by Michael Lund
In my mind, though, I heard, alongside her words of instruction, notes from her flute. "Do-re-mi-fa-sol-la-ti-do," that flute had sung many months ago. And, recovering her own music from early years of training, she'd gone on to fill our home with polished melodies, played primarily for her own pleasure but certainly creating a new sense of richness for my father and me.
My dad's voice, too, sounded in my mind, though more as background, a soft bass over which higher voices carried. I heard him explaining his wartime golfing, the tension and relief of that momentous time.
More distant was the voice with which I'd learned he had courted my mother. He was the telephone engineer who'd rigged up a fancy walkie-talkie and sent his marriage proposal down the line to a young musician. He had called and she had answered.
There was still another voice following me into the auditorium, that of my older sister Tricia. All through my growing up, I had heard her perform at public functions, demonstrating her talent, a certain star quality. I think I'd blotted out that voice during the recent weeks of competition, not wanting to battle her reputation as well as candidates my own age. Tonight, a friend was supposed to be driving Tricia up from Springfield to join my small group of supporters. (To this point I'd heard only the voice of her pet parrot, Juliet.)
I was among the last to arrive in our group dressing room, a regular classroom for the college's theater classes.
"Susan, here's a spot," said Mary. She had saved me a student desk and some space on a portable metal clothes rack. Half a dozen such racks had been set up for the girls, most of whom already were in the required evening gown for the first round of competition. Some mothers, friends, and cousins were busy putting final touches on hair, makeup, the dress itself. I'd told my mom I'd be calmer with her in the audience.
"Do you need some help?" asked Liz Rogers, our runner with great, long legs.
"I'm fine, I think."
I had come dressed in the evening gown, preferring to risk getting it wrinkled on the way there to dressing in front of so many others. I propped my case in the chair of the desk, unpacked and assembled my flute, took a deep breath.
"I think," I said to Liz, "I think I need to just walk about a bit to settle my nerves."
She smiled and patted my shoulder. "Go. Relax. We still have thirty minutes."
After two turns up and down the hall, I slipped for a minute into the area immediately back of the stage. The stage, decorated as the Garden of Eden, was quiet behind the curtain, but I could hear a low murmur from the crowd on the other side. Stepping through a gap in the set's backdrop--the bushes, flowers, and grasses of Paradise--I saw Sally Winchester walking away from the little dressing room where Mr. Pierce had told me to meet him.
The door to that room was closed, so I didn't know if Sally had come from there. And there was no evidence that anyone--say, Mr. Pierce--remained inside.
Frozen in place, I could see that Sally was smiling broadly and that there was even more bounce to her walk than usual.
2
"What are you doing, wandering around the halls?" said a friendly voice beside me.
"Me?" I asked, turning to find Blind Bill Martin cocking an ear in my direction. He was coming from in front of the curtain, probably having just made last-minute checks on his microphone, the podium where he stood, the headset by which he could receive directions from the college's technician who worked the lights.
"Yes, you, Susan, the flute player," he said, smiling. Could he tell it was me by the sound of my walk, the smell (slight) of my perfume, the elimination of other possibilities? I had no idea.
"I . . . uh," I stammered, watching the retreating back of Sally over Blind Bill Martin's shoulder as she marched toward our common dressing room. "I was just trying to calm my nerves." I adjusted my flute's mouthpiece and tried a few notes.
"Um-hm. Sit with me a minute, young lady." He took my arm at the elbow (how did he know where it was?) and sat us both down on a bench beside the stage's side entrance.
"I'm going to tell you the story of my first record contract. You do want to hear it, don't you?"
His manner was fatherly and gentle--but insistent. So, of course, I prepared myself to listen.
I would come to wonder some time later if Blind Bill Martin knew that Sally had just passed him in the hall, if he suspected where Mr. Pierce was right then (in the little dressing room, as I had guessed myself), if he, Tiresias-like, could tell what it was like to be a man and what it was like to be a woman. Whatever he knew at that moment, the brief story he told me that evening contained kernels of wisdom I have never forgotten.
"I grew up on a farm outside Calico Rock, Arkansas, down on the White River," he said. I nodded as if I knew where that was. Some months later I would find it on a map not far south of the Missouri border. And then years after that, on a trip to Memphis, I would take a detour through this hamlet to see the region where the Martins came from. It's remote even for the Ozarks.
"My daddy and his daddy," Blind Bill went on, "and a bunch of cousins, they were musicians. Good ones, too."
"I see." I was continuing to blow softly into my flute, keeping it warm and trying to calm myself.
"Hello there, Mary," Blind Bill said. My fellow contestant was passing us on her way to a rest room.
"Hi, Blind Bill," Mary said brightly. "Blind Bill" was my friend's stage name, by the way, and he had insisted from the beginning of rehearsals that all the girls call him that. "Big crowd, Susan," she said to me.
I squirmed on the bench, thinking of all those townspeople waiting to criticize my clothes, my walk, my flute playing.
"I was born blind, you know, so I never missed seeing. And I could strum on Daddy's guitar when I wasn't four years old. Sing anything I'd ever heard."
"I only started playing the flute last summer."
"You told me that, and you've learned fast. You may have real talent. 'Course that's what they all told me from my childhood on up. 'You got a gift, Blind Bill.' 'You gonna be on the radio.' 'You'll be going far one day, you Blind Bill.'"
"I guess they were right," I agreed, but I secretly didn't think Fairfield was all that far from Calico Rock.
"I been to Nashville, you know?"
"Is that right?"
"Sure. Sang at the Opry, met some famous people there. But that's not what I want to tell you about tonight."
"Oh?" I was beginning to get nervous, looking around for a clock to make sure I wasn't going to be late for the pageant's beginning, that moment when the curtain rose on all of us standing at the back of the stage. But Blind Bill, it turned out, knew time along with everything else.
"You relax now, quit squirming. We've got a few more minutes before all that business in there gets started."
"OK. But it's not just the show. . . ."
"I know that too, honey. Now, you just listen. I remember the first agent to come down our way, a Kansas City guy, name of Stryker, never forget him. He heard me play at the county fair over in Mountain Home, I believe it was. I was with a group there headed up by my cousin, Frankie. We were doing old time country tunes, Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter family. I did some singing too, I do believe."
"Um-hm."
"Some of my own songs. I didn't write 'em out, of course. But the group played along with me. I did three, maybe four nice songs I'd been working up. Best was 'Can't See My Mama Now.' You've heard me do that, haven't you?"
"Well, I might have." I suspected he'd been singing that now and then during rehearsals. It wasn't, so far as I knew, one of the songs he would play that night. "Yes, I have."
"Now, Stryker, he took me aside, out in the night air. Gave me a cigarette, offered me a drink. I didn't drink then, and I don't now." He huffed his sense of affront. "And don't you either."
"Oh, I don't. I won't."
"There's temptations, you see. People say they'll do things for you. Ask you to do them favors first."
"Hm-um."
"Stryker, now, he had a contract in h
is jacket pocket. I heard him take it out, unfold it on the fender of his car. 'I'm going to give you a $100 bill right now, Blind Bill,' he told me. And I heard him snap that new print paper money. That would have meant something like a car in those days. 'And I want you to sign this contract.'"
"So you'd have a deal, then, with a recording company?"
"That's the way it was supposed to be. He said, 'I got this pen, Blind Bill. It's from the president of my company.' And he put it in my hand, wanting me to feel the size of it. It was a big, fat one, heavy too."
"The official company contract-signing pen," I agreed. I wondered if someone, the mayor, would sign a proclamation that I was the next Miss Route 66 with such a pen.
"'Then,' says Stryker, 'then, you'll get royalties on every song you record. We'll make sure they get played on the radio all across the country. You'll be a rich man. They'll ask you to come sing your hits--Kansas City, Omaha, St. Louis.'"
"It sounds like it was a good deal, Blind Bill. I mean, if it was like he said. If it was a genuine contract and all."
"Um-hm. You're right to say that, Susan. If it was all written down the way he said. 'Course I couldn't read it. You know that; I knew that; and that Stryker knew that."
"And it wasn't the way he said it was?"
"No, it wasn't."
"So you didn't sign?"
"Oh, I signed all right. Took that big pen he'd put in my hand; let him put my hand there on the paper right where he wanted it; and put down a right fine signature. 'Course I signed 'John Hancock' for him." He laughed. "He didn't even look."
"He was trying to trick you, and you tricked him!"
"That's right. He went off thinking he'd fooled this ignorant hillbilly. But I knew how these deals work. You think you're signing with the company and that they'll get you jobs and sell your records. But if your songs don't sell, they drop you but won't let you sign with anyone else. If your songs do sell, you still don't make the big money. The company does."
"You mean you're stuck with the deal you didn't understand?"
"That's right. You find you've given away something you didn't intend to, your freedom, your future."
"I see." I was beginning to think Blind Bill understood a lot about more things than the recording business.
"Hey, young lady, it's time for the show to begin. This could be your moment."
"I don't know. I don't feel much like Miss Route 66 yet."
"You just be Susan Bell. That's good enough for anybody."
And, I'm pleased to say, that's just what I did.
3
In retrospect, I've decided that the evening gown competition is the right place to begin a beauty contest. The girls are uniformly presented in the traditional format of bare shoulders, tight waist, and full dresses. So there's only so much one can do to stand out other than trust your figure.
There's also a neatness in this event: announcement of contestants (a beginning); parade across the stage (middle); resumption of the group order (an ending). Such cycles, as I've told you, always appeal to me. In the case of this process, of course, as in so many others, there was more than one thread connecting the parts together and leading to a conclusion.
For beginners in such competition, like me, staying composed within poses already established by contest rules is comforting. And that was what I wanted right then: simply to survive my first public appearance under the lights, on the stage, before the crowd. I counted on my slim waist at the center of that outfit.
Veterans of the evening gown event, on the other hand, knew other ways to draw attention to themselves even within this constricting situation. Sally Winchester, for one, began a distinctive pursuit of the crown even when encased in the same dress the rest of us were wearing.
I learned this only later, as, concentrating simply on not shaking and not falling, I didn't at the time observe much going on around me. Well, I did carry on an intermittent, whispered, stiff-lipped conversation with Liz, who stood next to me.
"You nervous?" she whispered while others were still taking their places. The curtain had not gone up.
"You bet!"
Mr. Pierce had arranged us in a semicircle at the back of the stage, tallest girls in the center and shorter ones down the line toward stages left and right. The small orchestra was playing the inevitable theme song for such events, "There she is, Miss America. . . ." (We were supposed to think "Miss Roo-oute Sixty-six".) When the curtain went up, Blind Bill introduced us as a group, then called us forward one by one.
We didn't do the famous walk out toward the judges and back right away, but simply stepped forward and waved to the crowd as our names were called. When all contestants were back in the row, Blind Bill explained the criteria the judges were using to rank us in the evening gown competition: stance, walk, turn, and return.
Since all three judges were men, I now know there were other, probably more telling criteria: bust, especially as revealed and in motion above the gown's top; hip pivot as we advanced; rump action in reverse. Oh, I suppose our faces counted some, too. With stage makeup, though, we all looked remarkably alike.
When he had introduced us, Blind Bill described the dress we were all wearing. He explained that Mr. Simpson, our well-known local merchant, had made these dresses available to contestants. And the way he said it suggested that Mr. Simpson was a civic-minded sponsor, sacrificing profit to support the town event. But, as you know, we'd each had to pay full price for the outfit.
Then began the parade of contestants, each of us walking to the front of the stage, looking left and right, then crossing from one side to the other before returning to our original places. I was among the first girls to go and, I suppose, passed this initial test with adequate scores. When I resumed my place in the line, Liz made me aware of Mr. Pierce off-stage to my right.
"You see him?" Liz whispered.
"You mean Mr. Pierce? What about him?"
"Yes. He's turning red!"
I snuck a peek to the side and saw what she meant. His face was flushed and his eyes glaring.
I had assumed at first that he would simply be watching the proceedings, anticipating perhaps the changes that would have to be made for the talent phase that came next--moving the piano, clearing space for baton twirling, setting up the podium used in dramatic readings. Instead he was intensely interested in something on stage.
The other girls took their walk, all of us continuing to look about the same to me. The thin ones wore the gown loosely, so their bony figures weren't conspicuous. Some bulges on heavier girls were smoothed by the tight fit the waist.
Liz Rogers, whose breast had famously flopped out in a track meet, did score well in this event. She wasn't that big, but what she had rose and fell provocatively as she walked. I watched her bosom sink and swell as she strode confidently away from the stage front. Alas, there had been no jiggle on my chest.
Finally Sally took her walk. How did she get to be last? This was clearly the best position for a strong candidate, leaving a lasting final image in the judges' minds. The first person is easily forgotten by the end. And as anyone knows who's watched Olympics judges rank figure skaters, each person after the first--who doesn't fall--tends to get a higher ranking.
Sally let the applause for the girl before her subside to near silence. Smiling broadly, she took her walk. And as she went forward, the rest of us on stage--and surely the judges--noticed something peculiar: a steady, rushing, swishing sound.
"What's that?" whispered Liz beside me, so softly I could still hear the sound coming from Sally.
"I don't know . . . unless. . . ."
"It's coming from her, from that girl."
"Yes, it's . . . it's her legs."
I can't imagine what kind of long distance bill she had run up in searching, but Sally had gotten (probably through mail order) an early form of panty hose. And that new sheer fabric literally sang as her legs rubbed together. No, it wasn't so much a singing as a humming, a human version of the crick
et's mating call.
Sally's humming was present whenever she walked, but it didn't stop immediately when she did, as if some unseen movement under the dress continued. And it was powerfully erotic, as a quick glance at the faces of Misters Rodd, Pollman, and Systrunk revealed. One, I'm sure, was drooling. The sound recalled the hum Mr. Pierce's finger made on the Coke glass at the Dairy Delite.
"There goes the evening gown competition," whispered Liz.