Джеймс Кейн - The Moth

Next thing I remember, I was at her house on Eutaw Place for Sunday lunch, and she fixed it herself. It was a little house in a yard with lilacs all around it, mainly studio, two stories high, with a grand piano in it, but not much else except a bedroom, bathroom, and kitchen with a sunporch at one side, where we ate. After lunch we went in the studio and sat on the couch, and she read the Sunday paper and let me play with her Airedale dog Muggsy. Then all of a sudden she put up the paper and said: “Now Jack, what happened?”

“When?”

“This morning. On the hymn.”

“Why — it was a misprint. Isn’t that what you said?”

“Yes, but why did you sing it correctly?”

“Well, I had a different book.”

“Are you sure?”

“Dr. Grant’s big book, that you gave me.”

“Is that the book you have home?”

“No, Miss Eleanor, but—”

“But what?”

“I don’t know what happened.”

“Did you study the parts?”

“Of course, Miss Eleanor.”

“Jack!”

“I study them, always.”

“Come here, Jack.”

I went to her, and she motioned me to sit there beside her, and I did, and she put her arm around me and pulled my head on her shoulder. Neither Nancy nor Sheila ever did anything like that, so I guess it was the first time any woman had touched me, and I can remember now how soft she was and how much I liked her arm around me with her face close and her eyes looking down into mine. At that time I was ten and she must have been a little under thirty. To most kids, from what I’ve heard them say, that would be a great-great-grandmother, but not to me. I never notice much how old a woman is. She seemed like a pretty girl I knew, and we were having a little talk. “Now Jack, if you studied the part on that hymn, how does it happen you sang it in the right key, and didn’t make the misprint mistake, the way the others did?”

“Too much for me, Miss Eleanor.”

We sat there, and her arm was around me, but she wasn’t looking at me, and all of a sudden she wasn’t friendly any more. Then she winked away a tear and gave me a little shake. “Jack, why do you lie to me?”

“Why, Miss Eleanor, I wouldn’t lie to you.”

“You have lied to me. Now there’s no use your trying to deceive me about what you’ve been doing. I’ve been suspecting it all along. You don’t study these parts up at all. You stand there with a cheeky look on your face and read them off at sight and only pretend you got them up. And this morning, when you sang it right and everybody else sang it wrong, it was because you were reading it off Dr. Grant’s book, which is a very beautifully printed collection of celebrated hymns with no misprints in it at all, where all the others had the cheap edition that belongs to the church, and that you have at home to study from. So I know, of course. Now why do you still look me in the eye and say you don’t know how it happened?”

“I don’t even know what you’re talking about.” She stared at the piano a few minutes, then got up and went out. When she came back she had a bunch of lilacs she said I was to take to my aunts. I knew I was to go.

I don’t know why, but when I got halfway home I turned around and marched right back again. I wish I could say I woke up to the wrong of lying, but I can’t. All I can remember is that I kept thinking how soft she felt, and it was like when you touch a baby and you feel like Christmas Eve and never want to do wrong any more. I knew I had to go back and do something about it. She looked surprised when she saw me again, but I started right in: “Miss Eleanor, I did what you said.”

“... Come in.”

She took me over to the couch again, sat me back on the cushion, and ran her fingers through my hair. “Did Miss Sheila teach you how?”

“How to what?”

“Read at sight.”

“... What’s reading at sight?”

“Well, most people, unless they’re professionals, have to read on some instrument, usually piano, for pitch and to make sure they’re getting it right. But — Jack, do you mean you just stumbled on it by accident? That you looked at the notes, and after a little practice there in the choir you knew how they went? That nobody had to tell you?”

“Is it supposed to be hard or something?”

“Jack, I just love it.”

She took me in her arms, and hugged me, and gave me little pats, and then went to the icebox and got out some sherbet she had stashed there. She explained to me about sight reading, and how unusual it was for somebody to be able to do it without particularly knowing how they did it. What excited her was that she thought she had some kind of a musical genius wrapped up in the same package as a pretty good boy soprano. In that she was wrong. But we didn’t know anything for sure then, except that I was a kid that wasn’t getting anywhere at a rapid rate of speed, and that she was a pretty girl widowed by the war and somehow out of step with her trade. It seemed exciting that we should cook up a secret between us, that I was to say nothing to anyone about it, that she would give me lessons and make a famous singer out of me, and I would make her laugh. “The way you’ve been standing up there, with a pious look on your face, and pretending to have your parts down pat, and not doing a thing but reading it off stone cold — that’s what enchants me.”

“If you like it, then—”

“Oh dear.”

“What’s the matter, Miss Eleanor?”

“It’s wrong, isn’t it, to encourage deception in the young? Then, I guess we start all over again. Well, I won’t do it. How do you like that?”

“I like anything you say.”

“Sometimes you have to kid them, don’t you?”

“You mean — use initiative?”

“Use what?”

I told her about Denny, and the car, and how I took the brake off, and she whooped. “You’re simply precious.”

“Can I stay to supper?”

“I’ll see.”

She called up my aunts, and they said I could stay, and she explained to me why she had to be so formal. “Your aunt, Miss Nancy Dillon, has certain reservations about my method, I believe she calls it—”

“Oh boy, you ought to hear her method!”

So of course, we had some more laughing over that, but then she went on: “It’ll be simpler, in the beginning anyway, if we keep our schemes to ourselves. You drop by, on your way home from school, and I’ll work you over, step by step, and we’ll see what we’ll see. That is, unless there’s something you’d rather do.”

“Nothing I know of.”

“You’re a sweet baby.”

That night, after she made some omelet and we had that with some ice cream I got at a drug store, she played for me and told me about grand opera and how she sang in the Washington and Baltimore Aborn seasons of 1912, 1913, and 1914, and the Century Opera in New York the year after that, and it was my first taste of romance. Because I went nuts about her, and she went a little nuts about me, but I sometimes wonder if that didn’t have something to do with the baby she lost, not long after she married the Frenchman. The nicest part was how funny it was, the great trick we were playing on everybody. It seemed wonderful to hook a tone up, see her eyes light, have her pull me into her arms for little kisses, and then feel her burst out laughing. Pretty soon I’d kiss her on the cheek and not feel ashamed about it.

The trouble with boys, it turned out, is that they’ve got breath trouble, but they’ve got so little time to be boys that nobody does anything about it. So everybody pretends the “reedy” quality is pretty terrific and makes them sound like little angels. She, though, she didn’t buy it. “All they sound like to me is brats that can’t sing. But you might be the one now to show what a boy might sound like if he sang instead of wheezed. Of course, it may not turn out like that. You may sound like some pip-squeak imitation of an operatic tenor. There’s such a thing as letting a wild Irish rose be a wild Irish rose, and not trying to make an American beauty out of it. Still, I’d like to try. At least you have a voice. It has every fault there is, from escapement to tremolo to four or five other things. It’s like a stream of warm honey that shatters in midair. But we may be able to coax it to flow, clear down to the waffle, and if we do, I’ll eat it with a little silver spoon... Kiss me now, and we’ll start.”