American Music - Jane Mendelsohn [64]
Joe
Joe walked by the river. He never stopped walking by the river. He didn’t think that he was looking for anyone, just thinking, and the river helped him think. All the men he knew had to get out of the house sometimes, away from the bills, the lonesome cupboards, the silent cleaning, the baby’s cries. He was a father now. He’d take the car and drive downtown even if he didn’t have much to do in the office and he’d park and he’d walk past the places he used to go when he was in law school or haunts he’d played in when he was still playing music and he’d always end up heading west toward the river. The river was green today and it reminded him of his daughter’s eyes: green and deep and sometimes severe. She was ten now but she could flash her eyes at him like she was a woman, glancing sideways at him flirtatiously one moment, slanted and accusing the next. What was she accusing him of? What did she know? She seemed to know everything, but of course she wouldn’t find any of that out until some years later when she came across the original birth certificate hidden among his papers. They had had a false one too, a doctor friend had obliged, but Joe had always kept the original in a file in a drawer in his office just in case, he told himself, just in case … he didn’t really know why. No, her accusations at this age were more general and, in some ways, more understandable. He was a man filled with guilt and she could smell it and nobody wanted a father weak with guilt. She would have him strong. She would have him able to withstand those green eyes.
But what did he have to feel guilty about? He had made mistakes, everyone makes mistakes, and he did not pretend to be perfect but he had done the best he could given the circumstances. And what were the circumstances? They were the conditions of time and place, America in 1936, where and when he thought his life had ended and begun. A time when the music that he loved played behind everything he felt and did, a music that was considered quintessentially American. But what did that mean? Wasn’t it a lie? Because of course, as he had learned, the music only existed, only swung because it was being led by the cymbals and those discs of beaten metal were not American at all but came from someplace far away and long ago. And he remembered the weekend in Massachusetts and the story of Avedis and how the cymbals had come from an Armenian alchemist in seventeenth-century Turkey, about as far away from Roseland as one could imagine. So the idea that the music had nothing to do with anyplace else, that it was as separate from the world as the country it romanced, this idea was a myth, as all separateness was a fantasy, a dream.
It was the same dream he had fallen into when he met Vivian at the dock, the same fantasy that they could live apart, from the world, from consequences, from Pearl. Like two ships floating in the lenses of a woman’s sunglasses. He had been so young. He had been so stupid. He did not regret falling in love with Vivian and he did not regret what they had made of their love. It was a kind of miracle that he was now able to be a father and that their love had resulted in this tender gift for Pearl. But the gift came with so much sadness that he was not always sure that it was worth it. For him, it was worth it. For Pearl, it was worth it. But what about the girl? Joe was not an intellectual and he was not a philosopher but he had become a thinker and the love he had for his daughter led him to thoughts that he would much rather have not had. He no longer experienced the pain he felt that night at Vivian’s bedside, he would never let himself feel that again, but his punishment was to be someone who would think and think and think. His mind was a river, and its contents were as green and deep and severe as his daughter’s eyes.
He turned up his collar to the wind. He kept walking. His thoughts rushed on, taking him places that he did not want to go. He thought about the future and what his actions would bring in the world. He wanted his daughter’s happiness