Plains Song (10 page)

It was Orion's custom, in the midmorning, to stop and warm himself in Cora's kitchen. He might eat what the girls had left over, or she might stir up a batter and make him some flapjacks. It troubled her to think what sort of life he led in his own house. When she went over to change his sheets she would find dog hair on everything she touched. The Bohemian girl, Anna, who had surely been willing, married a widower in Olney with five small children, three of them girls. Cora could not sort out in her mind if this was man's or God's injustice. Piled along the wall beside Orion's bed were magazines with stories about the Wild West, full of cowboys and Indians, as well as tales of adventure in faraway places. Cora had stooped to glance at the illustrations. What life had been like before she came to the plains she feared to know about.

Orion loved to shoot his guns—Cora could hear the crack of his rifle, like a winter branch snapping—but he had stopped bringing her what he had killed. She saw the pelts stretched on racks in the basement. To bring her a moose rug—it was his way of joshing—he took off to hunt in Canada, with Ned Kibbee, a Norfork carpenter. Three weeks later Ned Kibbee returned alone. Where was Orion? He had gone to war.
But who had he found to go to war with? There was a war in Europe, Ned Kibbee explained, and Orion had signed up to help the Canadians, who were taking the side of the English. He had acted the way he did fearing it might be over before he got into it. What he liked about a war was the free ammunition, and a place to shoot. Nor would it be a long one, in Ned Kibbee's opinion, with young men like Orion so willing and eager to fight it. During the time he was away Ned Kibbee would be free to live in his house and look after his dogs.

The war did not end, as Ned Kibbee had predicted. From what she heard and read in
Capper's Weekly,
Cora learned that Americans would soon bring it to a quick conclusion. They had one letter from Orion, mailed from England, in which he asked for chocolate and tobacco. He had never used tobacco. Perhaps he had asked for it for a friend. It was all so far away Cora did not know what to think. Ned Kibbee enlisted, rather than be drafted, and went to Fort Riley, Kansas, for his training. When he stopped writing, Madge thought he had gone to war, but instead he had come down with the influenza. Madge went down to help nurse him. Half the people in the fort were sick, and many died. The first armistice declared was false, but a real one was determined and the war was over before Ned Kibbee got to fight in it.

Without a word of any kind, Orion was seen in the streets of Battle Creek, where Dr. Geltmayer recognized him and brought him to the farm. Cora thought the stranger at the door was a salesman. He wore
rumpled city clothes, and his voice and manner had changed. Emerson wasn't sure it was his own brother until they had sat and talked a bit together. He had been gassed in the war. Most of his time had been spent in hospitals. His eyes moved from side to side as he talked. He knew Sharon Rose and Madge, and the names of his dogs, but he seemed to have forgotten about Fayrene. Speaking to the girls, he said, “Yes, ma'am,” or “No, ma'am,” as if they were young ladies. He was at ease with Cora, picking up where they had been when he left.

At the table he might have long spells of wheezing, his red face filmed with perspiration, his eyes popped. He never mentioned the war, but he spoke of friends and places in England. In the hospital he had learned to play cards and do tricks with coins. In spite of the tremor of his hands he could stand a dime on its edge on a table. Fayrene never tired of the way he could tilt a quarter back and forth on the back of his knuckles. If Ned Kibbee and Madge went to a movie in town, he went along for the ride. Cora was told, but she did not believe, that he had a manicure while he was being shaved. Later he would stand in the hotel lobby playing dice for cigars.

Because he was disabled in the service of his country he received a pension he could live on. He had always been so gentle with women he behaved as if he was courting. He brought Cora bars of clear glycerin soap she put away for a special occasion, if one should occur. He gave to the girls boxes of Whitman's chocolates, with the flavors printed in the box lids. This
discouraged Sharon Rose from biting into something, then putting it back. Cora kept to herself the fact that Orion relieved himself from the porch, rather than troubling to walk to the privy. It worried Cora that the girls might see him, since he often seemed unaware of their presence. Madge was now a young lady, with a beau, but when Sharon Rose used the outbilly, at night, she liked Madge to go along with her and wait in the dark. Cora herself would have preferred to be frightened rather than suffer the humiliation of an escort. Sharon Rose was at once fearless and as timid as a child.

The day Sharon Rose came back from Lincoln, where she had gone to enroll in the university, she was let off at the trail between the two houses while Ned and Madge sat in the buggy, spooning. Knowing they would hear her, knowing Cora would hear her, hoping the people in Battle Creek would hear her, she had screamed, “Is he looking for a wife or a housemaid?”

Cora had been on the screened-in porch, ironing; she had stood leaning on the iron, speechless. Nothing had prepared her to believe that Sharon Rose had such resentment, such bitterness, in her. Cora had followed her into Fayrene's room, off the kitchen, seized her by the wrist, and whacked her palm with the back of a hairbrush, sharply. How well they knew what Sharon Rose thought of her hands! “That will teach you!” Cora cried, knowing that it wouldn't even as she said it. Not Sharon Rose. She had turned from Cora and run up the stairs.

“Mama,” Madge had called, “now don't you cross
her. She don't mean it the way you hear it!”

In no world Cora cared to live in would she be so kind, so slow to take offense. In her soul she knew that Sharon Rose meant it even worse than she said it. She had come back from Lincoln hoping to share with Madge everything she had seen, and felt, and experienced, only to ride three in the seat of a buggy where she knew she wasn't wanted. The wild streak she had from her mother had made her cry out. Cora liked Ned Kibbee, and felt that Madge, a plain enough girl to look at, was fortunate to have him. What in heaven's name did Sharon Rose have in mind for Madge to do? Madge had no desire at all to waste time in school she could spend with Ned Kibbee. Was it envy? Was she possessive? Was it her pride that had been injured? Reasons were not lacking to explain such an outburst, but they did not satisfy Cora. In spite of her assurance that she had acted rightly, her cooling fury left her troubled. In Sharon's glance, when Cora had seized her, there had been less anger than pity. Pity for Cora, who felt no pity for herself. She leaned on the cabinet, propped on her spread arms, as Madge rattled the dipper in the water bucket.

“She likes Ned,” Madge said. “She just don't like farmers,” then she went off with the pail to the pump.

Whatever Madge had said, whatever she had meant, Cora's numbed, flickering awareness understood what she had implied. However much Sharon Rose disliked farmers, her scorn for farmers' wives was greater. She pitied Cora, who seemed to lack the sense to pity herself.

Ned and Madge were married in Olney, where he had his own people, then they came back to Cora's yard for the food and the reception. Under trees that Emerson had planted, on grass that had been freshly mowed that morning, they sat at picnic tables Ned had borrowed from the Burlington Railroad. During the eating and later the children played croquet with balls so new and bright they looked sticky. Ribbons were tied to the wickets as the lights dimmed, so the elderly wouldn't trip on them. Ned Kibbee wore the first pair of white flannel pants Cora had ever seen. There could surely be nothing more elegant and impractical. In the early dusk, candles were lit in the three sagging rows of Japanese lanterns. It made Cora almost dizzy to follow the zigzag flight of the bats. She would write to Sharon Rose, who had moved to Lincoln, that Ned Kibbee's relations were all upright people, three of whom had come from Sioux City, two with wives, to see him married. Other than what that implied, no admonishment. Sharon Rose would have to learn, by living her own life, that such losses were not easily recovered. From Omaha she sent Madge a comb and brush set in a velvet-lined case, the brush with silver backing, brushing Madge's hair being one of those things she really missed.

In August Sharon Rose visited her friend, Lillian Baumann, who lived just north of Chicago, in Waukegan. Most of the members of the Baumann family were musicians, and came together in the summer to make music. The Baumann house was so large that Mrs. Baumann was never sure how many rooms were occupied and who might come to breakfast. A huge lawn surrounded the house, with a garden at the back where music was played in an enchanting gazebo with a flag on the roof. Seeing it all from the window, Sharon Rose felt she must be staying in a
fashionable resort. The Baumanns were so well-to-do it was hard to determine what they did for a living. Otto Baumann took the train to Chicago four mornings a week, being the head of a firm that made paints and varnishes. A picture of the firm's plant, on the Chicago River, with a water tank atop the building painted to resemble a can of paint, was on the wall of Mr. Baumann's study. The four Baumann sons had gone to school in the east, or worked in the east and lived there, but Lillian, the youngest of the three girls, went west just to do something different. One of her father's relations had settled in Lincoln, and that was why she came to Nebraska and not somewhere else.

Lillian was plain. Even in Lincoln she could spend a year and go almost unnoticed. Living with so many brothers for so long had satisfied her need for male companionship. She felt she had more to learn from an unusual young woman, like Sharon Rose. The young ladies had first met at the voice auditions, where Sharon Rose was the accompanist for Dr. Schumann. Lillian had come forward when her name was called and sung German lieder with such assurance that even Dr. Schumann had not checked on her voice. It was small, but she had such an easy presence it seemed much better than it was. Sharon Rose had style, and everybody said so, but her palms were moist before she sat down to play and even her listeners feared she might forget something. She was so petite. She was so cunning. How could she, Lillian asked, find room in her head for all that music? On occasion she didn't. She might go around and around and around,
like a needle stuck in the groove of a record. She would do it with such aplomb, however, that her listener might feel it had been her intention. But not Lillian.

Even Sharon Rose was slow to see the style in Lillian's artless manner. Her figure had no lines of interest except for her remarkably relaxed posture. She wore strings of beads, which she cupped in one hand, the other hand placed at her hip in a way that was subtly provoking. Sharon remarked how the observer's glance returned to her face with renewed interest. Her best feature was a smile as elusive to read as Mona Lisa's. Was it mocking? It was often on her lips when Dr. Schumann praised her voice.

She had a
trained
voice, in Dr. Schumann's opinion, which he much preferred to an untrained voice. Her best moments were the solo bits in choral groups, where assurance and ease were pleasing as bird song. It was quite simply relaxing to hear Lillian sing.

The very opposite effect, to the point of discomfort, was the experience of listening to Sharon Rose. Although she was an accomplished young lady, her appeal was that of a
Wunderkind,
a prodigy. There were actually smaller pianists in the class, one of them a boy named Milton Sondschein, who could hardly reach the pedals, but the prodigious is seen on the mind's eye, and at the sight of Sharon Rose one had this sensation. Her specialty was Bach, the
Well-Tempered Clavier,
a source of pleasurable apprehension for Dr. Schumann, but the
pièce de résistance
—his own term—was her playing of the Partita in B-flat Major. Sublime
music, of course, but one could not explain the special effects achieved by Sharon Rose. The listener who failed to chill, as at the onset of a fever, at the transport of the second movement, had no earthly business—Dr. Schumann's opinion—listening to music at all. In this appraisal he did not overlook the visual. Lillian Baumann had tried it both ways, with her eyes closed and with them open, but the fever of which Dr. Schumann spoke was more palpable with the eyes open. The spectacle of the
Wunderkind,
the conjuror, nimbly evoking the harmony of the spheres was crucial to the listener's impression, the notes ascending to a summit from where the descent was like that of a swoon. No, it was important that the listener sit alert, and not with tilted head, the eyes languorously lidded, an index finger steadying the head's tremor induced by the flood of emotion. Perhaps it was just as well, in Dr. Schumann's opinion, that Sharon Rose seemed to lack the performer's concentration; otherwise some entrepreneur would surely put her on exhibit, an experience so terrible that he erased it from both their minds.