He turned to face me. “Ah. That, my dear, is Duke Ellington. Do you like it?”
“I’ve never heard anything like it.” The colors were swirling in my head as if they were living things. How beautiful they were.
Truman sat forward on his chair. “You’re seeing good ones, I can tell. I mean those colors of yours. You’re seeing something wonderful, aren’t you?”
“I am,” I said tentatively.
“Tell me.” Longing graced his voice. I liked hearing it.
“Purple and yellow,” I said. “Like flowers.”
He sat back, lifted his glass to me in a salute. “You don’t know how lucky you are.”
I felt my eyes widen. I didn’t know what to say to this. I certainly didn’t feel lucky. I hadn’t for what seemed like a long time. And especially not today.
“Celine doesn’t like the Duke.” Truman raised the tumbler to his mouth, tipped it back, and swallowed. “She doesn’t like jazz.Can you believe it? She won’t let me play it in the house when she’s home.”
“Is that what this is? Jazz?”
He poured another swallow from the bottle into his glass. “It is indeed. The best there is.”
I started to reach for his dinner plate sitting next to the ashtray, but Truman waved me away from the dish as he rose from the chair. “Just leave it.” He walked over to the bar, grabbed a bottle and two wineglasses, and came back to the chair. “Join me in a drink? You need to try this. It’s our newest vintage. A sherry. The most exquisite we’ve ever made.”
He began to pour from the bottle. The liquid was a robust red, almost brown.
“Oh, I don’t think—”
But he thrust the little glass toward me. “I just found out you had a birthday.”
“Yes, I did, but—”
“And nothing was done for it, right? No cake? Nothing?”
“Mrs. Calvert gave me some chocolates. Nice ones.”
“I can’t believe it came and went and Celine just now told me. Come. Let’s toast your seventeenth year properly. You haven’t tasted sherry this fine in your life.”
I took the glass with hesitation. “I’ve never tasted sherry at all.”
“Then I insist. Did you know Columbus traveled to the New World with barrels of it? It’s Spanish. Sherry is Spanish. We don’t have the right grapes here in California, but the Rosseau muscats have helped us create something quite nice. Try it.”
I raised the glass to my lips and sipped. The wine was honey-sweet and warmed me like sunshine.
“Impressive, right? Especially for our first try.”
“It’s... delicious.” I took another sip, and another. The drink was easing my disappointment of being startled at seeingbeautiful Alice Barrow in Celine’s kitchen and Wilson’s hand on the small of her back when she walked out of it.
Truman poured more for me and then set down his wineglass. He picked up the tumbler from before and splashed more whisky into it.
The phonograph began to play a new tune, this one as captivating as the one before it. I was feeling toasty all over, and the aches from the hours in the field were falling away as though my sore muscles were knotted threads being untied.
“Have a seat.” Truman motioned to the second chair. “We’ll pretend that today is your birthday, since we sadly didn’t do anything proper to celebrate it. We can play a game of cards and sip our drinks and listen to the Duke.”
I knew I should take his plate to the kitchen and get to bed, but my birthday had in fact gone by pretty much unnoticed. And today had ended up being a terrible day. I sat down in the other chair, telling myself it was just for one game of cards, one more glass of the delectable wine, and then bed.
Truman poured himself another tumbler and dealt the cards for gin, and soon it really did start to feel like it was not an ordinary day. We played three hands while he drank whisky and I consumed a third glass of sherry. And while we played, he told me stories of the Great War, how he’d loved being a soldier.
“I never regretted enlisting, even though it nearly killed me,” he said. “I’ve never been as close to death as I was in the trenches of Montreuil, but I swear, I’ve never felt as alive as I did then. I was part of something grand, something that mattered.”
