The City (The City 1)

107

We had some fine years after that. Oh, in the wider world, there were wars and more wars, riots upon riots, murder and mayhem and much hatred and the threat of nuclear annihilation. But in the gentler and more contained world of the Bledsoe family, we had much for which to be thankful. Mr. Yoshioka bought a car, a 1956 Packard Executive, yellow-and-white and in good repair, and Grandpa Teddy taught him to drive it, whereafter he could come more often for dinner. Mrs. Lorenzo remained with us, and although she didn’t get her weight under control, it was all sanctified fat. My mother packed them in at Diamond Dust, and she got some offers to sing backup on records by recording artists whose names just about everybody knows. I kept at the songwriting thing, and when I was fifteen, my mother liked one of them so much—I called it “One Sweet Forever”—that she had an arrangement of it done for the Diamond Dust band, and they played it regularly. One night, this executive from a record company had dinner there with friends, and he went wild for the song. I wish he would have signed up my mother, but he didn’t. If you don’t follow pop music enough to know, I’ll just say he signed me, and he placed the song with a pretty big star, and it topped out on the Billboard chart at number four. That released something in me, and what had been difficult before became easy. Like they say, the hits just kept on coming. Eventually we could buy a better house, but we didn’t want to leave the neighborhood, which no one would mistake for Beverly Hills but which suited us just fine. When the house next door came up for sale, we purchased it, remodeled it to accommodate one wheelchair and one clumsy saxophonist. When Malcolm turned eighteen and went to work in the Diamond Dust band, he moved across the street with me and never had to take it to the garage again. Amalia always haunted him, but he let despair lead him wrong only that once, when he was twen

ty-two and left the city and saved himself with banish-the-devil music. I won’t read this sentence to him, in case he really doesn’t know the reason for some of his obsessive-compulsive behavior, in case to understand would rob him of the power of these rituals to soothe his sorrow, but here’s what is clear to me: He hates mushrooms, will go to any length to avoid the sight of one, because the morning that Amalia died, he watched her anxiously cleaning a large pile of them, reduced to a scullery maid by their parents; he will neither buy nor borrow a newspaper on Tuesday because she died on Monday, and the news was in print the next day; the night of the day she died, there was a full moon, and so he goes to a church the first night of every full moon to light seventeen candles, one for every year she lived. I love you, Malcolm. So now to Lucas Drackman. His arms in casts, he had chattered nonstop to the police, recounting his every act and thought and feeling, as if he believed that he had triumphed and that they were disciples transported by his tale of glory; he and my father and Fiona and Smaller were convicted of their many crimes and sent away for life. Aurora Delvane? She turned state’s evidence and got a two-year sentence. In prison she wrote a novel. It never sold. At the start of this, I said my first and last names were Jonah Kirk, with seven others in between. But if you know my music, you know that my legal name, since I was eleven, is Jonah Bledsoe, with eight other names in between. I kept Kirk in there because he was my father, even if he never wanted to be, even though he had no use for me; my mother loved him once, after all, even if she was young and naïve at the time, and were it not for that love, I would not exist.

After nine years of good times, we had a bad patch. Life doesn’t run smooth your whole life, and no one ever promised that it would. One day, Mr. Yoshioka didn’t feel right, and the problem turned out to be cancer, a particularly quick-moving one. The last two months, when he was weakest and the hospital could do nothing more for him, we moved him in with Grandpa Teddy, so all of us could be close to visit with him and care for him. The night he died, I sat bedside, reading haiku to him, and sometimes he would recite them back to me in Japanese. Near the end, he asked me to put the book of poetry aside and listen closely to something he needed to say. He told me that he liked my pop songs, which he had told me before, but he believed that I had a greater destiny than that. He told me what he had once told Mary O’Toole, that in the days when I could play the piano at my full strength, God walked into the room every time He heard my music. Mr. Yoshioka said that I was earning a good living at such a young age but there was more to life than earning a living. In his gentle way, he insisted I should, as soon as possible, devote myself to writing grander things, so that when other people played my music in the years to come, God would walk into the room again. I was holding his hand when he died, and for the longest time I could not let it go. We were surprised how many came to his funeral, surely everybody at Metropolitan Suits but a great many others besides, and when I insisted that I must go not just to the church but also to the grave, across cemetery grounds that a wheelchair could not navigate, Grandpa and Malcolm took turns carrying me, and I am pleased to say that I didn’t give my grandfather a heart attack and that Malcolm did not drop me.

Two days after the funeral, when Omi Kobayashi, Mr. Yoshioka’s attorney, visited us, I discovered that in my friend’s will, he left everything to me. The pair of tiger screens were reproductions of those by the Meiji master Takeuchi Seiho. Because he could not have afforded the real thing, he commissioned the copies as a gift to his father, who had once owned the originals before Manzanar. His father had lived seven years with those reproductions before he passed. I was given, as well, the ivory carving of the court lady, which was dated 1898 and signed by the Meiji master Asahi Gyokusan and which Mr. Kobayashi said was of great value. Mr. Yoshioka’s father had owned that piece, too, before Manzanar; when his son could eventually track it down and could afford to purchase it years after Manzanar, the father had been overjoyed. But then the father died and Mr. Yoshioka no longer felt motivated to seek other items the family had once owned. To my surprise, I also inherited Diamond Dust. Johnson Oliver, the manager, only claimed to be the owner at the direction of his boss, Mr. Yoshioka. I inherited, too, Metropolitan Suits, where Mr. Yoshioka punched a time clock, just like all of his employees.

In our lives, we come to moments of great significance that we fail to recognize, the meaning of which does not occur to us for many years. Each of us has his agenda and focuses on it, and therefore we are often blind to what is before our eyes. That day so long ago, when Mr. Yoshioka opened his door and found me waiting with a plate of cookies, all I saw was a neighbor, a shy man, who even at home was dressed in a suit and tie.

And so at the tender age of twenty, I no longer had to work for a living. I could devote myself to the creation that he had asked me to pursue. His request seemed now to be a sacred obligation. As time passed, there were years when I thought he overestimated me and that I would disappoint him in the end. But then came the movie scores, the Oscar, and then another Oscar and a third. Broadway and the Tony Award. Broadway again and again. They say a Pulitzer this year for the lyrics and libretto of the current play, but I don’t think so. A bridge too far, perhaps. Funny thing is, the awards are no more what it’s about than is the money. Though I’ll keep both, thank you.

What it’s about is the music itself, that moment when I’m hearing it in my head for the first time, as I’m trying to get it down on paper, and it’s like hearing something from another, better world. It’s about the music and the people, and it’s about the street where we live even now that my beloved Grandpa Teddy is long gone, a street on which we’ve bought and remodeled every house on both sides of that special block, that sacred piece of earth where Amalia walked and where Anita lived, where my mother, now seventy-five, still lives three doors down from me, and Mrs. Lorenzo in her own place with her second husband, and so many others. Not least of all, this is the street where my wife, Jasmine, lives with me and our three children. The ability to pee presumes the ability to perform otherwise.

108

Miss Pearl, who said she was the city, the soul of the city, gave me a piano when I desperately needed one, and she gave me warnings and advice that proved of great value. She gave me back my life, too, after Lucas Drackman took it, after he shot me that night and I fell into death. Otherwise, something would have gone much differently than it did, and Fiona would have been killed as well, perhaps by Drackman, and my body and hers would have been put in the trunk of her car, to be driven away in the rain and perhaps left in some parking lot to be found as the body of Dr. Mace-Maskil’s wife had been found. The dream I was given was not predictive; it was only the way things might have gone, a warning. That’s what I think, anyway. Miss Pearl said we have free will, that what happens next is up to all the people who live along her streets, that my part of it is up to me. The next to the last time I saw her, she said that she had already done more for me than she should, that I was on my own thereafter, and yet she caught me in that long dark fall and brought me back into the world, from death to life. As you might imagine, I have thought about that a lot over the years, and about her claim to be the city.

When I was twenty-one, I sought out Albert Solomon Gluck, the taxi driver who had given the Lucite heart to my mother when I was eight years old. He never became a famous comedian. He still drove a taxi when I found him, and shortly thereafter he moved into a house in our neighborhood and became my driver. Back in the day, he had assured us that a woman, a passenger, had given him the pendant six months earlier and had told him that she wanted him to pass it along to someone. When he asked who, she said he would know who when that person crossed his path. The second time that I saw Albert, thirteen years after our first encounter, he told me more about that woman. He remembered her vividly. She was tall and beautiful and moved with the grace of a dancer. The outfit she wore was not like anything Miss Pearl had worn, but it did include a feathered hat. She favored a light rose-scented perfume.

She called him Ducks. But here’s the thing: Her skin was not mahogany, not any shade of black or brown. She was a Jewish lady, no one he knew and yet so reminiscent of some of the women in his family that he felt akin to her the moment she got into his cab.

If you recall, when I was in that dying fall and lifted by her, just before she breathed upon my face and brought me back to life, I met her eyes, felt a chill. The character of that chill was like unto what I felt in the Kalomirakis Pinakotheke, when I stood before the painting by Fabritius, The Goldfinch, and looked into the masterfully illumined right eye of the little bird and understood what the artist might have meant, understood that not only one cruelly treated bird watched me through that eye, but also all of nature watched, and not only all of nature. When I looked into Miss Pearl’s eyes just before I woke from death to life, I saw a rush of images, more than I could count, passing in mere seconds, a few of which were: my dear mother kissing my fingers, one at a time, as she had done that night soon after we moved in with Grandpa Teddy; Grandpa sitting bedside in the hospital, his fingers moving bead to bead as he kept watch over me; Grandma Anita giving me a silver dollar to spend only on the day that I was confirmed; the faces of Mr. Yoshioka’s mother and sister, not the internment-camp photos from the book, but those framed in silver, which he had kept always lighted, which he also had left to me, and which he had asked me to keep lighted as well; and the eternity of candles, the small flickering lights, that were part of what I’d seen in that big black purse.… And there as I rose with Miss Pearl out of death, just as I passed back to life, I knew that she was not the soul of the city made flesh, or at least that she was not only the city, that she was not just black, as she appeared to me, that she was of all races and continents and times, that she wore no rose perfume but was herself the embodiment of the rose, that she was the mother of the ancient story, that I had known her not just since I was eight, but always.

The purse. Put your face right down close to it, Ducks, right down close. Then you’ll see.

At first I had seen a confusing agglomeration of angled shapes thrusting toward me, but then they resolved into the skyscrapers of a city in miniature, and I was gazing down through those buildings into a maze of busy streets. Gazing down and then falling down, not with fear but with exhilaration, swooping between those glittering towers, flying as sometimes I had flown in good dreams. The city was no longer a miniature; it was real and vast, borderless, reaching to infinity, filled with gorgeous and mysterious light. I flew low, near street level, along avenue after avenue alive with busy people, and I began to realize that the mysterious light came from them, that it came from me, too, that we were the people of the city and the light of the city, flickering like endless tiers of candles in endless cups. And suddenly I saw the city in time, backward to its origins and forward through centuries, as it had been and as it would be, all existing now; and in every age, those ancient and those of the future, the lovely light did shine, our light.

What a purse.

I’ve thought often about what she showed me there on the porch steps of my grandfather’s house. Now that I’ve lived long enough, I understand the essence of it, but I don’t understand it entirely. No sweat. What matters is the day at hand and what we do with it, one day at a time, some butter-side-down days, some butter-side-up. And what should we do with the day? What direction is the one to take, which choice wrong? When I’m confused, I recall what she said that day, and I can hear her voice, remembered as clearly as I remember any music I’ve ever heard. No matter what happens, disaster piled on calamity, no matter what, everything will be okay in the long run.