Folly Beach - Dorothea Benton Frank [102]
“And she can split the vigil duty with us, too.”
“Well, I gotta get back to my class . . .”
We hung up and I went upstairs to lie down on the bed. I fell into a deep sleep with no dreams until almost noon. When I began to awaken, it was a slow return to reality. I drifted back and forth between waking and sleeping for a while and suddenly I was dreaming about George Gershwin. He was downstairs playing my piano. It was some time in between night and day. (Oh, wait! That’s Cole Porter. A little music joke. Sorry.) Okay, so in this dream it was a summer night. The doors and windows were all open and there was a gorgeous breeze. Dorothy and DuBose were there and so was Josephine Pinckney with her dog, a black spaniel named Peter, which is a stupid name for a dog, I remember thinking. The three of them were singing along with Gershwin, first “Summertime” and then “A Woman Is a Sometime Thing.” They were so happy and in the next scene Gershwin was holding his head, as though he was in blinding pain. Then I remembered he died from a brain tumor and I woke up.
I finally got up to wash my face and still couldn’t get Gershwin out of my mind. He wasn’t even forty years old when he died. Thirty-eight, in fact. What a loss to the world. If he had lived until his eighties, how many more wonderful songs of his would we have had the thrill to enjoy? That saying, only the good die young, was too terrible. Certainly there had been so many musicians who died young and it made me wonder for a moment if the gift of musical composition came with a price. I mean, just like certain people walked into a room and saw things geometrically, because they had a mathematical bent, and others walked in the room and saw color combinations, because they were artistically creative in another way, did the gift of being able to compose extraordinary music cause an extraordinary strain on the body? Chopin, Bizet, Mozart, Schubert, Schumann—all of them gone at young ages. And in our time there was Kurt Weill, not to mention all the others whose personal excesses and dark forces got the better of them. Well, I thought then, what if the spirit of George Gershwin wants to take up residence in this house and play my piano? It was all right with me. I was happy to have him.
I changed my clothes and had a bowl of cereal and decided that although Sara worked until late into the night, she would surely be up by eleven, her time. I was wrong. It was a groggy voice that answered her phone.
“Mom? Everythin’s ’kay? Oh man, what time is it?”
“Oh, sweetheart! I’m sorry to wake you. Do you want to call me back later?”
“No, it’s fine. What’s going on?”
“Well, it’s Aunt Daisy . . .”
I told her the whole story and she became very upset as I knew she would, because Sara is probably, no definitely the most sensitive one in the family.
“Do you want me to come home? Or should I come? I mean, it’s no big deal. So they’ll fire me. I’m just a bartender, for heaven’s sake. I can get another job tomorrow.”
She had gone from the lofty designation of mixologist to the normal term of bartender, which told me she was becoming disenchanted with her work. I would talk to her about that another time.
“No, I don’t want you to give up your job. And you know, it’s not so great out there. You might not get another job so fast. Besides, Aunt Daisy is not in a life-threatening situation. If she was, I would tell you.”
“I just hate being so far away. Something like this happens and I can’t see for myself what’s really going on. I just hate it.”
“Well, precious, you’ll just have to trust your mother. Or if you want, call Russ and ask him his opinion. He and Alice are heading over to MUSC after work this evening.”
“How’s she doing? Alice, I mean.”
“She seems fine. A little fatigued but that’s normal.”
“I still can’t believe Alice is pregnant. It’s so weird.”
“In some ways, yes. But you know, life goes on, doesn’t it?”
There was a silence then and I knew what she was thinking.
“I miss Dad,” she said. “I still can’t believe he’s gone.”
“I know. It seems like it all