Singing Hands (11 page)

I crossed my arms over my chest in disappointment as Miss Grace said good night and excused herself to go upstairs. Mr. Vincent settled back on the davenport and reached for his coffee on the tray. Then I saw it—the tiniest of clues. As he raised the cup to his lips, I was sure I saw his hand trembling, just enough to make the china cup shiver on the saucer.

It had to be the same Vincent.

By the time I went upstairs, my sisters were already asleep. Whenever guests came, Margaret moved into Nell's bed and Nell moved into mine. Of course Margaret had repositioned the fan to blow in her direction. I promptly turned it back to blow toward my bed, then changed into my nightgown and climbed in with Nell.

I was tempted to poke her awake and tell her everything. Wouldn't she be amazed to find out that Mr. Vincent Lindermeyer, the man sleeping right down the hall in Margaret's room, had once sent Miss Grace dozens of love letters?

"Nell?" I whispered.

There was so much I was itching to pour out. Not just about stealing the letter from Miss Grace, but about skipping Sunday school. Though if I told Nell about skipping, I'd have to confess that I'd been pocketing my offering money and spending Sunday mornings in the Tutwiler.

"Nell?"

She was lost in sleep. I turned on my side to face her, part of me longing for her to wake up and part of me knowing my secrets had grown too awkward to share. Nell reminded me of one of those cherubs on the front of valentines, the way she always slept with her hands pressed together, tucked sweetly under one cheek.

If she wakes up in the next minute, I promised myself, I'll tell her everything. If she doesn't...

I rustled around in the narrow bed, kicking the hot sheet off my feet and rearranging my sticky nightgown. I even began to hum softly—my old favorite, "Beautiful Dreamer," from start to finish. Outside, it had started to rain. I could hear the patter of drops falling against the catalpa leaves.

A minute passed. Then another, until all at once, Nell sighed and turned to face the wall. I turned away, too, and we both settled deeper into our separate halves of the bed.

When Nell stirred the next morning, I rolled over and went back to sleep, grateful to have my rightful amount of bed space restored. By the time I dressed and went downstairs for breakfast, the house was strangely quiet. Mother had left a note for me on the kitchen table. Over a bowl of corn flakes, I managed to decipher her hurried scribbles and figure out everyone's whereabouts: Daddy had already taken Mr. Vincent to the station to catch the bus back to Talladega; Nell was spending the day at a friend's house; and Mother and Margaret had gone to Saint Jude's for choir practice.

I sighed into my bowl of soggy cereal. Our trip to Texas to see Aunt Glo was still three whole weeks away. And with Mr. Vincent gone so quickly, the house seemed even duller than usual. The rain last night had washed away the muggy air, and it was Saturday—a breezy day meant for strolls and bike rides and picnics in the park. But for me, it meant Mrs. Fernley's word-list assignment, which was due at precisely four o'clock. And I hadn't even started defining the first word.

I rinsed my bowl at the sink and stood for a few more moments at the kitchen window, watching the swallows dive in and out of the overgrown grape arbor in the backyard. I had no choice. I'd have to drag myself up to my father's lonely office and get to work with the Funk and Wag.

Then I had a brainstorm—an ingenious idea for a way to finish my word list and escape the house for a while. I rushed back to the kitchen table and carefully added my own note to the end of Mother's:

Dear All,

Went to the downtown library to work on summer reading list for junior high. Be back this afternoon.

XOXO,
Gussie

Ever since vacation had started, Mother had been nagging me about the junior high reading list. She was bound to be thrilled when she came home and found my note.

I flew around the house scrounging for fare money in pockets and under beds, and soon I was settled happily in my favorite spot on the streetcar—halfway back on the driver's side. I pulled my latest word-list assignment from my purse and spread it across my lap. Mrs. Fernley had assigned opera terms this week—a pleasant surprise after the vocabulary she usually chose, which consisted mainly of words to describe my bad habits. The week before, for example, she had picked terms relating to the state in which she found the bathroom whenever she came down to wash her hair—words like "slattern" and "squalid" and "harum-scarum." The week before that, it was words relating to loud, unsisterly behavior, such as "dissension" and "cacophony" and "pandemonium." I had never realized until the word lists began how well Mrs. Fernley could observe us from her lofty perch on the third floor.

I recited the new words in my head. "Libretto ... nocturne ... cantata ... troubador ..." Finding their meanings would be a perfect excuse to ask for Miss Grace's help at the library. And then maybe I could come up with a way to dig for other answers, too—about her years at ASD, about when she might have met Mr. Vincent.

When I entered the reading room at the library and caught sight of beautiful Pegasus raising his wings over the quiet, sprawling space, I felt the same flutter in my chest that I'd felt the first time Miss Grace showed me the painting. My heart skipped again when I spotted her sitting at a desk near the circulation counter. She was bent over a large book, twirling a strand of her blond hair around one finger.

Her face brightened when she looked up and found me standing over her.

Suddenly, I felt flustered. "Hi there!" I blurted out without even thinking. A librarian stamping books behind the counter shot me a disapproving glare.

Miss Grace waited for her to turn back to her work, then winked and began to sign. "Good thing we know sign language."

I nodded, embarrassed.

"What brings you here on a Saturday morning?" Miss Grace asked, her hands moving quickly.

I laid the creased word list on the desk before her. She scanned the paper, then looked up at me, perplexed. With a glance back at the grumpy librarian, I started to whisper, speaking carefully so my lips would be easy to read.

Miss Grace stopped me with a wag of her finger. "Sign, please."

I lifted my hands awkwardly to sign. "I need to find the ... the..." I didn't know the sign for "definitions," so I had to fingerspell.

Miss Grace was studying the word list again. She made the gesture for music with an added O. "You like opera?"

"Not really," I signed back. "Mrs. Fernley does. She's trying to teach me."

Miss Grace clapped lightly. "So that's the music I feel coming through the back of my closet every weekend!" She shimmied her hands over her desk as if she was feeling the tremble of an earthquake. "I always wondered."

I wanted to laugh, but a couple of people waiting at the circulation desk had turned to stare. I was relieved when Miss Grace led me over to a nearby table and told me to have a seat. Before long, she had brought back not just a thick Webster's dictionary but a whole stack of reference books about music. Then she patted my arm and left so I could get started.

I mournfully surveyed the pile of books, wanting to wail out loud. So much for livening up my Saturday and solving the mystery of Mr. Vincent. For a while, I watched Miss Grace as she worked, admiring how efficiently she helped everyone. I could tell which customers were regulars at the library. They wrote their requests on slips of paper or whispered carefully so she could read their lips. Then, with a quick nod, Miss Grace briskly set off in search of the information they were hunting for.

With a sigh, I hoisted open the Webster's, but the sight of the tiny printed words quivering like germs on the page made me want to slam it shut again. It was impossible to concentrate. I reached for another volume,
The Passion of Opera, A-Z,
and lazily began to flip through the pages. The words "love affair" caught my eye, and soon I found myself reading a description of a famous opera called
Pagliacci.
The next chapter told about
Madame Butterfly,
the opera I had heard Mrs. Fernley play over and over again. I had never realized that Madame Butterfly was actually a poor Japanese girl jilted by an American naval officer.

I turned more pages, and read about the bewitching gypsy girl Carmen, who gallivanted around with soldiers and bullfighters and ended up getting herself stabbed to death.

It was like a cruel trick—the more I read about opera, with all of its tragic stories of love affairs and jealously and betrayal, the more I couldn't help imagining the worst about Miss Grace's past. As usual, my thoughts galloped in crazy directions. What if Miss Grace was like Nedda in
Pagliacci,
who was carrying on with the peasant Silvio behind her husband's back? Nedda wound up getting stabbed just like Carmen.

With so much stabbing going on, I practically yelped out loud when Miss Grace came up behind me and touched me on the shoulder. I stared at the big clock over the doorway in surprise. It was already a quarter past noon. I had managed to work my way through a half-dozen scandals described in
The Passion of Opera, A-Z,
but I hadn't finished a single definition. I slid my elbow over the word list, trying to hide the wide stretches of blank space on my paper.

"Are you finding everything you need?" she signed.

I nodded enthusiastically, hunching even further.

"Want to take a lunch break with me?"

I couldn't help bounding to my feet like a puppy. Miss Grace smiled and collected her purse from her desk. Then she led me through the main library hallway and out into the sunshine of Wilson Park, where a man was selling hot tamales from a pushcart. I had never tried tamales, so I had to pretend I wasn't nervous when Miss Grace bought us two and handed me the steaming bunch of corn husks wrapped in paper. We found a bench under a shady poplar, and I stole glances at her, trying to copy the dainty way she unwrapped the shucks and then ate the cornmeal-and-spicy-meat filling with her fingers.

I was still marveling over how good tamales tasted when Miss Grace wiped her hands on her napkin and signed, "So your father's guest left this morning?

I stopped chewing and nodded. I never imagined she would be the one to bring him up. And now Miss Grace was touching her shoulder with a letter V—the same name sign Mr. Vincent had shown Nell and me yesterday when we met him in front of Saint Simon's.

"That's what the students used to call him at ASD," she added.

I gulped down the lump of tamale in my throat and tried to look politely surprised. "Oh, I didn't know you knew each other," I fibbed, working to keep my hands steady.

Miss Grace kept her gaze on a couple of pigeons pecking crumbs at our feet as she signed. "He was a few years ahead of me at ASD. After he graduated, he stayed on and taught in the woodworking shop. He was a fine carpenter."

"Daddy says he's an assistant principal now," I told her.

Miss Grace's hands fell still for an instant. "Oh," she breathed. "I didn't know."

All at once, I realized how obviously I had been staring, with my mouth practically hanging open in suspense. I took my last bite of tamale, praying she would go on.

After another minute of thinking, she did. "I'm not surprised he's been promoted," she continued in a burst of signs. "He was a favorite at ASD. When I worked there, I was always a little jealous of how much his students loved him."

"You worked at ASD, too?"

She bobbed her fist up and down for "yes." "After I graduated from the high school there, I worked as a supervisor in the girls' dormitory and helped the secretary in the main office."

"For how long?" I asked in a rush, leaning forward.

"For two years. I loved my job, but my parents had been begging me to move closer to home. So I finally gave in and came back to Birmingham. I met James at church a few weeks later.... Mother and Father introduced us."

"You never went back to ASD?"

"No." She smiled wistfully. "James asked me to marry him."

I glanced from her hands to her face and back again, searching for some sort of clue, just as I had last night in the parlor. Sure enough, there it was—her palms clasped tightly together in the sign for "marry," so sincere and final. Then she was gazing: down at the wedding ring on her left hand and twisting the thin gold band around and around on her finger.

I stared at the wedding band, too, my brain racing to fit the pieces of her story together. Mr. Vincent must have fallen in love with Grace when she worked at ASD. But by the time he realized how he felt, he was probably too late. She had married Corporal Homewood, and she was devoted to him. She was devoted to him still, and obviously any spark between Miss Grace and Mr. Vincent had died out long ago.

"I have a new nickname for you," she said out loud, and poked my arm playfully. "Miss Twenty Questions." I could hear the teasing in her voice. Still, I touched my nose and shook my head, apologizing for being so nosy.

Miss Grace waved away my apology. "I like your questions. It's good to have you here to eat lunch with ... and to sign with. Sometimes I go days without signing."

I couldn't keep my face from breaking into a foolish grin.
Me.
Miss Grace said she liked signing with
me
of all people. I thanked her for the compliment, pleased with how light and graceful my hands suddenly felt moving through the air.

***

I expected Mrs. Fernley to be disappointed with me. I had finished only half of my word list. But at least she was impressed with the way I used each of those words in a sentence.

"Well, Gussie," she said, looking up from my assignment. "Your work is incomplete, though I admire your use of the word 'aria,' and I quite agree with your assessment."

She recited my sentence out loud in her crispest voice. '"In
Pagliacci,
Canio sings one of the greatest tenor arias in opera history.'" She seemed surprised. "That's very good. When, may I ask, did you have the pleasure of hearing
Pagliacci?
"