A Long Time to Swing Alone

The first time Ina Rogers ever heard of Boy Baylee was in March of the year she married him. She was singing then at a bar and grill on 79th and Broadway, a pleasant and futureless engagement of three half-hour gigs with her guitar and the piano accompanist with an hour between each during which the management hoped, without pressure, that she would be pleasant to the paying customers. She liked the work. It was three years now she had been trying to live with her life: since the polio death of Tad, her son by an adolescent marriage that had gone sour. It was a wound that would never heal. But she felt that everyone must do the thing they did as best they could. She thought she could do better. She had a soft, thickdark delivery, a good scat improvisation and a nice smile.

Her recording date (in an audio at 114th and St. Nicholas Avenue) was small without being skimpy, a bass, piano and drums, all three West Indians from the island of Guadeloupe, working mostly on charity – like her, looking for a connection. They swung and they liked each other and they had a good time.

"That is very nice," the piano said when they wrapped it up. He was called Duboise Ray and he was the leader if the three men had a leader. She had taped a pleasant little version of Heart of My Heart she had worked up, with a restrained guitar break. She could tell that the West Indians had enjoyed working the vein. "Send it around," Duboise Ray said, "and someone will pick up on it surely."

"Give it factory work first," the drummer said. His name was Touhey Lamartine, and of the three men he seemed to Ina most to have kept his lovely island speech mannerisms. "Peradventure a factory can mix the loud bass man down and let some more of that nice guitar come out."

"Go along with you, man," the bass, one Parker Pen (it really was) grinned. "But Touhey's right, miss. Get you a good sound technician to scan it before you shop it around."

"I wish I could hear the playback once more," Ina said. It was late and the temptation was there, but she couldn't afford the overtime. Even so, she smiled nicely at the sound engineer.

"I wish I could, miss," he said reluctantly. He had already worked a quarter hour over without charging for it. "But you know they catch you, they've got to bill you."

"I know," Ina said. "But thank you. Thank you very much."

"That's all right, miss," the sound engineer said, handing her the can. "It was a pleasure to hear you. I hope you do well with this, miss. It's a pretty number."

They were outside, in the dusk, when Duboise said: "Why could not we all go and hear that tape at the Home Boy Baylee's?"

"Mayhap we could," Touhey Lamartine said.

"Who is that?" Ina said. She looked at her watch. She had three hours before she was due to go on at the bar and grill. It was a hard time of day for her. It was that time she had used to give Tad his dinner, one little spoonful after another, talking low to him before she had to go out and work.

"Who?" Duboise Ray said. "The Home Boy? He's the boy who stays home." Beside him, Lamartine chuckled and slapped his thigh lightly.

"He has the highest of the high fidelities, miss," the drummer explained. "He can play the tape. He can even mix it, and like that, with the set he has. It is better than some audios, the set he has."

"Could we call him or something?" Ina said gratefully. "Do you think he would mind?"

"He wouldn't mind, miss," the piano said.

"How can you be sure?" Ina said, frowning at them.

Lamartine laughed out loud. "Because he is the Home Boy, miss."

She gave it up and smiled, puzzled but not piqued, wondering if they were having fun with her in their fashion. She didn't mind. She liked them as she liked working with them. They had that thing, she thought, unfortunately too rare in the business whose business it was supposed to be: they played happy.

It was a happy time and a happy afternoon in a happy season. Spring was her favorite. She had heard, and sung, about Paris in the spring, but she did not know about that herself. She imagined it to be like New York. Even after 26 springs in New York the time always thrilled her. After the long freezing grayness of winter, her toes and ankles always numb from the subway scramble in the tight evening slippers and sheer hose she wore for her work, the icy garbage cans to wrestle and the radiators knocking, spring every year was blissful. Each year in March came the happy day when one certain bush in the tiny park near her home suddenly burst with sparrows, and the buds looked clearly formed against a sky which, after hanging just about the 10th floor for months, had suddenly taken the elevator all the way up to the roof. That day she was always conscious of a need for big space and big joy and it came out in her singing big. She had no little boy to give all that to now. But for whoever might, she began to sing like that when they got off the bus on West End Avenue.

The apartment house was one of those with a nearly forgotten name like Excalibur Towers or Gotham Plaza built to look like castles on the Rhine in the West Side style of 40 years ago. There was a vast entrance hall of jaded elegance and rows and rows of brass name plates and buttons and a commodious paneled elevator with a seat across the back in threadbare green plush.

"Lady wants to know if the Home Boy is at home, perchance," Lamartine chuckled again on their way up. "Quite likely. Quite likely."

There were only two doors in the hall in this portion of the building, so she judged the apartments were of old-fashioned size. She was not disappointed when she did get in. Doors opened into rooms in what seemed a dozen different directions, and in the rooms she could see other doors open. A very solemn-looking elderly maid opened the door for them, and asked no questions and stepped out of the way.

"The Home Boy, miss," – Lamartine touched her lightly on the shoulder – "is home."

Their host's high fidelity instrument was playing. Ina paused a minute, wrinkling one corner of her forehead, before she recognized Schumann's Number One, B-flat major. Yet it wasn't quite that only. It was more than recognizing a tune that stopped her. And then she knew what it was and she smiled. For what had made her wrinkle her nose was the aura of leftover music.

It was a very curious feeling that always before she had associated with smells. She knew well enough the grip that cabbage and Clorox and rusty drains could keep on the halls of an old apartment house. This was like that. It was a goofy feeling, but for real that she felt the corners of this apartment hid stale notes and that the thin skeins of forgotten melodic lines clung like cobwebs to the walls.

"You come along in, miss." At the exact moment when Duboise Ray stepped out of the entrance hall into the living room, his voice fell to a whisper. "We get to Home Boy in good time."

The living room itself fascinated her. It was dim, too dim she thought, to read comfortably, even next to one of the two table lamps that were all there were for the room's big, old-fashioned size. Half a dozen people were sitting around, smoking, whispering now and then, but mostly silent, listening to the music. During the time she remained, the listeners changed; four or five departed over the space of half an hour, and half a dozen new people came. All the ones who went away did so quietly. And the newcomers took their places quietly, like old familiars, nodding now and again to others present whom they knew.

And the living room was furnished in tassels and furbelows, ferns and knick-knacks of ivory and onyx. There were old-time photographs about, and she could dimly make out a couple of early jazz bands, stiff, uncomfortable-looking musicians in the straw boaters and sleeve garters of another day.

"His daddy wrote the Jezebel," Duboise Ray whispered close to her ear in answer to her questioning look. "Wrote all those fine blues."

But the center of her attention was the far end of the living room where what she supposed had been intended for the library was in darkness except for one small blue light. And there, as her eyes slowly adjusted to the gloom, she strained to make out the person of the son of the legendary Yancy Baylee, whom some called the Father of the Blues.

The Schumann came to an end. Mozart's Quartet in G Major – the Budapest, she thought – came to an end. Ellington's Caravan and some McPartland and a strange thin recording of a Bartok concerto came to an end. Home Boy had catholic tastes. All the time, except when he changed the records, playing each one singly, the figure of Home Boy sat motionless in the blue light, hunched over atop a high stool, a lost, intent listener in the roaring gloom.

"Man put that set together for years," Lamartine whispered to her now from the other side. "Cost twelve thousand dollars, some say. Peradventure man's got him five thousand discs in there."

She could believe it. She had never heard such perfect sound. You could not get sound like that live, for any position you took was almost bound to throw one part of the playing ensemble out of your ken.

She had just begun to squirm, at the time going on, at the strangeness of it all, when the figure on the stool turned in the faint blue light. His voice was itself almost a melody, itself like a blues, she thought, rich, dark, grave, infinitely resigned.

"Anybody got anything?" it said.

"Home Boy?" There were a couple of starts at requests from the others around them, but Lamartine was on his feet first. "Hazard you're able run a tape for a young thrush we worked with today."

There was a silence. Nobody moved. Ina found herself holding her breath, as if the decision of this strange, unknown, almost unseen man in the blue room were somehow terribly important. "Gimme the tape, Touhey," the deep voice said.

"Hazard you'll say what you think," Lamartine said. He took the can out of her hands and went forward to the end of the living room.

"Inferior tape," the voice said, bending over. "That Gordie's audio on St. Nicholas and One One Fourth."

"That's it, Home Boy," Lamartine said gently at the far reaches of the room.

"Might as well rerecord," Home Boy said.

She was pleased, and excited, by the way she sounded. Mr. Baylee's sound reproduction equipment was infinitely better than the studio's had been. He played it through. Again there was a silence, again so long that she wondered if she ought to speak, to thank him, or something. Then he played it again, and this time it seemed to her that there were variations, so miniscule she sensed far more than actually heard them, in pitch and accent and resonance. He ran it through again, and this time there was an added richness to her delivery, a snap that was too subtle to really get, (continued on page 62)To Swing Alone(continued from page 42) but she felt it. Her guitar break came through this time like crystal. It was a happy record. A natural.

The third playing of her number ended. This time the silence was of short duration, and then the distant figure rose from the stool, turned and came toward her, head down, walking beside the low-talking Lamartine but saying nothing in answer. From a switch somewhere close to her, Home Boy turned on the lights, and the living room had illumination just a shade less than a normal living room.

Ina blinked and one of her hands went up instinctively to shield her eyes from the unaccustomed light. It was then she saw that, with the exception of their host, all the others did the same. But vastly more. There was an expression on every face as she looked around her, of utter astonishment, almost consternation. The meaning could not have been clearer in print. She wondered how long it had been since any of them had seen Home Boy turn on the lights.

The face was the mate to the voice. She found herself looking directly into unblinking eyes. Home Boy was small, about her own height. He was as grave as a Moor. She could not imagine him laughing. He turned a little, and she saw he was, just slightly, hunchbacked.

"You like some bourbon?" he said to her.

She blinked, unprepared for the question. Then she shook her head. "No. Thanks. Thank you so much. That was fine. Fine."

"It's good bourbon," he said. "You can't buy better bourbon than that is, chick." Again she shook her head, groping for her smile, conscious of his old eyes in his still young face studying her. "Some coffee, then?" he said.

"Coffee. Yes. Thank you."

"Mrs. Jackson?" He raised his voice slightly. "Give round the coffee and whiskey, and like that. What they want." Somewhere close the maid replied. "You blow good voice," Home Boy said to her.

"Thanks." She felt she was smiling exorbitantly. But he did curious things to her. She would like to have helped, without either knowing how or why, or even what.

"You like to see the set?" he said.

"It's a great set," she said.

For answer he nodded. He moved slowly back down the living room and now in the light she saw that while he did not limp, his body moved unevenly. His hands were large. She could not help thinking they were somehow aimless.

Without knowing much about it, she knew it would take a real bug even to dream a set like this. It had taken him 13 years and close on 12 grand to put it together, he said. He had everything she had ever heard of. Coupled speakers and tweeter-woofers and back-up arms and baffles in slate and in graphite. He cradled sound, fondled it and loved it, and as he spoke on she had insight into something more than passion or fanaticism or monomania. Sound, darkness, tonality, were the cave that Home Boy – he told her his real name was William – Baylee lived in.

". . . you record in a good tonality, chick." She looked at him, more than listened to him. "Lucky register to work in. Brings it up on average equipment." He looked at her, too. Then he looked away, down at his big hands, or ever and again at the fortune in fragile machinery. "You go on, get that coffee, chick. Wait. When you tape, you want to work on a high bass resonance factor. You follow me?" Half a dozen times, she thought, he seemed to be sending her away, then calling her back, as if in spite of himself. His eyes kept going to her face, then leaping away to the hi-fi again. The walls of this room were lined with racks. Almost the whole area was filled with tagged and cataloged thousands of long-playing records. She looked over her shoulder. Ray, Lamartine and Pen were openly watching her. The rest of the room, drinking coffee and whiskey now, were trying not to get caught doing the same.

And Baylee kept on looking at her. There was nothing in his look of audacity or the biding pitch she, like any entertainer, knew so well. It was the opposite of that. He looked at her nicely, attentive, not pleading, because it seemed to her he didn't value himself enough to even think he had a chance pleading, just grave and solemn and admiring. She liked to be looked at like that. She liked to be looked at like that by him.

But even so it got squirmy after a bit and she said: "The man says your daddy wrote the Jezebel Blues."

"Yes he did," Home Boy said. "He wrote that."

"And all those other fine blues," she said.

"Yes he did," he said. "He got twenty dollars for writing the Jezebel."

"Twenty dollars?" She knew she looked her astonishment. The tune was a standard in every jazz repertoire in the world.

"He got twenty dollars for it," Baylee said tonelessly. "And then when that was all written and the others got, and still get, the money from the Jezebel, then he set up the music company. And now, miss, now the others work for me."

She liked his face. But suddenly now it was hideous in her sight. He did not scowl or anything like that. But his face seemed to die. He was again to her the savage, all alone in his dark and blue-lit world, walled in by sound. She had to turn away.

"But thank you very much for mixing the tape," she said. "I hope sometime you will come and hear me sing. I work at a bar and grill on Seventy Ninth and Broadway." She was not sure of all the reasons, but he made her very unhappy.

"I cannot do that," Home Boy said. "But you can tape the good ones and you can bring them here. I'll listen then."

"Maybe you could come down," she said. She was growing restive. "Perhaps you could tape me down there one night."

"I cannot do that," he said. He smiled a little. "But I will give you a recorder. You can come back. I do hope you will come back."

"Why can't you come down?" she said. She did not know why it upset her so. "You could take a taxi. It is not far." If he owned the Yancy Baylee Publishing Company, she knew well he did not have to worry about the taxi fare. "Come down." She faced him.

"I cannot," he said sadly.

"Why not?"

"Because I am the Home Boy, miss." Slowly, somehow majestically, he left her.

A voice spoke softly behind her and she turned to see that Touhey Lamartine was standing there. "Happen you take your coffee, miss," he said in his soft chocolate voice. "The Home Boy, he is very nice. Do not make him sad."

"Sad?" Ina turned on the drummer, exasperated. "But why sad?"

"He goes not out," Lamartine said gently. "For fifteen years, since his daddy died, he never left this place."

"Fifteen years?" She said it very slowly. She could not take it aboard. "But why? With all his money?" That was dumb to say. She knew as she said it that had nothing to do with it. It was only that so much of her own life was conditioned on money. Every time she heard a liner blow she wanted to travel. For so long now she was paying medical bills. She had scrimped and saved and she was used enough to that. Only she had gotten into the habit, perhaps, of believing that the one thing that prevented people from doing anything they wanted was that they could not afford it.

"Home Boy is indeed well-heeled," Lamartine said softly. "But it is the hump, miss. He fears that others will see the hump on his back and they will see that." Lamartine looked at her.

"But it's small," she cried.

"To him, miss," he murmured, "it is very large."

She saw now that which she had not fully taken in before, that all the blinds were drawn on this living room and its (concluded on page 111)To Swing Alone(continued from page 62) furnishings of 30 years ago. It was not really stuffy, and she was sure William Baylee had the best in air conditioning equipment. But it felt stuffy to her. Something told her the lights, such as they were, burned here day and night the same. The sky was never seen here. Twelve thousand dollars of high fidelity phonograph drowned out the birds. Home Boy had hidden from 15 springs.

She sought him out. He turned to her with shy surprise, something beginning in his eyes a little angry, and she understood that he supposed himself used hardly by her persistence. Right now she did not care. "Home Boy?" She spoke deliberately loudly in this hushed temple of sound. "You have a copy of that old disc? The first Jezebel? The Boldy Band?" That was a real famous disc, and if anyone still owned an original, he would. They were worth about anything you had to pay if you could find one anymore. But it was a rocking lot more than that to her. She had never heard the genuine record, but she had listened to rerecordings maybe a thousand times. The utter charm of the Jezebel was that it was, above everything, a jumpy, wide-happy song. No tote-that-bale jazz, it was all sunshine and like the way river water looked when the light hit it just right, and funny things that happened to people and like that. The Jezebel smelled of life. It was for real of spring there in the music. And what she knew of Yancy Baylee, like everybody knew, was that he had been a big happy swinger.

"I don't own a copy of the Jezebel, chick," Baylee said stiffly.

"You don't own a copy?" she echoed dumbly. "Your daddy's big tune? You don't own a copy? You got five thousand discs and you don't own a copy of the Jezebel?"

"You read it, chick." He was starting to get angry.

"I don't get it," she said frankly, staring at him.

"He got twenty dollars for it," Home Boy snapped. "Let those others play it and let those others make on it. Not me."

"That's a great tune," she protested.

"Not in this house," he said.

For a long time she started at him. He'd had his own way long enough so she could not stare him down. And she could admit to herself even now that she liked his not trying to play hurt little boy with her. His eyes were just level and sad and that made her infuriated and she was glad she could sense him wilt a little. But he kept his guard up.

"You've got it real rough, Home Boy," she said to him, very, very slowly. "Because just nobody else in the wide world ever got cheated and hurt and lost anything; nobody else ever had a thing the matter with them. Not in this whole wide world, man." Deliberately, trembling, she walked away from him.

He had lied to her. She'd been pretty sure he had right from the start, when he'd told her. She left him talking more politely than she guessed was his usual fashion. She wouldn't let herself turn around to see if she'd left any mark on him. She knew if he was looking he'd try not to let her see he was looking at her. He pretended she didn't exist, and all else who'd heard her pretended that too, out of the feeling they had for the Home Boy. She went alone into the hi-fi room, nobody watching her, and she dug around and there, set all by itself in a special kind of little cabinet, in a velvet case, she found that Boldy Band record.

The equipment was still on tape. But except for about a million extra knobs and dials that made it look like something at Cape Canaveral, the components were basically known to her. She switched the arm needles and picked up the speed to 78.

She had never heard such sound. It was terrible. Every part of that record was tonally impossible. It scratched. Its drums were like on tin cans. Its piano tinkled like a little kid's toy xylophone. The reeds were squalls on a bent kazoo.

But that old record swung.

"Kill it!" Home Boy's voice thundered at her from the doorway of the blue room. She had known he would. She was ready for him. She had a great big, old-fashioned onyx paperweight in her hand. "Who told you to do such a thing? You kill it, chick." A kind of incredulous terror loaded his voice.

She guessed she was nutty from the nerves of recording, and from that being the first real spring day, all those things. But she stood him off, stood all of them off, staring at her popeyed, with that paperweight that could have smashed right through that Boldy Band record and maybe three, four thousand dollars worth of the infinite patience of years underneath the turntable. And all she could think to say during the whole of that tinny, wonderful, swingy, big-jumping music was, "You've got no right. You've got no goddamn right." And she found she was crying.

"Get out," he said in a dead voice when it was done, finally.

"I'm going, man," she whispered. "Don't think but I'm going."

"You're dead, chick," he said. "Around here, you're dead." And she noticed how he handled the Boldy Band record. Like it was gold. "Don't ever come back."

"Don't worry," she said. "I won't."

They got married the following October. He sent her a Webcor portable down to the bar and grill at 79th and Broadway and she sent it back. Around the end of April he went down, all wrapped up in a big cloak he'd bought especially, and it took her three hours to get him to check it. He was always polite and sad and anxious and he would look at people who were crippled in the street like they were crazy and he never did mention that night again. But she got a smile out of him in June, and a walk in Central Park daylight a month after and he was still sore what she was doing to him and she didn't blame him much. He gave her a real small contract in September and came as close as he ever did to laughing when he said he'd better marry her and keep the profit in the family. Then he spoiled the profit by taking her to Sweden to listen to some new-type atonal music. But he took more interest in the business and he figured he showed in the black even marrying her. She was a solid chick, he said. And 15 years was long enough for any man to swing alone.