Chapter Two
1892
A Night’s Alteration
Where does a person’s story begin? Mine starts with a hole in the middle, a hole where a father should have been. I must have had one, but the truth was that no one wanted to say out loud who he had been, if they even knew. I was raised in my grandparents’ house in Philadelphia. My name was Ada Bates. There was plenty of room and plenty of money, and I grew up straight and strong.
In my earliest memories, I remember my mother as a cello. She and her instrument fused: a deep voice, a wasp waist. She wielded her bow fiercely, the notes soaring high and plunging low until the very windows trembled in their sills. I heard her at a distance, practicing at all hours, from down long hallways and behind closed doors. As she and my father were never married, she must have been in disgrace, but she never seemed to feel it. She was always cheerful as a songbird in those days.
She taught me music herself, though I was at best a middling student. From her, I had inherited milk-white skin, large eyes, and a cleft in my chin, but the other side of the family delivered a tin ear. My singing was perpetually flat and my piano clumsy. I still looked forward to the lessons, because I rarely heard or saw her otherwise. Once a month, we both had our hair dyed from its natural red-gold to a more sedate brown, a tradition my grandmother had started when my mother herself was a child. I looked forward to those days, when we sat side by side for more than an hour, but they were all too rare. The rest of the time, a freckled governess named Colleen woke me, managed my days, and bid me good night, and I took my daily meals with her instead of in the dining room with my mother and grandparents. Except for music, my education was conducted by a series of tutors: French, history, grammar, drawing. All my tutors were so alike in demeanor—pale, cool, severe—that I believed when I was very young that they were all brothers and sisters from the same family. When not engaged in lessons, I was nearly always reading, my bookcases filled with Shakespeare and Seneca, Emerson and Donne. Reading was learning, and learning was a matter best conducted in privacy. My grandmother never trusted the schools.
As it turned out, my grandmother would have done well to be even more distrustful.
In 1892, when I was twelve years old, my grandparents arranged what was to be the greatest opportunity of my mother’s life. At considerable expense and trouble, they secured passage for her to travel to Europe for an audience with Franco Faccio of Teatro alla Scala in Milan, for whom she was to perform. If she impressed him, she might have a place with the orchestra as a first chair and soloist, appearing before large audiences to great acclaim.
And she might have amazed Signore Faccio with her skill at the cello, and she might have been a great star, except that she sold the tickets and traded away her best jewelry and gave the money instead to a man named Victor Turner, who had been her music teacher for several years and would later be a frustrated farmhand, my stepfather, and the love of my mother’s life. The day that she would have left for Europe became, instead, the day they ran away.
And that day, they took me with them. Heaven knows why. Someone else could have stood witness at their wedding, which was the only service I seemed to perform on the journey. I stayed silent and didn’t ask questions. I didn’t want them to think better of the choice.
Our destination was Jeansville, Tennessee, where Victor’s brother Silas owned a small farm outside the town, growing hay and breeding horses. Victor was a versatile teacher, a master of everything from singing to piano to woodwinds and brass, and his plan had been to teach music to the families of the town. It took only two weeks for this plan to fail. The people of Jeansville were suspicious of newcomers. No one owned instruments, of course, and even if they’d had the money to pay a singing master, it would have been seen as too frivolous. He may as well have been selling champagne coupes or china shepherdesses. With unwise optimism, they had paid ahead a full year’s rent on the house, and the rest of the money wouldn’t stretch far enough to make a stand in a different town. Therefore there were only two possibilities: crawl back to Philadelphia in supplication, or stay. Had this been my mother’s first misadventure, supplication might have been more tempting. She’d been forgiven the first time and given another chance. But she knew she was no longer welcome in her parents’ house. With the second chance squandered, there would be no third.
A new plan was hatched. Victor’s brother Silas was a fat man with a thin wife, and she had been complaining about the isolation of their farmhouse, which was too far from her friends’ houses in the town. She was as dedicated to the art of complaint as my mother was to the cello, and her virtuoso work had finally reached Silas’s ears. So they and their son Ray moved into the rented house, and my mother and Victor and I took occupancy of the farmhouse. It seemed like a fair trade. With no job prospects that matched his skills, Victor began working for his brother as a farmhand, and in this way, our cobbled-together household found its new equilibrium.
I began attending school for the first time, which I did not enjoy. I was an indifferent student at best and insolent at worst. My manners, so carefully inculcated by my high-society grandmother and the etiquette experts she had paid to reinforce her, were unraveling rapidly. Never having set foot in a classroom with other students, I didn’t see the point of sitting still or waiting to be called on. Even when these things were explained to me, I resisted. They seemed silly. If I knew the answer, why shouldn’t I say so? If the lessons bored me, as they often did, why shouldn’t I find something better to do? My teacher wore her hair in two braids over her shoulders like a girl, and she seemed to know only answers that had been written down for her by someone else. Besides, the classroom was always too warm. It stank of chalk, spit, and cheap slate. I missed my shelves of books, all of which we’d left behind. I missed the idea that behind those cloth covers lurked endless surprises—spare slashing lines of poetry, or the rhythmic cadence of a play, or characters who, despite being only invented, sprang warmly and fully to life. There was none of that in our simple schoolroom primers, none at all. Their singsong phrases were, only and always, exactly as expected.
With all of its drawbacks, however, this new life had one commanding advantage over the old. I was in my mother’s company for hours at a time. She was the only one of us with the luxury of rising late, so I didn’t always see her in the morning before I started down the road to school, but she was always there when I came home in the afternoon. She would hand me the cloth to wipe the dust of the road from my shoes, then we took a small glass of milk each, seated at the kitchen table in silent companionship. At dinner every night, I drank in the novel sight of her lovely, animated face and the reassuring hum of her smoky voice. After so long without her, I found her slightest attention intoxicating. I could subsist for a week on one of her smiles.
After dinner, she would often sit down with her cello between her knees and coax the most beautiful music from its strings. If he wasn’t in the fields, Victor would sing to accompany her. I wanted to do more than listen but had nothing musical to contribute, so I began to dance. Mother had taken me to New York a handful of times to see the ballet, and I emulated what I remembered of the ballerinas’ movements—long graceful arcs of the arms, fluttering pointed toes, the basic arabesque. My dancing made my mother smile, so I did it at every opportunity.
I took to it so well that my mother decided I should have more formal training, but of course there was no dance school in Jeansville, nor possibly in the entire state of Tennessee. I was in no rush to leave, of course, so I asked if it might be possible for her to handle my instruction? She agreed that it was. She wrote away to a woman in Russia for lessons, and we regularly received letters of detailed instruction. Eagerly we put these into practice. The Cecchetti method involved repetition of motion after motion. But not carelessly, not just with a mindless echo. Every motion was important, and it needed to be performed consciously, with purpose. One day, I would make a certain set of motions with my leg, the next day, a set of motions with my arm. One week was the right side, one week the left. It took discipline, and while I may have been undisciplined in other areas of my life, in dancing I was absolutely obedient.
And all was well. We were happy.
Until a boy named Ray changed everything.