One Sweet Quarrel (Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust Rediscoveries)

by Deirdre McNamer

  Lelia and I both practice in the mornings though it is sometimes very difficult because whistling can be heard very well from behind closed doors. I could almost believe that a country meadow full of larks existed in Lelia’s bedroom. She is very enthusiastic in her practice. Also the people above us are a “merry band” and have gin parties day in and day out. They do not rise before one p.m. on many days and then they start in. As Lelia says, This is not the outskirts of St. Paul, Daisy Lou, and I have to agree. There is every kind of person here you can think of, and many of them very smart-looking and fast. To be perfectly truthful, St. Paul has begun to seem like a dream. Shall I tell you a secret? I feel as tho my real life is just beginning and it is such a comfort to know with certainty that my life’s path is an Artistic Career.

  That is interesting news about the oil explorations. I shall keep my fingers crossed!

  Your loving sister,

  Daisy Lou

  She waits in the shadowy wings with six other women who look her age but are certainly younger. The air is stale with cigar smoke and the dust from the huge old curtain; the wooden floor is scuffed and gouged. All the young women except Daisy Lou are hatless—modern and smart with their bobbed hair and red mouths. Something in their light agitated voices sounds like too many glasses carried on a tray. Daisy Lou wears a hat and cloth gloves that smell of rose water and talc.

  Those who aren’t talking appear to be mouthing words silently. One stops to gargle water from a small paper cup. They all clutch sheaves of sheet music.

  Daisy stands at the end of the line, a little bit apart. She watches the others and feels like a governess, all muted and tucked; long hair rolled and pinned; conscious now that her clothes are a few years out-of-date. Her face is unlined, pretty but unadorned. No rouge on that mouth. She closes her eyes from time to time as if in prayer.

  They hear the final triumphant chirp of a soprano on the other side of the big curtain and then the girl is scampering back among them, her face flushed and hopeful. A brief bleak patter of clapped hands somewhere out there. They move up a notch. Daisy and five others in the dim wings.

  Daisy is thinking about her hair and about God. She wonders again whether she should get a bob; whether a bold and lighthearted look would help her musical career. She is asking God to be at her side during the coming ordeal and trying to wipe out the accelerating ripples of panic by concentrating fiercely on her song.

  To encourage the proper emotion in her voice, Daisy likes to conjure a small story or a picture to go with the words. A tableau vivant. Strange images come to her. When she sings “A Spirit Flower,” for instance, she sees her mother’s white hair like a fan, and then the young Dr. Sheehan on a block of marble, an iris sprouting from his chest. And then she has the appropriate feeling of beautiful grief.

  This will all have to be conveyed with her voice alone, without the usual help from gestures and movements, because those men down there in the smoky auditorium have their eyes closed. She sees that as soon as she begins to sing. They won’t watch but will simply listen, trying to imagine how the singer will sound on a phonograph record. She could be a Hottentot for all it mattered to a phonograph record.

  Shafts of light from three small oily windows at the far end of the high room hold moving dust and smoke, make it gold, and stretch it dusty, smoky, and gold onto the heads of the three men who sit at the foot of the stage, legs crossed, fingers weary around the stubs of cigars. It is the end of the day.

  “Okay, doll,” one of them calls up in a high gravelly voice. “What’ll it be?”

  “I should like to sing ‘A Spirit Flower,’” she announces in the mellifluous speaking voice she’s been practicing for the stage.

  “Parrot Flower!” His voice is a squawk. He appears to be interrogating the man next to him.

  “Spirit.” Her voice echoes in the big room. “Spirit.”

  He heaves a sigh of capitulation. “Belt it out, my girl,” he says. “Let’s get outa here.”

  She clears her throat and clutches her gloved hands to her midriff for support, fixing her eyes on a point far behind their heads, on the windows that let in the dirty light that fills her eyes, pushing everything else—the room, the barking men—away. The pianist begins. The men close their eyes. Daisy sees Dr. Sheehan on light-filled marble, an iris growing from his lovely cold chest.

  “My heart was frozen even as the earth / That covered thee forever from my sight,” she sings, articulating each syllable perfectly, placing her tone so that she will not quaver.

  She imagines that she is placing the song directly on a phonograph record, to be preserved for posterity—her voice as it exists at this very moment. What a thought that was! It was a way of stopping time, the way a painting or photograph did, while somehow keeping it still alive and moving too. A person hearing her on the phonograph record for the first time—her brother Jerry in Montana, say—would not receive her all in a piece, as he would in a painting or a photograph, but would hear her step by step, the way you knew a person in life. Gradually unfurling.

  “All thoughts of happiness expired at birth. / Within me naught but black and starless night.” She drops her voice to a hush. Her eyes close. She could almost weep.

  Someone is talking. Two of them are talking. The mumbles make their way into her thoughts, like taps at a window, and give her a little jolt. Her eyes fly open. The voices march in and push her song aside with dirty hands. They are talking, these men, while she sings for them! Huddled, talking among themselves, they share murmurs, a laugh. She could be the charwoman. A burst of louder laughter comes from beneath their tipped heads.

  The one with the tiny bow tie waves his arm suddenly, as if he is hailing a cab. “Whoa there, doll. You’re in the wrong place. This ain’t a temperance meeting. Enough spirit we got already. Stop with the spirit. You got anything from musical comedy?”

  Sept. 30, 1920

  Dear Jerry and Vivian and dear children,

  Well, the Aeolian people sent for me again yesterday, and I shall soon have a test record at last! My friend Lelia, the whistler, will be on it as well. I have been to a number of auditions and oh! it is a grueling business. At one audition, I sang “A Spirit Flower” by Campbell Tipton because I feel it is absolutely right for my range and also it is so very moving. The man who ran the machinery told me my voice was the most natural sound he had ever heard. However the men who decide about the test records were very difficult and I discovered they were looking for selections that were more frivolous and cheerful. One of the men said to me, “Miss Malone, my fear is that you are too spiritual for musical comedy.” I believe he is right and I am not ashamed of the fact.

  Lelia and I performed “The Nightingale’s Lament.” It is such a good study to hear your own voice, because then I can see all I want to undo and perfect. I do hope I shall have a test record soon and my voice will be coming to you in Montana in the form of a phonograph record.

  I am taking stage dancing and learning how to bow, do you know it is an art all its own, and how to pose and I have to stand before mirrors and make myself look artistic. If you were here, you would laugh me to noon, but believe me, you can’t go on the stage and be natural, my entrance is timed, my exit, every detail studied. Of course I should have had this training years ago, but didn’t get the opportunity with Mother’s illness.

  I sang at a Congregational church in Summit, New Jersey, yesterday. My selections were “The World Is Waiting for the Sunrise” by Seitz and two Schubert songs. A pianist played “Grande Polka de Concert” by Bartlett. I had numerous ovations and they have asked me to return at my earliest convenience.

  I shall cross my fingers for your election, Jerry. When you are treasurer, could you send me a small pile of money? (That’s a joke.)

  Love to all of you,

  Daisy Lou

  A neatly dressed young man sold liquor to the people upstairs in white ribboned boxes, the kind that might have held dozens of long-stemmed roses. Daisy sometime
s spoke with him on the front steps of the brownstone if she happened to be going or coming at the time. His name was Brendan Furey and he was a man in his middle twenties with springy dark hair and innocent eyes and the continual blue shadow of a beard. He held the boxes as if they were light with flowers.

  One day he told Daisy Lou a story about four girls from White Plains who drank bay rum and perfume, anything they could get their hands on, for the alcohol; drank such lethal stuff that one of them died and the rest were taken to the hospital half blind. Then he told her how Volstead had wreaked so much disaster and heartache you couldn’t believe it. And then he lifted the lid of one of the boxes and showed her the rows of brown bottles inside. Bona fide Canadian Scotch, he said. No poison in these.

  She felt for a moment as if he had said something lewd to her, shown her dirty playing cards. And then she looked at his young blue-shadowed face and thought, He’s Irish and an immigrant scrambling for a foothold. He does what he must. His face was so handsome and open and alert.

  Just then, a long Packard rounded the corner and drove slowly down the street, window open and in the window a man with a hat pulled low. All they could see of his face was a chin and a cigarette. Brendan Furey gave an amazing little jump—the same large twitch that would, not so many months later, mean he’d come to his bad end—and it rocked the length of his body and made the bottles ping softly against each other.

  “Smell these,” he hissed through a tight smile. “Smell these and smile. Give me a kiss on the cheek.”

  Startled, Daisy Lou simply stared at him. Then she stared at the man in the slow car. She could hear Furey’s fast breath, smell its sudden sourness. She bent her head like a queen and inhaled deeply. “Tea roses!” she said loudly, delightedly. “For me.” Then she stretched up to kiss his cool blue-shadowed cheek, and as she did it, as the car slowly disappeared around the corner and Brendan Furey’s eyes blinked blankly and she heard the faintest trembling of glass, she had the sudden instinctive knowledge that this particular combination of danger, adrenaline, and pantomime was what people meant when they said they were madly in love.

  Jan 2, 1921

  Dear Jerry and Vivian and children,

  Happy New Year to you, and thank you so much for the little writing kit. It is dear.

  I imagine you all in a cozy cabin in the swirling blizzards of the plains, with a crackling fire and the scent of holiday food! I hope you are warm and happy with one another.

  It is raining and snowing here. Very gloomy today, the autos throwing up huge piles of dirty snow and the horses sliding around. I saw one lorry with a fallen horse and it broke my heart. Lelia has gone to St. Paul for the holidays so the flat is mine. She is suffering from a bad romance. He was a young florist who came often to our house. A little more than a month ago, he simply disappeared. He told Lelia he was going to the corner for cigarettes and never returned. I did not know they were sweethearts, but Lelia insists they were, and she fears he has come to a bad end. She does not keep the best company, has become very interested in jazz and goes to clubs with young men, a different one every night. I fear she is squandering her musical talents. She is a disappointment to me. However, she wants me to stay on in her flat indefinitely because she needs help with the rent, and so I shall.

  So now it is another year, and time for reflection.

  Our test record is out and it is fine. I will send you a copy when they give me one. There are three different whistlers on it, including Lelia. Our selection is “The Nightingale’s Lament.” It seems after all my talk and all the promises from Aeolian Co. that there will be no contract for three more months. It is a continual disappointment to have to wait and to fight here, every step. I have had to learn so much and take all kinds of disappointments, they promise and then don’t live up to the promise, etc., but slowly, I am getting along. I am a better woman for it.

  Some of the people in this profession are pretty bad. Mister Ward at a company that shall remain nameless called me in his office presumably to sign a record contract, locked the door and tried to kiss me. I looked him straight in the eye and told him, Mister Ward if you are buying voices, mine is for sale, but if you are buying bodies mine is not for sale. He got terrible red and said maybe I wasn’t hungry enough yet and I turned on my heel and walked out. Oh! I get sick of the whole business sometimes but something makes me keep on. Advice from me, having no kiddies. Don’t shield your girl from hard knocks. I only wish I had been compelled as you boys were to face life when I was a child, it wouldn’t be so hard now.

  The people upstairs have been at it now for three days. You would not believe what you see right on the streets here from poison alcohol, people losing their eyesight or the use of their nerves. I saw a young woman, blind I believe and shaking, drinking spirits out of a Mason jar in a corner of Pennsylvania Station. What would Mother and Papa think if they were alive, I wonder! This world would shock them and break their hearts I think and they are better off out of it.

  My this is a gloomy letter. Don’t let the kiddies read it! I am just blue because it is the holidays and I have no home it seems and my record contract is so long in coming. But I have not lost hope, don’t worry! I will keep on. (Perhaps I won’t mail this after all.)

  Your loving sister,

  Daisy Lou.

  P.S. Someday I will get a break and some money and then I will visit you in Montana.

  If the church was out of the city, in Queens or up the Hudson, say, she wrapped a roll and perhaps some chicken left from dinner, or a hard-boiled egg, and put it in her small valise with her music. She also carried several folded rags to remove mud or dust from her shoes when she got to whichever church wanted her that day.

  She had bobbed her hair but wore a hat over it and she still reached up, suspicious, to make sure her new hair had not become mussed or disheveled in a way that would make her look flyaway or cheap. Dressing, she fixed her belt in exactly the right position and draped the bodice just so over the belt, stretching to see the back of herself in the long mirror.

  When she tended to her physical self in a slow and detailed manner, she felt tended by someone else. She adjusted her collar, her hat, in a proprietary and loving way, pretending that her hands were a mother’s hands. She smiled in the mirror for her father.

  Whenever she bought a piece of clothing, she made it a very long and involved process, even for something minor like a camisole. She would find clerks who liked to fuss and take time. When she had a dress made, once a year, many fittings became necessary because Daisy craved the feeling of someone attending to her. Seams had to be ripped out and done again. The hemline went up an inch, down two. And the ripping and resewing only stopped when the dressmaker lost all patience and called a halt to Daisy’s fussing.

  The test record was all whistlers, with an occasional soprano as accompaniment. Three different whistlers, including Lelia, and then Daisy in one song, and another soprano in another.

  She and Lelia drew wooden chairs close to the machine. The man who operated it lowered the stylus gently to the heavy disc. Rhythmic scratchings first, and then the wavering sound of violins coming to them, it seemed, from the past or a faraway room. A waltz. Then a bell, like a church bell in a distant green glade. Through and around all this floated the traffic from the street outside, a cop’s shrill whistle, the shouts of lorry drivers. Lelia squinted her eyes and bent closer to the phonograph as the sleepy flutter of her first whistled warblings began.

  This kind of whistling, this bird mimicry, was a skill. It required that the whistler pucker, blow, and flutter the tongue all at once. Now the soprano voice, Daisy Lou’s, began the refrain, “Once again… Once again…” And the bird grew ecstatic—warbling in and out, over and under the tune, its voice like burbling water. Daisy was entranced.

  The Woodland Flirt. The Bird at the Waterfall. The Bird and the Saxophone. Beyond the Clouds. Warblings at Eve.

  Lelia had become a full-fledged flapper who wore makeup, smoked, drank s
pirits, and loudly espoused free love. Though Daisy wouldn’t have put it in so many words, aspects of Lelia now appalled her. Aspects of both her personality and her musicality. After the florist-bootlegger disappeared, Lelia got fast and edgy; couldn’t slow down and smelled like begonias and gin. When she whistled, she got a very businesslike look on her face, a tough little foot-out stance, blotted her lips and wetted them and warmed up, cutting eyes at the technicians, stubbing out a cigarette.

  A few practice trills. Then the soggy little orchestra and Daisy Lou singing “once again,” in a frail nineteenth-century parlor voice, and this tough Lelia doing a fierce warbling bird for all she was worth and asking the man afterward when the thing was going to come out for crying out loud.

  Which Daisy Lou wondered about too, because she was running out of money. She needed a contract, more church work, something. She was certain that her fortunes would take an upward turn if she could just discover the proper mental attitude; tap her subterranean layers.

  11

  CARLTON ARRIVED on the No. 2 with a woman, the tearoom hostess named Fitzi. They had been together two years now. His wife, Ruth, wouldn’t give him a divorce; wouldn’t charge him with adultery or abandonment.

  Fitzi was a tall blonde and wore a very stylish city suit and lip rouge. Jerry had somehow expected a delicate cold little thing, not this rather formidable lazy-eyed woman with a deep, extravagant laugh. Ruth was much prettier. But this woman, as soon as you began talking to her, gave off a wry worldliness, a calm and sexy modernity. Was that what Carlton couldn’t live without?