The Magic Keys Albert Murray (read novels website TXT) 📖

to know him back then, because he was an upperclassman, two years ahead of me, and had not come back to complete his senior year, by which time I had come to be on fairly casual speaking terms with most of the more advanced students that I was most curious about. I did know that he was enrolled in the school of music and that he often served as the student concertmaster who conducted the band when it backed up the cheerleaders during athletic events in the campus bowl and field house. But I recognized his walk as soon as I saw him moving along up the sidewalk about ten yards ahead of me.

He was doing his own individual sporty-almost-limp variation of the marching band trumpet player’s parade ground strut. I still don’t remember having thought or wondered about him after I myself left the campus, but suddenly there he was again, posture correct but shoulders a little less rigid than an eager beaver infantry cadet, right leg with an ever so slightly but unmistakable hint of a drag, which added up to not quite the prance and not quite the lope that anticipate ponies posting on the right diagonal, so that in mufti the effect was that of a civilian musician rather than a military band man.

As I picked up my stride to overtake him I realized that I remembered his name from that long ago although I had never used it to address him person to person. Because the only verbal encounters I ever had with him were when he was on duty as a student assistant checking books in and out at the circulation desk in the main reading room of the library.

Each time, he looked at my name and stamped my slip and filed the card and pushed the book gently toward me and said, Handle with care. And all I said was, Thanks. Now as I came up close enough behind him on Fifth Avenue that many school terms later, I still didn’t call him by name. What I said in my old roommate’s mock conspiratorial stage sotto voce was, Hey, let that goddamn bucket down right there where you at, old pardner. You know what the man said!

And as if we were rehearsing the sequence in a theater piece he turned and looked at me, not in recognition, but as if more amused than surprised and said, What say, man! How are things down the way? And I said, Still in process, man, still in process, and told him my name and my class years, and that was when I said, Edison, Taft Edison. Taft Woodrow Edison. And he shook his head and said, What can I tell you, man. What can I tell you. My folks were big on newsworthy names. All I can do is try to make mine mean what I want it to mean so that when somebody drops it in there on me it sounds as if it belongs as much to me as to that son of a bitch Wilson, if you know what I mean.

And I said, I think so. And then, looking at the attaché case he was carrying, I said, Hey, but man, that don’t really look like no bucket I ever did see either on land or at sea, and no trumpet case, either. Is that some sheet music and your batons or something in there?

And he said, Man, that trumpet stays in the same case I had back on the campus. Same trumpet, same case. And when I said, So what’s up, man? He said, Man, I really don’t think of myself as a musician anymore. My big thing now is trying to find out what my interest in composition and orchestration can do for me as an apprentice writer, man.

Which didn’t really surprise me, since I for one had always seen him most often not in the music area of the campus but either in the library or on his way to or from Professor Carlton Poindexter’s survey course in the novel. He had not been a member of either of the two student dance orchestras, but I did remember seeing him and hearing him from time to time in the brass section of the chapel orchestra. So not only was I not surprised but even before he said what he said I realized that he had been an upperclassman who had always come to mind above all others when I thought about advanced reading courses, even after he had left campus.

What did surprise me somewhat was the way he was dressed. I had also remembered him as one of the upperclassmen who, not unlike my roommate, dressed in the collegiate style that I most admired in the fashion magazines: three-button tweed jacket with patch pockets and welt-seamed lapels, usually with contrasting tan twill or gray flannel pleated slacks and no hat. You stopped wearing hats and caps at Mobile County Training School in those days by the time you became a junior, knowing, however, that if you went to college you were going to have to wear a beanie or “crab” cap during your freshman year.

Now on Fifth Avenue he was wearing a snap brim brown felt hat, a three-piece Brooks Brothers business suit, wing-tipped shoes (which brought back to mind the two-toned moccasins and plain-toed brown crepe sole shoes back on the campus), tattersall shirt with a solid tie. All of which along with the fine leather attaché case he was carrying gave him the look that I thought of as being post–Ivy League Madison Avenue and/or Wall Street. Not that there wasn’t also an unmistakable touch of uptown hipness about the way he wore it all even so.

I said, Damn, man, that just might turn out to be old BTW’s freshwater bucket after all. And that was when he said, Man, if I could bring this stuff off that I hope I’ve got coming along in this briefcase,