Joplin's Ghost (28 page)

Although the man was retreating toward his end of the car, his words remained rooted in Scott’s memory, more potent than his physical presence. His warning about choking had sounded like a threat, as if he could will harm upon them. Scott cursed the quickening he felt of his heart. He might as well be an old woman clutching her
gris-gris
to ward off evil.

“The chicken’s good,” Freddie said, already at work on her first piece, which she held unself-consciously with bare hands. Nothing stood between this girl and her appetite. “I’m glad he came by. I was famished.”

Scott sat again. The man had returned to his own his seat, although Scott couldn’t make out his eyes. “I’m sorry I couldn’t get you a proper supper.”

“We would’ve missed the train! We ate a very late lunch, anyway.” As always, Freddie refused to find any conclusions except the happiest ones. He should expect that trait to wear off after a time, but he would enjoy it while it lasted.

Freddie coughed. The hacking sound alarmed Scott, as if somehow that conjurer
had
visited a curse on her through his chicken bones, but when Freddie took a breath and kept eating, he realized she wasn’t choking. He remembered hearing her cough once or twice before, but the sound hadn’t been so harsh, from her lungs. “Are you ill, Freddie?” he said, pressing his palm to her hot forehead. “I think you have a fever.”

“I’ll be glad to sleep in a bed tonight,” Freddie said softly. “I’m sorry, colds have always been drawn to me, since I was a girl. But nothing cures them like rest.”

“How long have you been sick? Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Tuesday, my throat started tickling. What could I say? Colds run their course.”

“Not in drafty train cars. And on so little sleep, from town to town.”

“Am I with my husband or my father?” Freddie said, annoyed.

“Always tell me if you’re ill,” Scott said. “Don’t be an actress with me, Freddie.”

Don’t sound so cross when you’re only angry with yourself,
he thought. Belle had always said the house could burn down around him, and he wouldn’t notice, he was so lost inside his music. When he was at his piano and Belle was out, their baby might have cried thirty minutes before he heard a thing. He should have guessed much sooner that Freddie wasn’t well.

“I’ve been feeling poorly, Scott,” Freddie said softly. “But you had your concerts. I didn’t want to slow you down.”

He pulled her close to him again, nuzzling cheeks. “I should have noticed. But I saw you dancing today…”

Freddie giggled, which drew another cough she politely hid behind her palm. “I couldn’t help
that
. I’ve been denied dancing so long, I forgot my cold.”

“Olivia Dixon will pamper you to death, I’m afraid. She won’t let you out of bed.”

“Yes, that sounds wonderful,” Freddie said. “A bed.”

The conjurer got off at the next stop, in Windsor, twenty-seven miles outside Sedalia. In the lamplight from the tiny depot, Scott saw the man look toward him and Freddie before he lumbered down the train’s steps. Scott was relieved the man didn’t speak to them again.

A white-coated colored porter poked his head into the car and announced they would reach Sedalia soon. “I sho’ am sorry they ain’t no light back here, Mr. Joplin,” the young porter said, darting inside their car with a hushed voice. “This colored car’s gone all to hell. Sorry to cuss, ma’am.”

“I’ve been thinking that and worse,” Freddie said.

“The conditions aren’t your fault,” Scott told him. “How do you know me?”

“Because you’re a famous man, silly,” Freddie whispered.

“Who don’t know Scott Joplin? I seed you play lots of times in Sedalia. That’s where I live. I heard you was ridin’.” He came and stood directly before them, bending down to eye-level. “Ain’t nobody left in third-class, if you wanna move. It’s cooler down there, and better seats. Anybody tries to say nothin’, blame it on me. This ain’t my only job. I play piano, too.”

The porter’s offer for better seats could hardly have been more tempting, at that hour. But Scott glanced around the car, and two other colored passengers remained. He couldn’t tell if they were sleeping or awake, but he felt confident that he knew his wife’s mind on the question.

“What’s your name?” Scott said.

“George.”

“I mean your
real
name,” Scott said. White passengers called every Negro porter George, so it was no wonder they forgot who they were.

The young man grinned. “George is the name my mama give me. I’m Lessie Mae’s nephew, from ’round by the depot. Lessie Mae’s brother Ben is my stepdaddy.”

Lessie Mae was East Main Street’s most successful colored madam, but so well-liked that she joined political groups and social clubs with no fear of exclusion. Her brother, Ben, was a respected minister—and one of their clan, Lionel, was a good singer and dancer Scott had hired alongside his brother Will for
The Ragtime Dance
at the Wood’s Opera House. Scott could only imagine the far-ranging conversations at their family Christmas dinners. Scott hadn’t seen Lessie Mae in years, but she had given him work when he needed it.

“Be sure to tell Lessie Mae I’ll be dropping by to see if she’s well,” Scott said. “Thanks for your offer, George, but if this is the car for coloreds, this is where we’d better ride. Next time I come through, maybe I can afford a car of my own.”

“I heard your Scott Joplin minstrel troupe was fifty folks strong. Musta been a sight!”

Maybe last year’s tour
hadn’t
been forgotten, Scott thought. “Well, we weren’t that big, but we were an opera troupe. Started out that way, anyway.” By the time most of the troupe’s members had deserted, even before the final theft, they had to call themselves a minstrel company to get bookings.

Scott didn’t know what the word
opera
meant to a boy who might never have heard one, but the porter’s grin widened. “Yes,
sir,
an opera!” The boy shook his hand, then studied his own palm as if he were trying to see his lines. “I just shook hands with Mr.
Scott Joplin,
who wrote the ‘Maple Leaf Rag.’ I better go pinch myself and make sure I ain’t ’sleep.”

Then the whistle sounded, and the porter vanished like a jackrabbit through the door.

“You have such a gift, Scott,” Freddie said, as the train lurched forward.

“Music? Yes, it’s quite a blessing.” Without music, Scott imagined he might be a porter like George, or picking cotton, or else a railroad worker like his father, brother and so many Sedalia residents, braving terrible conditions. That work would have made him miserable, and he was damned lucky to have avoided it. He never forgot that, not a single day.

“Your real gift is for making Negroes feel proud,” Freddie said. “I’m not as fond of Booker T. Washington as you—he doesn’t make enough demands!—but if you think he’s one kind of Moses, then you can be another. Those were
your
words, not his, you wrote in that opera. Your music can help free our people from their binds, so no one can make slaves of us again.”

Scott couldn’t discard Freddie’s talk of Negroes as slaves again. He might have laughed a few years ago, but not anymore. True, the number of colored doctors, lawyers, ministers and clerks was growing all the time, and their race now bore writers and poets, including Freddie’s beloved Dunbar, whose love poems she now recited to him nightly. But Scott had traveled enough to see the fear and despair. The growth of segregated facilities after the ominous
Plessy
ruling in ’96 was the first wind of it. A violent storm was spreading, and closer to home.

He’d heard about a young trombone player, Louis Wright, who’d been lynched in New Madrid a couple years ago, near Missouri’s Kentucky and Tennessee borders. The way Scott had heard it, the young man had cursed at whites throwing snowballs at him, and one thing had led to another until there was a riot at a theater. The entire troupe had been jailed, and Wright had died at the end of the rope. Scott’s father had told him he couldn’t remember a time he’d heard about more lynchings, even before Emancipation. And anyone who wasn’t a blind fool could see that Reconstruction had failed, with little hope of resurrection. Times
were
dire.

But what could a musician do?

“I’m well liked in Sedalia among Negroes and whites both, and I aim to get my feet under me,” Scott said, eager to change the subject. Freddie’s admiration felt burdensome. He’d be satisfied with a reliable bank account these days. “I don’t give speeches. I write music. I’m lucky to be in demand for picnics and dances.”

“What you see in yourself doesn’t matter,” Freddie said. “It’s what
they
see. You’re a Negro, and you’ve reached a high station. President Roosevelt probably knows your name.”

Scott covered his face, shaking his head. “Come now, Freddie. I doubt that.” He had dreamed of seeing
A Guest of Honor
performed at the White House one day, but that notion had been another casualty of the tour. How had he expected to make it to the White House when he couldn’t survive a handful of performances? Or overcome the treachery of low character in the theft by another Negro?

“You can help us
all
get better seats on the trains, and equal treatment everywhere. Your music gives you a platform, Scott. You’ll be heard.” Freddie spoke so emphatically that her words triggered a coughing fit, and Scott was ready to leap up to find a tin of water for her when Freddie waved with both hands to tell him she was all right. Her gray gloves swooped like doves in the dark. “The smoke excites me, I think. I’ll have to stop talking so much.”

“All I want,” Scott said, “is to get my wife out of this smoky car. And safely to bed.”

“I’m sorry I got sick. I should have stayed in Little Rock,” Freddie said, sounding tired; her new bride’s facade cracking at last. “Don’t come too close to me, or you’ll be sick, too.
That
would be a catastrophe. You have to be well to play.”

Belle had thought his concerts were a bore at best, a nuisance at worst, but Freddie was still charmed by them, protective. Scott prayed that would last awhile. If so, he was married for certain! He kissed his wife’s feverish forehead and held her to his side, feeling her heartbeat against his breast. “I would rather have you with me, sick or well,” he said. “And you’ll be well soon, dancing to make up for all the time you’ve missed. I’ll teach you how to cakewalk, so no one will guess how behind the times you are. I’ll teach you all the dances I know.”

“And you’ll bare your soul like Paul Laurence Dunbar? You’ll go back to your opera?”

Truly, she was relentless. “One day, I suppose, Freddie. Of course I will, by and by.”

Satisfied with his promise, Freddie closed her eyes and slept.

Marching music accompanied the train’s moans and hisses as it came to a rocking stop inside Sedalia’s stately Katy Depot. Scott wiped dark dust from his window with his handkerchief to see the ruckus: A dozen members of the Negro Queen City Band were assembled on the platform, playing a rousing rendition of the “Washington Post March,” the cornets, clarinets and trombones bobbing to the tempo. The soaring structure amplified their music, making it all the grander. The band members were even wearing snappy uniforms in blue and red, and matching caps, no longer a bedraggled group. Emmett Cook, as usual, played the bass drum, and Scott was glad to see his friend wasn’t in jail, which had been the rumor. Scott didn’t know most of the other young men’s faces. He had been gone too long.

Emmett saluted Scott with his drum mallet raised high, then spun it, grinning, before he found the beat again. At that hour, they’d be lucky if they weren’t locked up for disturbing the peace! At least there was little fear of lynching here. Scott had been reared in Texarkana—and he would always love St. Louis—but Sedalia might have been his home all along.

“I’ve married a prince,” Freddie said, leaning over him to take in the sight of the band.

“No,” he said, smiling. “They’re good folks, and I’m missed here.”

The night Scott Joplin arrived with his new bride in the town where he had composed his most beloved song, he couldn’t imagine needing any luck beyond that.

Los Angeles

P
hoenix was congratulating herself on a night of normal sleep when she saw the piano.

Since she was not in her own bed, first she had to remind herself where she was:
This is Carlos Harris’s bedroom. I agreed to sleep in here last night.
Carlos’s queen-sized bed was big enough to give them space without touching, as he’d promised. First question answered. But although Phoenix had been dead tired when he dragged her to bed at midnight, she was sure she would have remembered seeing a shiny piano with a tall, old-fashioned wood cabinet blocking his closet door, so big and misplaced that it jutted almost as far as the bedroom doorway. This piano didn’t belong in Carlos Harris’s bedroom.
ROSENKRANZ
, said the label painted in gold across the upraised key cover, above the keys.

This piano
especially
didn’t belong here, she realized, examining the instrument in the silvery morning light. The piano’s appearance was all wrong, dramatically altered—but she
knew
this piano. She knew its height, its width, its decoratively carved legs, its engraved flowers on the pale rosewood cabinet, and especially its two candelabra spaced above the keys to give light in the time before electricity. She knew its stare. This piano was a ghost, its youth restored. This piano had chased her down the stairs.

Phoenix heard Carlos breathing slowly behind her turned back. Carlos was here, asleep, and that simple knowledge was Phoenix’s anchor to sanity. There was nothing to panic about. All she would do, she decided, was roll very slowly onto her back, reach over to shake Carlos, and ask him if he could see the piano, too. Maybe the piano wasn’t really here. Or, maybe she
was
dreaming. Carlos could tell her one way or the other. She would have launched her plan if she hadn’t noticed the foot of the bed and forgotten her plan altogether.

There, a black man was sitting at the edge of the mattress, not three inches from where her feet were entwined. He sat with his legs wide apart, hands clasped between his knees, staring at the carpeted floor. If she twitched, she would kick him.

So this IS a dream,
Phoenix thought, her heart slamming her chest. But in truth, her heart was sending out an alarm because she did not feel like she was dreaming. Last night’s dream had seemed real at the time, but Phoenix understood the difference now. Last night, she hadn’t felt the stabbing awareness that she was awake, the constant onslaught of reminders. The satin bedsheets against her skin, the lumpy mound in the center of her pillow, or her skin itching all over, starting at her feet. The smell of Carlos’s aftershave, the thin cobweb billowing beneath the air-conditioning vent, and the words
Calle del Cristo
painted on the artwork shaped like a miniature country storefront hanging on Carlos’s wall.

Irrefutable clues that she was wide-awake were everywhere.

Phoenix dug her nails into her palm so hard that she carved raw crescents into her skin. She would rather hurt herself than risk a movement that might make the man sitting on the bed look toward her, or chase him away.

That is not a real person. That is Scott Joplin’s ghost, and he’s not going to hurt you,
Phoenix thought, trying to soothe herself, but she couldn’t forget she was lying: She didn’t
know
he wasn’t going to hurt her, she only hoped he wasn’t. She was pinning her hopes on a psychic’s conjecture and movies about sad, yearning ghosts. The hard truth was, she didn’t know anything about this realm that kept brushing against her shoulder. She had not known this man in life, and she knew him less in death.
Please, please go away. Shit shit shit, please leave me alone.

Phoenix’s feet trembled. Her efforts to lie still turned her muscles against her, shooting conflicting impulses across her rigid, restless body. Her eyes kept trying to look away from the man who wasn’t there, as if she hoped he would vanish if she blinked, but Phoenix forced herself to stare. The veins in her neck bulged from the effort, but she was going to look at him the way she would stare directly at an eclipse, even if there were consequences.

The man’s profile didn’t look like the stoic photograph she had studied these past days; his jowl seemed looser, and his lips were almost Ronn’s, with that plump velvet cushion on the bottom. He was darker than Ronn, maybe half Ronn’s size. His skin was onyx against his downy white dress shirt. His hair was wiry, tiny black coils. Agony had hollowed out the exposed side of his face. He might be praying or crying, or both. He was the portrait of misery. On her bed. And he was dead.

Phoenix’s mouth shook as words tried to bring themselves out for air:
What do you want from me? What can I do to help you?
But the words never came. Phoenix borrowed more oxygen from her lungs, trying to speak, but her voice had shut itself down, useless. She had never been more sorry to be afraid. But if he looked at her, she might faint. And if he
touched
her…

On her nightstand, Phoenix’s cell phone rang, and her fear set itself free as a scream. Her eyes went to the phone for a half second as she remembered where the ringing had come from. A second at most. But when she looked back, the man at the edge of the bed was gone. The piano, too. Phoenix felt like she was a part of a slideshow clicked to the next image, this one not quite identical to the last.

“C-Carlos,” she said. Her arm flailed for him.

Carlos’s eyes were already open, slits nearly hidden in the shadows across his face. He lay stock-still as a corpse, his eyes trained on the spot where the ghost had been. “I saw,” he whispered, not moving, as if he still expected the visage to come back. “He was there…ten, fifteen minutes.” Carlos didn’t sound blasé anymore. He was a man who had seen a ghost.

“Why didn’t you wake me up?” Phoenix felt a flash of irritation.

“I couldn’t. Anytime I moved, he seemed to fade. I pretended to be asleep.”

“Did you see a piano, too?”

“No. I saw a man sitting on the bed.”

“In a white shirt?”

“Yes. And he was posed like Rodin’s
The Thinker,
but his hands were folded. Every few minutes, I heard him sigh. Most of the time, he was looking right at you.”

By the time Phoenix noticed her phone again, it was on its fourth ring. The 314 area code told her who it was, and she thanked God for his timing. Her hands were so unsteady, she dropped the phone and had to slide from his bed to retrieve it from the floor.

“Mr. Milton?” she said, afraid she’d missed him.

“Yes, it’s me,” Van Milton said, sounding as relieved as she felt. “I—”

“The ghost was just here. In my bedroom. He was sitting at the edge of my bed, I swear. He was right
here
. Can you please tell me what’s going on?”

A blast of static on the line made Milton’s voice hard to hear. Puffs of her hair fell across Phoenix’s earlobe, and she brushed them aside while she strained to listen. “I was hoping you’d tell
me,
” Van Milton said. “I need to see you, Miss Smalls. Right away. How can I find you?”

“I’m in L.A.,” she said.

“So am I. I just landed, so I’m using my cell phone. After I saw the faxes you sent me, I took the first flight I could find.”

V
an Milton looked like he might be in his bedclothes when he met Phoenix and Carlos in the TSR lobby at eight-thirty in battered gray sweats and a faded T-shirt from a Sedalia ragtime festival. His eyes were overanxious and rest-broken, so he probably hadn’t slept on the overnight flight. By the way he lurched to his feet, he might have dozed off waiting for her.

Phoenix hadn’t wanted to meet the curator in such a public place, but there was no way around it. He’d refused to discuss more on the telephone, and she had an appointment in Ronn’s office at nine with Katrice, Manny and Jamal Lewis, the director of her music video. Sarge had been surprised when she said she didn’t need a ride to the studio—
So you’re still with him,
he said, the
him
being Carlos—but he’d kept his criticisms to himself. She’d see her father at the meeting. Felicha told Phoenix that The Mothership was free, so she and Carlos met privately with the curator in Ronn’s most prized studio, which Phoenix thought befitted the occasion.

Phoenix told Van Milton about the ghost they’d seen on her bed. While he listened—or half listened, she thought—the curator spread the pages of sheet music she’d faxed him across the control boards until paper blanketed the machinery, a makeshift exhibition.

When she was finished, Milton tapped the silent keyboard of the gray Yamaha MOTIF ES. “How do I get this to work?”

Since that was one of the few questions about Ronn’s studio Phoenix
could
answer—and despite the violation of The Mothership’s number one rule,
Nobody better fuck with the equipment
—she was happy to turn on the synthesizer and test a key. Her touch set off a blast from a techno-happy brass section, which made them all jump. “Let’s try a piano,” she said.

Milton nodded. “Please.”

That done, the curator’s practiced fingers launched into a ragtime melody on the MOTIF’s convincing imitation of a piano. Despite its cheer, the music filled Phoenix with dread even before Milton spoke. She didn’t know this song, yet she did. “This is ‘The Chrysanthemum.’ When I pulled your fax out of our machine, it jumped out at me in the first measure. Joplin dedicated it to Freddie Alexander, who was soon to be his wife,” he said.

Freddie again. It might be a melody Phoenix had heard in her sleep, but she couldn’t be sure. Phoenix wrapped her arms around herself, rubbing her skin for warmth. The Mothership always got cold overnight, so it was frigid, ghost or no ghost.

“Joplin’s publisher claimed it was inspired by a dream about
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
. It’s good work, from 1904, available in any full collection of Joplin’s rags. So when ‘The Chrysanthemum’ was at the top of your stack of so-called ghost music, I asked myself, ‘Why is this girl trying to make me out like some fool?’ I almost didn’t bother with the rest. I’d had an aggravating day…” Milton’s hands tinkled out a rapid melody in a different key.

“But
this
one caught my attention. I didn’t recognize it right away because I’ve never known how it begins. I called it ‘Page Two,’ the second page of an unpublished Joplin manuscript. One day in 1947, Joplin’s widow invited a photographer to the house, and he captured one of Scott Joplin’s unfinished manuscripts in a photograph. An enterprising young man in Chicago, Reginald R. Robinson—he’s a friend of mine—was researching Joplin a few years ago when he found that photograph of handwritten sheet music. Well, Reginald—now, he’s a bright young man who also happens to be a self-taught musician from the projects—had the brilliant idea that if he
enlarged
the photo, he could see the music clearly enough to transcribe it, which is what he did. He recorded it for the first time on his last CD, all thirty-one seconds of it. It was a rescue, because that original sheet music in the photo has been lost, like everything else Mrs. Joplin had in the 1940s. Or, we’d
thought
the music was lost.”

At that, Milton gazed at Phoenix above his glasses, a significant look that made her realize he had not made up his mind about whether to trust her. “But now, thanks to you, I also have Page One. And pages three and four, which make it complete, so I was able to play the whole thing last night. If it’s what you say it is, I’m the first to play the entire piece since the man who composed it. Except for
you,
that is. In your sleep.” His tone was skeptical.

“I’m just telling you the way it happened, Mr. Milton,” Phoenix said, defensive.

“Yes, so you’ve claimed,” he said with that same undecided, blank look again. “I should tell you, Reginald said he had a similar experience at the Joplin House, in the parlor. He sat at our piano for two hours and composed something he called ‘The Ventriloquist.’ He told me he felt like he was channeling Joplin’s spirit. The piece is good, and it sounds like Joplin, but Reginald is an excellent composer. My guess is, there’s a thin line between revelation and imitation.”

“Not with me,” Phoenix said.

“We have it on video,” Carlos said, speaking for the first time. He stood apart from them beside one of the video games near the door. “It may not prove she was sleeping, but if you saw the tape…”

Milton half shrugged, shuffling through his pages of scores. “If it were done cleverly enough, how would I know? Any good composer could imitate Joplin’s style.” He sighed, gathering several pages in his hand and slowly pulled off his glasses to pocket them. “I have a sense of humor, so when I came across ‘Page Two,’ you got my attention. It’s pretty obscure. But I could have called you from St. Louis about that. I didn’t need to use my sister’s discount flight pass to get here overnight.” Milton’s eyes shimmered as he gazed at her, probing as if he hoped to see past her mask. “Then I got to the next pages. These. And I had a different feeling.”