18. The Piano and the Pictures ... THE FARM IN PINE VILLAGE

Earlier that year, Robert and Charles had begun taking piano lessons from Miss Ella Beegle, who had a studio at the top of a building that housed Allen’s Dance Studio across from the Journal & Courier newspaper headquarters in Lafayette. Older than Joe and Ida, Miss Beegle was a kind, gracious woman who could hardly bring herself to correct a pupil. She was well-dressed and well-spoken. After awaiting his turn in a room filled with wicker furniture, Robert would hear Miss Beegle saying goodbye to Charles as the two of them walked down a short hallway. Then it would be Robert’s turn to follow Miss Beegle into her studio.

Robert enjoyed the lessons, although he seldom practiced enough. By this time in his first-grade year, he could begin to read simple scores in the beginner’s book. One of the short pieces had an illustration of kittens that Robert liked because he had found kittens in his father’s barn on more than one occasion. Each week, Miss Beegle asked Robert to write another scale in his booklet of music paper. Robert tried his best to form each note perfectly. “Your scales are better than print,” Miss Beegle often said, complimenting Robert’s handiwork. Of course, his notes were not better than print, but it was Miss Beegle’s method to be unsparing in her praise of a pupil’s accomplishments.

Miss Beegle’s studio boasted a grand piano. At home, Robert and Charles practiced on an old upright piano that was taller than many similar instruments. To Robert, it seemed harder to play than Miss Beegle’s grand. The keys of the old upright offered a little more resistance.

Ida was proud of her sons’ progress on the piano, and she insisted that they practice—although both slipped off the piano bench all too soon every day. Whenever Ida and Joe entertained guests, the boys had to play one song each on the piano. While the poor playing in general and the wrong notes in particular must have made it difficult to listen, everyone always applauded rapturously afterward.

Robert spent his time at the piano learning to read music, rather than playing “by ear,” as the saying went. He never developed the capacity to reproduce at the keyboard any song that he heard. He had a penchant for exactness, and playing a musical score required the satisfying precision that Robert felt would be lacking, were he to indulge in playing by ear. Many years later, he would wish that he could automatically play any song that he could hear.

For Robert, music lay at the heart of drawing. Ever since he could remember, his mother had provided a seemingly endless supply of crayons, pastels, and watercolor paints. Ida bought numerous large packs of oversized paper and encouraged the boys to make as many pictures as they could. When Robert was three, he sketched Grandma Rhode, and it actually looked like her! He felt that, if he could “hear” the inner music of a surface accurately, he could reproduce that surface in a two-dimensional drawing. No actual sounds were emitted from such surfaces; Robert had to imagine the sounds each surface would make. If he wanted to draw someone’s nose, he peered intently at the way the skin stretched across the bridge and imagined what sounds would best express the skin as it came over the bridge and swept toward the cheek—as a stream or a breeze might do. When he heard the sounds as clearly as possible, he put his pencil or his crayon or his paintbrush on the paper and made his hand move in harmony with the sounds he was hearing. Essentially, he was transferring the sounds to the paper, which, in turn, changed three dimensions into two.

So music and visual art were really the same! Visual art was music seen in shading and lines.

Robert had a small chalkboard that had been part of an easel but was now separate from it. He spent many hours drawing with white chalk on the dark green chalkboard.

He sat in a large armchair upholstered in a fuzzy fabric that was nearly knobby and bristly. With the chalkboard across his knees and steadied by his left hand, he drew sequential pictures to accompany stories that he invented and told himself. As soon as one was finished (sometimes even before it was finished), he erased it with a handful of dusty tissues and continued on to the next. The drawings were like the major pictures in an animation storyboard. Quite often, he took his inspiration from the TV westerns and from Disney movies. He drew stagecoaches in the desert with mountains in the background, log cabins, forts, and Indians. He never missed an opportunity to sketch Indians and frequently made portraits of them with their feathered headdresses.

Making countless chalk drawings meant that a thick ridge of white dust developed across his jeans. Where he set down his tissues, a broad pile of dust formed on the fabric of the armchair. Mysteriously, his mother never complained about the chalk dust permeating the chair. She periodically brushed and vacuumed the dust away. Robert gained the impression that visual art was approved, no matter how messy it might be.

On many joyous occasions, Ida sat down with Robert and his chalkboard on a davenport in the living room. She invited him to tell a story aloud while he illustrated it, and he complied.

“Your story needs an ending,” she always said. “You’re reaching a place where you stop, but that’s not an ending.”

“What should it be?” Robert always asked.

“You can end a story in many ways,” his mother would answer. “You can surprise whoever is listening to your story.”

“What would a surprise be?”

On one such occasion, Ida replied, “You could have the tribe make the boy in your story an honorary member because he rescued their pony from the deep hole that his father had dug.”

Robert quickly drew a picture of smiling Indians standing around the boy and the pony.

“That’s right,” Ida said. “Another way would be to make a point. You could tell why it’s important to keep fences around deep holes so that ponies don’t fall into them.”

Robert hurriedly rubbed away the existing sketch, set the handful of tissues to one side, and drew a hole with a fence around it. For good measure, he added several trees in the background.

“That’s good!” his mother said. “You could also return to what you said in the beginning and make it mean more at the end. Do you remember when you said that the boy wished he could do something for his Indian friends?”

“I see,” said Robert. “‘So the boy got his wish,’” he proclaimed in a louder voice, to show that the sentence was his ending. At the same time, he drew a close-up of the boy’s face with a big grin next to several faces of Indians, also with big grins.

“That’s very good!” his mother said. “Whenever you begin a story, think what your ending is going to be. Make everything in the story count toward the ending.”

Robert smiled with satisfaction. “I will!” he agreed, but, by the next time his mother sat with him and invited him to tell a story with his chalkboard, he had forgotten about endings. Patiently, Ida would guide him through various ways to end whatever story he had been telling her.

Eventually, there came a day when he remembered.

“And the puppy that nobody had wanted had grown up to be the prettiest dog of all!” he said, as he put the finishing touches to his sketch of a dog. He could hear the music of its pointy ears, its soft nose, and its twinkling eyes.

Ida smiled and said, “Now you know how to end a story!”