Songs without Words

by Robbi McCoy

  Harper felt herself growing angry. As calmly as she could, she said, “Mary, can we go inside and talk?”

  “Of course.” Mary gave Sarah a squeeze, then released her, saying, “Go back to your book, darling.”

  Mary offered Harper a seat in the living room. The walls were still covered with that incongruous collection of art, including the painting of Chelsea, which was hanging where Harper had first seen it, above the fireplace. It had been six years since she had been in this room.

  “What did you want to talk about?” Mary asked shortly. Her expression was unfriendly.

  “What the hell is going on here? What have you been doing with my niece?”

  “What do you think I’ve been ‘doing’ with her?” Mary asked defiantly. “Discussing the finer points of iambic pentameter?” She looked incredibly pleased with herself.

  Harper leapt out of her chair. “She’s only sixteen!” she exclaimed.

  Mary, her voice perfectly calm, said, “Too young for iambic pentameter? I think not.” Harper, confused, said, “What?”

  “Surely you’re familiar with iambic pentameter?”

  Harper realized that Mary was playing with her, which made her even angrier. She forced herself to speak calmly. “Why have you kept her here?”

  “Kept her? God, Harper, you make it sound like I abducted the girl. I hope that, despite what it sounds like, you aren’t accusing me of anything improper.”

  Mary’s glare was challenging. This antagonism was upsetting to Harper. There was a time when she had hoped she could be friends with Mary. Now they were practically enemies.

  “No,” Harper said, sitting again. “I’m not accusing you of anything. I just don’t understand what’s going on.”

  Mary’s expression relaxed. “Sarah showed up at my door Tuesday afternoon, looking for you, babbling incoherently. She assumed she would find you wherever she would find Chelsea, she said, and this was the address she had for Chelsea.” Mary pursed her lips. “Well, I assumed the same thing. I assumed you and Chelsea were together, that she had gone to you as soon as I turned her out. It’s what she does.”

  “I haven’t seen her,” Harper said softly. “I didn’t know she had moved out.” She felt awkward talking to Mary about this, but Mary was the best source of information she had at the moment. “You and Chelsea, then, you’re split up?”

  Mary looked at Harper dispassionately. “She’s no longer living here. But if I should want her to come back, she would do it in an instant. All I have to do is ask. You know that, don’t you?” Mary’s voice was calm, but forceful.

  Harper dropped her gaze to her hands in her lap.

  “But why are we talking about Chelsea?” Mary said, her tone lightening. “I thought you wanted to talk about Sarah. I decided to invite her in, and she just stayed. Nothing very mysterious about it. I did consider that it was a sort of joke on you at first, but, then, after a few hours, I was just enjoying her company.”

  “I’m still confused. Who does she think you are? I mean, in relationship to Chelsea?” Mary shrugged. “I believe she has some idea that I’m her aunt or something like that. I don’t know. To be honest, Harper, we haven’t been talking about Chelsea.”

  “So what have you and Sarah been doing, other than drinking champagne and eating caviar?”

  “It was just a tiny glass. No harm in it. She deserves to sample the finer things in life. We’ve had quite a bit of fun. We’ve been listening to music and talking, mostly about poetry and fiction. And, yes, iambic pentameter. She showed me some of her writing. She’s not very good, but she is enthusiastic, and she’s well read.”

  “How good could she be at sixteen?”

  “Right. My students are usually a little older than that, and that particular couple of years can do wonders for them. But she has this poem called ‘Passing Through,’ which is dreadful and utterly irredeemable, full of puerile rhymes and heartwarming sentiments. You decide for yourself, but you’ll agree with me. Said she wrote it on the train on her way across country.” Mary clasped her hands together with an air of solemnity. “Are you going to take her away now?”

  “Yes.” Harper stood and walked toward the kitchen. Mary followed.

  “You couldn’t maybe leave her here for a couple of days?” she asked.

  “Why would I do that?”

  “Why not? She’s enjoying herself. She loves to read, and I have books. She told me there isn’t a book anywhere in your house. What kind of travesty is that?”

  “I’ll take her to the library,” Harper said.

  It occurred to Harper, listening to the beseeching tone in Mary’s voice, that Sarah was providing a much-cherished bit of company for her. Harper needed to get her home, though, and tell Neil that his daughter was safe and under her protection.

  Well, Harper thought, steeling herself, if Mary gets lonely enough she can do as she boasted and reel Chelsea back in. She pushed through the back door to the patio.

  “Sarah, get your things together,” Harper called to her. “We’re going home.”

  Sarah looked up from her book. “Okay,” she said, sitting up and slipping on her wrap. “I’ll be back to visit,” she said to Mary. “I want you to show me that meter thing that Ovid and Homer used.”

  “Dactylic hexameter,” Mary reminded her.

  “Yes, that. I didn’t even know it had a name.”

  “And Virgil,” Mary pointed out, “in the Aeneid. That’s why it’s sometimes called the heroic hexameter, because it was used for the heroic poems.”

  “The epics,” Sarah said.

  “The epics, yes.” Mary smiled approvingly.

  Sarah held out the book she’d been reading toward Mary.

  “Keep it,” Mary said. “I have another copy.” Her voice was gentle. She was in her element instructing young women in the arts, Harper knew. Sarah must seem like the ideal accidental visitor to her. In just three days, they seemed to have formed a genuine friendship.

  “I’ll get my stuff from my room,” Sarah said, looking from Mary to Harper before slipping into the house.

  Mary turned to Harper and said, “She’s a sweet girl. What are you going to do with her?”

  “Send her back to her parents. What else?” She turned to go back in the house.

  Mary caught her arm and said, quietly but emphatically, “Harper, while you have her, teach her something.”

  On the way home, Sarah talked nonstop about her trip out on the train and about her stay at Mary’s house, which started to sound like the most fabulous few days any girl had ever had.

  “We went out to lunch yesterday with a friend of Mary’s. Her name is Catherine Gardiner. She’s wicked cool. Do you know her?”

  “Well, yes, I do. In fact, I made a documentary about her. She’s a famous poet.”

  Sarah looked astonished. “Really? I didn’t know she was famous. You have the most amazing friends! At lunch, I just sat there with my mouth open, listening to the two of them talking. They don’t talk like other people. They talk like they’re in a play or something. I’ve never heard a real-life conversation like it.”

  I would have liked to have been at that lunch myself, Harper thought. It had been Mary who had introduced her to Catherine Gardiner and who had suggested her as a subject for the documentary series. Harper had been grateful for that. She had been interested in the eccentric poet ever since first hearing about her association with Hilda Perry so many years ago. Harper was amused at the thought of Sarah at lunch with the two of them, these odd, intriguing figures of the modern art world.

  “And then they quoted poetry at one another, right there in the middle of dessert!” Sarah continued. “I tried to remember it, but mostly I can’t. Something about Julia’s clothes.”

  Harper smiled. “When as in silks my Julia goes,” she recited, “Then, then (methinks) how sweetly flows that liquefaction of her clothes.”

  “Oh, my God, Aunt Harper! That’s it!”

  Harper understood Sarah�
��s amazement. She herself could remember a few times hearing professors speaking in that strange literary tongue, a banter of wits which bore no resemblance to ordinary conversation. Their speech was a kind of game, like chess. Chelsea had absorbed some of that from Mary, and Harper admired and enjoyed it, though she herself was unable to play. She had the knowledge for it, but not the skill.

  “I hope you got a picture,” Harper said, “because you just had lunch with two prominent artists, and there are a lot of people who would have paid money to have been in your place yesterday.”

  “I’ve never even heard of her. I feel like such a freak. I’m sure they both think I’m a total spaz.”

  “I think Mary believes you’re worth saving.”

  Sarah then spoke about the places she had traveled through on her way from Massachusetts to California and the strange characters she encountered. That was just as intriguing to Harper, though in a different way, since the people she had met in train stations, while also colorful and interesting, were often people at the opposite end of the spectrum. They were equally alien to Sarah, whose life up until now had been sheltered, even cloistered in the bosom of her nuclear family. “You should write all of this down,” Harper suggested. “So you’ll remember. All the details of your adventure.”

  “Oh, I have been! I have a journal. I’ve taken notes of ‘my epic journey’ across the U.S.A.”

  Sarah quit talking for a moment as she contemplated that thought, which she was obviously savoring deeply.

  During the silence, Harper’s thoughts turned to Chelsea and the information Mary had given her. She had moved out in April and had called Harper in June and asked to see her. Mary had assumed that they were back together. What did that mean? Harper wondered. Mary knew Chelsea better than anyone did. If she expected her to run to Harper, what other conclusion could there be but...

  Harper stopped herself from completing that thought, forcing herself to listen more carefully to Sarah’s description of rumbling through Wyoming overnight, listening to elk bugling at sunset and how that had made her feel really far from home, impossibly far, as if she had crossed some divide that was passable in only one direction and there was no longer any chance of turning back.

  Chapter 22

  JUNE 26

  Harper put the cereal bowls in the dishwasher and sat across from Sarah at the kitchen table as she finished her glass of orange juice. Dressed in shorts and a T-shirt, she looked different today. Without all of the cleavage and thigh of yesterday, she looked younger, more like the child Harper knew.

  Sarah sifted through the stack of CDs at the edge of the table, then screwed up her face in distaste. “Dean Martin?”

  “Not mine. I picked those up for a friend.”

  “Good.”

  “Have you ever even listened to Dean Martin?”

  Sarah shrugged. “Guess not.”

  She got up and put her juice glass in the dishwasher.

  “What was the book Mary gave you?” Harper asked.

  “It’s poetry. It’s Catherine Gardiner’s. She told me to read this one poem in particular, but I decided to read the whole book.

  I’ll get it.” Sarah ran into the guest room, retrieving the book and returning, flipping it open to a marked page. “Should I read it to you?”

  Harper nodded and listened as Sarah attempted to read a poem called “Tradition.” Harper had read that poem years ago and hadn’t thought of it since. Sarah read it too fast and without a lyrical quality.

  “What do you think it means?” she asked when she’d finished.

  Harper took the book from her. “Listen,” she said, and then she read the poem, pausing in the right places so the meaning came through.

  Young girl sat

  spinning, spinning,

  knotting herself into a tapestry

  of mothers upon mothers,

  a pantheon of mothers

  stretched along her coiled thread.

  Each one sat

  spinning, spinning,

  admiring the crimson and the silver

  where blood of moonlight mingles

  in the fine lines of cloth,

  consecrated by unquestionables

  While daughters upon daughters sat

  spinning, spinning,

  weaving a dense web of ignorance

  and vainglory

  around and through themselves

  to please their mothers

  Who sat

  spinning, spinning,

  welcoming the end of their days

  with regrets for

  the patterns and the colors, mutely dreaming of unravelings,

  But only

  wailing, wailing

  over the spinning

  of young girl who sits smiling

  at the flawless absolutes

  in the shroud she has made.

  Harper looked up from the book to see Sarah gazing at her, her brow furrowed by a look of concentration. “Wow,” she said. “You read that so much better than I did.”

  “Did it make more sense, hearing it like that?”

  Sarah nodded and took the book back, then studied the page, silently reciting the poem again to herself with her new insight.

  “Read it a couple more times, and then we can talk about what it means,” Harper told her.

  Sarah continued reading. Harper drank her coffee, thinking about how much she could tell Sarah about this poem and about so many poems and stories and the people who wrote them, if there were more time. “Teach her something,” Mary had advised. There was only so much you could teach someone in a couple of days. Not enough to make much difference. To make a difference, you’d have to have more time.

  “Sarah, Mary mentioned a poem you wrote called ‘Passing Through.’ Do you mind if I look at it?”

  She went to get the poem for Harper, returning with a piece of paper that had been folded often into fourths and was covered in a scrawling longhand. Harper skimmed it quickly, agreeing with Mary’s assessment. It was dreadful, at least in its current state.

  “Why don’t you read it out loud to me?” Harper suggested. “That makes such a big difference, especially in the author’s own voice.”

  Sarah’s eyes widened with delight, and Harper understood that it was because she had used the word “author” to refer to her. Sarah took the poem and read it aloud, lending a singsong rhythm to it that had eluded Harper when she read it. The message was a simple one about passing through the dingy side of small towns without ever knowing anything about them or the people who lived there, people who must have interesting and tragic lives, each one a story worth telling. It wasn’t so much “dreadful” as amateurish, a poem that probably wasn’t worth a second thought...until Sarah recited it. Because, in her voice, it wasn’t a poem at all. It was a song. “A little stiff,” Harper said. “What if you try to sing it?”

  Sarah looked astonished. “Well, I did. I mean, that’s where it came from. I heard it in my head first. I sang it, like a song. And then I wrote it down as a poem.”

  “So sing it for me, like you did in your head.”

  Sarah took a deep breath and then sang the song without looking at the paper. She sang in a pop style with a slightly melancholy tone, and the song had more complexity to its melody than the poem had revealed.

  Harper was taken aback. “That’s a lovely song,” she said. “It’s melodic and thought-provoking. Do you read music?”

  Sarah shook her head.

  “Come here.” Harper led Sarah to the piano in the living room. She pulled the bench out, then asked Sarah to sing her song again. While Sarah sang, Harper began to play, picking up the tune. In a few minutes, she had embellished it and increased the tempo, and Sarah was laughing with excitement and a little embarrassment to hear her song transformed like this.

  “Let’s record this,” Harper suggested, “and when I have time, I’ll write down the notes for you.”

  Sarah seemed elated. It had obviously never occurred to
her that she could actually write a song. Because she didn’t know how to read or write music, she had written an unremarkable poem instead. Now, of course, she wanted to be able to play the song herself. She was all fired up, in fact, to take lessons and launch herself into an entirely new realm of artistic achievement.

  After they had recorded the music, Sarah sat at the computer, listening to the instrumental version of her song, singing along with it, pleased with herself. Okay, Mary, Harper thought, I’ve taught her something. But there’s not going to be time, unfortunately, for much more than this.

  “I called your father last night,” Harper said.

  Sarah looked up. “I figured you would.”

  “Your parents were very relieved to hear that you were safe.”

  Sarah shrugged.

  “Don’t you care that you terrified them?”

  “I was just pissed off.”

  “About what?”

  “They won’t let me do anything. They took away everything. I felt like I was suffocating. I couldn’t go out. I couldn’t use the computer. I couldn’t watch TV even. They took my phone. If I had stayed there, they would have chained me up in the basement next.” Sarah held up her iPod. “This is the only thing I have left, my tunes.”

  Harper smiled. “So why’d you come here? You knew I would rat you out.”

  “Oh, sure, but it was an adventure getting here. I had fun. Besides, you promised that I could come out for a visit and I was tired of waiting.”

  “Sorry about that.”

  “Well, here I am. Let’s party!”

  “Your parents have asked me to send you back right away.”

  “Can’t I stay just a little while?” Sarah’s expression, pleading and sincere, plucked at Harper’s heartstrings.

  After pondering it a while, she called Neil again and proposed a new plan. “Let her stay here until my scheduled trip home,” she offered. “That’s July twenty-sixth. I’ll bring her home then.”