The Diamond House

by Dianne Warren

  When Oliver got back in the car she said, “Did you put the fear of God in him?”

  “Probably,” her father said.

  “I am old enough to look out for myself, you know,” she said.

  “True,” Oliver said. “Probably.”

  He started the car and they were on their way again.

  * * *

  IT WAS IN 1939, when Estella was fifteen years old, that Oliver had hired the piano player. The Diamonds were not in the habit of entertaining, but Oliver had decided to throw Beatrice a surprise party for their anniversary because the Depression appeared to be over and he thought everyone needed an excuse to celebrate. The oldest three Diamond brothers were married by then, so Oliver had enlisted Jack and Estella to help with the preparations, although it was mostly Estella, because Jack had no useful opinions when it came to food or music or who should be invited.

  On the day of the party Theo and his wife Gladys were to get Beatrice out of the way for the afternoon by saying they needed her to babysit their two children for a few hours. They were then to take her to a salon for a hair appointment, present her with a new dress (chosen by Oliver with Estella’s help) and her best shoes, collected from her closet, and tell her Oliver was taking her out to a restaurant. Oliver would pick her up in the early evening, then pretend he had forgotten something, and when they arrived at the house, Beatrice would find it filled with party guests: couples from the business community and her church and clubs, and of course the whole Diamond family.

  As Beatrice walked in the door to a chorus of “Surprise!” Estella watched her mother and tried to tell if she’d guessed what Oliver had been up to. If she had, she was a good actor. She looked positively stunned until one of the grandchildren said, “Are you really surprised, Nana?” and then Beatrice said, “You mean there’s no restaurant? You sneaky people!” and she began to circulate among the guests, greeting every single one of them, all the time expressing her amazement that Oliver had managed to do it all without giving a thing away. Estella waited for her mother to get to her and ask what part she’d played—quite a big one, Estella thought—and compliment the new outfit she’d bought all on her own, a skirt and pale-blue sweater with pearl buttons, but it was taking forever for her mother to get through all the guests.

  When Estella grew tired of waiting, she placed herself against a wall in the dining room so she could watch the musician who had come with the piano her father had rented for the evening. He was young, not much older than Jack, and was a music student at the College. Estella knew her mother had played the piano when she was a girl in Ontario, but she had never suggested her children do so, perhaps because the first four of them had been boys and she’d given up by the time Estella came along. Estella wished she hadn’t. It seemed to her that the musician was able to make magic out of the long row of black and white keys. He hummed to himself as he played popular songs by the likes of Glenn Miller and Larry Clinton and Bing Crosby, and he kept looking up at Estella. He was making her nervous, so she moved around the room until he couldn’t see her anymore, but she could still watch him.

  Once all the guests had drinks in their hands, the caterers brought trays of hot and cold finger food from the kitchen and laid it out on the dining room table, which had been pushed against the wall to make room for the piano. Before Oliver invited people to eat he made a speech. The musician stopped playing and everyone fell silent as Oliver spoke about thirty-five years of marriage and how Beatrice had always stood by him, through good times and bad. The last decade had been especially hard for everyone, he said, but the brick business had survived the Depression, and his sons were grown up, and he had been blessed with wonderful children, and now grandchildren. He made a toast to Beatrice and the family she had raised, and her many years of support and loyalty. Everyone raised their glasses and toasted Beatrice, and then the future.

  By this time, Estella was annoyed that her mother had not yet sought her out, and she hadn’t had a single compliment on her new outfit. To top it off, everyone and his pet donkey had earned a mention in her father’s speech except her, when she had been his co-conspirator and Girl Friday since Jack had turned out to be hopeless. She’d chosen the flower arrangements, gone with her father to select invitations, helped make the guest list, and addressed every envelope, including one to his old business partner in Texas. Since her father didn’t have a mailing address for him, she’d even gone to the library to track down the address of his company’s head office in Houston. It all made her so irritable that she looked at the teapot on its shelf in the corner and thought, What about Salina, shouldn’t she get some thanks? She knew from the letters that Salina had been Oliver’s first champion, even before there was a Diamond brick factory.

  After Oliver’s speech, it was obvious that everyone wanted to hear from Beatrice, so she reluctantly took the floor to thank him, and then thank everyone for coming. Estella was jarred out of her bored annoyance when she heard her name. “I know Estella had something to do with this,” Beatrice was saying. “Estella, wave your hand so people can see you.” Estella waved even though it made her self-conscious, and then her mother said, “Oh, what a lovely outfit, Estella. That’s new, isn’t it,” and she wanted to die on the spot. When her mother quit talking and the party started up again, she considered sneaking upstairs to her room for the rest of the evening, but that possibility soon dissipated when the grandchildren were put to sleep upstairs, one of them in her bed.

  Once the children were settled, Estella’s sisters-in-law and the other women moved into the sitting room and the men gathered in the parlour, where her father was serving brandy from a cut-glass decanter. Estella was still watching the musician from her spot in the dining room. When he took a break, he swivelled on the bench and saw that she was there. He looked around to make sure he wouldn’t be overheard, and then he suggested that the two of them slip outside together. It was the first time a boy had said anything like that to her. What did he have in mind? It couldn’t be good.

  She walked away from him with her face burning, and went to hear what the women were talking about. Nothing of interest—their children mostly, the scamp who’d got himself in a pickle the week before by taking the milkman’s money, the little Shirley Temple who had decided to lop off her curls with her mother’s sewing scissors.

  “Estella,” one of Beatrice’s friends from the church said, “you’re getting so grown up. What plans do you have for the future? Girls seem to be planning careers these days, rather than their weddings.”

  She’d always assumed she’d go to work at the plant, as had her brothers, in spite of its name being Diamond and Sons.

  “I’ll do something at the brick plant,” she said. “Wherever Father thinks I’m needed.”

  “She’s very good at school,” Beatrice said. “Better than any of the boys were.”

  Estella knew what was coming next, the story of how they’d discovered she could read when she was only five years old. Sure enough, Beatrice told them how Estella had picked up Oliver’s newspaper and read an obituary aloud to them, and it turned out to be the obituary of a child, and Estella had put the paper down and asked, “Is it true that children can die?” It always sounded as though that was the point of the story, but really her mother was bragging that Estella had learned to read so young.

  She left the women and saw that the piano player had helped himself to a plate of food and was now sitting on his bench eating. His eyes followed Estella as she tried to find a spot out of his line of vision. Then Jack came to stand beside her and he nudged her in the ribs and said, “Ooh, Nelly’s caught someone’s eye. Better watch out.”

  “Shut up,” Estella said, and once again she felt herself blushing. The whole family was out to embarrass her, she thought as she followed Jack to the parlour. The French doors were open and the two of them stood together in the entrance to the room. The men by now had had several drinks and were discussing the possibility of war in Europe. The non-aggression
pact between the Soviets and the Germans had just been signed, with all indications that Hitler was up to something. One of her father’s business colleagues asked if he was worried, having sons who were the right age for military service, especially Jack, who wasn’t married, but her father said King George wisely did not see the need for Canadian casualties in a war aimed at putting Germany in its place, in spite of Mackenzie King’s announcement that Canada would support Britain if it came to that.

  “It will not happen,” her father said, and Estella was relieved, because there was so much talk about war in the news.

  Then Jack himself spoke up and said that a war might be just the thing to fix the economy.

  Estella couldn’t believe it, that anyone could think war was a good idea. “Since when do you know anything about the economy?” she asked Jack, but he shushed her because he was listening to the conversation.

  She persisted and said, “You can’t really think a war would be good for the country.”

  It was as though she hadn’t said anything at all as Jack left her and found a chair among the men, who began to argue about Canada’s responsibilities toward Britain. The room was full of smoke from their cigars and pipes and cigarettes. Estella’s feelings were hurt that Jack had just walked away from her, without giving her opinion any consideration at all.

  From where she was standing, she could see into the dining room. The caterers were now clearing away the food, and the piano player was back at work, playing “Indian Love Call,” a popular song from the movies. He periodically glanced up at her, and she grew curious. Did he think she was pretty? Interesting? Someone he’d like to get to know? She got brave enough to stand near the piano again, and he asked her if she wanted to try a few chords. She sat down on the bench beside him, and he taught her a simplified version of the bass line of “Heart and Soul,” and they attempted to play it together but Estella couldn’t get past the first few bars without getting mixed up. She kept looking at his hands instead of her own. Before she knew it, she felt her thigh touching his on the bench. When she kept hitting the wrong keys, he picked up her hand and placed her fingers in the correct position.

  Her father appeared by the bench. He had a cheque in his hand.

  “I think the lesson is over for the night,” he said, dropping the cheque onto the keyboard. “No need to stay any longer. I believe the caterers have gone. Estella, you can go and see if your mother needs anything in the kitchen.”

  The piano player collected the cheque and quickly took his leave, as though he were the boy caught stealing the milkman’s money. Estella felt like a twelve-year-old.

  “We weren’t doing anything,” she said to her father after the musician was gone.

  “Oh, I know that,” he said, “but he was a bit cocky, don’t you think.”

  How was he cocky? she wondered. All he’d done was what they’d hired him to, with a little piano lesson thrown in.

  When she tried to join her father and the other men in the parlour to see how the war discussion was progressing, her father said to her, again, “Estella, go to the kitchen would you, and see if there’s anything that needs doing there. Your mother would appreciate it.”

  By this time Jack was in the thick of the conversation. Estella knew there was nothing that needed doing in the kitchen—that’s what the caterers were there for—but she went anyway because it was obvious she had been dismissed. Clearly war was not an appropriate topic for women, and apparently that’s what she was now.

  Her mother wasn’t in the kitchen. Estella found a tea towel and wiped down the counters even though the caterers had left everything spotlessly clean. When she looked out the kitchen window, she saw that the piano player was still there, standing in the garden with a cigarette, and she threw the tea towel down and went out the back door and asked him if he had a smoke for her. She led him to a dark spot behind the garage so they wouldn’t be seen. As he lit a cigarette for her, he said he’d been hoping she would see him and come outside.

  “Well, don’t get your hopes up for anything else,” she said as she puffed on the smoke, trying to act as though she knew what she was talking about and smoked cigarettes all the time.

  He began to hum “Heart and Soul,” and then he sang the first few lines about falling in love and stealing a kiss, and she said, “What do you think, you’re Larry Clinton or maybe Clark Gable now?” She thought she was being funny, but she had no experience with boys. The piano player stopped humming, and then he stepped closer to her, and he dropped his cigarette and stubbed it out under his foot. She knew what was coming and she didn’t resist. He tipped her chin and then he kissed her full on the lips. It was so dark she wasn’t sure how he found her mouth. He tasted like cigarette smoke. She felt his hands on her waist, and when they moved down and began to lift her skirt, a little at a time, almost imperceptibly, she pulled away.

  “Stop it,” she said, not knowing what else to say.

  He left then. Just walked away, out the gate and down the alley. She could hear his footsteps on the hard-packed clay on the other side of the fence. Maybe her father was right. He was cocky.

  She went back inside, remembering the feel of his lips on hers, his hands on her hips. When her mother smelled the smoke, Estella told her that she’d been visiting with the caterers before they left, and they’d been smoking in the yard. Beatrice expressed the opinion that they shouldn’t have been, but then she was distracted by a woman in a coral dress looking for directions to what she called the powder room. There was no powder room in the Diamond house, Estella thought. There was an upstairs bathroom.

  The party broke up soon after, with everyone leaving in good spirits, saying how wonderful it had been to have a reason to be happy again. Oliver and Beatrice stood together in the foyer to say goodbye to the guests, and when there were only Diamonds left, Gladys and Fay prepared to retrieve their sleeping children from the upstairs bedrooms, but Beatrice said, no, let them sleep, and she sent their parents home without them.

  Estella was not ready for bed, and besides, there was a child asleep in her room. She wasn’t sure what to do with herself. She noticed the piano’s white keys shining under the dining room light and she had the crazy idea that she would magically know how to play both parts of “Heart and Soul” if she tried. She wanted to sit down on the bench and bang it out as loud as she could, whether she hit the right keys or not. Of course she would never do such a thing. She could imagine the disapproval. She wondered what it would have been like to grow up with the rebellious Salina as a mother instead of Beatrice, and then she felt guilty for thinking of Salina twice now on the night that had been so carefully planned to honour her mother.

  Before her parents went to bed, they had a cup of tea in the parlour and Estella heard them talking about Nathaniel Thick in Texas, from whom Oliver had not heard.

  “It’s understandable,” he said. “A long way to come for a party. I don’t think he would bear any hard feelings.” Then he added, “It couldn’t stay Diamond and Thick forever, could it.”

  Estella hadn’t known there was a time when the company had been called anything other than Diamond and Sons.

  When just she and Jack were left downstairs, she told him what their father had said and asked him if he had known the plant was once called Diamond and Thick.

  Jack shrugged, and she thought again that he was no longer interested in what she had to say. She had become his little sister, just as she had always been to the others. He went upstairs, and Estella made herself a bed on the couch.

  In the morning, she was wakened early by a three-year-old niece poking her face with a kitchen spatula. She got up and helped her mother give the children their breakfast before their parents came to collect them, and after they were gone the rental company collected the piano. Except for the elaborate bouquet of flowers on the dining table, the house looked as it had before the party. When just Beatrice and Estella were left in the dining room, her mother said, “You’re turning into a you
ng lady, Estella. Everyone remarked on it. And I believe you caught the attention of that musician your father hired.”

  There was a pause, and then Estella knew what the real topic of the conversation was going to be. Her mother had noticed the piano player watching her the night before, or, more likely, her father had told her about the two of them on the bench. She began with a series of warnings: A girl’s reputation can be ruined in an instant. You have your whole life ahead of you so don’t get distracted by young men who have no intention of putting a ring on your finger. Don’t trust any man with a wandering eye. On and on, with no useful information about what Estella really wanted to know and wasn’t about to ask. She didn’t even know what words to use. She struggled to think of a way to escape her mother, and it came when her father entered the room. He tried to leave again when he realized what his wife and daughter were discussing, but Estella took the opportunity to say, “We’re not talking about anything important,” and she left the room instead. She heard her mother say, “I think I made my point” as Estella fled to the backyard.

  She walked out to the alley and then up and down the length of it. She didn’t know what point her mother thought she had made with that speech about rings and intentions. She was fifteen years old. She’d rather have a boyfriend with a wandering eye than one with a ring. She decided her mother didn’t know what she was talking about. When she thought enough time had passed, she went back in the house and avoided her for the rest of the day.