Джеймс Кейн - The Moth

It was Denny, that summer or maybe the next, that got me started on my singing career, though all it amounted to, at first, was some more of the Deets initiative. They had had a mixed choir at St. Anne’s with four paid soloists and I guess maybe fifteen to twenty volunteers like Nancy. But when Dr. Grant came in, after Dr. Struthers died, he was very High-Church, and pretty soon there was a fight, but he had his way. The soloists were out and the mixed choir was out. The men stayed, to sing the tenor and bass parts, but the sopranos and altos were to be boys. I’d hate to tell you what Denny and I did to them. We chased them up alleys and yelled at them and beat them up. One night a couple called, the man with a buggy whip. He wanted to dust me off for something that had happened, and my father had to get tough.

But then one day Denny found out that the cutie pies got eighty cents a Sunday for doing it. He almost set Nancy, Sheila, my father, and his aunt, Miss Eunice, crazy, that he and I should get a shot at the sugar. Finally it turned out two places had become vacant, and we would be given a trial after rehearsal one afternoon. We waited quite a while, sitting in the rear of the church, while they went through Te Deums and anthems and Gregorian chants, or plain songs as they’re called. They seemed to be the main reason Dr. Grant wanted boys, as it was dry, gray music, some of it sung without accompaniment, and women would have ruined it. But the director was a woman, Miss Eleanor Grant, Dr. Grant’s cousin. She had sung with the Century Opera, but after we got in the war married a French officer, and when he got killed she didn’t go back on the stage right away, but stayed on in Baltimore and taught. She was small and dark and pretty, and even watching her from the back of the church, where I was sitting with Nancy and Sheila and Denny and Miss Eunice, I fell for her hard.

We had been told, when our turn came, not to sing anything religious, but whatever we happened to know and like, so Denny sang A Perfect Day, with Anderson playing for him, and I sang The Rosary, with Sheila. Denny got as far as “when you sit alone with your thoughts,” when Miss Eleanor stopped him and said it was very nice of him to sing for her, but he needn’t bother to finish it, and later, maybe when he was older, she hoped he’d come back. The cutie pies, who were hanging around, all began to laugh, and for once I didn’t blame them. Because Denny sang it in the same gashouse bark he used on Over There, which was his favorite tune at the time, and maybe it sounded funny but it didn’t sound good. Me, I only got as far as “The hours I spend with thee, dear heart.” Because Sheila, as soon as she got spread out on the organ bench, and got the stops pulled open, and got a heel-and-toe grip on the pedals, unfortunately let her music go sliding to the floor. However, she started anyhow, and that was how I came to be thrown out at first base. Because of course her fingers would start it in the key she knew it in, which was two flats, but when Anderson put the music back, her eyes would read it in the key they saw it in, which was six flats. That was how it happened that the first chord and I were in one key, and the second chord and Sheila were in another key, and it sounded like a lunatic asylum.

Next thing I knew, there was Sheila, as usual, giving out with the gushy alibi, like she was a real virtuoso or something, and small chores like this were quite beneath her, and Miss Eleanor was smiling and nodding and patting me. By that time I had somehow swallowed that string of pearls and maybe a couple of tonsils, but I got the surprise of my life. Miss Eleanor put her arm around me, and said there wouldn’t really be any need to go on, as she thought I was a boy they wanted, and would I report next Wednesday to rehearse?

Walking home I never heard three women have so much to say about another woman in all my life. Miss Eunice was burned up at the way Denny had been cut off, though how much he had sounded like a crow with the croup she didn’t mention. Sheila said no wonder I was flustered, the highhanded way things were done around there, and as for that draft, that practically blew the hair off your head, to say nothing of the music in front of you, well! Nancy, who was still sore about being fired, criticized Miss Eleanor’s “method.” Denny had nothing to say, until he and I were alone together, out in his front yard. Then he hauled off and hit me. Then he hit me again. By that time I had got to know him fairly well, so I just waited. Pretty soon he began to blow and backed off, and I stepped up and let him have it, but with the flat of my hand, a slap on the cheeks that sounded like a seal clapping for himself in the circus. “Now do I beat you up or do you cut this out?”

He burst out crying and plumped down on the bench beside the front walk. I sat down beside him and let him bawl. Until then he’d been the smart guy, but when I got the job and he didn’t, he hated me for it. Not that he let it interfere with our beautiful friendship, or kept him from figuring what we would do with the money, once I began collecting my eighty cents. Or, as we could truthfully say, our eighty cents.

But the one really to blame for my singing career was Miss Eleanor, and she got interested in me, as you might expect, on account of my trying to get away with something, though up to then she hadn’t tried to hide it that she liked me. She rehearsed us, as I said, on Te Deums and anthems and chants, but on hymns there was no rehearsal, only home work. It was her test for character. Because if a boy, once he got his book to take home, and was given next Sunday’s numbers, wouldn’t go to his mother’s piano and beat out his part and learn it, there wasn’t much to do about him. If he would, maybe he had something and she would work on him. If he wouldn’t, he was out. Well, she gave me a hymn book, and also another book, that explained how to tell one key from another, major from minor, treble from bass, and 3/4 from 4/4. So I wanted the eighty cents, and made Sheila play the stuff for me, so I could learn it, which wasn’t hard, as my voice was high, and I always got the soprano part, which was melody.

But pretty soon I thought: Why all that work? The notes, once I got straight how they worked, seemed to tell all you had to know, like when to go up and when to go down, how much, and how long to hang on. So of course, by my system then, I used initiative instead of work. Sheila would be all ready to brief me, and I’d say I’d already got the parts up. She wouldn’t believe me, and would shove the book at me and I’d read the part off and there’d be nothing she could say. It cut her out of a chance to act important, but if I knew it I knew it. Quantum quantum, as the Old Man would put it. But one Sunday something happened. By that time I was already a bit of a feature, but more on account of my angelic looks, I imagine, than my heaven-sent golden voice, which hadn’t developed a lot yet. I was put on the end, with a lectern in front of me, and a big leather-bound hymn book on it, that Dr. Grant found in his library, with a ribbon marker that had a golden fringe, so I made kind of a picture. And this morning we were singing a thing called Parting Hymn, with me on the melody, the cutie pies and the men on the parts, and the congregation doing whatever it felt like, mostly nothing. The organ wasn’t in it, except to play it through once before we started, because with just the voices and nothing instrumental there was that ethereal angelic effect Dr. Grant seemed to be so stuck on. And we were going fine until all of a sudden it sounded like eight cats in a barrel and everybody stopped, except that after a split second Miss Eleanor motioned at me and I went on. Then the rest came in, and we were moving again. To pull things together, Anderson brought the organ in. But on every verse, even with the organ, there was the same mess, and on every verse Miss Eleanor motioned me on. At last, though, it came to an end, and pretty soon after that we filed out singing our chant, and when she came down to the basement everything was straightened out, or so she said anyway, when she showed Anderson the misprint in the books, which of course had made things a little sour.