“Oh, thank you.” I clasped the book.
“You’d better check with that person who’ll do anything for you about doing the blue bells’ costumes,” she said, locking her desk and getting her car keys out of her handbag.
I trotted at her hip to her car. “I’m sure it’s all right about the costumes. Can I tell Ben you’ll let him do the you-know-what?”
“If you can learn to play ‘The Blue Bells of Scotland’ by next Wednesday,” she said, and drove off. That the Scottish air had to do with a war-deprived lovelorn maiden rather than with flowers had not deprived Miss Bunce from scheduling its performance by the blue bells of the fifth grade.
When I got home, I didn’t think once of informing Fred of the forthcoming emergent need for his seamstress service; the issue of how I was to acquire a piano was of such preeminence. I exploded with the request.
My father warmed to the idea immediately. The client he had moved to San Francisco to see had a magnificent pianoforte, a seventeenth-century one, if he could persuade the fellow to sell it.
“Oh, please don’t,” Fred begged, considering the additional specialist moving men such a purchase would necessitate.
“But it’s a beautiful thing,” my father insisted.
“No, Mr. Briard.”
“But, Fred,” I interjected, “If I don’t get a piano right away, Ben has to stay a leaf.”
My father had, as usual, an attitude of hands-off sympathy for Ben’s ambition, but his arguing for the piano was motivated more by desire for another art treasure.
“You haven’t seen this piano,” he said acerbically to Fred. “It’s inlaid with—”
“No. Absolutely no, sir,” Fred insisted.
“I cannot see your reasoning,” my father rebutted.
“Mr. Briard, I’ve said nothing in all these years about the two Empress beds you found necessary for Lucresse, because they were such a beautiful pair, or those enormous bronze plant holders that won’t hold a daisy, but are so beautiful—but we do not have space for a beautiful piano!”
“Couldn’t we get one that’s not beautiful?” Ben suggested.
My father could do no more than gesture his disgust at such an idea, but to me it had real merit.
“One that we could leave here when we move?” I said hopefully. “I only need it for two-and-a-half weeks.”
Fred, at military attention, stated his position with ultimatum clarity. “I will agree to a small, cheap, ugly piano that we can abandon. Should a beautiful seventeenth-century piano be carried into this already overweighted leaky house, I will move out and go back across the seas from whence I came.”
“If you get a cheap, ugly piano, dear children, you will get it by yourselves,” my father said bitterly. “I will have nothing to do with it.”
“Will you pay for it?” I asked.
“You will pay for it?” asked Ben, more positively.
“No more than twenty-five dollars. And if it’s ugly, it’s not worth that.”
“Thank him for his unsparing generosity, children,” said Fred, squinting nastily through his spectacles at my father. “I’ll try to help you find an inexpensive piano, but I doubt that there is one so inexpensive in the entire western half of the United States. If you need twenty-five dollars more, I shall provide it, with all my good wishes.”
“Oh, Fred!” I said, hugging him—as much to make my father feel bad as to make Fred feel good. “But you’re already going to have enough to do for us, what with the twenty costumes.”
“What costumes?” Fred unclasped my arms from his waist.
“For the blue bells,” I said, and I explained my bargain with Miss Bunce.
“Ho-ho!” my father exclaimed.
Fred removed his glasses and breathed on them furiously. “How could you promise such a thing, Lucresse? A few buttons, surely—but twenty costumes? No. Definitely, no!”
“But if you don’t,” Ben pleaded, “I won’t get to do anything but be another leaf. Why make me suffer? I didn’t promise you’d do the costumes. It’s all Lucresse’s fault.”
“It was your idea for me to play the piano,” I retaliated.
Fred snapped his glasses back on behind his ears. “At the rate I sew, it would take me the fortnight, without sleep, to do up twenty costumes. No, young sir, and no to you, mum. I have enough to do.”
“Please, Fred?” Ben and I pleaded.
“Why, Fred, what’s happened to your compassion?” my father teased. “Take pity on these poor, corrupt little beggars.”
“Great heavens above, I need strength to control myself. All right, Mr. Briard—being it is as it is—I’ll make my own bargain with you. All of you. I do not withdraw my offer to help pay for a cheap piano, but I will not help find one. And I will not take one blasted stitch in one blasted costume unless all of you share the work of making all twenty. I can teach you to sew as well as I. If that isn’t a satisfactory bargain, I will prepare my notice on the spot.”
“If you made that threat more than once every ten years, I’d take you up on it,” my father said. “Now, we accept your bargain.”
“Agreed. Children, just let me know when you need the money.”
I asked Ben twice, in my father’s hearing, how one goes about buying a cheap piano. Both times Ben said he had to think about it, and my father just went on silently doing whatever he was doing at his jumbled desk. Late in the afternoon, when I thought Fred might be in a better mood, I tried him. Though calm, he said, “I declared I wouldn’t help, and I’m a man of my word.”
Even later, when I judged that my father may have softened to a call for help—he was reading the evening newspaper and appeared to be far removed from the realities in his immediate household, and therefore more easily persuaded to face them with detachment—I brought up the subject again, in a louder than necessary voice.
“Ben, how can we find a piano? Where?”
The paper didn’t move from its position in front of my father’s face.
“I’m still thinking about it,” Ben said.
My voice grew louder. “But the book Miss Bunce gave me to learn from has sixty-four pages, and I only have seventeen days.”
Without moving the newspaper so that we could see his face, my father said, very low, “When you want something, you have to let other people know.”
“We have let you and Fred know,” I said indignantly.
“You have to let other people know, people who may have cheap pianos that they wish to sell,” the voice spoke from behind the paper.
“But we don’t know who the people are who have cheap pianos and want to sell them,” Ben said.
“You have to find them, dig them out, separate them from all the people who don’t have cheap, ugly pianos for sale.”
I felt like punching the newspaper. “How?” I said desperately.
“You’ll have to deduce the answer for that yourself. I’m busy reading a notice about an auction in Marin where I may pick up one of the tapestries Mr. William Randolph Hearst missed.”
Ben was no more intelligent than I. His intelligence was, characteristically, just put to use more quickly than mine.
“May we see that newspaper when you’re through?” he asked politely.
“You may, if you don’t construe this as aid or report it to Fred.”
A moment later, with me at his shoulder, Ben found a column headed, “Merchandise For Sale.” One two-line ad caught our fast and slow intelligence. Ben read it aloud. “Piano. Uprt. Chp.” The address was on a business street on the way to our school. The ad was signed “A. Forelli.”
My father suggested that I stop in to see Mr. Forelli in the morning, but Ben could not come with me because “Nobody, not even Ben, should influence my decision whether or not to buy a cheap, ugly piano.” The responsibility was to be mine alone.
The next morning, Ben left me at the address—a recently opened dry-cleaning shop; Mr. Forelli was its proprietor.
“Avanti, Avanti,”
he said. “Your mamma, she send a little girl to look first? C’mon, it’s in the back.”
The instrument had a muddy-brown, scarred case and chipped, yellowing keys. Its top was higher than Miss Bunce’s piano’s, and its backboard was nicked around the pedals. In large, gold Gothic lettering above the keyboard, “Needham” was printed, and beneath that, “New York.”
“You see?” said Mr. Forelli, “She’s American.”
To the right of Needham and New York was the designation, “Upright Concert Grand.” I didn’t ask what that meant and Mr. Forelli didn’t say.
“You know Milano?” he asked. “The shoemaker had this store before? He liked music, so he had this here. When he die, his wife, she say she ain’t payin’ to move it out…I can have it. But I don’t want it. So he liked music? So why couldn’t he listen to the radio like me?”
From under a pressing table, he pulled a dusty bench over for me. Even with my fledgling instruction, I detected that you could almost blow the keys down. And Mr. Milano either hadn’t liked B-flats or at some time he’d mistakenly engaged a plumber to repair all eight. Not one of them sounded.
“You tell your mamma she can have it for twenty dollari if she take it away,” Mr. Forelli said.
“And how much would it cost to move it?”
“Ah, now I see why she send a little girl! You live near?”
“Yes.”
“Then, I tell you what. If she want it, my boy and me, we put it on my delivery truck and bring it. But it still twenty dollari. After all, I paid for the paper ad.”
“We want it, all right. You bring it,” I said. “Today.”
“Calma! We ask your mamma first, eh?”
“My father said it would be all right. He’ll pay you the twenty dollars.”
When I came home from school the next day, the piano was in my room, hidden from my father’s critical sight. I wouldn’t let Fred dust it or Ben touch it. I only suffered everyone to listen to it. It and Miss Bunce’s book became the focal points of my existence. To an audience that didn’t even try to conceal its displeasure, all that afternoon and evening I practiced beginning exercises and scales, less their B-flats. I played them for Miss Bunce the next afternoon, and she used the principal’s telephone to arrange for one of the more willing members of the reprehensible costume committee to deliver the unfinished costumes to our house that very evening.
The next week was filled with fulfilling our various bargains. Fred, tight-lipped and antagonistic, directed sewing sessions. He was particularly abusive about my father’s difficulty with mastering the craft of tacking a light material to a heavier host, the veiled headpieces. My father spent one entire session searching for a silver thimble that he’d once bought as a gift for me but had forgotten to give me. Now he used it himself, and that, added to his missing one work period, compounded Fred’s anger. He invented opportunities to remind my father that he was hardly abiding by the bargain. In return, my father kept reminding Fred that his grandiose gesture of offering Ben and me financial aid had not been called to action. Ben bent to the sewing task with intense, distracted grace, his mind chained to the purpose of memorizing the introductions and lyrics to “Welcome, Sweet Springtime.” The only waking hours we ceased sewing, practicing, memorizing, and complaining were the afternoon my birthday party came and went.
Three days before the exchange program, the costumes were finished. My father was criticizing Fred’s handiwork and musing that he himself might have become a very successful tailor. Ben could do the introductions and “Welcome, Sweet Springtime” in his sleep, and I could play “The Blue Bells of Scotland” and the chord progressions Miss Bunce had arranged as accompaniment for her bedecked vocalists.
Last rehearsals were wars of sound: Miss Bunce’s larynx, frantically urging the chorus to shriller and shriller heights, pitted against me stabbing the keys with all my might, and Ben’s lone, melodic greeting spring “in so-ong” contesting unscheduled noise from the restless leaves and blue bells.
The night before the performance, Ben said his throat hurt. My father looked at it and said it couldn’t. Ben said his stomach ached. My father said it would stop.
“Flowers of Spring is going to be awful. Those kids don’t know what they’re doing. I wouldn’t come see it if I were you.”
“But you and Lucresse are in it. And I’ve contributed more needlework than ten women. Certainly Fred and I will be there.”
“Tell him how awful it’s going to be, Lucresse,” Ben ordered.
I didn’t know if I should support him or not. “Are the other parents going?”
“Sure. But what difference does it make? The point is, it’s going to be awful.”
It made all the difference to me. My father and Fred would again be the odd, conspicuous old among the usual young.
“Don’t come. Please don’t,” I begged. “You and Fred already heard Ben do his part, and you’ve heard me.”
“You’ll make Lucresse nervous,” Ben added.
The prospect of the performance had not made me nervous, until now. Now, instantly, I translated the strange, strained behavior I’d noticed in many of my friends in their parents’ presence. They were nervous. Mothers were overly interested in their daughters being ladylike; I was glad I didn’t have that situation. Fathers with young, unsure faces were so anxious to be proud of their sons. Regardless of whether my father hoped for me to be ladylike, regardless of whether he wanted me to make him proud, I wanted to be like the others. I would be nervous if he came.
“Yes, it would make me nervous,” I said.
“Tomorrow at two thirty will never happen again,” my father said. “And you both know that. You’re going to do something you’ll never do again. Of course you’ll both be nervous—but you’ll do the best you can. And I wouldn’t miss it for anything.”
“Suppose something goes wrong and I’m out there all by myself?” Ben said.
“Nothing ever goes completely right.”
Ben woke up in the morning sniffling and speaking in a new, echoey voice. “I’ve got a cold. I’ve got the worst cold adybody ever had!”
He attributed it to a new breakthrough in the ceiling above his bed which silently dripped cold water onto his pillow all night.
“What ki’d of crazy house is this adyhow?” he said.
My father looked hurt.
I came to my father’s defense. “Aw, Ben, we’ve lived in worser ones.”
“Worse,” my father corrected.
“No, we haven’t,” Fred interjected.
“A’d I have to si’g!” Ben wailed.
Fred had seen us through chicken pox, measles, and mumps. Immediately, he gave Ben his own adjunct to any medicine a doctor ever prescribed, a cup of boiling hot coffee with a tablespoonful of whiskey stirred in. He was convinced that heat and alcohol could cure any disease. This time they relieved the congestion in Ben’s nose and left his eyes glazed, his muscles relaxed, and his voice more resonant. Fred was pleased. “I’ll bring you some more in a thermos before the performance,” he assured Ben.
An adult seeing Miss Bunce lurching around in the schoolyard as she frenziedly herded us all into the buses hired to take us to San Bruno might have suspected that she too had swallowed a few bracers in preparation for the occasion. No doubt she hadn’t; it was her unfamiliar high-heels causing the imbalance.
At San Bruno, I went with her and the blue bells to a classroom where they were to change into their costumes. It took a half hour to snap and hook fast all their leotards, another half hour to adjust all our creations over them, and twenty minutes more to attach headpieces. The whole process could have taken twenty minutes had not Miss Bunce been scolding one child after another, and had not one of the interested mothers been flitting about resnapping snaps that she was sure hadn’t been securely snapped in the first place and telling every girl she looked “adorable.”
Fifteen minutes before curtain time, we met the leaves and Ben, who had been ensconced in a
different classroom, on the stage. Miss Bunce bounced across it screeching between clenched teeth, “Everybody ready?” The children took turns teasing and tugging each other away from the curtains’ center where they could peek out. Hysteria built as waves of hostility floated up to us from our audience, composed mostly of our San Bruno fourth- and fifth-grade counterparts, glad that they weren’t in our places and waiting to see how badly we’d do.
Ben coughed in everyone’s face and warned, “Keep real quiet while I’m singing, or else.”
I pulled his arm. “Ben! I think I’ve forgotten the tra-la part of ‘Flowers that Bloom in the Spring’!”
“You got to remember!” he said, shaking a fist at me.
“Now, now, Ben—” Fred’s voice said, as he came to us from the wings, carrying a thermos. “You mustn’t treat Lucresse that way. Here. Sip this.”
“Quiet! Everybody get ready!” Miss Bunce hissed, teetering above a babbling cluster of net-covered heads. “Quiet!”
“Quiet!” Ben repeated, in a startling unconscious imitation of her normal bugle voice.
There was a sudden silence onstage, making the chattering from the auditorium more deafening.
“Take your positions, everybody,” Miss Bunce ordered.
In one continuous motion, Ben drained the steaming, doctored coffee, shoved the thermos back at Fred, and leapt to a statue-stance where the curtains met.
“I do hope you don’t catch his cold,” Fred whispered to me and hurried away through the wings.
Miss Bunce and I left the lined-up blue bells and leaves and went out front to the piano by the same route Fred had taken. I sat next to her on the bench as she got ready to strike the opening chord cue for Ben’s solo rendition of “Welcome, Sweet Springtime,” and I tried not to see my father and Fred in the third row amidst the San Bruno youngsters and the San Francisco parents who’d made the trek for the event. The two men looked even older and more enthusiastic than I’d feared.
Trouble With the Truth (9781476793498) Page 4
