Because Woolworth’s was still cleaning up from the kitchen fire, my mother didn’t have to work the lunch shift. She wanted to come with me to the community center, to hear what I’d learned of the piano, which I worried wouldn’t be impressive to someone who could sing like Ella. You should have seen her that day. She dressed as though it must be an occasion, as if she were accompanying me to some concert hall where two thousand people were waiting to hear me play. She wore a yellow dress with a pleated skirt and with black piping at the cuffs and collar, a black belt, and black high-heeled shoes. We walked the block and a half, and she was so gorgeous that people turned to look at her, men and women alike, as if a goddess had come down to Earth to walk this skinny boy someplace special for some reason too amazing to imagine.
Mrs. O’Toole was there, and I introduced them, and it turned out they had something in common: Grandpa Teddy. Mary O’Toole said, “My first husband played tenor sax with Shep Fields in ’41. Shep’s band was heavy with saxes—one bass, one baritone, six tenors, and four altos—and Teddy Bledsoe was the piano man part of that year, before moving on to Goodman.” Mary looked at me in a new way when she knew I was Teddy Bledsoe’s grandson. She said, “Bless you, child, now it makes perfect sense how you could come along so fast on the ivories.”
I had progressed quickly through the lessons, but what had excited Mrs. O’Toole was that recently I’d gotten to the place where I could listen to a piece of music and sit down and play it right away, insofar as my arms could reach and my fingers could spread. I had an eidetic memory for music, which is the equivalent of reading a novel once and being able to recite it word for word. If I was alone at the keyboard, I was able to play just about anything, regardless of the complexity or tempo, not a fraction as well as Grandpa Teddy could have played it, but still so you’d recognize the tune. I needed to have the bench to myself because I had developed this butt-slide technique, polishing the bench with the seat of my pants, slipping left, right, left as required without bumping my elbows or disturbing my finger placement, so I had good reach for a kid my age and size.
My mom stood listening to me play, and I didn’t dare look at her. I didn’t want her to make nice and pretend I was better than I truly was, but I didn’t want to see her trying to keep from wincing, either. The second thing I played was a favorite of hers, an old Anita O’Day hit, “And Her Tears Flowed Like Wine.” I was but three bars into it when Mom started to sing. Oh, man. Community center acoustics don’t measure up, but maybe that was still what those lyrics sounded like at the Paramount Theater or the Hotel Pennsylvania, back when O’Day was with Stan Kenton and was better than the band, before I was born.
I became aware that people were crowding into the Abigail Louise Thomas Room, drawn by my mom’s singing. I was so proud of her and embarrassed that she had no one more accomplished than me to accompany her. We were rolling toward the end, and she was better than great, her tone and her phrasing, and just then, among the little crowd, I saw Miss Pearl.
She wore the same pink outfit with the feathered hat that she had been wearing almost three months earlier when she sat on the stoop with me and called me Ducks. She wiggled her fingers at me, and I smiled.
I couldn’t wait to introduce Miss Pearl to Mrs. O’Toole, so that our benefactor could be thanked for the piano. I figured the shiny-as-new Steinway had been there too long suddenly to be dilapidated and in the basement again, with nobody to remember that it had been restored or replaced, which was the fear that had kept me from mentioning Miss Pearl on the first day I’d seen the piano glossy and black and beautiful. There you have the magical thinking of an eight-year-old boy: that when the miraculous happens, it soon can be undone by the whim of God, but if it isn’t undone in a day or a week or a month, then it becomes permanent, and even God doesn’t have the power to take it away.
The truth is, to this day I still pretty much operate under that assumption. If chaos plagues the world—and it does—and if there’s any benign power that wants the world to survive, then stability will be encouraged and rewarded. Maybe not all the time. But most of the time.
Anyway, we came to the end of “And Her Tears Flowed Like Wine,” when I stupidly added a concluding flourish that wasn’t part of the number. Fortunately, the crowd of community-center staff and patrons knew the song was over when my mom hit the last word, and they broke into applause that saved me from the embarrassment of them having heard the unnecessary flourish. A lot of the people who came there to play cards and socialize were older than Grandpa Teddy, and they knew the old tunes so well that they might have sung along if they hadn’t wanted to hear Sylvia Bledsoe solo. They called for more, and I looked at Mom, and she nodded.