Duet for Three Hands

by Tess Thompson

  “Why, Mama, because usually I just flit about?”

  “Jeselle Thorton, you watch your mouth.”

  “Sorry,” she mumbled and forced herself to eat the bowl of butter beans that tasted like sand. After lunch, she pulled the rug from the music room and draped it over the veranda railing and whacked it like the devil was in the dust particles. With each wallop of her rug beater, she prayed to forget the thoughts she’d had that morning.

  And then it came to her, plain as anything. This devil had made his way into Whit a while ago. She couldn’t be certain how long. But she understood with new clarity, the furtive glances and the way his lids went half closed when he looked at her sometimes.

  Now, here by this creek, he watched her this same way, having taken his eyes from the downward-looking purple flower to her. “Jes, what is it? Is the book no good?”

  “Just daydreaming.” She glanced down at the book she held between her hands. “Anyway, I finished this last night.” The Hemingway novel, A Farewell to Arms: a tale of doomed lovers and war and a dead baby. Nate had given it to Mrs. Bellmont the last time he’d visited. For hours last night after she’d finished the book, Jeselle remained awake, thinking of Nate and Frances and of the events on that terrible night.

  “It’s a heartbreaking story.” Her voice caught in the back of her throat. “Don’t read it.”

  “Mother said so, too.”

  “Why does life have to be so cruel?”

  “I don’t know.” He tossed a pebble into the stream. “I don’t want to leave. You know that, don’t you?”

  “Doesn’t matter. You have to go.”

  “Jes.” He held her gaze. A current traveled between them like the lightning that jolted northern Georgia on countless summer nights.

  She shook her head, trembling. “No, Whit.” And then, as if everything between them was benign, she untangled her legs, which were crisscrossed under her dress, and stood, pointing to the car. “We best be going. Mama will have a fit, we’ve been gone so long.”

  Jeselle heard the loud chirp of a cricket from the bottom rung of the ladder up to the tree house. When she reached the landing, Whitmore was there, his long legs stretched out from one side of the small room to the other. The days at the end of summer had ambled and drifted in the midst of the dirt road drives and peach pie and lingering moments on the veranda when the orange and pink twilight was so lovely it made Jeselle ache in the back of her throat. The days that seemed so numerous, that might never end, were now gone, stolen in moments already forgotten. Whitmore would leave tomorrow for New Jersey.

  He held up a package wrapped in tissue paper, no bigger than the palm of his hand. “For you.”

  “A goodbye present?”

  “No, just something to keep while I’m at Princeton.” The sound of the cricket ceased, replaced by the rustle of pine needles in the surrounding trees.

  “I’m supposed to be helping Mama.”

  “Please, Jes, just come up. Open it.”

  “I can’t be gone but a minute.” She climbed all the way in and settled on the floor, sitting cross-legged. She unwrapped the package. It was a small painting: a portrait of her.

  “I wish it was bigger,” he said.

  “But I have to have one I can hide. Isn’t that right?”

  “From Father, yes.”

  “From Mama, too. From everyone, Whit.”

  “You sound angry.”

  “Everything makes me angry lately.” The tissue paper made a crinkling sound as she wrapped it around the painting. “Mama sees how you look at me.”

  “I know. She’s happy I’m going.”

  Neither spoke for a moment. The three-quarter moon shone brightly between the slats of the tree house roof. A single tear escaped from her eye, falling on the package in her hands, making a hole in the tissue paper. “I’d rather have a painting of you.”

  He ran a hand through his hair; the spot under his eye twitched. “Not sure I could do a self-portrait.”

  “Why not?”

  “Can’t see myself.”

  “I can see you.”

  “I know, Jessie.” His voice was gruff. “Sometimes it’s the only way I know I’m here.” Outside the doorway, fireflies glittered, prancing about in the late August air. “I’ll write twice a week.”

  “I’ll be sure to get the post before Mama.” She hugged her knees to her chest.

  “I can tell you everything we do. You and Mother can order the textbooks and study here.”

  She nodded, resting her forehead on her knees. “All right.”

  “Don’t say it like that.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like this world’s already beat you.” He took her hand. “Please.”

  She looked up, almost defiant. “I’ve never once complained. You know that?”

  He nodded. “Yes.”

  “And I won’t.”

  An owl hooted from a tree close by. Whitmore shifted but continued to hold her hand. “Jes, I have something to say to you.”

  “Don’t.” She put her forehead back on her knees.

  “I have to. What if something happened to me and I never said it?”

  “Please, don’t.”

  “I love you.”

  She felt the tears coming, the kind that started in her belly and came out as shaking sobs and hiccups. “No good can come of it. You know that as well as I do.” They’d never spoken of it, and words gave love a power, a realness that couldn’t be drawn back into hiding, like taking a lid off a canning jar full of fireflies. Once set free, they never returned.

  He drew her onto his lap like she was nothing but a limp rag doll. “Please don’t cry,” he whispered, wiping the tears from her cheeks with his thumbs. He looked into her eyes like there was an answer there for him, so close she could almost taste his mouth, imagining the soft plumpness of his lips.

  His gaze moved to her mouth, no more than a sliver of air between them. She closed her eyes. He would kiss her, and she would let him. Nothing else mattered more than this.

  And then, Mama’s voice called from the veranda so that it echoed in the moonlit night. “Jeselle.”Just once. But it was enough for her to know that Mama had felt the heat and longing from where she stood on the veranda, searching with an all-encompassing ray like the beam from a lighthouse on a foggy night that surveys and sees every aspect of a landscape.

  “I have to go, Whit. I’m sorry.”

  He loosened his grip from around her waist. She scrambled from his lap, toward the entryway.

  Climbing down the ladder, she felt the weight of Whit’s gaze as strong as the invisible rope that Mama yanked with all her might.

  Jeselle, Whit, and Mrs. Bellmont left for the train station in Tate at midmorning. Whit drove them there; Jeselle, now in the backseat, was to drive home. They pulled out onto the highway, heading down the mountain. The heat felt suffocating. They opened all the windows, making it impossible to converse, but the air felt good on Jeselle’s overheated skin. Mrs. Bellmont’s perfectly set curls blew this way and that until she tied a yellow scarf around her head. Jeselle wanted to stick her head out the window and close her eyes and let that warm wind take her away until she reached the cool spray of the sea. But instead she peered at the back of Whit’s head. The left side of his hair blew up, giving her the idea that those strands were happy to have escaped the heaviness of the pomade he’d carefully combed in, which made those little ridges all along his head. She hated this flattened, slick hair, his going-to-a-new-world hair, and was ridiculously pleased to see that the pomade couldn’t hold up against the Georgia wind.

  Mama had cut his hair yesterday, so there was a strip of white on the back of his neck where the sun hadn’t reached during the hours he’d spent outdoors. That pale section of skin, like the soft underbelly of an animal, made him appear vulnerable to her, instead of the strong, limber athlete she knew him to be. He sat stiffly, upright, the muscles in ropy lines on each side of his neck, as if he were steel
ing himself for the inevitable farewell. Jeselle’s fingers twitched, wanting to touch them. She could simply sit forward an inch or two, she thought, and rest her hand against his skin that she imagined was slightly damp.

  Nearing the town of Jasper, Whit slowed the car.

  “I do hope your roommate will be pleasant,” said Mrs. Bellmont.

  “I’m sure he will be, Mother. Don’t worry. I’ll be fine.” His voice was flat, like he didn’t care one way or the other.

  “You’ll write to us right away?” Mrs. Bellmont asked.

  “I surely will, Mother.”

  “I wish that you’d gone to Auburn. Or Duke. A good southern school like your father wanted.”

  “Closer to home,” he said in a tease that sounded miserable.

  “I know. It’s better this way. Farther from your father.” Mrs. Bellmont sighed and adjusted her scarf. Her voice was bright, overly so, Jeselle thought. All of them pretending to be happy. “I’m thrilled about Princeton. Of course I am. I dreamed of it for you.” Mrs. Bellmont’s face crumpled and tears came to her eyes, her voice quiet now, with a tinge of the grief that always seemed near since that awful summer when the baby died and Nate’s career was ruined. “But now, well, I wish you and Jes were still small.”

  Jeselle looked out the window. Tears were contagious. Stay strong, she thought. Like Mama.

  They drove through the middle of town. Several white women, packages in their arms, chatted in front of the drugstore. A small red-haired boy, cheeks crimson from the heat, walked a fluffy black dog on a leash. The Ten Commandments etched on the side of a marble building gave warning to the masses. “Thou shall not covet…” Did God make this proclamation for little black girls who wanted to go to school? Was it a sin to covet what Whit had?

  “I’m glad you learned to drive,” Mrs. Bellmont said to Jeselle. “Sometimes your mama’s so stubborn, I wasn’t sure.”

  “There’s nothing to it,” Jeselle said. “I could teach you.”

  “No, no. Frank would never allow it.”

  They drove ten miles south, to Tate. Whitmore parked around back by the cemetery, and they walked around to stand on the platform. Two other clumps of people also waited on the platform, both groups surrounding young men holding suitcases. They heard the loud, high whistle of the train long before it came chugging down the track, black smoke rising in the air. The conductor waved his hat in greeting as the cars of the train slowed before coming to a loud, horrific stop in front of the platform.

  When it was time, Whit hugged Mrs. Bellmont and nodded at Jeselle. “I’ll see you both in a couple of months,” he said. Mrs. Bellmont’s eyes were full again, and she wiped the escaping tears from her cheeks. Jeselle set her gaze on her own shoes. “You both write me now.”

  “We will,” said Mrs. Bellmont.

  “You too, Jes?” he asked.

  “Of course,” she said.

  “Goodbye then.” He turned, suitcase in hand, and trudged up the stairs of the long, black train.

  “I feel like he won’t be back,” she said to Mrs. Bellmont.

  “Nonsense. He’ll be back for Christmas. It’s hardly anytime at all.” But her voice was flat, like she didn’t believe it herself.

  They were silent, searching the train’s passenger car for the appearance of his face.

  “Wish we were going with him, baby girl.”

  “He said he’d send us a list of everything he’s doing. Maybe we could get the textbooks.”

  “Sure.” Mrs. Bellmont wiped under her eyes.

  “It’s not the same,” said Jeselle. “I know that.”

  “No, I suppose not.”

  Don’t say it like that, Jeselle thought. She couldn’t bear it, to hear Mrs. Bellmont defeated by this world, too.

  Whit was at one of the windows now. He took off his hat and placed it over his chest, watching them. The train began to move, slowly, with a great moan and gusts of steam. Mrs. Bellmont waved with her lace handkerchief. Jeselle stood motionless beside her, never taking her eyes from Whit. His car went around the bend in the tracks and was swallowed by pines. Gone from view, the whistle blew, lonesome in the close, muggy air.

  Chapter 16

  Nathaniel

  * * *

  The metronome on the piano kept rapid time. Nathaniel matched the clicks of the metronome with bobs of his head, standing in the peripheral vision of his student, Sally, as she played Chopin’s Revolutionary Etude, Op. 10, No. 12. Always a crowd pleaser at the annual Alabama College for Women recital, the piece was based on simple arpeggios and recurring hand movements. Most of his pupils could play it decently after some practice, even with their small, female hands. But poor Sally was hopeless. It was pacing, mostly. A sturdy, blonde, fresh from her family’s dairy farm, she had energy like an earnest, rambunctious puppy and short, thick limbs with fingers to match. When she entered his office, he had the urge to put away Frances’s photograph and the papers stacked neatly on his desk in case Sally careened unexpectedly and fell over. Sally, hunched over now with her brow furrowed, plunked and pummeled the keys in a haphazard rushing and then slowing so that it felt to Nathaniel like he was on a boat in a stormy sea.

  He looked out his office window. It was a glorious September day, blue sky over brick buildings with white pillars. Matching brick paths wound between expansive lawns, scattered with young women chatting or studying under the shade of oaks and pines. Walt, his former manager, had urged him to consider the position as a professor in Walt’s hometown of Montevallo, Alabama. This was after Nathaniel had spent a year watching the birds fly outside his New York City apartment while the world crashed below. Black Thursday had come on that dark day in October 1929, and nothing had been the same since. The world slid further and further into despair.

  Given that, Walt urged him to consider a steady job in the small college town as a way to move forward. “Alabama College for Women is the place to send proper young ladies to study post high school. You’ll teach debutantes how to play the piano while they look for a young man to marry. Just temporary, while you figure out something to do next.”

  Just temporary had turned into three years. This is the way, he thought. Time tumbles along without any effort at all. What had seemed alien at first was now routine, was now a life. A music professor living in the small, quaint college town of Montevallo, Alabama? Surely he could not have predicted it, yet, here he was.

  A few leaves on the oak tree outside his office remained, flapping like the sad wings of a dying butterfly, holding on when the others had fallen and been swept up by the groundskeeper into piles.

  “Was it better today, Professor Fye?” Sally asked when she finished, her wide, pale blue eyes hopeful.

  “Much better, Sally. Keep up the practice, and you should have it mastered in no time.”

  She sighed, sliding off the bench. “You’re only saying that to be kind. I know I’m dreadful.” She swept a section of her hair behind her ear.

  He went to the bookshelf, leafing through the phonograph records until he found a collection of Chopin pieces. “Take this and listen to it with your friends tonight. Pay special attention to the pacing.”

  “Professor Fye, I know we have months left in the semester, but do you think I’ll pass? I need this credit to graduate, and I’m supposed to get married next summer.”

  “It’s only necessary that you try. I understand you’re not a music major. Anyway, your effort’s been exemplary. Keep trying, Sally, and all will be well.”

  She smiled and clasped her hands over her chest. “Oh, thank you. I’m so relieved. Professor Fye, one of the other girls told me you sometimes play with your right hand.” Her eyes skirted to his left hand and then back to his face. “Won’t you play the right hand part for me, just so I can hear how it’s supposed to be played?”

  “If you think it will help.”

  She slid from the bench and stood by the open window as he took her place at the piano. The breeze brought the smell of camellia
s as he played the notes with his eyes closed, hearing the left hand in his mind.

  There were tears in her eyes when he was finished. “It’s awful pretty when you play it.”

  “Thank you.” He rose from the bench. “Now, scoot along. I’ve two more students to hear before I get to have my lunch.”

  Tuesday. After Sally, there was Matilda, and then Gertie. She was the best of his students, not particularly gifted except that she adored music and loved playing, and therefore put in the hours of practice that were necessary to improve. After Gertie’s lesson, he would have lunch and then teach his music appreciation class, ending the day by grading papers at his desk for an hour before heading home to see how Frances had fared. This was a day in a long string of days so similar to the others it was impossible to remember later almost any detail that would distinguish it.

  That afternoon he walked home, enjoying the lushness of the gardens and the moderate temperatures September had blessed them with. Tall oaks lined streets named after trees and shrubs. Homes, a mixture of Victorian, colonial, and modern bungalows in the Craftsman style, sat on small lots with tidy, lush gardens.

  They lived on Vine Street in a compact but attractive bungalow. Roses, lilacs, and azalea bushes lined a fenced backyard. A maple in the backyard provided needed shade in the summer months. On a porch covering the front of the house, two wooden rocking chairs sat side by side like a happy couple. He’d had the movers place his piano in the corner by the window that looked out on the front porch.

  When they’d arrived from New York, Frances immediately began crying at the sight of the house. “This is where we’re living? It looks like one of those Sears kit houses. I can’t possibly survive here.”

  “But it’s lovely.” It was a kit house, in fact, replete with a sitting room, dining room, and kitchen on the first floor, and upstairs, two modest-sized bedrooms and a bath.