If I Should Die Page 7

  “So what do you think can be done to solve this problem?” Flashing a smile brighter than the lights that surrounded them.

  “Well, you know, the drugs—crack—is all over the place. Police need to git on the case. Do somethin’ to clean it up. If a kid in the street know where the dealer is, how come the top cops don’t know and they gittin’ paid big bucks to know what’s goin’ on. How come they can’t stop these out-a-town kids from comin’ into this neighborhood to cop the stuff, and while we at it, how come every time somethin’ bad happens—I ain’t talkin’ about this crime, you understan’, ’cause it did happen right here—but how come when it happen up on, say, Riverside Drive, or Washington Heights, y’all still say Harlem? But when somethin’ okay happens, y’all say Upper West Side? What’s happenin’ wid yo’ geography, ma’am?”

  “Well, yes, those are interesting observations but drugs are a problem, a major problem, in many urban areas, thank you.”

  Fade away to graffiti-scarred wall and burned tenement, this time with baggy-pants teenager wandering into the camera’s path and staring, bewildered, into the blinding lights, then back to reporter.

  “And there you have this breaking story, folks. The police have no suspects but the investigation is ongoing. More at eleven o’clock. Back to you at the studio.”

  There had been two days of saturation coverage before the cameras disappeared. All this time, Alvin and I had remained glued to the television and I was glad when the news shifted to the criminal pursuits of the other boroughs.

  The papers treaded lightly on Gary Mark, briefly mentioning his career as a whiz kid on Wall Street in the high-flying eighties before his conviction on insider trading. He had misappropriated millions and was sentenced to ten months in jail, which had been suspended in lieu of two years of community service.

  How had he wound up at the Uptown Children’s Chorus?

  I called Deborah to find out how far she had been able to dig beneath the surface.

  She came on the line and there was a pause. “Mali? Is that you?”

  “Yes. What’s going on? What’s wrong?”

  When she answered, the hesitation was more pronounced. “Mali, listen to me. Give it up, okay?”

  And she hung up before I could ask her why.

  chapter eight

  Alvin sat at the table moving his breakfast around on his plate. I glanced at him for the third time in as many minutes and wondered how anyone could look at food so cold the egg yolks had congealed and the bacon had wilted. Again this morning, it seemed he was not going to eat. In fact, for the last few days, he had hardly touched any food.

  I was running out of menus and wondered if I should try the corner hot dog stand next. Well, maybe not quite that, but it might be a good idea to eat out.

  “I’m taking Ruffin for a stroll,” I announced, pushing my chair back from the table. “Want to come with me?”

  Dad glanced up from his newspaper. “I already took him out, just an hour ago.”

  “Well, okay. But I feel like walking anyway. Come on, Alvin. Today’s Saturday. The weather’s nice. Why stick in the house? We can stroll down to the African Market on 116th Street, or maybe pick up some pies from Wimpy’s and fish ‘n’ chips from Majestic’s.”

  He didn’t respond, even to a menu like that.

  “And if you want, we can pass by the ball court on the way.”

  He looked up then. “Which court?”

  “The one near the projects where Clarence lives.”

  I watched his face for a reaction. There was only mild interest, and I wondered if he had heard anything of Clarence’s threats against Dr. Harding. The rehearsal hall had closed temporarily following Gary Mark’s death, so any new rumors were hard to come by. Maybe I could pick up some word on the ball court.

  He considered it for a minute, then smiled faintly. “Okay, let’s go.” He put his plate in the sink and grabbed his jacket from the back of the chair. “See you later, Grandpa.”

  Outside, the sky was a penetrating blue washed with the fading streaks of a skywriter. The unpredictable weather, so characteristic of late April, seemed to have come to terms with the calendar and decided to settle into a pleasant and steady springlike mode.

  The Saturday crowd, taking advantage of the great weather, was out in force. The barbecue stand was already smoking on the corner of 127th Street and a ten-gallon vat nearby was filled with corn on the cob, bobbing in a boiling foam. The vendors, under the market umbrella, had stacked fresh boiled crabs in scarlet rows and had their shucking knives and hot sauce ready for the littleneck clams.

  We reached the basketball court a little past noon, too early for the large crowd that usually shared the benches to watch the ballplayers or to lay something on the single action when the numbers runner passed. A few boys were under the hoop, all much older than Alvin, practicing the art of bobbing, weaving, and hustling for the ball.

  One of them flew past, bouncing the ball down the court and out of bounds.

  “Yo! Down for one?” He beckoned to Alvin as he retrieved the ball.

  “Naw. Not yet. You seen Clarence?”

  “Clarence? He don’t show till the afternoon. He a night owl. Or vampire, one. He up in the dark and doze in the day …”

  The boy dribbled the ball, turned suddenly, and executed a half-court shot that spun on the rim for a second before dropping through. Then he was gone down the court again, clapping, jumping high in the air.

  We watched for several more minutes and decided to go to the market and stop by again on the way home.

  Two hours later Clarence was on the court. I watched him move with the ball, turn, jump, and shoot, then he was gliding away from the hoop. His body was long and thin and he had hands that palmed the ball so that at one point he was able to lob it like a baseball.

  When he approached, his sleeveless tank top clung to him and his dark skin glistened in the sun.

  “How you doin’, Miss Mali? I see you sometimes when you come to pick up Striver from the rehearsals.”

  Clarence had given the nickname Striver to Alvin when he learned that he lived on Strivers Row. Alvin must have accepted it in good humor, knowing that everyone had a nickname that symbolized something or other, but this was the first time I had heard it. It was also the first time I had heard Clarence’s voice.

  Although his speech was not up to the level of the cultural ambassador that Lloyd had recommended, the voice itself, as Mrs. Johnson had described, was indeed heaven-sent. He had a bass tone that rightly belonged to someone twice his weight. I listened and wondered how his lungs and diaphragm accommodated such volume. If Dad heard him, I know he’d say, “This boy could be the next Paul Robeson.”

  I smiled at him now. “I’m all right, Clarence. How are you doing?”

  “Okay, I guess. No use complainin’.”

  About what? I wanted to ask, but knew he would go tight as a new zipper if I probed too far, too fast.

  Then, like most young men who felt compelled to show off before a woman, Clarence tapped Alvin on the shoulder.

  “Come on, Striver, let’s hit it. Show your sister what I been tryin’ to teach you …”

  “She’s my aunt.”

  Clarence looked at me, then back at Alvin, and whistled softly, “Man, you got a pretty aunt.”

  Then he literally ran away, knees pumping, yelling until he reached the basket, laid up a shot and hung from the rim a second before dropping to the ground again.

  Alvin shed his coat and followed him down the court. Clarence had a broad smile, no sign of broken teeth, or the discoloration that would suggest he’d worn gold caps lately. Besides, if he had the money and had a choice, he’d probably take a pass on the caps and get himself some decent sneakers. The boy’s shoes were in such disrepair his feet were practically on the ground.

  A minute later he came to sit beside me to watch Alvin continue his jump shots.

  “I’m sorry to hear about Dr. Harding and about Gary Marks,
” I said, trying for an opening. “I heard you singing at Dr. Harding’s service” (which wasn’t quite accurate: everyone sang but there had been so many choristers I couldn’t distinguish one voice from another). “First, Dr. Harding, now this thing happening to Mr. Marks …”

  I tried to read his expression as I lumped the two deaths together in a single expression of sympathy.

  “One, two, just like that,” I whispered. “I can’t believe it.”

  Clarence turned to look at the far end of the court, then glanced down to study the holes and mismatched laces in his sneakers.

  “Yeah. Nobody can believe it, but that’s the way it went down.”

  “The way what went down?”

  “You know. One. Two. They out.”

  He had regular features and rather deep-set eyes, eyes that should have been easy to read, but his face was completely without expression.

  “I suppose all the tours have been canceled. What’s the Chorus … what are you … going to do now?”

  He shrugged and continued to concentrate on his laces. “The rehearsal hall is closed for a while. I don’t know about the group. I don’t … I don’t know about me.”

  He suddenly turned to look at me appraisingly. “I heard what you did about Morris.”

  “What?”

  “You know. Steppin’ out for him and you wasn’t even strapped. Wasn’t packin’ no heat.” He shook his head, but his face still seemed guarded. “Man, that was somethin’. I was tellin’ Striver, that was somethin’.”

  “Well,” I said, not sure if that “something” was good or bad, “sometimes we do what we have to, when we have to. And we don’t think of the possible consequences. We just … do it.”

  He looked up now and gazed toward the far end of the court. Still no perceptible change. No joy or sadness, guilt, grief, or even curiosity. No remorse or sense of loss. Was this boy alive?

  The more I talked, the more he seemed to veer off on various tangents. It was tough trying to lead him back to his feelings about Erskin Harding and how he had died. And he did not want to talk about Gary Mark at all.

  When he shifted the conversation a third time to the art of karate, and the various moves and stances I needed to know in order to defend myself, I knew it was time to let it go, maybe pick it up again further on down the line.

  He rose to demonstrate a particular movement and I tried not to glance down at his sneakers. Up close, they looked as if they would not last another week.

  He went through several stances, each one more pronounced than the one before. His eyes finally changed and the anger and frustration that I saw was frightening.

  Alvin came over, sweating from his workout. He pulled his jacket on and I tried not to notice the difference in their clothing. I looked beyond them but couldn’t ignore the overflowing trash cans at the end of the court, the broken benches surrounding them, and the patches of grass pushing through the worn asphalt. And everywhere, the small, Day-Glo caps of crack vials strewn about, like confetti after a parade.

  I saw this and knew that Clarence saw it also. Day after day. So much so that it had become part of a landscape that no longer registered in his consciousness. I remembered how often I had walked along 34th Street in the shadow of the Empire State Building and had never risked eyestrain or “tourist neck” because the building, for all its massive presence, had always been there. And like most born and bred and blasé New Yorkers, I tuned out that landscape, the same way Clarence tuned out the vials and other debris that crushed under his foot as he moved to the end of the court. It was simply something he no longer saw.

  I watched him move and imagined his long arms and legs—indeed his entire body—metamorphosing into the jointed, bony plates of an armadillo enabling him to deflect all sensation.

  But he sang in the Chorus, sang songs so full of feeling that he was able to pull up the pain and tears from that spring hidden within all who heard him.

  I left the park, convinced that he did not own the gold caps, nor would he have stolen a car, but that flash of anger when he had gone into his karate stance was unmistakable.

  chapter nine

  Erskin Harding’s mother lived in a five-story tan brick building near the corner of Frederick Douglass Boulevard and 137th Street. Across the avenue, construction was in the final stages of a four-block-long row of two-family homes. Young trees had been planted and new sidewalks were in place.

  I paused on the corner, trying to remember what the old houses had looked like and what had happened to the cleaners and Billy’s candy store and Bob’s “Friday Night Fish Fry” restaurant that once occupied the space.

  The lobby walls of Julia Harding’s building were old pink-veined marble and the small lighting over the mailboxes still worked. I pressed the bell and walked up the four flights.

  Her large living room overlooked the construction site and I took a seat by the window as she placed my gift of roses in a vase.

  “Maybe I should have telephoned before dropping in like this. You’re sure I’m not interrupting anything?”

  Mrs. Harding shook her head and smiled. “Of course not. Folks my age don’t have that many schedules. If we do, we don’t have to stick to them. That’s one of the privileges of age. You kinda do what you want, when you want … if you want. And besides, it’s nice to see you again. Pink and red roses. What a pleasant surprise.”

  She was a small woman, with a tiny waist and soft hazelnut skin. Her white-streaked hair was pulled into an old-fashioned French twist and she moved with the airy grace of a dancer who had not forgotten certain steps. She walked the way my mother once walked.

  “I wanted to see how you were doing and to let you know how much Alvin misses your son.”

  “Thank you, Mali. Your nephew’s a fine boy. Lost his mother and father together, didn’t he? God only knows why these things happen but He only gives us what we can bear.”

  I thought of my own mother, small, strong, non-smoker, yet dead of a heart attack before Alvin was even born.

  I thought of my sister and brother-in-law and wondered about my own struggle with the ragged, on-and-off feelings of depression.

  There were days when I wanted to sit in my room and do nothing, think nothing, and feel nothing. And nights when I tried to shut out the sound of Alvin’s crying as long as possible before getting out of bed to go sit with him and talk, or kneel beside his bed to repeat the prayer that never failed to calm him. “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die …”

  I held his hand and he usually fell asleep before I finished. And in the mornings, I tried not to see the lines deepening in Dad’s face.

  On other days, I felt okay.

  I looked around the living room, gazing at the baby grand piano, the pictures and awards that Erskin had, and the profusion of plants that blocked the window glare, though it was not really a sunny day. A fish tank took up a large space near the alcove, and there were shelves and shelves of books.

  There was no television, so I imagined that Erskin had preferred to spend his time reading or practicing rather than vegetating in front of a screen.

  I felt his presence more keenly now than when I had been in his office. How could I begin to question his mother? Would he have wanted me to?

  “My father is a musician,” I volunteered, searching for a way to begin. I moved toward the piano, not to touch it—because I knew it was Erskin’s and to touch it was to touch him again. I moved close enough to stand and admire it, a Baldwin baby grand, highly polished, facing the window at an angle.

  “Erskin practiced every day,” Mrs. Harding said. “He’d play and I’d listen and watch the sun set. Even after he moved to his own apartment, he still dropped by to practice at least twice a week. I miss not hearing him …”

  She walked over to the window and gazed out. “You know, I raised him alone from the time he was five years old. His father and I separated, then he divorced me. I never remarried, although I suppose
I could have, many times. But I raised a son I was proud of.”

  She moved from the window toward the wall with the pictures. “Senior class president. College on a four-year music scholarship. Dean’s list. Then he worked at doing what he loved, which was playing music.” She turned to face me. “Very few people get to do what they love in this life, you know. If you can earn a living doing the thing you enjoy, it won’t seem like work, it’s like an endless vacation. That’s the way he described his job—an endless vacation.”

  I nodded, understanding now why Dad had remained a musician, even when times had gotten so hard, and he and Mom had nearly lost the house. Mom had wanted to go to work—any kind of work—but Dad wouldn’t hear of it. So they had held on for years by their fingernails, and eventually things turned around. The studio work picked up, there had been the commercials, then the steady gigs came again, and he was able to count himself lucky. But he never forgot those lean times, and even today he takes in more students than he can handle.

  “I remember your father, knew him probably before you were even born. Heard him play at Minton’s on 118th Street, Smalls’ Paradise, and later at Basie’s Lounge, all those places. Best bass player around.”

  I smiled at that. “My father had given Erskin a tape, a recording of ‘Profoundly Blue.’ ”

  “My goodness, that’s really going back a long way.”

  “And he also came to Erskin’s service. He wanted to speak with you afterward, but the place was so crowded …”

  Mrs. Harding looked at me and her eyes filled. “I know … I know. It was a beautiful service. Everything was just the way Erskin would have wanted it, except—” Her eyes cleared and her voice was strong. “Except he didn’t want that … other person there.”

  “Who?”

  “Oh …” Mrs. Harding seemed undecided about going on. She seemed exhausted and her voice was soft again. “Can I offer you a glass of something? Sherry, perhaps?”

  “Anything you have would be fine,” I said, knowing she probably couldn’t get through whatever it was she wanted to say without fortifying herself.