Jack of Diamonds (14 page)

‘Well, if you have him for an hour and a half twice a week, that leaves him four hours,’ Miss Frostbite said.

‘Totally inadequate! I know he’s young but I want another three. Seven hours’ practice and three hours’ tuition.’

‘Isn’t that rather a lot for a young boy, Mona?’

‘Less than seven hours’ practice and I’d simply be wasting my time with him. Make up your mind, Floss.’

Miss Frostbite glanced over at me. ‘Leave it to me. We’ll work out something.’

‘Good!’

She looked up at Miss Bates. ‘The problem is solved. Jack is very keen to be given the opportunity to study piano under your tuition, Mona.’

‘Do you have far to come, Jack?’ Miss Bates asked.

‘No, Miss Bates.’ I didn’t tell her Jarvis Street wasn’t that far from Cabbagetown because of Miss Frostbite saying not to mention where I lived.

‘When will he start, Mona?’ Miss Frostbite may have been annoyed on the inside but she wasn’t going to show it to Miss Bates.

‘Let me see now. Today is Friday. Monday week at half-past four will be splendid, Floss.’

Miss Frostbite turned to me and said, ‘Jack, put your hands over your ears.’

I did as I was told but not so hard that I couldn’t hear. ‘Shall I pay you in advance, weekly or monthly, Mona?’

I was too young to realise this was meant as a putdown, it being the Depression and all. But Mona Bates was not to be intimidated. ‘You may do as you wish, my dear,’ she replied.

‘Cash or cheque?’ Miss Frostbite asked, smiling, but the smile wasn’t in her voice.

‘Oh, dear, Floss, you are so good at managing money, running that
jazz club
as you do, and I am so utterly hopeless, perhaps cash every week would be the best thing?’ Miss Bates said, smiling like a Cheshire cat. Again, I didn’t realise this was a double-whammy putdown.

I was just about coping with Miss Frostbite and now I had Miss Mona Bates to deal with, who seemed to me to be even tougher than nails.

Later, in the taxi going home, Miss Frostbite said, ‘It’s not going to be easy, Jack. The talented Mona Bates and I went to school together in Burlington, although I was several years below her. She always was a prima donna. She was to become the most famous girl ever to attend our exclusive girls school.’ She laughed. ‘I was to become the most notorious. But now she is known as an absolute perfectionist.’ I made a mental note to look up ‘perfectionist’ the next time I was at the library. ‘But we can truly thank our lucky stars. She only takes the very best, the most promising. You must have done very well indeed. But being accepted is one thing, maintaining the pace is quite another. Children don’t have inbuilt discipline, so I’ll be keeping a time sheet. Now we simply
must
average seven hours’ practice a week. With your lessons, I know that’s a lot, and as you get older it will increase. As Miss Bates said, we have some catching up to do.’

We arrived back at the Jazz Warehouse and I thanked Miss Frostbite for everything she’d done for us, and then told her about my mother wanting to help and not minding if she had to do the dirty work in the kitchen. ‘That is very kind of her, Jack, and I will certainly call on her in an emergency, as sometimes happens. But you tell her that I shall never marry or have children, and that it’s a great privilege to be allowed to share her son on the day shift.’

Because I was only starting with Miss Mona Bates on Monday week, I could go to the jam sessions all week. On Thursday night Mac was there, so I went into the kitchen and told the cook I was walking home with a friend and wouldn’t be having my dinner as usual. ‘You got grub at home?’ he asked.

‘No, but it’s okay.’

‘Hang in there, Jazzboy, I’ll make you some sandwiches.’ Everyone, except Miss Frostbite, now called me ‘Jazzboy’.

He made me two large ham sandwiches, and Mac and I ate one each as I told him about going to Jarvis Street to meet Miss Mona Bates, and how we’d gone in a taxi, a Model A Ford. Then I told him about the new schedule and that in future, because of my musical education, we couldn’t meet on school days, though I quickly added, ‘But there’ll be lots of times during school vacation when you’re not working.’

He was real good about it and said, ‘It don’t change anything, Brother Jack. Friends is friends; jazz buddies are forever. Knowing you’re going to make something out of your life, that’s the best news, and I want you to know I’m behind you 100 per cent. Education is the only way out of this miserable Depression. Your generation is the future hope of the nation.’ He sighed. ‘The twins are sixteen already, and they’re planning to leave school this year. I think they’re fed up with their mother and want to leave home.’ He grinned. ‘Possibly sick of me, too, although we get on pretty well these days. But I don’t know how they’ll find jobs, and I get scared just thinking about it. The education they have isn’t enough, although their mother says they can cook, clean, knit, sew and mind children and that’s all a working-class woman needs to know to get by in life. But that’s not true in today’s world. It’s scary. They’re turning out to be very pretty, and that can mean trouble for young girls in these hard times.’

I wasn’t sure what he meant by this, but you’d often hear people talking about young girls leaving school and then ‘going off the rails’, so I suppose that was it. I imagined a streetcar going off the rails: it would be a pretty nasty business for the people inside, all mangled up. It was years since Dolly McClymont put the talking ban on us and the twins still hadn’t ever said hello, nor, as they swept past, did they ever smile back at me when I smiled at them. But they’d long since given up bumping into the invisible me in the hallway. Maybe Mac had spoken to them, although I had never mentioned it to him.

I also told Mac about the two shiny yellow couches and he said they would definitely be silk or silk shantung from the Orient. I then told him about the radiogram in Miss Frostbite’s home with the picture of the dog. He laughed and said, ‘Jack, it stands for “His Master’s Voice”. Our gramophone upstairs is exactly the same model as the one in the picture. The dog is supposed to be sitting in front of it listening to “his master’s voice”. Radio is here to stay, and you’ll see, one day everyone will have one. Mark my words, with a twist of a knob we’ll be able to hear news from all over the world, and what’s more, music as well, just as good as a gramophone record. Jazz straight from America, and classical music, like you’re going to learn. It’s called mass production and it was started way back by Henry Ford. That taxi you rode in to Jarvis Street was an example of it.’

‘Yeah, but not everyone can have a motorcar, can they?’ I challenged.

‘Just you wait and see, Jack. One day . . .’

In my wildest imagination it didn’t seem possible to own a car. I couldn’t see how the Depression was going to end, but Mac had always been an optimist. I suppose you had to be if you had a wife like Dolly who treated you so badly. But since we’d become friends he hadn’t got drunk even once. We’d still sometimes hear her having a go at him, but not anything like so often as before.

Mac was quiet for a while after I told him about my lessons. I hoped he wouldn’t be lonely now I was only going to have half an hour to sit in on the daily jazz jam. But when he next spoke he was still thinking about radios. ‘Ever thought of making a crystal set, Jack?’ he asked.

‘No. Only English boys make them, I read about them in a
Boy’s Own Annual
I once borrowed from the library. But I don’t think we can find crystals in Canada, and you need earphones.’

‘I bet we could make one every bit as good as those English boys’.’

‘Yeah? What about the earphones? They cost money.’

‘Ah, that’s just it. You know how I am about collecting stuff. I was working last month on the extension to the Toronto Telephone Exchange. They’ve got hundreds of girls there who use earphones all the time. I found three broken earphones in an old built-in cupboard when we knocked down a wall. There was nothing else in the cupboard and the room was empty, so I figured they didn’t want the earphones. I asked the foreman and he said it was okay to take them, they were obviously trash. I just thought at the time they might come in handy one day.’

I laughed. ‘Like the hockey stick?’

‘Yeah, sort of. I’m always carting home junk that Dolly throws out unless it’s small enough to hide. Well then, when you mentioned your piano practice and not being able to hit the stairs any more, then the HMV radiogram, “
Ding!
”, on went the light bulb. “I’ll use the earphones and make a crystal set for Jack.”’

I could hardly believe my ears. ‘
Really?
’

Mac shrugged. ‘Shouldn’t be too difficult.’

‘What about the crystals? And you need lots of copper wire.’

‘Ah, the crystal is easy,’ he said with a grin. ‘Dolly’s mom left her this quartz necklace that hangs halfway to her waist. She sometimes wears it to church. It’s got maybe thirty or forty of these quartz crystal beads.’ He gave me a wicked look. ‘She’s never gonna miss one, is she? I mean, the pawnbroker says it’s worthless. So it’s not as though I’m taking something precious.’

I tried to imagine the thrashing Mac would receive if Dolly discovered the bead missing from her mom’s necklace. He’d be a hospital case, for sure.

But Mac’s enthusiasm for his crystal set was tumbling out as we talked. ‘The copper wire I’m gonna need? Now that’s real easy, Jack. Lots of abandoned factories along the Don have big electric bells on the outside wall to call the factory workers in to start a shift. If they ever open again, the dome and the hammer will have rusted, but each one has a copper wire coil that will still be good as gold.’

‘But wouldn’t that be stealing?’ I asked.

‘Nah, it’s all junk now, Jack. Hey, they ain’t never gonna bring those bells back to life.’

Carting useful bits of junk from an abandoned factory was so common that most people never regarded it as stealing. If the factory didn’t have a guard, then this indicated that the owners didn’t consider what was left as worth saving. I felt sure Sergeant Crosby, who was in charge of the Cabbagetown police station, would see it the same way. People in the Depression needed bits and pieces to repair their homes or make something, and there was no place else they could get the raw materials without paying for them. Many of the abandoned factory windowpanes and inside doors had been carefully removed to help fix houses.

‘And you’ll be able to hear music? I mean, properly, just like from a radio?’

‘Yeah, CBS and all the New York radio stations. Maybe even Chicago. But listen to this will’ya, Jack,’ he said, grabbing my shoulder. ‘The best part is the earphones. No one else hears it except
you
and you can choose your own stuff to listen to, private like. So, you see, it’s almost better than a big radio blaring stuff out to everyone and his dog who maybe don’t want to listen. You can just sit in bed and jam all you like.’

I imagined myself sitting up in bed late at night hearing jazz played from New York, right under my dad’s nose, jazz blaring in my ears and him none the wiser.

Two days before Christmas Mac presented me with the crystal set. ‘I couldn’t give it to you on Christmas Day because everyone will be home.’ Mac wasn’t just the best buddy a boy could have, he was like a proper dad. It seemed so unfair: he had Dolly and my mom had my dad and everyone was unhappy and the good guys got beaten up. But, like I said before, I don’t suppose Dolly would have done a swap. She was big, but my dad was even bigger, and with his fierce backhand her nose would soon have looked like my mom’s, never mind her teeth. Dolly with two black eyes, a broken nose and no front teeth would be a sight to behold, all right. I think my mom had once been pretty but I doubt that this was true of Dolly McClymont. She had these small pale blue eyes, big jowls and a downturned mouth with a large nose that turned up at the end, so she looked a bit like a rhinoceros wearing a red wig. The twins must have got their looks from Mac, who, if he wasn’t so little and didn’t have a broken nose (it wasn’t hard to guess how he got it) would have been quite a nice-looking guy.

My mom had saved up and we had a meat stew for Christmas and I got a new shirt. I’d saved the money left over from my dollar streetcar fare and bought her a washcloth, some perfumed soap and a tiny bottle of scent, all in the same box with a pink ribbon and cellophane.

The new year was the first of my childhood to be thoroughly organised and timetabled. Everything had to be planned around piano lessons; you couldn’t just expect to have time when you suddenly wanted to do something. Music and the piano, or, as Miss Bates called it, ‘the pianoforte’, had become everything from the moment I woke up to the moment I fell asleep at night. I learned to read music in a month and by the end of the first year I was pretty competent at sight-reading. But that was like learning stuff at school; the piano was an altogether different matter. Practice, practice, practice! Scales, scales, scales! Studies and exercises until they seemed to almost spill over the keyboard onto the floor! Then just a bit more practice. It was never enough and seemed as endless as the Depression itself, although more enjoyable.

It wasn’t that bad, but because of Saturday and Sunday practice, I had to give up shinny in winter. I still had time to read, and I played harmonica and listened to the brilliant jazz coming from New York and Chicago. Every once in a while you’d get Art Tatum on the piano – oh, man, that was something else! I’d be swaying and bumping up and down in bed with a big grin on my face, and my mom would nudge me and say, ‘Jack, I’m trying to get to sleep!’