wanted – ‘Okay,’ he’d say to almost any suggestion. That was the problem – sometimes Bobby didn’t really want to do anything but curl up with a book. But Duval didn’t like to read – ‘I gets too much of that in school,’ he said. If Bobby lay on his bed with a book, Duval would watch the old black-and-white TV, then after a while Vanetta would come back and switch it off. ‘You watched enough now,’ she’d say to her grandson. Which would leave Duval with absolutely nothing to do. If he went up to the kitchen Vanetta would send him back – ‘to play’. And Bobby would sigh then, put his book down and try to think of something they could do.
There were only so many games they could play. Board games grew boring, and make-believe wore thin. They’d take a blanket and fold it up, then one of them would tuck three dozen plastic soldiers in its fold, defending a mountain pass, like the Germans fighting in Italy in the history book Bobby had read. The resulting game could easily take until it was time for Duval to go home with Vanetta. But if you played it every day, it got dull.
Though now at least there was music.
Theirs was not a musical family. There was a piano in the living room which Lily played dutifully in preparation for her weekly lesson; no one else touched it. His father had the radio on when he made breakfast – WMAQ, where show tunes and crooners from what seemed to Bobby a Neolithic era alternated with the traffic reports and weather forecast. And Vanetta listened to the radio too – WVON, the Voice of the Negro – as she ironed in the kitchen, humming to the songs. Once when her heroine Aretha Franklin got played, she burst into song herself, singing along to ‘Do Right Woman’, then laughing when she saw Bobby staring at her in amazement.
Then Mike got a new record player for Christmas. He had been a Beach Boys fan, once attending a concert at McCormick Place; for the first time their father let him take the car. Lately, he had been buying harder-sounding stuff, the Rolling Stones in particular; he played ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ over and over, until Bobby begged him to stop.
But Duval inspected Mike’s collection of LPs with disbelief. ‘Where are the 45s?’ he asked.
‘Mike doesn’t buy those. He says they’re a waste of money.’
‘Yeah, but where’s the real stuff, man?’ He had started lately to call Bobby ‘man’, which to Bobby seemed grown-up and cool.
‘What real stuff?’
‘You know, the Temptations, Marvin Gaye, the Four Tops. I don’t see none of that here.’
And the next time he came to play he brought a dozen 45s in his school bag, a green book bag Bobby had been glad to give him now that his father had bought him a satchel case. He put a record on and the room filled with a slow deep beat. Duval turned up the sound. Fortunately only Vanetta was home.
It was ‘What Becomes of the Broken Hearted’, familiar-sounding from the radio. But the actual record sounded different, almost as if the singer was in the room with them. It was beautiful.
He saw that Duval was singing along, and then to his astonishment he realised that the pure voice he’d been marvelling at was Duval’s. His friend was simply amazing: he had a rich melodic voice that didn’t seem to belong to his little boy’s body. When the scratchy needle dug into the vinyl grooves, the slightly buck-toothed geeky guy was transformed, as he shed all his inhibitions and lost himself in the music.
When the record ended Duval smiled shyly. ‘That’s Jimmy Ruffin. Good, ain’t it?’
He had to say something. ‘You can really sing, Duval. You’re great.’
Duval shook his head modestly. ‘You should hear my cousin Jermaine. Now that is singing.’
One Wednesday when they met across from Steinways as usual, they didn’t head for the apartment but instead got in Vanetta’s car. ‘Are we going to your place?’ asked Bobby as they drove west out of the neighbourhood, through Washington Park and along Garfield Avenue.
‘Nope,’ said Vanetta. ‘It’s a surprise.’ And for a moment Bobby fantasised that he and Duval were being kidnapped, taken by Vanetta away . . . to where? Mississippi, of course, and he wondered what it would really be like, since he was of an age now to know intuitively that dreams did not always correspond to