Джеймс Кейн - The Moth

How we started was to take a streetcar down to a five-and-ten and come back with a red balloon. We worked on it quite a while. She’d have me blow it up and squeeze the neck with one hand and press the air out with the other, then wet the neck and hold it tighter or looser, while I pressed the air out harder or easier. Then she’d make me notice how the higher the pressure the higher the whine of the air going out the neck. After a while I got it through my head that pitch is a matter of tension and pressure. Then we had to go over the way it worked in my throat and my lungs, and she drew a lot of pictures of how I was put together inside, with vocal cords and windpipe and lungs and diaphragm and abdominal muscles, all with exact shape and names, so I can remember them yet. Then I had to get it through my head that pressure from the abdominal muscles, exerted on the relaxing diaphragm, is transmitted to the cords, which are under tension, and that pressure and tension had to balance. If there was too much pressure on the diaphragm and too little tension in the cords, there was escapement, and if it was the other way around there was clutch, or hard throat. In the beginning it surprised me how little she let me sing. Pretty soon, though, there was some of that, and I had to learn to forget what it sounded like, to me inside my head, “as you didn’t buy a ticket, alas,” and get my mind on what it felt like, “as that’s what’ll determine what it sounds like to the customers, who after all are the ones we’re trying to please.” The only one I was trying to please was her, and to me it felt thin, but she seemed satisfied. And then one day I didn’t know if it sounded thin or thick, but only that it felt solid in my belly and like bubbles in my throat, and her eyes began to shine. “Felt good, didn’t it?”

“Yeah, felt easy.”

“Rest, and we’ll work it higher.”

The first song I got was the Mozart Alleluja. Now you’ll hear that Mozart is the delicate tracery that Jack Frost puts on the window pane, that every picture is different and the number of them infinite, that even the crystals have their own design and that it’s never once repeated, that it’s the greatest musical talent we ever had, that it’s genius. Just the same, it’s ice. And yet, the first time I sang that number in church, I could feel the congregation catch its breath, and see women all over the church take out their handkerchiefs and hold them to their eyes. When I got through, Miss Eleanor had found what she’d been looking for. A boy, if he’s taught, has something that a tenor hasn’t got and a soprano hasn’t got and that all of them haven’t got. I guess it’s what a bud has, before it’s a flower.

From then on, I showed speed. Before I knew it I had four or five operatic arias, some songs and ballads, enough to put on a show with whenever I got booked. That was all the time, at the Masonic Temple, at the Rotary Club, at the reception to the Bishop, at anything you could think of. It caused kind of a situation at home. By now, of course, I had to come out with it that Miss Eleanor had given me a little help, so of course nothing would suit Nancy but that I had to switch to a good teacher, like a friend of hers, Mrs. Pyle, and of course Sheila took it for granted she would play for me. That didn’t sit so well with Miss Eleanor, because I think I’ve told you about Sheila’s ideas on how to ruin a number at one fell swoop. It was the Old Man that knocked it all in the head, and for the right reason: “The two of you will keep hands off, for it’s my considered opinion that you don’t know enough music between you to shake out a Tipperary clog, and why you’d be cluthering into it I don’t know. The little lady, the rector’s niece, seems to have things well in hand. Lad, do you knew The Minstrel Boy?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Ah well, it makes no difference.”

But he didn’t know his son’s slick ways. In the house was an album with The Minstrel Boy in it, so of course in ten seconds I was in the hallway, singing it for him, reading at sight. That clinched everything.

Who Miss Eleanor finally picked to play for me was a girl named Margaret Legg, whose family owned one of the big hotels in town, the Cartaret, over on Charles Street. She was about my age, and played a lot better than Sheila. We made a nice pair, specially after we got booked into a New York vaudeville house, she in kind of an Alice in Wonderland outfit Miss Eleanor got her, me with a Little Lord Fauntleroy suit, all in blue velvet with Buster Brown collar. We were always spic and span, as her mother was always there, in New York and the other places we went, and she shined us both till we gave off sparks.

Margaret pulled one thing I didn’t understand. She went to a private school, Kenneth Hall, where most of the girls boarded, but some came from Baltimore as day scholars. One Friday she asked me to take her to the german, as she called it, that the school gave now and then, and that the girls could invite their friends to. I was all crossed up. The big news with me was I had my first long-pants suit, and as I had grown exactly as tall as Miss Eleanor, I had invited her to go to a movie that was coming to town, called Little Old New York, with a girl in it named Marion Davies, and some old-time fire engines. I sulked, but she kept saying we could see the movie some other time, and I had better take Margaret to the german. So I did and we led some kind of a march they started with, and I felt like I had been sent off to the tots’ wading pool. But what got me, after I took her home, was that she started bawling, right there in the lobby of the hotel, with her mother and father and a dozen people looking on. After that I took her around quite a lot, on Miss Eleanor’s say-so, though what it had to do with our appearing together I couldn’t see. There was only one thing about her I liked, at least at that time, and that was her baby sister Helen. She was just able to walk when I first ran into her, and was the cutest thing I had ever seen. I used to bring her apples and ice cream and lollipops and gocarts, and play with her by the hour, and a new word she learned was bigger stuff to me than knocking off an E flat above C, which finally became my record for the event.

The row with Anderson came just as Miss Eleanor was packing for St. Louis, where she was to sing some summer opera, so she had hurried home after service, and wasn’t there for the grand finale. The phone kept ringing, and I didn’t answer, as by that time the cook had gone and I was alone in the house. About five my father and Nancy and Sheila drove up in a cab, and about five thirty the phone rang again. Nancy answered, and it was the mother of one of the cutie pies. So now they had it, here in the house. I went on the carpet, before Nancy and Sheila, with my father listening, his face dark. What I told them was nothing, as I was afraid they’d get it out of me about my mother. The doorbell rang and it was the cop, with a warrant for my arrest. My father rolled his r’s and refused to let him in or say where I was or help him out in any way. We were all three in the front room to listen, and pretty soon the cop went. Then my father went to the phone, and there was some pretty sharp talk, but from the way Sheila and Nancy began looking at each other, I knew it had been fixed up, somehow, and I wouldn’t be arrested. Then my father brought me back to his den and had a look at my chin, that had a mark on it. Then we went into it. “What started this thing?”

“... I don’t want to talk about it.”

“What started it?”

“He laughed at me.”

“What for?”

“Making a fool of myself. Crying.”

“What were you crying about?”

“I didn’t feel good.”