Shoot the Piano Player (9 page)

"Sorry? About what?"

"Butting in. I shoulda kept my long nose out of it."

"It ain't a long nose. It's just about right."

"Thanks," she said. They were standing outside a fiveand-dime. She glanced toward the display window. "I think I'll do some shopping--"

"I'd better go in with you."

"No," she said. "I can make it alone."

"Well, what I mean is, just in case they--"

"Look, you said there was nothing to worry about. You got them going to the movies or a Turkish bath--"

"Or Woolworth's," he cut in. "They might walk into this Woolworth's."

"What if they do?" She gave a little shrug. "It ain't me they want, it's you."

"That cuts it nice." He smiled at her. "Except it don't cut that way at all. They got you tabbed now. Tied up with me. Like as if we're a team--"

"A team?" She looked away from him. "Some team. You won't even tell me the score."

"On what?"

"South Jersey. That house in the woods. Your family--"

"The score on that is zero," he said. "I got no idea what's happening there."

"Not even a hint?" She gave him a side glance.

He didn't reply. He thought, What can you tell her? What the hell can you tell her when you just don't know?

"Well," she said, "whatever it is, you sure kept it away from that cop. I mean the way you played it, not telling the cop about the gun. To keep the law out of this. Or, let's say, to keep your family away from the law. Something along that line?"

"Yes," he said. "It's along that line."

"Anything more?"

"Nothing," he said. "I know from nothing."

"All right," she said. "All right, Edward."

There was a rush of quiet. It was like a valve opening and the quiet rushing in.

"Or is it Eddie?" she asked herself aloud. "Well, now it's Eddie. It's Eddie at the old piano, at the Hut. But years ago it was Edward--"

He waved his hand sideways, begging her to stop it.

She said, "It was Edward Webster Lynn, the concert pianist, performing at Carnegie Hall."

She turned away and walked into the five-and-dime.

8

So there it is, he said to himself. But how did she know? What tipped her off? I think we ought to examine that. Or maybe it don't need examining. It stands to reason she remembered something. It must have hit her all at once. That's it, that's the way it usually happens. It came all at once, the name and the face and the music. Or the music and the name and the face. All mixed in there together from seven years ago.

When did it hit her? She's been working at the Hut for four months, six nights a week. Until last night she hardly knew you were alive. So let's have a look at that. Did something happen last night? Did you pull some fancy caper on that keyboard? Just a bar or two of Bach, maybe? Or Brahms or Schumann or Chopin? No. You know who told her. It was Turley.

Sure as hell it was Turley when he went into that boobyhatch raving, when he jumped up and gave that lecture on musical appreciation and the currently sad state of culture in America, claiming that you didn't belong in the Hut, it was the wrong place, the wrong piano, the wrong audience. He screamed it oughtta be a concert hall, with the gleaming grand piano, the diamonds gleaming on the white throats, the full-dress shirt fronts in the seven-fifty orchestra seats. That was what hit her.

But hold it there for just a minute. What's the hookup there? How does she come to Carnegie Hall? She ain't from the classical groove, the way she talks she's from the honkytonk school. Or no, you don't really know what school she's from. The way a person talks has little or nothing to do with the schooling. You ought to know that. Just listen to the way you talk.

What I mean is, the way Eddie talks. Eddie spills words like "ain't" and says "them there" and "this here" and so forth. You know Edward never talked that way. Edward was educated, and an artist, and had a cultured manner of speaking. I guess it all depends where you're at and what you're doing and the people you hang around with. The Hut is a long way off from Carnegie Hall. Yes. And it's a definite fact that Eddie has no connection with Edward. You cut all them wires a long time ago. It was a clean split.

Then why are you drifting back? Why pick it up again? Well, just to look at it. Won't hurt to have a look. Won't hurt? You kidding? You can feel the hurt already, as though it's happening again. The way it happened.

It was deep in the woods of South Jersey, in the wooden house that overlooked the watermelon patch. His early childhood was mostly on the passive side. As the youngest of three brothers he was more or less a small, puzzled spectator, unable to understand Clifton's knavery or Turley's rowdyism. They were always at it, and when they weren't pulling capers in the house they were out roaming the countryside. Their special meat was chickens. They were experts at stealing chickens. Or sometimes they'd try for a shoat. They were seldom caught. They'd slide out of trouble or fight their way out of it and, on a few occasions, in their middle teens, they shot their way out of it.

The mother called them bad boys, then shrugged and let it go at that. The mother was an habitual shrugger who'd run out of gas in her early twenties, surrendering to farmhouse drudgery, to the weeds and beetles and fungus that lessened the melon crop each year. The father never worried about anything. The father was a slothful, languid, easy-smiling drinker. He had remarkable capacity for alcohol.

There was another gift the father had. The father could play the piano. He claimed he'd been a child prodigy. Of course, no one believed him. But at times, sitting at the ancient upright in the shabby, carpetless parlor, he did some startling things with the keyboard.

At other times, when he felt in the mood, he'd give music lessons to five-year-old Edward. It seemed there was nothing else to do with Edward, who was on the quiet side, who stayed away from his villainous brothers as though his very life depended on it. Actually, this was far from the case. They never bullied him. They'd tease him now and then, but they left him alone. They didn't even know he was around. The father felt a little sorry for Edward, who wandered through the house like some lost creature from the woods that had gotten in by mistake.

The music lessons increased from once a week to twice a week and finally to every day. The father became aware that something was happening here, something really unusual. When Edward was nine he performed for a gathering of teachers at the schoolhouse six miles away. When he was fourteen, some people came from Philadelphia to hear him play. They took him back to Philadelphia, to a scholarship at the Curtis Institute of Music.

At nineteen, he gave his first concert in a small auditorium. There wasn't much of an audience, and most of them got in on complimentary tickets. But one of them was a man from New York, a concert artists' manager, and his name was Eugene Alexander.

Alexander had his office on Fifty-seventh Street, not many doors away from Carnegie Hall. It was a small office and the list of clients was rather small. But the furnishings of the office were extremely expensive, and the clients were all big names or on their way to becoming big names. When Edward signed with Alexander, he was given to understand that he was just a tiny drop of water in a very large pool. "And franldy," Alexander said, "I must tell you of the obstacles in this field. In this field the competition is ferocious, downright ferocious. But if you're willing to--"

He was more than willing. He was bright-eyed and anxious to get started. He started the very next day, studying under Gelensky, with Alexander paying for the lessons. Gelensky was a sweetly-smiling little man, completely bald, his face criss-crossed with so many wrinkles that he looked like a goblin. And, as Edward soon learned, the sweet smiles were more on the order of goblin's smiles, concealing a fiendish tendency to ignore the fact that the fingers are flesh and bone, that the fingers can get tired. "You must never get tired," the little man would say, smiling sweetly. "When the hands begin to sweat, that's good. The flow of sweat is the stream of attainment."

He sweated plenty. There were nights when his fingers were so stiff that he felt as though he was wearing splints. Nights when his eyes were seared with the strain of seven and eight and nine hours at the keyboard, the notes on the music sheets finally blurring to a gray mist. And nights of self-doubt, of discouragement. Is it worth all this? he'd ask himself. It's work, work, and more work. And so much work ahead. So much to learn. Oh, Christ, this is hard, it's really hard. It's being cooped up in this room all the time, and even if you wanted to go out, you couldn't. You're too tired. But you ought to get out. For some fresh air, at least. Or a walk in Central Park; it's nice in Central Park. Yes, but there's no piano in Central Park. The piano is here, in this room.

It was a basement apartment on Seventy-sixth Street between Amsterdam and Columbus Avenues. The rent was fifty dollars a month and the rent money came from Alexander. The money for food and clothes and all incidentals also came from Alexander. And for the piano. And for the radio-phonograph, along with several albums of concertos and sonatas. Everything was from Alexander.

Will he get it back? Edward asked himself. Do I have what he thinks I have? Well, we'll soon find out. Not really soon, though. Gelensky is certainly taking his time. He hasn't even mentioned your New York debut. You've been with Gelensky almost two years now and he hasn't said a word about a concert. Or even a small recital. What does that mean? Well, you can ask him. That is, if you're not afraid to ask him. But I think you're afraid. Coming right down to it, I think you're afraid he'll say yes, and then comes the test, the real test here in New York.

Because New York is not Philadelphia. These New York critics are so much tougher. Look what they did last week to Harbenstein. And Gelensky had Harbenstein for five years. Another thing, Harbenstein is managed by Alexander. Does that prove something?

It could. It very well could. It could prove that despite a superb teacher and a devoted, efficient manager, the performer just didn't have it, just couldn't make the grade. Poor Harbenstein. I wonder what Harbenstein did the next day when he read the write-ups? Cried, probably. Sure, he cried. Poor devil. You wait so long for that one chance, you aim your hopes so high, and next thing you know it's all over and they've ripped you apart, they've slaughtered you. But what I think now, you're getting jumpy. And that's absurd, Edward. There's certainly no reason to be jumpy. Your name is Edward Webster Lynn and you're a concert pianist, you're an artist.

Three weeks later he was told by Gelensky that he'd soon be making his New York debut. In the middle of the following week, in Alexander's office, he signed a contract to give a recital. It was to be a one-hour recital in the small auditorium of a small art museum on upper Fifth Avenue. He went back to the little basement apartment, dizzily excited and elated, and saw the envelope, and opened it, and stood there staring at the mimeographed notice. It was from Washington. It ordered him to report to his local draft board.

They classified him 1-A. They were in a hurry and there was no use preparing for the recital. He went to South Jersey, spent a day with his parents, who informed him that Clifton had been wounded in the Pacific and Turley was somewhere in the Aleutians with the Seabees. His mother gave him a nice dinner and his father forced him to have a drink "for good luck." He went back to New York, then to a training camp in Missouri, and from there he was sent to Burma.

He was with Merrill's Marauders. He got hit three times. The first time it was shrapnel in the leg. Then it was a bullet in the shoulder. The last time it was multiple bayonet wounds in the ribs and abdomen, and in the hospital they doubted that he'd make it. But he was very anxious to make it. He was thinking in terms of getting back to New York, to the piano, to the night when he'd put on a white tie and face the audience at Carnegie Hall.

When he returned to New York, he was informed that Alexander had died of kidney trouble and a university in Chile had given Gelensky an important professorship. They're really gone? he asked the Manhattan sky and streets as he walked alone and felt the ache of knowing it was true, that they were really gone. It meant he had to start all over.

Well, let's get started. First thing, we find a concert manager.

He couldn't find a manager. Or, rather, the managers didn't want him. Some were polite, some were kind and said they wished they could do something but there were so many pianists, the field was so crowded--

And some were blunt, some were downright brutal. They didn't even bother to write his name on a card. They made him acutely aware of the fact that he was unknown, a nobody.

He went on trying. He told himself it couldn't go on this way, and sooner or later he'd get a chance, there'd be at least one sufficiently interested to say, "All right, try some Chopin. Let's hear you play Chopin."

But none of them was interested, not the least bit interested. He wasn't much of a salesman. He couldn't talk about himself, couldn't get it across that Eugene Alexander had come to that first recital, had signed him onto a list that included some of the finest, and that Gelensky had said, "No, they won't applaud. They'll sit there stupefied. The way you're playing now, you are a master of pianoforte. You think there are many? In this world, according to my latest count, there are nine. Exactly nine."

He couldn't quote Gelensky. There were times when he tried to describe his own ability, his full awareness of this talent he had, but the words wouldn't come out. The talent was all in the fingers and all he could say was, "If you'd let me play for you--"

They brushed him off.

It went on like that for more than a year while he worked at various jobs. He was a shipping clerk and truck driver and construction laborer, and there were other jobs that lasted for only a few weeks or a couple of months. It wasn't because he was lazy, or tardy, or lacked the muscle. When they fired him, they said it was mostly "forgetfulness" or "absent-mindedness" or some of them, more perceptive, would comment, "you're only half here; you got your thoughts someplace else."

But the Purple Heart with two clusters started paying off and the disability money was enough to get him a larger room, and then an apartment, and finally an apartment just about big enough to label it a studio. He bought a piano on the installment plan, and put out a sign that stated simply, Piano Teacher.

Fifty cents a lesson. They couldn't afford more. They were mostly Puerto Ricans who lived in the surrounding tenements in the West Nineties. One of them was a girl named Teresa Fernandez, who worked nights behind the counter of a tiny fruit-drink enterprise near Times Square. She was nineteen years old, and a war widow. His name had been Luis and he'd been blown to bits on a heavy cruiser during some action in the Coral Sea. There were no children and now she lived alone in a fourth-floor-front on Ninety-third Street. She was a quiet girl, a diligent and persevering music student, and she had no musical talent whatsoever.

After several lessons, he saw the way it was, and he told her to stop wasting the money. She said she didn't care about the money, and if Meester Leen did not mind she would be most grateful to take more lessons. Maybe with some more lessons I wifi start to learn something. I know I am stupid, but--

"Don't say that." he told her. "You're not stupid at all. It's just--"

"I like dese lessons, Meester Leen. It is a nice way for me to pass the time in dese afternoons."