“Any of his brothers about?” Cronin said.
“No, I’m afraid it’s just the two of us.” She extended her hand. “I’m Lilly.”
Cronin looked at her hand, then down at the bag. This wasn’t meant to be a social call. “Are you the one who found him when he was missing?” he said.
“I am,” she said. “Though I’m finding it very difficult to say good-bye.”
“What happened there?” He nodded toward Michael’s arm.
“Oh, just a little slip at the hotel. And you?”
“Something like that, I suppose,” he said.
Michael followed the movements of their mouths and tried to guess at the course of the conversation. He could be doing a lot of this, he imagined, in the years to come.
“I came to drop this.” He set the bag next to Michael. “It belongs to him and his brothers.”
“You’re welcome to wait with us,” Lilly said.
Cronin shook his head. “I’ll be on my way,” he said, but he did not move. Michael’s nose and eyes were so like his mother’s, and his hair was as thick and black as his father’s had been.
Michael squinted up at him, this big man with the sun behind his head.
“So,” Cronin said. The word had a finality to it, as if he were bringing an end to one thing, and whatever came next would be something new. He wanted to be home by nightfall. He had decided to keep the car, so when the family drove to church tomorrow and all the Sundays that followed, they could do so in the Packard and not in the truck. He also kept the five hundred that Gavigan had stacked up on his desk, all but the one bloodstained bill that he’d left behind. The Webley would go back into its box among Alice’s hats at the top of the closet. Cronin hoped that he would never again feel its grip.
Michael and Lilly watched as the car rolled away, turned left, and made for the Grand Concourse. Michael had brought a pad of paper emblazoned with the Plaza’s crest, but he wouldn’t need it for these questions. He pointed to the bag and shrugged. What’s this about? Lilly raised an eyebrow and waved one hand: Why don’t we open it? Michael, in his sling, could not manage the clasp, so Lilly set the bag between them, released the catch, and opened the hinged top. She let out a shriek at the stacks of dollars and bundles of pound notes and slammed the bag shut. She and Michael exchanged a goggle-eyed look, like two children who had stumbled on a pirate’s treasure. Lilly opened the bag again and shut it just as quickly. It was barely pin money for Countess Eudoxia Rothschild and Sir Malcolm MacFarquhar, but to Lilly Bloch and Michael Dempsey, it looked like a fortune.
WOODLAWN
WHENEVER HE TOLD THE story of his big break, Elston Hooper—Fess to generations of jazz aficionados—would say it all started at an Irish wedding in the Bronx. It was a onetime gig, cooked up by a cat he’d met at a late-night jam session, a white fellow from one of the Midtown bands who was always hanging around the Harlem hot spots: Minton’s, Monroe’s Uptown House, Tillie’s, Club Hot-Cha. How he’d talked Hooper and Teddy Gaines into playing in a wedding band was a mystery for the ages. He must have been one of those gift-of-gab Irishmen who could argue a leprechaun out of his pot of gold—or convince two black musicians that they’d be welcomed with open arms at a social club in the whitest neighborhood in the Bronx. The way Hooper told it, things looked ugly at the get-go: the bride’s father was a local bigwig who carried on like they’d stepped in the wedding cake; the club’s manager said they didn’t have a policy against integrated bands, they’d just never done it before; and to top it all off, the fellow who’d put the whole job together—the bandleader and, if you can believe it, the brother-in-law of the bride—was a no-show. Apparently, he’d cut out to see the king of England at the World’s Fair and hadn’t even told his wife. It was that kind of gig.
What could they do but play? They started off slow, some nice and easy numbers, though with a change here and there on account of losing their piano player, who also happened to be the bandleader, the brother-in-law, the husband at the fair, et cetera. But Hooper hadn’t signed up for a snoozy set of light-and-sweet. After the happy couple’s first dance, “Begin the Beguine,” they turned up the heat song by song until the joint was ready to boil. That room might have been chockablock with old folks expecting to shed a tear or two to “Danny Boy”—there was even a table full of nuns!—but the bride wanted to dance and she had a dozen friends who were ready to help her cut loose. After the floor had filled and the young folks realized there was a party in the works, Hooper leaned into the microphone and, in his best radio-announcer voice, said, “I know we’re in Woodlawn, but how about we try ‘Jumpin’ at the Woodside’?”
This was the part of the story where Hooper had a tendency to play the professor. His wife of fifty-plus years, the incomparable Lorena Briggs, would say that he had always been that way, that even straight off the train from Baltimore, with his feet having been on the sidewalks of Lenox Avenue for only a day, he was already telling everyone in Harlem how it was done. Maybe it was bred in the bone, and maybe it was his late-in-life turn as a visiting professor and artist-in-residence at Rutgers, but Hooper couldn’t resist explaining the difficulties of launching into “Jumpin’ at the Woodside” with an eight-piece outfit and no piano. People had to understand just what sort of on-the-fly improvisation it required to pull off a stunt like that—improvisation, he would remind students and listeners alike, that was grounded in years of practice and a reverence for the possibilities of one’s instrument.
By the time the band took its first break, the room was really hopping. The bride was a blur of blond hair, white veil, and klieg-light smile. The groom, a string bean who had to be coaxed out for the hot-jazz burners, had undone his bow tie and loosened his collar and was dancing like a man still trying hard to get the girl.
Hooper wasn’t about to mistake this good feeling for what it wasn’t. During the break, he didn’t set foot in the dining room, didn’t even cast a look at the bar, where the white fellows in the band were ordering club sodas with—when the bride’s father wasn’t looking—a shot of something extra. While Teddy Gaines took five outside, Hooper waited in a back hall close to the kitchen, wiping his head, his neck, his face with a cold towel. A lanky white man in a Park Avenue suit approached him with a tall glass of ice water and asked if he had a minute. After the man handed over the glass, Hooper said sure, he’d give him two, maybe even three. And when the man introduced himself as John Hammond, Hooper told him he could take all the time in the world.