Beneath the surface

Bonds

       Davis High school has been quite a burden to me. I was a good student, but I wasn't one of the popular sets . When classes were over, the piano in Miss Rita's music room was mine.                   I played better than most kids of my age, I guess so. That was partly because I loved music better than anyone on earth. I played very well, improvising  upon the snatches of melody that ran through my mind, fumbling sometimes, faking at others, but finally finding something that sounded beautiful and right to me . When that happened, I rearranged and polished and worked at it until the notes went slipping under my fingers like water.
             Harry shared my love of music, and he was one of those rare musicians . He seemed to have been born with an instinct for understanding music, for hearing it precisely and then reproducing it with a little something extra, all his own. Without being able to read a note, he could coax music out of a piano, a guitar, a mouth organ, a pocket  comb. His favourite instrument, though was a banjo. He had an old one which he once told me he had stolen, and that  was very likely true. However he came by it, that that banjo meant more to Harry than anything on earth. He knew how to make those strings sing, and we hadn't practiced together very long until we were making music that sent splinters of delight all through me . With music like that I could forget the anxieties at home; I could forget Dad's moods and and cheerless faces everywhere on Chicago's grim west side . Day after day Harry and I closed the door of the music room and shut out the troubled times.
            Harry was a boy of many sorrows, but he was one that sorrow couldn't quite pin down. He was only a few months older than I was, but not much taller than Joey. He was a thin- faced, sallow boy with great dark eyes that could look mournful one minute and full of laughter the next  as if they mocked mournfulness and refused to accept it. I guess he had never know his father; he'd had a line of stepfathers, none of whom cared much about him. His mother was drunk when she could find money to buy whiskey; when she wasn't drunk she was mean . Harry didn't talk much about her. He liked to talk of things that made for laughter, and the most striking feature about him was his mouth, a mouth that seemed always eager to laugh. Maybe I noticed that especially because my own mouth was characteristically unsmiling, even a little sullen. He was a wonderful guy, that Harry, the only real friend I had in high school.
           That afternoon, I was practicing something I had composed. It was a fluid, changing true- story, a theme that I improvised upon according to my mood, an outpouring of feelings that were inside me changed with the quality of sunlight  or the lack of it, with the dreams that sometimes seemed to be possible, with the despair that was a part of the times. It was something  Harry and I worked on for months, and lately when we'd played it, Miss Rita face glowed. We didn't have to ask her if we were good. We knew we were when she asked us to play for the school assembly.
            The October afternoon outside the windows was as gentle and drowsy as if there weren't a trouble in the world. For all old Nature knew or cared, every able- bodied man the length and width of the country had  good- playing jab; every supper table in the country had enough on it to satisfy the hunger of the children gathered around it. Nature might even have carelessly supposed that the hunger of the children was an indifferent kind of hunger, sharp enough from work or play, but nothing to be scared about. The jab of hunger pangs was nothing to panic over when the smell of a good supper at twilight was as much expected and as little considered as twilight itself, or the light of morning. That is the way it has been with me once wonderful, ravenous, indifferent hunger. It was no longer like that for a great many of us.
           I was suddenly angered that Nature could be so carefree, so oblivious to the dreariness that my music only brightened  for minutes. I was stuck a few chord's on yellow keys, full of a helpless kind of resentment, but Harry brought me out of my mood in seconds.
      .  " What's itching" at you, Kevin? " he asked laughing at me. " Come on, let's get goin". This banjo's got a deep, low yearnin' for something with a Dixieland beat." His fingers skittered over the strings as he spoke.
            I grinned at him and brought my hands down on the keyboard, ready for the opening bars of our number. All the months of playing together had made Harry and me like one boy when we swung into our music. He could sense the moment when I'd go into a change  of tempo; he knew when my mood called for laughter and clowning, or when it began to sink low, low down into the blues of men who covered around the wire trash baskets on street corners and warned themselves with burning newspapers. Harry and I vibrated with music neither of us have talked about in  musical terms .
            Miss Rita must have been bone- tired that afternoon. Her face looked faintly gray and drawn, but she came into the room and stood there watching us, swaying a little with our rhythm, smiling and brushing tears out of her eyes at the same time. When we were through, she walked over and stood beside  the piano.
           Harry  was a ham. There was no doubt about that. He laid his head against the back of his chair and closed his eyes. " Lord, wasn't that sweet! Kevin, you're terrific, and I'm mighty near as good as you."
           Miss Rita  laughed then; she often laughed at Harry. " You two all  but make make me forget the bread lines for a minute." She nodded at me," it's good, Kevin, real good. You're making it come alive, and Harry is giving it a beat that's going to make the assembly sit up and listen next week."
            When Miss Rita praised us, we felt clouds under our feet. Although she made a gesture of brushing us outside the door when we lingered over our thanks for the use of her room, we were confident that she liked us, that  she was proud of what we were doing.
             " Get  on home now, you two," she told us. " You have homework, and I have an hour's ride on the street car. Get going gentlemen.
            We had to go, although we hated leaving her. We wanted to stay and hear again how much she liked our music. Mostly, I guess we wanted to put off the hour when we had to go back to our families.
             Outside I said goodbye to Harry and told him that maybe I could get out that evening in which case I'd meet him at the usual place by the corner drugstore. I didn't say that I'd have to explain; Harry knew how things were.
           He said, " Bring  Joey  along. I snitched a jigsaw puzzle the other day from someone who'll never miss it.  I want to give it to Joey.
              I shrugged. " He has to go to bed early, " I said I didn't care to have a younger brother tagging after me. Harry didn't mind. He had no brother s of his own, and he had a special kind   of   affection for Joey.
            Joey was ,of course, the  protected and best loved  one of us at home. He had grown stronger with the years, but he was still fragile,a little too slender and delicate for the lean times. He was also beautiful,  a golden child born with a mouth that looked  as if it had been sculptured, and great  gray eyes under his shock of bright hair. I loved Joey's beauty, but I wasn't cured of the old  resentment toward Joey himself. His birth had meant the end of happiness between Dad and me. I suppose I should have been a little wiser, but as the years  went by, it didn't occur to me to bring  reason to my feelings. I just went on thoughtlessly, not exactly disliking my brother, but not liking him much either.
            I took. Joey's hero- worship for me with indifference just as for years I had taken such things as food and shelter and security for granted. It was obvious that Joey thought of me as a great guy. I was strong and husky. I knew things that made him feel I was pretty brilliant. I could do things he thought it would be great to do, and he didn't seem to mind that I was often brusque with him, that I lorded it over him with an authority I had no right to claim. Maybe Joey accepted these things as the way of all big brothers. I don't know . But I do know that a thrust of guilt sometimes hit me where I lived when I looked at  his face and saw the eager friendliness there which I knew I didn't always deserve.