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 twenty-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 na?ve 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.
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