John Sayles - A Moment in the Sun

There will be only this one opportunity with the Maestro. She has made an effort not to frighten the girl, tried not to overstress the importance of the audition. But the fact remains that it is one of those rare moments in which the course of one’s future is determined, the road dividing, only one path leading forward. She is so young, Jessie, innocent yet of the terrible knowledge that certain actions, certain decisions, cannot be undone. Miss Loretta dabs at her neck with her handkerchief, then fans herself, suddenly flushing with one of the vaporous attacks she is prone to lately, worse always when she is tense or upset, and then Jessie stops playing.

Just stops.

The ballade is meant to change character here, gaining power and certitude, but Jessie only sits staring at the keys as if this more resolute music is a forest she dare not enter.

The Maestro turns his head to Miss Loretta, arches an eyebrow.

“I’m sorry,” says Jessie, her near whisper carrying out to them.

The girl stands and steps off into the wings, footsteps hammering. Miss Loretta is up and leaning in to placate the Maestro.

“Perhaps if I speak with her—”

“She understands,” he says, shaking his head slightly and reaching for his coat as he rises. “Left to their own devices, they prefer to dwell at their own level.” He pats Miss Loretta’s hand as he steps into the aisle, as a father pats the hand of a child who has lost her balloon. “Your efforts for the girl are commendable, and I’m sure you saw the spark of something there,” he says, slipping his coat on, “but the Academy is not a settlement house.”

“I apologize for—”

“No need. I’ll be able to catch the three o’clock if I hurry.”

Miss Loretta sits then, suddenly exhausted, till she hears the door to the lobby thump shut behind him. The chill that so often follows her hot spells shudders down her spine from the sides of her neck. It is very quiet in the great hall. She stares at the piano, mute and reproachful at the center of the stage. She remembers hearing Anton Rubinstein from this very seat on the aisle, enthralled at thirteen years of age, the music filling her soul. Miss Loretta sighs and stands to find the girl.

Jessie sits on a stool by the bank of pulleys that control the scenery and curtains. Her cheeks are wet with tears as she looks up to see her teacher.

“I am so very sorry.”

“Not as sorry as I.” Jessie flushes as if she has been slapped. Miss Loretta regrets the phrase the moment it is uttered, but she has suffered the Maestro’s condescension, has confused her own thwarted hopes with those of this colored girl.

Softer now, “You’re not feeling well?”

The girl’s forehead is damp, the neck of her shirtwaist darkened with perspiration.

“I was afraid I was going to be ill.”

There was a girl at Conservatory, Antonia, a lovely girl who played like the wind and had great dark eyes that were rumored to be the result of gypsy blood in her family. Miss Loretta and the others would gather outside the rehearsal room and marvel at her facility, her passion. But if more than one of them stepped in to listen Antonia would break off and return to playing scales or pretend to study the score. The morning of her first recitif she began to tremble and by noon was burning with a fever so intense an ambulance was called for. It was said that her symptoms had disappeared by the time she reached the hospital, though none of them ever saw her again. The porters were there to remove her belongings from her room the next morning.

“The nature of your sex,” said Professor Einhorn without mentioning Antonia by name in his next lecture, “disposes you to a heightened sensitivity. It is both your glory and your undoing.”

Miss Loretta chooses her words carefully. “You have performed in front of people, important people, before this,” she says. There was the concert in February, the haute monde of Wilmington present, and but for the girl’s parents not a dark face in the audience. She was brilliant.

“I feel ill all the time,” says Jessie. “Not just today.”

It is unthinkable.

The girl has been rounding out lately, her body ripening. Nothing more. These are growing pains, perhaps, the unruly sway of female humors. We women are slaves to our bodies, thinks Miss Loretta, and our emotions rule our health.

“Have you had—”

She is not the girl’s mother, after all, not responsible. But at the end of all her pleading to lure the Maestro here for a trial, after all her steady instruction and guidance through the years, her investment in this child, there must be an accounting.

“Have you started having your flow?”

The girl seems to understand. “It began last August,” she says. “But since I’ve been ill—”

Unthinkable.

Miss Loretta feels her own tiny swoon of nausea. She is a music instructor, nothing more. “How long has it been interrupted?”

The girl looks at her with fearful eyes. “It can’t be that.”

“Of course not.” It is very stuffy, here in the wings, the air stale and motionless. “Because you’ve never engaged—” they are familiar, Miss Loretta and this colored girl, more familiar than teacher and student, more familiar than society will normally allow, given what separates them, “—because you’ve never engaged in improprieties with your young man.”

It is not a question.

It is a statement begging confirmation and the girl lets it hang too long, another caesura, the sound of Miss Loretta’s words decaying in the narrow space that is heavy with the mildew of the side curtains bunched around them, and then the realization that they are not alone.

“Pologize for disturbin you ladies,” he says, pulling his cap off and holding it over his chest, “but you finish with that pianner?”

It is the day man, old Samuel, a fixture at Thalian Hall since Miss Loretta was a girl, known as Songbird because of his constant humming while at his tasks. He has appeared without a note, however, and stands frozen in a slight bow awaiting her instruction.

“We are quite finished with it, Samuel. Thank you.”

He turns to the girl. “I seen your Daddy out the hallway, here on city bidness,” he says. “He ax if I know how it’s goin for you in here.”

“I’ll have to tell him when I get home,” she says quietly.

Samuel bows again and puts his cap back on. “Yes M’am, Miss Jessie.” He leaves them to attend to the piano.

“It was only the one time,” she says when he is gone, as if this may provide absolution.

Slaves to our bodies.

“Yes,” nods Miss Loretta, wishing there was a place for her to sit. “You will need to tell your father when you are home.”

“I’ve let you down,” cries the girl, Jessie, her Jessie. “I’ve betrayed you.”

Jessie is weeping now and Miss Loretta finds herself holding her, cradling her head against her chest as she stands and the girl sits on the stool, feeling the tight-coiled black tresses she has always wanted to touch, if only from curiosity, stroking her hair now and this is too much, too much to bear. She has lost her, lost her dear Jessie forever.

“What can I do?”

“Oh my dear,” says Miss Loretta, weeping herself now, “there is so very little you can do.”

“They’ll find out.”

“You will tell them. Today.”

She is amazed to discover that she does not think any less of the girl, that there is, in fact, no betrayal. Only sadness. There are worse fates, of course, but she wanted more for this one. Colored society — what, society in general being what it is — the young man may suffer no consequences. Off in the Army somewhere, at liberty, in the eyes of the world, to shoulder his responsibility or not. What must it be to move with that freedom, to love without care. What reckless joy to saunter through life with only your conscience as restraint, ever the raptor and never the ruined.