“Fine.”
“And how are the lessons going?”
“Fine.”
“And how is the house now that Mrs. Parker’s gone?”
“It’s the same. Mr. Parker bought a kitten.” As I said it, I knew it was betrayal.
“What kind of kitten?”
“A sort of pink one.”
“What’s its name?”
“It doesn’t have one,” I said.
One night she said, “Does Mr. Parker drink?”
“He drinks lemonade.”
“I only asked because it must be so hard for him,” she said in an offended voice. “He must be very sad.”
“He doesn’t seem all that sad to me.” It was the wrong thing to say.
“I see,” she said, folding the dish towel with elaborate care. “You know how I feel about this, Jane. I don’t want you alone in the house with him.”
“He’s my piano teacher.” I was suddenly in tears, so I ran out of the kitchen and up to my room.
She followed me up, and sat on the edge of my bed while I sat at the desk, secretly crying onto the blotter.
“I only want what’s best for you,” she said.
“If you want what’s best for me, why don’t you want me to have piano lessons?”
“I do want you to have piano lessons, but you’re growing up and it doesn’t look right for you to be in a house alone with a widowed man.”
“I think you’re crazy.”
“I don’t think you understand what I’m trying to say. You’re not a little girl any more, Jane. There are privileges of childhood, and privileges of adulthood, and you’re in the middle. It’s difficult, I know.”
“You don’t know. You’re just trying to stop me from taking piano lessons.”
She stood up. “I’m trying to protect you,” she said. “What if Mr. Parker touched you? What would you do then?” She made the word “touch” sound sinister.
“You’re just being mean,” I said, and by this time I was crying openly. It would have fixed things to throw my arms around her, but that meant losing, and this was war.
“We’ll discuss it some other time,” she said, close to tears herself.
I worked on the Invention until my hands shook. When I came home, if the house was empty, I practiced in a panic, and finally, it was almost right. On Wednesday, I went to Mr. Parker’s and stood at the doorway, expecting something drastic and changed, but it was all the same. There were cookies and lemonade in the solarium. Mildred took a nap on my coat. My fifteen-minute warmup was terrible; I made mistakes in the simplest parts, in things I knew by heart. Then Mr. Parker played the lesson of the week and I tried to memorize his phrasing exactly. Before my turn came, Mr. Parker put the metronome on the floor and we watched Mildred trying to catch the arm.
I played it, and I knew it was right—I was playing music, not struggling with a lesson.
When I was finished, Mr. Parker grabbed me by the shoulders. “That’s perfect! Really perfect!” he said. “A real breakthrough. These are the times that make teachers glad they teach.”
We had lemonade and cookies and listened to some Palestrina motets. When I left, it was overcast, and the light was murky and green.
I walked home slowly, divided by dread and joy in equal parts. I had performed like an adult, and had been congratulated by an adult, but something had been closed off. I sat under a tree and cried like a baby. He had touched me after all.
imelda
SHE CALLED HERSELF Imelda and she said she was a cook. Since her English was scanty, she was restricted to words of one syllable: “yes,” “no,” and “what,” with the exception of “O.K.” and “chicken,” which she pronounced “chicking.” The family spoke several phrases in Spanish, but hers was an idiomatic Colombian, and since in mid-conversation she often dissolved into fits of giggling, even well-known phrases were generally indecipherable.
The family were the Jacobys: father Irwin, mother Grace, son Fritz, and daughter Jane Catherine. They lived in a large apartment overlooking the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in the Chinese collection of which Jane Catherine had arranged her prepubescent assignations behind the ornamental urns. The Jacobys were victims of the servant problem: Suzie, their aged cook, had died on them and had been followed by a series of noncooking domestics whose common problem was weak feet. Imelda was sent to them by an ageńcy, and they hired her out of desperation, but Grace Jacoby thought it would be useful as well as educational to have some Spanish spoken in the house. Imelda cooked like a dream, and so, despite the fact that she rarely spoke and when she did could not be understood, everyone was satisfied. Her only drawbacks were the giggle, which Jane Catherine called “a crystal smasher,” and an unnervingly placid smile.
Imelda was not her real name: it was later discovered by Jane Catherine that “Imelda” was the name of a song that had been number one on the Bogotá hit parade for a year. Imelda’s real name was Zaida Escribano, and the label that issued “Imelda” was Zaida Records Company. This information was revealed to Jane Catherine one afternoon when she found a copy of “Imelda” stuck in between two vintage Ricardo Ray singles at a record store called Discos Latinos. She found this information compelling, but the family was unmoved by it.
Jane Catherine, the family daughter, was problematic. She had long chestnut-colored hair, eyes the color of turtle shells, and she was fresh.
“This fresh mouth of yours does not endear you to me,” Grace Jacoby said to her daughter.
“You have to love me. I’m your child.”
“I was speaking of charm, not love.”
“Love’s more important,” Jane Catherine said, “so I’m not terribly worried.”
Most difficult to contend with was that Jane Catherine could not be threatened. She had been born smart, which was bad enough, but worse, she seemed to have been born wise. Jane Catherine was unflappable. She was effortless and constantly threw back at her parents examples from the sense of values they had taught her, by which she knew that love was better than charm. Since she knew that she was lovable, she did not go much out of her way to be affable. Most of her spare time was spent hanging around Discos Latinos or at the Bronx Music Palace in the company of her loved one, Tito Ricardo-Ruiz, who, fortunately for Grace Jacoby’s peace of mind, was an upper-class Argentinian whose father was with the embassy.
Tito had a true slum streak for which Jane Catherine revered him. She could not get over his penchant for the cheap and the magnificent. In his room, concealed from the Olympian eyes of his parents, were his American treasures: an enormous plaster saint in orange and blue, wearing a purple robe; a candle in the shape of the Empire State Building; a cigarette lighter in the shape of a motorcycle, and four crates full of records. His most treasured item of clothing was a sleazy yellow-and-green jacket made of artificial silk with “Perflex Valve Company” embroidered on the back. He was the darling of the embassy, but he hung around Suggie’s, a place noted for mediocre pizza and a terrific jukebox with the same sleepy casualness. His smile, which was slow, was also spectacular, and it rendered him virtually untouchable. His manners, when he needed them, were almost otherworldly, and in adult company he glowed like a slightly fallen angel.
Jane Catherine had been drawn to him at a party given by the Bieberman twins, Libby and Brenda. Their father was a millionaire. Jane Catherine, whose few feelings about the twins included contempt and scorn, watched her peer group play under a number of large Renoirs. Tito’s parents’ house was filled with pre-Columbian statuary in glass cases, so he was unimpressed. Jane Catherine was wise enough to know that everyone had Renoirs: her family had a school of Raphael drawing, several small Matisses, and some Albert Pinkham Ryder. The Jacobys knew what they were about.
The music provided by the Bieberman twins was loud, and in the opinion of Jane Catherine, undanceable, until, by accident, someone put on a samba record, at which point Tito and Jane Catherine found each other and danced. It was for this moment that J
ane Catherine had practiced in the mirror, had put up with her Uncle Seymour’s cha-cha, and her father’s ritual New Year’s Eve party rhumba. After a trip to Rio, Mrs. Jacoby taught her the bossa nova, and the samba came to her naturally. The only thing Fritz had ever taught her was how to steal records. Hence the consummate product Tito held in his arms, dancing to Jackie Cruz and his Latin Rhythm Kings.
Tito, it was clear, was not in the same league as the bland, clammy group of prep-school boys the Biebermans and their friends found enthralling. It was for him that diplomatic immunity had been invented. Had it not been for the special tags on his license plate, he would have been good for about eight years in jail, in speeding violations alone. His glove compartment was filled with tickets, which he dumped every couple of months into the incinerator off the pantry. He had just turned seventeen, but already he had been propositioned by several of his mother’s friends and had ridden a horse in a race in Buenos Aires. The fathers of his classmates were aware of his large store of Cuban cigars, and were often put in the humiliating position of cadging. For this reason, Tito kept several in his jacket on all social occasions.
Tito’s brother was at Harvard, and Fritz was away at school, and since the Jacobys and the Ricardos were frequently out, Tito and Jane Catherine found considerable time to be alone. Imelda was invisible and the Ricardo servants, whom Tito called “the Incas of Eighty-third Street,” were virtually deaf and perpetually mute, so Tito and Jane Catherine spent many happy hours engaged in adolescent love. If the Jacobys and the Ricardos were in, they went sulkily to the movies, or to Suggie’s. They did not much fraternize with their peers, whom they found trying and silly. Since Tito’s father kept a horse—a fact that made Grace Jacoby’s heart sing—they often went riding in the park after school and then went off to Suggie’s. When they returned to their separate apartments, they smelled bitter and aromatic, of horse and pepperoni.
Imelda did not live in, but a room in the nether part of the Jacobys’ apartment was hers, in which she sometimes entertained her brother, who drank quantities of tomato juice. His name was Francisco and he was an ensign in the Colombian navy, but on the side he smuggled a little cocaine into the United States in gift bags of coffee beans. It was quite a lucrative sideline and he had set Imelda up in an apartment in Washington Heights, wither she retired after a day with the Jacobys. In the apartment lived Francisco, when he was on shore leave, Imelda, and her fiancé, Freddy Bonafia, who played the tenor saxophone in Graucho Pacheco’s Latin Band.
It was at a concert in the Bronx Music Palace that Jane Catherine and Tito saw Imelda in her street clothes. She was almost unrecognizable. At the Jacobys she wore a black uniform and black sneakers, and stuck her hair into a bright-green snood. Her skin was the color of cork, and she had beige eyes. There was quite a lot of gold in her smile. At the Bronx Music Palace she wore a dress of electric blue with matching shoes. She was very thin, but her dress was cut so close to the bone that it was difficult to imagine how she managed to walk. Her hair, out of its snood, was arranged in a series of curls decorated with blue velvet bows. When she saw Tito and Jane Catherine, she gave them a bright but vague smile. On one side of her sat Francisco; on the other was Wilda Bonafia, Freddy’s sister, wearing what looked like a series of sliver hair nets.
The music began, and Tito knocked Jane Catherine in the ribs, and Jane Catherine knocked him back—a sign that they liked what they heard. Several overexcited members of the audience shouted in Spanish that to Tito sounded like highly inflected running water.
The Bronx Music Palace was immense, cavernous, and moist. Even a standing-room-only crowd seemed minuscule and lost in its depths, but the acoustics were perfect. Jane Catherine and Tito held hands. Jane Catherine was musically emotional and Graucho Pacheco’s band was so good that she found herself in tears. He was only the first act, and by the time Jocko Sanagustino came on, she was practically beside herself.
Tito was a genius, not that he cared much. At his school he had a large desk, rather like that of a nineteenth-century merchant, on which he kept a conch shell, a potted plant, and a small cactus. He spent a good deal of time staring at these objects, or gazing out the window.
“I have to let my brain cool off,” he explained, having discovered that two hours of work on his part was worth ten on anybody else’s.
Jane Catherine’s high level-brain worked at a steadier, less manic pace, but she too needed frequent rest and rehabilitation. She kept a transistor radio plug in her ear, and turned on some music between calculus problems. On a dare, without much effort, she had memorized the first book of Paradise Lost, and had constructed a DNA molecule out of shirt cardboard.
Under the well-known guise of studying together, Jane Catherine and Tito rubbed each other’s backs behind closed doors and listened to the music they loved the best. Tito was teaching Jane Catherine Spanish.
“What are they singing about?” she asked.
“It’s about a coffee pot,” said Tito. “It’s the South American mentality. They sing about beaches and bars of soap.”
In the kitchen, meanwhile, Imelda basted the chicken. Then she read, and holding the book, her face took on the seriousness of a Chinese scholar. She sat straight in her chair, her neck stiff. Her eyes were steely and intense in back of wire frame glasses that made all her features seem immobile with effort. She was reading a novel of horror, featuring a monster called El Gordo.
Jane Catherine’s closest friend was Leah Morrisy, and their loving admiration had been originally based on self-assumed uniqueness. They were stylistically different, but the intensity of their styles was similarly motivated. Basically, they thought their personalities were works of art, and they were not far wrong.
Leah’s true love was Mick Skipworth, a blond, slightly walleyed National Science Foundation winner: he had mutated fruit flies. Her family lived in a townhouse, on the third floor of which she had a room cluttered with her secret possessions: a cheap nightie with a plunging décolletage, from a mail-order house in Hollywood; a leather jacket, stolen by Mick from his older brother; a set of spangled pasties; some hot, illiterate love letters, and an old briefcase filled with sultry, sulky photographs of herself, taken by Mick and several previous loves.
Leah was tiny, skinny, and her eyes were so brown they appeared to have no pupils, giving her the smoldering look of a burning tire. She was shaped on the lines of a vase and she was heavily addicted to Coca-Cola. For her birthday, Mick gave her a case of it, and it was gone within five days. Her hair was dramatically shaggy and waiflike.
Her mother said of her with a sigh: “I’m afraid to let her out on the street. She walks from her pelvic bones. My heart fails when she leaves for school, even in that uniform.”
Some afternoons, Leah and Jane Catherine walked through Central Park, wearing ritual clothing. Jane Catherine wore the hacking jacket that had been her mother’s twenty years ago, loafers with tassels, and bright-green socks. The belt that held up her jeans was a present from Tito. Leah wore an old shocking pink windbreaker that had never been washed—she had bought it second-hand for half a dollar and taken it to her heart. She wore black velvet trousers, a pair of minuscule ballet slippers, and a fifty-dollar shirt.
“I’d like to turn Mick into an ice cream soda,” she said. “He has the most beautiful mouth I’ve ever seen. His brother is a moron and his parents are awful. He calls them the gargoyles. His mother cries all the time. He comes in, and she cries. He goes out, and she cries. He goes to play soccer and she’s in tears and when he won that science thing, she almost fell apart.” Leah yawned. “She hates me. She thinks I’m cheap. She told Micky. She said: That little bit dresses like a tiny French tart.”
“Nobody’s mother talks that way,” said Jane Catherine.
“I made it up,” Leah said. “But that’s what she would say if she had a mind. They’re all so brainless over there. Micky says he feels like a changeling. His sister Florence has begun to call herself Flopsy. It’s depressin
g.”
“Tito’s parents are invisible,” said Jane Catherine. “Or else we’re invisible to them.”
“That’s because you dress nice,” said Leah, pulling her cerise jacket around her. “Someday Tito and Mick will be memory.”
“I only think of that when I want to make myself cry.”
“Well, I think about it all the time and it makes me seasick. We’ll all go off to college and be memories. We’ll say: remember Tito? Remember Micky? God only knows what will become of us.”
“What will, do you think?” Jane Catherine said.
“I think no one will know what to do with us. We have too many tastes for our age, but it’ll get worse. People will call us strange—it’ll be our prefix. People will take you out to nice civilized parties and you’ll come home and put the old record player on. People will say I’m cheap, or some variation of that. I’m a prisoner of my sultriness. I’ll wear these kind of clothes, and so will you and only very odd, intense men will find us at all interesting.”
They walked past the boulders and toward the fountain where they saw Imelda holding the arm of an unnaturally tall, skinny man wearing green lizard cowboy boots and a ten-gallon hat. Next to him, Imelda was a peg. She had on a bright-pink dress that was as small as a scarf. She looked like a little flag that fluttered off his belt. When she saw Jane Catherine she smiled her unnerving, gold smile.
Jane Catherine was abashed. She was frightened of Imelda, who made her feel profoundly awkward. She did not approve of having servants and did not know how to deal with them. The Jacobys, who instilled in their children the belief that servants are human beings, did what all parents do: they treated their servants like human beings who are deaf, or blind, or suffering from some other lowering infirmity. The recently deceased old Suzie they had treated like a kindly grandmother from another planet, whose customs were not their customs—with the courtesy they would have doled out to a dignitary from an underdeveloped country.
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