Clothes, Inflections, and a Piano
Rachel’s day with Posy Fossil made a great difference to her. On Sunday morning, as breakfast was finished, she decided what to do about her clothes. She would rush up and put on her m’audition dress, with her coat over it so that Peaseblossom and Bee would not notice what she had on. This worked perfectly. Posy turned up to fetch her punctually at ten, and Rachel rushed down to her. Peaseblossom smiled
It see her so pleased and excited and shamed her by congratulating her on taking a coat. Bee kissed her and asked if she had her bathing suit and ballet shoes, and nobody noticed her flock.
The drive to Posy’s home was lovely because they talked ballet all the way, and it was only when they were walking across Posy’s garden to the swimming pool that Rachel remembered her frock, and then for the very opposite reason she had supposed she would think of it. Posy’s sister Pauline, the film star, was lying on a chair in the sun. She got up when she heard Posy’s voice and came across the lawn to meet them. One look, and Rachel saw that what Pauline was wearing was almost an exact copy of the cotton frock she had taken off as unsuitable. Pauline was not a bit what Rachel had supposed film stars were like. She was not as bouncy a person as Posy, but just as easy to talk to; in fact, the only thing about her which was what Rachel had expected was that she was beautiful. She kissed Rachel and toldher the family was thrilled to have her with them, as they all wanted to know the latest news from England.Then she took her by the arm and introduced her to her guardian, whom she called Garnie, saying that most people called Garnie Aunt Sylvia, and Rachel could, too The Fossil’s old nurse, Nana, had taken Rachel to the audition, was sitting by the swimming pool darning a pair of Posy’s tights. She gave Rachel a friendly, welcoming smile. Then came the moment Rachel dreaded. Nana said “Take off that hot coat, dear, and give it to me.”
Rachel took off the coat. Her cheeks were pink with shame when she had to let them see that she was wearing a red crepe de chine dress made from Peaseblossom’s old evening dress. Aunt Sylvia gave Rachel a quick, surprised glance, and Rachel couldfeel she was thinking, “Funny she does not look as if she would wear clothes like that on a Sunday morning.” Posy was practicing dancing steps and noticing what Rachel wore, but Pauline’s face was half, halfsympathetic. Nana, though, was a person who said what she thought.
“Good gracious, child what did your mother send you that dress for? There’s no audition today. You’ve come to play in the garden Take it off, and put on your bathing suit. Later I’llfind you one of Posy’s playsuits.”
Rachel’s cheeks grew redder. She wished a crack would appear in the ground so she could slide through it and disappear. She had never thought that the Fossil family would think Bee had let her wear that frock. She said in a whisper “Mom doesn’t know I’m wearing this. It’s m’audition dress.”
Pauline flung her arms around Rachel.
“I knew it! I knew it! Oh Garnie, Isn’t she like us!”
After that the day became heavenly Aunt Sylvia, Nana, Pauline, and Posy could not talk fast enough to tell Rachel about themselves when they had lived in London and gone to Madame Fidolia’s academy. Rachel had never imagined that Pauline or Posy could ever have been poor. She had thought of them as always having been rich and successful, but they had been really poor once and had had a dreadful struggle to go to auditions in the right clothes. Pauline said the minute Rachel took off her coat she knew that she had on her m’audition dress and that she guessed she was trying to wear the right clothes for California, for that was just what she would have done when she was Rachel’s age. The Fossils’ conversation was all of the “Do you remember?” sort, and all the remembering was how frocks had been obtained for special occasions. When at last they stopped remembering, Rachel felt so at home that she found herself telling them not only about Jane acting the part of Mary but how she felt about it.
“Oh, don’t I know!” Pauline said.
Posy, who was dancing, stopped dead at that.
“You don’t. Petrova never could act at all, let alone have a part you wanted.”
Pauline explained to Rachel that she, Posy, and a third sister, Petrova, were all adopted and only sisters because they had chosen to share the name of Fossil. That Petrova, the second eldest, had been at Madame Fidolia’s and done a few things on the stage, but she had always hated it because she wanted to fly. During the war, she had been a ferry pilot, ferrying new airplanes from the factories to the air bases. Now she was working in the experimental part of an airplane factory.
Posy broke in there. “She’s inventing something that’s going to put the name of Fossil into the history books. You’ll see.”
Pauline nodded as if that were certain. “But I know how you feel about Jane. Because I’ve felt like that about Posy.”
Posy stood on one leg, holding the other over her head. “Me? Why? You never wanted to dance.”
“I shouldn’t you’d ever have felt left behind, because you’ve always been success. You played Alice in Wonderland when you twelve.”
Pauline was pulling off her dress, under which she had a bathing suit. “Yes, but I’ve always wanted to be a great actress. I want to act Viola in Twelfth Night, and Portia, and Rosalind-oh, hundreds of parts- and here I am making movies.”
“You were sweetly pretty in the last one,” Nana interrupted.
Pauline threw her frock onto a chair “‘’ Sweetly pretty’ just describes it.” She undid Rachel’s frock. “Put on your bathing suit and that your stars you haven’t got the part of Mary or been picked for Pirouette. You be like Posy-know what you want, and scorn all the things that aren’t part of what you want.”
“Have a nice swim, dear, and later Posy can bring you up to her room. I’m going to look at a lot of things she’ll never wear again that
Aunt Sylvia looked worried. ‘What about your mother? Will she mind?”
Nana was moving toward the house with Rachel’s things over her arm. “Nonsense, Miss Sylvia, putting ideas like that in the child’s head! You can send a nice note to Mrs. Winter. Pretty things to wear will make you feel a lot better, won’t they, dear?”
The clothes, the fact that Posy gave her a present of three dancing lessons a week with Madame Donna, and that John could drive her to them did make Rachel feel much better. It was a good thing, for she had a lot to put up with in the next few weeks. Jane and Jane’s appointments seemed to be the only things anybody talked about.
Jane did not make life easy for Rachel. Rachel tried at first to be nice and talk about Jane’s work, and in fact, she really w as interested in everything that happened at the studio. But Jane was simply awful. She nearly always answered, “It’s no good telling you about that; you wouldn’t understand.” Nobody could like that sort of thing from anybody, let alone from a younger sister. Many mornings and evenings, when Rachel and Jane were alone in their bedroom, it was all Rachel could do not to hit her.
Tim did not see nearly as much of Jane as Rachel, but the little he did see was enough.
“Jane was always terrible,” he grumbled to Rachel, “but now she’s nastier than I thought any person could be.”
Aunt Cora was the only person who found Jane improved. Soon after Jane’s contract had been signed, Aunt Cora gave her first party for the Winters, and she actually bought Jane a frock for it. It was of yellow muslin with little frills at the shoulders, and to go with it there were very short yellow socks and shoes. To explain why she was outfitting Jane and nobody else, Aunt Cora said in her whiny way, “Your Mossel friends have given you plenty of clothes, Rachel, and Tim’s all right, but Jane seems to have nothing to wear, and she should have now.” She said “now” in such a way that it sounded as if acting the part of Mary had made Jane into somebody new.
Jane behaved beautifully to Aunt Cora. She flung her arms around her and told her she was the nicest aunt in the world. Rachel and Tim thought this the final awfulness of Jane, considering how she spoke about Aunt Cora as a rule. They g
ave very good imitations of people being sick to show how they felt; but that only made Jane worse, and she kissed Aunt Cora again.
On the night of the party, Jane was a person none of the family had ever seen before. Not a sign of black-doggishness, not a sign of being bored at handing around plates; she was all smiles and politeness. Aunt Cora had explained that well-brought up American girls curtsied when they met people and Jane even agreed to that. Rachel and Tim, standing about unnoticed heard over and over again, “This is my niece Jane, who has taken over little Ursula Gidden’s part in The Secret Garden.” Then they watched Jane curtsey and smile and saw Aunt Cora’s friends look admiring and say she was cute and darling.
John, Bee, and Peaseblossom were enjoying the party so much, for they found Aunt Cora’s friends amusing and gay, that they did not have much time to notice the children. Bee did say “Oh, dear do look at Jane playing up to Cora. She’ll be dreadful to tomorrow.
But John only laughed. “Won’t do Jane any harm; it’s the only time I’ve seen her give a display of good manners, don’t stop her, for goodness’ sake.
The real reason why Jane was being so especially awful was a reason nobody guessed. She was absolutely miserable at the studio. Being Jane, instead of admitting she was miserable, she stuck her chin in the air, pretended everything was marvelous and behaved insufferably. Her hope that everybody at Bee Bee studios would treat her like royalty had been dashed at the very outset. She was not used in the early scenes of the picture, and so, at the moment, she was just another child going to school. There was a little grandeur when the police at the gates recognized her and John drove the car onto the lot without being questioned, but that was the end of the grandeur.
Nobody and could make a person feel more ordinary and unimportant than the people Jane met for the rest of the day. There was Miss Barnabas, head teacher of the school. She did not think it was good for children, whether they were world-famous or not, to be treated differently from children in any ordinary school. She was in charge of a mixed collection of boys and girls between the ages of eight and eighteen. Many of them had faces as well known as Princess Margaret’s, but it made no difference to Miss Barnabas: They were treated as ordinary pupils. Jane, whom nobody had ever heard of, really was an ordinary pupil, and to her great annoyance she was not even an especially bright one.
In the Bee Bee studio school there were more teachers than in an ordinary school because at any moment a boy or girl might be wanted on a set, and if that happened, a teacher would have to go along if the child had not completed three hours of lessons for the day. A corner of the floor where the film was being shot would be fixed up as a schoolroom, and to a minute the three hours of lessons would be made up.
Jane was handicapped in some subjects, like history, because it was taught differently and from a different angle in the United States, but even without that she knew that she was going to have to work very hard to keep up. Unfortunately for Jane, her way of trying to keep her end up when she felt it was down was to be truculent and unpleasant. Before she had been in the school a week, Miss Barnabas was saying to the other teachers, “Jane Winter seems badly raised.” That remark would have scandalized Peaseblossom when she had heard it.
The other people Jane met each day were Mrs. Gates of the wardrobe department and Miss Steiman, the coach. The large wardrobe for Mary had to be made over for Jane, and this seemed to her to take hours and hours. She thought it all unnecessary, the dresses fitting well enough without being altered as far as she could see. She did not say what she thought about the fittings, for there was something about the cool competence of Mrs. Gates which kept her silent. But she looked her most black-doggish, and her expression did not escape Mrs. Gates. Several times she said to her seamstresses, “What a bad-tempered child that little Jane Winter is,” and the seamstresses sighed and said how different from dear little Ursula. Ursula was loved by everybody it seemed. She was a sweet-tempered, nice-mannered clever child, and though Jane had never seen her, she grew to hate her. The more thought about Ursula, the higher her chin stuck in the air and the sulkier she looked.
The worst trial of Jane’s day was the time she spent with Miss Steiman. This happened every afternoon; Miss Steiman worked with Jane on her part. Every time that she had to say had to be said in a certain way and that depended on what Miss Steiman called inflections. Every afternoon Jane heard, “Your inflections Jane! … Your inflections!” the word “inflection” made Jane furious. She could not see, if she said a line in the right tone, that it mattered if she got the right inflection or not, and she fought Miss Steiman every line. The truth was that Jane who had never acted in her life, did not really understand what an inflection was and she did not try to learn. Every day poor Miss Steiman, who was a patient woman said, “I’d rather coach anybody else for twelve hours than spend half an hour with that little Jane Winter. That child just wears me out.”
The one nice part of Jane’s day was the time spent with David Doe. David had Bob, Mickey, two more squirrels, a baby fox a crow a pheasant, seven rabbit, and a pony in a kind of little zoo on the lot. Every afternoon Jane was taken was taken by Bee to play with David and his creatures. Actually this time part of her work but Jane did not know this, and the spent with David was perfect. They never talked much because David was busy. None of the birds or animals was allowed to be fed by anybody but him. When they saw him, therefore, they connected him first with food and would fly or jump to him and nuzzle or peck in his pockets or at his hands. What Jane had to do was to be about every day so that they all would get used to her and treat David with the same confidence when Jane was there as they did when she was not. Actually better than that happened. Jane, so difficult with human beings, was a different person with birds and animals. If Miss Barnabas, Mrs. Gates, or Miss Steiman had seen her then, they would not have believed their eyes, for a gentle, shining-eyed Jane was not a person they had ever met.
One day Miss Steiman told Bee that the shooting of The Secret Garden had reached the place where Mary came into the story. Jane would start working the next day. In the funny way things seemed to happen in California, it was a day when there was news for everybody. Rachel had a phone message from Posy Fossil. Manoff had said she might attend rehearsal. Everybody the Winters knew in England had written letters which arrived that day. A gentleman was taking an interest in Tim from the point of view of putting him on a radio show.
Peaseblossom had driven the Ford over to fetch Jane and Bee and knew none of the excitements. So when Jane strutted into the hall and announced, “They start filming me as Mary tomorrow,” her words were drowned. Rachel danced up to Bee and flung her arms around her.
“Imagine! Tomorrow Monsieur Manoff will let me watch a rehearsal. Isn’t it the most gorgeous thing that ever happened to anybody!”
Tim, who was playing his imaginary grand piano, stopped in the middle of a concerto. “I may be going to play a piano on the radio. A man’s coming to see Dad about it.”
The family gasped. On the radio! What a dream come true!
Aunt Cora clasped her head. “Radio! This is too much. You know, John, when I invited you all, I never thought of such things happening. I’m worn out with all this excitement.”
John laughed. “Don’t worry, old girl. You look upon us as you might upon a snowstorm-just a passing affair. When we’ve gone, you might miss us, you never know.”
18
The First Day’s Shooting
Mr. Hiram P. Sneltzworther, who wanted Tim to play on a radio program, came to call the next afternoon, and in Aunt Cora’s living room he did a lot of talking. Mr. Sneltzworther said he was a man who had made himself. He had started as a small boy selling newspapers, and today he was just about the most important dealer in secondhand cars. Surely John and Aunt Cora had heard of Hiram’s Hour? Luckily Aunt Cora had. John took refuge behind Aunt Cora's saying, “Why, of course. Everybody knows Hiram’s Hour,” and just grunted in a way which could have meant yes and could
have meant no. Mr. Sneltzworther said he never let himself rest. There was never a moment day or night when he was not looking for something new for Hiram’s Hour. So when he ran out of cigarettes outside the Antonios’ store and happened to hear Tim play, he had a brain wave.
“I can see him, Mr. Winter. The hall packed with people. And Junior sitting at a great big piano, playing something catchy and perhaps cracking a few jokes with the announcer. You needn’t worry about the formalities. Approval has to come from the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children; but it’s not a complicated matter, and the radio people will give you all the help you need.”
Aunt Cora was so pleased she was almost signing a contract for Tim when John stopped her. He said decisions of that sort he left to his children to decide, so he called Tim in.
John placed Tim between his knees so that he would not fidget and explained as clearly as he could what Mr. Sneltzworther wanted. When he finished, Tim thought for a minute and said nothing. Mr. Sneltzworther was afraid Tim might not be appreciating the wonderful opportunity he was being given.
“My announcer’s the funniest man. I’ve heard folks say they laughmore at him than Bob Hope. And just think of all you could buy with a few bucks …”
Tim swung around toface Mr. Sneltzworther.
“Enough bucks to rent a piano?”
“If yougo over big enough, to rent two or three pianos.”
Tim s face was scarlet. How pleased Bella would be! Even she had not thought that the Lord wouldbe sending more than one piano.
“I want only one piano but if there are enough bucks, I should like some music.”
John gave Tim an affectionate slap. “Excuse my offspring’s sounding mercenary. They all understood that while they are over here, any money they need for lessons and so on they’ve got to earn.”
Tim wanted to tell Bellaabout the piano. He said good-bye to Mr. Sneltzworther who looked admiringly after him.