Tiger Rag Read online

Take Three, Bolden’s copy, with Willie Cornish, to whom Bolden entrusted it for safekeeping. He knew Cornish was going directly home to dine with his wife while he himself was not going home at all but to the Hotel Marais on Perdido Street, a hotel for gentlemen where he rented a room by the month to take his girls. That night Ella, his favorite.

  Honeymoon’s over, Bolden laughed, putting on a white derby and heading for the door with Ella on one arm and his cornet cradled in the other. An hour later, still wearing the hat and enveloped in steam, he was being sponged down in the bathtub by Ella and her cousin Florida Jameson, who wore only yellow stockings and was telling him in a husky voice that, yes, Florida was her real name, which she shared with her mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother, none of whom had ever set foot in that state, though she herself planned to live there one day. In a yellow house, King Bolden, with yellow sheets, she whispered, and before the night was out Bolden had two favorites.

  The first cylinder disappeared sometime before dawn. En route to Richelieu Street, Guideau stopped at the Calabash Tavern for a drink. He found two friends there at a table with a bottle of Liberty rye. The three of them finished the bottle and had two more rounds. The friends were heading for Mrs. Vance’s sporting house on Franklin Street, and Guideau decided to join them. Guideau was a white man who liked mulatto girls. He paid in advance for an hour with a girl named Tina. She had hazel eyes and small hands. They took a bottle of whiskey to her room. Guideau had another drink, fucked her, and fell asleep. When his hour was up and Tina couldn’t wake him, Mrs. Vance’s son Orson did. Orson, who was six feet four and formerly laid track for the Illinois Central Railroad, watched Guideau pull on his pants and button his rumpled shirt. He asked for and received a dollar for the whiskey Guideau had drunk (Tina as always had been drinking whiskey-colored tea in a short glass) and then followed him downstairs. The next morning at six, Guideau woke with a start in his one-room apartment off Cochran Park, his head splitting, and looked around the room for the cylinder. It dawned on him that at some point he had stopped carrying the cylinder around in one of Zahn’s leather bags, but he couldn’t remember where. He dressed hurriedly and retraced his steps, to Mrs. Vance’s, where Orson, drinking a warm beer, was just locking up.

  No, nothing was found in Tina’s room, Orson told him, and anyway, there was three or four johns up there after you.

  Guideau went on to the Calabash Tavern and waited for the day bartender to arrive at nine. The two of them searched without success the places where a lost item might be stored: the coat closet, the back room, behind the bar. The bartender promised to ask Ferguson, who came on at six, if he’d found anything the night before. With some difficulty that sunny morning, Guideau went on to track down Tina, fast asleep in her boardinghouse. All he got from her were the first names of the three johns that had succeeded him upstairs. She also told him that there was another john, who had been entertained by the girl that shared the room with her. The girl’s name was Philippa, and Tina didn’t know where she lived. Maybe in Algiers, she shrugged. At ten-thirty Guideau reported to work and confessed to Oscar Zahn that he had lost the cylinder. He started telling him how it had happened, but Zahn didn’t want to hear it. He gave Guideau forty-eight hours to recover the cylinder or he was out of a job. Zahn had not fully trusted Guideau ever since he learned that he had changed his name from “Guiteau”—a name still universally recognized and reviled twenty years after Guideau’s deranged uncle, Charles Guiteau, had assassinated President Garfield.

  Zahn himself had placed the second cylinder in a locked walnut cabinet his grandfather brought to America from Prussia. Painted on its door was a likeness of Kaiser Wilhelm I, on a rearing white horse, framed by thunderbolts. There were a dozen other cylinders on the top shelf of the cabinet, each marked neatly in white ink with a musician’s name—THEOGENE BAQUET, FREDDIE KEPPARD, ALPHONSE PICOU—a song title, and a date. And now CHARLES BOLDEN—“TIGER RAG”—5 JULY 04.

  Willie Cornish likewise put Bolden’s cylinder, the third cylinder, which had additionally been marked FINAL, in his wife’s linen chest, where their most precious finery was stored. Of late Bolden had not been sleeping in the same bed two nights running, and both men knew Cornish could better keep the cylinder under wraps until it could be copyrighted and reproduced by one of the two big outfits, Edison’s National Phonograph Company or the Indestructible Cylinder Company. Whoever paid more. Zahn had intended to keep the other two cylinders, the ones Bolden found unsatisfactory, as backups—one in his home and one at his studio—to be destroyed after the third cylinder was reproduced.

  Bolden trusted Willie Cornish more than anyone, including his own family. He made clear to Cornish that, unlike other bandleaders in New Orleans, he actually expected to be well paid for the rights to his recordings. He wanted a contract, put in writing by a lawyer, and nothing left to chance.

  After that, the band can make another recording, and another after that.

  Zahn had told Bolden that the National Phonograph Company would soon be able to reproduce the staggering total of one hundred fifty cylinders a day and sell them for a dollar apiece. Enormous profits were going to be made, and Bolden wanted a piece of them. If not, I don’t want no one to hear the music at all, he instructed Cornish. Not if it’s for nothing. So, if they won’t pay, I’m going to keep this thing to myself. You do the same, if anything happens to me. My father died young, like his father before him, so I don’t have a day to waste.

  The Bolden Band never made another recording.

  That same week, in a courthouse in Trenton, New Jersey, National Phonograph lost the right to mass-produce its Edison cylinders when a judge ruled in favor of Indestructible. Thomas Edison hired a team of crack patent attorneys to appeal the verdict, but until the case was settled two years later, neither company was allowed to mass-produce cylinders.

  By then, the Bolden Band had dissolved, and the three cylinders they recorded on that summer afternoon were either missing or under wraps.

  SAINT GEORGE, SOUTH CAROLINA—DECEMBER 20, 2010

  There was a time when Ruby Cardillo did not obsess twenty-four/seven about what her husband and daughter were doing (or undoing) at that moment, and how their respective actions might impact her own, and what the repercussions might be from that moment on.

  A time when melodrama repelled her, when she did not feel trapped in her own head, gasping for a pocket of air like the victim of a cave-in.

  A time when even if she was at wit’s end, running on fumes, she could maintain her composure and in a crisis appear coolly detached.

  A time when she awoke without a stab of anxiety in her Key Biscayne villa, gazing out the picture window at the Atlantic, parrots squawking in the palms and the gardener hosing the bluestone around the pool.

  A time when she was not furious that the world was slowing to a crawl while she was speeding up—with no choice but to speed up.

  A time, above all, when she was not working two full-time jobs that had dangerously overlapped: the practice of anesthesiology, her occupation for two decades, and the job of losing her mind, which was new to her.

  But that was before the following three events, which occurred in quick succession, but to Ruby had felt like a single lingering explosion:

  First, Marvin Joseph Sheresky, cardiologist and self-proclaimed “doctor to governors”—having performed quadruple bypasses on two Florida chief executives—was declared her ex-husband in the Miami–Dade County Courthouse and immediately, publicly, went to work on Ruby’s own heart, marrying his twenty-six-year-old nurse in a lavish ceremony on his refurbished yacht, the Virginia, renamed after his new bride.

  Next, Ruby’s twenty-five-year-old daughter, Devon, jazz pianist, convicted shoplifter, former bartender, and sometime journalist, had been arrested at Miami International for possession of twenty-eight peyote buttons with intent to distribute—a charge Devon tried to refute by insisting the peyote was for her personal use.

  And then Ruby had been
called on to arrange her mother’s funeral and cremation at the Baptiste Brothers Funeral Home in Fort Lauderdale.

  Though the latter had occurred just days before, Ruby was far more concerned with Devon, who had recently completed her community service, trash picking on Florida highways, and was sitting beside her at that moment on I-95 in a hailstorm that pockmarked the roof and hood of Ruby’s silver Mercedes E550 coupe.

  Ruby fretted about many things, but never, anymore, about her possessions. The objects of value in her life, both sentimental and material, that once included expressionist paintings, Mexican ceramics, Devon’s baby clothes, and her grandmother’s inexpensive jewelry now held no allure. Anything her husband had given her, except money, she had destroyed or discarded. But it wasn’t just about possessions; the physical world, and the laws of science that ruled it, felt increasingly unreal to her. And that included the science of medicine, to which she had devoted her life.

  Abandoned by both her parents, Ruby was eventually, belatedly, raised by her grandmother in a stable household. She was a loner by nature, very shy, but prodded by her grandmother, she evolved into the alert, studious girl who sought validation by acing exams, winning ribbons at science fairs, and attending medical school on a full scholarship. She married a wealthy fellow student, the son of a doctor, who seduced her on their second date. During their twenty-six years of marriage, she worked in operating rooms, cold and harshly lit, watching men like him—narcissistic, Napoleonic, oversexed—saw open chests, reroute arteries, and transplant hearts. She had been a working mother well before that was considered admirable. And now, in middle age, she had abruptly been thrust back into the treacherous world of her early youth, where deception and denial were the rule and people’s worst qualities outpaced their best. She saw that what she had thought were the best years of her life were in fact the labyrinth of a sleepwalker. When she finally emerged, she was unprepared for the traps and trip wires that surrounded her. In the previous year, she had taken a crash course in betrayal and learned that, many rungs up the social ladder, she was no more immune to humiliation than when she had been a dirt-poor kid.

  True to form, she had gone through her divorce alone, keeping her few friends at arm’s length. She retained a divorce attorney as famous for her high-profile clients as Marvin Sheresky was for his celebrity patients. She was a woman her own age, coolly flamboyant as her name, Fortuna LeRoy. She spoke softly in a steely voice, never harsh or hurried, unruffled by the aggressive antics of Marvin’s lawyer. The latter insisted that the recorded grounds for divorce be incompatibility, not adultery.

  “Our clients are physicians,” he said gravely, “and it would not be good for their reputations.”

  “Only your client is an adulterer, however,” Ms. LeRoy replied. “Dr. Cardillo has an impeccable reputation. We’re not here to whitewash Dr. Sheresky’s marital transgressions. The grounds are adultery. The terms are nonnegotiable: fifty percent of their joint assets and she keeps the house in Key Biscayne and the deed to the adjacent lot.”

  LeRoy had urged Ruby to go after a portion of Marvin’s trust fund as well, and to subpoena other financial documents. “He’s concealing assets—I’m sure of it.” But Ruby declined. She was getting enough. That adjacent lot, purchased two years earlier to extend their property, would be worth plenty if she sold it. She also had had enough of Marvin and his prick of a lawyer. Being around them made her feel sick. Not once during the hearing, the conferences in the judge’s chambers, the chance encounter in an elevator, and the infuriating twenty minutes the state of Florida required them to spend alone in a room at the courthouse—to test the possibility of an eleventh-hour reconciliation—did Ruby speak to her husband. Ten days later, he remarried.

  Now, having left Miami, what preoccupied Ruby above all else was the moment at hand, and the fact she could no longer fill it or be contained by it: this had become her definition of madness—superior, she thought, to those found in her old medical textbooks.

  A moment, after all, is inhabited by billions of people whose actions ramify into trillions of situations, themselves ramifying by the trillions. And so on.

  With that sort of explosive potential, with numbers appropriate to the realm of atomic fission, a moment is not a safe place.

  But it is the only place.

  They were driving through the worst hailstorm to hit South Carolina in fifty years. Hailstones the size of golf balls grew to be like tennis balls. “And what next,” she said to Devon after one of their long silences, “basketballs, maybe?”

  “What?”

  “Are you hungry, dear? I’m hungry. Let’s pull off, find a place, have lunch.”

  “We just ate breakfast.”

  “I know, but I’m hungry.”

  Devon didn’t argue. Her mother’s idea of breakfast had become half a tangerine and a Ry-Krisp. For dinner the previous night Ruby had eaten two scallops and a cup of rice sprinkled with rice vinegar. She was down to one hundred twelve pounds.

  “I’m doing it for my heart” had become Ruby’s standard line on the subject. “I’ve been overweight for fifteen years. In the OR I’ve seen blocked arteries. Ventricle valves gone floppy. Hearts encased in fatty tissue. Not pretty.”

  “Mom, you were not fat.”

  “Easy for you to say, you’re like a rail. You have maybe ten percent body fat. Other issues, sure, but there’s no fat around your heart.”

  “What issues?”

  “Scarred lung tissue from cigarettes. Ditto your throat and mouth. Liver and spleen overtaxed by drugs. Irregular menstrual periods—am I right?—from going on and off the pill.”

  “Okay, okay.”

  Ruby cut across two lanes and braked smoothly onto a narrow exit ramp. “But I wasn’t thinking physiologically,” she said softly. “I was thinking emotionally.”

  “Spare me, Mom.”

  Ruby shrugged, then turned up the stereo. “I love the refrain.” For the last forty miles she had been playing a CD she burned: Joan Jett and the Blackhearts singing “I Hate Myself for Loving You” over and over again.

  “I can’t bear to hear this song again,” Devon cried, covering her ears.

  “There are two songs,” Ruby corrected her.

  “Right. The other song.” Ruby had looped Joan Jett ten times in a row, then there was one track of the Stones singing “It’s All Over Now,” then back to Joan Jett.

  “I find it therapeutic.”

  “But it’s driving me crazy. Can we just listen to the radio for a while?”

  “Sure. Let’s hear the weather. This hail is amazing.” After searching the radio frequencies for a few moments, Ruby pointed out the window. “Here we go,” she said, turning sharply into a strip mall parking lot. “A steakhouse. How many do you think there are between here and New York?”

  “I’m a vegetarian and you don’t eat steak.”

  “No? Watch me.”

  Ruby ordered the largest steak on the menu, a two-pound porterhouse, with a baked potato and buttered peas. Then she demanded the wine list.

  “We don’t have one,” the waiter said.

  “All right, then, I’d like a 1988 Chateau Latour.”

  The waiter was Devon’s age, wearing a white jacket a little short in the wrists. His haircut was choppy, his hands chafed. He shook his head in bewilderment. “We only have merlot and chardonnay,” he said.

  “Then bring me a shot of Jack and a glass of ice water.”

  “Mom.”

  “And an iced tea for the young lady. Because you’re going to drive, Devon.”

  “Coffee, black, please,” Devon said.

  Devon hadn’t told Ruby that it was seventy-one days since she had picked up a drink or drug. Ruby knew that at Devon’s sentencing, in addition to community service and a year’s probation, she had been ordered by the judge to undergo spot drug tests and attend six AA meetings a week. Reluctantly, gratingly, Devon had gone to all twenty-four required meetings—open and beginners’ meetings, ste
p meetings, NA meetings. What Ruby didn’t know was that Devon had surprised herself by going to a twenty-fifth meeting of her own volition. And another, and another.

  Devon could have used a meeting right then, but the last person she wanted to discuss that with was her mother. When it came to her family, she was grateful for her anonymity. She only wished she could have come by it sooner.

  As a teenager she had told her parents she wanted to be a musician, and it didn’t sit well with Marvin. He saw it as a hobby, not a profession. He tried to discourage her, and when that didn’t work, he turned to his typical means of persuasion, sly ridicule and innuendo. He gave her a new nickname, “Piccolo.” As in, your talent is small and your interest ought to be commensurate. When Devon confronted him about it, he told her she was oversensitive. “Maybe because you have your own doubts …”

  When Devon went to her mother, Ruby assured her that her father was only concerned about her future and intended no unkindness. As for nicknames, Ruby told Devon that her father only assigned them to people he cared about. “Out of affection.” That’s not how Devon figured it. She knew his penchant for them had more to do with his competitiveness and his need to control. She had heard him pin nicknames on friends and colleagues that were anything but affectionate. An overweight nurse was “Mama Cass,” a poor golfing partner “Sandpit,” a neighbor who had lost a fortune to junk bonds “Fast Buck.” Ruby had always explained away his attitudes, attributing his arrogance to the fierce stresses of his profession. This was Ruby’s blind spot. It had been confusing to Devon as a child, for in all other respects, her mother was steady and strong. Devon had to conclude that her mother’s passivity toward her father was simply reflexive, a product of his overbearing character, her own zigzag history, or maybe just a part of her DNA. No matter the source, it had lasting repercussions for Devon. If she couldn’t trust her mother on the subject of her father, the whole of her small familial map became enemy territory. Ruby tried to compensate for Devon’s unhappiness by showering extra attention on her—music lessons, concerts, CDs—a strategy that boomeranged because Devon read it as a joyless program of self-improvement. Something her father might have instigated. The harder Ruby tried, the greater Devon’s resentment, until finally, as a teenager, she pushed her mother away altogether. This was painful for Devon, but not as bad as the knowledge that it was unnecessary for her to push her father away since he had already beaten her to the punch.