Bailey, squirming around, added, “I guess maybe you didn’t know my mom played the piano.”
“I do know,” I told him, choking up.
“Gosh,” Birdie said, “that’s really nice of you, Uncle Rufus, and you, too, Bailey and Borden, but I couldn’t let you do that. On account of my friend Felice, we play together, and she doesn’t have the money for her own instrument either, and I couldn’t let her be the only one in Junior String Project who has to play a loaner.” And she came over and gave Red a big kiss, standing on tiptoe.
“Do you even know what a cello costs?” Borden asked, slicking back his preppie hair with a practiced hand. “We’re talking about a good one.”
Birdie walked over and stopped by her older cousin’s chair. “If you mean a really good cello? My teacher who plays in an orchestra, he’s the best or nearly the best, his cello costs twenty thousand. But naturally if you are doing the concert-stage-in-Europe kind of playing, which I won’t ever be doing, then I guess you can pay five hundred thousand, you know, for one made in 1700 in Italy or like that.”
“Well, double duh,” Borden said. “Excuse us. We wanted to do something decent for you, in Mom’s memory.” His face cracked just a bit, having to talk about his mother.
“I know that, Borden,” Birdie said, putting one of her firm hands on his shoulder. “But you were being condescending about my cello playing. That’s like you’re supposed to be real grateful if I was giving you a scholarship to a junior college in North Texas, when what you wanted was to go to Yale. My teacher’s fine cello costs less than one year at your good school is going to cost you. And even that eighteenth-century cello, back when they were violoncellos, costs less than your education that lets you go in all directions is going to cost you.”
Bailey half rose out of the leather chair in defense of his brother. “Just because you’re a squatty girl with hairy legs doesn’t mean you know it all.”
Red started to move, but I put my hand on his arm, and kept it there.
Sounding angry, he dropped his voice. “How come they get to fight—?”
“They’re better at it—,” I whispered back, sending him a smile, but meaning it, too.
“Ella—” He spoke so low I could barely hear him. “Don’t you know I’m doing this for you?”
All I could do was nod.
Then he asked Birdie, “What does your friend Felice play?”
“She’s a flutist, Uncle Rufus.”
“What could you and Felice both get good-condition student instruments for?”
Birdie stood in the middle of the small library, cooling off from getting mad at her cousin. “My teacher says you can get a good learning cello for two thousand and a good mid-line open-hole flute for two thousand. Not your all-silver handmade for eight thousand or one of the best grenadilla-wood flutes, like that, for twenty. That’s what he said. That’s what Felice and I are saving our money for. We baby-sit and we pet-sit, and we make a lot in the summer. Sometimes we make forty dollars a month.”
She looked really proud, my daughter, but I noticed the two boys looking down at their bare tanned knees, sticking out of shorts either pair of which cost more than her month’s earnings.
Red got a piece of scrap paper from his pocket and scratched a few figures. “How’s this for a proposition, Birdie—we can come up with three thousand, the boys and I, that’s one each, plus I’ll pay you forty dollars a day to board and room Bailey the week I drive Borden to New Haven and back. I figure dropping him off with you in Old Metairie on the way will save that much.”
I thought my younger nephew was going to have an attack on the spot. He grabbed his head, he threw his arms in the air, he hollered, “Daaaaaad.”
Borden broke out in a guffaw. “Dumbo-sitting.”
Birdie giggled. “That’s more than I get for cats.”
Bailey glared at his dad. “Is that what you two were arguing about? Who got stuck with me? Is it?”
I couldn’t believe he said it, that he could think such a thing. This kid, worth his weight in treasures. “Naw,” I said, before Red could answer. “We were fighting about who got stuck with me.”
Both boys looked at me funny, then looked at their dad.
“That leaves you seven hundred twenty short,” Red told Birdie, showing her his figures. And it really gave me a solid lump in my chest, that he made it a deal; that he didn’t just give the girls the whole thing. I knew he was aching for some need for reparation; that two student instruments hardly cost the price of the piano stool on a Steinway baby grand. But, still, he was treating this like a serious, quantifiable transaction.
“We each have a hundred and sixty dollars saved up to buy our instruments. I bet you, Uncle Rufus, that the music stores—I would get mine at a violin store and she would get hers at the orchestra store—could find us one just a little bit not as good.”
It was at this point—when the boys were making sight gags to each other, Bailey making an imaginary noose out of his hands, letting his head loll to one side, Borden pretending his fingers were pistols aimed at his brother—that Daddy rose from his seat behind the desk, where he had been so silent we’d all forgotten he was there. “What is this? What’s going on? Nobody told me my granddaughter needed a cello.” He looked around the history-filled room, a sea yawning in its frame behind him, five surprised faces looking back.
Of course he wasn’t only talking about Birdie or Birdie’s cello. Any more than Red had been, than the rest of us had been. His face crumpled, and he stood unsteady on his feet, looming over the top of his desk as he said, “She used to play. We liked to hear her play. Your aunt had a lot of talent, Girlie. She took lessons on that piano in there.” He gestured with his arm, which stayed fixed in the air, pointing. “We’ll sell it now. No need to have that sitting here, a reminder. Something your grandmother, your mother, Ella, something she has to dust every week of her life. We’ll sell it. Let the piano buy Birdie her cello.” He leaned forward, both hands supporting him. “Let the piano buy Birdie her cello.”
The rest of us—Red, the boys, and I—caught up in our own feelings, our own personal guilt, didn’t answer. But Birdie, reasonable, told him, “Granddaddy, you can’t sell that to anybody, because nobody can play it. Don’t you know it’s totally out of tune? Didn’t Aunt Terrell tell you?” She left the library and went into the living room, calling out, “Listen, Granddaddy.” And then in her fullest voice she sang the scale, “Do, re, mi …” Each time hitting a key on the piano that sounded flat, dull, so far off the note that each and every one of us could hear it.
“Nobody told me,” Daddy said, breaking into a sob. “We thought it was good enough. Nobody ever told me.”
“Sheeesh,” Bailey groaned, standing and studying the spines of a row of ancient chronicles.
“What’d you have to do that for, Dad?” Borden’s voice rose, his face red. “Why’d you have to make a big deal about it? Couldn’t you just have paid for the instruments and dropped it?”
Red took my hand, while both his boys found other places to look. His eyes were red. “We sang those Christmas carols and none of us listened.”
“This is a wonderful gift you’re giving,” I told him, no longer having the wish to fight.
25
Daddy, fixing our breakfast, looked as if he might be getting ready for the first day of classes in a new semester. He’d trimmed his beard, tightened the screws in his eyeglasses so they wouldn’t slip down his nose, and put on a freshly laundered light blue professor’s shirt and his best suit vest and trousers. And had on Sunday shoes instead of his bedroom slippers. If I’d for a moment forgotten that the former student of Mother’s was due for a visit this morning, his appearance and demeanor were instant reminders.
Plus, in honor of the occasion, my daughter had pulled her shawl of hair back into a neat thick plait, and had shaved her legs. “Granddaddy said today was important to Grandmom,” she’d explained when she appeared from the bathroom upstairs,
all scrubbed, talking while I ironed my café au lait dress on the bed. “I think he meant he wanted me to look nice.”
Yes, nice. I, too, had done my best, with barrettes and lipstick, a little color on my cheeks, the pressed dress, pale hose, sandals. Doing what I could to turn myself, turn Ella, into a presentable daughter.
My mind was on Red. We had talked late last night, me taking the phone around the corner into the large hall closet by the bathroom while Birdie slept, just as Terrell had often done in high school, when we shared a room. We talked mostly about the logistics of Bailey staying with me in Old Metairie, a bit of temporary custody which warmed the region under my ancient cotton nightie. He admitted he’d suggested that on impulse, an impulse having to do with wanting to see me both directions on his drive east.
“It’ll get him out of the impasse between my dad’s place and all his old buddies in West Lake Hills. Give him time to think over what he wants to do.”
“He can help me with the plumber,” I suggested, leaning my back against the wall beneath where Terrell’s and my clothes had once hung. I’d had a call that afternoon from my tenant, the teacher, about the recent flooding, and had made a raft of promises.
“I’ll take you back to dinner at the Pink Cafe. We can start over,” he offered.
“You can carry me through the swamp in my backyard again.” I shut my eyes thinking of that, wanting him.
“Can I see you tomorrow? Before you go?” His voice sounded slightly muffled, and I wondered if he called from the bedroom, his childhood bedroom, where I’d piled my panties, sandals, and sunglasses on the floor.
“We’re leaving at dawn,” I told him.
“I love you, Ella.”
But I had said, “Not now,” gazing, like an idiot, at my watch. “It’s too soon or too late or something.”
Today, at the breakfast table, the hot fried eggs staring back at me, I listened to Daddy holding forth on the lack of objectivity on the part of historians in relation to History. In plain words, how he was sick and tired of reading every single day in the newspaper some commentator’s explanation of this year’s crop-withering, livestock-starving, aquifer-depleting drought. How each and every one took their personal misery about the loss of their cattle and the lack of rain in their watersheds and the parching of their grasslands, and compared it to the disaster nearest his or her own birth—the drought of 1917 (Texas’s driest year), the Dust Bowl of the thirties, the arid, choking fifties. Turning it into some universal economic or geographical or even social theory.
Birdie, rapt, attended to every word as a granddaughter should, while Daddy stirred together a fresh-peach coffee cake, with the last of the Hill Country’s summer crop, accidentally dropping an egg on the floor, which took a sheaf of paper towels to remedy.
“Tell me the woman’s name again,” I asked him, pushing my eggs about my plate. A sign of stress: Ella with no appetite.
“Daughter,” Daddy said, washing away the last trace of his mess, “that will have to wait a spell. I am not at the peak of my concentration, here. Your mother, I might as well mention, is still evidencing some reluctance to welcome this former student into our home.”
“She’s not going to stay back in the bedroom, is she?”
He brushed the cake flour off the front of his good suit pants. “I am confident,” he said firmly, “that everything will be copacetic once the moment arrives.” Looking anything but, he washed up our plates and checked that the oven had heated up.
“What can I do, Granddaddy?” Birdie asked, in her lavender Amish cello-playing dress and the Chinese slippers she’d borrowed from Felice.
“Let me have a spell in the library with your mother,” he requested. “You keep an eye on my peach cake here. Twenty minutes ought to do it.”
“All right,” she said.
In his library, Daddy recalled the visitor’s name. “Sadie Grimes. Sadie Clark, she was back then. There were a pair of sisters, that’s what her letter reported.”
I sat in the persimmon leather chair where yesterday Bailey had gone bananas learning he was to be in my care for a week. My heart still both light and heavy with what had gone on in this room.
“Ella, girl,” Daddy began, safely behind the width of his paper-stacked walnut desk. “I think it’s time you were put in full possession of matters relating to your mother and me before we were blessed with our fine daughters. Being an historian, I know that there are a lot of factors bearing on any one event. But, it seems to me, with your mother’s recent trouble, and with the possible upset today may cause her, I’d be amiss not to put certain information in your hands.”
I felt totally lost. “Whatever you want to tell me, Daddy,” I said.
“You take these letters. I’ve saved them long enough. The reason for keeping them a closed subject is moot, with your sister gone.” His voice wobbled slightly, then he opened a drawer and pulled out a folder, removing two envelopes and handing them to me, one thin and palest yellow, one thick and a stock white.
“Keep an open mind,” he admonished.
May 10, 1950
My dear Judah,
I reread your letter over and over, as I have all of the others. You don’t know the happiness your correspondence provides me. I, also, think of our time together on your last visit here daily, and count the days until you can return.
I know our East Texas life seems slow and perhaps not as challenging as your academic life in Austin, but in our way, my way, it has its rewards. I have thrown myself into the work of tending these small children whom fate has placed in my hands. There is a mystery here I mean to solve. The migrant Mexican children, whose fathers work the hay and lumber mills, when they are older, will have access to every grade of the white schools here in town, which the Negro children, most of whose fathers work the oil rigs here, do not. Yet the lack of language seems to me (a mere observer, as teachers of the young are) a handicap more arduous to overcome than the separate schooling of the Negroes, who, after all, share the language of our King James Bible and the mutual language of our grandmothers. It makes my task a heavy one, not being myself a Spanish speaker. Nor am I sure I can make proper headway otherwise to prepare these small eager children for our public schools in which they will be, in another year or two, enrolled.
This topic (about which I fear I have gone on too long, and please forgive me, especially since I write to one who has the breadth and distance of History at his disposal) brings me, reluctantly, to your question of last week: Will I marry you and move to Austin? I cannot, at this moment in time, say yes with a light heart. I love you dearly, which I am not ashamed or embarrassed to confess. But I do believe that it is not my destiny to rear children of my own, but rather, that my “calling,” if I do not elevate myself too highly, is here.
We will talk more when you come. Please do not give up on me. Until then, may God look after you.
Your,
Agatha
AGATHA ADAMS
ANGELINA COUNTY, TEXAS
I looked across at my daddy, as if the answer to the questions raised by this long-ago letter might be on his stricken face. “Mother? This was from Mother?” I couldn’t conceive of it.
“Read on,” he said. “And don’t think too harshly of that young man I was.”
December 20, 1950
Dearest Agatha,
I miss you daily, although I am pleased to think of you in East Texas, in what must still feel somewhat like “home” to you. I trust your mother is pleased with the progress of your pregnancy, and will allow you to come back into my care soon, for it is almost too late in term for you to be traveling.
I confess, I do have my heart set on naming our firstborn Samuel, a strong name, with a good scriptural promise, although I certainly understand your wish to name him for your father, John. (Still, one can see that John Hopkins could possibly be a confusing name, so similar to a fine institution). But let us not even hint of a quarrel. I am not inflexible. Nor would I be anything
but glad should we be blessed with a daughter whom you might want to call after some branch of your own family.
And now, my helpmeet and my beloved, I must close. I wish you were here with me. East Texas seems as far away as China. Hurry home.
Your loving husband,
Judah
J. HOPKINS
AUSTIN, TEXAS
My first thought was that I had never known these people, that they were unknowable, having ceased to exist. This Agatha, a girl of twenty-two who did not want to be a wife or mother, later making that very persistent husband and those children the center of her life. It broke my heart. And that callow teacher Judah, suffused with pride: a wife, an heir on the way, a Ph.D. in hand. Already lonely. That broke my heart, too.
“Thank you, Daddy,” I said, folding the letters, fitting them in the envelopes, and handing them back to him.
“You see the way things were,” he said, looking disheartened, forlorn.
Did I? What had I missed? I took the letters back.
“Your mother and I married in July; your sister was born in February.”
I had to count on my fingers. I’d paid no attention to the dates on the letters, past seeing they were before we’d been born. That my mother had married, shamed and pregnant, was incomprehensible. My mother? We’d always celebrated their anniversary on Valentine’s Day. So romantic. My sister’s birthday a year later almost to the day. So perfect. But how could I, in the late nineties, have possibly understood what it meant in 1950 to “have” to marry? For a girl such as Agatha Adams. Or, perhaps, for any girl.
“I didn’t know any other way to win your mother,” Daddy confessed, his face streaked. “She meant to stay.” He studied his desk. “I’ve had to live with that.”
My mother, well before she was anyone’s, speaking of her work with the young as her “calling.” Asking God to bless the cultured man who’d come courting her. How much guilt she must have felt. I remembered going with Mother and Terrell to the small limestone Episcopal church, more than a century old, in downtown Austin, never missing a Sunday in Advent, never missing a Palm Sunday or an Easter. The words of the sermon—grace, shame, sin, salvation, sacrifice—the lexicon of my mother’s faith. And we, sitting on either side of her, her visible good works.
Ella in Bloom Page 16
