Trouble With the Truth (9781476793498) (4 page)

“And I'm gonna tell him not to give it to
you!
” Wally added, his voice breaking, and he dashed off.

In fresh agony, I rejoined my father and Fred and waited. Any moment Mr. Noonan might explain to the assembly what Wally must have noticed, that I had been aided with “believe.”

I watched as he listened briefly to his son, then motioned to him to stand aside with his mother. He exchanged a handshake with Miss Lyle and then asked Lucresse Briard to please come forward.

I stood before him, staring straight ahead so hard that the buttons on his suit coat began to look as big as saucers. I didn't hear what he said and didn't know what he was doing, until I felt the sharp edge of the crisp paper on my hand. Then everyone clapped dutifully, except Wally.

“See him?” I said a little later to my father in the hubbub of departing. “That's Wally Noonan, the one that said I lied. He said he wouldn't let his father give me the prize, too.” I started to giggle.

“Quid pro quo,”
my father said.

I didn't know what that meant, but something about the way he said it made me stop giggling.

It wasn't until three or four weeks later, during our drive to San Francisco a day ahead of the vans, that he used the phrase again, and Ben asked for a translation. “Tit for tat,” my father explained, giving me a conspiratorial smile.

But by that time the phrase held no disquieting impact for me. I had gotten rid of the five-dollar bill by presenting it to Aunt Catherine as a good-bye gift when she left for Sapulpa the day after the spelling bee. She was reluctant to accept it at first, but eventually did. She stuck it neatly into the zippered compartment of her black pocketbook, her sharp eyes wet with tears. “I'll use it to buy flowers for Jen's grave.”

Everybody knows that San Francisco is distinguished by its hills and hotels and bridges.

But San Francisco is distinguished to me because Aunt Catherine didn't visit us there, because Ben and I were in the same class there, because Ben made his first public theatrical appearance there, because Fred almost left our employ there, and because of Miss Narcissa Bunce.

We lived there in what we ever afterward referred to as “the leaky house.” It was a small, weather-stained cedar affair that listed carelessly to the east on the crest of a west-bent rise, a position that allowed it to store water in mysterious pockets between its sloping roof and off-level ceilings and disperse it in constant rhythmic drip-drops for days after a rain subsided.

Our school there, a mile across the indigenous hills, was brick again and harbored the same hot smells and disciplined fidgeting we'd become familiar with. And, we soon realized, when Ben and I and our transfer cards arrived in its principal's office, its board of education was operating within—well within—a particularly stringent budget.

Our records showed, wornly but still clearly, that Ben had been attending the fifth grade, and I the fourth. This caused the lady- principal considerable concern. The fourth grade (evidently due to
an inexplicable hyperprocreative impulse rampant thereabouts nine years before) was hopelessly overpopulated. One more pupil would endanger the potential education of all the others. The principal's forehead-wiping worry made me uncomfortable, and Fred had already left for home.

“I won't take up much room,” I said, “and since I'm not especially anxious to be educated anyway, I won't take up hardly any of the teacher's time.”

But the woman was adamant. The
fifth
grade was
not
filled to capacity, she said, fingering her hairline. “We'll see how well you do in the fifth grade with Ben.”

To make her feel better about it—there was no way of making Ben feel better—I said that my upgrading was probably right because I was having a birthday party the following Saturday.

She rechecked the data on my softened transfer card. “But you were nine last month,” she replied, perturbed.

Under the circumstances, Ben was more loyal than I would have predicted. “She said she was having a birthday
party
Saturday, not a
birthday,”
he explained benevolently.

“Oh.” She wiped her forehead again, and we were directed to our newest homeroom.

We soon found another reason to suspect that the budget was limited. All activities other than basic reading, spelling, history, arithmetic, and embryonic science instruction were under the aegis of one person…Miss Bunce. She was recognized only as “Music Teacher,” but due to funds, the theory that if you know anything about one of the arts, you know everything about 'em all, was in full practice. She was in screaming charge of first- to-sixth-grade art exhibiting, square dancing, glee clubbing, assembly programming, beginning instrumental instruction, and dramatic productions.

She was a towering, tense woman with a small head, a resounding
voice, and huge hands, which she used with hammering fervor at her upright piano—its top even with her spasm-ridden eyebrows. And at the moment of our matriculation, she was inextricably, despairingly involved in the creation of a self-concocted operetta called
Flowers of Spring
that was to be the exchange program with San Bruno's elementary school three weeks hence.

Ben saw the situation as luck-sent, supplying a vehicle to test his abilities before a larger audience than Fred, my father, and me. The second day, during Miss Bunce's regular singing instruction session with our class, he raised his hand six times to inquire about the forthcoming production. He had doubts that “Welcome, Sweet Springtime” was exactly right for the opening. He thought perhaps it would be better sung by a soloist. He thought Miss Bunce ought not to fill the role of introducer of the numbers, that that role could be expanded to include short narratives between the scheduled songs and recitations. He wondered why all the fifth-grade girls were required to sing. Couldn't most of them just stand around and look all right in their blue bell costumes, and let only those who
could
sing, sing—perhaps as accompaniment to a soloist?

Ben's only difficulty in attaining the role of narrator-soloist was that, after three days, Miss Bunce couldn't stand him. She made that clear in the middle of another of his suggestions by pounding out a murderous minor ninth and commenting, “We got along pretty well without you until now, Ben Briard, so will you please keep quiet and just be a good leaf?”

All fifth-grade boys were reluctantly (for other reasons than Ben's) blooming alto leaves. To Ben, fluttering anonymously as one of them, when he envisioned himself as an imposing tree, was a searing manifestation of Miss Bunce's heinous, heedless lack of appreciation.

Climbing the hill home that afternoon, he complained. “Those kids can't sing.
You
heard them. And how do you think they'll sound
without
her
right in front of them, directing? Terrible, that's how. Worse. And she knows it—that's why she's always screaming at them.”

“Isn't she going to
be
directing them, from the piano, at San Bruno's?”

“No, stupid. You never listen. In the auditorium there, the piano's down on the floor, in front. They're going to be up on the
stage
. Of course, I guess she
has
to play the piano part…” His face stopped, stunned with pleasure. “Except if she got somebody else to play it.”

“Who?” I asked.

“You, for instance.”

“Me? But I'm a blue bell!”

“But you're not making it any better by being a blue bell. And she's wasting me on a leaf,” he retorted. “If you could play the piano for the whole thing, she could lead all those dumb blue bells and leaves. And maybe she'd see how important that was, and let somebody else do the introductions.”

“But, Ben, I can't play a piano.”

“How do you know until you try? She could teach you to play the accompaniment. It looks easy. And you'd be helping her out. She likes you. Then, if you offer to help her, she'll like you even more. And she'll like me too, because we're related. See?”

“Ben, I don't think she likes me. I don't think she knows I'm there.”

“You've got to make her know it, but not the way I did. You've got to keep her liking you. Will you tell her you'll play the piano for the thing or not? Yes or no.”

“Well, I'll try.”

It was a halfway commitment, but enough of the fraction to make me consider what I might be letting myself in for. I decided that it would be very nice to play the piano for the performance. Ben was so good at many things—this might be something I'd be good at. And it did look easy.

At the next day's singing session, Miss Bunce banged a key chord and yelled, “Now, your best voices!”

Best was synonymous with loudest.

“Just a song at twi-li-ight—when the lights are lo-o-ow—and the flick'ring shad-dows—softly come and go-oo—,” we bellowed.

“Hold it! Stop!” Miss Bunce shouted, smashing out a thunderous discord. “Lucresse Briard! What are you doing in the front row! You don't sit there!”

“I traded with
her
,” I said, indicating the girl named Janet in the seat behind mine.

Janet whispered, “She's a skunk.”

I didn't know whether she meant me or Miss Bunce, but it didn't matter; I had to secure this position.

“I wanted to be able to see you better, Miss Bunce,” I said.

“Hee-hee,” came sotto voce from Janet.

“Good girl,” came a ventriloquist-like rasp from Ben in the back row of the boys' section.

“I think you can see me from anywhere in this room.”

“I mean your fingers. I'm learning to play the piano.”

“Oh—well, that's very nice, Lucresse. I guess it's all right if you sit there, as long as you pay attention to our songs too.”

“I will. I really will.”

“It's all right with you, isn't it, Janet?” Miss Bunce said.

“Oh, sure. It really is,” Janet agreed, sticking the toe of one shoe through the open back of my chair.

After the last bell that afternoon, I dashed back to Miss Bunce's room and offered to stack the songbooks for her. She let me. I asked her if she studied music when she was nine. She said yes. I told her I hoped I'd be as tall as she was when I grew up and that her hands were beautiful. She looked at me with mild, not displeased, surprise.

“Is there anything else I can do for you?” I asked.

“No. Just don't squirm in class while the leaves sing ‘Welcome, Sweet Springtime.' ”

“I won't,” I promised, and I could hear my breath going in and out.
“But there
is
something else I can do for you, Miss Bunce. I can play the piano for the singing while you lead, if you just show me how.”

Her head jerked up nearer the ceiling. “Show you
how
?”

“Oh, I'm sure I can play—it's just that I don't know
what
yet, if you see what I mean,” I said reassuringly.

Probably from a reasonable urge to get rid of me as promptly and kindly as possible and get home, she suggested that I play something for her.

I sat down before the orderly keys, my hands in my lap. I was in no rush. I judged it would take her at least an hour to teach me all I needed to know to beat the keys into ringing sound the way she did. “What shall I play?” I asked. “Which ones?”

“You mean, which
keys
?” she said, her voice catching. Then she smiled. “All right, Lucresse. Play C-sharp.”

“What?”

“Lucresse, you haven't had piano lessons, have you?”

“Not until now.”

“Don't you see? If you want to play the piano, you need
instruction.”

“Yes. Sure.” I thoroughly agreed. “So I can play the accompaniment and you can lead the singing better.”

“Now, Lucresse, what I'm trying to tell you is that we don't give piano instruction in the public school system. Do you have a piano at home?”

“No,” I said desperately.

“I see,” she said, examining my suffering eyes, my dress, my good shoes, and doubtless reckoning that my family, like most families enduring the recent downturn of the economy, was forfeiting other pleasures to clothe me so well. “There
is
instruction in the trombone and trumpet, starting in the sixth grade. Why don't you wait until next year and study one of those instruments?”

Not only did I not wish to explain that I had reason to believe I
wouldn't be in the sixth grade in this school's system, but I was now overwhelmed with desire to play on the provocative keyboard.

“But I don't want to play something you blow,” I said, trying to cry. “I want to play the piano—now—so I can play it for the program. I want to the way Ben wants to do the introductions and sing ‘Welcome, Sweet Springtime' by himself.”

“Oh he does, does he?”

“And he can—if you'll let him. And
I
can—if you'll show me how.”

She turned her pinched face skyward. “Why is it I can't get the people I
need
to work this way?” she asked heaven. “The mothers on the costume committee, for example. The leotards came from the factory last Tuesday, but only the Lord knows if the wardrobe the ladies are supposed to be making will be ready on time.”

I ceased urging the tears that wouldn't come. “Miss Bunce, if you'll let Ben do the introducing and the talking and the singing he wants, and teach me to play the accompaniment, we'll get the costumes done for you—all of them.”

“Listen, Lucresse,” she said wearily, “I have no doubt Ben could do the narrative, and sing some songs, alone. I don't even doubt that you could learn to play a few decent chords, if you had a piano at home, which you don't. But how do you think you and Ben can finish twenty blue bells' costumes—with ruffled headpieces—in seventeen days? Tell me that.”