Wessingham Awaits (Book 1, Music) by Owen Maddox Read Free Book Online Page B

hide me from it. “Poppycock,” he said. “Let them think what they will. The longer we wait, the worse it will be. You can’t hide my daughter forever.” 
    The Duchess, almost in tears, admitted, “This is true.”  She raised her eyebrows, appealing to me for mercy, and when my staid expression continued without incident, she murmured to herself, “Why me?” and wept in earnest.

 
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    3
    Alas, it came to pass that I, along with the Duchess, would accompany my sister Helen for her weekly voice lesson at the Queen-Anne-style home of Dr. Louis DeWitt Talmage III, a former opera tenor, a current divorcee, who lived in Colonial Heights alongside a parakeet named Figaro and a shiny banister leading upstairs to his four poster bed.
    He seemed to be a good man, this Dr. Talmage. Upon excavating his quintessence—staring into his eyes of forty or so years and interpreting the warmth in his voice, the sincerity of his wrinkles and stained teeth, the theater in his gestures, the value in his lustrous shoes and cut clothes, his lack of jewelry or anything cold and injurious, the affirmation in his walls of books and mounds of composition paper near blotters, powders, and quills and freshly cut tulips below framed choir photographs, and, above all, the wisdom in his music, in his piano pumping and plethora of stringed instruments—I found that he was of the same light as I, but probably too adult-like to be a dependable playmate.
    “Please forgive her,” the Duchess apologized on my behalf. “I don’t know why she does that.” 
    Dr. Talmage, however, seemed to welcome my admiration, and encouraged me to sit near the piano for the duration of the lesson. Whilst Helen was the one straightening her neck, loosening her jaw, singing scales and arpeggios, he addressed his remarks, with some exceptions, to all three of us, as if we were a class. This is why I came to depend on Dr. Talmage, because he spoke to me with such refinement, regardless of my supposed retardation. He gave Helen a peppermint wheel for singing so well, and me a lemon drop for listening “like a true professional.” 
     
    In time, Helen progressed to singing actual music, songs such as “Buffalo Gals,” “Long, Long Ago,” and “Pretty Saro.”  I obtained charge of her songbooks after the Duchess discovered that I would rather look at them than stare people down on the trolley. Still, on occasion, I might fixate on an arbitrary stranger, some bright smile with potential, but after he proved to be indifferent toward me, and thus undependable, I once again became enchanted with the interlacing curves of the treble clef, the flagged circles that somehow corresponded to the very words Helen sang—words that not only sounded quaint to the ear, but amalgamated into a story.
    I dearly loved “Grandfather’s Clock,” although Helen had difficulty singing its notes. Whilst she rarely made it through the song without botching it, I knew in my mind’s ear what it was supposed to sound like, and sang it to myself constantly without ever parting my lips or humming the faintest sound. I didn’t know if I could actually voice the notes, but I didn’t care, either. Music was more magical than even speech, something you shared with only a dependable playmate, not your brothers nor the Duchess and her tea friends nor the lovely Helen, not even Dr. Talmage.  No, I had to keep my distance from everyone just as a stray kitten must avoid loud strangers, though it be starving.
     
    The social obligations of the Duchess changed, relegating Helen’s voice lesson to a later, almost unbecoming hour when the trolley took longer stops, allowing all the redolent, coatless, unshaved men with wooden buckets and dirty fingernails to board and depart. The Duchess pressed against me, but I found these men more fascinating than stratus formations.
    “Lizzie, please stop staring.” We were late for Dr.