Joplin's Ghost Page 9

  Furtively, Scott looked for a shadow in the hall that would betray Belle’s approach.

  “How do you know?” Scott said, once he was satisfied Belle wasn’t near.

  “Mother’s tryin’ to keep it quiet how Rose took and run, but she went home down South, and it’s the dog for sure. I don’t know for sure I got it from her, like I said, but…I’d swear to it to a judge. A damn shame for a pretty thing like that to get spoilt, ain’t it?”

  Scott’s hands curled into fists. He did have some hard, open sores on his upper thigh for a time a couple years back, but after two weeks, just when he’d begun to worry, they’d vanished. And he’d had a recurring rash on his feet a while later, but he’d assumed that was a simple foot infection, the kind he’d suffered in childhood when he shared his brothers’ shoes. The discomfort had bothered him on and off for a few months, then it had vanished, too. That was during his strenuous effort to mount his first, short-lived ballet at the Wood’s Opera House in Sedalia, The Ragtime Dance, and he’d nearly fallen asleep on his feet many times. Was fatigue a symptom?

  He had seen Rose each time he visited St. Louis that year. That much he remembered.

  Jesus Almighty, Scott realized, his heart stalling. He might have it, too. He might. Scott tugged his handkerchief from his pocket and mopped his brow, which was damp with sudden perspiration. The last traces of his meal sat sour in his mouth.

  “I ain’t gonna ask you what ain’t my business, but I remember how you ran with Rose awhile. The dog sleeps, Scotty,” Louis said, his voice somber. “Sometimes a long time, the doc says. It leaves you, then it comes back to bite.”

  Scott could only nod, robbed of speech, and nearly robbed of thought. He’d hardly heard Louis. The grief he had felt when Louis told him he was sick had felt deep and genuine, but what he felt now was deeper than he had known fear and grief could burrow. He felt impaled.

  My God, he might have passed it to Belle, and Belle to their unborn child, if indeed she was pregnant as she hoped. He had heard syphilis killed babies in the womb, or else soon after. Belle had already lost two children soon after they were born, with her only living son in Sedalia—what if he caused her to lose another? My God. My God. My God.

  How could his life have stood so grand one moment, ground to rubble the next?

  Louis sighed, and Scott smelled the sweet whiskey on his friend’s breath. Scott was a poor drinker, but he longed for a sip himself. Maybe he should go to Tom’s after all. But how could he, when his limbs refused to move?

  “I hope you don’t got it, Scotty,” Louis said. “Me? Well, I ain’t never been no good. But you—it wouldn’t be right, professor.”

  Scott blinked. “That’s a backwards lie,” he said, remembering the boy’s graceful melody.

  Louis only shrugged with a bare smile. “Listen, I got a yen, and I ain’t gonna sleep if I don’t go get me a smoke. Come on with me.”

  Opium. Scott had suspected the boy’s oft-bloodshot eyes were the result of more than spirits. “I can’t see how that habit’s any good for your condition.”

  Louis chuckled. “Shows what you know. That’s how the doc used to give me my mercury, but I like opium better without it. The pipe’s good for up here.” He tapped his temple. “My pipe’s the only thing that’s ever treated me right. That and my sweet lady.” He turned over his shoulder to gaze soft-eyed at Scott’s piano against the wall. Louis stretched his fingers, wriggling them one by one. “I’m man enough to take dying, Scotty—hell, I should’a died five times over by now, tonight on Market, too. But I sure am gonna miss my sweet lady one day.”

  Scott didn’t know if the tear creeping past his eyelid was for Louis or himself. Maybe it was for both of them, or all of them. Half of Chestnut Valley must be in a panic over the news about Rose. How could communion with that heavenly creature hasten them so surely into Hell?

  With a pat on Scott’s shoulder, Louis said it was time for him to go. When Scott offered to walk him downstairs, Louis refused, asking him to thank Belle for dinner and bid her good night. With Louis gone, Scott stood alone in the empty parlor for a long time.

  Belle came to announce that she felt queasy and would go to bed. I must be expecting for sure, she said cheerfully, hugging him from behind. Scott couldn’t find it in his guilty heart to kiss his wife good night.

  He stood at the parlor window and stared at the falling snow, which tumbled down more quickly now, burying everything in his sight.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The area skirting the Scott Joplin House on Delmar Boulevard in St. Louis was so bare that Gloria and Phoenix drove past the historic site twice before they realized they’d missed it. Only an open field, maybe a park, sat across the street from the huddle of newer two-story brick buildings on a curb bordered by bricks, like a movie set amid the drabness. A wooden sign identified the building as a historic site designated by Missouri’s Department of Natural Resources.

  Gloria idled the rented Ford Focus at the curb, lighting up a Newport with her pearl-colored lighter. “Have fun. I’m gonna find some Chinese. See you in an hour.”

  Phoenix had expected a regal Victorian with trellises and a whitewashed porch beneath century-old trees, not a town-house-style building. The area near their hotel in the heart of St. Louis’s downtown district had struck Phoenix as desolate, too. The streets emptied out after dark, so she guessed most of the residents had fled for the suburbs long ago, or else been driven out. Downtown St. Louis, like this area, seemed incongruous with the St. Louis of legend, full of hardy businesses and Mississippi River traffic bringing fortune seekers from all over the world. What had changed so much in a hundred years?

  Phoenix grabbed her cousin’s wrist. “Girl, don’t leave me here.”

  Gloria sighed, and her bloom of cigarette smoke irritated Phoenix’s nose. “You’re the one who thinks you’ve got to do everything Sarge says like when you were six. Look, we’re here, we’ve seen it, so why don’t you just get out and kiss the earth so we can go? I’m starving.”

  “Starving from what? All you do is sit on your ass.”

  Phoenix thought Gloria’s caustic wit might give her a shot at stand-up or comedy writing, but Gloria wasn’t interested in any pursuits that entailed actual work. Gloria had dropped out of the University of Miami as a junior, and she’d quit her job as paramedic only six months after finishing the fire academy, complaining about long shifts. Since then, she hadn’t done much of anything except answer the telephone at her parents’ health-food store in South Miami. As far as Phoenix could tell, Gloria didn’t have any plans except waiting for her cousin to get rich. A hybrid with twice Gloria’s ambition and half of mine might be a normal person, she thought.

  Gloria flipped her a bird. “Eff off. Check yourself, cuz. You sound like your father.”

  “You eff off.” Phoenix looked at her Rolex, which felt like stolen property on her knobby wrist. “It’s a quarter to five. I bet this place is about to close.”

  “Even better. We can say we tried. Sarge has major control issues, and you enable it. This is some codependent shit. It’s straight out of Psych 101, truly.” Gloria never missed an opportunity to trumpet the two and a half years she’d spent in college.

  Phoenix ended the argument by climbing out of the car. Two white men in cycling shorts emerged from the building’s bone-colored door, ambling toward the mountain bicycles chained to the wrought-iron fence beside the car.

  “Are they closed?” Phoenix asked the cyclists.

  “Don’t think so,” said one, whose face was burned red from sun. He had an English accent that reminded Phoenix of Hugh Grant. “Worth popping in. Are you a music student?”

  “No…just a fan,” Phoenix said, although the word fan felt trite.

  “Cheers,” the second man said, mounting his bicycle. He was English, too, and he was unsmiling, apparently eager to cut the conversation short. Maybe he was hungry, like Gloria.

  Don’t stir this up, Phoenix’s mind implored, but
she felt trapped. Shit, if these guys from England thought it was important enough to come—these white guys, her mind clarified—then she had no excuse. This was her heritage. Phoenix turned to the car to look at Gloria, one hand slung to her hip. “You’re really not coming in? Are you actually allergic to cultural growth?”

  Gloria waved her cigarette hand through her open window, and its ash flared bright orange before falling to the asphalt. “Black History Month was in February. Call my cell when you’re done kissing Sarge’s ass. I’ll bring you curried chicken.”

  The cyclists set out in one direction, Gloria in the other. Alone on a street that now felt truly deserted, Phoenix stared up at the building with resignation. If she walked in and someone was playing “Weeping Willow” or “Bethena,” she decided, she was gone.

  Inside, there was no music playing. A black man with a shaven head, round spectacles and a V-shaped gray goatee met her at the door. He wore a uniform like a park ranger, a tan short-sleeved shirt and blue-gray slacks. He smiled warmly. “Miss Smalls?”

  Phoenix nodded.

  “I’m Van Milton, the curator here. I was expecting you. I hear you’re a famous singer, but I’m sorry to report I don’t know any of your songs.”

  “You and the rest of the world,” Phoenix said with a smile, shaking his cool, dry hand.

  “I know one!” called a sister with bleached-blond hair at the rear of the room. She wore an identical uniform, leaning against a glass display full of books presumably about Joplin and ragtime. “I heard one on the radio today—Party something. Your name is Phoenix, right?”

  Phoenix nodded again, dumbstruck. She didn’t know “Party Patrol” had already hit the airwaves in St. Louis! None of the songs from her first two CDs had made it beyond the underground and college radio circuits, so she’d only heard her own voice on the radio cooing background vocals on G-Ronn’s “Calling Collect,” which had ruled the airwaves last fall. “Whassup, Phoenix?” he’d said on the recording, so everyone would hear her name. She had appeared for thirty full seconds in his video, in a scene it had taken her all day to shoot in a pushup bra, stilettos and a black catsuit two sizes too small. “Calling Collect” was when she’d known her ascension was officially under way, nestled beneath Ronn’s expansive wing.

  “Do you remember which station?” Phoenix said, knowing Sarge would ask.

  The woman shrugged. “All I know is, my fingers were popping. We got a celebrity here today, Van, so don’t act up.”

  “Not a chance,” the man said. “Let me give you a tour.”

  “You sure? If it’s too late…”

  “Nonsense,” he said. “Let’s go to the Rosebud first. I helped oversee its construction.”

  The Rosebud, it turned out, was an outside building attached to the house by a wooden walkway. Van Milton told her it was a replica of the Rosebud Bar that had been a center of the black social scene in turn-of-the-century St. Louis: part hotel, part bar, part cafe—and a hangout of all the top “professors,” as ragtime players called themselves. The original was blocks away, but the replica had been built beside the Joplin House, since he had been its most famous patron.

  The Rosebud replica was made up of wooden wall planks, wooden floors and wooden tables and chairs, striving for an aged appearance. An oversized antique cash register gilded with elaborate chrome flourishes sat before the large mirror that spanned the length of the bar. Behind the bar, against the far wall, sat an upright piano. A large, grainy photograph of Scott Joplin hung above it. Phoenix had seen that photograph before—it was the same one from the Gallery of Greats in the Silver Slipper. In it, Joplin looked like a college instructor, with a face slightly too broad for his tiny earlobes, full lips, close-shaved hair and dark, inscrutable eyes staring away from the photographer, as if lost in their own pursuits. His dress was formal but unremarkable: a dark suit, an old-fashioned shirt with a high collar, and a necktie. Phoenix couldn’t guess his age.

  “Joplin died young, didn’t he?” Phoenix said. She forgot where she’d heard that.

  “Maybe not by the standards of the day, but he was forty-nine when he died in 1917.”

  “How did he die?”

  “Syphilis,” Milton said grimly. “A sad waste. Let’s move to the other displays.”

  Back across the walkway, inside the Joplin House, Milton walked her past maps of old St. Louis, original Joplin sheet music, and displays of ragtime instruments like banjos and fiddles. One small, brightly lighted room was home to two upright pianos side by side beneath a large color painting of Joplin on the wall, the omnipresent noble. Phoenix admired the large foot pumps on the player piano, then the compartment for piano rolls.

  “I could put on a roll for you,” Milton said. “It’s not Joplin himself playing, but…”

  Phoenix shook her head, smiling. She sat at the cushioned bench and launched into “Maple Leaf Rag” on the slightly sticking keys, startling herself with how easily the music returned to her. Her fingers romped, playing the song as deftly as she had as a senior in high school, after untold hours of practice. Images often sprang to Phoenix’s mind as she played, and this time she saw a succession of women’s long skirts flaring and twirling in synchronization with the bold bass notes and infectious melody. Dancing. Men in derbies lifting their partners airborne. Maybe it was her presence in Scott Joplin’s house, but Phoenix had never enjoyed the sound of it so much.

  Phoenix was grinning by the time she finished, in her best mood since waking beside a stranger that morning. Screw Gloria. Sarge had been right to send her here.

  Milton’s mouth was parted slightly, exposing the bright pink soft inside his lower lip. His salt-and-pepper eyebrows were raised in surprise. “We have an aficionado,” he said.

  “I play a lil’ bit.”

  “I love to see young people play Joplin.”

  “He’s no joke.”

  “If he were here, of course, he would tell you to play it more slowly.”

  “Him and my piano teacher both.” Ms. Garcia had almost been as disappointed as her mother when Phoenix told her she wasn’t going to a conservatory after high school. Phoenix and her rival Gregory Ballsley had raced “Maple Leaf Rag” to a frenzy in Ms. Garcia’s class. That memory almost made her laugh aloud.

  “You can grace me with a concert,” Milton said.

  “You must hear Joplin all day.”

  “I hear it and play it, and for a salary. It’s the privilege of my work.”

  “No, that’s all right, I’m good,” Phoenix said. Standing, she felt weightless, buoyed by the music’s vigor. She followed Milton to the next room, humming “Maple Leaf Rag” under her breath, her fingers still exhilarated from their exercise.

  In the main display room, Phoenix noticed that the black woman who had been behind the counter was gone, and no one else was in sight. She checked her watch again: It was a quarter after five. A telephone rang in a back office, unanswered. After six rings, the phone went silent. They might be the last ones here, she realized.

  “I feel bad keeping you after hours,” Phoenix said. “You sure I’m not tying you up?”

  “Not at all. My wife tells me this is where I really live.”

  Phoenix scanned the large room, trying to imagine it as a house rather than a museum. “So…which of these rooms did he sleep in? Do you know?”

  “None of these,” he said. “The actual residence is upstairs. I’ve saved it for last.”

  With a sweep of his arm, he indicated a doorway leading to a separate section of the building, where she could see the brightly painted yellow wooden floor planks reflecting like a pool of gold against the wall from the sunlight pouring through a hidden window. Phoenix thought she felt the hair at the nape of her neck sway, and she rubbed her palm there. She’d expected this pronounced response when she first set foot inside the house, but it had been absent before. Now, it was here.

  Milton led her toward the doorway, pausing to flip the sign hanging in the window on the door Ph
oenix had used from OPEN to CLOSED. “This door is for visitors,” he said. “There’s another door alongside it, the one Joplin would have used, the entrance to 2658-A Morgan Street, the former address. We don’t have any of the original furniture up there, but…”

  The phone in back began its persistent ringing again.

  “Listen,” Milton said quickly, “we usually don’t allow visitors upstairs on their own, but be my guest. I’ll take care of this and join you shortly.”

  Before Phoenix could offer to wait, he had hurried off, weaving past the displays with agility. He silenced the phone in midring. Phoenix heard a rise of recognition in Milton’s voice, and she guessed his call would not be a quick one.

  The stairwell was narrow, with a door identical to the main entrance on one side—its window covered by a semisheer white curtain, the painted street numbers showing backward through the pane—and a long trail of steps on the other. The wooden wall supporting the banister was deeply scarred. When Phoenix held the banister to climb the steps, it was cold to her touch. The banister was just a pipe, she realized, maybe original to Joplin’s time, too.

  He touched this, she thought. That hadn’t been true about the rest of the house, since nothing here had belonged to him. But she had no doubt that Scott Joplin’s own hand had once rested on the banister. Phoenix’s disappointment about the external appearance vanished. This was where homeboy had lived. Even if this had been a raggedy shack, what did it matter?