Girls at the Piano

by Virginia Lloyd

  31

  AFTER THE INCIDENT WITH THE BARITONE, Alice stopped singing in public. ‘Mrs Lloyd let Mr Palmer put his arm around her!’ went the refrain around Yeoval district, my aunt Charlotte recalled, when the pair performed the duet ‘I’ll Walk with You’ at the annual end of year concert in a manner that the locals judged overly enthusiastic. It was the hair-trigger the Baptists had been waiting for ever since Alice Lloyd had arrived in their town with her thick Scottish accent, her astonishing soprano voice, and her lack of humour.

  Alice must have wondered how it was possible to travel halfway around the world only to end up in the same place as she’d started. Da capo. She might as well have been back in Mrs Rankin’s haberdashery among the inane chatter of dagger-mouthed women. She abandoned performance for accompanying. At the piano she could see everything yet remain invisible.

  ‘I don’t recall Mum singing at home,’ Charlotte said when we talked about her childhood. ‘She never sang with me. She wasn’t very interested in girls. I had a hearing impediment that wasn’t diagnosed until I was fourteen. But I do remember her spending a lot of time with Jimmy, trying to get him to sit up.’

  James Lloyd, born in 1925, made few sounds and couldn’t sit up by himself. At what point does a parent suspect something is not quite as it should be with their child? There are too many unanswerable questions here. Did Alice know there was a problem and George refuse to acknowledge it, or was it the other way around? As James grew from chubby baby to toddler, they must have sought doctors’ opinions for their little boy, who remained floppy as a ragdoll. Whether it was through a local doctor or Nance, George and Alice learned of the Stockton Mental Hospital, on a peninsula across the Hunter River from Newcastle. Opened in 1917, Stockton catered to adults and children with intellectual disabilities. From the very little public information available about this facility, it appears that patients of all ages were housed together. Not until 1937 was there a call for tenders to build a dedicated children’s wing.58

  I’m trying to imagine the agonising journey to Newcastle, George staring straight ahead, his lips tightly drawn, his bony hands gripping the wheel of their green kerosene-powered truck. They left Charlotte, now three, with Nance and Richard. Alice, clutching a sleeping Jimmy to her chest, was most likely relieved that Charlotte wouldn’t witness them leaving her brother in the care of strangers.

  From what Charlotte remembers, Alice regarded her daughter with a detachment she could not shake. I wonder if she felt Charlotte belonged to George in some way that she did not belong to her, and whether she thought it was due to their relentlessly positive outlook on life.

  There would have been a chain of correspondence with Stockton, containing no end of assurances about the quality of care they provided, the expertise, the years of experience helping other children with the same condition as Jimmy. ‘We’ve done all we can for him at home, love,’ I can hear George saying. ‘They’ll know how to help him.’ How could Alice argue with the truth?

  Even so, the most practical of mothers would feel anguish handing the care of her child to an institution full of strangers—all well-meaning, but none of them his mother. Was Alice tearful or tight-lipped? Weeping or stoic? Did she suffer catastrophic visions of Jimmy alone, cold, crying out for the comfort only a mother provides a toddler? Had she lain awake at night as the date approached, seeing flashes of Jimmy screaming for help, sick with the feeling that she shouldn’t be leaving him no matter how qualified the Stockton people presented themselves to be? I am convinced that even after so many years, Alice would still have found it impossible to trust anyone. But there was no logical reason why Jimmy would be better off staying on the farm. And so George and Alice Lloyd committed their little boy into the care of the Stockton Mental Hospital.

  Less than one year later, Jimmy contracted dysentery and died there, under the supervision of those who had been charged with his care. He was two and a half.

  ‘When Jimmy died they were stripping the wheat,’ my aunt Charlotte recalled, close to ninety years after her brother’s death. ‘And the wheat could not wait for grief.’

  The wheat, the seasons, the dawn and the sunset—life ruthlessly continues, and to those struggling with loss of one kind or another it can feel pretty isolating, if not downright insulting, for time to keep ticking over while your world has collapsed.

  I can imagine that stripping the wheat, or any of the seasonal activities of a farming life, might have provided ritual comfort to Alice, even if she felt as empty as the cloudless Yeoval sky. But she wasn’t close to her daughter, and she and George must have nearly broken from having to bury their son.

  Did she fantasise about returning to Glasgow, or dream of making another fresh start? I doubt it. Alice Lloyd was nothing if not practical. She would have rolled up her sleeves and got on with whatever jobs needed doing, even if she felt dead inside.

  32

  A YEAR AND A HALF AFTER my husband died, I moved to New York. I was thirty-six. I wanted a break with everything that was familiar to me, in a place that had always been my beacon. I had a green card, and I knew three people who lived there: a married couple, and an ex-boyfriend. It was a start.

  But four years later, I had reluctantly started to think about returning to live in Australia. Though it’s a big place, New York is also a small town, and freelance writer-editors without a strong network of contacts are as common as muck. Skype had become my professional lifeline because most of my work came from Australia. I had enough—just—but it felt tenuous. Outside work, I went on dates generated by algorithms that, in person, had no rhythm of their own. Inevitably I would have to tell my story and, for most suitors, widow was a curiosity killer. I had no piano in my apartment, but I carried my metaphorical piano stool like Schroeder did his toy piano. It didn’t seem to matter where I was; I kept men at a manageable distance. Which is to say that I kept myself at a safe distance from everyone else.

  Widowed for more than five years, I still hadn’t moved on with my life. Perhaps it looked from the outside that I had—after all, I had given up a salaried corporate job for the freelance life; I had sold or given away most of my possessions and rented out my house; I had moved country. For a while I even had what Stevie Wonder called a part-time lover. But inside, I didn’t feel that much had changed. Most of the actions I’d taken since my husband died were about renunciation—giving up things, just as I had done in abandoning the piano after I failed at the Chopin competition. I hadn’t replaced what I’d farewelled with a hopeful vision of my future and a clear plan to achieve it. I felt as though I were treading water. The water just happened to be in the northern hemisphere. I had longed to be free and to be anonymous in the big city: I was both, and I was lonely. What I really wanted, I realised, was to experience love and intimacy again. I was, after all, human. That goal felt small, and immense, and impossible.

  I lived in the tiniest bedroom of a decrepit three-bedroom apartment on St John’s Place in the Prospect Heights neighbourhood of Brooklyn, which hugs the north-eastern tip of Prospect Park. It is—or was—the poor cousin to the more prosperous Park Slope, the location for many independent films about angst-ridden thirty-somethings. My flatmate Derek worked at a nearby cafe, Cheryl’s Global Soul on Underhill Street, while he tried to further his career as a cartoonist and illustrator. Due to the dimensions of my room, which I referred to as the cabin, I did my writing and editing at Cheryl’s, or at the Brooklyn Public Library on Eastern Parkway, two blocks from our doorstep. We picked up our essentials from the corner store, which we dubbed the cat-piss bodega due to its persistent odour. A pair of running shoes was slung over the telegraph lines at our nearest intersection, just like you see in the movies. The neighbourhood was quiet, except for the very occasional gunshot.

  Derek was an excellent cook, and he and I would feed each other if we happened to be home together. One morning he announced that he had invited around a friend to share dinner with us that evening. I smiled when he told me, b
ut I had been dreading it all day—the last time a friend of his had joined us for a meal, I had retreated to my cabin after an excruciating attempt at conversation.

  This time the friend was a fellow cartoonist, from the Midwest, who had only recently moved to New York. When people ask me how Nate and I met, I like to say that he walked into my kitchen. He was handsome, funny, intelligent, and refreshingly unperturbed by the fact that I was a widow. To top it all off, he loved jazz. Our first date was at a now-defunct jazz bar called Puppets in Park Slope, where the tenor saxophone of Noah Preminger was so loud we had to shout at each other. Which is the only time in the eight years since that we’ve done that.

  33

  IN APRIL 1934, SIX YEARS AFTER Jimmy’s death, George and Alice again made the journey to Newcastle in the old green kerosene-powered truck, this time with ten-year-old Charlotte squeezed between them. At Newcastle Hospital they signed the final papers and collected a healthy three-month-old boy with wisps of white-blond hair. Who knows why his mother had been forced to abandon him. Well, I’m sure that Alice suspected why, and that she was relieved she hadn’t ended up pregnant with John Henry Edwards’ child. I wonder if the relief of not having to face an unwanted pregnancy, and a likely forced adoption, had softened the pain of his lies and her humiliation. Pregnancy by a bigamist would not have been a good look in Partick parish in 1918—and especially not for the choirmistress.

  But now, Alice and George officially had a new son: John. Did it bother Alice that her son shared the name of the bigamist? Perhaps, being such a common name, it was easier to bear as sheer coincidence. According to my aunt Charlotte, John was the name that his biological mother had chosen for him, and that was good enough for Alice. Staring at her new baby, I can only imagine how Alice’s heart burst with love for him as she yearned for James, the son she had lost. I wonder if she thought much over the years about the woman who gave my father up for adoption—and about whether the agony of giving up a baby and wondering, year in, year out, where he was, how he was, who he was, and dying without ever seeing him again, would be even more difficult than burying one’s own child.

  Under any circumstances, the decision to adopt a child is enormous. But for Alice and George Lloyd, having raised a daughter for ten years and having endured the loss of a son, to take on the care of a newborn baby was an act of almost unfathomable hope. Their generosity in adopting John does not quite gel in my mind with the apparent lack of maternal feeling Alice displayed toward Charlotte, or her severity to other members of her family. Such as her daughter-in-law, my mother.

  ‘Your father was Mummy’s little soldier,’ Aunt Charlotte told me. ‘She always preferred boys.’

  John, who grew up knowing he was adopted, never felt compelled to find his birth mother. Over the years, whenever I asked him about it, he said, ‘I had a happy childhood, and I knew I was loved.’ John survived the inherent life-limiting risks of a bush upbringing, endured every minute of school until he could leave at fifteen, and worked in his father’s stock and station agency. Too young to go to war, John moved to Sydney to live with Charlotte, who had married and moved there five years earlier. In 1955, when he met my mother Pamela at Vic’s Cabaret at Strathfield, in Sydney’s inner west, John was twenty-one, and a busy subcontractor to builders and property developers.

  ‘He was the nicest man I’d ever met,’ my mother told me.

  34

  IT’S A WARM SUMMER EVENING ON the corner of West End Avenue and 86th Street, and I’m sitting in a cavernous church. But I’m not in a pew, and I’m not taking Communion. I’m seated at a beat-up old grand piano, as a member of an amateur jazz ensemble. Twenty years after Freddy Wilson’s workshop, I’ve progressed from a converted garage to another repurposed structure. And it’s a broad church, too: all around me in the warrens of the building are acting classes, exercise classes, and self-defence and martial arts classes. But the jazz ensemble gets to play the main stage.

  To my right sits Corporate Mike with his honey-coloured acoustic guitar, which he must have brought directly from his office downtown. On the other side of him is Marcellus from Washington Heights forty blocks north, who waits tables at Dizzy’s in Columbus Circle when he’s not playing his tenor. In front of me is the gently spoken Pablo on bass; and a pimply monosyllable is at the drum kit who, depending on the night, could be Joe, Sam, Scott or Dave. The drummers look like children, because they are, while the rest of us have a few more runs on the board. Sometimes we’re joined by a singer who crosses the Hudson from New Jersey to get here, and sometimes by an older guitarist who, when not practising his instrument, is a practising cardiologist. For a while during the summer we even had an elderly tuba player from Switzerland. A jazz ensemble is one of the few places on Earth where you will reliably find people from different generations listening to each other with attention, respect and genuine interest.

  Tonight, like we do every week, we warm up with a blues tune. This time it’s Thelonious Monk’s ‘Blue Monk’. Playing a blues is the conditioning stretch for a jazz band, because it has a common twelve-bar structure that allows us to play ourselves into readiness for the more complicated chord progressions in the three or four other pieces we’ll play during the two-hour workshop. Within the twelve-bar harmonic progression of a blues song, almost infinite variation is possible, which is mind-blowing if you consider that the most basic blues progression uses just three chords—the first, the fourth and fifth—of any chosen key. So for a blues in A, for example, your chord progression uses A, D and E. That’s it. Its simplicity also explains why so many popular songs across all genres are, at their core, blues progressions (conjure up the Batman television theme song), and why—if you’re a pop guitarist, a jazz pianist or a budding singer of any stripe—learning the blues is one of the best things you can do to develop your skills. If you are so inclined, you have a lifetime of homework to do—listening to great recordings, practising chord voicings, learning to transpose into different keys, transcribing and imitating great solos—but for the beginner and the advanced student alike, it all comes back to knowing your scales in every key.

  In the Well-Tempered Clavier, Johann Sebastian Bach composed a prelude and fugue for the keyboard in every one of the twenty-four major and minor keys. His purpose, stated on the dedication of the original 1722 publication, was ‘for the profit and use of musical youth desirous of learning, and especially for the pastime of those already skilled in this study’. In terms of the time I have to devote to the piano, and the level of dexterity I enjoy these days, I’m a long way from my early encounters with Bach’s foundational work, when I was one of those ‘musical youth desirous of learning’. But now in my forties, reflecting on the composer’s dedication, I’m struck by his second target audience: ‘for the pastime of those already skilled in this study’. He’s right—learning is a pastime, an endeavour worth doing for its own sake. As a formal student, whether at school or university or in piano lessons, I always associated learning with a goal or end point that lay beyond the here and now: good grades, graduation, the performance diploma. As an adult returning to the piano after a long and self-enforced separation, I’m taking up Bach’s challenge in the environment of the jazz workshop. I’m not sure what Johann Sebastian would think about my choice, but I’ve decided that I’ll be doing pretty well if I can learn to improvise over a blues progression in any of those twenty-four keys. There’s no greater goal to that pastime than improving how I play with other amateur musicians. And what a relief that is.

  Once each instrumentalist has taken a chorus of ‘Blue Monk’, our teacher Ron, a professional trumpet player and arranger, asks the group which song we’d like to play first. We choose from a shortlist nominated by the students at the end of last week’s workshop. Our weekly homework is to familiarise ourselves with the chord charts for each piece, to learn the melody accurately and to study the basic structure, so that next week we can simply start playing it together.

  ‘When you go all ove
r the world and you know a handful of tunes, you can speak to each other,’ Ron says, as if each of us were planning to sit in at a jazz club jam session the next time we’re visiting Paris. And just like Freddy, Ron is full of aphorisms:

  ‘There’s the notes versus the spirit of a piece.’

  ‘We have to play with confidence.’

  ‘Play it wrong but play it strong.’

  ‘Great solos have an arc, a shape to them.’

  ‘When we play we want to get out of our heads entirely.’

  I’d say that last one is my favourite, though it remains aspirational. I still find myself counting bars as the other band members play their solos, trying to make sure I don’t lose my place. The pianist needs to give the soloist the occasional harmonic or melodic reminder as to where in the chorus he is—at the end of the second A-section moving into the bridge (or B-section); coming toward the end of the bridge and going back to A, for example—so it’s pretty important I know where I am. Inevitably each of us gets lost at some point during a workshop, but the beauty of the group is that usually we’re not all lost in the same tune at the same time, and so one of us can lead the others out of the musical wilderness.

  In my early years of living in New York, I spent a lot of time attending jazz gigs by myself. At the Village Vanguard, the 55 Bar and Smalls, mainly, a short stroll from each other along Seventh Avenue South in Greenwich Village. Sometimes I’d have company, but the lack of it never stopped me attending a gig by a musician I really wanted to hear play.