful and probably getting obnoxious.

  Grandpa Teddy abruptly stood up from the piano and said, “Enough. It’s my day off. Jonah and I are going for a little walk before lunch.”

  The day was warm but not suffocating. The street maples, which would be scarlet by October, were green now, and a faint breeze trembled the leaves, so that on the sidewalk, patterns of light and shadow quivered like dark fish schooling in sun-spangled water, reminding me of the koi in Riverside Commons.

  Grandpa Teddy towered over me, and he had a deep voice that made me sound like a chipmunk. He was as stately in his bearing as a grand ocean liner, while I was a bouncing little boat with a buzzing outboard motor, but he always made me feel that I belonged with him, that there was nowhere else he would rather be. We talked about all kinds of things as we walked, but the purpose of that stroll was what Grandpa Teddy had to say about my father.

  “Your mother gave you a new apartment key.”

  “Yes, sir. She did.” I took it from a pants pocket and dangled it, sunlight winking off the bright brass.

  “Do you know why the locks were changed?”

  “Tilton.”

  “You shouldn’t call your father by his first name. Say, ‘My father.’ ”

  “Well, but it doesn’t feel that way.”

  “What way doesn’t it feel?”

  “I mean, it doesn’t feel like he’s my father.”

  “But he is, and you owe him some respect.”

  “You feel more like my father.”

  “That’s sweet, Jonah. And I give thanks every day that you’re in my life.”

  “Me, too. I mean, that you’re my grandfather.”

  “Your father isn’t the easiest man to keep your equilibrium with. You know equilibrium?”

  “Yes, sir. Like balance.”

  “It isn’t easy to keep your balance with him, but you always have to walk a line of respect because he’s your father.”

  As we progressed, we passed people sitting on their porches, and they all called out to Grandpa Teddy, and he called back to them and waved. Sometimes drivers of passing cars tooted their horns or passengers shouted his name, and he waved to them, and we met a few people walking their dogs or just out for some fresh air, and they had to talk with him and he with them. In spite of all that, he kept coming back to the subject at hand.

  “You have to walk a line of respect, Jonah, but you also have to be cautious. What I’m going to say to you isn’t meant to make you think any less of your father. I would feel terrible if it did. But I would feel even worse if I didn’t say this—and then had reason to regret holding my tongue.”

  I understood that whatever he told me would be something I must take as seriously as anything that I heard in church. That’s what it felt like—as if Grandpa was churching me not on the meaning of a psalm or the story of Bethlehem, but on the subject of my father.

  “Your mother is a wonderful woman, Jonah.”

  “She’s perfect.”

  “She just about is. None of us is absolutely perfect in this world, but she’s but a breath away from it. She and I were once miles apart in our estimation of your father, but now it’s an inch or two. But it’s an important inch or two.”

  He stopped and looked up into a tree for a long moment, and I looked up, too, but I couldn’t see what interested him. There wasn’t a squirrel up there or any bird, or anything.

  When we started walking again, he said, “I hope this is the right way to say it. Your mother’s current assessment of your father is that he’s basically a good man, means well, wants to do what’s right, but he’s damaged by some bad things that happened to him as a child, and he’s weak. I agree with the weak part. There’s no way to know if what he says happened to him as a boy actually happened. But even if it did, bad things happen to all of us, and that doesn’t mean we can hurt others just because we ourselves have been hurt. Are you with me so far?”

  �
�Yes, sir. I think so.”

  “Your father’s going to divorce your mother.”

  I almost broke into a dance. “Good. That’s good.”

  “No, son. Divorce is never good. It’s sad. Sometimes it might be necessary, but never good.”

  “Well, if you say so.”

  “I do. And these days it’s no-fault. If there’s no property to split—and there isn’t—and if he doesn’t want custody of you or even visitation rights—which he doesn’t—then it’s not even necessary for your mother to agree.”

  “She should agree.”

  “It’ll happen just the same. Anyway, when marriages fall apart, some people sometimes get bitter, they get very angry.”

  “Not my mom.”

  “No, not her. But sometimes people can get so angry, they do foolish things. Sometimes the fight in court is about the children, one of them trying to punish the other by taking away the children.”

  Alarmed, I halted. “But you said he doesn’t want me. And if he does, he can’t have me. I won’t go. Never.”

  Grandpa Teddy put a hand on my shoulder. “Don’t worry, son. No judge in this city would take you away from a woman like Sylvia and give you to your father.”

  “Really? You’re sure?”

  “I’m sure. And he says he doesn’t want you, but he’s a man who says all kinds of things he doesn’t entirely mean. Sometimes people do reckless things, Jonah, they don’t want to leave it to a court, they take matters into their own hands.”

  “Could he do that? How would he do that?”

  We had walked almost to Saint Stanislaus, and Grandpa said, “Let’s rest a bit on the church steps there.”

  We sat side by side on the steps, and he took a pack of Juicy Fruit gum from a pocket and offered me a stick, but I was too scared to want any. Maybe he was a little scared, too, because he didn’t want any chewing gum, either, and he returned the pack to his pocket.

  “Let’s say you’re walking home from the community center one day, and your father pulls to the curb in a car and wants to take you somewhere. What should you do?”

  “Where would he want to take me?”

  “Let’s say it was somewhere you’d like to go, maybe to a movie or for a milk shake.”

  “He wouldn’t take me anywhere like that. He never did before.”

  “Well, maybe he wants to make things right with you, apologize for things he’s done by taking you out for some fun.”

  “Would he? I don’t think he would.”

  “He might. He might even have a present for you, wrapped and on the passenger seat. You’d just have to get in the car and unwrap it while you go to the movie or for that milk shake.”

  The air was warm and the steps were warm from the sun, but I was cold. “I’ve got to walk the line you talked about, give him respect.”

  “So what should you do?”

  “Well … I’d have to ask Mom, was it all right to go with him.”

  “But your mother isn’t there.”

  “Then he’d have to come back later, after I talked to her, but even if Mom said it was all right, I wouldn’t want to go.”

  Three crows landed on the sidewalk and hopped along, pecking at grains of rice from a wedding the day before, each of them studying us warily with glistening black eyes.

  We watched them for a while, and then I said, “Would Tilton … would my father ever hurt me?”

  “I don’t believe he would, Jonah. There’s an emptiness in him, a hollow place where there shouldn’t be, but I don’t think he’d hurt a child. It’s your mother he might hurt by taking you away from her.”

  “I won’t let that happen. I just won’t.”

  “That’s why I wanted us to talk, so you wouldn’t let it happen.”

  I thought about the two trash-talking delinquents in Riverside Commons a few days earlier. “Boy, it’s always something, isn’t it?”

  “That’s life. Always something, more good than bad, but always interesting if you’re paying attention.”

  He offered me the gum again, and I took a stick, and so did he. He took the paper and foil from me, and he folded them with his paper and foil, and he put them in his shirt pocket.

  After we chewed the Juicy Fruit for a minute or two and watched the crows at the rice, I thought of Mr. Gluck’s pendant and took it from my pocket and showed it to Grandpa.

  “Isn’t that a marvelous piece of work.” He took the pendant and dangled it in the sunlight and asked where I’d gotten it. When I told him, he said, “Son, that is a classic story of the city if I ever heard one. Just classic. You’ve got a lasting conversation piece.”

  “What kind of feather do you think it is, Grandpa?”

  He gently twisted the chain between his fingers, so that the Lucite heart turned back and forth. “I’m no expert on feathers, but there’s one thing I can say with complete confidence.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s not an ordinary feather. It’s extraordinary. Otherwise no one would’ve gone to the trouble of sealing it in Lucite and shaping the Lucite into a heart.” He frowned at the pendant for a moment, then smiled. “I feel comfortable saying it’s not a bit of juju.”

  “What’s juju?”

  “A religion in West Africa, full of charms and curses and lots of gods, good ones and bad ones. In the Caribbean, they mix it up with some Catholic bits and call it voodoo.”

  “I saw this old voodoo movie on TV. It scared me, so I had to turn it off.”

  “Nothing to be scared about, because none of it’s true.”

  “In the movie, the voodoo wasn’t on some island somewhere, it was right in the city.”

  “Don’t give it a thought, Jonah. This piece the taxi driver gave you, it’s too well meant to be anything dark and dangerous. Whatever feather this might be, you should figure it was so important to someone that they preserved it. You should keep good care of it.”

  “I will, Grandpa.”

  Returning the pendant to me, he said, “I know you will.”

  We got up, and the crows squawked into flight, and we walked back to the house, where lunch would soon be ready.

  “The little talk we had about your father is just between you and me, Jonah.”

  “Sure. We don’t want to worry Mom.”

  “You’re a good boy.”

  “Well, I don’t know.”

  “I do. And if you stay humble about it and remember talent is a gift you didn’t earn, then you’re going to be a great piano man. If that’s what you want to be.”

  “It’s all I want to be.”

  Under the maples, the black-and-white patterns of leaf shadow and sunlight didn’t remind me of schooling fish in bright water, as before. They sort of looked like piano keys, not all lined up in the usual order but instead intersecting at crazy angles and shimmering with that kind of music that makes the air sparkle, what Malcolm calls banish-the-devil music.

  12

  During his off-the-rails period, when Malcolm was twenty-two, he lost his way in grief. He began secretly using drugs. He withdrew into himself and went away and didn’t tell anyone where he was going. Later, I learned that he had left the city, which was a mistake for a young man so suited to its streets. He had enough money for a year, and he rented a cabin by a lake upstate.

  He smoked pot and did a little cocaine and sat on the porch to stare at the lake for hours at a time. He drank, too, whiskey and beer, and ate mostly junk food. He read books about revolutionary politics and suicide. He read novels, as well, but only those full of violence and vengeance and existential despair, and he sometimes was surprised to rise out of a kind of stupor, bitterly cursing the day he was born and the life in which he found himself.

  One night, he woke past one o’clock in the morning, at once aware that he had been talking in his sleep, angry and cursing. A moment later, he realized that he wasn’t alone. Although faint, a foul odor filled him with revulsion, and he heard the floorboards creak as something moved rest
lessly back and forth.

  He had fallen asleep half drunk and had left the bedside lamp set low. When he rolled off his side and sat up, he saw a shadowy form on the farther side of the room, a thing that, to this day, he will not more fully describe than to say that it had yellow eyes, that it wasn’t any child of Nature, and that it was no hallucination.

  Although Malcolm is superstitious, neurotic in a charming sort of way, and undeniably eccentric, he recounts this incident with such solemnity, with such disquiet, that I’ve never doubted the truth of it. And I can’t hope to convey it as chillingly as he does.

  Anyway, he knew that his visitor was demonic and that he had drawn it to him by the acidic quality of his anger and by his deep despair. He realized that he was in grave danger, that death might be the least he had to fear. He threw back the covers and got out of bed in his underwear, and before he realized what he was doing, he went to a nearby armchair and picked up his saxophone, where he had left it earlier. He says that his sister spoke to him, though she was not there with him, spoke in his mind. He can’t recall her exact words. All he remembers is that she urged him to play songs that lifted the heart and to play them with all the passion he could summon—music that made the air sparkle.

  With the unwanted visitor circling him, Malcolm played for two hours, at first a lot of doo-wop but then also many numbers written long before the rock ’n’ roll period. Isham Jones tunes like “It Had to Be You” and “Swinging Down the Lane.” Loesser and Carmichael’s “Heart and Soul.” Watson and Monroe’s “Racing with the Moon.” Marks and Simons’s “All of Me.” Glenn Miller’s “In the Mood.” He looked only indirectly at the yellow-eyed presence, afraid that a direct look would encourage it, and after an hour of music, it slowly began to fade. By the end of the second hour, it had been dispelled, but Malcolm continued to play, played passionately and to exhaustion, until his lips were sore and his jaws ached, until he was dripping perspiration and his nose was running nonstop and his vision was blurred by sweat and tears.

  Banish-the-devil music. If only it had worked as well on my father—and those with whom he eventually became associated—as it did on that yellow-eyed fiend in the lakeside cabin.