ed to teach me a long time ago, I hadn’t inherited any of her talent, any more than I had inherited talent from the First and Best Audrina. Not gifted, not gifted, I went around tormenting myself.
“Audrina,” Arden comforted me one day after I complained to him that I wasn’t gifted, “no one magically, automatically knows how to play.”
“Listen,” I said, “I’ll tell Papa I just have to have piano lessons. He’ll pay for them if I plead hard enough.”
“No doubt,” he answered, looking away uneasily. Then, hand in hand, we walked toward his cottage. Much to my disappointment, Billie stayed at the window but still didn’t invite me inside the cottage. Arden and I sat on the back porch and talked to her through the open window. Flies could easily enter her house, and that would have driven my aunt crazy. Billie didn’t seem worried about flies, but she did seem happy to see me again.
That very evening I approached Papa about music lessons. “I’ve heard you banging. If ever anyone needed lessons, it’s you. Of course, your mother would have been thrilled. I’m thrilled, too.” I couldn’t believe he’d changed his mind so completely. He seemed lonely, bored, making me step closer to put my arms about him. Maybe, after all, Papa was going to try to let me be happy.
“I’m sorry for all the ugly things I said after Momma died, Papa. I don’t hate you, or blame you for her death. If only you’d bring Sylvia home I’d feel she didn’t die for nothing. Please bring Sylvia home soon.”
“My darling,” he said, looking far away, “I will. As soon as the doctors give the word, you’ll have your baby sister.”
I told myself that night that perhaps God did know what he was doing when he took away mothers and gave fathers a new daughter. Perhaps he had a good reason for doing what he did. Even if it did rob me of a mother I desperately needed, Sylvia wouldn’t miss her because she’d have me and wouldn’t know any better.
It was midsummer before the music teacher Arden knew came back from a long stay in New York City. Finally, one wonderful day Arden put me on the handlebars of his bike and rode me into Whitefern Village to meet Lamar Rensdale. He was tall and very thin, with a high, broad brow and wild, curly, chocolate-brown hair. His eye color matched his hair color exactly. He looked me up and down approvingly, smiled, then led me to his piano and asked me to demonstrate what I already knew. “Just fool around, like you said you’ve been doing,” he said, standing behind my shoulder as Arden sat down to smile encouragingly.
“Not as bad as you told me,” said Mr. Rensdale. “Your hands are small, but you can scale an octave. Did your mother play exceptionally well?”
That’s the way it began. Of course, Papa knew that it was Arden who rode me to and from the village, but he didn’t object. “But don’t you play with him in the woods. You stay in view of his mother at all times. You are never to be alone with him. Never. You hear?”
“Now, listen here, Papa,” I began, facing him squarely and struggling not to sound weak. “Arden is not the trashy, low-class kind of boy you think he is. We don’t meet in the woods, but on the rim. His mother sits in the window and talks to us. We’re seldom out of her sight. And she’s so beautiful, Papa, really she is. Her hair is dark like yours, and her eyes are like Elizabeth Taylor’s. Only Billie’s eyes are even prettier. And you’ve always said no one had eyes prettier than Elizabeth Taylor’s.”
“Isn’t that nice?” he said cynically, as if he didn’t believe any neighborhood woman could be as beautiful as a movie star. “Nobody is as beautiful as Elizabeth Taylor but Elizabeth Taylor. People are individuals, Audrina. Unique, each one of us. A miracle, each one of us—never to be duplicated, though this old world of ours may spin around another five to ten billion years. There will never be another Elizabeth Taylor, another Lucietta Lana Whitefern Adare, another you or another me. That’s exactly why you are so special to me. If ever I am lucky enough to meet a woman as beautiful as your mother, and as warm and loving, then I will fall down on my knees and thank God. I may never find another like her, and I’m lonely, Audrina, so lonely.”
He was lonely. It showed in his shadowed eyes, in his loss of appetite. “Papa, Billie is really beautiful. I haven’t exaggerated.”
“I don’t care what she looks like,” he said despondently. “I’m through with wives and married life. I’m devoting all my energies to taking care of you.”
Oh, I didn’t want him to devote all his energies to taking care of me! That meant he’d never give me any freedom. And that meant he’d spend all his time trying to turn me into the First and Best Audrina. And if he really believed there was only one of each person, why did he always want me to become her?
I stood before him, his hands still on my waist, and I couldn’t speak up and say more. I could only nod and feel confusion whirling like a maelstrom in my brain.
Since Arden rode off every day to the village, I was allowed five weekday lessons, which made me think I’d soon make up for lost time. For one solid hour I stayed with Lamar Rensdale and really tried to retain all he taught. According to Mr. Rensdale, I was an exceptional student with great natural ability. I wanted to believe he was telling the truth, not just flattering me just keep me coming back and paying his fees. Arden would hurry back from delivering his evening newspapers to pick me up when my lessons were over.
Late one night eight months after Momma’s death, I stole downstairs and again practiced on Momma’s grand piano. Its tone was so wonderful, so true, much better than the cheap piano my teacher used. Before my music lessons I hadn’t even noticed it had a tone. As I sat there in the dead of night playing my simple little piece, I closed my eyes and pretended I was Momma, and my fingers were as skilled as hers were, and I could pour into them all the nuances that she had. But it didn’t sound wonderful. My music didn’t send chills down my spine as hers had. Discouraged, I opened my eyes and decided I’d better keep a close eye on the music and not try to improvise. That’s when I heard a small sound behind me. I whirled to confront Vera standing in the doorway. She smiled at me archly, making me squirm.
“You sure are wrapped up in music all of a sudden,” she said. “What’s he like, your Mr. Rensdale?”
“He’s nice.”
“I don’t mean that, stupid. I heard the girls at my school say he’s very young, handsome and sexy—and a bachelor.”
Uneasily, I fidgeted. “I guess he is all of that, but he’s too old for you, Vera. He wouldn’t look at a kid like you.”
“Nobody is too old for me—but everybody will be too old for you, sweet Audrina. By the time you escape Papa, you’ll be creaky in the joints and wearing glasses to match your gray hair.”
The worst of this was I knew every word she said was true. Papa was latching onto me more and more with each passing day. In all ways but bedroom ones, he was making me his wife. In fact, I listened to his stock market talk with far more tolerance and understanding than Momma ever had, and my aunt had no patience with that sort of “boring talk.”
“I’m gonna make Papa give me music lessons, too,” stated Vera, glaring hard at me, and I knew she’d give me hell if she didn’t have her way.
The very next morning Vera was dressed in her most becoming clothes. Her strange, bright orange hair somehow flattered her very pale face, and her dark eyes were truly shocking. “You do everything for Audrina, and nothing at all for me,” she said to Papa. “And it’s my mother who cooks your meals and cleans your house and washes and irons, and you don’t pay her anything. I want to study music, too. I’m every bit as sensitive and talented as Audrina.”
He stared at her pale face until she flushed and turned half sideways, as she always did when she had something to conceal. “I need some beauty in my life, too,” she said plaintively, casting down her dark eyes and tugging on a length of her apricot hair.
“Once a week for you,” he said grimly. “You go to school and have lessons to learn. Audrina can have one class a day to keep her idle mind out of trouble.” I thought surely Vera would object to thi
s unbalanced arrangement, but oddly enough, she seemed satisfied.