“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.
—A cadence?
—Bet your ass, junior. An underlying rhythm, like your own personal drummer. All through The Good Soldier I kept trying to remember where I’d heard it before. Faded in, faded back out. A couple of days ago, I nailed it. Lily Cavanaugh. You can’t me blame for wanting to see if I was right, can you?
—Blame you? Jack said. I’m too stunned to blame anybody, but give me a couple of minutes.
—Your secret’s safe. When people see you, you don’t want their first thought to be, Hey, there’s Lily Cavanaugh’s son. Makes sense to me.
Henry Leyden has great ears, all right.
As the pickup rolls through French Landing the din filling the cab makes conversation impossible. Dirtysperm is burning a hole through the marzipan center of “Where Did Our Love Go” and in the process committing hideous atrocities upon those cute little Supremes. Henry, who claims to loathe this kind of thing, slouches in his seat, knees up on the dash, hands steepled below his chin, grinning with pleasure. The shops on Chase Street have opened for business, and half a dozen cars jut at an angle from parking spaces.
Four boys astride bicycles swerve off the sidewalk before Schmitt’s Allsorts and into the road twenty feet in front of the moving pickup. Jack hits his brakes; the boys come to an abrupt halt and line up side by side, waiting for him to pass. Jack trolls forward. Henry straightens up, checks his mysterious sensors, and drops back into position. All is well with Henry. The boys, however, do not know what to make of the uproar growing ever louder as the pickup approaches. They stare at Jack’s windshield in bafflement tinged with distaste, the way their great-grandfathers once stared at the Siamese twins and the Alligator Man in the freak show at the back of the fairground. Everybody knows that the drivers of pickup trucks listen to only two kinds of music, heavy metal or country, so what’s with this creep?
As Jack drives past the boys, the first, a scowling heavyweight with the inflamed face of a schoolyard bully, displays an upraised second finger. The next two continue the imitations of their great-grandfathers having a hot night out in 1921 and gape, idiotically, mouths slack and open. The fourth boy, whose dark blond hair beneath a Brewers cap, bright eyes, and general air of innocence make him the nicest-looking of the group, gazes directly into Jack’s face and gives him a sweet, tentative smile. This is Tyler Marshall, out for a spin—though he is completely unaware of it—into no-man’s-land.
The boys glide into the background, and Jack glances into the mirror to see them pedaling furiously up the street, Sluggo in front, the smallest, most appealing one in the rear, already falling behind.
“A sidewalk panel of experts has reported in on the Dirtysperm,” Jack says. “Four kids on bikes.” Since he can scarcely make out his words, he does not think Henry will be able to hear them at all.
Henry, it seems, has heard him perfectly, and he responds with a question that disappears into the uproar. Having a reasonably good idea of what it must have been, Jack answers it anyhow. “One firm negative, two undecideds tending toward negative, and one cautious positive.” Henry nods.
Violent marzipan-destruction crashes and thuds to a conclusion on Eleventh Street. As if a haze has blown from the cab, as if the windshield has been freshly washed, the air seems clearer, the colors more vibrant. “Interesting,” Henry says. He reaches unerringly for the EJECT button, extracts the disc from the holder, and slips it into its case. “That was very revealing, don’t you think? Raw, self-centered hatred should never be dismissed automatically. Morris Rosen was right. It’s perfect for the Wisconsin Rat.”