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“Pretty darn good,” said Lisa, at my elbow. I felt immortal. Then I realised that she was stealing glances at Willy. “Want to order something, now that you’re not too nervous to eat it?”
I blushed, but in the dark, who could tell? “PB and J,” I told her.
“PB and J?” Willy repeated.
We both stared at him, but it was Lisa who said, “Peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Don’t you call them that?”
The pause was so short I’m not sure I really heard it. Then he said, “I don’t think I’ve ever been in a coffeehouse where you could order a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.”
“This is it,” Lisa told him. “Crunchy or smooth, whole wheat or white, grape jelly or peach preserves.”
“Good grief. Crunchy, whole wheat, and peach.”
“Non-conformist,” she said admiringly.
He turned to me when she went towards the kitchen. “You were pretty good,” he said. “I like the way you sing. For that last one, though, you might try mountain minor.”
“What?”
He got an eager look on his face. “Come on,” he said, sprang out of his chair, and led the way towards the back.
We sat on the back steps until the open stage was over, and he taught me about mountain minor tuning. His guitar was a deep-voiced old Gibson with the varnish worn off the strategic spots, and he flat-picked along with me, filling in the places that needed it. Eventually we went back inside, and he taught me about pull-offs. As Steve stacked chairs, we played “Newry Highwayman” as a duet. Then he taught me “Shady Grove,” because it was mountain minor, too.
I’d worked hard at the banjo, and I enjoyed playing it. But I don’t think I’d ever been aware of making something beautiful with it. That’s what those two songs were. Beautiful.
And Lisa moved through the room as we played, clearing tables, watching us. Watching him. Every time I looked up, her eyes were following his face, or his long fingers on the guitar neck.
I got home at two in the morning. My parents almost grounded me; I convinced them I hadn’t spent the night raising hell by showing them my new banjo tricks. Or maybe it was the urgency with which I explained what I’d learned and how, and that I had to have more.
When I came back to Orpheus two nights later, Willy was there. And Lisa, fair and graceful, was often near him, often smiled at him, that night and all the nights after it. Sometimes he’d smile back. But sometimes his face would be full of an intensity that couldn’t be contained in a smile. Whenever Lisa saw that, her eyes would widen, her lips would part, and she’d look frightened and fascinated all at once. Which made me feel worse than if he’d smiled at her.
And sometimes he would ignore her completely, as if she were a cup of coffee he hadn’t ordered. Then her face would close up tight with puzzlement and hurt, and I’d want to break something.
I could have hated him, but it was just as well I didn’t. I wanted to learn music from Willy and to be near Lisa. Lisa wanted to be near Willy. The perfect arrangement. Hah.
And who could know what Willy wanted?
Fourth of July, Independence Day 1970, promised to be the emotional climax of the summer. Someone had organised a day of Vietnam War protests, starting with a rally in Riverside Park and ending with a torchlight march down State Street. Posters about it were everywhere—tacked to phone poles, stuck on walls, and all over the tables at Orpheus. The picture on the posters was the photo taken that spring, when the Ohio National Guard shot four students on the Kent State campus during another protest: a dark-haired woman kneeling over a dead student’s body, her head lifted, her mouth open with weeping, or screaming. You’d think a photo like that would warn you away from protesting. But it gives you the feeling that someone has to do something. It gets you out on the street.
Steve was having a special marathon concert at the coffeehouse: Sherman and Henley, the Rose Hip String Band, Betsy Kaske, and—surprise—Willy Silver and John Deacon. True, we were scheduled to go on at seven, when the audience would be smallest, but I didn’t care. I had been hired to play. For money.
The only cloud on my horizon was that Willy was again treating Lisa as one of life’s non-essentials. As we set up for the show, I could almost see a dotted line trailing behind Willy that was her gaze, fixed on him.
Evening light was slanting through the door when we hit the stage, which made me feel funny. Orpheus was a place for after dark, when its shabby, struggling nature was cloaked with night-and-music magic. But Willy set his fiddle under his chin, leaned into the microphone, and drew out with his bow one sweet, sad, sustained note. All the awareness in the room—his, mine, and our dozen or so of audience’s—hurtled to the sharp point of that one note and balanced there. I began to pick the banjo softly and his note changed, multiplied, until we were playing instrumental harmony. I sang, and if my voice broke a little, it was just what the song required:
The sun rises bright in France, and fair sets he,
Ah, but he has lost the look he had in my ain country.
We made enough magic to cloak three shabby coffeehouses with glamour. When I got up the nerve to look beyond the edge of the stage, sometime in our fourth song, we had another dozen listeners. They’d come to line State Street for the march and our music had called them in.
Lisa sat on the shag rug in front of the stage. Her eyes were bright, and for once, her attention didn’t seem to be all for Willy.
Traditional music mostly tells stories. We told a lot of them that night. I felt them all as if they’d happened to friends of mine. Willy seemed more consumed by the music than the words, and songs he sang were sometimes almost too beautiful. But his strong voice never quavered or cracked like mine did. His guitar and fiddle were gorgeous, always, perfect and precise.
We finished at eight-thirty with a loose and lively rendition of “Blues in the Bottle,” and the room was close to full. The march was due to pass by in half an hour.
We bounded off stage and into the back room. “Yo,” said Willy, and stuck out his right hand. I shook it. He was touched with craziness, a little drunk with the music. He looked…not quite domesticated. Light seemed to catch more than usual in his green eyes. He radiated a contained energy that could have raised the roof.
