On Sunday mornings, Dwight and his mother and sisters always dressed for church. This was the most important day of Dwight’s mother’s life, the day she prayed for everybody: her mother, and President Truman, and the children, and Joe Louis, and Clark Gable, and even Dwight’s father, who’d gone out for a bottle of milk one night during the war and had never come back. On Sundays, starch cut Dwight’s neck; his sisters smelled like soap; his mother wore her blue hat with the white veil. Today was Sunday, and Dwight’s neck hurt.
When they came out onto the stoop on Gates Avenue, the biggest car in the world pulled up to the curb. It was all shiny and black. A man with a cap was driving. The door opened and the horn man got out, and waved good-bye to a white woman. A white woman. The horn man looked bleary and surprised. He put the horn down.
“Where the hell I’m at?” he asked as the limousine pulled away.
“Brooklyn,” Dwight’s mother said sharply. “Outside the house you’re stayin’ at.” A pause. “On Sunday. The Lord’s Day.”
“Well, abide by me, Momma,” the horn man said, smiling a big, wonderful smile. “And hey! Lay a little prayer on me, would ya, Momma? Like a good Baptist.”
“I don’t even know your name,” Dwight’s mother said icily. The horn man lofted the scuffed black case.
“Charlie Chan,” he said, bowing formally at the waist, and then hurrying up the stoop. Dwight had never seen his mother look the way she looked at that moment.
The horn man did not go out that night, or the night after that, and, at dinner, Dwight wondered out loud if the man was all right. Dwight’s mother said he was probably worn out from sinning. Then Dwight said it would be Christian to bring the man some soup, and Dwight’s mother was trapped. The boy brought the bowl of soup upstairs, with a plate over the top to keep it from spilling. Then he heard the horn: the door to the roof was open and Dwight followed the sound. The man was standing on the roof in a gray bathrobe and street shoes, his eyes closed, playing his glistening horn for the trees and the backyards and the birds of Brooklyn.
Dwight waited there, mysteriously chilled by the music, until the horn man finished. Then the man opened his eyes and looked at the boy and smiled. “What you got there, man? Oh, hey, chicken noodle! That for me? Chickendamnnoodle! The best! Damn!”
He laid the horn against a chimney and took the bowl in both hands and drank greedily. Dwight offered him a spoon; he ignored it, and shoved the final noodle into his mouth with his fingers. Then he saw Dwight looking at the horn. “Go ahead, man. Give it a try.”
Dwight lifted the horn, feeling the chill enter him again, and blew into it. Nothing happened. The man showed him how to hold it, where to put his fingers, how to breathe, and that evening on the roof on Gates Avenue, it began. He hummed a tune in bed. Over and over. A tune he learned from Charlie Chan. At the end of the week, the eleven-year-old boy could play “London Bridge” on this thing called an alto saxophone. He went up to the roof every day. The horn man was his teacher. The boy added “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” They met each evening on the roof, and played together for an hour, the boy bringing soup, the man full of music. After their session, the man went to work, way over in New York. Dwight’s mother began to include the man in her prayers. And Dwight told everybody he was going to be a musician just like Charlie Chan. Everyone except his mother.
One afternoon, after playing stickball with his friends, he hurried to the family apartment. The kitchen window was open to the summer. His mother was beside it, listening to the music of the horn man drifting down from the roof. She was very still, her face lost in melancholy. Then she heard Dwight and turned.
“Jus’ takin’ a break, son,” she said with a chuckle. “Need something to eat?”
“No, Momma. I gotta go back. Just, you know—”
He darted into the bathroom, closed the door. When he returned, he took a deep breath.
“Momma, I wanna tell you something,” he said. “I want to be a musician. Just like Charlie Chan.”
“No, no, no,” Dwight’s mother protested. “You’re gonna be a lawyer! A doctor! No musicians! Just look at that man.
But Dwight persisted. He took a summer job at a grocery store a few blocks away, saving money for his own Selmer. He found a radio station that played jazz. He learned sixteen bars of “April in Paris.” One evening, he even told Charlie Chan he wanted to be a musician.
