Singing Hands

by Delia Ray

  She rattled on and on. "That's right. Margaret's an awful worrywart, but I guess you can't blame her. People say he could be hiding anywhere in Birmingham. Maybe right in this neighborhood..."

  "Oh, I'm sure Margaret needn't worry about this Baines character," Mrs. Fernley said rather impatiently. "This is a very safe neighborhood. I really only lock the door to my room out of habit.... Now, dear, I do hate to disturb your mother, but if you'll please just go and ask her for the duplicate of my key."

  "Are you sure you don't want to wait downstairs where it's more comfortable?" Nell asked nervously. "This might take a while. Mother's awfully hard to wake up from her nap sometimes."

  "I see," Mrs. Fernley said. "Well, I think I'll just wait for you upstairs. Please apologize to your mother for the interruption."

  "Yes. I'll be sure and do that," Nell announced loudly. Then I heard her rush up the stairs ahead of Mrs. Fernley. I could see her legs from my spot under the bed. She had planted herself in front of Mother's doorway.

  Once Mrs. Fernley was on her way to the third floor, Nell tiptoed into the bedroom. "Gussie?" she hissed.

  I thrust my hand with the keys out from under the bed and jingled them. Nell snatched them away, then scrambled toward the dressing table. Over my head the box springs gave a sudden squeak. I held my breath, waiting for the worst, but Nell must have heard the noise and wheeled around in time to see Mother sitting up in bed.

  "Oh, you're awake!" Nell practically shouted. She took a few steps closer so Mother could read her lips. "I was just getting the keys from your drawer for Mrs. Fernley. She's locked herself out of her room."

  Mother's stocking feet appeared beside me, resting lightly on the floor. Her voice sounded woozy with sleep, even fuzzier than usual. "Locked out? Why didn't you come get me?"

  I knew Nell must be signing as she explained. I could hear the keys jingling. "You were so tired. I didn't want to bother you."

  "It's all right," Mother said, getting to her feet. I clenched my arms closer to my body, trying to make myself smaller. "You go take the keys to Mrs. Fernley. I just need to splash some water on my face."

  Nell hurried off as Mother shuffled toward the bathroom down the hall. I waited to hear the door close behind her and the rush of water filling the sink. It was simple, almost too simple, to crawl out from under the bed, dust myself off, and slip from her room unnoticed. Maybe if it had been more difficult in the end, I would have dropped my far-fetched plan for getting revenge on Margaret. But we had the keys now. We even had Mother's permission to take them!

  Yes, there was no doubt about it. The Birthmark Baines dummy was meant to be.

  Chapter 8

  I didn't have second thoughts about my plan until I saw Corporal Homewood staring up at me from the box in Miss Grace's closet. His dark eyes gazed out from the same silver-framed photograph I had caught a glimpse of the first day Miss Grace moved in. I had expected that the picture would be on display, on the dresser or the bedside table. But now, here it was, still nestled in the cardboard carton on top of his old things. No wonder she's hidden the picture away, I thought. It would make her too sad to look at her dead husband's face every day.

  Even though it was warm and stuffy in Miss Grace's little room on the third floor, a cold chill prickled along the back of my neck. Still kneeling by the closet, I glanced over my shoulder into the dim corners. I hardly knew Miss Grace, but I could feel her all around me. A faint trace of the rose water she wore hung in the air. And strands of her white-blond hair trailed from the enamel brush sitting on the small table next to her neatly made bed. How perfect they must have looked together, the corporal with his dark hair and eyes, and Miss Grace so small and fair.

  I felt a little better once I started trying to make sense of the objects in the room. Kneeling there, I felt like I was finding the lost parts of a jigsaw puzzle. I hadn't known that Miss Grace went to the Alabama School for the Deaf like Daddy did when he was young, but there was her ASD diploma hanging on the wall over her desk. My father paid visits to ASD often to hold chapel services for the students there. He had probably met Miss Grace on one of those trips.

  Nell would be sorry she had turned chicken and refused to be my lookout. She was probably flopped on the glider on the front porch now, bored senseless and sulking over how I had snatched the third-floor keys from her hand and called her a yellow-tailed crybaby. I didn't need Nell to stand watch anyway. It was only two o'clock. Miss Grace's parents wouldn't bring her home from Sunday dinner for at least another couple of hours.

  I stood up and tiptoed over to the tidy desk for a closer look. It was almost bare except for a pile of blank stationery stacked in the middle with a small wooden paperweight perched on top. I carefully picked up the paperweight and set it down again, admiring the unusual design and the smooth ridges in the wood. It was shaped like a perfect, small hand, pressing whatever was underneath into order.

  The only other object on the desk was a framed photograph of a young couple gazing down at a towheaded toddler in her father's arms. The baby girl was wearing a sunsuit and beaming at the camera. Her mother was on the verge of laughing, tickled with some clever thing her child had just done. I bent closer. Was that a picture of Miss Grace with her parents when she was little? I hardly recognized those delighted faces. Miss Grace's parents seemed as cold as stone whenever they came to fetch their daughter on Sunday mornings. Several times I had peeked around the drapes in the parlor to see them sitting at the curb in their long black Oldsmobile, staring blankly ahead until Miss Grace slipped out of the house to meet them.

  Once, Mother had joined me at the window to watch over my shoulder as they drove away. "Why don't they ever come up on the porch to say hello?" I had asked.

  "They're hearing," Mother had signed. Then she had added another little gesture—a quick brush of her finger under the tip of her nose while she pursed her lips, as if she had just bitten down on something sour. I knew what she meant. Miss Grace's parents were Uppish Hearing. Too high and mighty to try to communicate with simple deaf folks like Mother and Daddy, who lived on the wrong side of town and rented out rooms on the third floor.

  "But what about Miss Grace?" I had asked, pushing for as many answers as I could get before Mother grew impatient. "Their own daughter is deaf."

  Mother had shrugged as she signed. "They can't stop wishing she wasn't."

  I had frowned, lifting my hand to fire out more questions. But Mother had already turned away from the window and was rushing off to clear the breakfast dishes from the table.

  I moved back to the box of Corporal Homewood's things, feeling a little squeamish as I suddenly remembered my mission: to get a pair of trousers and shoes for the Birthmark Baines dummy. Mrs. Fernley's opera music seeping through the back wall of the closet didn't help to calm my nerves. It was a recording I had never heard before—something wild and frantic, with dueling voices and clashing cymbals that made me think of armies charging into battle. My heart thumped along with the music as I set the corporal's photo aside and fumbled through the box, searching for what I wanted. On the top of the pile were a striped necktie and a fine gray wool suit, with suspenders still buttoned to the pants and traces of a sharp crease running down the front of each leg. Too swanky for Birthmark, I decided, and carefully laid the suit on the floor. Next came a worn baseball mitt and a white sweater with a blue border around the V-neck—the kind I had seen tennis players wearing at Aunt Glo's country club. No help.

  A red silk bathrobe. No.

  Flannel pajamas. No.

  Growing impatient, I yanked out the next piece of clothing in the pile and then caught myself as I slowly realized what I was holding. It was the military jacket Corporal Homewood was wearing in his photograph. My hands tingled as I laid the dark blue jacket in my lap and ran one finger over the gold buttons and the colored military badges still fastened over the breast pocket. An awful thought crept into my mind, and I leaned closer, examining the pocket for holes. He had been shot
through the heart. What if this was the jacket he had been wearing?

  "Snap out of it, Gussie," I whispered. This was his dress uniform. He would have been wearing soldiers' fatigues on Okinawa. I closed my eyes for a second, then thrust my hand down to the bottom of the box and pulled out the matching pants of the uniform.

  I groaned under my breath. They were light blue with red trim. I'd never be able to pull off Birthmark Baines with a pair of marine pants. Feeling defeated, I returned the clothes and the photograph to the box, making sure to get them in the right order. Then I shut the cardboard flaps and shoved the carton back into the closet. I was giving the closet one last look to make sure nothing was out of place when I noticed the stack of shoe boxes on the top shelf.

  Shoes! I had almost forgotten. If I just had some halfway convincing men's shoes to stick out from under Margaret's bed, maybe I could make my trick work after all. I stood on the tips of my toes and pulled down the boxes. Mrs. Fernley's music was getting louder, practically vibrating Miss Grace's clothes hangers on the rod as I lifted the lids on sandals and high-heeled pumps and rain galoshes.

  I was tempted to give up after the disappointing set of screwdrivers under the fourth lid, but there was one shoe box left at the far end of the shelf. And now through the wall I could hear a huge cast of singers joining in with the orchestra, their triumphant voices soaring and urging me on to victory. I dove back into the rising cloud of mothball dust and lavender sachet and reached for the last box. My heart sank at first. It felt much too light to hold the heavy leather clodhoppers I was looking for. Just to make sure though, I opened the lid.

  Of course I knew it was wrong. Of course I shouldn't have been in the room in the first place. I shouldn't have been digging through a dead soldier's last earthly possessions. And I definitely shouldn't have perched myself on the edge of Miss Grace's bed and pulled the end of the ribbon tying the stack of old letters in the shoe box together. But there were no envelopes hiding the letters, and she was such a mystery to me, and here were all the clues to her lost life with Corporal Homewood at my fingertips.

  With trembling fingers, I flipped through the stack. "My Dearest Grace," the letters began. They were written on faded light blue paper and dated 1944 and 1945, the exact years when her husband would have been half a world away at the front, fighting the Japanese and writing his wife from some lonely tent or foxhole. I stopped at the last letter, which was no more than a paragraph long, and read greedily:

  February 12, 1945

  My Dearest Grace,

  In your last letter you said that each word I write only makes our separation more painful. But how can I stop writing? Our letters are the last tie binding us together—the only good to come out of this long, vicious war.

  My sincerest hope is that you will write again.

  Vincent

  I gasped. Vincent? Who was Vincent? Corporal Homewood's name was James! I scanned the letter again, not wanting to believe it. But there it was, plain as day, "makes our separation more painful." I turned back to the first letter in the stack and checked the signature. Vincent. The next letter was signed Vincent, too. But how could Miss Grace have loved someone else?

  I wanted to read more, to search for an explanation, but I knew I had stayed too long already. So I didn't have a pair of men's shoes when I quietly slipped from Miss Grace's room and locked the door behind me. Or even a pair of suitable Birthmark Baines pants. But I had one very shocking and mysterious letter from the bottom of the secret bundle to discuss with Nell ... if I ever decided to speak to her again.

  Chapter 9

  Forgiving Nell for turning chicken was the easy part. Showing her the letter proved to be more difficult. I was dying to share what I had found. But somehow once I was downstairs again, away from Mrs. Fernley's pounding battle victory music and in the cozy quiet of our bedroom, I knew I couldn't tell anyone what I had done. All of a sudden even I was shocked at the thought of Miss Grace's letter tucked down inside the pocket of my dungarees. What had I been thinking? Nell would be appalled. Genuinely scandalized.

  "So you didn't find anything for the dummy?" Nell asked as I sat on my bed inspecting a broken fingernail.

  I shook my head.

  "No pants, no nothing?"

  "Nope," I said.

  Nell crossed her arms over her chest, studying me suspiciously. "You sure were up there a long time."

  "Well, I didn't find anything," I shot back. "All right?"

  I swiped a Nancy Drew mystery off the dresser, then threw myself back on my bed and pretended to read The Hidden Staircase. After a while, Nell wandered away. As soon as she was gone, I lurched to my feet and fished the letter out of my pocket, searching the room for somewhere to hide it. My old sewing basket sat forgotten in the corner. Quickly I stuffed the letter underneath a tangled needlepoint sampler I had never finished. Once I figured out a way to sneak back up to Miss Grace's room without anyone noticing, I'd return the letter and try to forget any of this had ever happened.

  I was just closing the lid of the basket when Nell flew back into the room, her eyes shining with excitement and her arms wrapped around a lumpy bundle of clothes.

  "What's that?" I asked.

  "Everything you need for Birthmark Baines," she said happily. "You looked so pitiful when you came down from Miss Grace's room. I decided I should help you after all." She dropped the bundle on my bed, and a pair of shoes I had never seen before rolled out.

  They were snazzy brown and white buckskins that looked like something an old-timey college boy out on the town would wear. "Where'd you get those?" I asked.

  "Daddy's closet," Nell declared triumphantly. "And look." She held up a pair of baggy khaki trousers. They were covered in paint stains, with a rip on one knee. I vaguely recalled seeing Daddy wear them when he organized a team of men to paint the parish house.

  "Can you believe he ever wore these?" Nell asked. "Aren't they perfect?"

  I started to laugh. "The pants are okay, Nell, but those shoes will never work."

  Nell gave a little stomp with her foot. "You said we needed something that did not look like Daddy," she huffed.

  "Well, gah, Nell, do you think Birthmark Baines would go around kidnapping kids in buckskin dancing shoes?"

  Her face flooded with disappointment. I hadn't meant to sound so ungrateful. I reached for the shoes and held them up at arm's length. "But you never know," I said slowly. "Maybe ... maybe these do look like what a convict would wear to disguise himself."

  Nell brightened a little. "Really? So you think we should go ahead with the plan?"

  "Sure," I said. "Why not?"

  No sooner had the words left my mouth than we heard Margaret coming through the front door.

  "Dadgummit!" I said. "What's she doing home already?"

  Nell heaved a huge sigh. "Oh, never mind. Let's just forget about the dummy. It wouldn't have worked anyway."

  "Nope," I said stubbornly. "We're gonna do it. But we don't have time to stuff a dummy now. I'll have to be Birthmark Baines."

  "You what?" Nell's eyes widened as she watched me yank Daddy's trousers off the bed and hold them up to my waist.

  "You'll see. But first go listen at the top of the steps and make sure she's not coming up here."

  Once I had shooed Nell into the hall, I quickly pulled the paint-stained pants over my dungarees. But even with my own clothes underneath, the pants looked too long and floppy. Daddy was taller than I thought. Hitching up the waistband in one fist, I waddled over to our dresser and yanked the top drawer open to reveal piles of silky slips and training bras and no-nonsense cotton underwear. I never knew Aunt Glo's undergarment obsession would come in so handy. "You can never have enough clean underclothes, girls," Aunt Glo would remind us at the beginning of every stay in Texas before she carted us off to Conway's department store for another shopping spree in the girls' department.

  Now I grabbed handfuls of underwear and stuffed them down the pants until the trouser legs began to fi
ll out and appear slightly more manly.

  Nell was standing in the doorway again. "What in the world are you doing now?" she asked breathlessly, staring at the pairs of panties clenched in my fists.

  "I need more padding!" I cried. "Come help me."

  Nell scurried over to shove more underwear up around my shins. She fluttered about my bottom half like a lady in waiting as I started shuffling toward the door.

  "What about socks?" she asked.

  I grabbed Daddy's shoes off my bed. "If Baines can wear bucks," I said, "I suppose he can wear white bobby socks, too."

  "Now, listen," I went on. "I'm gonna get under Margaret's bed. All you have to do is go downstairs and tell Margaret you found the back door wide open while she was gone and you just heard strange noises coming from her bedroom. If she asks where I am, tell her I've been at the vacant lot all afternoon. Mother should be cooking dinner, so she'll be too busy to see what you're saying. Okay? Have you got it?"

  Nell was eyeing my lumpy trouser legs doubtfully. "This isn't going to work, is it?"

  I shrugged. "Probably not, but it's worth a try. Margaret's been looking for escaped convicts around every corner. Now she's finally gonna get one." I grinned and waddled down the hall toward Margaret's bedroom with a buckskin tucked under each arm.

  Nell watched me from the top of the stairs. "Just give me a couple minutes to get myself situated," I whispered over my shoulder.

  Getting situated was not as easy as I thought it would be. By the time I had propped my feet in Daddy's shoes, squeezed myself partway under Margaret's bed, rearranged my underwear padding, and strategically placed my legs so that they looked halfway convincing, I was worn out. Margaret's bed wasn't nearly as high as Mother and Daddy's. The musty-smelling box springs were barely two inches from my nose. To make matters worse, a hook on a training bra was poking like a needle into my rear end—but every time I tried to wiggle around to adjust it, Daddy's heavy bucks would flop off my feet and bang on the floor.