Local Souls

by Allan Gurganus

  I should not, could not, cry. That, see, was a rite for the Deserving. Instead I felt some blackness banking up. A dense mass gathering in Jean’s midsection. It would have to come out. 7–10 lbs. worth. One healthy baby’s weight. Someday there would be such an explosion, but not yet.

  • • •

  ALL THE SMARTEST kids from Falls High began streaming in on us at all hours. 110 Milford Cul-de-Sac was suddenly Action Central. Didn’t matter to me if they were punks, linebackers or band-geeks so long as they loved her. An older man arrived on foot, alone.

  Head shaved, he moved in lurches, depending upon furniture to stand for long. Where had I seen him? Beard gone, wasn’t he that bum she’d hoisted to help pee? One of the Matts told me: the loss of Caitlin had finally driven this old guy to rehab. He looked like a petrified Klondike miner, dug up then shaved by a careless undertaker; and yet his voice sounded tearful, an intelligent Irish tenor’s. “May I see where she slept?” I heard him whisper to one twin. Patrick took a spotted old paw and pulled the bum upstairs.

  Mostly the right people came. The East Indian junior who’d won the Bell Labs science award but truly needed his teeth braced. A redheaded boy so funny onstage, they did three years of comedies to cash in on his gift. (He was rumored to already have a Tootsie Roll commercial in the works.) Filled with student body officers, my home soon felt like the Hollywood Canteen.

  Certain young boy-leads seemed legendary after Cait’s years of dinner-hour tales to her brothers and me. Her gang had become our favorite soap opera cast. I never expected to actually meet certain major actors. Before Africa, at meals, I had heard my sons, usually restrained, press Cait for deeper in-crowd gossip. “Wait,” Patrick shook his head. “Tracey cannot ev-en be with Erick. Not after he left her at Tori’s without a ride during that giant blizzard, are you kiddin’? Get real. Don’t girls have an-y pride, Mom?”

  “Have any . . . how-you-say-zees word ‘pwide’? Because zat iwwegular French word eets new to me.” I’d made one of my jokes. No laughs, unless six rolled eyes count. But I felt proud to simply sit here: imagine having a teenage daughter who would take time to update then fascinate her pesky kid brothers. A seventeen-year-old who’d actually tell you what daily happened at her high school! Unusual girl.

  Belatedly, see, I was joining the Cult of Caitlin. It was a club I’d founded then resisted as somehow bad for her. But now that she was beyond being spoiled by her own superb reviews? I caved. She drew more praise-songs than you could quite stomach or believe. Even the Atlanta paper sent a reporter by plane. “Gave Her All: ‘Love’ Was Girl’s Actual First Spoken Word.”

  • • •

  SHELBURNE NOW PHONED nightly around eight, soon as his wife was “up putting down the kids.” From their narrow front porch, he’d speak into his old shoe-box-sized cellular. My twins joked about this thing’s being Thomas Edison’s first try. To me, honestly? It looked like a huge, sad erection, all antenna, humorless, unhideable, endearing as a basset hound’s gnawed-on cow-bone.

  As we talked he would secretly smoke, hiding this from his mate and me (but I heard each inhale). Stan would pace, reciting small remembered facts about “our Cait.” Her flute player’s bee-stung mouth, the sprightly if unorthodox angle at which she held her instrument. How straight her spine, never touching chair-back. Arching.

  Near our talk’s end, Stanley would cough to hide tonight’s concluding whimper. I imagined his bedraggled wife upstairs reading Goodnight Moon for the thousandth time to their two- and four-year-old. I soon calmed and encouraged Stan. I used terms that sounded very unlike Ice’s frozen-chosen daughter: “Yes, m’ gifted one. Just let it out, Stan. Our Cait, she called you ‘all that,’ too, friend. Just release, babe. Go on, let it flow, m’ sweet boy.”

  I wanted him to cry all over me or worse. I would be absorbent—for him—my hips, my butt pure sponge.

  • • •

  MORE CARS NOW parked outside Cait’s flaky mom’s brick rancher than those circling the big Tudor on Lakeland, home to Tori, the slutty cheerleader. (At least that tramp, with her short denim skirt and six-inch heels, hadn’t barged into our place pretending to mourn, thank God.) Tori’s parking area might’ve featured Mercedes sports cars and one hideous gas-hogging chrome-yellow Hummer. But our drive stayed packed with battered dune-buggy Jeeps and vintage Harley-Davidsons whose drivers I forced to wear helmets. My daughter’s friends were bright, often lovely-looking. Watching BlondMatt and BlackMatt together reminded me of the old scotch ads with one white and one dark terrier. The Matts slouched near and against each other in slack arrangements all yin and yang. Though males, they were still so smooth they lived on the shy side of manly danger. They looked beautiful as certain deer. And I, confused, watching them, imagined the Matts as failed experiments at becoming girls. And felt almost lesbian.

  Kids asked for art supplies so as to draw and write their Cait memories. Turns out, she’d been their group guidance counselor. “I can tell you she was a better mom than my mom,” BlackMatt confessed while holding my hand. “Same here,” BlondMatt added. “Oh yeah, me too. Totally,” plump ceramicist Millicent flirted, unoriginal. Only a Cait could’ve loved her.

  I baked cookies and, in one week, gained six pounds just from helping others with treats made in Caitlin’s honor. A scholarship was being set up; over eleven thousand dollars already raised; that idealistic wet-eyed big-phoned Mr. Shelburne must be behind it. His nightly voice was all blackness but with highlights—like dark olives.

  Stan’s forearms looked ridged (so strong just from daily conducting?). His biceps domed up, bald; but from the elbows downward, each arm came gift-wrapped in a black-bear’s mascot fur. Stan favored short-sleeved shirts that maybe allowed for extra air across his surely-matted chest. My pitiless observant twins code-named the arms: his Shredded Wheats.

  —Both my towheaded sons and their dad glowed mere vanilla-butterscotch all over. Darkness intrigued me, now especially. I felt moved when Stan jaggedly cried—a deep clicking between throat and chest, sounding part adolescent orgasm, part Elmer Fudd hiccup. His lashes blackened-separated as if caked with sudden theatre mascara. He’d begun stopping by for my fresh-baked pastries after school. He’d curl in on himself; he’d turn away from me as if ashamed to let me see his outsized emotion. If my life now felt like some war movie—a missing body at its center—Stan became that film’s swarthy “city guy,” rendered suddenly girlish by some bumpkin buddy’s death. When Shelburne got extra-teary, he just blotted eyes onto absorbent fur forearms.

  “Jean?” Nights, his voice would speak into my now-busy phone. “Just me. —How’re you holding up?”

  This was as close as I came to losing it.

  I swear it seemed: no one had ever asked me that before.

  • • •

  EN ROUTE TO band clinic, Stan started leaving notes in my porch mailbox. Once, his envelope held only a broken robin’s egg (nearly the color of her eyes and room) and made me want to scream. Instead I received a lower body pain, no hot flash this, but one young, with a snapdragon’s snapping most fierce. All this wasted tenderness burning in wait down there.

  Not desire again! No, I greeted that like some voluntary root canal. But nothing spared me now. Not even sex.

  • • •

  WE MOVED TOWARD the date she would’ve returned to us. I braced for postponed feelings, a lifetime’s. This would be what would’ve should’ve been the start of her senior year, as school vice president. Her older friends had mostly sped off to college; others were heading back to Friends School or Falls High, seniors at last. Those in-state university freshmen I’d assigned eulogies or solos, they promised to rush back home . . . whichever Thursday her service.

  One night by phone, Shelburne asked, “What could someone as flawed as I ever do for her, Jean, or for you?” The answer came. For once it was literal. “Write a cantata for choir-and-orchestra then conduct it in her memory? That’d be so: you being you. But, is there even, like, time, Stan?” (I
was picking up new word patterns, but where from? Off new friends, I guess.)

  “You already hinted to me it should be—and I’ll just quote you back to you, sir—in C major, right?”

  “Brilliant. But you think I could, Jeannie? I mean I do still have all my composition notebooks from Curtis. But it’s been so long since I even. . .”

  “‘If not now, when?’ as Hillel tells us.”

  (I sounded fairly prissy-preacherly then. I sounded like a diary or some thought for the day. —No, wait, for one last time, you know what I sounded? . . . I sounded young!)

  Via his twelve-inch cell, I heard him light another guilty cig. Feeling deep and dark myself, I spoke, “Please stub that one out, Stan. You don’t need those now, understand? You have your talent, you have your mission, m’ dear boy.”

  “All along you knew I smoked? Psychic and . . . attractive. —Gosh, your power is almost scary, Jean.”

  “You have no idea,” I told him.

  VII

  I FINALLY ASKED STAN IF HE’D COME PLAY US A PIANO reduction of his Cantata for Caitlin in C Major: “The Monument.” See, I had chosen that Elizabeth Bishop poem for him to set. I’d specified that the piece’s soloist should be, like our late darling, an alto. Otherwise I left everything up to his unheralded genius. I felt that, having commissioned Stan, I ought to somehow pay him.

  He confessed he was now “all but eating” his old Curtis Institute composition sketches. I hoped this spotlight might give Cait’s frazzled teacher artistic credibility at last. Maybe Father Tim had been correct by accident: something good might actually squeak through here.

  In our basement rec room, I keep a Chickering upright inherited from Ice. At it, a child myself, I’d once practice-practiced to get to Carnegie Hall. The thing’s veneer had buckled by now; kids’ juice boxes and Snapple bottles cut a hundred squares and rings across its top. (I’d sort of allowed this, hoping that such marring might let our piano fall beneath Caitlin’s Goodwill attention. She favored only donations of items she crudely called “high-end-looking.”)

  THE DAY BEFORE our at-home Stan Shelburne world premiere, I finally welcomed a reputable piano tuner. Soon as I saw his red and white cane I volunteered to lead him down the stairs. I recalled how people robbed of one sense get instantly better at another just next door. I was counting on that, now I’d lost my sense of . . . Caitlin.

  I asked if I might listen to him work and, a true indulgence, during, told him our tale—the drowned child, the commissioned piece, the Curtis grad stuck teaching band and high school chorus. (Did I not sound like Mrs. Shelburne, I mean his mom?)

  The tuner said any composer deserves the best possible players, singers. He said that the Virginia Symphony Orchestra sometimes performed private gigs. “Not cheap, I don’t expect,” the blind piano tuner told my general direction. “But they come to a town by bus, rehearse all morning, scatter for lunch, come back, I guess, and play it that same night. If his piece is any good it’s going to sound better in the hands of pros. Think of the strings, young lady.”

  I asked him how much. My directness sounded shocking, Ice’s own. But I felt my heart rate increase at just such ruthlessness (for others, always others). Using fingers, he sat tallying. “Maybe twenty, twenty-five?”

  “Thousand? Thousands, of course. They’re professionals. —Funny, but my late mom did leave me a little. I’d saved it for her tuition, my daughter’s. Also ‘late’ now, I guess . . .”

  Ice had left me money. What she had willed me—after taxes, after the cost of her round-the-clock care—might come out right at nineteen to twenty-one thousand. Think what suave orchestral brass, lush strings, might do for Stan! And the community, of course.

  NEXT DAY, ONCE I’d crowbarred my twins from PlayStation 2 and back to school, I made an appointment in Richmond. I overdressed and drove our rust-colored (and rusting) Volvo wagon two hours north. I explained my daughter’s disappearance, the major piece being written in tribute. Ian, the young “community liaison” man, hinted how, for the amount I had, I could maybe hire a skeleton orchestra.

  “Sort of appropriate . . .”

  “Say what?”

  “Nothing. —Grief.”

  But Stan must conduct: I made that my one condition.

  “Who?”

  “Stanley Shelburne, Curtis Institute of Music.”

  The boy shook his head no. I explained the composer actually also conducted for a living. I had memorized the name of Stan’s most famous teacher. I tossed that out with Ice-like authority. Young Ian stared at me.

  “An esteemed name, certainly. —We do have to screen, ma’am. We sometimes get vanity calls. A car dealer on his sixtieth birthday, say, will want to wave his arms around in front of party friends. Now I’m sensing that your booking isn’t just a vanity one. —Still, only our next few Thursdays might be free. By then, your daughter, she’ll . . . you’ll surely have her . . . ready?”

  Young Ian did ask if I’d mind paying maybe two-thirds up-front, a no-refund assurance, in order to hold whichever of the next three Thursdays she’d be most likely to . . . fill.

  STAN COULD NOT believe it. Only after he’d arrived holding his inky score did I mention having hired the VSO (Virginia Symphony Orchestra, natch). Sweet man kept asking me to repeat. First I made him promise me, no tears.

  “But this cannot be cheap, Jean. You sure you guys can swing it?”

  “Not so pricey as you’d think. —And heck, they throw in their round-trip bus for free . . .”

  “This sounds major,” Stan flopped onto my piano bench. “But these musicians, they cut their teeth on Bach and Brahms. And, now, Stan?” Poor man laughed at himself.

  Settling close, I took his haired hand in my own; by contrast mine, being so smooth, looked far younger.

  “Not Stan,” I said, low. “‘Shelburne’s First Symphony in C Major: the Chorale.’ —Now, does that sound ridiculous, m’ talented one? Mmmm, I think not.”

  “Jean, you’ve finally given me permission to, sort of . . . ?”

  “Be yourself?”

  “‘Be myself,’ exactly, Jeannie . . . Hey, wait one, if you can pay for that orchestra, I’ll throw in and hire the state’s best darned recording engineer. We’ll just get this little treasure saved forever . . .”

  “Stan!”

  I called the twins downstairs for a family hearing. Wary, in white shirts, they took the root-beer-stained tweed couch. I settled beside Stan at our Chickering, newly-tuned. To celebrate, I’d had my royal-blue cardigan dry-cleaned. Even wore a little tasteful eyeliner. Subdued, you know, but there.

  Stan is one of those men who gives off intense body heat. My right cheek and upper arm soon felt campfire-lit (orange). He pounded right into our cantata. I thought of Cait’s trite phrase majorly. C-Majorly, Stan now played her anthem. I sat, meek, just to Stanley Shelburne’s left. I turned for him. (I’d actually practiced it down here last night, using my girlhood sheet music for “Moon River.”) He, rocking, sweated across ivory, punished whole octaves. Stan would nod and, my lips pursed, I’d flip that page so fast.

  The piece? Boys later remarked that no tribute to Caitlin should get far without “any real tunes in it.” And their desire for melody seemed reasonable and astute.

  True, the piece turned out more “modern” than expected. But dynamic and, my yes, unique.

  —People’s characters, I know.

  Music? I’m no judge.

  VIII

  AT LAST I “SET” THE RATIO OF YOUNG SPEAKERS TO ADULTS. With Stan’s help, I decided how to contrast the crescendo—his C major “Monument” Cantata—with a certain number of testimonials regarding Cait’s activism’s impact, etc.

  That Ian! Our symphony’s young liaison man sent me a beautiful note, my receipt, his guarantee that the next three Thursdays would be held open by the dear VSO. My one event-planning worry, it might go too long. Three hours, no. Two and change, more like it.

  I could now lean toward what mattered most: th
e daily talk with Mr. Higgins our mortician, plus Stan’s nightly musical progress report: He had hired a senior-boy computer whiz to copy orchestra parts. My phone would ring, often right at eight. It never was for Cait. Sometimes in advance, to amuse only myself, I might change clothes, apply one dot of cologne; I’d settle, waiting on a white French chaise inherited from Mother.

  First thing I’d hear, “Just me, Jean. But how’re you holding up?”

  His pet name for me alluded to our both believing Stephen Foster underrated (the American Schubert?). “And how’s my ‘Jeannie with the Light’?”

  (I’ve tucked that tribute away, set it on a dim cool ledge where it’ll always “keep.”)

  • • •

  I SHIED AWAY from accepting for myself even our program’s smallest speaking role. I have always suffered terrible stage fright; my attempt to say my Atlantic poem aloud at a Sweet Briar convocation is one memory best-hurried-past. But BlackMatt promised: my own clothe-ure depended on addressing just this assembly. He’d started turning up unannounced, often at mealtimes. The twins held that against him but I told them he was desolated, that being with us meant being near Cait. “Means being near food!” Patrick laughed. But I was never sorry to warm up soup for a boy so blue-eyed soulful as BlackMatt.

  The school’s jazz combo had asked to play. Then a steel drum troupe auditioned (in our own driveway!). Suddenly I had to be so diplomatic (for her sake). Also volunteering, a black gospel group whose church she’d helped reshingle; first I’d heard of that.

  At the urging of Shelburne and the Matts both light and dark, I finally assigned myself only one small quotation. It would be from Mother’s 1928 Book of Common Prayer, one I had not opened in years. Though I shunned poor Father Tim, I found myself more and more respectful of the liturgy itself. I kept Ice’s battered blue book beside my toilet. I would sit there muttering its round phrases till they each took on a different surface like clay or glass or beaten metal, a purity of tone and purpose that actually half-consoled.