The piano has been my mother’s instrument since she was a girl taking lessons from Miss Elizabeth Richmond in Madison. Trudging through the street with her music books, she probably dawdled a bit, stopping to look at the windows of Chowning’s Dry Goods, run by Wray’s father, Scott, or stopping at the Rexall if she had the money for a stick of candy or an orange slice. “We weren’t poor poor,” Mammy always said. “But we were poor.”
Betty’s gentle touch at the piano, the soft way she rests her fingers on the keys and makes the music flow, remains. There is such sweet feeling when she touches the keys. The piano is where she hides a certain part of herself that must be kept covered up and safe.
I don’t want her to have to stop playing in church. I don’t want her to stop trying. I don’t want to lose the part of her I feel when she makes music, that softness. Betty has always been a little tough on me; to her that is a mother’s job. When I notice who she becomes at the piano or, on occasion, with other people, I find myself a little envious.
. . .
Every year after my father died, I came back in late August to check on things. About ten years ago, I arrived in the midst of a summer blooming everywhere, blessed by rain enough to fill the rivers and please the farmers. On the way home from the airport, I could do nothing but stare out the window. In the early mornings, the branches of my father’s trees looked to be floating in hazy green clouds.
For weeks, I had gotten surprising reports from my cousins. Betty had a beau. I was the last to be told. Maybe she had always wished I would confide in her and this was her response to my silence. Maybe she thought the subject of love was off-limits, since I have never shared anything. Maybe she had been hurt by this.
Perhaps she believed I would think her disloyal to my father, but I didn’t. I loved seeing her this way: happy, purely happy, and not just for a moment as a wave of enthusiasm passed across her face.
Her boyfriend was a former postman and recent widower named John Hickey. His wife, Charlotte, always wore a fishing hat, decorated with tackles, to church and sat on the side where we do when Betty doesn’t play. She was formidable and, like Betty, was gifted at the piano. John was briefly adrift after Charlotte died before falling into the arms of another strong woman: Betty. More than eighty years old, he remained the little boy lost, dependent on a woman to handle what he couldn’t or didn’t want to. So Betty took control. She ran the show, as she often had with my dad. From what I could see, my mother had taken over John’s life, helping him with everything that Charlotte took charge of. Betty and John stepped right back into what they’d had before with others, the unspoken arrangement of things that couples come to. Maybe I was jealous.
“You could let him make the occasional decision,” I told her.
“I make what he wants to eat.”
“He’s sluggish. He goes to sleep. Last night I looked over and thought he was dead.”
“He’s not dead. He carried the mail.”
“Can’t you find someone a little more lively?”
“It’s not so easy,” she said, laughing a little, “after eighty.” After she started seeing John, Betty began going to St. Louis to get her hair done. Out of her crazy, messy drawers came a foggy bottle of L’Air du Temps. Spritzed onto her wrist and neck, it scented her room, and sometimes I stuck my head in to smell the fragrance that settled comfortably into everything. Granny’s bedroom also smelled of perfume. I remembered the old days back in St. Louis when, escaping from the others, my mother and I sat in front of my grandmother’s vanity with its silver combs and brushes. I studied my mother’s face in the mirror as she shyly reached out to try a bit of Granny’s perfume, which she dabbed on her wrist and held out for me to inhale. “Don’t,” I told her, when she sprayed a little on my skin. “Granny will see.”
That summer when John arrived in our lives, a coating of pink polish mysteriously appeared on my mother’s fingernails. The weather seemed to inspire our sense of a world working out as it should, at its best. Betty called me out to the deck to see the mother deer and her fawn who emerged every night from the woods behind the house around the time the sun set. She was so warm that summer, my mother. She touched everything gently, including me.
John had a catfish pond, and sometimes we drove down there in his golf cart, my mother beside him, me sitting on the back and usually falling off. Betty laughed as I ran to catch up, and all was well. She and John had gone on one date in high school, which he had forgotten, though Betty remembered. I suspected that she had been hurt when he hadn’t called again. It was clear that she had always been attracted to him, but I had never heard her as much as mention his name.
“I guess I wasn’t pretty enough for him to ask out a second time,” she said to me as John listened.
“Maybe you was too bossy,” he said. Now and then he rose to the occasion. He had been a great baseball player and, he claimed, almost made the Cardinals.
When he spoke of his prowess on the field, I rolled my eyes at Betty. “Shut up,” she mouthed silently.