Mildred Pierce - James M. Cain [123]
Mildred wanted to cry when people began to leave, and then discovered that the evening had hardly begun. The best part came when she, and Veda, and Monty sat around in the small library, across from the big living room, and decided that Veda should spend the night, and talked. Then Monty, not at all reverent in the presence of art, said: "Well goddam it, how did you get to be a singer? When I discovered you, practically pulled you out of the gutter, you were a pianist, or supposed to be. Then I no sooner turn my back than you turn into some kind of a yodeler."
"Well goddam it, it was an accident."
"Then report."
"I was at the Philharmonic."
"Yes, I've been there."
"Listening to a concert. And they played the Schubert Unfinished. And afterwards I was walking across the park, to my car, and I was humming it. And ahead of me I could see him walking along—"
"Who?"
"Treviso."
"Oh yes, the Neapolitan Stokowski."
"So I had plenty of reason for not walking to meet the honorable signor, because I'd played for him once, and he wasn't at all appreciative. So I slowed down, to let him get ahead. But then he stopped, and turned around, and looked, and then he came over to me, and said: 'Was that you singing?' Well, I have to explain that I wasn't so proud of my singing just about that time. I used to sing Hannen's songs for him, whenever he wrote one, but he used to kid me about it, because I sang full chest, and sounded exactly like a man. He called me the Glendale Baritone. Well, that was Charlie, but I didn't know why I had to take any kidding off Treviso. So I told him it didn't concern him whether I was singing or not, but he grabbed me by the arm, and said it concerned him very much, and me. Then he took 'a card from his pocket, and a pen, and ran under a light, and wrote his address on it, and handed it to me, and told me to be there the next day at four o'clock, that it was important. So that night I had it out with myself. I knew, when he handed me the card, that he had no recollection he had ever seen me before, so there was no question of kidding. But—did I want to unlock that door again or not?"
"What door?"
Monty was puzzled, but Mildred knew which door, even before Veda went on: "Of music. I'd driven a knife through its heart, and locked it up, and thrown the key away, and now here was Treviso, telling me to come down and see him tomorrow, at four o'clock. And do you know why I went?"
Veda was dead serious now, and looking at them both as though to make sure they got things straight. "It was because once he had told me the truth. I had hated him for it, the way he had closed the piano in front of me without saying a word, but it was his way of telling me, and it was the truth. So I thought maybe he was telling me the truth now. So I went. And for a week he worked on me, to get me to sing like a woman, and then it began to come the right way, and I could hear what he had heard that night out there in the park. And then he began to tell me how important it was that I become a musician. I had the voice, he said, if I could master music. And he gave me the names of this one and that one, who could teach me theory, and sight-reading, and piano, and I don't know what-all."
"Oh yeah?"
"Yeah, and did I get my revenge, for that day when he closed the piano on me. I asked him if there was a little sight-reading he wanted done, and he handed me the Inflammatus from Rossini's Stabat Mater. Well nuts. I went through that like a hot knife through butter, and he began to get excited. Then I asked him if he had a little job of arranging he wanted done, and then I told him about Charlie, and reminded him I'd been in there before. Well, if he'd hit gold in Death Valley he couldn't have acted more like a goof. He went all over me with instruments, little wooden