Five Night Stand: A Novel (28 page)

He tips his head—gleaming under the lights for the first time in as long as he can remember without his trademark porkpie—and his sons clap, Cedric lets out the whoop of a seventeen-year-old boy, and Charlene smiles.
That smile
, Oliver thinks,
is the smile of Francesca.
Tears blur his eyes and he turns them back on his hands to guide the fills and melodies that impress everyone in the room.

“Baby girl,” he says as he comes to his daughter from the stage, holding his arms wide and enfolding her as though she were six years old again and not a grown woman standing beside a husband and teenage son.

“Daddy.”

He takes the time to go around the table and hug his sons, his son-in-law, and Cedric. He whispers in his grandson’s ear, “Hell of a show last night, son. You got it in you. You got it, baby.”

And then it’s back to Charlene because the mere sight of her has let him know that everything will be okay and that, whether he ends up in Brooklyn, Manhattan, or Memphis, he has his family, still and always.

“You sound good up there, Daddy. How are you feeling?”

“Oh, Charlene, I can’t complain. Feels good when I’m at the piano, don’t even notice the arthritis or diabetes or nothin. Just music.”

“Music always had that way with you, didn’t it?”

“It did. Yes ma’am, and it still does.”

Oliver has champagne sent over for the table and Ben stops by to greet this further extension of his family, one whose patriarch, in some ways, was his own father, Ira. Oliver and his children talk, catch up, comment on the crowd and on his retirement. Charlene keeps a distance, but it’s melting into softness. She doesn’t mention Frank Severs’s visit, or how she’d spent the rest of the day in her music parlor alternately crying for her family and angry at the intrusion. She doesn’t tell Oliver that she almost came to the show the night before, that she’s put on a dress and shoes every night this week with the intention of taking a cab across the Manhattan Bridge to hear him, but that it took a stranger from the South to jog her priorities, and her brothers to promise to come into town so they could present this united front of Pleasants. She’s been thinking so much about her father these past weeks leading up to his final shows as he’d called her and left messages asking her to come. She’d sat listening to his albums and had, once or twice, pulled one of those old books of her mother’s from the shelf just to hold it while she did so. She wanted to feel the weight of it, the weight of memory on her soul.

Charlene has known about her mother and Lucchesi since she was barely a teenager, since one morning when she’d suddenly become ill and had to stay home from school. Her mother had errands to run and was unable, or unwilling, to suspend them for a sick child. So Charlene was bundled up and they took a bus to Greenwich Village, where her mother poked in and out of shops before turning into a bookstore where Charlene had never been. Francesca browsed, taking books from their places to flip through them. She put most back but kept a few. As Charlene pretended to read a Nancy Drew mystery, she watched her mother at the counter asking the clerk, a bearded man with a sparkling smile, some questions. He answered and she laughed, tipping her head back lightly and touching him on his sleeve. He winked and smiled even wider.

There was something between the two that Charlene, even at a young age, could sense. It would be years before she put a name to it, before she herself would know the touch of a man, the feeling of love in laughter. She also noticed that the clerk rang her mother up for her purchase but put another book on the stack before placing them all in a bag. Later that evening, Charlene took that book from the shelf where Francesca had placed it and opened it to find “ML” written in the corner. She thought nothing of it until a few weeks later when she was looking through her mother’s books and saw the same letters in the same spot on another book. She kept looking to find more of the same, and her curiosity led her to the “FP” in her mother’s handwriting in the back of those books.

Charlene would notice, too, as she grew into a woman, her mother’s light mood when she would return from shopping trips, always with new books, and her eagerness to go out on these errands when Oliver was out of town. Charlene found she looked forward to those days, to her mother’s easy happiness that replaced the loneliness the house had come to know in her father’s absence.

And it wasn’t until recently—Charlene grown into a woman with her own child, her own husband, her own feelings of sadness and loss that all adults come to know—that she has seen her parents as people, as a man and a woman with their own needs and regrets independent of children and family. She’s come to understand her mother’s infidelity, not in relation to Oliver’s but on its own. Her parents were flawed, but their flaws shouldn’t detract from their love for her or her brothers, or even their love for each other.

After her talk with Frank, she’d sat in that room with music playing and a book of her mother’s on her lap and missed them both, missed them together as husband and wife, father and mother. And then she’d gone into her room and put that dress on for an evening in Manhattan.

The audience mingles and drinks, taking cursory notice of the party in the center of the room, a group of people who appear to have no interest in anyone or anything around them. They are insular, this family, caught within the vacuum of lost time and the urge to make it all up.

Oliver lingers. He doesn’t drink or smoke, but considers his children as adults and the similarities in speech and comportment between them and their parents. He doesn’t even think about returning to the show, but the band has taken the stage, tuning and noodling on their instruments, and Ben hovers, happy for this reunion in his club but also considering his paying guests.

During the second set, Oliver calls his sons onstage. It doesn’t require much to convince them—they are showmen born of a showman, and have come straight from the airport, their instruments close at hand. As they take the stage to applause, Oliver introduces Rodney and Will, heckling them lightly about their chops the way musicians do. His sons understand this fraternity; they were baptized into it as babies under the watchful eyes of Dizzy, Coltrane, Bird, and Hawkins. The band steps back for them, fists bumping, hands shaking, and when Rodney lifts up his trumpet and Will his trombone, Oliver calls out a Basie piece that’s all speed and fire to test his sons. They give it right back. They’ve been on the road now for nearly twenty years and Oliver realizes quickly he won’t trip them up this evening. The now-seven-piece band is loud and raucous, louder than previous nights, and Ben looks around wondering if it will overwhelm this elderly crowd, but they all swing along with it, realizing what they’re witnessing. Davis McComber, at the bar with his composition book and beer, realizes it, too.

Oliver doesn’t allow time to breathe but goes into the next—a Lester Young tune—without even calling it out. It’s like water cutting through rock, just as smooth and sharp as he’d want with his own traveling band.

He laments then that he and his boys have never worked together professionally. There were nights in their apartment when Oliver would encourage his boys to bring out their instruments and he’d put Charlene on the bench with him to take the high notes while he took the low. These are memories he cherishes, all the stuff of photo albums and lore, nights when McCoy Tyner or Hamlet might stop by and be given an impromptu show. But there was never any recording, no traveling, not even a five-night stand of shows with his family for Ben’s club or one of the dozens smaller in the Village and Harlem.

He wonders if Charlene still plays. She does, but not so that she’ll take the stage with Oliver Pleasant. She’s nowhere near the level of her father, or of Agnes Cassady, whom Oliver wishes he could have introduced to his people. He looks around the club again—no Agnes, no Frank. But here they are, his kids.

The last number is not called out. Oliver lets the final notes fade on Prez’s tune and waits for all to go quiet before he picks out a melancholy few notes with his left hand. The melody, the sadness, is immediately recognizable and the three Pleasants ease into “Blues for Chesca,” the tune Oliver wrote for his wife in 1966, shortly after the death of his best friend, Hamlet Giraud. The rest of the band fills in, but keeps a respectful distance. Charlene leans over to Cedric and whispers in his ear. He nods and she wipes a tear from her eye. The audience, the real devotees, bow their heads as though an invocation has begun in church.

Heart is poured into this final song and a soul circles the room from bandstand to the front of the club and back, and it envelopes the congregation in its meaning. The song fades out as it began, into the ether and heavenward, and a standing ovation goes out to the two younger men as they exit the stage. Oliver beams with pride and takes the show back for himself with some old-fashioned Dixieland jazz.

As the show winds down, the band departs on this last night as they’d come in the first night and each night since. One by one, they lay their instrument down as if at the feet of a deity. It’s the end of the night, the end of the last week, and the end of an era. No one is ready to see Oliver go, least of all Oliver himself. The saxophonist leaves, bowing to Oliver. He’s followed by the trumpet, who kisses the tips of his fingers and touches the piano. The rhythm section stays with him for a few extended minutes, winding down the music in an improvised salutation. The bassist lays his big lady down, removes a handkerchief from his pocket, and wipes his eyes, this massive thumper soft inside. The drummer’s beat drops lower, then lower, and then fades out altogether. He rises and places his sticks on top of the piano before exiting. The musicians have been shed like a comfortable, expensive suit, and Oliver is truly sad to see the music go, knowing he will never don such refinement again.

Only Oliver remains. The house lights are dropped even lower and a lone spotlight picks up his hands, these hands that have given music for seven decades. He hasn’t thought of this moment. As a boy in a rough-hewn restaurant with a sawdust-covered floor, playing piano for uninhibited black folks to dance by, he never thought of this moment. As an adolescent at the elbow of Marcus Longstreet in New Orleans, or rolling in the beds of Madame Fontaine with his first lover, he never thought of this moment. In his first nights in New York, married on one of those small stages to the love of his life, on a steamer heading to Europe, or in a small Parisian flat with his mistress, he never thought of this moment. Yet here it is. And when it comes time, he merely lets the final note fade, takes that last one for himself, and then pulls the lid closed over the keys. The crowd is hushed in a reverent silence as Oliver rises. He finds it easier than he could have ever expected to leave that stage because there, at a table in the center of all of these unfamiliar faces that have come to hear him play, waiting on him, is his family.

CODA

Highway 51 cuts through the Delta heading north from Mississippi and into Tennessee, where it jogs and jives through Memphis until it cuts through the heart of that city, past a king’s castle, the children’s hospital, and neighborhoods thick with oak trees and magnolias. It snakes past broken-down cars and rusted-out buildings, factories long since dormant, and pawnshops doing a brisk business. Beyond the city’s limit, the asphalt tears into fertile land filled with cotton, soybean, and kudzu. It’s a road that’s been traveled by slaves and freedmen, carried Jim Crow’s laws and dusty promises of a better life. And, through it all, it has brought the music and musicians beating that pavement for bigger audiences and sweeter sounds.

In view of a corrugated-metal shack gone to rust and a wood-sided barn there lies a small cemetery plot off to one side of the highway with the smell of the river in the distance. On this day it’s as though water is everywhere, standing in nearby furrows plowed for seed and collecting in the sky overhead. A solitary bird soars and dips into the clouds and over the alluvial plains. It’s a gray day and even the clouds carry with them a sadness. A band stands near a freshly dug hole, idle and waiting for their cue. It’s a true New Orleans marching band brought here to play as if for royalty, for one of their own. The players hold their horns and drum, rocking back and forth on brogans as black and scuffed as their own faces, as the preacher says his final words of heaven and peace, of better places while maybe just touching on damnation and repentance. Near the grave, the men will wait until a single white rose is thrown onto the casket and the first shovelful of dirt is laid on top, followed by another and another, until what’s left is a grave lying beside another that still looks all too fresh. When it’s all said and done, there will be two white markers side by side like keys on a piano: father and daughter.

And only then will the leader call out and the band will strike up “West End Blues,” with the trumpet sending that soul up to heaven.

“Hell of a thing,” Frank says. “She was so young, so much talent and promise.”

“Tragic is what it is,” Oliver says, shuffling along with a walking stick now, holding on to his niece’s arm when he feels unsteady. “Men write about tragedy. Shakespeare and them, but this here, this is tragic. Shame.”

They walk from the cemetery in silence, though Oliver hums lightly under his breath along with the tune’s melody. The big bird overhead has moved on to a field alive with whatever it searches for this morning.

“You ever find out what happened in the end?”

Oliver shakes his bowed head. “Don’t know for sure. Didn’t ask, neither. Reasons ain’t never brought nobody back.”

Frank and Oliver have been meeting every so often for lunch at Rachel’s Diner, Frank having replaced Stanton Harris as Oliver’s reason to get out of the house. The argument the men had in New York has never been mentioned again, both choosing to leave it for Lucy, the waitress, to toss into her bus tub that day with that morning’s dirty plates and mugs. Oliver has settled into his niece’s home and he and his sister spend evenings on the porch looking out at the river and reminiscing about childhood, Hillbillie, and all the good times and bad. It’s not such a bad life now. Quiet is what it is, but he still feels the need to get out and see a city, stretch his legs for an afternoon.

Frank still writes. He’s begun a blog to tell stories of his seventeen years as a reporter, and he’s taken on some construction work with Rachel’s cousins to fill in the gaps of freelancing. He’s also agreed to renovate Hank the photographer’s broken-down duplex for him, more because he’s tired of Hank’s complaining and whining than for any money offered, and because he has the urge to see a thing completed.

Once the casket is lowered and the people pay their last respects, the group walks from the cemetery for a bit up Highway 51 so that traffic has to go around or stop altogether, the drivers having never seen anything like a true New Orleans–style funeral. Men and women in black walk and sway with the music and their emotions. Handkerchiefs, bright white in the gray day, dab their eyes and flutter in the wind like tethered souls. Agnes’s mother leans on her sister’s shoulder, her own lacy handkerchief hanging listlessly at her side.

“Where’d all this come from?”

“New Orleans,” Oliver says. “That man there, the old one in the sharp suit? He bought out a whole train car and brought all these cats up. All of ’em, even that white boy there on baritone sax. Boy ain’t had a dry eye all day. That one there, too, you recognize him from Benji’s? He ain’t a player, but he been down there with Agnes and that old man brought him up, too. They all stayin at the Peabody, playin a gig up on the rooftop tonight.”

“How do you know all this? You a reporter now?”

“Hell no, don’t nobody need reporters no more,” Oliver teases. “That young man on trombone. His daddy was a sideman up in Chicago and New York. I been knowin him for years.”

Frank shakes his head in wonder at the network of musicians, even those nearly a century old, playing music even older than that. Music, in all of its variations and venues, is the world’s oldest social network.

The procession carries them to a farmhouse up the road where Oliver will sit in the family room at an old upright piano with a well-worn porkpie hat at rest on top and play slow songs for those assembled as they drink coffee and iced tea and eat casserole and potato salad off paper plates. They shake their heads in grief and loss, and with curiosity over the chicken salad recipe. Later, once the crowd has thinned, the music will grow naturally faster, and horns and drum and whiskey will fill in the music’s rests. The melancholy will be pushed into the corner with a fat calico cat unaware of the reasons behind the day. A rug will be rolled away and men and women, cousins, aunts, friends, and neighbors will move to the sound of Oliver Pleasant like no one has in more than a year. Like no one ever will again.

Frank will sit on the porch with Agnes’s mother and listen to stories she tells about Agnes as a little girl with her father. He’ll offer his handkerchief to wipe her eyes and then ask her to keep it, and he’ll tell her how nice it is out in the country, how peaceful. “No cicadas this year,” she’ll say, and smile. “When it’s their time, you can’t hear anything for the calling. But now it’s just silence.”

Indeed, for miles around, all the way from that house back down to the small cemetery, all that can be heard is the music.

The next morning he rises early, as has become his habit. It’s the quietest time of the day now and he sits at the desk in his small office on the second floor of the house where sun streams through the window, the cloud cover of the previous day having blown away in the night. On the wall above him is a framed story from
DownBeat
magazine about Oliver Pleasant’s retirement and return to Memphis, written by Frank Severs, freelance reporter. He’s had other work since then, and makes ends meet with his various projects, but the mornings are reserved for his novel.

He’s lost in his thoughts, banging on an old college typewriter as though it were a piano. The story moves along and he doesn’t hear Karen enter. She comes up behind him and he stops once she’s near. He puts his arm around her waist and pulls her closer.

“How’s it coming?” she asks.

“Good,” he says. “Really good, like it’s coming up from within, where it’s been all along.” He leans over to kiss the fuzzy top of his daughter’s head, held in the crook of Karen’s arm. He breathes in deep that smell of life.