Trouble With the Truth (9781476793498) (6 page)

The night before the performance, Ben said his throat hurt. My father looked at it and said it couldn't. Ben said his stomach ached. My father said it would stop.

“Flowers of Spring
is going to be awful. Those kids don't know what they're doing. I wouldn't come see it if I were you.”

“But you and Lucresse are in it. And I've contributed more needlework than ten women. Certainly Fred and I will be there.”

“Tell him how awful it's going to be, Lucresse,” Ben ordered.

I didn't know if I should support him or not. “Are the other parents going?”

“Sure. But what difference does it make? The point is, it's going to be awful.”

It made all the difference to me. My father and Fred would again be the odd, conspicuous old among the usual young.

“Don't come. Please don't,” I begged. “You and Fred already heard Ben do his part, and you've heard me.”

“You'll make Lucresse nervous,” Ben added.

The prospect of the performance had not made me nervous, until now. Now, instantly, I translated the strange, strained behavior I'd noticed in many of my friends in their parents' presence. They were nervous. Mothers were overly interested in their daughters being ladylike; I was glad I didn't have that situation. Fathers with young, unsure faces were so anxious to be proud of their sons. Regardless of whether my father hoped for me to be ladylike, regardless of whether he wanted me to make him proud, I wanted to be like the others. I would be nervous if he came.

“Yes, it would make me nervous,” I said.

“Tomorrow at two thirty will never happen again,” my father said. “And you both know that. You're going to do something you'll never do again. Of course you'll both be nervous—but you'll do the best you can. And I wouldn't miss it for anything.”

“Suppose something goes wrong and I'm out there all by myself?” Ben said.

“Nothing ever goes completely right.”

Ben woke up in the morning sniffling and speaking in a new, echoey voice. “I've got a cold. I've got the worst cold adybody ever had!”

He attributed it to a new breakthrough in the ceiling above his bed which silently dripped cold water onto his pillow all night.

“What ki'd of crazy house
is
this adyhow?” he said.

My father looked hurt.

I came to my father's defense. “Aw, Ben, we've lived in worser ones.”

“Worse,” my father corrected.

“No, we haven't,” Fred interjected.

“A'd I have to si'g!” Ben wailed.

Fred had seen us through chicken pox, measles, and mumps. Immediately, he gave Ben his own adjunct to any medicine a doctor ever prescribed, a cup of boiling hot coffee with a tablespoonful of whiskey stirred in. He was convinced that heat and alcohol could cure any disease. This time they relieved the congestion in Ben's nose and left his eyes glazed, his muscles relaxed, and his voice more resonant. Fred was pleased. “I'll bring you some more in a thermos before the performance,” he assured Ben.

An adult seeing Miss Bunce lurching around in the schoolyard as she frenziedly herded us all into the buses hired to take us to San Bruno might have suspected that she too had swallowed a few bracers in preparation for the occasion. No doubt she hadn't; it was her unfamiliar high-heels causing the imbalance.

At San Bruno, I went with her and the blue bells to a classroom
where they were to change into their costumes. It took a half hour to snap and hook fast all their leotards, another half hour to adjust all our creations over them, and twenty minutes more to attach headpieces. The whole process could have taken twenty minutes had not Miss Bunce been scolding one child after another, and had not one of the interested mothers been flitting about resnapping snaps that she was sure hadn't been securely snapped in the first place and telling every girl she looked “adorable.”

Fifteen minutes before curtain time, we met the leaves and Ben, who had been ensconced in a different classroom, on the stage. Miss Bunce bounced across it screeching between clenched teeth, “Everybody ready?” The children took turns teasing and tugging each other away from the curtains' center where they could peek out. Hysteria built as waves of hostility floated up to us from our audience, composed mostly of our San Bruno fourth- and fifth-grade counterparts, glad that they weren't in our places and waiting to see how badly we'd do.

Ben coughed in everyone's face and warned, “Keep real quiet while I'm singing, or else.”

I pulled his arm. “Ben! I think I've forgotten the tra-la part of ‘Flowers that Bloom in the Spring'!”

“You
got
to remember!” he said, shaking a fist at me.

“Now, now, Ben—” Fred's voice said, as he came to us from the wings, carrying a thermos. “You mustn't treat Lucresse that way. Here. Sip this.”

“Quiet! Everybody get ready!” Miss Bunce hissed, teetering above a babbling cluster of net-covered heads. “Quiet!”

“Quiet!” Ben repeated, in a startling unconscious imitation of her normal bugle voice.

There was a sudden silence onstage, making the chattering from the auditorium more deafening.

“Take your positions, everybody,” Miss Bunce ordered.

In one continuous motion, Ben drained the steaming, doctored coffee, shoved the thermos back at Fred, and leapt to a statue-stance where the curtains met.

“I do hope you don't catch his cold,” Fred whispered to me and hurried away through the wings.

Miss Bunce and I left the lined-up blue bells and leaves and went out front to the piano by the same route Fred had taken. I sat next to her on the bench as she got ready to strike the opening chord cue for Ben's solo rendition of “Welcome, Sweet Springtime,” and I tried not to see my father and Fred in the third row amidst the San Bruno youngsters and the San Francisco parents who'd made the trek for the event. The two men looked even older and more enthusiastic than I'd feared.

Miss Bunce struck the chord and left her fingers resting on the keyboard. The center of the curtain jutted and yanked about, but didn't part to reveal Ben and the company. She struck the chord again and stepped on the sustaining pedal. Still, the curtains didn't open. The silence, which had come gradually over the auditorium, was broken by beginning murmurs.

“Run in and find out what's happening,” Miss Bunce whispered between violent breaths.

I sprinted. Backstage, boredom and bedlam reigned with equal strength. The bored few stood shifting about in their approximate places. The bedlam was caused by all the others, who seemed to be rushing back and forth from the stage to the exit to the hall on the other side, pulling and yanking at their costumes. The formerly flattering young mother-aide was dashing from escapee to escapee, rehooking and resnapping with vicious might. Ben, holding the center of the curtains in a deathlike grip, was inquiring desperately over his shoulder of one and all, “What's the matter? Why isn't everybody in place?”

I approached the quietest songstress—ordinarily a bystander type. “What's happening?”

“Janet had to go to the bathroom,” she whispered.

“But what about everybody else?”

She shrugged. “They all had to go too, I guess.”

The delay was understandable. The bathroom was situated a third of a block down the hall, and satisfaction of this sudden mass urge was not possible with the snapped and hooked costumes and leotards in place. Complete undressing and redressing for the number of people milling in and out could take an hour.

I ran to Ben with the information.

“Why can't they hold it?” he said at me, as though I, not Janet, had set off the chain reaction. “If I wanted to, I could go too, but…never mind. Tell Miss Bunce I'm coming out to do ‘Welcome' in three minutes, whether they're ready or not. Go on. I'll count to sixty just three times.”

He reminded me of my father: absolute purpose untouched by practicality, a firm belief that it was worth trying to order things as one wanted them to be, no matter what the odds or consequences.

I hurried back out to Miss Bunce to give her the news. “Oh my gracious!” she muttered, sending the now boisterous audience a twitching deceitful smile over my head. “Just wait till I get my hands on them.”

From the way she was kneading her hands in her lap, I was happy I wasn't a blue bell.

A spotlight shone on the middle of the stage's apron. Ben parted the curtains enough to slide through, and there he was, his eyes shining at the noisy throng. Miss Bunce struck her chord again, but to no avail. The intemperate babbling grew louder, if anything.

Ben put his hands on his hips, threw back his head, and shouted, “Quiet!”

There was laughter, a few boos, and some joyous applause from
the vicinity of the third row. I lowered my eyes so as not to confirm the identity of the isolated claque.

“I'm going to sing whether you hear me or not!” Ben yelled.

That earned a burst of laughter. Then, as Miss Bunce, seemingly in a trance now, banged out the key chord once more, awful, total silence.

Ben's head wobbled from side to side before finding a relaxed, balanced position on his neck. A slow, beatific smile spread across his face. “Now you are ready,” he complimented his audience. “I am Ben Briard, and our program is called
Flowers of Spring.
I will open it by singing ‘Welcome, Sweet Springtime,' accompanied by our director, Miss Narcissa Bunce, down there at the piano. The girl next to her is Lucresse Briard and she'll play the accompaniment for the rest of the program.” He included Miss Bunce and me in his gracious smile for all the world. We stared dumbly at him.

Clapping came from the third row again and was duplicated in dots from other rows. Miss Bunce hit her chord for the last time, and Ben sailed into song.

He sang it better than he had in practice. The cold and the coffee made his voice more carrying and less strained. And having an audience of strangers had an electric effect on him. When he held the last note as long as possible, it occurred to me that he didn't want to end the song. Ben would like to stay up there alone in the light as long as he lived. But it had to end, and the second it was over, even before the applause broke, Miss Bunce shoved my music in front of hers and galloped away backstage.

Ben took three bows, the last one and a half unnecessary, in my opinion, and I braced my fingers for “The Flowers that Bloom in the Spring.” Reluctantly, Ben withdrew through the curtain, the blissful smile lingering softly on his lips as he disappeared.

My fingers trembled waiting for the curtains to draw aside, revealing the revelers. My fingers began to ache.

The middle curtain shook and Ben returned. As I watched him, wide-eyed, he said, “There will be a short delay because some members of the cast are not quite ready…because…they're not. Lucresse Briard will play ‘The Blue Bells of Scotland.' ”

Immediately there was a terrible clapping from the third row. I dared to glance its way and almost tumbled off the piano bench as I saw hundreds of pairs of eyes looking straight and expectantly into mine.

I looked to Ben for reassurance, but he was no longer there. I placed my hands in the familiar position of the opening notes, and as if they weren't attached to me, much less under my control, they began to move. They played measure after measure, and most of them sounded unfamiliar, out of tune, discordant, though my fingering was automatic and accurate. It wasn't until the closing chord, when I took a good look at them, that I realized I had played the entire piece in a different key from the one it was written in.

Ben returned, applauding with the audience. I was tempted to stand up and bow as he had before, but I was afraid my legs wouldn't hold me.

I prepared for the opening of “Flowers that Bloom” again and waited for him to announce the number.

“Will you play something else for us, Lucresse?” he inquired smoothly.

“NO!” I croaked, in shock.

“Well, ladies and gentlemen,” said Ben with barely a pause, “this isn't really part of the program, but they're still not ready back there, and Miss Bunce said something had to be done, so I'm going to do something. It's part of a play named
Romeo and Juliet
by a man named Shakespeare. He lived a real long time ago in the ancient times and he wrote a lot of swell stuff, only you need a whole bunch of actors to do a lot of it, except if you don't have them and then you can act out swell parts by yourself like this one. You'll see what I mean.

“I'm Mercutio, a real brave character that just got stabbed and is about to die, but his stupid friend—the dumb Romeo who the play's named for—he says the hurt can't be so bad. And I say, ‘No, 'tis not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church door…”

Ben acted it up, clutching at the general area of his heart and lurching from foot to foot. At the end, as he collapsed, a boy in a back row yelled, “Say, he's some crazy kid, ain't he!” Others stamped their feet and whistled and some took up the cry, “More! Do some more!”

Ben jumped to his feet and hollered back, “Sure!”

Miss Bunce's furious face poked out from between the curtains behind him. The mouth moved and the face was quickly withdrawn. Ben held up his hands, the glad stamina going out of his body. “The program is finally ready,” he announced. “I'm sorry.”

The curtains parted all the way, exposing the most terrified group of faces, including Miss Bunce's, I've ever seen.

“They'll sing ‘The Flowers that Bloom in the Spring,' ” Ben said, and stalked off into the wings.

Miss Bunce raised her hands, and the wooden faces and my wooden hands did their duty, song after song.

Between the songs, the applause was loudest when Ben came out to make the introductions.

At the very end, Miss Bunce gestured to me to join them on the stage. Before I could get to her side, Ben hurried out from the wings to her side to share the curtain call. As I joined them, the lights made me squint and my feet felt foolish.