The Jazz Palace (4 page)

Arthur broke his bread into four pieces, buttering each one separately, cowering before his father, but his gaze was fixed on his older brother, who seemed more like a hero, back from the wars, than a boy with a propensity for disaster and a musical ear.

T
he Regency Theater was four blocks away, and after dinner Benny wandered over. He'd been going to the Regency since he was small. The dank theater consisted of eight rows with six folding chairs in each, a small balcony with a dozen more chairs, a tattered sheet that served as the screen, and a projector. The piano player wore her hair piled on her head and held up with two chopsticks. She never took her eyes off the screen, and the light from the picture illumined her face. Benny kept his eyes on her. He never cared much for the stories that were on the screen. He came for the music.

As the tension mounted, the piano player worked up from the bass with a rising crescendo. With each rescue she struck a heart-wrenching set of right-handed trills. She hit the keys in ways that imitated slaps, claps, knocks, and falls. She played romantic melodies to introduce the love interest, bold chords for the hero, and minor chords in the bass brought on the villain. She played ragtime between reels or to announce the happy ending. And it was always happy.

In the dark theater with the notes rising, all the stories blended into one. Women tied to a chair, tied to a railroad track and freed, women released just before they tumbled down Niagara Falls, as they bounced through white water, rescued at the edge of a precipice, delivered from poverty, from grief, from having to sell their bodies, from having to sell their souls. In ten finger crescendos women swooned in the hands of an evil man. The boy next door rescued them. Every man wanted to save a beautiful woman. Everybody wanted to save someone.

The gem sisters slept in the order in which they were born. Pearl lay in the middle, with Opal and Ruby on either side. Ruby slept against the wall while Opal teetered on the edge. Though this should have been reversed, Ruby, who was almost ten when their youngest sister was born, refused to give up her place against the wall and, as a toddler, Opal seemed to prefer the outside. It was Pearl's task to keep her from falling.

Anna wanted her children named after tangible things. In the old country she had spoken only
mamaloshen
, the mother tongue. In the Yiddish of the shtetl there were only two words for flowers—violet and rose. No words existed for the varieties of wild birds or trees. But in English, Anna learned, everything had a name. Before, all trees were simply “tree.” Now there was oak, maple, elm. She found hawk, peacock, cockatoo. Lily of the valley, Rose of Sharon, jack-in-the-pulpit. In the end she named her oldest boys Robin, Wren, and Jay after birds—except for Jonah, her firstborn, because she liked the story of the whale. She called her middle children, Moss and Fern, after woodland plants. And the final three became her precious stones.

While the others came from air or the soil, the gem sisters emerged from the depths. Anna told Pearl that she came from water, from the grain of sand that disturbs the oyster, and that her gem
sisters came from the deepest of mines. In Burma and Australia, dark men dug into the earth to find them. “But you, Pearly, you're lucky. You come from the sea.” And Pearl trembled, thinking how her mother had tried to return her there.

Of all the children Opal and Pearl looked the most alike. They bore no resemblance to Ruby, with her fire-engine-red hair and tiny pinched features, who looked like an Irish girl. Opal and Pearl shared the round Slavic cheeks and broad smiles. They were identical, except that Opal had piercing blue eyes and hair the color and texture of corn silk, and Pearl was opaque, a chocolate brown. When they stood together, it seemed as if Pearl was her sister's shadow.

Since Opal was born, Pearl had taken care of her little sister. In winter she made sure she ate hot broths. In summer she bathed her every evening. As an infant Opal had wheezy breath. She shivered when it wasn't cold and burrowed deep into her sister's arms. On the hottest nights Pearl swaddled her in an extra blanket. At times, confused about whom her mother was, Opal tried to nurse on Pearl's tiny breasts, which made Pearl laugh even as she pushed the baby away.

But now, as Opal slept, Pearl tasted the sand between her teeth and felt a hunger she could not name. As she tried to sleep, she saw a darkening sky and felt as if she could not breathe. The night sounds came together like water, rising over her head.

Though it was a warm, breezeless night, Pearl lay awake. There was a chill, locked in her bones. She listened to the noises of the house as an animal does for danger. She could hear a creak on the stairs, the clang of trash cans in the alley. A sob reached her ears. No one else could have heard it except Pearl. Downstairs in the saloon someone wept. Since the
Eastland
went down, Pearl had been afraid to close her eyes. She was wedged as always between Ruby's bony hip and Opal's warm breath.

She nudged Ruby. “Ruby,” she whispered, “wake up. Someone's crying.” But her sister just groaned and pressed herself closer to the wall. Pearl turned and wrapped her arms around Opal's waist, and even Opal pushed her away.

Her mind raced as she remembered Wren and his solitary dance.
She missed her brothers who'd drowned. Robin, the oldest, used to pick her up at school and carry her home on his shoulders. Jay played tunes on the harmonica before she went to bed while Wren mimed stories that made her laugh. Opal was too young to remember such things, and Ruby had begun drawing in a notebook every spare moment when she wasn't at school or busy with chores. Besides, Ruby hadn't been there that day, but Pearl would never forget. Even when she wasn't thinking of her brothers, she saw the boy on the bridge and the package he swung by a thread. In her half sleep Pearl watched as the parcel slipped from his fingers into the water below. It left a hole on the surface of the river as it sank. His tapping fingers and sad, dark eyes stuck in her head like a song that wouldn't leave.

Then she arrived at blank space. It came to her as if in a dream, only she'd been awake. It felt as if it had happened to someone else. Like a story you tell and think is your own. At the water's edge Anna had pressed her hand against the small of Pearl's back. Cold water soaked Pearl's skirts and seeped into her shoes. Her feet disappeared on the sandy bottom. Children born inside their cauls never drown, Anna told Pearl when Opal was born encircled in blue slime like a baby chick. But since the day when the
Eastland
settled into the river's mud, Pearl wasn't sure.

Clasping Opal's tiny fist, Pearl had persuaded her mother to get away from the shore. There was somewhere they had to be. It took three streetcars to bring them home.
Our mother tried to drown us, too
, Pearl wanted to tell her siblings when they asked what was wrong. But who would believe her? “You just want all the attention,” Ruby would say.

Instead Pearl grew hard and silent as a stone.

By day she roamed, looking for a secluded place. Sometimes her oldest sister, Fern, found her dozing in the back of the cedar closet, the fresh scent of woods in her hair, and she'd carry the girl to her proper bed. In the house she walked around with her hands pressed over her ears. She complained that she couldn't stand the jammering, the footsteps and sighs, the bathroom noises, the farts and belches, the guffaws and laughter, the bronchial coughs and fog horn sneezes, the whisperings that came through thin walls, the
shouts from room to room. But her father was dead and her brothers drowned. Her mother had tried to return her to the water from where she'd come, and Pearl did not know that the sound she could not stop hearing was the scream inside her head.

But the crying seemed to be coming from below. Pearl eased her way out of bed and to the top of the stairs, then made her way down. The wood was rough under her feet. Often she got splinters, but tonight she didn't care. At the landing she gazed into the bar. In the dim light she saw her mother slumped across a chair. Anna, draped in black, heaved like a despondent beast. Pearl wanted to go to her, but she didn't dare. The impression of her mother's fingers was etched on her wrist.

Anna had always kept her from harm. She left a honey pot open in the kitchen to trap bad spirits floating by. If someone told Pearl she was pretty, her mother retorted, “Like a pig,” then spit in the air to drive the evil eye away. When Anna sewed Pearl's dresses right on her back, she made her hold a thread between her teeth for good luck.

Now Pearl's skin burned from the sun. Small blisters covered her nose, and the freckles emblazoned on her cheeks would remain. Her birthday was a sad memory of a July day that she'd never celebrate again. She'd never taste strawberry ice cream and not feel her throat constrict. Pearl had pulled her mother from the water's edge on to a streetcar, going the wrong direction. For hours they'd been lost in the city. When they got home, they found Jonah, sobbing, certain that they were all dead.

Turning away, Pearl tiptoed back up the stairs. Her heart beat as if someone had jumped out of a dark corner to frighten her. She thought she would die if she went back to bed. She could not bear to lie awake, entombed between her sisters. In the hallway she paused before the photograph of her mother, trim and smiling, standing in front of the first Ferris wheel. In 1893 Anna had strolled the Chicago World's Fair on her father's arm and thought that this was what her life would be. All white with gondolas sailing in man-made lakes, women in elegant gowns walking by. Music coming from wooden
boxes. The classical white buildings, the pillars. Everything before Anna was white, shimmering.

No wonder they'd called it the White City. Chicago had risen from its ashes. A carpenter who worked on the Court of Honor named Elias Disney would tell of its wonders to his son, Walt. A Chicago writer, L. Frank Baum, reinvented it as Oz. Through the pavilions Anna had caught glimpses of herself in windows and mirrors. Her russet hair piled on her head, and her body trim in its green dress as they shopped for Turkish delight on a Cairo Street, viewed a Bavarian castle, and paused before a Hindu snake charmer.

Anna had ogled Little Egypt, the belly dancer, and laughed at what scandalized the fair most—the first zipper. Already newspaper editorials bemoaned how easy carnal knowledge would be. She ate handfuls of a nutty snack called Cracker Jack. In the Palace of Electricity she shrieked as sparks flew from the fingertips of a man named Tesla and swayed at the Haitian Pavilion as a young piano player played his “Maple Leaf Rag.”

Two years before, her family had come to this city where pigs could not walk on Michigan Avenue on a Sunday. They had crossed a roiling sea where Anna had lain across her father's lap, the sea having entered her as well. Her father stroked her hair and promised her dresses of silk, indoor plumbing, and a pony in the New World. He had made good on most of these.

On the Midway, men turned their heads. A photographer snapped her picture, and her father took it home. It would be the only image of Anna as girl. She was aware of her small waist and plump breasts, her fleshy thighs. There was a sweetness in the air like spun sugar.

Anna did not know then—nor would she have cared—that the fair buildings she passed were sheds of tin and lumber, coated in a mix of plaster, jute fibers, and cement. That they would burn in the fire which, along with the assassination of the mayor, would bring about the end of the fair. Or that even as Scott Joplin played his “Maple Leaf Rag,” Frederick O. Douglass was complaining that the White City was just that. White.

She had been oblivious to all. Anna was sixteen years old and secretly in love. She had no idea that this was the last time she and her father would enjoy a stroll. That everything was about to change. She begged him for a ride on the first Ferris wheel. As they rose in the glass cage, she clung to her father's arm. People were small as ants; carriages and buildings looked like toys. Individual lives seemed insignificant from her vantage point. She wondered not how but when she would tell her father that she intended to marry for love.

As Pearl listened to her mother's sobs, it was hard for her to believe that the girl in the picture had become the woman crying downstairs. Anna's father had disowned her when she married Samuel. Even after Samuel's death her father refused to forgive her. And now their sons were gone, and it seemed to Pearl that her mother was no longer right in her head. Pearl snuck into the kitchen and opened the door that led to the back porch. She did this often when she couldn't sleep. She stepped outside and knelt down. The wooden slats pressed against her flesh.

Tucking her nightgown under her thighs, Pearl gazed into the smoky sky. There were no stars, no moon. Just the humid, still air. She leaned against the brick wall and listened to the sound of distant waves, pounding the shore.