The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty - Eudora Welty [77]
Late at night they play the one waltz they will ever consent to play—by request, "Pagan Love Song." Powerhouse's head rolls and sinks like a weight between his waving shoulders. He groans, and his fingers drag into the keys heavily, holding on to the notes, retrieving. It is a sad song.
"You know what happened to me?" says Powerhouse.
Valentine hums a response, dreaming at the bass.
"I got a telegram my wife is dead," says Powerhouse, with wandering fingers.
"Uh-huh?"
His mouth gathers and forms a barbarous O while his fingers walk up straight, unwillingly, three octaves.
"Gypsy? Why how come her to die, didn't you just phone her up in the night last night long distance?"
"Telegram say—here the words: Your wife is dead." He puts 4/4 over the 3/4.
"Not but four words?" This is the drummer, an unpopalar boy named Scoot, a disbelieving maniac.
Powerhouse is shaking his vast cheeks. "What the hell was she trying to do? What was she up to?"
"What name has it got signed, if you got a telegram?" Scoot is spitting away with those wire brushes.
Little Brother, the clarinet player, who cannot now speak, glares and tilts back.
"Uranus Knockwood is the name signed." Powerhouse lifts his eyes open. "Ever heard of him?" A bubble shoots out on his lip like a plate on a counter.
Valentine is beating slowly on with his palm and scratching the strings with his long blue nails. He is fond of a waltz. Powerhouse interrupts him.
"I don't know him. Don't know who he is." Valentine shakes his head with the closed eyes.
"Say it agin."
"Uranus Knockwood."
"That ain't Lenox Avenue."
"It ain't Broadway."
"Ain't ever seen it wrote out in any print, even for horse racing."
"Hell, that's on a star, boy, ain't it?" Crash of the cymbals.
"What the hell was she up to?" Powerhouse shudders. "Tell me, tell me, tell me." He makes triplets, and begins a new chorus. He holds three lingers up.
"You say you got a telegram." This is Valentine, patient and sleepy, beginning again.
Powerhouse is elaborate. "Yas, the time I go out, go way downstairs along a long cor-ri-dor to where they puts us: coming back along the cor-ri-dor: steps out and hands me a telegram: Your wife is dead."
"Gypsy?" The drummer like a spider over his drums.
"Aaaaaaaaa!" shouts Powerhouse, flinging out both powerful arms for three whole beats to flex his muscles, then kneading a dough of bass notes. His eyes glitter. He plays the piano like a drum sometimes—why not?
"Gypsy? Such a dancer?"
"Why you don't hear it straight from your agent? Why it ain't come from headquarters? What you been doing, getting telegrams in the corridor, signed nobody?"
They all laugh. End of that chorus.
"What time is it?" Powerhouse calls. "What the hell place is this? Where is my watch and chain?"
"I hang it on you," whimpers Valentine. "It still there."
There it rides on Powerhouse's great stomach, down where he can never see it.
"Sure did hear some clock striking twelve while ago. Must be midnight."
"It going to be intermission," Powerhouse declares, lifting up his finger with the signet ring.
He draws the chorus to an end. He pulls a big Northern hotel towel out of the deep pocket in his vast, special-cut tux pants and pushes his forehead into it.
"If she went and killed herself!" he says with a hidden face. "If she up and jumped out that window!" He gets to his feet, turning vaguely, wearing the towel on his head.
"Ha, ha!"
"Sheik, sheik!"
"She wouldn't do that." Little Brother sets down his clarinet like a precious vase, and speaks. He still looks like an East Indian queen, implacable, divine, and full of snakes. "You ain't going