The service in town was good. The people were friendly, and the girls seemed to enjoy it, so we were in a good mood coming home. Brenda and Melba had got up at the crack of dawn to get the dinner ready, so all we had to do was put the meal on the table as soon as Mr. Ringstaff arrived.
When we pulled in at Priscilla Home, his car was already there.
15
Mr. Ringstaff stood talking with Ursula while the van was unloading. With him not all decked out in five-hundred-dollars’ worth of fishing gear, he looked a lot different. Wearing a dark suit, a sensible tie, polished shoes, and a carnation in his lapel, he looked more like a salesman.
I don’t care much for salesmen. They come on strong with a big smile pasted on their face and start the shakedown with jokes. In my case, they size me up as a little old lady who has not got bitty brains, and if flattery don’t work with me, they sober up and get religious. All they’re thinking about is the commission they’ll make. You can see dollar marks every time they blink their eyes.
On the other hand, Ringstaff didn’t seem to fit that bill. For one thing, he was too laid back to be a four-flusher. Ursula was doing all the talking, and he was doing all the listening. His looks were a cut above average. Don’t get me wrong, he was not handsome like the pictures you see in magazines of men advertising whiskey, but he was an all right looking man. On a scale of one to ten I’d put him somewhere above the middle. He was losing his hair, which gave him a forehead that wouldn’t be satisfied until it reached the crown of his head, but what hair he had was more pepper than salt. And his mustache was full-grown and clipped right. He was not very tall, but in my book that was not a strike against him. I hand it to any man his age who has kept himself trim and don’t carry around a potbelly. Ringstaff was definitely not one of those gluttons whose mouth pops open every time his elbow bends.
Lenora was the last one getting out the van, and he reached his hand up to help her. “Oh, Miss Barrineau, how good it is to see you again.”
She thanked him and quickly followed the other women going toward the back door, but Ursula called her back over.
After I had took inventory of Ringstaff’s features, it came to me that whatever appeal he had was not so much in his looks as in his manner. Without being a dandy, he had a lot of polish, if you know what I mean. Just the way he stood listening to Ursula told me he was a quiet, gentle-natured man who “knew the propers,” as Mama would say. Of course, I didn’t so much like that he was wearing a carnation in his lapel. But just as I thought that, I heard him say, “Oh, I forgot,” and he removed it, explaining, “I’m an usher in church.”
Ursula didn’t sound like her usual self; she was putting on the dog and asking Lenora very politely to take Mr. Ringstaff to the parlor.
Why don’t she ask me to do that? I’m the resident manager. That woman treats me like I fell off a turnip truck.
“I have to run up to my apartment for a few minutes,” Ursula was saying, “then I’ll join you.”
I led the way inside with the two of them right behind me. At the top of the stairs I excused myself and went into the kitchen to help the girls, and Lenora took him into the parlor.
I put the biscuits in the oven, turned up the gas under the pots to warm the food, and prayed nothing would burn, boil over, get scorched, or turn out uneatable. The tea and coffee were ready, and Brenda and Melba were setting out the plates and glasses on the serving counter, so I left them in charge while I ducked in my room for a pit stop. I wasn’t going to take off my girdle or change shoes as I usually did. I dabbed some powder on my nose and gave my hairdo a lift here and there.
I wondered if Ursula had come inside yet. No doubt she was still up in her apartment trying to fix her face to impress Mr. Ringstaff.
Once the biscuits were done, we put the dinner on the serving counter and rang the bell. All the girls filed in and took their places at the tables, but Ursula and Lenora were still in the parlor with Ringstaff. What’s keeping them? I wondered. “Ring it again, Melba.”
She did, and the three of them moseyed into the dining room, taking their own cotton-picking time, their minds on whatever they were talking about. Hearing that little German accent Ringstaff had made me think, Nazi. I seated the three of them at my table.
Since Ringstaff was a man who went to church, I didn’t think he would mind if I asked him to say the blessing. He obliged, and I tell you right now, Nazi went right out of my mind. Nobody could pray like that man and not know the Lord! He didn’t rattle off one of those “Let’s get it over with” blessings we say from memory—the words were all his own, short but heartfelt. Like Splurgeon said, “Prayer requires more of the heart than the tongue.”
Ursula led the way through the serving line; you could smell that girl’s perfume a mile away. I followed behind Ringstaff, and Brenda and Melba served him a generous helping of baked ham, sweet potato soufflé, green beans, applesauce, and biscuits. It didn’t look like anything had burned, boiled over, or turned out uneatable, but you never know until you taste it, and the man was smiling as if he liked what we were serving him, so that was a relief. You can never tell about foreigners; they eat stuff we’ve never heard of.
Once we were all seated, Ringstaff unfolded his napkin, laid it in his lap, and looked across the table at me. “Miss Esmeralda, we were just looking at the piano. That is a very fine instrument you have there.”
“Oh?” I said, surprised.
“Yes. It’s a Steinway, and in my opinion a Steinway is the best piano money can buy. Your baby grand is exceptionally fine. It was made in Hamburg, Germany, in 1930.”
I laughed. “No wonder it’s falling apart.”
He smiled and there was a twinkle in his eye. “Not this one. It hasn’t been used in a long time and needs repairing, but our pianos rarely fall apart.” His hands came into play, those long fingers motioning as he spoke. “A Steinway is built with an iron plate, over strung strings, with a thin, sensitive soundboard all handcrafted. At Steinway, four hundred men work nine months to produce one concert grand.” His eyes fairly sparkled as he talked about it.
“Mr. Ringstaff is a piano tuner for Steinway,” Ursula informed me in that smug way she has got.
So he’s not a piano salesman, I thought, just a tuner. But I was in for a surprise. Lenora came out of her shell and corrected Ursula. “Mr. Ringstaff is Head Concert Technician.”
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“It means he travels all over the world with famous concert pianists to care for and tune their pianos.”
“Oh,” I said. That’s the most Lenora had ever said at one time in my presence, so I was glad to hear her open up and say something.
Then, before she retreated back into her shell, she added, “Mr. Ringstaff is not only the best piano technician in the world, he is a genius.” Her voice was soft but confident. “He works sheer magic for artists who are too temperamental for anything less than the best.”
He was quick to dismiss the compliment by saying, “Miss Barrineau, you were never temperamental.”
Slightly frowning, she touched her finger to her lips, and he got the message. By way of changing the subject, he said, “Most maestros are temperamental, but I enjoyed working with them. I could tell you lots of stories.”
“Please, Mr. Ringstaff, tell us one,” Ursula purred.
Ringstaff dabbed his mustache with the napkin before he spoke. “You would recognize this artist if I told you his name,” he began. “He is world famous, but I will just call him ‘Maestro.’ It happened in Berlin . . .”
As he told the story of a piano string that broke just minutes before this Maestro, as he called him, was to begin a concert, I was thinking, What a wonderful storyteller he is. His facial expressions and the way he used his hands beat all I ever saw. I could have listened to him all night.
“In a crisis like that, I always tell myself to stay calm, and I always pray, ‘Lord, help me in this situation.’”
There! I
glanced at Lenora and, upon my word, those slate gray eyes seemed to be coming alive.
Once he finished the story and went back to enjoying his meal, Ursula announced, “Mr. Ringstaff has offered to bring his tools and work on our piano.”
Well, I didn’t have much hope for that piece of junk, but for whatever reason, I figured it would be good to have a Christian man visiting Priscilla Home.
After dinner, Ursula told Lenora to come out on the porch with her to visit with our guest while the girls cleared the tables and cleaned up in the kitchen. I got up to go in the kitchen, but Mr. Ringstaff took my arm and steered me out onto the porch. He was smiling and telling me, “Miss Esmeralda, you must have had some interesting experiences to share with us.” He made me feel like I was somebody, and that told me more about him than anything else he might say or do.
I tell you, we had a wonderful afternoon visiting on the porch. He wanted to know what it was like being brought up in Live Oaks, so I told him about Beatrice and me, how we had to quit school and go to work. I told him about marrying Bud and him dying the way he did. Finally, I said, “That’s enough about me,” but he wanted to know about Apostolic Bible Church, so I told him about Pastor Osborne and the Willing Workers—about the Lord bringing Maria to us. I was set to tell him that whole story when I cast an eye at Ursula. My talking so much was making her fidgety, and I smiled to myself. Too bad she don’t have a handful of paper clips to do in.
But it was time for me to get out of the limelight. “Mr. Ringstaff,” I said, “what kind of wood goes into making one of them grand pianos?”
I don’t know if he caught on why I put the ball in his court, but I knew he loved talking about pianos. He commenced right away. “Miss Esmeralda, pianos have what is called a soundboard. That is the soul of any piano. The Steinway soundboard is either a close-grained Alaskan sitka or an Eastern Seaboard or European spruce.”
I turned in my chair and pointed to the tree on the corner of the lawn. “There’s a blue spruce.”
“So I see,” he said and admired it a minute. “Wood from a spruce like that has unusual stability and vibrancy under stress. It will give a free and even response throughout the entire scale.”
I felt good about knowing the tree was a spruce. I doubt Ursula knows a spruce from a hemlock.
Ursula, desperate to get in the conversation, asked, “What holds a piano together?”
“The ribs. They’re made of sugar pine to give strong support to the bridges and soundboard. Now, the bridges are made of hard rock maple and notched for each string.”
“Hard rock maple can’t hardly be split,” I said.
“True. The action parts are also fitted with a hard maple interior dowel. We force-fit the dowel so that there is a minimum of moisture content. That makes for stability in every climate.”
“A man was in here the other day, and he thought our piano was made of mahogany,” I said. “To me, it don’t look too much like mahogany.”
“You are quite right, Miss Esmeralda. It isn’t mahogany, it’s rosewood. That is a very fine and beautiful case.”
Good heavens, was I ever feeling my oats!
“The rim and case of every Steinway are double bent,” he was saying. “That is, both the inner rim and the outer rim are bent and pressed together.”
“You don’t use machines,” I commented matter-of-factly.
“No. All the components are fitted by hand, glued and maple-doweled before the installation of the sound-board.”
I was really enjoying myself; Lenora was hanging on to every word, but Ursula looked like she could bite a ten-penny nail in two. Ringstaff must have seen the situation because he got off the subject of pianos to talk about something Ursula knew. “So, Miss Ursula, you are a psychology major?” The rest of the conversation was textbook gobbledygook, but I didn’t mind. I’d had a very good time.
It was almost suppertime when Ringstaff said he must go, but he looked reluctant to leave. I think he had enjoyed the afternoon as much as I had. When he went around the back to get his car, the three of us remained on the porch, not saying a word. As he came around the house and up the driveway, he tooted the horn, and we waved back.
Of course, my joy was not to last. Monday morning after Praise and Prayer, Ursula called me into her office. “Esmeralda, something distressing has come to my attention.”
“Oh?”
“Linda tells me that when Dora stormed out of the house the other day, you went after her. Is that correct?”
I tried to hedge. “Oh, come, Ursula, you know Linda lies.”
“If this is not true, tell me. Did you or did you not go after Dora?”
“Well, yes, I did. I felt I had—”
“And where did you go?” Looking over the top of her glasses, her eyes were so fixed on me I guess I was supposed to squirm.
With no way around her, I confessed. “Dora was up at the falls.”
“And you followed her up there?”
“I did.”
“In the rain?”
“Yes, in the rain.”
Ursula fished out a paper clip from a tray and, twisting it all out of shape, leaned back in her chair. “Did it ever cross your mind that a woman your age is in no condition to attempt such an operose venture?”
“No. I can’t say as it did.”
She popped forward in the chair. “Fatuous, absolutely fatuous! A reckless, egregious disregard for cautionary procedure!”
For all I knew she could have been cussing me, but the Walking Dictionary was not finished. “Did it not occur to you that should you fall and break a limb, it would tax all the emergency service resources we might engage to bring you out?”
Anything I would have said would only add fuel to the fire, so I didn’t answer. As Splurgeon says, “If a donkey brays at you, don’t bray back at him.”
Leaning herself back in her oversized chair, she succeeded in straightening that paper clip into a straight piece of wire, then toying with it, asked me, “What exactly did you accomplish by such intrepid heroics?”
“Exactly? . . . I don’t know, Ursula. I do believe it was the Lord’s will for me to do what I did, but we don’t always know the reasons why, do we?”
“No, I guess we don’t.” I thought she was softening, but then she threw me a curve. “The Priscilla Home Board would not see it your way.” If she was threatening me, she was wasting her breath. When I didn’t say anything, she tossed the paper clip in the wastebasket and wheeled around. “I have decided to dismiss Dora.”
“Dismiss Dora!” I nearly came out of my chair!
“Precisely. She has been most uncooperative, and now this tantrum that has endangered not only her life but also yours is unconscionable. You can tell her to pack her things.”
“Ursula, you can’t mean that. Maybe this tantrum, as you call it, is the breakthrough you’ve been waiting for. Think about it!”
She reached for another paper clip.
“Besides,” I told her, “we need Dora in the garden. The rain has just about ruint the rows she’s laid out—”
“Not ruint!” she said in that cold, unfeeling voice she had got. “Ruined.”
“Okay, ruined,” I said as calmly as I could. “Ursula, Dora’s the only one can handle the plow and get the garden back in shape.”
“Esmeralda, I never approved of your bringing that animal on this property and having our residents digging in the dirt. We are not a farm colony.”
“Think of it as therapy, Ursula. Outdoor work gives us a good appetite and we sleep better.”
“There is more to this program than eating and sleeping.” She was bending that paper clip this way and that but looking out the door as if she was thinking. I sensed she might be reconsidering about Dora.
“Don’t we give the residents three strikes?” I asked.
She didn’t answer me. “Now that you mention it, there is another matter that has been brought to my attention.”
Oh no, I thought. What e
lse?
“I want you to go in your bathroom and see if you can find your mouthwash.”
“Mouthwash?” I was puzzled, but I got up and went in there to check it out. I did remember that I couldn’t find the new bottle I had bought, but I thought I must have left it in the van when we came home from town. I had forgot to look there.
Well, it wasn’t in the bathroom, so I went back in the office. “I must have left it in the van.”
“Your mouthwash has been consumed,” she told me.
“Consumed?”
“Yes, consumed. Portia stole it out of your bathroom and drank all of it.”
“Stole it out of my bathroom? When?”
“The night you came from the falls. Linda tells me several of the residents descended on your room, and you allowed them to visit with you.”
“Well, yes, I did but—”
“That was most unprofessional. Linda tells me that when Portia went to the kitchen to bring you another cup of coffee, she slipped into your bathroom and took your mouthwash.”
“Now, see here, Ursula—it was Linda who went in my bathroom—Linda, not Portia.”
“We found the bottle in Portia’s backpack.”
“Then Linda put it there!”
“No. Portia did not deny the charge.”
“Ursula, you don’t understand—”
“Esmeralda, I understand perfectly. If you had read my guidelines, you would be aware that an alcoholic will drink anything that has an alcohol content—cough medicines, mouthwash—anything containing alcohol. This offense is strike two for Portia. One more and I will have no choice but to dismiss her.”
“Oh, Ursula, you’re making a big mistake!”
She ignored me. “By this experience I hope you have learned the wisdom of making our personal living quarters off-limits to the residents. Do you understand?”
“Ursula—”
“It was most unprofessional for you to allow them to congregate in your room.” She stood up, dismissing me.
Good Heavens Page 16