“‘We’?”
How to explain Roland Lundi? “He’s an older gentleman, Ma. Here at the hotel where I’m staying.” She walked through the story like tiptoeing through thistles. “I told him everything I knew, and, well, he’s been a tremendous help.”
“I’m sure he has,” Ma said, her suspicions unmistakable.
“He’s an older man.” True enough, but Dorothy Lynn had no desire to defend him. “What matters is I’ll be seeing Donny tomorrow, and I hope he’ll be coming home with me for the wedding.”
“God willing.” The edge around Ma’s prayer seemed to encompass more than her wayward brother, and Dorothy Lynn gripped the phone tighter.
“There’s going to be a wedding, Ma.”
“Well, I hope so. Lord knows you need someone to keep you in line.”
A dozen retorts rested on the edge of her tongue, but Dorothy Lynn held them inside, lest her mother learn just how far from the line she’d strayed. Instead, she said no man short of Pa would be able to do that, but Brent was about the best they could hopefor.
“How is he, by the way?” she asked, hoping she sounded more confident than she felt.
“He preached this mornin’, powerful sermon, but I can tell his heart’s hurtin’. It’s him you should be talkin’ to, not me.”
“He wants to see me face-to-face.”
“And when’s that gonna be?”
“Soon, Ma. I promise.”
“It’s two weeks away, honey-cub.”
“I’ll be there.”
The vow settled between them. Vague as it was, it brought new, hopeful vigor to Ma’s voice. “I got a package from your sister the other day. Great big box.”
“What was it?” Dorothy Lynn tried to match her mother’s enthusiasm.
“Why, your dress, of course.”
For a single, honest second, Dorothy Lynn wondered, What dress? before she realized—her wedding dress. And then she couldn’t speak at all.
“It’s beautiful,” Ma said, rushing to the rescue with conversation. “So modern, not like anythin’ I’ve ever seen before.”
Dorothy Lynn’s eyes came to rest on the red silk dress hanging from a hook on the closet door. She’d left it in a pile on the floor this morning. The housekeeper had taken pity and shown it more respect.
“But I don’t think your pa would approve.”
Illogically, Dorothy Lynn repositioned herself, blocking the view of the dress from the phone.
“It’s too modern,” Ma continued. “He would’ve wanted you to wear my dress. Maybe that’s what we shoulda done.”
“I still can, if you’d rather.”
“I’d be fine if you wore a flour sack. I just hope there’ll be a weddin’.”
“Ma—please. Aren’t you excited about seeing Donny?”
“Haven’t seen him yet. And I worry you’ve set yourself on a fool’s errand.”
“How can you say that? He’s your son—my brother! I’m just trying to bring our family together.”
“By tearin’ your new family apart.” Suddenly, the plush hotel room became the kitchen of Dorothy Lynn’s childhood. She could almost smell the aroma of fresh biscuits and bacon as her mother toiled at the stove, chastising over her shoulder. “Stuff and nonsense, this fetchin’ your brother. You’ve been lookin’ for an excuse to get yourself away ever since that young man asked you to marry him. First runnin’ off to St. Louis, then this mess I don’t even know what to call.”
“Ma—”
“You just better hope that Brent’s the forgivin’ sort, and I’m prayin’ that you’re gettin’ this wanderlust knocked out of your system.”
“I’ll be home by the end of the week,” Dorothy Lynn said, affixing a deadline without a clue as to its feasibility. Still, she followed with a promise.
“Don’t you promise nothin’. Your brother was all for promises. Sayin’ he’d be home by Christmas, then my birthday, then next summer. And never showed.”
“He didn’t have anything to come home to,” Dorothy Lynn said, instantly regretting having done so. She might as well have slapped her mother in the face.
“I’m just sayin’,” Ma said, clearly hurt, “that I don’t want to hear promises. I don’t want to hang my heart on a day, then be disappointed when it blows by.”
“Then as soon as I can, Ma. As soon as I can fix it with Donny, we’ll be home.”
“Well, then. That’ll be fine.”
“One more thing? The sermon this morning? Since I wasn’t there . . . what was the text?”
“Well, now, honey-cub, you haven’t been here in a while.”
“Please, it’ll make me feel like home.”
She could hear Ma’s sigh from two thousand miles away. “He’s been talkin’ on the vanity of vanities. Would do you well to read it.”
Ecclesiastes. Her eyes searched out the Gideon Bible on the other side of the room. “I will.”
“Today it was the rivers all runnin’ into the ocean, and the ocean never fillin’ up. All that runnin’. Useless. He was talkin’ about you, honey-cub, wearin’ his heart right there on the pulpit. There was weepin’ in the pews.”
She could picture him, standing before the church family who—no matter their flaws—made up the only family he could claim. Except, of course, for the Dunbars. And of them, only her mother remained.
“Will you tell him? That I called? Or do you think . . . Ma, do you think he’ll still want me?”
Another bout of silence. “The announcement’s still hangin’ in the entry. But the Lord knows people are talkin’.”
“I can’t imagine they have anything useful to say.”
“They have enough, girl. You get yourself home.”
In a note delivered the night before by a bellboy, Roland had written early as his only detail as to when they would be leaving, so she was grateful to have woken so fully rested long before the jangling alarm clock was due to rouse her. She splashed cold water on her face to wash away the memory of Ma’s foreboding tone and forced a smile onto the smooth, pink reflection.
“We get to see Donny today.”
The words brought out the dryness of her mouth, and she quickly drank two full glasses of water while standing at the sink. Refreshed without and within, she took another look in the mirror. “You were a child the last time he saw you. Just fourteen years old.”
In that moment, she knew she couldn’t face Donny with eyes lined with kohl and cheeks covered with rouge. Instead, she plaited her hair into one long braid, which she wound around her head in the style she’d worn before he went away to war. Folded neatly at the bottom of her trunk was the dress she’d worn when she left Heron’s Nest. The soft cotton was faded, muting the calico print into nothing more than smudges of color.
She held it close, inhaling the familiar scent, suddenly longing for its comfort. This was a dress that had leaned up against trees as she sat on the forest floor, scribbling messy songs in her notebook. It had been washed in the tub on her own front porch. Brent had touched her in this dress—his broad, warm hand splayed against her back as he held her. What would he have thought of the red dress, where he could have put his hand in the same place and touched her skin?
“God, forgive me,” she said aloud. Each thought of that night seemed to uncover a new sin.
She put the dress on, along with dark stockings and her familiar, sturdy shoes, thinking Donny would probably recognize her bare feet long before her face.
Now, not knowing exactly what Roland’s definition of early meant, she settled in to wait.
“I thought you’d be ready,” Roland said thirty minutes later, holding himself back from his customary rush across her threshold.
“I am ready.”
His eyes, an even richer brown in complementing his houndstooth jacket, traveled every inch of her, and he made no attempt to hide his disappointment in the journey. “What is that?”
“This is my dress. From home.”
“You look li
ke you should be in one of those cowboy movies. Like your landlord is going to defile you for the rent money or tie you to the railroad tracks.”
“Stop it.” She ran her hands along the front of the dress, wishing she’d at least had an opportunity to press it. “I want Donny to recognize me. I thought if I wore something familiar—”
“He’d think someone conked him on the head and he woke up back on the farm?”
“I’m not a flapper, Roland.”
“Sweetheart, in that dress you’re hardly even a woman. Aw, there you go. . . .”
Every moment she’d lived from the first taste of champagne to this very one erupted, and tears flowed once again—this time into the comforting, coarse material of Roland’s lapel. “Ma said this was a fool’s errand. That I was just trying to run—run away like Donny—and that Brent might not even want to m-marry me because everybody back home is talking. And I—I don’t even know who I am anymore.”
This last word came out more like a wail, but if she’d been seeking any sympathy from Roland, she found it wanting as he abruptly pushed her away, back to her own side of the threshold.
“Wrong. You know exactly who you are, and you’re more than some backwoods preacher’s daughter. You’ve got talent and potential and—when you work at it—style. You’re just too terrified to enjoy it. And now you think that if you put on some dishrag of a dress and do your hair up like some milkmaid you can snuff out all those inconvenient desires.”
“I don’t have any desires except to go home.”
“I believe you, sweetheart. And who knows? Maybe it’s the best thing. But not like this. Not in the same dress you wore when you left.”
“You’re right,” she said, feeling every fiber of the dress recoil from the task of covering her sin. “I’m not the same girl.”
“No, you’re not. You’ve sung in front of twenty thousand people. Plus dozens in the park. You were part of something that changed lives, a voice for Jesus in a way Sister Aimee could never be. This—” he captured her in a single, dismissive gesture—“throws all of that away.”
“No.” She stormed to the wardrobe, grabbed the red dress, and threw it in a heap at his feet. “This threw it all away.”
Roland bent down and picked it up, turning the dress into nothing more than a silk scrap in his hand. “This is a dress. It isn’t you, and I was hoping you’d forgiven me for . . . well, for everything.”
“I have.” She wanted to reach out for him but thought better. “Not that there’s anything for me to forgive. I can’t very well ask God to forgive me if I’m placing my sin on you.”
“So instead you’re punishing yourself. You can’t erase what happened, so you’re trying to bury the evidence.”
“I told you I just wanted Donny to recognize me.”
“He’s not the same kid that ran away from the forest, and neither are you. You want to start your reunion with a lie?”
“It’s not a lie.”
“Isn’t it?” He took a cigarette from his breast pocket, held it—unlit—between his first two fingers, and pointed at her with it. “How do you feel in that getup?”
“Comfortable,” she said too quickly for it to be anything other than defensive. “Familiar.”
His continued scrutiny, however, even behind the eventual cloud of smoke, brought her to truth. Even apart from the fact that the sleeves landed just above her wrists, she knew she’d outgrown the dress. The shoes felt heavy, the stockings itchy in their woolliness.
“You see?” Roland said, without the lash of condescension. “Now, put on something nice, fix your hair, and meet me at the car in thirty minutes. And bring the guitar.”
“My guitar?” Her head reeled at how quickly he could change his tack between puffs on a cigarette.
He tossed the red dress inside, where it landed on the corner of the foot of the bed. “I’m hoping to wrangle one more favor out of you before you disappear.”
She found him waiting in the car with a white paper bag and a large round box. The bag held an array of sugar-dusted doughnuts—still warm—from the bakery around the corner. The box, a stylish crushed-velvet hat—a perfect complement to the peach-colored chiffon blouse and modest brown skirt she’d opted to wear.
“Wonderful!” she said, settling into her seat. “How did you know?”
“That you’d be hungry?”
“About the hat.” She pulled it down on her head before diving eagerly into the bag.
“I’m always a step ahead of you, baby. Thought you’d know that by this time.”
The city had a crisp, clean feel this morning—like it had been scrubbed with the salt on the breeze. They drove in silence, hers fueled by nerves and pastry; his nothing more than his usual unflappable demeanor. Finally, as he brought the car to a stop at a square brick building on a street with only two other structures in view, she asked, “Where are we?”
He was already out of the car, lifting her guitar from the backseat. “I told you I had one more favor to ask.”
“And yet you haven’t asked me anything.” She intended to stay in her seat, but he was opening the short iron gate at the front of the property, ready to disappear with her single prized possession. Frustrated, she followed.
“Is this the studio? Is this where Donny works?”
“Yes. And no.”
“What does that mean?”
“Yes, it’s a studio. And no, it isn’t your brother’s.”
They’d arrived at a tall, arched door with a sign instructing all who stood there not to knock or ring the bell if the light above it was on. Their heads moved in unison to look at the red bulb, and upon finding it dark, Roland bypassed any knocking or ringing entirely, grabbed the handle, and walked inside, saying, “You’ll see.”
They were in a small room, bare save for a few photographs and wooden benches along three of the walls, and a desk where a telephone stood in a sea of scattered papers.
“It’s not much,” he said with a modest swoop of his arms, “but it’s ours for the next couple of hours.”
“For what, exactly?”
“To make a record, like we talked about.”
She folded her arms and risked leaning against the wall, despite its dubious film. “When did we talk about this?”
“Okay, I’ve talked about it. Sometimes with you, sometimes not. But after looking around, I wish we could do this in Chicago. With all that jazz, they’ve got great studios in that town.”
“Roland, I don’t want to make a record.”
“Why not?”
She wasn’t expecting that question, and she didn’t have an answer. “Why should I?”
“Leave me something, Dorothy.” He said it like she owed him, like she bore some responsibility for bringing him to this sad, dingy place. But if she allowed herself to look beyond his carefully crafted edges, she saw something more than an obligation. Like he was asking for a memento of what they’d built together.
“What would you do with it?”
“You mean besides listen to it every night, dreaming of what you could have been?”
She made a playful grab for her guitar, but he snatched it away, holding the case at the neck like a hostage.
“I don’t want to make a record, Mr. Lundi.” She aimed for more insistence.
“Listen. Sister Aimee’s going into radio. Her own license. Sure, mostly to broadcast her own sermons, but who’s to say? People loved your song.”
“So get someone else to sing it.”
“Nobody sings it like you, sweetheart. Just come take a look.” He opened a door next to a large curtain-covered window and, after a quick peek inside, motioned for Dorothy Lynn to follow.
“Is anyone else here?” she called before budging. Not that she was worried about being alone with Roland, but it seemed like there ought to be somebody in charge.
“Not yet.” His voice sounded both distant and muffled. “I thought you might need some convincing, so I told Freddy to give us a few
minutes. Come in here.”
The longer she waited, the less choice she seemed to have, and she took a few tentative steps that quickened at his encouragement.
The dark, colorless room they’d first entered had done nothing to prepare her for what was on the other side. Her steps slowed again out of sheer awe. Here the ceiling was twice as high as in the outer office, and everything was painted a perfect, pristine white. Half of the floor was a series of three wide steps, the top one filled with neatly stacked chairs. Music stands were scattered about, and a massive piano—not as beautiful as the one in the Alexandria lobby, but somehow more authoritative—seemed to be holding court over all.
“Don’t let any of this intimidate you.” At some point, as she’d turned in a slow circle, taking everything in, Roland had come up behind her, and his whisper seemed little more than spoken breath in this big room. Her fingers were folded around the handle of her guitar case as he relinquished it to her, saying, “This is all you need.”
He procured a high-backed stool and brought it to a place where a long, horn-shaped object protruded from an ominous-looking black curtain.
“Like you’ve always done, Dorothy. You just sit down, close your eyes, and sing. Right in here. The magic happens in the office back there.”
“I sing for Jesus, whether I’m alone or in front of people who want to sing with me. I can’t sing into a tube.”
“You write your songs down, don’t you? In that ratty little notebook.”
“Yes.” In fact, it was nestled in with the guitar at that very moment.
“This is nothing more than another way to write them down. To capture the words and the music all at once.”
“I know what a record is. But I’d feel silly singing here, like this.”
“I remember a time when you couldn’t imagine yourself singing in front of an audience. And you managed to overcome that all right.”
She smiled, warm with the memory of the lights and the voices raised in song alongside hers. “I felt the Lord with me then.” The Lord, and Roland waiting in the wings.
All for a Song Page 25
