The Moth

by James M. Cain

  “If you like it, then—”

  “Oh dear.”

  “What’s the matter, Miss Eleanor?”

  “It’s wrong, isn’t it, to encourage deception in the young? Then, I guess we start all over again. Well, I won’t do it. How do you like that?”

  “I like anything you say.”

  “Sometimes you have to kid them, don’t you?”

  “You mean—use initiative?”

  “Use what?”

  I told her about Denny, and the car, and how I took the brake off, and she whooped. “You’re simply precious.”

  “Can I stay to supper?”

  “I’ll see.”

  She called up my aunts, and they said I could stay, and she explained to me why she had to be so formal. “Your aunt, Miss Nancy Dillon, has certain reservations about my method, I believe she calls it—”

  “Oh boy, you ought to hear her method!”

  So of course, we had some more laughing over that, but then she went on: “It’ll be simpler, in the beginning anyway, if we keep our schemes to ourselves. You drop by, on your way home from school, and I’ll work you over, step by step, and we’ll see what we’ll see. That is, unless there’s something you’d rather do.”

  “Nothing I know of.”

  “You’re a sweet baby.”

  That night, after she made some omelet and we had that with some ice cream I got at a drug store, she played for me and told me about grand opera and how she sang in the Washington and Baltimore Aborn seasons of 1912, 1913, and 1914, and the Century Opera in New York the year after that, and it was my first taste of romance. Because I went nuts about her, and she went a little nuts about me, but I sometimes wonder if that didn’t have something to do with the baby she lost, not long after she married the Frenchman. The nicest part was how funny it was, the great trick we were playing on everybody. It seemed wonderful to hook a tone up, see her eyes light, have her pull me into her arms for little kisses, and then feel her burst out laughing. Pretty soon I’d kiss her on the cheek and not feel ashamed about it.

  4

  THE TROUBLE WITH BOYS, it turned out, is that they’ve got breath trouble, but they’ve got so little time to be boys that nobody does anything about it. So everybody pretends the “reedy” quality is pretty terrific and makes them sound like little angels. She, though, she didn’t buy it. “All they sound like to me is brats that can’t sing. But you might be the one now to show what a boy might sound like if he sang instead of wheezed. Of course, it may not turn out like that. You may sound like some pip-squeak imitation of an operatic tenor. There’s such a thing as letting a wild Irish rose be a wild Irish rose, and not trying to make an American beauty out of it. Still, I’d like to try. At least you have a voice. It has every fault there is, from escapement to tremolo to four or five other things. It’s like a stream of warm honey that shatters in midair. But we may be able to coax it to flow, clear down to the waffle, and if we do, I’ll eat it with a little silver spoon... Kiss me now, and we’ll start.”

  How we started was to take a streetcar down to a five-and-ten and come back with a red balloon. We worked on it quite a while. She’d have me blow it up and squeeze the neck with one hand and press the air out with the other, then wet the neck and hold it tighter or looser, while I pressed the air out harder or easier. Then she’d make me notice how the higher the pressure the higher the whine of the air going out the neck. After a while I got it through my head that pitch is a matter of tension and pressure. Then we had to go over the way it worked in my throat and my lungs, and she drew a lot of pictures of how I was put together inside, with vocal cords and windpipe and lungs and diaphragm and abdominal muscles, all with exact shape and names, so I can remember them yet. Then I had to get it through my head that pressure from the abdominal muscles, exerted on the relaxing diaphragm, is transmitted to the cords, which are under tension, and that pressure and tension had to balance. If there was too much pressure on the diaphragm and too little tension in the cords, there was escapement, and if it was the other way around there was clutch, or hard throat. In the beginning it surprised me how little she let me sing. Pretty soon, though, there was some of that, and I had to learn to forget what it sounded like, to me inside my head, “as you didn’t buy a ticket, alas,” and get my mind on what it felt like, “as that’s what’ll determine what it sounds like to the customers, who after all are the ones we’re trying to please.” The only one I was trying to please was her, and to me it felt thin, but she seemed satisfied. And then one day I didn’t know if it sounded thin or thick, but only that it felt solid in my belly and like bubbles in my throat, and her eyes began to shine. “Felt good, didn’t it?”

  “Yeah, felt easy.”

  “Rest, and we’ll work it higher.”

  The first song I got was the Mozart Alleluja. Now you’ll hear that Mozart is the delicate tracery that Jack Frost puts on the window pane, that every picture is different and the number of them infinite, that even the crystals have their own design and that it’s never once repeated, that it’s the greatest musical talent we ever had, that it’s genius. Just the same, it’s ice. And yet, the first time I sang that number in church, I could feel the congregation catch its breath, and see women all over the church take out their handkerchiefs and hold them to their eyes. When I got through, Miss Eleanor had found what she’d been looking for. A boy, if he’s taught, has something that a tenor hasn’t got and a soprano hasn’t got and that all of them haven’t got. I guess it’s what a bud has, before it’s a flower.

  From then on, I showed speed. Before I knew it I had four or five operatic arias, some songs and ballads, enough to put on a show with whenever I got booked. That was all the time, at the Masonic Temple, at the Rotary Club, at the reception to the Bishop, at anything you could think of. It caused kind of a situation at home. By now, of course, I had to come out with it that Miss Eleanor had given me a little help, so of course nothing would suit Nancy but that I had to switch to a good teacher, like a friend of hers, Mrs. Pyle, and of course Sheila took it for granted she would play for me. That didn’t sit so well with Miss Eleanor, because I think I’ve told you about Sheila’s ideas on how to ruin a number at one fell swoop. It was the Old Man that knocked it all in the head, and for the right reason: “The two of you will keep hands off, for it’s my considered opinion that you don’t know enough music between you to shake out a Tipperary clog, and why you’d be cluthering into it I don’t know. The little lady, the rector’s niece, seems to have things well in hand. Lad, do you knew The Minstrel Boy?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Ah well, it makes no difference.”

  But he didn’t know his son’s slick ways. In the house was an album with The Minstrel Boy in it, so of course in ten seconds I was in the hallway, singing it for him, reading at sight. That clinched everything.

  Who Miss Eleanor finally picked to play for me was a girl named Margaret Legg, whose family owned one of the big hotels in town, the Cartaret, over on Charles Street. She was about my age, and played a lot better than Sheila. We made a nice pair, specially after we got booked into a New York vaudeville house, she in kind of an Alice in Wonderland outfit Miss Eleanor got her, me with a Little Lord Fauntleroy suit, all in blue velvet with Buster Brown collar. We were always spic and span, as her mother was always there, in New York and the other places we went, and she shined us both till we gave off sparks.

  Margaret pulled one thing I didn’t understand. She went to a private school, Kenneth Hall, where most of the girls boarded, but some came from Baltimore as day scholars. One Friday she asked me to take her to the german, as she called it, that the school gave now and then, and that the girls could invite their friends to. I was all crossed up. The big news with me was I had my first long-pants suit, and as I had grown exactly as tall as Miss Eleanor, I had invited her to go to a movie that was coming to town, called Little Old New York, with a girl in it named Marion Davies, and some old-time fire engines. I sulked, but s
he kept saying we could see the movie some other time, and I had better take Margaret to the german. So I did and we led some kind of a march they started with, and I felt like I had been sent off to the tots’ wading pool. But what got me, after I took her home, was that she started bawling, right there in the lobby of the hotel, with her mother and father and a dozen people looking on. After that I took her around quite a lot, on Miss Eleanor’s say-so, though what it had to do with our appearing together I couldn’t see. There was only one thing about her I liked, at least at that time, and that was her baby sister Helen. She was just able to walk when I first ran into her, and was the cutest thing I had ever seen. I used to bring her apples and ice cream and lollipops and gocarts, and play with her by the hour, and a new word she learned was bigger stuff to me than knocking off an E flat above C, which finally became my record for the event.

  The row with Anderson came just as Miss Eleanor was packing for St. Louis, where she was to sing some summer opera, so she had hurried home after service, and wasn’t there for the grand finale. The phone kept ringing, and I didn’t answer, as by that time the cook had gone and I was alone in the house. About five my father and Nancy and Sheila drove up in a cab, and about five thirty the phone rang again. Nancy answered, and it was the mother of one of the cutie pies. So now they had it, here in the house. I went on the carpet, before Nancy and Sheila, with my father listening, his face dark. What I told them was nothing, as I was afraid they’d get it out of me about my mother. The doorbell rang and it was the cop, with a warrant for my arrest. My father rolled his r’s and refused to let him in or say where I was or help him out in any way. We were all three in the front room to listen, and pretty soon the cop went. Then my father went to the phone, and there was some pretty sharp talk, but from the way Sheila and Nancy began looking at each other, I knew it had been fixed up, somehow, and I wouldn’t be arrested. Then my father brought me back to his den and had a look at my chin, that had a mark on it. Then we went into it. “What started this thing?”

  “... I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “What started it?”

  “He laughed at me.”

  “What for?”

  “Making a fool of myself. Crying.”

  “What were you crying about?”

  “I didn’t feel good.”

  “Were you sick?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Are you sick now?”

  “No.”

  “If you were sick, you could hardly thresh him.”

  “Then I wasn’t sick.”

  “You did thresh him?”

  “So the cop said.”

  “So the complaint said, with many affecting particulars, and so several affidavits said, with a startling unanimity.”

  “Then I beat him up.”

  “What are you concealing?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “You may go to your room.”

  For the next hour or so there was a lot more telephoning, all of them trying to find out what it was about, and a fat chance I’d tell them. But then the phone rang, and I could tell from the way Sheila began to talk that it was Miss Eleanor, and I knew I had to see her no matter what they did to me for it. I took off my shoes and stepped out the window to the roof of the back porch. There was an arbor at one side with Virginia creeper on it, and I climbed down on that. As I started for the back gate Sheila called. I didn’t stop, and it wasn’t till I got to North Avenue that I sat on the curb and put on my shoes.

  “What happened?”

  “Miss Eleanor, I saw my mother.”

  “Where?”

  “In church.”

  “Ah—the one in green?”

  “I didn’t notice her clothes.”

  “She sat on the aisle? One or two pews back?”

  “Yes, that was her.”

  “And you recognized her?”

  I told how I had felt those eyes looking at me, and about the pat, and the perfume. I broke down two or three times telling about the perfume in the attic, because it seemed so silly, but she held me close and said it wasn’t silly at all, and after I got a little bit under control I let her ask me questions, and answered them, and finally she had it. “I’m sure it was she.”

  “I know it, Miss Eleanor.”

  “I saw her, and do you know what I noticed?”

  “What was it, Miss Eleanor?”

  “How much she looked like you.”

  “Like—me?”

  I had a light, happy feeling, because she’d been so beautiful. “You’re very beautiful, Jack. Now tell me the rest of it.”

  “In the basement, when I got the surplice off, I waited a minute, so I wouldn’t make a holy show of myself, and then I came back upstairs in the church, looking for her. And I looked everywhere, in the vestry room, in the vestibule, in the library, in the chapel, all over. Everybody else was there, saying goodbye to Dr. Grant, but not her. Then I went down in the basement again, and then it hit me and I tried to keep from crying and couldn’t. And then that son of a —”

  “Yes, Mr. Anderson.”

  “Started to whistle Una Furtiva Lagrima.”

  “Mr. Anderson has beautiful hands and an ugly mind.”

  “And I hit him, that’s all.”

  “There’ll be some who won’t exactly weep.”

  “You mean it was all right?”

  “Jack, hitting Mr. Anderson, just because he made himself objectionable in some way, wasn’t so very important, one way or the other, except to let him have it good, if you were going to let him have it at all. Hitting him because it got mixed up with your mother and how you felt about her was beautiful. Silly and utterly divine. My little Jack, that’s no longer a boy, but has become a man. I’ve thought about her, Jack, and I’ve tried, in a way—”

  “To take her place?”

  “Well?”

  “I think you’re wonderful.”

  “And it was with her in mind, anyway quite a little with her in mind, that I made the arrangements for the records we’re going to do tomorrow. So she could hear them, and keep them. So, if you want really to do something for her, sing as well as you know how, and then when they’re made I’ll see that she gets them.”

  “You’re coming with me?”

  “Of course. I don’t leave for St. Louis until night.”

  The first number I was to record was The Glow Worm, which was to be done with the cutie pies. The studio was in Camden, New Jersey, and they went by train, with a man from the company. But Miss Eleanor drove me in her little green coupé, after quite some argument about it when she took me home. The Old Man was all for having a showdown about me running out of the house, but she had to get it through his head that a boy who has to stand up in front of a symphony orchestra and do a performance can’t be put through a workout the night before with a hair brush. But on the chorus, where I was to do an obbligato with the others singing under me, I had hardly started when I broke. They put in a new master and we got going again. I broke again. Miss Eleanor said something to the conductor about my having had a trying time the day before and took me outside in the hall. She made me take a drink from the water bubbler, then squeezed my hand and brought me back. “All right, sir, I think I’m all right now.”

  But even as I was talking to him my voice popped. And one of the bull fiddlers said: “That boy’s got the goslins.”

  It was the cutie pies’ turn, and from the way they yelped I knew what was the matter with me, and that that ended my days as a soprano. Miss Eleanor didn’t take me home right away. She took me to her house, and phoned my aunts about it, and made me some supper, and had me ride with her in the cab to the train she was taking for St. Louis. It wasn’t till we were in Union Station, sitting on one of the benches in the waiting room, that she really said anything about it. “Now nothing has happened. You’re going to forget it.”

  “It’s all right. I don’t care.”

  “But you must care!”


  “For that bunch of—”

  “For yourself! And singing and music and beauty and doing things well and everything we’ve been so excited about! Hasn’t it meant anything to you?”

  “Why, sure. But if I’ve got the pip—”

  “Don’t you know why? You’re a man!”

  She put her arm around me and looked at me a long time and smiled. “You’re growing up so fast, and I’m so proud of you! And soon it won’t be a boy’s voice any more, but a man’s, much more beautiful, and then we’ll go on, and—”

  She kept on talking like that, but pretty soon came the rumble of her train, and I went down to the platform with her to see her aboard. She wouldn’t let me take her to her berth, but said goodbye on the step, after the redcap went aboard with her things. We shook hands, and she pushed her cheek against my face, and I remembered to wish her well with the engagement. She turned to go, then came running down the steps again, pulled me to her, and kissed me warm on the mouth, the only time she did, ever. Then she ran into the car.

  5

  BUT WE NEVER WENT on with my voice, because in the first place when it got through turning it was nothing but a beer-barrel bass, just good enough, with what was left of the belly support she had given me, to fool somebody that didn’t know anything about music, and just bad enough, from the wood that had got into it, to set crazy somebody that did. And in the second place she never came back, except once, when she dropped by the house at the end of the summer to say hello, after she got home from the opera. I was plenty glad to see her, and proud of the two inches I had grown, and of the blue spot on my lip, where I had begun to shave. But she seemed anxious to get away, and I thought it funny she said nothing about coming over to make peach ice cream, which she had cooked and I had cranked. Next day I found out she had met another lady, and was going to open a studio with her in New York. She wrote me for years and I wrote her, and she didn’t drop out of my life. But she wasn’t in it either, and it would come over me all the time, the loneliness I had felt the day I beat up Anderson. I didn’t mope off by myself, it was nothing like that. I went around with guys and played on the high-school basketball team and got moved from forward to center on account of the way I was shooting up all the time, and studied a little. Anyhow, I got A in math and physics and mechanics, and C in English and French and Sociology. But I got D in deportment on account of the fights I got into, which was the tip-off on how I was enjoying life.