Streets of Gold

IV

Would you like to know how I became a big success?

By accident.

And overnight, of course. This is America, and all successes here happen overnight. Ten years of studying classical music, and eleven years of learning to play jazz — the nights are longer here, especially now that we’re on daylight-saving time all year round.

My mother still can’t believe a grown man can earn a living playing piano. If I were not blind, I’m sure she’d insist I find a good civil service job. Even being blind, I should be able to do something else, no? (Like what, Mom? Watch repairing?) Did I mention that my father collects all sorts of things? Anal, I’m sure. Coins, stamps, first-day covers, matchbooks, cigar bands, and of course clippings about his famous son, Dwight Jamison. Didn’t I mention it? Time is running out, this is the last thirty-two bars, and I have the feeling there are many things I haven’t mentioned yet. He’s a collector, Pop is. He is especially proud of his coin collection; he has left it to my youngest son David in his will. I know because my lawyer prepared the will. First let me tell you about that coin collection, and then I’ll tell you about my mother’s attitude toward piano players in general and me in particular. If I forget anything, just nudge me.

My manager, Mark Aronowitz, also collects coins. With him, it’s an investment. (Everything with Mark is an investment, which is why he doesn’t call me much anymore.) Well, in 1961, 1962, I’m not sure which, the baker decided to sell the house on 217th Street because “the neighborhood was changing.” This meant the neighborhood was becoming black. My parents found a new apartment on the Grand Concourse. Ironically, they chose this location because it was close to where Sophie and Abe were living. By that time, they had become fast friends with the Baumgartens, played poker with them every Sunday night, became members of their Family Circle, went to Broadway musicals and kosher restaurants with them, the whole megillah. Anyway, my mother insisted that my father clear out all that junk on the sun porch before they moved. She was referring to his collection of coins, stamps, matchbooks, and so on. I suggested to my father that if he was thinking of selling the coins, my manager might be happy to take them off his hands. “Well, I don’t know if he can afford them,” my father said. “They’re worth a fortune.” (Are you ahead of me? You can never anticipate me at the piano because while you’re listening to Bar 10, I’m already working on Bar 11 in my head — but this ain’t a piano, ma’am.) My father lugged his precious coins down to Broadway and Forty-seventh, and Mark looked them over and called me that very afternoon. “Ike,” he said, “what am I supposed to tell your father? The stuff is worth face value; there isn’t a rare or even slightly hard-to-find coin in the lot.” I handled it by telling my father a lie. I told him he was right, Mark simply couldn’t afford the collection, he’d probably do better taking it to a dealer. My father never took it to a dealer. “The hell with it,” he said, “I’ll leave it to the kids.” So when he dies, David will inherit from him something worth maybe five hundred dollars, if that much. It’s the thought that counts.

Which brings us to what my mother thinks about piano players.

It was along about this same time, just before the move to the Grand Concourse, while my mother was still ranting and raving about all that junk on the sun porch, that she made a remark I consider classic. We were lingering over coffee (as they say in novels) at the dinner table in the new house Rebecca and I had built in Talmadge. My mother, in her characteristically compromising fashion, said, “If you don’t get somebody to take that stuff away, Jimmy, I’m going to throw it in the garbage.”

“Aw, come on, Stella,” he said.

“Come on, Mom,” I said. “That’s his hobby.”

“That’s right, Stella, it’s my hobby.”

“Your hobby?” my mother said. “If you need a hobby, why don’t you get one that doesn’t clutter up the whole house?”

“Like what?” my father asked.

(Are you ready?)

“Like your son’s,” my mother answered. “Playing piano.”

I had earned close to four hundred thousand dollars playing piano that year, what with record albums and sheet music and personal appearances and the lot. I owned a department store in Dallas (for the depreciation value) and interests in oil wells (one of which had actually come in), and my tax lawyer had told me I would become a millionaire within the next three years, provided things continued to go well for me. But to good old Stella, piano playing was a hobby, and my success was a freak.

She was right. It was.

Here’s what happened.

In 1955, I changed everybody’s name. Rebecca Baumgarten Di Palermo became Rebecca Jamison, and I became Dwight Jamison, and my three sons became, respectively and respectfully, Andrew, Michael, and David Jamison. Actually, when we named the boys, who were separately born in 1949, 1951, and 1953, we were trying to find names that sounded good with Di Palermo. Andrew, Michael, and David sounded fine to us — and American besides. We changed the Di Palermo, finally, because we got tired of people asking us how we were going to raise the children. (That was the good reason; I still don’t know what the real reason was.) When you change your name, the Department of Health will send you, at your request, a pink birth certificate with the new name on it. There is no indication on this certificate that your name once was Merton Luftfenster. It merely states that Lance Wasp was born in the city of New York on such and such a date. It looks exactly like the birth certificate that might have been issued way back then when you first drew breath. Not a soul can tell the difference, and it saves you the trouble of producing your court order every time you apply for a passport or a driver’s license or an insurance policy or anything requiring proof of age and birthplace. New York City is very accommodating in this respect. But that is only natural since New York perhaps best represents the spirit of constant change that is America.

Marian McPartland once said to me, “Drummers are always disappearing, Ike, have you ever noticed that? I wonder where they go all the time.”

Marian . .. people are always disappearing.

Ignazio Silvio Di Palermo disappeared in 1955, when my lawyer went before a judge to petition for the name change. He said it was for professional reasons, a blatant lie since by then I was known as Blind Ike, and was in fact playing under that name at a club on the East Side. The judge signed a court order, and told my lawyer that the order had to be published in a newspaper of the court’s choice within twenty days, just in case anyone had any objections whatever to my becoming more American than I already was. No one objected, and we all became Jamisons. It only remained to send two bucks to the Board of Health for each of those brand-new pink certificates. How simple it is to disappear from the face of the earth, unless (like me) you are plagued by memories.

Everybody (except my grandfather) continued calling me Ike, of course — they had, after all, been calling me that for almost a decade. But I was now Dwight Jamison. As a boy at the Blind School, I had learned to write my own name in longhand, using a sheet of raised letters, and a board with sunken letters, and writing paper embossed with guidelines a half inch apart. I would feel the raised letters with my fingertips, touching each until I thought I knew each curlicue, tail, and dot. Then I would fit my pencil into the sunken letters on the board, learning how to manually recreate each letter by tracing it over and over again, the pencil tip caught in the grooves. And finally, I would practice my signature on the paper, feeling the raised lines and knowing the upper and lower limits of the defining space. I did not know what my handwriting looked like. My mother said I wrote like a Chink. She should only have known how long and how hard I practiced my signature.

I had to practice another signature when I became Dwight Jamison.

I changed my name just in the nick, as it turned out, because I was on the verge of becoming a big success, ma’am, and think of what might have happened to Kirk Douglas if he’d still been Issur Danielovitch Demsky when he made Champion. Talent notwithstanding, my success was pure unadulterated chance, the result of a series of accidents, cause and effect mating to produce an inescapable conclusion. My quintet consisted of five musicians (what else? eight?). Cappy Kaplan, from the original Auntie’s trio, had been killed in the Korean War, but Stu Holman was still with me on bass. As drummer, I was using another black man, a kid named Peter Dodds, who succumbed to drugs before we opened at Birdland the following year; he sent us a congratulatory telegram from Lexington, Kentucky, where he was trying to kick the habit. On trumpet, I had a white man named Hank D’Allessio (who had not changed his name for professional reasons) and on vibes another white man named Larry Kimberly. The quintet was what is known in the trade as a “salt and pepper band.” But tell me, does the instrumentation strike a familiar note, ring a reminiscent bell? Here’s your clue: the vibraphone. In 1955, before I became a big success by accident, I was mostly being “influenced” by George Shearing, who had begun winning all those % Down Beat polls back in 1949, and who had single-handedly buried solo piano in a grave so deep that resurrection was impossible. There are some piano players who instantly generate excitement among other piano players, and Shearing was one of them. I had first heard him on a record he had cut for Savoy, and later caught him at the Three Deuces, where he was busting the joint wide open with what was then a trio. By 1950, every piano player in the country was trying to copy him, and I was no exception. The same thing had happened in the thirties, incidentally, when a then-current musician’s accolade — “Tatum, no one can overrate ’im” — was coupled with the warning: “Tatum, no one can imitate ’im.” I was unabashedly imitating George Shearing in 1955, right down to the incidental blindness and the almost identical instrumentation — I was using a trumpet in place of the guitar George had in his quintet.

When I accidentally tripped over the hairy unwashed body of success, the quintet (mine, not George’s) was playing at a fairly decent club on the East Side, pulling down respectable loot (twelve bills a week) and enjoying some sort of recognition in a profession not noted for its charity. On a Thursday night, Larry Kimberly, my vibes player, got sick. (He said he was sick; I think he was on a bender. No matter.) I called Mark Aronowitz, who had begun managing me six months earlier, and who had in fact come up with the East Side gig, and told him I needed a vibes player to fill in for the weekend. Mark said he’d get right to work on it; he called me back late Friday afternoon.

“Well,” he said, “I’ve got a flute player for you.”

“A what?” I said.

“A flute player.”

“What the hell am I going to do with a flute player?”

“This is a very fine flute player. He played with the Boston Symphony.”

“Mark,” I said, “I need a vibes player.”

“No vibes players,” he said.

“What do you mean, no vibes players?”

“None. Noplace. I called 802, I called every agent and manager I know, I even called Benny up in Connecticut, and asked him for Hamp’s number on the off chance he might know somebody. But Hamp’s out of town, and there is not a single fucking vibes player in the entire city of New York this weekend, and that is that.”

“That’s impossible,” I said. “There must be thousands of vibes players looking for work.”

“Yeah?” Mark said. “Where are they?”

“I don’t want a flute player,” I said.

“What do you want? A tenor sax? A trombone? Name it. The only thing I can’t get is a vibes player. I thought a flute sounded a lot like a vibraphone.”

“Mark, it doesn’t sound anything like a vibraphone.”

“Silvery, you know? This guy is a fine musician, Ike. Take him, try him out. Just for the weekend. I’m not asking you to marry him.”

“What’s his name?” I asked.

His name was Orion (I swear to God) Burke, and he was the first link in the chain of events that led to the success of the Dwight Jamison Quintet. The second link was a singer named Gerri Pryce. You’ve never heard of her; she didn’t grow up to be Petula Clark or anybody. She was a girl of nineteen who was also on Mark’s list of “artists,” as he chose to call us. He had been grooming her (and probably fucking her) since she was seventeen, and he had miraculously arranged a recording date for her on the Thursday following the night Orion Burke joined the band. I did not like the way the band sounded with a flute substituting for the vibes — which shows how much I know. But Orry was indeed a fine musician (who insisted on calling himself a “flautist,” by the way, pish-posh) and he got on to what we were laying down after a quick Friday rehearsal, and the weekend went by without incident or fanfare. That is to say, nobody came up to the stand to tell us they missed the vibes, but neither did anyone tell us how extraordinary we sounded with a flute in there. Monday was our night off, and on Tuesday Mark called to say he wanted us to back Gerri Pryce on her record date.

“Who’s Gerri Pryce?” I asked.

“Nobody you know yet,” he said. “She’s going to be a big star.”

“How much is the gig paying?” I asked.

“Minimum,” he said. “This is a very small record company, an independent, but when Gerri hits it big with this single, I’ll be able to go back to them and remind them who was on the gig with her.”

“Why do I always end up with all the shit gigs?” I asked Mark.

“Oh?” he said. “Oh? Is the gig you’re playing now a shit gig? I didn’t realize twelve bills a week was shit. You’re taking home more than three hundred for yourself each and every week, Ike, and that puts a lot of meat and potatoes on the table, and that is not shit, Ike, that is good hard American currency on my block. Now perhaps you consider it an imposition to be asked by your manager to play for somebody who’s going to be a singing sensation as soon as this single is released, and who is giving you his sacred word of honor...”

“All right, Mark.”

“. . . that once this record takes off, I’ll go back to the company and be in a position to negotiate a contract for the quintet, on terms more acceptable...”

“All right, already.”

“Three o’clock Thursday, Nola Studios,” Mark said, and hung up.

In 1955, it cost thirty dollars an hour to rent space at Nola Studios, and the company cutting Gerri Pryce’s first Big Hit Single (or so Mark hoped) had reserved the facilities for three hours of rehearsal and recording time. In addition, they had paid Gerri a five-hundred-dollar advance against royalties, and they were paying the quintet scale, which came to $41.25 for each sideman and double that for the leader. According to union regulations, this permitted them to utilize our talents for a maximum of three hours, in which time they were entitled to cut four ten-inch masters, each side running no longer than three and a half minutes. The A&R man and the sound technician were the company’s own, and on salary. Still, the session was going to cost $837.50, which was a considerable amount for a small independent to be shelling out. There was an air of confidence in the studio when we assembled at 3 P.M. Since we were there to rehearse and record only two sides, the three hours should have been more than enough time to ensure a professional job.

But Gerri Pryce, at the age of nineteen, already considered herself a star, even though she had never cut a record, and even though her singing engagements to date had been exclusively limited to a series of toilets on Long Island’s Sunrise Highway. She walked into the studio an hour and twenty minutes late, by which time the A&R man — whose name was Rudy Hirsch — was ready to climb the walls. She was accompanied by an entourage consisting of a weight lifter from San Diego, whom she introduced as her chauffeur (his motorcycle was probably parked illegally downstairs), and who grunted “Groovy” when he shook my hand; a fluttery old woman named Mabel, who knocked over Hank D’Allessio’s music stand and tittered endlessly while precious seconds were frittering away (she was Gerri’s hairdresser, though Christ alone knew why a hairdresser was necessary on a recording date); and Gerri’s uncle, a dyspeptic forty-two-year-old Pole (Gerri had changed her name from Przybora) who was there to make sure his niece’s innocence remained unsullied; he had heard a lot about musicians, old Uncle Stanislaw. I later heard from Mark (but this may be gossip) that young Gerri had taken on the entire marching band of a high school in Secaucus when she was but a fourteen-year-old cheerleader. But there she was at nineteen, chauffeured, coiffed, cloistered, and an hour and twenty minutes late. She nonetheless insisted, rightfully, that we rehearse the two tunes she was about to record. She had written one of these tunes herself, and this was to be the Big Hit side of the record. The tune was called “Mooning,” and the lyric, if I recall it correctly, went something like this:

The chart was the very one I had tried to explain to Susan Koenig on the day she introduced me to the mysteries and delights of blind passion, with that selfsame overworked, I, VI, II, V in the first two bars.

“Terrific, ain’t it?” Mark Aronowitz said to me as we ran down the chords.

“Bound to be a smash,” I said.

We spent close to forty minutes rehearsing the tune, and we were ready to record the first take when Gerri announced that she had to go to the ladies’, and swept out of the studio followed by her tittering hairdresser, The boys and I sat waiting for her to come back. Rudy Hirsch was pacing nervously. Five minutes went by. Ten minutes. Rudy said, “Mark, will you for Christ’s sake go find her?” Mark went out of the studio, and Orry began blowing a twelve-bar blues, and we all picked up on him and jammed for the next ten minutes, and still no Gerri, and now no Mark either.

“Shut up, you guys,” Rudy said. “Where are they?” he asked Uncle Stanislaw, who replied, “Kto wie?”

“Go find them,” Rudy said to the chauffeur from San Diego, and the chauffeur said “Groovy” and went out of the studio. We were ten minutes into the third and final hour already, and we still hadn’t cut a take, nor had we yet rehearsed the tune that was to be the flip side of the record.

Mark came back into the studio and said, “The lady’s gone home.”

“What?” Rudy said. “What do you mean, she’s gone home? Home? Where is she?”

“I told you. She went home.”

“Why?”

“Female complaint.”

“What?”

“She’s menstruating,” Mark said. “She has cramps.”

“What?”

“Rudy,” Mark said, “I can’t believe you’re as hard of hearing as you pretend to be.”

“What?” Rudy said. He was about to have a fit. I have heard many men on the edge of throwing a tantrum, and Rudy was right there, an inch away. “Are you telling me that dumb cunt walked out of here because she...”

“Have you ever tried singing when you’re menstruating?” Mark said.

“I have never,” Rudy said, “in my entire experience in the music business had some dumb cunt walk out of a recording session because she got her period. I have had a dumb cunt blow every member of the band, including the drummer, and I have had a dumb cunt threaten to slit her wrists if we didn’t fire the trombonist, but never, and this goes back thirty years in this fucking business, never have I had a cunt tell me she couldn’t sing because she got her period. What the fuck has anybody’s period got to do with the music business?”

“We’ll try it again tomorrow,” Mark said.

“The fuck we will!” Rudy exploded. “You think I’m going back to Harry and tell him we spent all this money for nothing? He’ll throw me out the window.”

“I’ll talk to Harry,” Mark said.

“I want the five bills back,” Rudy said abruptly. “I want that money back. And you tell that cunt singe of yours if I ever lay eyes on her again, I’ll give her such a period she’ll never forget it in her life. I’ll give her such cramps...”

“Rudy, please relax,” Mark said calmly. “We’ll try again tomorrow.”

“We’ll try again never!” Rudy shouted. “I paid for today, not tomorrow. We got forty-five minutes left I already paid for, who’s going to absorb that? You? You’ll be lucky if Harry doesn’t sue you! You wouldn’t pull this if we were Columbia, I can tell you that. You think because we’re small...”

“Rudy, please, you’ll have a heart attack.”

“That’s better than getting thrown out the window,” Rudy shouted, and then he must have pressed the button connecting him to the control booth because he suddenly asked in a much calmer voice, “How much time do we have exactly, Ned?”

“Forty-one seven,” a voice said over the loudspeaker.

“I’m getting two sides out of this session,” Rudy said. “I paid for two sides, and I’m going back with two sides. What can these shlocks play?”

I realized he was referring to the Dwight Jamison Quintet.

“How about ‘Stardust’?” I said.

“Very funny,” Rudy said. “Ned,” he said, “take your level, and get ready to roll.”

“Right,” Ned said over the loudspeaker.

“I want a jump and a ballad,” Rudy said to me. “How’s the time, Ned?”

“Thirty-nine twenty,” Ned answered.

Rudy was standing close to the piano now; his voice was almost confidential. “Start playing,” he said. “Ned’ll let us know when he’s got his level, and then it’s for real. If we’re lucky, we’ll get two takes on each side.”

“Just a second here,” Mark said.

“What now? If we run into overtime...”

“These men were hired to back a vocalist,” Mark said. “I accepted scale because...”

“And you’re taking scale, too,” Rudy said, “or I’ll go to AFTRA and your cunt singer’ll never open her mouth again in New York. Ned, you ready?”

“Ready.”

“How about you, maestro?”

“Give us a minute to run down the tunes, will you?”

“We ain’t got a minute,” Rudy said. “Ned, where are we?”

“Thirty-seven twelve.”

“Play,” Rudy said. “Play good.”

The jump tune was chose was “A Night in Tunisia,” which by 1955 had already become a bop standard. We had no opportunity to rehearse it or time it. We did six bars, and then Ned cut in to say he had his level, and I counted off the beat again, and we took it from the top. Rudy stopped us before we got to the bridge, telling us we were playing too fast. Peter Dodds, my drummer, muttered something under his breath. He had cut his chops playing almost everything at breakneck speed, and here was a halfassed A&R man telling us we were playing too fast when maybe we were ambling along at 250 on the metronome. I counted off again, slower this time, and we got through the second take without any interruptions from Rudy. He listened to the playback, checked the time with Ned again, and said he wanted another take, this time with an added unison chorus of flute and piano. (Rudy was later to take credit for the “distinctive sound” of the Dwight Jamison Quintet.) We did the third take, and Rudy said it was “satisfactory.” (You was adequate, man.) I hadn’t much liked the sound of it at all. Orry and I had not rehearsed any of the riffs we played together, and it seemed to me they were extraordinarily sloppy. For the flip side, we had decided on “The Man I Love.” Rudy checked the time again, and Ned informed him we had five minutes and twenty-two seconds left before our studio time ended. By union edict, each side of a single could run no longer than three and a half minutes. This meant we had to get the ballad right on the first take. Either that, or Rudy would have to go back to his boss with only one side of a record, and Harry would throw him out of the window.

“All right, let’s go, let’s go,” he said. “You. You got a mute?”

“Me?” Hank said.

“No, the flute player, who the fuck you think I mean?”

“Sure, I’ve got a mute,” Hank said.

“Put it in your horn. And you, I want brushes on the ride cymbal, and no klook-a-mop shit. I want everybody cooling it but the piano and the flute, that’s what I want to hear mostly. Open it with piano and flute in unison, then give me two choruses on piano, one on flute, back to the head again and out You got me? The rest of you guys play anything louder than a whisper, I’ll cut off your balls. Ned, what’ve we got?”

“Four and twenty,” Ned said, and he was not referring to blackbirds baked in a pie.

“Let’s go, here’s your beat,” Rudy said. “One... two...”

“I’ll set the tempo,” I said.

“You played too fast on...”

“It’s my band. I’ll set the tempo,” I said.

Rudy might have argued the point further, but time was running out, time was tick-tocking along, and success was waiting in the wings to gather us into his powerful arms, and press us to his barrel chest, and belch into our faces. The contretemps lasted no more than ten seconds.

“Just, for Christ’s sake, start playing!” Rudy said.

I have listened to that unrehearsed, totally improvised version of “The Man I Love” countless times since 1955, in an attempt to understand why disk jockeys all over the country, including those on the rock stations, suddenly began playing the record incessantly. Payola did not account for it. Rudy’s company was small and virtually without funds; we might, in fact, have sold many more copies than we actually did if distribution and promotion had been even slightly better. I am firmly convinced, and Rudy swears to it, that nobody got anything under the table. The record simply took off, and I’ll be damned if I know why. In my estimation, it is simply not a very good record. All it did was define a sound, and even the sound was an accident.

I still believe we achieved that smoothly rehearsed ensemble effect only because we were trying to prove to Rudy that a group of highly trained musicians did not have to be told how to blow or at what speed. I think Hank and Peter were angry all through the three minutes and forty-four seconds it took us to cut the side. If you listen closely to the record, you can hear a heated understatement from the trumpet and drums, as though they are trying to push through the imposed restraints — the straight mute in the horn, the brushes on the top cymbals. Listening, you can hear rage seething in the background, vibrating beneath the diamond-hard (also somewhat angry) piano, and the silvery-cool tones of the flute. (Mark was later to take credit for the flute; it had been his inspiration, he said.)

But in addition to the anger, and perhaps as a result of it, the sound also has that quality of reckless freedom one usually associates with a jam session. We were all of us quite relaxed, despite Rudy’s hysteria. Frankly, none of us gave a good goddamn about his problems, nor did we for a moment believe the record would ever be released. We figured Rudy was simply protecting his job. He must have felt fairly certain that Mark would return the five-hundred-dollar advance paid to Gerri Pryce, the unknown disappearing singing star. But he had agreed to pay us for three hours at scale, and we were still there, we had not walked out, we had not had our periods, we had in fact already done three takes on an undistinguished “Night in Tunisia,” and he would have to pay us in full whether we cut the second side of the record or not. The way we figured it, the two sides were Rudy’s insurance policy. He could not go back to his boss with nothing to show for the company’s cash outlay. If his boss didn’t like the sides, well, there was no accounting for taste, right? Into the ashcan, and better luck next time; Rudy had done his job, he had delivered a viable record. Meanwhile, all we were getting was scale, and for scale you do not bust your ass. For scale, you relax — especially when the session is going to be over and done with in less than four minutes. We were all very relaxed.

My piano playing on “Man” is almost a put-on, in fact, a combination of clumpy Dave Brubeck, bluesy-funky Horace Silver, and pyrotechnic Oscar Peterson. Orry, too, is more frivolous on this side than on the “Tunisia” cut, perhaps because he was sensing my own devil-may-care, what-the-hell attitude. Our head chorus, possibly the only display of real musicianship on the record, is a small miracle of precision, considering we’d never rehearsed any of the figures we played spontaneously and in unison. (They may have been bop figures we’d both heard before, I’m sure I don’t know; they sound fresh and improvisational to me, even now.) The lead-in Orry gives to my piano solo is a corny, overworked bop riff, a series of eighth-note triplets, which he restates at the end of my two choruses and uses as a springboard for his own thoroughly uninspired solo. Eight bars into Orry’s solo, Peter and Hank suddenly stop playing, and Stu Holman begins walking the chart on bass, with me tossing right-hand sprinkles haphazardly into the mix (it sounds a little like a stout man walking ponderously on glass, which shatters with each footfall) until we go into the head and home with the full ensemble. Hank takes out the straight mute before we wrap it up, and Peter drops a bass-drum bomb that comes like an unexpected belch, Orry and I repeating the same figures we played at the top, this time more knowledgeably. That last single-string strum on the bass is because Stu Holman somehow thought we were going into another chorus. It promises something that never comes because that’s where the record ends. When I later asked Peter and Hank why they’d stopped playing eight bars into Orry’s flute solo, they told me he was boring them out of their minds, and they just quit.

That was the record that ensured almost ten years of popularity.

The quintet has probably played “The Man I Love” twenty thousand times since 1955. The musicians come and go, they are replaced, they leave to form groups of their own (as did Orry), they become hopeless addicts (as did Peter), or they simply quit the music business (as did Hank D’Allessio, who is now a real estate agent in Santa Monica). The only one of the original quintet who is still with me when we play infrequent club dates is Stu Holman. But wherever and whenever we play, “The Man I Love” is always requested, and if we deviate by so much as a thirty-second note from the way we played it on that ancient disk, the crowd begins to grumble. We are supposed to reproduce the record note by note, without variation, a demand anathema to jazz musicians. (I knew exactly how Bobby Darin felt, may God rest his soul, when I caught him in Vegas years after his initial success, and he was singing up a storm, better than he’d ever sung in his life, and all the audience wanted to hear was “Mack the Knife.”) I’m a better musician now than I was in 1955. I know for certain that any one of my quintets, on occasions too numerous to recall, has played “The Man I Love” better than the original quintet did on that September Thursday in 1955. In fact, when the original quintet (minus Peter, who was in Lexington) opened at Birdland the next year, we jammed on “Man” for a full twenty minutes, and Christ, we were beautiful that night, we put to shame the record that had launched us into the big time.

But who can argue with success?

As Biff had prophesied, we had somehow made the right music in the right time and the right place. By the beginning of 1956, there was not a jazz buff in the United States of America who did not know of the Dwight Jamison Quintet. Rudy Hirsch was jubilant. His boss, Harry Arnberg, offered us a long-term recording contract. In gratitude for the splendid job Harry had done with our first record, Mark Aronowitz promptly signed the quintet with RCA Victor.

That’s show biz.

He had turned her pictures to the wall, he had told everyone his eldest daughter was dead. She had married a blind shaygets, a wop entertainer, she was dead. But he comes around in 1956, after eight years of silence. Coincidentally, this is after I’ve opened at Birdland to resounding critical cheers, and am no longer a blind shaygets to Honest Abe; I have become his “son-in-law the jazz artist.” He has three grandchildren to discover. They distinguish him from “Papa Jimmy,” their other grandfather, by calling him “Papa Abe.” There is a lot of catching up to do. To facilitate the osmosis of Papa Abe into the family bloodstream, Rebecca puts the “big one” on the turntable. We are living at the time on Park and Eighty-first, in an apartment we’ve sublet from a saxophone player who is in Paris. The windows are open, a balmy New York spring flirts with the stench of cigar smoke (my father’s and Abe’s) in the living room twelve stories above the street.

“This is the one that did it,” Rebecca says.

“Daddy got a hit with it,” Andrew says proudly.

“Well, well,” Abe says. “Well, well. What record was that?”

“ ‘The Man I Love,’ ” Andrew says. “Everybody knows that.”

I listen to the record. I have not yet grown weary of listening to it. At Sophie’s insistence, Rebecca is breaking out the photo album again. “Show him the pictures of when you were in Florida,” Sophie says. “Show him the pictures, darling.”

“That’s a very nice record,” Abe says. “I think I heard it on the radio. Very nice.”

Success at last. Approval from the Mad Oldsmobile Dealer.

For our perseverance and our courage, and to prove that only good things come to those of us who have the integrity to stand up for our convictions (ours being that only in America can a Jew and a Gentile, working side by side in the same double bed, construct Rockefeller Center), Rebecca and I have been rewarded with S*U*C*C*E*S*S! We have obediently learned the American myth, and faithfully adhered to its precepts, and we can now live in the luxury of its full realization, while simultaneously serving as prime examples of its validity. “Look at your father,” Stella tells my children. “He was raised in Harlem; see what can happen in America?” Stella believes it. Rebecca believes it. I believe it.

“How come you never blow me?” I ask her.

“How would you like a prick shoved into your mouth?” she answers. She never calls it a “cock,” though I have asked her to repeatedly. To her, it is a prick. To a man, a prick is a son-of-a-bitch bastard. When I explain this to her, she says, “Who told you that? Susan Koenig?”

But her tone is bantering now, and not at all malicious. In and out of bed, her mood is playful and assured. She often goes around the apartment humming in her slightly off-key voice, and once — to my great surprise — she sings “On the Good Ship Lollipop” at the top of her lungs, waking David, who is in for his afternoon nap. It is as though the hit record, not the record itself, but what the record means — the mink coat in the closet, the leopard beside it for sportier occasions, the forty acres of land we have purchased in Connecticut, the jazz-buff architect who is thrilled that he is designing a residence for the Dwight Jamisons, the paintings Rebecca buys at Hammer Galleries in anticipation of the move to the country — all of these have caused her to look at herself in a new and exciting way. So when I remind her again that it is a cock, and not a prick, she seizes it just below the head and says, “A cock, is it? Oh, is that what you are? Hello, cock, let me kiss you, cock,” and kisses it noisily, and then says, “Oh, that’s a nice tasty cock, how would you like me to suck you out of your mind, cock?” and goes down on me with a fervor that knocks all memories of Susan Koenig clear across the room, and out the window, and down to Park Avenue, and perhaps clear across the East River. “Now that was a premature ejaculation,” she says, and giggles against my wet belly, and then murmurs, “Hurry up and get big again, Ike. I want you to fuck me.”

I lie with one hand covering my eyes, grinning foolishly at the ceiling. The construction company of Jamison & Jamison, Inc., has finally come through, we have finally made it; all it took was a little sprinkling of success.

“I’m probably putting you to sleep, Daddy,” Rebecca says.

“No, no, the snapshots are really very interesting,” Abe says. “Quite interesting, Ike,” he says, using my name for the first time that day.

When he leaves the apartment later, he gives each of the boys a five-dollar bill. Penance, Papa Abe? For all those wasted years?

You prick.

Actually, I liked him.

He had style, the prick.

The shark, for example. In the spring of 1957, while the house in Talmadge was being built, the saxophone player came back from Paris, and we took a place on Martha’s Vineyard for the summer, rather than go through the hassle of looking for another apartment, which we knew we’d be vacating in the fall. I spent a lot of time on that ferry from Woods Hole to Vineyard Haven because the quintet was playing in Boston, and I was virtually commuting back and forth from the island. But the gig ended the last week in August, and Rebecca invited the entire Baumgarten clan to spend that week with us — which I needed like a loch in kop; I was exhausted, and scheduled to leave again for San Francisco just after Labor Day.

Our rented house in Menemsha was set high on a bluff overlooking Vineyard Sound and (I am told) the most beautiful sunset anywhere in the Western Hemisphere. But the Menemsha beach was quite rocky that summer, and Davina’s husband, an accountant named Seth Lewis (né Levine), constantly complained about having to drive to a beach on the ocean side.

“Don’t be a pain in the ass, Seth,” Davina told him.

“I thought there were supposed to be private little beaches here,” Seth said in his whining adolescent voice. “I thought people swam in the nude here and everything.”

“People do swim in the nude here,” I said.

“If you haven’t seen a bunch of aging publishers and their wives swimming around in the nude,” Rebecca said, “you haven’t lived, Seth.”

“Would you like everybody to see me swimming around in the nude?” Davina asked.

“What’s so special about you in the nude?” Seth answered.

According to Rebecca, Seth was either as blind as I, or else totally jaded after four years of marriage. Rebecca told me Davina was quite beautiful, and this was a gracious admission indeed, since there was little love lost between the two sisters. Davina was described to me as a tall blonde, her long hair worn loose and sleek, her green eyes dominating the pale oval of her face. She had a generous bosom for someone so slender, and was blessed with spectacular legs besides, which she showed to best advantage in shorts rolled high on her thighs, or long party skirts slit up each side. She was undeniably the center of attraction at most of the insufferably “in” cocktail parties we attended. There was, in fact, almost as much ooh-ing and aah-ing over Davina as there was over the sunsets, or the sneak previews of scores from Broadway shows in preparation, or the new painting by any one of the island’s artists in summer residence, or the current performance by this or that visiting actor; everybody was “somebody” on Martha’s Vineyard, and Davina Lewis was “somebody,” too, if only because she was so extraordinarily lovely. I am speaking now of her physical appearance. Since I had never seen the lady, I could only judge how lovely she was by what she said and what she did. I did not find her particularly attractive. It seemed to me that she made impossible demands on both Seth and her father, requesting, for example, that one or another of them drive her all the way to Oak Bluffs so she could ride the carousel (I mean, for Christ’s sake, she was twenty-five years old!), or one day forcing Abe to take her all over the island in search of a lobster roll because the shack up on the hill near the beach was temporarily out of them. She was not pregnant, there was no excuse for satisfying this bizarre and childish urge. (She had, in fact, never been pregnant, and professed she would jump off the cliffs at Gay Head if ever she missed her period. She said this in the presence of my three sons.)

At cocktail parties, Davina was quick to announce that she was Dwight Jamison’s sister-in-law, and seemed to enjoy whatever cachet this guaranteed. I have never (much) begrudged anyone taking a free ride on my coattails. My father has taken advantage of my fame often enough, as has Honest Abe. Even Rebecca, whenever she signed for anything in a department store, was inordinately delighted if a shopgirl asked, “Are you the Mrs. Dwight Jamison?” Come to think of it, the only ones who’ve never used my position to further their own are my sons. I have overheard conversations between them and new acquaintances. When the talk got to music and eventually to jazz, my sons never once revealed that their father was the Dwight Jamison. I respect them for that. (Or should I? Is there something darker in their act of omission? Come on, you fucking wop! You’re as paranoid as the entire city of Naples!) It rankled (a little) when Abe boasted about me to potential car buyers — did you sell more Oldsmobiles because I was your son-in-law, you prick? — and it annoyed me, too, when Davina, sleekly blond and tanned (“She looks terrific, the bitch!” Rebecca said), whispered to a photographer, or a sculptor, or a writer, musician, or swordsman of renown, “Who, me? I’m nobody but Dwight Jamison’s sister-in-law,” knowing full well she was dazzling the poor bastard, anyway, with her beauty and her phony Hunter College speech major voice.

It did not hurt to put down poor Seth, either. A woman who puts down her husband sounds available, even if she isn’t. In those days, I was never quite sure whether Davina was looking around or just taking jabs at Seth to keep him on his toes. Not that I liked him very much, either. He had a high nasal voice, and he was invariably complaining about one thing or another. If it wasn’t the drive to the beach, then it was the service in a restaurant. And if it wasn’t that, it was the sand in the bedroom. Or up his ass, for all I know. He was a mean little man who kept telling me I should get a new tax lawyer, when the lawyer I already had was well on the way to making me a millionaire. He kept yelling at my kids. Once, when he told Michael to stop making so much noise, I told him, “Michael lives here.”

“I am your guest,” Seth said.

“You can fucking well take the next ferry back,” I said.

“Oh, is that it?” Seth said. “Well, I didn’t know that was it.” But he didn’t take the next ferry back. Nor the one after that, either. He stayed the whole damn week, while Sophie, who never went to the beach, sat on the porch and knitted. She was probably knitting a shawl identical to the one she wore around her shoulders on the hottest days. Sophie was always chilly. “It’s in my blood,” she said. She wore that gray woolen shawl to all the cocktail parties, too, where she chatted nervously with strangers — “How do you do, I’m Rebecca’s mother” — and seemed clearly out of her element. Not so with Abe, the prick. Abe would meet a movie star and immediately and familiarly say, “Oh, sure, John [or Frank or Joe or Sam], I saw that picture you made, you were actually very good in it.” Or, if introduced to the man who’d written the lyrics for one of Broadway’s long-run musicals, Abe would burst into a song from the show, invariably out of tune, and then would slap the man on the back and say, “You wrote that, huh? What do you know? I sell Oldsmobiles.”

He had style, the prick.

Of a sort.

On the day Abe took my eldest son fishing, Rebecca and I had a terrible fight. The fight was over a woman. Specifically, it was over a woman who had asked me to play “The Man I Love” at a cocktail party the night before. Rebecca knew I hated requests for “The Man I Love,” and she wanted to know why I had so readily succumbed to this particular request from someone she termed “a horsy Wasp cooze from Bedford Village.”

“I just felt like playing,” I said.

“With whom?” she said. “The cooze?”

“I felt like playing piano,” I said.

“I thought you were tired,” she said. “You told me you were ‘utterly exhausted,’ weren’t those your words, Ike? Didn’t you say you couldn’t understand why I’d invited the whole mishpocheh up here on the one week you’d hoped to get some rest?”

“That’s what I said.”

“Well, for somebody who’s so tired, Ike, so utterly exhausted, you certainly leaped to that piano in a flash when Miss Bedford Village put her hand on your arm.”

“She did not put her hand on my arm. Or anyplace else.”

“She put her hand on your arm, and she put her face so close to yours I thought she was giving you artificial respiration.”

“She merely made a request, Rebecca.”

“What did she request? ‘Roll Me Over in the Clover’?”

“She requested ‘The Man I Love.’ You know what she requested.”

“So you played it.”

“I played it. You heard me play it.”

“And she draped herself on the piano and sang along. I thought you hated people singing along when you play.”

“I do.”

“But you didn’t mind her singing along.”

“I didn’t even hear her singing along.”

“You didn’t? Well, well, I knew you were blind, but I didn’t realize you were deaf, too. She sang along in a very horsy Wasp cooze voice, with her mouth an inch from your left ear; are you sure you didn’t hear her? Maybe we ought to take you to Manhattan Eye, Ear, Nose and...”

“Rebecca, what is the point of this?”

“The point, Ike, is that I find the sight of a man tripping over his own cane in a mad rush . ..”

“I did not trip over any goddamn cane...”

“... in a mad rush to get to the piano because some twirpy blonde stinking of horse sweat puts her hand on his arm and requests a goddamn song you hate to play... well, Ike, that is just plain disgusting,” she said, spitting out the word so that it really did sound disgusting. “When a man your age...”

“What do you mean, a man my age?”

“You are thirty-one years old,” she said.

“So what’s that? What the hell is that supposed to be? Decrepit?”

“Everyone thought you made a fool of yourself.”

“I did not make a fool of myself.”

“Everyone thought so. Including me.”

“The cooze from Bedford Village did not think I made a fool of myself.”

“Go to hell,” Rebecca said, and stormed out of the house, the screen door clattering shut behind her. I went into the bedroom and closed the door behind me, and lay on the bed. I thought of what my brother Tony had promised me on those long rides to the Bronx, when I was taking lessons from Federico Passaro, who was going to make me a concert star. You’ll have beautiful girls hanging all over you, rich girls in long satin dresses, wearing pearls at their throats, draped on the piano, and never mind that you’re blind, that won’t matter to them, Iggie. Well, in 1957, though many beautiful girls in long satin dresses, wearing pearls at their throats, had draped themselves on the piano in more cities than I could count, I was still (Surprise, Rebecca! Stick around, I’m full of surprises) as virginal, so to speak, as my grandfather had been in 1901 when Luisa Agnelli, feigning sleep, had flashed her luxuriant crotch at him.

Mark Aronowitz had told me that in the entire United States he knew only one man who was not cheating on his wife. That man was Mark himself. Mark did not consider his frequent extramarital excursions “cheating.” Mark was simply “advancing careers.” And besides, his wife knew all about his penchant for young singers, which automatically implied tacit approval on her part, and therefore rendered meaningless the word “cheating”; you cannot cheat someone who knows she is being short-changed. I did not tell Mark that he could add a second name to his list — that of Dwight Jamison. Instead, I went along with the American fantasy (I thought it was a fantasy at the time; it is not) that anyone achieving celebrity status could call his own tune with members of the opposite sex (or the same sex, for that matter). Whenever Mark and I had breakfast together after an opening night someplace, and he asked over scrambled eggs and coffee, “Did you boff that gorgeous blonde last night?” I automatically answered, “Why, Mark, you know I don’t fuck around,” which he automatically took to be a sly and gentlemanly denial of the all-night orgy he knew had taken place. My masculinity had been preserved, Mark’s suspicions had been verified, and in addition, he had been able to assuage any guilt he might have felt for his own unfaithfulness to Josie — who, by all accounts, was a devastatingly beautiful girl who had given up a promising singing career only because she’d fallen so madly in love with Mark.

In 1957, I still thought the bedrock of a successful marriage was fidelity, and whereas I was subtly flattered by Rebecca’s jealousy, I also had to admit that my response to the Bedford Village blonde (I had not known she was a blonde till Rebecca told me) had been something more than innocent. To begin with, she had definitely not smelled of horse sweat, no matter what Rebecca later claimed. Instead, she had smelled of something reminiscent of Susan Koenig’s perfume, which of course recalled countless hours of ecstasy spent in Susan’s embrace. Moreover, when she rested her hand briefly on my bare arm (I was wearing an imported short-sleeved sports shirt, and hand-tailored slacks), I felt a response that seemed wildly out of proportion to her delicate touch, as though she had applied pressure to a particularly sensitive spot that immediately flashed a signal to my groin. She put her face very close to mine, I sniffed in Susan’s perfume or something very close to it, and detected the admixtured scent of minty toothpaste and — what else? Was it the lingering aroma of suntan oil? Had she not showered after her day on the beach? This thought, too, was somehow stimulating. She told me that she just adored the way I played piano, and would I please, as a personal favor to her, though she was sure everyone asked me to do this, I was probably bored to tears with the same request over and over again, but would I please just do a few choruses of “The Man I Love,” for which she would be eternally grateful, please? I rushed to the piano, more in self-defense (the slacks were very tightly fitted) than in eagerness to please. She followed me there, and sang into my ear as I played, almost throwing me off meter. She told me afterward that her name was Hope Coslett and that she was in the Westchester directory. “Hope is the thing with feathers,” she whispered. Lying on the bed in the room I shared with Rebecca, I wondered what she’d meant. If I ever called her, would she do a dance with ostrich fans? She had excited me, no question about it. Rebecca had been right on target.

I heard voices in the kitchen. My son Andrew was exuberantly relating to Rebecca all the details of the fishing expedition with Papa Abe. They had caught a small sand shark, which was now proudly displayed on the kitchen table. Abe told his daughter he had never eaten shark meat in his life, and he wanted to try it now; he was willing to bet it was a rare delicacy. Rebecca sounded unconvinced, but we had a housekeeper with us that summer, and I guess she figured if Abe made a mess of the kitchen, the housekeeper would clean up after him. Besides, eight-year-old Andrew was begging her to please let them cook the shark (his whine was almost identical to Sett’s except that he produced it in a high, piping voice, and usually accompanied it with a little nervous tap dance), and it would have taken someone stronger than Rebecca to have resisted both Abe and Andrew in the same kitchen on the same hot August afternoon.

They must have cut the shark open, preparatory to broiling it or frying it or whatever Abe had in mind for it, because the next sounds I heard were compounded of surprise, awe, and (from Andrew) delight. Apparently, there were three perfectly formed tiny sharks inside the one they had just cut open. Honest Abe ventured the opinion that the eviscerated shark had been feeding on smaller sharks just before they hooked it. But Rebecca, whose knowledge was encyclopedic, told her father flatly and authoritatively that some species of sharks were viviparous, and that what they’d caught and sliced open on her kitchen table was nothing more nor less than a pregnant shark. Her father wanted to know what viviparous meant (I was glad he’d asked the question because I was dying to know myself), and Rebecca told him viviparous meant bearing live young, and repeated that what he’d cut open on her kitchen table was a pregnant shark. Andrew asked what pregnant meant, and Abe said What the hell, it’s only a fish, and they went about preparing to cook and eat the shark, as had already been planned, though I think Rebecca vetoed the idea of cooking the pups. The house rapidly filled with the stench of frying shark meat. Abe took one taste (he had style, the prick), told Rebecca it was the vilest thing he’d ever eaten in his life, promptly threw the whole stinking mess into the garbage can, and then went out onto the back porch, leaving Rebecca in a kitchen reeking of fried shark meat, and filled to bursting with a tap-dancing eight-year-old boy who wanted to know all about how the shark had got those babies in her belly. Quite calmly, Rebecca told him — even though I’m sure she hadn’t the faintest idea of how sharks mated — that the mama shark and the papa shark had got together because they loved each other very much, and the papa shark had put his sperm into the mama shark, and the sperm had got together with the mama shark’s eggs, and the baby sharks had been formed inside the mama shark’s belly. She made the mistake of adding, “Sharks make babies the same way people do.”

“What do you mean?” Andrew asked immediately.

“People,” she said.

“Is that how I got made?” Andrew asked.

“Yes,” Rebecca said. “Why don’t you go out on the porch with your grandfather?”

“You mean a sperm got inside your belly?”

“Yes.”

“And got together with an egg?”

“Yes.”

“An egg like in the refrigerator?”

“No,” Rebecca said. “Well, yes. But not a chicken egg,” she said. “A human egg.”

“Yeah?” Andrew said.

“Mm,” Rebecca said. “Now go outside and play.”

“How did the sperm get inside your belly?” Andrew asked.

There was silence in the kitchen. It lasted at least a minute.

“The same way it got in the shark’s belly,” Rebecca said at last.

“What do you mean?”

“The papa shark puts the sperm inside the mama shark.”

“Did Daddy put the sperm inside you?”

“Yes,” Rebecca said. “Andrew, why don’t you go outside and find your brothers? I think they’re...”

“How did Daddy get it inside you?” Andrew asked.

When I heard this, I almost burst out laughing. I was delighted by my son’s persistent questioning (so like his dear grandmother Stella’s), and I was also tickled to death by Rebecca’s discomfort. Good, I thought. See what happens when you falsely accuse Dwight Jamison of having responded to some dumb cooze from Bedford Village? Go ahead, smart-ass. Explain the mysteries of life to your eight-year-old son. You’ve probably memorized a lecture from some goddamn textbook, anyway. Answer the kid!

“Well,” Rebecca said, and then took a deep breath, and apparently decided to go whole hog. “The daddy,” she said, impersonalizing it so that it referred to daddies in general and not to Andrew’s daddy in particular, “puts his penis into the mommy’s vagina.” She took another breath, and in a rush said, “And the sperm comes out, and that’s how it gets in there.”

“Yeah?” Andrew said.

“Mm,” Rebecca said.

Andrew was thoughtfully silent for quite a few moments. I held my breath.

“That’s how people do it, huh?” he asked.

“Yes,” Rebecca said, and the confident tone in her voice indicated she thought the conversation had ended.

“Let’s do it!” Andrew said.

His offer was so unexpected, his tone so exuberantly innocent, that I almost choked to death. I quickly covered my mouth with my hand. If Rebecca heard a sound from the bedroom, I knew she’d come in there with a meat cleaver. It was one thing to play “The Man I Love” for a dizzy blonde from Bedford Village; it was quite another to allow your own wife to flounder helplessly before the sexual inquisition of a bright eight-year-old.

“We... uh... can’t,” she said.

“Why not?” Andrew said. He sounded extremely puzzled.

“Well... uh... the mommy can only do it with the daddy,” she said.

“Oh,” Andrew said, and again fell silent. And then, with the spontaneous brilliance of pure inspiration, he piped excitedly, “Let’s get Daddy!” and was running toward the bedroom when Rebecca’s voice stopped him.

“Daddy’s sleeping!” she shouted in panic.

“Let’s wake him up,” Andrew said.

“No,” Rebecca said. “No! Now that’s it, Andrew, I want you to go outside this minute.”

I heard the screen door opening. But Andrew must have hesitated on his way to the back porch, because I heard him ask, somewhat suspiciously, “Is it really true?”

“Is what really true?”

“All that stuff you told me.”

“Yes, it’s true,” Rebecca said.

“That’s the way sharks make babies, huh?”

“That’s right.”

“And people, too, huh?”

“Yes.”

“You mean everybody? Or just you and Daddy?”

“Everybody,” Rebecca said.

“Then how come I never saw it on television?” he snapped, and I swear to God his voice had all the triumphant timbre of someone shouting, “Ah-ha, got you, didn’t I?” I burst out laughing. Rebecca came rushing into the bedroom, and I covered my face defensively, expecting that single cleaver stroke that would smite my skull in two. But instead, she threw herself on top of me, and began kissing my closed eyes, and my nose, and my mouth, and my cheeks, laughing between kisses, and saying again and again, “Oh, you son of a bitch, you no-good son of a bitch.”

Standing in the doorway, Andrew logically asked, “Are you doing it now?”

I took Rebecca to dinner alone that night. Davina and Seth had been invited to the home of a couple they’d met at one of the cocktail parties. (“Who, me? I’m nobody but Dwight Jamison’s sister-in-law”), and I prevailed upon Honest Abe and Sophie to sit with the kids. Abe protested at first. “We should all get out of here,” he said. “The place stinks to high heaven.” But he and Sophie stayed, and Rebecca and I enjoyed a quiet, candlelit shore dinner together. I apologized to her for the way I’d foolishly allowed myself to be flattered by the blonde (“It’s beneath you, Ike, really,” she said), and I promised it would never happen again, and we drank muscadet with our lobsters, and laughed over what had happened with Andrew in the kitchen, each of us telling the story from our separate viewpoints, Rebecca in the kitchen in a head-on confrontation, I in the bedroom as an eavesdropper. We laughed a lot that night, we reaffirmed our vows.

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

What you should be thinkin’ about are the good things. And they got no thin’ 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... 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... there just ain’t many I know of.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Ah?” he said. “Sì? È vero?”

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

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

“And Uncle Dominick?”

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

“I’ve been busy, Grandpa.”

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

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

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

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

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

“When I saw her at Pino’s funeral...”

“Ah, sì.”

“... she seemed so frail,” I said.

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

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

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

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

“Cosa?” he asked.

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

“What does that mean?” my grandfather asked.

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

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

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

“What do you mean?” he said.

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

“A what?” my grandfather said.

“Una lesbica,” I said.

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

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

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

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

“For what?” my grandfather said.

“For art direction.”

“What’s that?” he said.

“They work for advertising agencies,” I said.

“Ah,” he said.

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

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

“Does he get a hard-on?”

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

“And what else?” my grandfather asked.

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

“A what?”

“Pisciasotto,” I translated.

“Ah.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I suppose I was spoiled rotten even before the album took off. Success is difficult to resist; it is exceedingly difficult to resist. It has been personified as female, the Bitch Goddess, but I firmly believe it is male in gender and exclusively American in origin. (John Wayne probably thinks of success as a voluptuous full-blown woman; what can I tell you, Duke?) I have seen this hairy male beast (success, not you, Duke) attack and devour the strongest men and women. He stinks of booze and fornication, his breath can knock you senseless for a week. He belches and farts in public, he uses obscene language, he is a braggart and a dullard, and he has but a single ear. Yet when he clutches you in his powerful arms and plants upon your lips a kiss that surely reeks of all things vile (it is the kiss of death, make no mistake), there is nothing to do but succumb. The Beast is too strong, he N can break you in two, he can scatter your limbs to the four winds after he has picked them clean of flesh (he will do that, anyway), and it is better to suffer his crushing embrace (it’s what you’ve wanted all along, isn’t it?) and let him take you where he will.

It is no accident that America is the nation that pioneered the best-seller lists, the record charts, the best-dressed lists, the ten-best-movies-of-the-year lists, and (God help us) even the ten-worst-movies-of-the-year lists, a distinction in itself; if you cannot be one of the ten best, there is some satisfaction (but only in America) in knowing you are listed among the lousiest. In America, if you are eleventh, you might as well be dead. And if you are Number One, then you are exactly what America itself desires to be, ever and always. I do not wish to raise problems, forgive me. But what is so terribly wrong about being number two? Or (God forbid) number eleven? In 1960, Dwight’s Blues was number One on the LP record charts for more months than I can recall, and something began happening to me.

I was spoiled rotten even before the raging success of the album; I had, after all, been successful since 1955. I was used to making my demands known and having them satisfied, I had grown accustomed to deferential treatment from headwaiters and recording executives, music publishers and nightclub owners, hotel managers, airline hostesses, everyone. Everywhere I went, they asked, “Is everything all right, Mr. Jamison?” Yes, everything was all right. When I was a boy, my grandmother Tess had treated me like an Italian Prince, which is one step higher than a Jewish Princess. My brother Tony could sometimes escape her solicitous clutches, being blessed with vision and a pair of stout little legs that could carry him scurrying away from her advancing embrace. I never escaped her. “I’m going to get you, Ignazio!” she would say, and those loving grandmotherly arms would snatch me up, and her tongue would cluck in deep affection, and sometimes she would sing to me in Italian, and press me against her pillowy bosom, and tell me what a darling little boy I was. If I had been left solely to the care and training of my grandmother Tess, I would have grown up to be a hopelessly dependent vegetable. It was my grandfather who taught me to stand on my own, blind or not. But my grandfather was Italian, you see. And I was American. And starting in 1955, I was a successful American. And in 1960, I became a ragingly successful American, and the world was full of Grandma Tesses eager to tell me what a darling little boy I was, eager to turn me into a hopelessly dependent vegetable. And something began happening to me.

Maybe I only (only!) wanted to go to bed with my mother. Maybe those tales of Charlie Shoe exploring her youthful quim had incited me to fantasize wildly about the joys to be experienced between those maternal thighs. Success had brought me power, after all, the power to command whatever I wanted whenever I wanted it. So why not now dismiss my father, who had peed his own pants when he was but a mere lad, and take my rightful place in bed beside my mother? Maybe that was it. Or maybe I had to prove to Jimmy Palmer that his own fumbling attempt at adultery (had there really been an Irish whore on Pelham Parkway?) could be topped by his famous blind son, show him I was not only a better musician than he was, but also a better swordsman, a man who could screw every beautiful woman in the universe without having the Virgin Mary appear to Rebecca, without getting caught, and certainly without leaving any telltale evidence about golden earrings with sapphire chips in my dresser drawer. That’s another possibility. Or maybe, being blind, I just naturally demanded more of everyone — more and more love, more and more respect, more and more proof that I was not what I (and thirteen other little blind bastards) thought myself to be — nothing.

Whatever it was (and I certainly do not dismiss any of these quite respectable tenets), I began to think that since my album was Number One, then I myself was Number One. I had cut the album, hadn’t I? I mean, after all, the album was only a mechanical reproduction of the music I had made, the music I had pulled from somewhere inside my head and my heart; the album was me. Now never mind whether or not I was a good father (I was), or a loyal and devoted husband (I still was), or a man who did not cheat on his income tax (I took advantage of legal loopholes), a man eligible for the Talmadge Good Neighbor Award, an upstanding member of the town board, a pillar of the community, or an all-around darling nice guy. Never mind any of that. Never mind what the man Dwight Jamison was. The man was the album. And the album was successful beyond my wildest dreams. They used to touch me. When I walked toward the bar after a set, they reached out to touch me, I could hear them whispering, “Here he comes,” and then I would feel the cautious touch on the sleeve of my jacket.

Well, unless I wished to believe that America was a land of idol-worshipers bowing and scraping at the clawed feet of the hairy monster called Success; unless I wished to believe that the crowd reaching out to touch me as I walked from the bandstand to the bar was really reaching out to touch The Beast; unless I chose to come to grips with the painful knowledge that The Beast was something independently alive, standing behind my shoulder each night, leering out at the crowd and demanding adoration for him-self, then I had to believe the cheers were for me and not for my success, the cheers were for Dwight Jamison, the cheers were, in fact, for Ignazio Silvio Di Palermo. And why not? I deserved them.

Yes.

Deserved! Because I was giving so much of myself to the public, yes, and it was only fair that I should get something more than money in return. (Christ, was that me? Did I really believe that?) Yes. Up there on the bandstand each night, I was reaching into my head and my heart and discovering somewhere in my own experience something I was willing to give to total strangers. It leaped from my fingers and into the room, and it became theirs, no longer mine, not even mine and theirs, but theirs alone. My past and my present, my joy, my anger, and my sorrow became theirs to push around on their plates with their leftover dinners while they signaled the waiter for another round.

I rationalized my promiscuity (which is exactly what it was) on two levels. First, I told myself I had already given of my head and my heart, so what would it matter if I now gave of my cock? Giving of my cock was really giving nothing; I was still being true to Rebecca. Secondly, I played a mental trick that can only in retrospect be considered schizophrenic. (Don’t be so quick to agree, Rebecca!) I told myself all these women really did love me and my shabby, dignified good looks, and my blond hair and sightless blue eyes, and my talent, and everything about me. But at the same time, I told myself they only loved the incandescence of my success, they only loved The Beast. I zippered on The Beast’s hairy hide the way I would a gorilla suit, but at the same time I denied that he was me. All those women loved me for myself, yes, but no, they really loved The Beast. I was only the conduit through which adoration for The Beast flowed. The women were faceless; they would have been faceless even if I could have seen them. And I was faceless as well. The Beast was getting it all; I was only his boy. And yet I knew they adored me.

Mishegahss, I admit it.

I’d have to be really nuts (I know, Rebecca; save it) to pretend at the age of forty-eight that all that fucking around had been caused by a capitalized Beast relentlessly stalking the landscape of the American myth. But sometimes, when I’m alone and I remember with a start that after all is said and done I am | only blind and only Ignazio Silvio Di Palermo, I wonder what it would have been like if I’d never been a big success, ma’am. Would you offer to blow me if you saw me stumbling along Broadway behind a Seeing Eye dog, with a sign ADVISING HERE BUT FOR THE GRACE OF GOD GOES THEE?

Jesus, the things I remember!

Jesus.

It is the summer of 1941, and my brother has taken me to the Friday-night dance at Our Lady of Grace on 225th Street and Bronxwood Avenue. We are walking home together afterward. There are roses blooming everywhere. They line the fences outside the two-story houses as we walk in the balmy, scent-laden night.

My brother picks a rose and gives it to me.

The Masters At Forcing Independents to Acquiesence came around to see me in the fall of 1961. The man who ran the Chicago club in which I was playing was a hood. There are some nightclub managers or owners who tell you to play softer or louder or faster or slower or not at all, depending on what their drinking clientele is doing at any given moment, but Al Gerardi never bothered us. He was smart enough to know that we were riding a wave of popularity, and he wasn’t about to mess with music that was causing his cash register to jingle along in counterpoint. I almost liked him. When he said he wanted me to meet a few of his friends, I honestly thought they were fans.

We sat in Al’s office, and they introduced themselves as Arthur Giglio and Ralph Isetti.

“Is it true you’re Italian?” Isetti asked.

“That’s right,” I said.

“That’s what we heard,” Giglio said.

“That makes us ’paesani,” Isetti said.

I said nothing.

“Your album’s doing pretty good,” Giglio said.

“It’s a nice album,” Isetti said.

“This guy Aronowitz,” Giglio said. “He’s your manager, huh?”

“Yes.”

“Who else does he handle?”

“Well, he’s got a long list of clients.”

“But you’re the biggest one, huh?”

“I don’t really know.”

“Sure, you’re the biggest. What do you want to stay with him for?”

“We’ve been together for a long time now. He’s a good manager. And also a good friend.”

“They only look out for themselves,” Giglio said. “The kikes.”

“My wife is Jewish,” I said.

“Yeah, we know,” Isetti said, and this was the first warning I had that trouble was on the way. I felt my scalp begin to tingle.

“Well,” I said, “I’d better get back outside.”

“No, don’t rush yourself,” Giglio said. “Al’s in no hurry. You ain’t in no hurry, are you, AT?”

Al, who had been silent till this moment, now said, “No, everybody’s happy outside.”

“Everybody’s happy in here, too,” Giglio said.

“We coulda sold a shit pot full of that album,” Isetti said. “That’s a nice album.”

“Victor’s doing a fine job,” I said.

“Victor who?”

“RCA Victor.”

“Oh, the record company, you mean. Yeah, but maybe you ain’t getting the right kind of jukebox distribution, you know what I mean?”

“We lifted three singles from the album, and they’re all doing fine on the jukes,” I said.

“They could be doing better,” Isetti said.

“We got a few record companies of our own,” Giglio said.

“We also got some hotels in Vegas.”

“And of course we could guarantee very good jukebox exposure. Much better than you’re getting now.”

“I’m not sure I understand,” I said. I understood completely. They wanted to get into the dry-cleaning business.

“We’d like to manage you, Ike,” Giglio said.

“I’ve already got a manager.”

“Kiss him off,” Isetti said.

“I couldn’t do that.”

“Try. I’ll bet you could do it if you tried.”

“Why should I?”

“Because we can handle you better. We’re Italian, we understand you better. We like the way you play piano, Ike.”

“Well, I’m very flattered, but...”

“Don’t be so fucking flattered,” Isetti said. “We’re talking business here.”

“If you want to talk business, go see my manager.”

“We will. As soon as we settle this with you.”

“It’s already settled.”

“No, we don’t think so. Not yet, it ain’t settled.”

“Al, we’ve got paying customers out there,” I said. “If your friends are finished .. .”

“We ain’t finished,” Isetti said, “and the customers can wait.”

“Sixty-forty is the deal,” Giglio said.

“Look,” I said, “I’m satisfied with Victor, I’m satisfied with my manager...”

“And I’ll bet you’re also satisfied with Alice Keating,” Giglio said, and the room went silent.

“Yes,” I said. “She’s a very good flute player.”

“Especially the skin flute,” Isetti said, and the room went silent again.

“We’ve got pictures of you and Alice,” Giglio said.

“You like broads, huh, Ike?” Isetti said.

“We’ll get you plenty of broads, you like broads.”

“It’s too bad you’re blind,” Isetti said. “These are nice pictures.” I heard the sound of something being slapped onto the desktop. “It must be a real drag being blind, huh?”

“You can’t even see yourself in action when you’re blind,” Giglio said. “Take a look at those pictures, Al. Go ahead, open the envelope. We had them blown up eight by ten, Ike,” he said confidentially. “Take a look at them, Al. They’re nice pictures, ain’t they?”

Al moved to the desk. He was silent for several moments. Then he whistled softly.

“Listen,” I said amiably, “who do you guys think you’re kidding?”

“Oh, are we kidding somebody?” Giglio said.

“Gee, I didn’t know we were kidding,” Isetti said.

“What do you think of those pictures, Al?” Giglio said.

“Those are some pictures,” Al said.

“You got a nice shlahng for a blind man,” Giglio said. “Ain’t that a nice shlahng, Al?”

“Yeah, that’s a nice shlahng,” Al said.

“She goes down on it nice, too,” Isetti said. “Almost like a pro.”

“I’ll bet your wife and kids would like to see how this girl plays flute, huh, Ike?”

“Maybe we ought to sign her too,” Isetti said, and they all laughed.

“This is all bullshit,” I said. “You haven’t got any pictures, and you’re...”

“We’ve got pictures, Ike,” Giglio said, and I knew they had pictures.

“We own that hotel you’re staying in,” Giglio said. “You know that mirror across from the bed?”

“How would he know where the mirror is? The man’s blind.”

“Well, there’s a mirror across from the bed,” Isetti said. “It’s a one-way mirror. Like the cops have. It comes in handy sometimes.”

“You shouldn’t ought to fuck in the daytime,” Giglio said.

“We wouldn’ta got no pictures if you fucked only at night.”

“Unless you kept the lights on.”

“He’s blind, what would he need the lights for?”

“What do you say, Ike?”

“Sixty-forty is the deal,” Isetti said.

I decided to pull rank. If there’s one thing Italians understand, it’s somebody telling them exactly who he is. In Italy, it is not uncommon to hear people in every walk of life indignantly demanding, “Do you realize who I am?” In Italy, this has become a joke. Even a street cleaner will get on his high horse and say, “Do you realize who I am?” Rank was very definitely the thing to pull. Who did these cheap hoods think they were fooling around with here? I was Dwight Jamison.

“Do you guys realize who you’re talking to?” I said.

“Yeah,” Giglio said. “We’re talking to Ignazio Silvio Di Palermo.”

“A ’paesano,” Isetti said.

“A ’paesano who’s going to pick up the phone, and call the police, and tell them...”

“A ’paesano who’ll get his hands broken if he does, that,” Isetti said.

“You won’t break my hands,” I said.

“We won’t, huh?”

“If you break my hands,” I said, taking a cue from my grandfather, “I won’t be able to play piano anymore. And sixty percent of nothing is nothing.”

“So we’ll find ourselves another piano player,” Isetti said. “Meanwhile, you’ll be on the street selling pencils.”

“You won’t break my hands,” I said, but I wasn’t so sure anymore.

“Anyway, who’s talking about breaking your hands?” Giglio said. “What are you threatening the man for, Ralphie? We’re about to enter a partnership here, and you’re threatening the man.”

“I wasn’t threatening the man,” Isetti said.

“What do you say, Ike?” Giglio said amiably. “Sixty-forty.”

“No,” I said, “I don’t think so. I appreciate your interest, but. . .”

“Ike,” Giglio said, “this is not a threat, please don’t take it as a threat. But what we’re going to do is mail those pictures to your wife.”

“And maybe to a few newspapers, too,” Isetti said.

“Nobody’d publish them,” Giglio said, and laughed. “Not those pictures. Ike, I got to tell you, those are the dirtiest pictures I ever seen in my life. What do you say? You want to be partners? Or you want your wife to see you lapping that girl’s pussy?”

“If you mail the pictures...”

“Oh, we’ll mail them, all right.”

“Then you’ve got no hold on me anymore. I’ll have nothing to worry about.”

“You’ll still have your hands to worry about,” Isetti said.

“Stop it with the man’s hands, will you, please?” Giglio said. “Ike, be sensible. You don’t really want your wife to see those pictures, do you?”

“Look,” I said, “what the... what are you bothering with me for? I’m just a piano player. There must be...”

“We like the way you play piano, Ike.”

“We can make a lot of money from the way you play piano.”

“What do you say, Ike?”

“Mail them,” I said. “I don’t give a damn.”

“Okay,” Giglio said, and sighed. “Ralphie, put the pictures back in the envelope and mail them to the man’s wife. That’s Rebecca Jamison, Old Holly Road, Talmadge, Connecticut.”

“You’re not scaring me,” I said.

“Who’s trying to scare you?” Giglio said. “We want to be partners.”

“Go ahead and mail them,” I said.

“We will.”

“Is that it?”

“That’s it,” Giglio said. “For now. We’ll see what happens next, huh?”

“Take care of your hands,” Isetti said.

They did not mail the pictures, if indeed the pictures existed at all. I kept waiting for an explosion from Rebecca, but it never came. Alice quit the band just before Christmas. She had met a Miami land developer while we were playing down there, and had decided to marry him. She asked me to promise never to tell anyone about the things we’d done together. I told her I never would, and meanwhile I kept waiting for that envelope full of pictures to be delivered to Old Holly Road in Talmadge. By February, I began to think I’d bluffed them out of the post, just the way my grandfather had done back in 1937. An occupational hazard of playing jazz piano is beginning to believe that life is only an echo of jazz. If it had worked for my grandfather back then, maybe it was working for me now. He had played the head chorus, and I was playing the head and out. I was home free.

They caught up with me in March.

I was working in Detroit at the time. I was alone in my hotel room when a knock sounded at the door. It was close to eleven-thirty; the eleven o’clock television news was just signing off.

“Who is it?” I said.

“Danny.”

Danny Sears was my new flute player. I opened the door. Two men came into the room, pushing me back and away from the door. I heard the bolt being thrown.

“Hello, Mr. Jamison,” one of them said,

“Who’s that?” I said. “Who is it?”

“Don’t panic, Mr. Jamison,” the other man said. “All we’re going to do is break your hand.”

I turned immediately and ran for where I knew the phone was. I got almost to the night table beside the bed, when one of them clamped his hand onto my shoulder, and twisted me around to face him, and hit me in the gut. I doubled over. My dark glasses slid halfway down my nose.

“That hurts, doesn’t it?” he said.

“Don’t let us hurt you no more than we have to,” the other man said.

“Sit over here, Mr. Jamison.”

“Look...”

“Sit down, Mr. Jamison, this won’t take a minute.”

“Look,” I said, “look, are you guys Italian?”

One of them laughed.

“Hey, come on,” I said, “this ain’t funny, you know? It may be funny to you guys, but it ain’t funny to me.” I suddenly realized I had fallen back into the speech patterns of my youth, the language I had used every day of the week in the streets of Harlem. In a recurring nightmare I’d had ever since that night in Detroit, I dream I am standing on the curb in Harlem, waiting for a taxi. I am dressed in white tie, tails, and a top hat. A woman is standing not fifteen feet from me. As in all my dreams, she is only vaguely defined, a blurred shape, an uncertain presence. But she is a woman, I know this, and she is Italian, I know this too. She is standing on the corner waiting for a bus. I hear a vehicle approaching and, hoping it is a taxicab, I raise my cane to hail it. It pulls to the curb. I hear a man, presumably the driver, asking, “Where you going, Mac?” I answer, in the acquired speech I’ve been using for half a lifetime, “I’m Dwight Jamison, would you mind taking me to Birdland, please?” As I get into the taxi, the Italian woman cackles and says, “Who do you think you’re kidding?”

They were both laughing now. Their laughter was mean, the privileged laughter of people sharing an inside joke.

“Well, come on,” I said, “are you Italian?”

They had to be Italian, my infallible ear told me they were Italian. But why were they laughing if they weren’t something very far removed from Italian? Were Italian racketeers now hiring black men or Poles or Jews or Irishmen to break the hands of Italian musicians. Ahhh, the American myth realized at last. But they were my hands.

“Let’s talk,” I said.

“It’s late as it is,” one of them said. They sounded almost identical. I could not tell their voices apart. They still sounded Italian. But then why had they laughed?

“Who sent you here?” I said.

“Mr. Jamison, it don’t matter who sent us.”

“Was it Giglio and Isetti? All right, here’s what you do. Go back to them and...”

“No, we’re not going back to nobody.”

“I’m trying to tell you we can talk!”

“About what?”

“About sixty-forty, seventy-thirty, whatever the hell they want!”

“It’s too late,” one of them said.

“You’re too late, Mr. Jamison.”

“They ain’t interested no more, Mr. Jamison. They got themselves another boy, Mr. Jamison.”

“You’re too late.”

“You missed the boat.”

“You coulda had yourself a sweet deal, but instead you got to get your hand broke. You understand?”

“That doesn’t make sense,” I said. I had put my hands in my pockets. I was trying to hide my hands. “If they’re not interested in me anymore...”

“Yeah, well, lots of things in life don’t make too much sense,” one of them said.

“Which hand?” the other one said.

“You hear him, Mr. Jamison? Which hand?”

“What?”

“Which hand? They told us only one hand. Which one you want?”

Yes. Yes, that was what they had said when they came into the room. They were here to break my hand. Singular. One hand. And now they wanted to know which one. That was very considerate of them. They were behaving like gentlemen, inquiring which of my hands I preferred broken, or conversely, which I preferred left intact.

“Look,” I said, “this is my livelihood....”

“This is ours,” one of them said.

“Which hand?”

“How much are they paying you for this?”

They both laughed again.

“I’m serious. I don’t know how much they’re paying you, but I’m sure...”

“Forget it.”

“And make up your mind, you hear? Otherwise we’ll break both fuckin’ hands and get it over with.”

“The right or the left? Which one?”

The right or the left? Which one, Ike? Which hand do you find most useful to the geography of your performance? Which of these precious appendages do you find essential to the definition of contours and shapes? Which of your eyes would you like plucked out, because those hands in addition to being your source of income are also your eyes, Ike, you have been using them to see with since the day you were born. Which could you most readily do without? Which one will you sacrifice? The left hand that strikes the chords or the more inventive right hand that creates new melodies? Which? Choose.

“Break them both,” one of the men said.

“Wait a minute!”

“Then which one?”

“The... look,” I said, “please don’t break my hand. Please. Please, I...”

“This guy’s gettin’ on my nerves,” one of them said.

“Which fuckin’ hand?” the other one said.

“The... the... the left,” I said and I began to whimper.

One of them stood behind me, his hands on my shoulders. I heard the other one moving a piece of furniture over to where I was sitting. “Please,” I said, “please,” and he seized my left hand by the wrist and held it firmly to the top of whatever he had moved into place in front of me, and I said, “Please, no, don’t, please,” and I thought of Basilio Silese in the locker room of the Boys’ Club, and I wished my brother Tony were there to rescue me as he had rescued Basilio, wished he would barge into the room and shout, “Hey, what are you doing there?” but my brother Tony was dead, he had been killed in Italy by an Italian soldier. “Please,” I said, “please don’t, please,” and the man standing behind me said, “Shut up, you cocksucker,” and looped a folded towel or napkin or handkerchief over my head and into my mouth like a horse’s bit, twisted it tight from behind with one hand while the other hand forced me back into the chair again. I tried to say please, please, please around the cloth, but the other man smashed something hard down on the knuckles of my hand, and then methodically and systematically and apparently emotionlessly — he did not grunt, I could not even hear him breathing heavily — smashed three of my fingers at the middle joint.

I passed out after the first finger.

The boys did not quite wreck my career, though I’m sure the oversight was unintentional. They left my pinkie and my thumb intact. This allowed me to play shells the way Bud Powell used to play them way back then when I learned to hate his style.

My mother called the day before Rebecca and I were scheduled to leave for Europe. My hand was still in a cast. We had arranged for Sophie to stay with the children while we were gone; she would be assisted by our live-in housekeeper and a college student we had hired to chauffeur the children to their various activities. Sophie had arrived, with three valises, a week before our departure date. She told us she wanted to get accustomed to the routine, learn her way around the thermostats and the garbage disposal unit. I spent a lot of time hiding from her in my studio. It was there that I took the call from my mother.

“Hello, Ike,” she said, and I knew instantly that something was wrong. My mother’s voice is a delicate instrument. It can promise the hyacinths of spring or the gardenias of death in a single breath.

“What’s the matter?” I said.

“Nothing.”

“Is Grandpa all right?”

“Yes, fine.”

“Then what is it?”

“Nothing,” she said. “Are you all packed for your trip?”

“Yes, Mom. Mom...”

“Is Sophie there?”

“She arrived last Thursday.”

“Give her my regards.”

“I will. Mom, is anybody sick or anything?”

“No, no.” She hesitated, and then said, “Aunt Cristie came to see me this morning. She came all the way from Massapequa.”

“What is it?”

“Nothing,” my mother said, but she was weakening, I was beginning to reach her, not for nothing was I her son, not for nothing had I listened to countless interrogations and cross-examinations conducted by Stella Di Palermo, Mr. District Attorney, in various kitchens I had known.

“Is Uncle Matt okay?”

“Yes, he’s fine.”

“Then what is it, Mom?”

“Your aunt wanted to talk to me,” my mother said, and sighed.

“What about?”

“Nothing.”

“Mom, she didn’t come all the way from Massapequa to talk about nothing. Now what the hell is it?”

She hesitated for a long time. Static crackled on the telephone wires. Then she sighed again, and said, “It’s Luke.”

“What about Luke?”

“He drinks,” she said, and fell silent again. “Do you know what I mean? He’s a drunk,” she said. “My brother.”

I waited. I could hear the electric clock humming on my desk. My hand inside the plaster cast felt suddenly confined.

“I can’t understand it,” my mother said. “I just can’t understand it, Ike. We used to have such fun together, Luke and me. We used to go to the movies together every week, oh, we saw everything, all the big stars, all the pictures, we had such fun. Just Luke and me. My father wouldn’t let Dom go till he was older, and Cristie was too tiny, it was just Luke and me, he was so much fun, he was such a good brother. He used to have this very high, silly laugh, Dee. When Charlie Chaplin or Fatty Arbuckle came on, Luke used to bust out laughing, oh, what a laugh he had, and all the kids began laughing the minute they heard him, they knew it was him, they recognized that laugh of his. He was funnier than the movie, I swear to God, it makes me want to laugh just thinking of those Saturdays when we... when we...”

My mother sighed, and fell silent. I waited.

“I couldn’t believe Cristie,” she said at last. “When she told me, I just couldn’t believe it. Luke? I said. Are you talking about Luke? Are you telling me Luke is a drunk? Yes, she said, yes, Stella. But, Cristie, I said, are you sure this isn’t something like... like once at a party or... or with the boys or...”

She stopped talking. For a moment, I thought the connection had been broken. Then she said, “Always be a good boy, Ike. Luke was always a good boy, I can’t understand it. Cristie told me he’s so drunk sometimes he can’t even stand up at the pressing machine. Do you know the big iron Grandpa has, the one he uses for hand pressing? Luke left it on a pair of pants the other day and burned a hole in the leg and almost started a fire in the shop. I don’t know what to do. Grandpa will kill him if he finds out”

“No,” I said, “he won’t kill him.”

“You don’t know Grandpa,” she said.

“I know him,” I said.

“Oh, what are we going to do?” she said. “What are we going to do?”

I did not know what to tell her. Our plane was leaving for Rome early the next morning. I finally suggested that she contact my Uncle Dominick, and asked her to please write me, she had the itinerary.

On our third night in Rome, Rebecca and I looked up an Italian saxophone player with whom I’d been corresponding over the years. He was playing in a nightclub on the Via Emilia. He recognized me the moment I came through the door, even though we’d never met. He introduced me to his sidemen and they played a set in my honor, starting it with “The Man I Love.” They were not very good jazz musicians. I was discovering that hardly anyone in Italy played good jazz. But they were overwhelmed by my presence, and they tried hard. At the end of the set, they came to our table. One of them had a cousin in Chicago, and wanted to know all about Chicago. I had played there frequently, of course, but Rebecca had never been to Chicago. She became restless as we chatted in Italian, a language she found impossible to grasp, though it was simpler than the French she’d studied at Barnard.

They began asking me questions about famous American jazzmen, and since I’d played with many of them, including some of the old-timers, I was able to relate inside anecdotes, which they listened to intently. They were cautious about my blindness until I told them a story about Charlie Mingus and Lennie Tristano, who is a blind piano player, and a damn good one. Mingus and Tristano had got into an argument one night, and Mingus had said, “If you don’t shut up, Lennie, I’m going to turn out the lights and beat hell out of you.” The Italian musicians hesitated a moment in puzzlement. It was the saxophone player who burst into laughter, and then explained the anecdote to the others — “Tristano è un cieco, eh? Dunque, quando Mingus...” They, too, began laughing. Rebecca was bored. She had heard all my stories a hundred times before, and was getting a headache from all the Italian babbling. She excused herself at 2 A.M. and took a taxi back to the Hassler. When I came into the room at four, she was still awake.

“Do you really want to go to Saint Peter’s tomorrow?” she asked. “Frankly, I don’t care if I ever see another church as long as I live.”

“What would you like to do instead?”

“You’re the big wop,” she said. “You tell me.”

I hired a chauffeured car to take us to Villa d’Este the next day. Rebecca told me that the hundreds of fountains there only made her want to pee, and she spent half the day searching for ladies’ rooms. She could not get the word gabinetto straight. I told her to think of “cabinet.” She answered that a cabinet was in her mind something very far removed from a toilet. “Then ask for the pissoir,” I said. “Everybody knows what a pissoir is.”

“Don’t be so smart,” she said. “If I can’t understand the language, I can’t understand it.”

“You should have gone to Berlitz. You had plenty of time to go to Berlitz.”

“What were you doing while I planned this trip?” she asked. “Besides getting your hand broken?”

“I was sitting around thinking how nice it would be to get away alone with you.”

That night, we made love together. In the shuttered room overlooking the Spanish Steps, the sounds of cats and taxi drivers filtering up from the Piazza Trinità dei Monti below, we copulated on the oversized bed, and when I asked, “Did you come?” Rebecca testily replied, “Of course I came! Will you please shut up?”

We left Rome in a rented Fiat. Rebecca, of course, did the driving. She found it exhilarating at first, but long before we reached Florence, she was complaining that we should have spent the extra money for a chauffeur-driven automobile, which we could most certainly have afforded. I explained to her that having a chauffeur along would be identical to sharing the trip with a stranger. She made no comment. In Florence, there was a letter from my mother. She told us that Dominick had spoken to Luke about going to Bellevue for a voluntary drying out, but Luke had refused. That evening we had dinner in a hotel outside the city. We ate outdoors on a terrace above the Arno.

“Do you remember the night we met? I asked her. “In that Staten Island toilet? You were with someone named Martin....”

“Marvin,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Yes, I remember,” she said.

We stayed at the Excelsior Palace in Venice, at the beach, but it was still too chilly to swim. Rebecca bought little glass animals to take home to the children. I learned that melanzana was the proper way to say “eggplant” in Italian, and not muligniana, the Neapolitan pronunciation I had learned as a boy in Harlem. We bought a ring for Rebecca. We visited the lace factory. We sat in San Marco’s and listened to outdoor concerts. We drank a lot. On a gondola ride, we heard rats splashing into the canal.

In Stresa, there was another letter from my mother. Rebecca recognized the handwriting at once, impatiently said, “Your mother again,” and tore open the flap. I waited anxiously while she unfolded the letter. My grandfather had found out about Luke, as of course had been inevitable. He had personally taken him to two meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous, and Luke seemed to be responding well, intent on curing himself, grateful for all the familial attention that was being lavished upon him. “I hope he gets better,” my mother wrote. “I love him so.”

“I wish she’d stop about Luke already,” Rebecca said. “There isn’t a word here about how the kids are.” To the desk clerk she said, “Is that all the mail?”

“Sì signora, è tutto,” he answered.

“I told my mother to make sure they wrote,” Rebecca said to me. “They have the itinerary, we should have at least got a card by now.” Her voice turned away. “The five bags there,” she said. “The green ones. No, the green ones.”

“Signora?”

“Le cinque valigie verdi,” I said.

“Grazie, signore,” the bellhop answered.

In the evening dusk, we sat sipping cocktails outdoors as Rebecca outlined the next day’s journey. A road map was spread on the table before her, I could hear it crackling as she nervously traced out the route. She was fearful of driving through the Alps and the Brig Pass. A man’s voice apologetically intruded. He said he couldn’t help overhearing our conversation, and offered the advice that we could put the car on a train at Domodossola, if we liked, and then take it off again at Brig, though actually at this time of year, mountain driving wasn’t all that bad. Rebecca invited him and his wife to join us. His wife said very little at first, she smelled of bath oil, and I envisioned her as small and dark. The man was a stockbroker. Rebecca immediately informed him that I was a jazz pianist, and though he had already heard my name in introduction, he asked again what it was, and I said, “Dwight Jamison,” and he was silent for a moment, and then said, “You’re kidding! Honey, this is Dwight Jamison! Jesus, I have all your records going back to the original quintet! Jesus, this is a real honor! Dwight Jamison! Jesus!” Beside him, his wife quietly said, “I love your records, too.”

In the evening after dinner, we strolled beside the lake together, the man walking up ahead with Rebecca, the wife by my side. She told me she was unhappily married. She told me she had a lover. She told me she missed him terribly, and wished he were here with her, instead of her stockbroker husband.

“Are you and Rebecca happy?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said, “we’re very happy.”

“I can tell,” she whispered, and then sighed.

The bed in our room was a huge letto matrimoniale. I awakened in the middle of a nightmare, groping for Rebecca. I was shouting, “You can give it right back to the Indians!”

“Give what back?” she asked sleepily.

“Italy,” I said.

On the drive through the Alps, Rebecca kept cursing the stockbroker for telling her there was nothing to worry about this time of year. She also confided that he’d put his hand on her ass while we were walking the town the night before.

“What did you do?” I asked.

“What do you care what I did? You probably had your hand on Miss Bryn Mawr’s ass.”

“No, Rebecca, I didn’t.”

“Sure,” Rebecca said.

In Interlaken, we ate trout caught fresh from the river running beside the hotel, and Rebecca described to me the distant shrouded beauty of the Jungfrau. In Lausanne, there were hastily written notes from the boys, enclosed in a letter from Sophie. Rebecca read them to me as we sat on the terrace at breakfast in the morning sun, and flies buzzed around the jam pots. It was almost the end of May, the breeze was balmy. In the distance I could hear the delighted cries of children pedaling boats on the lake, and suddenly I missed my sons terribly.

“They seem to be fine,” Rebecca said.

“What?”

“The children.”

“Yes,” I said.

The last letter from my mother was waiting for us at the Meurice in Paris. As we stood by the desk, Rebecca read it aloud to me. My mother informed us that Luke had disappeared. My grandfather had hired private detectives, and Uncle Matt had asked all his friends to be on the lookout. “I hope we can find him,” she wrote. “I worry about him, Iggie.” This was the first time she’d called me Iggie in years.

That afternoon, when Rebecca went to have her hair done, I took a taxi into Pigalle and wandered the streets alone, and at last stopped at a small bar, and ordered a double Scotch on the rocks, and sat sipping at it. The girl who took the stool beside me reeked of perfume reminiscent of what Poots had been wearing the night I first sat in with a band and was told to chop off my left hand. “Vous désirez, monsieur?” she asked, and immediately rested her hand on my knee. We chatted for a while, my Santa Lucia French was clumsy, she switched in desperation to English as we settled upon a price.

At the hotel she led me to, she whispered discreetly that the concierge expected a pourboire, and I fumbled in my wallet for the unfamiliar bills, and was not quite certain how much I handed her. In America, I carried only tens, and I took my change in singles, and kept the smaller bills in a separate section of my wallet. There were days when I came home with as much as fifty dollars in singles. Now I blindly paid the concierge, and then the girl, and she led me to a bidet in one corner of the room, where she washed first me and then herself. The bed was narrow and set against the wall. I touched the wall with the spread fingers of my right hand, and realized there was a mirror fastened to it beside the bed. I told the girl I wanted only soixante-neuf. She worked long and hard, she was a thorough professional, but at last she straddled me and brought me to reluctant climax inside her. I was vaguely dissatisfied when she left me on the street outside the hotel. I lifted the lid of my Braille watch. It was still early. Rebecca would be busy at the hairdresser for at least another hour.

I did not know what I wanted.

I wandered through Pigalle again. A breathless voice implored me from a doorway, and I hesitated and then approached. There was the aroma of perfume, the rustle of silk, the click of high heels as the girl shifted her weight. We bargained for several moments until I realized with a shock that I was talking to a man in drag. I backed away in horror. “Mais il y a des filles aussi,” he explained, but I hurried to the curb, and held my cane aloft, and hoped a taxi would stop for me.

We arrived home during the second week in June. The children scrambled out of the house and rushed into our open arms. I held little David close, I stroked his hair.

“Did you have a good time, Daddy?” he asked.

“Yes, we had a marvelous time,” I told him.

My grandfather called that night. He welcomed me home and then told me he had finally heard some word about Luke. According to the detectives, Luke was living in a hotel on the Bowery. I asked my grandfather if he wanted me to go down there, but he assured me this wasn’t necessary.

The next day, he went down alone to talk to Luke, and tried to persude him to come home again.

Luke told him to go to hell.

Rebecca is shrieking, shrieking. I rush out of the studio, I trip on the rough stone steps leading up past the pool to the house, cross the patio, find her screaming still. “What is it?” I ask. “For God’s sake, what is it?”

“Andrew,” she says.

He is moaning near the pile of logs stacked alongside the storage shed. I search his face with my hands. There is an open wound over his left eye. I feel his blood hot and sticky on my fingers. Hysterically, Rebecca tells me he’d been trying to split the logs with an ax when a huge splinter hit him in the face. She goes suddenly limp in my arms and though I try to support her, her dead weight collapses her to the ground. My son is crying in pain now. I rush into the kitchen. Harriet dials the hospital for me, and it is she who drives Andrew and me to Stamford. He is bleeding profusely as she leads us into the emergency room. The doctor takes five stitches over Andrew’s left eye, and bandages it, and asks me if I carry Blue Cross. I can only think what might have happened if this had been Harriet’s day off.

My thirty-seventh birthday fell on a Tuesday. Honest Abe personally went to Harlem to pick up my grandparents, shrugging aside the very idea that I should send a Carey limousine for them. “What’s the matter with an Oldsmobile? An Oldsmobile is no good? An Oldsmobile, if you want to know, is a better car than a Cadillac.”

Abe was performing a familial duty. In October of 1963, we were one big happy family, you see. On Passover that year, my grandfather had read the four questions in the Seder ceremony to my youngest son, David, and if that had not been a fine demonstration of the melting-pot theory, then I have never understood the theory at all. (I sometimes think I never have.) From the page printed in English, my grandfather had read (quite dramatically, in fact), “Why issa this night of a Passove differ from all the odder nights of a year?”

And David, reading from the Hebrew side of the page, had answered, “She-b’chol ha-lay-los o-noo och-leen cho-maytz u ma-tzoh, ha-lai-loh ha-zeh ku-lo ma-tzoh,” and so on.

Even Honest Abe laughed.

The quintet was between engagements on my birthday. That is not a euphemism. My career did not take its nose dive till 1965, and I owe its longevity to the boys in Detroit. News of my “accident” had made modest headlines in most of the country’s newspapers, and I’m sure the public’s curiosity (“Is his hand all gnarled, or what?”) accounted for the increased attendance wherever we played, and extended a career that should have ended in 1962, just as Biff had prophesied. Five, six years, he had said. Seven the most. By 1962, the rock shlocks were already making inroads. By 1964, when the Beatles made it all respectable with their film A Hard Day’s Night, jazz musicians, with a few rare exceptions, had all but had it. Listen, who can kick? I got ten years out of it. Remind me to send the boys in Detroit a bunch of roses. Or a case of crabs.

We sat around the rosewood dining room table in the house on top of the hill. My grandfather, as befitted a patriarch, sat at the head of the table, though he knew, as I knew, that he was no longer the patriarch; his own family was scattered to the four winds, Dominick in Brooklyn, Cristie in Massapequa, my mother on the Grand Concourse, and Luke only Christ knew where. With neither pomp nor ceremony, my grandfather had passed the scepter on to me, ignoring those next in the line of succession. His son-in-law, Jimmy, was affable but ineffectual. His eldest daughter Stella, was formidable (especially during inquisitions) but nonetheless a woman; he was Italian, you know, though by 1963 he had been a citizen of these United States for eighteen years. I was now the actual if not the titular head of the family, and though my grandfather occupied that chair at the head of the table, not a soul sitting around it doubted that we were here to honor the reigning potentate. Rotating clockwise from where my grandfather sat with his back to the draped sliding Thermopane doors, my kinsmen, my compaesani, my landsleite, and my devoted followers were:

1. Davina Baumgarten Lewis, blond and beautiful, thirty-one years old, who was wearing (according to the testimony of Reliable Rebecca, her doting sister) “a green jersey dress slit to her navel.”

2. My mother, the indomitable Stella.

3. My oldest son, Andrew, who at the age of fourteen had taken to announcing each of his intentions to fart or belch. “I have to fart,” he would say, and invariably would do so.

4. My mother-in-law, Sophie, who while babysitting with the children during the long trip Rebecca and I took to Europe in the spring of 1962 caught Michael innocently examining his penis and told him about a woman named Sheine, who used to live on the lower East Side, and whom everyone called the Crooked Lady. “Sheine used to abuse her genitals,” Sophie told him. When we got back in June, Michael asked me what his “generous” was.

5. The aforementioned Michael, who, at the age of twelve, was seeing a psychoanalyst in nearby Greenwich three times a week. Rebecca refused to believe that her mother’s story about Sheine the Crooked, Lady had only aggravated Michael’s problem. “Your mother is a cunt,” I told Rebecca.

6. Me, the thirty-seven-year-old birthday boy, my staunchest admirer, sitting in sartorial splendor (Rebecca supervised the tailoring of all my clothes) at the end of the table opposite my grandfather, shades covering my dead baby blues.

7. My grandmother, Tess, on my left. She was eighty years old, and complained constantly of arthritic pains. She also complained about there being thirteen people at the table; thirteen, she said, was a hoodoo jinx of a number. She walked with a cane these days. Welcome to the club, Grandma.

8. My youngest son, David, ten years old. David was the star pitcher of the town’s Little League baseball team. When I told him my brother Tony had been a very good ballplayer, he said, “Is he the one got killed in Korea, Daddy?” Wrong war, son. Close, but no cigar.

9. Seth Lewis, Davina’s husband, the noted certified public accountant, the least loyal of all my subjects, though certainly the most vociferous. He had predictably complained about the long drive up from Central Park West, where he and the fair Davina now lived, still childless. “That Merritt Parkway is a bitch,” he said, the moment he stepped into the house. And belatedly, “Happy birthday, Isadore.” He called me Isadore as a joke.

10. My father-in-law, Honest Abe, who, though never devoutly Orthodox or Reform, had come a long way toward becoming reformed — in his fashion.

11. Rebecca Baumgarten Di Palermo Jamison, my bride of fifteen summers. Our anniversary would fall on a Tuesday this year, and we had already decided to take a long weekend away together, perhaps go back to Mount Pocono, where we’d spent our honeymoon — provided I was not playing in Nome, Alaska, or Kalamazoo, Michigan. She was wearing a green dress, too. I knew because when she took it from the closet she asked if she should wear the green. “The wearin’ of the green will be fine, m’dear,” I’d said in what I thought was a perfect Irish brogue. Rebecca had not laughed. She had not laughed when Davina came through the door wearing green, either. Rebecca did not laugh much lately. Had she seen the pictures, after all? Or were they only in her head — as they were in mine?

12. My father, Jimmy Di Palermo, who now stood up and banged on his glass. I knew it was my father, and I knew what was coming.

13. Francesco Luigi Di Lorenzo, my grandfather.

Three more than a minyan.

An all-American minyan, at that.

My father cleared his throat. “I have a little poem,” he said.

“He always has a little poem,” my mother said, and sighed.

“In honor of Ike’s birthday,” he said, unfazed.

“Read it fast, Pop,” Rebecca said. “The roast is almost done.”

“I like Jimmy’s poems,” Sophie said. “You write good poems, Jimmy.”

“You do, Jimmy,” Abe said. “Your poems are very interesting.”

“What has he got?” my grandmother asked. In addition to the arthritis, she was going deaf in one ear. I put my hand gently on her arm and said into her good ear, “A poem, Grandma. He’s going to read us a poem.”

“Oh, good,” she said, almost childishly.

My father’s poems were always acrostics, the first letter of each word on every line combining vertically to spell out a message or a name. He tapped his glass for silence again, and then began reading:

“Happy birthday, son,” he said, and handed me the shirt cardboard upon which he had hand-lettered the poem. I could not see the ornate lettering, but I knew he had probably worked on it for weeks.

“Thank you, Pop,” I said.

“That was a good one, Jimmy,” Abe said. “I think it was one of your best.”

“I don’t know what you mean by ‘relatives alike,’ ” my mother said. “What’s a family, if not relatives?”

“I had to make it rhyme, Stella,” my father said.

“Yeah, but that’s stupid,” my mother said. “Relatives are the family. Isn’t that right, Seth?”

“Well, he had to make it rhyme,” Seth said.

“Pop, do you want to help me carve the roast?” Rebecca asked, rescuing my father.

“He tries to make it rhyme sometimes,” my mother said, “and he don’t make any sense.”

“The artwork is so beautiful, though,” Sophie said.

“Well, he used to design crochet beading, don’t forget,” my mother said.

“Do you need any help in the kitchen?” Davina asked.

“Wouldn’t you know the shvartzeh would get sick on Ike’s birthday?” Abe said.

“No, we’re fine here,” Rebecca called.

“Grandpa, would you open the wine?” I said.

“What?” my grandfather said, and I suddenly realized he had been silent for quite a long time.

“Open the wine, Papa,” my mother said.

After dinner, they brought in the cake, turning out the lights first, even though the effect was lost on me. I beamed embarrassed approval while they sang to me, and then Rebecca put the cake on the table, and moved my hand toward the rim of the plate, helping me to locate it. I had already felt the warmth of the burning candles, and knew exactly where it was.

“Make a wish,” Davina said.

“I already have.”

My fingertips touching the edge of the plate, I positioned myself over the cake and let out my breath.

“A little to the right,” Rebecca prompted, and they all burst into applause when I blew out the candles.

“What did you wish, Daddy?” Michael asked.

“That’s a secret,” I said.

“Tell us,” Davina said.

“He’s not allowed to,” little David said. “Otherwise it won’t come true. Isn’t that right, Daddy?”

“That’s right, son.”

“I have to fart,” Andrew said.

“Andrew!” my mother said sharply, and burst into laughter.

I felt arms encircling me from behind. A kiss touched my cheek. I thought at first it was Rebecca. “Happy birthday, Ike,” Davina whispered. “What did you wish?”

“Can’t tell,” I said.

I had wished we could go again to Pass-A-Grille, and walk again in Rebecca’s magic garden, and sit again in sunshine on a white sand beach while she read Peter Pan aloud to the children.

David is throwing a rubber ball against the wall of the garage. I sit in sunshine on the patio, and listen to the steady rhythm of the ball thumping against the wooden doors. His brothers are away, there is no one to play with him. So I listen to the solitary game, and I sit in sunshine, and wish for all the world that I could walk out there to him, walk unerringly to where he is monotonously throwing the ball and catching it, throwing it and catching it, and say to him, “Hi, son, want to catch with me?”

I listen to the ball.

The record sales began plummeting sometime in 1965. The drop was sudden and swift, no gradual tapering, no slide from popularity to relative obscurity in a slow descending curve. I was at the time demanding (and getting) $7,500 a week for myself and the quintet, and taking home, from personal appearances alone, somewhere between $3,500 and $4,000 a week for myself, fifty-two weeks a year (if I felt like playing that often). In addition, there were television appearances, and royalties from records and my How to Play Jamison Jazz books (Volumes I through IV) and from sheet music annotating my unique improvisations, and there were European tours, and a guest shot in at least one motion picture — there was, in short, the whole shmeer. I had hit the American jackpot, than which there is none greater. Even after paying four sidemen, and a driver for the band bus, and a band boy to help us load and unload the instruments, and a personal valet, and my manager, Mark Aronowitz, and a publicity agent, and an advance man, there was more than enough loot left to keep Rebecca and me living in the style to which we had become accustomed. (I was to dread the sound of those words every time they came up during the divorce negotiations.) We had the big house in Talmadge, with a housekeeper, a gardener, and a chauffeur, a swimming pool and tennis courts (Rebecca played, and loved the game), and we also had a house in the Virgin Islands, which we visited on those rare winter weekends when I was not out there earning the big buck, and an eight-room pied-à-terre in the city — we had it made, friends. I was earning money by the fistful, and I was investing it wisely, and my investments made more money, and it seemed to Rebecca and to me (and probably to my grandfather, too) that I was indeed digging out gold from the streets, and the vein of ore would never be depleted, I would keep on working with my pick and shovel forever, the supply was inexhaustible.

And then in 1965, the new album came out (I’ve blocked out the title) in the spring sometime, I’m sure it was the spring (I’ve blocked out the month), and it simply refused to move despite a lot of newspaper advertising and radio ballyhoo from Victor. In the next two months, I dropped from number two to number eight in the polls, a nose dive that seemed absolutely inconceivable to me. A month after that, a gig in Miami was abruptly canceled, and a month after that Mark started talking about playing a series of one-night stands across the country — “Get a new audience for yourself,” he said.

“What’s the matter with my old audience?” I asked.

“If you’re talking about your hard-core audience, you’ll always have that, Ike. But the big bread comes from a floater audience, and jazz lost some of those people to folk, and now it’s losing the rest of them to rock. It’s your own fault.”

“What are you talking about? My fault?”

“Not your fault personally. I’m talking about jazz musicians. You guys have become so intellectual, nobody knows what you’re doing anymore. These rock groups get up there and start playing and there’s a gut appeal...”

“Mark,” I said, “you give me any rock musician, and I’ll put him up against his jazz counterpart, and he’ll be wasted in ten seconds flat.”

“The jazz musician?”

“The rock musician! These clowns think they’re making music if they can play two or three chords in sequence. They learn the I, and IV, and the V, and they teach them to another kid down the street, and turn up the amps, and that’s it, that’s supposed to be music. Have you heard some of these guitar players driving a single chord into the ground, playing the same boring lick over and over again? I’ll put a guitar player like Joe Pass up against any one of them, and he’ll kill them in a minute.”

“Ike, what can I tell you?” Mark said. “Am I the arbiter of taste?”

“No, you’re my manager,” I said. “And my manager is supposed to get gigs for me.”

“All I’m trying to say is that you need a new audience, Ike. Maybe you ought to add a folk singer to the quintet. Or fuse jazz with rock, come up with something. . ..”

“I’m not a gimmick musician, Mark.”

“Who said you were...”

“What are you going to suggest next? That I do a light show next time I play?”

“That wouldn’t be such a bad idea,” Mark said.

“I’d rather retire gracefully than . ..”

“Oh, bullshit,” Mark said.

“. . . than corrupt the kind of music I’ve been playing for the past ten years.”

“Okay, so go play it,” Mark said. “Play it in your studio. Get your mother up there to listen to you. I’m trying to tell you it’s impossible to get back an audience that’s drifted away. You’ve either got to get a completely new audience or...”

“Or what?”

“There are other things. Maybe I can get you some work scoring a movie.”

“I’m blind, Mark.”

“So what? You’ll listen to the actors talking, and some stooge’ll describe the action to you.”

“I don’t want to score a movie. I want to play piano.”

“Well, what can I tell you?” Mark said.

I felt nothing but hostility and contempt for rock music and the people who were making it. It seemed to me that most of the rock musicians were barely competent instrumentalists who got together in groups only so they could combine and organize their ineptitude to create a sound which, highly amplified, obfuscated their lack of talent. In 1964, when the intellectuals embraced the Beatles, I analyzed “A Hard Day’s Night” (the tune, not the movie) in an attempt to discover why these four musicians who could not play their way out of a paper bag had suddenly captured the public’s imagination. It was a mix-olydian tune with a double tonic, and mildly interesting — certainly more interesting than much of what the other rock musicians were playing. But it seemed to me that even the Beatles were reducing a highly skilled form to something completely pedestrian.

And besides, they were putting me out of work, they were breaking my rice bowl.

Michael has run afoul of a bully in his class, a boy who constantly taunts him about seeing a shrink, and makes fun of his stutter, which is one of the reasons the poor kid makes the damn trip to Greenwich three times a week. (The analyst tells me the stutter is only a symptom; the real trouble is that Michael feels overpowered by his “famous” father, a not uncommon phenomenon. When I ask him why my other sons don’t stutter, he says, “They may be stuttering inside.”) In desperation, Michael challenges the boy to a supervised fistfight in the gymnasium. The boy accepts immediately; he is twice Michael’s size and certain he can demolish him. That night at dinner, Michael asks me how to fight. He has never had a fist-fight in his life.

I do not know how to advise him.

It is his older brother Andrew who tells him to make sure he gets in the first shot, just hit the other» guy right off and keep hitting him before he can catch his breath. In the playroom, I hear them boxing. Andrew offering encouragement as Michael punches at his open palms. I am afraid for my son, but I cannot help him, I do not know how to help him. The next day, when the other boy asks him if he’s sure he wants to go through with this, Michael punches him squarely and unexpectedly in the mouth, just as Andrew had advised, and keeps punching him across the length of the gym floor until the other boy begs him to stop. He describes the fight to us that night. “He was bleeding from the mouth and from the n-nose,” he says excitedly, and then turns to Andrew and says, “Thanks, Andy.”

I am losing them.

When they were infants, I held them in my arms at night, each and separately, and fed them their bottles and learned to change their diapers, though I was fearful at first of the safety pins. I bent over their cribs, and sniffed the sweet aroma of their baby smells, and powdered their bottoms, and listened to them giggling in wonder or surprise at each new discovery they made, and told them each and separately, over and over again, “I love you.”

I love them still.

But they are becoming men too soon.

At least once a month, and sometimes twice, Immigrant America came into our Wasp America living room in Talmadge. There was always good reason for these get-togethers. My mother’s birthday was October first, and mine was the fifteenth. Honest Abe’s birthday was in November. December meant Christmas. Sophie’s birthday was in January, Michael celebrated his in February. March was sometimes Passover and Easter both. Rebecca had been born in April and so had David (we had planned to name him April, if he’d been a girl). Mother’s Day came in May, and Father’s Day in June, and July 7 was my grandfather’s birthday, and August was Davina’s (we never celebrated Sett’s, fuck him), and Andrew had been born in September, and on my block that added up to a full year of family reunions, such as they were.

Rebecca despised them.

STELLA: He doesn’t have a xylophone in the band.

JIMMY: I couldn’t think of a word starting with X, Stella.

STELLA: Still, it don’t make sense if that isn’t what he has in his band, Ike, do you remember Goomah Katie in Newark, New Jersey? Her grandson got appointed principal of a high school.

SETH: You should get yourself a new tax lawyer, Ike. There are new gimmicks coming up every day, of the week, and that kahker you’ve got working for you is straight out of Charles Dickens. You know those jazz books you wrote? Did you know you can donate the manuscripts to a university library and get a big deduction?

DAVINA: Let me tell you what happened Friday. I got on the subway at Fifty-ninth and Lex, and this little Puerto Rican started, well, feeling me up, and I. . .

SOPHIE: You should have slapped his face for him!

DAVINA: No, what I did was reach behind me and take his hand in mine. I held it all the way downtown.

ABE: He probably thought you were falling in love with him, darling.

DAVINA: At least it stopped him.

JIMMY: Anyone want to play cards? Abe? Some poker?

SOPHIE: It’s chilly in here. Do you find it chilly in here?

ABE: Well, frankly, Ike, I don’t know what Becky’s so upset about. I figured with Sophie dead, may she rest in peace, if anything should happen to me...

ME: I understand that, Pop. But Davina says you drew up a new will, is that right?

ABE: That’s right.

ME: And you’ve left everything to her.

ABE: Well, yes. What’s the matter with that? Seth isn’t a millionaire, you know. I figure you’ve taken good care of Becky, chas vesholem anything should happen to you. And I know you’ve got trust funds set up for the kids...

ME: Pop, that isn’t the point.

ABE: Then what’s the point? I think I’m missing the point.

ME: The point is you’re hurting Rebecca.

ABE: You’re making this up.

ME: Why would I make it up?

ABE: How do I know? Maybe you want the money.

ME: Pop, you can shove the money up your ass, for all I care. I’m talking about the fact that you have two daughters, and you’re hurting one of them by leaving everything you’ve got to the other one, to Davina.

ABE: Davina should have kept her mouth shut. I told her in private, and now she’s causing trouble.

ME: Pop, you’re the one causing trouble. Why don’t you change the will?

ABE: If it means that much to Becky, I’ll change it already. I don’t know why it should mean so much to her. She’s got plenty. You got plenty, the two of you together.

ME: Shall I tell her you’ll change it?

ABE: It’s not even that much money. What do you think it is, a fortune? It’s a couple of thousand dollars, that’s all.

ME: Shall I tell her?

ABE: Tell her, tell her.

ME: When will you change it?

ABE: I’ll get around to it.

JIMMY: Seth? Some cards? A little pinochle?

STELLA: Never you mind! This is Mother’s Day. The men are supposed to do the dishes. Am I right, Rebecca?

DAVINA: Where’s Harriet today? Did you give her the day off?

STELLA: Certainly. Harriet’s a mother, too, right, Rebecca? We’re all entitled to the day off.

SETH: Davina’s not a mother. Let her do the dishes. Like Jimmy said in the poem.

JIMMY: Well, what’s new, Ike? Anything new? Any new records or anything?

GRANDPA: Ike, play something for us. Come on, give us a little tune on the piano. You never play for just the family no more.

ME: Grandpa?

GRANDPA: Sì, Ignazio?

ME: Are you all right?

GRANDPA: Sì.

ME: Grandpa?

GRANDPA: That was nice of your father. To mention Tessie. In the poem.

SETH: What is it? Is the old man crying?

DAVINA: Rebecca, have you got a minute?

REBECCA: Sure. What’s the matter?

DAVINA: Come upstairs, okay?

JIMMY: Seth? Some cards? Stella, I put a new deck of cards in your purse.

STELLA: He’s crippled, your father. Get them yourself!

REBECCA: What is it?

DAVINA: Why didn’t you invite Daddy here today?

REBECCA: I did invite him.

DAVINA: But you told him not to bring Donna.

REBECCA: I told him nothing of the sort.

DAVINA: Then what did he do, invent it? You know, Rebecca, for someone who’s intermarried herself...

REBECCA: I have nothing against Donna.

DAVINA: Then why can’t he bring her here?

REBECCA: I didn’t say he couldn’t bring her here.

DAVINA: He goes everywhere with her, you know. It’s not as if it’s a great big secret.

REBECCA: No, it’s certainly not a secret. Mama’s dead a little more than a year, and he moves in with a shvartzeh file clerk who...

DAVINA: She’s very good for him.

REBECCA: She’s twenty-four years old!

DAVINA: So what? Don’t be such a prude, Rebecca. You want to know something? I think it was going on even when Mama was alive, what do you think of that?

REBECCA: I believe it.

DAVINA: So?

REBECCA: So let him do whatever the fuck he wants, but he’s not bringing her to this house. Not yet, he isn’t.

DAVINA: Then when?

REBECCA: How does eight years sound?

ABE: Donna, you want some more turkey? Rebecca, is there more turkey in the kitchen?

REBECCA: Harriet? Would you bring in the turkey platter, please?

DONNA: The stuffing is delicious, Rebecca.

REBECCA: Thank you. Harriet made it. Harriet!

HARRIET: Comin’, comin’.

STELLA: Why does Ike have to leave the table right in the middle of dinner?

REBECCA: It’s an important call.

STELLA: What kind of call is so important he has to leave the table on Christmas Day in the middle of dinner?

REBECCA: It’s something about scoring a movie.

JIMMY: Ike’s going to be in another movie?

REBECCA: No, he’s going to score it. Write the music for it.

JIMMY: Yeah? Maybe he can get a part for me in it.

HARRIET: Who wants the turkey, ma’am?

REBECCA: Donna would like some, please.

HARRIET: You the one, miss?

DONNA: Yes, please.

JIMMY: I could do my Charlie Chaplin imitation.

REBECCA: Well, Pop, all he’s doing is writing the music for it.

JIMMY: Maybe he could put one of my poems to music.

STELLA: You and your poems.

ABE: He writes good poems. Didn’t you think that was a good poem, Donna?

DONNA: Yes, it was very good.

STELLA: Thank God he didn’t use “xylophone” again. That’s ’cause I told him about it that time. He’s got some memory, this one.

JIMMY: She takes credit for everything I do.

STELLA: Well, didn’t I tell you?

ABE: Did you see that Christmas card from Harry James, Donna? Ike knows Harry James.

DONNA: There’s one there from Count Basie, too.

JIMMY: Those bands are always repeating themselves. Ike never repeats himself. That’s what I like about his band.

STELLA: What bands repeat themselves? What are you talking about?

JIMMY: Like Count Basie’s.

STELLA: Sure, only your bands were good.

JIMMY: Did I say anything about my bands? I said Ike’s band was good.

DONNA: I love “The Man I Love.”

JIMMY: That was his best record. It was the first one, and it was the best one. I don’t care what anybody says.

HARRIET: Ma’am, if the young lady’s through, I’d like to start clearin’.

It amazes me now that everything remained so predictably constant in our Immigrant America. Aside from statistics — Sophie’s death, Tolerant Abe’s shvartzeh, this or that latest event in my all but invisible career — the voices, the cadences, the tonalities were precisely those I had heard in Harlem and Rebecca had heard on the lower East Side during all the days of our separate childhoods. When Rebecca repeated the conversation she’d had in the bedroom with Davina, I could have sworn I was listening to a similar conversation my grandfather once had with Grandma Tess, who’d refused to allow Aunt Bianca to bring her butcher boyfriend into the house. And in contrast to those seemingly endless Sundays we spent with the family, the times we spent with close friends and acquaintances were exhilarating. They were Wasp America — even though most of them were the grandchildren of immigrants or slaves. I don’t know when Wasp stopped meaning White Anglo-Saxon Protestant. I feel certain that in the new American lexicon, the acronym should more properly read Wealthy And Successful Professional. A Protestant ditchdigger is an Immigrant American, and Paul Newman is a Wasp American, and Camelot (when it existed) was divided between the folk who lived up there in the uppermost chambers of the castle and the folk who squatted in the castle keep below. Forget the fact that John F. Kennedy was the grandson of Irish immigrants, forget that he was a Catholic. Even my mother (who’s American, don’t forget) knows he was a Wasp. She knows it because she is an Immigrant American, whatever else she may tell herself.

In July of 1970, like all men who suddenly find themselves to be not only forty, but almost four years past it already, I began questioning everything — my success, my marriage, my family, and America. I had a lot of time to do a lot of soul-searching, navel-contemplating, and nitty-gritty investigation. This is what I decided. I decided everything was hunky-dory.

My success had lasted longer than anyone might have reasonably expected. I had enjoyed ten long years of popularity, and people still knew my name wherever I went; in fact, the house band would invariably break into the Dwight Jamison version of “The Man I Love” whenever I walked into a club. I’d already scored one movie, and Mark was certain he could get me other movie gigs. Every now and then he’d line up a weekend in a posh spot on the Coast or in Miami, and that was enough to keep my hand in. Alone in my studio, I would sometimes spend long hours listening to my jazz collection, and in truth I rather enjoyed the serenity of what could only be called semiretirement.

As for my marriage, I considered it quite carefully, and decided it was no worse and perhaps a lot better than most of the marriages around us. I no longer had the freedom I’d become accustomed to on the road, but I discovered there were a great many... well. . . “restless” women in the town of Talmadge, Connecticut, and that they were eager to exorcise their demons in various motels and country inns to which they were kind enough to drive me in their station wagons. I lied relentlessly and recklessly to Rebecca. Our chauffeur would drop me off at a record shop in Stamford, and I’d tell him I wouldn’t be needing him till four o’clock, to pick me up in front of Bloomingdale’s at that time, and then the transfer to this or that station wagon would take place, one or another willing matron transporting me first vehicularly and later physically. They all had different station wagons and different in-bed specialties, the most bizarre of which perhaps was... but I digress again. I would be standing in front of Bloomingdale’s at the appointed hour, having first wandered into the record shop to buy two dozen albums at random, and when I got home that afternoon I would tell Rebecca I’d had a marvelous time record-hunting, not to mention a delightful Chinese lunch. Rebecca bought it. (I thought she was buying it.) And meanwhile I figured this was what marriage in America was all about. I mean, if such and such a respected Talmadge matron was cheating on her husband with me, then it was reasonable to assume he was cheating on her with a respected matron somewhere in New York City, where he took his three-hour lunches. In a way, my explorations into suburban sex were more satisfying than the liaisons on the road had been. My fame had passed, you see; The Beast no longer claimed morsels from the table.

I told myself, too, that those euphemistic record-hunting expeditions, or shopping trips, or dental appointments, or fittings at the tailor’s, or simply long walks alone in the Talmadge Reservation were helpful to the sex life Rebecca and I shared together. I had long ago decided that I simply needed more sex than she did (does that sound familiar, Mr. and Mrs. Phil Anderer?) and that she was getting no more and no less (well, perhaps a teeny bit less) than she desired. I remained convinced, too, that Rebecca was faithful to me, that whereas she immediately triggered desire in any man who mistakenly read her smoldering look, she would just as quickly turn on her green death ray and zotz! — a smoking pile of ashes from which could be heard the echoing traces of an advertising man’s voice oozing, “Do you ever get into the city?” I told myself that what I was doing was not only American, it was probably international or maybe universal as well. If I’d been a successful (albeit fading) jazz musician in Italy, I’d have had a steady mistress with whom I would spend weekdays in Porto Santo Stefano, shtupping her before her own hubby came down from Milano for the weekend. (During the week, he was up at Lake Como, putting it to a Genoese lady whose husband was in Portofino sticking a lady from Naples.) There were a lot of Little Orphan Annies in Talmadge, and I found at least a few of them, and we used each other to satisfy our separate needs, whatever we told ourselves they were. Actually, I had no needs. Everything was hunky-dory.

My immediate family was as hunky-dory as any of the families surrounding us, or any of the families we knew in New York City, fifty miles to the south, or New Haven, approximately the same distance away to the north and the east. My youngest son, David, was attending a private school in New Canaan, intent on getting into Princeton — sixty percent of the kids who were graduated from his school found themselves in Princeton afterward. He was a bright kid who maintained a straight-B average, and who (like every other kid in the world) was a member of a rock group; his instrument was bass guitar. He played it as well as did any of the bass guitarists in any of the successful rock groups; he was lousy. I once told him all I had to do was pull out the plug and rock music would go away. He told me I was old-fashioned. Actually, he called me an alteh kahker; not for nothing was he half Jewish. My middle son, Michael, had been accepted at Columbia University, and was living in a rat-infested apartment on 119th Street near Amsterdam Avenue. He shared the apartment with a girl two years older than he was. She had not told her parents she was living with a boy. She referred to Michael only as “my roommate” whenever she spoke to Brighton, Massachusetts, on the telephone her parents were paying for. If Michael ever chanced to answer the phone when they called, he used one of a dozen different names and told them he was the superintendent come to fix the pipes (I suppose he was, in a way), or the faygeleh poet who lived down the hall, or the boyfriend of a girl who was visiting the girl he lived with — his inventions were varied and imaginatively deceitful; not for nothing was he half Italian. My farblondjeteh son, Andrew, was at the moment in India, having dropped out of three colleges in succession, and having discovered that his father was nothing but a nine-to-fiver in disguise, a money-grubbing, materialistic fink — “Who needs money?” he asked. “I can get along on pennies a day. Pennies!” (Yes, son, but they’re my pennies; I busted my ass to earn them.) He had not written for three months, but many of our friends had wandering children, too, and we were all convinced this would pass, eventually they would settle down. In the meantime, Andrew was safe from the draft (he’d had cartilage removed from his knee after a skiing accident), and we figured if he had already survived the war in Vietnam, he might one day survive the war raging within himself. My immediate family, then, was what any of us successful Americans might have expected of our immediate families in the year 1970, by which time one president, one assassin, one separatist, one neo-Fascist, one civil rights leader, and one presidential hopeful had been murdered.

My Immigrant family was in pretty good shape as well — with the possible exception of my Uncle Luke, who had disappeared from the face of the earth right after my grandfather confronted him on the Bowery. Honest Abe had remarried — not his little shvartzeh, but a nize Jush lady from Miami. He was living down there with her and helping to run the gift shop she owned on Collins Avenue. My parents, though they seemed to be going to doctors and to funerals more and more often, were nonetheless happy in their apartment house on the Grand Concourse. Each time my father came for one of the family get-togethers, he brought one of his poems. Seth and Davina were still happily married, still childless, still living in the same building on Central Park West, though they had moved to an apartment four stories higher, overlooking a magnificent view of the park. My grandmother had died of a stroke the year before, and at the age of eighty-nine, my grandfather had finally been convinced to leave Harlem and to move in with my Aunt Cristie out in Massapequa. I saw him perhaps once a month, usually at my mother’s house.

And my Wasp family was in fine shape, too, consisting as it did of successful American like myself, wealthy self-made men who were ready to swap ethnic jokes, and tell this or that intimate anecdote about one or another Broadway production or Hollywood film or celebrity more or less famous than ourselves, and exchange Christmas gifts, and do favors for each other, and embrace each other (an old-world affectation) whenever we came into or left each other’s company. One or two of us were also fucking each other’s wives (though not my Rebecca! never my Rebecca!) and looking the other way while we swigged the booze and danced the wild Tarantella and greeted the sun or bayed at the moon. We were one great big Wasp American family, and we realized that nowhere but in the United States could we have scaled such dizzying and spectacular heights while managing simultaneously to cling to our spectacles, testicles, wallets, and watches.

As for the greater American family, the family at large... well, the country was in ragged shape, but it had been there before, and in 1970 we still clung to the hope (speak for yourself, John) — all right, I still clung to the hope that we’d somehow get out of the mess we were in. Somehow we’d manage to preserve what was good, true, and noble, we’d find new well-springs of courage, and drink from them deeply, and replenish our spirit, and go marching arm in arm together into a bright and shining space-age future, brothers one and all, including the fucking black man who was dominating whatever was left of jazz in New York. In the meantime, I had grown accustomed to the fact that I was no longer Number One (or any number at all) on the charts, and no longer mentioned in any of the polls, and no longer a Big American Hit. I was a man secure in the knowledge that he was loved by family and friends, and I gave to them my own boundless love in return. I was a man at peace with himself.

Why then, you may ask, did I go to bed with Davina Baumgarten Lewis on the afternoon of July 17, 1970?

The seventeenth was a Friday. My schedule for that day (I still have the memo I punched out on my slate; I am a very organized fellow, except where it concerns my life) was as follows:

           11:00 am    Leave Talmadge

           12:30 pm    Chipp’s — final fitting

            1:30 pm    Lunch — Mark Aronowitz

                            Four Seasons

            3:30 pm    Jeffrey Epstein

                            MGM — 29th floor

                            1350 Avenue of the Americas

            5:30 pm    Drinks — Davina and Seth

            7:00 pm    Dinner — Sardi’s

            8:30 pm    “Fiddler on the Roof”

                            Majestic Theater

I took the car and driver into the city that day. Rebecca planned to drive her own car (a $22,000 Maserati) to New Canaan later, catch a train to Grand Central, and then taxi over to the apartment on Central Park West. Our plan was to spend the cocktail hour with the Lewises, after which we would go our separate ways, Rebecca and I to dinner and the theater, Davina and Seth to a party in the Village. My afternoon meeting with the MGM executive was to be an important one; we were supposed to discuss the possibility of my scoring another film. I suppose that’s why Mark had asked me to lunch. He was anticipating a fat fee on the horizon, and it does not hurt to be kind to the people who are putting ten percent of their daily bread on your table. In retrospect, I’m amazed he showed up at all, or — considering what he had to tell me — stayed to pay for a lunch that did not promise future revenue. The first thing he said was, “We’ve been screwed, Ike. Here’s the story....”

The story was glum. I listened to it as I downed first one Beefeater martini, and then another. It seemed that MGM had changed its collective mind. They were having internal troubles, Mark said. They weren’t even sure they were going ahead with the picture, but even if they did go ahead with it, they wanted to use the guy who had scored The Wild Bunch, had I seen The Wild Bunch?

No, I told him, I had not seen The Wild Bunch.

“So that’s it,” Mark said. “Epstein was supposed to fly in last night, but he canceled. They called me just a little while ago. I tried reaching you in Talmadge, but Rebecca told me you’d left early.”

We finished lunch at a quarter to three. I walked’ Mark up to his office on Forty-seventh and Broadway, shook hands with him, and began walking crosstown and then downtown. I had no specific destination in mind. It was a reasonably cool day for July in New York, and I wandered aimlessly, wondering if I should fill the time between now and five-thirty by taking in a movie. There was a crowd on the corner of Forty-fourth and Sixth. In 1970, there used to be a very good hot dog stand on that corner; it has since been torn down. A lot of sidewalk hookers used to line up there for a late-afternoon lunch before starting their daily grind. I figured now, as I heard the buzz of the crowd all around me, that one of them was being hassled by a cop.

“What is it?” I asked someone who was standing beside me clucking his or her tongue, the repeated tsk-tsks falling like brushes on a snare drum.

“Oh, it’s a bum,” the person answered. She was a woman who sounded very much like my mother. I immediately identified her as Italian, though she spoke without a trace of accent.

“Is something wrong with him?” I asked.

“He’s picking bugs,” she said.

“He’s what?”

“He’s sitting on the curb with his shirt off, and he’s picking bugs out of the shirt and stamping them dead under his shoe.”

“Bugs?”

“Lice,” she said. “You know. Bugs.” She began clucking again, and then she said, “His back is all covered with sores. The bugs must’ve bit him, don’t you think?”

At that point, the vagrant said, “What are you all looking at? Leave me alone,” and his voice startled me for a moment because (I’m sure I was mistaken) it sounded exactly like my Uncle Luke, or at least my Uncle Luke as I’d last heard him in 1950, when I’d telephoned to ask him something — what was it I’d called to ask him? “Go on,” he said, “get lost,” and I was convinced now that the man sitting on the curb picking lice out of his shirt and stamping them dead under his shoe was my Uncle Luke (I’m positive I was mistaken), who had disappeared from sight eight years ago.

“What does he look like?” I asked the woman, but she was gone, and a man answered for her.

“Who?” he said. “The bum?”

“Yes.”

“He’s an old fart,” the man said.

“How old?”

“Sixty, seventy? Who can tell with these bums?”

“Is he wearing glasses?” I said.

“Yeah,” the man answered, surprised. “How could you tell that?”

I turned away swiftly. If it was Luke (It can’t be, I told myself, though Luke if he was still alive would be in his late sixties, but no, it can’t be him!), I didn’t want to talk to him, I didn’t want to hear him say again, “Hey, Iggie, how’s the kid?” I tapped my way through the crowd, “Excuse me, excuse me, please,” and found my way to the curb, and asked someone to help me across Sixth Avenue. I walked east, still without a destination in mind (or so I believed), thinking about that man sitting on the curb killing lice, and telling myself over and over again that Luke was dead, he had to be dead, he’d been gone a long, long time now, no one had heard from him in years, of course he was dead. I turned left on Fifth Avenue and began walking uptown. It was not until I reached Fifty-seventh Street, and was standing outside the Double-day’s there, that I realized I was sweating and trembling. I walked to the curb and raised my cane, holding it aloft, hoping some passing vehicle would be a taxicab, hoping the driver would realize I was hailing him. As I waited, still trembling, I imagined a woman standing at the corner bus stop not fifty feet away, staring at me. I wanted to get away from her as quickly as possible, before she could say, “Who do you think you’re kidding?”

A taxicab pulled to the curb. “Where you going, Mac?” the driver asked.

“Central Park West,” I said, and I gave him Davina’s address, and climbed into the back seat, and closed the door.

“You okay?” he asked.

“Fine,” I said.

I heard him throwing his flag, and then he gunned the taxi away from the curb.

“You look familiar,” he said. “Are you somebody?”

“No,” I answered.

The doorman at Davina’s building recognized me, but he called upstairs nonetheless to announce me. The elevator operator took me up to the sixteenth floor, and I tapped my way down the hall, and found the doorbell in the jamb, and pressed it, and heard the familiar chimes inside the apartment, and then heard the peephole flap being drawn back, and then the door being unlocked.

“You’re early,” Davina said. I went into the apartment. She locked the door behind me. “Is something wrong?” she asked. “You look...” She let the sentence trail.

“I think I need a drink,” I said.

“Sure.”

“My meeting was canceled,” I said.

“You’re lucky you caught me home.”

“Were you going out?”

“Just to pick up a few things. Sit down, Ike.”

I had followed her into the living room. I knew where the furniture was (unless she had rearranged it), and I found one of the couches, and sat, and heard Davina padding barefooted to the bar in one corner of the room, on the side with the window overlooking the park.

“What would you like?” she asked.

There was the scent of lilac in the room. I suddenly thought of my Aunt Bianca.

“Ike?”

“Anything.”

“Well, what?”

“A little Scotch,” I said.

“Ice?”

“Please.”

As she poured, she said, “Are you sure you’re all right?”

“Yes,” I said. “I’m fine.”

She came back to the couch, put the glass in my hand, and then sat beside me. “What time is it, anyway?” she asked, and must have looked immediately at a clock someplace in the room, because then she said, “You really are early. Becky won’t be here for at least two hours.”

“Yes, well, I told you. The meeting was canceled.”

“No problem,” she said.

“If you have to go out...”

“I have to run up to Columbus Avenue for a minute. We’re out of club soda, and I thought I’d pick up some hors d’oeuvres while I’m at it. Those little things you warm up. You can come with me if you like.”

“No, I’d rather wait here.”

“Well, excuse me then, huh? I want to get out of these dungarees. Would you like another drink?”

“Please,” I said, and extended my empty glass.

She rose, took the glass, and went to the bar again. I heard the sound of whiskey being poured. She came back to me and put the glass into my hand. As she started out of the room, she said, “Shall I put on some records?”

“No,” I said. “Thanks.”

“Make yourself comfortable,” she said, and went down the corridor to her bedroom.

I sat on the couch sipping my Scotch. For no apparent reason (I already knew what time it was, Davina had already told me Rebecca would not be here for at least two hours, which meant it was now three-thirty or a little bit later), I opened the cover on my wrist watch and felt for the raised dots. The first ten letters of the Braille alphabet also double for the numbers one to ten. The big hand was now on the G, the little hand was almost on the D; it was now precisely twenty-five minutes to four. At the Blind School, I had never had any difficulty translating letters to numerals; it was the imaginative jump following this simple task that threw me. I asked Miss Goodbody why the three was a three when the small hand was pointing to it, but a fifteen when the big hand was pointing to it. And why was the seven a seven, but also a thirty-five (Like when we say it’s seven thirty-five, Miss Goodbody), and also a twenty-five (Like when we say it’s twenty-five to four). That’s a very good question, Iggie, Miss Goodbody answered. It was now twenty-five to four, and Davina was in her bedroom, which was at the far end of the apartment; I had placed my coat on the bed in that bedroom many times over the past several years. I decided to go into the bedroom to chat with her. I told myself I was a little drunk. Two strong martinis at lunch, a pair of Scotches now, I was just a little drunk. I got up off the couch, and banged my shin against the coffee table, and found my way down the corridor, past the bathroom I knew was on the right, and the small room on the left Seth used as a study, and then knocked on the door to the master bedroom, and called, “Yoo-hoo, are you decent?”

“Ike?” she said.

“That’s who,” I said. “Are you decent?”

“Well... no,” she said. “Not exactly.”

I opened the door. “Who did you think it was?” I said.

“Hey!” she said. “I’m not dressed.”

“That’s okay,” I said. “Who’d you think it was?”

“Come on, get out of here,” she said. “I’ll be with you in a minute. Go make yourself another drink.”

“I feel like talking.”

“Ike, get out of my bedroom,” she said, and laughed, and came across the floor (she was still barefooted) to where I was standing just inside the door, and gently turned me around, and gently nudged me out of the room, and then closed and locked the door behind me. “I’ll be with you in a minute,” she said.

I went back into the living room. I found the bar and poured myself another drink, sniffing the lip of the bottle first to make sure it was the Scotch. Again, for no apparent reason, I checked the time. It was twenty minutes to four. I snapped the lid shut on my watch, went to the sofa (this time managing to avoid the coffee table), and sat. When Davina finally came into the living room, I said, “That was some minute. That was an Italian minute.”

“You’re not getting drunk, are you?” she said. “Becky’ll kill me.”

“Why don’t you have a drink yourself?” I said,

“What time is it?” she asked.

“About a quarter to four.”

“I’ll have one when I get back,” she said. “Ike, if the phone rings, don’t bother answering it. It’s out in the kitchen, I don’t want you breaking your neck.”

“Poor little blind bastard,” I said. “What are you wearing now?”

“Just a little white cotton shift,” she said. “And sandals.”

“Aren’t you allowed to wear dungarees on Central Park West?”

“Well, that’s not it. I like to...”

“Are you wearing stockings?”

“With sandals?”

“What are you wearing?”

“I just told you.”

“I mean under the shift.”

“None of your business,” she said.

“Is it what you were wearing when I came into the bedroom?”

“I was putting on my face when you came in.”

“Yes, but what were you wearing?”

“Hey, Ike... cut it out, huh?”

“Do I smell lilac?”

“What? Oh, yes, I have some in a vase.”

“I thought you might be wearing lilac under your shift My Aunt Bianca used to wear lilac all the time. She ran a corset shop. They called her the Corset Lady. She made corsets, girdles, bras, everything. I used to handle a lot of bras in her shop. You wouldn’t by chance be wearing a bra under your shift, would you?”

“Yes, I would by chance be wearing a bra.”

“And panties?”

“Panties, too.”

“Pity. Is that what you were wearing when I knocked on the bedroom door? Bra and panties?”

“Yes. Are we finished with my underwear?”

“Who’d you think it was?”

“I don’t follow.”

“When I knocked on the door.”

“Well, I knew it wasn’t Seth because he called and said he wouldn’t be home till six or a little after. And my boyfriend only comes on Wednesdays,” she said, and laughed lightly. “So it had to be you.”

“Lousy tune,” I said. “Why wouldn’t you let me stay?”

“In the bedroom? Are you kidding?”

“Can’t see a fucking thing, you know. Blind, you know.”

“Poor little blind bastard,” Davina said. “Listen, I’d better get going. You sure you don’t want me to put on some records?”

“Have you got The Man I Love’?”

“Yes, shall I...?”

“Dwight Jamison’s version?”

“What else?”

“Hate it,” I said.

Davina laughed.

“Don’t you believe me?”

“I never know when to believe you,” she said. “I never know when you’re serious.”

“You can believe me when I say I hate ‘The Man I Love.’ You can absolutely believe I’m serious when I say that.”

“I believe you already,” Davina said. “Is there anything else you’d like to hear?”

“No. Thank you.”

“Okay. I’ll be back in a little while.”

“Did I tell you about Michelle?”

“No. Michelle? Who’s Michelle?”

“A Beatles tune. Too many unpredictable chord changes in it. Goddamn tune isn’t even logical. Probably the best thing they ever wrote, but useless to a jazz musician.”

“I’m always fascinated by what you do with a song,” Davina said.

“Thank you,” I said.

“I really am. I think it’s amazing.”

“Thank you. It’s a shame nobody else is fascinated these days, but thank you, anyway, Davina. I appreciate your fascination.”

“I’d better get going,” she said. “Are you sure you’ll be all right?”

“Listen,” I said, “why don’t you forget the club soda? We’re just beginning to talk.”

“Well... Seth likes club soda.”

“You can go for it later. He won’t be home till six, isn’t that right?”

“That’s right.”

“Isn’t that what you said? Six or a little after?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“So?”

“So?”

“So here we are. Alone at last.”

Davina was silent for a moment. She walked to the bar. I heard her pouring herself a drink.

“Booze and the piano go together, did you know that?” I said.

“No, I didn’t know that,” she answered. “What is this, Ike? A pass?”

“Davina, I’m sure you would recognize a pass if...”

“Is it?”

“Yes.”

“Are you drunk?”

“Sober as a judge.”

“Then cut it out, okay? You’re making me nervous.”

“I notice, however, that you still haven’t left the apartment.”

“Well, I’m flattered, of course ”

“And interested?”

“No.”

“Curious?”

“No. Cheers,” she said.

“Cheers.”

“Do you do this often, Ike?”

“Never,” I said.

“That’s a lie. I know at least four women you’ve had affairs with.”

“Would you like to be number five?”

“Nope.”

“Time is running out, Davina. Time is tick-tocking along. Before you know it, the whole mishpocheh will be here, and then what? A beautiful afternoon wasted.”

“You’re really something,” she said.

“Why don’t you take off your dress?” I said.

“Who’s Michelle?” she said.

“Did you hear me?”

“I heard you. Who’s Michelle? One of the women on your list?”

“I have no women, I have no list. Davina,” I said, “I really would appreciate it if you took off your dress.”

“Why?”

“Because I would like to go to bed with you.”

“Well, that’s putting it on the table, all right,” she said. I heard the ice clinking in her glass, she was silent for a moment, I assumed she was sipping the drink. Then she said, “I have to admit I’ve thought about it.”

“So have I. I thought about it just a few minutes ago. And I asked you to take off your dress, but I don’t see anything happening yet.”

“Is that why you came up here?”

“I came up here because I thought I saw a ghost. But now that I’m here, I’d like to go to bed with you.”

“So it shouldn’t be a total loss, right?”

“What do you say, Davina?”

“No, Ike. Of course no.”

“Okay,” I said. “Nice seeing you.” I stood up and banged my shin against the coffee table again. “You ought to move that coffee table,” I said. “Blind people have a lot of trouble with it. I think I’ll run down and take a look at Lincoln Center. Never have seen Lincoln Center; might as well take a look at it now. I’ll be back around five-thirty.”

“Sit down,” she said.

“No,” I said. “You’ve hurt my feelings.”

Davina began laughing. “Sit down, you nut,” she said. “Sit down and be a good boy.”

“My mother told me I should always be a good boy. Like my Uncle Luke. My Uncle Luke was always a good boy. But now he’s a drunk sitting on the curb squashing bugs.” I sat. “May I have another drink, please?” I said.

“Uh-uh. If Becky comes here and finds you drunk...”

“You know what she used to call my Uncle Luke? Mr. Rumples! Met him once or twice, and right away decided he was too... shabby for her. Too... shabby for the goddamn Jewish Princess!”

“Why do you want me, Ike? Because I’m Becky’s sister?”

“Want you? Now that is a very quaint way of putting it, Davina. I don’t believe I’ve heard it put so quaintly since my mother told me about her flapper days.”

“How would you put it?”

“I want to fuck you.”

“Say it again.”

“I want to fuck you, Davina.”

“Why?”

“Because of your mind. I want to fuck your mind, Davina. I want to fuck you out of your mind.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s what you’ve wanted ever since we shook hands on Mosholu Parkway in the year...”

“Oh, boy!” Davina said, and began laughing again.

“That’s the truth,” I said. “And if it isn’t, who cares? Everything’s a lie, anyway, what difference does it make? Do you want to, or don’t you.”

“I want to.”

“Good.”

“But I won’t.”

“You’ll be missing a marvelous opportunity,” I said. “I’ve been told I have a very nice shlahng for a blind man. I was told that by experts in the recording, hotel, and jukebox industries — not to mention the photography profession.”

“I’m sure it’s gorgeous.”

“And I’m also a very tactile fellow. You wouldn’t believe the things I can do with my hands.”

“I’m sure your hands are heavenly.”

“Then come here,” I said.

“No. You come here.”

“Gladly. Take off your dress.”

“You take it off for me.”

I found her, I pulled her into my arms and slid both hands up under the short white dress, she was dressed for a wedding, why was she dressed in white, didn’t she know we were attending a funeral? “Easy, you’ll rip them,” she said, and I found her mouth, and placed upon her lips with donnish solemnity the kiss of death, my death, Rebecca’s, the death of everything we had known. Davina pulled away breathlessly and said, as though reading my mind, “What about Becky?” and I answered, “What about her?” having already forgotten her, having already relegated her to a tattered mythic past of roller skate keys and Tim Mix shooters. I thrust my tongue into Davina’s mouth, and again she twisted away, and tossed her head and laughed and said, “She’s your wife,” and I thought Was my wife, was, we are burying her today, and said only, “She’s your sister,” and kissed her fiercely. We sank together, sank locked in felonious arms to the floor, and Davina said, “Not on the rug, for Christ’s sake,” ever the Jewish housewife, were there newspapers on the kitchen floor on this bloody afternoon of shabbes? “Wait,” she said, and, “Wait,” again, and then said in false and foolish defense, “I’ll tell her, you know.” I answered curtly, “Tell her,” and entered her, the coup de grâce of a marriage and a lifetime. Jaggedly we coupled on the thick pile rug, the rhythms of our murderous intent raggedly forcing a contrapuntal rhythm from between her clenched teeth, “Tell her you forced me, tell her you raped me, tell her you, tell her you, tell her you,” a litany strangled when she came on a moan. I stopped, I withdrew immediately, I held back juices already climbing that homicidal shaft, as if even then it was not too late, even then I had not committed myself finally to what was irrevocable. “You won’t tell her,” I said, and Davina whispered, “I won’t have to.”

I was the one who told Rebecca, though that was not what Davina had meant. Lying spent and sweating beneath me, Davina had meant only that Rebecca would sense what had taken place, there would be no need for anyone to tell her she’d been slain on a living room rug. I told her at the end of August. She had suggested, apparently on the spur of the moment, that we drive up to the Catskills. When I asked her why, she said she just felt like taking a drive up there. I should have known there was a reason for the trip. (“Smart, smart, smart — but stupid,” Rebecca used to say.)

She drove me up to the little town in which her Tante Raizel had rented the kochalayn summer after summer when Rebecca was a child. She took me down to the river where she and Davina used to swim while her mother sat watching them from the bank, her shawl wrapped around her shoulders. She took me to the drugstore, where the proprietor still recognized her, took me to the luncheonette, where she ordered a celery tonic and a hot pastrami on rye, the way she used to when she was a kid. And then we walked up into the hills.

This was August, the end of summer was almost upon us. Rebecca said she had been doing a lot of thinking about us and the family and the lives we were leading. She said she knew how important the family was to me — the kids thought of the family as a dynasty, that was a very good thing I had done for the kids, instilling in them such a strong sense of family. But now, she said, the kids are all grown up, Andrew is off in India someplace, he’s almost twenty-one, Ike, I guess he’ll find himself one of these days, I hope he finds himself one of these days, and Michael’s at Columbia, he’s got his own apartment in the city, I’m sure he’ll be all right, though I know the city is terrible right now — would you like to sit, Ike?

We sat. The woods were still except for the incessant buzz of flying insects.

“I guess we could take David with us,” she said. “There are good schools over there. He’s seventeen, he can finish high school someplace over there, it won’t hurt him. High school is a bunch of crap, anyway. He won’t really be learning anything till he goes to college, if he decides that’s what he wants to do.”

“When you say ‘over there,’ what do you mean? Europe?”

“Yes.”

“You want to go to Europe?”

“Yes. Maybe Italy. Maybe we could sell the house in Saint Croix and find a little villa in Italy.”

“Well,” I said.

“It’s just that I think it’s time we devoted a little thought to ourselves,” Rebecca said. “You’re not tied down with such a grueling schedule anymore...”

“You mean I’m unemployed these days,” I said.

“Well, whatever you want to call it. We’re well off, Ike. We won’t ever have to worry about money, thank God. So maybe it’s time... well, we never had much time to ourselves. There was always the band and the children.” She hesitated. “I’m forty-two years old,” she said.

“Yes,” I said.

“Yes,” she repeated, “and I’ve noticed how bored you are lately....”

“Bored?”

“Yes, and I don’t want to find myself becoming bored, too. I think... well... there are a lot of bored people, bored women, in Talmadge. I... guess you know there are bored women there.”

“Well,” I said.

“Well, Ike, let’s be honest with each other, okay? Let’s for maybe the first time in our lives be honest with each other.”

“I’ve always been honest with you, Rebecca.”

“Sure,” she said. “Ike, I know there are other women. When you were on the road all the time, I could ignore what you were doing because you were far away, and...”

“Rebecca, I’ve never...”

“Ike, please. There were women then, and there are women now, but now they’re very close to home, and I’m getting tired of looking the other way. I don’t know how much longer I can go on looking the other way. I’m not blind, Ike... forgive me, I didn’t mean to say that.” She paused. I reached out to touch her face, certain she was crying. She shook her head, telling me she was not. “I want to start again,” she said. “It’ll be easier this time. We’ve got money, we’re still healthy, thank God, we can go anyplace we want to, anyplace in the world. We can go to Greece, if you like, I did enjoy Greece, Ike, even though the fucking colonels are running it. Or we can spend part of the year in Europe and part of it in the Caribbean; it’s entirely up to ourselves, don’t you see? We’re free agents.” She hesitated again. “Ike,” she said, “I want to start all over again. Before it’s too late.”

“Rebecca,” I said, “I don’t know who’s been talking to you...”

“Nobody’s been talking to me, Ike. I’m not stupid. Those long telephone calls you take in the studio aren’t from Mark Aronowitz; he doesn’t call that often these days. And I’ve had a few calls at the house, too, you really should caution your ladies to...”

“Rebecca, there aren’t any...”

“Would you like me to provide a list? Please, Ike, I know exactly who they are; they all go out of their way to give me signals, they all want me to know that my husband is fucking them. Ike, I don’t want to make this a... a... recriminating sort of thing. I really don’t give a damn about your stable, I just want to get away from it. Can you understand me?”

“You’re mistaken,” I said.

“Your sons know, too,” she said.

“My sons...”

“They have friends, their friends talk to them. Ike, some of these women, Ike, they’re just pigs, really, it’s so beneath you. Can’t we please leave Talmadge? Can’t we go to Europe or someplace, try it for a year? Ike, don’t you see? There’s nothing to keep us here anymore.”

I thought, in the split second it took for me to steel myself for what I was about to tell her, I thought Yes, Rebecca, you’re quite right. There’s nothing to keep us here anymore. I’m tired of lying to you, Rebecca. I’m tired of lying to myself.

“The afternoon I was with Davina,” I said. “The afternoon we were alone together...”

“I don’t want to hear it,” Rebecca said.

“I want to tell you what happened.”

“I know what happened,” she said. “I’m not a fool.”

“Rebecca,” I said, “Becky, Becks...”

“Don’t say it.”

“I want out.”

“No.”

“I’m tired of lying.”

“Then don’t anymore.”

“It’s too late,” I said.

“I love you, Ike.”

I took a deep breath.

“Rebecca,” I said, “I don’t love you.”

My grandfather was almost ninety-three years old when he died. He might have lived to a hundred and three if he hadn’t been mugged on the Grand Concourse, in broad daylight, on the afternoon of June 16, 1973. My Uncle Matt had driven him from Massapequa the day before, and he had planned to spend the weekend with my parents; Matt was scheduled to pick him up again on Sunday night. On Saturday afternoon, having run out of De Nobili cigars, he had gone downstairs to replenish his supply. His attackers caught him as he was walking back from the candy store. He was never able to describe them to us; they had struck from behind, suddenly and without warning. They could have been white, black, tan, yellow, red, or any one of the myriad colors that had been tossed into the caldron that never boiled. They could have been the Irish he had feared and hated for most of his life, or the Jews he had come to partially understand, or the Italians he considered his own. Whatever they were, they were Americans. A woman from my mother’s building recognized him lying on the sidewalk as a patrolman went through his pants pockets searching for identification. She ran upstairs immediately and knocked on my mother’s door. By that time, an ambulance from Bronx-Lebanon was already on the way. My mother called me from the hospital, and I called a local taxi service and had them drive me to the Bronx. (The driver complained about having to go into the city on a Saturday night.) I got to the hospital at 7 P.M. My grandfather had just been brought down from the operating room. The surgeon explained that they had evacuated a subdural hematoma caused by the blows to his head. They had stopped the internal bleeding, and it now remained to see how he would respond.

My grandfather came out of the anesthesia at twenty minutes to nine. He was groggy, but he recognized my mother, and said to her, “Madonna, che mal di testa!” and then drifted off to sleep again. He awakened again at nine-fifteen. My mother, my father, and I were still in the room with him. We asked him how he felt. He told us he still had a headache, and then asked if he could have a cigar. The nurse told him no cigars, not yet. He chatted with us for about ten minutes, and then seemed to drift off to sleep again. At twenty minutes to ten, he began talking incoherently. The nurse summoned the doctor on duty, who recognized immediately that my grandfather was in a semicomatose state. The doctor could not say whether his condition was a reaction to the trauma of surgery, or whether internal oozing had started again. My grandfather’s vital signs were perfectly normal. There was nothing they could do but watch him very carefully. At ten minutes to ten, the doctor and my parents left the room, and I took up my vigil beside my grandfather’s bed.

A great many people came into that room during the next fourteen hours. Some of them were real. Some of them were ghosts recalled in my grandfather’s rambling narrative. Some of them were conjured by me, as I told him stories I was not quite sure he heard or understood. Some of them rushed only fleetingly through my mind as I listened for his breathing in periods when he was silent.

My three sons came to the hospital. Aunt Cristie and Uncle Matt came to the hospital. Their three children came, too. I hardly recognized their voices anymore; I had not seen them for more than twenty years. Uncle Dominick came in from Brooklyn with his wife Rosie and their married daughter. Aunt Rosie kept asking me if I remembered her sister Tina, and then went on to say she’d married a lawyer, too, and was living in Seattle. I told her I remembered Tina. My grandfather must have known I was sitting beside the bed because he kept addressing me by name as he told me, in scrambled chronological order, all the things he remembered. I don’t think he knew he was dying, but he was summing up his life nonetheless, and trying to make some sense of it. And like a good jazz piano player feeding chords to a horn man, I filled the silences with reminiscences and thoughts of my own, and tried to sum up my life as well — and make some sense of it. My grandfather kept wondering aloud where Pino or Angelina or Aunt Bianca or Umberto the tailor or Grandma Tess or his sister Maria were. He was waiting for dead people to come to the hospital to visit him.

I kept expecting Rebecca to show up. I don’t know why I expected her to show up.

I guess he expected her, too.

At one point, in the middle of the story he was telling me or telling himself about the day he had met Grandma Tess, he suddenly said, “Rebecca? Dov’è Rebecca?” and I told him again we were divorced now, Grandpa, we had been divorced since 1972, when an Italian boy had gone down to Haiti to sever all ties with a Jewish girl, and he said, “Ah, Ignazio, che peccato,” and then went on to describe the girl coming to him across a picnic lawn, the girl with hazel eyes and chestnut hair.

And again, when he was recalling the day he had marched into Honest Abe’s showroom to extend his personal welcome to the family, he interrupted his wandering narrative to say, “Ma dov’è Rebecca. She no comesa?” and then immediately asked, “Where’sa Abe-a Baumgart?” And I thought of the last conversation I had ever had with the Mad Oldsmobile Dealer, in September of 1970, three weeks after I’d left Rebecca. He called me from Miami, and I picked up the telephone in the living room of the house I had rented on the water in Rowayton, and he said, “What’s this I hear about you and Rebecca?”

“I don’t know what you’ve heard,” I said. I had told Rebecca to keep the news of our separation secret until Andrew got back from India; a cable had informed us he was in Amsterdam, and we’d assumed he was on the way home. Now Honest Abe was on the phone.

“I heard you left her,” he said.

“That’s true,” I said.

“You want my advice?”

“What’s your advice?”

“Go back to her on your hands and knees, and kiss her ass. That’s my advice.”

I told my grandfather now, told him in a lull during his own untiring monologue, still not certain that he was hearing anything I said, told him I might have done just that, might have crawled back to her on my hands and knees and kissed her ass, if only Rebecca hadn’t been so willing to forgive even what had happened with Davina. Grandpa, I said, I know what I did was terrible, but was it any worse than what I’d been doing all along? The first time I went to bed with another woman, forgive me, Grandpa, was in Malibu in 1960, she wouldn’t take off the tiny gold cross a lover had given her, I couldn’t understand it, forgive me, please. She told me I just missed looking shabby, and I laughed, and then in bed she wouldn’t take off a crucifix I couldn’t even see. Ah, Grandpa, that was the true death, the rest was only cremation. If I’d had the courage then, I would have told Rebecca about that woman whose name I can’t remember, all I can remember is the crucifix, the way I told her about Davina ten years later. Christ. Ten years! Ten years of living a lie.

“Are you crazy?” my mother had asked on the telephone when I broke the news to her. “What do you mean, you’ve left Rebecca? Are you crazy? Jimmy, do you hear this? Did he tell you this? Are you crazy, Ike? You have everything!” she shouted, and she began to cry.

“Grandpa,” I said, “everything was a lie.”

He began talking again, he was telling me now of what had happened when he and the men walked into Charlie Shoe’s shop, and I thought of that day in the Catskills, the day of my belated confession, thought of having told Rebecca I did not love her, thought I loved her still and loved the memory of what we once had been. And she suggested as she wept that perhaps we could make some sort of arrangement, lots of married people had different kinds of arrangements — but what the hell were we living already, if not an arrangement? Could I allow her to forgive me forever, until one day I took between my hands an actual stiletto, no symbolic phallus plunging deep inside a weak and willing sister, but an actual honed piece of steel, and plunged it into her breast and ended it that way? I did not want forgiveness from her, I did not want absolution, I wanted freedom. I wanted myself back, whoever that person was in the year 1970.

“I am thirta-four years old,” my grandfather was saying, “it is enough. I promise you, Ignazio, this time I go home because I have been no more I wish to have this terrible things that happen, where in Italy, no, it does not, I will go home, I will tell Tessie, I will tell you grandma, I will say no, Tessie, we go home, you hear me, Tessie, I take you home now, I leave here, this place, we go home now, we go.”

And then, abruptly, he began laughing and told me about the time the barrel of wine broke in the front room, and I fell silent with my own thoughts again, and only half listened; I had heard this story before, I had heard it as a child when I was growing up and learning to be an American. I had learned quite well. On the telephone last December, Rebecca had said to me, “I don’t care if the children spend Christmas with you. Christmas is yours.”

Ah. And I had thought it was ours.

I had thought, in my silly sentimental notion of us and America, that everything was ours to share together. I had thought the gold in the streets was there for all of us to pick up, to pulverize, to toss over our shoulders like magic dust so that we could soar up over the tenements — Christ, her voice on that Pass-A-Grille beach as she read Peter Pan aloud to my sons, that Jewgirl voice I had first heard in a smoky toilet on Staten Island, and can still hear now in the dead of night when I awaken with a start and stare sightlessly into my bedroom and hear below the murmur of water against the rotting pilings of the old house.

Grandpa, I said aloud again (we were talking simultaneously now, I don’t think either of us was hearing or listening), I still hate myself for having led Rebecca to the showers, and washed her clean, and stuffed her into a boxcar for transportation to the ovens and later picked her teeth of gold. Grandpa, I think I stayed with her as long as I did because I wanted to prove to Honest Abe that only in America could a Jew and a Gentile live happily ever after, show him he’d been wrong. But he was right, the prick, and I can’t stop believing I’ve betrayed not only Rebecca and the kids, but also an ideal I loved almost as much.

“Ah, Ignazio,” he said, “that Christmas Day, to tink of steal a chestnut? No, this wassa no right. I come out the house, I walk to where Pino lives, together we go on top the hill, we can see Don Leonardo’s house, everything blows on the hillside, we talk about America ”

“Grandpa,” I said, “was I wrong? Should I have stayed? It was a lie, Grandpa, but where the hell is the truth?”

“And first,” he said, “when I come here, I say to myself, I say to Pino, no good. We go home. We go back tomorrow the other side. What gold? Where is this gold Bardoni says? In the subway? In the mud? No, Ignazio, was terrible this America.”

“Grandpa,” I said, “don’t die.”

“And the noise. Madonna mia, che rumore! I tink I never get used. I swear, Ignazio, I woulda go back if I no meet you grandma. Ah, che bellezza! Oh, I see her, I fall in love....”

“Please don’t die on me,” I said. “You’re the connection.”

We both fell silent then.

We were silent for a long time. The sun was up. I had not realized the sun was up. I snapped open the lid of my watch and felt for the time. It was a quarter to twelve. Had the sun been up that long?

“Ignazio?” my grandfather said.

“Yes, Grandpa?”

“Ah,” he said.

“Ah,” I said, and smiled.

I did not know where his semiconscious meanderings had led him, or whether or not he had reached any conclusions. I knew only that he was still alive, and his voice sounded strong, and that was good enough.

“Wassa time I no like this country,” he said. “You believe that, Ignazio?”

“I believe it,” I said.

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

“Yes, Grandpa.”

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

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

Head and out.

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

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

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

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

As for the rest...

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

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

Dreams are lies.

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

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

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

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

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

And I wonder anew.

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

I used many different sources while gathering information that would help me to understand music, and jazz music in particular. But I am especially indebted to John Mehegan — the jazz pianist, teacher, and writer — for sharing with me his own love for the piano, and his vast understanding of this unique art form. In a series of interviews taped over the space of two months, he gave to me tirelessly and graciously of his time and knowledge, and I am humbly grateful.

So, little book... good-bye. I hope you are a big success.

This is America, don’t forget.

Evan Hunter

Pound Ridge, New York

February, 1974