Miss Bunce struck the chord and left her fingers resting on the keyboard. The center of the curtain jutted and yanked about, but didn’t part to reveal Ben and the company. She struck the chord again and stepped on the sustaining pedal. Still, the curtains didn’t open. The silence, which had come gradually over the auditorium, was broken by beginning murmurs.
“Run in and find out what’s happening,” Miss Bunce whispered between violent breaths.
I sprinted. Backstage, boredom and bedlam reigned with equal strength. The bored few stood shifting about in their approximate places. The bedlam was caused by all the others, who seemed to be rushing back and forth from the stage to the exit to the hall on the other side, pulling and yanking at their costumes. The formerly flattering young mother-aide was dashing from escapee to escapee, rehooking and resnapping with vicious might. Ben, holding the center of the curtains in a deathlike grip, was inquiring desperately over his shoulder of one and all, “What’s the matter? Why isn’t everybody in place?”
I approached the quietest songstress—ordinarily a bystander type. “What’s happening?”
“Janet had to go to the bathroom,” she whispered.
“But what about everybody else?”
She shrugged. “They all had to go too, I guess.”
The delay was understandable. The bathroom was situated a third of a block down the hall, and satisfaction of this sudden mass urge was not possible with the snapped and hooked costumes and leotards in place. Complete undressing and redressing for the number of people milling in and out could take an hour.
I ran to Ben with the information.
“Why can’t they hold it?” he said at me, as though I, not Janet, had set off the chain reaction. “If I wanted to, I could go too, but…never mind. Tell Miss Bunce I’m coming out to do ‘Welcome’ in three minutes, whether they’re ready or not. Go on. I’ll count to sixty just three times.”
He reminded me of my father: absolute purpose untouched by practicality, a firm belief that it was worth trying to order things as one wanted them to be, no matter what the odds or consequences.
I hurried back out to Miss Bunce to give her the news. “Oh my gracious!” she muttered, sending the now boisterous audience a twitching deceitful smile over my head. “Just wait till I get my hands on them.”
From the way she was kneading her hands in her lap, I was happy I wasn’t a blue bell.
A spotlight shone on the middle of the stage’s apron. Ben parted the curtains enough to slide through, and there he was, his eyes shining at the noisy throng. Miss Bunce struck her chord again, but to no avail. The intemperate babbling grew louder, if anything.
Ben put his hands on his hips, threw back his head, and shouted, “Quiet!”
There was laughter, a few boos, and some joyous applause from the vicinity of the third row. I lowered my eyes so as not to confirm the identity of the isolated claque.
“I’m going to sing whether you hear me or not!” Ben yelled.
That earned a burst of laughter. Then, as Miss Bunce, seemingly in a trance now, banged out the key chord once more, awful, total silence.
Ben’s head wobbled from side to side before finding a relaxed, balanced position on his neck. A slow, beatific smile spread across his face. “Now you are ready,” he complimented his audience. “I am Ben Briard, and our program is called Flowers of Spring. I will open it by singing ‘Welcome, Sweet Springtime,’ accompanied by our director, Miss Narcissa Bunce, down there at the piano. The girl next to her is Lucresse Briard and she’ll play the accompaniment for the rest of the program.” He included Miss Bunce and me in his gracious smile for all the world. We stared dumbly at him.
Clapping came from the third row again and was duplicated in dots from other rows. Miss Bunce hit her chord for the last time, and Ben sailed into song.
He sang it better than he had in practice. The cold and the coffee made his voice more carrying and less strained. And having an audience of strangers had an electric effect on him. When he held the last note as long as possible, it occurred to me that he didn’t want to end the song. Ben would like to stay up there alone in the light as long as he lived. But it had to end, and the second it was over, even before the applause broke, Miss Bunce shoved my music in front of hers and galloped away backstage.
Ben took three bows, the last one and a half unnecessary, in my opinion, and I braced my fingers for “The Flowers that Bloom in the Spring.” Reluctantly, Ben withdrew through the curtain, the blissful smile lingering softly on his lips as he disappeared.
My fingers trembled waiting for the curtains to draw aside, revealing the revelers. My fingers began to ache.
The middle curtain shook and Ben returned. As I watched him, wide-eyed, he said, “There will be a short delay because some members of the cast are not quite ready…because…they’re not. Lucresse Briard will play ‘The Blue Bells of Scotland.’ ”
Immediately there was a terrible clapping from the third row. I dared to glance its way and almost tumbled off the piano bench as I saw hundreds of pairs of eyes looking straight and expectantly into mine.
I looked to Ben for reassurance, but he was no longer there. I placed my hands in the familiar position of the opening notes, and as if they weren’t attached to me, much less under my control, they began to move. They played measure after measure, and most of them sounded unfamiliar, out of tune, discordant, though my fingering was automatic and accurate. It wasn’t until the closing chord, when I took a good look at them, that I realized I had played the entire piece in a different key from the one it was written in.
Ben returned, applauding with the audience. I was tempted to stand up and bow as he had before, but I was afraid my legs wouldn’t hold me.
I prepared for the opening of “Flowers that Bloom” again and waited for him to announce the number.
“Will you play something else for us, Lucresse?” he inquired smoothly.
“NO!” I croaked, in shock.
“Well, ladies and gentlemen,” said Ben with barely a pause, “this isn’t really part of the program, but they’re still not ready back there, and Miss Bunce said something had to be done, so I’m going to do something. It’s part of a play named Romeo and Juliet by a man named Shakespeare. He lived a real long time ago in the ancient times and he wrote a lot of swell stuff, only you need a whole bunch of actors to do a lot of it, except if you don’t have them and then you can act out swell parts by yourself like this one. You’ll see what I mean.
“I’m Mercutio, a real brave character that just got stabbed and is about to die, but his stupid friend—the dumb Romeo who the play’s named for—he says the hurt can’t be so bad. And I say, ‘No, ’tis not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church door…”
Ben acted it up, clutching at the general area of his heart and lurching from foot to foot. At the end, as he collapsed, a boy in a back row yelled, “Say, he’s some crazy kid, ain’t he!” Others stamped their feet and whistled and some took up the cry, “More! Do some more!”
Ben jumped to his feet and hollered back, “Sure!”
Miss Bunce’s furious face poked out from between the curtains behind him. The mouth moved and the face was quickly withdrawn. Ben held up his hands, the glad stamina going out of his body. “The program is finally ready,” he announced. “I’m sorry.”
The curtains parted all the way, exposing the most terrified group of faces, including Miss Bunce’s, I’ve ever seen.
“They’ll sing ‘The Flowers that Bloom in the Spring,’ ” Ben said, and stalked off into the wings.
Miss Bunce raised her hands, and the wooden faces and my wooden hands did their duty, song after song.
Between the songs, the applause was loudest when Ben came out to make the introductions.
At the very end, Miss Bunce gestured to me to join them on the stage. Before I could get to her side, Ben hurried out from the wings to her side to share the curtain call. As I joined them, the lights made me squint and my fe
et felt foolish.
“We will sing ‘My Country ’Tis of Thee,’ ” Miss Bunce announced, digging her heels into the stage floor. “You are invited to join in.”
She about-turned, stopping herself with her heels again, and Ben began the song, in his own most comfortable key. Miss Bunce, I, the leaves and blue bells, and the audience went into “sweet land of liberty” in the same key.
As “Le-et free-dom ring,” died out, I heard a burst of laughter that was all too familiar. My father.
“I wonder what he thinks is so funny,” Miss Bunce remarked as the curtains swept closed in front of us.
Ben and I let her get embroiled with the mob, and we made our way down to the auditorium, where my father was still laughing. All his top teeth were showing; there were tears glittering in his eyes.
“You both did very well,” he explained, “but Fred almost caused an international incident here.”
“Yes, you did very well indeed,” Fred said quickly. “Jolly good.”
“When everyone else sang ‘Let freedom ring,’ ” my father choked back laughter, “Fred rang out, ‘God Save the Queen’! He’s rarely been in such fine voice.”
My father and Fred drove us back to our school, trailing the buses filled with our classmates and Miss Bunce. In the schoolyard, Fred said innocently, “You ought to go in with the children, don’t you think, Mr. Briard? To compliment Miss Bunce. She worked so well with Ben and Lucresse.”
It was my father’s turn to be embarrassed. “That’s her business,” he said abruptly.
The inside of our car was the closest he got to the inside of our San Francisco school.
The next day, Ben’s cold was gone. A note, in tiny, delicate handwriting, incongruous with her physiognomy, came to Mrs. Walter Briard from Miss Bunce, thanking her for her fine contribution to the costume committee and saying that Ben and I were a fine pair of youngsters and that she thought the program went off fine. She told our class the program could have been better, and it wasn’t mentioned again until the day, two months later, that Ben and I picked up our further handled transfer cards.
When she heard we were leaving, Miss Bunce said she’d be thinking of us the next time they had an exchange program and she bid us good luck. And at the end of our last school day, Janet, who had become one of my closest friends and whom Ben ignored since the occasion of her stampede-instigating bathroom break, stopped me in the corridor. “I didn’t want to tell you before,” she said, “but at the end of the program when you came up on stage, I could see right through your dress. And my mother says she just despises kids that show off, like your brother.”
CHAPTER THREE:
SEXUAL STIRRINGS
We left the upright concert grand in the leaky house, and Ben deliberately explained to the empty-eyed old woman in charge of the admissions office at our next school that I rightfully belonged back in the fourth grade. That was mean and foolish of him, because, in that school—between Hulbert and Edmondson in Arkansas (my father’s client had a holiday ranch across the border outside of Memphis)—it wouldn’t have mattered which grade I was in. Every class had boys and girls, with queer haircuts and queerer speech habits, as old as seventeen.
There was one general store that also housed the post office and the one-man police-fire–chief’s headquarters. Marijuana grew under its back windows. The older boys in my class picked it on their way to Sunday school, the Sabbath being the only day that the police officer wouldn’t catch them since he went to the church earlier than they, being the Sunday school teacher, too.
We didn’t stay there long. Fred offended the storekeeper to the point of open enmity by asking the last name of his young, black helper and thereafter addressing the fellow as “Mr.” My father took to correcting my English almost every time I opened my mouth. Ben got embroiled in a ferocious argument with a fifteen-year-old boy in his class over whether boxing was an art or a science; I don’t know which side Ben represented, but he came home with a cut lip. And his opponent, continuing the fracas, stole our car that night. The police chief recovered it and confiscated it as evidence for a week. It was certainly useful evidence. We saw him drive past our house in it on his way to his office every morning.
Even Aunt Catherine, who visited us there for a long weekend, didn’t think this town the ideal place for us to settle down—not that she had any real hope that we would settle anywhere. The “community life” appeared to her to be limited compared to Sapulpa’s; there was no Kiwanis club for my father.
He sold whatever it was he wanted to sell to his Tennessee client without prolonged negotiation, and we left. For Macon, Georgia, I think. But I’m not positive.
• • •
As bread lines lengthened around the country and construction came to a shrieking halt, my father’s trade in priceless art objects remained strangely unaffected, and our life plodded on. Ben perfected his imitations of Bing Crosby and both Nelson Eddy and Jeanette McDonald. As a comfortable child among children with unemployed parents, I continued to feel on the outside of whatever life we were inhabiting. And Fred dealt with our constant upheavals by developing his own unique cause, to which he devoted insistent energy—even threatening to strike. He was determined to persuade my father to have dinner at the same time every evening. True to his character, my father never did succumb to regularity, and Fred never did strike.
In the year I was twelve and Ben was thirteen, I refused to have boys to my birthday party and Ben wouldn’t invite girls to his. Our attitudes died hard. The last party we had, before insisting that we were too old for such celebrations, was a double production when I was nearing thirteen. I invited only girls and he only boys. The sexes giggled at and insulted each other and had a fine time. Then suddenly Ben and I were a lot taller, though still straight and narrow-bodied, and we were fourteen and fifteen, and on our way to Palm Beach, Florida.
Ordinarily when we moved, neither Ben nor I, nor Fred, knew the specific reason. We were used to people floating in and out of our lives and long-distance phone calls that led us to pick up and move someplace else.
The move to Palm Beach was different. Perhaps I was more interested than before in the exact nature of our propelling force. My father was excited. He had been commissioned by a jewelry firm in New York to buy the Peddicord diamond for them. And the Peddicord diamond, one of the largest in the world, belonged to Mrs. Mead Peddicord, Jr., who was in Palm Beach at the time.
Mrs. Peddicord, Jr., better known as the motion picture actress Felicity Gorham, had so far resisted every offer of purchase.
This presented a challenge my father found titillating. He enjoyed the flattery implicit in the New York company appointing him to achieve by personal contact what they couldn’t, as much as he liked the prospect of the fee agreed upon for his successful service, a small percentage of the gem’s value, a sum close to $100,000. I’ve never known a more tumultuous winter.
The house my father was able to buy by remote decision through an agent was unimpressive. Bright, blond stucco on the outside, dim, pocked plaster inside, vaguely Spanish, with mosaic-tile floors. But it was adequate to house us and our goods. The goods, as usual, hung around and leaned around wherever space offered itself. And we each had a room—my father, two. Fred’s was belatedly built—an addition to the garage reached via a staircase off the kitchen. Ben’s and mine were off the second-floor hall and shared a bathroom situated between them. My father had a duplicate of our layout off the opposite side of the hall.
Felicity Gorham, from what the butcher told Fred and some refound, old acquaintances told my father, was in a seafront mansion. Once we were there, he didn’t look her up right away. He seemed to be in no hurry. After a few weeks—time enough for Ben to become his tenth-grade speech teacher’s favorite and for me to become familiar with my ninth-grade homeroom teacher’s right name (it was Wyatt, and I kept getting it confused with a Wyle and a Wyant I’d once had)—when he’d still made no attempt to meet her, he met her by accid
ent, through Ben and me.
On weekends and occasionally after school, we had swimming lessons at the pool of one of the most elaborate resort hotels. After each lesson, I liked to linger in the calm water no higher than my chin and pretend to perform an accomplished crawl. Ben’s instruction had been more fruitful. He preferred to practice his stroke and unfearful breathing in the more turbulent ocean. There was a daily argument as to whether we’d go to the beach or the pool. Usually my father settled the dispute by taking me to the pool, where, after one swim back and forth, he donned a robe and sat at a table on the surrounding patio nodding approval of my efforts as he sipped a highball. And he permitted Ben to go to the beach, so long as he was with friends, or, if friends weren’t available, Fred.
I couldn’t understand why, when friends weren’t available, Ben accepted Fred’s company without protest—until the first time I was compelled to go to the beach too because my father was keeping an appointment with a young architect whose ideas for a small, modern house near the shore interested him temporarily.
Fred considered exposure of the skin to direct sunrays uncivilized. Once, years before, at Brighton, when he had evidently already become bald, he had lain for only twenty minutes, he said, unshielded from a summer sun, and had to salve every inch of his fair-complexioned, so mistreated body, including his tortured skull, every hour on the hour for two weeks with a vile-smelling, medicated slime. Now he was unshakable in his distrust of tropical sun, his dislike of sand, and his repulsion to moving salt water.
To accompany Ben and me to a place replete with these abominations, Fred geared himself with a long-sleeved shirt, Bermuda shorts, high socks, a wide-brimmed straw hat, a jar of Noxzema, one blanket, and three bed sheets. Ben and I carried our own towels. At the edge of the pavement where the sand shore began, Fred removed his shoes, wrapped one sheet, Moslem style around his waist, making sure it skirted his legs to his toes. He laid another sheet, half-unfolded, over the top of his hat, and warning us not to step on crabs or shells, hobbled and hopped in the soft, despicable sand to the nearest spot he could get us to encamp. There, he spread the blanket flat and covered it with the last sheet, in hopes of barring the entrance of the powderiest grain of sand through his floor, and he sat down in the very center of his tiny stronghold of civilization, cross-legged, with his Noxzema jar in his lap. He unfurled the sheet balanced on his hat and draped it from its middle fold over his entire person, like a tent. He then arranged the smallest possible aperture, no more than the width of his glasses, between the sheet’s meeting edges, as a sighting spot from which he could fulfill his duty as potential rescuer of human life from the vicious ocean.
Trouble With the Truth (9781476793498) Page 5
