Dancers in the Dark. Dorothy Speare
up to Joy. He took her face in his hands and turned it gently to the window.
“Life and work—those are all you need, my child,” he said. “You are going to learn to sing so that the tears will flow or the smiles will dance, at your will.”
“Then you’re no longer discouraged, Pa?” Jerry demanded triumphantly from her seat.
“I do not know her well enough to say that. The greater a voice, the more work there is to do, to reach the perfection that voice demands. And there is one thing, Louise——Oh, yes, child, I’ll make you into a Louise, and many other things—it is not from lack of voices that there are so few great singers—it is because so few are willing to pay the price—the heartbreak of the years of toil and self-denial.”
Jerry rose, pulling out a box of cigarettes. It had been a great self-restraint on her part not to light up before. “Then you think it would be worth it for her to try?”
“Worth it!” He turned almost fiercely to Joy. “It’s not worth it if the years of labor will not seem pleasure—if you do not enjoy every step along the way.”
Joy felt heady with excitement. Enjoy it? Well—she had never thought so before; but with the wail of a wronged Louise air still in her ears, the magical atmosphere of music, busts, pictures, and the eager faces around her, the voices of her heritage tore her soul with their insistence. Almost as if she were mesmerised, she heard the words leave her lips: “I—would—enjoy—every step along the way.”
And then, with the familiar puffing of Jerry’s cigarette, things seemed to quiet down. The accompanist, wearing a slightly altered demeanour, left the room, and Joy and Pa came down from the platform.
“Your voice is young, of course,” said Pa, “and tender. But it will grow. It is bigger to start with than most, but do not be deceived by its volume and think you are a dramatic soprano. You are a lyric; and you shall learn to sing colorature in golden, matched tones. Just now you have no nasal resonance—and not much point. Don’t believe you can run a scale. But your legato is not bad, your high notes are good. Come to-morrow at this time for your first lesson.”
He bowed them out, and they stood in the little waiting room while Jerry finished her cigarette and threw it away. They did not speak until they were on a street car bound for home. Then Joy asked Jerry what a lyric soprano was.
“Dunno’s I can explain,” said Jerry; “a lyric soprano sings most of the snappy opera—I’ll say you’re in luck. Of course you can do Louise, as he said, and Manon and all the Puccini stuff, and one of your type will sing Rigoletto and Traviata thrown in. Never Aida—that’s for a dramatic and would tear your lungs out. And colorature is super-runs and super-trills—like Melba and Galli-Curci. Do you follow me? If not, I’ll fill in the blanks.”
“Jerry,” she asked timidly, after some minutes had gone by; “how do you know about him? I—I wish you’d tell me a little about yourself.”
Jerry’s red lips took a downward quirk. When she spoke, it was in a queer voice that sagged and paused. “I will, Joy—sometime when I feel like it. I—I really—am going to. I’ll tell you about Pa now, though. He was a big teacher in New York a few years ago, and only came to Boston to retire. He says coming to Boston in itself is retiring—but he still takes a few pupils. He couldn’t live unless he did—it’s been his life for so long, and he’s so bound up in music. I met him first in New York through a friend of mine who was studying with him. I even studied with him myself, until——Oh, yes, I used to do—a lot of singing.”
What had Jerry said at Prom that was faintly reminiscent of this last? “I used to do—a lot of sewing.” And then again: “I used to do—a lot of making-up.” Jerry was what one might call a girl of mystery. The thought was pleasantly exciting. Joy speculated, and silence stayed between them until they descended from the street car in front of the apartment house. A dashing blue Marmon was poised in the road, with Sarah and a youth in the front seat—Sarah now resplendent, cheeks flaring pink under an alluring veil, and dressed in a way to make men look at her and women look at her clothes. She shrieked to them:
“Wigs and Davy just went up to leave a note saying we’d come back—come on—we’re going down the Cape somewhere for luncheon and somewhere else for dinner and somewhere else to dance!”
Joy did not have time to write her father that day—and only barely time the following noon. She found herself started on a round of gaiety which she had never pictured in her most riotous moments, a routine such as she had never dreamed existed outside of fiction—with Jerry and Sarah it was just one youth after another, with an abundance over and to spare, although this abundance was never spared. Continually they streaked around, always making up new things to do, with an airy disregard of selection of hours by day or night. The men who made all this possible were nearly all college boys but not nearly all Harvard. There were New Haven men who “ran up,” and Joy was constantly meeting men from the smaller colleges who had met Jerry and Sarah at house-parties and never failed to call them up when they were in town. There was also another, smaller class, non-college men who seemed to be “men about town.” Joy did not like them as well as the college youths. They lacked the humour for the most part that the college boys possessed to superfluity, and their idea of a good time travelled along fixed and set lines.
Joy welcomed everything with an eager excitement that wore her out more than the steep hours that were taken for granted by Jerry and Sarah. She had been sleeping in Foxhollow Corners all her life—storing up her energy for youth’s playtime; playtime which might never have come if her father had not taken the initiative; playtime which might never have come if somebody had not whistled ragtime on the street. If she was white and tired, she applied Sarah’s rouge with a liberal hand and drank a “prescription” of Sarah’s from the cellarette in the club-room. Jerry objected to these “prescriptions,” but since she drank more than either of them, her word did not carry much weight. Jerry drank as she smoked; thirstily, and in long pulls, like a man who needed it, while Sarah drank and smoked daintily, as a girl does to be devilish.
When finally the answer to her hurried morning’s scrawl came from California, she was thrown into a guilty joy. Evidently her father had not read her letter with care. She had scribbled somewhat incoherently, it was true, of her change in address to the “rooms of two older girls” whom she had met before—but she had honestly not intended that he should misinterpret, or to scrawl so hastily that he would overlook the salient points in the matter. But the fact remained that he had merely made a note of her changed address, as if she had been placed in another Students’ Annex, and then proceeded to the business of the letter, which came to the information that complications would postpone his return for possibly a month longer. Adjuring her to let him know constantly of her health and progress, he was her affectionate father.
There was no seesawing of decisions, no teetering from one course to another when she read that letter. Beneath her relief she might feel guilty, but it was the triumphant guilt as of the stout lady who takes chocolate while sighing “I ought not to take this!” She would stay—for a month longer. And then—then she would see!
Strangely enough, Packy did not appear for a long time after that first day. He called up promptly, and as Jerry had expressed it, “reneged” on his invitation to the ball game. He had invited a girl, Class Day, and it seems, he explained, that one had to take one’s Class Day girl to the game. “Perhaps it’s just as well, though,” he said, “because when I see you, I want to see you, and not necessarily in a howling mob where I might forget and pound you in the frenzy of the moment. I’d much rather pound my Class Day girl!”
When Joy told Jerry, she turned up her snub nose. “I thought he’d give you a rain-check on that. It’s their Commencement game, you see—families thick all round—maybe he got faint at the thought.”
“What do you mean?” Joy had demanded.
Jerry shrugged her shoulders and took another cigarette. “Merely that never in all my intercollegiate activity, have I been asked to a Commencement, or any affair where all the proud families have come to gaze on their angel