Leeway Cottage (33 page)

 

Laurus was unusually busy that fall and winter. He had three talented students from the high school, and was also teaching the younger brother of Clara Thigpen. Richard was not as talented as Clara, but he worked hard. Laurus had a busy performance schedule, mostly in New England, and he was booked to judge a piano competition in Salzburg and another in Los Angeles. He invited Sydney to go with him to Europe; they could stop in Copenhagen on the way home, as it was quite a while since she'd seen the family. She found that she was too busy for that trip, but she did go with him to Los Angeles. She spent one day with Laurus there, then went on to visit Jimmy at boarding school, where he was homesick and furious, and by great luck while there, she ran into Neville Crane, out visiting his parents in Los Gatos.

 

Laurus gave Richard Thigpen his piano lessons in a music room in the basement of the junior high school. He had tried teaching Clara at her house, but there was too much going on there, and the younger Thigpens were too taken with the exotic visitor to leave them alone. Richard and little Lorma kept slipping in and sitting on the horsehair couch, silently staring, and it made Clara laugh. Laurus regretted it—the Thigpens' piano was a much better instrument than the school one. Still, Clara had to learn to get music out of all kinds of keyboards, and she had. Now it was Richard arriving in the basement room at three-thirty on Thursdays.

They were working on Chopin, the Nocturne in E Minor. As he sometimes did when Richard's whole attention seemed not to be on the work, Laurus closed the music book and said, “Let's have some Pinetop.”

Richard tore into “Pinetop's Boogie.” Their mother played, and this was the music Richard had grown up with. He could play all his mother's tunes by ear, while Mr. Moss's music he learned by reading, note by note, often astonished when he heard what those notes, all like random black bugs that had died all over the page, connoted as sound. The music he played by ear was spacious and three-dimensional, with structures and rooms like castles of sound, while the Chopin was as flat as a map. The challenge in teaching him, for Laurus, was to figure out why the jazz part of the brain couldn't recognize all those same intervals and patterns and rhythms when he was reading.

When the boogie was finished, Laurus opened the Chopin again, and Richard set off along its creaking paths, as stiffly as ever. What am I going to do here? Laurus was thinking. What can I do for this boy, that I couldn't do for Jimmy? He wants it so badly.

He ended the lesson a few minutes early, and said, “It's almost spring. Our crocuses are up.”

“Yes, sir.”

“So summer's coming. What do you like best about summer?”

Richard looked down at his hands and shrugged. Was the Good Humor truck the kind of answer Mr. Moss wanted?

“How about swimming? That's my favorite.”

Richard shook his head. “I like baseball games on the radio.”

“You don't like to swim?”

“Don't know.”

“Don't know if you like it? Do you know
how
to swim?”

Richard shook his head.

Uh-huh. Okay, let's drop back and see what we've got here.

“Does Clara know how to swim?”

“I don't think so.”

There was a public beach at the lake in the next town, with a lifeguard. But did they offer lessons? He didn't know. Could either of Richard's parents spare time from work to take them there? Laurus had only been to the lake once or twice when the children were little; in high summer they were always away in Dundee. And come to think of it, did you need to buy a residency permit to use the beach?

“You should know how to swim.”

“Yes, sir…”

“You really should. What if you went to sea and your boat sank?”

Richard smiled.

“There are lessons at the Y. It doesn't cost very much. Would you like to take lessons? You and Lorma could take them together.”

Richard sat still and then shook his head. No.

“You don't want to learn to swim?”

“No. Yes. I do, but we don't go in there.”

There. The Y. We.

Right. Laurus's children didn't go in there much either, because they went to the Country Club instead. He played over images of the events he had observed as a trustee at the Y. Square dances, various courses of sports instruction for the young, and lectures and socials for the old. After-school programs. What had he thought, that the Negroes of the town were off somewhere else at their own separate but equal YMCA? Apparently.

“Do you think your mother would allow it, if you went to the Y with me for swimming lessons?”

“I don't know.”

“Well, ask her. And if she says yes, next week bring Lorma and your bathing suits.”

Over the weekend, he had planned to discuss this with Sydney. He knew she would feel about it as he did, but thought it only right she be forewarned. However, in the event, Sydney was in a mood that weekend. Touchy, blue, preoccupied. Jumping for the phone every time it rang. He didn't know why and she didn't want to talk, so he left her alone.

The next Thursday, Richard came into the music room with a shy smile, his sister, and a paper bag with two towels sticking out the top of it.

“Splendid,” said Laurus. Lorma sat silent and attentive as Richard slogged away at the Chopin. He got through it creditably, and they chose a new piece, Debussy's
Arabesque,
for next week. Then Laurus stood up.

“All right? Let's go have some fun.”

 

Richard put his sister in the front seat of the Nash beside Mr. Moss, shut her door carefully for her, seeing that she didn't crush her fingers or toes, and installed himself in the backseat. Off they went down to Main Street, where they drove past the shops and the drugstore and the movie theater, with the children looking out the windows intently, wondering if anyone was noticing them. They turned up Second Street and past the Tots and Teens shop, then into the driveway of the big brick YMCA. Mr. Moss led them up to the double doors in front and showed them in.

Inside, it was like a big fancy school. The walls were glazed tiles, the floors linoleum. They could hear the echoing ring of basketballs being thrown and dribbled and shot in some nearby unseen court. Through an open door to a stairway they could smell something bleachy, a warm thick watery smell. They crowded up close to Mr. Moss, who was saying to a lady in a little office, with a half-door open at the top into the lobby, “Hello, Rosemary. My friends here would like to join the Y; Christine is going to give them swimming lessons.”

“Oh, how nice! I'll just…” When he moved aside so the children could come up and speak to her themselves.

For a moment she just looked at them. They looked back at her as if they were statues. Laurus didn't think he'd ever seen children go so long without blinking. Then Rosemary looked at Laurus, spun in her chair to look up at the wall clock (no help there), then she spun back and said, “Yes, then. I'll just type up their cards, we'll start with you, shall we?” She looked at Lorma, as if by hitting the smaller one first she might be able to panic them into running away.

First Lorma, then Richard, told their names and birth dates. The cards were typed (she spoiled one, spelling Lorma “Lorna,” and laughed nervously while she did it again). She tore the cards crisply from the typewriter and said, “Now there's just the fee…”

“I will take care of that,” said Laurus. He handed Rosemary some bills and she went to her cash box and handed some back. He showed the children where they should sign the backs of their cards and said, “All right, then. Thank you, Rosemary,” and led them off toward the door where the wet cleaning smell came from. As soon as they were out of sight, Rosemary dove for the telephone.

As the children clattered down the stairs behind Mr. Moss the air grew softer and thicker, almost as if it should have its own color. Then they stepped out into a big room with a floor made of water, like a field of bright blue, dancing and reflecting on the ceiling. They never imagined you could have so much water inside a building. There were straight lines, dark blue, on the bottom of the pool; you could see through to the bottom, which you couldn't in a river or a pond. There was a lady in the pool in a white bathing cap cutting through the water like a porpoise with pink windmill arms. Richard listened to the sounds echoing from the walls, smelled the fat soft air, and thought the only place he'd ever seen even vaguely like this was church.

The lady came to the end of her lap and pulled up. She stood in water up to her hips, turned the corners of the cap up to expose her ears, and tipped her head toward her left shoulder, bumping the side of her head with her right hand. Richard was too astonished to ask what she was doing. Mr. Moss started walking along the edge of the water field to the end where the wet lady was. The children stood stock-still, awaiting instruction. The edge you walk on looked wet and it would be bad to slip and fall in before they learned how to swim.

“Hello, Christine.”

“Hi, Mr. Moss! I was just doing my wind sprints.”

“I saw. I brought my friends for their lesson.”

Christine nodded. Laurus discovered that the children were not behind him but standing where he had left them. Christine turned to follow his gaze, and there was a moment of stopped time. She looked at the children in surprise, and they at her, waiting.

Christine woke up, as it seemed, from the little momentary standing coma she had entered, and smiled and waved. She pulled herself out of the pool and took off her cap. The children had now made their way gingerly along the edge of the water field to where she was, and Laurus performed introductions. Richard shook hands and Lorma curtsied. Christine's smile grew warmer.

“Would you show Lorma where to change? Richard, we go this way.”

Laurus took Richard to the men's dressing room. Richard looked solemnly at the lockers, the row of big shower stalls, the other plumbing, the small collection of toiletries to be used for free on the table by the sinks, talcum powder and spray deodorant and other things he didn't understand.

Laurus helped him choose a locker, and with his pocketknife cut the tags off Richard's new bathing suit. Modestly, Richard went off to a toilet stall to change. When he reappeared he carefully stowed his clothes in the open locker.

“I don't have a lock for it.” He looked anxiously in at his defenseless shirt and pants, his shoes and socks, his paper bag.

“It will be all right,” Laurus said.

When they went back out to the pool, Lorma hurried to him and whispered, “I don't have a bathing cap. Mama didn't get me one. The sign said I have to.” She seemed certain that that would end the adventure right now, something was bound to and here it was.

“Christine, she won't need a cap for today, will she?”

“No, not at all. She won't have her head in much. Come on, ducks, into the pool.”

The look on Lorma's face of surprise, fear, delight, and excitement as she walked step by step down into the pool and felt the water come up to her knees, then her hips, then almost to her shoulders, was unforgettable. It took Laurus back himself to his first forays into the water on the beach at Fyn, with his mother holding his hand, and the shock of the first touch of it, the feel of hot sand under his feet and then the cold between his toes. Then the amazing fact of adjusting to the temperature, of moving into this new medium, of Ditte smiling her delight, so it was unthinkable that he find it anything but delightful. Suddenly he even remembered his first bathing suit, a tiny white and blue knit one (although mostly at home small children didn't bother with bathing clothes). Where was that bathing suit now?

He sat on the bench and watched as Christine showed the children how to breathe while swimming, their faces down in the water blowing bubbles, then turning the head to the side to inhale. She led them in prancing around and bouncing up and down to get the feeling of the water and warm up. She showed them how to take a deep breath and hold it, then go all the way under the water. She showed them they could open their eyes underwater, which was front-page news to them. Lorma couldn't make herself do it, but Richard managed, on the second try. On the count of three he and Christine submerged themselves and shook hands underwater, then came exploding back up, Richard crowing with triumph. They learned to hold on to the side with their whole bodies stretched out on the water, doing the flutter kick. Laurus sat on a bench for an hour and smiled.

By the next week, there were three more students in the class, a friend of Lorma's and two boy cousins. Christine said five was as many beginners as she could safely teach. When more wanted to come, she found a friend with Red Cross training to join her, and the class grew to ten.