"I haven't been writing," he said.

"That's terrible. When are you gonna finish it?"

"As soon as I get the chance."

"Chance? What have you been doing nights?"

"I've been working with my brother, nights. He's a song writer. I do the lyrics for him."

I looked at him with my mouth open. He had just told me that Robert Browning had been hired to play third bass for the Cards.

"You're being ridiculous," I said.

"My brother writes wonderful music."

"That's great. That's just peachy."

"I'm not going to write lyrics for him my whole life," Joe explained. "Just till he clicks."

"Do you spend all your times nights doing that? Haven't you worked on your novel at all?"

Joe said coldly, "I told you I'm waiting till he clicks. When he clicks I'm through."

"What does he do for a living?"

"Well, right now he spends most of his time at the piano."

"I get it. Joe Artist doesn't work."

"Do you want to hear one of Sonny's numbers?" Joe asked.

I said no, but he took me into the rec room anyway. Joe sat down at the piano and played the number that was later to be called I Want to Hear the Music. It was tremendous, of course. It knocked you out. It dated the time and place, and filed both away for future sweetness. Joe played it through twice. He played rather nicely. When he was finished, he ran a skinny hand through his black hair. "I'll wait till he clicks," he said. "When he clicks I'm through."

For the Inside Dope Department, Sonny Varioni was handsome, charming, insincere and bored. He was also a brilliant creative technician at the piano. His fingers were marvelous. I think they were the best of the old 1926 fingers. I think his fingers played with a keyboard so expertly that something new had to come out of the piano. He played a hard, full-chord right hand and the fastest, most-satisfying bass I have ever heard, even from the colored boys. When he as in the mood to show off for himself, he was the only man I have ever seen throw either arm over the back of his chair and play the bass and the treble with his remaining hand alone, and you could hardly tell the difference. He was frightfully aware of his talents, of course. He was so congenitally conceited that he appeared modest. Sonny never asked you if you liked his music. He assumed too confidently that you did.

I'm always willing to acknowledge one virtue in Sonny. While he knew there were Berlins, Carmichaels, Kerns, Isham Joneses plugging out tunes comparable in quality with his own, he knew that Joe was in a class strictly by himself among the lyric writers. If Sonny ever took the trouble to brag at all in public, he bragged about Joe.

Sonny would never let me watch him and Joe work together. I don't know what their methods were, except what Joe once told me. He told me Sonny would play whatever he had composed, through about fifteen times, while he, Joe, would follow his playing, with a pad and pencil handy. I think it must have been a pretty cold business.

I went with them to Chicago the day they sold I Want to Hear the Music, Mary, Mary, and Dirty Peggy. My uncle was Teddy Barto's lawyer, and I got them in to see Teddy.

When Teddy announced dramatically that he wanted to buy all three of the numbers, Neither of the Varionis went into a soft-shoe routine.

"I want all three," Teddy said again, but more impressively. "I want all three of them songs. You guys got an agent?"

"No," Sonny said, still at the piano.

"You don't need one," Teddy informed. "I'll publish your stuff and be your agent. Look happy. I'm a very smart man. What have you guys been doing for a living?"

"I teach," Joe said, looking out the window.

"I weave baskets," Sonny said, at the piano.

"You should move into town right away. You should be near the pulse of things. You're two very talented geniuses," Teddy said. "I'm going to give you check on account. You should both move into town right away."

"I don't want to move into Chicago," Joe told him. "It's hard enough to make my first class on time as it is."

Teddy turned to me. "Miss Daley, impress on the boy he should move in town by the pulse of the whole country."

"He's a novelist," I said. "He shouldn't be writing songs."

"So he can write a few novels in town," Teddy said, solving everything. "I like books. Everybody likes books. It improves the mind."

"I'm not moving into Chicago," Joe said, at the window.

Teddy started to say something, but Sonny put a finger to his lips, ordering silence. I hated Sonny for that.

"I'll leave it to you to work out for yourselves in the most advantage to yourselves personally," Teddy said beautifully. "I'm not worried. I'm confident, you might say. We're all adults."

On the train back to Waycross we had the porter put up a table and we played poker. We played for hours. Then all of a sudden I felt something terrible and certain. I put down my cards and walked back to the platform and lighted a cigarette. Sonny came back and bummed a cigarette. He stood over me easily, positively, frighteningly. He was so masterful. He couldn't even stand over you on a platform between cars without being the master of the platform.

"Let him go, Sonny," I begged him. "You don't even let him play cards his own way."

He wasn't the sort to say "What do you mean?" He knew exactly what I meant, and didn't care if I knew he knew. He just waited easily for me to finish.

"Let him go, Sonny. What do you care? You've got your break. You can get somebody else to write lyrics for you. It's your music that's terrific."

"Joe does the best lyrics in the whole country. Nobody touches him or comes close to it."

"Sonny, he can write," I said. "He can really write. I spoke to Professor Voorhees at college--you've heard of him--and when I told him Joe wasn't writing any more, he just shook his head. He just shook his head, Sonny. That was all."

Sonny snapped his butt to the platform floor, ground it out with his shoe. "Joe's as bored as I am," he said. "We were born bored. Success is what both of us need. It'll at least demand our interest. It'll bring in money. Even if Joe does write this novel, it may take the public years to pat him on the ego."

"You're wrong. You're so wrong," I said. "Joe's not bored. Joe's just lonely for his own ideals. He has lots of them. You don't have any. You're the only one who's bored, Sonny."

"You certainly have it bad," Sonny said. "And you're wasting your time. Could I interest you in something on my type?"

"I hate you," I said. "All my life I'm going to try to hate your music."

He took my handbag away from me, opened it and took out my cigarettes. "That," he said, "is impossible."

I went back into the car.

The Varioni Brothers followed up Dirty Peggy with Emmy-Jo, and before Emmy-Jo was cold that wonderful job, The Sheik of State Street was dropped on Teddy Barto's new, more expensive desk. After the Sheik they did Is It All Right if I Cry, Annie? and after Annie came Stay a While. Then came Frances Was There Too, then Weary Street Blues, then--Oh, I could name them all. I could sing them all. But what's the use?

Right after Mary, Mary they moved into Chicago, bought a big house and filled it with poor relations. They kept the basement to themselves. It had a piano, a pool table and a bar. Half the time they slept down there. Almost overnight they were financially able to do almost anything--chucking emeralds at blondes, or what have you. There just suddenly wasn't a grocery clerk in America who could climb a ladder for a can of asparagus without whistling or singing a Varioni Brothers' song, on or off key.

Just after Is It All Right if I Cry, Annie? my father became ill, and I had to go to California with him.

"I'm leaving tomorrow with daddy. We're going to California, after all," I told Joe. "Why don't you ride as far as California with me? I'll propose to you in Latvian."

He had taken me to lunch.

"I'll miss you, Sarah."

"Corinne Griffith is going to be on the train. She's pretty."

Joe smiled. He was always a good smiler. "I'll wait for you to come back, Sarah," he said. "I'll be a big boy then."

I reached for his hand across the table, his skinny, wonderful hand. "Joe, Joe, sweetheart. Did you write Sunday? Did you, Joe? Did you go near the script?"

"I nodded at it very politely." He took his hand away from mine.

"You didn't write at all?"

"We worked. Leave me alone. Leave me alone, Sarah. Let's just eat our shrimp salads and leave each other alone."

"Joe, I love you. I want you to be happy. You're burning yourself out in that terrible basement. I want you to go away and do your novel."

"Sarah, please. Will you keep quiet, absolutely quiet, if I tell you something?"

"Yes."

"We're doing a new number. I've given Sonny my two weeks' notice. Lou Gangin is going to write lyrics for him from now on."

"Did you tell Sonny that?" I said.

"Of course I told him."

"He doesn't want Lou Gangin. He wants you."

"He wants Gangin," Joe said. "I'm sorry I told you."

"He'll trick you, Joe. He'll trick you into staying," I told him. "Come to California with me. Or just get on the train with me. You can get off where and when you like. You can--"

"Sarah, shut up, please."

While Joe came to the train with me and daddy, I made Professor Voorhees go to see Sonny. I couldn't have seen him myself. I couldn't have stood those cold, bored eyes of his, anticipating all my poor little strategies.

Sonny received Professor Voorhees in the basement. He played the piano the whole time the old man was there.

"Have a seat, professor."

"Thank you. You play well, sir."

"I can't give you too much time, professor. I've got an engagement at eight."

"Very well." The professor got right to the point. "I understand that Joseph is through writing lyrics for you, that a young man named Gangley is going to take his place."

"Gangin," corrected his host. "No. Somebody's been kidding you. Joe writes the best lyrics in the country. Gangin's just one of the boys."

Professor Voorhees said sharply, "Your brother is a poet, Mr. Varioni."

"I thought he was a novelist."

"Let us say he is a writer. A very fine writer. I believe he has genius."

"Like Rudyard Kipling and that crowd, eh?"

"No. Like Joseph Varioni."

Sonny was playing with some minor chords in the bass, running them, striking them solid. The professor listened in spite if himself.

"What makes you so sure," Sonny said. "What makes you so sure he wouldn't plug out words for years and then have a bunch of guys tell him he was also-ran?"

"I think that Joseph is worthy of taking that chance, Mr. Varioni," Professor Voorhees said. "Have you ever read anything your brother has written?"

"He showed me a story once. About some kids coming out of school. I thought it was lousy. Nothing happened."

"Mr. Varioni," said the professor, "you've got to let him go. You have a tremendous influence on him. You must release him."

Sonny stood up suddenly and buttoned the coat of his hundred-and-fifty-dollar suit. "I have to go. I'm sorry, professor."

The professor followed Sonny upstairs. They put on their overcoats. A footman opened the door and they went out. Sonny hailed a cab and offered the professor a lift, which he declined politely.

One last attempt was made. "You're quite determined to burn out your brother's life?" Professor Voorhees asked.

For answer, Sonny dismissed the cab he had hailed. He turned and made his reply, scrupulously for him. "Professor, I want to hear the music. I'm a man who goes to night clubs. I can't stand going into a night club and hearing some little girl sing Lou Gangin's words to my music. I'm not Mozart. I don't write symphonies. I write songs. Joe's lyrics are the best--jazz, torch, or rhythm, his are the best. I've known that from the beginning."

Sonny lighted a cigarette, got rid of smoke through thinned lips.

"I'll tell you a secret," he said. "I'm a man who has an awful lot of trouble hearing the music. I need every little help I can get." He nodded good-by to the professor, stepped off the curb and got into another cab.

Perhaps my sensitivity because has become blunted somewhere along the disposition of a reasonably normal, happy life. For a long time after Joe Varioni's death I tried to stay away from places where jazz was played. Then I suddenly met Douglas Smith at teachers' college, fell in love with him, and we went dancing. And when the orchestra played a Varioni Brothers' number, I treacherously found that I could use Varioni words and music to date and identify my new happiness for future nostalgic purposes. I was that young and that much in love with Douglas. And there was a wonderful, ungeniuslike thing about Douglas--his arms were so ready to be filled with me. I think if ever a lady, in memory of a gentleman, were determined to write an ode to the immortality of love, to make it convincing she would have to remember how the gentleman used to take her face between his hands and how he examined it with at least polite interest. Joe was always too wretched, too thwarted, too claimed by his own unsatisfied genius, to have had either inclination or time to examine, if not my face, my love. As a consequence, my mediocre heart rang out the old, in with the new.

Intermittently through the seventeen years since Joe Varioni's death, I certainly have been aware and close to the tragedy of it. Often painfully so. I sometimes remember whole sentences at a time of the unfinished novel he read to me when I was a sophomore at Waycross. Oddly, I remember them best while I was bathing the children. I don't know why.

As I have already mentioned, Sonny Varioni is now in Waycross. He is living with Douglas and me in our home about a mile from the college. He isn't at all well, and he looks much older than he is.

About three months ago, Professor Voorhees, very old and dear, opened the door of my classroom during one of my lectures, and asked me if I would kindly step outside for a moment. I did so, prepared for some major announcement or admonition. I was horribly late with my mid-term grades again.