MOTHER CONTINUED TO SPEND TIME WITH TONY, BUT SHE FELT crowded between him and her kids, accommodating, sneaking around. She wasn’t painting enough, which put her on edge. Sometimes she had Tony do chores almost like penance.
Stella, you’re making me into one of those stuffed fish heads in Bill’s room, complained Fruscella one afternoon when Mother had him moving canvases around in the 14th Street studio.
She tore into him: Tony, I’m drowning in your needs. You’re the same as Abe.
Such words didn’t matter to Tony, who burrowed into drinking and shooting up. Finally, to get him out of the studio, she told him she wouldn’t make love to him until he left 14th Street forever.
Deciding that Tony was like Abe gave her resolve. That’s how my mother’s mind worked. She wouldn’t leave him for robbing churches. In the weird and exasperating way Mother made connections, Tony was my father. She rammed this down my throat. Tony was Abe. Though she loathed his memory, Dad remained a locus for my mother, a way to access anger and spur herself out of indecision and torpor.
Mother found Tony a room on the third floor of a dive on 49th Street and Eighth Avenue. Tony brought home a stray cat to keep him company. He called the cat Stella. Mother found this amusing. She bought food for Tony and occasionally spent the night. But she didn’t like to stay because the neighborhood was bleak and threatening. In the morning, when it was time to go, men were shooting up in the streets. One night he asked her not to leave and they argued. When she got up to go home Tony threw the cat out the window. Then he ran down the stairs to get her from the street. He came back crying, holding Stella in his arms. The cat was wild-eyed and wounded. Tony fell onto his knees pleading with Mother to stay with him.
Mother saw Tony Fruscella less frequently but left bags of food for him. She kept retrieving his horn from the pawnshop on Third Avenue. As long as he had it, she believed he would survive. One time they arranged to meet in front of the shop so that she could give him back the horn. Right in front of the window there was a trash can and the cat was lying on top of the garbage with a noose around her neck. Mother decided Tony was sending her messages.
She wouldn’t see him after this. Mother continued to bring food to the door of Tony’s hotel room. When she heard that he was living on the street, she sent him word that she would leave food in a brown bag at the southeast corner of Washington Square Park. Mother did this for months. Sometimes from around corners she would peek until he had picked up the bag of food. Tony set fires a couple of more times outside the front door of the 14th Street studio. He told neighbors and the police that he was Stella’s husband.
Sometime after Mom stopped seeing Tony, when he was back on the street and barely surviving, his friend, the great bass player Red Mitchell, composed lyrics to Tony’s previously recorded version of “I’ll Be Seeing You.” Mitchell’s words describing Tony’s art and painful life were taped over Fruscella’s gentle lilting solo. This collaboration over time is a masterpiece that cradles the listener in life’s sadness. Fruscella’s version had been recorded a decade before the words were added, when he was the toast of a few smoky Village nightclubs, experimenting, blowing, wearing slick clothes, when Fruscella was a giant, a young Miles, they said, doing dreamy junk and playing his breathy solos, singing through the horn, so vulnerable and yet untouchable, as if life could go on and on like this.
In August 1969 Tony died in a friend’s apartment. The doctors determined it was a heart attack from too much drugs and drinking, but Mom believed Tony was just worn out and had stopped struggling. At the funeral Stella put Tony’s horn into the coffin with him, which angered some of his musician friends who felt it should have been given to a kid, but she insisted.
Mother was the only one to go to the cemetery. In a distant life Tony had been a lieutenant in the army, and now he was honored with a military burial and a bugle playing taps. It is unlikely that the soldier musician knew that he was celebrating a great horn man who had played this lonely tune his whole life. Taps for the vegetable merchants on Seventh Avenue. Taps for Stella and the gravediggers. Afterward they gave my anarchist mother, of all people, the American flag.