Body & Soul (7 page)

"This is foolishness," the German said.

"Well, they were meeting anyway. I thought they should see you."

She made a U-turn on Madison and proceeded downtown.

"You know where to go?" the newcomer asked. He was an American.

"Yes." She glanced into the rearview.

"I don't see what you hope to accomplish," said the German.

"Money, for one thing," the American answered. "It's expensive to be on the run. The more you have, the better. And there are other reasons we don't have to go into."

The German sighed heavily.

"Just let me handle it," the American said. "These people are submarines, mostly. Completely undisciplined. They'll blather on all night about Browder, white chauvinism, and God knows what else if you let them. They're like children."

"I can imagine. I don't know how you put up with it."

"I have very little choice, obviously."

She parked near the East River. Claude watched the electric signs go on and off on the other side, floating in the darkness.

"The house should be two blocks down," she said.

The men got out and crossed the street.

She looked down at Claude. "Pull that blanket up and go to sleep. This will be a while."

He lay on his side, his hands folded under his head, and drifted off.

***

A bright, windy afternoon. Weisfeld had closed the shop early and now, after hot tea and donuts at the luncheonette on the corner of Third and Eighty-fourth, they walked to Park Avenue.

"It's a concert grand," Weisfeld said. "Nine feet. A Bechstein. Maestro Kimmel brought it with him on the boat years ago. A fabulous instrument. But he can't play anymore."

"Why not?" Claude asked.

"He's an old man, and he's got some kind of muscle disease. But he still writes." He tapped the manuscripts under his arm. "He writes incredible music."

"But how can he do that if he never comes out of his room? If he can't play it, how does he know what it'll sound like?"

Weisfeld laughed. "In his head, my boy. He hears it in his head. Strings, brass, tympani, everything. He doesn't write for piano anyway."

"And they play it on the radio?"

"Oh, yes. Yes, they do. The older stuff."

They turned south on Park Avenue. The wind whipped the stiff hedges in the islands running down the center of the street. In the distance, clouds sped behind Grand Central Station, creating the illusion that the building itself was in motion.

"Here we are."

Claude stopped in his tracks. It was Al's building.

"What's the matter?"

"Nothing," Claude said.

"There's no need to be nervous. You won't even see the man."

For a moment it seemed to Claude that it was simply too great a coincidence, that Weisfeld had somehow found out about Al and the trips in the dumbwaiter, and that a reckoning was at hand. But a glance at Weisfeld's earnest, open face reassured him. The very idea that Weisfeld might find out made him feel slippery inside, as if a stone had rolled over in his chest.

The doorman touched his cap as they went inside. The gleam of marble, dark wood, the smell of wax. The elevator car was mirrored and had a small padded bench. They entered and the attendant came after them, closing the doors and the safety gate. Claude watched the numbers through the small window as they ascended to the tenth floor. He felt relieved—he had never gone up that high for Al.

At the door to the apartment Weisfeld removed his beret and rang the bell. "You will wait for me at the piano. I won't be long."

After a moment the heavy, ornately carved door swung open. A thin elderly man with a pronounced stoop stared out at them from over his glasses. His Adam's apple was so large it looked like a bone stuck in his throat. Weisfeld urged Claude forward with a hand on his back.

"Franz," he said.

"Herr Weisfeld. So this is the wunderkind?"

"Just so. Shake hands with Franz, Claude. He will be looking after you."

Claude obeyed.

"How is the maestro?"

"Good. He worked all morning, so a little tired, but good."

"Wait in there, Claude." Weisfeld indicated the living room, behind a set of half-open sliding doors. "We won't be a minute."

Claude slipped into a large room. A thick oriental rug, heavy drapes, an entire wall of books, couches, a wing chair by the fireplace, footstools, hundreds of framed pictures and photographs everywhere on the walls and tables, and there, at the far end of the room, standing free in a large open space, an enormous black piano. As Claude approached silently he could see his reflection in its side. He sat at the bench, opened the lid, and stared at the keys. He didn't move until Franz entered and walked, stooping and with a slight limp, across the room to open a side door.

"A small bathroom here," he said, closed the door, and approached the boy. "Should you ever need to call me or Helga from the back, just pull this." He tugged a ribbon of heavy cloth hanging over the drapes. "Gently. Don't jerk it."

"Who is Helga?"

"Helga is my wife. She is the cook." He glanced back at the other end of the room. "The big doors will be kept shut while you practice."

As he said this, Mr. Weisfeld came in. He was rubbing his hands together as he walked. "Now, Claude. Do you have any questions? Has Franz explained everything? Good."

"What about the man at the door downstairs?" Claude asked.

"They will be given their instructions," Franz said.

"Don't worry," Weisfeld said. "You come after school at three-thirty and you leave at six. Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. They will know all about it. So."

The two men looked down at the boy.

"Why don't you try it before we leave?" Weisfeld said.

Claude flushed. "What should I play, I don't have, I didn't bring any—"

"Try the little Schubert piece. You don't need music for that. The little one you were playing in the store."

Claude raised his arms, opened his hands, and began to play, instantly adjusting to the fact that the keys seemed to go down without resistance, or just enough resistance so that he could feel them, every key the same. He had the sensation of playing almost without effort—as if the piano itself were playing, and he was simply moving his fingers along with it. When he finished he looked up.

"It's different. It's very different."

Franz was nodding, a faint smile on his face.

"Of course," Weisfeld said. "I told you."

"I like it," Claude said.

"Well, maybe if it likes you, it will teach you," Weisfeld said. "We will see."

Sometimes the phone rang two or three times in a week, and then there were long periods—a month or more—when he almost forgot it was there. The shrill sound would pull him out of sleep, and he would get up and get dressed like an automaton, follow her up the stairs, into the cab, and fall back asleep almost instantaneously.

It was always the small stocky man with the round glasses, sometimes by himself, sometimes with others, and the pickups and dropoffs were always at corners. People appeared out of the night and disappeared into the night, as if in an extended, interrupted dream. The German spoke very little but was invariably courteous to Claude's mother, and sometimes he gave the boy a gift of candy (licorice pastilles, strong and bitter tasting). Occasionally, while dozing, or shifting in his sleep, his feet bumping his mother's huge, hard thigh, he would catch an exchange from the back.

"Don't they have instructions for us? Don't they know what's happening?"

Gerhardt: "No instructions. Perhaps eventually."

"Eventually will be too late. I can't believe this!"

Mostly the other voices were anxious, or fast (which might have been why Claude would tune in momentarily), but Gerhardt was always calm, and he often sighed.

***

It was many months before Claude looked up from the piano, as it were, and allowed himself to wonder about the maestro. The boy was so in love with the Bechstein, so protective of the conditions that allowed him to play it, that he had instinctively made himself small, almost invisible, putting everything else out of his mind when he would ring the bell and be ushered in by Franz, saying next to nothing as he slipped into the big room, head down, and walked a straight line to the instrument. The silence, dimness, and peaceful stasis of the place worked on him in a strange way—he was not afraid to play, but he was almost afraid to breathe, as if the vulgar fact of his being alive might somehow disturb things. (Although he continued to pick up the bottles in the basement once a week, going in by the back service entrance, he had not told Al about the events upstairs, about how the doormen knew him now, or about how Franz and Helga set out a glass of milk and two almond cookies on the coffee table near the piano as a silent greeting every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, nor did he think he ever would tell Al. He was not aware of having made the decision, it somehow just happened.) But one afternoon, after almost half a year, he found himself gazing at the framed photographs and identifying the maestro simply because he was in more pictures than anyone else. He felt a small shock and a vague sense of guilt, as if he weren't supposed to be looking.

There were cities, some of which he recognized from pictures he had seen in
Life
magazine. Two men and a woman standing in front of a café, and far off in the distance, the top of the Eiffel Tower. A shot of Piccadilly Circus, double-decker buses jammed in a circle, bowler hats, servicemen, signs and advertisements. But most of the pictures revealed an exotic city of old buildings with rococo embellishments, spidery wrought-iron arches over narrow streets, a river, a cliff, and a castle atop the cliff. A strange city with very few signs in a strange alphabet made up of odd letters. Everyone wore dark clothing, and there, towering over everyone else, a bear of a man, often in a fur hat, often carrying a cane, was the maestro, or the man Claude took to be the maestro, since Claude had never seen him. His size, his full beard, his unnaturally penetrating eyes, all contributed to a near-palpable feeling of power. He dominated every photograph in which he appeared. Once, he seemed—a trick of the eye—to move ever so slightly within the frame. Claude jumped back, as if rebuked, and returned to the piano.

Weisfeld continuously monitored Claude's feelings about scales. Every few months he would check—is it getting too boring, too tedious? Can you maintain concentration, or do you get dreamy? Claude reassured him. Scales were something he liked to do. It felt good. There was a sense of progress. In addition to traditional drills, Weisfeld would give him new exercises of his own design. Contrary motion, three octaves both ways, ascend in half steps. Ascend in thirds, fourths, fifths. Delayed scales—the left hand entering first, the right hand entering three notes later, descend in whole tones. Then reverse the process. Claude particularly liked the sensations attendant to playing different scales simultaneously—F major in the right hand against D-flat major in the left, for example—not so much for the sound, although it was fun to split his mind in half and listen to both of them, or to hear them converging and diverging harmonically, but for the physical feeling in his hands, the slow-wave feeling that emerged from the various patterns, different kinds of waves with different pairs of juxtaposed scales.

The perception of the waves, and the nodes of the waves which gave his hands, while they were in motion, a series of home bases, quite different from the root notes themselves—this perception led him to realize that there were thousands of interesting scale exercises, perhaps tens of thousands, waiting to be played. Thus the finite eighty-eight-key reality of the Bechstein contained a possibly infinite number of different wave forms concealed within its configuration. Claude enjoyed catching the waves and riding them. It just felt good.

He noticed that Franz would occasionally leave the big sliding doors partly open. Was it an oversight, or was someone listening? Eventually they were left partially open almost all of the time.

And then one day as Claude went through the doors into the foyer on his way out, Franz appeared out of a dark corridor. "If you could just wait a moment," he said. "If you could just stand here, please." He indicated a particular spot on the parquet and retreated into the corridor.

After a few moments the boy discerned movement in the distant darkness—shapes, a low dark shape gliding from one of the rooms into the hall. A wheelchair? Low voices. Franz re-emerged. "The maestro wants to get a look at you. Please hold your hands up like this." Claude held his hands up, palms forward. "Yes, that's it," Franz said. "Now stretch them wide. Excellent."

Was that a head? A shoulder? Claude strained to see.

"How much do you weigh?" Franz asked.

"I don't know."

"You can put your hands down now. Thank you." Franz gently led him to the door. "Until next Monday, then."

One afternoon, in his room, Claude sat at the white piano working on "The Choo-Choo Boogie," one of a number of blues and boogie tunes he'd found in the bench. His left hand pounded out repeated fifths and a little figure with his middle finger while his right hand ran up and down doing some complicated but entirely symmetrical variations on the simple melody. The beat was as powerful and relentless as the locomotive on the front of the sheet music. He'd used up the half hour when his mother came in.

"Claude!" she shouted. He stopped immediately. "I need you."

He got up and followed her through the apartment and up the iron stairs to the cab. "I almost had it," he said, getting in the back.

"Had what?"

"That tricky part where it sort of curls around."

"What are you talking about?"

"When it goes back to F. That part."

"We're picking him up and going to the docks," she said, pulling away from the curb.

He was waiting on the corner of Twelfth Street, dressed in a suit and tie and wearing a topcoat that looked brand new. He carried a small leather suitcase, which he placed on the floor as he got in beside Claude.