Finally the funeral was over. The people drifted away to leave only our family ready to ride home in Papa’s car. “I’m going to New York,” I said to Papa as he held open the front passenger door for me to get in. “I’ve decided I’m going to be a concert pianist like Momma wanted to be. There’s nothing, absolutely nothing that you can do to stop me.”
Arden was right behind me, ready to climb into our car, too, and sit with Vera and my aunt in the back seat. “You don’t know how to play the piano,” Papa replied harshly. “When your mother was your age she’d been playing for years. You have not once put your hands on the keyboard. That surely indicates you are not drawn to music.”
“Neither was she, Papa. She told me her parents forced her to take music lessons, until eventually she caught on. Then she began to like it very much. I’ll like music, too, once I know how to play.”
“Give Audrina her chance,” said Arden, who’d clung to my other hand during the funeral. I was hurt because Billie hadn’t come to see my mother buried.
“You stay out of this, young man,” growled Papa, throwing Arden a hateful, mean look. “You’re only a child, Audrina, and you don’t know yet what’s right for you. You have other gifts, gifts far more important than banging on the ivories.”
I didn’t believe for a minute that he really regretted making Momma only a wife and mother. Nor did I believe he’d let me escape him—but I was going to give it a try. I’d accomplish everything my mother had desired for herself when she was young and full of dreams. I’d make her dreams come true, rather than sitting on the rocking chair to make Papa’s dreams come true.
“It’s a foolish ambition,” began Papa, still glaring at Arden, as if he hoped he’d drop dead and never bother me again.
“Now, wait a minute, Mr. Adare. Stop putting Audrina down. It’s not a foolish ambition to want to fulfill her mother’s dreams. Audrina is just the sensitive, feeling kind of person who’d make a great musician. And I know just the right teacher. His name is—”
“I don’t want to hear his name!” stormed Papa. “Are you going to pay for her lessons, boy? For damned if I will. My wife’s father spent a fortune, thinking his daughter would become world famous, and she failed to follow through.”
Why, he was forgetting all he’d said the day Momma died. He didn’t have any regrets! None at all! “Because she married you, Papa!” I raged loud enough for the people still in the cemetery to turn their heads and stare our way. I blanched from their interested stares and moved my eyes to where that slender white headstone stood stark against the stormy sky. How disquieting to see your own name on a headstone.
“This is not the place to discuss careers,” said Papa.
Once more he addressed Arden. “And you, young man, can stay out of my daughter’s life from this day forward. She doesn’t need you, or your advice.”
“See you later,” called Arden, waving to me and, in his own way, showing his defiance.
“That boy means nothing but trouble,” grumbled Papa. Somehow or other, Vera had climbed over the backseat and sat between me and Papa, making him even more angry as she waved frantically to Arden when we passed him by.
Now that Momma was gone the house seemed empty, without a real heart, and Papa seemed to forget the rocking chair. It occurred to me one restless night that if Papa thought I could contact the First and Best Audrina by rocking and singing, perhaps I could communicate with Momma by doing the same thing. I wouldn’t scream if I saw my mother again. The thought kept me from falling asleep. Did I dare steal into that room and rock all alone, without Papa in the hall outside? Yes, I had to grow up. Somebody had to teach me how to, and Momma surely would know her mistakes and tell me how to avoid them.
Silently I tiptoed down the hall, past Vera’s room, where I could hear her radio playing. In the playroom I lit one dim lamp before I closed the door and looked around. It was not nearly so clean as it had been before Momma died. Aunt Ellsbeth said she had too much to do if she had to cook and clean and do the laundry as well. The few spiders that had scurried away to hide from Momma had reproduced and were clinging to the ceiling. Some were spinning webs between the lilies of the rocking chair. Feeling repulsed, I went to one of the two armoires and reached inside to find a baby dress. I yanked it off a hanger and dusted the rocking chair, then used the baby dress to shield my shoe before I squashed each spider dead. It was a messy, gruesome thing I’d never done before. Already I was growing stronger.
Trembling and weak, I sat gingerly in the chair, ready to jump out if anything bad happened. The house was so quiet I heard myself breathing. Relax, I had to relax. I had to become the empty pitcher that would fill with peace and contentment, and then Momma could come to me. As long as I thought of Momma and not that other Audrina, the boys in the woods wouldn’t come.
It was one of Momma’s songs I chose to sing.
… and he walks with me,
and he talks with me,
and he tells me I am his own …
For the first time since Papa had forced me into this chair, it didn’t terrify me, for Momma was waiting, as if she’d known I’d do this. Behind my closed lids I saw her, about nineteen, running in the fields of spring flowers, and I was a baby in her arms. I knew it was me and not the First Audrina, for around that little girl’s neck was my birthstone ring on a golden chain. Then I was seeing Momma helping me tie my sash, teaching me how to form bows. Then, much to my surprise, she had me beside her on the piano bench and was showing me how to play the scales. I was older this time, and the ring once worn on a chain was on my index finger.
I came back from the playroom terribly excited. Nothing terrible had happened. And what was more, I’d found out a secret. A lost memory had filled one hole in my brain. Unknown to Papa, Momma had given me a few piano lessons.
That knowledge I carried back to my bed, hugged tight in my heart, for now I knew for certain. It had been my mother’s desire to see me take her place, and find the career love had stolen from her.
Part 2
Music Begins Again
Life became very different in our house after Momma’s death. I no longer went into the cupola to find peace and solitude. I sat in the once-dreaded rocking chair, where I could feel that Momma was near. Because life was opening up for me more and more, I paid little attention to Vera, who had difficulty climbing the stairs. When it rained she limped worse than when it was dry. Still, I couldn’t help but notice she was beginning to be very concerned about her appearance. She washed her hair every day, curled it, polished her nails so often it seemed the house smelled constantly of polish remover. She pressed her slips, her dresses, and sometimes even her sweaters. Even her voice changed. She tried to speak softly and not shrilly as she used to do. I realized in many ways Vera was trying earnestly to imitate my mother’s many charms—when I thought they belonged to me alone.
The fall days that had seen the last of my mother soon shortened into winter. Thanksgiving and Christmas were bleak celebrations that made my heart ache for Papa and me. Even Vera looked sad when she stared at Momma’s empty chair at the foot of the table. When Papa was working I was alone in a house of enemies, a shadow of what I used to be when my mother lived. I clung to her memory desperately, trying to keep her image sharp in the vagueness of my nebulous memory. Never did I want anything about my mother to sink into those bottomless holes in my brain where all those awful forgotten memories struggled to reveal themselves.
Papa kept me almost a prisoner in our home, clinging to me with a kind of desperation that made me pity him, love him, hate him … and need him, too. I wasn’t supposed to be seeing Arden at all, but quite frequently I managed to slip away to the cottage in the woods.
Whenever I had the chance, I was at the grand piano trying to figure out how to place my hands, how to make a tune come magically from the keys. For hours and hours I banged away before I began to sense the piano resented the sour, ugly noises I made. I couldn’t play. Even if Momma had tri
ed to teach me a long time ago, I hadn’t inherited any of her talent, any more than I had inherited talent from the First and Best Audrina. Not gifted, not gifted, I went around tormenting myself.
“Audrina,” Arden comforted me one day after I complained to him that I wasn’t gifted, “no one magically, automatically knows how to play.”
“Listen,” I said, “I’ll tell Papa I just have to have piano lessons. He’ll pay for them if I plead hard enough.”
“No doubt,” he answered, looking away uneasily. Then, hand in hand, we walked toward his cottage. Much to my disappointment, Billie stayed at the window but still didn’t invite me inside the cottage. Arden and I sat on the back porch and talked to her through the open window. Flies could easily enter her house, and that would have driven my aunt crazy. Billie didn’t seem worried about flies, but she did seem happy to see me again.
That very evening I approached Papa about music lessons. “I’ve heard you banging. If ever anyone needed lessons, it’s you. Of course, your mother would have been thrilled. I’m thrilled, too.” I couldn’t believe he’d changed his mind so completely. He seemed lonely, bored, making me step closer to put my arms about him. Maybe, after all, Papa was going to try to let me be happy.
“I’m sorry for all the ugly things I said after Momma died, Papa. I don’t hate you, or blame you for her death. If only you’d bring Sylvia home I’d feel she didn’t die for nothing. Please bring Sylvia home soon.”
“My darling,” he said, looking far away, “I will. As soon as the doctors give the word, you’ll have your baby sister.”
I told myself that night that perhaps God did know what he was doing when he took away mothers and gave fathers a new daughter. Perhaps he had a good reason for doing what he did. Even if it did rob me of a mother I desperately needed, Sylvia wouldn’t miss her because she’d have me and wouldn’t know any better.
It was midsummer before the music teacher Arden knew came back from a long stay in New York City. Finally, one wonderful day Arden put me on the handlebars of his bike and rode me into Whitefern Village to meet Lamar Rensdale. He was tall and very thin, with a high, broad brow and wild, curly, chocolate-brown hair. His eye color matched his hair color exactly. He looked me up and down approvingly, smiled, then led me to his piano and asked me to demonstrate what I already knew. “Just fool around, like you said you’ve been doing,” he said, standing behind my shoulder as Arden sat down to smile encouragingly.
“Not as bad as you told me,” said Mr. Rensdale. “Your hands are small, but you can scale an octave. Did your mother play exceptionally well?”
That’s the way it began. Of course, Papa knew that it was Arden who rode me to and from the village, but he didn’t object. “But don’t you play with him in the woods. You stay in view of his mother at all times. You are never to be alone with him. Never. You hear?”
“Now, listen here, Papa,” I began, facing him squarely and struggling not to sound weak. “Arden is not the trashy, low-class kind of boy you think he is. We don’t meet in the woods, but on the rim. His mother sits in the window and talks to us. We’re seldom out of her sight. And she’s so beautiful, Papa, really she is. Her hair is dark like yours, and her eyes are like Elizabeth Taylor’s. Only Billie’s eyes are even prettier. And you’ve always said no one had eyes prettier than Elizabeth Taylor’s.”
“Isn’t that nice?” he said cynically, as if he didn’t believe any neighborhood woman could be as beautiful as a movie star. “Nobody is as beautiful as Elizabeth Taylor but Elizabeth Taylor. People are individuals, Audrina. Unique, each one of us. A miracle, each one of us—never to be duplicated, though this old world of ours may spin around another five to ten billion years. There will never be another Elizabeth Taylor, another Lucietta Lana Whitefern Adare, another you or another me. That’s exactly why you are so special to me. If ever I am lucky enough to meet a woman as beautiful as your mother, and as warm and loving, then I will fall down on my knees and thank God. I may never find another like her, and I’m lonely, Audrina, so lonely.”
He was lonely. It showed in his shadowed eyes, in his loss of appetite. “Papa, Billie is really beautiful. I haven’t exaggerated.”
“I don’t care what she looks like,” he said despondently. “I’m through with wives and married life. I’m devoting all my energies to taking care of you.”
Oh, I didn’t want him to devote all his energies to taking care of me! That meant he’d never give me any freedom. And that meant he’d spend all his time trying to turn me into the First and Best Audrina. And if he really believed there was only one of each person, why did he always want me to become her?
I stood before him, his hands still on my waist, and I couldn’t speak up and say more. I could only nod and feel confusion whirling like a maelstrom in my brain.
Since Arden rode off every day to the village, I was allowed five weekday lessons, which made me think I’d soon make up for lost time. For one solid hour I stayed with Lamar Rensdale and really tried to retain all he taught. According to Mr. Rensdale, I was an exceptional student with great natural ability. I wanted to believe he was telling the truth, not just flattering me just keep me coming back and paying his fees. Arden would hurry back from delivering his evening newspapers to pick me up when my lessons were over.
Late one night eight months after Momma’s death, I stole downstairs and again practiced on Momma’s grand piano. Its tone was so wonderful, so true, much better than the cheap piano my teacher used. Before my music lessons I hadn’t even noticed it had a tone. As I sat there in the dead of night playing my simple little piece, I closed my eyes and pretended I was Momma, and my fingers were as skilled as hers were, and I could pour into them all the nuances that she had. But it didn’t sound wonderful. My music didn’t send chills down my spine as hers had. Discouraged, I opened my eyes and decided I’d better keep a close eye on the music and not try to improvise. That’s when I heard a small sound behind me. I whirled to confront Vera standing in the doorway. She smiled at me archly, making me squirm.
“You sure are wrapped up in music all of a sudden,” she said. “What’s he like, your Mr. Rensdale?”
“He’s nice.”
“I don’t mean that, stupid. I heard the girls at my school say he’s very young, handsome and sexy—and a bachelor.”
Uneasily, I fidgeted. “I guess he is all of that, but he’s too old for you, Vera. He wouldn’t look at a kid like you.”
“Nobody is too old for me—but everybody will be too old for you, sweet Audrina. By the time you escape Papa, you’ll be creaky in the joints and wearing glasses to match your gray hair.”
The worst of this was I knew every word she said was true. Papa was latching onto me more and more with each passing day. In all ways but bedroom ones, he was making me his wife. In fact, I listened to his stock market talk with far more tolerance and understanding than Momma ever had, and my aunt had no patience with that sort of “boring talk.”
“I’m gonna make Papa give me music lessons, too,” stated Vera, glaring hard at me, and I knew she’d give me hell if she didn’t have her way.
The very next morning Vera was dressed in her most becoming clothes. Her strange, bright orange hair somehow flattered her very pale face, and her dark eyes were truly shocking. “You do everything for Audrina, and nothing at all for me,” she said to Papa. “And it’s my mother who cooks your meals and cleans your house and washes and irons, and you don’t pay her anything. I want to study music, too. I’m every bit as sensitive and talented as Audrina.”
He stared at her pale face until she flushed and turned half sideways, as she always did when she had something to conceal. “I need some beauty in my life, too,” she said plaintively, casting down her dark eyes and tugging on a length of her apricot hair.
“Once a week for you,” he said grimly. “You go to school and have lessons to learn. Audrina can have one class a day to keep her idle mind out of trouble.” I thought surely Vera would object to thi
s unbalanced arrangement, but oddly enough, she seemed satisfied.
I took Vera with me on Friday to introduce her to Mr. Rensdale. “Why, beauty must truly run in the Whitefern family, just as everyone in the village says,” he said as he held out his hand and smiled. “I don’t think I’ve ever met two prettier sisters.”
It seemed to me Vera’s fingers gripped his hand so that even when he wanted to stop shaking hands, she wouldn’t let go. “Oh, I’m not nearly as pretty as Audrina,” said Vera in a shy, small voice, fluttering her mascaraed eyelashes. “I only hope I’m half as talented.”
I had to stare, really stare. This girl talking to Mr. Rensdale wasn’t the Vera I knew. He liked her, I could tell that, and he was grateful for another student, especially one who flattered him and couldn’t stop staring at him. Whenever she could, she was picking lint from his suit or brushing back that lock of hair that kept falling on his forehead.
On the way home she confided all she knew about him from her school friends. “He’s very poor, a struggling artist, they say. I’ve heard he composes music in his spare time and hopes to sell his songs to some Broadway producer.”
“I hope he does.”
“You don’t hope it nearly as much as I do,” she said fervently.
The months passed so swiftly by without Sylvia coming home that I grew more and more apprehensive about my unseen little sister. I knew my father had taken my aunt to visit her several times, so she truly did exist, but not once did Papa allow me to go with him. He took me to the movies, to the zoo and, of course, to the First Audrina’s grave, but Sylvia was still out of bounds.