“You know any other stuff?”
“No. I play ‘I’m Gonna Be a Wheel Someday’ over and over till I drive everybody insane. If I ever heard it, I pretty much know it.”
“I’m just needling you. I know all about your musical memory, if that’s what it’s called. Your granddad thinks you’re the end-all and be-all.”
That revelation filled me with pride, but then I remembered what Grandpa Teddy said about talent being an unearned grace, and I said, “Well, I’m not.”
“Never thought you were, pilgrim. I’m just telling you what your granddad said.”
“Why’d you call me pilgrim?”
“That was my John Wayne imitation.”
“Better stick with music.”
“Hey, you know who Sy Oliver was?”
“He wrote and arranged some great stuff back when, like for Tommy Dorsey. Four-beat swing, two-beat pop.”
“ ‘Easy Does It’ and ‘Swing High.’ ”
I said, “ ‘Swingin’ on Nothin’.’ You know it?”
“Let me in, and instead of stabbing you like four thousand times, I’ll play it with you.”
“What if you stink at it?” I asked.
“After you hear me, if you think it stinks, then I’ll beat you to death with this axe.”
“What axe?”
“You yanking my chain? It’s slang for saxophone.”
“We don’t use much slang in our family.”
I let him in, and he didn’t stab me four thousand times, or even once, and I didn’t give him any reason to beat me to death with his saxophone.
47
I consider it to have been a small miracle that Malcolm and I, two musical prodigies, lived across the street from each other that summer, and that each of us needed a friend. To other kids, I was a figure of fun because I was on the short side and was as skinny as a pretzel stick, and also because my father didn’t live at home. Back then, the vast majority of black families, of all families, were still two-parent households, and single mothers—whether divorced or never married—were subjects for gossips. Most kids made fun of Malcolm, too, because he was, well, Malcolm. Mismatched as we seemed to be at first glance, we built the friendship of a lifetime, and in fact I think we were fast friends by the time he left that day, about four hours after he had rung the doorbell.
Sometimes, when he’s in a funk, Malcolm says that maybe if we had never met, we wouldn’t have suffered through our most difficult losses, because we wouldn’t have been in the wrong place at the wrong time, but I never see it that way. Friendship is a great good thing, and the happiness that we got from our friendship did not tempt fate to spring a trap door under our feet. There is no fate, only free will, and we were just in the way of other people’s free will when they decided to do the Devil’s work. People are doing the Devil’s work everywhere you go; there’s no avoiding it unless you go live on a mountaintop somewhere, a hundred miles from everyone.
Anyway, Monday was not a night that Grandpa Teddy played at the hotel. After he finished his set in the couture department of the big fancy store in Midtown, he would pick up Sylvia at Woolworth’s and they would come home together. I expected them around five o’clock.
After Malcolm left, I turned on the TV and discovered that the regular programming had been interrupted by breaking news. Later in the year, the anti-war protests would grow in number, and there would be a march on the Pentagon that ended in violence and arrests. Though our city was seldom thought to be on the cutting edge of societal evolution, for some reason we had a couple of the larger and more tempestuous demonstrations that summer, as if the various anti-war organizations had decided to practice here before going on to more prominent venues in the autumn.
The demonstration that day was at City College. An angry crowd of three or four thousand were challenging the college regarding its ROTC program, and phalanxes of police in riot gear were trying to prevent them from surging into the building that they most wanted to seize. The race riots in Detroit had ended just the day before, and the news anchor kept teasing that story while covering the current one, from time to time repeating what Jerome Cavanaugh, Detroit’s mayor, had said regarding the aftermath: “It looks like Berlin in 1945.”
Although my mother had told me that the news is never all the news, only what they want to show you, I found myself riveted to the chaos on the TV screen, and I didn’t move even when they went to a commercial break. In those days, cigarette companies could still advertise on television, but lawyers couldn’t; some changes are for the better, and others are not.
Seconds after the station came back from the commercials to City College in turmoil, I saw Mr. Reginald Smaller. Most of those in the crowd were of college age, but among those who were older, our former building superintendent stood out like—not to be cruel—a gorilla among gazelles. He wore a colorful bandana that obscured his steel-wool every-which-way hair, but he was still a short man with a big middle, and he wore a tank top that revealed a dismaying amount of hirsute skin. That pelt alone conclusively identified him. Of all those in the shot, he appeared to be angriest, shouting at the police with such force that spittle sprayed, pumping one fist in the air, his face twisted and grotesque with rage.
I rose from the armchair and went to my knees directly in front of the screen, mesmerized by the spectacle and by this revelation of Mr. Smaller’s activist side, but perhaps fascinated most of all because this was the first time that I had ever seen someone I knew on television. Just then I saw a second person I knew. She wore jeans and a halter top and a cute straw hat with a ribbon that seemed out of place at that event. Unlike those around her, she didn’t shout or gesture, and she didn’t carry a sign, but instead clicked pictures with a small camera and observed everyone else as though taking copious mental notes. Maybe Miss Delvane was gathering material for a magazine article or for a novel to follow the one about the rodeo.
Right then I knew beyond doubt that if the camera shifted to the left, I would see my father with her, resplendent in his new beard. Tilton didn’t believe in much of anything except Tilton, and it made no sense that he would be risking a police baton to the face that might permanently diminish the pleasure he took in a mirror. But he was there. I could feel it. Maybe he was there only because of Miss Delvane. She was hot, and I don’t mean because it was
a summer day. Although only ten, I recognized hot when I saw it.