The Blue Room

 

She was a regal gal under a blue hat past her prime
and had crossed the threshold into the golden years of her decline.

I was surprised when she stopped me outside the hotel and commanded me to have a drink with her, to hold her hand
inside the Ritz's deserted piano bar where she resurrected an ancient jazz band
from the Blue Room that played music so sad it would wrench your heart and make you cry
with a sound so terribly beautiful you wanted to die.


It was a time when everybody smoked
and people had class and joked
about everything under the sun
and men understood sacrifice and had honor and wouldn't run

like the scared chickens they are today,
so full of themselves and their own vanity--
"Present company excepted, of course,"  she said--
"all the good men are dead."

Women felt safe riding the subway late at night
and people were kinder to others and men did what was right.

High school graduates could recite The Road Not Taken
and read Madame Bovary and everyone knew the literary criticism of H.L. Menken.


We sipped our drinks and she talked while I listened.
There were breaks in her speech and her ageless eyes sometimes glistened.
She spoke of the only man who captured her heart,
a jazz musican from the South End--true love from the start
but he was killed in the war and she married a Beacon Hill financier
a good man, generous to her, but to their children cold and austere.  Cold and austere.


Now would I be kind enough to escort an old lady from this once great piano bar and put her in a cab.
I wasn't her first choice, she couldn't enter a bar alone but other men ignored her--no, no, I'll pay the bar tab.
She kissed my cheek and took my arm, stopping once to thank me for listening to an old lady gab.

(As we walked out arm and arm I wondered how long she would have waited for an escort, and what I'd be like in my golden years.
Would I be like her and tell younger people about my own Blue Room and what it was like or would they even lend me their ears?)