Joplin's Ghost Read online

  A hundred thousand dollars had sounded like a fortune a year ago, but no more. Phoenix had banked a chunk of her first major advance so she couldn’t touch it, but she hated to think about how much of the rest she had already spent. “I’ve told her,” Phoenix said.

  “You should have left her home, Phee.”

  “Don’t start, Sarge.” Her cousin could be a pain in the ass, no doubt, but without Gloria, the road would be a cruel companion, beyond lonely. Sarge had agreed to Gloria’s presence on the tour, and Phoenix had agreed to give D’Real and Ronn the creative direction of Rising. Most days, it hardly seemed like a fair trade.

  Phoenix heard the Egyptian string tracks from “Party Patrol” squall through the open doorway as Olympia queued up the CD. Although she’d heard it two hundred times, Phoenix still felt a charge when her multitrack violin solo came on the club’s speakers. Kendrick was right about this song: It was a hit-in-waiting. It didn’t all belong to her, but a piece was enough.

  “The show doesn’t feel right yet, Sarge,” Phoenix said. She almost called him Daddy, craving comfort, but he preferred Sarge when they were working.

  “It isn’t right. But you’ll get there. Give it a couple more hours, and come back strong in the morning. We have time to tighten it up before tomorrow night.” Sarge had promised never to bullshit her when it mattered, so she prayed this was one of those times.

  “The radio stuff is really splitting my attention,” she complained.

  “There’s no more radio interviews in St. Louis. You got bumped because of the blues festival. You’re a free woman until the show.”

  Good. Canceled interviews would give her more time to rehearse, rest and watch a couple movies with Gloria, even if Ronn and the publicity department wouldn’t like it. Publicity is paper, Ronn always said. Even though she was sure Ronn had nothing to do with the shooting that killed DJ Train’s bodyguard in Brooklyn, Ronn said he’d seen a big bump in his SoundScan numbers because everybody said he was behind it. Publicity was paper, all right. If anybody knew about money in the bank, it was Ronn.

  “I talked to Serena today,” Sarge said. “She’s coming out to join us in L.A., and she says she’ll stay on through New York.”

  Phoenix hardly knew her two half brothers, but Serena was a true sister despite their twenty-four-year age difference. Phoenix had only seen Serena two or three times in the past few years, and she’d been begging her to come on this tour. “She said she’ll sing with me?”

  “We’ll work on that. For now, she says she’ll do your hair so you won’t look so nappy.”

  Phoenix laughed. Serena owned a beauty shop in Atlanta, and was a virtuoso with hair. Ronn wanted Phoenix to get a more television-friendly weave, and Serena would hook her up. At the moment, Phoenix’s blowout Afro was a curly brown-red crown reaching toward the sky, virtually untended. Not suitable for mass consumption. Ronn hadn’t said it quite that way, but that was what he’d meant.

  “What about Mom?” Phoenix said.

  “Call her yourself, but she still says she’s not coming until New York. Sorry, Peanut.”

  No surprise there. For years, on the rare holiday occasions they all stayed in the Miami house, Mom slept in the master bedroom and Sarge hibernated in the garage he’d refinished for himself. Her parents were married only in name, and probably had been longer than she’d known. Phoenix wondered how much of her parents’ long, slow drift she could blame on her career.

  “I’m gonna go hit that stage again,” Phoenix said.

  “Save your voice for tomorrow night, though. Work on your moves.”

  Sarge followed her through the doorway back out to the cavernous nightclub, where the bass for “Party Patrol” resounded like thunder.

  Le Beat was a two-story nightclub bedecked in mirrors and shiny poles against a black dance floor and dark walls. The deejay booth lorded high over the stage like the control panel of a space shuttle. They passed the VIP section just beyond stage right, with a velvet rope partitioning off Art-Deco-style furniture, the room’s only bright colors. There might be more than five hundred people there Friday night, the club owner had told them, and the most important ones would be in the VIP section: deejays, music writers, record buyers. The airplay sentinels.

  Olympia was taking Arturo and the other two dancers through the opening, which started with them lying flat on their backs, thrusting their torsos high and leaping to their feet after a B-boy-style spin. Phoenix could see that Arturo had taken Sarge’s criticism to heart: His motion was energetic and crisp, the way she remembered him at New World. His body sailed through the air, and he landed solidly, cranking his shoulders into the next move, hitting his beats. The other two dancers looked like children at play beside him. She could only imagine how lame she must look trying to pull off Olympia’s moves.

  “Ronn knows I’m not Janet Jackson, right?” Phoenix said to Sarge.

  “You don’t have to be. But trust Olympia. She understands illusion, how to make you look like you’re doing more than you are. By the way, Arturo looks good. A little discipline, and he’ll shake things up when it’s time to start shooting that video.”

  “I know,” Phoenix said, smiling. Arturo’s personality clashed with hers too much for a deeper friendship, but she and Arturo had lived through a storm when their friend Jay died of AIDS complications in high school. She and Arturo had shared their first tragedy in common. “Could you just ease off on him a little, Sarge? He’s touchy.”

  “Why quit a tactic when it works?” Sarge said, winking. “I’ll think about it. Listen, where are you going after rehearsal?”

  “Back to the room with Gloria, I guess. Why?”

  “I’m gonna make a call and set something up for you.”

  “Please don’t, Sarge. I’m tired.”

  “Not an interview. I want you to go to the Scott Joplin House. It’s near the hotel.”

  For an instant, Phoenix was sure her father was just trying to get a rise out of her, but no smile cracked his face as he gazed at the stage. It was bad enough rehearsals and interviews were driving her into the ground, but in each new city Sarge was trying to be a tour guide, too. In Atlanta, he’d dragged her to the King Center when she’d barely gotten four hours of sleep. In Memphis, the Lorraine Motel.

  “Sarge, I said I’m tired.”

  “That’s your own fault for staying up late. It’s a state historic site. I’d go, too, but I have to work my phone. Gloria can drive you. Make her earn her damn keep for a change.”

  One oversight in Phoenix’s quest for stardom had been learning how to drive. She’d better hope she could afford a driver one day. “OK, you’re not hearing me. I can’t be running all over the place twenty-four/seven on some kind of history lesson.”

  As always, her words seemed to have no effect on Sarge, as if they were a wind gust he had to tolerate before he spoke again. “Just go for an hour. You can’t get where you’re going until you know where you’ve been, Phee.” His voice quieted as he locked their eyes. “Remember me telling you about how you played that Joplin in your sleep? And the two of us played a duet in the living room while your mom watched?”

  It isn’t fair to bring up those days, Phoenix thought.

  “I wasn’t asleep. I just don’t remember it,” she said. The skin on her forearms fluttered every time Sarge talked about that night. That year came with a slew of bad memories: a long, boring hospital stay; painful therapy; and worse, seeing for the first time how fragile her mother was, understanding what a nervous breakdown was. That was a bad year.

  And the story of the piano at the center of it all scared the hell out of her. That damn thing had almost killed her. And she’d never heard the pieces Sarge told her she’d played in her sleep, much less should she have been able to play them. She could hardly remember the piano anymore. If not for her family’s corroboration, she wouldn’t believe it had happened. And whatever it was, Phoenix didn’t want to nudge it to see what else might stir.

 
; “You need to go over there and pay your respects,” Sarge said. “That man helped open the door for every one of us in music with black or brown skin. Simple as that.”

  “You say that about everybody.”

  “And it’s true about everybody I say it about.”

  This was her punishment for hiring a former Black Panther as her manager, Phoenix thought. Hell, this was her punishment for hiring her father. Why was it so hard to stand up to him? Gloria’s right. I’m too old to be such a Daddy’s girl.

  Phoenix had forgotten Scott Joplin ever lived in St. Louis, and she didn’t care. She’d played a little of Joplin’s ragtime in high school as part of her classical piano curriculum, but the happy syncopation sounded like the soundtrack to old black-and-white movies, and she’d never even seen The Sting, the movie Sarge told her had made Joplin internationally famous. When it came to old music, Phoenix preferred blues. Or even jazz, Sarge’s favorite. Maybe Scott Joplin had been ruined for her that night when she was ten, she thought.

  What if you’ll jinx yourself if you diss Scott Joplin on his home turf? The last thing she needed before this show was a jinx.

  “OK, I’ll go to the Joplin House. But this is the last diversion, Sarge. I mean it.”

  “Good girl, Peanut,” Sarge said, grinning. “You won’t be sorry.”

  I’m already sorry, Phoenix thought, suddenly so weary she couldn’t imagine another two minutes of rehearsal, never mind two hours. Then, under her father’s vigilant eyes, Phoenix joined her dancers on the brightly lighted, waiting stage.

  CHAPTER TWO

  St. Louis

  1901

  Scott saw the teardrop of bright blood on Louis’s shirt collar before he noticed the rag wrapped around Louis’s right hand, liberally stained in crimson. Despite the frigid air outside, Louis’s thin overcoat hung open, buttons torn. Fresh snowflakes clung to his wind-wild hair.

  “God in Heaven,” Scott said.

  “I’ll answer to that.” Louis grinned in the doorway with a prettiness that had always seemed misplaced on a man. Louis reeked of lavender and whiskey. His youthful complexion and delicate curls made the boy grievously handsome despite his dishevelment. At nineteen, he lived in a world not sampled by most men their entire lives.

  “What happened?”

  “This nigger on Market got mouthy, tellin’ me he never did meet a Creole could fight. I told him I might be small, but I’d show him if Creoles could fight or not. Before he could blink, I took a swipe at him—” Louis took a half step and shunted to demonstrate, thrusting an invisible razor. “He got lucky and cut my hand, but he wished he hadn’t after that.”

  This boy was a fool. An injury might destroy Louis’s ability to play. No insult was worth losing his music. “You need a doctor,” Scott said.

  “He’s the one better go find a doctor. Bet he won’t say that no more.” Louis leaned against the doorjamb. “I’m hungry. Let’s get some grub. Where you been, Scotty?”

  Belle was upstairs cooking supper, but Scott didn’t dare invite Louis to join them. She couldn’t abide liquor, and Louis smelled like a brewery. Belle tolerated Tom, Otis, Sam and Arthur fine, but Louis would confirm all of his wife’s misgivings about their move to the larger city two hundred miles from Sedalia, in a flat so close to the sporting districts. Lower Morgan and Chestnut Valley were too close for Belle’s comfort.

  Behind Louis, a covered black Purina wagon loaded with bags of feed rumbled just ahead of a blustering horseless carriage. The day traffic of peddlers, furriers and delivery wagons on Morgan was thinning into the more languid pace of night traffic and its more dubious pursuits.

  “I’ve been here,” Scott said. “Working.”

  “Scribbling, you mean. Hey, you heard Mother’s moved her girls to Chestnut? She’s tryin’ to compete with the Rosebud. Paying top dollar for professors, too—not just tips. And twelve dollars to the winner of the Friday-night contests. She can afford it, ’cause I swear Mother charges for cooze like it’s plated in gold—”

  “My wife is upstairs.” Scott gave Louis’s shoulder an irritated shake.

  Louis clapped his good hand over his mouth. “Aw, shit,” he said, but he laughed.

  Scott found the money he’d folded in his pocket after his last student left, three dollars for the week’s lessons. With his expensive habits, Louis spent more money than most people made, so Scott guessed he was begging for a meal. “Go to the Rosebud and eat. I’ll meet you later.”

  “I ain’t gonna eat no food at Tom Turpin’s place. Something I ate there the other day tore a hole in my stomach. He’s tryin’ to poison me, he’s so damn jealous he can’t play as pretty as me,” Louis said, but took the money anyway.

  “Tom’ll sit on you if I tell him how you’re talking. You’re drunk, Louis.”

  “Man, Scotty, just let me in out the damn cold.”

  “You smell like a bawdy house.”

  “Old man, don’t make me go tell stories on you,” Louis said. “Scared of your wife! Shoot, your mademoiselle’s gonna like me better than you want her to.” He tipped his hat and flashed a smile toward an imaginary Belle, miming a peek at where her cleavage would be.

  “You’re a sad excuse for a Creole, little man. A mademoiselle is unmarried,” Scott said.

  “They all forget they’re married when I’m near, professor.”

  Scott heard quick footsteps on the stairs behind him. It was too late to send Louis away.

  “Your hand,” Scott whispered. Louis gave him a maddeningly ignorant look for several seconds, mocking him, but Louis slid his bandaged hand into his coat pocket, hiding it from sight.

  “Scott? It’s suppertime,” Belle said, a ready chide for whoever was at the door. She was a sturdy woman, nearly as tall as he and twenty-six, with a dark, comely face beneath strands of early silver hair dotting her temples. Scott noticed an ember of intrigue in his wife’s eye. Louis’s beauty, again.

  “I wish you hadn’t come all the way down. My friend is leaving,” Scott said tightly. “Have you met Louis Chauvin? Louis—this is Belle Joplin, my wife.”

  “Madam, sorry to bring you down all them stairs,” Louis said. He not only tipped his hat; he took it off and pressed it to his breast. Louis could imitate a gentleman’s behavior with an actor’s ease, which made Scott all the more impatient with the boy’s coarseness. “I’m one of the young men fortunate enough to look upon your husband as a great teacher and friend. I’ve known Mr. Joplin since I was a young Sunday school student in Sedalia. Belated congratulations on your marriage, madam. You must be very proud to be Mrs. Scott Joplin.”

  Liar! Scott had met the boy in St. Louis two or three years ago, when Tom pointed him out at Mother’s and his ears had first thrilled to Louis’s elegant musicianship. Sometimes Louis lied for the sheer pleasure of telling a story. All musicians were liars, to hear Belle’s opinion, and he wasn’t sure she was wrong. Scott intervened before Louis could trip himself up. “Louis only stopped by—”

  “Because I wanted to congratulate my old mentor on his success. We boys back at Holy Church have always known Mr. Joplin walked a higher plane. He’s no coon musician, madam, oh no. Our Mr. Joplin is an artiste. And it has been the joy of my life to see him held up beyond our small circles. It’s no time before he’ll be composing for the Governor’s Ball and eating with royalty in Germany. He is a true credit to his entire race.”

  Scott nearly groaned at Louis’s sarcasm. “It’s a shame Louis can’t stay,” Scott said.

  Belle looked disappointed. “Where are you going, Mr.…?”

  “Chauvin,” Louis said, with a half bow. “Mr. Joplin says I should go to the Rosebud for supper, but my mama says St. Louis’s streets are too rough for an honest boy at night.”

  “Tom’s place?” Belle said, looking at Scott, surprised. “But I just finished cooking.”

  “We didn’t expect a guest,” Scott said.

  “We have plenty.” Belle’s eyebrows scowled at Scott’s lack of man
ners. “You can’t send a gentle young boy to Chestnut Valley at night. After he’s come such a long way!”

  “He’s been to St. Louis many times, Belle,” Scott said. “It’s like his second home.”

  “Scott, for goodness sakes, let’s let your young friend in out of the cold.”

  “Yes, Mr. Joplin, for goodness sakes, let your young friend in out of the cold…motherfucker.” Louis muttered the last word nearly inaudibly as he passed Scott in the narrow hallway. He stepped hard on Scott’s toe as he walked inside, a private insult.

  While Louis spun fairy tales, embellishments and fantasies about his life for Belle, Scott directed him to the upstairs washroom, where he gave Louis a washrag to clean himself. Scott did not trust the mysterious smile on his wife’s face while she busied herself in the kitchen, but there would be more peace in the house that night if Belle kept smiling.

  Scott found a clean white shirt in his wardrobe and knocked on the washroom door.

  “We goin’ to a funeral?” Louis said when he saw it.

  “Change that shirt. You have someone’s blood on your collar.”

  Louis sighed and took the shirt without further argument. Scott stood in the doorway while Louis shaved in the mirror. Louis never went anywhere without his straight razor, and not because he needed one for his fine, spare facial hair.

  “Let me see your hand.”

  “It’s already seen after, Dr. Joplin. I rinsed it clean,” Louis said. “Don’t worry about me, worry for your own self. Yessir, you’re up here living the hincty life, scared I’ll shame you. No wonder you don’t want nobody stopping by. Tom told me about you, walking ’round with your nose stuck up in the air. You won’t play nowhere like you used to, huh? But I understand, Scotty. Listen, you got a nice little flat up here. You’ll never go hungry with a butcher shop next door. Folks say durin’ the war, this was a real pretty neighborhood.”

  Scott lived upstairs at 2658-A Morgan, in a brick row house identical to every other building for blocks. Their five-room apartment had been improvised from a single town house, so two families now lived in the space intended for one, although the building’s refinement was still apparent in the long balcony winding the length of the building from the bedroom door. Scott noticed the apartment’s shortcomings most often as he climbed the mountain of steps—more than twenty!—his hand squeezing the rude pipe that had been fitted against the wall as a banister. At the upstairs landing, the pipe ended and met its regal ancestor, the shiny wooden globe that crowned the banister like a recollection.