Leaning, Leaning Over Water Page 11

  “Then take the record home, too,” she said. “See what you can do, and bring everything back to me next Friday.”

  I wanted to push it all back at her but I didn’t know how. I began my descent from the stage and my shoe caught in a layer of cardboard that had been set down to protect the platform next to the stairs. I heard my voice shout, “Jesus Poêle,” and I landed on the planks below, unhurt. I grabbed the record and the sheet music from the floor and looked up to stare straight into Miss Tina’s absent chest. It was all I could do to keep from crying when she rushed down to help.

  “Live music will add so much to the opening number,” she said. She smiled at me. It was very hard not to like Miss Tina.

  Somehow, somewhere, after I’d been forced to announce my coming performance, Father found a blind man to tune my piano. None of us had ever met a blind man, though Father had, lots of times, he said. He went into a long drawn-out story about when he was nineteen and walking on the road near the farm outside Darley. A man a hundred feet ahead of him was struck by a speeding car.

  “The car came out of the night without warning,” Father said. “He never knew what hit him. The sonofabitch behind the wheel didn’t have the guts to stop. And the head—the poor bugger was decapitated—rolled right down the centre of the road.”

  “Was the man blind?” I asked, wondering at the connection.

  “How the hell should I know? When I got to the head, its eyes were wide open. They were looking right through me.”

  So. My idea of what a blind person looked like was considerably distorted by the staring head rolling down the road.

  Father usually took the bus to Hull Saturday mornings to order groceries that would be delivered the same afternoon. This day, he delayed the trip because the piano tuner was coming. Lyd and Eddie and I took up position on the front steps.

  “When the blind man comes,” said Father, as if he’d thought this through carefully, “I’m asking you not to stare.” He looked weary and helpless, which surprised us and added weight to the blind man’s visit. “Can’t you go round to the backyard?” he said. But we would not be dislodged. Finally, he joined us on the steps, binoculars hanging from his neck.

  A battered yellow convertible with the top down was sighted across the field. It was a sunny October day and the convertible turned at the river and approached along our dirt road. Eddie, awed by its arrival, was moved to stand on the grass.

  There were two occupants: the blind man in a broad-shouldered three-piece suit, a bowler hat pressed to his forehead; and his wife, the driver. The blind man did not carry a white cane but looked jovial enough when his wife pushed him, with practised firm shoves, and got him stumbling up the steps and through the front door. We scattered to both sides of the porch as Father waved his hands behind the blind man’s back and then we followed, hovering in the doorway between the dining room and living room.

  Father spoke to the blind man and his wife as if they were hard of hearing but they nodded and smiled as if that were just fine. The blind man, a head taller than his wife, had a watch-chain that dipped across the front of his vest. Eddie and I looked at each other in disbelief: how did he tell time?

  Inside the house the bowler hat came off and was placed on the back of the chesterfield. The blind man’s wife rolled up her sleeves and pushed her husband towards the piano. Before they got down to business he turned to the place each of us was standing and said in a low rumble, “Howarya.” He then proceeded, board by board, to take my piano apart. Even the lid to the keyboard lifted off, and at this, his wife cried out as if she couldn’t help herself, “Oh darling, if you could only see these ivories.” She was an experienced assistant, for she stayed and helped prop the boards and opened the black toolcase so he could get started on the inside work. Then she left him and went outside to sit with Father on the front steps so she could watch the view.

  Lyd and Eddie and I made an excessively loud departure for the piano tuner’s benefit, and escaped through the back door. We looked at one another. The real blind man could not compete with the head rolling down the road, the eyes that for all time had penetrated Father. None of us had had a close look at his eyes. Lyd had expected him to be wearing dark glasses. Eddie thought the eyeballs were loose, rolling around and hitting the inside of his head.

  “He’s probably fake,” I said. “He can probably see.”

  “Then why would he let his wife push him around?” said Lyd, and we couldn’t answer that.

  “Oh, for Cripes’ sake,” Lyd said, “he’s only blind.” She left and went around the side of the house, heading for the front. I decided to tiptoe back inside and when I reached the entrance to the living room I could see Lyd and Eddie staring in through the window.

  I had paused in front of Duffy’s full-length mirror and now I stood watching the blind man’s fingers as they moved rapidly in and around pegs and hammers, fastening ribbonlike strips to wire hooks. Every few minutes his large hands came down heavily on the keys, bang bang.

  I stood like that for a long time. The longer I stood the more I was afraid to move because the blind man would hear me and think I’d been spying. My legs began to cramp. I could see Lyd through the window, beckoning me to come out, but I might as well have been frozen in Statue Tag. I stared at my own unhappy face, my pins-and-needles body, in the mirror. Just as I was about to bolt, two blind eyes rolled in my direction and the mouth said, “You can’t be comfortable all cramped like that.”

  This both shocked and freed me and I mumbled, “I’m all right.” I crossed the room quickly and walked deliberately past him, letting him know that I’d watch whomever I liked in my own house. I sat on the front steps and his wife squinted at me and patted my shoulder. “Poor motherless child,” she said, and I was furious that she felt sorry for me. She didn’t seem to notice, and called back cheerily through the screen, “Almost done, darling?”

  His hands answered bang bang on one low key. He’d been turning his head this way and that before I left the room and I wondered if he’d been trapping sound waves so he wouldn’t be fooled and tighten something that would leave a sour note on my piano. I squirmed on the front steps until Father, who looked as uncomfortable as I’d ever seen him, gave me his warning look.

  “What a view,” said the blind man’s wife, looking out over the river, oblivious to both Father and me. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a view.”

  The opening ceremony was to be held on a Friday night, the dress rehearsal on Friday afternoon before the entire student body. The school had been readied: walls had been rubbed free of fingerprints; classes of younger children could be heard chanting recitations; the school choir, newly formed, was forever practising “À La Claire Fontaine,” and “O Canada! Terre de nos aïeux,” every recess and noon.

  Because I was part of the rehearsal and opening number, I did not have to file into the gym with the rest of my class, Crawfish sidling up beside me in the line. Instead, I went through the backstage entrance, three steps up from a doorway in the hall.

  Grades one to eight filed conspicuously into the gym and took their places in rows of fold-up chairs. Everyone seemed awed by the cavernous space after the one-room schools; it was still that new to us. Our little dance troupe stepped forward. The stage curtains had not yet arrived, and when I took my place at the piano and glanced at the girls lined up along the front of the stage, I saw that we were exposed like gaping fish washed up on a cliff shelf. I was glad to be on the fringes, though I could still be seen by the rows of faces that shone up like rounded buoys, from the backwaters of the darkened gym.

  Each girl stood stiffly with a cane in one hand, a black top hat in the other, the hats tipped jauntily over the row of heads. Together, they were perched like thirteen Mr. Peanuts. I heard a rap on the hardwood floor, my cue from Miss Tina to play the opening bars. The sheet music was propped in front of me but when I raised my eyes all I could see were shifting lines of the same note. I felt a lightning movement insi
de my head. I hesitated and Miss Tina rapped again. The girls looked back over their shoulders. My hands came down on the keys, bang bang, and I thought, Blind man. I stumbled into the opening bars and made a quick decision to wing the piece by ear. I couldn’t see the page anyway; it had moved away from me, in a blur.

  I was aware of twenty-six feet keeping time and a chopping movement to my right, as thirteen canes axed in my direction at forty-five degrees. I had to get through the piece twice, never playing faster than the feet could tap tap tap and shuffle shuffle. As long as I did not think about separate notes, as long as I kept the rush of memory intact, my hands moved without any assistance from me. I knew that even one thought could break the flow. As soon as I thought about thinking, the thread frayed and snapped.

  My hands floundered. I chorded left. My head emptied. Mind flown, memory flown. The dancers carried on, unaccompanied. I could hear the scraping of soles against dry wood. The feet stopped. I wanted to shout the way Father did, “Keep up the beat!” but the dancers had lost their place and so had I. The audience was still. There was no need to look out to that dark sea when I could feel it rolling up towards me in a crushing wave. I placed my hands on the keyboard and tried again, this time from the beginning. I was incapable of starting in the middle. The dancers did not move. I tried again. They made a collective decision to follow and their bodies jerked forward. I thought of thirteen Mr. Peanuts cracking open and then I tried not to think. My hands took on a speed of their own and rushed through “Pretty Baby,” too quickly, two more times. The black sea inside the gym swallowed. There was a long silence during which the audience seemed to wonder whether to clap. The dancers, bewildered at this, tipped forward and left the stage. Not one of the girls looked at me.

  I tried to slip out through the stage door into the hall but Miss Tina caught up with me. Behind us a row of younger children had already begun to recite, “Dame Trot came home one wintry night, A shivering, starving soul…” Miss Tina slipped an arm around my shoulder and turned me to face her. “Trude King, this is something you can do and do very well. You know it and I know it. What you probably don’t know is that when we have problems in rehearsal, it’s a good omen for a solid performance at night.” She hugged me and I carried on, not wanting to return to the gym to join my class.

  I knew now that no matter how hard I tried to lie low, I was always going to end up being a spectacle. My lungs were dry and I stepped into my room so I could be in my seat when my classmates returned. There was nowhere else to go.

  But Crawfish was there before me. He was behind the door and when I opened it he moved quickly, forcing me to bump directly into his flabby chest. There were tears rolling down both blubbery cheeks.

  “We’ve been humiliated,” he said, and I felt his thick fingers groping at my bare arms. I forced myself to squint into his face.

  “Oh, Trude,” he said. “Of all those girls, why did it have to be you?”

  I yanked away and ran for the washroom. I stayed there until I heard the school bus and then I went back for my coat and ran for it, again.

  Lyd did not mention the rehearsal. Nor did Eddie, who seemed to have forgotten by the time we got home. Lyd and I were used to sharing our misery in public, now, and knew there was nothing to say. If I failed at the evening performance, the failure would be hers, too. Worse still, it would be in front of Father, whom we were forced to drag along.

  I went into the clothes closet and stood between the blouses. “The hell with Crawfish,” I told Mother. “I don’t want him bawling on my shoulder. He won’t leave me alone.” My hands and arms and shoulders were knotted and tense as I went through, not every note, but every finger movement of “Pretty Baby” in my head.

  We returned after supper and approached our new school, which was lit like a horizontal beacon in the dark. We had not yet had our first snowfall but I could smell its promise in the air. We’d arrived on the school bus that had been sent to St. Pierre to fetch the Protestant families for the grand opening. Parents, too, had come on the bus, riding with a grown-up air of levity that was easy to see through. I spoke to no one, but lines of one of Father’s poems streamed through my head: Into the jaws of Death, Into the mouth of Hell, Into the jaws of Death, Into the mouth of Hell. I refused to look at Father, who was standing with the other parents, packed into the aisle. He was wearing his one brown suit and both Lyd and I tried not to acknowledge him in case he would say or do something outrageous.

  We entered the school through the front door, the teachers’ entrance, and I noticed that, already, the P had fallen off the wall outside, leaving ROTESTANT in its wake. A program was thrust into my hands. I’d never been to the school at night and was surprised by the artificial light illuminating the halls. Voices were not harsh the way they were during the day. The ceilings seemed low and there was a silken echo from one end of the school to the other, an atmosphere of high reverence. The teachers were dressed in fancy clothes—pleated skirts and sheer blouses—and their manners were more formal and less punitive in intent. I did not go to my room because of Crawfish. I took off my coat and handed it to Lyd. She looked as if it were she and not I who was headed for slaughter. She crushed my coat to her chest and her mouth made a kind of grimace that was meant to give me support.

  The stairs inside the stage door were high and slippery with new wood. The piano looked like a piece of heavy machinery; the stool in front of it wobbled lopsidedly, something I’d never noticed before. The thirteen girls were pressed amoeba-like into the wall at one end of the stage, waiting in terror for the gym lights to go down. I did not feel my feet as I walked forward and took my place on the uneven stool. Miss Tina was calm and composed and was wearing, not her skimpy leotard, but real clothes. It was her last night in the school and she did not seem at all disturbed by the vast audience below.

  But it was only after the performance that I remembered all of these details, not before. My pre-performance self existed in some other, closed space of its own. I played “Pretty Baby” with my eyes closed, or so I told myself at home that night, after Lyd and I had gone to bed. I had made up my mind to play well and I did. Not too quickly, no notes missed. The way I played had nothing to do with Miss Tina’s kindness and nothing to do with Father’s anticipatory pirouette, executed at the entrance of the school after we’d climbed down from the bus in the dark. The way I played had come out of my will. The dancers followed every beat and I knew it would be safe to face them the rest of the school year.

  But when I returned home, and before I fell into bed, I walked into the empty living room and pulled the lid over the keyboard of my piano. I raised the cover of the bench and dropped in the Play Piano folder I’d last worked on, and on top of that, “The Whiffenpoof” and “The Midnight Fire Alarm.” I could feel the weight of Father’s hands on my shoulders as I closed the lid of the bench. I would not tell him my decision. Sooner or later, from my triangle of space behind the piano, I would hear what he had to say.

  It was Crawfish I was going to have to deal with now. I began to steel myself for the things I would have to do to stay out of his way.

  I hung my clothes in the closet and shoved aside Mother’s blouses. I stood there, eyes wide open, “Pretty Baby” still rippling through my fingers and wrists. I listened to the silence of the house and thought of the thirteen dancers that evening. How they’d straightened their torsos and slid back a row of right feet in their last dying “Pretty Baby” shuffle.

  GO IN AND OUT THE WINDOW

  1957

  I knew Father was worried about our future when I found him at the desk in the living room altering tax receipts. On the desk were a bottle of ink remover, a dropper and a fountain pen. He was working under the glare of the gooseneck lamp and I leaned over his shoulder to watch. He placed the edge of the blotter beneath the line and changed five to fifty. The receipt had been signed, T. S. Donnell, Treasurer. Father moved the decimal, squeezed in an extra zero and blew on the paper, to dry. It was a very pro
fessional job.

  “Isn’t that cheating?” I said. “Dad?”

  “Louis St. Laurent is still eating rare roast beef and mushrooms on my taxes,” he said. “Duplessis isn’t showing any signs of quitting, either.” He was not in a good mood.

  I went out to the kitchen and found Lyd dyeing her shoes. One arm and both hands were blotched with canary yellow shoe dye. She held the dauber upside down.

  “Leo wants me to go to the dance tonight,” I said. “He has a date for you.”

  “No,” she said. “Definitely not.”

  “His friend is tall.”

  “No.”

  “Well then, give me a reason.”

  “I can give you more than one,” she said. “I’ll give you two. I hate blind dates, and you’d be lying. Father would kill us both if he knew you were lying.”

  “It’s not a blind date. Leo knows him. He isn’t going to bring someone you’ll hate. And I’ll tell Father I’ll be with you. The truth.”

  “Partial truth.”

  “It’s a stupid rule, Lyd. If I’m with you or a bunch of girls from school, I can go. If a guy asks me out, I’m not allowed.”

  “Not my rule,” said Lyd.

  “I’m not staying home. Anyway, I need you to do something with my hair.”

  From the way she looked up I knew she sympathized. During the week, I’d chopped my own hair trying to make myself look older, and had made a real mess of it. I’d never done that before.

  I thought of Leo then, how he and I danced together, and I added, “You can wear your canary yellow shoes.”