bixstory

Sheryl Smith

1915 Bellomy St. #2

Santa Clara, CA 95050

Bix: To What End?

In the weeks before he died in August 1931, jazz cornet genius Bix Beiderbecke was planning to marry. Hoagy Carmichael, one of the few friends who met Bix’s fiancée, gives her name as Helen Weiss, but Bix gives her name in a letter home as Alice Weiss O’Connell. She helped Bix rent a flat in Queens. After Bix died she seems to have arranged a wake for him, and sent his cornet mouthpiece to Hoagy, who kept it for many years: it’s now in a museum, with the one of two cornets Bix had that could be found. Bix wrote to his family that he and Alice were together constantly, but the rental agent of the building in Queens said he seldom saw her. She doesn’t figure in the agent’s recollections of Bix’s final days. Bix Beiderbecke died unexpectedly in the rental agent’s presence on the evening of August 6^th, 1931, during an apparent attack of the DT’s: the death certificate, signed by a doctor at the same address, gives the cause of death as lobar pneumonia. Alice O’Connell and her family have not been traced by later biographers, and actual details of the relationship, along with Bix’s motivations, remain a mystery.

Bix gazed around the room. The sun that slipped into it was brighter than brass horns at Plunkett’s, brighter than the neon tints in gin—much brighter than any note he would ever coax again from his cornet.

“Yes,” he said softly, abstractedly. “It’ll be fine. But I’ll need a piano again sometime soon.”

“Of course, you can’t be without one.” Alice glanced up at him briskly with a smile. “Buy the Weber you looked at, or move the borrowed one from 44^th Street, whichever you like. I know a drayman who can get either one here within two days.”

Bix squeezed her closer, feeling a wave of amusement and somewhat baffled love. Bits of fugitive light twisted through her hair, picking its reds apart into several shades of rust, fringing shadows on her pallid scalp and skin. Irish grace over German bedrock, a flapper’s languor in her eyes belied her talent for organizing lives. Her image roused his instincts to protect, but in the upshot all he had to do was cling—and secretly he longed for nothing more. He was run down these days: waning energies locked in a clinch with booze and music. Whatever arrangements she would take off his hands suited him fine.

His eyes snapped briefly into focus at the scene beyond the casement: Sunnyside in Queens, neat, living in daylight hours, its speaks quiet, tucked away in a neighborhood innocent of jazz. Inconvenient enough to keep casual crowds from dropping in with bottles. His left arm tightened slightly on the hard contours of his bagged cornet. He let his right arm slip from Alice’s shoulders as he turned more fully towards the window. In automatic craving he lit a cigarette, but the cough this caused interrupted Alice’s talk with the agent.

“Bix, you’ve had that cough a long time,” she chided, her blue eyes wide over a moue of worry.

“Too much night life,” he replied, smiling. “Never mind, it’s just a cold. I’ll get better here in Queens, away from the clubs.” Cigarette between his lips, he took a drag and fought the irritation of the smoke, trying to soak its relaxation into his blood. It irked him to have trouble getting air: as a cornetist he had to breathe for a living: concerts for work, jam sessions for play, a double shift of breathing with each note roundly struck, precisely placed in its fills and hot choruses. Now his breath had been constricted for weeks, and his neat moustache hid a weakened embouchure that failed, and made mistakes, and sometimes shamed him. When the booze had him bad even his hands would shake at the piano, and the tireless harmonies in his head were throttled. Parts of him still rebelled at his decline, but the inertia of his habits pulled him steadily toward silence.

Alice took the cigarette from Bix’s lips, a caressing double-purpose theft that couldn’t help but make him smile. She puffed it once herself, then threw it down, and her neat black shoe crushed it on the wooden floor. Her arm snaked through his and she pulled him tight against her side as they followed the agent out. “We’ll have to go shopping,” she said. “You’ll need a chest of drawers so you can move your things in. Oh, and a bed.”

“A double?” he jested.

“Not yet,” she said, laughing. “Just a tiny bed for you, till we can get married.”

“Have you set a date yet?” he asked.

“Oh Bix, very soon.” How could her nasal New York voice seem so caressing? “After I’ve met your family in Davenport, and my sisters and brothers have grown used to the idea. After we’ve had time to talk over the details. A few months at most.”

“Not soon enough,” he said, pausing to brush her lips with a light kiss.

“At least we don’t have to wait till you’d saved up several thousand dollars,” she teased. “That could’ve taken ages in this Depression.”

“Instead, little girl, you already have that much, and more,” he said lightly. “Even though you’re only twenty. The remains of my salary with Whiteman went west in the crash. But you escaped that, with your good head for business.”

“I didn’t escape it quite,” she said. “But my parents left safe investments. And my sister and I cashed out a lot to fund the little dance-hall—my brothers had to be convinced to allow it, but now they’re glad. It’s doing OK so far. When we’re married, you can afford to buy some of your records.”

“Anyone can,” he said wryly, “if they can find them in the second-hand shops.”

“You’ll make new ones too,” she said quickly. “We’ll get those free.”

A pang—his hand tightened on her elbow. “Will you play them?” he asked. “Will you really play them?”

“Why so serious, Bix? Of course I’ll play them. I’m not a jazz hound, but I like music—don’t I live on dance these days?”

“You’ll be a loyal wife then.” He heard hints of sarcasm in his voice that he should’ve suppressed. “As loyal as my own family.” His diaphragm churned guilt over the money they had lent him, as worthless as he’d been to them—as worthless as the unopened records he had sent them, stored one by one in the cupboard under the stairs. “You’ll be dancing with customers while I’m on a bandstand somewhere else. The picture of loyalty.”

“Dancing is part of my job—I’m not addicted to it.” Alice spoke vaguely: she usually put miles of emotional distance between herself and his moments of petulance.

“I was never much of a dancer, even before my knees gave out.” His voice was tight, the vicious mood was on him. “Now I even need a cane sometimes. I can’t dance much myself—you might as well get your arms around some customers.”

Alice sighed. “Bix, we both work in entertainment. We both have customers—male and female. I think we should trust each other, myself.” She sounded crisp, efficient—she had withdrawn her warmth a little, but he couldn’t complain, since he’d needled her into it. Then her face got a little mischievous. “And it’s much harder to cheat when the customers don’t speak English: you think you know what they mean, but you dasn’t say yes. My sister said yes once to this dreamy Finn, and found herself buying two knives and a small carving of a reindeer.”

Bix kept a straight face, but even with a bad mood it was a struggle. “Lucky your sister’s religious—or is that the one who isn’t?”

“It’s the one who can’t handle a cash register, so we’ve got to go. We have a lot to do, to get you ready to move in tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow? Why so soon?”

“Because I’m busy Friday,” she said, “with the accountant. Tomorrow’s my day off from the museum, and I don’t have to work until evening. I can come by Rex’s flat around ten, and help you shop for furniture—and linen, unless you have some back on 44^th Street. If we start early, we can see about a piano too.”

“Why not next week?” he asked.

“Why not tomorrow?” she reiterated. “At ten.”

“I may not be up that early,” he objected, still sulky. “But I could find a jam session in Harlem, and stay up that late.”

“Oh Bix, please don’t go to Harlem tonight.” The open distress in her voice made his sarcastic barriers melt. “I know you won’t drink—you’ve gone thirteen days now without it—but you really need to rest, and take care of that cough--not sit in stale smoke and play jazz for hours and hours.”

Bix met her eyes, and dropped his own, and pulled her close again. He kissed her forehead, feeling her fine hair caress his ruined lip. “I won’t go to Harlem—I have no reason to go there,” he said. “I can’t keep up with good jazzmen now—why go searching for the best?” His horn, no longer cradled, hung by its ties at his side, with its weight of guilts and pressures. He carried it by instinct, but the tool would soon go out of use.

“When you’re moved in, I’d like to have a little party, and have your Harlem friends come here—if they can do it without rousing the natives. Ask the agent for his advice.”

“Willie the Lion speaks Yiddish—if we’re raided, he can talk to the police.”

Alice laughed, and took Bix’s arm. “I must meet these people.”

“At the wedding,” said Bix. “So hurry up and arrange it.”

In that new room in Queens, as in any other, Bix would sleep through visitations of the sunlight. But once he was settled, he thrived on a calmer routine. The distance to Manhattan wasn’t convenient, but wasn’t daunting when he really wanted to go there. His bandstand comrades came sometimes to see him too. But the stifling summer subways discouraged the more casual dropping in that Bix had politely endured on 44^th Street, and Bix had to admit he liked it so. He could indulge his shyness and partially escape his vices, leaving his long-intemperate nerves a little soothed. Bix had never denied anyone his mild fame, and was generally obliging with his time. But idle visitors would come with liquid temptations he didn’t need, and would sometimes interrupt his flow of music.

When Bix wasn’t in Manhattan at night, he sometimes walked the dark streets of his new neighborhood. He tried not to learn where the speakeasies were, but that turned out to be impossible. All the years of Prohibition he’d been a drinker, and his instincts were too well-tuned. The spoor of the bootlegger was unmistakable in any section of any city, if you walked at night when the illegal traffic was highest. He kept out of the places, but he knew where the nearest ones were—and would’ve found more if his breath and bad knees had let his walks be longer. Was it only ten years ago that he had thrown himself into every school sport that would have him, and had so much energy to squander in play? Football in Davenport, baseball at Lake Forest, and tennis everywhere: he knew the rhythms of those sets before he’d tamed his cornet to the subtler ones of jazz. Fatigue, except in the classroom, was only a mirage. Ten years of excessive jazz life had finished that: after all the bad drink and too many bandstands, he was damaged, depressed. He’d never get that athlete’s body back, or the limpid moods that used to fuel his jazz.

Yet he should be able to get some health again, at twenty-eight. The cold couldn’t hang on forever, and thanks to Alice he was still looking at the speaks from the outside. Bix didn’t see her every day, though he wanted to: she needed her busyness, as he needed his time alone. But they talked by telephone, and dated at odd hours: morning movies, afternoon teas, communal reading, a light flurry of Wodehouse quotes in the park. So far they had never visited each other’s place of business: Bix hadn’t seen her dance, and she hadn’t heard him play with professionals. Some casual postponements had become a standing joke: it was too amusing now to say they’d never seen each other work--to do the thing would spoil it.

Bix was still getting gigs, though he wasn’t sure why. His embouchure was wrecked, and everybody knew it--though not everybody knew that a long summer cold made it painful to practice. He apologized for himself, and rationed his solos, and fought the clams as best he could. The cold fed on his smoking, and he tried to ration that as well; but he was on the wagon and too nervous to combat all his cravings at once.

Still his friends let him sit in, and helped him to gigs despite the scarcity of jobs, and he could still do his business well enough not to let them down. Not with Whiteman any more, not with the band that was technically the best, and he excused himself from playing on recordings with exacting colleagues. But at college dances, little out-of-town things, he could still play the odd chorus without disgrace. His lip was soft, and when his thinking was bad he couldn’t read fast enough, but his ear for harmony still let him improvise new fills within a section. Notes in a chord stood out for him, stretched across the octaves, bright, precise beads in hanging strands of sound. Even at his drunkest he could name all of ten notes played together—and turn some of his own wrong notes right. There were always implicit melodies that nobody was playing—always another hot chorus to loop over the spindles of a riff.

His ear would be the last to go, while everything else was crumbling—his body, his lip, the very coherence of his thoughts. Music still fell like manna in his mind, he could hear it inwardly. But he needed some dexterity to get it out, and he was losing that fast to dissipation. Enough alcohol and even his thoughts would silt up. The sounds that used to balance his emotions broke their patterns now. He had raw nervous outbreaks, and saw phantoms, and sometimes his inner music was lost in sludge. He could live without well-toned muscles; he couldn’t quite live without jazz.

He wanted to believe that Alice, and genuine love, were a way out for him. But a way out of what? He loved her more firmly than he had loved other women, even Ruth from St. Louis, who had almost married him once. He loved Alice as much as he hated, sometimes, his bad habits. But the roots of his bad habits were in jazz, all mixed in, and jazz was in him deeper than even love. The music and the mire were both in him, and he wasn’t sure he could separate the two.

Alice seemed to set little store by Bix’s misbehaviors—and as little by the music he played. She could disregard both equally, except as they affected the man in between. Her affection was really for himself: it enticed, distressed and puzzled him, more so in that he knew to his depths that it wasn’t falsified. He was a fit for what she wanted in marriage, and what she wanted to do in it. She wanted to be the protector, not the protected. She could shield him from the beast underneath, and prop up his failing frame when music strained it. She could do it warmly, firmly, and with humor, and he sensed that he needed all three.

Bix had expected, sometime, to marry conventionally—to let a wife and children happen in the background, and support a family without having to mind it much. He would support a family with his talents, and come home to it in whatever lax hours music didn’t fill. But conventional marriage hadn’t occurred to Bix, probably just as well: he was exhausted from just seven years of his musical harvest, and he could scarcely support himself nowadays. He had done so little, and other things had mastered him instead.

Now love had mastered him, awkwardly, as external concerns always did, in a royal flush of inconvenience. An unconventional love for (Helen) Alice (Weiss) O’Connell had arrived with the summer, and pulled him out of the sulks. And it was something of a relief to have a summer like this: the last three seasons had been close to unbearable.

--Autumn, 1930. Bix was sick, and half an invalid to drink, marking time in a radio job on the Camel Pleasure Hour—a lucrative berth, not much challenge to it. But this undemanding sinecure went west one liquorous day, when he found himself in front of a mike with a solo to play and absolutely couldn’t play one. Till that moment Bix had music like he had a pulse, but , even panic produced in him some broken sounds. But then when he turned into the darkness there was fog and silence, not even enough motion in his mind to be afraid. The other player in the section saw him falter, and covered for him, and the crime of dead air was averted. But nobody wanted to take a risk with him again: the producer, once a fan, had been forced to replace him. And for a while he was afraid all the time.

So he’d done the only thing he could think of: thrown himself on a train for Davenport. His family, his father, would take him in, but only on their terms—terms implicit in the cupboard of unopened records. They would lend their intolerance to his own, while he fought for the abstinence he utterly had to reach.

Bix didn’t call ahead that he was coming, couldn’t even quite call home from the station when he arrived. Instead he called his friend and fellow musician, Esten Spurrier: he was surprised to hear Bix was in town without the band, but he drove over to the train without questions, and dropped Bix off at the family house on Grand Avenue.

Bix’s mother was surprised too, but glad to see him; his father he didn’t see. Bix stumbled once on his way up the staircase (were the records still underneath?), then reached his vacant room and locked the door. There he expended all the strength left in his nerves, but he sweated and struggled and saw snakes until the bite of the alcohol loosened once more. His mother brought trays to his door: she would’ve done more, but her kindness shamed him, and he thanked her, but discouraged further talk. His father occasionally grumbled in the hall about the sanitarium. But Bix played deaf, and avoided him, until coal and lumber reclaimed the patriarchal thoughts. Bix hid from everyone by inhabiting the night, and survived the ordeal since in this house he had no choice. When his body stopped hurting, and his nerves less unstrung, and mood shifts weren’t absolutely rampant, Bix felt he could present himself downstairs in a decent sobriety, and he did.

It took six weeks, and Bix wasn’t sure he would be downstairs for Thanksgiving, but he was. They welcomed him, not effusively, but cheerfully, willing to have him take his old place in their holidays. He fell into his role as younger son and younger brother, old patterns of behavior that pleased the others with their familiarity, though Bix himself found them hard to play. He had always been more than these roles, even when he was smaller and the patterns could be made to fit. Now he had changed, and only a repressive silence kept the masks from slipping. But Bix was silent by nature, and nothing boisterous could come from him there anyhow. He had a cornet with him, naturally, but he practiced little, and there was no audible jazz in the house. But loose from his room Bix was able to take over the familiar piano, where his chords could be anything as long as they were quiet. He played in decorous joy while his second nephew was being born in a room upstairs; and later he helped his mother serve up Christmas songs on the same instrument.

So Bix let his lip decay, and the rhythmic cornet breaks he heard in his head had to stay there. His moods were dark and tense in the German-American winter. But his body healed itself resiliently, and his well-being couldn’t help but increase. By and by he began to play cornet a little, with scarves in the bell to mute the sound. After that, with union dues paid up, he began sitting in with local bands for their winter functions. He was the visiting fireman, and no one mentioned that his playing was lousy: some of his normal chords sounded dissonant to dance musicians anyway, and his mistakes could do no worse. And he did just enough of it to keep jazz out of his nightmares.

Bix continued these journeyman habits through the crisp prairie holidays and into the new year. He knew Paul Whiteman’s band was coming through Davenport in mid-January. He planned to show himself to them unsullied, booze-free and healthy. But he did nothing to build up his lip, and that laxity hid beneath his grin when he met them at the station. The band was reduced in numbers since the Crash, but they crowded around him in genuine affection, which made Bix laugh but touched him too. He had ties to this group, and the camaraderie, under the circumstances, was a bit daunting.

But Frank Trumbauer was the person Bix was most eager to see—and he was gratified when Tram approached him on the platform and put extra warmth into his greeting. His friendship with Tram went back a half-decade, through several orchestras, some of them Goldkette units with Tram as the leader. Tram’s lead, and Bix’s lift, provided ballast to the few white bands with a reputation for serious swing. Bix and Tram had teamed on record dates as well, with small groups, where Tram’s liquid C-melody sax had shared hot breaks with Bix’s cornet: musicians could still quote some of their solos. Tram’s steadiness supported Bix personally as well. With Tram around, the world fell into place around Bix’s vagaries, while Bix’s enthusiasm and flow of ideas gave the cautious saxophonist more heat and daring. The partnership had sparked both men’s careers as well as their lives, and Bix hoped to see their teamwork last.

Some estrangement between them dated from Bix’s last touring days with Whiteman. When Bix drank nowadays he was unreliable, and Tram’s willingness to help control and vouch for Bix was ingrained in their friendship, and implicit sometimes in their employment. While Bix searched for fathers in his friends, this had worked well.

But somehow Bix had changed, from normal aging or drink, he couldn’t tell which. His resentments were spilled at his friend’s efforts to control him, and Tram found his own responsibilities compromised by the change. It was a complicated chase Bix had led him, and Bix wasn’t sure he understood even his own part in it. Tram fretted, and rightly, because Bix wasn’t controlling himself: Bix realized later he was a little mad then, from emotions and not only from drink, but he couldn’t see that at the time. Bix sensed his friend’s frustration, but wouldn’t give the leash back, even to that trusted hand. Instead he went his own way, with his own limitations, and they led him to a fall. More a series of falls: total crackup in Cleveland, destructive wanderings, getting his guts carved in a Mexican bar. Sanitariums, hospitals, chemical damage and disease—humiliation, weakness, and the failure of all his gifts. Hard to guess what Bix had learned from handling this, except that he couldn’t handle it. Or maybe he’d just learned how to fall.

Tram could’ve spared him a lot, and both of them knew it—and Bix faced his friend now with more than a little rue. Tram had cared about Bix at one time, respected his music. Bix’s willfulness had damaged that. Bix stood in front of Tram, a bit sheepishly but in some semblance of health: he said nothing of the past, couldn’t find words for it. But Tram’s finer character seemed to take Bix’s health as a form of apology. Bix was responsible now, could return to the fold of that elegant dance-band and resume his rightful place, a black sheep no more. If Bix did this, and stuck to it, Bix and Tram could be friends again, and partners too. Bix might get to keep the friendship this time, and he valued it enough to try.

But Bix’s most effusive welcome came from Paul Whiteman, who folded Bix in bear-like arms and said the “young punk” was looking swell. Wall Street and changing tastes had made inroads, but Paul’s was still the most expensive dance-band in the land. Bix and Tram had joined Paul together, two hot players adding jazz breaks to a versatile and sleekly-trained organization. Paul hadn’t been their first choice of employers, and they had less to do there than in earlier, hotter bands. But those bands had folded, and Paul’s rewards were generous. Tram, with a family, was enticed by the salary and prestige; and the footloose Bix hoped to soak up musical education. His gift let him play professionally without the formal chores of reading parts, but he was beginning to want this grounding. The harmonic palettes of modern classical masters ravished him, but feeling alone couldn’t put them to work. Bix heard jazz and classics as one music, and Paul’s arrangements mingled them already. Sometimes the charts were a little posh, but Bix could learn from them.

Then too Paul was a jovial and paternalistic boss, and more generous than business required. Bix had been paid during his furloughs for drying out, and he had reason to be grateful. Now on the platform in Davenport, Paul clapped Bix on the back and said again and again that Bix’s chair with the band would always be open—and Bix knew he would act on what he said. Bix would bring his cornet when he went to hear the band play their date in town, since he knew Paul would ask him to sit in with the brass. To Bix, that section of the band was home. When he joined it, he felt again like he belonged. If Bix returned, the cornet man who played hot solos now would likely lose his job—but even he seemed genuinely pleased when Bix again sat beside him.

Bix looked out at the audience of his home from this familiar perspective. His family hadn’t come, but there was Esten Spurrier and others he knew. Playing with the section, he invented little fills: always an implicit line that Bix could find and play. He knew too the Paul eventually would let him solo. Bix waited for the moment, and didn’t flinch until the moment came. Flinched, but stood up, felt the warm lights on his hair, and took the chorus. Knew when he stood to solo that he wouldn’t fight his ailing lip one bit. Knew what the result would be. Knew when he sat down after the fiasco he would be shivering inwardly, but hadn’t known that most of his shivering not with embarrassment but guilt.

Bix had played badly before, and would play badly again, but only that one night in his life had the bad playing been intentional. Hadn’t known until then the anguish of fraudulence. How sickening a small betrayal of men and music could be. How a hangover of self-disgust could outlast the other kind.

The fellows on the band never dreamed he had messed up deliberately. They covered for him, threw their hearts into the number so when it finished the audience would clap. They were musicians, but so was Bix, and he had failed too plausibly. They assumed Bix would never let down the section, so instead of despising him they saved his face. Bix once had followed jazz like some teenaged martyr, left this very town of Davenport and all its decency behind like a sloughed crust—betrayed his family and class without a qualm. Had grown disreputable in a career he was already throwing away. Why was he not hardened to this little fault, this thorn that might’ve pierced his thumb but should never have drawn blood from his heart. His poker-face looked bland enough, but hid sin beyond redemption.

Afterward the concert everyone was still cordial. His bandmates pretended he had sounded all right, but Bix knew they had heard what musicians have to hear. Heard without a thought of duplicity. Bix apologized for being out of practice, and everyone reassured him that all he needed was a bit more rest. When he went back to the station to see them leave, they still said he’d be back playing with them soon. But they would say differently when they were by themselves.

Paul hugged Bix again on the platform, and said they’d be keeping his chair warm for him; Bix thanked him, but their eyes never met. Only Tram, who had lived for years with Bix and his playing, dropped the optimistic mask. Tram’s suspicions, if he had any, stayed behind his mature eyes. But his open face showed bewilderment and dread more than sadness. He took Bix aside and said, “You know our itinerary, Bix. Don’t forget it. If there is absolutely anything you need, or if you just want to talk, put through a call. And if you’re in even a little trouble, I want you to promise that I’ll hear from you. I’ll always do my best to help—even if I’m too much of a cornfed hick to understand you.” Bix said if true friendship was cornfed he was glad they were hicks together, and hoped they would meet on the right bandstand very soon—feeling suddenly that soon might be decades, which made no sense. But they were reconciled now.

Bix played casual and walked away before the train pulled out, but stopped in the shadows of the platform to watch it go. Bix waved, knowing they no longer saw him, then wrapped his arm around a post and leaned his cheek against it for a moment. His separation from the band was finished. He had closed himself off forever from that crushing weight of playing with the best. The internal cost of it was more than he had foreseen, but he would pay that until it too was finished.

Bix went back to his room in the house of another betrayal. And packed his bags and horn with gritted teeth. Tainted as he had never been, still he owed it to himself, at least, not to have to stay with his folks. He could go away, and be as weak as he needed to be--return to the cities, to the gully-low haunts of jazz, where he felt more at home. He would be a misfit there too—feeling tainted--but the chafe would be less. Stupid time to be on the wagon—he could use some alcohol now, to kill the taint in his thoughts. And his motives for abstinence were not what they had been anyway.
II.

In time Bix decided it was his body’s fate to drink, and he might as well get on with it. Intuition behind the scenes knew this for specious thinking: but speciousness was in the air in the fimbulwinter of ’31, just as surely as prosperity was not just around the corner. Yet having made this bad resolution, Bix wasn’t in haste to keep it: maybe it went by opposites, or maybe something in him stamped all resolutions “to be ignored.” But he moved back Manhattan, and waited: his pals enough on the pavement to help him down. Pee Wee Russell, Jack Teagarden and the Dorseys were around: fine musicians, hard drinkers, friends. But even in this society, Bix lingered for a while at the tailgate of the wagon. –Realized when you’re really depressed it’s too much effort to bend your arm to kill yourself.

Musicians to tempt Bix, some musicians to help him find work. One blindly optimistic soul even tried to get him into the Casa Loma Orchestra, a collective band of business-musicians with strict rules, and trendy arrangements that Bix with his pigeon skills would have to read. Bix would be replacing a player who was on his way out for excessive drinking on the bandstand, so Bix had to consider it a dubious fit in every way. He had been coaxed into a car and was on his way to join them in Boston, but got no further than Central Park before his saner instincts got through to him that wildly unsuitable jobs were not easier to get in a depression. But the friend had connections, and continued to persuade—and Bix never had been much at saying no. And he didn’t want to waste anyone’s good offices, so OK, he would meet with them anyway.

Bix was back in his old room on 44^th Street, with his borrowed piano in the bathroom, which was where the skewed floor-plan let it settle best. Too inert to practice much on cornet, he salved his self-esteem at the keyboard, improvising ideas into place for what he hoped would be two more published scoresfor piano. Bix still wrote music haltingly, but Bill Challis the arranger was a pal, and came often to help put Bix’s ideas on paper.

They were together at Bix’s piano the day after Valentine’s Day--the day before Bix was due to join the Casa Lomans. Jack Teagarden was staying with Bix that weekend, and breezed in with his trombone case: the big Texan carried it easily, though Bix knew the case was packed with heavy bottles of gin wrapped in underwear. Bix had been waiting for the gin—the tailgate of the wagon had slipped out of his hand and he was on the street, if not yet in the gutter.

Bix didn’t leave the piano right away: he was deep in moaning harmonies and searching for the right bridge. Jack, unpacking the liquid cargo, paused to listen: Jack spared fewer words than Bix, but conversed as easily in music. This time he whistled what Bix realized was a perfectly-shaped transition for his piece. Bix repeated the fragment of melody, smiling, it and filled it with chords: one set, then another, then another. Yes, yes—he felt each resolution go through his body with the shivers of orgasm. That was it—and he asked Bill to write it down. Bill observed that Bix now had three bridges, with different progressions, and had to choose one. Bix insisted that Bill to make the choice: a fourth possibility began to form in his mind, but Bix suppressed it because of the gin.

Bill left soon after: he wasn’t a drinker. Bix’s tolerance had dropped, so his inroads were modest, but Jack could put away a lot—and play faultless jazz, and sing the blues with scarcely a hint of slurring. Bix remembered the days when he could drink as steadily, and show it as little. And hardly ever on the bandstand, a privilege reserved for the clear-headed. Gin for the fearful moment of awakening, and for social moments where he would otherwise feel shy. But his music then rode natural elations, and he wished he’d left it alone to ride them still.

Bix was all nerves this night about Casa Loma, and tried to keep his moods to himself, so for a while they drank in silence. The big Texan eventually got out his trombone and blew two choruses of “St. James Infirmary”--delicate and grievous, heartfelt and superb. Bix was conscious, therefore he was moved—and knew the help he had to give. He took his drink to the piano, and brought in rhythm and deliberate dissonance behind another chorus, then settled into a steady riff that, as he’d hoped, enticed the trombonist to stop playing and sing the words. When Big T moved back to trombone, Bix led them through venturesome and somber changes, and played a few rhythmic tricks with the bar-lines. The big Texan’s ear never faltered, and Bix loved it. He played until it wasn’t St. James any more, and kept playing in a changed rhythm a little while after the trombone stopped—too far gone in his meanderings to register his partner’s silence. At last he recalled himself, raised his head from the piano and looked around. Jack was gazing at him mildly. The bell was off his trombone and he had been using a glass as a mute, but he had set the horn aside and was drinking from the bottle.

Bix finished his own drink despite its alarming fullness, closed the keyboard and stood up none too steadily. “I’m going to the morgue,” he announced. “to see if my sweet baby’s there. Wanna come?”

Jack looked puzzled for a moment at the sudden request. But he understood drinking, and they both understood compulsion. “Sure,” he drawled, “if I can take the gin along. Stiffs can make a guy sick. But I’ll come along, just to be neighborly.”

They put on coats, carried bottles into the ice-spattered night, then caught a cab to Bellevue. Bix recalled a letter from his brother Bernie, who had left his father’s employ and was going to work for a Davenport undertaker: Bix wondered if Bernie’s stint in the war made corpse-work seem ordinary now. At Bellevue the two jazzmen managed to charm and bribe their way into the morgue, which included a little tour of the exhibits.

The antiseptic coldroom of the song didn’t prepare them for what they found: a modern charnel-house, where death wasn’t pale, sweet and fair, but disgusting, God’s images befouled in ways even the earthiest of blues could barely sketch. Maybe Bernie could stand this—but Bix hoped his mother, with her Bible views of death, would never see it. They toured slabs at random: a middle-aged immigrant woman raped and stabbed (maybe not in that order); a female impersonator, dead of drugs, half-dissected; suicides by hanging and drowning, an alkie, frozen; and finally a young Creole, naked with a saga of wounds—he had been battered and cut repeatedly before a final slash to the windpipe: a musician’s nightmare of damage to hands and mouth. Bix thought of another musician he had known slightly, attacked and beaten on a street in Mexico City--alive but he could never heal enough to play. That Mexican bar in the Bowery, his own blood and the first cold slivers of pain—not lips and hands, thank God, but parts as fragile, oh so full of nerves.

“Let’s get out of here,” Bix whispered to Jack—saliva filled his mouth, he was beginning to puke. Jack looked white himself, but he got his arm around Bix and piloted them out of there, ahead of disgrace. Jack stood aside while Bix vomited on the sidewalk, then handed him an handkerchief to wipe his face.

“Well, that’s over,” said the trombonist, searching his pockets for the gin. “Let’s not do that again. Let’s just sing about it.”

Bix nodded. “I don’t want to hear “St. James Infirmary” for a while either.”

“Hardly enough sex in a barnyard to make you forget those stiffs.”

“We can try,” said Bix lightly. “Or sing about it, either one.”

Casa Loma, as Bix expected, didn’t work out: Bix actually joined them this time, and some guys helped him with the book, but they he parted from them in a few days by mutual consent: even if Bix remained sober, the band didn’t need what he could do. Paul could no longer afford to pay Bix if he couldn’t come back, so he had to scrounge whatever jobs he could get. Which got him through while he could play them.

Then tonsillitis or something interrupted all income: he struggled to make gigs but was too sick to play them. Somber fevers cornered him: he remembered Bellevue, and death-glazed eyes all alike in despair. No one around could lend anything, and Bix finally had to borrow from his folks: a humbling experience. The money came, but grudgingly, in a letter that put the worst construction on his illness.

March 1^st, his mother’s birthday: Bix couldn’t even send a gift. He was without funds, in bed with chills and a burning throat. Dizzy with dreams of corpses, he awaited signs of death: surely no one under thirty could feel this decrepit and live. This wouldn’t do. Think about Christian Science: some of his own relatives professed to believe that sickness was unreal, and how could he die from delusion? The exercise didn’t cure him, but his mind grew quieter, and he was well enough in a few days to at least write his excuses. By his own birthday, March 10^th, he could make his gigs. A week later, thankfully, he could pay back his father’s fretful loan, and add birthday money to it.

He wasn’t sick from drink, not then. But drink had moved back into his life, and grew encroaching: there were messes after that, plenty of them, musical and otherwise. But he could still compose, and April his two new piano sketches were safely in the press—“In the Dark” not quite fine-tuned, but freed from his brain’s darkness: others could play it, and as he played it himself it would change, and be better worth preserving. He was hardly Eastwood Lane, but had a little written music to his credit. His imagination faltered in the scores, and Bix had learned that many subtleties of swing couldn’t be set down at all. But musicians were learning how to read that in, and recordings helped. He would leave something more substantial than cornet solos tossed off on the bandstand.

Anyway there was money around the place again, and prom season increased it. Bix went to Princeton and played for his old fans—not all that well, and he could hardly be persuaded to solo: but their memories made it sound better than it was. He was taciturn and discouraged about everything, and hadn’t will enough to turn down any drinks. But at least he could pay for any drinks that didn’t come free.

Many did, of course, musicians being what they were: drinks were offered by those in funds to those who were not--out of conviviality, or kindness, or colder motives. Red Nichols found him once in Plunkett’s, when some fellows bought Bix too many drinks till he was staggering, and then convinced him that “the great Bix Beiderbecke” could still play his horn. Bix’s recollections were vague: he couldn’t even remember all of his mistakes exactly. But Red had tried to defend him--as if he needed defending from such trifles. When Bix was drunk enough he could defend himself, with his own sarcastic tongue. The humiliation of public failure wasn’t new to him: hadn’t he brought it on himself with Paul in Davenport? His life was riddled with mistakes, and many had been pointed out to him from his cradle. And he understood musicians’ jealousy—understand that impulse better than he understood why musicians could hear all his faults and overlook them. Sometimes he felt grateful when one of them finally complained. Sober, he felt slights sometimes where none were intended—why bother about real slights if he was too drunk to feel them?

Summer season after the proms was coming on hot. Bix had less to do now; and Christian Science aside, had picked up a summer cold that wouldn’t quit. Sometimes he swore off drink for a few days, but his nerves couldn’t take it: in this heat he couldn’t sleep on boozeless days. Bix could hardly fathom that: usually he could sleep on a wish, and amazing pranks had been played without waking him up. Sometimes he was slow to recognize that a prank had been played, and his earnestness made it all the funnier—to himself too, when he finally caught on.

But the placidity that had cradled him once was gone now, dissolved in irritation of the nerves, widespread symptom of Prohibition and its overindulgence. And behind that a family failing that was Bix’s own: sharp mood-swings he’d learned not to show, fed by reservoirs of guilt and groundless terror. Drink at first was medicine for the terror, but drink caused more terror now than it quelled. And sometimes the terror came without drink to cause it.

For a while the terror came only when he was alone: he would imagine his family house in Davenport invaded by ghosts only he could see, or hear his solitary playing joined by a familiar solo and remember while he backed it that the jazzman who played it was dead. But at a certain stage of drinking, Bix would start to see things, and then all bets were off: the terrors could come anywhere.

As they came one night in June. A friend had asked Bix to play intermission piano at Salzman’s Restaurant while his band was off the stand. Bix was drunk, but someone got him to the instrument, and once he was there, his hands went to work automatically. Bix never played formal piano in public, but finding an unoccupied instrument, often sat down and lost himself in vapor trails of improvisation, his own world: people listened sometimes, but he never felt like a performer, as he was on cornet. But this occasion was different, almost an audition for a gig. Bix wasn’t ready, his friend was absent, and something happened that never did when Bix was playing for himself: someone came up to him and asked him to play a request, Bix stared at the person in some surprise, and changed the tune, but he couldn’t understand the speaker, and didn’t change it right.

--Panicked, tried to keep playing, use music as light to route the ghosts. But played the wrong tune, and his ghosts draped their sheets over the facts--like when they draped snakes over innocent furniture in a Cleveland hotel-room till he wrecked it all. Paul Whiteman got Bix someone medical to calm him down, but the band had to leave him behind. Paul and Tram wanted him to take the train to Davenport, but his train went the wrong way, and he ended up in New York instead. Then he tried to go uptown to Harlem, but that train also went the wrong way, and he ended up in the Bowery, where he had to play and drink alone.

--A Mexican dive where Mexican longshoremen called booze tequila, and didn’t especially want to hear jazz. The piano seemed without a pianist, and wasn’t in tune: this annoyed Bix, but he played it just the same, substituting where he could for notes that hurt. The longshoremen continued to drink and talk Mexican, and for a while they ignored Bix. He ignored them back. He ordered some of the tequila, drank it down, ordered more, and continued playing.

All was well until somebody came over, put a dollar next to his glass, and made a request. Bix ignored that too, but the fellow insisted: he had to ask several times before Bix could disentangled the name of the tune from the fellow’s accent. It was “Valencia.” Bix and the fellow were both frustrated by then. Bix said yes, he could play “Valencia,” but he wasn’t working here, and didn’t want to, and damn well wouldn’t—and tried to give the dollar back. The fellow crumpled the dollar and threw it on the floor. He went back to his buddies and they called Bix names in Mexican. Bix told he couldn’t understand their spic swear-words, and he dared them to say it in English. He even played a few bars of fucking “Valencia,” his way—and when they didn’t recognize it, he laughed.

He slammed the keyboard shut and tried to leave, but they wouldn’t let him do that, and the bouncer looked the other way. Bix had no allies now. When they went for him, he protected his lip with his hands, but this left his body defenseless. They tripped him, kicked his stomach and ribs. They held him down while he struggled, and cut into him with a broken bottle: only then did the bouncer stop them. They dragged him outside and left him lying on the ice-rough sidewalk and said they’d cut off his cojones with knives if he ever came back. Didn’t even bother to rob him. He started to hurt then, and blood flowed like piss and chilled his clothes. No police, but a cab stopped for him, for his respectable clothes, and he got back to 44^th Street. The band had checked in: they were playing somewhere, but the clerk knew Bix. He saw the blood, but Bix said he’d be fine, and they checked him in with one of his bandmates. He used towels to sop up the blood, and threw up all the gin in the room.

He was still bleeding when they found him, Paul and Tram. Explanations were lost in the confusion. The cuts were nasty, but Bix refused to be hospitalized. Paul got him a doctor, who put him through an ordeal of stitches, but patched him up. Paul told Tram to stay with Bix, and make sure to put him on the train for home in the morning.

What he meant was a train for Davenport, and his family met the train with shocked faces. Bix’s father overruled him about hospitals, and had him sent to one, where they did their best to heal Bix of everything, even of drink. He’d had a touch of pneumonia and so forth, but what gave the most trouble, for some reason, were his knees: damaged nerves, shouldn’t expect to play a lot of tennis. Bix couldn’t get home to the band right away, though he wanted to—and had to walk with a cane for a while when he did. He still took wrong trains: but he remembered the knives, and carefully avoided trains that went toward the Bowery.

But tonight he’d done it—taken the wrongest of wrong trains, so the ghosts dropped their sheets over Salzman’s and it changed. He was in the the Bowery with knives and an out-of-tune piano. They were breaking bottles, he tried to play “Valencia,” but it was too late—clenched his hands over his face, shouted—the music stopped. He cried no into the silence, then someone said his name, touched his shoulder--he flinched, looked up--

The ghosts were gone--it was Salzman’s after all. Bewildered, Bix stood up, looked around. Joe Sullivan took back the keyboard, and the music started again with the conversation. Someone led him to a table with never an armed Mexican in sight.

Bix laughed a little, and apologized, and told his friend he was afraid his nerves were shot. He needed a drink, and got one, and wished one would be enough. But he sat quietly, and listened to the band, and the panic gradually left him.

When the set was over, the musicians conferred. Then Rex Gavitte, the bass player, came over and sat down with Bix. They chatted, and Rex invited him to stay with a few days with him in Astoria. Rex lived in a little flat there with his wife—it was quiet, and they could look after him for a while. To help him shake the cough.

And the booze, thought Bix, but nobody said it. Still, he didn’t mind being looked after. He said yes. And thank you. And went.

Three days later—was it only three days?—Bix was engaged. What the hell. It seemed there was a conspiracy to save him.

III.

Rex’s wife seemed to be one of the right wives--right for a jazz musician. She hadn’t expected to house a bedraggled cornetist, but coped graciously. They had a spare room that didn’t yet have a child in it, and Bix slept there on a daybed. He brought clothes from 44^th Street, and when he woke up she insisted that he separate the clean from the dirty, so she could send the latter to the laundry: almost everything was dirty, but Bix obeyed. He sometimes grew lax about bathing, but at present it was too warm for him to forget—and she prodded him ostentatiously with clean towels.

She claimed there was never gin in the house, but would be glad to serve him wine with meals, but stipulated that he had to eat those meals. Bix was too far gone in drink to have an appetite—he agreed to the terms, not sure he’d be able to meet them. But as it turned out her cooking was good enough to make food a temptation. One meal seemed to follow another in arpeggiated sequence, and nourishment sort of fed on itself. The rationed alcohol fretted him: he could never get calm, but he never had to shake and suffer.

Rex’s wife worked as a librarian, and was gone during the day. Bix was worried about the propriety of staying with her at night when Rex left to play at Salzman’s, but she told him not to be gothic, that they’d hardly see each other: she went to bed soon after supper and liked to get up in time to breakfast with Rex before she had to leave for work. The radio or piano played quietly at night wouldn’t wake her up, and she knew Bix was a reader. if he didn’t see what he wanted on their bookshelves, she’d be glad to fetch things from the library. “Oh, and by the way, would you mind meeting someone? A friend of mine is coming Monday for dinner, and I’d rather not put her off. She’s connected with entertainment some way, but I know her because she helps out in the library. Nice girl.”

“I don’t want to be in your way,” said Bix. “I could go out instead.”

“I’d rather have you come,” she told him. “Rex will be there. It’ll make the table even. You don’t have to talk if you don’t want to—just sit and eat.”

“Whatever will be less trouble for you,” said Bix. He sensed a little harmless matchmaking: bandsmen’s wives were always doing this for Bix, and he didn’t mind it. He wasn’t in shape for the pursuit--still edemic from drink and with the lingering cold he’d picked up in May at Princeton. But if it pleased his hostess, he could shrug and come to dinner.

“Don’t get up,” said Miss Alice O’Connell: good news for Bix and his dubious knees. “Sorry I’m late. I had to climb a transmitter this afternoon, and barely had time to get the dirt off. I’ll never have my nails done again—it isn’t worth it.“

Dinner was ready and they weren’t allowed to linger. They all sat down to an unpretentious meal, and there was little inter-gender conversation: the women talked about a book called Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, an airy piece of humor that Bix decided he might want to read, while Rex talked about some radio work he hoped to get.

Alice looked up at the mention of radio, and asked Bix if he’d ever played on “The Camel Hour.” Bix told her he had, last fall, and she remarked she rather thought she might have met him. Bix made a polite feint that he remembered her, or ought to (though his eyes weren’t focusing on her now.) But she demurred, and said she didn’t remember him either, only his name—or rather, than the audio engineer she was working with introduced her to a musician named Bix.

“And you wanted to know if I was the same one?” he asked dryly, and she laughed, saying that she had an easier time remembering a Bix than he had remembering an Alice—though there weren’t many woman radio engineers of any sort. It turned out she was a student of broadcast technology at Columbia—yes, she volunteered at the library too, and at one of the museums. At night she worked at a neighborhood dance-hall with one of her sisters.

“How’s the band there?” asked Bix automatically.

“Improvable,” put in Rex.

“You wouldn’t like it,” Alice said.

“I hope you can sleep through it then,” commented Bix. “Seems like your only chance to sleep at all.” The woman was bursting with energy, which Bix usually liked—but in his depressed state the litany of her activities seemed exhausting.

“I can’t sleep,” she laughed. “I have to dance, I’m one of the hostesses.” Then she added, “Rex says you’re somebody in jazz. I must’ve heard you play at the radio station, but I don’t remember. There were equipment problems, and I couldn’t pay attention to anything else.”

Bix shrugged. “I’m just somebody who needed a place to stay.” His eyes were on his plate. “Rex was kind enough to give me one is all.” Rex and his wife had taken up some household issue between themselves, and Bix lapsed into his usual silence.

“So who are you in jazz?” Alice asked.

Bix smiled down at his peas. “I’m just a cornet player from Iowa.”

“I could tell it was Iowa,” she said, “by your accent.”

“Pure New York in yours,” he replied. Bix had in fact found her accent flat, her voice unmusical, and had taken her measure of attractiveness from that. But now he looked up at the other guest, really focusing on her, and missed a breath. She was startlingly gorgeous: eyes blue with panchromatic flashes of green, skin white as the shimmer of violins, and he had never seen hair with so many delicate shades of red. Her figure, what he could see of it, was more generous than fashionable on top, and her legs--he couldn’t see them, but she was a dancer, and he could imagine the rest. He was taken aback, and his hand, none too steady, shook. Then he had a forkful of peas in his lap, which was hardly the way to impress her.

“Oh, have you met?” asked his hostess. She handed Bix a fresh napkin with ironic innocence, and the tiny gloat of good generalship.

“Don’t let her embarrass you,” Alice told Bix. “I never do.”

“I can do that for myself,” said Bix, wiping his lap. Alice seemed oblivious to what had made him drop the peas.

“Never mind,” she told him. “I know you’ve been—ailing.”

“I suppose they told you all about me,” said Bix plaintively.

“Of course,” Alice replied, warm and funny about the eyes. “And they told you almost nothing about me. That way both of us would want to come.”

Bix grinned. “I’m glad I came,” he said, looking at his lap. “I wish you could say the same.”

After that Bix participated more in the conversation—and found himself captivated, and a little challenged. Alice was witty, and well-informed, and left Bix wanting to show her his own wit and intelligence. And downplay his weaknesses, though she had hinted it was too late for that. She didn’t seem to mind it though. And her companionship pulled him out of himself, and away from his habits. The double-tongued wine he drank wasn’t entirely forgotten, but it wasn’t lonely: without intending to, he had eaten fully, and his well-being swelled with the change.

Soon Rex had to leave for Salzman’s--after which his helpmate declined all offers of dishwashing services with an emphatic refusal to wash dishes at all until morning. The three of them took their coffee into the parlor--Bix following Alice, to give her legs and figure the attention they deserved. The upright piano was still open, but he didn’t go there. He leaned against a chair and lit a cigarette while the women hovered in the middle of the room.

“I really ought to make some conventional feint at departure,” said Alice, half-bewildered and half-kidding.

“I don’t see why,” said her hostess. “I need to go to bed soon, but Bix will be up till all hours.”

“I don’t know if Bix wants to talk,” said Alice doubtfully.

“Bix doesn’t have to talk. He’ll be playing the piano.

Bix looked at her gratefully. “With pleasure,” he said. His weakened knees made him feel particularly ungraceful, but he could sit comfortably at any piano in the land. And the room was arranged so he didn’t have to face the women when he played. He flexed his wrists, and his fingers found some chords from “In the Dark,”: he toyed with them a while, then leaned into it to give it an extra touch of swing. The piece had been published, he felt, but prematurely: it was still evolving, and he lost himself for long minutes trying new transitions.

“What was that?” Alice asked when he’d finished. Bix turned, and found that his audience of two had become one. “She’s gone to bed,” said Alice, answering his look. “It’s obvious, isn’t it? They’re matchmaking, but you shouldn’t mind it.”

Bix smiled. “I like it,” he admitted. “You’re fun to talk to, besides being gorgeous. I’m surprised I don’t remember meeting you before.”

“I was wearing pants and a cap,” she said. “For the control room. And you were none too sober—and neither was the engineer who introduced us. He was asking you about after-hours clubs in Harlem. And by the way, I lied when I said I didn’t remember you—though I don’t recall your playing, and I was wrong about the color of your eyes. Did you write what you just played?”

Bix admitted he had, and that it was the last piece of four. “There are more of them?” she asked.

So he played the set through, with “In the Dark” again at the finish. “You changed it, didn’t you?” she asked.

“That’s jazz,” he said. “You’re never sure what will happen next.”

“I’m startled to think that’s not even your instrument,” she said.

He bowed his head. “I can’t play cornet for you now,” he said glumly. “I can’t execute on it. My lip is putrid.”

“I don’t know what that means, but you know best.”

Bix stared at the horn, burrowed in its bag on the top of the piano—a gilded mystery. “I’ll try,” he whispered. “A few notes, just one chorus. For the sound.”

“You don’t have to—“ she began.

“I have to.” His voice was grim. “Don’t expect much. There’ll be mistakes.”

He pulled the bag from its position and moved to a corner of the room, away from Alice and the piano. Only then did he unveil his cornet. Feeling its weight, he inserted the mouthpiece and blew a few notes, bell towards the floor. Not too dreadful. He took a few deep breaths, imagined a beat, and blew “Cryin’ All Day,” the melody and one plaintive chorus. “It needs rhythm and other instruments. Cornet is just my part of a whole—“

He looked up and found her standing too, and was startled into silence by her look. She looked appalled—as if his horn had turned demonic, and he had caused the change. “No wonder you drink too much,” she breathed. “I wish I could help you take care of yourself. You have all you can do to take care of that.”

Bix thought at first she was saying she didn’t like his music, but the movement of an apologetic shrug let him meet her eyes. Then Bix knew what she meant, absolutely. It was there naked on her face. Bix’s music was not hers to take care of, but she wanted to take care of Bix. She looked at him with shifted values that a musician like Bix couldn’t share. She saw the jazz, but saw past it, and what mattered to her was the man.

Bix lowered his eyes: was he mistaken? But when he raised them again, the revelation was unchanged. He set the horn aside and walked across the room to sit beside her. He touched her hand gently, as if fingering a valve, and she smiled. “You’ve put the wrong part of me in the spotlight,” he said. “That’s never happened before. I don’t even know how to like it.”

“You deserve it,” she said, “don’t you think?”

“I can’t do anything to deserve it. I can’t even promise not to drink. I’ve known you for three hours, and I’ve wanted to marry you for two, but I don’t know how to get you to say yes.”

“You couldn’t do anything to make me,” she replied. “But consider it said.”

Could salvation be this simple? Bix shrugged: he had his doubts. But put an arm around his fate and kissed her, and took the chance.

IV.

“Hoagland: that’s a curious name,” remarked Alice.

“His Indiana school friends still call him Hoagmichael,” said Bix. “But it’s Hoagy Carmichael when he writes songs.”

“And Bix Beiderbecke, who never let anyone call him Leon Bismarck,” said Hoagy with a slow laugh. “And this is Alice O’Connell, an Irish gal, marrying a horn player so German nobody can spell his name.”

Bix snorted. “This from Hoagy Carmichael.”

“Oh, I’m half-German already,” Alice laughed. “My mother’s name was Weiss. And I’m Alice because I won’t let myself be called Helen—except by my family, who won’t call me anything else.”

Hoagy sat down on the piano bench of his very New York flat, and comfortably hiked one thin ankle over its opposite thigh. “Glad to meet you at last, Helen Weiss,” he drawled. “Glad Bix is settling down. I’ll do it myself too, someday, if I find the right sweetheart.”

Bix said nothing, just beamed, and looked with well-schooled pride from his friend’s face to his fiancée’s. He had already alerted Alice to what was coming, and come it did. Hoagy rambled into reminiscences of Indiana University, callow days of music and hijinks. Bix was touring the Midwest with a hot jazz group called the Wolverines; Hoagy booked them for a college dance; and Bix met Hoagy. At that time the Wolverines were a hot unit, and laid down the newest rhythm: sock-time. Hoagy fell hard for the group’s music, especially Bix’s part in it, and talked about it now through such a haze of young sentiment that might’ve taken decades to collect, not a mere seven years. Alice had been warned, though, so she tolerated it pretty well.

Bix asked Hoagy to play and sing his songs for them, and Alice liked that better. The same bucolic tinge was beginning to flavor the still-very-young composer’s jazz, but music put to words made it shimmer. Lyrical passages followed each other with uncommon variety, and always the abiding swing. “Stardust,” “Rockin’ Chair”—rural relaxation at its freshest. And “Riverboat Shuffle”: Bix remembered when Hoagy gave him the new tune, and the composer’s delight when the Wolverines recorded the piece for Gennett. The song had caught on: many groups played it now. Bix and Tram had given it more seasoned treatment on a later recording, with a picked group of jazzmen. Even that record was dated now, and the Wolverines disbanded and almost forgotten—cast aside as carelessly as on a winter’s day Bix and Hoagy had once cast cornet breaks over an Indiana cornfield’s earless stubble, a breath of hot music to remind the dead harvests of summer.

But Hoagy had left off playing the cornet. Now he searched piano keyboards without sleep, mining the ivory slats for melody. Hoagy had a day job in finance now, but his songs kept gathering new performances—as would his future songs, if everyday rewards didn’t stop the flow of song. When Hoagy finished and stood up, Bix stood also. “That’s a darb,” he said. “Never give up music, OK?”

Hoagy smiled as he closed the piano. “I won’t, Bix,” he reassured his friend. “Can’t anyway. No more can you.”

Hoagy, the bachelor, had an excellent delicatessen dinner brought in from a local restaurant—he called it a “spread,” and Bix teased him about the down-home word. He said it sounded like one of Jack Teagarden’s meals in Harlem: he went there for hog jowls, greens and chitlins. Jack missed Texas home cooking, and the white joints didn’t offer it.

“And Jack’s real name is Weldon,” added Hoagy, cocking an eyebrow at Alice, who laughed, and squeezed Bix’s knee. They helped themselves casually from the sideboard. Mention of Jack led Bix’s thoughts to a break the trombonist had played lately on Hoagy’s “Washboard Blues”—fascinating turns there, and then Pee Wee came in on clarinet from his own blue universe until—suddenly Hoagy was saying, “When did we make those last sides?” and Bix had to have the question repeated before he took it in.

“In the studio? I don’t remember exactly,” Bix said.

“A year ago, maybe?” Hoagy pressed.

“Thereabouts,” replied Bix.

“So when will you be ready to get a new date and make some more? I’d love to hear you and a few of the fellows on “Stardust.”

Bix sighed. “Hoagy, there are so many other cornet players now.”

“Bix, there are no other cornet players for my music.”

“I can’t do it justice any more—I just can’t. My lip’s a disgrace.”

“You’re looking good,” Hoagy said, “not drinking.”

“Looks don’t matter to shellac.”

“You can do it, Bix. The music will be there—all you need to do is stand up and blow.”

“I can’t even try any more,” said Bix. “Honestly.” Alice looked worriedly from one musician’s face to the other. Hoagy lapsed into silence--but the silence filled with hurt, and Bix couldn’t let the hurt stay there. He breathed, taking it to himself, and said, “You’re not going to like it, chum, but I won’t turn you down. Just wait till I get rid of this cough, will you? So I can practice first? Wait till fall--the studios will be cooler then too.”

“Cooler!” crowed Hoagy. He seemed nervous, and seemed eager to let the disagreement pass without comment. “Remember Gennett? Richmond, Indiana in June. Like a Bessemer furnace in Gary, only noisier, because of the railroad outside.”

“Pretty dim old wax,” said Bix. “The playing was dim too. The first time it was like listening to some other orchestra.” Ghost-sounds drawn out of the air.

“At least we can hear what players sound like,” put in Alice. “We couldn’t before Mr. Edison gave us a way.”

“We can hear ‘em forever, mistakes and all,” said Bix dryly. “No more legendary virtuosos—just a bunch of guys making fifty bucks a side.” Bix was beginning to fret. Hoagy was talking around Alice as if she was a piece of furniture. He had known this to happen to other women who found themselves in the accidental company of jazzmen. But most of those women were pick-ups: Alice was different, and Bix felt Hoagy should acknowledge that. Hoagy and Alice seemed to have little in common besides an attachment to himself, and he didn’t know how to be a conduit between them. Conversation for Bix was a few telling statements surrounded by acres of rests—a few missed opportunities, some unadorned ejaculations and any number of awkward full stops. He could drive the rhythm of a jazz band, but he couldn’t guide this talk into friendly channels, and was rather at a loss.

Alice, luckily, had more command of small talk. Bix could sense she was irked beneath the surface, but she rescued the conversation, asking Hoagy questions about his home and family. The two of them ended up describing b