Sonata to Broadway Baby by Stephanie Johnson
Her father’s trumpet sat in its case for several years. A glittering icon of her youth, the silver and pearl keys less important in memory than the sound. What sound: the brassy, rumbling roll of arrogance and self-importance was scared, the pinnacle of religion. The warming up—that incandescent A—still was like prayer.
Last week, she heard the noise fluttering down the street, brass notes flapping wildly, a crow in downtown Manhattan. It was that same A, that growing caw of resonance. Mid-chop, she threw her head out the kitchen window, the smell of the café escaping with her. Her eyes scanned madly for the father of her childhood, but found only taxis, a thick yellow line like a highway on a map. There was no jazz man.
That night, she called her dad. They hadn’t talked for months, a relationship befuddled with grief for their mother-wife and one-way phone tag. When he answered, she knew he was preparing for emergency.
“No,” she sighed. “Just checking in.” After a long pause, “I heard a trumpet playing on the street today and thought of you.”
“Oh.” He was quiet. He never knew what to do with her bursts of affection; prom photos punctuated the living room piano at home, struck with a Bible distance between father and daughter. “I started playing again.”
“Not at the corner of Broadway and fifth, by chance?” She tried, but his laughter was delayed, the space filled by the broken hum of a couple arguing downstairs.
“No. At church.”
“Oh? What do you play?”
“Well, I played taps for the 9/11 service recently.”
“Ah! Cool. Good for you, Dad.”
“Thanks.” Then, “I enjoy it.”
It’s quiet again. The phone crackles. Her apartment heater clicks in its metallic belly; the dishwasher fills. Outside, New York City buzzes and spirals like a ballad. She remembers how she propelled from the kitchen window, foie gras simmering voraciously behind her, how she had searched for the instrument that stole her father’s joy.
“I’d like to hear that,” she found herself muttering absently, raking a hand through pick-up-sticks hair. In sepia-shadowed memory, she remembered him saying once that her mother had been the one in charge of lullabies.
“I could…” he muttered, and he disappeared into the shuffling and fluttering of papers; noises she could only assume was sheet music kissing the stained, lilac carpet of his study, converted from her room after she’d moved to NYU and stayed through Christmas her freshman year. “Could play for you on speakerphone.”
“Okay.” She scarcely breathed.
Her father, she could imagine, struggled with the antiquated landline, glowing green buttons remembered from teenage years of whispered telephone calls to boys at two AM. It wasn’t much later that she heard the cushioned keys clicking and raising scales, and then, finally, that beautiful A. She put her own phone, a streamlined mess of touch screens and sleek logos, on speaker and let the warm, baptizing sound lap at her feet, flood the apartment and leak, drip, flow over the window sill, the New York skyline, stringing together the high rise buildings.
Stephanie Renae Johnson is a recent graduate of Flagler College and now works as a production artist at Xulon Press. Previously, Stephanie worked as an editor assistant for Jason Cook at Ampersand Books. Stephanie’s work has been published by poeticdiversity, danse macabre, writing raw, opiumpoetry, Orlando Sentinel Online, and The Flagler Review.