The Facts and Fictions of Minna Pratt (7 page)

“Two-hour rehearsal today,” Minna called to McGrew and Emily Parmalee.

“Yep,” said McGrew. “We're going to the movies.”

They sat for a moment, their backs against the building, and the dog collapsed in a fury of friendliness against them. Minna looked around once more for Willie, then she dragged her cello up the steps.

Hello, gargoyles. Hello, door. Hello, stairs.
Hello, Mozart
.

Upstairs it is not peaceful. Lucas has a buzz in his viola and he loosens and tightens strings. Orson has lost his music. He crouches over his case like a dog unearthing a buried bone, music flying out behind him. Haydn, Schumann, Donizetti, a piece of Ives flies by. No Mozart. Imelda sits peacefully, the eye of a storm. A muscle in Porch's cheek twitches and his eyes are dark.

“Aha!” exclaims Orson, straightening up with Mozart clutched in his hand.

The buzz stops when Lucas adjusts his bridge. Minna unzips her case and pulls out her cello.

“Do not threap us, we are ready,” pronounces Orson. “Scold, that means,” he tells Porch.

Porch smiles suddenly and they all smile back.

“Four weeks,” says Porch. “An A please. C scale, then G.”

Love, thinks Minna, peering at Lucas, who smiles a bright smile at her.
Surely love is a fact
. She misses a note and Porch points to her and glares. She glares back and stretches her fingers, furiously attacking the repeat of the andante. Porch nods and beckons her to play louder, stronger. She does and he grins.
Love
.

Cheerfully Porch loads them all into the elevator. Inside Minna leans back and closes her eyes as the elevator starts downward. Next to her Lucas stands close and his fingers drum the beginning measures of the presto on her hand. She smiles, her eyes still closed.

“I wonder,” says Imelda, “if we have to wear uniforms for the concert. You know, dress alike.”

“It's not baseball, Imelda,” says Orson.

“I wish it were,” says Minna, opening her eyes.

“It's a little like baseball,” says Lucas, thoughtfully. “Everything has its own rhythms, I guess.”

Minna closes her eyes again.

Downstairs, Willie had joined the dog.

“Willie!” called Minna.

Willie looked up from his tuning and smiled at her, surprised at her voice.

It was clear the dog loved Willie. He sat on Willie's shoe as Willie began a mazurka, wagging his tail just out of time, a little on the slow side, like a stubborn metronome. He slipped in and out of the crowd when Willie had finished and watched the listeners toss coins in Willie's case.

Minna fished a quarter out of her pocket and handed it to Willie.

“Thanks.”

Willie bowed and handed it back.

“Thank
you
.”

The dog whined, and Minna reached out and scratched his ears. He had wisps of brown hair that stuck out above his eyes and around his chin.

“He looks like an unfinished painting,” said Lucas. “You know, not all smoothed and complete?”

Like me, thought Minna suddenly.

“You know, you're right,” said Willie, looking down at the dog. “I wonder if he's mine.”

Minna and Lucas laughed.

“What I mean,” said Willie, “is that he's been here for days. He has no collar, no tags. I've been feeding him. He loves Mozart,” added Willie. “My favorite, too.”

Willie stuck his fiddle under his chin and played Schubert. The dog lay down. Willie played Tchaikovsky. The dog yawned and stretched. Willie played Mozart and the dog sat up, wagging his tail.

“That's it, then,” said Willie, grinning. “His name is Mozart and he's mine. Just to keep it simple,” he said to Minna, “I'll call him Dog.”

So simple. Minna wished that everything were that simple; her mother, her father, her vibrato, her life. Maybe it was Willie who was that simple. That must be it. The rest of the world—
my
world—whirls and dips and turns inside out. But Willie is simple, dependable. Like a fact.

“Willie?” Minna could see McGrew and Emily way off in the distance, walking toward them.

“What?”

“When did you get a vibrato?”

“Vibrato? It was like magic. Almost like magic. One day I was playing and it happened. Up to then I'd done everything I could think of.” He peered down at Minna. “Mostly practice.”

“Did you get frustrated? Angry?”

“No,” said Willie, smiling broadly. “I just played!”

There was a pause.

“Porch says it's like a light coming on over your head,” said Minna.

“True, in a way,” said Willie thoughtfully. “Sometimes it's unexpected. Almost natural and hardly noticed, like your eyebrows growing. And sometimes it comes as a great surprise after a lot of hard work.” He stopped. “Like becoming an adult.”

McGrew and Emily Parmalee came then, with popcorn from the movies.

“She cried,” announced McGrew.

“Can you play ‘Baby, Baby, You're My Life' in B-flat?” asked Emily Parmalee tearfully.

Willie could. And he did.

Magic. Light over the head. Eyebrows growing?

Lucas walked Minna to the bus.

“Phone if you get your vibrato,” he called to her.

Minna waved good-bye from the bus window. Maybe it had nothing to do with organization, thought Minna. Maybe getting a vibrato had something to do with intelligence. She held her nose all the way home. Just in case.

T
he day was warm, though it had rained, and the grass had lost its winter brown that Minna loved. That brown, Minna thought, was the way the prairie would look. Lucas was coming to dinner tonight and Minna wished she were in the middle of the prairie, or perhaps sitting on the continental divide, just she and Lucas with a campfire and Devil Dogs for dessert. They would make wise and witty conversation in complete sentences with big words, adverbial phrases, and commas. Maybe even semicolons. Not conversations like her parents had at dinner, full of dashes and hyphens.

Luv. Her mother and father wrote notes to each other, almost always signing them “luv.” They kissed often, not only in the kitchen and in the quiet hallways of the house, but in the yard. Once she had seen them on the street, leaning against a tree, their arms around each other, kissing directly on the mouth for a great long time as if her father might be going off to war. Minna had been with McGrew and Emily Parmalee, who had been fascinated, mostly by the breathing techniques involved in such a long kiss.

“Do they breathe through their noses, or do they leave a bit of free space at the edges of their mouths, do you think?” Emily Parmalee asked, amazed. “My parents never kiss long enough to run out of air.”

“I imagine that they take a great gulping breath before they do it,” said McGrew, not embarrassed like Minna. “Though it's hard to say. We could try.”

And they had, right there on the sidewalk in daylight, smashed their lips together while people walked by smiling and a cat, its tail in the air, stopped to peer up at them. Mortified, Minna felt surrounded by kissers. Afterward, McGrew and Emily had agreed that taking a breath didn't work.

“You have to blow it out suddenly,” explained Emily, “you know, explode on your partner's mouth.”

Minna shrugged away the memory and dragged her cello down the hallway, pausing outside her mother's writing room.

“Lucas for dinner tonight,” she reminded her mother.

“I hope he's plump and tender,” joked her mother, not looking up.

“Mother.”

“Okay, sweetie. We'll have stew instead.”

“And no tofu,” said Minna. “Or hamburger pickles.”

“Check, luv,” said her mother, leaning over her typewriter to pen in a correction.

“Mother,” said Minna softly. “I want this to be a special dinner.”

“Um,” said her mother, her voice coming from somewhere far away. She stared at her page.

“Mother,” repeated Minna. “You're not paying attention to me. Mother?”

Silence.

It is then, at that very moment, her mother's head bent over the typewriter, Minna's arm draped around her cello, that Minna's anger overtakes her. It is like a spilled drink, the anger that flows over her. She leans her cello against the wall in the hallway, walks down the stairs, her face grim, and walks out the door to the mailbox. She passes the Parmalee house, crisp and still in its neatness; passes the big tree where her parents have lately kissed, and drops her letter without a return address into the mailbox. With a clatter of the mailbox door it is gone. Minna stands there for a moment, both frightened and pleased. Then she walks back past the tree, past the Parmalee house, back to the upstairs hallway, where her cello waits in its case. Her mother is still hunched over the typewriter, her back to Minna.

Frowning, Minna walked down the hall, down the stairs, through the dining room to her father's office. The door was open and her father was inside, his feet up on his desk, conducting the Triumphal March from
Aida
. Minna slipped in and sat, waiting for the end. She looked around. It was a peaceful room, with comfortable chairs and book-lined walls. Full of facts, thought Minna. There are many facts here, many truths. Does my father know all these facts?

The music ended and her father looked up.

“I did that well, don't you think?” he asked her, smiling.

Minna nodded.

“Could we, do you think,” she began slowly. She paused.

“Clean up the house?” her father finished for her.

“Could we?” asked Minna eagerly. “Could you?” she added because she was off, it suddenly occurred to her, to play Mozart, whom she could never play as right, as perfectly, as her father's recordings. “We're having Lucas for dinner tonight, Papa.”

Her father got up and came over to her. He put his arm around her.

“I hope,” he said.

Minna knew what he was about to say.

“That he is . . .” her father went on.

“Plump and tender,” whispered Minna before her father could finish.

Her father smiles at her. Minna does not smile back. She is weary of his smiles. She suddenly wishes that she had a letter in her pocket to mail to her father, return address and name unknown. Then, at the door, she decides on something better. She turns.

“You should, you know,” she says in a high clear voice, “teach your son McGrew how to catch a fly ball.”

Surprised, her father looks up. Before he can speak she is gone.

Minna carries her cello outside, where Emily Parmalee is hitting fungoes to McGrew in the side yard. She watches McGrew miss every ball that comes to him. Unexpected tears sting her eyes.

Emily has startling rhinestone earrings on today, shaped like chandeliers.

“They belonged to my great aunt Lila,” she calls to Minna, who admires them from the steps. “She died in the bathtub with them on.”

Minna believes that. They are huge and long, swaying heavily as Emily swings the baseball bat. They probably pulled Aunt Lila to the bottom of the tub, under the water.

The bus pulls up to the curb, the doors opening for her. Minna leans her cello on the seat next to her and practices her vibrato on her knee. She can do it on her knee and on the dining room table and on her night stand. After what she has just done—mailing a letter to her mother, telling her father what she has always wished to tell him—perhaps she will suddenly and magically be able to do it on her cello. Minna sighs. Right now the only place she can't do her vibrato is on her cello. She feels like a surgeon who can only carve turkeys, or a prima ballerina who only dances in her dreams.

Willie and Dog were playing Schubert. Rather, Willie was playing and Dog was looking smug and patient as he waited for Mozart. When Willie finished he nodded, and the listeners applauded and tossed coins. One man had brought Dog a biscuit.

“Nice,” said Minna. She handed Willie thirteen cents from her pocket.

He dropped it back into her hand.

“We thank you, Dog and I,” he said solemnly. “Any luck yet?” he asked. She knew what he meant.

“Nope. No light over my head.”

“Don't work so hard,” said Willie, wiping rosin from his violin. “Think about the music, not just the notes. It will creep up on you, like moonlight.”

The music, not the notes. Weren't they the same? Minna frowned. Everyone she knew spoke words she did not understand. Moonlight? No moonlight here, thought Minna.

“Good-bye, Willie.” She leaned down to touch Dog. “Good-bye, Dog,” she whispered.

Willie tuned and began to play again. Minna pushed the great door open and trudged up the stairs after a quick glance at the elevator. Old habits, the stairs. Wasn't there a saying about that? About old dogs and old habits? Or was it old dogs and new tricks? Minna felt like an old dog. Sadly she climbed the stairs, for the first time forgetting to look up at the gray gargoyles. She remembered halfway up the stairs, hesitated, then, leaving her cello stranded on the landing, dashed down and out to look at them for luck.

Upstairs Porch was cross, out of sorts in a great oppressive, sighing kind of way.

“Porch's in a bilious mood,” whispered Orson, barely moving his lips as he spoke. “Irritable.”

“You're on time,” said Imelda in a soft voice. “It is said that punctuality reflects an orderly mind.”

Hush
, said Minna in her head as she smiled at Lucas.