Despite the hard times, my parents at last thought about giving Miriam her own piano. My mother had convinced herself, privately, that it was in a good cause—that making it easy for Miriam to practice might cut into her time with T. At any rate, my father went over to Venable’s Music Store and bought one, an upright so big it stretched across a whole wall and then some.
Miriam and Miss Brookie had decided on “The Golliwog’s Cakewalk” and the Minuet in G, and Miriam spent a lot of time practicing her pieces. And this meant, as my mother had hoped, that when T was home, he and Miriam were not always together.
One Saturday afternoon, Miriam said she was going to Miss Brookie’s to spend the day practicing over there.
My mother said, “Already something’s wrong with our piano?”
No, it was that the competition was on a grand, and Miriam wanted to practice on one.
My mother was going to the store and, as Lizzie Maud no longer came on Saturdays, she told Miriam to take me with her.
When we got to Miss Brookie’s, nobody was home. The house was empty, quiet. And hot as blazes.
“Wonder where she’s got to,” Miriam said, putting her music on the rack. “Reckon she’s down at the mayor’s, blessing him out for this hot weather.” She settled herself on the piano bench.
I wandered around the house. I went up to the bedrooms where we had once stayed, came back down. I opened the icebox, took out the pitcher of tea, poured some into a glass, replaced the pitcher. I checked the harp to see if it still played, and Miriam told me to hush.
I thought about going outside, but I had noticed on the way over that the sky was turning dark, and ever since that awful time in the Broomes’ storm cellar, I definitely had no use for storms. There seemed nothing to do but to lie down on the Victorian affliction divan. I listened for a moment to Miriam pounding away, and I began to get sleepy. I could hear a drop or two of rain coming down on the front porch, and I wondered if there was going to be a thunderstorm. Then my eyelids closed, and I was adrift.
I was not quite tight asleep when I heard the squeak of the front door. Miss Brookie, I thought, and hoped she wouldn’t talk too loud. The voice I heard, however, was a man’s voice, and it was very loud indeed. It was saying, “Well, well, what have we here? I do believe it’s the Jew babies.” There was a laugh. “Tell you what’s the truth, you never know what you’re going to find at Brookie’s.”
I turned over into a sitting position. Mr. Dillon.
Miriam had stopped playing. Her mouth was shaped into a stiff little smile. “Miss Brookie’s not here, Mr. Dillon. I declare I don’t know where she is.”
There was silence. Miriam went on in her role as substitute hostess. “She’ll be mighty sorry to have missed you.”
“You let me decide that, little lady,” Mr. Dillon said. “You don’t know if she’ll be sorry or not.” He gave Miriam a sort of teasing smile. “Now do you?”
“No sir, I guess that’s right.” Miriam began to fool with the music on the rack.
“See how it is, you dassent go around talking for other folks. Especially Jews talking for Christians. Jews and Christians don’t think alike, you know that?”
“I hadn’t thought about it all that much,” Miriam said, turning pages swiftly.
“I’m talking to you, girl, so pay attention. You may have call to remember what I’m saying someday,” Mr. Dillon said.
He crossed the room to the nearest chair—one of Miss Brookie’s uneasy ones and inappropriate for a man of his size—and sat down. Pulling a cigarette pack from his shirt pocket, he extracted a cigarette, then withdrew a box of matches and struck a match into flame with his thumbnail. After lighting up, he threw the match on the little table beside him, put one leg over the other, and let out a great cloud of smoke.
Miriam spoke into her music book. “If you’re going to wait on Miss Brookie, I reckon we’ll just go along. You won’t want to hear me practicing.” She stood up and walked around the piano. “Come on, Stella Ruth.”
I got myself up, glad to be rid of the prickly red plush and all the sweaty spots.
Suddenly Mr. Dillon was pointing at Miriam. “Hey. Hey, wait a minute,” he said to her. “Ain’t you the one who won our Charleston contest that time?”
“Yes, sir.” Miriam pulled me by the hand.
“Well then.” Mr. Dillon bent forward. “Don’t you see? That makes us friends. Sit back down and we’ll have us a little conversation.” Mr. Dillon’s look took in Miriam from top to toe. “You still know how to dance?”
I guessed they were going to have a chat. I went back to sit on the divan.
Miriam plunked back down on the piano bench.
“Tell me about it, big sister,” Mr. Dillon was saying.
Miriam looked over at me, as if asking me how she should answer. I wanted her to say, “I’m the best dancer in town next to Lizzie Maud,” but she just said, “A little.”
Mr. Dillon’s eyes were tightly focused on her. And doing the crinkling thing. “You still dance better than any girl around, you know you do. Ain’t that the truth?”
Miriam said, “I don’t know,” and looked at me again.
I was tired of all the talk. I considered nagging Miriam to leave, but I had gotten too many blessings out for this habit of mine. I leaned back on the sofa, feeling again the need to sleep. It was so hot. My eyes began to close.
“Little sister?”
I realized Mr. Dillon was talking to me.
“How about it, little sister?” he was saying. “Don’t big sister here show them a thing or two about dancing? And don’t the boys flock around?” He returned his look to Miriam. “Course they do, like flies around a ripe peach.”
I wondered if he really wanted an answer. Just in case he did, I nodded to the back of his head.
“Let’s see can we get big sister to dance for us. Like she does for the boys. Shall we ask her?”
I couldn’t help it, I had to say, “Go on, Miriam, dance. Mr. Dillon wants to see you dance.”
“Hush, Stella Ruth,” Miriam said. “You just hush.”
Mr. Dillon was looking at me, intently, as if preparing to say something important. “Why don’t you just go on out and play, little sister?” He waved a hand toward the outside. “You won’t have no fun sitting here while us two old friends get in some chatting, now will you?”
It was Miriam who answered. “Stella Ruth doesn’t want to go out, Mr. Dillon. It’s fixing to really pour, and if there’s anything she hates, it’s a thunderstorm.”
“There you go talking for other people again,” Mr. Dillon said to Miriam. “I got to break you of that habit.” He took time out for some rough, raspy coughing.
The coughing subsided, he laughed, and an ash fell off his cigarette end and onto his shirt front. “All right, that’s fine. Baby sister and I will just sit right here. And you, you pretty thing, get on up and dance for us.”
“I just can’t, Mr. Dillon.”
“I vow I never knew Jew folks to be so bashful. Next to niggers, Jews is the worst for calling attention to themselves.” Mr. Dillon laughed and coughed, coughed and laughed. “Now tell me why you can’t dance for me.”
“Because I don’t think my mama would like it. She might wear me out.”
“Don’t you worry none about your mama,” Mr. Dillon said. “You just leave your mama to me. Fact is, she wouldn’t want you to disappoint old Tom Dillon.” He put his cigarette out in the ashtray on the near table, got up, and went over to the piano. He leaned toward Miriam, and his bulky body blocked my view. Though he talked low, I could hear him plainly. “Lord, a pretty thing like you ought not to be hiding behind that piano,” he was saying.
I watched as he moved around to the piano bench. “Come with me, pretty thing,” he said to Miriam. “You and me’ll dance.”
He grabbed Miriam up, and she stood there, her hand in the man’s grip. But instead of dancing, he just stood there looking into Miriam’s face, saying the same words
, mumbling them over and over, “Come on, pretty thing” and “You get on up here with me,” although Miriam was already up. Then, before I could turn my eyes away, he had his mouth on hers.
Miriam’s head jerked away. “Please, Mr. Dillon! Please, please! Don’t do this! Please don’t do this! Stella Ruth and I have to go home!” The voice didn’t sound like Miriam’s. It sounded like some lady’s in a picture show. She was swinging her head and ducking. “Stop this!” she was saying. “Please stop this!”
And then Miriam was screaming at me. “Stella Ruth! Get somebody! Hurry!”
I was already at the door when I heard the last of her words. I knew what I had to do: I had to get to Miz Earp’s. I darted to the front door, preparing to run across the strip between the two houses. But when I pushed open the screen and stepped out, there was the rain—pelting, pounding, battering. I had a moment of wanting to draw away, to go back into the house, to lie down and close my eyes. Oh, I knew I needed to make the run, but when I looked out into the yard, into the fury of the wind and rain, I couldn’t. I could only cry out for the rain to stop.
Then all at once a figure was running up the walk and bounding over the porch. It was T, already snatching open the door.
“T!” I cried. “Hurry!”
In the house T was holding Dillon by the collar, shoving him forward. “You crazy old coot! I got a notion to wring your neck!” he was saying.
“Listen, Medlin,” I heard Mr. Dillon say, “I was just messing around.”
“Messing around? What right have you got to mess around with Miriam?” T tightened his hold. “If I had good sense, I’d bust your head wide open!”
And then Mr. Dillon was out the door and rushing through the rain to his car. When I turned back, Miriam had sat herself on the divan. There were no tears, just big eyes and a pale face. With both hands she was shoving her hair over and over behind her ears.
We sat down on either side of her, T and I. T’s breath was still coming hard. “That danged fool!” He looked at Miriam. “You hurt?”
Miriam shook her head.
“What on earth got into that weasel?” T had apparently not been going to come, but then he “got to thinking” that maybe he could walk Miriam home.
Miriam sighed. It wasn’t the sigh we all knew so well—the one that told us my mother was purely hopeless—but one that came from a far deeper place. She lifted her head and tied the ribbon around her hair. “Listen, y’all,” she said.
We waited.
“Listen, y’all,” she said again. “This is important.” What was important was that we couldn’t let our mother know about this.
“Not tell your mama?” T was bewildered.
Miriam shook her head. “She’d kill me.”
T still couldn’t understand. “But why? You didn’t have nothing to do with it, nothing atall!” T might have been surprised, but I wasn’t. I was used to Miriam keeping secrets from my mother.
“Yeah, I know,” Miriam answered T. “I know and you know. But Mama always knows something different.” And if my mother was told, Miriam said, we’d be leaving town “on the next thing going out.”
Then surely, T was saying, Miriam must tell our father. “Lord,” he said, “if ’twas up to me, I’d run tell your daddy this minute.”
Not our father either, Miriam said. “If Papa knew, he might get it in his head to agree with Mama.”
She took our hands and made us swear. “Y’all swear never to tell Mama. Or Papa, either one.” She squeezed our hands hard. “Cross your heart?”
“And hope to die,” we said.
Miriam didn’t feel like practicing anymore and she didn’t enter the piano competition. She said one of her fingers wouldn’t move right. I assumed it was a story she had made up, but when I watched her move her hand, I saw it was true: The forefinger on her right hand just stayed stiff, its only movement a kind of flutter. She would stand over the piano and plunk with one finger, but that was all.
I wanted to know if it had happened when she was wrestling with Mr. Dillon, and Miriam said no, her finger just decided on its own that it wouldn’t move right.
For a while she didn’t have a whole lot of fun. She didn’t even go on the fall buying trip with my father, and my father said to her, “How you going to be a clotheshorse if you don’t gallop around the wholesale houses once in a while?
“Who would have thought?” he asked my mother. “That little finger. Who would have thought?”
“She’ll get over it,” my mother answered my father. “We all have to get over things.”
She did get over it, and her finger returned to normal. And when she got over it, she was more in love with T than ever. Whenever T was home, they were together day and night, and in summer he was always home. During the day T did chores at his family’s farm, but every night he and Miriam would go sit on the grass of the vacant lot across from our house (still there, still vacant) and Miriam would play her ukelele. This plot of ground (which had seemed as spacious as a meadow when I had played in it but, on my revisit, turned out to be just a builder’s-sized lot on which, in all those years, nobody had built) was where the neighborhood children chased fireflies in the summer twilight and where after dark the older brothers and sisters brought whatever stringed instruments they had and sat together and played. There was only one banjo, for banjos were expensive, but several ukeleles, which weren’t. There was also a zither, whose sound lingered longer in the warm air than any of the others. And it was here, on the grass, in my meadow, that Miriam and T sat and strummed and talked the summer nights away while my mother watched.
CHAPTER 27
PUSH COMES TO SHOVE
My mother’s dream that the Depression would be short-lived, and we could go to New York, remained a dream. The Depression lingered and lingered. Still, our store remained open and even made a little living, and the shoe factory limped along.
A couple of years went by in this way, and then Miriam was seventeen, and everything came to a head. It happened at the moment when Miriam asked my mother for permission to spend a weekend with T in Knoxville.
Miriam thought to broach the subject in the kitchen while my mother was fixing cole slaw. As Miriam never watched my mother cook, never just sat in the kitchen and chatted, schmoozed, as my father would say, when Miriam came in, I knew something was up.
Miriam sat in the nook and plunged right in. She told my mother that she would take the train to Knoxville. “Goodness knows I’m old enough,” she said, an unsure quality in her voice. “After all, I’m seventeen.”
Exactly, my mother was thinking: Seventeen is exactly the problem. Hadn’t she herself been seventeen when she got married? Chopping furiously at the cabbage, she gave a curt no.
Whenever Miriam could see that my mother was in a mood where no amount of wheedling would help, she could be counted on to say absolutely the wrong thing, and she did it then: She told my mother how “important” T was to her.
“What are you saying?” my mother asked her. “A boy means so much to you?”
Apparently Miriam still wasn’t thinking. “Yes,” she said.
My mother finished chopping. She grated the carrot and onion (her addition to traditional cole slaw) and went to the icebox and brought out the mayonnaise (the mayonnaise issue having long ago been settled in favor of the mayonnaise). She was saying nothing, seemingly just going about her business. I knew better.
Like everybody else in Concordia, Miriam rushed into all silences. “I’m thinking how T’s way over there,” she said, while I cringed, “and I’m over here and how much I love him.”
Was my mother swayed by Miriam’s evocation of romantic love?
She was not. She said, “We all want things we can’t have, Miriam. It’s time you learned that.”
Miriam was not through. As she said later, “Mama always thought T just hung the moon, so I just knew she’d give in when I reminded her how smart and considerate he was.”
My mother said
she didn’t have to be told how good T was. But did Miriam have to be told that T was not a Jewish boy? “You’re altogether too serious about T,” my mother said to her.
Miriam, now desperate, said the worst possible thing: “If you don’t let me go, I’ll just run away!”
No surprise here, my mother could also say the wrong thing. “So run,” she said. After which she left her cutting board and went to her bedroom with a headache.
Miriam did not run away after all; she ran over to Miss Brookie’s. I ran with her.
We rushed into Miss Brookie’s house, Miriam already crying out for relief—from all the abuse she had endured, from all the unfairness! What do you think, Miss Brookie? Mama’s just so unyielding!
Miss Brookie astounded both of us. She did not immediately settle into her usual half-humorous, half-serious comments on my unbudgeable mother. Her opening remarks were something quite different and quite unexpected: She talked about what she called “blighted love.” I was stunned, and Miriam was as well. What did Miss Brookie know about love, blighted or unblighted? As it turned out, Miss Brookie knew a quite a lot.
It seemed that Miss Brookie had experienced a “blighted love” of her own. My Miss Brookie? My round Miss Brookie, my unstylish Miss Brookie, my Miss Brookie who, as far as I could tell, disdained all feminine stratagems? Where? When? Who? In Chicago was where; when was the time she had visited with the Landaus; and Jack Landau was who.
The story poured out of her, as if, I thought, she was telling it for the very first time. Had the story always been a secret? I’ve always hoped that perhaps in later years, she was able to tell it to T.
She and Jack Landau had wanted to get engaged, but—“Wouldn’t you know it?”—Miss Brookie’s father “just wouldn’t hear of it.” If Miriam’s “blighted love,” was due to my mother, Miss Brookie’s was due to her father. He had been just like my mother on the subject, Miss Brookie said—“rigid as a steel flagpole.” And what had Jack’s German-Jewish folks thought of it? Well, they thought “the planet would keep on rotating,” as Miss Brookie put it. But in the end, her father had been so “downright apoplectic,” Miss Brookie said, that Jack just stopped trying. When she told us the story she took her glasses off, as if to return to the days before she wore them.
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