Body & Soul (57 page)

"This is kind of you," Tom said. "I just thought it would be appropriate for me to introduce myself. Letters are so ... impersonal. Person to person is the way to do business, as I'm sure you'll agree."

"Sure."

"Now, I read your letter. Very clear, and I thank you for it. Frankly, I came over to test the waters a little bit, you might say. See if we can find the tiniest bit of room to move around in, with an eye to working out some mutually beneficial arrangement."

"I understand, Mr. Thorpe, but—"

"Call me Tom. Please."

"I want to hold on to the place. It's meant a great deal to me for almost as long as I can remember."

"Oh, I see," Thorpe said, surprised. "I'm sorry, I had no idea. I thought you only recently, ah, I thought it was only some months ago that—"

"Mr. Weisfeld left me this place," Claude said. "He was my first piano teacher, and I worked here all through my childhood, as his assistant, sort of." Claude could see an emerging glint of impatience in Thorpe's eye and decided to speed things up. "I don't really own it, you see. It's more like it was left to me in trust."

"You are, however, or shortly will become, the legal owner, with every right to sell if you want to."

"Legally, yes."

Thorpe appeared to be pondering this.

"I thought," Claude said, "you could build around me. An inconvenience, but surely a minor one. I don't know much about these things. I hope it doesn't cause a problem."

"No, no," Thorpe said quickly. "Absolutely, we could build around. Certainly we could do that. It's just that from the architectural point of view—aesthetically speaking—there's a certain look we're after. The uninterrupted flow of the lines."

"Well, I'm sure it'll be a handsome building."

Thorpe seemed not to have heard him. Ed stood motionless behind Thorpe, his arms folded, leaning back against the huge mahogany display case, his dark eyes watching Claude.

"I do believe," Thorpe said, "in the light of your perfectly understandable emotional attachment to the place—we didn't know about that until today, which just goes to show you that face to face is the way to do business—in the light of that, I may well be able to prevail on the corporation to amend the original offer." He held Claude with an expectant smile.

"I'm sorry," Claude said. "I guess dealing with so many people, the different situations, you might think I was trying to jack the price.
People probably do that. I can imagine. But that isn't the case here. It isn't money. I'm holding it in trust, or at least that's the way I see it."

"Sure," Thorpe said. "The problem is, money comes into everything eventually. That's how the world works. Some things make you money, other things, well, other things can lose you money. Cost you money. There's an up side and a down side." He shook his head at this sad state of affairs.

Claude leaned forward and put his forearms on the counter. The other two men waited. "So my lawyer has advised me," he said finally, stressing each word.

"The thing is," Thorpe began, but his companion interrupted.

"Let's leave it there, Tom," Ed said, straightening up. "Mr. Rawlings has things to do. Thank you for your time, sir."

Thorpe's head swiveled in surprise.

"You're welcome." Claude nodded to Folsom. "Sorry I can't help you."

Claude showed them to the door, stepping back one step to watch them through the side panel of the window as they made their way down the sidewalk. Folsom walked directly to the corner, appearing to respond as Thorpe moved from one side of him to the other, talking animatedly. It was as if, trying one ear without success, he would scurry over to try the other.

A Cadillac limousine waited at the curb. Thorpe held the door for Folsom and followed him into the rear compartment. Then the car pulled away.

They all seemed to be Irish. Mr. Muldoon, a short, square man with crew-cut gray hair and green eyes set close to his nose. "I'm here to look at the wiring," he said, presenting his City of New York credentials.

"I'm just curious," Claude said. "What are you supposed to do if I say no."

"Whaddya mean? It's the city. You can't say no."

"So you go get a cop? Is that it?"

"Hey, give me a break here. They tell me to look at the wiring, here I am."

"Did they tell you what to find?"

"My tool chest is getting heavy. You going to let me in or what?"

Claude let him in.

Over the next week or so he let in Mr. Heaney, the fire inspector, Mr. Crawford to take a look at the plumbing, and a Mr. O'Dougherty, building inspector, who arrived with an assistant. Quite soon official letters started coming, which Claude forwarded to Mr. Larkin, who eventually telephoned.

"They have you over a barrel, I'm afraid."

"Can we appeal? Go to law?"

"Yes, certainly. But the expenses would be great and the outcome uncertain. We'd have to get bonded inspectors of our own to counter their assertions—and who knows, it's an old building, some of their assertions may be correct. The legal work would add up to a lot of hours, more if they made us jump through hoops, which we can reasonably assume they will."

"What do you advise?"

"If it was me, I'd sell."

"Yes," Claude said, "that's probably the rational thing to do." He paused. "I've thought about it, but for some reason I just can't bring myself to do it."

"In which case I see no alternative to compliance. If you comply, I don't see what they can do."

"What does that entail?" Claude asked, and then listened to the sound of rustling papers.

"Major items," Larkin said. "Rewire the whole building. Break through the rear wall on the first floor and install a fire door. Replace the furnace and boiler. There's some other observations about illegal pipe widths in the upstairs apartment, but that's about it."

"Can we use funds from the estate to do the work?"

"Yes we can. They will be more than sufficient."

"Let's do it, then."

"Okay. I'll get a letter off today that informs the city of our intent to comply. That will surprise them, I'm sure. We'll have to put the work out to bid. You want me to take care of that?"

"Please. And I appreciate your help."

"You'll be billed my usual rate. But this one is fun. I just hope nothing goes wrong."

In a matter of days, teams of Luris Corporation workmen erected a sort of open tunnel from around the corner on Eighty-third, all the way up the block, and around the corner on Eighty-fourth. Using pipe, plywood, and two-by-fours, a protective ceiling was mounted over the
sidewalk. The structure did not stop for the music store, although access to the street was unimpeded. Claude was astonished at how quickly the work was done.

A week later his own workmen began arriving at seven
A.M.
every day, dispersing through the building to address their various tasks. Plaster dust filled the air as the old wiring was torn from the walls, and Claude was forced to pack up all the instruments without cases in sealed cardboard boxes. He covered the pianos with dropcloths, emptied the display windows, and piled up books, scores, supplies, sheet music, and parts into every enclosed or partially protected place he could find. Great crashing sounds emanated from the boiler room downstairs against the steady thump of boots from the men working on the pipes above. It was a daily scene of disorder and confusion, the workers in constant motion, dust everywhere, electric tools whining up to painful frequencies, wires tangling underfoot, equipment and building materials covering every surface.

Late one afternoon, after a week of chaos without any visible progress, Claude sat alone on a folding chair near the front door and regarded the mess. He was exhausted. It seemed to him that he had moved every object in the place a dozen times. He couldn't recognize the store, and he had a moment of doubt. Had he been wrong? Would the place ever look and feel the same? He got up and walked carefully to the rear, stepping over various hurdles, to examine the wall where the fire door was to be installed. It had already been stripped to the bare brick. He reached out to touch it, and then remembered the night he'd woken Weisfeld, who had come down disoriented in his nightgown. The bare brick was at the same spot Weisfeld had placed his hands. Claude interpreted this as more than a coincidence.

Larkin called the next morning.

"They've upped their bid fifteen percent. They say it's their last offer, only because their work schedule forces them to commit one way or another on the new building. What should I tell them?"

"I'd thank them, but no thanks. Sincere regrets that we weren't able to help." Claude had to shout over the sound of hammering.

"You know what surprises me the most?" Larkin said. "That they couldn't find some way to block our building permit."

"Maybe they ran up against an honest man."

Now the Luris trucks came early every morning and took all the space on the west side of the avenue. Waste chutes were constructed
and demolition workers began gutting all the buildings simultaneously, starting at the top floors and working down, the whole length of the block. There were workmen everywhere, like ants crawling over some huge, ruined cake.

The last of Claude's crews to finish were the boiler men. Getting the new equipment off the truck and down the exterior shaft (as the Bech-stein had come down) involved dismantling some of the Luris scaffolding, and a good deal of arguing, stalling, and consultation had to be gotten through before the job was accomplished.

After a second round of inspections by the city—conducted somewhat perfunctorily this time, Claude thought—the building was found to be in compliance. His next task was to complete the cleanup and replace all the stock. The original appearance of the store's interior was of course engraved in his mind, and he knew he could put everything back exactly where it had been. He started in the rear, by the new fire door. He also uncovered the Bechstein in the basement and began playing several hours a day.

One night, asleep in his bed upstairs, he woke up at the sound of a tremendous crash, so loud it might have been an explosion. He ran downstairs and found that a municipal garbage can had been thrown through the plate-glass display window, sending shards of glass half the length of the store. Rotten fruit, newspapers, a moldy bedroom slipper, and various kinds of trash spilled over onto the floor of the shop. Claude called the police and spent the rest of the night cleaning up. The next day he arranged for the open space to be covered with plywood. A week later the same thing happened to the other display window. With it also boarded up, it was very dark inside the store, and it became necessary to leave the lights on all day. Claude decided it might be wisest to wait before replacing the windows, and to put off the question of when to reopen. He consoled himself with the thought that now they had done everything they could possibly do short of firebombs, that he had only to wait them out. He believed they would not dare something as obvious as fire, and in that, at least, he was correct.

Working at the Bechstein, he became aware of a curious tension in the muscles of his arms and back, a kind of thickness in his body that kept the music from flowing as it should. He could control some of it by will, but could not entirely shake it. He called Fredericks in Paris, who
prescribed long, hot baths, deep-breathing exercises, two-mile walks every day, sex every day (Claude let that one pass), and specific relaxation exercises for the hands, arms, and shoulders. Fredericks also said the problem was quite common and would no doubt go away even if Claude did nothing. The thing to avoid was becoming obsessive about it, which would only prolong it. "It will pass," Fredericks said. "Just work through it, and one fine day you'll wake up and it will be gone."

Claude had assumed that the demolition would begin at the end of the block. However, the tall crane with the wrecking ball parked directly in front of the music store. Claude ran out and began buttonholing workmen. Eventually one of the foremen told him the first building to go down would be the one next door, Mrs. Keller's. When Claude asked why, the man shrugged his shoulders. "That's the plan. Start in the middle and work out."

The next day Claude was unpacking books in the front of the store when a great, rippling crash jammed the air and the floor shook under his feet. A fine dust appeared as if by magic. Claude was squatting, and when, after a few moments, the next crash came it was so violent he lost his balance and fell backward. He got to his feet and wondered what, if anything, he should do.

The third shock was even more powerful, shaking the entire building. He happened to be looking at the E-flat silver bell over the door when it occurred. The bell rang faintly, and he was momentarily hypnotized by the sound. He focused entirely on the bell, and when it tinkled again at the next shock he found himself comparing its weak clarity with the deep, rumbling, chaotic sounds from next door. He stood motionless, closing his eyes and listening with total concentration, listening across the entire spectrum. Without thinking about it he began to time the blows of the wrecking ball, anticipating them.

And then something extraordinary happened. At the precise instant of the crash, followed a split second later by the bell, he hallucinated the full sound of an orchestra and a piano playing two chords in succession, the first chord dissonant and the second consonant. The hallucination was clear and precise, complete in every musical detail, which he instantly memorized. Then it was as if he had gone deaf to real sound. Although his eyes and the soles of his feet told him the demolition was continuing, he heard nothing. He held the memory of the two chords in his head and walked slowly to the rear of the store. He went down the stairs, got a pencil and paper, and sat at the Bech-stein. It took half an hour to get the two chords out of his head and, fully scored, onto the paper. When this was done he sat for an hour looking at them, his mind working rapidly, spinning out every conceivable musical implication of the tension inherent in the chords. He glimpsed structure after structure, and as his excitement grew, so grew his ability to imagine ever more complex structures, until finally, trembling with exhilaration and terror, he forced himself to get up, walk around the studio, and calm down. He now had a great deal of work to do—an entire piece to write—and he knew he would have to pace himself. Otherwise the music would overwhelm him, suck him right out of existence like a great star swallowing a comet.