“So,” he began in a bitter way, “you’re going to be like all the others and believe the worst of me.” He jumped up from the bench and paced his small living room. “You happen to be the only student who keeps me tied to this hick town. I keep telling myself even if I’m not good enough for Broadway, I am contributing a fine musician to the world.”
I felt sorry for him, for me, too, for there wasn’t another qualified teacher except in the city thirty miles away, and I had no way to reach the city. “Mr. Rensdale—” I tried to begin.
“Lamar—why can’t you call me by my first name?” he shot out angrily, locking his long fingers together and flexing them back and forth.
“I can’t call you by your first name. Papa has warned me not to do that, for it’s the first step …” Here I hesitated, beginning to feel very hot and uncomfortable. “Vera talks a lot, remember that. If she ever told Papa about your reputation, he’d come after you. Papa is huge, and it’s not his way to stop and listen to reason. He’d believe anything Vera told him … and she hates me. He knows she hates me, and still he’d believe what she says, for he doesn’t trust any man around young girls. If he didn’t believe me so chaste and pure in mind, he wouldn’t have let me come in the first place.”
“I’ll speak to Vera when she comes for her next lesson.” He stopped pacing and stood before me. “She’s wasting her time with me, and your father’s money. She has no musical ability at all, yet she insists on trying. She’s competing with you, Audrina. She wants everything you want. She wants your young man, she wants the love your father gives you and not her. She’s jealous of you, and dangerous, too. Beware of Vera.”
Slowly my eyes lifted to meet his. He lightly touched my hair, then my cheek where the tear had slid. “Are you crying for me, or for yourself?” he asked softly. “Who will teach you the piano when I’m gone? What will you do with your talent then? Bury it under the dishes you wash and the babies you bear, like your mother did?”
“I’ll come back,” I whispered, terribly afraid of repeating my mother’s frustrations. “I’ll risk Vera’s telling Papa, but you be careful of her, too.”
His smile came thin and crooked as he wiped away my tears. It was a smile very much like Vera’s.
Each day I played better and better. At her piano I felt like Momma, enthralled by the music I created and somehow disappointed in the life I led. Something was missing, and I didn’t know what it was.
I stood that winter staring out at the softly falling snow, wistful and needing, and I allowed myself to believe it was Sylvia I needed for fulfillment. Once I had Sylvia home with me, where I could give her all the love and mothering she must desperately need, I’d feel happy. I wondered as I’d wondered a thousand times just what was wrong with Sylvia. Was it so awful Papa was sure the truth would deliver such a blow to my “sensitivities” that I might not recover? Was I really that sensitive? My aunt ridiculed the notion so often that I felt both she and Papa shared the proof of my hidden weakness.
The snow danced in the wind, whirling around like tiny ballerinas, bouncing up, drifting down, floating sideways, making pictures, telling me, always telling me that I was never, never going to be free, anymore than Momma had been free.
Vera came bounding through my bedroom door, the cold air clinging to her heavy coat as she threw it down and stained yet another delicate chair. “Guess what I’ve been doing!” she exploded, hardly able to contain herself. Her eyes were lit up like black coals. The cold had made her cheeks red as apples. There were red marks on her neck. Marks she pointed out to me. “Kisses made those,” she said with a smirk. “I’ve got those marks all over me. I am no longer a virgin, little sister.”
“You’re not my sister!” I flared.
“What difference does it make, I might as well be. Now, sit down and listen to what’s going on in my life, and compare it to the dull stuffiness of yours. I have seen a naked man, Audrina, a real one, not just a picture or illustration. He is so hairy. You’d never suspect just how hairy by looking at him fully clothed. His hair travels from his chest down past his navel and runs into a point and keeps on going and getting bushier until—”
“Stop! I don’t want to hear more.”
“But I want you to hear more. I want you to know what you’re missing. It’s wonderful to have all those nine inches stabbing into me. Did you hear me, Audrina? I measured it … almost nine inches, and it’s all swollen and hard.”
I ran to the door, but she was up and blocking my way. With surprising strength she threw me to the floor, then straddled my body. I thought about kicking her out of the way, but I was afraid she’d fall and break another bone.
She put her shod foot on my chest, which was just beginning to swell. “He’s got a marvelous body, little sister, really a fantastic body. What we do would shock you so much you’d scream and possibly faint… and I love every second of what we do together. Can’t get enough, never can get enough.”
“You’re only fourteen,” I whispered, truly shocked at the loony way she looked and the disgusting way she talked.
“Soon to be fifteen,” she said with a hard laugh. “Why don’t you ask me who is my lover? I’ll tell you, gladly tell you.”
“I don’t want to know. You tell lies all the time. You’re lying now. Lamar Rensdale wouldn’t want a kid like you.”
“How do you know that? Because he doesn’t want you? Who would want you but a kid like Arden? He feels obligated to you, protective of you … and I could tell you so much about that you’d probably lose your mind that already hovers on the brink of insanity. Anybody fully sane knows exactly what’s gone on in their lives—everybody but you.”
“Leave me alone, Vera!” I shouted. “You’re a liar and always will be. Lamar Rensdale wouldn’t want you after I told him about Papa.”
“What did you tell him ab
out Papa?” she asked with hard, narrowed eyes.
“I told him Papa was huge, and had a terrible temper, and even if Papa isn’t your father, you could ruin our name.”
She laughed so hysterically she fell on the floor and rolled around like someone demented. “Boy, you take the cake, Audrina! Ruin our name? How can something already destroyed be ruined? And if you don’t believe me, go and ask Lamar. He doesn’t object to my age. He likes young girls. Most men do. Why, if you could see him striding to me without a stitch on, with that great gun cocked and aimed …”
Appalled by what she said, I ran from the room, down to where Aunt Ellsbeth was in the kitchen. I forgot about Vera as I felt pity for my aunt, always working so hard, doing half my share of chores and most of Vera’s, too, now that I didn’t stay home all day.
Aunt Ellsbeth looked up from washing the dishes. What I saw in her dark eyes startled me. They were glowing radiantly, as if she’d looked all her life and had at last discovered something to be joyful about. No longer did she call Papa cruel and callous as once she had. He no longer called her a walking beanpole, tall, lean and mean, with the tongue of a shrew.
“Audrina,” she began, and in her voice I heard a bit of warmth, “you’ve got to be very careful not to let your father dominate your life. He’ll never do that to Vera because she doesn’t care what he thinks of her. Because you do care, you make yourself vulnerable. He’s self-serving to the point of being cruel enough to rob you of what you need. He lies; he cheats and deceives. He’s devilishly clever and likable but, I’m sorry to say, completely without honor or integrity. If he can possibly manage it he will keep you here with him until the day he dies and never allow you to have a life of your own. I can tell that you love him. In some ways I commend you for your loyalty and devotion. But blood ties are not supposed to be chains. You don’t owe him, or Sylvia, your life.”