Home from the Vinyl Cafe (9 page)

The Lowbeers arrived home on Sunday, as planned. Dave flew to Montreal before they arrived and joined his family in St.-Sauveur. When they got home on Tuesday night, there was a loaf of bread and a note from Carl on the back porch.

You certainly looked after the starter.
Thanks for everything.

“He knows,” said Dave. “He must.”

“That’s just Carl,” said Morley.

Dave wasn’t so sure. He gave Carl a wide berth for the next few weeks. They didn’t rub shoulders again until the first neighborhood barbecue, on the long weekend in May.

Dave was at the condiment table looking at the buns when Jim Scoffield leaned against him and whispered conspiratorially, “Aren’t you going to have one of Carl’s sourdough buns?”

“What do you mean?” said Dave nervously. Did everyone know?

Jim rolled his eyes. “Carl just gave me his bread lecture. Do you know he has a framed genealogy in his den?”

Dave felt relief wash through him. “Did he tell you about his aunt in Germany?” he asked.

Jim nodded.

Dave smiled. “He’s a bit much,” he said, “but I like his bread.”

Dave picked out one of Carl’s buns from the bowl on the picnic table. He wandered over to the grill, got a hamburger, and then looked around the yard. Carl was standing near the fence, a hot dog in his hand. He was alone.

Dave waved and headed over.

               
T
he problem of Sam’s piano lessons began with his Christmas report card. The music teacher, Mrs. Crouch, wrote:
Sam has an unself-conscious sense of rhythm. It appears to come from inside him
.

“What does that mean?” said Dave. He was sitting in the kitchen reading the report. “ ‘It appears to come from inside him.’ Where else would it come from?”

“I think she means it’s a gift,” said Morley.

In February, at parent-teacher night, Mrs. Crouch sought
them
out. “Do you know he has perfect pitch?” she asked.

Morley smiled. It wasn’t so much what Mrs. Crouch was telling her—just to have a teacher say nice things about her child was good enough. Morley didn’t want her to stop.

“The other day in choir,” said Mrs. Crouch, “he started to sing the descant quietly to himself. I just happened to catch it as I walked by. Most of the grade sixes can’t do that.”

Morley nodded earnestly.

By the time they got home, however, her joy had been sideswiped by a spasm of guilt. Sam was eight years old, and they hadn’t done a thing to encourage this musical talent. When Stephanie was eight, she’d been taking piano
and
dance lessons. What if Sam did have a gift? Morley felt as if she’d been asleep at the switch.

She knew from her years in the theater that every time you
see a great artist stand up onstage and perform, there is another person standing alongside. Usually, it’s a teacher or a parent. All great artists need a support system. Someone who believes in what they have to offer.

She had done absolutely nothing for Sam.

That night Morley dreamed she was in the audience at a symphony concert. In the middle of her dream, the conductor abruptly snapped his baton in two and hurled it on the stage. The hall fell deadly quiet, and the conductor swiveled around and looked at Morley.
Someone
, he boomed, glancing back angrily at the orchestra,
has to leave the stage
.

Morley noticed for the first time that the musicians were playing vegetables. Then she saw Sam push his way through the middle of the leafy greens. He was waving a large eggplant over his head. “How do you expect me to play the eggplant,” he said, “when I’ve only ever been given potatoes?” Then he left the stage, passing the cucumbers with his head hanging. As he went, Morley noticed that the entire root section was having dental work done as they played.

When she woke up, Morley turned to Dave and said, “I am going to get Sam a potato—I mean piano—teacher.”

She knew what had gone wrong. Stephanie had kicked up such a fuss about her piano lessons that she had worn Morley down. It wasn’t fair. Sam deserved his own chance.

He started lessons at the beginning of March with the only piano teacher in the neighborhood who had space to take him. The teacher’s name was Ray Spinella, and he had only one arm. He wasn’t the teacher Morley wanted, but she wanted to get Sam going. Everyone said the best teacher around was Laurence Merriman. But Laurence Merriman
wouldn’t take Sam until September, and only if Sam got his grade one first. Brian suggested a month at a music camp. “Camp Dutoit is good,” he said.

The problem was that Sam didn’t want to go to Camp Dutoit to get his grade-one piano. Sam wanted to go to the Lazy M Ranch and learn to ride a horse.

Dave said Sam should go to the horse camp. “Summers are for fun,” he said. But Morley found herself uncharacteristically muddled. She was sure Sam would have fun at Camp Dutoit once he got there. But she didn’t want to send him against his will. Morley thought perhaps if she gave him some time, a few weeks of lessons, maybe he would change his mind. The danger was, if she gave him too much time, there wouldn’t be a spot left for Sam at either camp. So she sent a deposit to both. She thought things would be clear by the time the bulk of the fees were due.

Well, the bulk of the fees were now due, and things were no clearer. The forms from both camps were sitting on Morley’s desk. And if she didn’t choose one and get the check in the mail soon, Sam wouldn’t be going away at all. Morley thought of sending money to both camps to give her a few more weeks. But she knew that was crazy. And if she did that, one day she would have to tell Dave. As much as you’d want to keep that sort of behavior to yourself, it would be difficult—eventually, you’d just blurt it out.

On Thursday, Dave’s sister, Annie, phoned from the airport. She said, “I just got into town. I’m recording some sort of, I don’t know, thing. Tonight. I’m flying back tomorrow morning early. Are you free for lunch?”

Annie lived in Halifax. She played in the string section of Symphony Nova Scotia.

Morley said, “I’d love to have lunch.”

They met in a large formal dining room, on the top floor of a downtown department store.

Music had always been a big part of Dave’s and his sister’s lives. It was no accident that Annie played in the symphony and that Dave owned a record store and had spent all those years working in rock and roll.

Dave and Annie’s father, Charlie, loved music. There was no money for music lessons when Charlie was a kid, but as an adult, he taught himself to play the piano and, during the dark Cape Breton winter nights, the double bass. When Dave and Annie were growing up, they were constantly surrounded by music. Nearly every morning, when it was time to get the kids out of bed, Charlie would sing them awake. He would make up lyrics about the day ahead, the things they were going to do. He used tunes that drove them crazy, like “Hello, Dolly”:

Hello, math test
This is Dave, math test
It’s so nice to have a test
On Tuesday morn—

“Come on, Davey.

Up and at ’em!”

Or “Big Spender”:

The minute you walked in the room
I could tell you were a real cool fraction
Math-a-maction!
Numerator hangs out over the line
How’d you like to come and be reduced sometime?

What Charlie loved most were the nights when friends came over to the house and made music with him. He used to send away to a store in New York City for sheet music. He would hand out the music a week before his get-togethers so people could practice. Anyone was welcome as long as he or she could play something, which made for weird combinations of instruments: for example, a trio made up of recorder, double bass, and trumpet. Charlie was inevitably the worst player in these bands because, although he loved music, he had absolutely no sense of rhythm and a very unusual sense of pitch. So the guy on the recorder and the guy on the trumpet would be playing away, and Charlie would lumber along on his bass about twenty yards behind them. Charlie was often still playing when the others got to the end of the piece. When Charlie finally played his last note, his friend Fred, who regularly showed up to play the piano, would say, “Well, we won that one, Charlie.” They had a great time.

------

Both Dave and Annie began piano lessons the autumn they began school. They studied with the only piano teacher in Big Narrows, Sister Emilienne, at the convent of the Sisters of St. Seriah.

Sister Emilienne came from Pointe-Verte on the south shore of the Baie des Chaleur. She was French, but she could speak English, and Annie thought she was the nicest, kindest woman in the world.

Sister Emilienne’s studio, with the wainscoting and the two pianos, was the closest to religion that Annie and Dave ever got. The room was so ordered and quiet that it lent a sense of mystery and sanctity to music.

Sister Emilienne had names for all the notes on the piano.
Mrs. Treble Clef with her tightly folded skirt; Mr. Bass Clef with two buttons on his shirt. When Dave was having trouble with B-flat, Sister Emilienne drew little bumblebees wherever Dave was supposed to play the note. “Press hard,” she said. “Make the bee flat.” In one lesson, the B became Dave’s best note. He became very attached to the B.