“Stephen.”
“Yes.”
“Do you want a swig of this sauce.”
“No thank you.”
“Well, Stephen, are you listening.”
“Yes.”
“You change your name by deed poll to mine. Swear fidelity to me under pain of discontinuance and renouncement. And I’ll finance your career.”
“Holy cow, ma’am.”
“Is that your answer.”
“No ma’am, just my expression of amazement.”
“Well, what’s your answer.”
“You’re buying me.”
“In so many words. Yes. In certain circles it’s called, ‘singing for your supper.’”
“Well ma’am, you may be able to buy another world out beyond the sky. But I’m not singing for my supper. And while I still have a hand on the end of my arm and I can run and grab a hot dog off a hot dog stand, you’re not going to buy me.”
Waiting for a janitor to jump on me any second as an escaping jewel thief I went out the service entrance at Sutton Place. Just like the masturbating boy who probably wanted to do what I had just done. Gonads paining more than glowing, I walked every inch of my impoverished rain-soaked way down Third Avenue under the elevated train and back to Pell Street. Having thoughts enough that made it seem to take only a moment. Be adopted. Sing for my supper. Put on a butler’s uniform. Announce, Madam, dinner is served. Then sing, “Bimba, bimba, non piangere” from Puccini’s Madama Butterfly. Wait for my own crumbs to be brushed off the table and fall into my upturned open mouth. She said as an aside one day, “We who buy people know those who can be bought.” Well ma’am, not me.
Hanging clothes to dry I lay the night through in Pell Street, staring at a ceiling. Trying to make sure to wake in time for the funeral which gets more sounding like my own. Yet many great composers had patrons. And were bought and kept. And King Ludwig of Bavaria’s largesse to Wagner never made his music any less beautiful.
In the early hours, down from the Adirondacks, a cold front descending on New York. A sprinkling of white on the street in the morning was the first sign of snow after one of the city’s coolest summers. No frying eggs on the sidewalks or crisping your bacon on the steel manhole cover in the middle of the street. But it was after a snowfall that I first really learned how to spell when a bigger boy named Newt taught me while taking a pee, how to write my name with piss in the snow. Newt also said that it was knowing how to do things like that that held the Indians back and let the white man make our country great.
From the Bowery bar where now it seemed every other drink was on the house, I telephoned Amy again at the Pennsylvania Hotel, but she was out. Left a message to invite her on a ferry ride. At a nickel a head, a dime round-trip, it was the only thing that I could afford to do in New York. Smell of garlic on the subway train and a fume that comes from wet wool. My shirt not the cleanest and covered up by a black chesterfield coat belonging to my older brother who, like Max, worked on Wall Street before he married a rich girl with money. But for it’s being too conspicuous, I thought of coming in Max’s motorcar. There were the hearses and a line of limousines parked outside St. Bartholomew’s. And more around the corner with their chauffeurs waiting across from the entrance to the busy luxury of the Waldorf Towers. As I passed Ajello’s candle makers, a perfumed smell came out the doorway.
Brace myself. Cross the street, join as anonymously as one can the elegant gathering. In the church, a flag on one coffin and a posy of flowers on the other. Church nearly full. Obsequies begun. The searing sorrow already anguishing through one’s body. My lungs heaving to pour out tears. Hold. Hold back. The despair. The hopelessness. The dreadful guilt. Head up. Straighten the back. Stand when they do. Kneel when they do. Sit when they do. Recitation of the words from the Bible. Said to these heads of the living and these coffins of the dead. “I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord; he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live …
“For a man walketh in a vain shadow and disquieteth himself in vain, he heapeth up riches and cannot tell who shall gather them.
“The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.”
Voices of a choir. Sing “Now the Day Is Over.” And here I am at the back of this church in this last pew, the object of an occasional furtive look. It being nobody’s business to care who I am. Or what I do or how I feel. But what I am is an outcast. An outsider. Who would not sing for his supper. Amid these mourners from near and far. Can nearly pick out the polo players. The society celebrities. Rustle of black silks. Yet perhaps silk doesn’t rustle. But the scent of burning candles and fragrant perfumes is certainly aromatic. Dru in a front pew with relatives, family servants and retainers. And suddenly it’s all over. The choir sings “Abide with Me.” Triumphington had a great-aunt and — uncle who went down on the Titanic, stood on its deck in their evening clothes as it sank into the frigid Arctic waters.
Snow now falling heavily. The big white flakes melting on the church steps and sidewalk. Pallbearers, coffins on their shoulders, loading them back into their hearses. Odd nods, condolences and handshakes from the few familiar faces as they pass. Very very sorry about Sylvia. In one of the limousines, Ertha, Max’s divorced wife. She nods her head about her. Sees me on the church steps just as she bends down to step into her car. She must now have Max’s shell collection, all his silk ties and shoe trees. Plus his refrigeratorful of marvelous champagnes. Dru. There she goes. All in the bleakest but most luxurious black. On those wonderful legs carrying the rest of that slender wonderful body an out-of-work composer has got to know so well. For a moment I even thought I’d have to walk to take the subway to Brooklyn where the cemetery was. But on the sidewalk I was tapped on the arm by the chauffeur who took Dru and me to Valhalla when she was alias Mrs. Wilmington. He opened up the limousine door for me to step in to the comfort of this armored vehicle.
The cortege swept around the ramps of Grand Central Station and rapidly down Park and Fourth avenues. Funerals in New York always rush the fastest way away. Leaving behind all those familiar streets that I have so many times passed in my broke circumstances. Houston, Prince, Spring, Broome and Grand. Now travel in the luxurious comfort with my guts twisted in guilt and grief. I did and do love her. Her death now swept away over the Gothic majesty of the Brooklyn Bridge and down and along these stranger streets to the sudden oasis of open sky over this vast cemetery with its large buildings flanking its entrance. Triumphington’s flag-draped coffin carried up the steps of the Triumphington family mausoleum. Sylvia’s casket covered in flowers, waiting in the hearse parked on the road. So hard to believe that that once-lithe body is in there in its coffin, its living beauty scorched, seared and stilled in death. On the mausoleum steps, sailors in leggings, rifles at present arms. A commander in attendance, gold braid on his cap. Calling “Ready, aim, fire.” The crack of shots echoes in the cold air. Bugler blowing taps. I raise my hand, stiffening my fingers to my brow in my best salute. Sailors take the flag from the casket and the Stars and Stripes is deftly and exquisitely folded and handed to Dru, and they too salute.