Tiger Rag (8 page)

“That’s where she met him,” Ruby said, unrolling a pair of black gloves monogrammed
V.O
. “This must be the stuff he left behind when he took off. She’s been lugging it around ever since. Pathetic …”

There was a small stack of LPs with worn covers. Devon grew excited, rifling through them: Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet, Bix Beiderbecke, and, at the bottom, an LP entitled
Undercurrents
, by Tex Mayeux’s Hurricane Band. Wearing white tuxedo jackets with silken lapels, the band members had been photographed with their instruments before a neon-blue curtain, circa 1959. Tex Mayeux, a big man with a lopsided face, was front and center at his piano, showing a lot of teeth.

Ruby put her finger on the trumpeter, a tall unsmiling man
with a square jaw and slicked-back brown hair. He was the only one in the band looking directly at the camera. “That’s my father,” she said. “My mother played this record all the time. I did, too, when I was around twelve. Then one day I couldn’t stand it anymore.”

“How come you never mentioned that he cut a record?”

Ruby shrugged. “I never listened to it again. And I doubt you would’ve thought it was any good.”

“I would’ve liked to have heard it.”

“I’ve told you, your becoming a musician had nothing to do with him. You have more talent than he ever did.”

“I never cut a record.” Devon turned back to the LP. “Looks like he played a Selmer trumpet. You can tell because it’s unusually long. Made in France.”

“Evidently that trumpet was his prized possession,” Ruby said, slipping on one of the gloves.

“The liner notes say the band toured South America as well as Europe. I’ve listened to a ton of music, but I never heard of these guys.”

“I’m not surprised. This was their moment, and it didn’t last. My father didn’t last. According to my mother, he never played with a real band again. He went back to being a session man, a fill-in. He scraped along. It was his solo on ‘This Can’t Be Love’ that she used to play over and over again.”

“Did you ever hear him play?”

“Once.” She took off the glove and folded it. “In Saint Louis.”

“You never told me that, either.”

“I’ll tell you about it some other time.”

“I don’t know most of this playlist, except the standards. ‘Body and Soul.’ And there’s one Monk.”

Ruby had already moved on, sifting through the rest of the suitcase. “I never had a single thing of his,” she muttered.

“Why didn’t she give you any of this before?”

“Because it was hers,” Ruby replied matter-of-factly. “This was what she got from him, and this is what I’m getting from her. No money, no property. This is their legacy.”

“Did he have other family?”

“I wouldn’t know. He may have married, had other children. Like my mother, he lived in a lot of places. He got his big break with Tex Mayeux right here in Miami. The rest is history,” she added dryly.

“All you ever told me was that he and your mother met in New Orleans.”

“Met, mated, and parted. March 1960.”

“You lived in New Orleans yourself for a while, right?” Devon knew she was pushing her luck.

Even in her agitated state, Ruby didn’t take the bait. “That’s another story,” she said brusquely. She looked around and shivered. “Let’s get out of here.”

When she realized Ruby was ready to leave the suitcase there, Devon quickly repacked it and carried it out with her.

When they got home, Ruby took a bath. Her stereo system included a turntable, and Devon took the opportunity to put on the Hurricane Band’s album. Her mother was right: they weren’t very good. Brassy but bland, they reminded Devon of the resident bands on late-night shows.

Ruby returned in her kimono and mixed herself a vodka martini and lit some scented candles. She was in her own world again. Devon was sitting on the floor in front of the open suitcase.

“If you want any of that stuff, it’s yours,” Ruby said offhandedly.

“I want that Selmer trumpet.”

“Good luck finding it.”

Devon unzipped an interior pocket in the suitcase and removed a packet of envelopes. “Look, there are some old letters.” She flipped through them. “From your father to your mother, it looks like. Do you want to see them?”

Ruby sipped her drink. “Leave them on the table. Would you play the piano for me, dear? You play so beautifully.”

“Now?” Devon hadn’t played for her mother in years.

“Whatever you like: Schumann, Liszt—or some jazz.”

“Mom, I don’t play much anymore.”

Ruby waved away her reply. “Please. Play me something. Can I fix you a drink?”

“No, I don’t want a drink.”

Devon sat down at the piano and, closing her eyes, launched tentatively into “Criss Cross.” If Ruby was listening, she didn’t show it. She had moved on again, arranging some flowers, watering a plant. Finally she circled around and picked up the packet of letters. She curled up on the sofa, scanning several letters, then examining the postmarks on the envelopes instead. Devon began improvising, losing herself in the music. She was surprised at how easily it was coming back to her.

“Devon,” Ruby called out.

Devon did not want to stop playing. She looked over at her mother.

“Two of these are postmarked in Chicago, two in New York, one in Atlanta,” Ruby said. “They were sent over just a few years, when I was small. I wouldn’t have expected that.”

Devon lifted her hands from the keyboard. “Love letters?”

“Hardly. Take a look. They’re all about the clubs he’s playing. The famous musicians he’s hanging out with. He’s responding to letters of hers, but I bet she sent a dozen for every one she got in return. Later she would spin me her romantic fairy tales about how terrific he was.”

Devon joined her on the sofa and picked up the letters. Her grandfather’s handwriting was cramped and spindly. He omitted some words and misspelled others, like
foregn
and
pospone
. Devon could see why Ruby might have wanted to stop reading; when he mentioned her at all, it was perfunctory.
What grade was she in? Would Camille send a photo when he had a permanent address?
Except he never seemed to get a permanent address. The letters were short and impersonal. Devon wondered why he took the trouble to write at all. It was like someone who calls you to vent his complaints. Maybe it was all about the complaints. His health, the fact he couldn’t get work, the corruptness of the music business. He didn’t ask Camille to lend him money, but not so subtly inquired if she knew anyone who could. He usually signed off with his full name, nothing else. Unfolding the last letter, Devon stopped short.

“This one’s from someone else, Mom.”

“A letter to him?”

“No, a letter to your mother about him. Recent.”

Ruby’s interest was momentarily piqued. Devon handed her the letter, typed on business stationery and dated July 2, 2010. The letterhead read:

A calling card was stapled in the upper corner; under the name and address was this:

The signature was florid, and his name on the card was printed in brown ink.

“What do you think?” Devon said.

“He doesn’t really say much.”

“He says it’s important.”

“That could mean anything.” Ruby shrugged. “It is weird that he sent this twenty years after my father died.”

“I think so, too. ‘Musical rarities’—that’s right up my alley. I’d like to find out if your mother ever contacted him. If it’s okay with you.”

“Be my guest. I doubt she acted on this: she was fading fast over the summer. I’m surprised she even filed it away.” Ruby became irritated. “Why are we even discussing this as if it’s important? Valentine Owen was never connected to anything important in his life.”

At six
A.M
. Devon made the first of several calls to Browne’s number, but even during business hours, she got nothing but a ringtone. No secretary, no answering machine.

“You can look him up when we get to New York,” Ruby said to her that evening. She was wearing a gold kimono,
applying matching polish to her fingernails. Whatever the invitation to speak at the conference meant to Ruby, the trip itself—requiring the better part of two days in an automobile rather than three hours on an airplane—had taken on an importance of its own, paralleling the inner journey she had undertaken, whose destination was not yet clear.

“Maybe you’ll come with me when I meet this guy,” Devon said.

Ruby kissed her cheek. “Of course I will. You know, Devon, you haven’t told me about your tattoo. I hadn’t seen it until you put on your bathing suit.”

“It’s new. I had it done last year.” Devon realized it was the tattoo, centered between her shoulder blades, that mesmerized Ruby when she was in the pool, not her swimming. “What do you want to know?”

“Everything,” Ruby said, holding her hand out to study her nails. “I want to know everything.”

Alice Bolden called her son Charley from the day he was born to the day she buried him. The crowd knew him by other names. Buddy, of course. Then they called him Kid Bolden, and finally they crowned him King. She took pride in hearing others call him King Bolden, but it made her uneasy, too. Kings get knocked off their thrones; the same people who cheer them on bring them down. She was afraid for him—the adulation, the women, the money flowing in and flowing out. In the winter of 1906 her worst fears were realized
.

Charley was on fire—not with his music, but with demons like she’d never seen. All his sweetness had turned bitter. He said he had enemies waiting on him. He accused her of letting them into the house and hiding them. He kept a knife under his pillow. Then he began sleeping on the floor, against the wall, so no one could come up behind him. He had a foul temper, and when he fed it alcohol, it could flare up and swallow him. She’d
watched her husband waste away, and then her mother and father died, and her daughter Lottie, who was only five. But this was worse. Charley hollering in the night, like someone had him by the throat. Stumbling home filthy at dawn. Sometimes just making it back to the neighborhood, blind drunk, and passing out in the gutter where one of the neighbors—when they still cared—picked him up. Often with his pockets turned out by his bum companions, but still clutching his cornet, even if he hadn’t played it all night
.

Charley, you better stop before there’s just enough of you left to kill off, and nothing more.

But he couldn’t hear her, not a word of it, even if he wanted to. He could rave and shout, but he had trouble hearing any voices except his own, and sometimes there were so many of those that it sounded like a chorus, every singer working a different key. For a while, when he was still playing, that roar was way in the back of his head, a constant, ebbing and flowing, and he was able to draw a single line of sound out of it and make it into music. But that didn’t last long
.

When everything collapsed on him, it happened so fast that for the rest of her life Alice could barely make sense of it. The previous year, Charley was still on top, raking in the big money, wearing expensive suits and alligator shoes and custom-made hats. Some days he played seven or eight engagements, from the saloons in Back-of-Town to the biggest halls in New Orleans, where people lined up to get in. For four years running, he brought her enough money so that she didn’t have to work at all, his sister Cora, too. He himself was living in a white house with yellow shutters on LaPierre Street with Nora and their daughter, Bernedine, and making his rounds, as everyone knew, of the hotels and apartments where he kept those other
women in style. He was paying rent all over town. His house was two stories high with indoor plumbing and brass fixtures and a wide widow’s walk on the roof where he could see clear to the river. He used to lounge up there with Cornish and Lewis, drinking good whiskey. Once, when Nora was out, just to see what would happen, he played his horn loud and, sure enough, people gathered, ten, twenty deep and called out to him, frightening Bernedine inside, so he never did it again. He had been spending more money in a week than Alice would see in an entire year, but then he got erratic, drinking heavily, missing gigs, disappearing for days at a time, until he was nearly broke, and Nora left him and went to live at her mother’s house with Bernedine, and Alice herself was back at Morton’s Laundry on Quillon Place, scrubbing and ironing. She would tell the story of her famous son to the other women in that steaming room, she needed to hear herself tell it, because by then he was disappearing before her eyes, and the story was all she had left, the unfinished story he would remain for the next three decades
.

Alice told them how Charley started out, learning the cornet from her onetime beau, Mr. Manuel Hall. She was still a pretty widow then, and Charley was eight years old. Her husband, Westmore, whose good looks and charm Charley inherited, had died of a heart attack two years earlier, age twenty-nine. Nearly all the men in that family died young. Not Charley, who would suffer a long living death. Manny was a cook at Nelson Quirile’s Café on Royal Street. He often had sawdust on his shoes from the kitchen. A widower himself, a big man who worked the night shift, sweating in a low-ceilinged kitchen with two coal stoves. He smelled of shrimp and shallots and the West Indian lime cologne he splashed on Sunday morning
that stayed with him till Tuesday. After she took Charley and Cora to church, and served them all lunch, ham hocks and beans with yellow rice, she and Manny would stroll along Marin Street, past the St. Jacques Shipyard, to a riverfront bar for a pitcher of beer. Then they’d go back to Manny’s house, Number 2359, five doors down from her house. Sometimes Alice felt sure Charley and Cora saw them return from the bar. But they never once came knocking at Manny’s door or questioned her when she came back home alone at dusk. Later, Charley told people that Manny was the only real father he ever knew
.