Caine Mutiny, The - Herman Wouk [7]
Willie shed his dripping galoshes by the piano, stripped off his brown rabbit-lined gloves, and sat at the stool in his overcoat, inspecting the girls with the horse trader’s eye of a man of twenty-two. The blonde stood and handed him her music. “Can you transpose at sight, honey? It’s in G, but I’d rather take it in E-flat,” she said, and from the twanging Broadway tones Willie knew at once the pretty face was an empty mask, one of hundreds that floated around Fifty-second Street.
“E-flat coming up.” His glance wandered to the second singer, a small nondescript girl in a big black hat that hid her hair. Nothing doing today, he thought.
The blonde said, “Here’s hoping this cold of mine doesn’t ruin me completely. Can I have the intro?” She plowed through Night and Day with determination, and little else. Mr. Dennis, the proprietor, thanked her and said he would telephone her. The small girl took off her hat and came forward. She placed an unusually thick arrangement on the music rack in front of Willie.
“You might want to look at this piece, it’s slightly tricky.” She raised her voice to address the proprietor. “Mind if I keep my coat on?”
“Suit yourself, dear. Just let me look at your figure sometime before you go.”
“Might as well look at it now.” The girl opened her loose brown waterproof coat and turned completely around.
“That’s fine,” said Mr. Dennis. “Can you sing, too?”
Willie, examining the music, missed the view, though he turned to look. The coat was closed again. The girl regarded him with a slight mischievous smile. She kept her hands in her pockets. “Does your opinion count, too, Mr. Keith?” She made a pretense of opening the coat.
Willie grinned. He pointed to the arrangement. “Unusual.”
“Cost me a hundred dollars,” said the girl. “Well, ready?”
The arrangement was no less ambitious a piece than Cherubino’s love song from The Marriage of Figaro, with words in Italian. Midway it broke into a syncopated parody in clumsy English. At the end it returned to Mozart’s music and Da Ponte’s words. “Haven’t you something else?” Willie said, noting that the singer had amazingly bright brown eyes and a handsome mass of chestnut-colored hair rolled up on her head. He wished he could see her figure, and this was a strange wish, since he was indifferent to small girls and disliked reddish hair; a fact he had explained away as a sophomore with the aid of Freud’s theories as a repressive mechanism of his Oedipus complex.
“What’s the matter? You can play it.”
“I don’t think,” said Willie in a stage whisper, “that he’ll like it. Too high-class.”
“Well, just once, for dear old Princeton, shall we try?”
Willie began to play. The music of Mozart was one of the few things in the world that affected him deeply. He knew the aria by heart. As he called the first notes out of the battered yellowing keyboard scarred with cigarette burns, the girl leaned against the piano, resting one arm on the top so that her hand, loosely closed, hung over the edge near his eyes. It was a little hand, rather more square of palm than a girl’s should be, with short, thin, strong fingers. Roughness around the knuckles told of dishwashing.
The girl seemed to be singing for the pleasure of friends, rather than for an urgently desired job. Willie’s ear, trained by many years of opera-going, told him at once that this was no great voice, nor even a professional one. It was just such singing as a bright girl who had a love of music and a pleasant voice could accomplish, and it had that peculiar charm denied great performers, the caroling freshness of song for its own sake.
The melody filled the gloomy cellar with radiance. The blonde, going out at the door, turned and stopped to listen. Willie looked up at the girl, smiled, and nodded as he played. She returned the smile, and made a brief gesture of plucking the imaginary guitar accompaniment of Susanna. The motion was full of casual humor and grace. She sang the Italian words with a correct accent, and apparently knew what they meant.
“Watch for the break,