The Moth (2 page)

My mother I saw once, to know it. She was born in Baltimore, but she and my father didn’t meet for some years after he got here. Then at a Christmas party, when she was home from school, they danced together, and before New Year’s got married, in Elkton, after running away. She was sixteen, he twenty-eight. You’d think they were the right age to be happy, and that they’d got started the right way. But his hair had started to gray, and from things I’ve heard from Nancy and Sheila and others, he got the idea the difference in their ages was an Irish Sea between them. And then he began figuring she moved in a world of kids that thought he was funny. Three years after I was born in 1910, a rich boy came down from Philly. It was over him they had the bust-up, and it was on account of him, or what the Old Man got in his head about him, that it was put in the settlement he should keep me. But I’ll go to my grave believing it was all his imagination, and I’ve got my reasons for thinking he went to his grave believing so too. The bust-up knocked him galley-west, and he never remarried. He and she had set up shop in Roland Park, with Nancy and Sheila staying in the Walbrook house. But after she left he sold both houses, and he and his sisters moved to the house on Mt. Royal Terrace, and they even started going to a different church, which I’ll call St. Anne’s. So far as they were concerned there had never been a Louise Thorne, and I was a boy that had really been brought by a stork, and had a father and aunts but no mother.

All that, though, was before I was four years old, and I had no memory of what she looked like, and no pictures of her were around. All I knew about her was from a little trunk I found in the attic, that I doubt if the Old Man or my aunts even knew about. It had in it some of her clothes, especially a dark-blue velvet dress I loved to touch, and a black leather case with a nail file in it, a buffer, an orange stick, a powder box, a fluffy puff, and a little bottle of perfume with a glass stopper. By the time I was ten I must have smelled that perfume a thousand times, and when something had gone wrong, I’d go up there in the attic, open the trunk, touch the velvet dress, and smell the perfume. Well, came the time when I was the wonder child of Baltimore, the sweet singer of Mt. Royal Terrace, the minstrel boy of Maryland, with the church full whenever I sang, pieces about me in the papers all the time, and money rolling in, specially those twenties for
Abide with Me
at funerals, very joyous occasions in the life of a cute boy singer. And one morning we hadn’t even finished the first hymn, when I noticed this number on the aisle in the second pew, that was alone, and seemed most interested in me. By that time, though I was only thirteen, I’d had plenty of admiration from the female sex, partly from how I sounded, but partly from how I looked, with my big blue eyes and bright gold hair, in my little white surplice. But if you think I had got bored with it in any way, you’ve formed a false impression of my character. And if she looked older than I was, I had already found out even if they were older, the pretty ones could be awful sweet. She was plenty pretty. Her hair was gold, but the light from the Resurrection, streaming in through the stained glass window behind her, turned it red. Her eyes, though, were blue, and they stared straight at me.

So when we got to the offertory and I started the Schubert
Ave Maria,
I gave out with plenty, and beamed it right at her. After about three bars of it she looked away quick, and then back at me again, and I knew she’d got it, I was singing to her. When I finished and sat down, our eyes crossed and she nodded and this beautiful smile crept over her face, and for the first time I began to wonder if there was something about her that was more than a pretty girl that had liked how I sang. I was still crossed up when we started out, and she put out her hand as I went by, and gave me a little pat. We robed in the basement, not because there wasn’t plenty of room in the vestry, but so we could file out through the church, singing a recessional
a cappella,
and our voices would die away in the distance as we went down the stairs.

I had already passed her when it hit me, the perfume she had on, and I knew who she was. I wanted to turn around and speak to her, but I was afraid. I was afraid I’d cry. So I kept on, one step at a time, just like the rest, and hoped nobody would notice that I wasn’t singing any more. We got back to the basement at last, and I tore off the robes and ran back upstairs. People were all over the place, in the vestibule and outside, just leaving, some of them talking with Dr. Grant, the rector. She wasn’t there. It was part of the deal, I know now, that she would never visit me, and the way I dope it out, somebody had tipped her that my aunts and the Old Man were on one of their trips to New York, with me left behind with some friends, so she could see me without anybody knowing who she was, and hear me. But I hadn’t doped out anything then. All I knew was she was beautiful, and my mother, and I wanted to touch her, the way she had touched me. And when I couldn’t find her I went down to the basement again and cracked up, but good. The organist was a young guy named Anderson, that could play all right but thought he was a wonderful cut-up. He winked at the other boys, and began to whistle
A Furtive Tear,
from
The Elixir of Love,
or
Una Furtiva Lagrima,
as I sang it, in Italian. I almost killed that organist. I beat him up so bad even the boys got scared, and the men, the basses and tenors, called a cop. But when he got there I was gone.

M
Y FIRST FRIEND WAS
a boy named Glendenning Deets, and I met him in the park. He was a little older than I was, so instead of a tricycle, like I was riding, he was on a bike. We stopped, and he passed some remarks about the gocart, as he called it, then said that for five cents he’d let me ride the bike. I said all right. But when he got off the bike, I grabbed it and tried to run off with it without paying the five cents. He mauled me up pretty bad. But then something happened that gave me the bulge on him from there on in. I went down, from the hook he hung on my jaw, and as I got up I stumbled into the tricycle and went down again. That hit him funny, and he began making a speech about it to the nursemaids that were looking on. That made me sore, though until then I had felt like a few uppercuts were coming to me for what I had done. So I piled into him. But all he did was wrestle me off and back away and duck. And I smelled it that knocking me down and making a speech about it was all the fight he had in him that day, and he was my potato if I wanted him. I let him have it. Somebody pulled me off him and made us shake hands. I took the bike over to some grass, but when I tried to ride I couldn’t.

When I got tired of trying he said we ought to get ourselves some peaches. “Where?”

“From the orchard.”

“What orchard?”

“... On Park Avenue.”

“Just steal them, hey?”

“What do you mean steal them? They’re prematures.”

They were a few trees in a backyard, what was left of an orchard, and like all old trees they produced prematures, fruit that ripens ahead of the regular crop. It was the first I knew about that, but he got it off with quite an air, like it was inside stuff you had to get wise to before you had it straight what was stealing and what was not. He said the prematures were no good to sell, “and they’ll thank you for taking them away.” But by the time we had eaten four or five white clings, something in overalls came through the fence and we got out of there quick. He was pretty sore. “The dumb buzzard, with not even enough sense to know we’re doing him a favor.”

People with not enough sense to know you were doing them a favor by taking whatever they had seemed to be quite numerous whenever he was around.

Denny lived in Frederick, but he spent his summer in town with an aunt, Miss Eunice Deets, who lived on Linden Avenue, while his father and mother went to Europe. The summer after we hooked the peaches he said we should have a job, to make some money. That was all right with me, but what job I had no idea. One night, though, he was over after dinner, and got to talking with my father about the garage, and how he’d been noticing things there, specially the time the men took going for wrenches, jacks, and stuff, so why couldn’t he and I be hired on to do that running, and save a lot of time? What he was doing at the garage, which was half a mile from his house, he didn’t bother to say. But he made my father laugh. When he was asked how much we wanted, he said ten cents an hour apiece. So my father said a buck a week, for five hours’ work on Saturday, wouldn’t break him, and we could consider ourselves hired. It was still only eight o’clock, so he drove us to an Army-Navy store near Richmond Market, and got us a jumper suit apiece, visor hats, brogan shoes, lunch buckets, and cotton gloves. I don’t say we didn’t earn our money, because the men ran us ragged, though if it was for the time it saved or the fun of seeing us trot I wouldn’t like to say. But one day, around twelve thirty, when everybody was out back sitting against the fence eating lunch, a guy came in with his car boiling. We took him back to Ed Kratzer, the foreman, who said leave it and he’d see what he could do. The guy got loud about how he had to get to Germantown, Pa., by six o’clock that night. “Then in that case take it somewhere else. If you want us to fix it, leave it and we’ll see what we can do. Just now we’re eating, and if you ask me that’s what you could be doing, and you’ll get there just as quick.”

“... Where do I eat?”

“There’s a drugstore across the street.”

So after he swallowed three times that’s where he went. But of course, when he was gone I had to look big, so I lifted the hood of the car, which was standing in the middle of the garage floor, with nobody around it but us. But when I opened the door I noticed the hand brake was on, hard. It should have been, of course, but it came to me I hadn’t noticed him set it, and you generally did notice it in those days because the ratchet sounded like somebody winding an alarm clock. Then something else came to me. It was a Ford and I don’t know if you remember the old Model T. It had low and high gear on the left, reverse gear center, foot brake on the right, and hand brake straight up the middle. You set the hand brake when you stopped, but in low gear, the car could still go, and I had a hunch. As soon as I cranked it I got in and let off the brake. Sure enough, when I pushed in low gear the car went, and when I dropped the pedal back into high it still went. I stopped and tried reverse and it was all right. I cut my motor and got out. “Well, now, there’s a dumbbell for you.”

“How do you mean, Jack?”

“Driving with his brake on. You can’t do it.”

“And that’s all that was wrong with it?”

“That’s all.”

I got a can, put some water in, and that helped with the temp. He kept studying me. “What we going to charge him, Jack?”

“We got nothing to do with that.”

“Why not?”

“The men attend to charges.”

“When they do the work, they do. But for crying out loud,
we
did the work.
We
made it run. We—”

“I thought that was
me
.”

“Oh, pardon me.”

“We, my eye.”

“Then it’s all yours—for whatever
you
get.”

What I would get was nothing, as I very well knew. Pretty soon I said: “What do you think we ought to charge him?”

“Who
ought to charge him, Jack?”

“
We
ought to.”

“That’s better. That’s a whole lot better. Gee, that’s a pain in the neck for you, a guy too dumb even to see chances to make dough, and then when somebody
else
kicks in with a little brains—”

“What do you think we ought to—”

“Two dollars.”

“For just taking off his brake?”

“I thought you put in a new bearing.”

“I don’t like to crook anybody.”

“Who you crooking? Not your old man, that’s a cinch, because we haven’t even used a handful of his waste. And not Kratzer, because
he
was too lazy even to get in here and see what was wrong. And not the guy. He’ll
thank
you for getting him out of here on time. He’ll
want
to pay you. He’ll—”

But my face must have told him, because he shut up and slid over to the back door to check on the situation out back. Then he had me roll the car out front. Then he raced across to the drugstore.

I drove the car up the street, took a U-turn, and had hardly run back before there the guy was, so excited he could hardly talk. I played it just like Denny said, with a whole lot of stuff about how I didn’t want to see him wait while the men finished their lunch, and some more about how he should be careful to let the brake off, “as that’s generally the answer when you burn out a bearing.” He hardly heard me. It turned out he had had the car two days, and probably didn’t know what the hand brake was until somebody set it for him the night before in the garage where he stored it in Washington. He paid the two dollars without a whimper, and even gave me a half dollar extra for helping him out. Soon as he drove off that was divided, in the drug store. Denny saw to that. “All you need is a little brains, Jack. In the garage business it’s like everything else. It’s initiative that counts, every time.”

It was Denny, that summer or maybe the next, that got me started on my singing career, though all it amounted to, at first, was some more of the Deets initiative. They had had a mixed choir at St. Anne’s with four paid soloists and I guess maybe fifteen to twenty volunteers like Nancy. But when Dr. Grant came in, after Dr. Struthers died, he was very High-Church, and pretty soon there was a fight, but he had his way. The soloists were out and the mixed choir was out. The men stayed, to sing the tenor and bass parts, but the sopranos and altos were to be boys. I’d hate to tell you what Denny and I did to them. We chased them up alleys and yelled at them and beat them up. One night a couple called, the man with a buggy whip. He wanted to dust me off for something that had happened, and my father had to get tough.

But then one day Denny found out that the cutie pies got eighty cents a Sunday for doing it. He almost set Nancy, Sheila, my father, and his aunt, Miss Eunice, crazy, that he and I should get a shot at the sugar. Finally it turned out two places had become vacant, and we would be given a trial after rehearsal one afternoon. We waited quite a while, sitting in the rear of the church, while they went through
Te Deums
and anthems and Gregorian chants, or plain songs as they’re called. They seemed to be the main reason Dr. Grant wanted boys, as it was dry, gray music, some of it sung without accompaniment, and women would have ruined it. But the director was a woman, Miss Eleanor Grant, Dr. Grant’s cousin. She had sung with the Century Opera, but after we got in the war married a French officer, and when he got killed she didn’t go back on the stage right away, but stayed on in Baltimore and taught. She was small and dark and pretty, and even watching her from the back of the church, where I was sitting with Nancy and Sheila and Denny and Miss Eunice, I fell for her hard.