The One-in-a-Million Boy (27 page)

This is Miss Ona Vitkus. This is her life memories and shards on tape. This is Part Eight.

Where did you get this thing, anyway?

. . .

A financial writer? My. Your aunt sounds smart.

. . .

Louise? Again?

. . .

Well, yes. She was. A friend.

. . .

A good friend, yes. But you know . . .

. . .

It's just that—I've never had a true-blue friend.

. . .

Faithful. Through thick and thin. That kind. Where were we?

. . .

She left Lester Academy in the spring of '57, the end of her fifth year. We'd read dozens of books by then. All those writers, now
they
were my friends. What a pleasure that seminar was! We were
all
friends, after a fashion, even if I was the boring old guppy thrown into the fish tank.

. . .

You know how guppies bubble their mouths open, like this . . . ?

. . .

Don't laugh! That's exactly what I was doing, all but swallowing knowledge. I was so sorry to be fifty-seven; I thought I was so old! Even two minutes with Louise made me feel smarter.

. . .

For example, the difference between
convince
and
persuade.
The meaning of “To be or not to be.” Louise loved Shakespeare, especially all those lippy women pretending to be men.

. . .

As a matter of fact, I just this week finished reading
Hamlet.

. . .

It was like—it was like running into a pack of crazy folks I thought had predeceased me. Louise had a streak of premonition in her, I guess: she fixed it so I'd have company in my dotage.

. . .

Convince
is for thought;
persuade
is for action. You couldn't
convince
me that taping my horrible old-lady voice was a good idea, but you
persuaded
me to do it anyway, didn't you, you little dickens?

. . .

Let's see; there's this dithery prince named Hamlet. His uncle killed his father. Hamlet's in a knot over the whole business, so he talks to himself a lot, which is where “To be or not to be” comes into the picture.

. . .

Because he's wondering if death, which is an undiscovered country, might be preferable to life, with its known drawbacks.

. . .

Like slings and arrows and outrageous fortune and what have you. Did I mention that Louise taught me to dance?

. . .

Right there in my parlor on High Street. These foolish things always happen in winter, when people are so sun-starved they don't know up from down. She brought over a book for me, as she often did, and I made a stew and bread. My apartment smelled like baking, which in winter is a marvelous thing. Louise came in, smiling. She had a new beau—Louise always had a new beau.

. . .

Not the kind you tie. The kind you kiss.

. . .

Paramour. Gentleman friend.

. . .

She always came alone. The table looked nice. I always put out cloth napkins for Louise, my really good ones, hand-tatted by my mother. Louise appreciated fine things; she was like Maud-Lucy that way. She dabbed her lips with the corner of the napkins just like Maud-Lucy. In all those meals we shared—I must have fed her a thousand times—she never actually soiled a napkin.

. . .

Not a speck. This night I'm thinking of, it had one of those skies where the stars look poured from a barrel. The cannery lights looked pretty, too, glowing on the river, like stars themselves, or the reflection of stars. Louise and I were chitchatting about her new beau—I wasn't even really listening, they were all more or less the same man—and it somehow came to light that I didn't know how to dance.

. . .

Well, I do now. Louise kicked off her shoes and led me into the parlor. I didn't have much in the way of music, so in the end we turned on the radio. I preferred Glenn Miller, but Elvis was all the rage that year.

. . .

Because he swiveled his hips and made goosy girls cry. This station Louise liked was playing Elvis. Three right in a row.

. . .

Oh. Well. Let's see. There was “All Shook Up.”

. . .

One: “All Shook Up.”

Two: “Jailhouse Rock.”

Three: The hound-dog one.

Louise hears the first song and she says to me, “Do you know how to jitterbug?” Honestly, sometimes that woman could be so unhooked from the obvious. “Louise,” I told her, “where in my squeezed-up life would I have learned how to jitterbug?”

“Here,” she says. “Right here in your life. I'll be the boy,” she says, “you be the girl.”

. . .

Oh, I can't.

. . .

No, I can't.

. . .

Don't expect miracles. That's all I'm saying. Lower your expectations. My hip is acting up.

. . .

Step, step, and back-step. Good. Step, step, and back-step. You hold the lady's hands like this. That's right. Step, step, and back-step. You twirl the lady under your arm, like this.

. . .

That was my fault. I stepped on Louise's foot like you just—Wait a second. Whoo. I have to sit.

. . .

I'm perfectly fine. Just getting my breath. Whoo. We did laugh a lot. I can still see Louise's face, you know, clear as I see you.

. . .

Like an upside-down triangle, delicate but fierce. A fox face. Those snappy eyes. That woman could laugh. And she moved like warm water.

. . .

Oh, I know, listen to me! But it's true. Even in the parlor, just fiddling around, no audience, teaching me that silly dance. You could see why men thought so much of her. She had this way of making you feel . . . poetic. I was no good at all at the jitterbug, as I have just now demonstrated, but then this other song came on, a song from a movie.

. . .

“Tammy.” About a girl falling in love. I haven't thought of that song for years. Debbie Reynolds sang it, in a voice that would put you in mind of maple syrup.

. . .

It was a waltz:
one
-two-three,
one
-two-three. Louise said, “May I?” and I said, “You may,” and presto, we're waltzing, and Louise, you know she was really a very good dancer, even taking the man's part, because we waltzed the whole song through and didn't once blunder into the footstool. “Don't try to follow,” she said, “just melt. You try to melt against the man and let him take you over.”

Remember that when you get your girl.

. . .

Oh, yes you will. Handsome boy like you. At the end of the song—I just remembered this—I was awash. Just
awash
in tears.

. . .

Feeling sorry for myself, I surmise. Feeling alone in my world. Randall was a good son, very polite, dutiful, obliging. But indifferent, for all that. Howard and I, we were his obligation. He saw Howard on the second Sunday of every month and me on the fourth Sunday of every month. Like clockwork. Like notations.

. . .

Oh, but I'd never especially minded being alone. When you're dancing in the arms of your only girlfriend, however, and this dreamy song comes on the radio, sung in this dreamy way, you cry. You just do.

. . .

Of course you understand. Why else would I be telling you all this?

. . .

She stayed right where she was, in the waltz position. It was like being caught outside in a blizzard with nothing on but your slip. You'd have thought Louise was the snow itself, falling all around me, muffling the cold and the wind even as she was the source of it.

. . .

Actually, we never spoke of it afterward. We had our dessert as we always did, chatted a little more as we always did, she kissed my cheek as she always did, and went on home as she always did.

. . .

I don't recall. Cake, very likely. I still had Maud-Lucy's recipe for tomato-soup cake, kept through all those years. I made it all the time. As a matter of fact, the recipe came from Maud-Lucy's auntie, the same one she'd gone back to Granyard to care for in the summer of 1914. If not for that auntie, I'd never have run off with the midway show. I'd never have been reeled in by Viktor. I'd never have had my first son. For ninety years I've been making that silly cake.

. . .

No, really! Tomato soup. It's delicious. I'll make one for you. I'd be delighted to make one for you. Louise was flat-out mad for that cake.

. . .

You go like this. Other hand—that's right.
One
-two-three,
one
-two-three. Good.
One
-two-three,
one
-two-three.

Wait. You forgot to turn off the—

On the way back from Granyard, whenever she began to nod off, Ona had been met by an image of herself and Maud-Lucy strolling past Shurtleff's Dry Goods, its window bright with silks and muslins. They're walking languidly in this memory, Ona twelve or thirteen, and spring seems the likely season: early springtime, a brilliant high noon, all the awnings on Mercantile Street rolled down in a gauntlet of colorful stripes. They're within shouting distance of the mills, if shouting could be heard over the din of the falls. Across the footbridge hundreds of men and women, her parents among them, are choking in the heat or burning their fingers or tending a machine at half-doze.

Maud-Lucy's voice rises at her ear, urgent and melodious: “You won't be going to work there. You were born for better.”

All at once the memory snaps clear, the time and place precise: shoppers stalled in small, jostling herds to review the
Titanic
's shocking fate, it's all anyone can talk about, so it is indeed spring—April 1912—and she is twelve, not thirteen, and her hair is swept up for the first time, a thrilling rite of passage, the whole shining mass held fast by four of Maud-Lucy's good combs. They are standing in the sunny doorway of Stanhope Music Company, where Howard Stanhope, her future husband and jailer and millstone, is polishing a piano.

“He belongs back in the city,” Maud-Lucy confides to her, “among city people.”

Howard hurries over, a portly businessman straightening his cuffs. His wife had been plump and sweet-faced, older than Howard by years, selling song sheets for a nickel apiece on Saturdays until her twinkling voice gave out to cancer. It was she who'd set up the floor plan—pianos in the front, Edison machines and Victrolas in the back, bright-buttoned concertinas half-mooned in the window as if ready to play themselves. Smaller items glimmer in a long glass case: mouth harps in three sizes; picks and bows; spoon sets with directions typed in four languages on Kimball card stock.

Ona will come to hate the sainted and savvy Mrs. Stanhope, whose design will be replicated in the Portland store eight years hence, down to the precise placement of the music racks. The first and best and irreplaceable Mrs. Stanhope, to whom Ona will be compared endlessly over a span of twenty-eight years until one day in 1948, when Howard—sitting in a cat-wrecked chair, listening to
Vic and Sade
on his beloved Crosley, business all but gutted thanks to his Tin Pan Alley dreams, attic bulging with unsold music sheets—
this
Howard Stanhope, this shucked shell, eyes sunk nearly to holes behind his greasy eyeglasses,
this
Howard will look up at Ona, the mother of his war-killed son, and say, “The first Mrs. Stanhope often looked into my eyes and burst into song.”

To which Ona, out of rope, grieving Frankie, and secretly recredentialed in the secretarial arts, will reply, “Oh, Howard. Oh, dear Lord. I'm leaving.”

On this day in April 1912, his ruin decades away, Howard greets the ladies and Maud-Lucy asks for a song. “Some gladness for my girl here, Mr. Stanhope,” she says, knowing that Howard is famous for gloom.

He tries too hard, as he will always, plucking a sheet from the rack and swooping it theatrically. “It's a dark day for some, Miss Stokes,” he intones, referring to the tragedy at sea. Taking a long, audible breath, he tenders his new ballad, penned for the Saturday shopping traffic, a mournful account of a motorcar somersaulting into the falls and hitting an ice floe and sinking into the black and hungry river. A few shoppers gather in the doorway, then a few more, tapping their feet to keep him tethered to the beat. Entranced and troubled, Ona listens. Despite his trimmed hair and immaculate fingernails, Howard's desperation teeters on calamity. If she had money she would buy a song. She tries to picture him happy, younger, lying on a picnic blanket with Mrs. Stanhope's steadying hand laid across his forehead.

“A triumph,” Maud-Lucy chirps, applauding. Ona hears the sparkle of flirtation and in her three-gore dress and shimmering hair becomes fully aware, for the first time, of Maud-Lucy's overlarge features and dowdy shirtwaist. Howard adjusts his line of sight and aims it squarely at Ona, who all but catches fire. She lifts her chin to expose her throat, feeling brazen and amazed.

She's being appraised and appreciated and considered—by Howard Stanhope, by old Mr. Drapeau looking to buy fiddle strings, by the Comeau boys knifing by with their newspapers, by Mrs. Farrar and her daughter Belle-May picking out sheet music. She melts in pity for Howard Stanhope and his droolsome ballad and castor-oil voice, never dreaming that a few years hence it will be her wifely hand on his big pink forehead, her shivering voice trying vainly to quell his fever for fame.

Then she catches Maud-Lucy, whose head turns on her thick neck, regarding Ona with possession and pride and something else that is not possession and pride. It looks like pain. It is envy.

As for the old Ona—her 104-year-old self stepping through the door of her house, leaving Quinn to get rid of that Shirley creature—the old Ona spied her beehive overnight case just where Quinn left it. Howard, at this moment, was both the portly store owner and the hound-eyed shell in the cat-ruined chair; he was everywhere and nowhere as the bouquet from Belle's wedding shed petals on the spotless floor. Reaching down to gather them, Ona received a sunslanted glimpse of her hand, the spotted ruin that retained a gentle taper, an echo of girlhood, as if to lay bare the futility of physical beauty. Its brevity. Its useless invitations.