Black House (Page 36)

Henry sighs. "The handle tells me where it is. Obviously. All I have to do is listen to it."

"The door handle makes a sound?"

"Not like your high-tech radio and The Goldberg Variations, no. More like a vibration. The sound of a sound. The sound inside a sound. Isn’t Daniel Barenboim a great piano player? Man, listen to that — every note, a different coloration. Makes you want to kiss the lid of his Steinway, baby. Imagine the muscles in his hands."

"That’s Barenboim?"

"Well, who else could it be?" Slowly, Henry turns his head to Jack. An irritating smile raises the corners of his mouth. "Ah. I see, yes. Knowing you as I do, you poor schmuck, I see you imagined you were listening to Glenn Gould."

"I did not," Jack says.

"Please."

"Maybe for a minute I wondered if it was Gould, but — "

"Don’t, don’t, don’t. Don’t even try. Your voice gives you away. There’s a little, whiny topspin on every word; it’s so pathetic. Are we going to drive back to Norway Valley, or would you like to sit here and keep lying to me? I want to tell you something on the way home."

He holds up the CD. "Let’s put you out of your misery. The pothead gave this to me — Dirtysperm doing an old Supremes ditty. Me, I loathe that sort of thing, but it might be perfect for the Wisconsin Rat. Cue up track seven."

The pianist no longer sounds anything like Glenn Gould, and the music seems to have slowed to half its former velocity. Jack puts himself out of his misery and inserts the CD into the opening beneath the radio. He pushes a button, then another. At an insanely fast tempo, the screeches of madmen subjected to unspeakable tortures come blasting out of the speakers. Jack rocks backward into the seat, jolted. "My God, Henry," he says, and reaches for the volume control.

"Don’t dare touch that dial," Henry says. "If this crap doesn’t make your ears bleed, it isn’t doing its job."

"Ears," Jack knows, is jazz-speak for the capacity to hear what is going on in music as it unfurls across the air. A musician with good ears soon memorizes the songs and arrangements he is asked to play, picks up or already knows the harmonic movement underlying the theme, and follows the transformations and substitutions to that pattern introduced by his fellow musicians. Whether or not he can accurately read notes written on a staff, a musician with great ears learns melodies and arrangements the first time he hears them, grasps harmonic intricacies through flawless intuition, and immediately identifies the notes and key signatures registered by taxi horns, elevator bells, and mewing cats. Such people inhabit a world defined by the particularities of individual sounds, and Henry Leyden is one of them. As far as Jack is concerned, Henry’s ears are Olympian, in a class by themselves.

It was Henry’s ears that gave him access to Jack’s great secret, the role his mother, Lily Cavanaugh Sawyer, "Lily Cavanaugh," had occupied in life, and he is the only person ever to discover it. Shortly after Dale introduced them, Jack and Henry Leyden entered into an easy, companionable friendship surprising to both. Each the answer to the other’s loneliness, they spent two or three nights of every week having dinner together, listening to music, and talking about whatever came into their well-stocked minds. Either Jack drove down the road to Henry’s eccentric house, or he picked Henry up and drove him back to his place. After something like six or seven months, Jack wondered if his friend might enjoy spending an hour or so listening to him read aloud from books agreed upon by both parties. Henry replied, Ivey-divey, my man, what a beautiful idea. How about starting with some whacked-out crime novels? They began with Chester Himes and Charles Willeford, changed gear with a batch of contemporary novels, floated through S. J. Perelman and James Thurber, and ventured emboldened into fictional mansions erected by Ford Madox Ford and Vladimir Nabokov. (Marcel Proust lies somewhere ahead, they understand, but Proust can wait; at present they are to embark upon Bleak House.)

One night after Jack had finished the evening’s installment of Ford’s The Good Soldier, Henry cleared his throat and said, Dale said you told him your parents were in the entertainment industry. In show business.

— That’s right.

— I don’t want to pry, but would you mind if I asked you some questions? If you feel like answering, just say yes or no.

Already alarmed, Jack said, What’s this about, Henry?

— I want to see if I’m right about something.

— Okay. Ask.

— Thank you. Were your parents in different aspects of the industry?

— Um.

— Was one of them in the business end of things, and the other a performer?

— Um.

— Was your mother an actress?

— Uh-huh.

— A famous actress, in a way. She never really got the respect she deserved, but she made a ton of movies all through the fifties and into the mid-sixties, and at the end of her career she won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress.

— Henry, Jack said. Where did you —

— Clam up. I intend to relish this moment. Your mother was Lily Cavanaugh. That’s wonderful. Lily Cavanaugh was always so much more talented than most people gave her credit for. Every time out, she brought those roles she played, those girls, those tough little waitresses and dames with guns in their handbags, up to a new level. Beautiful, smart, gutsy, no pretensions, just lock in and inhabit the part. She was about a hundred times better than anyone else around her.

— Henry . . .

— Some of those movies had nice sound tracks, too. Lost Summer, Johnny Mandel? Out of sight.

— Henry, how did —

— You told me; how else could I know? These little things your voice does, that’s how. You slide over the tops of your r’s, and you hit the rest of your consonants in a kind of cadence, and that cadence runs through your sentences.