The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate

Chapter 6 MUSIC LESSONS

THE SUMMER WORE ON, and I found respite in the coolness of the river and the dimness of Granddaddy’s laboratory. My Notebook progressed nicely, each page filled with many Questions, an occasional Answer, and clumsy illustrations of various plants and animals. But despite my pressing new activities, I was not excused from my music lessons.

Our piano teacher, Miss Brown, looked like a thin, dry stick, but she could swing her ruler with plenty of juice when she thought no one was looking. Sometimes she would smack my knuckles so hard that my hands crashed into the keys, causing an ugly dissonant chord to detonate in the middle of the piece. I wonder if my mother, sitting on the other side of the closed pocket doors with her sewing basket, ever puzzled over these frightful noises. For some reason, I didn’t tell her about Miss Brown’s assaults. Why didn’t I? I guess I had the sense that something shameful on my part—I don’t know what—invited these pedagogic outrages. And it’s true that Miss Brown did not attack me at random. Her violence boiled over when I got lost picking my way through the thicket of notes I’d been traversing without mistake all week long. (Of course, the hovering ruler didn’t help.) I was the worst kind of coward; I seethed in silence and never said anything to anybody. And why did only Harry and I have to suffer through this wretched weekly imposition of culture? My other brothers were free and clear.

I learned to play Mr. Stephen Foster for Father and Vivaldi for Granddaddy, who was also partial to Mozart. He would sit in the parlor, sometimes reading, sometimes sitting with his eyes closed, for as long as I would play. Mother was partial to Chopin. Miss Brown was partial to scales.

Later there were Mr. Scott Joplin’s rags, which I learned for myself. They set Mother’s teeth on edge, but I didn’t care. It was the best music my brothers and I had ever heard, with gorgeous cascading chords and an electrifying ragged timing, which compelled the audience to get up and dance. All of my brothers came running when I struck up the opening bars to “The Maple Leaf Rag.” They lurched so wildly around the parlor that Mother feared for the very pictures on the wall. Later we got a gramophone and then I could dance, too. My younger brothers adored running the machine and begged to take a turn, but you had to watch them—they were murder on the crank.

Jim Bowie’s favorite tune was “Kitten on the Keys.” He’d manhandle one of the beleaguered cats up onto the keyboard and coax it with a scrap of ham to walk back and forth. J.B. thought it was a terrific joke. When you’re five years old, I guess it is. It predictably drove Mother up the wall (and me too, though I’d never admit it), which of course added to J.B.’s pleasure. Mother frequently had to resort to a couple of tablespoons of her Lydia Pinkham’s. Sul Ross once asked Mother if I would also get to drink Lydia Pinkham’s when I grew up to be a lady, and she replied mysteriously, “I hope Callie won’t need it.”

Viola would sing alto with me in the kitchen to “Hard Times Come Again No More,” but she refused to listen to Mr. Scott Joplin.

“Music for savages,” she sniffed, which perplexed me.

IT CAME TIME for Miss Brown to present her piano students at a recital held every year at the Confederate Heroes Hall in Lockhart. For the first time, Miss Brown deemed me accomplished enough to be included on the program. To be truthful, it’s just that I couldn’t talk my way out of it for another year. Harry had performed for six years in a row and told me it was a snap. All you had to do was avoid staring into the gas footlights, since the light might blind you and you could pitch off the stage. Also, I had to memorize a piece of music. Miss Brown gave me Beethoven’s Ecossaise in G, which, strangely, had chords not unlike the Joplin rags. Oh, how the ruler twitched with aggravation. “Wrists down! Fingers up! Tempo, tempo, tempo!” Crack. I learned that piece in record time, and soon I was playing it in my sleep. It goes without saying I grew to hate it. My best friend, Lula Gates, had to memorize a piece that was twice as long as mine, but she was ten times a better player than I.

For the great occasion, Mother made me a new white broderie-anglaise dress with many layers of stiff, scratchy petticoats. This was no corset but it definitely ranked as a form of torture. I complained at length and clawed savagely at my legs. I also had a brand-new pair of pale cream kid boots. They took forever to close with the hook, but, once on, they were fine-looking, and I secretly admired them.

Miss Brown taught me how to curtsy, holding my dress out sideways and dipping at the knees.

“No, no,” she said, “don’t grab your skirt like some clodhopper. Think of making wings, like an angel. Like this. Now sink. Slowly! Don’t plummet, child—you’re not a rock.” She made me practice many times before she was satisfied.

Then we had to deal with The Matter of My Hair. Mother had finally noticed that I seemed to have less hair than expected, but I explained that it had snarled so badly over the summer, what with the terrible sticker burrs, that I had been forced to chop out the rats’ nests and then cut a smidgen more to even everything up. Mother’s expression grew beady at this but she didn’t say anything to me. She called for Viola to help. Together they spent a good hour brushing and twisting and parleying as if I weren’t even in the room. I didn’t know you could spend so much time on hairstyles. Of course, I couldn’t protest too much because we all understood that this was my punishment for hacking away at it, and only fitting, too.

Then they slathered me with Peabody’s Finest Hair Food, Guaranteed to Produce Lustrous Locks, and set me out in the sun to bake for yet another hour with this revolting sulfur grease on my head. This, I thought, this is what ladies go through?

The one thing that made it bearable was that Granddaddy took pity on my wretched state and brought me one of his books, Fascinating Flora and Fauna of the Antipodes. The picture of the kangaroo showed a baby peeking out of its pouch. (Question for the Notebook: Why don’t people have pouches? Such a convenient way to keep a baby at hand. I tried to picture Mother with J.B. in a pouch. Answer: He’d never fit under her corset.) I yearned to see a kangaroo. And a platypus, a mammal that looked like a bizarre cross between, oh, say, an otter and a duck. Since I’d been lucky enough to see a hippopotamus in a touring circus in Austin, maybe my wishes weren’t so outlandish. I contemplated my chances and fanned a dim ember of hope in my heart as I sat in the sun, reeking like a giant match.

Finally, they put me in the hip bath and took turns pouring buckets of water over me. Then they scoured my head clean and tied up my hair in ringlets with cotton rags that stuck out all over like a frightful job of bandaging. I smelled like brimstone and looked like a casualty from the War. I was an apparition from H–ll.

Poor Jim Bowie burst into tears when he saw me, and I had to take him on my knee and convince him that I was not mortally wounded. Sul Ross called me Old Golliwog until I caught him and sat on him. Lamar snickered, and even Harry smiled. There was nothing I enjoyed more than being a source of amusement to my brothers.

I didn’t sleep well that night on my lumpy rags. I woke up sluggish and cranky the next morning. Mother decided it was pointless to finish my hair before we got to Lockhart, so I suffered the further indignity of having to wear an enormous ruffled cap over the rags all the way there in the wagon. My head was huge. I looked deformed; I looked like Lula Gates’s brother, poor old feeble-minded Toddy Gates, who had water on the brain. (Questions for the Notebook: Where did the water on Toddy’s brain come from? Did Mrs. Gates drink too much while carrying him?) I prayed that we wouldn’t meet anyone I knew and then felt guilty for drawing God’s attention away from serious matters to what was, after all, only an item of vanity. I admit I got more nervous the closer we got to Lockhart, but Harry kept telling me it would be a cakewalk.

We pulled up to the hall, and as the horses came to a stop, I leaped from the wagon and ran around to the back door before I could draw a crowd. Mother and Viola followed behind with a basket filled with hairpins and ribbons and tongs. They parked me on a stool and set to work on me, yanking the rags from my head. There were several other girls being tortured in the same way, so it wasn’t as bad as I had feared. Mrs. Ogletree even primped her boy Georgie, whom she’d gadded up in a green velvet Little Lord Fauntleroy suit. He churned with excitement on his stool, his blond sausage curls bouncing on his cambric collar.

Lula trembled and clutched a tin bucket to her chest and looked like she was going to be sick at any moment. The identical twins, Hazel and Hanna Dauncey, were an interesting and identical shade of grayish green. The sight of all this obvious distress in the others perked me up.

Miss Brown swept in wearing a new and unbecoming chartreuse gown and clapped her hands for attention. “Children! Mothers! Attention, s’il vous plaît.”

Instantly, there was complete silence. There was not a peep, a squeak, a rustle, not even from the squirmy Georgie. I realized that Miss Brown had the same threatening hold over all her other pupils as she had over me. Why, I thought, I bet she smacks all of us. Probably not Harry, but everybody else. So it’s not just me. Well, how about that.

“In ten minutes you will line up,” Miss Brown said, “from youngest to oldest, and then you will file into the auditorium behind me in an orderly—an orderly—fashion. You will then sit in the row of chairs along the back of the stage until it is your turn to play. There will be no talking. There will be no fidgeting. And there will especially be no pushing. Do I make myself clear?” Mute nods all around.

“Do not forget to bow or curtsy after your selection. Mothers, ten minutes.” And she turned and swept out, kicking her train behind her in one practiced motion. Viola and Mother both fell on me again with a vengeance, beating and thrashing my hair with brushes and tongs. Finally they stepped back to admire their work.

“There,” said Mother, “don’t you look a picture? I wouldn’t have recognized you. Look.” She handed me a mirror.

I wouldn’t have recognized me, either, what with the elaborate structural pile teetering on my head. Above my forehead rose a steep cliff of hair, which then swooped into an intricate pointy arrangement at the crown, all massed above triple pontoons of hair along each temple; bringing up the rear was a trailing cascade of fat curls down my back. This magnificence was topped off with the world’s largest pink satin bow. Mother and Viola looked well pleased. They didn’t bother to ask me what I thought, so I didn’t have to say that I thought I looked . . . appalling.

“See how pretty you look?” said Mother.

My hand drifted up to my hair.

“Don’t you touch that,” said Viola. “Don’t you dare.” She gathered up their tools while Mother struck up a conversation with Mrs. Gates.

I sidled over to Lula and whispered, “Hey, Lula, are you all right?”

She looked at me with her enormous hazel eyes and nodded but didn’t—couldn’t—speak. I noticed with envy that she had escaped drastic coiffuric ministrations; her pale, silvery-blond hair hung down her back in two neat braids. I tried to jolly her out of her panic. I nudged her and whispered, “Lula, look at what they did to my hair. It’s the worst, isn’t it?” Lula’s lips were clamped together. She responded with a long, quivering breath through her nose. I had the feeling she didn’t remember how to speak English.

“Lula,” I said, “you’ll be all right. You’ve played that piece a million times. Take some more deep breaths. And if that doesn’t work, well, you’ve always got your bucket.”

I looked around. Harry stood before a mirror in the corner, dousing himself with lavender pomade and painstakingly parting his hair with a comb, over and over. I had never known him to take such care with his appearance before. As the oldest student, he would play last, but he would have to sit onstage and suffer through the rest of us until it was his turn.

Miss Brown returned, and we received final admonishments from our mothers before they hurried out. My last whispered instructions were from Viola: “Don’t touch that hair. I mean it.” We lined up in silence. No one talked or fidgeted or pushed. Harry winked at me from the back of the line. Lula quaked in front of me, shivering all the way to the tips of her braids.

“Lula,” said Miss Brown, frowning, “you have to put that bucket down.” Lula didn’t move. “Calpurnia, take that bucket from her.” I tapped Lula on the shoulder and said, “Give it over, Lula. It’s time.” She stared at me in mute appeal. I ended up prying it from her damp hands.

Miss Brown said, “Children, this is the time for your very best deportment. Chins up. Chests out.”

She opened the side door to the auditorium, and we marched in behind her to what sounded like hard rain on a tin roof. It was applause, and Lula flinched like a startled fawn. For a moment, I thought she would bolt. I did a rapid and complex series of mental calculations about the range of possible blame that could be assigned to me if she got away, but good old Lula stuck it out and stayed in line.

Then I saw Miss Brown floating majestically upward at the front of the line. Why? How? What was happening? It took me a second to remember that there were a dozen or so steps up to the stage and she was walking up them.

Steps! I had forgotten there were steps. Hundreds and hundreds of steps. I had seen them before, but they were not part of my mental practice; I hadn’t practiced them in my mind’s eye. My ankles went wobbly, and I felt hot and cold all over. Lula glided upward in front of me without any apparent problem. I followed in terror and somehow made it to the top without falling on my face, and then stopped myself just in time from staring into the dazzling limelights that marked the edge of the precipice. We made it to our chairs, and the applause died down like a passing storm.

Miss Brown walked to the edge of the stage and curtsied to the audience. She gave a small speech about this splendid occasion, about Culture making inroads in Caldwell County, oh yes, and how young minds and fingers benefited from exposure to the Great Composers, and how she hoped the parents there would appreciate her hard work in molding their children to value the Finer Things in Life, since we were still living, after all, almost on the edge of the Wild Frontier. She sat down to more applause, and then we got up, one by one, in varying states of misplaced confidence or paralyzing terror.

Do I need to tell you what happened? It was a massacre. Do I have to tell you that Georgie fell backward off the piano stool before he played a single note and had to be hustled off, wailing, in his mother’s arms; that Lula played flawlessly and then got violently sick the second she finished; that Hazel Dauncey’s foot slipped off the pedal in the dead silence before she began, filling the auditorium with a deep reverberating sprrroiiinnnnggg; that Harry played well but kept looking out at a certain part of the audience for no good reason that I could tell; that I played like a windup clockworks with wooden fingers and forgot to curtsy until Miss Brown hissed at me?

I DON’T REMEMBER much more about the day. I managed to blot it out. But I do remember vowing in the wagon on the way home that I would never do it again. I told Mother and Father this, and there must have been something in my voice because, the next year, despite Miss Brown’s formidable efforts, I handed out the programs, along with Lula, who was barred for life from playing in the recital.