The Song Reader (37 page)

I rarely cried at all, and never for upwards of fifteen minutes as I did that day with Grandma. Crying invariably led to an attack of my nervous breathing, and I had learned over the years to stop the feelings before the tears could begin. I expected to have an attack that day too, but instead I just kept crying until I managed to pull myself together and return to the job of reading
Jane Eyre.
I’d been reading it to Grandma since the day she came back from the hospital: partly because it had always been one of her favorite novels, but mainly because every time I asked her what book she wanted now, she’d say
Jane Eyre
as though the title had just occurred to her—even if we’d just finished it. We made it all the way through the book seven times and were halfway through the eighth when she finally passed away about a month later.

Before she died though, she managed to convince Jimmy that he should leave the Sanctuary as soon as possible. This was what he told me, only two weeks after Father and the preacher had buried her. He claimed Grandma had even told him where he should go, and it wasn’t to California, like I would have expected. It was to a place that made absolutely no sense. Missouri.

When I asked him why Missouri, he refused to say. My brother, who had always told me everything, would not tell me the reason for the most important decision he’d ever made in his life.

“Because there isn’t a reason,” I sputtered. “Because Grandma mumbled ‘misery’ and you decided she must have meant Missouri.”

He refused to argue. He was going to Missouri, end of discussion. He was leaving even though he knew how Father would feel about it.

“Too bad,” Jimmy told me, right before he left, “if I hurt him. He hurt us more.”

No doubt the anger I felt at Jimmy helped me watch him walk down that dirt road and disappear.

“I’m at the bus station,” Jimmy wrote. “I’ve never heard so much noise! The buses, the cars, talking, screaming, laughing! I’m sitting next to a woman from town who told me she heard our father was the richest man in New Mexico. Then she asked me, ‘Isn’t he eccentric, like Howard Hughes?’ I burst out laughing.”

I wasn’t sure who Howard Hughes was, but I looked him up in the appropriate volume of the encyclopedia. There wasn’t enough to conclude he was eccentric. I wondered how Jimmy knew to laugh.

From the beginning, he kept his promise to write; I was relieved about that. I got mail from him almost every day: sometimes letters, sometimes postcards. When he arrived in St. Louis, he sent me a card with an aerial view of the city. He talked about how excited he was, ending with, “I had to run in front of traffic to get a cab. Poor old man would shit if he knew.”

I winced at Jimmy’s crude language; I’d never heard him use a curse word before. The sad part was Father did know. He’d collected the mail himself every day for all the years we’d lived here. He read the postcard, and he saw all the return addresses on the letters as Jimmy moved from place to place, from new friend to new friend, trying to find where he belonged, he said. Find whatever it was he was looking for.

“I worry about him,” Father would say, nearly every night at supper. He still wouldn’t let me cook and nothing I could say would persuade him. Whenever I pressured him too hard, he would remind me of the day I was born.

“You only weighed five pounds. I could hold you in one hand.” His voice would grow soft. “I vowed that day to make sure nothing ever happened to you.”

One time I asked him, “What if your mother had vowed the same thing? Then how would we eat?”

He laughed a little, but he continued cooking the stew. And during the meal, he mentioned Jimmy again. Wondering how he was. Wishing he would return to us. Hoping he was all right, out there all alone in the world.

I was worried about Jimmy too, but I was also worried about Father. What Jimmy had done by leaving was no less than crush his spirit, and nothing I tried seemed to be of any help. My optimism was unrelenting; I never greeted Father with anything but a smile; I mentioned every day how lucky I felt to be here in the safest of places, but still, the shadow of sadness never left him.

It wasn’t even two years later when it took its inevitable toll.

Father was only sixty-one, but the disease that came over him made him seem like a very old man. For weeks I watched him struggle to get out of bed, eat almost nothing, hold his head between his thin hands and wince with a pain he wouldn’t talk about. He still insisted on doing all the cooking himself, but luckily, there was much less to cook now that it was just the two of us. We could and did go months without ordering any food. I could and did eat meal after meal of what I claimed was my new favorite: bread and prepackaged slices of cheese (no cutting required), so he wouldn’t have to prepare anything.

I knew it was bad when he asked me to call Dr. Humphrey for a visit. I rushed to Father’s study where he kept the only phone we had, an unusual kind, according to Jimmy—it could dial out but not ring in. Though I’d never used a phone before, I figured it out quickly and was so pleased with myself I almost forgot the urgency of my mission.

Dr. Humphrey came by that same day. He said he was concerned, but he couldn’t make a precise diagnosis unless Father would come to the hospital for tests. I tried to persuade him, but all my attempts went nowhere. He wouldn’t leave. He said the only thing he wanted was to see his son again.

I wrote to Jimmy. I’d been hearing from him less and less, but still, I expected a quick response given this emergency. No matter how angry he was with Father—and surprisingly, he seemed to get angrier as time went by; his recent letters were full of curses, talk of how our father had fucked him up royal and screwed up his whole life, et cetera to coarse et cetera—I couldn’t imagine that he could ignore my cry for help.

Two weeks later, when I still hadn’t heard anything, I snuck into Father’s study again and tried to track down a phone number for Jimmy, to no avail. A week or so after that I decided there was no choice: I had to go to St. Louis and get my brother.

I called Dr. Humphrey and asked him what to do about caring for my father. Mrs. Rosa, our housekeeper, was still with us, but she barely spoke English and she was only at the house one day a week. Dr. Humphrey sent a nurse who agreed to stay until I returned, as long as I gave her a large sum of money “up front,” which she explained meant before I left. I did so, and an hour later, dressed in what Grandmother had always called my Sunday best clothes, I walked through the door.

Father was still asleep and I couldn’t bring myself to say good-bye. I did leave him a long letter, in which I explained that I would be as careful and cautious as he’d raised me to be and promised to return to the Sanctuary very soon. I also told him I loved him, but I refused to let myself feel how true this was, knowing I would break down at the thought of how worried he would be when he discovered I was gone. But there was no choice. If the only thing he wanted was Jimmy, then I would just have to bring Jimmy home. Surely the two of us could convince Father to get the medical help that his life might depend on.

It was a Wednesday; my plan was to return by Saturday. It was feasible. Jimmy had told me the trip there took about a day and the trip back the same. That left me one day to find my brother, and it shouldn’t take half that, I thought, since I could just give the taxi driver the return address on the most recent envelope.

I had decided not to carry a suitcase or umbrella or even a purse, so a thief couldn’t come after me. I could wear the same clothes for three days; I’d always been a tidy person. My socks were the only things I would have to replace at some point. I had on three pairs of panties; I figured I would remove the inner pair each day and throw them out. I had the stack of money I took from Father’s desk drawer, hundreds of dollars (in case of emergency), curled together and shoved deep in the pocket of my skirt. I had my toothbrush wrapped in plastic and stuck in my sock. I had Dr. Humphrey’s phone number committed to memory, so I could call and check on Father’s condition each day. The last few letters Jimmy had written, with three separate addresses, were tucked under my sweater close to my heart. And folded into the bottom of my shoe was a page from a poem,
The Faerie Queene.
I’d cut it out carefully, so the binding of the book wasn’t disturbed. In the middle of the page was the line that would be my new motto:
Be bold, be bold, and every where Be Bold.

I admit I tried not to think too much about what all this boldness might entail.

Dr. Humphrey offered me a ride in his automobile to the local bus station, and I gladly took him up on it. Jimmy had walked the dirt path all those miles, but I wasn’t as healthy, nor did I have the time to waste. I took the local bus to Raton, and then the Greyhound to Denver, and then the second Greyhound to Missouri, and then I was finally in a taxicab, probably going down the same roads my brother had gone down when he first arrived in St. Louis. And he was right: the noise was the first shock. It was stunning how loud a city was: stunning and absolutely thrilling.

Everyone on the buses had been quietly pleasant. When people smiled at me, I acknowledged their smiles with one of my own, to be polite. After a while though, I was smiling more spontaneously. Nothing outside was bad. This was what Jimmy had been telling me for nearly two years, but I hadn’t believed him. I expected to be afraid. I was waiting to feel the dread of other people that Father felt, that he couldn’t help letting slip out now that he was too sick to keep up a brave front.

Nothing outside was bad, and so much was astonishing. The trip across Colorado, Kansas and Missouri was wonderful, but being in the city—knowing that I was in a real city, a place with thousands and thousands of fellow creatures—was almost more exciting than I could bear. I watched the crowds moving on the sidewalks. Such colorful clothes! The variety of expressions people made! The unusual songs playing on what appeared to be giant portable radios! The black people and brown people and especially all the younger people! People of my own age and Jimmy’s!

I’d been in the taxicab for fifteen minutes and I was feeling very bold—bold enough to speak to a total stranger. The driver had an appealing face; perhaps that was why I decided to let him be the first person in the city I spoke to. I was also proud that I had something to say to him. Some months before, Jimmy had sent me a ticket stub from a concert he’d attended. When it fell out of the envelope, I’d studied it carefully before putting it away. I knew the difference between a ticket and a stub. I knew the tickets the taxi driver had displayed were never used.

My question was so ordinary, or so I thought, and yet the next thing I knew, the driver was not only refusing to answer, he was so angry he turned all the way around at the first stoplight to look at me with what seemed to be unmitigated hatred.

The sudden feeling of fear struck me with the force of a blow, and yet I also felt vindicated. So
this
was what Father had tried to protect us from.
This
was why he kept us from any contact with the world outside the Sanctuary: because human beings were every bit as unpredictable as a tire swing, and just as capable of harm.

Of course the fear was stronger than the vindication, and I squeezed my eyes tight and wished to be home harder than I’d ever wished for anything in my life. When I found myself still in the cab, I also found myself headed for the worst kind of nervous attack. My heart was already pounding so hard I felt like it would beat its way right out of my chest, when I began to steady my breathing and calm myself the way my father had taught me, the way I’d been doing since I was a very small child. I opened my mouth and began to sing.

A starkly lyrical novel of page-turning intensity and rare emotional power, about following dreams and overcoming obstacles, about finding your voice and becoming the hero of your own life.

Patty Taylor can handle anything. So what if the guys in her band dismiss her as just a pretty face, hired by their manager to make them more popular? She’s already survived a bad childhood, a destructive teenage relationship, homelessness, and working twelve-hour shifts washing dishes. Traveling with the band gives her a way to provide for Willie, the two-year-old son she adores. But on a hot summer day in Kentucky, when Willie’s father shows up outside her hotel room, newly paroled from prison and intent on having her and his son back, Patty begins a journey that will change her from a girl who can put up with anything to a woman with a voice that can bring the house down.

Read on for a look at Lisa Tucker’s

Shout Down the Moon

Currently available from Pocket Books

I
know he’s coming. His sentence was seven years, but after less than three, he’s made parole. Mama sends me the news on one of her yellow stickies: FYI, with the date he’s being released—June 3, 1991—circled several times in thick black pen.

On the phone I remind her of the letter I sent him after Willie was born, explaining I wouldn’t be writing anymore, it was over between us. I talk as though I believe the letter convinced him, and change the subject while she’s still feeling relieved.

For weeks I expect him to show up at the club. Sometimes I peer out into the blackness of the audience, wondering if his eyes are on me, if he is listening. Once, I’m sure I hear him laughing right before the first set and I screw up one of the verses of our big opening number: a medley of oldies we call “Yesterday Once More.” Our keyboard player, Jonathan, frowns and later, grumbles to the other guys that I’m an air- head. He doesn’t like me, none of them really do. Before I came along a year ago, they were the Jonathan Brewer Quartet, no chick singer, strictly jazz. They didn’t make any money as Fred Larsen, our manager, likes to point out. Fred likes money and he likes me just fine.

Fred renamed the band, making me the primary attraction, the name on the marquee and the face in the advertisements. At the time I felt flattered; now I realize this means it will be easy for Rick to find me. And he does, but he doesn’t come to the club. We’re doing a two-week stint in Paducah, Kentucky; it’s the middle of the afternoon on a Saturday in July so hot the blacktop feels soft under my sandals. I’ve been down the road at the drugstore, picking up chewable vitamins for Willie, and as I round the corner, I feel my breath catch as I see him, slumping in a lawn chair outside of my motel room with his head against the green concrete wall. Asleep.