By Sophie T.

My right ear is to the ground, my eyes closed. I can feel vibrations through the soft, wood floors on my cheekbone, but I have to strain to distinguish the muffled sounds from below. There�s some laughing. There�s shouting now, but I recognize it to be without anger. Hovering above it all is the sound of a piano, notes chasing each other. I used to crouch like this until I fell asleep, my fingernails set comfortably in between the worn-down floorboards of my sitting room. My odd manner frightened mother for a few months, when she would find me missing in the morning from my parents� bed. After time, however, she grew to expect to find me curled asleep on the floor.

Scolded as I was by mother when I was scooped up in her warm, white arms, I saw a flicker of a grin across my father�s face as she struggled to put me to bed properly. I knew that I could continue my absurd little game of where does the music come from?? despite mother�s chiding about children growing up in �bad neighborhoods� with �wine bar lullabies.� These are my earliest memories.

We had to continue living on 14th Street, above Tom Sharkey�s Saloon(1), because in 1905 we became a family of four. I was three years old when my sister, Catherine, was born. I was thrilled that there was something in the house for me to play with other than lifeless penny-toys and cabinet doors (which made a satisfying swap sound when I flung them open). I was rarely jealous of the attention she received. Actually, different from most homes, in which the older sibling cannot accept such a drastic change in family dynamics, in our family it seemed that Catherine was jealous of me. She wanted to do everything I did, and when she could not she got very angry and would pout and stare at me with those dark, mischievous, black eyes. She had taken those beautiful Sicilian eyes from my father, along with his head of thick, sable hair. I had inherited my mother�s light, gray eyes and pale, blond locks. Indeed, even by appearances it seemed that Catherine and my father were a pair, as were mother and I.

As I started going to school I became the sedulous child, to the delight of my mother. Catherine, on the other hand, would have none of it. When awake, she would peer over my shoulder and, after absorbing all she could, tried to sabotage my studies with the bottle of India Ink I had besides my writing tablet. My sister�s need to see and do everything resulted in two things. First, she was able to walk at nine months and read at four years, and second, I began to work at night.

My father had built an oak bureau when he and mother moved to our walk-up. He had painted the bureau a light, moss color, detailing pink roses scrolling across the drawers. I worked here by lamplight, listening to the ragtime floating up through the floorboards. Tracing the paint with a finger, I often wondered what circumstances made father, the proud first-generation-American Michael Amari, work as a livery driver and not a painter? Perhaps solely the need for my mother�s approval had transformed the spirited 24 year old Michael into a self-employed family man. Father had risen from being a carriage driver of a successful, Bowery livery service, to running his own service. He called it �Loyal Livery Services,� and it consisted of one automobile: a gleaming, third-hand, black Stanley Steamer, and one driver: himself.

During his work as a livery driver in the Bowery, Michael often drove elite New Yorkers to the fashionable sections of the city. On one of these occasions, Michael clip-clopped a monocled, elderly man to the awning of Delmonico�s, on 26th and Fifth(2). Before he pulled away, he caught the eye of a �golden locked belle� serving a Lobster Newburg(3) to society ladies. Father was so stunned that he almost got run over by a trolley running on the Fifth Avenue Line. The next time he delivered a customer to Delmonico�s, father made sure to meet the waitress, Anne Kane, and he courted her endlessly afterwards.

Anne was supporting her stern, widowed mother at this time and welcomed a break from responsibility. Father provided this freedom, once �chartering� his employer�s carriage one weekend and driving Anne to Coney Island to see the first roller coaster(4), and �your mother in her bathing costume.� I can imagine how she fell for those dark eyes and his proposals to �paint me forever.� Anne was, however, from the middle classes originally. She only found herself struggling financially because of her father�s death and her mother�s expensive medical treatments (she suffered from rheumatism and had had a recent stroke). Anne was also a pretty girl of nineteen who got many compliments from the diners at Delmonico�s. She felt (although she would never admit to it) deserving of high society. The year 1898 gave Michael the chance to propose to Anne. Delmonico�s moved to midtown, 44th Street(5), too far from Anne�s 10th Street apartment, and Anne�s mother passed away. Father was let go from his position as a livery driver in 1898 on accounts of his returning a carriage four hours late one evening.

Michael convinced Anne that now was the time for new beginnings; a new apartment, a new cab, a new century. The two were wed the next fall.

Father always told my sister and me that our parents� marriage came around in part because of Isadora Duncan. On that fateful evening when father had returned the livery carriage late, he had driven a striking brunette to the door of a mansion. Starting out with the usual idle conversation, rooted on nothing and going nowhere, father became more engrossed with the face peering out of the carriage�s wool blankets. The lady spoke to him with confidence, with intelligence and with a certain power. She, he learned, was Isadora Duncan, a dancer (who he was sorry to say he had never heard of), returning from Europe to New York to perform solo dances for wealthy patrons(6). Father watched the entire performance through the window of the great house. He didn�t notice his hands were frostbitten as he gazed into the warm parlor.

Father would remember the dance, humming what I later found out were Beethoven�s Ninth and melodies of Stravinsky. At this point, mother, disgusted, and I, bored, retired to different areas of the apartment. Catherine, on the other hand, would abandon her paper dolls in order to imitate the dances of my father�s descriptions. She flew around the house, bare-legged, with swirling hair, twirling to father�s delectation and mother�s dismay. Although shocking, I had to admit Catherine had found a better pastime than opening cabinet doors.

In 1920 Bernice bobbed her hair(7) and so did my sister. This was the year of the Immigrant Quota Act, a phrase that could only be heard in our house if spit off the edge of father�s tongue. The Act allowed (and I use the term loosely) only 3% of the population of each nationality to immigrate, based on census reports of 1910. But people accepted it. In the Spring, the Ku Klux Klan elevated heightened terror against Southern Negroes, but few people up North noticed. In the Summer, however, SinClair Lewis published Main Street(8) and the urban sophisticates roared in favor. On February 6th, Charlie Chaplin debuted in �The Kid,� and crowds rushed to theaters. Now that the war had ended, the people needed a time free from worries. Prohibition had begun, but speakeasies were spreading like typhoid, one taking the place of Sharkey�s, right under my sister�s bed.

The ideal woman was no longer boned and corseted into and �S-shaped� silhouette and did not wear large, heavy hats like my mother. Waistlines dropped, and hemlines crept up the leg. Catherine was having a fine time rehemming her dresses, half an inch shorter per week and maybe mother won�t notice. Mother did notice and, thinking that Catherine had grown, proceeded to buy her a new dress from the Montgomery Ward Catalog.

After hearing that she would have to wear the dress for a while, because mother just wouldn�t be set back another four dollars ninety-eight, Catherine ran out of the apartment, crying. It seems she wound up at the barber shop on 12th Street, because my sister came home with her black hair cutting across the line of her chin.

I kept my mouth shut, as usual when Catherine was angry. This new look was one thing in the picture-house, but I did not want to see my sister become a cherub-mouthed siren. As mother worded my same sentiments, I saw that she was restraining herself from touching the girl in any way. Then it came, a loud slap across the jaw.

Catherine stayed in her bed in our room for the majority of three days. At night, I knew she could hear our parents arguing like I could, I knew she understood that I would be out of the house more, working as a headline scout for the Pictorial Review (a woman�s magazine, I know, but I needed to start somewhere). I also knew that it was not long before the carefree sounds of the speakeasy under her drew Catherine into its arms.

On my day off, I took Catherine with me to see The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse(9) starring a new actor, Rudolph Valentino. The young man had the dark, Italian looks of our father. In accord with the new fashions, he had parted hair, slicked back with brilliantine(10). I wondered if I could somehow achieve his wild grace or intrigue. Catherine made it clear to me that it would be a great deal more than a jar of brilliantine to transform me into such a man. I struck back with the obvious remark, that Valentino had tangoed himself right into her little heart. Rudolph Valentino had become my hero, the kind of man I aspired to be. Catherine, like that rest of the girls in New York, had fallen for him.

That night I awoke to find Catherine�s bed empty. I checked the kitchen, the lavoratory, and the sitting room, but our apartment was small enough for me to know that she was not there. It was cold outside, being the end of November in the city, so I slipped on wool slacks and pulled my worn Fedora over the tops of my ears. Where are my gloves? Rubbing my hands together as I stepped out of 126 14th Street, I rounded the corner into the alley I knew to hold the entrance of the club. Still groggy with sleep, I had not really considered what I�d do when I found my sister there. Valentino would probably use his cunning to win his sister back, but I did not feel cunning at this moment. Behind three stacked wooden crates, I found a door with a looking slot. I tried to pry the slot open with my numb fingers, but it wouldn�t give. I finally knocked like a gentleman, hoping to be received as one. The slot snapped back, a blast of heat warmed my face, and two black, little eyes enveloped in folds of skin stared out at me.

I continued demanding to see my sister who, through a number of stories, ended up being my �poor, sick, old mother who had mistakenly wandered in to the club, and who I needed desperately to find� until it was obviously useless. I took a wooden crate to sit on and stayed here for a few hours. At five, I reluctantly climbed up the flight of stairs, stopping to listen to the music at the South wall for a few minutes.

The next day, I came home from the magazine with a copy of Modern Priscilla I had picked up for mother for twenty cents at the news stand. I usually brought Catherine something, but I thought coming home empty-handed would tell her I knew, and would help to avoid a direct confrontation. I did not speak to Catherine and only looked at her out of the corner of my eye. She was smiling through sleepy eyes, even as she finished schoolwork or swept the floor.

That night, I stayed up until I saw my sister crawl out of bed. This time, she came over to my bed to wake me up.

�Come now, wouldn�t you rather come with me now or have me go out alone with all those lushes walking about? I�m only seventeen.� I watched Catherine put stain on her lips and pencil on her eyebrows. She slipped on a white taffeta dress, cut in the gar�onne style(11), the fabric of which I recognized to be one of mother�s old dresses. After I made her take the colors off her face, we walked around the corner until we reached the door. She hammered out a strange pattern of knocks on the door with her little fist, and the slot opened. �It�s Cat,� she said, �and my brother.�

The door opened to reveal a hot room, filled with little round tables surrounding a raised semi-circle of a stage. There was a wooden bar of course, with a dirty looking-glass behind it for the barkeep to see what was going on at all times. Mostly men sat at the tables, often with women in loose, colorful dresses and bobbed hair. The women sipped drinks and laughed while playing with the long beaded chains that hung around their necks. Men who were with women laughed, too as they drank, running fingers along white arms. Older men sat alone at tables, drinking, and occasionally looking at shiny gold watches at the end of long fobes(12) as if they had somewhere else to be. The rich man and the working man rubbed elbows at the bar, where social barriers fell in the common pursuit of drink. I stood there, not knowing what to do with myself, as �Cat� hung on my arm and smiled. Then the jazz started playing. A piano was centered on stage, the player�s right arm facing the audience. We took a table next to the stage, in the left corner of the room where we could see the pianist�s hands barrel across the keys. Catherine was more entranced when the dancers came out, shaking their shoulders and letting arms and legs fly.

Over the next few years, I went out at night to jazz clubs. This was a time when Sidney Bechet recorded �Wild Cat Blues� with Clarence Williams� Blue Five, Gershwin premiered �Rhapsody in Blue� with the Paul Whiteman Orchestra in Aeolian Hall. People downtown were headed to Harlem to take in the scenes at Connie�s Inn, The Nest, and Small�s Paradise. I even saw Duke Ellington and Orchestra open at the Cotton Club. I grew into my role as an avid jazz fan, occasionally catching my sister dancing at Jack and Charlie�s, on 49th Street(13).

But the Jazz Age ended as quickly as it began. We began to see the bitter effects of such carefree years. In March of 1925, mobster Johnny Torro left Chicago in the hands of Al Capone to come to the empire state. In 1926, the same year his �Son of the Sheik� premiered, Rudolph Valentino died after surgery to a perforated ulcer. He was 31 years old. It was estimated that there were 100,000 speakeasies in New York alone(14), a dramatic contrast to the 16,000 taverns that had existed before prohibition. Father cried in September of 1927, when Isadora Duncan�s free-flowing scarf caught the revolving back wheel of her automobile as she cruised along the French Riviera. Our heroes were not invincible.

People ignored warning signals, blinded by the sixty homers that Babe Ruth hit into the sky. Flappers and young things continued to dance the Lindy Hop(15), the Charleston and the Black Bottom right into Black Thursday(16). The New York Times headline on Sunday, October 13, 1929 read:

STOCK PRICES WILL STAY AT HIGH LEVEL FOR YEARS TO COME, SAYS OHIO ECONOMIST

Twelve days later, the world opened the paper to see:

PRICES OF STOCKS CRASH IN HEAVY LIQUIDATION, TOTAL DROP OF BILLIONS ---------- PAPER LOSS $4,000,000,000 ---------- 2,600,000 Shares Sold In The Final Hour In Record Decline ---------- MANY ACCOUNTS WIPED OUT (17)

Americans had to leave the fun behind and prepare for the somber uphill climb that lay ahead. I had my magazine experience to fall back on, but Catherine had to go home and live with our disheartened father and worn-out mother. Free spirits like my sister suffered the greatest, thrown off balance by a vision of splendor taken away just as it began to materialize.