Chapter 18

Dad had the piano removed when my mother let it slip I'd stopped taking lessons. She said it took a whole morning and part of the afternoon for the men to take it apart and lift it out of the windows. In a way I'm glad it happened when I was at school.

I admit it, I missed the piano. School had turned worse than ever because now I wouldn't even speak to Joe/Jason. I figured that any kid who had blabbed to Beef about Geraldine was not my friend; even though he tried to tell me about a zillion times that it had accidentally just slipped out of him to two East-Enders in science class, when the teacher was talking about extra chromosomes. I thought I might forgive him in five or ten years, but I wasn't ready to forgive him now; I just wandered around school alone most of the time, feeling like a flea without a dog.

Until one day when I wandered into the auditorium right after school. It was empty, there was a gorgeous concert grand piano just standing there waiting for someone to play it, and I was in no hurry to get home to look at the big empty space in the living room where our own Bechstein had been.

I sat down and did a few scales just to get my fingers limber, and then I slid into a few chords, an arpeggio, and on into the Battle Hymn of the Republic, and I guess I was halfway through when I realized I had an audience.

A whole bunch of kids from the music/drama group had come into the auditorium, probably to rehearse for the Follies, and had been standing there listening to me play without my even realizing it. Of course, I stopped cold and just sat there feeling like I was winning a blushing contest, not knowing what to do and not knowing what to say.

"Hey, don't stop now!" somebody called to me from the back, and no kidding, I'm not sure what came over me, but not knowing exactly what else to do, I just started again where I'd left off and went through the whole piece better than I'd ever played it, with only one baby mistake that no one but Wendy Wellington could have picked up.

She was there too, of course; I saw her watching me from the stage exit and when I finished, she started the applause. By this time I felt like my face had gone to the color of tomato soup, so I jumped up from the bench and said, "I gotta go now," and I ran out of there past all those kids like I had to rush off to be on time for an appointment with the President of the United States. As I ran out of the auditorium, I heard Joe/Jason's voice call after me, "Neil, hey, Neil! Come back here, willya?" but I kept running and running until I was out on the street and by myself, where I guess I felt I belonged.

***

That night, Dad picked me up in the ord and drove me out to Lake Alfred for the weekend. We had a great time fishing Saturday and I caught one small and one pretty good-size rainbow trout and a sunfish we had to throw back. On Sunday it rained most of the morning, so Dad and I sat in the cabin after breakfast looking at the rain run down the windows, and I guess it made us both sad, because Dad got into one of his silent moods and I didn't fell much like talking either.

When it let up after lunch, I said I was going for a little hike around the lake to look for early raspberries. I was hoping Dad would come with me, but he was sitting in the living room rocker with yesterday's newspaper in his lap and said to go right ahead, he'd see me when I got back; he'd just stay here and take it easy. I set off with an empty tin can and didn't give it another thought, because I never expected the surprise that was waiting for me when I got back.

The whole hike was pretty much of a disaster, not only because it turned out to be much too early for raspberries, but also because when I'd gotten halfway around the lake it started to rain again. It rained hard enough to get me soaked through to the skin and kept me busy trying to avoid stepping into mud puddles that looked bigger than moon craters, and the whole hike took about three times longer than I'd expected it to.

Dad wasn't in the living room when I got back, and he wasn't on the porch either. I went into the bathroom to dry off and I found an open razor lying on the sink. I was really puzzled because Dad doesn't use anything but an electric shaver. It scared me a little too. I guess I've seen a thousand horror movies that use razors for bloody murder and suicide weapons and it got me jittery and wondering–where was Dad, anyway?

"You back, Neil?" His voice came from the kitchen, sounding safe and unmurdered. A minute later his face appeared in the doorway. "Did you get caught in that downpour?" he said.

I nearly jumped a foot. Good, grey grief, Dad had shaved off his moustache! No kidding, I was speechless. It was gone. His face was back, and it was the last thing I expected. Dad had really loved his moustache. I'd seen him at the mirror a hundred times trimming it and brushing it, smoothing it down and even shampooing it. It had taken him so long to get it full and thick, the way he wanted it.

"Why'd you shave it off, Dad?" I asked. "How come?"

Dad sort of shrugged the way he does when some little thing goes wrong, like a fuse blowing or the fishing line getting tangled around the rod, and he said, "It was uncomfortable, Neil, darned uncomfortable. It was getting on my nerves so I thought, why not get rid of it? And I found this old razor up in the medicine chest and–fffft–no more moustache, see?"

It took a while getting used to a moustacheless Dad, but by the time he got me home I decided that although I liked his face better with a moustache, it wasn't bad plain either. He stopped in front of our building, and now that he was double-parked, he got talkative. He said he was sorry about taking the piano but he really needed it. He said he'd finished "Firecracker" and wanted me to come to his new apartment to hear him play it. Then he got very serious and said he wanted me to think over moving in with him as soon as possible. All the while he was talking I kept thinking that now that his face was so different maybe he's come home again to live. I guess all along I'd thought that his moving out wasn't going to be forever and that one day when I woke up in the morning, he'd be in the living room sitting on the piano bench like always.

"I wouldn't really want to leave Mom and Gerri," I said, and my father turned away from me and looked through the windshield, although there was nothing out there to see.

I thought that maybe I should tell him how my mother sometimes does the same thing, stands looking out of the window for an hour at a time at nothing at all, and how she burst into tears for no reason day before yesterday when she dropped a bottle of shampoo in the bathroom and it broke.

Instead I said, "Gerri is learning to talk. She can say 'shoe' and 'sock' and she can count to two. She can say 'one, two'." I had taught Gerri that myself yesterday and she'd picked it up fast. By next week I figured I'd have her counting to five.

Dad did not seem to be listening to me. "Look, Neil," he said, "Gerri will never get better. She'll never have any real sense."

It wasn't that Gerri didn't have any sense, it was just that she had her own kind of sense, but Dad didn't understand that.

A car had driven up behind ours and was honking, so Dad said I'd better get out and that he'd call me soon. I was sort of glad to leave because I didn't want to talk about Gerri any more. I wanted to get up to the apartment and tell my mother about the neat fish I'd caught. I'd tell Gerri too. If she didn't understand, I'd just show her a picture of a trout in the encyclopedia. Maybe I'd teach her to say "trout."

Dad rolled down the window to say good-by when I'd gotten out of the car, and all of a sudden, I thought of what he'd said about his moustache, how it was uncomfortable and got on his nerves, so he'd decided to get rid of it–fffft–and no kidding, it was like being hit with an icy wind when I realized that the way he felt about his moustache was exactly the way he felt about us.

"Remember, if you change your mind about moving in with me, call me any time, will you, Neil?" he said.

I said okay, but I didn't really think I'd change my mind. I didn't have any intention of moving out then, of leaving. I couldn't possibly guess that in a week's time, I'd be packing my own suitcase, saying good-by to my sister, and dialing my father's number to come and get me, fast.