The Music of Your Life (17 page)

Thanks be to Her.

She has saved them.

Alleluia.

The little boy stands under the dogwood tree in the front yard, holding the
Mary Poppins
record album close against his side. He keeps it with him most of the time, even though he has been told it doesn't do much good to carry around a record, since a record needs a record player in order to be a useful thing. But he loves the illustrations on the front and back of the album and the record jacket's sleeve. He does have a record player, of course, a small one, but when he is not playing the record, he is content to stare at the album cover, with its photos of the stars and the colorful artwork.

The
Mary Poppins
album is the first big record he has ever owned; up until now, his records have mostly been the little red and yellow 78s that play songs like “Turkey in the Straw” and “She'll Be Comin' Round the Mountain,” sung by childish, high-pitched voices he doesn't much care for, though he sings along anyway.
Mary Poppins
is a big black record, like grown-ups have, and his father has explained that it is called an LP, for “long playing.” He likes that; he seeks out activities that occupy his mind for long periods of time, activities that require his constant and careful attention. The boy plays
Mary Poppins
for its duration, both sides, and when it is over, he lifts the needle and cautiously repositions it at the beginning of the record, as he has learned how to do. Again and again.

The boy has just turned five, and the
Mary Poppins
LP is a birthday present from his mother and father. He thinks of it as perhaps the best gift he has ever received, and he has, in a matter of weeks, learned every song by heart. He sings the words over and over, sometimes loudly for Mama and Daddy, like a performance, and sometimes just softly to himself, as he is walking along the sidewalk in front of his house or climbing the dogwood tree that has turned so green and white-flowery since the spring came.

His name is Hunter. It is 1964. He is dressed in a sailor suit and new Buster Browns, and his short honey-brown hair has been combed wet and parted on the side, the way it is usually groomed for Sunday school, only this is Saturday night, and he is going to the movies with his mother to see
Mary Poppins
—it has finally opened in their town. How long it has taken for this evening to come! He has hardly thought of anything else for weeks, ever since he saw a preview for the movie during a telecast of Walt Disney's
Wonderful World of Color
, which isn't in color on their black-and-white TV, but is still something he watches faithfully every Sunday night. He has seen other movies before, and enjoyed them, but this one promises to be different. It looks bigger and more lavish than any of the other movies he has seen, containing, as its ads promise, both cartoons and live action.

“Mama, look, it's cartoons
and
people!” he had said, when he first saw the two adult characters dancing on dark rooftops and alongside bright, animated penguins.

“Yes, I see that,” she said. “We'll have to make a special trip to see it when it comes.”

“Is
Mary Poppins
gonna come here? To our town?” Hunter asked, aware of his own heart starting to beat faster with anticipation.

His parents assured him it would, and they promised to take him when it did.

At kindergarten, he made a detailed canvasing of the other children, to see if they had seen the
Mary Poppins
movie preview during the Disney program on the peacock channel. Some of them had, but they didn't seem to share his enormous sense of enthusiasm about it. That didn't surprise him; he was already used to the indifference of other schoolchildren. He fared better with adults; they listened when he talked nonstop about a television show, or a book he had checked out of the library, or the new song he had learned in Sunday school. He liked the way adults paid him attention, the way they included him more readily in their conversations than other children did.

A few days after seeing the movie preview, he was shopping with his mother at Sears and discovered that there was a record version of the
Mary Poppins
movie. Hunter then wanted to own the record as badly as he wanted to see the movie, and he thought if he could just achieve these two goals, he would never ask his mother or father or God for anything ever again. He would promise always to be kind to animals and other children, even the ones who shunned him at kindergarten, and to smile and hand out nickels to the poor people he occasionally spotted on the main street of his town, the ones who slept on the park benches outside the library, near the movie theaters. He vowed never to argue or be disagreeable, to never call anybody “stupid” again, and he would never again step on the red and black anthills in his yard, destroying their homes when they had never done anything to him. He would even stop asking God to send him a baby brother, which, before the appearance of
Mary Poppins
, was something he had hoped for more than anything else.

“I don't think you have to sacrifice all that much just to get a record and see a movie,” his mother said, when he told her of his
Mary Poppins
wish and recited the list of things he would no longer do. He didn't know what a “sacrifice” was, but he thought it might have something to do with stepping on the anthills, and he had already promised to stop doing that.

“You have a birthday coming up, Hunter,” she had said. “The record might make a good birthday present, what do you think?”

As it turned out, his birthday arrived before the Mary Poppins movie opened in town. (“Nothing ever gets here on time,” his father said. “Why is that, Grace? Do we live in the boondocks?”) So he had gotten the record first, and proceeded to learn all the songs. When his grandmother asked him what his favorite songs from the LP were, he found it impossible to answer. He had no favorites; they were all his favorites, and he could sing the words to every one of them. “I just … I just love them all,” he told her.

“I love them all,” he whispers again, to himself, as he stands under the dogwood tree on this Saturday evening, waiting for his mother to come out of the house, car keys in hand, ready to go. She will be dressed up in a Sunday dress and high heels and carrying a pocketbook. She peers out of the living room window, which is open. “Hunter! Are you ready to go, honey?”

He has been ready for weeks. For years.

“Uh-huh,” he says, still staring at the album cover, and then, remembering, says, “Yes ma'am.”

“Do you need to go to the bathroom one more time before we go?”

“No ma'am.”

“I'll be right out.”

His father is also outside, watering the azalea bushes. As it turns out, he is staying home tonight—there is an educational program on TV he doesn't want to miss. Hunter stands under the tree, and his father stands next to the bushes; finally, after a moment, their eyes connect across the small expanse of yard; the father holds a garden hose, the son holds a record album. Hunter's father wipes his brow with his sleeve; it is a warm night, unseasonably warm for late April. “Hunter,” he asks, “are you taking the record album to the movie?”

Hunter looks at him warily. “Yes,” he answers. Of course yes. Why not? This is
His
evening. His evening. “Yes sir.”

“Is that a good idea, son? To carry the record with you to the movie? Why don't you leave it here?”

Hunter says nothing, just stares at him.

“Suit yourself, then,” his father says, and returns to watering.

Hunter glances back down at the record jacket.
Julie Andrews. Dick Van Dyke
. He can't read the names, really, but he knows which one is which. He has grown to love them without ever seeing them. Richard M. and Robert B. Sherman. They must be wonderful people to have written something like this. He knows what music is; his mother helped him look up “lyrics” in the Webster's dictionary.

“A song is a poem set to music,” the kindergarten teacher has said.

Hunter thinks Julie Andrews is beautiful, and he thinks his mother is beautiful too.

“Look at this. Julie Andrews and I are the same age,” she told him, while reading him the liner notes on the album sleeve, which he often chooses as his bedtime story. He looked up at her, wide-eyed. He saw it made his mother happy, too, to know that she was the same age as a famous Walt Disney movie star. He was thrilled.

“I'm almost ready,” his mother calls out again from the living room window. “Don't give me up. Ed? Ed, are you still watering?”

Earlier that afternoon, Hunter and his mother had walked up and down Mount Pisgah Avenue collecting for the Heart Fund. Hunter wore pedal pushers and PF Flyers and a Green Hornet T-shirt. His mother wore a light cotton red-and-white-checked dress, with white patent leather high-heeled shoes and matching pocketbook. She wanted to make a good impression for the Heart Fund people. The two of them took turns carrying the collection canister.

“Are you the little Green Hornet?” Mrs. Brinson, at 2601, asked him, bending down to put a quarter in the tin cylinder.

“No ma'am.”

“Isn't that a sweet little boy?” she said. “All little boys seem to love those Superman-y things like that, don't they?” she asked his mother, indicating his T-shirt.

“He's just crazy about all kinds of entertainment,” said his mother.

At 2610, Mrs. Faircloth hemmed and hawed about giving to the Heart Fund.

“I'm going to see
Mary Poppins
tonight,” Hunter offered, aware of the awkward moment.

The older woman looked at him quizzically.

“Who?” she asked.

“It's a Walt Disney movie,” he explained. “Julie Andrews is the same age as Mama, and she sings and dances on a roof with a broom and a penguin and she sits on a … um …”

He looked to his mother for the word.

“Banister,” his mother said.

“A bansitter,” he continued. “And she slides up it.”

“My, what a talkative child,” the woman said, after a moment. “And so taken with things. Do you go to Sunday school too?”

“Yes ma'am.”

“Here's a dime, then.”

At 2102, for a young couple who had just moved into the neighborhood, he sang, in its entirety, the song about a spoonful of medicine going down like sugar.

Clink
went a fifty-cent piece into the canister.

“What a talented child I have,” said his mother, holding his hand on the way home.

Now, waiting for her, he leans against the dogwood tree and holds
Mary Poppins
against his chest. He shuts his eyes and practices the “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” song in his head. It is, by far, the hardest lyric to get right.

“Let's go, honey,” says his mother, finally emerging from the door, and fishing in the white patent leather pocketbook for the keys to the Rambler.

He carries the album into the car, somewhat defiantly.

“Have a good time,” says his father, sitting on the porch steps and stuffing his pipe with Kentucky Club.

“You could still come with us, you know,” she says slowly, standing next to the car, twirling the car keys on her index finger. Hunter fidgets—why is she not getting in? His father made it clear he doesn't want to go—why is she wasting time?

“I can't miss this program, Grace,” his father says, lighting the pipe and puffing.

“Oh, what program is it that's so important?”

He looks at her. “The one about the Korean War. I told you that.”

“Mama, let's go!” Hunter says, as loudly as he can. “We have to go
now
!”

He cannot miss even one minute of
Mary Poppins
. He cannot allow them to do that to him.

The Miracle Theater—at last. Hunter and his mother join a long line of people waiting to get in—parents with children, some teenagers, a few adults by themselves. Many of them are dressed up, as if for church, as Hunter and his mother are, and the people, the spectators, are talking and laughing—he feels the hubbub in the air; he didn't realize other people would be as excited as he is about
Mary Poppins
.

Suddenly, while standing in line, he realizes that he has left his album in the car.

“Mama, I have to get my record!”

The line begins to move.

“Oh, Hunter, sweetie. You don't need it now. Look, we're going in.”

He has no choice but to clutch her hand and walk beside her; he is jostled by other patrons, by other children the same height as he, though they don't really notice or look at him. He notices a little girl carrying a Mary Poppins umbrella—it is bright pink, with a green parrot head for a handle. Before he can get a good look at it, the girl and the parasol disappear in the crowd. The uniformed ushers point the way for the spectators through the auditorium doors on either side of the concession stand, over which a bright neon sign blinks out a message Hunter's mother reads for him: “
MIRACLE THEATER: SHOWPLACE OF THE SOUTH
.”