American Music Read online

  ALSO BY JANE MENDELSOHN

  I Was Amelia Earhart

  Innocence

  TO MY PARENTS,

  TO MY DAUGHTERS,

  AND, ALWAYS,

  TO NICK

  Contents

  Other Books By This Author

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Part Two

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Part Three

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Acknowledgments

  A Note About the Author

  Copyright

  O boys, this story

  The world may read in me: my body’s mark’d With Roman swords.

  —WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Cymbeline

  If you expect happy days, look out.

  —BILLIE HOLIDAY, Lady Sings the Blues

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER ONE

  2005

  She stands up in the subway car where she has been sitting and looks out into the darkness. Her stop is coming and she likes the moment before the light breaks through the window. There is her reflection in the glass, a ghost with a shifting skeleton and a visible heartbeat as the columns and dim lights that make up the architecture of this underworld scroll through her body rapid-fire in the blackness. Then she disappears into the light. She turns toward the doors. She adjusts the strap of the bag slung across her chest and quickly steps onto the platform.

  It is raining softly when she emerges onto the street. From a distance, she appears to be marching, silently, through the mist. With her steady gaze and long coat, her faded satchel and heavy boots, she looks both present and ancient. She looks like some beautiful soldier arrived from history.

  She walks several blocks along empty gray streets toward a large white undistinguished building. In the lobby of the building she shows an identification card and rides up in the elevator. She steps off and walks down a hall. A door is open for her. Inside, a man is lying chest down on a table, a thin white sheet covering his body. His hand lifts slightly when she enters.

  You’re here, she says.

  I’m here, he says.

  That’s something, she says.

  It is.

  Every week she pulls down the sheet and studies his back. She washes her hands and oils them and then rubs the oil onto the skin. His hands clench when she starts to work. He seems to be experiencing something more than pain. As she touches him there is transmitted to her bones his fierce desire to remain separate. He is determined not to reveal his secrets. She has visited him for weeks and she knows his back by now, the flat plane between the shoulder blades, the slope down to the sacrum. But she knows only his back, his neck, his arms, his legs. He will only lie on his front. He will never lie on his back, never let her work on his chest or face. He will not tell her why. She knows only that he has seen more than he can share, and she was told during the interview that she would have to respect his privacy. These men are suffering, the nurse had cautioned her. These men are haunted.

  Still, there were stories in his body that she searched for like a detective. She had begun to feel as though she could read him, as if she could interpret the meaning in his knots and sinews. Sometimes, and this was not the first time she had questioned her sanity, she received visions from his limbs, his muscles, his bones. The first time it had happened she was touching his ankle when there arose in her mind the image of a woman standing underwater in a shaft of light, her dark hair wafting weightlessly like ink. Then her hand reached his neck and she saw more people. At first, they appeared to be moving to music, glittering couples swaying on a dance floor. But then in a shift of perspective she saw hundreds of bodies, each alone, swaying upright underwater. An underwater graveyard with thousands of unseeing eyes staring directly at her.

  Suddenly, she felt sick. The light changed outside, the sky grew darker, and in the small dim room the body on the table seemed to break beneath her touch. Then from inside that, as if it were a hollowed-out broken sculpture, came pouring waves of water. She placed her hands on the man’s back until she could not see the swaying bodies any longer. She took a breath. For the moment, there were no more visions. She was safe. Yet within him, she knew, were only more stories. For a soldier’s body is a work of art that contains his country’s history.

  You were saying something in your sleep, she said.

  No, he said.

  Yes, you were trying to tell me something.

  He whispered something inaudible, then nothing. She had her hand on his arm and in a sudden flash she saw a pair of cymbals made of burnished beaten metal. She thought she could hear the reverberations of their clanging, as if from a great distance. Then she looked down at his face and saw the rapid uncontrollable movement of his eyelids. He was sleeping, but he was not at peace.

  He began to speak again. This time it was clear and she could make out most of the words. He described an elaborate ballroom and dancing with his hand pressed firmly against a woman’s back. He talked about someone who disappeared. “For years I looked for her in the jungle, in the desert. I saw her face on the body of a tiger.” He opened his eyes but he was still sleeping. She looked into those eyes and they were shining, metallic. What was he trying to tell her?

  We died that night at Roseland.

  He said they fell in love because of the music. Count Basie was making his New York debut on Christmas Eve at the Roseland Ballroom. The Count and the reflections of the Count on the instruments swayed slightly when he lifted his arm. He turned in time to the beat and his image danced along the line of brass, so that although he was gracefully and confidently conducting his orchestra he appeared to be imprisoned inside the music. He took a seat at the piano. He nodded his head. The music swung. The bodies on the dance floor moved like thoughts in one consciousness, bubbles in a glass of champagne.

  He said he put his hand on a woman’s back. He pulled her close. When they danced they danced slow and that’s when he knew that the music would kill them both.

  On the dance floor there were hundreds of us, swaying upright like moving tombstones.

  Is this a dream? she asked.

  No, he said.

  When did it happen?

  1936.

  1936

  Joe lifted his black saxophone case with one hand and with the other he picked up his brown leather suitcase. He used his arm to push his hat a little bit back on his head. He watched the city coming toward him. Over the railing in the water the reflection of the skyline slid closer with its gray syringe buildings shooting straight ahead like a metal tray of instruments being handed to a doctor.

  He would not have known what to do with them. He was a musician. The boat pulled in lazily to the harbor and the air tasted like salt and dirt and real silver. Across the green expanse of river he saw a milling crowd. In that instant he lived peacefully with the certain knowledge that he would be met with an embrace. His wife would be there. He couldn’t help smiling.

  Someone’s happy to be home, a stranger said to him.

  Welcome to New York City, Joe said.

  The sun
was strong although shrouded now and then by clouds and he was hot in his best suit. When the ship finally pulled in he saw the cumulus blow away to reveal a powder blue sky. The heat surged, causing the passengers on the deck to shift uncomfortably and then remove various items, gloves, scarves. Everyone was overdressed. By the time the liner docked most people were disheveled and in the excitement of arrival had overcome their usual propriety. Strangers spoke to strangers. Those who had become friends during the crossing bade farewell, exchanged addresses, shed tears. It was as if the assembled had gathered for a wedding or a funeral on this sunny morning in September. He closed his eyes and let a last gasp of ocean air hit his face.

  The dock was shadowed by the great ship and crowded. A watery light filtered down from on high and seemed to float between the bodies. He moved with a steady grace through the throng. He passed a woman standing amidst twelve pieces of well-traveled luggage. She recognized him from her time at the captain’s table, and as he walked by she grabbed hold of his arm to tell him how much she had enjoyed him, his playing. He had hardly time to thank her he was moving so quickly, searching the faces. A flash of anger pierced his thoughts when he considered that Pearl might not be there but then he reconsidered. He stepped beyond the center of the crowd into the brightness where he saw a man holding a birdcage. When the man bent down to get something the space behind him revealed a gray hat with a white feather. It was her best hat.

  Pearl did not see him. She was looking just to the left of him, beyond him, and she was beautiful. She was beautiful in a simple, lovely way that he knew like he knew a song. Her eyes were squinting a little and she held a small piece of paper in her small hand and standing next to her and clearly with her was someone he didn’t know, a woman. The woman was looking also at the crowd, or past it, and seemed to be saying something to Pearl. In all likelihood she was asking her what he looked like but the expression on the woman’s face was so calm and unquestioning that she might have been talking about something completely unrelated. It was as though she was not aware of the movement around her, or if she was, it did not concern her. She seemed to occupy her own air. She was taller than Pearl. She was wearing sunglasses.

  As he approached and Pearl saw him her lipsticked lips burst apart and she rushed toward him and held him and the person next to her stood still in her own atmosphere. Only after he and Pearl had kissed and he had stroked her temples and eyelids with his thumb and she had clasped her hand on the back of his neck and they had said hello with their eyes did the air open up around the other person enough for him to actually look at her face. That’s when he observed the curve of her cheek, like a dangerous road, and the elegant line of her mouth. In each of the lenses of her round sunglasses floated a tiny, perfect ship.

  Still, he could not quite look at her.

  2005

  The hospital was the oldest veterans’ hospital in New York. It stood atop a hill on the highest point in the city, a spot that had been a strategic vantage point during the Revolutionary War. In 1847 the millionaire William Bailey, later of Barnum & Bailey Circus, had built an estate on this location for his bride. In 1922 the veterans’ bureau had bought the land and set up a hospital for veterans suffering from mental and nervous disorders. In 1970 Life magazine had run a feature on the hospital exposing its deplorable conditions. Paralyzed vets lay on one side for ten hours without being moved or washed. Without enough attendants to empty them, the urine bags to which the men were hooked up spilled over onto the floor. When and if they were given a shower, the men could wait helplessly for hours to be dried, and often they were put back into bed on the same sweaty sheets. There were rats. A paralyzed veteran might suddenly awaken to find a rat on his hand. He could not move his hand, so he would try to jerk his shoulders. He screamed, and the rat jumped casually off the bed. In the paraplegic ward, a completely crippled patient would depend on a buddy who still had the use of his arms to get a sheet thrown, sailing and rippling and falling like a shroud, over his bed.

  As a result of the Life magazine exposé, the hospital was overhauled and conditions were vastly improved. More than thirty years later those who were aware enough of their circumstances to appreciate them, or the families of those who weren’t, felt lucky to be living or have their loved ones living in this hospital and not in a bad hospital and not out on the streets. The ever-increasing number of homeless veterans was a decades-old national tragedy. During the day they lingered in the parks and on the sidewalks. They sat beside signs scrawled on cardboard boxes in which had been shipped computers and flat-screen televisions and imported foods and kitchen appliances. The faces of the soldiers looked stricken and lined and their eyes blinked in the rays of sunlight that beat down on them like the unstoppable force in civilian life of their own private wars.

  The woman was also happy to be working in the hospital and not to be out on the streets. She was nearly alone in this world. Her name was Honor. Her soldier’s name was Milo.

  •

  Is that too much? she asked.

  No, he said.

  She warmed more oil in her hands and rubbed her way down his arm. She loved the strong wrists, the length of his fingers, each bone like the neck of a small animal, the hollow of his palm. Reaching the center of his hand she pressed gently, then with more force, and he winced, breaking her trance.

  That spot, he said. You told me once before what it was called.

  In the center of your palm?

  Yes.

  In Chinese medicine?

  Yes.

  The Palace of Anxiety.

  He made a sound that was almost a laugh.

  1936

  The three of them stood in the September heat still and formal like too many figures on a wedding cake. Then Pearl took Joe’s hand and squeezed it and looked up at him saying weren’t they lucky it wasn’t raining it was supposed to rain and then said oh and the most marvelous thing my cousin Vivian is in town. Here she is. I don’t think the two of you have ever met, have you?

  Joe was sweating quite a bit now. He wiped his hand flat on his white shirt and held it out to the woman with the ships in her eyes.

  No, I don’t think so, he said.

  She did not lean forward to reach his hand. She held out hers and he took it. Hello Vivian, he said. Still, he felt he could not really see her face.

  You must be Joe. She had a quiet voice that seemed to emerge from someplace outside of her, from her dark hair, her patterned scarf. It’s nice to meet you Joe. It was a voice that had a slight tremble in it, like the beating of a bird’s wing.

  He picked up his saxophone case and his suitcase in one gesture with Pearl still holding on to his arm. The woman seemed very comfortable with silence. It made him nervous. Were you waiting long? They said the ship would be on time but we took forever to pull in … The round sunglasses reflected cars now as they walked toward the street.

  Pearl grabbed his arm with both of hers. I would have waited for you all day, she said.

  Only a day? he said.

  A day and a half. She smiled.

  The woman walked a little ahead of them, politely, although it didn’t entirely feel polite. She took off her scarf and tied it loosely around the strap of her handbag.

  The car is up the block, Pearl said, hurrying beside him to keep up with his long stride.

  Vivian walked on ahead and the scarf slid off from her handbag and fell to the ground. Joe pulled away from Pearl instinctively and ran up a ways and bent down to the sidewalk and he picked up the scarf with his hand still holding his saxophone case. She was standing by the car.

  You dropped this, he said.

  Oh thank you, she said. That was careless of me.

  She took the scarf.

  Pearl walked slowly toward them in the heat.

  I hope I didn’t spoil your homecoming, Vivian said. Pearl insisted that I join her.

  It’s nice to have a welcoming committee, he said.

  Not always, she said.

  S
he was looking right at him. He could not see through her glasses.

  Yes it is, he said. Always.

  They drove uptown. The air blew in the windows hot as smoke. They drove up the West Side Highway, alongside the Hudson River which shimmered white in the heat, past ferry and ship terminals and some warehouses and then out into the open where they could see New Jersey across the water green like the countryside. They passed low buildings on their right, seedy hotels and bars for sailors, cheap restaurants with a chair and table out front. Then Joe said he was sick of the water and missed the city so they turned off the highway and headed across midtown where the buildings shadowed their little vehicle like the bodies of prehistoric beasts. Up Eighth Avenue the stores were to the trade only and then he sped up Sixth where the people’s clothes got fancier and the store signs were written in elegant cursive or clean bold print. Joe drove and Pearl sat next to him and Vivian sat in the backseat with her profile cutting into the rearview mirror, a precise cameo. She answered his questions about how she was related to Pearl, on her mother’s side, where she’d grown up, in Brooklyn, where she’d been lately, to Europe. She had gone to college, on scholarship, which explained a little bit about her demeanor, so different from Pearl’s. She’d been studying art, in Italy, on a fellowship, until recently, when she’d come back. Her father was sick. For now she was living at home.