Anybody Can Do Anything (3 page)

We had just dumped our five hundred and seventy-second stone into the wheelbarrow and were morosely trying to subtract 572 from 10,000 when Mary had her idea. “I’ll get
all the kids in the neighborhood in the summerhouse, you tell them ‘Nancy and Plum’ [a continued story about two little orphans I’d been telling Mary in bed at night for years and years] and when you get to the most exciting place you stop and I’ll tell them you won’t go on until they each pick up a hundred stones and put them in the well.” It worked loo. That afternoon we got 1,100 stones dumped in the well. The next day the smarter children didn’t show up but, by stopping twice in the story, we got the six that did come to gather two hundred stones each so we actually fared even better than the day before.

By the end of the week, over six thousand stones had been dumped in the well, Nancy and Plum, who had made a harrowing escape from the orphanage, had been captured by Gypsies, kidnapped by bank robbers, lost in an abandoned mine, weathered a terrible storm in a haunted house, adopted a baby who turned out to be a prince, stowed away on a boat to China and finally come to rest with a dear old farmer and his wife who had an attic full of toys, and I felt like my bath sponge when I squeezed it dry.

Daddy’s cultural program with lessons in piano playing, singing, folk dancing, French and ballet, added further proof to Mary’s theory that anybody can do anything and, in her case, without practicing.

Our favorite piano teacher among many, and the one we clung to longest, was a Miss Welcome, a very temperamental Kuropean who calcimined her arms dead white up to within an inch of her short sleeves, dressed entirely in fuchsia color, wore turbans with flowing veils when she taught, always had fish breath, counted on our backs with her strong fingers digging into the flesh, “Bun and boo and bree and bour!” screamed, “Feel, f-e-e-l, FEEL IT!” as she paced around the room her veils flying, her calcimined arms beating out the rhythm like big plaster casts, often produced real tears (to our delight) when we made mistakes. “Oh, dear God, no,
not B flat!” she’d moan, covering her face with her hands and sobbing brokenly.

Miss Welcome never bored us with scales or exercises or any of those stupid little Pixie-in-the-Glen or Lullaby-for-Tiny-Hands type of thing. Everybody studying with her started off the very first day on some great big hard well-known piece by some great big hard well-known composer. If, by our third lesson, we couldn’t manage the full chords or the fast parts in say, Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in C Sharp Minor, Miss Welcome cut them out. She cut the bottoms off octaves and the tops off grace notes without turning a hair. “Now try it,” she’d say and if we still couldn’t play it she’d take out her ever-ready pencil and x out the whole hard part. “Now,” she’d say, “let’s hear some feeeeeeeeeeling!” and with the fervor of relief we’d bear down and pound feeling into what was left.

Because I had long, thin hands and was so scared of Miss Welcome, I bawled at every lesson, she told me I was very very sensitive and gave me long sad selections with enormous chords and huge reaches. “Bun and boo and bree and bour, now come on Betsy, play, play, PLAY!” she’d yell at me and I’d begin to cry. “I can’t reach the notes,” I’d sob, my long, unyielding hands trying to reach the two keys over an octave so unreasonably demanded by Schumann. “You must reach it. You CAN AND YOU MUST!” Miss Welcome would hiss spittily into my tearstained face. I tried and tried. I practiced one and two hours every day on my sad, great pieces but my heart wasn’t in it. I didn’t want to play slow, sad things with huge chords that gave me bearing-down pains. I wanted to be like Mary, who talked back to Miss Welcome, hardly ever practiced, played entirely by ear (she didn’t learn to read music until after she was married), chose her own loud, showy pieces and whose small freckled supple hands flew over the keys like lightning. Now that I think
about it my sister Mary was really one of the pioneers in the field of the medley.

When Daddy and Mother had company we children usually performed. First Dede, who had perfect pitch even at two, sang “My Country ‘Tis of Thee,” then Cleve, until his clarinet playing had progressed to solos, recited, then Mary and I played the piano.

I would give a sweaty-fingered uninspired performance of my latest piece exactly as it was written and exactly as Miss Welcome had taught me even to the lowered wrists, high knuckles and leaning forward and pressing heavily on the keys for depth of tone. I always knew my pieces and never made a mistake but nobody cared, I could tell from the bored rattle of newspapers, nervous scraping of chairs, even snores, so audible during the long, long waits between notes required by the dramatic Miss Welcome. “That’s very nice Betsy,” Mother would say when at last I finished one of those interminable D.C.L. Fine pieces where you keep playing the same thing over and over with a different ending.

Then it was Mary’s turn. Up she would flounce to the piano and effortlessly dash off Grieg’s “Carnival,”
“Danse Negre”
“Anitra’s Dance,”
“Le Papillon” “Solfeggietto”
or “Rustle of Spring,” and everyone would say, “Isn’t she talented?” and only I, in my envy, noticed that each was seasoned with the other and they all reflected strongly the influence of composer Mary Bard.

Miss Welcome openly adored Mary even when Mary was talking loud and trying to force her to believe that Grieg had written in that Chopin passage in Beethoven’s Sonata
Pathétique
and she always eventually gave in to her.

When Mother and Daddy took us to hear De Pachmann Mary and I were so entranced with his playing of Chopin’s Third Ballade that Mary decided that she would play it in the spring recital, which was only about a month away. Miss Welcome said, “Mary, darling, you are terribly, terribly
talented but the Third Ballade is too difficult and there is not enough time.” Mary said, “I’ll practice four hours a day.” Miss Welcome said, “Not enough.” Mary said, “I’ll practice eight hours a day, twelve, sixteen,” and finally Miss Welcome gave in and with only slight encouragement sat down at the piano and played the Third Ballade for us. She couldn’t hold a candle to De Pachmann in technique but she had it all over him in dramatics. For the soft parts she stroked the keys as though they were tiny dogs, and when she came to the dut-dah—dut-dah—dut-dah, dah, dada, dah, dah . . . she lifted her hands off the keys about four feet and came down on the wrong notes but the effect was very brrrright and certainly staccato. For the loud passages she used full strength and full pedal, topped off with grunting and heavy breathing. While she played, Mary and I, to keep from hurting her feelings, stifled our laughter in her purple velvet portieres that smelled of mildew.

For the next month I read the notes and Mary memorized them and by recital time we both knew the Third Ballade, but Mary played it, giving a brilliant performance if you discounted her omission of several runs and that entire, most difficult, interval near the end where the left hand is supposed to race up and down the keyboard while the right hand pounds out the original melody. Miss Welcome, to whom omission didn’t mean that much, shouted, “Bravo, Bravo,” from the back of her stuffy little parlor where the recitals were held and then rushed forward, kissed Mary on both cheeks and said, “Oh, Mary, Mary, I didn’t think you could do it.” To be perfectly honest, I wasn’t sure she had.

We both took singing from our Sunday School teacher’s sister, or rather Mary took singing and I played her accompaniment, but we always referred to it as our singing because it took both of us for a performance.

Mrs. Potter, our teacher, had an enormous contralto voice
and was a thick singer and always sounded as though her throat was full of phlegm. She was supposed to be a very good teacher and to know Madame Schumann-Heink, which fact she just happened to mention at least ten times during every lesson. “Watch my diaphragm,” Mrs. Potter would demand as she sang, “Caddy me bok to old Vugiddy. Deeahs wheah de cottod ad de sweed bodadoes grrrrow. Deahs wheah de buds waughble sweed in de sprrrring tahb . . . . . .”

At first Mrs. Potter wanted me to study singing too but Mother thought that, as I had once had very bad tonsils, it would be better for me to be Mary’s accompanist, which was fine for a while.

“Pale hahnds I loved beside the Shalimah . . . ah, wheah ahhh you now, oh wheah ahhh you now?” Mary wailed at Cousin Reginald Coxe, who was painting Mother’s portrait and had to endure this form of reprisal. “When the dawn flames in the sky, I love yewwwww. When the birdlings
wake and cry, I love yewwwww. . . .” Mary’s rendition
of “At Dawning” was to me the most beautiful thing in the world and always brought tears to my eyes. Mary’s soprano voice was clear and true but not that good, so probably adolescence had something to do with it.

We were about twelve and fourteen then and loved romantic things but Mary’s love of romance took a different turn from mine. While I wanted her to sing “At Dawning” every time we performed so I could get tears in my eyes, she wanted to swathe herself in Mother’s Spanish shawl, clench her teeth and sing, “Less than the dust, beneeeeeth thy chaddiott wheeeeel, Less than the rust, that never stained thy saw-word.” Not only that, but having by this time ceased all pretense of practicing, she often made up her own tunes and words and her unimaginative accompanist, often a page behind, after frantically changing keys and turning pages, would finally stop dead and point out to Mary where she was and where I was and what she had sung and what she
should have sung. This infuriated the great artiste and she would assume a tortured expression and sigh heavily as we got ready to start over.

It was during this cultural interlude that my brother Cleve, who had begun ominously to refer to Mary and me as “those darn gurls” and to fill the baseboard of his room with shotgun shells, put an enormous automatic bolt on his bedroom door, spent all his free time with the Laurelhurst bus driver and ate Smith Brothers cough drops by the box. One day Gammy interrupted one of our best recitals to show Mother a large armful of empty cough drop boxes and to tell her that it might interest her to know that while her daughter was traipsing around in her naked strip (her interpretation of the Spanish shawl) singing those lusty songs, her son had become a dope fiend.

Then Mary entered and won an elocution contest.

“Fat black bucks in a wine-barrel room,
Barrel-house kings, with feet unstable
Sagged and reeled and pounded on the table . . . !”

she shouted as she sagged and reeled around the kitchen, pounding on the table so hard her fist stuck to the oilcloth.

“Beat an empty barrel with the handle of a broom,
Hard as they were able, Boom, Boom, Boom,
With a silk umbrella and the handle of a broom,
Boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, Boom.”

she roared. Then suddenly half-crouching, with eyes like slits, she reached behind her and got her right arm and thrust it directly at us, the stiff index finger appearing suddenly at the end like a knife blade on a cane. Still crouching, her squinty eyes on the pointing finger, she slowly moved the arm in a half-circle and hissed through clenched teeth:

“Then I saw the Congo, creeping through the black,
Cutting through the jungle with a golden track.”

That’s the one she won the contest with and it was usually her encore and my favorite. Cleve and Gammy liked “Lasca” best.

“The air was heavy, the night was hot,
I sat by her side, and forgot—forgot;
. . . . .
Was that thunder? I grasped the cord
of my swift mustang without a word. . . .”

For Lasca, Mary wore her high laced hiking boots, her fringed Campfire Girl dress tucked up to be a riding skirt, a green velvet embroidered bolero that belonged to a Bolivian costume a friend of Mother’s had left at our house, a cowboy hat of Cleve’s, and carried Mother’s quirt, which she flicked against the hiking boots when she sighed “for the canter after the cattle” or “the mustang flew, and we urged him on.”

“That girl ought to be on the stage,” Mrs. Watson, our cleaning woman, said, the first time she heard Mary do “Lasca,” and I thought so too. I thought all her recitations were absolutely marvelous and was delirious with happiness when she offered to coach me.

After studying me from every angle, Mary decided that I was the “cute” type. Why she made such a decision I’ll never know because at the time I was painfully thin, pale green, wore a round comb and had a mouth filled with gold braces. Perhaps it was kindness, perhaps wishful thinking, but whichever it was, it was most gratifying to me and gave me a lot of self-confidence.

My first cute recitation was “Little Orphant Annie.” Mary taught me to stick out my lips like a Ubangi, wrinkle my high forehead, roll my eyes, waggle my forefinger and say in a kind of baby talk, “An’ the Gobble-uns ‘ll git you, Ef you Don’t Watch Out!” Then came “The carpenter man said a bad word, he said, ‘Darn,’ “ only Mary had me say “corpenter” and “dorn” as being cuter.

The family were openly nauseated by my performances, but when I recited at school the girls thought I was cute and begged for more so I learned, “Elthie Minguth lithsps the doeth, the liveth wite croth the threet from me. . . .” Mary, terribly proud of her handiwork, took me down and showed me to her elocution teacher, who said that I should study, which we took as a compliment.

As elocution was very popular and most of our little friends studied, some of them reciting from memory, and at the drop of a hat, whole chapters from
Daddy-Long-Legs, Tom Sawyer
and
Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm,
I probably would have studied except that Daddy died that year and we stopped all of our lessons but piano and ballet. Mother could have stopped these too, as far as I was concerned.

“One, two, three, LEAP!” shouted our ballet teacher, as she pounded her stick on the floor. Mary leaped so high they had to pull her down off the ceiling but I, who had also seen Pavlova and the Duncan Dancers, rubbed my ballet slippers in the rosin and dreaded my turn.

When anything was sewed with small, hard, unrippable stiches Gammy said it had been “baked” together. I felt “baked together” at dancing class. The other girls did arabesques that made them look like birds poised in flight. I wiggled noticeably and the leg that was supposed to point up toward the ceiling hung down like a broken wing. When we stood at the bar I pulled and strained and kicked but my bones were as stiff and unpliable as pipes and I seemed to have fewer joints than the rest of the class. In spite of it all I finally got up on my toes and appeared in many recitals.