by Caro Soles
DANCING
WITH
CHAIRS
IN THE
MUSIC
HOUSE
CARO SOLES
ADVANCE PRAISE FOR DANCING WITH CHAIRS IN THE MUSIC HOUSE
“Quirky, funny and haunting.”
—LINWOOD BARCLAY, New York Times bestselling author
“Caro Soles’ book is an extraordinary piece of fiction. Haunting, and highly evocative, it deserves to find its place in the pantheon of the best of Canadian literature.”
—MAUREEN JENNINGS, author of the Murdoch Mystery series
“Author Caro Soles takes us on a captivating trip through late-1940s Toronto, its afternoon teas and general propriety, revealing a story rich in character and local colour. Our guide is young Vanessa, whose astute observations of her genteel family and the oddball tenants of a downtown rooming house keep the pages turning with hints of calamity to come. Great (and often witty) writing, love of music, and a wonderful sense of time and place mark this enjoyable novel.”
—CAROLE GIANGRANDE, author of The Tender Birds and All That Is Solid Melts Into Air
Intimate, evocative and memorable, Caro Soles’ Dancing with Chairs in the Music House holds the reader spellbound from its opening sentence — It’s 1949, a brand-new year, and we’re moving. Again. — to its heart-stopping conclusion. Vanessa Dudley-Morris, the novel’s engaging ten-year-old narrator, kept from school by an eye condition that threatens blindness, is free to roam her new home, a rundown rooming house at 519 Jarvis Street. Vanessa is a keen observer of her world and through her, Soles gives us accurate and incisive portraits of Toronto and her citizens at mid-twentieth century. Remembering the way we were then is a gift, but the greatest gift in Soles’ novel is her characterization of Vanessa. Like Henry James, Caro Soles is able to capture in words the experience of what it feels like to be growing inside.
—GAIL BOWEN, award-winning author of the Joanne Kilbourne series
DANCING
WITH
CHAIRS
IN THE
MUSIC
HOUSE
CARO SOLES
INANNA PUBLICATIONS AND EDUCATION INC.
TORONTO, CANADA
OTHER FICTION PUBLISHED UNDER THE NAME CARO SOLES
Marlo’s Dance
Do You Know Me?
A Friend of Mr. Nijinsky
The Memory Dance
The Danger Dance
The Abulon Dance
A Mutual Understanding
Drag Queen in the Court of Death
The Tangled Boy
In memory of my Mother,
whose middle name really was Boadicea.
1. MOVING DAY
IT’S 1949, A BRAND-NEW YEAR, and we’re moving. Again.
From a lofty height—from the tip-top branches of the naked elm trees that march along both sides of Jarvis Street, say—we must look like ants. Worker ants, of course, because we’re each one carrying something. A long line of ants, carrying our possessions across the street to our new home upstairs in Rona Layne’s big house at number 519. Ferrying our Lares and Penates across the River Styx, only we have to walk, so I guess that doesn’t work.
Naturally I don’t get to carry much because I could drop something, or stumble, or not see a car coming and get run over. Mother thinks it’s likely I’ll get run over more than anyone else, though I don’t understand why. I’m not too small for them to see. I’m quite big, especially in my winter coat and hat—wider than Janet anyway, who’s tall but skinny. And the driver would feel a tremendous bump if I were hit. But I won’t be. I can see the cars plainly. It’s all quite silly, but there’s no use saying anything. No use at all.
The weather is cooperating by sending us the January thaw. The snow is mostly melted on the sidewalks, and the sun is shining. As usual, my big brother Jonathan is telling everyone what to do, even though he’s not as old as Janet’s big brother Francis, who came home from studying to be a priest just to help. Isn’t that grand? Janet’s family is Catholic, but that’s all right, Mother says, because not all Catholics are bad. I know this already from history, but I don’t say anything. And I still like to read Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. So does Janet. She says it makes her feel all shivery. Janet is my best friend.
Daddy is over at the new house now, making sure everything goes in the right place. He helped move the piano and is probably tired after that and has to rest. Early in the morning, before the milk wagon clinked its way up the street, the Sullivan boys brought a wide board and a few things like long rolling pins covered with bits of carpet. Then they rolled the piano across the road, sort of like the way they built the pyramids, according to the Book of Knowledge. Jonathan stood with his arms outstretched in case some cars came along. Since Mother wouldn’t let me cross the street, I don’t know how they got it up all the wooden stairs at the back to the second floor where we’re going to live. But later on, after breakfast—oatmeal again, with lots of brown sugar—I got to carry armfuls of cushions and then the footstool Daddy made last year as a Christmas present for Mother. There’s a scratch on one of the curvy legs from where Mother threw it across the room that time a letter came saying we didn’t get some money we were supposed to get from the government because of Daddy’s service in the war—the Great War, not the one we just had. You don’t notice the scratch if you turn the stool with that leg to the wall.
I love moving. We do it a lot since coming to this big city, sliding from rooming house to rooming house when people complain about the noise from Jonathan practising all the time or someone points out the unwritten no children rule. I barely remember all the places we’ve been. Something about this move makes my parents think we might stay here for a while, and that’s what they long for. A haven. Perhaps it’s because the piano is considered a good thing in the Music House and the owner has known about me from the start. She once said I have perfect pitch.
After months of nothing happening in my life, suddenly everyone is here with us. Everyone we know in Toronto has come to help, even Mr. Steels, the man who lived upstairs at Mrs. Alistair’s place. He used to show me how to make animals out of pipe cleaners in his room until Mother found out and told me not to go up there alone any more. But he’s here now, for a while at least. A few times he catches my eye and winks, and I feel a strange flutter in my chest and put my head down and flush. I am relieved when he leaves, touching the grimy peak of his flat cloth hat to my mother in a small salute before setting off down the street with his irregular jolting gait. He was in the Great War, too.
In my head, I think of the new place as the Music House. I have been inside lots of times because of the master classes in piano that Miss Rona Layne teaches to a Select Few in her studio. She is an artiste. She has toured Europe and played for the Crowned Heads many times, and now she takes on only the brightest and best … and my brother, who is studying to be a concert pianist when he isn’t busy doing high school things. Twice a week we climb up the four smooth steps and go through the heavy front door into the gloom of the square hallway. Stairs wind up sedately into the dust-filled sunshine that floods in from the frosted windows on the landing. I am curious to know what they look out on, what the sun on the other side of the windows would shine on, but I never have the nerve to take a look. I always sit as if glued to the black oak of the bench with the griffins carved on each end. When I was younger, I was afraid the great creatures might attack me if I left them, breaking the promise I made to my brother to stay on the bench. I could almost hear their enormous wings beating as they took to the air to hunt me down and dra
g me back in their great talons. So I sat there, swinging my legs in their long black stockings, trying to hear what was going on in the studio. But the door was down a corridor and covered by a thick velvet curtain, and nothing penetrated to the dim hall. But now that I’m ten and I’ll be living here, I can find out about the sunshine. I can come down from upstairs anytime I like, and the griffins won’t even know I’m there. Isn’t that grand?
Standing now on the other side of the street guarding a pile of bedding in a basket, I look at the Music House, trying to imagine living there in our two rooms and tiny kitchen (which is really just a closet) on the second floor. Going in the front door as a matter of course, crossing the wide hall, climbing up the long flight of stairs through the dust motes. Good morning, how do you do? Yes, I live here now. I live in this mansion.
From here the house looks a little like the profile of a giant beast, crouching on the lawn behind the ornamental wrought-iron fence, showing us its profile. The one-storey studio wing would be the paws, stretching off to the left, while the head towers up to the third-floor gables and the back swoops down to the porte cochère on the right. It seems heavy, sinking into the ground with the gravity of its own importance, rather like Mrs. Craven, the landlady at the house before last.
Our old place is just a big house. As I turn around and look at it now, it makes me think of a fat old lady, the verandah her full skirts spread around her on three sides, resting on the snow-covered lawn. Mrs. Bowther often sat there, watching the world go by from under lowered lids, her hands clasped over the big bible spread across her capacious knee. Mother often said she would do better to read it than to try to absorb it by osmosis. Then she explained how if Mrs. B. were a plant, it might work a lot better, and Daddy explained how osmosis works in plants. Most of my lessons are like that. It’s better than school, I imagine, though sometimes I long for the company of others my own age. Mrs. B. is out there now, watching us, no expression on her face, her eyes like raisins sunk into her unbaked cookie-dough face.
Finally I get to help Janet carry the basket across the street while Jonathan walks beside us, a rolled-up rug on his shoulder as if it were nothing more than a long rolled-up music score. It occurs to me for the first time that playing the piano must make you strong. Thumping with both hands on the great black Steinway that crouches in Miss Layne’s studio, making it growl and whimper and shout, would take the kind of strength that makes it easy to carry our rug as if it were nothing. I feel a thrill of pride in my brother that all his musical accomplishments have never aroused in me before.
By noon everyone has gone, and we are officially living in the Music House. It feels so different here; everything is on a loftier scale: the halls are wider, the rooms bigger, even the ceilings seem higher. Daddy is very tired, but he has already put up the big metal double bed in the bedroom where he and Mother and I will sleep. Mother has made it up with clean sheets and the bleached pillowcases made of sugar bags, and he is now lying down, resting, boxes and baskets piled up waiting on the floor around him. The rest of us are across the hall in the living room where there’s a daybed for Jonathan to sleep on. It is the first time we have had a real living room. Jonathan says we had one in the apartment when we first came here, the one that was broken into and the police came and told Mother this was no place for a lady. We moved a few days later. Pity I can’t remember it.
The living room seems huge. It has a working brick fireplace with several ornamental painted tiles. A truck brought our old dining table and chairs from storage sometime during the morning. It brought the wing chair, too, which is now sitting in the cupola where the windows curve out almost like a ship. The tall expanse of small leaded panes reflect the light unevenly. When I stand there, I can almost see the street and the roof of the porte cochère where Taffy, Miss Layne’s fat cocker spaniel, is waddling around sniffing in the yellowed snow. As I watch, I can tell by the slope of her back what she is about to do, and I turn away, embarrassed for the poor thing.
“Taffy. What a disgusting name for a dog,” I say, thinking of the wonderful butterscotch flavour called up by the word, the way it would melt on my tongue, the contrast with the squatting ugly dog.
“That’s a bit harsh, isn’t it, dear?” Mother is putting books in our new bookcase that is built into one wall under a row of small windows, but I know she isn’t really paying attention.
“If I ever have a dog, I’ll call him Vercingetorix,” I say, rolling the name off my tongue with pleasure.
“No, you wouldn’t,” says Jonathan. “Don’t show off.”
“I’m not!” I exclaim, indignant. But I feel a tremble of uncertainty, a cool wash of hurt. Often I am unsure why I say things.
“I think it’s a fine name,” Mother says.
“Make yourself useful.” Jonathan heaves another box onto the table. He has just brought several boxes across the hall from the room where Daddy is napping, and he forgot to close the door, so anyone walking down the hall can look in. A wizened old woman lurches by with a small paper bag clutched in one hand. This is the second or third time she has come down the hall and out to the back porch where the icebox and garbage cans live. As she goes by, she turns her head and stares at us, her beady eyes bright like tiny searchlights, before turning away abruptly. Mother gets up and closes the door, the latch clicking softly in the silence.
Jonathan makes a choking sound. I clap my hands over my mouth to keep from exploding in rude laughter.
“What a nosy old bag,” Jonathan says. “Not very subtle, is she?”
Mother smiles, her grey eyes sparkling with mischief. “Poor thing is just a bag of bones.”
“All she has to do is knock on the door and introduce herself, like a civilized person.” Jonathan is unpacking the dishes and laying them out on the table. I begin to fold up the paper. Everything in our family gets used many times. Some of this tissue paper is so soft from wear, from being used to wrap Christmas presents and birthday gifts, creased from packing dishes and glasses and cups, that it makes no noise when I fold it.
“Baggy Bones,” Mother says softly, and we all burst out in muffled laughter.
Suddenly I feel very happy. It happens sometimes, when we’re doing things together like this, when Mother is laughing, Jonathan is smiling, and I feel a real part of something.
I push my glasses up on my nose. “Baggy Bones,” I whisper.
2. THE MUSIC HOUSE
DAYS GO BY, AND I AM STILL EXCITED about living in the Music House. For one thing, there’s the kitchen, even though it’s very tiny. Infinitesimal, really, and there’s no window. Mother says it was probably a broom closet for the maids in the former life of the house, but we don’t care. There’s a sink with a cupboard over it and beside it a small table with a shelf underneath. Last week Daddy bought a stove for the kitchen. It, too, is tiny, almost like a toy, but it’s way better than a hotplate. Daddy says it’s a table-top model, and sure enough, it just fits on top of the table. It has two burners on top and an oven just big enough to get our eight-inch square cake pan inside. Mother made a sponge cake with chocolate sauce to celebrate the move, the kitchen, our new life here. I mixed the margarine in its bag with the colour bud until it was bright yellow all the way through, then helped Mother spoon it into the crystal butter dish. When we are both in the kitchen, we can just close the door.
When Mother gets tired and depressed, she says our new place is nothing but three rooms in a glorified rooming house, but mostly she calls it a flat. If that’s the same thing as an apartment, even I know this isn’t right. Everyone on the second floor uses the hall that separates our rooms—two on one side, one on the other. Anyone can walk down past the tapestry, past our kitchen, our living room, and our Everything Room. You never know who you’re going to meet when you open one of our doors, but mostly it’s just Baggy Bones pretending to take a small paper bag out to the garbage cans on the porch. We think of it as our p
orch because it’s outside the windows of the room where Mother and Daddy and I sleep in the big brown metal bed with the shiny silver-blue spread. Mother’s two wardrobe trunks sit open along one wall, serving as dressers. The table Daddy made last fall from cast-off wood juts into the room at a funny angle, and the laundry basket sits under it. Mother bought the basket from a Gypsy woman who came to their back door one day down East. A week later, when they brought me home from the orphanage, that’s where I slept, under a blanket crocheted by some Anglican nuns Mother knew from church. One of them is my godmother, but I’ve only seen her a few times. Mostly I remember the brown habit that almost swept the ground, the wrinkled wimple framing a wrinkled face. Mother said she was thrown out of her old order so she started her own. I guess she decided to wear brown to be different. I would choose pink, or perhaps bright green like the grass.
Daddy is going to make window boxes so Mother can have a garden this summer. She used to have a wonderful garden in the big house on the corner lot out West, when my brother was still a baby and we still had lots of money. I wasn’t even born then, but I’ve heard so many stories about that house I can see it in my mind’s eye: the gleaming hardwood floors, the bay window in the living room, the big entry hall with its black-and-white marble tiles, the sweeping, curved staircase.
The Music House may have hardwood floors, too, but most of them are covered by the long runner in the hall. There’s only us, Baggy Bones, and Mrs. Smyth on this floor, not counting Miss Layne and her housekeeper Miss Jones, of course. They live in a totally separate real apartment at the front of the house, right at the top of the stairs, and we rarely see them. I don’t know how many rooms they have. Up on the third floor, there’s a Miss Tyndall whom we’ve never seen; the Englishwoman, Mrs. Dunn; and a new couple, mother and son, who will be moving in this weekend. I overhear Baggy Bones tell someone called Marie this bit of news through the door that she leaves open a crack so as not to miss anything.