Rhoda Read online

  He was coming across the yard toward her now, wearing his jodhpurs and his riding boots. He stopped, one hip cocked out, his black patch over his injured eye.

  “Get out of here,” she said. “I’m doing something.”

  “Let me see.”

  “It’s a time capsule.” She handed over the matchbox. He opened it and looked inside.

  “You ought to put your scout pin in. There ought to be something about the scouts.”

  “Well, I don’t have anything else. That’s all that’s going in.”

  “This is going to rot. You ought to get a tin box.”

  “Just mind your own business.”

  “I’d use tin if I was you. You want me to get you a can?” He was getting his hooded look. Rhoda grew wary. There were no meaningless encounters between Rhoda and Dudley. Every word and gesture was charged with meaning and intent. There was no meager stuff here. It was the world they were fighting for.

  “Just mind your own beeswax,” she said. “Just leave me alone.” He backed off. He actually walked away. Turned his back and walked away. Rhoda dug a few more inches in the ground, stuffed the box in the hole and covered it with dirt. Then she got up and went into the house to see what he was doing.

  He was in his room with the door shut. There was the sound of shuffling, the sound of muffled voices, muffled laughter. Rhoda pressed her ear to the door. Laughter again. It was Cody Wainwright. They were doing something. They were talking about their secret things. She would use the hidden passageway behind the stairs. They would never know she was there. She could stay there for hours without a sound, hot and close in the little alcove behind his room.

  She climbed down through the small door and into the crawl space between the dormers, walking on the two-by-fours. She sat down on the crossbeams. She prepared to listen. Nothing was going on. They weren’t talking. They weren’t saying anything. Someone laughed. It was Dudley. Yes, it was Dudley laughing. Cody laughed back. Silence. Only silence. They turned the radio on. It was hot. Before long she would breathe up all the air. She would die back here and no one would ever find her. She got up and beat on the wall of his room. “I hear you in there. I can hear every word you’re saying. I heard everything you said.” Then she climbed back out the door and turned around to face them. “I heard you,” she said. “If you hit me I’ll tell her everything you said.”

  “You’re a nasty bad little girl,” Dudley said. “You are as bad as anyone gets to be.”

  “Let’s take her with us to the sweetshop,” Cody said. “Let’s get her a lemonade.”

  “She’s been out in the yard making a time capsule with her picture in it.” Dudley laughed and turned his back on her. “That’s how much she likes herself. She thinks someone’s going to be interested in her after she’s dead.” He laughed again, a dark vicious laugh, and took his friend’s arm and left her there.

  A week later Rhoda’s father came home one afternoon and announced that they were moving to Terre Haute, Indiana, to build another airport. They had one week to pack up and be there. The War Department was going to build the biggest airport in Indiana and get this goddamn war over with. They were going to live in a famous writer’s house, a writer named Virginia Sorensen. The writer had a little girl just Rhoda’s age and Rhoda would live in this child’s room. They must hurry and put everything in storage. The war was heating up. There must be more airports, more pilots, more planes. Everyone must pitch in and do their share. They must tighten their belts, pack the boxes, get on the move.

  Dudley began to cry. He was afraid to go to a different school so soon after he lost his eye. Rhoda’s mother put her arms around him and cried too. Only Rhoda and her father did not cry. Only Rhoda and her father had enough sense to win a war. Rhoda took some boxes up to her room and began to throw things into them, singing as she worked. “Over hill, over dale, as we hit the dusty trail. And those caissons go rolling along. . . .” She threw in her movie star pictures and her music box and her false fingernail set and her Kiddie Kurlers and her hot water bottle. She threw in her books and started on her dresser drawers. All her nice white socks. The pair of ecru rayon pants her mother wouldn’t let her wear because they were tacky. She held them up to the light. There were stripes of ecru silk. She threw them in and finished off the drawer. A rumbled sheet of white tissue paper was in the bottom. She folded it and left it in the drawer. Jimmy got up out of a corner and came and stood by the boxes. He was her imaginary playmate. He had come to live with her when she was four, when her mother was in the hospital. He had stayed with her all that long year. He had sat with her on the fire escape of the apartment in Louisville, Kentucky, waiting for the bread man to come and bring the bread with the picture of the Seven Dwarfs. Rhoda hadn’t seen him in a long time. Now he was here, wearing his gray suit and white shirt and black tie, wearing his cynical look. “Well, I see we’re moving again,” he said. “I hope you don’t get a bad teacher like you did last time. I’ll never forget that day.”

  Rhoda stopped packing. She sat down on the bed. All her courage disappeared. The day she had come to Seymour to the new school, a fat, blond teacher had put her in the bad reading group. THE LOWER GROUP. Rhoda Katherine Manning, the best reader in the world, sitting in the back of the room. She had sat there all day until they found out she could read. “It could happen again,” Jimmy said. “Go find her. Make sure she knows. Go find her right now. Get it settled.”

  Rhoda found her mother in the bathroom packing the iodine and alcohol and Mercurochrome and hydrogen peroxide. “If you put me in a school that puts me in a dumb reading class I will kill myself. You had better be sure they don’t do that.”

  “Oh, darling.” Her mother closed the bathroom cabinet and sat down on the edge of the tub. “I’m so sorry. So sorry about everything. I’m doing all I can. I’m doing everything I know how to do.”

  “Just be sure about the school.”

  “I will. I promise I will. I’ll go with you the first day and take your test scores. I’ll talk to the teacher before you go there. Nothing will happen. I promise you. You’re going to live in a writer’s house, honey. She wrote A Little Lower Than the Angels. We’ll get all her books and read them. It will be an adventure. We must be brave, darling, we’re in a war.”

  “I know. You already told me that. How big a room?”

  “Plenty big. Your father said it had a blackboard. And Rhoda, don’t worry about the school. I will never let that happen to you again.”

  “It better not.”

  “It won’t. I promise you. Things can’t be perfect right now, honey. We have to get this war over. Our men are dying over there. We have to save as many as we can.” As soon as she said it Ariane regretted the words. It was not good to say dead or death to Rhoda. The child backed up and moved into the corner.

  “What does it mean to die? What happens to you?” Rhoda was near the sink. She could smell the alcohol and the Mercurochrome. It smelled like the hospital where she had had her tonsils out the year before. They had strapped her to a table and put a mask on her face and dripped sleeping gas on it. Her mother and father were in the hall. Nuns were all around her, holding her down. There was nothing she could do. Her life was in the hands of nuns and strangers. Death will be like that, Rhoda thought. They will hold you down and drip poison in your nose and there will be nothing you can do and your mother will be out in the hall. She refused her mother’s hands. “I can’t stand to die,” she screamed. “I hate God. I hate it all so much. I won’t do it. They can’t make me do it. They won’t get me. I won’t hold still. I won’t go in there. Go to goddamn hell, that’s what I’m going to tell them. You won’t make me die, you goddamn old God, to hell with you.”

  Her mother had her now. Her mother had her in her arms. “It isn’t like that, honey. People you love are up there waiting for you. You can be with Jesus. He died to give us everlasting life. He frees us from death.”

  “That’s a lie. None of it is true. Nothing you ever
tell me is true.” Her mother dropped her arms. She sighed a long deep sigh. Rhoda was too much. Too smart for her own good. Too wild, too crazy, too hard to manage or control. She was a long way from the sweet little redheaded girl Ariane had ordered from Jesus. Thinking of Jesus, Ariane remembered her duty. She fought back. “You just calm down, young lady. You just stop all that talk right this minute.”

  “Make sure about the school,” Rhoda said and made her exit. She went into the hall and found Jimmy waiting at the top of the stairs. She took his arm and started down. “Let’s go dig up the time capsule,” she said. “I might need that picture where I’m going.” She stamped down the wooden stairs, making as much noise as she could on every stair, stamp, stamp, stamp, back in control with Jimmy by her side. She lifted her head and began to sing. “I’m happy when I’m hiking. Off the beaten track. I’m happy when I’m hiking. Pack upon my back. With a right good friend, to the journey’s end. Ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty miles a day. Tramp, tramp, tramp, tramp.”

  “The name of the pack is life or death,” Jimmy muttered. “Therefore, let’s keep moving.”

  1944

  When I was eight years old I had a piano made of nine martini glasses.

  I could have had a real piano if I had been able to pay the terrible price, been able to put up with piano lessons, but the old German spy who taught piano in the small town of Seymour, Indiana, was jealous of my talent.

  “Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!” she would scream in her guttural accent, hitting me on the knuckles with the stick she kept for that purpose. “Stopping this crazy business. Can’t you ever listen? Can’t you sit still a minute? Can’t you settle down?”

  God knows I tried to settle down. But the mere sight of the magnificent black upright, the feel of the piano stool against my plump bottom, the cold ivory touch of the keys would send me into paroxysms of musical bliss, and I would throw back my head and begin to pound out melodies in two octaves.

  “Stop it,” she would be screaming. “This is no music, this crazy banging business. Stop on my piano. Stop before I call your momma!”

  I remember the day I quit for good. I got up from the piano stool, slammed the cover down on the keys, told her my father would have her arrested, and stalked out of the house without my hat and gloves. It was a cold November day, and I walked home with gray skies all around me, shivering and brokenhearted, certain the secret lives of musical instruments were closed to me forever.

  So music might have disappeared from my life. With my formal training at this sorry end I might have had to content myself with tap and ballet and public speaking, but a muse looked down from heaven and took pity on me.

  She arrived in the form of a glamorous war widow, was waiting for me at the bar when I walked into the officers’ club with my parents that Saturday night.

  There she sat, wearing black taffeta, smoking long white cigarettes, sipping her third very dry martini.

  “Isn’t that Doris Treadway at the bar?” my mother said. “I can’t believe she’s going out in public.”

  “What would you like her to do,” my father said, “stay home and go crazy?”

  “Well, after all,” my mother whispered. “It’s only been a month.”

  “Do you know that lady?” I asked, wondering if she was a movie star. She looked exactly like a movie star.

  “She works for your daddy, honey,” my mother said. “Her husband got killed in the Philippines.”

  “Go talk to her,” my father said. “Go cheer her up. Go tell her who you are.”

  As soon as we ordered dinner I did just that. I walked across the room and took up the stool beside her at the bar. I breathed deeply of her cool perfume, listening to the rustling of her sleeves as she took a long sophisticated drag on her Camel.

  “So you are Dudley’s daughter,” she said, smiling at me. I squirmed with delight beneath her approving gaze, enchanted by the dark timbre of her voice, the marvelous fuchsia of her lips and fingertips, the brooding glamor of her widowhood.

  “I’m Rhoda,” I said. “The baby-sitter quit so they brought me with them.”

  “Would you like a drink?” she asked. “Could I persuade you to join me?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Sure I’ll join you.”

  She conferred with the bartender and waved to my parents who were watching us from across the room.

  “Well, Rhoda,” she said, “I’ve been hearing about you from your father.”

  “What did you hear?” I asked, getting worried.

  “Well,” she said, “the best thing I heard was that you locked yourself in a bathroom for six hours to keep from eating fruit cocktail.”

  “I hate fruit cocktail,” I said. “It makes me sick. I wouldn’t eat fruit cocktail for all the tea in China.”

  “I couldn’t agree with you more,” she said, picking up her stirrer and tapping it on her martini glass. “I think people who hate fruit cocktail should always stick together.”

  The stirrer made a lovely sound against the glass. The bartender returned, bringing a wineglass full of bright pink liquid.

  “Taste it,” she said, “go ahead. He made it just for you.”

  I picked up the glass in two fingers and brought it delicately to my lips as I had seen her do.

  “It’s wonderful,” I said, “what’s in it?”

  “Something special,” she said. “It’s called a Shirley Temple. So little girls can pretend they’re drinking.” She laughed out loud and began to tap the glass stirrer against the line of empty glasses in front of her.

  “Why doesn’t he move the empty glasses?” I asked.

  “Because I’m playing them,” she said. “Listen.” She tapped out a little tune. “Now, listen to this,” she said, adding small amounts of water to the glasses. She tapped them again with a stirrer, calling out the notes in a very high, very clear soprano voice. “Do, Re, Mi, Fa, So . . . Bartender,” she called, “bring us more glasses.”

  In a minute she had arranged a keyboard with nine perfect notes.

  “Here,” she said, moving the glasses in front of me, handing me the stirrer, “you play it.”

  “What should I play,” I said. “I don’t know any music.”

  “Of course you know music,” she said. “Everyone knows music. Play anything you like. Play whatever comes into your head.”

  I began to hit the glasses with the stirrer, gingerly at first, then with more abandon. Soon I had something going that sounded marvelous.

  “Is that by any chance the ‘Air Corps Hymn’ you’re playing?” she said.

  “Well . . . yes it is,” I said. “How could you tell?”

  She began to sing along with me, singing the words in her perfect voice as I beat upon the glasses. “Off we go,” she sang, “into the wild blue yonder, climbing high into the sky, dum, dum, dum. Down we dive spouting a flame from under, off with one hell-of-a-roar, roar, roar . . .”

  People crowded around our end of the bar, listening to us, applauding. We finished with the air corps and started right in on the army. “Over hill, over dale, as we hit the dusty trail, and those caissons go marching along, dum, dum, dum . . . In and out, hear them shout, counter march and right about, and those caissons go rolling along. For it’s hie, hie, hee, in the field artilll-a-reeeee . . .”

  A man near me began playing the bass on a brandy glass. Another man drummed on the bar with a pair of ashtrays.

  Doris broke into “Begin the Beguine.” “When they begin the beguine,” she said, “it brings back a night of tropical splendor. It brings back the sound of music so te-en-de-rr. It brings back a memorreeeeee ever green.”

  A woman in a green dress began dancing, swaying to our rhythm. My martini glasses shone in the light from the bar. As I struck them one by one the notes floated around me like bright translucent boats.

  This was music! Not the stale order of the book and the metronome, not the stick and the German. Music was this wildness rising from the dark taffeta of Doris’s dres
s. This praise, this brilliance.

  The soft delicious light, the smell of perfume and gin, the perfection of our artistry almost overwhelmed me, but I played bravely on.

  Every now and then I would look up and see Doris smiling at me while she sang. Doris and I were one. And that too was the secret of music.

  I do not know how long we played. Perhaps we played until my dinner was served. Perhaps we played for hours. Perhaps we are playing still.

  “Oh, just let them begin the beguine, let them plaaaaay . . .Let the fire that was once a flame remain an ember. Let it burn like the long lost desire I only remember. When they begin, when they begin, when they begi-i-i-i-i-in the be-gui-i-i-i-ine . . .”

  Victory Over Japan

  When I was in the third grade I knew a boy who had to have fourteen shots in the stomach as the result of a squirrel bite. Every day at two o’clock they would come to get him. A hush would fall on the room. We would all look down at our desks while he left the room between Mr. Harmon and his mother. Mr. Harmon was the principal. That’s how important Billy Monday’s tragedy was.

  Mr. Harmon came along in case Billy threw a fit. Every day we waited to see if he would throw a fit but he never did. He just put his books away and left the room with his head hanging down on his chest and Mr. Harmon and his mother guiding him along between them like a boat.

  “Would you go with them like that?” I asked Letitia at recess. Letitia was my best friend. Usually we played girls chase the boys at recess or pushed each other on the swings or hung upside down on the monkey bars so Joe Franke and Bobby Saxacorn could see our underpants but Billy’s shots had even taken the fun out of recess. Now we sat around on the fire escape and talked about rabies instead.