Out of Time

by Michael Z. Lewin

  But this was the genuine article. Classical stuff. More than one note at a time.

  I stayed in my inner office while the melancholia of the first piece ran into frenetic jig-joy in a second.

  Quietly, I opened the door and went out to sit and watch and listen as the woman in the music seat played a sequence of short pieces which continued to alternate from what I would call happy to what I would call sad. After twenty minutes I began to feel the difference between the two blurring.

  Quite suddenly, the playing stopped and the woman turned the straight chair to face me.

  In an assured but distracted way, Paula Belter said, ‘I came by earlier. You were out.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  She said, ‘I am restless at home. Tamae has cancelled all my lessons. Earlier, after I went away, I found myself thinking about your piano. It is a lot like one I had for a while when I was learning. It needs tuning, you know.’

  ‘I’m not surprised.’

  She turned to the keyboard and played some scales. She turned back to me as if there had been no interruption and said, ‘I’ve been thinking about my childhood. I think my “mother” always felt a distance from me. And I know that her husband did, before he died.’

  Not knowing what she wanted, I said, ‘You were lonely then?’

  She accepted the question as a perception, as if we had talked of such things before. She said, ‘I’ve only begun to realise just how little of my childhood I remember before I started playing the piano. I never think about it. I never talk about it. I remember that big boarding house, now I’ve been to see it.’ For a moment she gazed at me, or rather through me, as if seeing something a mile away. ‘But it was, it is, almost unfamiliar. From the outside anyway. I remember having some corners, secret places where I would read and hide. And I remember the kitchen. We had a wooden table and I used to get splinters from it sometimes. And I liked cherry pie. I loved cherry pie. And I used to play in a big empty lot a couple of blocks away, but it isn’t there any more. And there was a little girl called Lorraine McKenzie who used to have a dirty face all the time and take my hand and we’d go hunt for boys and throw stones at them. I remember all these things, but I don’t feel that I know them, not really. I don’t feel intimately familiar with my life there. I don’t quite feel that I was one of the people living there.’

  Suddenly she closed her eyes and tilted her head back and opened her mouth and spouted a deep breath in the manner of a whale sounding.

  ‘Dear oh dear. What I came to tell you about was Aunt Vee.’

  ‘Aunt Vee?’

  She looked at me again. ‘There was a woman who visited my “mother”. Whenever she came I would be called from wherever I was. I didn’t mind, because she gave me candy. I wonder now whether she was my mother. My biological mother, I mean, rather than the one who raised me.’ She ran a little finger around the inside of one of her cheeks for several seconds. ‘I don’t know how “Vee” fits from Daisy, but when I was looking at the house I remembered her. For what it’s worth.’

  ‘Do you remember anything else about her?’

  ‘A green scarf with a pattern on it. I suppose it was a paisley pattern with bits of red and yellow. And she wore some rings, but I don’t know whether they were real or not.’

  ‘Colour of hair? Tall or short?’

  She shrugged.

  ‘Age?’

  ‘Oh, younger than my mother. My – well, you know what I mean.’

  ‘How often did she come?’

  ‘Not very often. And she didn’t come after I was about five or six.’

  ‘Not at all?’

  ‘I don’t remember her after I started school. There were some dresses I wore at kindergarten. She brought them but I’m sure that she never came again.’

  ‘At least,’ I said, ‘it is a new name to try on Mrs Murchison.’

  Mention of Mrs Murchison made Paula Belter visibly uneasy and sad. She nodded slowly.

  ‘Mrs Belter, do you remember anybody else from those days?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘It might help if I could locate someone who lived in the boarding house around the time that Daisy Wines did who knew her or knew of her.’

  ‘I see.’ She locked her hands behind her neck and pressed her elbows together in front of her chin. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘There was a man who I thought was a cowboy, because he had that kind of boots, you know. I don’t remember his name.’ She squinted. ‘I don’t know. My brain hurts. I’ll think about it for you. I don’t recall there being many people living there as I got older. There certainly weren’t many when we moved. Doug says that you are coming to the house tonight.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘I’ll try to think by then.’

  She closed her eyes and breathed deeply in the chair.

  Opening them for a moment, she asked, ‘Is there somewhere I can lie down?’

  Having little option, I led her to my bedroom. I tried to pull the covers from the floor over the sheets, but she moved quickly and seemed to fall sidelong into the hollow which was exposed.

  She closed her eyes and said, ‘Thank you.’

  ‘That’s quite all right.’

  She reached towards me, I thought for the blankets I was holding, and I stopped to put them over her. But she found my hand and pulled at it. At first I sat beside her but it was clear that she wanted me to lie beside her and I did so for a while, until she relaxed into sleep.

  I watched her breathe for a time. Then I rose carefully and went back to my inner office and sat at my desk.

  Half an hour later I heard the outer door open and close.

  Chapter Eleven

  Charlie Carson seemed pleased to see me when I arrived a little after five. I think you gonna be happy,’ he said.

  He led me through his house to a small brick extension at the back behind the garage. The walls were as filled with folders and papers on shelves as those in his club office had been with photographs.

  Carson smiled almost embarrassedly. ‘I kinda keep things. Gladys says I ain’t never thrown nothing away, which ain’t far off the truth. But if I can afford it and I enjoy it, well, where’s the harm?’

  We stepped carefully over boxes on the floor to find two chairs at a small desk. Carson pulled out two scrapbooks, and a wages ledger.

  ‘Daisy Wines, you said.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  He talked as he leafed through one of the scrapbooks. ‘She was a singer. Never real good, because she didn’t draw much money, but on the other hand good enough she worked for my old man more than three years. Probably didn’t work nowhere else, maybe rested two weeks out of four part of the year and worked through other parts. I could figure it all out for you, because I have his wages books.’

  He found the scrapbook page he was looking for. ‘There she is.’ He turned the volume for me to see better and pointed to a newspaper clipping from the Star that comprised an advertisement for The Hideout, a club then on West Washington Street. There were three pictures of entertainers ‘performing nightly’, one of whom was ‘that pretty little Miss, Daisy Wines’.

  The picture was small, and not terribly clear, but showed a young blonde woman smiling shyly.

  ‘This book is for 1936. The only other thing I got by way of Daisy Wines is a picture from 1938.’ He opened the other scrapbook and leafed lovingly about a third of the way through. This time he stopped at a black and white photograph of revellers at a club table.

  Carson said, ‘I told you before about Ginny, right?’

  ‘Ginny Tonic,’ I said. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, this is a picture of Ginny having a drink with my old man.’ He pointed to a man whose stubby, round, rough body sat merely as a pedestal for a compelling face with silent-movie eyes and black, straight hair. The woman with him was full-featured with a wide happy mouth.

  ‘They was friends, him and Ginny, but she left the circuit – must have been soon after this pi
cture – and never worked around here again.’

  ‘And?’ I said.

  ‘Well, see this girl down the table . . .?’

  And I could tell, now that he pointed her out, that it was Daisy Wines. Older than in the first photograph, but, if anything, looking even less worldly with a genuine fair complexion and blonde hair.

  There was another woman at the table and two other men. I asked whether he knew who they were.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘All civilians.’ He thought for a moment. ‘I might be able to work it out if I go through the books looking for them, maybe in other shots. It’s possible.’

  ‘Would you mind?’

  ‘I’d like it. Jees, I flick through them a lot anyhow, but it will keep Gladys off my back to be doing it for somebody.’

  ‘And I would like to borrow the photograph, if I may.’

  ‘I thought you might want it,’ Carson said thoughtfully. ‘I don’t like to lend these things out or mess up the books.’

  ‘I can understand that.’

  ‘You’ll have to sign a receipt and leave me fifty bucks as an incentive, kinda, to bring it back. Sorry, but I won’t be happy otherwise.’

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘I just hope I’ve got the cash on me.’

  We settled on thirty-nine fifty. I handled the photograph carefully, putting it inside the hard cover of my notebook as I prepared to go.

  Carson looked at me.

  ‘What?’ I said.

  ‘That all? Don’t you want something else?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘What?’

  ‘How about Ginny’s address?’

  The address was for a tiny board-sided bungalow in a dead-end street off Bethel Avenue, the south-east side of town. It was porchless and painted in faded lavender and sat on a plot of ground which ran to about five feet on each of the four box sides.

  I knocked at the door and it was opened immediately by a woman as big and round as the house was small and square. ‘Hi, there,’ she said.

  ‘Miss Tonic?’

  ‘Why, I sure am, honey. Even if nobody much knows it these days. Hey, why’n’t you come on in.’ She stepped back and I entered. There were two chairs in the chintzed and laced and frilled sitting room. ‘Sit down, sit down.’

  I sat down.

  She poured me a drink. After giving it to me she topped up another, already seemingly a double, and sat down facing me. She drank deeply, plumped a cushion at the back of her head and said, ‘Ah, that’s more comfy. I got a call, out of the blue, from Charlie Carson about you. I nearly fell on my backside. He was only a run-around kid when I first met him, you know. God, it brings it back. Anyhow, Charlie said you might be coming around. I didn’t want to start before you, but I tell you, honey, I don’t usually wait for the sun to get this low before I have a little drink, you know?’

  ‘Many thanks,’ I said and sipped. It was undiluted vodka. ‘Not living up to your name these days, then?’

  ‘Naw. Don’t mind gin, but the tonic makes me all bubbly inside. So I give it up for Lent. About twenty years ago.’ She laughed loudly.

  When she finished she shrugged and said, ‘The flavour kind of gets me down. Vodka’s straighter. You know where you are.’ She sighed. ‘Charlie said you’re looking for Daisy Wines.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Cute little kid.’

  ‘Do you know where she is?’

  ‘God, no. I haven’t seen her for years. I didn’t even know where she lived when I knew her, if you get me. I never did know her very well. Charlie didn’t say I did, did he?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘That’s all right. Naw, that was kind of my heyday, you know? Now is more my hay day because I sleep a lot. More and more, and alone, more’s the pity.’ She laughed again easily and tossed her hair from her eyes. Grey now, it had been dark in the photograph and I could see why, if she could sing too, she had enjoyed a popularity.

  She said, ‘I knew Daisy only from having her start to sing in The Hideout when I wanted to take some time off. She was a tiny little kid. Not short so much as skinny. No meat on her and if there was anybody who was ever a change from me it was her.’

  ‘Do you know where she came from?’

  ‘She lived somewhere in town. Everybody wanted to know if she was old enough to work in a place like The Hideout. She looked maybe thirteen. But I suppose she was sweet sixteen and . . .’ She stopped.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Now that you mention it, I remember thinking that she sounded like she was fresh off the farm. The way she talked, you get me? I figured her for a real little country gal. Maybe she just up and moved to the big city. Yeah, that was probably it. But she had her a real sweet voice, and not quiet. It was no glass-rattler, but she could sing over the drunks and she got a bit of style as things went on.’

  ‘Charlie has a picture of her from The Hideout from 1936. Was that when she began?’

  ‘Yeah,’ she said unhesitatingly.

  I smiled.

  ‘You wonder how come I’m so sure. Well, I had kind of personal reasons to take some time off in ’36. I took a few weeks to St Louis with a guy I thought I had plans with. They didn’t work out but I remember the year ’cause of that.’

  ‘Sorry things didn’t go well.’

  She wrinkled her nose. ‘Guy got machine-gunned to death, machine-gunned no less, a couple of years later.’ She shivered and drank. ‘So many holes that his blood didn’t know which ones to leave by.’ She leaned back. ‘A year and a bit after I got back from St Lou I went to Texas. I worked down there mostly ever since. Houston in the war and Fort Worth after. I packed it in a few years ago and came back here.’

  ‘The name you were born with wasn’t Ginny Tonic?’

  ‘Uh no,’ she said. ‘The Ginny is mine right enough, but they had to force the tonic on me.’

  ‘So Daisy Wines was unlikely to be the girl’s real name?’

  ‘Right. Mike – that’s Charlie’s father – he gave us these names. Did Charlie explain?’

  ‘Yes. But you said you were Ginny already?’

  ‘Virginia, yeah. Must have been after the state.’

  ‘Does that mean there would be a good chance that Daisy was the girl’s real name?’

  She shook her head. ‘Not really. More likely the kid came in for an audition with a daisy in her hair and Mike was drinking a glass of wine at the time.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I never did know her that good, nor nothing much personal about her.’ And she stopped.

  ‘Something come back?’

  ‘She had a boyfriend. Well, I mean there were always a lot of guys hanging around club singers then, you know.’ She raised her eyebrows. ‘And around the dancers. And waitresses. And hat check girls. Jees, just think. Every guy around used to wear a hat. How many hats do you see nowadays?’

  I took Charlie Carson’s photograph from my notebook and handed it to her.

  She stared at it a long time.

  I asked, ‘Is that Daisy’s boyfriend?’

  Absently she said, ‘What? Oh. Yeah. I was looking at me. God, that was a long time ago. I wasn’t a bad-looking broad.’

  ‘You’re not a bad-looking broad now,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah, yeah,’ she said dismissively. Then she looked up. ‘You know I was singing until a few years back?’

  ‘You said.’

  ‘I’ve got like I was made out of pink pumpkins since I stopped. I didn’t want to quit, but my voice began to crack and hurt and it’s no good like that. So I packed up and came back where I started. I looked up Mike’s boy. Hell of a guy, Mike. Didn’t forget you. Helped you if he could. If you was a friend. Rough bastard if you wasn’t. But I was. Good kid too, Charlie.’

  ‘Did you set much money aside?’

  ‘Not much. Some. I had money, mind you. Oh yeah, a lot of good money passed through my pudgy little fingers. But there are expenses too, to keep things going. Especially later on.’ She pushed up lightly on
her cheeks with her finger tips. ‘Like my face. This old thing has been lifted so often it ought to float away like a goddamn helium balloon.’

  ‘You said the guy in the picture was Daisy’s boyfriend.’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Which guy?’

  She picked the more obscured of the two men who were not Michael Carson. There was little distinguishing about him. In his twenties, dark hair. Smiling less than the others.

  ‘Do you know who he was?’

  She shook her head. ‘Sorry. I’d like to help more. All I know was that he seemed to have plenty of money, that he was crazy about her and wanted to marry her.’

  ‘Wanted to marry her or to become better acquainted?’ I asked.

  ‘Marry is what I heard. Though those was definitely the days of the good girls and the bad girls and we was usually considered bad girls. I don’t know. It’s only information I remember hearing kind of sideways since I was more involved with my own . . . engagements, if you get me.’

  ‘Did you ever hear of Daisy having a child?’

  ‘A child? Daisy? No. I never heard that. Why?’

  ‘I just wondered.’

  ‘As far as I knew Daisy didn’t know what it took to make a baby. Not that there weren’t plenty of fellas around, from the boss on down, willing to help a girl out on that part of her education.’

  ‘Country girls usually have at least a theoretical knowledge pretty early on,’ I said.

  ‘That’s true,’ she said. ‘But if Daisy knew how she didn’t go in for practising.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I said she had this guy hanging around her all the time.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Guy with money.’ She handed the picture back. ‘Not a bad-looking guy. Young. Well, in those days, in the kind of situation we was in, guys like that didn’t show up every day. Not for many of us. Well, all I know is that word was she wouldn’t let him touch her, you know what I mean? And she wouldn’t take nothing off him, no presents. There are some guys who maybe like that, and I couldn’t tell you if in the long run he was one of them. But I can tell you for fact that in those days, around The Hideout, there wasn’t many girls that had the nerve to play it like that for very long.’