Streets of Gold

III

Oscar Peterson once said: “First you learn to play piano, then you learn to play jazz” — or words to that effect. I once heard him play eighteen straight choruses of “Sweet Georgia Brown,” and while he was on the sixth chorus, I thought He’ll never top that one, but he topped it in the seventh, and then again in the tenth, and he kept topping himself as he went along, utilizing a personal retrieval system to yank idiomatic ideas out of his mind and push them into his hands, shaping those ideas into an entirely fresh improvisational line, each chorus having no intrinsic relationship to the one preceding it or the one following it, except as part of an original, imaginative, and (to me) inspirational flow. But he had paid his dues, he had the technical knowledge stored in the computer bank of his memory, all of it was under his hands; those years of learning Bach and Chopin from one of the best classical teachers in Canada finally paid off when he came down to New York and promptly knocked off everybody’s hat.

In 1943, I knew how to play piano, but I didn’t know how to play jazz, and if there was anyone teaching it, I couldn’t find him. It’s a different tune today, when jazz has been elevated to the stature of an art form. (I still think it’s only folk music, and I’ve been playing it for thirty-one years now, but I suppose mine is a minority opinion.) Today you can find jazz departments at Indiana U. and the New England Conservatory and several other revered institutions across the length and breadth of this great creative nation. And even those schools without departments per se are offering courses in jazz. It wasn’t that way in 1943. In 1943, there was nobody. I had only my brother’s records.

His collection of piano stylists was fairly comprehensive, I now realize, including such early ragtime players as Scott Joplin and James P. Johnson, and some good representative barrelhouse piano playing by Jelly Roll Morton and Frank Melrose, and stuff by old jazzmen whose names alone seemed to promise strange and exotic keyboard happenings — Pine Top, and Cripple Clarence, and Speckled Red; Cow Cow, Papa Jimmy Yancey, Willie the Lion — and then moving up through men like Meade Lux Lewis, Albert Amnions, and Biff Anderson. Most of the records, though, were by Fats Waller, Earl Hines, Teddy Wilson, and Art Tatum. I liked these best, possibly because there were more of them than any of the others. I’ve since learned that there was a direct line of succession from Waller to Tatum and from Hines to Wilson, but I didn’t know it then. I only knew that I liked the way these men played jazz.

I once sat in with Dizzy Gillespie, and he jokingly (I think) said, “I sure wish you cats would give us back our rhythm,” and I jokingly (I think) replied, “Okay by me, Diz. Just give us back our harmony.” Well, harmony and rhythm were jogging along there simultaneously in the left hand of every piano player I listened to, and it was the left hand that delineated the various styles I learned to identify. But even though I was no stranger to counterpoint (who could be after all those years of Bach?), and even though I had no difficulty recognizing that the chords in any jazz chorus were held for either two beats or four beats, and the rhythm was a steady four/four, and the melody was built on eighth notes, I nonetheless had difficulty understanding how all of these units were put together to get that distinctive... I’m sorry, but “swing” is the only word that describes it. Jazz is by definition a duple musical system. Everything in it is based on equivalents and multiples of two; that’s part of its symmetry. But those three levels of duo-divisible rhythm moving in counterpoint were pressed into a larger rhythmic context that seemed like...

Well, magic.

I’m blind. To me, there’s no such thing as sleight of hand. I figured it was simply a matter of sitting down and learning a new system. There was no one to teach me, and so I had to teach myself. If Tatum had learned it, I could learn it. I now know that Tatum was perhaps the greatest keyboard virtuoso since Franz Liszt. But ignorance is bliss, and I figured if I had once mastered the “Hungarian Rhapsody,” I could now master this thing called jazz.

Back in 1937, Susan Koenig had gently patted my hand and told me my “Moonlight” Sonata was the most beautiful thing she’d heard in her life. In December of 1943, we were both seventeen years old, and I was itching to get into her pants (or anybody’s, for that matter). I had no real idea what she looked like, but I had formed some tactile, olfactory, and auditory impressions — I had touched her a little, smelled her a lot, and hardly listened to her at all.

Every Friday afternoon, Santa Lucia’s held a social for its juniors and seniors, and I had been dogging Susan’s tracks for the better part of a year now, seeking her out in the school gymnasium while the record player oozed Harry James’s “I Had the Craziest Dream,” Dinah Shore’s “You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To,” or Freddy Martin’s “I Look at Heaven,” a popularization of the Grieg Concerto upon which I’d worked so long and hard. I was working equally long and hard on Susan, who — unless my senses were sending absolutely haywire messages to my brain — looked something like this:

1. She was approximately five feet four inches tall. I reckon this by deducting from my own height the distance between the top of my head and the tip of my nose, which, according to my Braille ruler, was six inches. The top of Susan’s head came to just under my nose. Subtracting six inches from my own height, which was five feet ten in 1943, I got a girl who measured five-four.

2. Her eyes were brown. She told me this. She wore shades all the time. So did I.

3. She wore her hair very long, almost to the middle of her back. It would brush the top of my hand as we danced. The style was unusual for 1943, when girls were wearing shoulder-length pageboys, with or without high pompadours. But Susan later told me it was simpler and neater for a blind girl to wear it long and straight.

4. Her brassiere size was 36B. I pressed against her chest a lot and based my estimate on empirical knowledge, having handled many such garments in my Aunt Bianca’s corset shop, and having been intimately involved with Michelle’s bras during the thirteen-month period of her extraordinary growth. Michelle’s bra size, when she moved away in 1941, was a 34C.

5. The top of Susan’s head smelled of Ivory soap. Her ear lobes smelled of Wortt’s Je Reviens. She later identified this brand name for me while my nose was nestled between her naked breasts, where she also dabbed a bit of that intoxicating scent.

6. Her voice, angelic back there in 1937 when she’d praised me for my performance, had lowered in pitch to a G above middle C, somewhat husky, always breathless, even when she wasn’t whispering in my ear as we endlessly circled that gymnasium floor and tried to avoid collisions.

Did you know that blind people can detect the presence of an object by the echoes or warmth it gives off, and even by changes it causes in the air pressure, which are felt on the face? A little-known fact, but scientifically authenticated. I once detected the presence of a short, fat lady standing on the corner of White Plains Avenue and 217th Street, and asked her if the approaching trolley went to Fordham Road. When she did not reply, I asked the question again and discovered I was talking to a mailbox. The mailbox did not answer me. But then again, neither did it answer the Martians when they insisted it take them to its leader. Which reminds me of what Django Reinhardt, the gypsy jazz guitarist said when he first came to America in 1946: “Take me to Dizzy.”

Susan Koenig made me dizzy.

We did not talk very much as we danced our way around the world, preferring to sniff each other and rub against each other, and derive whatever small erotic pleasures we could while the eagle-eyed nuns watched our every fumbling move. But in our brief, breathless conversations over the course of countless Fridays spent in that room lingeringly reeking of dirty socks and jockey shorts, I learned that Susan’s father had been born in Munich, and that he’d gone back there in the fall of 1934 because he wanted to be in on the big resurrection Mr. Hitler was promising. Mrs. Koenig, an Irish-American lady born and raised in Brooklyn, chose not to accompany her brown-shirted mate on his return to the fatherland, and so the two were separated when Susan was eight and her older brother was ten. Her parents were legally divorced in 1938, by which time Herr Koenig was probably smashing the plate-glass windows of Jewish merchants — “Good riddance to him!” Susan said. She had no idea where he was now, and no desire to find out. Her fear, before her brother was drafted, was that he might be sent to Europe, where he would meet his own father on a battlefield and put a bullet between his eyes. Not that she cared about her father. But suppose the reverse happened? The thought had been too dreadful to contemplate, and she’d been enormously relieved when her brother was sent to the Pacific, even though she was terribly afraid of all the awful things the Japs did, like burying prisoners up to their necks in ant hills, and then covering their faces with honey and letting the ants eat them to death — urggh, it was disgusting. She could not wait for her brother to get home from the war. They had had such good times together.

The thing that interested me most about Susan’s autobiographical meanderings as we meandered the length of the gymnasium and back again in time to Ellington’s “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore” (which I’d heard on one of my brother’s Duke records as “Never No Lament,” before lyrics were added to it) was the incidental information it provided on her mother’s occupation and hours of employment. Her mother had never remarried, and she now worked as a saleslady at Macy’s downtown. Normally, she worked only five days a week, Monday to Friday, from 9:30 A.M. to 5:30 P.M., except on Thursdays, when the store was open till 9:00 P.M. But Thanksgiving had come and gone, and the annual Christmas rush was on, despite the fact that a war was raging in Europe and the Pacific, and her mother had been asked to work a full day on Saturdays as well, until the holidays were over. Counting off a steady four/four beat, shuffling around the gym floor, sniffing in Susan’s Je Reviens and pressing against her as discreetly as I knew how, I made a lightning calculation: on Saturdays her father was in Germany, her mother was in Macy’s, and her brother was on a censored atoll. This meant that Susan would be alone in the Koenig apartment any Saturday I decided to drop by to discuss jazz and the weather while inadvertently and accidentally taking off her pants. This was a discovery of no small importance to a seventeen-year-old blind boy. For whereas normally sighted youngsters of my age were being granted licenses to drive in 1943, and thereby had access to mobile bedrooms, we underprivileged blind adolescents, possessed of the same overriding sex drives, could find no appropriate spaces for the unleashing of those furious urges, it being December and quite cold in Bronx Park, where if you took down a girl’s drawers, she might suffer frostbite rather than defloration.

Two weeks after the Friday dance at which I’d learned that Susan was alone in the apartment virtually all day every Saturday, I found my way to White Plains Avenue and asked a mailbox whether the approaching trolley went all the way to Mount Vernon or stopped at the Bronx border, as many of them did; Susan lived just a block over the city line. The mailbox turned out to be a short, fat lady, who told me it did indeed go all the way. Determined to do the same, I hopped onto the trolley and rode it uptown, and then walked down the short street to Susan’s block, and found Susan’s address with a little help from a kindly neighborhood yenteh who led me into the lobby of the building, and summoned the elevator for me, and told me it was the fourth floor, and wanted to know if she should come up with me and show me the exact door; little did she know what was on the mind of the Mad Blind Rapist, Ignazio Silvio Di Palermo!

“Who is it?” Susan asked when I knocked on the door.

“Me,” I said.

“Iggie?” she asked, recognizing my voice at once.

It was exactly twelve noon.

I lost my virginity an hour later.

I started by telling Susan I just happened to be in the neighborhood and thought I’d drop in. This was an outrageous lie that might have been swallowed had Susan herself not been blind. Being blind, she knew that none of us just happened to be anyplace. We took ourselves where we wanted to go, and normally we prepared ourselves in advance with detailed mental maps of the exact transportation systems we would use, and the exact number of streets we would traverse after we got off a trolley, train, or bus, and the exact number of doorways to the dentist’s or the fishmonger’s. (Actually, we could smell the fish store and didn’t have to count doorways.)

But she let the he pass, which I thought was an encouraging sign, and she told me she was delighted I’d dropped in, or stopped by, or whatever it was she said, because she found it terribly lonely sitting here all alone in the apartment from eight in the morning when her mother left to sometimes nine or ten at night when her mother got home. It was so cold this month that she hardly went outdoors anymore, and just sitting here listening to the radio or reading Braille got terribly boring, though now that her brother was gone and there was no one to help her with the selection of her clothes, she had begun occupying herself by marking them according to color and style, using little French knots on the red dresses and sweaters, or cross stitches on the blue ones, or a single bead sewn into a green skirt, where it wouldn’t show when she was wearing it, and hanging color-coordinated belts with their proper skirts, and making little Braille labels for drawers containing different shades of nylon stockings or different-colored panties and brassieres. I cleared my throat at the very mention of these unmentionables, and said that I myself paid little attention to my appearance, sometimes going to school wearing different-colored socks, or a green tie with a blue suit, or black shoes with tan trousers. My mother kept telling me I looked like Coxey’s army, whatever that was. Susan giggled. She didn’t know what Coxey’s army was, either, but it sounded very funny. She told me it was different for a girl, a girl had to look attractive even if she was blind, and I told her I thought she looked very attractive, and she said Why, thank you Iggie.

Blind people, if you haven’t realized it by now, accept the words “see” and “look” without any feelings of self-consciousness or embarrassment except when some well-meaning dope says, “Just look at that rain, will you?” and then immediately and fumblingly adds, “Oh, forgive me, please, I should have realized you can’t... I mean, I know I shouldn’t have... that is, I meant...” as if we hadn’t heard the rain, and smelled the sudden scent of dust riddled on a summer street, as if we hadn’t seen the goddamn rain. Susan said if I was truly serious about becoming a jazz piano player (and I assured her I was), well, then, wouldn’t that mean I’d have to perform before audiences? Sighted audiences? So maybe I should begin paying a little attention to the way I dressed, because whereas a suit with an egg stain on it didn’t mean very much to us, it did offend people who could see, and evoked the sort of pity none of us encouraged and all of us resented.

I told her maybe she was right (actually I did nothing at all about the way I dressed until Rebecca made it a real issue years later), and since Susan had provided the perfect opportunity for further conversation, having mentioned jazz, I told her about all the exciting discoveries I’d been making, all of which I’m sure thrilled her to the marrow. I had figured out all by myself, for example, that a great many of the songs I was listening to and trying to learn had the identical sequence of chords in the first two bars and that the progression, in the key of C at least, was C six, A minor, D minor, and G seven. Susan would probably recognize these as the underlying chords of “We Want Cantor” — if she tried it she’d see what I meant. Susan tried “We Want Cantor” in her husky, breathless voice, and admitted she’d never realized such an amazing thing about that particular tune. Well, it’s not only that tune, I said. Songs like “I Got Rhythm” and “These Foolish Things” (Oh, I love that song, Susan said), yes, I said, and “Ain’t Misbehavin’ ” and dozens of other songs I’d been learning, all started with those same chords in the first two bars.

That’s really interesting, Susan said, would you like to see how I’ve arranged my things?

She led me into her bedroom, and told me that because all her bobbysocks were white, she had them all in this drawer here, but when it came to stockings, they were difficult to tell apart because there were her best ones, for example, which she wore to the socials on Friday, and her everyday ones for less special occasions like when somebody was coming to the house to visit, and also they came in so many different’ shades (though she tried to buy neutral shades that went with any color), and she usually identified the pairs by tying them together after she’d rinsed them out and let them dry, and immediately putting them into drawers marked with Braille labels — here, Iggie, these are my good stockings, feel them, they’re much better than the ones in the other drawer.

When it came to garter belts, she had only two of them, a white one and a black one, and she identified the white one with a tiny button sewn here near the catch, can you feel it, Iggie? The brassieres were another problem, because if she wore a dark brassiere under a white blouse, it showed through the fabric, and if she wore a white brassiere with a black dress, say, and one of the straps showed, it looked positively horrible. She’d never had any trouble with her clothes when her brother was home because he’d helped her choose colors and styles and was kind enough and honest enough to tell her when something looked dowdy or shabby. Well, as a matter of fact, he’d begun helping her dress when she was eight years old and her father left the family and her mother had to take a job and left for work early each morning. Here’s one of my drawers for panties, she said. These are my favorite ones, they’re a pale blue with lace around the leg holes, can you feel the lace, Iggie? They’re rayon, I don’t usually wear rayon panties for every day, I’ve got a drawer full of cotton panties, those are here, Iggie. Like, for example, when I’m just wearing an old skirt and a blouse, like today, I’ll just wear a half-slip and cotton panties under it, that’s what I’m wearing today. My brother used to kid me a lot about wearing cotton panties, he said only snotnosed little kids wore cotton panties, if I was as grownup as I thought I was, I’d be wearing rayon, he always used to kid me that way. Well, I’m sure you’re not interested in my underthings.

We sat on the edge of her bed, and I told Susan I’d known her for, gosh, how many years was it now?

Six, Susan said.

Yeah, six years, I said, wow, that’s a long time to know somebody. And whereas I had some idea of what she looked like because, you know, we’d talked a lot and all, and naturally I knew a lot of things about her... I’d never in all that time explored her face with my hands, which was possibly the only way I’d ever really get to know what she really looked like, ever get to form a mental image to augment the other impressions I’d...

You can touch my face if you like, she said, and very softly added, Iggie.

I touched her face. Gently, lingeringly, with both hands, I touched the wide brow below the delicate hairline, and then gingerly explored the arched eyebrows, and then lifted the dark glasses onto her forehead, away from her sightless eyes, and touched the lids and the lashes, and while the glasses were still raised I touched the bridge of her nose and felt along it to the delicately curved tip, a fine film of perspiration on it, and then moved my hands outward toward her cheekbones, I have freckles, she said, and I answered You never mentioned that, and she murmured Yes. And then I gently lowered the glasses over her eyes again, and ran my hands lightly over her cheeks and the line of her jaw and her chin, and explored her mouth, touched the bow of her upper lip where it curved away from her teeth, and the fleshy lower lip, and then the moist inner membrane as she parted her lips and I said You’re beautiful, Susan.

Sitting on her bed, my hands in my lap again, we began talking about the nuns at school, the ones we particularly loved or despised, and about kids we’d known for God knew how long, and how we would miss them after we graduated next June, though I said it wasn’t necessary to lose track of people you really liked or admired, it would be a shame, for example, if she and I lost contact after we’d known each other such a long time. Susan quickly said Oh, no, we mustn’t let that happen, and I agreed No, we certainly mustn’t, not now that we were really getting to know each other even better. Susan said there were some kids, though, she wouldn’t mind seeing the last of. Kids like Donald Hagstrom, who was always using being blind as an excuse to go feeling around, did I know what she meant? No, I said, and Susan said You know, he puts his hands out in front of him and goes feeling around, you know, hoping he’ll, you know, bump up against someone, you know, like in the coat closet or someplace, just feeling around, do you understand what I mean, Iggie?

Oh, I said.

He’s done that to me a few times, Susan said. I slapped his face for him one time. I know he can tell I’m there, and it’s not only me, it’s lots of the other girls, too, he knows we’re there, he just makes believe he’s groping around, it’s really humiliating and embarrassing. Girls don’t like to be grabbed that way, Iggie. I mean, if they’re going to be touched at all, especially there were it’s so personal and private, they want to be touched gently. The way you touched my face. That way.

This way? I asked, and I reached out and touched the soft skin of her neck, and she said Yes, that way, but of course he touches lower. Donald, I mean. When he touches. And not as gentle as that. A little lower, though.

Here? I said.

Yes, she said, but you’d better stop, Iggie, because we’re all alone here and my mother won’t be home till very late tonight, so I don’t think you should be doing that, do you?

I guess not, I said.

Though it feels very nice, she said, you have nice hands.

Thank you, I said.

You’re welcome, she said, but please stop, okay? My brother has very gentle hands, too, did I tell you he used to dress me when I was very small? Well, actually, he used to help me dress right until the time he left for the Army. He’d sit right here on the edge of the bed, right where we’re sitting, and I’d be putting on a pair of stockings and fumbling with the damn garters, Iggie, I really don’t think you should be doing that, do you? and he’d say he hoped I wasn’t planning on wearing those stockings with the red dress or the green one or whatever it was, he was really very helpful, I miss him a lot.

The buttons are different, you know, she said. On a girl’s blouse. They’re the reverse. I mean, from a boy’s. Lots of boys have trouble unbuttoning a girl’s blouse because the buttons are turned around. I remember once, will you promise not to tell this to anyone, I was fifteen, I guess, and I’d gone to a party at a girl’s house up the street, she can see and everything, she’s not blind, and they had a keg of beer there, I think it was a party for some boy who was going in the Army, I’m not sure, it was right after Pearl Harbor. And I drank a lot of beer, and I got very, well, not drunk, but sort of tipsy, you know, and when I came home my brother was lying here on my bed, reading, my mother was out someplace, he took one look at me and said, Oh-oh. I couldn’t even unbutton my own blouse, would you believe it, he had to unbutton it for me. And even though he’d had lots of practice dressing me when I was small, he still had trouble getting my blouse off that night, I guess because I was weaving all over the room, oh, God, it was so silly. I finally passed out cold and didn’t remember a thing the next morning, my clothes were on the chair there, Iggie, you’re getting me very hot.

I am now going to attempt something that might frighten even the likes of Oscar Peterson. I am going to demonstrate what it is like to play a jazz solo, and I am going to do so in terms of what happened with Susan Koenig in her bedroom that day after we got through the basics of taking off her blouse and her bra and her skirt and her half-slip and finally her cotton panties (but not her dark glasses), and after she unbuttoned my fly and helped me off with my undershorts and fell upon me with blind expertise and unbridled passion. I am going to prove to you not only what a great piano player I am, but also what a unique and marvelous writer I could be (if only I had the time), and I am going to do so by demonstrating what jazz would look like if you were reading it in the English language instead of hearing it in a smoky nightclub. An impossible feat, you say? Stick around, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

To keep this simple (look, he’s already copping out!), I’m going to use a twelve-bar blues chart with only twenty-one chords in it, as opposed to a more complex thirty-two-bar chart with as many as sixty-four chords in it. If I were playing a real blues chorus, the chords I’d use most frequently in the key of A flat, let’s say, would be A-flat seven, D-flat seven, and E-flat seven. But we’re not concerning ourselves with chords in what follows; we’re substituting words for chords.

This, then, would be the chord chart for “Jazzing in A Flat,” as it is known in England (a pun, Mom), or, as it is known to American blues buffs, simply “Up in Susan’s Womb.” (Another one; sorry, Mom.)

            BAR    1:    SUSAN

            BAR    2:    ME

            BAR    3:    SUSAN

            BAR    4:    BED

            BAR    5:    ME

            BAR    6:    ME

            BAR    7:    DECEMBER and AFTERNOON

            BAR    8:    HOT and COLD

            BAR    9:    AFTERNOON and EVENING

            BAR   10:    AFTERNOON and EVENING

            BAR   11:    SUSAN and BEDDED and I and MYSELF

            BAR   12:    LIMP and DUSK and BED

There are four beats in each bar, but the last two bars combined have only seven beats in them and are called, traditionally and unimaginatively, “a seven-beater,” the last beat understood but not played. If you count all the capitalized words in all the bars above, you’ll discover there are exactly twenty-one of them, just as promised. Their selection was determined by the actual incidence of a conventional set of chords in a typical blues chorus, with which I’ve taken no liberties. For example, the word “bed” in the chart represents an A-flat dominant chord, whereas the word “bedded” represents an A-flat dominant inversion — “bed,” therefore, becomes “bedded,” a different but similar chord.

The first chorus of the tune will consist of these chords being played in the left hand and the composer’s melody being played in the right hand almost exactly as he wrote it. I’ll add a swing to it that did not exist in the original sheet music, but for the most part I’ll play it almost straight, in order to identify it (solely as a courtesy) for my audience. The choruses following the head chorus will be improvised, invented on the spot, and will bear no resemblance to the original tune, unless I choose to refer back to it occasionally, again solely as a courtesy. I am interested only in the chord chart. And the chart consists of those twenty-one words listed above. The rest is all melody — my melody, not the composer’s. In fact, the melodies I improvise in each succeeding chorus may have nothing whatever to do with sex per se, except as sex defines the overall “mood” of the tune. In short, the blowing line I invent to go with the chord progression doesn’t need to make an emotional or philosophic commitment to the composer’s melody. I can use all sorts of musical punctuation in my running line — eighth notes, eighth-note triplets, thirty-second notes, sixty-fourth notes, runs — the way I would use commas, semicolons, periods, or exclamation points. I can repeat sequential figures, augmenting or diminishing licks as I see fit, or I ran utilize silences if I choose. (A jazzman listening to J. J. Johnson once said, “I sure like those notes he’s playing,” and another cat replied, “I like the ones he isn’t playing.”) I can do whatever I want with whatever melody I invent. I am entirely free to create.

But I cannot deviate from the chart. Once the chart is set in motion, it is inviolable, it is inexorable, it is inevitable. I am locked into it tonally and rhythmically, I cannot change SUSAN to ALICE, nor can I hold that chord for longer than the four beats prescribed in Bar 1, though I can of course repeat it four times in that measure, if I like. At the end of those four beats, me must come in for another four beats; the chart so dictates. When it comes time for me to play AFTERNOON for two beats in Bar 7, I’d better not be lingering on DECEMBER. I can use substitute chords, or passing chords, or what are known as appoggiatura chords — SHOT to HOT or BLIMP to LIMP — but only to get me where I have to be when I have to be there. Jazz is a moving, volatile, energetic force that is constantly going someplace. Each chord exists only because it is in motion toward the next chord and from the chord preceding it. It’s pure Marxist music, in a sense, utilizing the dialectic process throughout. I can take the chord EVENING and break it into an arpeggio if I choose, transforming it into a linear EVE, EN, ING, or I can play it diatonically E,V,E, N,I,N,G, as a mode, or I can play it as a shell, EVNG, but I have to play it; it is part of the chart, and the chart is the track upon which the express train of my improvisation runs.

So-in the first twelve bars, I’ll play “Jazzing in A Flat” as the composer wrote it, mingling and mixing right-hand melody with left-hand harmony because we’re doing prose here and not musical notation, and anyway, that’s exactly as you’d hear it. In the next twelve bars, I’ll improvise a jazz solo with a blowing line unrelated to the original melody except where brief reference may be made to it, the entire improvisation based on those twenty-one chords in the relentless chord chart. Then, utilizing whatever bag of tricks I possess, I’ll take us into the final twelve bars, where I’ll play the head again almost as straight as I did at the top, and then go home (“head and out,” as it’s called). All of this will be enormously abbreviated, you understand. A jazz solo, especially on a blues chart, can go on and on all night. This solo will consist of only three choruses.

Ready?

Ah-onetwothreefour...

SUSAN spent six hours with/ME, who soon learned that/SUSAN was not a virgin, that her/BED had been shared with her brother, who, like/ME, had desired her, but, unlike/ME, had been humping her for years./DECEMBER was my turn, that AFTERNOON apartment/... HOT radiators clanging, COLD wind rattling the windows,/AFTERNOON waning, EVENING on the way. Oh, that/AFTERNOON! Coming four times and, in the EVENING, once again in/SUSAN’s mouth, BEDDED still, she asked that I let MYSELF out, lying there/LIMP, still wearing dark glasses, as dusk shadowed the rumpled BED.

SUSiphANy SU SU whispering/ME, and oh, andering, MEandering, black-eyed/SUSAN flat-boy-ant, optimum/BED! a dead hollow vesper, a con-spir-a-see/ME-eyed poinciana, eyed,/o sole ME-eyed poin-/DEE-CEM-BER, all white, and A-F-T-ERNOON all all all un-ending./HOT musky HOT mustard, COLD stinking COLD thurible,/AFTER-sun and NOON sinking, E,V,E,NING fuck and tongue, an/AFTER-taste, but NOON gone, AFTER-NOON screaming, screening EVEN-ING/SUSAN, SUSANitary seas, BEDAZZled by moonlight and I... I... coconut-fronded, MYcamel-SELFconsciousness slinkily slumbering/LiMPingly stuttering, DUSKily darkening, deepening daisies and violets in BEDS.

SUSAN six hours with/ME all astonished, for/SUSAN’s no virgin, her/BED was her brother’s!/ME she fucked royally,/ME she taught brotherwise, all through/DECEMBER, or all AFTERNOON at least./HOT dizzy licks, COLD chops but warm cockles,/AFTERNOON heat begat cool EVENINg’s expertise./AFTERNOON practice for EVENINg’s fel-ay-she oh/SUSAN! oh Christ! how she BEDDED and wedded and urged that I be MYSELF,/LiMPly suggested she’d best be alone now, DUSK softly shrugging and hugging her naked and leaving her lying in shades on her BED.

The bar was on Fordham Road, just off Jerome Avenue.

“It’s full of niggers,” my Uncle Luke said. “Let’s get out of here.”

This was February of 1944, and you could hardly walk through any street in New York without stumbling upon a place offering live jazz. I had asked Luke to take me to this particular bar because Biff Anderson was playing here this weekend. There were eight Biff Anderson records in my brother’s collection, two of them with him backing the blues singers Viola McCoy and Clara Smith, four of them made when he’d been playing with Lionel Howard’s Musical Aces, the remaining two featuring him on solo piano. His early style seemed to be premised on those of James P. Johnson and Fats Waller. Waller, I had already learned, was the man who had most influenced Tatum. And Tatum was where I wanted to be.

I was not surprised that the place was full of black people. I had begun subscribing to Down Beat and Metronome, which my father read aloud to me, and I knew what color most of the musicians were; not because they were identified by race, but only because there were pictures of them in those jazz journals. My father would say, “This Tatum is a nigger, did you know that?” (He also told me Tatum was blind, which was of far greater interest to me, and which confirmed my belief that I could one day play like him.) Or “Look at this Jimmie Lunceford,” he would say. “I hate nigger bands. They repeat themselves all the time.” I knew Biff Anderson was black, and I expected him to have a large black audience. But my Uncle Luke must have been shaken by it; he immediately asked the bartender for a double gin on the rocks.

“How about your friend here?” the bartender asked. He was white.

“I’ll have a beer,” I said.

“Let me see your draft card,” he said, and then realized I was blind, and silently considered whether or not blind people were supposed to register for the draft, and then decided to skip the whole baffling question, and simply repeated. “Double gin on the rocks, one beer.” We had to register for the draft the same as anyone else, of course, and — at least according to a joke then current — even blind people were being called up, so long as their Seeing Eye dogs had twenty-twenty vision. I didn’t have a draft card because I wasn’t yet eighteen. I’d have skipped the beer if the bartender had raised the slightest fuss; I was there to hear Biff Anderson play, and that was all.

The bar was a toilet. I’ve played many of them. It did not occur to me at the time that if someone of Biff’s stature was playing a toilet in the Bronx, he must have fallen upon hard times. Nor did I even recognize the place as a toilet. I had never been inside a bar before, and the sounds and the smells were creating the surroundings for me. Biff must have been taking a break when we came in. The jukebox was on, and Bing Crosby was singing “Sunday, Monday, or Always.” Behind the bar, the grain of which was raised and then worn smooth again, I could hear the clink of ice and glasses, whiskey being poured, the faint hiss of draft beer being drawn. There was a lot of echoing laughter in the room, mingled with the sound of voices I’d heard for years on “Amos ’n’ Andy.” The smells were beer and booze and perfume, the occasional whiff of someone who’d forgotten to bathe that month, the overpowering stench of urine from the men’s room near the far end of the bar — though that was not what identified this particular dump as a toilet. To jazz musicians, a toilet is a place you play when you’re coming up or heading’ down. I played a lot of them coming up, and I played a few of them on the way down, too. That’s America. Easy come, easy go.

“Lots of dinges here tonight,” the bartender whispered as he put down our glasses. “What’re you guys doin’ here?”

“My nephew’s a piano player,” Luke said. “He wants to hear this guy.”

“He’s a dinge, too,” the bartender said. “That’s why we got so many of them here tonight. I never seen so many dinges in my life. I used to tenn bar in a dump on Lenox Avenue, and even there I never seen so many dinges. You hole a spot check right this minute, you gonna find six hundred switchblades here. Don’t look crooked at nobody’s girl, you lend up with a slit throat. Not you, kid,” he said to me. “You’re blind, you got nothin’ to worry about. You play the piano, huh?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“So whattya wanna lissen to this guy for? He stinks, you ask my opinion. I requested him last night for ‘Deep Inna Hearta Texas,’ he tells me he don’t know the song. ‘Deep Inna Hearta Texas,’ huh? Anybody knows that song.”

“It’s not the kind of song he’d play,” I said.

“You’re tellin’ me?” the bartender said. “He don’t know it, how could he play it? I don’t recognize half the things he plays, anyway. I think he makes ’em up, whattya think of that?”

“He probably does,” I said, and smiled.

“He sings when he plays,” the bartender said. “Not the words, you unnerstan’ me? He goes like uh-uh-uh under his breath. I think he’s got a screw loose, whattya think of that?”

“He’s humming the chord chart,” I said. “He does that on his records, too.”

“He makes records, this bum?”

“He made a lot of them,” I said. “He’s one of the best jazz pianists in the world.”

“Sure, and he don’t know ‘Deep Inna Hearta Texas,’ ” the bartender said.

“There’s got to be four hundred niggers in this place,” Luke said.

“You better lower your voice, pal,” the bartender advised. “Less you want all four hunnerd of ’em cuttin’ off your balls and hangin’ ’em from the chandelier.”

“There ain’t no chandelier,” Luke said.

“Be a wise guy,” the bartender said. “I tole the boss why did he hire a dinge to come play here? He said it was good for business. Sure. So next week this bum goes back to Harlem and we’re stuck with a nigger trade. And he can’t even play ‘Deep Inna Hearta Texas.’ Can you play ‘Deep Inna Hearta Texas’?” he asked me.

“I’ve never tried it.”

The bartender sang a little of the song, and then said, “That one. You know it?”

“I’ve heard the song, but I’ve never played it.”

“You must be as great a piano player as him,” the bartender said.

“How about another double?” Luke asked.

“Fuckin’ piano players today don’t know how to play nothin’,” the bartender said, and walked off to pour my uncle’s drink.

“I know ‘Deep in the Heart of Texas,’ ” Luke said.

“Whyn’t you go play it for him?” I said.

“Nah,” Luke said.

“Go on, he’d get a kick out of it.”

“Nah, nah, c’mon,” Luke said. “Anyway, here he comes.”

“Who?”

“The guy you came to hear. I guess it’s him. He’s sittin’ down at the piano.”

“What does he look like?”

“He’s as black as the ace of spades,” Luke whispered.

“Is he fat or skinny or what?”

“Kind of heavy.”

“How old is he?”

“Who can tell with a nigger? Forty? Fifty? He’s got fat fingers, Igg. You sure he’s a good piano player?”

“One of the best, Uncle Luke.”

“Here’s your gin,” the bartender said. “You want to pay me now, or you gonna be drinkin’?”

“I’ll be drinking,” Luke said.

From the moment Biff began playing, his heritage was completely evident. Johnson had taught Waller, and Biff had learned by imitating both, and when Tatum took Waller a giant step further, Biff again revised his style. He played a five-tune set consisting of “Don’t Blame Me,” “Body and Soul,” “Birth of the Blues,” “Sweet Lorraine,” and “Star Eyes.” This last was a hit recorded by Jimmy Dorsey, with Kitty Kallen doing the vocal. It was, and is, a perfect illustration of a great tune for a jazz improvisation. The melody is totally dumb, but the chord chart is unpredictable and exciting, with no less than nine key changes in a thirty-two-bar chorus. I still use it as a check-out tune. Whenever I want to know how well someone plays, I’ll say, “Okay, ‘Star Eyes.’ ” If he comes up with some fumbling excuse like “Oh, man, I don’t like that tune so much,” or “Yeah, yeah, like I haven’t played that one in a long time,” I’ve got him pegged immediately. It’s a supreme test tune for a jazz musician, and Biff played it beautifully that night.

He played it beautifully because he played it exactly like Tatum. A tribute, a copy, call it what you will, but there it was, those sonorous tenths, those pentatonic runs, the whole harmonic edifice played without Tatum’s speed or dexterity, of course, but letter perfect stylistically. I was sitting not fifty feet from a man who could play piano like Tatum, and I had been breaking my balls and my chops for the past seven months trying to learn Tatum by listening to his records.

“Let me have another one of these, huh?” Luke said.

“Hey, Uncle Luke,” I said. “Go easy, huh?”

“Huh? Go easy?”

“On the gin.”

“Oh. Sure, Iggie, don’t worry.”

The music had stopped; I could hear laughter and voices from the bandstand.

“What’s he doing up there?” I asked Luke.

“He’s standing near the piano, talking to a girl.”

“Can you take me up there?”

“Sure, Iggie. What’re you gonna do? Play a little?”

“I just want to meet him. Hurry up. Please. Before he leaves.”

“He’s lookin’ down her dress, he ain’t about to leave,” Luke said, and he offered me his elbow, and I took it and got off the bar stool, and followed him across the room, moving through a rolling crest of conversation and then onto a slippery, smooth surface I assumed was the dance floor, and heard just beyond earshot a deep Negro voice muttering something unintelligible, and then caught the tail end of a sentence, “. . . around two in the mornin’, you care to hang aroun’ that long,” and the voice stopped as we approached, and my Uncle Luke said, “Mr. Anderson?”

“Yeah?” Biff said.

“This is my nephew,” Luke said. “He plays piano.”

“Cool,” Biff said.

“He wanted to meet you.”

“How you doin’, man?” Biff said, and he must have extended his hand in greeting because there was a brief expectant silence, and then Luke quickly said, “Shake the man’s hand, Iggie.”

I extended my hand. Biff’s hand was thick and fleshy and sweating. On my right, there was the overpowering, almost nauseating smell of something that was definitely not Je Reviens.

“You play piano, huh?” Biff said.

“Yes.”

“How long you been playin’?”

“Twelve years.”

“Yeah? Cool. Hey, Poots, where you goin’?” he said, his voice turning away from me. There was no answer. I heard the click of high-heeled shoes in rapid tattoo on the hardwood floor, disappearing into the larger sound of voices and laughter. Somewhere behind me, the jukebox went on again — David Rose’s “Holiday for Strings.”

“Dumb cunt,” Biff said, and turned back to me again. “So you been playin’ twelve years,” he said without interest.

“I’ve been trying to learn jazz,” I said.

“Mmm,” he said, his voice turning away. I heard the sound of ice against the sides of a glass. He had picked up a drink from the piano top.

“He’s real good,” Luke said. “He studied classical a long time.”

“Yeah, mmm,” Biff said, and drank and put down the glass again with a small final click.

“Whyn’t you play something for him, Iggie?”

“That’s okay, I’ll take your word for it,” Biff said. “Nice meetin’ you both, enjoy yourselves, huh?”

“Hey, wait a minute!” Luke said.

“There’s somethin’ I got to see about,” Biff said. “You’ll excuse me, huh?”

“The kid came all the way here to listen to you,” Luke said, his voice rising. “I went all the way uptown to get him, and then we had to come all the way down here again.”

“So what?” Biff said.

“That’s what!” Luke said. His voice was louder now. He’s been talkin’ about nothin’ but you ever since he found out you were gonna be playing in this dump.”

“Yeah?” Biff said. “That right?”

“Yeah!” Luke said, his voice strident and belligerent now. It was the gin talking, I realized. I had never heard my uncle raise his voice except while playing poker, and nobody was playing poker right that minute. Or maybe they were. “So let him play piano for you,” Luke said. “It won’t kill you.”

“You think I got nothin’ better to do than...?

“What the hell else you got to do?” Luke asked.

“That’s okay, Uncle Luke,” I said.

“No, it ain’t okay. Why the hell can’t he listen to you?”

“I just wanted to meet him, that’s all,” I said. “Come on.”

“Just a minute, you,” Biff said,

“Me?”

“You’re the piano player, ain’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Then that’s who. What can you play?”

“Lots of things.”

“Like what?”

“Tatum’s ‘Moonglow’ and ‘St. Louis Blues,’ and...”

“That’s plenty. Just them two, okay? If you’re lousy, you get one chorus and out. Now if your uncle here don’t mind, I’m goin’ to the pissoir over there while you start playin’, because I got to take a leak, if that’s all right with your uncle here. I can listen fine from in there, and soon’s I’m finished I’ll come right back. If that’s all right with your uncle here.”

“That’s fine,” Luke said.

“Show him the piano,” Biff said. “I’ll cut off the juke on my way.” He climbed down from the bandstand and walked ponderously past me toward the men’s room.

“Black bastard,” Luke muttered under his breath, and then said, “Give me your hand, Iggie,” and led me up the steps and to the piano.

I played. I wish I could report that all conversation stopped dead the moment I began, that Biff came running out of the men’s room hastily buttoning his fly and peeing all over himself in excitement, that a scout for a record company rushed over and slapped a contract on the piano top. No such thing. I played the two Tatum solos exactly as I’d lifted them from his record, and then I stopped, and conversation was still going on, laughter still shrilled into the smoky room, the bartender’s voice said, “Scotch and soda, comin’ up,” and I put my hands back in my lap.

“Yeah, okay,” Biff said. I had not realized he was standing beside the piano, and I did not know how long he’d been there. I waited for him to say more. The silence lengthened.

“Some of the runs were off, I know,” I said.

“Yeah, those runs are killers,” Biff said.

“They’re hard to pick up off the records,” I said.

“That where you got this stuff? From Art’s records?”

“Yes.”

“Well, that’s not a bad way. What else do you know?”

“A lot of Wilson, and some Waller and Hines...”

“Waller, huh?”

“Yes.”

“Takin’ it off note by note from the records, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“Mmm,” Biff said. “Well, that’s okay. What’ve you got down of Fats?”

“ ‘Thief in the Night’ and ‘If This Isn’t Love’ and...”

“Oh, yeah, the sides he cut with Honey Bear and Autrey, ain’t they?”

“I don’t know who’s on them.”

“That’s all shit, anyway,” Biff said. “That stuff he done with ‘Fats Waller and his Rhythm.’ ‘Cept for maybe ‘Dinah’ and ‘Blue Because of You.’ ”

“I can play those, too.”

“Can you do any of his early stuff?”

“Like what?”

“Like the stuff he cut in the twenties. ‘Sweet Savannah Sue’ and... I don’t know, man... ‘Love Me or Leave Me.’ That stuff.”

“No, I don’t know those.”

“Yeah, well,” Biff said. “Well, that wasn’t half bad, what you played. You dig Tatum, huh?”

“Yes. That’s how I want to play.”

“Like Tatum, huh?”

“Yes.”

“Well, you doin’ fine,” Biff said. “Jus’ keep on goin’ the way you are. Fine,” he said. “Fine.”

“I need help,” I said.

“Yeah, man, don’t we all?” Biff said, and chuckled.

“A lot of Tatum’s chords are hard to take off the records.”

“Jus’ break ’em up, that’s all. Play ’em note by note. That’s what I used to do when I was comin’ along.”

“I’ve tried that. I still can’t get them all.”

“Well, kid, what can I tell you? You wanna play Tatum piano, then you gotta listen to him and do what he does, that’s all. Why’n’t you run on down to the Street; I think he’s play in’ in one of the clubs down there right now. With Slam, I think.”

“What street?” I said.

“What street? The Street.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Well, kid, what can I tell you?” Biff said, and sighed. “While you’re down there, you might listen to what Diz is doin’. Dizzy Gillespie. Him an’ Bird are shakin’ things up, man, you might want to change your mind. Hey, now, looka here,” he said.

“Hello, mothah-fugger,” someone said cheerfully.

“Get up there an’ start blowin’,” someone else said. “We heah to help you.”

“Don’t need no help, man,” Biff said, and chuckled.

“Whutchoo doin’ in this toilet, anyhow?” the first man said. “Disgraceful!”

Biff chuckled again, and then said, “Kid, these’re two of the worl’s worse jazz musicians...”

“Sheeee-it,” one of them said, and laughed.

“Been thrown off ever’ band in the country ’cause they shoot dope an’ fuck chickens.”

All three of them laughed. One of them said, “We brung Dickie with us, he gettin’ his drums from the car.”

“The shades is he’s blind,” Biff said, and I realized one of the other men must have been staring at me. “Plays piano.”

“Hope he’s better’n you,” one of them said, and all of them laughed again.

“What’s your name, man?” Biff said. “I forget.”

“Iggie.”

“This’s Sam an’ Jerry. You sit in with ’em, Iggie, while I go dazzle that chick. I’m afraid she goan git away.”

“Hey, come down, man,” one of them said. “We here in this shithole to blow with you, not some fuckin’ F-sharp piano player.”

“I’m not an F-sharp piano player,” I said.

“Hey, man, gimme a hand with this,” somebody said. I figured that was Dickie, who’d been getting his drums from the car. “Come on, Jerr, move yo’ black ass.”

“Any blind piano player I know’s a F-sharp piano player,” the other man insisted.

“Tatum’s blind,” Biff said, “and he can cut your ass thu Sunday.”

“He only half blind,” Sam said.

“I can play in any key on the board,” I said.

“There now, you see? Sit down with Iggie here, an’ work out a nice set, huh? And lemme go see ’bout my social life. Play nice, Iggie. Maybe you can cover up all they mistakes.”

“Sheeee-it,” Sam said, and then laughed.

I listened as the drummer set up his equipment and the trumpet player started running up and down chromatics, warming up. Sam asked me to tune him up, and when I asked him what notes he wanted me to hit, he said, “Jus’ an A, man,” sounding very surprised. I gave Jerry a B flat when he asked for it, and he tuned his horn, and meanwhile Dickie was warming up on his cymbals, playing fast little brush rolls, and pretty soon we were ready to start the set. I’d never played with a band before, and I wasn’t particularly scared. I’d listened to enough jazz records to know what the format was. The piano player or the horn man usually started with the head chorus (I didn’t yet know it was called the head), and then the band took solos in turn, and then everybody went into the final chorus and ended the tune. I figured all I had to do was play the way I’d been playing for the past seven months, play all those tunes I’d either lifted from my brother’s record collection or figured out on my own. Biff, after all, was a well-known and respected jazz musician, and he had told me that what I’d played wasn’t half bad, which I figured meant at least half good. Besides, he was the one who’d asked me to sit in.

“You sure you ain’t a F-sharp piano player?” Sam asked behind me.

“I’m sure,” I said.

“ ’Cause, man, I don’t dig them wild stretches in F sharp,” he said. “You got some other keys in your head, cool. Otherwise, it’s been graaaand knowin’ you,”

“Well, start it, man,” Jerry said to me. He was standing to my right. The drummer was diagonally behind me, sitting beside Sam. I took a four-bar intro, and we began playing “Fools Rush In,” a nice Johnny Mercer-Rube Bloom ballad, which I’d never heard Tatum do, but which I played in the Tatum style, or what I considered to be the Tatum style. We were moving into the bridge when Sam said, “Chop it off, kid.” I didn’t know what he meant. I assumed he wanted me to play a bit more staccato, so I began chopping the chords, so to speak, giving a good crisp, clean touch to those full tenths as I walked them with my left hand or used them in a swing bass, pounding out that steady four/four rhythm, and hearing the satisfying (to me) echo of Sam behind me walking the identical chords in arpeggios on his bass fiddle. As I went into the second chorus, I heard Jerry come in behind me on the horn, and I did what I’d heard the piano players doing on the records, I started feeding him chords, keeping that full left hand going in time with what Sam and the drummer were laying down, though to tell the truth I couldn’t quite understand what the drummer was doing, and wasn’t even sure he was actually keeping the beat. It was the drummer who said, “Take it home,” and I said, “What?” and he said, “Last eight,” and the horn man came out of the bridge and into the final eight bars, and we ended the tune. Everybody was quiet.

“Well, you ain’t a F-sharp piano player, that’s for sure,” Sam said. “But you know what you can do with that left hand of yours, don’t you?”

“You can chop it off and shove it clean up your ass,” the trumpet player said. “Let’s get Biff.”

They were moving off the bandstand. In a moment, and without another word to me, they were gone. I sat at the piano alone, baffled.

“What’s going on here?” a voice asked. “Who the hell are you? Who’s that band? Where’s my piano player?”

The voice belonged to a fat man. I could tell. I could also tell he was Jewish. I know it’s un-American to identify ethnic groups by vocal inflection or intonation, but I can tell if a man’s black, Italian, Irish, Jewish, or whatever simply by hearing his voice. And so can you. And if you tell me otherwise, I’ll call you a liar. (And besides, what the hell’s so un-American about it?) I was stunned. Some black bastard horn player had just told me to shove my precious left hand up my ass, and I didn’t know why.

“You!” the fat man said. “Get away from that piano. Where’s Biff?”

“Cool it, Mr. Gottlieb,” Biff’s voice said. “I’m right here; the boy’s a friend of mine.”

“Do you know ‘Deep in the Heart of Texas’?” Gottlieb said. “The bartender wants ‘Deep in the Heart of Texas.’ ”

“Beyond my ken,” Biff said, in what sounded like an English accent.

“What?” Gottlieb said, startled.

“The tune. Unknown to me,” Biff said.

“What?”

“Advise your barkeep to compile a more serious list of requests,” Biff said in the same stuffy English cadences, and then immediately and surprisingly fell into an aggravated black dialect, dripping watermelon, pone, and chitlings. “You jes’ ast you man to keep de booze comin’, an’ let me — an’ mah frens who was kine enough to come see me heah — worry ’bout de music, huh? Kid, you want to git off dat stool so’s we kin lay some jazz on dese mothahs?”

“What?” Gottlieb said.

“I’ll talk to you later,” Biff said as I climbed off the stool and off the bandstand.

My uncle Luke had drunk too much. His head was on the table, touching my elbow, and I could hear him snoring loudly as Biff talked to me. On my right, the girl with the five-and-dime perfume sat silent and motionless, her presence detectable only by her scent and the sound of her breathing. The trumpet player had left around midnight. The bass player and the drummer had followed him at about one. We were alone in the place now, except for the bartender, who was washing glasses and lining them up on the shelves, and Gottlieb, who had tallied his register and was putting chairs up on tables, preparatory to sweeping out the joint. As he passed our table, he said, “This ain’t a hotel, Mr. Jazz,” and then moved on, muttering.

“Cheap sheenie bastard,” Biff said. “He’s got his bartender watering my drinks. You okay, Poots?” he asked the girl. The girl did not answer. She must have nodded assent, though, the motion of her head and neck unleashing a fresh wave of scent. Biff said, “Fine, that’s fine, you jus’ stick aroun’ a short while longer. Now, you,” he said. “You want to know what’s wrong with how you play piano?”

“Yes,” I said.

“You’re lucky Dickie’s a gentle soul. Dickie. The drummer. Otherwise he’da done what Jo Jones done to Bird in Kansas City when he got the band all turned around. He throwed his cymbal on the floor, and that was that, man, end of the whole fuckin’ set. ’Scuse me, Poots.”

“Well, they ended the set, too,” I said. I still didn’t know that Bird was someone’s name. This was the second time Biff had used it tonight, and each time I’d thought he meant bird with a lower-case b; the reference was mystifying. For that matter, I didn’t know who Jo Jones was, either. But I figured if he’d thrown a cymbal on the floor, he had to be a drummer, whereas all I could think about the use of the word “bird” was that it was a black jazz expression. (Come to think of it, it was.) “And I’ll tell you something, Mr. Anderson, your bass player pissed me off right from the start. Excuse me, miss. Making cracks about F-sharp piano players.”

“Well, le’s say he ain’ ’zackly de mos’ tac’ful of souls,” Biff said in his watermelon accent, and then immediately added in his normal speaking voice, “But he’s a damn fine musician, and he knows where jazz is today, and that’s what he was trying to convey to you.”

“I’m no damn F-sharp piano player,” I said.

“He didn’t know that. Anyway, that ain’t what got him or the other boys riled.”

“Then what?”

“Your left hand.”

“I’ve got a good left hand,” I said.

“Sure,” Biff said. “If you want to play alone, you’ve got a good left hand, and I’m speakin’ comparative. You still need lots of work, even if all you want to play is solo piano.”

“That’s what I want to play.”

“Then don’t go sittin’ in with no groups. Because if you play that way with a group, you’re lucky they don’t throw the piano at you, no less the cymbals.”

“Mr. Anderson,” I said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I’m talking about that bass,” he said.

“That’s a Tatum bass,” I said. “That’s what you yourself played. That was Tatum right down the line.”

“Correct,” Biff said.

“So?”

“Maybe you didn’t notice, but I was playin’ alone. Kid, a rhythm section won’t tolerate that bass nowadays. Not after Bird.”

“What do you mean, bird? What’s that?”

“Parker. Charlie Parker. Bird.”

“Is he a piano player?”

“He plays alto saxophone.”

“Well... what about him?” I said. “What’s he got to do with playing piano?”

“He’s got everything to do with everything,” Biff said. “You tell me you want to play Tatum piano, I tell you Tatum’s on the way out, if not already dead and gone. You tell me you want to learn all those Tatum runs, I tell you there’s no room for that kind of bullshit in bop. You know why Sam...”

“In what, did you say?”

“Bop, that’s the stuff Parker’s laying down. And Fats Navarro. And Bud Powell. Now there’s the piano player you ought to be listening to, Powell; he’s the one you ought to be pickin’ up on, not Art Tatum. You want to know why the boys shot you down, it’s ’cause you put them in prison, man, you put them in that old-style bass prison, and they can’t play that way no more. These guys’re cuttin’ their chops on bop. Even I’m too old-fashioned for them, but we’re good friends, and they allow me to get by with open tenths and some shells. Sam wants to walk the bass line himself, he don’t want to be trapped by no rhythm the piano player’s layin’ down, he don’t even want to be trapped by the drummer no more. Didn’t you hear what Dickie was doing behind you? You didn’t hear no four/four on the bass drum, did you? That was on the cymbals; he saved the big drum for klook-mop, dropping them bombs every now and then, but none of that heavy one, two, three, four, no, man. Which is why they told you to stick your left hand up your ass, ’scuse me, Poots, to lose it, man. They wanted you to play shells in the left hand, that’s all, and not, that pounding Tatum rhythm, uh-uh. You dig what I’m saying?”

“What’s a shell? What do you mean, they wanted me to play shells?”

“Shells, man. You know what a C-minor chord is?”

“C, E flat, G, and B flat,” I said.

“Right. But when Powell plays a C-minor, all he hits are the C and the B flat. With his pinkie and his thumb, you dig? He leaves out the insides, he just gives you the shell. He feeds those shells to the horn players, and they blow pure and fast and hard, without that fuckin’ pounding rhythm and those ornate chords and runs going on behind them all the time, and lockin’ them in, ’scuse me, Poots. Piano players just can’t play that way no more.”

“Tatum does,” I said. “And so does Wilson.”

“A dying breed,” Biff said in his English accent, “virtually obsolete. Look, man, I was with Marian McPartland the first time she heard Bud play, and she said to me, ‘Man, that is some spooky right hand there,’ and she wasn’t shittin’. That right hand is spooky, the things he does with that right hand. He plays those fuckin’ shells with his left — the root and seventh, or the root and third — because he’s got tiny hands, you see, he couldn’t reach those Tatum tenths if he stood on his fuckin’ head, ’scuse me, Poots. Some of the time he augments the shell by pickin’ up a ninth with the right hand, but mostly the right is playin’ a horn solo, you dig? He’s doin’ Charlie Parker on the piano. There are three voices dig? Two notes in the shell, and the running line in the right hand, and that’s it. Tatum runs? Forget ’em, man! They’re what a piano player does when he can’t think of nothin’ new, he just throws in all those rehearsed runs that’re already in his fingers. That ain’t jazz, man. That’s I don’t know what it is, but it ain’t jazz no more.”

“You people going to pay rent on that table?” Gottlieb said.

“What’re you thinking, kid?” Biff asked. “I can’t tell what you’re thinking behind them shades.”

“I just don’t understand what you’re saying.”

“You don’t, huh? Well, here it is in a nutshell, kid. The rhythm ain’t in the left hand no more — it’s passed over to the right. The left hand is almost standin’ still these days. And if you want to keep on playin’ all that frantic shit, then you better play it all by yourself, ’cause there ain’t no band gonna tolerate it. That’s it in a nutshell.”

“I still want to play like Tatum,” I said.

“You’ll be followin’ a coffin up Bourbon Street,” Biff said. “Look, what the hell do I care what you play? I’m just tryin’ to tell you if you’re startin’ now, for Christ’s sake, don’t start with somethin’, already dead. Go to the Street, man, Fifty-second Street, dig what the cats are doin’. If you don’t like it, then, man, that’s up to you. But I’m tellin’ you, sure as this sweet li’l thing is sittin’ here beside me, Tatum and Wilson are dead and the Bird is king, and jazz ain’t never gonna be the same again.” He suddenly burst out laughing. “Man, the cats goan drum me clear out of the tribe. They got strong hostility, them boppers.”

“I want to hear them play,” I said.

“Get your uncle to take you down the Street. Diz an’ Oscar — Pettiford, Oscar Pettiford — got a fine group at the Onyx, George Wallington on piano. Go listen to them.”

“Will you take me there, Mr. Anderson?”

“Me? I don’t know you from a hole in the wall,” Biff said.

“Oh, take the fuckin’ kid,” Poots said.

Well, he didn’t take me. He didn’t take me because, as it happened, he was leaving for California in a week to play a gig out there, and if things went well for him, he would stay there through the winter and spring, and probably wouldn’t be back in New York till June or July. When I asked him if he’d take me to the Street when he got back, he told me again that he didn’t know me from a hole in the wall, and said I should get my uncle to take me. Uncle Luke was still asleep, and snoring very loudly at that point. I told Biff my uncle had other things to do, and besides, he couldn’t teach me to play the kind of piano I wanted to play. Biff said Now hold it just one minute, kid, who said anything about teaching you piano? I never taught anybody in my life, and I ain’t about to start now. I don’t know you from a hole in the wall, go down the Street, get yourself some bop records, it’s been nice talkin’ to you.

My mother would not allow me to go down to Fifty-second Street, either alone or accompanied by Luke. She said she wanted me to maintain my good grades at Santa Lucia’s, especially since I’d be graduating in June, and besides, I was doing enough gallivanting, what with running off on mysterious errands every time the phone rang. The telephone calls were from Susan Koenig, of course, and they would notify me that her mother would be gone for the evening or the afternoon, whereupon I would hop the trolley to Mount Vernon and spend a few blissful hours in bed with her. Or up against the sink. Or on the kitchen table. All that ended in April when her brother — whose obnoxious name was Franklin — was inconsiderate enough to get himself shot in the foot by a Japanese sniper, thereby earning himself a Purple Heart and managing somehow to finagle a boat ticket to the States at a time when nobody, but nobody, was being sent home for minor wounds. In April, too, a week or so before Easter, the Virgin Mary came down to visit my mother and precipitated a family crisis that was more immediate to me than jazz, or the war, or the fact that Susan seemed to prefer her brother’s brand of houghmagandy to mine.

She appeared to my mother on 218th Street and White Plains Avenue at three o’clock in the afternoon. There is nothing particularly noteworthy about that corner, and God alone knows why Mary chose it for her return to Earth. My mother had been out marketing, and was loaded down with shopping bags as she wended her gentle way homeward that afternoon. The Virgin was wearing black. Black topcoat and black stockings, black shoes, and a small black hat. She approached my mother and said, “Stella Di Palermo?”

“Yes?” my mother answered, puzzled. She had never seen this woman before. We had been living in the Bronx for seven years, and my mother knew most of the neighborhood ladies, but this woman was a stranger to her.

“I’m telling you this for your own good,” the woman said. “Your husband Jimmy is in love with a woman on Pelham Parkway. He goes to see her almost every day, after work.”

“Who are you?” my mother asked.

“Never mind,” the woman said. “God bless you, Stella,” and walked off.

My mother stood there watching her as she disappeared. She was forty-one years old, young Stella, and a strange lady in black had just told her that her beloved husband was enamored of a woman on Pelham Parkway, which was exactly where my father delivered mail. My mother immediately concluded that the woman in black was the Virgin Mary. Why this association should even have occurred to a person who hadn’t been inside a church for twenty-one years is beyond me, but again, I have no desire to probe the convoluted mental processes of anyone who happens to be my mother. Maybe Easter had something to do with it. Maybe the religious identification was triggered by the fact that my mother had seen a miniature replica of the crucifixion in the window of the butcher shop an instant before she was confronted by the lady in black. It doesn’t matter. My mother gets these fixed ideas. If Charlie Shoe was a hophead rape artist, then the lady in black was the Virgin Mary, and that was that. And that, believe me, was more than enough. As fate would have it, my father was late getting home from work that afternoon, and this naturally confirmed everything the Virgin Mary had whispered to my mother in the street. I was not as fortunate as my father; I got home from school at my usual time and found a raving lunatic in the kitchen.

“I thought it was the bum,” my mother said. “I’ll kill him. I’ll kill him the minute he comes through the door.”

“What?” I said.

“Him and his whore,” she said, pronouncing the last word “hooer.”

“What do you mean? What...?”

“You think I’m stupid?” she said. “Where is he, it’s four o’clock, he’s supposed to be here at three, where is he, the bum? He’s with that whore, that’s where he is. We’ve been married twenty-one years, the dirty bastard, he’s rotten through and through, la Madonna opened my eyes, she told me what your father’s been doing, oh, and I believed him, I believed him when he told me he was lining up wedding jobs after work, sure, some wedding jobs, I’ll kill him when he gets home, don’t you say a word, Iggie, I’m going to kill that rotten son of a bitch.”

“Mom, sit down, will you? Mom, please . ..”

“What am I stupid?” she said. “I must be stupid to let this happen. I called my father, I called him the minute I came in the door, I put down my bundles and I called him at the tailor shop. I told him la Madonna stopped me on White Plains Avenue and told me what a bum my husband was, told me he’s been seeing this whore from Pelham Parkway every day, every day, I told him, who knows where they do it, she must have an apartment there, he probably delivers mail to her, or else he met her at one of those beer parties he plays, of course, why else does he go all over the Bronx playing those jobs, to meet whores, I told my father, I told him. And he said What madonna, what are you talking about, my own father, would you believe it, he sticks up for that rotten son of a bitch, I saw her with my own eyes, all in black, she had this sad face, there were tears in her eyes when she told me, and she said God bless you, Stella, and then she vanished, my own father didn’t believe me. He told me to calm down, he told me to wait till Jimmy comes home, talk to him, find out what it’s all about, my own father, what’s there to find out about when la Madonna comes to me and tells me, what’s there to find out, Iggie, oh, Iggie, what’s there to find out?”

“Mom,” I said, “Grandpa was right. When Pop gets here...”

“I’ll kill him!” she said.

“Mom, please,” I said, and burst into tears.

She came to me, she clutched my head against her bosom. Frantically she stroked my hair, and the hysterical monologue went on, and I half listened, and prayed her rage would run its course before my father stepped through that kitchen door, because I knew for certain she would stab him with a bread knife if she did not calm down before then. “How could he do this to us? To me, sure, he doesn’t love me, he never loved me, but to you? Iggie, how could he do this to you, doesn’t he know you’re his son, doesn’t he have no respect for the family, you’re blind, doesn’t he know that, isn’t that enough for you to bear, do you have to be ashamed of a bum for a father? Oh, no wonder, oh now it makes sense, oh yes now I understand, I thank you sweet Madonna, I get on my knees to thank you, I’ve been stupid, so stupid, I’ll take care of you Iggie don’t worry your mother loves you she’ll always love you no matter what that bum does I don’t care if he ever comes back I’ll kill him when he comes in this house that dirty bastard twenty-one years I’ve been good to him twenty-one years and he finds himself a cheap rotten whore a blond woman la Madonna said an Irish whore with blond hair she lives on Pelham Parkway he goes up there all the time when he’s delivering mail he met her at one of the beer parties he plays la Madonna said it’s been going on for years now she said she told me everything Iggie and she said God bless you Stella oh Iggie what am I going to do how are we going to manage my own father won’t believe me.”

In my mother’s temporary insanity there was irrefutable logic. If the woman in black had not been the Virgin Mary, then how did she know who my mother was? My mother, after all, had never seen her before, so how could this woman, unless she was the Virgin Mary, immediately identify her as Stella Di Palermo? And similarly, if the woman had not been the Virgin Mary, how could she have known what my father was up to on Pelham Parkway almost every day after work, how could she possibly have known that he was in love with another woman? My father maintained that the lady in black was a troublemaker, that my mother was a fool to believe a stranger who had stopped her on the street and told her such a lie, how did my mother know the woman wasn’t some kind of nut? “Then how did she know me?” my mother screamed. “Why did she pick me out of the crowd, the avenue was crowded, everybody was out shopping, she came up to me and said right off Stella Di Palermo, she knew me, you son of a bitch!” My father told my mother (this was all in my presence) that she was as crazy as the lady who’d stopped her, if she believed such a thing. My mother said, “Oh, no, I’m not crazy, you’re the one who’s crazy if you think I’m going to live under the same roof for another minute with a bum who’s running around with some cheap Irish whore on Pelham Parkway,” and my father said, “For Christ’s sake, Stella, will you please shut up, you’re giving me a headache,” and she said, “I’ll give you a headache, you rotten son of a bitch,” and my father left the house.

My mother immediately went through all the drawers on his side of the dresser, searching for evidence that would link him incontrovertibly to the mysterious blond Irish whore on Pelham Parkway. She found a bill from a jewelry shop, and she read it off to me triumphantly — “One pair gold earrings, sapphire chip, forty-seven dollars and twenty-two cents, where are those earrings, Iggie? Did you ever see those earrings, this bill is dated January twenty-eighth, did he give those earrings to me, did you ever see those earrings in this house? He gave them to his whore, he spent our good money on an Irish whore!” My father told her on the telephone that he had picked up the earrings for a friend in the post office, my mother could go check with the jeweler if she wanted to, but she said, “Sure, the jeweler’ll lie, too, you think I’m stupid?” He had gone to stay at my Uncle Nick’s house in Corona, and on Good Friday, Nick came to my mother as an emissary. Nick told her she was foolish to believe a strange woman who’d come up to her on the street....

“What strange woman?” my mother shouted. “La Madonna, do you understand me, Nick? La Madonna, all in black!”

“Sure, but after all, Stella, are you going to believe some crazy person or your own husband?”

“I’m not crazy, don’t worry,” my mother said.

“Who said you were crazy, Stella? I’m telling you this person, this woman who came up to you...”

“La Madonna!” my mother said.

“Now come on, Stella,” Nick said, “make sense, will you? What the hell is la Madonna gonna be bothering coming here to the Bronx to tell you about Jimmy, huh?”

“He’s a no-good bastard,” my mother said.

“All right, so what do you wanna do? I’m wastin’ time here. You want me to tell him to come home, or you want me to tell him to go drop dead? Which is it, Stella?”

“Why won’t he tell me the truth?”

“He swore to me on the Bible he ain’t got no other woman; now what more do you want, Stella?”

“He’s a liar,” my mother said.

“So okay, I’ll tell him to go drop dead, okay? What do you want me to tell him, Stella?”

“Who cares what you tell him? Who cares about him or what he does with his whore?”

“The kid’s sittin’ right here,” my Uncle Nick said. “You shouldn’t talk that way in front of the kid.”

“Why not? He should know what kind of bum his father is.”

“Okay, so I’ll tell Jimmy not to come home, okay? Is that what you want me to tell him? I’ll tell him whatever you want, Stella. I ain’t gonna buck the system, that’s for sure. You buck the system, you wind up with a busted head.”

“Tell him what you like.”

“Well, what kind of answer is that, Stella? Now listen to me, I’m gonna talk to you like you was my own sister, all right? He’s been at my house since last Wednesday, he goes to work in the morning, drives all the way here to the Bronx, and comes home for supper every night when Connie’s puttin’ the macaroni on the table. Now if he’s foolin’ around with a woman here in the Bronx, why’s he comin’ back to my house in Corona every night, would you please tell me that?”

“Because she’s married, why do you think?” my mother said. “Married, you understand, Nick, or are you thickheaded like your brother? If I knew who she was, if la Madonna had only told me who she was, I’d go see her husband, he’d fix Jimmy’s onions, you can bet on that.”

“Stella, if you don’t know who this woman is supposed to be, how do you know she’s married?”

“You think I’m stupid?” my mother said.

“Stella, I think you ain’t listening to me,” Nick said. “Look, it’s two days till Easter, where you gonna be spending Easter Sunday?”

“At my father’s house.”

“Okay. You want me to tell Jimmy to come here Easter morning, pick up you and the kid and take you to Harlem? How’s that, Stella?”

“Who cares?” my mother said. “Tell him what you like.”

“Okay, I’ll tell him to pick you up Easter, okay?”

“Tell him what you like. Who cares?” my mother said.

My father came back to the house at ten o’clock on Easter morning. Nick had neglected to mention that the day after my father had left home, he’d withdrawn most of the money in my mother’s and his joint savings account. He was driving a new Dodge, and carrying armloads of gifts for my mother and me. (I forget what my presents were.) The trip to my grandfather’s house in Harlem was frosty with silence. When we got to the apartment on First Avenue, my grandfather clasped my father in his arms and said, “Jimmy, Buona Pasqua! Come! You have to help me bring some wine from the cellar.”

“I’ll help,” Pino said from the other room.

“No, Pino, sta qui,” my grandfather said. “Jimmy and I can manage alone.”

I do not to this day know whether or not my father had an Irish whore on Pelham Parkway. I did not believe the Virgin Mary had accosted my mother on White Plains Avenue, of course, but I could find no reasonable explanation for a strange woman coming up to her with such information. I thought of a great many possibilities, but none of them made much sense. Was it conceivable, for example, that the woman in black had herself been my father’s doxy, and that she’d gone to my mother seeking revenge after a lovers’ quarrel? Or was she the sister of my father’s whore? Or her mother? Or was it all simply a case of mistaken identity? My father’s partner on the Pelham Parkway route was named Jimmy, too, and he also wore a mustache, and was about my father’s size, though a bit heftier. Was it he who’d been shtupping the lady every afternoon? Had the informer in black fingered the wrong fornicating mailman?

I began to check up on my father. I became the first blind detective in history. I would drop in unexpectedly whenever he was playing a wedding or a dance, using the excuse that I wanted to sit in and get some practice playing with bands. My father’s ( band — he then called it James Palmer’s Rhythm Kings — was square to the toes, and sitting in with them was total torment. But I wasn’t there to advance my musical career. I was Ignazio Di Palermo, Private Eye. Blind in both, I wouldn’t have recognized an Irish whore if I’d tripped over her vagina and stumbled into County Killarney. (Remind me to tell you the joke about George Washington’s horse sometime.) I never did get the goods on my father, nor did he ever once deviate from his story: The lady in the street was crazy, he did not know a whore on Pelham Parkway or anyplace else in the world, the receipt for the gold earrings with the sapphire chips had been given to him by the jeweler when he went to pick them up for a friend. Eventually, my mother forgave him. But to keep the matter in perspective, and to correct any misconceptions about the extent of her willingness to forget, she promptly stopped talking to my Uncle Nick, who had served as nothing more than an innocent go-between in the entire affair. Nick was a house painter. He died in 1953, when he suffered a cerebral hemorrhage after a fall from a ladder. My mother had not spoken to him since that Good Friday in 1944, and she did not go to his funeral.

Who says there never were any streets of gold in America? In 1944, I found one. I had learned from an issue of Down Beat that Biff Anderson was back in New York. I sought him out again. I told him I’d been trying to understand bop, and was hopelessly confused. He told me that was tough shit. I told him he was the one who’d advised me not to even try playing Tatum piano, that bop was the new thing, and that was what I should be learning. He said That’s right. So where am I supposed to learn it? I asked. Nobody’s teaching it, Biff, there aren’t any bop solos in Braille, there aren’t even any Tatum solos in Braille, what am I supposed to do? (I was using the little-blind-bastard ploy that hadn’t worked on my grandfather with Vesuvio; it didn’t work on Biff, either.)

“Look,” he said, “I don’t know you from a hole in the wall, I got enough problems of my own, I don’t need a blind man hanging around me all the time asking questions.”

“Biff,” I persisted, “if you saw me walking down Broadway with a cup full of pencils, you’d take pity on me, wouldn’t you?”

“Oh, sheeee-it,” he said.

“Biff, all I’m asking you to do is take me around a little, help me to understand the styles, okay? And then if I decide I want to play bop... which is what you advised me to do, right? am I right?”

“Yeah, yeali,” he said.

“Then all I want you to do is give me a lesson every now and then. Or even if I decide to play Tatum, okay? I just need some help, that’s all. I can’t take it off the records anymore, I’m not getting anywhere.”

“Where in hell you want to go, man?” he asked.

“I want to be the best jazz piano player who ever lived.”

“Oh, sheeee-it,” he said again.

“I can’t pay you much for the lessons, Biff...”

“Ain’t gonna be no lessons,” he said.

“Fifteen, twenty dollars a week maybe, that’s what I was paying the man who taught me classical music...”

“Man, you one hell of a pushy blind person, you know that?”

“I’ve got to be,” I said.

He was quiet for a long time.

Then he said, “I must be outa my fuckin’ mind.”

Fifty-second Street was pure gold. I very nearly suffered a cardiac seizure the first time Biff took me downtown and I learned (he had saved it as a surprise) that Tatum was playing at the Famous Door, with a bassist and a guitarist as his sidemen. We got there at ten, and I sat there in ecstasy till two in the morning, when Biff took me up to meet Tatum. The next night we went to hear Sidney Bechet, an old-time New Orleans soprano sax player, and the night after that Biff took me to hear Coleman Hawkins at the Onyx. Biff had played with Hawkins many years back, and he told me this man could shake down the Empire State Building with his horn. Man, he shook me to the roots. He was playing with two young musicians who had cut their chops on bop, a drummer named Max Roach, and a trumpet player named Howard McGhee. Biff asked me to pay particular attention to the drummer, who had learned from Klook Clarke (another new name to me), and I listened to him very carefully and did not like what I heard. The next night we went to the Downbeat and listened to Red Norvo on the vibraphone, and the night after that we caught Eddie Condon playing Chicago-style jazz, and Biff introduced me to him, and later told me he was the one who’d said, “The boppers flat their fifths; we drink ours.” For the next six months, or seven, or eight, Biff and I walked from door to door on the Street, and then taxied downtown or crosstown to every jazz joint he could find, listening to the main attractions and the intermission bands. For me, it was like rushing through an encapsulated chronology of jazz from its earliest beginnings to its then current form, all the giants and near-giants assembled, blowing for all they were worth in cabarets stinking of booze and smoke — Bobby Hackett, Don Byas, John Kirby, Pee Wee Russell and Bud Freeman and Zutty Singleton and, of course, the Bird — who was playing at the Three Deuces with a band that spelled Erroll Garner, who was the feature attraction.

I hated what the boppers were doing. I hated their music on the few records I’d heard, and I hated it all over again hearing them in person. I cursed Kenny Clarke, who, Biff told me, was the first drummer to stop playing time, hated the klook-a-mop explosions that erupted unexpectedly from bass drum or snare like mortar shells in an undeclared war. I hated those flatted fifths the horn men were playing, though Biff told me he’d first heard them played on a piano as far back as 1940 (while I was still laboring over Chopin) by a man named Tadd Dameron, who was also one of the first to play in what Biff described as “the legato manner,” using his English accent, which I learned was both defensive and derisive. I think he hated bop as much as I did, but he was stuck with it, he recognized it as the wave of the future, and like my Uncle Nick, he wasn’t about to buck the system. I hated Gillespie and I hated Parker and I hated Powell and Wallington, Pettiford and Monk, and the whole damn gallery of men who were, it seemed to me, forcing me to change my path even before I’d firmly placed a foot upon it.

To me — I was eighteen and eager and excited and ambitious — these men were doing this deliberately, were trying to screw up my life, were out to get me personally. I wasn’t far from wrong. They were out to get Whitey, though he was known as Charley in those days. They were playing music they thought the white man could not steal, changing the names of songs so that when they played them with strangely revised charts, they would be unrecognizable to square Charley - “Ornithology” was “How High the Moon”; “A Dizzy Atmosphere” was “I Got Rhythm”; “Hot House” was “What Is This Thing Called Love?”; “Donna Lee” was “Back Home in Indiana.” The machine-gun chatter in the early stages of this war was an idiomatic cliché vocalized as “Bu-REE-bop,” or “Du-BEE-bop,” and probably deriving from Gillespie’s “Salt Peanuts,” a tune with a I, VI, II, V chord pattern and a Sears Roebuck bridge. Salt-PEA-nuts — the tonic, the octave, and the tonic again. The “Salt” was an eighth note on the second beat of the bar, followed by an eighth-note rest. The “PEA” was an eighth note on the upper tonic, and the “nuts” was an eighth note on the tonic below; beamed together they comprised the third beat of the bar. And there you were — “Ru-BEE-bop” or “Bu-REE-bop,” later shortened to “bebop” or “rebop” and finally to “bop” as the definitive label for the new jazz.

Freed from the need to express themselves in an archaic musical tongue, the boppers invented a shorthand verbal language as well, and this became the coinage of everyday communication. A word like “ax” was first used to describe a horn of any kind, but its scope rapidly expanded to include any instrument, even the guitar and piano, which are about as far removed from an actual ax as a giraffe is from a water buffalo. The word “gone” was initially an abbreviation of the expression “out of this world.” If you are out of this world, why, then you are literally gone, no? But it was also used in brief exchanges such as this:

“So I’ll see you Tuesday, man.”

“Gone.”

The “gone” meant “okay,” or “all right,” or “agreed,” and was frequently used interchangeably with the word “crazy,” which also expressed approval, and which was sometimes linked with the word “like.”

“Like three bills for the gig, cool?”

“Like crazy.”

“Like” was probably the most overworked word in the new jazz vocabulary. If, on the battlefield, soldiers (black and white) were using “fuck” in its numberless variations — “Pass the fuckin’ ammunition, you fuck, or fuck if I give a fuck what fuckin’ happens” — so were black musicians at home using “like” with every fucking breath.

“I was like walking along, when I dug this wigged-out chick, she like gassed me.”

“Like I’m short of gold, you got like a pad for me tonight?”

“Like, dig, man, you puttin’ me on?”

“Like I got eyes for like retiring like in Paris.”

“Like gone, man.”

“Like I like love you like.”

Like I like hated it, man.

I hated the music, which I thought was simplistic, crude, mysterious, irritating, architecturally inept, and utterly without warmth or feeling. I figured the only reason Bud Powell was playing such primitive stuff was because he had tiny hands, as Biff had pointed out, and couldn’t reach those resounding Tatum chords. Tatum had riches to squander; he threw gold coins into the air, rubies poured from his ears, he swallowed emeralds and belched black pearls. Bop seemed impoverished to me, and the boppers — for all their dexterity — made music I considered emotionless and cold. I know a lot of jazz players who assign colors to keys. B flat will become brown, F will be green, E pink — meaningless references for me. I think instead in terms of warmth or lack of it. D is my favorite key, but only because it represents the feel of sunshine, and not because I think of it as saffron or burnt umber. Keys, as a matter of fact, have never meant very much to me. The problem confronting me each time I sit at the piano is not what key I’m going to play in, but only what I’m going to do with the tune. If I’m going to bomb out in E flat, I’ll bomb out in G as well. As far as I was concerned, the hoppers were bombing out in all twelve keys, and if they were playing in any color at all, it was the opposite of black, which most of them were; the music they made was cold and white. Dead white. I listened to it, and I thought This can’t be it, this can’t be where it’s going, this has got to be a fad.

I hated them for systematically and maliciously (I thought) destroying a sound I had loved instantly and without reservation from the first minute I’d heard it; I hated them for their exclusivity, which I did not recognize as naked hostility until that day years later when Rex Butler put me down on Broadway; I hated, them because they caused me to long for acceptance into their inner circle, where they spoke a childlike code, easily cracked and therefore no code at all, and yet impossible to imitate without incurring derision from them. Actually, I was missing the point, and it took me a long time to realize that Charlie Parker had been right. He understood, intuitively, that jazz as it was being played had come as far as it could ever go. There was no longer any way to modify or refine the existing system; it had to be completely demolished. He had reevaluated the entire harmonic and rhythmic structure and decided — not consciously; none of these decisions are ever conscious — to return jazz to its purest form.

I did not know what to do. I had given up classical piano in favor of jazz, and had hardly registered as an alien before my adopted country exploded in revolution. I now had the choice of sticking with the Tatum style and perfecting it (eating cake, so to speak, while the rabble was clamoring at the palace gates), or learning to play a music I did not like or even understand. I could either go it alone, play solo piano if I chose — solo piano already had its head on the chopping block, and George Shearing would lop it off forever in 1947 — or I could learn to play with other musicians in small ensembles where the piano player was a part of the rhythm section and, except when taking a chorus, was expected to feed chords to horn players. I had no idea that running down a chart for a horn player could be excitingly heady stuff when the horn players were inventive geniuses like Parker or Gillespie. I did not realize that the bass line of the thirties had indeed been a prison, or that Powell and Wallington and many, many others were freeing the right hand from those cop-out pentatonic runs, more suited to the playing of bagpipes than the playing of piano. In bop, the concentration on the right-hand blowing line — the truly creative line, the invented melody line — was intense. The very system of using hollow shells in the bass demanded that the right hand be innovatively restless at all times, free to express ideas and feelings. And the left hand was no longer rigidly playing the rhythm, but was playing against the rhythm — and that was freedom, too. I didn’t realize this when I first told Biff I’d made up my mind. I only knew that I could either go it alone, or I could learn to play music with other men in... well, a family. If it happened that the family was black, and perhaps angry, that was something I would have to cope with. This was America.

I made the American choice.

Rebecca.

I suppose we have to get to Rebecca sooner or later.

The last time I saw her was when I went back to the Talmadge house to pick up the personal belongings I’d left behind, all of which had been clearly detailed in our separation agreement. When I wrote Rebecca trying to set a time and a date, she wrote back saying she didn’t know why I felt I still needed all that “small assorted junk.” The small assorted junk included two pieces of sculpture we’d bought in Venice, and a complete set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Rebecca would not let me take the Britannica. She said I’d given it to the family as a gift, and she intended to keep it. I did not argue the point. When I left the house in Connecticut for the last time, I took with me the sculpture and the outdoor furniture and my own extensive record collection, including the jazz I’d first listened to in my brother’s room — small assorted junk. I also took with me a Braille edition of The Well-Tempered Clavier, which Rebecca had bought for me in London and given to me as a birthday present years ago.

That was the last time I saw Rebecca.

The first time I saw her was in July of 1945. Franklin Roosevelt was dead, and the war in Europe was over, but everyone was saying that the end was still nowhere in sight. An invasion of Japan was expected, and we all knew it would be bloody and costly, but by God we would finish the job in the Pacific the way we had in Europe, all of us out there doing our part — the tobacco-spitting kid from the Ozarks alongside the wisecracking kid from the Bronx and the snooty rich kid from Boston and the divinity student from Duluth and even the handsome sun-bronzed kid who’d tried to dodge the draft because he was making it with four blond starlets in a Malibu beach house, but who’d ended up realizing the fight was his, too, he was part of the family, and the family was out there struggling for survival. For me, the war had ended the day they killed Tony. I still believed in the myth, of course; I had to if I was to make any sense at all of my brother’s death. But victory was a foregone conclusion; America always emerged triumphantly. Even when Roosevelt died, I knew we would pull ourselves together and get on with this distasteful job that needed finishing. In those days, Americans were good workers, possibly because we’d come through the Depression years longing for work, and were now grateful for any job that came our way, even if it happened to be war. Today... don’t ask. If I played piano the way the man who installed our Talmadge kitchen cabinets did his job, people would throw rotten eggs and tomatoes at me. Rebecca later said that the man who’d installed our cabinets was to blame for the divorce, since his shabby work caused a connubial fight that lasted for a week. Rebecca dear, men who install kitchen cabinets, however, shoddily, are not responsible for divorce actions.

Biff had been busy teaching me every chart he knew, which he said I had to learn — “That’s the nexus, man, the nexus.” His method of teaching was... well... not quite the same as Passaro’s. Very often, Biff would give me the chart for a tune, and I would discover that some of the chords were different from the ones on the sheet music. He would tell me to never mind the sheet music, this is the right chord. And when I complained that it couldn’t be the right chord, he would say, “This’s the chord we play, man. This’s the chord that sounds right.”

A great many jazz musicians are very superstitious people, and Biff was one of them. Erroll Garner, for example, refuses to learn to read music because he thinks it’ll fuck up the way he’s playing. (Mary Lou Williams told me he can read, but Erroll insists he can’t and won’t learn, besides.) I once got into a discussion with George Shearing about his sound, and the “locked hands” or “block chord” architecture of it, which had as its forerunner the Glenn Miller saxophone section — a clarinet on top of the four saxophones normally found in a big band. I was telling George this meant that the melody could be played in two separate voices an octave apart, and I was about to go into a further technical exploration of it, when I detected (we’re both blind, and such detection wasn’t easy) that he was becoming a bit agitated, and finally slightly angry, or maybe just frightened. He didn’t want to know about it. His block system had only been one of the major shaping forces in the history of jazz piano, emulated by every young piano player in the country (including me at one time), but he didn’t want his style dissected. He was an articulate man, and he didn’t quite put it in these words, but what he was saying was, “Man, don’t bug me. I just blow, that’s all.”

Biff just blew, that was all. He had his own Rube Goldberg system of working with harmony and rhythm, and he explained chords to me the way he’d learned them. “Play me a C-diminished ninth,” he’d say, and I’d play it, and he’d say, “That ain’t no C-diminished ninth, I don’t know what that is, man.” I’d played a C-diminished ninth, all right, but what Biff had wanted me to play was a C-dominant chord with a flatted ninth. (Similarly, in Biff’s argot, a half-diminished became “a minor flat five.”) He taught me all the things he knew, hundreds of charts and tricks, milking the minor, moving voices; he gave me gratuitous advice: “Don’t play in B for no horn players, that’s a bum key for them, five sharps in it”; he told me stories about jazz men: “There was this one night with Philly Joe Jones, he turned the whole band around with his drumming. Did it as a joke. Got them so fucked up, they lost the meter”; he laid down the law: “Don’t you never lose the meter, man. You play them chords in their proper order, and you hold them for how long you’re supposed to, and that’s it, man”; issued warnings and proclamations: “Don’t you never mess with dope, you hear me? Lots of cats, they go listen to Bird, they go home and try to play like him, and they can’t do it, and they figure they got to go shoot dope the way he does. That ain’t the answer, dope ain’t what makes Bird play like he does. I don’t mind drinkin’, that goes together, booze and piano does. But you ever shoot a needle in your arm, I’ll personally come bust your ass, Iggie, you hear me? Blind or not, I’ll kick your ass all over the block I ever hear you’re messin’ with dope.”

The week before I met Rebecca, Biff had taken me up to Harlem with him. He didn’t live in Harlem anymore, but he went up there for a haircut every Wednesday. I don’t want to get into a dissection of that. All I know is that Biff lived on Canal Street, in a big loft that used to be a hat factory, and there were hundreds of barbershops in the area, including some barber colleges on the Bowery, but Biff went uptown to Harlem for his haircut every Wednesday. I was with him that Wednesday because he wanted me to meet a drummer who was putting together a trio and looking for a piano player. Biff figured I was about ready to get out there on my own; the only way I’d ever really learn to play ensemble piano was to start playing with a band. The guy he introduced me to must have been under a hot towel when we came into the barbershop. Biff told him I was a good man, told him I’d been getting down all the bop shit, knew hundreds of charts, and if he hadn’t yet hired a piano man for the gig on Staten Island, I was the man Biff was recommending for the job. The guy’s name was Herbie Cooper. He kept mumbling all the while Biff talked. Finally Biff said, “So what do you say, man?”

“This’s a union club,” Herbie mumbled. “You union?”

“No,” I said. “But I can join.”

“Costs more’n a bill to join,” Herbie said. The barber must’ve taken off the towel; I could suddenly understand him. “Gig don’t pay but seventy-five a week.”

“How long you booked for?” Biff asked.

“Just a week. Hardly be worth the kid makin’ that kind of investment.”

“He got to join the union sooner or later,” Biff said. “Might’s well be now.”

“How old’re you?” Herbie asked.

“I’ll be nineteen in October.”

“Your folks goan fuss ’bout you playin’ a club way out on Staten Island?”

“Don’t worry about that,” I said.

“How you goan git there, man?” Cooper said.

“I don’t know,” I said. “How’re you gonna get there?”

“I got a car,” Herbie said. “Where you live, man?”

“In the Bronx.”

“I ain’t goan way to the Bronx to pick up no piano player. I can git me a piano man lives right aroun’ the corner here, an’ he damn good, too, used to play with Lunceford.”

“If he used to play with Lunceford,” Biff said, “he ain’t goan take no fuckin’ job in a Staten Island toilet for seventy-five a week. How much you gettin’ as leader, Herb?”

“I don’t see as that’s rightly your business,” Herbie said.

“Give the kid a break,” Biff said. “You got my word he’s a good man. What the hell more you need?”

“You goan pick him up in the Bronx, man? I need a blind piano player like I need a fuckin’ hole in the head.”

“I’ll come to Harlem,” I said. “If you’ll give me a ride from here, that’ll be fine.”

“Gig starts this Saturday. You goan be able to join the union an’ all by then?”

“I’ll do it tomorrow,” I said.

“We all colored in this band,” Herbie said as his final defense.

“I’m blind,” I said, as mine.

“Well, you go join the fuckin’ union, an’ git back to me by Friday. I ain’t heard from you by then, I git me another piano man.”

“I’ll call you soon as everything’s set,” I told him.

“Fuckin’ kid better be good,” Herbie said to Biff.

Which is how I happened to be playing piano in a bar on Staten Island on the night of July 18, 1945, when a girl standing near the piano said, “That’s a nice Erroll Garner imitation.”

This was my first paying job. I had started on Saturday night, and this was Wednesday, and whereas no bedazzled teenager had yet come up to the bandstand and requested a plaster cast of my cock, I was nonetheless learning that simply being up there, and visible, and making music was somehow attractive to certain types of girls. There are, I’m sure, countless theories to explain why some girls will go to bed with musicians after no more formal an introduction than a single chorus of “Stardust.” (“Stardust,” by the way, is a joke tune to jazz musicians. Whenever anyone says, “Let’s play ‘Stardust,’ ” the whole band breaks up. It has a good melody, but a totally dumb white chart.) I have never been able to understand the groupie phenomenon. I have never been able to understand the telephone, either, but that hasn’t prevented me from using it over the years. After I hit it big in 1955, it was not uncommon for girls to come to the piano, and, without preamble, whisper, “Let’s ball, Ike.”

This girl standing at the piano was Jewish. I knew that voice. For those of you who are not familiar with it, I refer you to the other Barbra Streisand. There are two Barbra Streisands. One of them sings. The other one talks. The singer enunciates each and every word clearly and meticulously; you cannot find a vocalist anywhere in the world who has more respect for lyrics. The talker is a Jewish girl from the Bronx (or Brooklyn — the difference is slight). I am not for one moment suggesting that Barbra Streisand goes to bed with blind jazz musicians; I have certainly never had the pleasure myself. (Please don’t call me, Barbra, I’ve got enough problems right now.) But you don’t grow up in Harlem and later an Italian section of the Bronx without learning that all Jewish girls put out. The girl at the piano was Jewish, and she had just delivered a perfectly acceptable opening line — “That’s a nice Erroll Garner imitation” — and just as my grandfather had entertained high hopes of ‘na bella chiavata the night he and Pino dated those two “American” girls back in 1901, I now assumed I was on the verge of terminating the celibacy imposed by the return of Susan Koenig’s brother. I waited till we finished the set. The girl was still standing there. I turned to her and smiled.

“How do you know he isn’t imitating me?” I said.

“I meant it as a compliment,” she said.

“Well, thanks,” I said. “I like him a lot.”

“So do I. Marvin took me to hear him a few weeks ago.”

“Marvin?” (Mild foreboding.)

“My boyfriend.”

“Oh. I take it he likes jazz.”

“Oh, yeah, he digs it even more than I do.”

“He digs it, huh?” (Defensive sarcasm.) “Well, well, well.”

“Yes. He was the one who suggested we come all the way out here tonight. We came over on the ferry.”

“That’s nice,” I said. (What does she want? Why’d she come up here to the piano?)

“Well,” she said, “I’ve got to go now.”

“Is that it?” I asked.

“Huh?”

“I mean, is that why you came up here? To tell me it was a nice Garner imitation, and your boyfriend is Marvin, and you came over on the ferry?”

“Yeah. What’d you think?”

“Well...” (Desperate fumbling.) “Some people come up with requests or...”

“No.”

“Okay.”

“It was a nice Garner imitation.”

“Thank you.” (Hope springs eternal.) “What’s your name?”

“Rebecca. What’s yours?”

“Iggie.”

“Iggier?”

“That’s short for Ignazio.”

“Oh. Well, Iggie, thanks again. Marvin and I really enjoyed...”

“You’re not leaving right this minute, are you?”

“Yes, it’s late. We’ve got a long ride back to the Bronx.”

“What’s your phone number?”

“Why?”

“I’d like to call you.”

“Why?”

“Well. . .” (To fuck you, why do you think? You’re Jewish, aren’t you?) “To talk about... uh... jazz and... uh... Garner and... uh...” (Uh, shit!)

“We don’t have a phone.”

“Well, how does Marvin get in touch with you? Like when he wants to go ‘dig’ jazz someplace, how does he let you know? Does he send a carrier pigeon?”

“He calls Shirley.”

“And takes her instead?”

“No.” (A suppressed laugh at my devastating wit?) “We don’t have a phone yet because we just moved into a new apartment. Shirley lives across the hall.”

“What’s her last name?”

“Ackerman. But don’t call her.”

“Why not?”

“Well, what’s the sense?” she said.

“Why’d you come up here?” I asked.

“I wanted to see what you looked like up close.”

“What did I look like far away?”

“Okay.” (A shrug in her voice?)

“What do I look like up close?”

“Okay.” (Another shrug?)

“So?” I said.

“So?”

“Let me call you.”

“I’d rather you didn’t.”

“Is the phone listed in Shirley’s name?”

“No.”

“What’s her father’s name?”

“Don’t call, okay? I mean it.”

“Okay,” I said.

“I mean it.”

“I said okay. What color are your eyes, Rebecca?”

“Green,” she said.

“My mother’s eyes are green.”

“What color are yours?”

“Blue.”

“Blue,” she said. “Well, good night,” she said.

“Good night,” I said.

I called the following night, a Thursday. I started calling at six o’clock, before heading crosstown to Harlem where Herbie was waiting to take me to Staten Island again. I knew Rebecca lived in the Bronx, and I knew that her friend, Shirley Ackerman, lived across the hall. I did not know Shirley Ackerman’s father’s first name (nor even the name of Lincoln’s mother’s doctor’s dog). I asked my mother to read me all the Ackerman phone numbers listed in the Bronx directory. There were two columns of them. Patiently, she recited the numbers as I punched them out with my stylus. Then I carried the phone and the list into the bathroom, and closed the door on the telephone cord, and began dialing. Blind people, if you are interested, invented the digital system of dialing long before the telephone company did. That’s because we count the holes in the dial when we’re telephoning anyone. The first hole is just the number 1, but the second hole is the number 2 and also the letters ABC. The third hole is 3 and DEF and the fourth hole is 4 and GHI and a partridge in a pear tree. When dialing the prefix OL 4, therefore, I automatically translated it to 654. That was the prefix for the twelfth number I dialed. There was a Shirley Ackerman at only one of the numbers I’d dialed previously, but she did not know a Rebecca across the hall. My second Shirley Ackerman answered the telephone, and when I asked if she would run across the hall to get Rebecca for me, she said, “Who’s this?”

“A friend from school,” I said.

“From Barnard?” she asked, surprised. Barnard was an all-girls’ school.

“Columbia,” I said, recovering quite nimbly, I thought.

“What’s your name?” she asked.

“Just tell her it’s the guy who helped her with her English homework that time.”

“Well, don’t you have a name?” Shirley asked.

“Yes, but she doesn’t know it, it wouldn’t mean anything to her. Just tell her what I said.”

“Well,” Shirley said dubiously, but she put down the phone and went to call Rebecca across the hall. I thought I’d been pretty clever. It seemed to me that at one time or another Rebecca must have accepted English-homework assistance from one male student or another.

The first thing she said when she picked up the phone was, “I told you not to call.”

“What are you doing tonight?” I asked.

“I’m seeing Marvin.”

“How about tomorrow night?”

“I’m seeing Marvin tomorrow night, too, and every night till we get married.”

“What are you doing the night after you get married?” I said.

“What do you want, Iggie?” she asked.

“I want to see you.”

“Why?”

“Why the hell not?” I said.

“I love Marvin.”

“That’s a good reason,” I said.

“Okay?”

“I didn’t realize it was that serious.”

“It is,” she said.

“Okay. Look, lots of luck, huh? Forgive me for calling. I honestly didn’t realize...”

“That’s all right,” she said.

“Well, so long then.”

“So long,” she said.

I hung up, and immediately dialed Susan Koenig’s number. Her brother answered the phone.

“Who’s this?” he said, before even saying “Hello.”

“Iggie,” I said. “Who’s this?”

“Franklin,” he said.

“Benjamin or Roosevelt?” I asked.

“What are you, a wise guy?” he asked, and hung up.

I tried again just before I left for Harlem, and this time I was lucky enough to avoid his surveillance system. I told Susan I still thought of her fiercely and passionately (this was already more than a year after Fodderwing had returned from the»Pacific), and I suggested in the most delicate language I could muster that it was neither psychologically sound nor genetically safe for a girl to be fucking her own brother.

Susan said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” and hung up.

On Saturday night, the band concluded its Staten Island engagement. I told Herbie how happy I’d been, and expressed the hope that I’d fulfilled his expectations.

“You was adequate, man,” he said magnanimously.

The meeting between Biff and my grandfather takes place in a club in Greenwich Village, where Biff is playing a one-night stand. He is late arriving, and the owner of the place is in an uproar. Biff placates the boss, stops briefly at our table to be introduced, and then excuses himself, saying he has to go to the men’s room. The moment he is gone, my grandfather whispers, “Ignazio?”

“Yes, Grandpa?”

“This man is a nigger, did you know that?”

“Yes, Grandpa.”

“Eh!” he says, or something that sounds like “Eh!” an explosion of breath that translates into English as “Okay, you know it; I just wanted to make sure you knew it.”

As sidemen that night, Biff is using a drummer, a bass player, and two horn men — one on trumpet, the other on sax — the usual instrumentation for a bop combo. The set they play is strictly Parker-Gillespie, all the stuff those two have been laying down, some of the tunes not even named yet, the charts picked up by emulating musicians who put them into the jazz lexicon and only later identify them as “Epistrophy” or “Swingmatism” or “A Night in Tunisia.” Biff is in trouble almost from go. He tries desperately to control his trained left hand, but it keeps trying to play time — fleshed-out tenths leap unexpectedly from his fingers, a brief swing bass oom-pahs over the riding ching-ching-ching-ching of the drummer’s top cymbals, tenths walk precisely in meter with the bass fiddle. He pulls himself back suddenly, you can feel the effort, and he begins playing shells again, using only two fingers of his left hand, and he tries to get a rhythmic line into his right hand, but the right is trained as well, it responds automatically, filling spaces where he feels something is needed, a florid little run sprinkling into that arid bop desert like an impossible rain squall. There is something hysterical about the way he plays, and something bitter, too. The marvelous counterpoint I’d listened to on my brother’s records is all but gone. Biff keeps squelching his left and forcing his right into strange new patterns, and it is like listening to half a piano player. The people are responding strangely, I can hear their constant chatter all through the set. They are there to hear Biff Anderson, yes, but in their minds jazz is jazz and they expect Biff to play the jazz they are starting to hear everywhere around them, even though they know this is not the kind of jazz upon which he built his reputation. It is quite an odd demand — somewhat like going to see a Clark Gable movie and expecting him to play Andy Hardy.

Biff comes over to the table after the set, and sits down on my right, so that I am between him and my grandfather. He asks my grandfather if he’d care for something to drink, and my grandfather orders a glass of red wine, and Biff tells the waiter he’d like a bourbon and water, and I fill in the lag before the drinks come by asking Biff a lot of questions about the sidemen. When the drinks arrive, my grandfather says, “Salute” and drinks, and makes an odd sound that tells me this is not the sort of red wine he is used to making and drinking. Abruptly, he says, “So what about my grandson?”

“You got some grandson here, Mr. Di Lorenzo,” Biff says.

“Is he a good piano player?”

“Very good. An’ gettin’ better all the time.”

“What you played,” he says. “That was jazz?”

“That was jazz,” Biff says.

“I don’t like it,” my grandfather says.

Biff begins laughing. “You ain’t alone.”

“Do you like it?”

“Well, that’s a difficult question to answer,” Biff says. “It’s changin’ right now. It’s in the mist of change, you dig? If you mean do I like playin’ piano, yes, I love it. It’s what I’ve been doin’ all my life, and I guess it’s what I’ll keep on doin’.” Biff laughs again. “That is, if they let me.”

“Who?” my grandfather says.

“The people who’re changin’ it all.”

“What people?”

“Mainly Parker, Powell, and Gillespie. Klook. Them.”

“Why don’t you go see them?” my grandfather asks. I think he feels these men are politicians like Marcantonio, people you can go to with complaints or requests for favors. I don’t think he quite understands that they are musicians, and that the revolution in jazz is not being legislated.

“I’ve seen them,” Biff says.

“You told them?”

“Told them what?”

“That you don’t like it?”

“No. No, I didn’t tell ’em that, Mr. Di Lorenzo.”

“Why not?”

“Well, it don’t matter to them what I like or don’t like. They’re playin’ what they feel.”

“Do you play what you feel?”

“I try. It’s... well, it’s like learning a new Ianguage, that’s all. You got to put your feelings into new words.”

“Ah,” my grandfather says. This he understands. He has been trying to learn a new language for forty-four years now. “Are you teaching this language to Ignazio?”

“Yes, sir.”

“How can you teach it if you don’t understand it?”

“Oh, I understand it, all right. I just don’t quite feel it yet.”

“Ah,” my grandfather says, and strikes a match. “You want a see-gah?” he asks Biff.

“I don’t smoke,” Biff says.

“Tell me some more things.”

“What do you want to know?”

“Is this where you play jazz? In bars?”

“Mostly.”

“This is where Ignazio will play jazz?”

“In better places than this, I hope. This is a toilet, Mr. Di Lorenzo.”

“Yes,” my grandfather agrees. “But even better places, they’ll still be bars, eh?”

“Bars, clubs, cabarets, yes. That’s mostly where jazz is played.”

“Mm,” my grandfather says. “You drink a lot?”

“Enough.”

“Mm,” my grandfather says.

“Booze and piano go together,” Biff says.

“Mm,” my grandfather says. “Why?”

“Because there’s always a drink on top of the piano.”

“The girls here,” my grandfather says, and pauses. “Mi sembrano puttane, you understand me?”

“No.”

“He says the girls look like prostitutes.”

“Some of them are,” Biff says.

“Mm,” my grandfather says. “Where do you play in these bars? In New York?”

“All over. All over the country. Or at least I used to. I even played in Paris and Stockholm.”

“Paris, eh? Paris.”

“France,” Biff says.

“But now you play only in New York, eh?”

“I can’t get many gigs other places.”

“Jobs,” I explain to my grandfather.

“Mm, jobs. Why not?”

“Because it doesn’t last that long.”

“What doesn’t?”

“A career in jazz.”

“How long?”

“Five, six years. Seven the most. I’m just hangin’ on now, Mr. Di Lorenzo. I was on the way down long before this new stuff came in. I’m talkin’ about big money. I can still earn a living, more or less, but I don’t make big money no more.”

“What do you call big money? If you play jazz, what’s big money?”

“Well, I was pullin’ down three, four bills a week in the thirties, an’ that’s when people were starvin’, and I’m not nowhere near the piano player Tatum or Wilson is. I guess Art is still makin’... what? a thousand a week? But I ain’t sure how long that’s gonna last for him, not with this new jazz we’ve been tellin’ you about. An’ that’s just playin’ club dates; he makes money on his records, too, and other stuff.” I hear Biff lifting his glass. He drinks, I hear him swallow, he puts the glass back on the table and says, “Mr. Di Lorenzo, I get the feeling you don’ want no bullshit where it concerns your grandson’s prospects...”

“That’s right, no bullshit.”

“So, okay, I’ll lay it right on the line. I already told you he’s a good musician. I don’t know where he’s goin’ yet, but lots of young kids comin’ up today don’t know where they’re at, either; this bop ain’t so easy as you think. You hear Bird play, you want to go out an’ hang yourself, I’m not kiddin’. He’s that good, he’s that brilliant, you just want to go kill yourself. Instead, you try to do on your instrument whatever he’s doin’ on his saxophone, an’ that’s where it is today, and Iggie - if he keeps up with this — will have to do Parker on the piano, I s’pose, same way everybody else is doin’ Parker on whatever instrument they play. That’s where it’s at now; I can’t tell you how long it’ll last, but even when it’s gone, I know for sure it’ll have changed everything for keeps. What I’m sayin’ is I think Iggie’s got the chops, the hands, Mr. Di Lorenzo, and he’s got real feeling for what he plays, and I think he’s got a good head, too, but that don’t mean it’ll be easy for him.

“It won’t be easy ’cause first of all he’s blind. I know Iggie good enough to talk about his bein’ blind without fear of offendin’ him; I wouldn’t hurt him for anything in the world. But he’s blind, Mr. Di Lorenzo, and he’s gonna run into a lot of the same things colored musicians are up against. Not ’cause he’s colored, but ’cause he’s blind. He can’t read regular music, he can only read Braille, and that means he won’t be able to get jobs that are bread-an’-butter jobs to good paper men — men who can read music good. I mean, even if by some miracle some Broadway producer decided to hire Iggie to play for a big musical, and wanted to have Iggie’s part written out in Braille, even if that happened, why, Mr. Di Lorenzo, it would just be too much trouble for everyone concerned, they just wouldn’t be able to cope with a blind man in an orchestra pit, you understand me?”

“I understand you,” my grandfather says, and quickly covers my hand with his own.

“So let’s count that out as a possibility. Iggie ain’t gonna be called in by no contractor who needs a piano player to fill a chair on a big-band record date, and ain’t no radio station gonna call him up to do studio work, an’ he’s not about to get a rush call from the guy runnin’ Carousel, just forget them as possibilities, okay? That means he’ll have to make it either as a solo piano player or with a small group, and I think he already knows solo piano is on its last legs; where jazz is at today is in the small group. He’s got to work hard, and get his bag of tricks together, and start himself a group makin’ the right sound in the right time and in the right place. An’ he’ll start makin’ some records with that group, and if they catch on, he’ll have it made. He gets a couple of hit records, he can count on some good club dates followin’ them, and some real gold playin’ and makin’ more records that’ll bring in royalties, and so on, it’ll keep mush-roomin’ for maybe five or six years, he can be pullin’ down, oh, say fifty thousand, seventy-five thousand a year while he’s on top. If he doesn’t just blow that gold, he can make himself some good investments so that when things begin to taper, when the records stop sellin’ because maybe another sound has come in, or another style, or another piano player comes up with the right thing in the right time an’ place, why, then Iggie’ll have enough to tide him over while he ain’t makin’ as much gold but is still playin’ here and there because people still know his name. He’s got to make it first, you understand. Lots of guys never make it.

“There’s things he’s gonna have to deal with whether he makes it or not. They’re all part of jazz, and you might as well know the whole story, you said you didn’t want no bullshit. He’s gonna be playin’ mostly in clubs. And there’re gonna be whores in lots of those clubs, because that’s where whores hang out. Even if he don’t run with whores, there are gonna be other women, they dig musicians, I don’t know what it is. And he’s gonna be traveling around a lot playing these clubs, and I got to tell you marriage and music don’t go together, I been married and divorced twice myself, though I ain’t even sure the last divorce is legal. And there’s gonna be gangsters in lots of them clubs because gangsters own most of them. And there’s gonna be booze, because like I told you before, booze and the piano do go together. There’s also gonna be dope, because lots of these new musicians comin’ up think dope’s gonna help them play like Bird, an’ even if they didn’t believe that, there’s always been dope around jazz music, I know guys who were usin’ cocaine when I was still playin’ in Kansas City, that’s just the way it is. I already told Iggie I’d break his arm if he ever went near no narcotics, and I think he knows I’m not kiddin’ him.

“But all these bad things in jazz ain’t what should be concernin’ you, Mr. Di Lorenzo. What you should be thinkin’ about are the good things. And they got nothin’ to do with makin’ a lot of gold, or becomin’ famous, or whatever. They got to do with the way playin’ jazz makes you feel. Pee Wee Russell once told somebody — he’s a clarinet player, Mr. Di Lorenzo — he once told somebody the moment of truth comes for him each time he stands up to take his chorus, that’s the most important thing in his life. Well, it is, Mr. Di Lorenzo. It’s jumpin’ in the middle of the ocean. It ain’t swimmin’ out gradually, it’s jumpin’ right out to where you can’t see no land no more, it’s usin’ everything you know to stay afloat and to swim however far out you think you can, and then like magic you get whisked right back there to shore again, and you wrap it all up with a big yellow ribbon, and there you are, and you feel good and clean and happy all over, and there ain’t many things I know that can make you feel that way in life, Mr. Di Lorenzo, there just ain’t many I know of.”

My grandfather has been silent through all this, and he is silent now for several more minutes. Biff lifts his glass again. I sense he is a bit uneasy; perhaps he thinks he’s gone too far. He is not at the piano where he can jump into the middle of that ocean he described, and swim out as far as he dares. My grandfather is, to him, an unknown quantity. He waits.

My grandfather says, “I never talked to a colored man before. I don’t understand why you should care about Ignazio.”

“Why shouldn’t I?” Biff answers. “Used to be a nice, friendly feeling in jazz, Mr. Di Lorenzo. Used to be you played. That’s changin’. And maybe I got to change my style to keep up with what’s comin’ in, but, man, I don’t have to change the way I feel. I got to get back on the stand,” he says. “You goan stay for another set?”

“Yes,” my grandfather says.

He orders another glass of wine and listens while the band plays a set that includes “A Dizzy Atmosphere,” “Anthropology,” and “Keen and Peachy.” As they play, I think Yes, I will make between fifty and seventy-five thousand dollars a year, and yes, I will cut records and I will make sound investments so that when another piano player comes up with the right sound in the right time and place I’ll have enough to tide me over and I’ll still be playing because people will remember my name.

Iggie Di Palermo, I think.

They will know my name, and they will remember it.

I will make it.

I will not be one of those guys who never make it.

“Pffffff,” my grandfather says. “What noise.”

By Christmas of 1945:

1. My mother had been visited on earth by the Virgin Mary, who displayed a worldly wisdom unbecoming to the Mother of God, almost destroying a happy family in the Bronx, and causing an innocent house painter to suffer the lifelong torments of Stella’s silent treatment.

2. My Aunt Victoria, at the age of sixty-four, had finally found herself a husband, a widowed Sicilian pig farmer who lived in New Jersey with five hulking sons, spoke barely a word of English, and reputedly beat her regularly with a sawed-off rake handle.

3. Pino Battatore’s son, Tommy, had either jumped or been pushed to his death on the elevated tracks of the Third Avenue El one black September midnight. The police found four thousand dollars in cash in the inside pocket of his jacket, together with a large collection of policy slips. When the cops told Pino his son had probably been involved in the numbers racket, Pino told them they were lying bastards.

4. My Aunt Bianca’s boyfriend, Rafaelo the butcher, had dashed into her corset shop one bright October day shouting, “Bianca, he caught me, he caught me!” scaring her half out of her wits till she realized he was making reference to the man upstairs, who had just stumbled upon the butcher in bed with his wife. My Aunt Bianca, who’d been working on a brassiere, belatedly stuck her sewing needle into Rafaelo’s left buttock, thereby effectively ending their relationship.

5. My Uncle Dominick’s unmarried, sixteen-year-old daughter had got herself pregnant by a detective in Brooklyn, where Dominick now lived next door to his wife’s parents, who ran a pizzeria on Coney Island Avenue.

Now that, my friends, is the stuff upon which soap operas are built. I made it all up. But only because I wanted to prove I could easily find a job writing for CBS if ever I became arthritic and couldn’t play piano anymore. I’m also about to make up what happened on that Christmas Day in 1945. You’ll know it’s another lie the moment you read it.

My grandfather’s house was abnormally cheerless. We had none of us grown accustomed to Tony’s death; I doubted if we ever would. My Uncle Dominick was spending Christmas Day with his wife’s family in Brooklyn, and Aunt Victoria was in New Jersey with her sadistic pig farmer, and Uncle Joe had canceled (again) his promised trip from Arizona, and Pino was in mourning and would have considered it sacrilege to have played the mandolin. When the telephone rang, my Aunt Bianca rushed to answer it, hoping (I think) that it was the butcher. “Iggie,” she said, “it’s for you.”

I got up from the dining room table. I had been sitting very close to my grandfather, because he’d been oddly silent all through the meal, and I wanted to touch him every so often, just to make sure he was there and all right. I touched him now as I went to the phone, just rested my hand on his shoulder for a moment, and he covered it briefly with his own, and then I went out into the hallway and put one finger in my ear as I picked up the receiver, hoping to drown out the clatter of the women doing dishes in the kitchen.

“Hello?” I said.

“Iggie?” a woman asked. She was black.

“Who’s this?” I said.

“You don’t know me,” she said. “Biff ast me t’call. Said I should try the Bronx first, an’ if you wasn’t there, I should look up Lorenzo, Di Lorenzo in Harlem. Is this Iggie?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Biff’s sick,” she said. “Can you come down here right away? I don’t know whut t’do.”

“What’s the matter with him?”

“Well, like you know, man.”

“No, I don’t know. What is it?”

“Well, like can you jus’ come down here right away?”

“Have you called a doctor?”

“No,” she said. “Can you get here right away, please?”

“Well, what...?”

“Please, man,” she said.

“Where are you? Canal Street?”

“Yes.”

“All right,” I said. “Tell him I’m on the way.”

I put the receiver back on the cradle, and went into the bedroom for my coat.

“Who was that?” my mother said.

“Biff’s sick. I have to go down to Canal Street.”

“Does he know you’re blind, your nigger friend?”

“He knows it, Mom.”

“So why is he dragging you out of the house on Christmas Day?”

“Che successe?” my grandfather asked.

“Biff is sick,” I said.

“Where did you say you’re going?” Aunt Bianca asked.

“Canal Street,” my mother said.

“I’ll take a taxi, don’t worry about me.”

“I’ll go with you,” my father said.

“I can get there okay, Pop.”

“Let him go, Jimmy,” my mother said. “The hell with him and his nigger friends.”

“I got the cab right downstairs,” Matt said. “You want me to drive you down?”

“Thanks, Uncle Matt, I’ll be all right.”

“Iggie,” my grandfather said.

“Yes, Grandpa?”

“Stat’ attento,” he said. “Be careful.”

“I will, Grandpa.”

I went downstairs, and stood on the corner outside the pasticceria, waiting for a cab heading downtown, raising my cane whenever any kind of vehicle approached. I must have been standing in the cold for perhaps ten minutes, regretting having turned down my Uncle Matt’s offer, when suddenly an automobile pulled to the curb.

“Where are you going?” a girl’s voice asked.

“Canal Street,” I said.

“You’ll never get a taxi, this is Christmas,” she said. “You want to share mine?”

“Thank you,” I said.

I heard the door opening. I felt for it, edged my way around it, and using it as a guide and a support, climbed into the taxi. I was reaching over to pull the door shut behind me, when the girl said, “Can you manage?”

“Yes, thank you.”

“Okay,” she said.

I closed the door, slamming it to prove I was entirely capable of performing such a simple action.

“Don’t break the window, huh, Mac?” the cabby said.

“Sorry,” I said.

“So what is it now? Houston, then Canal?”

“Yes,” the girl said.

The driver put the cab into gear and pulled away from the curb. The girl and I sat side by side in silence.

“This is very kind of you,” I said at last, in apology for having slammed the door.

“Listen,” she said, “don’t I know what it’s like trying to get a cab?” Her voice was pure Bronx Jewish. I suddenly thought of Rebecca, the girl with the green eyes. We rode the rest of the way downtown without saying another word to each other. On Houston Street, the girl directed the driver to the building she wanted, and then offered to pay him what was on the meter. I told her that wasn’t necessary, I’d take care of it when I got to Canal Street. She then offered to pay at least half, but I refused that as well. Sighing, she got out of the cab, said, “Happy Chanukah,” and slammed the door behind her,

“Everybody’s tryin’ to bust my windows today,” the cabby said, and threw the taxi into gear again, and squealed it away from the curb. He was silent for several moments, and then suddenly and angrily said, “Why’n’t you let her pay?”

“What for?” I said. “I’d still be standing on that corner if it hadn’t been for her.”

“For her? For me, you mean. By rights, I ain’t supposed to pick up no passenger when I already got a passenger in the cab. That’s ridin’ double, an’ that ain’t allowed. By rights, when I let her out on Houston, I shoulda collected what was on the clock and then thrown the flag again. That’s by rights.”

“What difference does it make?” I said.

“I work percentage, Mac. Every time I throw the flag, I get a percentage of the first drop, too. What do you think I ony get a percentage of ony the rest, is that what you think? By rights, I’m gettin’ gypped out of part of the fare.”

“I’ll make it up on the tip,” I said.

“Sure,” the cabby said. “Everybody’ll make it up on the tip.”

“I can’t read the meter, anyway,” I said, “so just charge me whatever the fuck you want, and shut up, will you?”

“Nice,” he said. “Nice for a blind person.”

“Just drive the fuckin’ taxi,” I said.

“Very nice,” he said. “Oh, beautiful.”

When we got to Canal Street, I paid him what he said was on the meter, and then added a dollar to it. “Can you make it upstairs?” he asked.

“I can make it.”

“I’ll help you upstairs, if you like.”

“I don’t need any help, thanks.”

“Fuck you too,” he said, and drove off.

There was usually an old black man running the cage elevator in Biff’s building. But this was Christmas, and after I’d been ringing the bell for several minutes, I realized he probably had the day off. I felt around in the hallway for a door leading to the steps, found a metal fire door, eased it open, and cautiously began climbing. The iron stairwell stank of urine and booze. I had been coming to this building for more than a year now, but I had always been taken up to the third floor in the elevator run by the old black man, who smelled of whiskey a bit, true, but never of tiger piss. Biff had described him to me as a punch-drunk old club fighter who always wore a brown leather jacket and a woolen watch cap. In all the time I’d been taking lessons from Biff, the old man had never said a word to me. I’d get into the elevator, he’d carry me to the third floor, and then pull open the gate and wait for me to get out. The stench began to dissipate as I climbed higher. I figured the ground-floor landing was a haven for bums who wandered over from the Bowery. I kept climbing, tapping the metal steps. I had counted the steps from the ground floor to the first-floor landing, and knew there were thirty-six of them between floors. When I reached the third floor, I opened another fire door, and then located the elevator door so that I could direct myself from there to Biff’s loft. There was a bell set into the metal doorjamb there. I knew exactly where it was. I reached for it, and heard the bell ringing inside the loft. Footsteps approached the door.

“Who is it?” a voice said. It was the voice I’d heard on the telephone.

“Iggie,” I said.

I heard the night chain being removed, and then the lock being turned. The door opened.

“You’re blind,” she said at once.

“Yes.”

“He didn’t tell me. Whut the fuck help you gonna be, man?”

“Where is he?”

She closed and locked the door behind me. I knew my way around the loft by heart; it was as familiar to me as my own home in the Bronx. The grand piano, which Biff had bought in better times and never parted with, sat against the Canal Street wall, huge windows above it opening to the street. There was a battered easy chair near the piano, and a mattress on the floor in the middle of the loft. Biff was lying on that mattress. All I could hear was his tortured breathing.

“Biff?” I said.

He did not answer. I reached out to touch him. He was drenched with perspiration. The sheets under him were wet.

“Biff?” I said again. I turned to the girl. “Is he unconscious? What’s the matter with him?” I was beginning to panic. I could not see him, and he was trembling under my hand, and I did not know what was wrong with him. “Why didn’t you call a doctor?”

“I didn’t figure it was nothin’ at first,” the girl said. “He was ony complainin’ his neck felt stiff, tha’s all. I figured it was bad shit.”

“What? What do you mean?”

“Lots of bad shit runnin’ roun’ the city.” She was silent for a moment. She must have been staring at me, she must have been trying to look through my dark glasses and see into my eyes, read what was in my eyes as though I were sighted, trying to fathom my confusion. “Listen,” she said, “I thought you an’ Biff was friends.”

“We are.”

“An’ you don’t know?”

“Don’t know what, for Christ’s sake?”

“That he’s a junkie?”

“No,” I said. I was not answering her question. I was denying the information she had just given me. “No,” I said again.

“Hooked clear through the bag an’ back again,” she said.

“I don’t believe you.”

“Come down, man, he been a addict for ten years now.”

“Then... then... what...?” There was a sudden sharp movement on the mattress; his body lurched under my hand.

“Oh, Jesus!” the girl said.

“Where’s the telephone?” I said.

“Ain’t none here,” she said. “I called fum a booth downstairs.”

“We’ve got to get an ambulance,” I said.

“What for, man? One thing we don’t need on Christmas is any heat about dope.”

“Where’s that phone booth?” I said. “Don’t leave him alone, you hear me? Just stay with him while...”

“Cool it, man,” she said softly. “I’ll go make the call.”

He died that night. He died of asphyxia or exhaustion or a combination of both. Medical bullshit. I listened to medical bullshit from an intern in the charity ward of a hospital built twenty years before my grandfather first came to .these shores. Biff died in spasm induced by the tetanus bacillus that had infected a subcutaneous abscess on his left arm, undoubtedly caused by repeated insertions of a hypodermic needle. He’d been a dead man a week or two before I’d arrived at the loft that Christmas Day; that was the incubation period, the intern told me, that was how long it had taken for the exotoxin to launch its fatal attack on the central nervous system. He died with his jaws locked shut. He died in a room as black as the color of his skin. (Light, it had something to do with light, they did not want light in the room.) The nurses tiptoed quietly past the door, not because a man was dying inside, but only because any sudden noise (it had something to do with noise) might set off another racking spasm. The spasms were killing him. He was being shaken to death and choked to death, that poor lovely son of a bitch.

I left the hospital at ten minutes past one on the morning after Christmas. That was five minutes after they’d pronounced Biff dead. A thin drizzle was falling. I stood outside the main entrance with the girl. She didn’t say anything for a long time. Then she sighed, and said, “Well, that’s that, man,” and began to weep. She did not want to go back to the loft. I took her to Harlem in a taxi, and then I found a pay phone in a bar where bad jazz musicians were trying to play Charlie Parker, and I called my grandfather’s house. He answered the telephone before it rang twice. I told him not to worry, I was okay. I went to the bar, and sat down, and began drinking, and got drunk for the first time in my life. When the black bartender asked me what I was doing up in Harlem, I said, “I don’t know. What are you doing up in Harlem?” and he laughed.

That’s what happened that Christmas Day.

I made it all up.

I like to think, even now, that I made it all up.

In 1946, I began playing at a place called Auntie’s on Macdougal Street in New York’s Greenwich Village. The “auntie” who ran the joint was a crazy old Frenchwoman, named Madeleine. She paid me and my sidemen $350 a week for playing six nights a week, from 10 P.M. to two in the morning. I gave the bass man and the drummer a bill apiece, and kept $150 for myself as leader. My bass player was black, my drummer was white. The odd sets were played by a piano man who was black; his name was Oz Rodriguez. Oz was in his late fifties, a gifted musician steeped in Waller and Hines. He played solo piano the way I’d first heard it on my brother’s records, spelling us during our fifteen-minute intermissions and doubling as an accompanist whenever anybody wanted to sing a song. Madeleine was always wanting to sing a song. I sometimes think she opened the club only so she’d get to do her world-famous imitation of Piaf as often as she liked. She used to bug poor Oz out of his mind. Once she came to me and asked if I’d accompany her on “La Vie en Rose.” I told her I wasn’t an accompanist, I was leader of the house band. She told me she could get another house band any time she wanted. I said she was free to do so, if that was her desire, but the boys and I had built at least something of a following since we’d begun playing at Auntie’s and I’d hate to have to move over to the new club that had opened two blocks south of Sheridan Square, and take good steady drinking clientele to another place. “Ike,” she said, “tu es vraiment un bâtard aveugle.”

I had adopted the “Ike” the moment I got the steady gig at Auntie’s. The name came to me out of the blue. I went into the kitchen one night, and said to my mother, “How do you like Blind Ike?”

She said, “What?”

“For a name,” I said.

“What do you mean for a name?”

“For the trio. The Blind Ike Trio.”

“Ike?” she said. “What’s that?”

“Instead of Iggie,” I said.

“What’s the matter with Iggie?”

“Nothing, I just think Blind Ike sounds better. There are lots of blind piano players, you know. George Shearing is blind, you know.”

“Does he call himself Blind Ike?”

“Well, no, but...”

“Then why do you want to call yourself Blind Ike? Your name is Iggie. What’s the matter with that name?”

“Nothing, Mom. I’m thinking of what sounds better, that’s all.”

“Iggie sounds fine to me.”

“Well, I’m going to tell Madeleine to put it on the poster outside the club. The Blind Ike Trio. Okay?”

“If you decided already, why are you asking me?”

“Because if you ever come down to Macdougal Street, I want you to know who I am.”

“I know who you are,” she said. “You’re Iggie, that’s who you are.”

(But today she calls me Ike, the same as everyone else.)

I can’t remember what kind of piano I was playing back in 1946. I was searching for a style, and stealing from everything I heard. There was a lot to hear. I’d listen to it, and try it for a while, and then abandon it when I heard something I liked better. Jazz musicians are notorious thieves. I’m not talking about the fact that throughout the history of jazz the white man has packaged and commercialized the innovations of the black man. That’s not theft. That’s American free enterprise. I’m talking about a lick that’ll suddenly pop up in a horn solo, deliberately or unconsciously swiped from something the musician heard the night before at another club, or on a record, or hummed from behind the door of a pay toilet. I listened a lot, and stole a lot. Or, to put it more delicately, I was “influenced” a lot. By Nat Cole, Garner, Powell (reluctantly, because I still thought he was a crude pianist), Hampton Hawes, Herbie Hancock, Joe Albany, Lennie Tristano, Mary Lou Williams, Clarence Profit, Monk, Oscar Peterson — the only man, incidentally, who ever had the motor skills to play Charlie Parker on the piano, a consummate musician with more technical facility than any of us. I listened to whoever was making records or appearing in person in New York City, and invariably tried to copy what they were doing. The sidemen in the trio — Stu Holman on bass and Cappy Kaplan on drums — were my accomplices in crime. We stole outrageously, casing joints all over the city, busting open a style the way we might a bank vault, plundering what was inside, throwing away the wrappers around the bills, spending all the loot, and then searching for another safe to crack. We were serving our apprenticeship in the only way we could. None of us, you see, were true innovators. But in America, you don’t have to be.

I was sitting at the bar. We had just finished a set, and Madeleine was arguing in French with one of her countrymen who kept insisting it was time we forgave the German people. (This was May of 1946; the war in Germany had ended only a year ago!) The voice on my left said, “Hello, Iggie, long time no see.”

There are very few accidental meetings in the city of New York. Yes, sometimes you will run into an old classmate, and you will babble on unenthusiastically about old times long forgotten — do you ever see Charlie Hobbs, who used to throw scum bags filled with water from the elevated IRT, whatever happend to Jennie Whatshername, who used to be so good in math, and golly, you’ve got fourteen kids now, huh, wow, amazing, yes, I’m with Amalgamated Life over in Newark, and gee, great to see you again, give my regards home, huh, got to run. That happens rarely; it’s a big city. The girl on my left sounded a lot like Rebecca with the green eyes, and she was in Auntie’s on Macdougal Street in Greenwich Village, and I had not spoken to her since that Thursday night in July, ten months ago, and I turned to face her, and I held my breath and thought This can’t be an accident; if it’s her, it can’t be an accident. Aloud, I said, “Is it you?”

“Who?” she asked.

“Rebecca.”

“Is it Iggie? Or is it Ike?”

“It’s Ike, but it’s Iggie. Is it you?”

“It’s me,” she said.

“Where’s Marvin?” I asked quickly.

“Marvin? Who’s Marvin? Oh, Marvin. Marvin is married.”

“Not to you, I hope.”

“Not to me. He married a singer. Would you believe it? I think he kept taking me to all those jazz joints only so he could meet a singer.”

“Listen,” I said, “you didn’t happen to pick me up in a taxicab last Christmas, did you?”

“No,” she said. “What?”

“Outside a pasticceria on First Avenue?”

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

“Positive. I was in Miami last Christmas.”

“I’m glad you’re back.”

“So am I.”

“What’s your last name?”

“Baumgarten. What’s yours?”

“Di Palermo. How’d you know I was here?”

“I saw an ad in the paper. I figured Blind Ike? Had to be.”

“So here you are.”

“Here I am.”

“So what are you doing Monday night? I’m off Mondays.”

“Take it easy,” she said.

“Why?”

“Well...”

“What is it?”

“Well... you see, my father has trouble with Italian names.”

“Huh?”

“In fact, he has trouble with any names that aren’t Jewish.”

“Huh?”

“He’s what you might call a raging bigot.”

“You’re kidding,” I said. “You’re kidding, aren’t you?”

“Am I? My father’s got two specialties — selling Oldsmobiles and hating the goyim.”

“What’s that?”

“Goyim? That’s you. Do you know what a pogrom is?”

“Yes.”

“A pogrom is what’ll happen if my father ever finds out I came here to see you. He’ll come riding down from the north Bronx with his tallis thrown over his shoulder...”

“His what?”

“That’s a prayer shawl.”

“Of course it’s a prayer shawl,” I said. “But your father’s got some tallis, too, if he can throw it over his shoulder.”

Rebecca burst out laughing, and then sobered immediately. “Listen,” she said, “I’m a nice Jewish girl, and... and not whatever you’re thinking.”

“What am I thinking?”

“I mean... you know. I don’t make a habit of following piano players all over the city.”

“I should hope not.”

“In fact, I don’t know what I’m doing here,” she said.

“Well,” I said, “look... uh... why don’t you... would you like a drink or something? I mean, Jesus, whatever you do, don’t go running off again, okay?”

“Why’d you call me that time? You didn’t even know what I looked like.”

“I still don’t. What do you look like, Rebecca?”

“I’m gorgeous, what do you think?”

“That’s what I think,” I said.

“You don’t look Italian at all,” she said.

“What do Italians look like?”

“Oh, you know, short and dark and... not like you.”

“I’m really Jewish,” I said. “I got kidnapped from my very religious Jewish parents by a band of Sicilian...”

“I only wish,” she said.

“Why?”

“Because... listen, do you want to know something? I got Marvin to take me back to Staten Island two weeks later. But you were gone. There was another band there. I’ll tell you the truth, I was relieved. I once went out with an Irish boy, and my father chased him down the stairs.”

“Rebecca, you’ve got to be...”

“Michael, his name was. Michael Sullivan.”

“Rebecca, let’s worry about your father later, okay?”

“No, let’s worry about him now.”

“Okay,” I said, and fell silent.

“Are you worrying?” she asked.

“I’m worrying,” I said.

“Where shall I meet you Monday night?” she asked.

It had been a suffocatingly humid week, and the stifling heat in the Mosholu Parkway apartment staggered me as we came through the front door. (There was a mezuzah on the doorjamb, similar to the one my grandfather’s “Kasha” had touched her fingers to in the year 1901. I did not see it.) I had been dating Rebecca for close to three months, but I had not yet met her parents. Rebecca had prepared both of them for our impending visit, and Honest Abe Baumgarten had said, predictably, “If you bring a blind shaygets up here, I’ll shoot him on the spot.” The apartment was strange to me, the lingering cooking smells alien. There were voices, men talking and laughing. Rebecca led me into the kitchen. I recognized the sounds of a poker game in progress and suddenly thought of my Uncle Luke. “Daddy,” Rebecca said, and the voices stopped.

“Daddy, I’d like you to meet Ike Di Palermo,” she said. Her voice had a frightened quaver in it. She was clinging to my left hand, and her own hand was sweating.

“How do you do?” I said, and extended my right hand.

I stood there for several minutes with my hand extended, and suddenly realized no one was going to take it. I pulled it back.

“Who deals?” somebody asked. I later learned this burning question had been put by none other than the Mad Oldsmobile Dealer.

“Ike is a piano player,” Rebecca said. “Do you know ‘Far, Far Away’?” someone at the table asked.

I had been playing piano since the time I was six, but I swear to God I had never heard this old saw before. Innocently, I said, “No, I’m sorry, I don’t.”

“We don’t want you to play it,” the man said. “We want you to go it.”

“Far, far away,” someone else said, and everyone burst out laughing.

“Who’s shy in the kitty?” Abe asked. “I don’t want to be in the kitty,” someone said. “The kitty is for Ratner’s,” Abe said. “September fifth, we’re going to Ratner’s. Get up a nickel.”

“I don’t want to go to Ratner’s,” the man said. “Go without me, I don’t want to be in no kitty.”

“We need a cup for the fecahkteh kitty,” someone said.

“Anybody got a tin cup?” Abe said.

“Excuse me,” I said, and turned to go, and knocked something off the cabinet close to the table. I stooped to pick it up.

“I’ll get it,” Rebecca said.

“I can find it,” I said, and got down on my knees, and scrambled around on the floor for whatever it was, something metallic, an ashtray, a small pot, something; I didn’t know what the hell it was, and I couldn’t find it, either. Rebecca said, “Leave it, Ike. I want you to meet my mother.”

She took my hand and led me into what I supposed was the living room. The ladies were seated there silently. They had heard the exchange in the kitchen, and were now awaiting my approach.

“Mom, this is Ike,” Rebecca said.

“How do you do?” Sophie Baumgarten said. She had risen from the couch or wherever she’d been sitting, and was approaching, I felt her approach. “Won’t you shake hands?” she said, and I realized her hand was extended, and I put out my own hand, and she took it. Her hand was trembling. This was costing her a lot. “Sit down, why don’t you? We were just talking about how hot it’s been this week. A record, in fact, I heard on the radio last night. Would you like something cool to drink?”

“No, thank you,” I said.

“And this is my sister Davina,” Rebecca said.

“How do you do?” I said, and extended my hand again.

“Nice to meet you,” Davina said. Her voice was pitched a trifle lower than Rebecca’s; her handshake was cool, and dry, and firm.

“Are you sure you wouldn’t like something to drink?” Sophie asked.

“Thank you,” I said, “but Rebecca and I have to be going. Thank you, Mrs. Baumgarten,” I said. “Come on, Rebecca,” I said.

As she led me past the kitchen, someone at the table said, “Leaving so soon?”

“Shut up, Seymour!” Rebecca snapped. I had recognized the voice. Seymour was the man who’d made the request for “Far, Far Away.”

“I like your boyfriend,” Seymour said. “He seems like a very Gentile fellow.” He slurred the word “Gentile” so that it sounded almost like “gentle” — but not quite.

“Let’s go, Ike,” Rebecca said, and led me out of the apartment, slamming the door behind us.

“The lousy bastard,” she said.

To this day, I do not know whether she was referring to Seymour or her father.

Rebecca Baumgarten is four years old when her sister is born. Her mother names the new baby Davina, which in Hebrew means “the loved one.” Sophie intends no slight to her first-born daughter, whose name in the ancient tongue means “the captivator.” But in Rebecca’s four-year-old head, the new child is the loved one, isn’t that what they named her? She asks her grandfather about this.

“Zayde,” she says, “why do they love Davina and not me?”

“They love you both together,” the old man says.

They are sitting outside his dry-goods store on the lower East Side. It is the summer of 1932. The old man is in a cane rocker he bought from the sidewalk stand of Shmuel two doors down. Rebecca sits at his feet on a stool she has dragged from inside the store. The old man wears a black pair of pants, and a white shirt, and a brown sweater with buttons up the front. He wears a black silk yarmulke. She has never seen him without the yarmulke. He has had a white beard for as long as she can remember, and wire-framed eyeglasses perched on his nose. His nose is like the Indian’s on the buffalo nickel. He is a very handsome man, her grandfather. His name is Itzik Galdek, and he is her mother’s father. He came to this country in 1890, from a city named Bialystok, on the Polish border some twenty-five miles from Russia. He explains now that Rebecca’s sister was named Davina not because she is any more loved than Rebecca herself, but only because she came second. They are Ashkenazic Jews, he explains, and the Ashkenazim will not name a child after a living relative. When Rebecca was born, in 1928, her grandmother of the same name was already dead, and so she was named after her, which was a great honor because her bubbeh was a fine and wonderful woman.

“Rivke, that is your name in Yiddish,” he tells her. “Rebecca is what that means, Rivke. Now... if your sister had been born first, she would most likely have been named Rivke, she would have been given your name, do you see? But your sister was born only last month, isn’t that so, and Rivke was all used up already, they had used up this fine and honorable name on you, my bubeleh, and so your mother had to search around for another name, and she picked one that had been my beloved sister’s, who is now dead, too, may she rest in peace, and that is why she is Davina and you are Rivke, Rebecca, eh? Now tell me what you are learning in Hebrew school.”

In Hebrew school, she is learning Biblical stories, prayers, and a smattering of language. Whenever they have dinner at her grandfather’s house, she gives the Hebrew blessing. “Bo-ruch a-toh a-do-noy, e-lo-hay-noo melech ho-o-lom, ha-mo-tzee le-chem meen ho-o-retz” and each time she has to try very hard not to say “ha-mo-izee le-chem Minnie Horowitz,” the way the boys do when they’re joking in the streets. She lives two doors away from the dry-goods store, on the third floor of a five-story tenement. The neighborhood is exclusively Jewish, but occasionally the goyim come in to make trouble; they are always making trouble. Her mother will not wear any jewelry if she is out at night, for fear she will be attacked by goyim and robbed of her treasures. This is what her mother calls her wedding and engagement rings, her pearl earrings, a garnet brooch that was Grandmother Rivke’s in the old country: her treasures.

“The goyim make trouble because they drink,” old Itzik tells her. He has been in this country for forty-two years now, coming to these shores when he was twenty-four. His name was Yitzchak then, the Hebrew for the Biblical Isaac. He is now known by its Yiddish equivalent, Itzik, and already everywhere around him he hears young men being called Isadore and Irving, anglicizations of the name he had proudly worn in Poland. “In Poland,” he tells her, “the goyim would drink all the time, and then they would come into the shtetl and do terrible things; I do not wish to befoul your young ears with stories of the terrible things they did. Sometimes, the Cossacks would ride in and take men away for the army, spirit them away from home and loved ones, never to be seen or heard from again. The Russians owned Poland then, bubeleh, they would come to take the young men, line them up in the square near the fountain, pick them out, you, you, you, you, tsssst, they would disappear from sight.

“I learned a trick,” the old man says, and chuckles with the memory, “such a trick, Rivke, it fooled those farshtinkener Cossacks. There was a man in the ghetto, he knew already about army raids from the Crimean War, when they used to come, the Cossacks, and take away the young men to get killed by the French. So he showed me a thing to do with my leg, do you want to see, Rivke, I can still do it. I paid him plenty; it cost me, don’t worry. But when they came the next time, the Cossacks, I did the trick, this is the trick, bubeleh, see?” he says, and he rises from his rocker and before Rebecca’s astonished eyes he pulls his left leg up into the socket where leg joins hip and makes the leg a full two inches shorter than it normally is. Still chuckling, he grasps the leg between both hands again, and manipulates it, freeing it from the socket. “They thought I was a cripple, those paskudnyaks,” he says, laughing. “I never went in their army; for what reason should I go?”

Every Wednesday night, when she is old enough, her grandfather Itzik takes her to the Yiddish theater on Second Avenue. She watches with her green eyes wide, catching only some of the dialogue, listening to her grandfather as he patiently explains what is happening on the stage and the people in the rows in front of them and behind hiss “Shah! Shah!” When she is eight years old and she catches the whooping cough, it is her grandfather who takes her out to Coney Island every day in the dead of winter, and stands on the boardwalk with her and tells her to breathe deeply of the fresh ocean air, this is the way to get rid of the racking cough. “Breathe, bubeleh, in, out, in, out, good, darling, good.” Her sister is a beautiful child, with green eyes like Rebecca’s, but with blond hair and a pert shiksa nose. “She looks like a regular Shirley Temple,” everyone says, and Rebecca knows this is because her mother rolls Davina’s hair into those long blond curls. One night, when her grandfather comes home from work — he works with her other grandfather, who owns a business in the garment center, and whom she does not like — he finds her sitting in the middle of her room with her Shirley Temple doll on the floor, her hand wrapped around its leg, the head caved in. He asks her why she did that. “Why did you do that, Rebecca? The doll cost me fourteen dollars!” She tells him the doll slipped out of her hands.

She loves her father, but she hardly ever sees him. He comes home late more often than not — her mother explains that he goes to his card games — and then he marches directly into Davina’s room and Rebecca can hear him laughing with her, and tickling her; he tickles her under the chin all the time, he never tickles Rebecca. He is a big man, her father, six feet four inches tall and weighing 220 pounds. Everyone is always mistaking him for a detective. He is very tough, her father. She can remember when she was six years old and a black man came in the store, her grandfather’s dry-goods store, and tried to steal a bolt of cloth, good cloth, too, not a second or anything. Itzik had his eye on the black man from the minute he walked in the store, he wasn’t going to let no shvartzer take from him. But the man was fast, he snatched up the bolt and ran for the doorway, and Rebecca’s father was just coming in to tell Itzik not to forget supper was six o’clock tonight because Sophie had to go to Screeno. He saw the black man running off with the bolt of cloth, and he picked up a broom that was near the doorway, and chased the man all the way over to Third Avenue. When he caught him, the man pulled a knife from his pocket — “You always have to watch those niggers for knives,” her father said later, “they all carry knives” — but he took the knife away from the man and beat him up and told him if he ever came anywhere near the store again, he would be one dead nigger.

Sometimes, her father takes her for a walk on Saturday, and these are the times she likes best, when she is alone with him, and he lets her stop outside the open door of the delicatessen, and allows her to sniff the aromas pouring out onto the sidewalk — the sour pickles in the barrels, the corned beef and the pastrami, the knishes, the fresh rye bread, the kosher hot dogs. For the longest time, she thinks delicatessens are only for sniffing. She later learns that whenever her father takes Davina for a walk, he buys her a knish, or a piece derma, or a nickel-a-shtickel, or some shoe leather, which is dried apricot and delicious. Her father owns a Studebaker with a rumble seat. When they go for a ride in the country, her father, her mother, and her sister sit up front. Rebecca sits in the rumble seat. She does not mind this because she makes up stories about the clouds, sitting with her head back against the leather cushion and watching the sky as the car heads up toward the Catskills — and besides, Davina is just a baby. They keep telling her Davina is just a baby. In the mountains, they stop for lunch at her Aunt Raizel’s kochalayn, which is a bungalow she rents near one of the big hotels. It is only three rooms and a kitchen with a big stove. Her Aunt Raizel has a daughter named Hannah. Hannah has black hair and brown eyes, but Aunt Raizel does her daughter’s hair in the same long Shirley Temple curls. Once, on the way back from the mountains, it begins to rain, and Rebecca pulls the rumble seat closed above her, and then cannot open it again, and is afraid she will not be able to breathe. Her father does not discover that the seat is closed until they stop for gas. He opens it, looks in at her, and says, “Why did you do that, Rebecca? You could have suffocated.” Her face is streaked with tears, her nose is dripping snot. She answers in a very small voice, “It was raining, Daddy.” The only time Davina sits in the rumble seat with her is once coming back from the mountains, when her father stops to help a priest who has a flat tire and no spare. Her mother and Davina get in the rumble seat with Rebecca, and the priest sits up front with her father and the tire. Her father lets the priest out at a filling station near the Washington Bridge. That night, when they are eating supper at home, her father says, “He was an interesting man, the gaylach.”

She is an enormously bright child; her teachers have told her mother that her IQ is 154. She has skipped from 1A to 2A, and again from 4B to 5B, and at the age of ten, she is the youngest child in the sixth grade. But her sister has moved out of kindergarten into the first grade, and some of the teachers Rebecca once had are now beginning to notice Davina, and stopping Rebecca in the hallways to comment on how beautiful her younger sister is. Sometimes, she tries to look at her sister objectively. She studies the green eyes, so like her own, and the blond hair — well, her own hair had been blond when she was a baby, it did not become red and ugly till she was three; perhaps Davina’s hair will change, too. She supposes it is the nose. She stands before the mirror and lifts the end of her nose with her middle finger. Her hand hides her mouth, which she considers her best feature, so she raises her arm above her head, and reaches down for the tip of her nose with her hand upside down. When she exerts the tiniest upward pressure, her nose becomes very much Davina’s nose. She asks her grandfather one day whether she should have her nose cut off.

“Your what?” Itzik says.

“My nose, Grandpa. Should I get a nose job?”

“What is that, a nose job?”

“They fix your nose,” she says.

“There’s nothing wrong with your nose. That’s your grandmother Rivke’s nose. That’s a beautiful nose.”

“Mm,” Rebecca says, but she does not believe him. If it is such a beautiful nose, why is it that none of the movie stars have it? Or none of the models in the magazines? If it is such a beautiful nose, why does everyone tell Davina she’s a regular Shirley Temple? She is getting very tired of Davina and Shirley Temple. Her mother has encouraged Davina to learn the words to “On the Good Ship Lollipop,” and whenever there is company, Davina sings the song and tap-dances around the living room, and everyone exclaims how beautiful and talented she is, and Rebecca wants to go into the bathroom to throw up. Whenever no one is watching, she hits Davina, who runs screaming into the kitchen. Rebecca is invariably punished for the attack, but she doesn’t care because she would rather be in her own bedroom with her treasured books than in the living room with Davina tap-dancing all over the place. In a book called Ivanhoe, she discovers a woman named Rebecca. Rebecca is the heroine. She reads the description of the fictitious Rebecca over and over again, until she has memorized it:

She does not finish the book, it is much too difficult for her, but she has gathered from it precious ammunition to use against her sister.

“I’m in a book,” she tells her.

“So am I,” Davina says.

“You are not!” Rebecca says.

“I am so.”

“Where? What book?”

“In a book Mommy has in her room. It’s Davina’s Baby Book, and it tells all about me. How much I weighed and things I said when I was little, and everything about me.”

Rebecca does not have a baby book. She takes Ivanhoe back to the library and tells the librarian it was lousy. In 1939, when she is eleven years old and enters junior high school, she is jubilant because it means she can escape little Shirley Temple for at least the length of the school day. In the seventh grade, there is a big fat girl named Rosalie, who becomes fast friends with Rebecca — perhaps because Rebecca is the only one in the class who doesn’t call her Fat Stuff, after one of the cartoon characters in Smilin’ Jack. One day, when Rebecca is telling Rosalie about what a pain her little sister is, Rosalie says, “Why don’t you just kill her?”

“Always singing and tap-dancing,” Rebecca says.

“Yeah, kill her,” Rosalie says. “Drown her in the bathtub.”

“You could go to jail for that,” Rebecca says.

“No, they don’t send little girls to jail,” Rosalie assures her.

Rebecca considers the idea. She and Rosalie talk about it often and seriously, concocting new methods of murder each time, some of them quite bizarre. Sitting on the front stoop of their tenement, picking their noses, they talk about hanging little Davina, or poisoning her (Yeah, but where would we get the poison? The man in the drugstore would remember us), or throwing her off the roof, or — and this causes both of them to burst into hysterical laughter — holding her head in the toilet bowl. Sophie Baumgarten heartily disapproves of the relationship with Rosalie, even though she knows nothing of these dire plans for murdering her regular Shirley Temple. She disapproves of Rosalie only because she is fat.

“Fat,” she says, “disgusting,” she says, and spits on the extended forefinger and middle finger of her right hand. “Ptoo, ptoo!”

“What’s wrong with fat?” Rebecca says. “And anyway, she isn’t fat.”

“She’s fat as a horse,” Sophie says.

“Well,” Rebecca says, “she’s my friend.”

“Some friend.”

“She’s my best friend.”

“Better you should find yourself a Goodyear blimp,” Sophie says.

In school, whenever the friends are together, the other kids begin to chant, “Fat and Skinny had a race/All around the pillowcase/Fat fell down and broke his face/Skinny won the race.”

“Yaaaaaah,” Rebecca says, and sticks out her tongue.

In the fall, when her father buys the Oldsmobile agency, they move to the Bronx. She misses Rosalie dreadfully, and at her new school she is very wary of making friends. Around the house, she is quiet and unresponsive. She reads now more than she did in Manhattan. Sometimes she memorizes long passages from the encyclopedia. Her mother tells her she must take piano lessons. She begins these when she is thirteen. She hates the piano, and she plays badly. Once, in the kitchen of their apartment, her father’s friend Seymour asks, “How old is she now, Abe?” and her father looks at her as though discovering her for the first time, and is silent for a moment, and then says, “Gee, I don’t know. How old are you, Becky? Eleven? Twelve?” He knows exactly how old Davina is. Davina is nine years, two months, and seven days old. She was born on July 12, 1932. Her father knows the date by heart. “Sunshine was born that day,” he says, smiling. “My little sunshine. Sing ‘My Little Sunshine’ for me, baby.” Davina no longer sings “On the Good Ship Lollipop,” thank God. Nor, at the age of nine, does she any longer sport those Shirley Temple curls Rebecca once found so distasteful. Instead, she combs her hair the way Veronica Lake does, hanging over one eye. Rebecca thinks her sister is too young to be imitating a sex-pot movie star, and she tells this to her mother. Her mother says, “Look who’s talking.”

Whenever a Veronica Lake movie is playing at the Tuxedo on Jerome Avenue, Rebecca stays away from it. But she goes to the movies every Saturday, and sometimes on Wednesday nights with her mother. Except for Veronica Lake, she loves the movies. She loves the way people meet in the movies. At the movies, she learns to identify all the families of the various studios; just name the studio and she will reel off the names of the contract players. She tries this phenomenal feat of memory on her father one night. She tells him that MGM, that’s Leo the Lion, has the biggest family in the bunch, with grandpas like Lionel Barrymore and Lewis Stone and C. Aubrey Smith and Guy Kibbee and Charles Winninger; and grandmas like Edna May Oliver and Fay Bainter and Marjorie Main; mothers and fathers like Greer Garson and Spencer Tracy and Margaret Sullavan and Herbert Marshall; uncles like William Powell and Robert Taylor and Franchot Tone; aunts like Joan Crawford and Laraine Day and Hedy Lamarr; cousins like Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland and Freddie Bartholomew, and landsleit from Far Rockaway, like Ruth Hussey, Nelson Eddy, Gladys George, Ann Sothern, and George Murphy.

The Warner Brothers family (she tells her father) is Humphrey Bogart, George Brent, Bette Davis, Olivia De Havilland, Errol Flynn, Ann Sheridan, Edward G. Robinson, Pat O’Brien, Donald Crisp, Priscilla Lane, Ida Lupino, James Cagney, and Ronald Reagan, whom she adores. And then there’s the Twentieth Century-Fox family with Alice Faye and Don Ameche and Linda Darnell and Tyrone Power and Henry Fonda and Cesar Romero and Warner Baxter and Sonja Henie and Shirley Temple (she passes over this name very quickly). The Paramount family is Betty Grable and Gary Cooper and Dorothy Lamour and Fred MacMurray and Claudette Colbert and Bob Hope and Bing Crosby on the road to everywhere, and sometimes people from the Columbia family or the Republic family pop up in a picture with one of the other studio families, and then it’s like one big family, Daddy, it’s really terrific, Daddy, she says, and grins at him.

“Daddy?” she says.

He does not answer.

“Daddy?”

Her father is asleep in his chair.

“Well,” she says, and goes to her room.

She is not permitted to date until she is seventeen years old, not that any boys are banging down the door. It is Davina, at thirteen, who is the undisputed beauty of the family, with cupcake breasts almost as large as Rebecca’s own, and wide hips, and a smile Rebecca considers suggestive. Whenever a boy comes to the house to pick up Rebecca, her sister magically appears in the living room, and extends her hand, and says in a low and studied voice (she is now imitating Lizabeth Scott), “Nice to meet you.” The boys invariably ask Rebecca how old her sister is. When she says “Thirteen,” they seem disappointed. It is only when she begins going steady with Marvin Feldman that she feels free enough to ask, “Do you think I’m prettier than Davina?”

“Yes,” he says.

“Do you think I have a big nose?”

“No,” he says.

“I sometimes think I ought to get my nose fixed.”

“What for?” he says. “It’s an okay nose,” and he kisses the tip of it.

From the bedroom, Sophie Baumgarten calls, “Rebecca?”

“Yes, Mama,” Rebecca says. She knows what is coming next.

“What time is it, Rebecca?” Sophie asks.

“A little past one, Mama.”

“Already?” Sophie says.

In December of 1945, just before Chanukah, her grandfather Itzik dies. The last word he utters is “Rivke.” Though Rebecca knows this was also her grandmother’s name, she chooses to believe the old man’s dying breath was drawn for her alone. They bury him on a bleak gray afternoon, and that night Rebecca walks over to the small park near their apartment. Snow is on the ground. She sits on one of the benches with her hands in her coat pockets. The park is empty. She sits alone on the bench until she is shivering from the cold. Then, slowly, she walks back to the apartment.

Davina is listening to the radio.

“Hi,” she says.

Rebecca does not answer. In the hallway, she takes off her coat and her muffler, and hangs them in the closet.

“Where were you?” Davina asks.

“In the park.”

“Doing what?”

“Sitting.”

“That was something, huh? The funeral?”

On the radio, they are advertising gasoline. Davina sits in the big easy chair that is their father’s whenever he is home, her shapely legs tucked under her, her loafers on the floor, and she tells Rebecca what she thought of the funeral, how it was despicable of a rabbi who didn’t even know Grandpa Itzik to go on and on about him as if they were bosom buddies, and Tante Raizel wailing like a banshee when they lowered the coffin into the earth, Davina had never seen anything so horrible in her life. But her voice trails when the commercial ends and the comic comes on again. He tells a joke, and Davina bursts out laughing.

In her room, Rebecca takes off her clothes and gets into bed. She feels very much alone. Except for Marvin, she feels she is now alone in the world. There is only Marvin now to tell her that her nose is an okay nose. (“What is that, a nose job?” her grandfather had said. “There’s nothing wrong with your nose. That’s your grandmother Rivke’s nose. That’s a beautiful nose.”) It is not such a beautiful nose, she thinks. Grandpa, it really is not such a beautiful nose, Grandpa, I love you, Grandpa. Thank you, Grandpa. Thank you, Grandpa. I love you, Grandpa. She cries herself to sleep that night, and dreams that Marvin is making love to her. She screams in the dream, she tries to scream but no sound comes from her mouth. Stop, Marvin, she tries to scream, but Marvin will not, please, she screams, she tries to scream, Marvin, please, no, please, no, you promised! — and. she sits up straight in bed, her green eyes wide, breathing heavily as she stares into the blackness of the room.

“You promised,” she whispers, but she has already forgotten the dream.

In April, Marvin takes her for a walk in the park and tells her he’s met a singer, and tells her he is going to marry the singer, and tells her he is sorry. Jonquils are blooming everywhere around them, the small grassy slopes are running wild with jonquils.

“That’s okay, Marvin,” Rebecca tells him. “Really, it’s okay.”

It is Marvin who bursts into tears.

I loved you, Rebecca.

I loved everything about you.

I knew you were beautiful because Cappy Kaplan, my drummer, described you to me in detail, not that I needed any physical description. “She’s a very zaftig person,” Cappy said, “about five-six or seven, I can’t say for sure, and very nicely stacked, as if you didn’t know. Not melons or cantaloupes, Ike, just very nice, well, grapefruits, I would say, very nice. And wide hips, she’s very curvy, she looks like a peasant from the old country, you know, with the wide hips for childbearing. Her hair ain’t red exactly, it’s sort of rust-colored, I guess you’d call it, though maybe she gives it a little help. Her nose is nothing to write home about, a Jewish nose, it’s my cousin Carol’s nose exactly. Her mouth is okay, lips a little thin maybe, but she’s got good teeth. I’m sure she brushes them regular. She dresses good, too. I got to tell you the truth, Ike: standing next to her, you look like a slob.”

That was Cappy’s description of Rebecca Baumgarten.

My grandfather said, after their first meeting, “Ha sembrato una settentrionale,” meaning he thought she looked like a northern Italian. Years later, in Rome, the city of redheads, Rebecca was always being mistaken for Italian. And, of course, being pinched on the ass by Italian men. That is not a myth. Even Rebecca’s green death ray could not dissuade those hot-blooded Mediterraneans from trying to cop a feel. La mano morta is not a branch of the Mafia, even though it translates literally as “the dead hand.” The expression describes a hand hanging limply at the end of a male Italian wrist, seemingly deceased, most certainly detached from its owner, who claims no responsibility for whatever it might be doing while he stands on a comer reading his copy of the morning paper. What the hand is doing is simply none of his business. If a woman recoils from la mano morta with a small surprised gasp, the man to whom the dead hand is attached will look at her (and it) in surprise equal to the woman’s own. La mano morta. “Fucking sex fiends is what they are,” Rebecca said whenever we were in Rome. She also said that in London.

It was Rebecca’s guess that her father the Mad Oldsmobile Dealer was approximately as religious as my mother, and objected to me only because I was blind. I did not believe this for a minute. Not once had he expressed any concern about how a blind man might support his daughter, or protect her from harm, or keep her happy and secure. I flatly told Rebecca she was wrong. If I’d been a blind Jew, Abe would have welcomed me into the family, perhaps not without qualms and doubts, but certainly without enmity. “Well, then,” Rebecca said, “he must be doing it for Baumgarten Frocks.”

“Baumgarten Frocks” was Abe’s father, a dyspeptic old cloakie who lived in the back room of their Mosholu Parkway apartment, and made ugly noises in the bathroom each morning. Rebecca hated him as much as she had loved old Itzik. His real name was Moishe Baumgarten, but Rebecca alternately called him Baumgarten Frocks and Moishe Pipik. When she and I first started getting serious about each other, she sounded Moishe on the remote possibility of marrying an Italian musician. The sly old fox knew all about me by then, of course, had in fact received gleeful reports from Honest Abe on the demolition of the blind goy in his kitchen that hot August afternoon. He listened to Rebecca and then began nodding his head in his best davening manner, and, as though he were reciting the shachris, the minchah, and the mairev (not to mention the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria), said to his granddaughter, “Ahhh, Rivke, Rivke, how can you even consideh such a peth for yourself? Ah pianeh playeh? Ah shaygets? Rivke, Rivke,” wagging that fine old prejudice-riddled head, “you could merry vun day ah doctuh,” he said, “ah lawyeh,” he said, and leaving the finest profession of all for last, triumphantly concluded, “ah biznessmen!” When Rebecca told me this story, I told her old Baumgarten Frocks could go frock himself.

That’s the way we felt about all of them, in fact.

I think if my own grandfather had raised the slightest objection to my marrying Rebecca, I’d have kissed him off, too. I mean that. I loved you, Rebecca, and it had nothing to do with descriptions of you. I knew you were beautiful long before anyone told me. Anyway, you’d told me so yourself, hadn’t you? “I’m gorgeous,” you said, “what do you think?” You were gorgeous, Rebecca. I loved everything about you. It’s too easy now to remember only the bad times, of which there were many. But there were good times, too — at least as many, and perhaps more — and I loved you thoroughly and completely for more years than I care to count.

How did I love thee, Becks? Let me count the ways.

I had told my grandfather all about you long before I took you to the tailor shop to meet him. I was taking no chances. I enumerated for him all the things I am about to enumerate now, all the reasons for loving you, and he listened patiently, and sometimes made pleased little sounds, encouraging me to go on. I told him first that you were beautiful, and then I told him you were the smartest person I’d ever met, that you could read through a book in an hour, sometimes two, but never longer than that, and retain what you had read, and reel off to me long passages you had memorized from just that single reading. I told him you knew impossibly ridiculous things, facts no one was expected to know, and which you probably wouldn’t have known if it weren’t for a memory that was almost photographic. I told him you could recite statistics on the area and population of Chile, for example, or list in order all the rulers of France since Pepin the Short; I told him you knew what to call the male, female, and baby animals in any of the animal families — as for instance, a drake, a duck, and a duckling; or a ram, a ewe, and a lamb; or, more exotically, a cob, a pen, and a cygnet. I told him you could, for God’s sake, name the methods of execution in every state of the Union — lethal gas in Arizona, hanging in Montana, electrocution in South Dakota, and so on. I told him (I had not yet told him you were Jewish) that you could even name all the popes in order, starting with Saint Peter and coming all the way up to Pius XII, who was the then-reigning pontiff. I was amazed by your knowledge, I told him, and I bet him that when you finally met, you’d be able to tell him the average yearly rainfall in every province of Italy. (“Even Potenza?” he asked, undoubtedly impressed.)

I told him how kind you were, and how generous, how sometimes we’d be walking along together and a panhandler would approach, and you’d catch your breath and stop in the middle of the sidewalk as though someone had suddenly slapped you, and I would hear you opening your pocketbook, and after you gave the man a coin, you would say to me, “We’re so lucky, Ike,” even though I was blind. My blindness never mattered to you. I told him how concerned you were about all the people of the world, Rebecca, not just the ones in your own family, and not just your close friends (I told him about your unswerving loyalty to Shirley Ackerman, too), but also people in faraway lands you’d never seen. I told him about the argument we’d had the time I was reminiscing about my boyhood and mentioned that my mother was always telling me to eat what was on my plate because the people in China were starving, and I admitted I didn’t care if the people in China were starving and you hit the ceiling, Rebecca, and wanted to know how I, of all people, could be so cruel and callous to those less fortunate. (“Well, Ignazio,” my grandfather said, “it isn’t funny, the people in China starving.”) I told him you’d call me sometimes late at night and read poetry to me on the telephone, I told him you’d taken me to the Museum of Modern Art and described your favorite paintings in meticulous detail, I told him you’d begun advising me on how to dress, I told him you played piano very badly (by your own admission, Becks), but that you’d always wanted to marry someone creative, and that you’d said marrying me would be the most important event in your life. I told him how much I loved you, Rebecca. I told him all the things there were to love about you, and they were myriad.

And then I told him you were Jewish.

And I said to him, I said, “Grandpa, that’s important too.” And I explained what it meant to me to be in love with a Jewish girl, and to want to marry a Jewish girl, and I explained what it meant to you, my being Italian, and I told him we had talked about it in great detail, and that none of it mattered to us. “She’s not religious,” I said, “and I’m not religious, either, Grandpa. Please don’t be hurt by that, but honest, I haven’t been anywhere near a church for five years now. We love each other, and that’s all that matters.”

I put it to him that simply, but it was much more complicated.

We were, Rebecca and I, the realization of the American myth, which both of us had been living for as long as we could remember. And in that myth the melting pot existed only so that fresh new alloys could be poured from its crucible. If I was copper, then Rebecca was zinc, and together we would create a brass band that marched noisily down the middle of Fifth Avenue playing “America the Beautiful.” Her father’s objections to our relationship seemed absurd, reactionary, and frankly unpatriotic. We met in secret, we made love in secret, we formulated our plans for getting married in secret, and secretly and privately and proudly, we each glowed with the knowledge that we were fulfilling our separate destinies and moving in the only direction possible for anyone who considered himself American.

We were wrong, Rebecca darling.

But we were both so young.

We had planned the wedding for months, inviting only my parents and grandparents, Rebecca’s mother and sister, and some close friends like Stu Holman, Cappy Kaplan, and Shirley Ackerman. Rebecca’s mother declined the invitation for Davina and herself, not because she objected to the marriage (she liked me very much, in fact, and gave us two thousand dollars of her personal savings as a wedding gift), but only because she had to live with Honest Abe for the rest of her life, and knew her attendance at our wedding would be considered rank betrayal. On November 17, 1948, two days before Rebecca and I were to be married, my grandfather went to visit Honest Abe at his Oldsmobile agency in the Bronx — and was somewhat baffled by the reception he received. Nor was Honest Abe any less baffled (or at least he seemed to be) by the old man’s appearance at his palais d’auto.

The first inkling we had of my grandfather’s visit came from Honest Abe himself. At the Baumgarten dinner table that Wednesday night, on one of his rare personal appearances with the family (being otherwise and usually occupied with his euphemistic poker games), Abe told the story of the mysterious appearance of an old guinea dressed in black and smoking a foul-smelling cigar. “I never turn any of them away,” he said. “Shvartzers, wops, Irishers, they’re all the same to me. If they got money to buy the car, I’ll sell it to them. So when he walks in the showroom, I personally go up to him and I say, ‘Good afternoon, sir, may I help you?’ and he sticks out his hand and grins, and says, ‘Frank Di Lorenzo,’ in an accent you can cut with a butcher knife. Do you know anybody named Frank Di Lorenzo, Becky?”

“No, Daddy,” Rebecca said, while her mother and sister busied themselves with the pot roast on their plates.

“You’re not still seeing that blind shaygets, are you?” her father asked.

“Oh, no, Daddy,” Rebecca said. She had been seeing me for the past two and a half years, and after Friday she would be seeing me for the rest of her life — or so we both thought at the time.

“He said he came up to the Bronx to tell me how happy he was.”

“Who?” Rebecca asked.

“This old wop, this Di Lorenzo with the cigar clamped in his mouth.”

“Well,” Rebecca said, very carefully spearing some sliced carrots and boiled potatoes with her fork, “it’s very possible that a happy Italian came into your showroom, but that doesn’t mean I know him.”

“What was that goy’s name that time?” Abe asked.

“Ike, do you mean? Ike Di Palermo.”

“Um, well this was Di Lorenzo. At least, I think that’s what he said; I could hardly understand him. You get these people, they’re here in America for sixty years, they still don’t know how to talk right.”

“Like Grandpa,” Rebecca said, trying to change the subject.

“Grandpa talks fine,” Abe said. “I understand him fine. Anyway, this old wop is slapping me on the back and grinning from ear to ear and telling me he’ll see me Friday, and I have to come to his house sometime, maybe for his name day... I think he said his name day; what the hell’s a name day? I figured I had myself a prime bedbug right there in the showroom, telling me what a fine man I am, and how happy he is to meet me, a nut plain and simple. You know what I think?”

“No, Daddy, what do you think?” Rebecca asked, and held her breath.

Abe thought about what he thought. Then he said, “I’ll bet that shaygets... what was his name?”

“Ike Di Palermo.”

“Yeah. I’ll bet he’s going around telling people he’s still dating you.”

“Why would he do that, Daddy?”

“Why not? A blind piano player? Nothing he’d like better than to have people thinking he’s dating a Jewish girl.”

“What’s so special about Jewish girls?” Davina asked.

“You’re both my special darlings,” Abe said, and smiled at his two darling daughters, but patted only Davina’s hand.

“Well, whatever Ike does is his own business,” Rebecca said. “I haven’t seen him since that day he came up here, and I couldn’t care less what he’s telling people.”

“That’s a good girl,” Abe said. “But still, I’ll bet that’s it.”

“So what did you say to him?”

“Who, the wop? Nothing.”

“I mean... how did you leave it?”

“Leave what? He said he’d be seeing me Friday, so Friday I’ll look for him. Who knows? He’ll maybe end up buying a car.”

Immediately after dinner, Rebecca ran downstairs to the candy store, and phoned me. I listened breathlessly, and then called my grandfather in an effort to determine exactly how much he had told the Mad Oldsmobile Dealer.

In his broken English, my grandfather said:

“I go in the store, he come up, I know he’s the fath, I see in the eyes, the face, the look. I say, ‘How you do, I’ma Frank Di Lorenzo.’ He saysa, ‘How you do?’ I looka him, he looka me. I tell him, ‘I’m Ignazio’s granfath,’ and he says, ‘Attsa nize.’ I tell him I come to meet him so he no be stranger the wedding, so he feelsa home, eh? He saysa, ‘What wedding?’ I tell him Friday, the wedding, whattsa matta he forgets the wedding? He saysa, ‘You wanna buy car, or what?’ I say to him, ‘What car? I’ma talk about how happ I am to marry with you daughter my granson.’ He saysa, ‘You craze.’ I say, ‘Hey, you, I’ma Frank Di Lorenzo, capisce? It’sa my grandson who’sa marry you daught, whattsa matta you? I’ma come alia way the Bronx to say hello, I make a mistake? You no Abe-a Baumgart?’ He saysa, ‘I’m Abe-a Baumgart, you wanna buy a car, or no?’ Ma, Ignazio, ho veramente creduto ch’era pazzo! I try one more time. I say, ‘Look, you gotta nize daught, I gotta nize granson, we be nize-a v family, you come have supper, you come my name day, I buy pasticcerie, we drinka wine, it’sa nize, okay?’ He says, ‘I get somebody to heppa you.’ An he goes away, he leaves me standa there like a dope. What I do, Ignazio? I do someting wrong?”

As planned, we were married on the nineteenth of November. All through the brief civil ceremony, I expected Abe to come barging in with a minyan of Jewish hoods, all of them standing six feet four inches tall and weighing 220 pounds, as did my imminent father-in-law. Calling upon Jewish tradition, they would place my head upon the floor, and then all ten of them would smash it under a tented napkin. Not even Uncle Matt would be able to save me. But nobody arrived to interrupt the wedding. Afterward, we herded the small group of somewhat cheerless celebrants to a restaurant in Mount Vernon, where Rebecca and I were wined and dined and toasted (three times by my grandfather alone!). We then took a taxi to Pennsylvania Station, where we sent off a telegram and boarded the train to Mount Pocono. At fifteen minutes past midnight, we found ourselves in a deserted, milk-stop railroad station that had no lights and a single phone booth with a broken door. I located the booth in the familiar dark, and Rebecca struck a match (and then another) and dialed the telephone number on the advertising brochure, and handed the phone to me. I told the owner of the lodge we were Mr. and Mrs. Di Palermo (How strange that sounded! Mr. and Mrs. Di Palermo were my parents!) and we were here, but there weren’t any taxis, and could he please send a car for us?

Lying in bed together, we tried again to understand her father’s reaction to what had happened that afternoon two days before. Was it possible he really hadn’t understood what was being said to him? My grandfather’s English was atrocious, true, but he generally managed to make himself at least comprehensible. Could Honest Abe honestly have missed the purpose of the visit? Had he really not understood that a wedding was to take place on Friday afternoon, and that the principals to be united in matrimony were none other than a Blind Shaygets and a Jewish Princess from Mosholu Parkway? We reached the conclusion that Abe had understood perfectly and had decided to look the other way. He must have realized there was nothing he could do to stop the wedding, short of breaking both his daughter’s legs and sending her to Paris, France, in plaster casts. She had been seeing me against his explicit wishes for more than two years, and it was too late now. He could either pretend he knew nothing about any of it, or else take a futile last stand that would accomplish nothing anyway. And so he’d professed ignorance and innocence; whatever his daughter chose to do was on her own head. The telegram we’d sent, addressed to Mr. and Mrs. Baumgarten, to circumvent any later recriminations hurled at poor, bewildered Sophie, read:

It is a Saturday afternoon in 1955. Sophie has brought her sister to visit us in our apartment on Ninety-seventh and West End Avenue. Sophie visits often; she has an arrangement with Honest Abe. His eldest daughter is dead, he has turned her pictures to the wall — but his wife may visit the grave whenever she chooses. Today she has brought Tante Raizel to meet the blind shaygets, and Rebecca is showing snapshots I cannot see.

My own snapshots are up here, in my head.

September of 1950. A sleazy nightclub in Jersey City. We have been married for almost two years. Rebecca tells a joke to my drummer. “A six-year-old boy is banging pots and pans in the kitchen,” she says, “and a five-year-old girl comes in and asks him what he’s doing. He answers, ‘Shhh, can’t you see? I’m a drummer.’ The little girl grabs him by the hand, and drags him into the bedroom, and tosses up her skirts, and pulls down her panties, and says, ‘If you’re a drummer, kiss me on the wee-wee.’ And the little boys says, ‘Oh, I’m not a real drummer.’ ” My real drummer does not find the joke comical. I suddenly wonder whether Rebecca told it only to annoy him. I am beginning to feel she purposely says the wrong things to my musicians. She does not enjoy nightclubs anymore; it is not the way it was before we got married, when each new gig was a circus. Our son will be a year old at the end of the month. He was conceived in December of 1948, a month after we were married. Rebecca is pregnant again, she bears huge babies, she is already swollen to bursting in her fourth month. I suspect she is angry with me for having knocked her up a second time (though she faithfully wears a diaphragm each and every time we make love), angry with me for not making more money, angry with me, too (may God forgive me), for being blind.

“This is when we were still living on 174th Street,” Rebecca says to her aunt. “I was pregnant with Michael at the time. God, look at me, I’m a horse!”

“You look very healthy,” Tante Raizel says.

“She had a terrible time with Michael,” Sophie says. “She went into shock right after the delivery. From losing all that weight so fast. Michael weighed almost ten pounds. Do you remember, Becky?”

“I remember,” Rebecca says.

She is nursing the new baby when I come home at three in the morning. She sits in an easy chair near the side of our bed, and I hear Michael’s sucking sounds as I undress. We are living on the sixth floor of a housing project two blocks from Westchester Avenue. I commute by subway each night to a club in the Village, where I am the intermission pianist; it is difficult to keep bands together unless you can provide work for them. I am earning eighty dollars a week, and we now have two children, and $340 in the bank. Rebecca carries the baby into the room he shares with his older brother, Andrew. I am in bed when she returns. I hear her snapping out the light. We talk for a while. My hand rests lightly on her hip. When I lapse into silence, Rebecca asks, suddenly and unexpectedly, “Do you plan to make love?”

“Would you like to?”

“Would you?”

“Sure.”

“Let me get my diaphragm.”

She gets out of bed and walks down the hall to the bathroom. I hear a colored woman shouting from an open window to her friends on the street below. “G’night, y’all, g’night,” and again, “G’night.” Silence. From the bathroom I hear the sound of running water. I lie back waiting, my hands behind my head. I suddenly remember a night in Stockbridge before we were married, when young Rebecca crossed the room as though traversing the burning sands of the Sahara, to climb into bed beside me, and surrender her virginity to me, and mourn its loss immediately afterward. I wait. She always takes an interminably long time to insert the diaphragm. A year ago, when she’d discovered she was pregnant again, she’d said, “I’ll never learn to put this fucking thing in!” She uses the word “fuck” a lot, my Rebecca, but never to describe what we do together in bed. In bed, we make love. (“Do you plan to make love?”) In bed, Rebecca is a contractor hired to construct an edifice, “make” a building she labels “love,” for want of a better word: Blueprints and specifications are tucked into her vagina just behind the diaphragm, while like a common laborer I sweat to bring her to orgasm. I touch her mouth often while we make love, I search her lips with my seeing-eye hands. There is never a smile upon her face, she “makes love” joylessly, straining for orgasm and achieving it soundlessly, with never so much as a grunt of pleasure, a groan of acknowledgment, certainly never a passionate shriek. When I ask her each time if she has come (I am never certain), she snaps impatiently, “Of course I came! Will you please shut up?” I always want to talk afterward. She always wants to sink back into the pillows, into silence, perhaps so she can admire from a distance this shining fifty-two-story office building we have built together from plans already dog-eared, this “love” we have “made.” The bathroom light clicks off, I hear her walking purposefully toward the bedroom. We are ready for the business of fucking.

“Who’s that man holding the baby?” Tante Raizel asks,

“That’s Ike’s grandfather.”

“He’s a tailor,” Sophie says. “He has his own tailor shop.”

“Yes? Avrum was a tailor. Do you remember your Uncle Avrum, Rivke? He was a tailor.”

Rebecca does not much care for my family. I do not understand this, but I do not have much time to care about her not caring. I am pursuing the hairy beast of success. She tolerates my grandfather because she knows how deeply I love him, but she describes my grandmother Tess as “a crabby, constipated woman,” my Uncle Luke as “Mr. Rumples,” my Uncle Matt as “the Mafioso,” and my mother as “the paranoid nut.” Once, when my Aunt Cristina takes the IRT up to 174th Street and walks to the housing project and knocks on the door, Rebecca seems not to know her at first, and then says, in surprise, “Oh, Cristie. Hi.” Cristie has come uptown because she wants to see the new baby. Rebecca has her coat on, and is preparing to do the weekly marketing. Andrew is bundled in his snowsuit. The thirteen-year-old girl from next door is in the living room doing her homework. Rebecca takes Cristie into the room where Michael sleeps “He’s beautiful, God bless him,” Cristie says.

“Thank you,” Rebecca says. “Cristie, I hope you don’t mind, but I was just on the way out.”

“That’s all right,” Cristie says, but later she tells my mother, “She didn’t even offer me a cup of coffee.” When I confront Rebecca with this, she says, “Well, I was all ready to go out; Andrew was in his snow-suit.”

“Honey, that was my aunt! She made me lemonade every day of my life!”

“She should have called first,” Rebecca says.

We visit Harlem rarely. My grandfather still has the tailor shop on First Avenue, but the neighborhood is rapidly turning Puerto Rican, and Rebecca is fearful of making the trip downtown. Where Sophie had once protected her “treasures” from the goyim who drunkenly invaded the ghetto, Rebecca now refuses to bring her treasures — Andrew and little Michael — into another ghetto, where they may be harmed. I tell her the neighborhood is actually safer than the one in which we live, and she says, “You’re thinking of when you were a kid. It’s changed.”

I sometimes wish I could go home.

I sometimes know exactly how my grandfather felt during that decade when he was twenty-four and longing to return to Fiormonte.

“Oh, and these,” Rebecca says to her aunt. “Oh, these are my favorite pictures.”

“That’s when Ike took the whole family to Florida,” Sophie says, a note of pride in her voice.

“Where?” Tante Raizel asks. “Miami?”

“Pass-A-Grille,” I answer.

“Where’s that?” she says.

The job is really in Treasure Island. The man who hires me for it, on recommendation from the leader of the house band where I am playing between sets, is fifty-four years old. His name is Archie Coombes, and he tells me at our first meeting that he is probably the world’s lousiest drummer, but his brother-in-law owns this small place on the Gulf, and this is how he gets a winter vacation each year; his brother hires him to come down with a pickup trio. The job doesn’t pay much, he says, but what the hell, it’s been a miserable winter, and maybe I can use some sunshine for myself and the family, he understands I have two kids. He tells me he is also looking for a good bass player, and when I recommend Stu Holman, he asks immediately if Stu is colored. He does not hire Stu. The bassist we end up with is a sixty-two-year-old white man, who reportedly once played with another Whiteman named Paul. I accept the job, but I have the feeling I will be making music with one of the Jimmy Palmer orchestras.

Rebecca is overjoyed. This is January of 1953, and she is six months pregnant with our third child (“I am going to burn that fucking diaphragm!”), and we have just come through a siege of chicken pox with Andrew and Michael. The children, in fact, still have drying scabs on their faces when we move into the rented house on Pass-A-Grille. The house is small — it once was the caretaker’s cottage for the sumptuous twelve-room mansion that sits on two acres of ocean-front property. We walk through the house with the real estate agent who found the rental for us. I can sense Rebecca’s disappointment. Kitchen, living room, bedroom, one bath. We are paying $750 for the month — which is exactly $250 less than I will be earning with the Archie Coombes trio. We are in the living room, the real estate agent is helpfully explaining that the two little boys can sleep together on the sofa bed. She is rattling a doorknob now, trying to open the glass-louvered doors leading to the rear of the house. She flings the doors wide with a sudden grunt, and I feel a rush of sunshine on my face and smell the heavy moisture-laden aroma of tropical plants. Beside me, Rebecca gasps and takes my hand, and leads me into the garden. I can barely keep up with her. She is ballooning with pregnancy, but she moves about the garden like a ballet dancer in flight, stopping at each bloom to identify it for me. “This is hibiscus, and this is bougainvillaea, and look, Ike, oh my God, it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever, oh God. it’s an oleander!” In the distance I can hear the sound of the surf, and suddenly I smile.

“That was such a happy time,” Rebecca says to her aunt.

“What are you reading to them there?” Tante Raizel asks. “What’s that book in the picture?”

“Oh, they loved that book,” Rebecca says, and falls silent.

“Peter Pan,” I say.

“Yes,” Rebecca says, and I wonder if she is looking at me.

In the apartment we move to on Ninety-seventh and West End, Andrew has his own bedroom, and Michael shares a room with his new brother. I have started another band. We rehearse in the huge, sparsely furnished living room because we cannot afford studio space. Rebecca constantly tells me that if I’m trying to break the lease, I’m well on the way to success. She no longer believes the other success is possible. She has been married to me for almost six years, this is the fall of 1954, and we are virtually standing still except for our boundless capacity to produce big, beautiful children. She is beginning to have doubts, and so am I. What if I don’t make it? What if I am one of those who never make it? (“He’s got to make it first, you understand. Lots of guys never make it.”) This is America, and I am talented and industrious and ambitious, but even in America two bills a week don’t go very far when you’re trying to raise a family. That is what I am earning with the quintet. Two hundred dollars a week. More or less. Some weeks. Rebecca counts out the money as grudgingly as a miser, putting aside so much for rent, so much for gas and electricity, so much for food and clothing, so much for entertainment. There is not much for entertainment, but then again there is rarely time for entertainment, either. I work six nights a week (when I’m working), and because baby-sitters cost more than we can afford, and because Rebecca has learned to hate sitting around smoky toilets while I play piano, and because some of the jobs are out on the Island or over in New Jersey or, once in a blue moon, up in Schenectady or Newburgh, I rarely see Rebecca on any night of the week but Monday. During the day, I either sleep or rehearse. I am pursuing success, certain I can track and trap that hairy beast. I am American.

My family is a new family. It consists of Rebecca and the children, my parents, and Sophie and Davina. (I do not consider Davina’s recently acquired husband a part of the family; I never ask him to pour the wine.) I see my grandfather only on holidays, though I try to call him at least once a week. I beg him to move out of Harlem; he has been having trouble lately with Puerto Rican street gangs who come into the shop demanding protection money. He is seventy-four years old, and though I can remember in exact detail the courageous stand he took in 1937, I am now truly fearful for his life. He belittles my concern “È niente,” he tells me. “Non ti preoccupare, Ignazio” The Italian words almost move me to tears. I do not know why. I have begun to learn a great many Yiddish expressions. Rebecca’s friends tell me I’m more Jewish than she is. “You’re a bigger Jew than any of us,” they say, and I take pride in this, certain it means they approve of me. They are calling me a white nigger, but I do not realize it.

In bed, in our spacious bedroom overlooking Ninety-seventh Street, in an apartment we are beginning to think we cannot afford, I sometimes wonder who is under the covers with Rebecca and me. It is surely not the two of us alone, grappling with this sweaty antagonist who yields so grudgingly. Is Tina in the closet wriggling her ass on these rumpled sheets, is Basilio in the locker room squirming against a Palumbo cock now become my own? It cannot be the two of us alone, laboring in tangled enterprise gone stale. I never know when she desires me now; she gives me not the faintest clue. I sometimes lie engorged beside her, certain she can sense my heat, yet reluctant to make an overture that will be either rebuffed or ridiculed. Where once I was the Blind Shaygets, all of me, all five feet eleven inches of me (a title I wore proudly because it defined her father’s own blind prejudice), the appellation has now been applied by Rebecca to three or four or five or seven inches of me instead — my one-eyed cock rising in blind expectation against her flesh. “Ooops, here comes the Blind Shaygets,” she says, and sometimes seizes me in both hands, and shakes me, and says in mock (I think) anger, “Don’t you ever sleep, shaygets? What do you want to do, knock me up again?” She is terrified of having another baby. She sometimes stands before the mirror examining the stretch marks on her belly, and says (although she knows I cannot see), “Look what you did to me.” So I lie beside her waiting for a move that never comes, waiting for her to reach for me and murmur, “Do you want to make love?” Sometimes, she encircles the Blind Shaygets with her hand, and gently teases it till I am quaking with desire, and then her hand stops, and I wait. And wait. And wait. And then realize she has drifted off to sleep with a hard-on in her fist.

When we do make love, she tells me I must learn to control what is surely premature ejaculation. If I complain that Susan Koenig never seemed to find my orgasms too swift for her pleasure, she tells me Susan Koenig was a fucking sex fiend, and besides, she doesn’t want to hear about Susan Koenig or Michelle whatever-her-name-was with the big tits. So I learn to control my premature ejaculations. While pumping diligently away, Rebecca supervising the work on our construction site (“That’s it, a little faster, no, goddamnit, don’t stop what you’re doing”), I allow my mind to consider the conformation of bicycle wheels or roller skates, lemon peels or stale pizza crusts, anything to keep from spurting too soon into that lubricated vault stuffed with diaphragm and diagrams. And when at last she grudgingly releases what she has been hoarding, expiring on a single exhalation of breath, tumbling from the spire of the Chrysler Building or the top of the Brooklyn Bridge or whatever architectural wonder we have wrought together, only then do I allow myself to consider Michelle’s swollen breasts or Susan’s grinding hips or thirsting mouth, and come inside Rebecca.

“Those are very nice snapshots,” Tante Raizel says.