“Jesus, is he! Turn him over. What’s that in his pocket?”
“A letter. Here, you take it.”
“ ‘Philip James!’ Philip James! Jesus, this ain’t Murillo!”
“It’s got to be Murillo. I shot him. It’s got to be. Shoot to kill, they said. Sure, it’s Murillo. It’s got to be! It’s got to be! He was carrying a gun. He had his hands in his pockets ready to shoot first.”
“No gun.”
“Must be a gun!”
“No gun.”
“Oh, Jesus, Jesus Christ!”
Chapter 18
“I’m sorry,” Sands said. “I’m sorry.”
“Sorry,” Alice said dully. “A stupid word to say.”
“Yes.”
They sat in the twilight and the room was hushed like a museum and except for their moving mouths they were wax figures in a timeless world. At any moment a group of school children might come in with their teacher. “That was how they dressed in nineteen hundred and forty-two,” and some of the children would giggle and others would make notes.
“That first night,” Alice said, pausing to give herself time to go into the closet and take out the yellow dress and slip it over her head again, feel it, smell it.
“That first night when he came with Johnny — I remember his eyes. They were unhappy, seeking eyes and they never changed. I never knew what he was seeking, what he was trying to find in this world!”
“Security,” Sands said, but her head moved a little. She didn’t want Philip to have been seeking security. Too easy and simple, Sands thought. She would like to think he was chasing a rainbow, something unattainable and worth dying for, not security which she had and which meant nothing to her.
“Restless,” she said. “You could tell it when he played, brilliant, savage, like a lion in a cage.”
This was the cage, Sands thought, but she won’t want to know that. Let her walk around in a fog for a while until she bumps into something.
“I think he was proud. That was why he didn’t stay from the beginning when mother asked him to. He had to go away twice before he came to stay. And even then he’d be away a lot, he’d stay in the room he rented to practice in.”
“He didn’t rent the room...”
“Stop it,” she said, without anger. “Let me dream a little. He went to concerts, even to New York. Mother gave him an allowance, and when she died Kelsey kept it up.”
“He had to go to her for the money?” Sands said.
“Yes. We all did. He didn’t mind. He was always very pleasant. He never went out with Johnny, to parties or nightclubs or anything, he didn’t like that kind of good time, he didn’t require it. When he wasn’t practicing he stayed at home and we talked.”
They talked, Sands repeated silently, with bitterness. They talked a hundred billion words, they taught him how to talk and what to think without giving him any foundations. They taught him a whole foreign language without telling him what the words meant or giving him a dictionary or a grammar book.
“I thought he was happy here,” Alice said. “I didn’t think he needed to blow off steam, or if he did need it I thought he could do it by playing, you see.” She half-closed her eyes as if the lids were mirrors to reflect herself and her family. “We are cramped people here in this house, cramped and cramping. If we had been different he would never have become...”
“No,” Sands said quietly. “No, don’t fool yourself. He didn’t become anything, he stayed as he was. He was never Philip James, not for an instant. He began to look a little like a man called Philip James might look. He got fatter and began losing his hair. He lost that cocky defiant look you can see on his pictures, his police pictures, and he didn’t get anything to replace that look so his face was formless, soft. I didn’t recognize him from the pictures. You don’t recognize a man by his skin color or his eyes but by his expression and his bones. And the expression had changed and the bones were padded with fat living.”
“No,” Alice said. “I don’t want to hear...”
“He was never Philip James,” Sands said again. “Maybe he got the name from a movie while he watched and played the piano. The name must have meant something to him. It’s a book name not a real one, it sounds like upper-class English or Scotch, and he was an Italian.”
“No. No, he wasn’t...”
“A wop,” Sands said. “A wop with some talent and no money. Twenty years of that, you see, twenty years of being a poor wop and then Johnny Heath brought him home. He had the name ready, probably. Perhaps it was the name he intended to use when he got rich peddling marihuana or picking pockets. Even the petty criminals have dreams and Murillo’s dream must have crystallized when he came into this room and saw you and Kelsey and the piano. His feet must have felt funny on this soft rug, that was why he went away and came back again. Here was the dream but he must have been smart enough to see that it had cracks in it. But he came back anyway and tried to live it out and be Philip James. He couldn’t do it. When he came back the second time he had it figured out. He could live in the dream but he could still be Murillo some of the time until he got used to being James. Then he could make the break completely. He didn’t intend to go on being Murillo all of his life. But he met this girl.”
“Don’t tell me about the girl,” Alice said.
“She had been around a lot with other men before she knew Murillo,” Sands said. “That’s probably how he met her. And they must have come together the way two people like that would, right away without any thinking or shunting back and forth or planning. I don’t suppose they even talked about love, they just started to live together and she was his woman. He’d come down to Charles Street to her room every time your mother packed him off to a concert out of town. Every chance he got he went back to his other life, his woman, his doped cigarettes, his clothes that he kept there in her room, the black fedora and the bright silk shirts and pointed yellow shoes. I think the clothes were important to him, not because they were different and emphasized his other life, but because they were the kind of clothes he liked to wear. He was still a wop. He never felt at ease in those baggy tweeds and English brogues that he wore here.
“As soon as he left this house he must have started to change, gradually, block by block, crossing from one world into another, like a man flying from here to the moon, knowing there was a point where the earth’s gravity stopped and the moon’s hadn’t begun, a vast sinking and falling into nowhere. Perhaps he had a special street which was this point and after he’d passed it he could have something under his feet again. Once he was there he was all right, he was Murillo, there was no need for pretense. Every humiliation he had suffered in this house he could take out on Mamie.”
“Mamie,” Alice said. “Mamie.”
“And everything he learned in this house he could teach to Mamie. He must have taught her some things because when Joey’s opened she got a job in the chorus and later on she became the singer. He didn’t go to Joey’s much except to call for Mamie a few times. He was scared he might meet Johnny there or one of Johnny’s friends, so he stayed in the background. Only one or two of the people at Joey’s knew him by sight: Stevie Jordan, Joey himself, and a girl called Geraldine Smith who was Mamie’s friend.
“He didn’t let his two lives merge. The only way they touched each other was that as Murillo he worked off the repressions he suffered as James. It was as if he set up a rigid set of rules for himself so that the two men he was were as different as possible. Mr. James was pleasant, earnest, did not drink, and paid no great attention to women.”