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COLD
It’s fastest, someone once warned you, when you let go. Here, in the sweltering dining room, you recognize no one, not a soul. Your mother took her supper at the usual hour and has already returned to her room. When you’ve come with her before or alone you’ve usually spotted at least one familiar face, from the City, or Philly, or Baltimore, since from June through the first turning of the leaves people arrive every weekend from all over. Like several other hotels in Catskill, Miss English’s has welcomed you, your mother, almost all who’ll pay, permitting stays without incident. There have, however, been a few: whenever one of them who has no clue about how the subtler rules this side of the Mason-Dixon line function, how the law sometimes falls on the other side. There was that time in the hotel on Kauterskill when you were asked to vacate your room and move to the other wing because the Carolinian took grave offense that you shared the same linens and dishes, that you might brush against his wife in the hallway or stairwell, as if you could not walk a straight or even angled line away from her, as if you had no will, as if you ever cast a second glance at her or any white woman, and that hotel’s owner, a round, pasty little man with a voice like a duck call had said that he wanted to avoid any trouble, please just move, he’d throw in a free whiskey as consolation. That afternoon in what felt like a stupor you had packed up and settled into your new chamber over here, from which you could see the creek and the mountains instead of your previous ampler river view, the one you’d reserved half a year in advance, and you fumed for a while until a bar, oh yes Lord, then the full song belled in your head and you spent the entire afternoon in bed scoring it. Even here you know better than to linger when the dancing begins or challenge one of them on the tennis court. The New Yorkers, city dwellers or upstaters, native or immigrant, do not so much as blink when they see you, staring mainly at the cut of your full dress suits and shoes, your mother’s elegant’s day ensembles and summer gowns, as if viewing an exhibit. Only one or two of them has ever known who they were looking at, or, for that matter, uttered more than a simple slur.
The surface appears tranquil, beware the undertow. The tanned hand slides the bowl of soup beneath your chin. You return what feels like a smile but almost isn’t. Vichysoisse. For the last month or two, or five, has it been year — why can you not remember? — these newest melodies you cannot flush from your head, like a player piano with an endless roll scrolling till infinity. Songs have always come, one by one or in pairs, dozens, you set them down, to paper, to poetry, like when you took the solemn melody of the spiritual Rosamond was whistling as you walked up Broadway and in your head and later on musical paper clothed it in brand new robes. Then somewhere along the way after the first terrible blues struck you tried to hum a new tune, conjure one, you thought it was just exhaustion, your mind too tired to refresh itself as it always had, that’s why the old ones wouldn’t go away. A few memory games, like rambling inside the rooms of your vast mental castle on the Nile, as you called it and the one song that resulted from it, filling each one with various quilts of harmonies from throughout your life, the sound of an engine starting, horses galloping up the road, boat horns from the direction of the Hudson: keys to release you from the musical bondage, from any of a thousand things you spot and listen to as you stroll up 136th Street, all the conversations, personal or overheard, hymns, ditties, stomps, work songs, quadrilles, cakewalks, rags. None of those could dispel these new ones until they did, then more appear, stuck as if a band has struck up the opening notes to the Black Four Hundred in your skull and decided to keep playing it forever… we have your trials here below, what’s a poor brother to do? You fear you can sometimes hear the upper octaves combining toward a crescendo that, soon as you open your mouth, might explode.
Close your eyes and lay your head back. For a few seconds you recline in your seat, suppressing a cry, rise, eyes shut, after only a few spoonfuls. Your fingers trace canons around your temples. You should head up to your mother’s room and tell her that it’s getting worse, again, let her minister to you, she used to know how to calm you down with words, a touch, Mrs. Isabella, he’s rattling on about something can’t no one understand, settle what between your ears only once in a while back in the day became a racket. You should hurry to the phone in the alcove and have the operator connect you to Rosamond or his brother Jimmy, your big sister down in Atlanta, call Aida Walker or Bert Williams, whose traveling schedule you can’t remember though you wrote down the dates in your notebook, even Erlanger or Klaw, at least leave word for them all, it wouldn’t take that long for someone to drive up or hire a car or take the elevated to Grand Central and be here before the night is out. Fact is you should not have told the attendants at the Manhattan State Hospital for the Insane you were free of the interminable internal bellowing, you should not have assured them you’d be fully in Mrs. Isabella’s care, that the tempest of those songs had died down, these ones like January storms that grind on all through the morning and evening, so persistent and fortissimo at times you can feel them chattering like piano hammers along your crown. As you stand at the table you recall that moment when you couldn’t stop caterwauling them, sometimes you’re on the floorboards, how the neighbors banged on the walls, the front door, gathered on the stoop as they came and carried you downstairs, saying, “Mr. Cole, you alright?”—“poor thing, you know he wrote the ‘The Girl With Dreamy Eyes’”—“I’ma pray for the man, er’rybody can see how bad off he is”—“my sis saw his Sambo Girls Company in Hartford and just keeping them in line’s what broke him in two”—“Inky Dink sold his soul to you know who to line them damn pockets”… all those comments tipped with interest, yes, and cheek, contempt twinned with compassion, to the accompaniment of that sonorous, infernal drone. Devil’s arias, you penned them. Showfulls. In your twenties it had all flowed so easily, you’d sealed the deal, the singing, the wisecracks, the dancing, all those godforsaken songs, that cooning and crooning minstrelsy copping a mountain of green in return, concreting a vision of you, of all of you in their heads, your own, the nigger who could do no wrong with the Creole Show, the All Star Show and later Black Patti’s Troubadours, before you turned it inside out again, alone and with Rosamond, his brother Jimmy, these songs unlike the previous ones, these were yours, nothing to feel the slightest pang of shame about, any colored person could whistle them without a pause, did whistle them as you heard yourself on the IRT. So easily, until these newest ones, undreamt, unsummoned, sonic suns blasting behind your eyes, these terrible samplings of the old and the unfamiliar. You should have told the attendants how your agent and the publishing firm’s representative had said in almost the exact same words about your newest pieces, “Bob, what has gotten into you, these notes together don’t make any melodic or harmonic sense,” how the arranger had cackled with reproach, “Cole, you have four or five different polyrhythms running concurrently, no man can play this,” how Rosamund himself whispered, this side of sorrow, as he clasped your hand, “Bob, this mess on the other side of sound.” Everyone began to train the same look on you, the bank cashier, the postman, the barber, the Bajan shoeshine, the tiny boy black as a crow with the crowbar who cranks cars for a cent on Lenox, the humpbacked begger guarding the curb hollering, “Mister, you need my help?” as you sat there on the front steps trying to massage the rondos out of your brow, your sinuses, your freshly trimmed and pomaded locks, trying to express them out—“Mister, you need me to call somebody? Excuse me, officer, but I think that gentleman sitting over there humming and crying to himself need….”