Music Makers by Kate Wilhelm Page A

room that appeared to be stadium-sized. Passing it, he could see more plants, groups of chairs, sofas flanking a fireplace . . . Another broad staircase led up from the foyer.
    She kept walking past the stairs. “I thought we’d be more comfortable in the family room,” she said. “In here.”
    She had stopped at a doorway and motioned for him to enter. This room looked out over the back of the property with flower beds and lawn, and beyond them a massive oak tree dripping Spanish moss, and what looked like a meadow crammed with blooming flowers. Modern America out front, turn of the century in back, he thought.
    Rattan furnishings with lime green cushions, a pale rose-colored rug, and sheer white curtains at wide windows made the room look like one out of a decorator magazine. The curtains were held back by rose-colored sashes. Jake felt as if he should go back to the porch and wipe his feet, then come in a second time.
    Luellen sat down and motioned for him to be seated. She was a light black woman, slender, her face unlined, her hair silver, age impossible to guess. The old man’s faithful lover/companion? Servant? She acted as if she owned the place, he thought uneasily, aware that he had not done enough homework.
    “Now, Mr. Manfried, why does your magazine want to do an article about Bob Wranger?”
    “We profile people who are important in the music world,” he said.
    “But he isn’t, now is he? Maybe at one time, but that was long ago.”
    “He influenced many of the great artists, introduced some of them, and that makes him important,” Jake said.
    “And most of them are as dead as he is,” she said in a gentle, chiding tone.
    Jake knew he was losing this interview and he didn’t understand how or why it had happened, but Luellen had taken control and he was left feeling almost tongue-tied. He pulled his notebook from his pocket and flipped it open in a business-like manner. When he glanced at her again, she was smiling faintly.
    “Why don’t you just go ahead and ask me a few questions?” she said in that same gentle tone she had used before.
    She had a nice voice, low pitched and somehow intimate. It was her accent, he decided. It was beguiling.
    When he didn’t immediately ask a question, she said, “I imagine the first thing we should tend to is whether I was Bob’s paramour, his lover. And the answer is no. He loved Leo Corning and had for sixty years or more. I was the singer of the group.”
    “He was gay?” There had not been even a hint of that in any of the obits he had skimmed.
    “Homosexual,” she said. “Somehow the word gay diminishes the love people can have for each other. When I was young,” she added, “gay meant happy, carefree, and brought to mind little girls dancing in a meadow.”
    “When did he move his group here to Memphis?” Jake asked.
    “Times were changing, music was changing,” she said. “The Beatles came along, and Elvis, hard rock, heavy metal. A lot of musicians changed along with the taste, and went to where they could make a living. Fewer and fewer folks seemed to care about jazz and the blues. Bob’s mother died along about the time he was hitting bottom and she left him the house. He grew up here, the baby in a family of four girls, an elderly aunt, a father who was a lawyer, then a judge, and a mother who played the organ in church and who ordered him to keep away from her piano if he couldn’t play proper music. He left when he was eighteen, turned up in New Orleans and found a place where he didn’t feel like a sinner among angels. We, some of the group, came here forty-two years ago. Bob and Leo are still here, their ashes out yonder under the oak tree. When it’s my turn, I’ll be there, too.”
    Jake felt his skin prickle with her words. Too quickly he asked, “Did the group play in a club in Memphis after the move?”
    “We played right here in the house. Come, I’ll show you.”
    She led him through another hallway and down a