Delta Belles

by Penelope J. Stokes

  Delta paused, thinking. “I suppose so, if you don’t mind. Do you have a pen?”

  “Yep,” the man said. “Whenever you’re ready.”

  “Please tell her that Delta Ballou called. Delta Fox Ballou.”

  “B-a-l-l-o-u? As in Cat Ballou?”

  “That’s right. Area code 404—” She gave him Cassie’s number. “Tell her I’m in Atlanta. Decatur, actually. Emory University area.”

  “Atlanta,” he repeated.

  “Right. Do you know when she might be available?”

  She heard a mumbling, as if he had put his hand over the mouthpiece and was consulting with someone else.

  “I’m not sure, but I’ll give her the message and have her get back to you.”

  “Okay, thanks,” Delta said, and, with a sense of disappointment that left her unaccountably bereft, she hung up the phone.

  FOUR

  BOURBON STREET DREAMS

  Rae Dawn took the cocktail napkin from Nate the bartender and leaned her elbows on the shiny mahogany surface of Maison Dauphine’s bar. Behind Nate she could see her own reflection in the lighted mirror, and she stared forlornly at the image.

  “Who is she?” Nate asked, gazing down at the name and number on the paper napkin.

  “An old friend,” Rae said. “From college. My best friend, to be more precise.”

  “And you didn’t want to talk to her?”

  Rae Dawn shook her head. “I don’t want to talk to anyone right now.” She gave him a narrow glance, and he raised both hands in surrender.

  “Okay, I get the message.” He retrieved a clean towel from under the bar and began polishing glasses.

  “Could you get me a Diet Coke, please?” Rae asked.

  “Coming right up.” Nate filled a glass with ice, poured the soft drink with a flourish, and set it in front of her.

  “Thanks.” Rae looked at him, the familiar boyish face, the blond curly hair, the soft downy beard he had been growing for two months now. Nate had been with her for years at Maison Dauphine—not just an employee, but a friend. A good friend. He didn’t deserve to be on the receiving end of her depression. “Sorry I snapped your head off.”

  Nate grinned and twisted his head first to the right, then the left. “Still attached. No problem.” His blue eyes softened as he gazed at her. “I understand.”

  “You’re a good man, Nate,” she said as she moved off toward a table near the front windows.

  “Yes, I am,” he called to her retreating back. “And don’t you forget it.”

  Rae Dawn installed herself at the corner table, sipped at her Diet Coke, and fingered the cocktail napkin. Nate didn’t understand. It wasn’t that Rae didn’t want to talk to Delta; she simply couldn’t bring herself to do it at the moment. Like everything else in her life, even a simple telephone call felt completely insurmountable to her. She would have to make conversation. She would have to explain.

  Besides, she’d lay odds on the fact that Delta was calling about the twenty-fifth anniversary bash, to ask if she was interested in coming. She’d probably gotten an identical letter from Tabitha Austin, suggesting a reunion show of the Delta Belles.

  Rae would have to call her back, of course. But not now.

  Nate appeared at her elbow and put a bowl of fresh popcorn on the table, then silently slipped back to the bar. Rae Dawn stared out the window at tourists passing by on the sidewalk, at old Mrs. Beaulieu upstairs across the street, shaking her rugs over the wrought iron railing of her balcony. Her husband had died last year, and Mrs. B had grown frailer and thinner every day since his death, until now she looked like a naked baby bird with parchment-thin skin and clawlike hands. Rae Dawn wondered how much longer the old dear would last, having to climb those stairs to her apartment.

  Rae ate a handful of popcorn and sipped at her drink, crumpling Deltas telephone number into a ball in her fist. So many losses. And yet so many gifts, too, as Mrs. B would undoubtedly remind her. You only feel the pain if you’ve felt the love.

  She smoothed out the napkin and stared at Deltas name, scrawled in blue ballpoint in Nate’s distinctive handwriting.

  Even the name took her back. Back to the autumn of her freshman year. Back to the place where her life—where the gifts—had truly begun.

  Freshman year

  AUTUMN 1965

  Most of the rehearsal rooms in the music building were dark and quiet this early in the morning, but the front doors were unlocked. Rae Dawn slipped inside and stood in the echoing marble foyer. At a distance she heard a click-click of footsteps, the creak of a door, the hollow thunk of a lock being turned, and then the faint, haunting sounds of scales from a clarinet.

  She leaned against one of the massive columns in the entry-way and closed her eyes. Music—any kind of music—carried her to a different place, a better place than where she’d come from. A clean, green, sunlit place caressed by fresh breezes and the scent of hidden blooms.

  Music, for Rae Dawn, generated a kind of homesickness of the soul, a bittersweet longing, a faint hope on the horizon.

  Not that she’d ever had much hope. Not until two months ago, when she came to college, anyway.

  The clarinetist had segued from scales into some bluesy, improvisational runs—easy on the ear, hard on the heart. An old Louis Armstrong tune: Do you know what it means to miss New Orleans. …

  The song reminded Rae Dawn of home, and she felt tears prick behind her closed eyelids.

  Home. She always claimed the Big Easy as home, and maybe it was, at least on some mystical, soul-deep level. New Orleans reached out to her, with its French flavors and its sensuous, gutsy music. Every good thing that filled her senses, every creative impulse that nurtured her spirit, had been birthed between Canal and Esplanade on the cobbled streets of the Vieux Carre. The soulful piano tunes that lingered like smoke on the air above Bourbon Street. The gray stone towers of St. Louis Cathedral and the bright, optimistic artists’ canvases that lined the wrought-iron fence around Jackson Square. The rich crispy smell of fried oyster po’boys from Acme Oyster House on Iberville. The scent of strong chicory-laced coffee and fresh warm bei-gnets at Café Du Monde.

  The truth was, Rae Dawn had always wished New Orleans was her home. Not Picayune, Mississippi, thirty miles northeast of the magic. Not a broken-down Airstream trailer at the dead end of a rutted, sandy track that bordered a tributary of the Pearl River called Hobo Creek.

  At thirteen, she had made her first solitary journey to New Orleans, accepting a ride from a gregarious trucker who never questioned—at least out loud—her far-fetched story about going to visit her estranged birth mother. After that one trip, she was hooked. Every school holiday and most weekends she managed to hitch a ride or scrounge up money for the bus. Anything to get back to the place where she belonged. She never questioned the risks, never felt in danger. The Quarter was a womb, not a threat. It fed and nurtured her, birthed her into a life marked by music and beauty and hope. As long as she roamed those familiar streets, she could forget all about her real life and become the person she was destined to be. The dirty brown water of Hobo Creek might run in her blood, but the heart that pumped it was pure New Orleans.

  And then, every time, came the moment of leaving….

  It was like dying over and over again. Forever, it seemed, she had been trying to flee Picayune permanently, to escape the Airstream and her fathers drunken rages and her mothers deadening inertia. She dreamed about making New Orleans her real home, living there, being part of its blood and breath, adding her harmony to the music in the air. But she had no money, no education, no skills.

  Thus, when the grant offer from MCW came—not the piano scholarship she longed for, but a “resident need subsidy,” what Rae Dawn called “the poverty package”—she took it and was grateful.

  It wasn’t New Orleans, but it wasn’t Picayune, either….

  The front doors opened with a creak and a bang, startling Rae Dawn out of her reverie. She jumped and turned to see Dr
. Manfred Gottlieb, head of the Music Department, standing backlit by the morning sun.

  “Guten Morgen ”,’ he said with a little bow. The professor was tall and thin. His wild graying hair stood up at all angles, and he reminded Rae Dawn of pictures she had seen of Albert Einstein. He was dressed in a starched white shirt and a worn brown tweed cardigan with suede patches on the elbows. His eyes were a soft gray-blue, and his smile revealed a dimple in his right cheek. He looked very old, but other things besides the passing of years could age a person.

  Against her will, Rae Dawn’s eyes jerked toward his forearm, where the sleeve of his sweater covered any evidence. Rumor had it that twenty years ago Gottlieb had been liberated from a Nazi death camp—Dachau, Buchenwald, Rae Dawn couldn’t remember the details. She had seen the professor in the halls and around campus, but mostly at a distance, never close up. She wasn’t quite certain what she expected of a survivor of a concentration camp—an expression of blank emptiness, perhaps, or else an unquenchable fury. But Manfred Gottlieb’s face, now gazing into hers, held only kindness, interest, and a tinge of mild amusement.

  “You are one of my students?” he asked in a quiet voice, his head tilted to one side.

  “I—ah, no,” Rae said. “I’m just—just coming in to use one of the pianos.”

  “I see. Unfortunately, there are no pianos out here in the hallway.”

  “N-no,” she stammered. “I know. I was … thinking.”

  He wiggled his eyebrows at her—a high arch, up and then down again. “Thinking, this is a good thing. People should engage in it more often, I suspect.”

  Rae Dawn chuckled. “You’re probably right. Except that what I was doing was more like daydreaming. Woolgathering.”

  “Ah. And yet such wool can keep the heart warm on a cold winter night, no?”

  It was a lovely thought—and indeed, Rae Dawn’s dreams of New Orleans did have a warming effect when life seemed cold and barren. She smiled at him. “I’d better go practice.”

  He inclined his head. “And I have lessons to prepare.”

  She moved off down the hall, but Gottlieb spoke again. “Pardon me. Your name?”

  “DuChamp,” she said, turning to face him once again. “Rae Dawn DuChamp.” She uttered the name in the French way, although her father and his father and all the Picayune DuChamps before them pronounced it champ, like the winner of a boxing match or a racehorse itching to run.

  “A pleasure to meet you, Miss DuChamp,” Gottlieb said, and turned toward his office.

  When he was gone, Rae Dawn made her way down the dim-lit corridor and into one of the practice rooms. The space was barely large enough for a baby grand and a bench, but the ceiling was fifteen feet high, and a frosted glass window diffused the morning sun and cast a cheerful yellow glow across the walls.

  The sunlight on her back warmed her as she sat down and flexed her fingers—warmed her almost as much as Manfred Gottlieb’s respectful words and gracious smile. Only one person in Rae Dawns life had ever affirmed her desire to become a musician—Teresa Cheever, a seventh-grade teacher who had discovered her pounding away at the ancient, battered, out-of-tune Everett upright in the school auditorium. Rae had a gift, Mrs. Cheever said, a gift that ought to be developed. Whatever she heard, she could instantly reproduce from memory. But she had no understanding. No foundation.

  Until Mrs. Cheever came along, Rae had no idea how to read the mysterious runes of a music score—she simply played by ear, by instinct. Like a starving refugee, she devoured everything the teacher put in front of her—fingering techniques, form, dynamics, music theory. She learned to read with unbelievable speed and accuracy, and soon experimented with composing music. By the time she entered high school, she had begun work on her own sonata.

  The DuChamp family had no piano, of course. The only instrument Rae Dawn ever got her hands on was the school’s old Everett, and she had to wait until late afternoon, when everyone was gone, to get in any practice time at all. But whenever she sat at the keyboard, everything else disappeared—the trailer, the fear, the abuse, the stench of whiskey that hung about her father, the haunted expression in her mothers eyes.

  Over the years other teachers had written her off simply because she was poor and the only child of the town’s most notorious drunk. Her mother never had an encouraging word to say about life in general or her daughter in particular; she spent the bulk of her days sitting at the small built-in kitchen table in the Airstream, chain-smoking and tracing patterns in the Formica with a blunt fingernail. And Daddy—when he was there, which wasn’t often—entertained himself either by yelling at the two of them or by parking himself in a rusted metal lawn chair and firing shotgun pellets into the eroded bank of Hobo Creek.

  No one cared much about a ragged, introverted child caught in a web of crushing poverty and neglect. No one except Teresa Cheever.

  Mrs. Cheever had saved her. Mrs. Cheever and the music.

  The woman taught Rae Dawn everything she knew, encouraged her, believed in her. But in the end, she readily admitted that Rae Dawn’s genius far outstripped her own abilities as a tutor. Rae needed another mentor, someone with advanced education and abilities.

  Given her background and financial situation, however, Rae knew that wasn’t likely to happen. She was on her own, and had to make do with what she knew.

  She ran some scales to limber up her touch, then began to recreate the tune the clarinetist had put into her mind. The music transported her, and she moved easily through three or four familiar pieces—torch songs, mostly, from Billie Holiday, Lena Horne, Sarah Vaughan. She played by ear, by heart, feeling the riffs in her soul.

  Rae Dawn loved all kinds of music, but mostly she loved jazz. Loved the freedom of it, the way she could experiment with it to make it her own. Just for fun, she had reinvented some of Bach’s inventions, taken classical pieces and fiddled with them to bring them into the twentieth century. And now, as the music took her over, she simply let herself go and began to pour out her soul into music of her own creation.

  At last, when she had played herself far away from Picayune and the Airstream trailer and Hobo Creek, back into the embrace of the French Quarter, Rae Dawn stopped for a moment and rifled through her bag. She had found some rudimentary melody sheets and chord charts for the folk songs the newly formed Delta Belles would be singing at the talent show. Not exactly her kind of music, nor an auspicious beginning to a career in performance, but it would be a chance to find out how well she could do in front of a large crowd.

  Within five minutes, she was bored out of her skull and wondering why she’d ever agreed to such an insane idea. Folk music, the way most people played it, was infuriatingly simple. Three or four chords, always in major keys like G or C. Rae Dawn experimented a little with the accompaniment for “Blowin’ in the Wind” and came up with a version that was recognizable but infused with her own particular style.

  She jotted down a few chord changes and made notations for an improvisational bridge between the second and third verses. No reason a song like this should be insipid and predictable, even if eighty percent of people under the age of forty could play it passably well on the guitar.

  Another thirty minutes passed, and by the time the warning whistle blew for nine o’clock classes, Rae Dawn was confident that she would be able to give the Delta Belles some good options for their debut at the Talent Extravaganza.

  She felt oddly satisfied. This was what she’d always dreamed of doing—not simply playing for herself and Mrs. Cheever in an empty school auditorium, but performing before an audience, drawing them into the world she had created, making the music her own.

  A light knock sounded on the door. Rae Dawn stowed her music in her bag and prepared to clear out to allow someone else into the practice room. But when she opened the door, she found a weathered face and a shock of gray hair.

  “Dr.—Dr. Gottlieb!” she stammered. “Were you—have you—how long have you been out here?”

  �
��Long enough,” he said. “Do you happen to be free at four o’clock this afternoon?”

  “I—ah, yes,” she said, scrambling to think of her schedule. “I have practice with my friends at four thirty. For the talent show.”

  “Then meet me in my office at four, if you please,” he said. “I believe there are some things we should discuss.”

  And without another word, he turned on his heel and moved noiselessly back down the hallway, as if gliding on a song.

  AT FOUR O’CLOCK, Rae Dawn stood outside Manfred Gottlieb’s office door. Her stomach squirmed, and her brain spun out imaginary scenarios, most of which centered around being banned from the practice rooms, told that she had no right to think of herself as a musician.

  She raised a tentative hand and rapped lightly. Through the frosted glass window, she could see a shadowy form rise and move toward her.

  The door swung open. “Miss DuChamp, come in please,” Dr. Gottlieb said, giving a slight bow and a wave of his hand. “Punctuality is one of your virtues, I see.”

  Rae Dawn looked at him. The starched white shirt was limp and a little rumpled, and his tie was slightly askew. The tweed cardigan he had worn earlier that morning now draped casually across the back of his desk chair. He seemed more approachable, somehow. More human.

  She entered the office—a spacious room with high ceilings, scarred wood floors, and an ornate chair rail that ran the perimeter of the walls. Or rather, it would have been spacious, had it not been cluttered with books and papers on every available surface.

  The professors desk sat squarely in the center of the office, flanked by overflowing bookcases and tall filing cabinets. In an alcove to one side stood an ancient baby grand piano, finished in mahogany and piled with stacks of staff paper and spiral-bound music scores.

  Dr. Gottlieb scooped an armload of books from a battered leather chair in front of his desk and nodded for her to sit. He dumped the pile on the corner of his desk, where it teetered precariously. Rae Dawn kept a wary eye on the heavy volumes, expecting them to fall at any moment. Dr. Gottlieb, completely unconcerned, went behind the desk and sank into his office chair.