In a Mist (6 page)

Once inside I placed the cigars and the wine on the table by the front window and sat down without bothering to remove my hat and coat. I began with the first paper, dated “December 30.” On a hunch I started with the obituaries. I scanned the narrow columns until I came across what Leventhal had intended me to find.

Benjamin Hirsch, born April 9
^th
1976, died tragically on December 26
^th
. He will be missed by his younger sister Lillian, family, friends and colleagues at Thornburg and Associates. Memorial service and interment to be held on Jan. 2
^nd
, 2pm at Sunset Memorial Lawns, Northbrook Illinois.

I then scanned the first section of the second paper, dated “December 27.” The initial report was located halfway down the sixth page.

A twenty-eight year-old-man died of internal injuries when struck by a car at approximately 3 am on Thursday morning. The man, whose identity has not yet been released, was struck from behind while walking along West Webster Ave. just south of Halsted St. The driver fled the scene and remains at large. Poor visibility may have contributed to the accident though alcohol is suspected of having been a factor. Police are asking anyone who may have witnessed the accident to come forward.

The last time I spoke to Benjamin Hirsch was the night of December 23
^rd
. He was bare-chested and unshaven when he answered the door. I could hear his companions in the background, their voices barely discernible over the music. Before I could bring the volume to his attention he smiled, apologized and promised to turn it down. I knew he would do so. He always did. I also knew that the sounds of their revelry, however hushed, would inevitably be heard long into the night. When I returned to my room I put on a Palestrina motet, adjusted the volume so that it was scarcely audible, and prepared to make the best of it. The next morning, in my robe and slippers, seated with tea and toast by the front window, I watched Benjamin walk out alone. In his fitted wool overcoat and sunglasses, he walked to his car, got in and drove away. I often wondered if he removed his sunglasses once behind the tinted windows.

My thoughts were interrupted by the sound of descending footsteps and the closing of the front door. From my window, through the growing darkness, I could make out the hunched, maundering form of Leventhal as he made his way down the empty street. Beside him, the elegant figure of Lillian Hirsch. Brotherless. Bereaved.

* * *

The “For Rent” sign appeared on the last Sunday in January. I called Leventhal as soon as it was posted and, after some negotiation, arrangements were made for me to move upstairs the following Monday. My rent would increase significantly. In fact, I would barely be able to aff ord it. Nevertheless, sometime in the dull hung-over hours of New Year's Day, I had resolved that a change was entirely necessary.

At the time, I was not optimistic about finding more lucrative employment. With two years of music history and film studies at DePaul University and a semester's experience at the campus bar, I had become resigned to the profession I had fallen into. I was not particularly attached to my job, but I found tending bar at the Tiger Rag preferable to the prospect of looking for work elsewhere. I got along alright with Jerome, an aspiring trumpet player from Washington Park, who worked the tables. And I respected the owner, Eddie O'Connell, a Canadian from Winnipeg, Manitoba. In middle-age, after an ugly divorce, estranged from his ex-wife and only son, Eddie had moved south to a town full of jazz clubs and managed to open a successful one of his own. Eddie prided himself on a peculiar notion of authenticity. Short of distilling the gin in a basement bathtub, he did everything he could to make the Tiger Rag the kind of prohibition-era speakeasy he was not quite old enough ever to have been inside. He would remark from time to time that running an over-the-table establishment took half the fun out of it. Jerome and I suspected he secretly funnelled half the profits from the bar to the temperance revival movement in the hopes that prohibition might one day be reinstated.

During my interview he asked me to make him an old fashioned. As I measured the rye whisky into a glass, he went over to an old upright Steinberg in the corner and
plunked out a meandering melody. He stopped after a few bars and when I looked up he stared at me expectantly, eyebrows raised, fingers poised on the ivories.

“
In a Mist
,” I said. “Beiderbecke's tune. The cornet player.” He grinned at me and I knew I had the job. He liked that I was from Iowa, that I had grown up with the sounds of well-worn forty-fives, dragged to Dixieland festivals from the time I could walk, regaled with tales of paddle boat bands and pleasure house parlours. Though I knew enough about early jazz to engage Eddie in conversation, I did not share his enthusiasm.

“Us outliers must stick together if we're going to weather this city of the big shoulders.” It occurred to me, even as he off ered me the job, that there must be hundreds of people out of work and from out of state much more qualified than me to tend bar in an upscale establishment like Eddie's. We shook hands nevertheless. I agreed to show up at four the following afternoon so he could show me how to mix a more palatable old fashioned. Then he asked me if I liked men.

When he saw my reaction he tried to smooth it over.

“You've got the job one way or the other. I shouldn't have asked. I just like to know who I've got working for me is all. I'm sure you can appreciate that.”

I did my best to assure him I had no interest in men. He smiled, nodded, apologized again for asking. Two years later, he still declined, when in my presence, to make the comments concerning the more attractive female customers he would freely exchange with Jerome.

The night after I arranged to move into the empty upstairs apartment was the night I saw her at the bar. It was a Monday, an unusually slow night at the Tiger Rag and, though I had only glimpsed her face for a moment on that afternoon following Benjamin's death, I was certain it was her, alone in the corner booth. She took off her coat and
hat to reveal her long, loose, sleeveless dress and dark, close-cropped curls. She sat with her legs crossed and watched as Eddie sat down at the piano and began to play the “Wolverine Blues.” Jerome approached her and she took a pen from her clutch and wrote on a napkin and he brought the soda water she requested. She lit a cigarette, only to extinguish it prematurely and light another a moment later. She produced a powder compact, examined herself in the mirror, and returned it to her clutch. It was as if she were waiting for someone. It occurred to me that she was waiting for Benjamin. I knew this was impossible, but nevertheless the scenario played out in my mind. The anticipation of the meeting, her early arrival, the ordering of the soda water so as to retain clarity of perception for the precise moment he appeared. That gradual, almost imperceptible transition from anticipation to anxiety as time passed and she remained alone. And then the threshold, the moment at which she loses hope, a phone call considered but not placed, anxiety given way to vexation. I wanted to go to her, to look her in the eye and tell her that he would not be coming, that she would never see him again. But I remained behind the bar and it was Jerome who collected her empty glass and that was when she ordered the dry manhattan.

The dry manhattan was a house specialty, the preparation of which, under Eddie's supervision, I had long since perfected. This time, however, at the last moment—after the Maraschino cherry was submerged, and without knowing precisely why I felt inclined to do so—I added a disproportionate quantity of sweet vermouth. I immediately regretted this decision. But there was no opportunity to start over, for Jerome hastened the drink to the occupant of the corner booth. I did my best not to look in her direction, and made some show of busily polishing wine glasses. And yet, without looking directly at her, in the periphery of my
vision I discerned an unmistakable expression of disgust on Lillian's face as she put the glass down. This was followed, inexplicably, by a smile.

Though I had never been overly fond of her brother, with his trappings of professional and material and amorous success, his self-satisfaction, I was strangely upset by this peculiar smile on his sister's lips only four weeks after his death. I now looked openly across the room as she raised the martini glass to her lips and drained its sickly contents in a single, saccharine draught. A table of bourbon-swilling regulars arrived at that point, momentarily requiring my attention. Only a minute or two had passed, however, before Jerome requested another dry manhattan for the corner booth. This I prepared with but a modicum of sweet vermouth. I then emerged from behind the bar, approached Eddie at the piano and requested the rest of the night off on account of a sudden, incapacitating bout of nausea. Eddie agreed, on the condition I arrive early the following afternoon as he had something important to discuss with me before I started my shift. Outside, I hailed a cab instead of walking the three and a half blocks to where my car was parked.

* * *

As I lay in bed that night it occurred to me she might have left something behind, forgotten her hat, left a note at the bar in case her companion arrived after she had gone. But the following afternoon nothing remained to indicate her presence the night before save a single lipstick-stained cigarette, half-smoked, in the ashtray on the table in the corner.

Eddie was leaning back in his chair when I poked my head in his office. The surface of his desk was covered in
empty low-ball glasses, coffee cups, accounting ledgers, back issues of
Down Beat
and the
Tribune
. He gestured to the empty chair, broke the news that he was opening a second club across town on the south side, to be called the Lotus Blossom. He then off ered me the position of assistant manager of the Tiger Rag. There would be a considerable raise, eff ective immediately, though I would have to continue my duties as bartender until he hired a suitable replacement.

“When I make up my mind as to someone's character,” said Eddie, “there's no two ways about it. My ex for example. I knew she was no good the moment I laid eyes on her.” He grinned at me, and winked.

“Things happen for a reason. Even terrible things. Without the atrocities of the Civil War, how many cornet horns and marching snares would have found their way into French Quarter hawk shops?” It was a question I had never bothered to consider.

“If you hadn't dropped out of college after your grandfather died, who would I have to help me out? A man's got to take stock of who he is and what he really wants.”

I accepted his off er without further hesitation. We shook on it. Eddie poured me a drink, and then another, and I went to work that afternoon, elated, in a soft scotch haze. That week, as I put in long hours learning the basics of managing the business by day, tending bar by night, Benjamin's worldly possessions were sold off , donated, cast out on the curb. I do not know if Lillian Hirsch paid another visit to her brother's apartment. During this time my only encounter in the front porch involved the two cleaning ladies Leventhal had hired the weekend before I moved in. Middle-aged Inez, and Maria, much younger, who took charge of introductions. On the day I took possession, I discovered that they had done a remarkable job of eff acing virtually every trace of
Benjamin's existence from the upstairs flat.

Leventhal was unusually friendly when he presented me with the keys. He told me of his plans to renovate the downstairs apartment and increase the rent.

“You're doing me a favour. I was wrong about you,” he called out, as he made his way down the stairs. “Thought I had you figured out but I was wrong.”

Shortly after Leventhal left I happened upon the first in the series of objects that had, for whatever reason, survived the purge. On the floor in the back corner of the bedroom closet, I discovered a black velvet barrette, rhinestone studded, a single strand of dark hair curled in its silver clasp. The following afternoon, I came across a gold-labelled one-litre bottle of balsamic vinegar, one third full, in the cupboard beneath the kitchen sink. I poured the vinegar down the drain, rinsed the bottle and set it in the light of the sun on the sill of the kitchen window overlooking the street below.

It was not until almost a month later, when I gave the bathroom its first thorough cleaning since Maria and Inez had scoured it immaculate, that I made the third discovery. Though it was perhaps the most insignificant of the three, in my mind it forever has greater magnitude in that it was immediately preceded by an altogether diff erent discovery, one entirely unrelated to my inheritance of wayward household objects. It was an unseasonably warm mid-winter day, February sunlight streaming down from the domed skylight overhead. By leaning my stereo speakers against the hallway wall at an angle of forty-five degrees so that they faced toward the bathroom ceiling, I discovered a peculiar quirk of the apartment's architecture. The sounds of Tallis's
Spem in Alium
reverberated with cathedral-esque resonance. The result was overwhelming. I stopped scrubbing and remained on all fours, eyes closed, like a supplicat
ing monk, amidst the stringent aromas of lemon and pine and the faintest trace of stale urine, in a state of transcendence. I did not open my eyes again until the forty-voice motet reached its exultant conclusion. Still marvelling at my revelation, I finished cleaning the bathroom as I listened to Tallis's minor works. It was then I came across the condom. It was still in its package, lubricated, computer tested, hermetically sealed.

I thought then about Benjamin Hirsch. I knew so little about him. I wondered if he had been aware of the acoustic properties of his bathroom, if he would have appreciated the profundity of my revelation. What had his life been like before he had moved in? What eff ect had the apartment upon him, with its pristine hardwood floors and twelve foot ceilings, its miraculously powerful water pressure, its opulent fixtures? I thought of Lillian Hirsch, of my encounter with her at the bar, of the strangeness of my reaction. I thought about my grandfather, dead at sixty-seven, of the trip home to the funeral in Davenport and how I didn't return until four months later. I thought about Eddie, his ability to overcome loss, his courage in starting over, how this courage had paid off and how his subsequent good fortune had contributed to mine. I considered my promotion, how the move upstairs was not, as it might have been, a strain on my bartender's wages, but entirely appropriate given my new position as assistant manager of the Tiger Rag.