Plains Song (11 page)

Although ten years younger than her husband, Mrs. Baumann looked considerably older. She had never been robust, and after bearing and rearing seven children, she looked to Sharon Rose like a grandmother. Music had been her life; she had studied the harp, but given up performing when she married. That was not something she regretted, but a choice happily made. A tall woman, inches above the average, stooping to the concerns of her children had bent her back and
rounded her shoulders. One could see by her eyes—usually averted from whomever she was facing, to check on something, or someone—how attractive she had been in her youth. On the death of her second son her hair had streaked with white. Something in her nature, in her tireless application, often led Sharon to think of Cora. The city of Chicago terrified Mrs. Baumann, and she was never at ease about her husband. While under her roof, none of her children were permitted to drive or own cars.

Through Mrs. Baumann's influence among musical people, Sharon received a scholarship to the Schurz Academy of Music on North Clark Street. She could have stayed with the Baumanns, commuting to the city, but she preferred to be more independent. In speaking to her mother Lillian used the word “freedom,” which she seemed to prefer to the word “independent.” One might say, and perhaps one of them did, that Lillian wanted her independence to be free, and Sharon her freedom to be independent. They agreed they would know a little better what they wanted, if and when they were deprived of it.

Several of the old homes near the academy had become dormitories for the music students, and Sharon could hear, until late in the evening, the muffled sound of the pianos on the floors below, although her windows were closed. Young men could be heard singing their scales in the showers. Strictly on her own, Sharon found part-time work as a clerk at the Newberry Library on Clark Street. This paid her nine dollars a week and made her financially independent.
Her work was to return books to their places on the shelves, and she often found time to browse in several of them. Sharon liked to read novels, but occasionally they depressed her with the grimness of the life around her. This, in turn, might affect her concentration.

“Ware you are?” Madame Skaya would ask, rolling her eyes upward in a suggestive manner. But Sharon was never where Madame Skaya thought she was. If she was not doing the exercises she detested, infuriated by the tick of the metronome, she was in the studio of Miss Baden-Hall, working on the César Franck
Symphonic Variations.
Miss Baden-Hall gave her attention to scholarship pupils believed to show professional promise. She had known Brahms, Debussy, and César Franck, and once played four hands with Paderewski, whose technique at the time had been slipping. From her Lillian Baumann had picked up the taste for gray and black, with just a touch of white, and toying with beads while she lectured. Arthritis had shortened Miss Baden-Hall's career, and caused her to crouch over the keyboard, as if weeping. She had her own method of teaching. Her students would appear, take their seat at the piano, and begin to play with little assurance that the great lady was present. Sometimes she was not. This was all part of her method. Having the music in mind was nothing: one must have it in the heart. At that point where Sharon Rose's concentration often faltered (and they knew, how well they both knew!), Miss Baden-Hall would be there, smelling like a sprig of lilac, her hair brushing the flushed cheeks of
the pupil, to repeat the passage correctly. No words were spoken. What did words have to do with music? Sharon Rose would be flooded with such emotion her eyes dimmed, and her heart pounded. It did not improve her playing, but surely it enlarged her capacity for feeling. The technique would come. First and fore-most the artist must
feel.
It had been this, perhaps, that led Miss Baden-Hall to confront Sharon with the
Symphonic Variations,
music so committed to feeling that there was little else to master. Could it have been Miss Baden-Hall's purpose to disturb Sharon's remarkable composure? In that, certainly, she succeeded, although the cracks in her surface were hardly visible to others. Returning to her room, Sharon Rose might sit on the floor beside her bed like a sick child. She often felt drained of her proper nature. Her mind was like a liquid in a sloppy container. Her soul rolled from side to side of a rocking boat.

Lillian Baumann sensibly advised Sharon to get back to Bach and Mozart. Pure states of feeling, in Lillian's view, were not for this world. César Franck was as bad as or worse than Wagner in the way he led one on, eyes averted, from the wallowing pit of emotion. Lillian suggested the music of Scarlatti as a cleanser and a tonic, before she couldn't tell a mermaid from a Rhine maiden. Lillian was in voice, not the piano, but her experience with Mahler and Hugo Wolf led her to wonder if music wasn't the very devil's advocate. Lillian then confided, with the understanding that Sharon Rose would never breathe a word of it to her mother, that she had left the Schurz Academy
and gone to Nebraska out of dread that she was
suffocating.
She couldn't put it better. She felt she simply lacked air to breathe.

Sharon Rose had never appeared so effortlessly composed as when she heard all of this on the beach at Waukegan, where they sat using each other as a backrest. Lillian had discovered this intimate way to talk and she also confessed that she found the very
idea
of marriage revolting, a barbarous arrangement for rearing and breeding. Look at her mother. Something that her father found it impossible to do. Not the demeaning captivity of marriage, but a free and independent sharing of life with a chosen companion. In England this was not uncommon. She went on to say that Miss Baden-Hall, who was English, had suggested that they spend the next summer in London together, but to be perfectly frank, Lillian found Miss Baden-Hall almost oppressive. The way she hovered about was revolting. It was not at all what Lillian would call a free and independent relationship. Sharon Rose, of course, knew this feeling so well, she knew it so
exactly,
that it brought on a fit of giggling, which left them both relaxed and carefree as children. Arm in arm they had walked along the beach until dark.

As they approached the house, Lillian had said, “There's no love among them. That's what I find intolerable.” For just an instant Sharon had been puzzled. No love among whom? Fortunately, she didn't ask, and after thinking it over she knew exactly what Lillian meant.
They
were intolerable, all of them, their otherwise decent lives more like that of livestock than
aspiring human beings. It both shamed and elated her to have such unthinkable thoughts.

The emotional swoon she experienced through her music was not entirely the doing of César Franck. Of course, Sharon had come east to visit Lillian Baumann, and study the piano with Miss Baden-Hall, but the reason she stayed and did not give in to homesickness had been Madge's decision to marry Ned Kibbee. Sharon had simply not believed that another person would take her place. With this shock there was the further revelation that women were incapable of binding friendships. They were willing to let men bag them like trophies. They gave no thought to the life they had rejected for the drab one they had chosen. They had been in Cora's garden, berry picking, and Sharon had stopped to fan the swarm of gnats from her face; without warning, Madge had said, “He asked me to marry him.” That was all. Sharon had been too astonished to speak. All that same morning, and the previous night, Madge's thoughts had been on Ned Kibbee even as she laughed and chatted with Sharon. It mortified her to realize that in all their years together Madge had lived in
wait
for marriage. Still, it had not crossed Sharon's mind that Madge would accept him. She was like a calf, bred and fattened for the market, and the buyer had spoken for her. In Sharon's humiliation, the loss of Madge troubled her less than the ease with which Madge had surrendered Sharon. Now she had a husband. It more than made up for anything she had lost.

In the fall Fayrene had written to Sharon that Madge
was “thick with child,” a repellent expression. There were many outrages, but surely none so distressing as one person's thoughtless rejection of another, no matter what the grounds. That woman should do it to woman, on the grounds that henceforth only the husband counted, testified to the truth of Lillian's assertion that women had been bred to be feeble-minded, and stay in their place. Sharon Rose took comfort in this point of view since it helped her to relate to Madge. She pitied her, but not in anger, as she pitied a woman like Cora.

It was strange how Sharon Rose, seated at the Baumann table, would find herself waiting for Madge to say grace. And if she used the bathroom, far down the dark hall, she missed having Madge with her. She had never been asked. She simply seemed to sense that Sharon feared the dark. Madge was the least nervous person in the world—a runaway team hardly got her excited—but while waiting in the dark for Sharon Rose she would break off the ends of twigs that were near her, a sound like someone stealthily approaching. Sharon Rose had been too ashamed to ask her to stop. It eased the silence of the night, and perhaps helped her ignore misgivings of her own. The two girls would then return to the house, Sharon's small hand gripping Madge's plump one, where they would pause on the porch to take sips from the water dipper. Fear of swallowing flies led them both to take little sips.

Madge closed all her letters to Sharon with the words “Mom and Dad are fine.” It pleased Madge to
think of them as sisters. If she spoke of Orion it was to say that he was not worse. Of Cora, Sharon had once said, “She cares more for her chickens than she does for us.” She was not affectionate. She never handled the girls as tenderly as she did an egg. If there was affection in Cora's nature, it was not something she shared with people. Nevertheless, it was Cora Sharon thought of in moments of self-concern or self-appraisal. And yet just thinking about Cora might put her on edge. She could see her in her rocker with the wire-braced legs, nervously working her teeth as if gumming her food, fanning the air to her face with flips of her apron. Summer and winter, the living room glared with light. She sat facing this glare, as if blinded by it. Her remarkable face had no likeness for Sharon until she saw a book of paintings in the library. The intense staring eyes were those of icons. Insensitive to discomfort in herself, how was she to be open to it in others? In the suffocating heat she would say, “I like it better than the cold.”

Sharon had sent Cora some Liberty prints from Marshall Field, suggesting that she make herself a dress or a blouse, then Madge had written to tell her that she had used the material for curtains. It maddened Sharon that she refused to think of her
self
. A box of English complexion soap she stored away in a drawer where the mice nibbled at it. Yet it was not lost on Sharon in how many ways they were alike. “Don't you two forget it,” Cora had said to them both. “Your father and I have never been beholden.”

It had seemed to Sharon, the first time she heard it,
a pitiful cause for pride. Now she felt different about it. It made no sense, for example, that Sharon could not accept Lillian's offer to spend the summer in England with her. Who would know that but herself? Lillian insisted. But that was just the trouble: Sharon Rose would know it. The independence Lillian had through money Sharon appropriated by being stubborn. She would not be beholden. How did that work out in matters of love?

Madge had written Sharon a long letter at Christmas (ignoring several months of silence) praising her husband, praising her life, eagerly looking forward to her
first
baby. Had it been necessary for her to say
first?
Her simple-minded goodness puzzled Sharon, yet it revived her affection for her. A few weeks later, on a piece of lined linen paper, given to her years before by Sharon, Cora wrote to say that Madge was “well,” Ned Kibbee was “well,” Emerson was “well,” and she was “well.” Only Orion seemed to be poorly. People were well if they were neither dead nor dying, unless so unwell they were “failing.” The emotion Sharon Rose had in such abundance to lavish on her music would gather like a knot of pain in her soul.

The day following Lillian's departure for England, Sharon wired Madge (giving her quite a shock: a wire could only mean death in the family) that she was coming the following weekend. She had removed the word “home,” knowing it was what all of them wanted to hear. She longed to see Madge, she wanted to see Cora, but a dread gripped her heart at the thought of what she might feel.

She had wondered if Ned Kibbee would recognize her, she had changed so much. “You've changed some,” he said, but he did recognize her. She thought he looked older. A nail he had hammered had flipped up and struck near his eye, giving him a scar. The thought of it sent a shudder through Sharon, but he had merely mentioned it in passing. The news was that Orion was neither better nor worse.

Ned had stopped work on a house to drive to Columbus and get her, and he showed her the house as they drove by. She thought the frame looked small. He explained to her, as a builder of houses, how he often had trouble with the ladies because the frame looked so different than they imagined. The ground plan might appear no larger than a big garage. Some women almost wept when they saw the walls up, the house so small. Inside it seemed small until it had been plastered, and had something on the floor. Building houses he had come to know that, but he didn't know why.

While Sharon had been in Chicago, becoming a different person, Ned had built four houses with inside plumbing, their own cesspools, and furnaces in the basement. One of these houses had been for Madge. The reason it looked as bare as it did was that the trees and the shrubs were hardly started. When they pulled into the yard the wind lifted the sheets drying on the lines. Sharon's glimpse of Madge, her apron pockets weighted with clothespins, filled her with such emotion her eyes creased, and she thought she might bawl. She had a moment to collect herself as Madge walked
around the sagging lines to get to her, a bonnet shading her face, the apron draping the bulge at her middle. Sharon babbled shrilly to relieve her feelings. Madge hugged and kissed her as she would a child.