Little Boy Blues (16 page)

Sometimes she would sing as she played, and she often sang while she did housework. She had a light soprano voice, and she often told me that she sang solos in church as a young woman.
“That’s how I met your daddy. He saw me singing in the choir in Great Falls.” She was quite jealous of the women who soloed in our choir, and I often regretted not hearing her when she was in full voice. I assumed that age had diminished her singing, until I realized, years later, that age had nothing to do with it. She was merely competing in a tougher league, and her talent was not in much demand.

She could still play better than just about anyone except the choir director, and she wasn’t shy about it. She played for her Sunday-school class. She played for her children at school. Sometimes she would come home in a snit because her school was putting on a play or a pageant, and the music teacher would be playing for the assembly. “She just reads everything right off the sheet music,” Mother would complain. “She doesn’t add a thing. I took my class in the auditorium today so they could practice, and all I could think about was getting to that piano and helping them out a little.” One day she came home in a much better mood. The music teacher had called in sick, so Mother subbed for her in the rehearsals. “Everyone said how much livelier the music was,” she said. Even the principal had stuck his head in the door and wondered aloud who that Liberace was at the keyboard.

After we had owned the piano for several months, Mother stopped playing as often—only when she was extremely happy about something, or extremely upset. And she still always played if there was an audience (I didn’t count, although if I pleaded with her to play, she would always acquiesce). I remember once, not long after my parents got divorced, we had a visit from a man I’d never heard her talk about before. He was a golfer who played in left-handed golf tournaments, and he was in town for a match.
I can’t remember where he lived or how she knew him. He might have been an old flame, or an old friend of my father’s. He took us out to dinner and bought me a steak, and then we went back to the apartment. I don’t know what happened after I went to bed, but he never came back, and Mother wouldn’t talk about it. But before we went out to dinner, she played piano for him for the better part of an hour. He wouldn’t let her stop. He said she was the best pianist he’d ever heard. That was the only date I remember my mother’s ever having, and she got mad at me when I called it a date.

I took piano lessons from three teachers, starting with a woman in Lexington found by my uncle. Once I moved back in with Mother to start the third grade, I was taught by Mrs. Jackson, one of the ladies from our church. The piano at her house sat in a damp, dark basement, and she sent me home with old exercise books (“Now you won’t have to buy anything”) that smelled of mildew. A year later, the Jacksons moved away and I began again, this time with a kind, soft-spoken woman who was sick a lot and canceled more often than I did. No matter the teacher, I was not a promising student. The margins of my sheet music were crowded with instructions and corrections. “Right hand only.” “Add left hand.” “Both hands together.” Some of the words were underlined, and some were underlined more than once. The underlinings were added because I hadn’t gotten the message the first time, or the second, and if a word had to be underlined three times, there was an exclamation mark: “legato!” I’d never seen punctuation scream in frustration quite like that.

This was strange territory: while I could memorize a song and
then play it more or less note for note, I wasn’t making anything that I recognized as music. I couldn’t figure out how to unlock its secrets, and in the meantime, I was forced to plod along, being spoon-fed a few scraps of information a week at a time. Even when I moved on to harder pieces—simple Haydn and Bach, études by Czerny—I chafed at my repertoire. I didn’t dislike it, but it was alien to me. No one I knew listened to classical music, except what we heard in church, and that was church music, what was playing while you found your seat.

Ironically, the song that I despised above all others growing up was not a church song, not a classical piece and not a song I ever learned to play, which was why I hated it. It was “Heart and Soul.” I don’t know why, but thousands of children who have never had a piano lesson can play “Heart and Soul.” When I was growing up, you could put three kids in a room with a piano and at least one of them would know it. Or worse, two of the three would play it as a duet, one taking the bass and the other the treble. I would be the third kid, sick with envy because after all my time spent on lessons and practicing, I couldn’t do what they were doing. That one song symbolized everything I hated about the rote disciplines that chained me to the piano. Hearing that jaunty melody, I saw only the arid musical landscape to which I was condemned, a world of endless scales, keys with three or four sharps and not a bit of fun in any of it.

At the time, none of this was clear to me. All I knew was that I was struggling through music that didn’t mean much to me. I didn’t want to learn “Country Gardens.” I wanted to play like my mother. More than anything, I wanted to know what it was like to be my mother at the piano, to lose myself so thoroughly in what I was doing, in the music my hands were making, that the rest of
the world would drop away. For this was precisely what it looked like when she played, like someone in a trance.

My career as a pianist lacked any such transformations. I remember taking part in only one recital. I don’t remember what I played, probably “The Spinning Wheel” out of one of the John Thompson books (those ubiquitous instructional books with their bright red covers can still make me flinch every time I see one). We had to get up on a little stage—it must have been held at a church. There were lots of windows, and the piano and the stage were right in front of the brightest windows, so that anyone at the piano was just a silhouette to people in the audience. Everything you saw was either dark or light, alternating like piano keys. The boys wore dark suits or sport coats over their white shirts and clip-on ties, and the girls wore starchy party dresses. None of us knew each other. It was a little gang of strangers. The only performers who got much applause were the youngest, who could barely reach the keyboard, and the oldest, who played the hardest pieces. When it was my turn, I went to the piano, played my piece, exhaled, then got off and waited for everyone to finish so we could have cake and punch. With the exception of one girl who played a note-perfect “Für Elise,” we all played our pieces as fast as we could to make it all end.

I hated my piano lessons, but I never hated the piano. It reminded me too much of Kershaw. Before it came to us, it had stood in the corner of my grandmother’s living room. Scrollwork lyres adorned the front, and small pillars anchored the sides. Its tobacco-brown finish was a maze of cracks, and like nearly everything in that ramshackle house down in South Carolina, it harbored
the musty, desiccated smell of neglect, of attics and closed rooms full of things old and no longer used but from which one cannot be parted. When the piano came to us, that smell came with it, and every time I lifted the lid, I inhaled a memory of that old house, which by the time I knew it was more museum of the past than living residence.

Not pretty, not even handsome, the piano was big and clumsy looking. But I couldn’t have loved it more if it had been a calliope or a jukebox. My mother and I each saw it as our link to the past. For her, it conjured up a time when people still gathered around the piano to sing while she played, when she was still queen of all she surveyed. I simply saw a time that predated my own troubles at the keyboard. It made me think of visits to Kershaw when I was quite young, five at the most. It was always either summertime or Christmas. As soon as we arrived, I took up my post, lurking in the front hall or on the porch swing. From either spot, I could keep an eye on who came and went in the living room, a room that, while I waited, I memorized: the two tall windows flanking the piano on each wall, the window at the front letting in the green light from the deep front porch, the sofa and chair in matching dark wicker and hard satin-covered seat cushions, the tall ceilings, the
Blue Boy
and the
Rose Girl
in their oval frames suspended on golden braided cords hooked on the picture molding, and behind one of the double doors that led to the front hall, a tall, glass-fronted bookcase stocked with a set of encyclopedias so unconsulted that when I opened the bookcase one day and took out a volume, the pages, compressed for years, fell to pieces in my hands. If it was a Christmas visit, there would be coal burning in the shallow ceramic-tiled fireplace and a cedar tree decorated in the corner, its wispy branches drooping under the weight
of the sparkling lights, lights so old that the paint was chipped away in places and the raw filament showed through like a wound. When I complained that the tree compared poorly with the nicely proportioned balsams we put up, my mother explained that in Kershaw they still got their trees from the woods, the way they did when she was my age. I’m sure I didn’t bother hiding my impatience—and I would have been impatient with this or any other story—because I did not want to listen to her reminisce. I was there because the piano was there, and I gave her no peace—it never took much coaxing—until she raised the lid and began to play.

The only other object in the house that could compete with the piano was the hand-cranked, floor-model Victrola that stood in the dark hall beside the telephone table. The hall was more like a small room, a room with no windows but with a door in each of the four walls. One door opened onto the front hall, which was really a foyer that separated the living room from the front guest bedroom. Facing that door was the door that opened onto the back hall that led to the kitchen. The other doors opened into bedrooms, one of them shared by my grandmother and Kathleen. The other bedroom was used for storage, and that door was never opened. That was the room where my mother’s brother, Buddy, had mysteriously died in his sleep when he was twenty, and she was five.

No matter how hot it got outside, that center hall was always cool and shady, and if I wasn’t on the front porch in the swing or listening to Mother at the piano, that was where I camped out during our visits. No one else ever spent any time there unless they were talking on the phone, and no one in my family was much for long telephone conversations—even my mother, otherwise
loquacious, seemed to view a telephone with some suspicion. A cane-bottomed chair sat beside the telephone table, which also held a small lamp and phone book slim enough to stick in your back pocket. Across the hall sat an old, overstuffed armchair big enough for me to curl up in and read and nap. No one bothered me there, and I came to think of the hallway as my room in that house. But what really drew me back and held me there was the Victrola.

Taller than I was when I first encountered it, that primordial record player reminded me of one of those lacquered cabinets from which magicians made their pretty assistants vanish. To my mind, the real business of this machine was hardly less magical. When you opened the doors on the front, you found a shelf for records and a space where the sound came out (the only volume
controls were the doors on the cabinet—to make it softer, you closed the doors). On top was a domed lid that you opened to reach the turntable, a broad platter covered in still-bright green felt, and the tone arm and needle holder, a rococo device that began as a wand and terminated in a solid metal wheel, ornamented on each side with concentric circles, deco style. The wheel was hinged to the wand, and the true fit of that hinge, oiled metal gliding over metal, was reason enough to make you want to fool with that machine.

To play a record, you wound the crank on the side of the cabinet, then manually set the needle onto the already spinning disc. There were around a dozen shellac records in the cabinet, some so old they were printed on just one side. I remember only one disc out of the collection, because after I’d sampled what was there, that was the only one I played. On one side was a song called “Talking Blues.” The flip side held a song called “Hannah.” The artist was Chris Bouchillon. I was crazy about both songs, but I was craziest about “Talking Blues.” It began with a nimbly finger-picked guitar intro, and then a man began talking, not singing, in a pleasant tenor over the music: “If you want to get to heaven, lemme tell you how to do it:/You grease your feet in a little mutton suet,/Fan right out of the Devil’s hands/And slide right over to the Promised Land./Go easy./Make it easy./Go greasy.” Here was something new: a funny song about religion! “Behind the henhouse on my knees,/I thought I heard a chicken sneeze./It was only a rooster saying his prayers/And giving out the hymns to the hens upstairs.” Then the same man who has just explained how to get to heaven changes direction: “Standing in the corner by the mantelpiece,/Up in the corner by a bucket of grease,/I greased my feet with a little axle grease,/And went slipping
up and down that mantelpiece,/Hunting matches,/Cigarette stubs,/Chewing tobacco.” Smoking, drinking, dodging work—there were ten verses in all; every one testified on the side of laziness, frolic and sin, and I memorized them all. At first, my recitations amused the rest of my family, who plainly stopped listening after the first couple of verses, given the benign tolerance with which they regarded my performances. “Make up the beds, gal, make ‘em up nice./Old Preacher Johnson’s gonna be here tonight./He’s a chicken eater./Loves cake./Loves the ladies, too.” No one could say how the record got in the house, but the crackling hiss on its surface told me that someone had played it a lot. That, and the information on the black and gold Columbia label, was all I knew. I thought Bouchillon was black, since he sang, “Ain’t no use me working so hard./I got a woman in the white folks’ yard.” I didn’t know that this couplet was ubiquitous in old blues songs and sung as frequently by whites as blacks. I had no way of knowing that he was, in fact, a white man from Greenville, South Carolina, who had enjoyed some success in the twenties and thirties with a string of comic songs that he and his brothers and sometimes his wife honed on the medicine-show circuit. I didn’t know medicine shows had ever existed outside of the Westerns I watched on television. I didn’t know that this “Talking Blues,” released in 1928, when it sold an impressive 90,000 copies, was in all likelihood the first of its kind and would inspire the more famous talking blues of Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan. For that matter, I’d never heard the blues, or a song played on a guitar. My family knew nothing about music like this. Blues musicians, country fiddlers, soul shouters, gospel choirs, guitarists who played on the street for nickels and dimes—all the people who would inspire the folk revival that would blossom in
the sixties—these people were our neighbors, but we didn’t know them, and if we had, we probably wouldn’t have thought much of them. I once asked my father, years later, if he’d ever liked Hank Williams, since his life was so much like a Hank Williams song lyric. No, he said, he liked Bing Crosby.