The City

While I’m still giving you background here, I should tell you about his musicianship. He played with good taste and distinction, and he had a tremendous left hand, the best I’ve ever heard. In the hotel where he worked, there were two dining rooms. One was French and formal and featured a harpist, and the décor either made you feel elegant or made you ill. The second was an Art Deco jewel in shades of blue and silver with lots of glossy-black granite and black lacquer, more of a supper club, where the food was solidly American. Grandpa played the Deco room, providing background piano between seven and nine o’clock, mostly American-standard ballads and some friskier Cole Porter numbers; between nine and midnight, three sidemen joined him, and the combo pumped it up to dance music from the 1930s and ’40s. Grandpa Teddy sure could swing the keyboard.

Those days right after his Anita died, he played music I’d never heard before, and to this day I don’t know the names of any of those numbers. They made me cry, and I went to other rooms and tried not to listen, but you couldn’t stop listening because those melodies were so mesmerizing, melancholy but irresistible.

After a week, Grandpa returned to work, and my mom and I went home to the downtown walk-up. Two months later, in June, when my mom’s life blew up, we went to live with Grandpa Teddy full-time.

3 (#ulink_9bacf370-2f05-5160-b662-74220869fa6b)

Sylvia Kirk, my mother, was twenty-nine when her life blew up, and it wasn’t the first time. Back then, I could see that she was pretty, but I didn’t realize how young she was. Only ten myself, I felt anyone over twenty must be ancient, I guess, or I just didn’t think about it at all. To have your life blow up four times before you’re thirty would take something out of anyone, and I think it drained from my mom just enough hope that she never quite built her confidence back to what it once had been.

When it happened, school had been out for weeks. Sunday was the only day that the community center didn’t have summer programs for kids, and I was staying with Mrs. Lorenzo that late afternoon and evening. Mrs. Lorenzo, once thin, was now a merry tub of a woman and a fabulous cook. She lived on the second floor and accepted a little money to look after me when there were no other options, primarily when my mom sang at Slinky’s, the blues joint, three nights a week. Sunday wasn’t one of those three, but Mom had gone to a big-money neighborhood for a celebration dinner, where she was going to sign a contract to sing five nights a week at what she described as “a major venue,” a swanky nightclub that no one would ever have called a joint. The club owner, William Murkett, had contacts in the recording industry, too, and there was talk about putting together a three-girl backup group to work with her on some numbers at the club and to cut a demo or two at a studio. It looked like the big break wouldn’t be a steakhouse waitress job.

We expected her to come for me after eleven o’clock, but it was only seven when she rang Mrs. Lorenzo’s bell. I could tell right off that something must be wrong, and Mrs. Lorenzo could, too. But my mom always said she didn’t wash her laundry in public, and she was dead serious about that. When I was little, I didn’t understand what she meant, because she did, too, wash her laundry in the communal laundry room in the basement, which had to be as public as you could wash it, except maybe right out in the street. That night, she said a migraine had just about knocked her flat, though I’d never heard of her having one before. She said that she hadn’t been able to stay for the dinner with her new boss. While she paid Mrs. Lorenzo, her lips were pressed tight, and there was an intensity, a power, in her eyes, so that I thought she might set anything ablaze just by staring at it too long.

When we got up to our apartment and she closed the door to the public hall, she said, “We’re going to pack up all our things, our clothes and things. Daddy’s coming for us, and we’re going to live with him from now on. Won’t you like living with your grandpa?”

His house was nicer than our apartment, and I said so. At ten, I had no control of my tongue, and I also said, “Why’re we moving? Is Grandpa too sad to be alone? Do you really have a migraine?”

Instead of answering me, she said, “Come on, honey, I’ll help you pack your things, make sure nothing’s left behind.”

I had my own bright-green pressboard suitcase that pretty much held all my clothes, though we needed to use a plastic department store shopping bag for the overflow.

As we were packing, she said, “Don’t be half a man when you grow up, Jonah. Be a good man like your grandpa.”

“Well, that’s who I want to be. Who else would I want to be but like Grandpa?”

Not daring to put it more directly, what I meant was that I had no desire to grow up to be like my father. He walked out on us when I was eight months old, and he came back when I was eight years old, but then he walked out on us again before my ninth birthday. The man didn’t have a commitment problem; the word wasn’t in his vocabulary. In those days, I worried he might come back again, which would have been a calamity, considering all his problems. Among other things, he wasn’t able to love anyone but himself.

Still, Mom had a weak spot for him. If he showed up, she might go with him again, which is why I didn’t say what was in my heart.

“You’ve met Harmon Jessup,” she said. “You remember?”

“Sure. He owns Slinky’s, where you sing.”

“You know I quit there for this other job. But I don’t want you thinking your mother’s flaky.”

“Well, you’re not, so how could I think it?”

Folding my T-shirts into the shopping bag, she said, “I want you to know I quit for another reason, too, and a good one. Harmon just kept getting … way too close. He wanted more from me than just my singing.” She put away the last T-shirt and looked at me. “You know what I mean, Jonah?”

“I think I know.”

“I think you do, and I’m sorry you do. Anyway, if he didn’t get what he wanted, I wasn’t going to have a job there anymore.”

Never in my life, child or man, have I been hotheaded. I think I have more of my mother’s genes than my father’s, probably because he was too incomplete a person to have enough to give. But that night in my room, I got very angry, very fast, and I said, “I hate Harmon. If I was bigger, I’d go hurt him.”

“No, you wouldn’t.”

“I darn sure would.”

“Hush yourself, sweetie.”

“I’d shoot him dead.”

“Don’t say such a thing.”

“I’d cut his damn throat and shoot him dead.”

She came to me and stood looking down, and I figured she must be deciding on my punishment for talking such trash. The Bledsoes didn’t tolerate street talk or jive talk, or trash talk. Grandpa Teddy often said, “In the beginning was the word. Before all else, the word. So we speak as if words matter, because they do.” Anyway, my mom stood there, frowning down at me, but then her expression changed and all the hard edges sort of melted from her face. She dropped to her knees and put her arms around me and held me tight.

I felt awkward and embarrassed that I had been talking tough when we both knew that if skinny little me went gunning for Harmon Jessup, he’d blow me off my feet just by laughing in my face. I felt embarrassed for her, too, because she didn’t have anyone better than me to watch over her.

She looked me in the eye and said, “What would the sisters think of all this talk about cutting throats and shooting?”

Because Grandma worked in Monsignor McCarthy’s office, I was fortunate to be able to attend Saint Scholastica School for a third the usual tuition, and the nuns who ran it were tough ladies. If anyone could teach Harmon a lesson he’d never forget, it was Sister Agnes or Sister Catherine.

I said, “You won’t tell them, will you?”

“Well, I really should. And I should tell your grandpa.”

Grandpa’s father had been a barber, and Grandpa’s mother had been a beautician, and they had run their house according to a long set of rules. When their children occasionally decided that those rules were really nothing more than suggestions, my great-grandfather demonstrated a second use for the strap of leather that he used to strop his straight razors. Grandpa Teddy didn’t resort to corporal punishment, as his father did, but his look of extreme disappointment stung bad enough.

“I won’t tell them,” my mother said, “because you’re such a good kid. You’ve built up a lot of credit at the First Bank of Mom.”

After she kissed my forehead and got up, we went into her room to continue packing. The apartment came furnished, and it included a bedroom vanity with a three-part mirror. She trusted me to take everything out of the many little drawers and put all of it in this small square carrier that she called a train case, while she packed her clothes in two large suitcases and three shopping bags.

She wasn’t finished explaining why we had to move. I realized many years later that she always felt she had to justify herself to me. She never did need to do that, because I always knew her heart, how good it was, and I loved her so much that sometimes it hurt when I’d lie awake at night worrying about her.

Anyway, she said, “Honey, don’t you ever get to thinking that one kind of people is better than another kind. Harmon Jessup is rich compared to me, but he’s poor compared to William Murkett.”

In addition to owning the glitzy nightclub where she’d been offered five nights a week, Murkett had several other enterprises.

“Harmon is black,” she continued, “Murkett is white. Harmon had nearly no school. Murkett went to some upper-crust university. Harmon is a dirty old tomcat and proud of it. Murkett, he’s married with kids of his own and he’s got a good reputation. But under all those differences, there’s no difference. They’re the same. Each of them is just half a man. Don’t you ever be just half a man, Jonah.”

“No, ma’am. I won’t be.”

“You be true to people.”

“I will.”

“You’ll be tempted.”

“I won’t.”

“You will. Everyone is.”

“You aren’t,” I said.

“I was. I am.”