The Christmas Kid

Lullaby of Birdland

ONE MORNING THAT SPRING, Dwight Roberts first saw the horn man. Dwight and his mother were going down the stairs of the house on Gates Avenue, he to school and she to work, and the horn man was coming up. He was a large man, with hooded eyes that made him look Asian, tan skin, a wrinkled blue suit, and dirty black-and-white shoes. He had a cheap canvas suitcase in one hand and the horn, in a scuffed black case, in the other. He was wheezing.

“’Scuse me,” he said in an exhausted voice. “Where’s 4D at?”

“Keep climbin’,” said Dwight’s mother. “It’s in the back, right over us.” She paused. “You lookin’ for Jimmy?”

“He moved,” the horn man said. “Went south.”

The man paused, as if gathering strength, and resumed the climb.

That evening they were having dinner, Dwight and his mother and his two little sisters, and first they heard the man walking, his tread heavy on their ceiling, and then the sound of water running. And then, suddenly, abruptly, they heard music. The windows were open to the warm spring air, and first there was a series of incredibly quick notes, up and down the scale, glistening, running, and then a shift into a beautiful, clear, lyrical song — a complaint, a sigh, a lament. Dwight Roberts had never heard anything like it before in his life.

“Just what I thought,” Dwight’s mother said. “A musician. Now, you stay away from him, Dwight, boy, you hear? You stay away from that horn man.”

“But why, Momma?” Dwight asked.

“Cuz he be playin’ the devil’s music.”

The horn man finished after twenty minutes, and in a while, they heard him thumping down the stairs into the night. The next day was Saturday, and in the spring morning, Dwight was reading a comic book on the stoop when a taxicab pulled up and the horn man got out. He looked up at the building and said to Dwight: “Need an elevator here. This ain’t human, man.”

And hurried up the stoop.

On Sunday mornings, Dwight and his mother and sisters always dressed for church. This was the most important day of Dwight’s mother’s life, the day she prayed for everybody: her mother, and President Truman, and the children, and Joe Louis, and Clark Gable, and even Dwight’s father, who’d gone out for a bottle of milk one night during the war and had never come back. On Sundays, starch cut Dwight’s neck; his sisters smelled like soap; his mother wore her blue hat with the white veil. Today was Sunday, and Dwight’s neck hurt.

When they came out onto the stoop on Gates Avenue, the biggest car in the world pulled up to the curb. It was all shiny and black. A man with a cap was driving. The door opened and the horn man got out, and waved good-bye to a white woman. A white woman. The horn man looked bleary and surprised. He put the horn down.

“Where the hell I’m at?” he asked as the limousine pulled away.

“Brooklyn,” Dwight’s mother said sharply. “Outside the house you’re stayin’ at.” A pause. “On Sunday. The Lord’s Day.”

“Well, abide by me, Momma,” the horn man said, smiling a big, wonderful smile. “And hey! Lay a little prayer on me, would ya, Momma? Like a good Baptist.”

“I don’t even know your name,” Dwight’s mother said icily. The horn man lofted the scuffed black case.

“Charlie Chan,” he said, bowing formally at the waist, and then hurrying up the stoop. Dwight had never seen his mother look the way she looked at that moment.

The horn man did not go out that night, or the night after that, and, at dinner, Dwight wondered out loud if the man was all right. Dwight’s mother said he was probably worn out from sinning. Then Dwight said it would be Christian to bring the man some soup, and Dwight’s mother was trapped. The boy brought the bowl of soup upstairs, with a plate over the top to keep it from spilling. Then he heard the horn: the door to the roof was open and Dwight followed the sound. The man was standing on the roof in a gray bathrobe and street shoes, his eyes closed, playing his glistening horn for the trees and the backyards and the birds of Brooklyn.

Dwight waited there, mysteriously chilled by the music, until the horn man finished. Then the man opened his eyes and looked at the boy and smiled. “What you got there, man? Oh, hey, chicken noodle! That for me? Chickendamnnoodle! The best! Damn!”

He laid the horn against a chimney and took the bowl in both hands and drank greedily. Dwight offered him a spoon; he ignored it, and shoved the final noodle into his mouth with his fingers. Then he saw Dwight looking at the horn. “Go ahead, man. Give it a try.”

Dwight lifted the horn, feeling the chill enter him again, and blew into it. Nothing happened. The man showed him how to hold it, where to put his fingers, how to breathe, and that evening on the roof on Gates Avenue, it began. He hummed a tune in bed. Over and over. A tune he learned from Charlie Chan. At the end of the week, the eleven-year-old boy could play “London Bridge” on this thing called an alto saxophone. He went up to the roof every day. The horn man was his teacher. The boy added “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” They met each evening on the roof, and played together for an hour, the boy bringing soup, the man full of music. After their session, the man went to work, way over in New York. Dwight’s mother began to include the man in her prayers. And Dwight told everybody he was going to be a musician just like Charlie Chan. Everyone except his mother.

One afternoon, after playing stickball with his friends, he hurried to the family apartment. The kitchen window was open to the summer. His mother was beside it, listening to the music of the horn man drifting down from the roof. She was very still, her face lost in melancholy. Then she heard Dwight and turned.

“Jus’ takin’ a break, son,” she said with a chuckle. “Need something to eat?”

“No, Momma. I gotta go back. Just, you know—”

He darted into the bathroom, closed the door. When he returned, he took a deep breath.

“Momma, I wanna tell you something,” he said. “I want to be a musician. Just like Charlie Chan.”

“No, no, no,” Dwight’s mother protested. “You’re gonna be a lawyer! A doctor! No musicians! Just look at that man. He plays. He plays real good. Sometimes, he plays…beautiful. And where’s he livin’? Right here with us! I don’t want you endin’ up where you started, Dwight Roberts!”

But Dwight persisted. He took a summer job at a grocery store a few blocks away, saving money for his own Selmer. He found a radio station that played jazz. He learned sixteen bars of “April in Paris.” One evening, he even told Charlie Chan he wanted to be a musician.

“Now, hold on, man,” Charlie Chan said. “You know what you’re saying? You know what it means, man? It means you gonna go to school, gotta learn to read, gotta learn harmony and composition. Not just play. You gotta create, man. You gotta know everything. Louis Armstrong, Stravinsky, Mahler, Bessie Smith, everything, man. You gotta see if you got it here,” he said, tapping his heart, “even more than up here,” he added, tapping his head. “You gotta have the other thing, too. You gotta have…I dunno, man. It’s mysterious. It ain’t got a name. Max got it. Dizzy got it. I got it. It don’t have a name. But you gotta have it, man. You gotta have it.” He looked sad. “It ain’t easy, man.”

The next day, while he was working at the grocery store, Dwight Roberts heard the sound of the fire engines. They were screaming up Gates Avenue. Dwight went out to look, and saw in the distance that smoke was pouring from his own house. He ran all the way. The street was a wilderness of hoses, engines, a pumper, three police cars. Kids were clambering on the apparatus or watching from across the street. Then he saw his mother against the fence, shaking and sobbing. The horn man was beside her, his arm on her shoulder.

“You be quiet now,” he was saying to her in a crooning, singsong voice. “You jus’ be calm, you jus’ be quiet.…”

And Dwight ran over and heard the story, about the fire in the kitchen, and his sisters screaming, and the wall of flame, and how the horn man was suddenly coming through the rooms, a blanket over him, grabbing kids, shoving his mother into the hall, the great large man knocking over furniture, shouting for them to get low, and then banging on all the doors on the way to the street. The apartment was ruined. But they were alive. And now the horn man was asking about the subway, his clothes gone, his horn in the rubble. He kissed Dwight’s mother, hugged Dwight, and started walking. Dwight shouted after him: “Where you goin’, Charlie Chan?”

“I’ll be around,” the horn man said, and walked out of the neighborhood, and out of Dwight’s life. Dwight turned to his mother, who was sobbing and praying, waiting for a chance to inspect the ruins. She glanced at the corner where Charlie Chan had disappeared.

“He was just like a bird,” she said. “Come here in the spring, and then flown away. Just like a bird.”