Jazz Funeral (46 page)

Steve whistled. “Boy, do I feel sorry for that kid.”

It was raining, but the front windows were up because the roof of the balcony protected it. Skip got up and walked over. She didn’t know why, just knew the thought of Melody made her want to feel the wet warmth, smell the ozone.

She had been born a pawn in a game, born to a mother forever locked in a dance of wills with her father—one desperate to be loved, the other determined to withhold love. Skip didn’t know why, and wondered. Patty had been so desperate, she’d forgotten Melody, forgotten she had a daughter to love, or perhaps she was simply so self-involved she couldn’t have been much of a mother anyway.

That was bad enough, but it happened to lots of kids. What Melody had suffered seemed unbearable. Skip wondered how she would get through. Whether she could recover.

Steve came up behind her, held her against his chest. “What are you thinking?”

“It’s funny, I’ve only seen Melody once, but I feel close to her. I wish I could—you know …”

“Be friends with her?”

“I guess.”

“That’s the down side of the job.”

“A million stories in the naked city.”

“Ships that pass in the night.”

“Another day, another case.”

They were trying to be brave, to cheer each other up, but it wasn’t going to work. Tonight they’d feel sad. And make love and wake up feeling better. She was glad to have Steve with her.

On the way to the cemetery, the band playing “Just a Closer Walk With Thee,” George was grappling once again with the alien idea that he had lost a son.

Sometimes I wonder if I ever knew I had one.

Now he felt the loss in his chest, in his gut, in his temples. And the feeling was almost too much, as if his body was stretched to the limit, a balloon inflated past capacity. It started to come out his eyes, then his throat. He was crying. He, George Brocato, was crying in public.

But it wasn’t in public. It was in a limousine with his daughter. Still, he was the father, he wasn’t supposed to cry. He turned his face to the window, hoping no one could see in. But he was making noise; he couldn’t stop that. He was almost as panicked at the thought Melody would know as he was sad. And then he felt her hand take his and intertwine her fingers. She didn’t say a word.

When he had regained control, he looked at her, wondering how she was. There were only three options: terrible, worse, and on the verge of collapse. Yet she looked all right. Her jaw worked, and she had on sunglasses, so he couldn’t see her eyes, but otherwise she seemed almost stony. She was holding it in.

How terrible, he thought, to be sixteen and go through this and not even be able to cry. He said, “Darlin’, you can cry if you want. Daddy’s here.” He never referred to himself in the third person; everything was different today.

She shook her head. “It’s okay, Daddy. It doesn’t feel real. It’s like a dream.”

It was shock. He’d been through it too, days ago, when Ham died. He felt like a different person now. Certainly he belonged to a different family, and in a way it was better. He had lost his son, he had lost his wife, it was hard to imagine anything worse—except, he thought, the way he’d been living most of his life: as if those people didn’t matter, as if Melody didn’t, George himself didn’t.

He felt as if he’d found some lost part of himself that could be with Melody now in a way he’d never been able to before. The saddest, most pathetic part of it all was that he had been responsible for everything. For being a drunk, for letting Patty down when they were first married, for treating her like a piece of property, creating an atmosphere in which she had to do something to protect herself; and the thing she’d done was have a child with his son. It was monstrous, and yet he knew, it was so clear to him now, that this was his monster. The enormity of it made him feel shriveled and impotent, a spider in a flame.

But worse, so much worse, was Patty’s killing Ham—also his doing, to George’s way of thinking, this new, strange, weight-of-the-world way that had him looking back practically to childhood at the ways he’d botched his life. His doing because he hadn’t loved Patty, because her whole life had been devoted to winning him: her husband of seventeen years.

He had tried to tell Melody. He wanted her to know what he had become. Her reply shocked him: “Dad, you can’t feel guilty, it’ll eat you up. You just have to take responsibility for what’s yours and let Mother take what’s hers. I mean, it isn’t all yours.”

She was right, he saw that, and couldn’t imagine how she could have known such a thing, and then he remembered that Patty had insisted on sending her to a psychiatrist, that Dr. Richard. He hadn’t seen the point, but he supposed this was the sort of thing that came out if it, and it wasn’t bad. At her age she knew more than he did.

When he got the news, when the cad came, he somehow wasn’t surprised at what Patty had done. He had lived with this woman for seventeen years, and much as he’d tried to keep his distance from her, to hold back, to live a separate life, he had an inkling of who she was. And what their life was. He knew, he knew when Melody told him, he knew with a thud like an anvil landing that there had been something between Patty and Ham, that Melody was not his child in the same way she was Patty’s.

He didn’t know how he knew this, or that he’d known it ad her life, he just knew that he had. Perhaps it was something about the timing of the birth, or something in Ham’s manner toward Patty; perhaps Melody was like Ham in some way that suggested paternity. He couldn’t put his finger on it, couldn’t remember much at all from the drunken period. But he knew now that this was why he’d held back from Melody, that there had been something in him like revulsion regarding her. He thought now that she—or his feelings about her—set thoughts in motion, memories, emotions; stirred things up that he didn’t want disturbed.

Now that he knew all this, he understood that odd feeling he’d had when Ham died—of relief, almost, instead of grief. All those years, in some way he couldn’t yet get to the bottom of, he must have been jealous of his own son.

He wondered briefly if the old, unacknowledged wound was what kept him from Patty as wed, but felt a tug in his gut that told him it wasn’t that, or wasn’t just that, that there was a lot more. He thought about the rest of it, the other things. These were things he’d always known as wed. It amazed him to see them now, fanned out like a poker hand, and know that they’d always been there, held closely.

Now I know this. I could change. Maybe it’s not too late for Patty and me.

But it was. She’d killed his son.

The sad music was soothing, Melody found. Made her feel better instead of worse, gave her a little distance, a chance to think.

She was trying to get used to this unaccustomed, unwieldy feeling in her chest. It hurt, it felt like a lump of cement. She thought it was love. Well, she knew it was. But she had thought love felt good, felt happy and joyous, and this thing felt distant and unattainable. It was taking the form of longing; she knew because this was a feeling as familiar to her as her own blue eyes, only usually it seemed to come from somewhere outside.

The love was for her dad. It was just so new to her she didn’t know what to do with it, and that was what the longing was about.

He’d gone to sleep yesterday after picking her up at the police station—had simply left her and gone to sleep! She’d been so desperate, she’d ended up taking his car—without permission—over to Ti-Belle’s. And miraculously, Ti-Belle had been there. She was having a glass of iced tea with a strange man. (Though she was quick to explain that he was a drummer, someone whose set she’d just caught at JazzFest because she was getting rid of Johnny Murphy.) Melody didn’t care about that—she just wanted Ti-Belle alone, to herself, wanted to bury her face in her chest and cry. Later, she realized she could have gone to Richard—that Richard hadn’t turned on her after all, but she hadn’t thought of that. Ti-Belle was the closest thing she had to a sister—to any kind of real relative, her mother being in jail and her father the sort of person who could fall asleep an hour after learning his wife had been arrested for the murder of his son.

But later it turned out he hadn’t been asleep. He’d been thinking—maybe crying, Melody didn’t know. What she did know was the person who came out of that room wasn’t the father she remembered. It was a beaten, vulnerable, much softer man. Or was she different—had he always been like that? But he said it himself: Ham’s death had changed him.

It wasn’t the first thing he said. If he wanted to win her over, he’d certainly begun on the right foot: “Melody, I want to do everything I can to help with your music. I know I haven’t been very supportive, and I regret that.”

It was stiff and his delivery was a little pompous, almost seemed to contain a note of belligerence, but she put that down to embarrassment. She heard what he was saying—he was saying he was taking her seriously in a way he never had before.

He hadn’t ever had the least interest in her music, hadn’t even gone to her piano recitals, and later, when she’d started singing, his disinterest had been more like disdain. He’d stopped a hair short of ridicule.

“I want to be a different person from now on.”

She couldn’t believe what she was hearing.

“When you disappeared, I knew how much—” He couldn’t finish. Was he going to say that he loved her? He didn’t know how. And yet her chest fluttered in a way that said something important was going on. If he’d just glibly said “how much I love you,” in a meaningless monotone, without affect, it wouldn’t have been nearly so moving, she thought.

“I know, Dad.”

He looked relieved. “Will you sit down?” He led her into the living room, where they’d probably never sat together in their lives.

He sat on a sofa, legs crossed formally, she on a chair, feeling awkward in her shorts. “Ham died; you ran away. I saw what I’d been missing and I knew that I was the cause of it. I saw that I really wasn’t a good father, either to you or to Ham, and I wasn’t a good husband. Patty is the way she is because of me.”

“No, she isn’t, Dad. She picked you because she couldn’t really … couldn’t do it either.” She noticed that she too had shied from the L word. “Dr. Richard told me that.”

“You discuss us in there?”

In spite of everything, Melody had laughed. “Daaaad! What do you think therapy’s all about?”

“I guess I thought she’d just tell you not to be such a brat and that’d be that.”

Could this be her father? Making a joke?

“Look, Melody, remember when you were a little girl? We were close then, weren’t we?”

“I think so. I can’t remember that well.”

“I do better with little kids than big kids. And a lot better than I do with adults.”

“Sure. You can control them. People with minds of their own are too threatening.”

Now, in the limousine, the memory of it made her laugh. You could have knocked him over with a feather. He had no idea she’d know things like that.

That was fun. It was the first good thing she’d gotten out of knowing what she knew. Just because you knew it didn’t mean you could change it. Richard said she could only change herself, and she’d tried; she’d wanted to be a person who didn’t have to live with these people. And now she didn’t; her mother was going to jail and her father was metamorphosing right before her eyes. Richard didn’t know every damn thing.

Her dad had said, “So that makes me a control freak, huh?”

She’d said, “Just a wimp, Daddy.” And they’d laughed together like they were used to it.

After the cemetery service, suffering the hugs and murmurings of dozens of powdered, sweaty, perfumed adults she didn’t care about, she thought she’d faint; only the memory of how unpleasant that was kept her upright.

She wanted to be alone, she told herself, but at the same time she was thrilled that these people were here for Ham—the mayor, everyone from Uptown, every music figure in town, and that meant plenty of nationwide importance. And lots and lots of people she didn’t know, and that Ham probably hadn’t known. People who appreciated his work, probably. She was proud of her brother.

People were there for her too—Joel; Dr. Richard; Flip and Blair; even that nice cop, that Skip. She knew the cop was there for her, she sensed it, and she felt loved, protected by her presence, though they didn’t really know each other and probably never would.

The band for the funeral had probably been assembled from lots of bands—that was her guess anyway. The Olympia Brass Band, the Magnificent Seven Brass Band, Dejan’s, Pin Stripe, the Young Tuxedos; some of the Boucrees were marching in it, and she knew they were there for her too.

As they left the cemetery, the band played “The Saints,” and when they got warmed up, they swung into “Didn’t He Ramble,” and for the first time that day Melody cried. She thought it ironic that she’d gotten through the dirges fine, but the happy songs made her sad. It was because they reminded her of Ham, because they celebrated his “bad life,” his earthly life, brought back the Ham she’d loved. He wouldn’t hear these songs again; he wouldn’t ramble and he wouldn’t march. That was what hurt.

But it was a sweet hurt, for the songs also celebrated the release of his soul.

And mine. The sad part of my life is over. With these songs it’s over.

She said it like an incantation and was tempted to add, “Begone!” as if she were banishing a demon.

She knew how pathetic she looked to the world; she had seen the look on Richard’s face. Her brother was in the ground, her mother in jail, Ti-Belle in trouble.

She missed Ham already, like she’d miss a hand or a foot. In spite of everything, she was going to miss her mother.

But she wouldn’t miss her childhood, and she was saying good-bye to that. Today she was like a saint: marching in.

THE END

Heartfelt thanks to the endlessly patient and generous people who helped piece this thing together, offering everything from medical and musical advice to much-needed company for walks on the wild side: Betsy Petersen, Chris Wiltz, Jim Colbert, Kit and Billy Wohl, Becky Alexander, Terrell Corley, Liz Scott, Chris Smither, Ed Becker, Steve Holtz, Michael Goodwin, Greg Peterson, Jamie Howell, Chris Smith, Captain Linda Buczek and Officer Joe Costanza of the New Orleans Police Department; Judy LaBorde and Paul Henkels of Covenant House; and the kids at Country Day, especially Marigny Pecot and the three musicians, William Petersen, Langley Garoutte, and Justin Rubin.