Delta Belles

by Penelope J. Stokes

  “Now, Miss DuChamp,” he said, tenting his long fingers together, “let us have a talk about your career.”

  “My career,” she repeated stupidly.

  “Precisely.” He ignored the obvious—that she sounded like an ill-trained parrot—and continued. “This morning you informed me that you are not a music major, is that correct?”

  Rae Dawn nodded. “Yes, sir.”

  “And why is that?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Why are you not a music major?”

  “Well, I… I guess because—” She shrugged and lifted her hands in surrender.

  “Because some foolish, ignorant pragmatist in your past— some so-called teacher, perhaps, or a parent—informed you that music is not a viable option for making money and fulfilling the American Dream? That smart people position themselves to have a regular paycheck coming in, a house in the suburbs, a white picket fence, a color television set?”

  He paused and ran his hands through his hair, making it stand up even more wildly. “Forgive my bluntness, Miss DuChamp. My own life experience has led me to value that which nurtures the soul above all else. Beauty, art, poetry, music …”

  At the words life experience, Rae Dawns mind jerked to images of emaciated bodies from the concentration camps, and she shuddered. She barely heard his next words: “For me, of course, music is the primary passion. And from what I heard this morning, for you as well.”

  She stared at him. “You think I have talent ?”

  Dr. Gottlieb raised an eyebrow. “You are, shall we say, unfinished. Rough, like unsculpted marble. But talent? Yes. A fire in the belly. A hunger in the spirit. I hear these things. I see them in your eyes.” He leaned forward. “This is your first year in college?”

  “Yes, sir. I’m a freshman.”

  “And yet you say, quite decisively, that you are not a music major.”

  “Yes.”

  “So you have settled on something else, even so early in your education?” He tugged at one ear. “May I ask what you have determined to be your life direction?”

  Rae Dawn ducked her head. “Elementary education.”

  He cleared his throat. “Because there are jobs available to you when you graduate.”

  It was not a question, and Rae Dawn did not answer. She kept her eyes fixed on the unsteady pile of books on the corner of Gottlieb’s desk. Something in her gut told her that everything in her life was about to tumble.

  All she had ever wanted to do was live in New Orleans and make music. But growing up in an Airstream trailer on the banks of Hobo Creek had skewed her values. Teaching might not make her rich, but it wouldn’t keep her poor either. As much as she loved music, it was—as Dr. Gottlieb himself had admitted—a calling that destined her to financial instability.

  He was still gazing at her from under his bushy white eyebrows.

  “I could—” she began hesitantly, avoiding his gaze. “I could teach music.”

  “You could.” He nodded. “Bringing music to children is a noble profession. But not for you.” He leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes, as if considering a monumental decision. “I will train you, if you would be willing.”

  Rae Dawn blinked, and for a moment her heart soared. “ Willing? Of course I would be willing.” Then she came back to herself. Lessons cost money, money her scholarship did not provide. The momentary flame of hope guttered and died, and the dream went out of her on a sigh. “I can’t, Dr. Gottlieb. I wish I could, but I can’t.”

  “And why not?”

  Memories flashed across her mind—all the times she had come home to find that once again Daddy had blown the welfare check on liquor and shotgun shells. The week after Christmas in third grade, when Julie McKenzie identified Rae Dawn’s new red wool coat as a castoff her mother had given to the Goodwill. The winter they had lived on nothing but sweet potatoes stored in an ammo box under the trailer and a few tough, stringy rabbits her father shot in the woods near the creek.

  But she wasn’t about to tell Gottlieb any of this. She had escaped. She was barely getting by on her stipend, but she still had her pride.

  “Pride nourishes the ego but does not feed the soul.” He said the words softly, as if he’d read her mind.

  Rae Dawn looked up and, to her dismay, a tear slid down her cheek. The professor did not turn away, but continued to gaze at her, his blue-gray eyes shining.

  “Your family is poor?”

  He uttered the word boldly and without apology, and it pierced her like a blade. The sharp edge of poverty was usually tempered by euphemism: families had financial challenges or just needed time to get on their feet. No one used real words like destitute or indigent or impoverished.

  Dr. Gottlieb’s honesty broke loose something inside Rae Dawn. She swiped the tear away with one hand and stared him down. “Yes,” she said fiercely. “We’re poor. Dirt poor. My father is an alcoholic. My mother’s useless. I grew up wearing clothes other people had thrown away. I’m in college now only because I received a resident need stipend.”

  Admitting the truth brought an unexpected sense of liberation. She exhaled a pent-up breath and ventured a tentative smile.

  He crossed his arms and smiled back. “Yes. The poverty package.”

  Rae Dawn felt laughter welling up inside her. “Dr. Gottlieb, I have never met anyone quite like you. You make me feel… I don’t know. Accepted.”

  He unbuttoned his cuff, rolled up his sleeve, and held his arm out toward her. The inside of his forearm bore a hazy, bluish tattoo, a string of numbers. “How old do you think I am?” he asked.

  She hesitated, not wanting to offend him. On appearance alone, she would have guessed seventy, perhaps more. But his spirit seemed younger than that, and his step lighter. Besides, he wouldn’t likely be teaching if he were that old.

  “Sixty?” she offered.

  “You are kind,” he responded with a smile. He rolled his sleeve down and rebuttoned the cuff. “I will be fifty-two in January.”

  Rae Dawn tried not to let the shock register on her face, but she felt a hot flush creep up her neck.

  “I was not yet thirty when the Nazis came,” he went on. “We lived in Berlin, and my family was well off—wealthy, by many peoples standards. My father was an art dealer, and my mother a pianist and composer. On the train to Auschwitz, I worried most about what would become of our beautiful piano, and my fathers art collection.” He shrugged. “But when the ovens began to belch out smoke and people were being murdered, twenty thousand or more a day, material things no longer mattered.”

  His eyes took on a faraway look, as if calling up memories Rae Dawn didn’t even want to imagine. “I do not often talk about those terrible days,” he said. “But I felt it imperative that you should understand. I have known abundance, and I have known deprivation. There is no shame in either.” A slight tremor went through him, and he shook his head. “What matters is life. What matters is holding fast to the dreams and values that fill your heart, even when others try to rip them away from you. What matters is hope.”

  Rae Dawn had no answer for this, and so she kept silent.

  “You are a musician,” Dr. Gottlieb went on. “It is in your soul. To deny it would be death to your spirit and would rob the world of beauty we so desperately need. And so I repeat my offer: I will teach you, if you are willing.”

  This time Rae Dawn understood. He was offering to teach her for free.

  He rose from his chair. “Come by tomorrow, and we will set a schedule for your lessons.”

  “Thank you so much,” she said as she walked with him to the door. “I don’t know how to express my gratitude—for your offer, for your faith in me. For everything.”

  He held the office door open for her and reached to shake her hand. “I am grateful too. For the opportunity to hear and create music. For the honor of teaching a student such as yourself. For the grace and the joy of being alive.”

  Rae Dawn left Dr. Gottlieb s office and walked dow
n the hall into the echoing foyer of the music building. She felt as if she had just stepped out of a dream—or into one. For the second time in her life, someone believed in her. Someone who could teach her, mentor her. Someone who could help her find her voice, the music of her soul.

  She would not tell anyone, of course, what Gottlieb had revealed of his horrific past. It was his story to tell, if and when he chose to share it. But she knew, or thought she knew, why he had opened those painful memories to her. It was a link between them, a connection. He understood suffering and poverty and did not bow to shame.

  She would learn much from him, this man who had survived such terrors and still found hope and wonder in the world.

  FIVE

  THE TWIN FACTOR

  HILLSBOROUGH, NORTH CAROLINA

  SEPTEMBER 1994

  Lacy Cantrell stood in the center of her living room, looked around, and sighed. Having a spotless house was a great feeling; actually doing the cleaning was a royal pain in the butt.

  Still, fall was upon her. School had already started, and she hadn’t yet finished her spring cleaning. Yesterday she had discovered a bit of old tinsel from last year’s Christmas tree in Hormel’s litter box. Where he’d found it she had no idea, but she was pretty sure that sparkly things in the cat’s poop couldn’t be healthy.

  “You could help, you big lazy lug,” she said.

  The cat, an enormous cinnamon-colored brindle with a snow-white belly, lay sprawled across the sofa taking her in with his inscrutable green gaze. He twitched his tail but made no reply.

  Lacy laughed and sat down beside him. When she began rubbing his ears, he responded with a rumbling purr and closed his eyes in ecstasy. He had come to her as a kitten three years ago—simply showed up on her doorstep one Saturday morning when she was cooking sausage, and demanded to be let in. She complied, and as soon as her back was turned he filched her breakfast off the kitchen table and wolfed it down, then dragged the empty sausage wrapper out of the trash can and wore it on his head like a hat. Clearly, the beast had chosen his own name.

  Despite his penchant for stealing food, however—a habit Lacy had never been able to break—Hormel turned out to be a most loving and noble animal. Fastidiously clean, he never made messes except when she inadvertently left the lid off the kitchen garbage, and his loyalty and affection rivaled that of the most devoted dog. He followed her everywhere, waited in the window when it was time for her to come home from school, slept at the foot of her bed, and gave unerringly accurate advice about the character of her friends. Hormel was wise beyond his years. If he didn’t like you, you didn’t stand a chance.

  Lacy gave the cat a kiss on the top of his furry head and went back to the onerous job of cleaning the hardwood floors and washing the baseboards. As she worked, her mind drifted to yesterday’s mail, which still lay on the coffee table. To the invitation to her college reunion. To the answering machine message from Delta Ballou. And to the past—inexorably, to the past.

  EVERYONE HAD GATHERED in Practice Room C for the first rehearsal of the Delta Belles—everyone except Lauren, who was always late. “All right, Lacy,” Rae Dawn said, “come over here and let’s tune your guitar.” She plunked out an E, and Lacy fiddled with the tuner peg until the first string more or less approximated the sound of the piano. “Up, up,” Rae Dawn said. “That’s it.”

  They continued tuning until Rae Dawn seemed satisfied. “Okay, now.” She pointed at the sheet music. “We’re going to start with ‘Blowin’ in the Wind.’ Here are your chords, up here above the staff. It’s pretty simple—just C, F, and G.”

  Lacy strummed the guitar and hummed under her breath as Rae Dawn played slowly through the accompaniment. “Now, when we get to here”—she pointed—“I’ll play an interlude on the piano before we go into the next verse.”

  She ran through the segue. By this time Delta had come to stand next to the piano. “That sounds great, Rae,” she said.

  “I worked on it a little bit earlier this morning,” Rae Dawn said. “You think the interlude’s all right? I can tweak it some more.”

  “You wrote that?”

  “Yeah, well, it’s kind of instinctive. This song is so familiar to everybody, always sung the same way. I just wanted to give it a little something extra.”

  Delta put a hand on Rae Dawn’s shoulder. “Well, there goes my plan.”

  Rae Dawn turned around. “What plan?”

  “The plan to have you all get up onstage and make fools of yourselves. This is going to be good. Really good.”

  “Don’t get your hopes up,” Lacy said gloomily. “You haven’t heard me sing yet.”

  Fifteen minutes into the rehearsal, Lauren finally did show up. Perhaps it was the dramatist in her. She did love to make an entrance. All their lives, Lauren had been upstaging Lacy, grabbing the spotlight for herself—walking first, talking in sentences while Lacy still struggled with “Mama” and “Daddy” and “no.”

  Lauren was the one who garnered most of the attention, sometimes angelic and adorable, sometimes petulant and demanding, in opposition to Lacy s steady, compliant, docile nature.

  Now Lauren’s late arrival interrupted what might have been a pretty good first run-through.

  Lacy rolled her eyes and bit her tongue to keep from saying something rude, but clearly Lauren got the unspoken message, because she shot a glare at her twin and said, “Don’t start with me, Lacy. I’m late because I was doing something for all of us”.’

  She held up an enormous bag so full it bulged at the seams.

  “Right,” Lacy said, not even trying to curb her sarcasm. “Shopping. For the group.”

  Lauren propped the bag on the seat of an empty chair. “That’s exactly what I was doing.” She dug around and came up with something that looked suspiciously like a rug made from dead ferrets. “Here.”

  She tossed it toward Delta, who shrank back and let it fall to the floor. “Jeez, Lauren,” Delta said, poking it with her toe. “What is that thing?”

  “It’s a vest.” She pulled three more out of the sack, in various fur patterns, and passed them around. “I’ve been thinking about wardrobe,” she said. “We want to be folky, right? I thought we could wear black pants and black turtlenecks and these vests.”

  “I don’t want to wear this,” Rae Dawn protested. “Dead animals creep me out.”

  “They’re fake fur,” Lauren said, as if this answered all their objections. “And then I found these —” With a flourish she extracted something yellowish and stringy from the bag. “Ta-da!”

  “Wigs?” Delta began to laugh.

  Lauren shrugged. “Well, we ought to be blonde, right?”

  “We’re already blonde,” Lacy said.

  “Of course you and I are blonde,” Lauren shot back. “But we don’t have long hair. Rae Dawn’s a brunette, and Delta’s hair is blonde, but not light enough.”

  “Light enough for what?”

  “For the Mary Travers look, of course.” Lauren gazed around as if expecting applause.

  “You be Mary,” Lacy said, eyeing the wig with distaste. “I’d rather wear a beard and be Peter. Rae Dawn’s tall and thin; she can be Paul.”

  Delta chuckled. “What about me?”

  “Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John,” Lacy suggested. “Take your pick.”

  Everybody laughed. Lauren was clearly not happy about being upstaged by her twin sister. She stuffed the wig back into the bag. “Fine.”

  “Ah, come on, Lauren,” Delta said, sidling over to her. “We’re just kidding. Where’d you get all this stuff, anyway?”

  “At the thrift store downtown. The vests cost five bucks apiece. The wigs were only two.” She put on a wig and one of the vests and modeled for them.

  Amid general laughter and hoots of approval, a thought occurred to Lacy, an idea that infuriated her. Where had her sister come up with money to buy these costumes? Since she had spent every cent of her monthly allowance on new loafers, Lacy suspected Lauren had pro
bably embezzled the funds from the stash Lacy kept hidden in the dorm room.

  “Lauren,” she began in a threatening tone, “where’d you get the money?”

  Her twin turned, and the identical face took on a guilty expression all too familiar to Lacy. “I, uh—”

  “You stole my allowance to buy this crap, didn’t you?”

  “Well, I—I sort of borrowed it. ”

  Delta intervened. “Hold on, let’s not have a war here.” She put a restraining hand on Lacy s shoulder. “She was just trying to help out, Lace.”

  Lacy narrowed her eyes, shooting Lauren an I’ll-get-you-for-this look, but said nothing.

  “I think we can all pitch in to pay for the wigs and vests,” Delta went on in a calming voice. “You’ll get your money back, Lacy.”

  “That’s not the point—”

  “The point is,” Rae said in a determined voice, “whatever we wear, we’ve still got to sing. Can we get back to rehearsal, please?” She heaved an exaggerated sigh. “If we don’t get this right, I’ll be the one peeing onstage.”

  AS THE MEMORIES CAME, Lacy found herself fighting back tears. Despite herself, she missed the camaraderie of those days, missed her old college friends, missed her sister most of all.

  Growing up, she had longed for an identity of her own. Being a twin could be complicated. Lacy recalled how captivated she had been in Psych 101 when the professor first introduced her to Maslow’s hierarchy of human need. She had latched onto the concept, clung to it like a drowning woman to a life raft. Self-actualization. That was what she wanted. To be not someone else’s mirror image, but her own person, a unique, fully self-actualized human being….

  An image from their teenage years rose in her mind, what Lacy thought of as the burger ritual. It happened every time: Lacy would remove the pickles from her cheeseburger, setting aside each slice one by one, and one by one Lauren would pick them up and eat them. It was the same with salads; Lacy took the tomatoes off Lauren’s greens and gave her all the croutons. They never asked, never discussed it; they did it automatically, in fluid movements as if a single person just happened to inhabit two bodies.