One Sweet Quarrel (Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust Rediscoveries) Read online

  In the early twenties, her name was Daisy Lou Malone, though she called herself Amelia. Then, briefly, she was Mrs. T.T. Wilkins. Then she became, in permanent ink on a courthouse paper, Amelia Malone.

  Knickknacks. Samplers with quotations from the New Testament, Coué; then Kahlil Gibran, Aimee Semple McPherson, Bahá’Alláh. A small tattered Bible. A blue stoppered bottle with a faded label wrapped around it. Two shelves of phonograph records. A gramophone, then a Victrola, then a hi-fi, then a modest stereo.

  In this room, listening to her students, she had held her arms close to her sides, the tips of her fingers stretched outward as if they rested on the heads of tall hounds.

  When Michael Cage took piano lessons in the fifties, Amelia was still allowing her students to play for her. She hadn’t taken over completely. She required a routine of scales, arpeggios, Czerny exercises. She would seem to be listening carefully, but the student she heard was never the student before her—not Michael Cage, for instance. She listened always to the perfect student trying to push through.

  In the sixties, she began to play along with one hand. Then she began to scoot the pupils aside and play the piece herself, the best she could, her face pinched and rapt.

  She did the same with her voice students—listened to them with an expression on her face that grew increasingly distracted, until finally she was joining in, then singing the passages herself. And not just passages, finally, but entire songs, entire arias.

  Her last few students spent the full hour on folding chairs, leafing through comic books, picking their skin, while Amelia played the piano or sang to them in a wild and quavery voice.

  No mail. She made her way carefully back across the post office vestibule to her car, which she always left running in the No Parking space closest to the door. Her heels clicked—she wore black suede pumps—and the clicks were echoed by the tongues of two girls, nine or ten years old, who marched behind her imitating her diva’s prance, their hands propped like flippers on their scrawny hips.

  Amelia didn’t hear or see them, because she was thinking about a speech she wanted to give at the banquet. She hadn’t been requested to speak, but she felt she should have some remarks ready in case Michael Cage had his version of her all wrong. What made her think about this was an item she’d seen in the Great Falls Tribune a few weeks earlier about an elderly man who had decided to go on a train trip without notifying his only relative, a son who lived four blocks away. After three weeks, the old man was declared missing. Two months later, disembarking from the train to return to his house, he picked up a newspaper that contained his obituary. They found him in a fatal coma, the newspaper clutched in his hand.

  Amelia felt it probably wasn’t the fact of the obituary that had killed him but the way they had worded it—leaving out the important things, putting in the trivial. The shock of seeing your entire life reduced to five statistics and a hobby. She didn’t want that to happen tonight, so she went home to gather her thoughts and take a long nap, hoping for the wherewithal to amplify herself if Michael Cage made it necessary. Also, her eye had begun to ache, the worthless one. It had never seemed to go entirely dead—she thought sometimes of hands beating against a wall—and she needed to give it a rest.

  1

  IT WOULD have been a hot green day around a pond of stagnant water. The high drone of mosquitoes. Steamy Minnesota air and the smell of everything overripe. Boys, five of them, in the stiff Sunday shirts, the heavy trousers and chunky boots, of their time. Small-town boys with dull, badly cut hair, their sweat pushing the smell of soap and starch into the air where it hovers like their mothers.

  They stand on the rim of the brackish water, searching its buggy surface for the slow shadows of pike, of pickerel. It is the aimless time between church and the long midday meal.

  A girl in a white dress comes through the trees, a huge bow in her hair, dolls in her arms. She sits herself on the grass, booted feet straight ahead, and arranges two dolls, torso to torso, so that they appear to be having a conversation in bed. One of the dolls tells the other that she has been bad and must be punished. This time, the punishment will be worse than it has been before. Legs will be pulled off. The other doll pleads for mercy in words she has used before.

  One of the boys, the loudest and beefiest one, heaves himself up a tree and untangles a rope. It is tied to a branch that stretches over the waiting pond. The boys strip to their underdrawers. The girl on the grass looks up; returns to her dolls.

  The boys take turns swinging from the bank on the rope, dropping with heavy splashes, flailing back to shore to do it again. Their faces, necks, and forearms are deeply colored; the rest is white.

  The girl on the bank is Daisy Lou Malone. She is eight years old. The beefy boy is her brother Carlton, who is thirteen. One of the frailer boys, the one who seems to be studying the water, is her brother Jerome. He is ten.

  Jerome had knobby squared-off shoulders, big hands and feet, enough height for his age. But there was something wispy about him; his reedy neck perhaps, or his large girlish eyes, which had already the squint of a person who is not surprised by pain. And he had suffered, Jerome had. He had nightmares in which ordinary things—the back of a person’s neck, an unblinking house cat, an empty barn—became holy terrors. He had days that began with sun and oatmeal and possibility, then developed sudden holes of bleakness that he couldn’t seem to leap or step around.

  Sundays like this were particularly bad for Jerome, because he had to listen to the sermons of his father, the Presbyterian minister, a kind but over-innocent man who would have been shocked to know that his homilies could settle on his younger son like a vest of lead. A vest of lead, which is what Jerome’s attacks of asthma felt like too. A vest with laces that tightened each time he took a breath, so that he couldn’t exhale. All the old air built up, and he couldn’t get it out. And then his whole body felt broken and sealed. He got on his hands and knees to breathe. A couple of times, he spent hours like that on a cold floor in the middle of the night, crouched like an animal, trying desperately to get rid of the old breath while all the tall shapes around him released air easily, sipped it in again.

  It wasn’t always terrible for Jerome, not at all. He did ordinary things, had ordinary days like anyone else. He laughed and did schoolwork and played boy tricks. He had a dog named Captain. Many nights, he slept straight through. Even the asthma seemed something he might outgrow.

  Jerome hated his brother Carlton. No one else seemed to know this, though Carlton might have suspected it if he cared to wonder. Carlton was a completely different manner of boy than Jerome. He didn’t fear his dreams; didn’t even remember most of them. He was a stocky, auburn-haired, high-colored, round-faced boy who snored softly at night, his heavy limbs splayed. He was, in many respects, already the man he would become—a jovial bully; a red-faced hustler. A man who would never, in his prime, be prone to melancholy or scrupulosity. No, his trip wire would always be greediness; a need especially for things he could get sooner rather than later. He would always want more, and what he would want would be obvious things like clothes and money and, when they became available, an automobile. He would want the well-fed, smooth-browed look of a man who could want nothing because he had it all.

  Even when he was a boy, most people didn’t like Carlton very much. His parents had for him a certain respect—the wary respect of the religious for the unapologetically worldly—and they would have told you that they loved him. But they didn’t particularly like him. Not at all. Maybe he knew it and that’s what made him so grabby.

  See? Carlton is doing it again. He is pretending to throttle one of the boys, his joyless adolescent laugh barking across the water.

  He releases the boy and hitches up his soaking underwear, his belly shaking a little as he does it, and looks around for his favorite victim. Jerome stands at the edge of the pond. Carlton smacks water at him with the flat of his hand.

  Then, with tumultuous splashing steps, Carlton lun
ges at his brother and swoops him into his arms like a farmer lifting a sack of oats. He wades off the sandy shelf into the deeper water, where he can dunk him; hold him down there in the thick water for a few seconds so he’ll come up sputtering and gasping and the other boys will laugh.

  Carlton knew Jerome’s fear of not breathing. He had seen him crouched like a dog on the floor at night. But he put that out of his mind, or perhaps he told himself that he had the job of making his little brother tough enough for the world. In truth, Jerome scared him sometimes. That desperate gasping for something so ordinary. The possibility that Jerome would die while he was gasping, and the way that made their mother love him and brush back the hair from his damp forehead, the way she would never think of brushing back the thatch of her eldest.

  Carlton stands thigh-deep in the water, holding Jerome’s angular body to him. Jerome feels a great weariness beneath his fury. This has happened so many times before, some version of this. His role in life is to oppose Carlton in a way that entertains others.

  This time, though, he begins to feel detached from his legs. They kick and flail with a vehemence that is removed from his head or heart. He is a chicken whose head on the block can seem to gaze on the body that is running away.

  The boys in the middle of the pond stretch up their thin arms as Carlton wades in deeper with his prey. “Red rover, red rover, throw him on over,” they chant.

  Jerome dutifully begins to kick his way toward the end of this, to the dunking and the draining rage. But he is visited that moment with a vision of his father in the pulpit. He hears his father’s sonorous voice. And the vision, the voice, stop his legs. They fall silent.

  The Reverend Franklin Malone, father of Carlton and Jerome and Daisy Lou, was a tall, gentle man with a deep voice and the rawboned, intelligent look of a Lincoln. He was the pastor of a Presbyterian church in a wooded little town that would someday be a suburb of Saint Paul.

  Shortly before the children went to the pond that day, the Reverend Franklin Malone gave a sermon on hope.

  It was stifling in the white frame church, the men fidgeting in their hard collars and scratchy wool, rivulets of sweat running down their sides; the women cinched tight at the waist, swaddled with corsets, petticoats, chemises, dresses, stockings, gloves, shoes, hats like sleepy crowns.

  The Reverend Malone was not fire and brimstone. He loved his flock—that would not be too strong a word—and he wanted to leave them encouraged. He quoted the Bible as he always did; mentioned Lazarus and reminded his sweltering congregation that hope is a high virtue and that the prophet says to be of good courage. It was a theme he circled back to every month or so, as if he wanted to convince himself and his listeners that their picket-fenced, end-of-the-century lives required battleground gallantry.

  He always tried to finish his sermons with something less ornate than Scripture, something more friendly, something to relax his people and put them in the mood for the big noonday meal. He liked to encourage a collective chuckle—the kind of chuckle that acknowledges the futility of human fussing.

  “A friend told me a story the other day, and I’d like to share it with you,” he began in a comforting voice. “A little boy suffered a terrible accident in a threshing machine. The doctors worked over him night and day, but the poison set in and they were unable to save his legs. So they did what they had to do. It was the boy’s life or his legs.

  “When the boy awakened from the ether, his little legs had been taken away. His parents held his hands, tears in their eyes, waiting for his head to clear, dreading the news they must give him. His name was Bobby.

  “‘Bobby?’ his father said softly, confronting the most difficult job of his life. ‘Son? I have some bad news.’ The little boy lifted his pale face to his father’s.

  “‘Son, the doctors had to cut off your legs,’ the father said, his voice choking. ‘It was the only way.’”

  The Reverend Malone raised his hands then and extended them toward his audience, palms up. He smiled serenely.

  The three Malone children sat in the front row with their mother, Mattie. Jerome’s breathing had acquired a wheeze on the edges.

  “Now, my good people. What do you think happened next?” his father asked. “Did that little boy hide his head in the bedsheets? Did he turn his head to the wall? Did he panic and scream?”

  Jerome closed his eyes and tried to think about the way Captain had learned to catch a thrown stick with his teeth while running.

  “No he did not!” his father exulted. “Do you want to know what that little boy said?”

  A few people smiled as if they’d heard the story before. Jerome bent forward to try to ease the tightening in his chest.

  “This is what that little boy said. He turned to his father with shining eyes. And he raised first one little white arm and then the other, and a smile broke across his face and he said: ‘But, Papa! My arms are all right. Papa, my arms are all right!’”

  He let that sink in for a couple of beats while his audience rustled complacently.

  Carlton yawned, then clapped a stub-fingered hand over his mouth at a stern look from his mother.

  Jerome. Thin and alert and wheezing.

  Daisy? All dressed up like a summer package, the big bow stuck in her lank hair. A heart-shaped face made somber by her lofty eyes, the kind of eyes that don’t crinkle or disappear when a person laughs but seem somehow to sit in judgment upon the rest of the face. She thought about legs and arms. About the arms of her doll Annabelle and how long and white they were. How she wished she had Annabelle on her lap right now so she could move the arms and legs and Annabelle, in her ballerina dress, would appear to be bowing.

  So there we have them, some long time before the real story begins, the lineaments of their adult selves already present. Carlton thick and unheeding. Jerome aghast, resistant. Daisy in a dream.

  “What did little Bobby have?” the Reverend Malone said with a broad shy smile on his face. “He had faith in our Father’s plan for him. Faith that he was put on earth to serve our Maker’s designs, though he could not—as we cannot—know with certainty what those plans are. Bobby had his spot in heaven, you can be sure of that. And, here on earth, he had his faith. He had his trust and his hope. He did not give up. He did not turn his head away.”

  He raised his long arms above his head, the hands clenched in a gentle fist. “And that, my dear friends, is better than two legs. It is better than a hundred legs.”

  Jerome’s head snapped up.

  “It is better than a thousand legs,” his father insisted.

  He raised his arms over the congregation now and inclined his head. “Heavenly Father, may each of us find within ourselves the wisdom of young Bobby. And may we go forth now, serene in the knowledge that the path is marked and we have only to grasp Your hand and walk it well.”

  He smiled gravely, the signal for their release.

  A loose collar now. A big chicken dinner.

  A thousand legs? An endless centipede of a smiling boy? How could that be better than anything?

  That was another of Jerome’s problems. He got a picture in his mind and it took over. Swallowed up everything else. He thought about a boy who tried and tried, who lived a mutilated fighting life though the outcome, his place in heaven, was the same, legs or no legs, fight or no fight. There was something horrible in the idea. There was cruelty and terror in the idea.

  Jerome goes absolutely limp in Carlton’s arms. He can feel the back of his head skim the surface of the pond. It is the last thing Carlton expects him to do, and a look of slow curiosity moves across his grinning face. He bends to examine his brother. Jerome’s eyes are closed. He has thrown it all in.

  The other boys laugh loudly at the surprise of this. Carlton doesn’t know exactly how to capitalize on the situation. He could go ahead and dunk Jerome, but without his resistance, the fun will be out of it.

  He examines his brother’s face again, the dangling body, then pretends he’d ha
d nothing in mind at all. He places Jerome upright in the water, shrugs his shoulders, and dolphins himself toward the other boys, kicking hard so his brother gets a good splash.

  Jerome stands in place. He shakes water out of his hair. He wears a small new smile.

  Daisy has stood up and holds one of the dolls, the ballerina Annabelle. She is making the doll clap for Jerome. Tick tick, go the little china hands.

  At the big midday meal, Mattie is crisp and impatient with Jerome because he has an uncustomary vitality that worries her. Jerome and Daisy Lou have a stifled laughing fit at the table and are sent to their rooms for an hour. Carlton eats much more than usual and gets a stomachache and has to lie on the porch swing for a while, flies droning around his head. The Reverend Malone unbuttons his vest and reads the newspaper while his wife and the Anderson girl clear up.

  The walls of the house breathe like an old dog.

  2

  New York City

  New York

  May 18, 1910

  Dear Jerome,

  Well my did you see the big comet out there? The newspapers said it caused violent disturbances on the face of the sun in the West, which means I know not what, but did you see them? This entire day has given me pause for thot, I must say. First there was my recital at Fernwood Presbyterian across the river in New Jersey. It’s Lelia Todd’s brother’s church, you remember her from home, and she made the arrangements for a guest artist (me) and accompanied me on the piano. A man from the church with a very deep and dramatic voice gave two readings, “Knee Deep in June” and something else I fail to recall at the moment. My voice I believe has reached a new level in the past two months from a program of very vigorous exercises that leave me nearly prostrate.

  This visit to New York has confirmed my desire to pursue a musical career in this city. As I was singing in the church this afternoon, the knowledge came over me that this is where I am meant to pursue my musical path, and so I now plan to take up residence in New York within one year at most. I will return to St. Paul to complete my preparations, Italian lessons and etc., and then I believe I will be ready.