At the beginning of that summer, I worried every time my father drove off in the car that he would come home drunk or not come home at all—as long as I knew him, he never said where he was going, unless you asked, and sometimes not even then. I went to sleep worrying that he would have started drinking while I slept, so every night when I said my prayers, I prayed that he would stay sober. But every morning, when I woke to the sun burning amber through the window shade, I could hear him rattling around in the kitchen. There was no whisky smell, just a faint scent of his hair tonic on the empty pillow beside my head.
As one day faded into the next and June turned into July and then August approached, I relaxed. Where before I had learned to brace myself for anything, now I got used to nothing happening. Every day was pretty much like the one before. The worst thing that happened was that one weekend I went to the Latauba river with my cousin and got the worst sunburn of my life. I was so burned, I couldn’t sleep, and my father stayed up with me, rubbing liniment into my back until well after midnight.
That summer he taught me how to fish and how to shoot. Mostly he taught me how to be comfortable with silence. Neither of us had much to say to the other one, and he taught me by example that this was fine. We could sit for an hour on the porch or by the pond without saying a word, just a couple of loners thrown together and enjoying the other’s presence without having to make conversation. Sometimes we got in the car and drove around, sometimes down to Kershaw, sometimes over to Great Falls, where we’d stop in and visit his aunt, who was a great cake baker. One time I opened her freezer and found a dozen cakes, angel’s food and devil’s food, all iced and ready to be delivered on the occasion of the next funeral or wedding supper. It felt like discovering gold. My overriding memory of that summer is that we had nowhere we had to go, we had nothing we had to do, and we made the most of it. I did not know it then, but that was the longest time I would ever have with my father, just the two of us, and the last time I would see him for almost four years.
“I never heard of such a thing.” We were headed back to North Carolina but we weren’t even through Lancaster yet, and my mother had been raving for five minutes. There had been some discussion over the phone with my father about where to pick me up. I had heard him suggest that she meet me at my aunt and uncle’s across town, but she insisted on driving out to Jones Crossroads. Now I saw why. She wanted nothing to do with that uncle who was going to teach me manners. “I’ve never been so insulted in all my life. As hard as I try. But this takes the cake. I don’t think I’ve ever been so insulted in all my life.”
She didn’t run out of steam until we got to Charlotte, an hour down the road, and even then she didn’t drop it altogether. But the longer she ranted, the less anxious I became, once I realized that she wasn’t going to blame me. This was one of those battles that were taking place over my head, with me in the middle. I was the prize being fought over, even though one of the parties in the argument didn’t even know there was a fight going on.
“So, tell me,” she said when we were almost home, “did you have a good summer with your precious father?”
“Yes’m. It was fun.”
“Did they have to teach you that, too? How to have fun?”
“No’m.”
“You know, we could all have fun if Mack would just do the right thing and stay with us where he belongs. Did you ever think of that?”
Talking Blues
I was trying to play “Country Gardens.” On the sheet music in front of me, tall stacks of notes strutted across the page in a parade I couldn’t keep pace with. My fingers groped for the right keys, found some and then staggered through the first measure again. Stamp your feet, my piano teacher had suggested, just to get the rhythm in your head. The song was supposed to sound like a march. That threw me. What did marches have to do with country gardens? For the umpteenth time, I read the words at the top of the page: “English Morris Dance Tune, collected by Cecil J. Sharp, set for the piano by Percy Aldridge Grainger.” I felt the same giddy terror I experienced when reading my science textbook. How could more-or-less plain English words be so impenetrable? What was a Morris Dance? How could you collect a song? What did “set for the piano” mean? But even reading what I couldn’t understand was easier than trying to play a song I’d heard my teacher play only once, a song with a brisk tempo, fistfuls of notes for both hands at once and three malevolent-looking little flats perched there on the staff. Cutting trail in the key of E-flat was slow work, and the thickety clusters of notes supplied by Mr. Grainger weren’t making it any easier. The more notes on a page, the angrier the page looked to me. I felt under attack. My usual response was to counterattack, to meet anger with anger. I did not play most songs so much as try to annihilate them. Perhaps that’s why my teacher gave me “Country Gardens.” Perhaps she thought, very well, if he wants to beat a song to death, here’s one that’ll give him a fight.
Because our apartment faced east, afternoon light in the living room was never more than anemic, even with the curtains drawn back. There in the gloom, I spent an hour of every afternoon after school for three years, from the age of nine until I turned twelve. I was supposed to be practicing. That was the way I thought of it, not as learning how to play the piano, or mastering an instrument, but more like exercising, like doing push-ups. There were always scales to learn, études to plod through. Mostly I sat, counting the minutes, listening to the silence, gazing into that watery light. Or I stared at the sheet music above the keyboard, tracing the orderly up-and-down of the notes as they moved across the staff. Most of the time, I felt like an illiterate.
Summoning all my strength, I waded into another couple of rounds with “Country Gardens,” mercilessly pounding the keys that always reminded me of the teeth of old people: chipped and yellowed. I saw my trouble: the rhythms differed in the bass and treble. The treble notes had a little stutter step, while the bass just clomped along evenly. I went to work on the right hand, and I was just beginning to isolate the hint of a dance rhythm when my doglike hearing apprehended the car door slam. That was my signal to make some noise on the keyboard. I struck up “Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee,” a hymn I knew by heart. I timed it just right, finishing a verse when Mother’s key turned in the lock.
As soon as she came through the door, I stopped playing and said, “The Morgans are moving.” The preemptive strike was mine. There would be no questions about piano practice now. To ensure that, I slid off the bench and moved away from the piano.
“And you got a letter from Leenie.”
“Moving where?” I could tell from the tension in her voice that I had her full attention.
“They bought a house. Somewhere out in the country, Pfafftown, I think.”
The defections had been piling up for months, as more and more of our old neighbors moved out. Nearly all my friends had gone already. It had happened block by block, and grew closer to us every month. It was the same in every case. A black family moved onto a block, and overnight for-sale signs popped up on all the nearby lawns. There weren’t any black families in our apartment complex yet, but if the Morgans had sold, that meant Negro families would soon be living a block away.
Mother put down her school bag and her pocketbook on the table in the dinette and picked up the letter from her sister. She still had her coat on and her car keys in her left hand. Staring at the envelope, she said, “Leenie’s handwriting is deteriorating.” I liked it when people used words I didn’t understand. I was trying what my teacher had told us to do: decipher meaning from context. It made me feel like a detective or spy. But then Mother dropped the letter on the table without opening it. That got my attention. Any other time she would have had it open right away Only. one of her sisters still lived in Kershaw, the South Carolina town where she grew up. Her mother had been dead for two years (her father died in the forties), and the other two surviving sisters had not lived in Kershaw in years. But getting a letter from any of them was still like getting a lett
er from home. She never said so explicitly, but I understood that we were exiles in North Carolina, and one day, when order was restored, we would return to Kershaw and live there happily ever after.
“Everything is changing,” Mother said.
“Deteriorating?”
“What?”
“Everything is deteriorating?” I wasn’t sure I had it right.
She laughed and said, “You and your fifty-cent words. Now hurry and get your Scout uniform on before we go to eat. You won’t have time to change when we get back.”
My earliest musical memory: my mother and I are sitting beside each other on the piano bench at the black studio piano in my Aunt Melita and Uncle Tom’s living room in Winston-Salem. I am three or four, and Mother is playing and together we are singing “The Bear Went Over the Mountain.” I liked everything about what was happening: the melody, that curious old bear and, best of all, the fact that he went over that mountain again and again—I never wanted the song to end. I loved watching my mother’s hands move over the keys, producing sounds that somehow combined into song. The piano was like some weird machine that only she knew how to manipulate—when to depress the pedals, when to use the black keys. At some point I became big enough to lift the top and look down into the works. I loved watching the felted hammers being driven into the strings while she played. Later, when I sidled over to the piano and tried a few notes, I produced nothing but chaos, which only ramped up my admiration for her skill. My mother at the piano was my mother at her best: exuberant, knowledgeable, in control.
The piano on which I practiced was the same piano on which Mother had learned to play. It came to our apartment after my grandmother died, when I was nine. It was an upright, but in our tiny living room it looked enormous, like something designed by a Hollywood prop department just so Laurel could drop it on Hardy’s head. Once the movers got it in, there was only room for the sofa, a cane chair, a couple of end tables and the coffee table. And when Mother sat down to play, it was as though an orchestra had come to live with us. I thought the room was going to explode.
Once the piano arrived, Mother played all the time. She would play standards, spirituals and hymns, and she did it all by ear. I never saw her consult a sheet of music unless she was completely unfamiliar with a song, and even then she used the music in front of her as nothing more than a sketch that she was free to alter, embellish and expand upon as she saw fit. She could read music (her college degree was “public school music,” a category that only later sounded odd to me. It probably wasn’t odd at all when she graduated in the thirties, especially in the South, where many all-girl colleges were hardly more than high-class finishing schools. As my mother explained, a young woman of her generation expected to work only until she landed a husband). Mostly, though, Mother played by ear. I always marveled at her ability to hear any song, even one she’d never heard before, and then sit down and play it through. She had a busy left hand and an addiction to the sustain pedal, and she always made it sound like at least two people were playing.
Sometimes she would sing as she played, and she often sang while she did housework. She had a light soprano voice, and she often told me that she sang solos in church as a young woman. “That’s how I met your daddy. He saw me singing in the choir in Great Falls.” She was quite jealous of the women who soloed in our choir, and I often regretted not hearing her when she was in full voice. I assumed that age had diminished her singing, until I realized, years later, that age had nothing to do with it. She was merely competing in a tougher league, and her talent was not in much demand.
She could still play better than just about anyone except the choir director, and she wasn’t shy about it. She played for her Sunday-school class. She played for her children at school. Sometimes she would come home in a snit because her school was putting on a play or a pageant, and the music teacher would be playing for the assembly. “She just reads everything right off the sheet music,” Mother would complain. “She doesn’t add a thing. I took my class in the auditorium today so they could practice, and all I could think about was getting to that piano and helping them out a little.” One day she came home in a much better mood. The music teacher had called in sick, so Mother subbed for her in the rehearsals. “Everyone said how much livelier the music was,” she said. Even the principal had stuck his head in the door and wondered aloud who that Liberace was at the keyboard.
After we had owned the piano for several months, Mother stopped playing as often—only when she was extremely happy about something, or extremely upset. And she still always played if there was an audience (I didn’t count, although if I pleaded with her to play, she would always acquiesce). I remember once, not long after my parents got divorced, we had a visit from a man I’d never heard her talk about before. He was a golfer who played in left-handed golf tournaments, and he was in town for a match. I can’t remember where he lived or how she knew him. He might have been an old flame, or an old friend of my father’s. He took us out to dinner and bought me a steak, and then we went back to the apartment. I don’t know what happened after I went to bed, but he never came back, and Mother wouldn’t talk about it. But before we went out to dinner, she played piano for him for the better part of an hour. He wouldn’t let her stop. He said she was the best pianist he’d ever heard. That was the only date I remember my mother’s ever having, and she got mad at me when I called it a date.
I took piano lessons from three teachers, starting with a woman in Lexington found by my uncle. Once I moved back in with Mother to start the third grade, I was taught by Mrs. Jackson, one of the ladies from our church. The piano at her house sat in a damp, dark basement, and she sent me home with old exercise books (“Now you won’t have to buy anything”) that smelled of mildew. A year later, the Jacksons moved away and I began again, this time with a kind, soft-spoken woman who was sick a lot and canceled more often than I did. No matter the teacher, I was not a promising student. The margins of my sheet music were crowded with instructions and corrections. “Right hand only.” “Add left hand.” “Both hands together.” Some of the words were underlined, and some were underlined more than once. The underlinings were added because I hadn’t gotten the message the first time, or the second, and if a word had to be underlined three times, there was an exclamation mark: “legato!” I’d never seen punctuation scream in frustration quite like that.
This was strange territory: while I could memorize a song and then play it more or less note for note, I wasn’t making anything that I recognized as music. I couldn’t figure out how to unlock its secrets, and in the meantime, I was forced to plod along, being spoon-fed a few scraps of information a week at a time. Even when I moved on to harder pieces—simple Haydn and Bach, études by Czerny—I chafed at my repertoire. I didn’t dislike it, but it was alien to me. No one I knew listened to classical music, except what we heard in church, and that was church music, what was playing while you found your seat.
Ironically, the song that I despised above all others growing up was not a church song, not a classical piece and not a song I ever learned to play, which was why I hated it. It was “Heart and Soul.” I don’t know why, but thousands of children who have never had a piano lesson can play “Heart and Soul.” When I was growing up, you could put three kids in a room with a piano and at least one of them would know it. Or worse, two of the three would play it as a duet, one taking the bass and the other the treble. I would be the third kid, sick with envy because after all my time spent on lessons and practicing, I couldn’t do what they were doing. That one song symbolized everything I hated about the rote disciplines that chained me to the piano. Hearing that jaunty melody, I saw only the arid musical landscape to which I was condemned, a world of endless scales, keys with three or four sharps and not a bit of fun in any of it.
At the time, none of this was clear to me. All I knew was that I was struggling through music that didn’t mean much to me. I didn’t want to learn “Country Gardens.” I wanted to play
like my mother. More than anything, I wanted to know what it was like to be my mother at the piano, to lose myself so thoroughly in what I was doing, in the music my hands were making, that the rest of the world would drop away. For this was precisely what it looked like when she played, like someone in a trance.
My career as a pianist lacked any such transformations. I remember taking part in only one recital. I don’t remember what I played, probably “The Spinning Wheel” out of one of the John Thompson books (those ubiquitous instructional books with their bright red covers can still make me flinch every time I see one). We had to get up on a little stage—it must have been held at a church. There were lots of windows, and the piano and the stage were right in front of the brightest windows, so that anyone at the piano was just a silhouette to people in the audience. Everything you saw was either dark or light, alternating like piano keys. The boys wore dark suits or sport coats over their white shirts and clip-on ties, and the girls wore starchy party dresses. None of us knew each other. It was a little gang of strangers. The only performers who got much applause were the youngest, who could barely reach the keyboard, and the oldest, who played the hardest pieces. When it was my turn, I went to the piano, played my piece, exhaled, then got off and waited for everyone to finish so we could have cake and punch. With the exception of one girl who played a note-perfect “Für Elise,” we all played our pieces as fast as we could to make it all end.
Little Boy Blues Page 11