26. The College Student ... THE FARM EAST OF PINE VILLAGE

The August day arrived when the family said goodbye to Charles outside Wright Quadrangle on the campus of Indiana University in Bloomington. He was excited, looking forward to his time in college. On the drive home, Joe, Ida, and Robert were not excited. Robert had a lump in his throat. Joe said nothing, and Ida made only the occasional observation about a flower in someone’s yard or a bird on a fencepost. How could the sanctity of a family be broken so nonchalantly? The knowledge that the home would never be the same again weighed heavily on all three.

When the Pontiac pulled into the driveway and everyone went inside the house, the home that had seemed so full of promise only a little over two years earlier now felt vulnerable. A big change had occurred. Spot wondered where Charles was and watched for him for many days, until the terrier gave up watching.

Robert thought he should be especially kind to his parents, now that Charles’ room was quiet and felt empty.

In the mornings, Robert waited for the bus alone.

Joe and Ida hoped for letters from IU, and a few came. Charles was busy, studying up to four hours a night. Ida, meanwhile, wrote and mailed many letters to Bloomington. She could be seen scrawling on a pad of lined paper while taking a moment to sit at the kitchen table with a dusting of flour up to her elbows and pies in the oven.

Ida had been to college; Joe had not. She had knowledge of what Charles was encountering; Joe had none. The move to the new house in 1968 had been one of two of the most traumatizing events in Joe’s life. The second occurred when Charles moved away.

Without either of them sensing the change, the bond between Joe and Robert—already strong—was becoming stronger.

Ida and Robert kept trying to grow a vegetable garden. Their first attempt—in the first spring and summer at the new home—had been made west of the driveway, but the plants did not thrive. Next, Ida had Joe plow the area north of the house where, in Lizzie’s youth, a garden had been located. As before, sprouts were few, mature plants fewer, and the quality of the produce poor at best. No one could understand why corn, soybeans, and wheat crops customarily were spectacular when grown in presumably the same soil in the fields just beyond the hedge apple trees.

Uncharacteristically, Ida gave up. She supplied the family’s table with vegetables from grocery stores. Robert no longer enrolled in the gardening project for the 4-H fair.

“If we don’t plant a garden, I’ll have more time to dust,” Ida said. In the country, the furniture and floors became dusty far faster than they had in town. Up until Joe bought a window air conditioning unit, the windows were kept open through the hot, muggy days, although a heavy green blind might be lowered by pulling on the little ring dangling from the string at the bottom of the shade.

Little by little, levity returned to the farm east of Pine Village.

Ida would turn from the kitchen sink to face Robert while suds rolled down her wrists from her upturned hands, and she would quote Lady Macbeth: “The thane of Fife had a wife: where is she now?—What, will these hands ne’er be clean?” Robert would laugh until he could hardly catch his breath.

Robert would squeak a pink rat made of rubber and fling it beneath the sofa. Spot would bark and jump up and down, finally resorting to twisting the front half of his body on its side and pushing with his hind legs, until he could reach the rat and pull it out. Then he would shake it, to everyone’s delight! “You get that ol’ rat!” Robert would say.

Naturally, events conspired to dampen Robert’s good spirits. Miss Beegle retired. Robert’s beloved piano teacher recommended that he continue his training with Miss Ruth Jamieson.

Such a huge change! Miss Jamieson had a small apartment above a men’s clothing store near Purdue. Robert trudged up several flights of stairs that snapped as if they would break. In the gloom at the top, a dim light bulb with no shade and yellowed with grime hung at the end of a dirty cord. Robert knocked, and Miss Jamieson swung open the door with what Robert would come to discover was her characteristic impulsiveness. There she stood. Her hair was pulled back tightly in a severe bun. Her very red lipstick was applied in a hasty smear—once across the lips and done! Her stare pierced Robert’s confidence. He looked down awkwardly.

“Well, I suppose you had better come in, don’t you suppose?” she asked, stepping back, so that Robert could enter her tiny, tiny apartment.

Her piano was a reddish upright, nothing like the twin grand pianos that Miss Beegle owned. Miss Jamieson’s reading material lay wherever it fell on the sofa or on the carpet. French paintings in gilded frames hung at odd angles. Strings of beads separated her tiny living room from her kitchen, and, every now and then, she unexpectedly leapt up from her rocking chair, dove through the beads (which tinkled against one another), and returned with a heavily scented hand cream that she rubbed vigorously between her palms.

For the first year of lessons, Miss Jamieson found fault with every facet of Robert’s playing—beginning with the way he clipped his nails. “Cut them much shorter!” she commanded. Quite often, as he stood on a windy street corner waiting for his parents to pick him up after a lesson, he thought about quitting. At the beginning of his training under Miss Jamieson’s sharp tutelage, he could not have predicted that she would eventually occupy the same place in his affections as a dearly loved aunt. Slowly, Miss Jamieson built Robert back up after tearing him down, transforming his playing.

In the beginning of his studies with Miss Jamieson, Robert often stumbled. At his first recital in Duncan Hall, he became lost in a Beethoven Sonata. His fingers flailed around, striking wrong notes in all directions. Instead of feeling horror or shame, Robert smiled. In his mind’s eye, Robert could just see the dramatic Miss Jamieson backstage, groaning, swooning, and falling to the floor.

When Robert walked into the wings, Miss Jamieson rushed up to him. “What happened to you, my boy?” she begged.

“I couldn’t remember where I was.”

“Oh,” she said in a kind of guttural utterance, as if someone had hit her in the stomach. Recovering, she said, “Well, it has happened to the best of performers and is one of the best ways to learn. Recitals may appear to be about winning and losing. Competitions may present the illusion of winners and losers, but, oftentimes, the losers are the winners, my boy! When you discover that making music is not about victory and defeat, you will be a pianist!”

Several weeks later, Miss Jamieson and Robert attended a piano concert by Vladimir Ashkenazy in the Edward C. Elliott Hall of Music at Purdue. Robert knew that he was in the presence of a prodigious talent. He observed Miss Jamieson’s gestures, such as pressing her hand against her heart while her lipstick formed the letter O. Suddenly, he could read her mind, which was not saying “I am in the presence of a prodigious talent.” Her mind was saying “Ah! How beautiful!”  

Miss Jamieson designed separate exercises for each of Robert’s fingers, and she coined fascinating expressions to help him overcome difficult passages in the music. For a rapid run in another Beethoven Sonata, she said, “It’s like small monkeys scurrying up trees in the jungle.” Somehow, that description made it possible for Robert to play the run accurately every time. When she was young, she had studied in France for a lengthy period, and she affected a French manner, calling Robert “Ro-BAIR.”

“Ro-BAIR,” she said one day, “we must begin preparing for your audition at Indiana University, for you will audition there one day. We will surprise the judges by having you adopt a method of performance preferred by some in Beethoven’s age but seldom practiced nowadays. I am alluding to using only the middle three fingers on the black keys. No thumbs, no pinkies!” The last word almost burst from her.

“Further,” she continued, “you will sustain notes by holding the keys down, not by pedaling. Your foot will not come near the pedal.” She chuckled. “The judges won’t know what hit them,” she mused.

“Of course, they will want to hear your range, so we will give them Bach and Chopin. Your Bach will be strict, as if played on a harpsichord, and your Chopin will be unctuously Romantic. We must get started at once!”

For months, Robert was in the piano equivalent of training for the Olympics.

There were moments of joy, when Miss Jamieson flung herself backwards in her rocking chair, clasped her hands over her heart, smiled, and exclaimed, “Formidable!”

There were moments of despair, when Miss Jamieson thrust herself forward, shooed Robert’s hands away from the keys, placed her hands where his had been, and made him watch carefully as she demonstrated what he should be doing. “Voila!”

Each day, each week, un peu de progrès!

Then came the afternoon when Miss Jamieson rocked back and said, “I am pleased to say that you now have a good technique. Technique is essential, but you can have perfect technique and not make music.”

Miss Jamieson seized a chopstick and pointed to a line in the score of the sonata. “Sing the melody!” she ordered.

“Oh, I can’t do that!” Robert said.

“What do you mean?” Miss Jamieson asked, a look of shock on her face.

“My voice is not good for singing,” Robert answered.

“Rubbish!” she exclaimed. “I never heard such utter nonsense!”

“My father is a good singer,” Robert began, “but I didn’t inherit—”

“I didn’t ask your father to sing,” Miss Jamieson interrupted. “I asked you. Now sing!”

Robert sang the melody.

“Now play the same way you sang!”

His mouth open, Robert silently sang while his fingers ran up and down the keys.

Miss Jamieson laughed a deep belly guffaw. “You are making music! You hear the difference! Your technique is the body; the music is the spirit.”

From that day forward, Robert’s mouth remained open whenever he played piano. He was silently singing—sometimes, not so silently.

More importantly, from that hour—no, moment!—onward, his heart was open.

13. Christmas Returns ... THE FARM IN PINE VILLAGE

As another Christmas drew near, Ida and Joe took the boys to Purdue University’s Christmas show matinee performance. After the long walk from the parking lot to the doors of the Edward C. Elliott Hall of Music, the family passed through a series of foyers. The boys and their parents waited in the innermost foyer until the doors would open. As Ida had seen to it that they were early, they were near the door on their right. More and more people entered the foyer and stood expectantly, speaking in low tones that steadily grew in volume as the crowd grew in numbers. The women’s perfumes were strong all about. Here and there, the scent of a cigarette came wafting through the fragrances.

Suddenly, black-suited ushers opened the many doors across the foyer’s inner wall, and Ida made a mad dash for the aisle beneath the balcony along the right of the ground floor. She had her boys’ hands in hers, and they were practically tripping as she sprinted down the carpeted ramp. Ida wanted seats as close to the front as possible. Other mothers were springing forward ahead of Ida, so she accepted seats in the center of the second row. Joe was farther back, as he did not want to appear too eager. Eventually, he caught up with the rest of his family.

The auditorium was huge. Robert turned to look at the balconies. He stared at the big organ on the platform at the left. He watched the well-dressed crowd quickly filling all the seats.

At the appointed hour, a hush fell over the throng. Almost simultaneously, the lights dimmed. The velvet curtains rustled back from the immensely tall stage, and a winter scene unfolded. Fluffy snowflakes were falling. A full-sized house decorated for Christmas stood at the right, and an ever-so-tall Christmas tree covered in lights was catching snowflakes in the front yard. Snow-covered fields stretched back exactly as they would in the real outdoors, and horses pulled a sleigh into view at the left. Carolers singing “Jingle Bells” jumped down from the sleigh. Their trained Glee Club voices reached into all the corners of the gigantic hall.

Robert was in awe of the set, and it was only the first of many to move in and out, across, and up and down the massive stage. He watched in wonder at the baton of Al G. Wright, the orchestra conductor and widely recognized director of bands at Purdue University. It caught the yellow light from the brass lamps on the musicians’ stands and flashed to the right and left of Al’s tuxedo shoulders. Gladys Wright, the conductor’s spouse, ably played bells and other percussion instruments.

When the renowned Al Stewart strode onto the stage, applause erupted immediately. He was the beloved choral conductor whose genius for entertainment lay at the heart of the annual Christmas extravaganza. He brought on soloists and various groupings of singers for number after number as the sets established mood after mood commensurate with Al’s vision of the scope of Christmas and its meaning.

The whole event was grand on a grand scale. Just when people in the surrounding counties thought that Purdue could not possibly exceed the glories of a Christmas show twelve months later, the next year would unveil a magnificent entertainment even more spectacular than the one before.

At the end of the performance, a spotlight illuminated the organist, a scrim became nearly transparent. What appeared to be a cathedral with stained glass windows lit by candles could be seen through the misty scrim. The organist played a solemn introduction, and voices singing “O Come, All Ye Faithful” arose behind the audience.

Robert swung around to look back. Down all the aisles came robed singers carrying candles. At the same time, the words to the hymn appeared in ghostly translucence on the scrim. A voice from somewhere invited the audience to sing. More and more voices joined those of the robed choir members, who just kept coming. There were so many singers! As they arrived at the stage, they took steps to the tops of multi-tiered risers in front of the cathedral windows. In dignified procession, the singers slowly filled the risers. Verse after verse lit the scrim before them. By the end of the song, hundreds of robed singers filled the stage in towering rows from one side to the other. The effect was breathtaking.

The crowd sang several traditional Christmas melodies along with the choir and the thundering organ. At the end came “Silent Night.” When the last chord trailed away, the robed singers blew out their candles, the stage was dark except for the central stained glass window with its depiction of the nativity, and the announcer’s voice said, “All of us at Purdue University wish you and your loved ones a very merry Christmas.”

The lights in the auditorium came up, and the crowd burst into a standing ovation.

Filled with Christmas joy, Joe, Ida, Charles, and Robert drove the twenty miles to their farm on the edge of Pine Village. All the way home, they talked about the sets, the singers, the clever dialog, Al G. Wright, Al Stewart, and the majestic ending.

Twilight was falling, and Joe plugged in the wreaths hanging in the windows and the lighted Santa Claus head that hung in the window at the foot of Robert’s bed. Then Joe plugged in the Christmas tree. The decorations seemed all the brighter and more beautiful because the Purdue show had put everyone in the perfect holiday spirit.