Forced to join the choir as penance for their wheelchair-scam, Robbie and Duncan recruited Vincent to share their misery. Aptly, Robbie and Duncan and Vincent became ‘probationers’ in the treble section of the Cathedral Men and Boys’ Choir, a serious outfit, belting out descants since 1883. A twice weekly trip downtown on the bus was required. The boys rehearsed on Wednesday after school, then together with the men on Thursdays.
Grandpa Fred Stark, despite his scunner against GM, insisted the boys ride the city bus. He claimed they needed “a taste of real life.” They climbed aboard the #7 bus at 46th Street and Central. Their mothers instructed them to give open seats to the old ladies. Their mothers obviously did not understand bus-riding. Robbie and Duncan and Vincent grabbed the first seat available. All three squeezed in tightly and piled their backpacks at the aisle side to create a buffer. They preferred to sit as close to the driver as possible, in case of incidents. Fights erupted between the Shortridge High teenagers. Someone tried to sneak in the back door without paying, and someone always missed their stop and frantically pulled on the cord.
Below 34th Street, the landscape worsened. Burned out cars lay upside down in vacant lots. Open fires threw sparks from barrels. Rain blew into houses with broken windows. Obstructions blocked the street, a dead dog, a stray shopping cart, a police car with flashing lights.
They climbed down at Market Street and scurried past the City County Building and bail bonds storefronts, arriving finally at the relative safety of Monument Circle. Once inside the church, Robbie and Duncan tried to pretend that Vincent was the only one who felt scared.
Choir membership did come with a few benefits. It meant being excused from Sunday school. And the choirboys got paid. A lot of money. Five dollars and fifty-two cents a month, which more than doubled Robbie and Duncan’s measly allowance.
Another unexpected bonus of choir membership during Sunday service was the close study of female asses at communion. The choir stalls offered a great view. In order to take communion at the upper altar, congregants slowly paraded through the nave. They waited patiently between rows of posterior-level adolescent eyes. The miniskirt had just arrived in Indianapolis. The miniskirt turned church into a religious experience for Robbie and Duncan and especially Vincent, who was often accused of drooling.
The director, Dr. Manning, was an experienced hand with ‘project’ probationers. He saw through the angelic faces in robes and ruffs. The life-skills inculcated through his practices were very basic. Always have a pencil handy and admit your mistakes. He demanded that his choristers immediately signal when they’d sung a wrong note or missed an entrance. Simply raise your hand and recognize your mistakes, acknowledge them, move on.
Otherwise, there would be consequences during Slaughter Ball.
Slaughter Ball was its own lesson in penance. Slaughter Ball occurred in the church catacombs during the supper-break between the boys’ afternoon rehearsal and the arrival of the men for the Thursday evening rehearsal. Many tenors and basses, aspiring professionals from the Indiana University Music School in Bloomington, arrived early in order to participate in this tribal ritual. A red rubber ball, slightly under-inflated, was hurled mercilessly at close range at thighs, butts, calves, arms, and bellies. Beware, the uncoordinated! Cry-baby Vincent, for example, suffered at the hands of his supposed best friends, Robbie and Duncan. Upon the ‘twweeee’ of the choirmaster’s whistle, all pain must be suppressed in order to file obediently back upstairs to sing motets by Henry Purcell.
The burly, meticulous Dr. Manning yanked at his ears when annoyed. He worked the boys hard on intonation and their high notes, and on the crisp pronunciation of consonants and vowels. Choristers truly sing in tune, he lectured, only when all the vowels are pronounced communally the same. Physiologically, high notes were healthy for boys, he believed. If they learned to breathe from the diaphragm and send the breath up the spine, locating the tone inside the cranial bowl, slightly above and between the eyes, the resulting harmonic vibrations in the skull expelled all manner of bad-seed karma.
Mary and Rusalka volunteered to serve as Choir Mothers. They slowly began to see results. After being interrogated one too many times on the moral of the Reverend Tyler’s sermon, Duncan snorted, “Mom, look, I don’t get anything out of that stuff. All I know is that when we’re singing Orlando Gibbons, it feels like God is in the place.”
Bits of text from the anthems lodged inside the boys’ minds. Not that they understood the bits, but repetition made them lodge deeper. Duncan began adapting the line, “No greater love hath a man, than he who lays down his life for a friend,” for his own purposes, as in, “No greater love hath a lead-off hitter, than he who lays down a bunt for the number-nine man.” Robbie hummed Randall Thompson’s “Choose Something Like a Star” in the bathtub. His mother overheard him reciting the Robert Frost lyrics from memory.
At the Wangert’s monthly card night, Rusalka’s reports on Vincent and Kayla were less encouraging. Her “lee-tul nee-hilists” were obsessed with BB guns. Kayla still consumed quantities of dirt. Vincent told his mother that sometimes on the choir bus downtown the boys played a Jesus-spotting game, inspired by Reverend Paul’s sermon on seeing the face of Jesus in homeless people. Elbert reported that Vincent made up a riddle, “Why does Jesus always wear a Purdue sweatshirt? Because he’s lost. Ha-ha!”
Mary smiled, “I’m glad to hear Vincent made a joke, but I don’t get it.”
“In French,” Elbert explained, “ ‘Purdue’ sounds like the word for ‘lost.’ ”
Ward, shaking a fresh round of martinis, said, “I didn’t know Vincent was studying French.”
“Nighttimes, I speak French to children,” Rusalka said. “Old Russian tradition.”
“Of the nobility, wasn’t it?” Ward said.
Draining his glass, Elbert chimed in, “Aha, yes—revealed at last—my Rusalka is a Russian princess. Is she finally admitting it?”
Rusalka spat an olive pit at him.
Ward shared the Purdue anecdote with Father Tyler, who included it in his next sermon, a cute story about a choirboy and Jesus in a Purdue University sweatshirt on a city bus—to Vincent’s bitter humiliation.
Vincent blamed his mother for betraying his confidence and she, in turn, blamed Mary. And Mary, in turn, saw an opportunity to finally unload on Rusalka for giving Ward the Dexedrine pills. The two women were smoking cigarettes in the powder room of symphony hall during intermission. The encounter snowballed into Russian swear words. “I have to tell you how much this disturbed me!” Mary said, and made the mistake of calling Rusalka “a snake in the grass,” a phrase Rusalka didn’t understand and Mary’s explanation only made worse.
“I thought she was going to challenge me to a duel,” Mary divulged to Ward afterwards. He secretly welcomed the wedge between them.
An awkward stalemate ensued. Neither Mary nor Rusalka wanted to risk sparking more skirmishes, for the sake of the children’s friendship. At the sledding hill that winter, they stood silently among the chattering group of mothers. The other parents nervously eyed Rusalka’s hand-warming technique with Kayla: stuffing the little girl’s icy fingers entirely inside her mouth. The kids did not appear to notice the distance between their mothers. They challenged each other into snow-pile crash-ups. Rusalka brusquely announced her brood’s departure with: “This princess feels cold pussy.”
Again, in the powder room at the symphony hall, during an intermission after the Shostakovich 7th, Rusalka cornered Mary and sputtered briefly about relations between Russia and the United States, “Our two countries must find way …. Let me tell you how it was when little girl was sent off …. We were mighty friends once. Russia was only hope against Nazis. Like nature spewing thousands of seeds, knowing that only few will take root, little ones sent to gather. When Americans find me and want to know all about ….” Her eyes narrowed and reddened and she never finished her sentence.
Mary talked it over with Ward that night, “It’s as if she’s tiptoeing around a confession to explain herself, and I’m sort of doing the same. But we don’t get there, and it only burrows deeper. Maybe you could call Elbert and feel him out on the situation.”
Ward did not want to feel out Elbert on the situation. He was tired of this female embroilment. He was ready for the wedge to end. It was easier when Mary and Rusalka were friends. He said, “Enough, just invite her to lunch and apologize.”
They met at Fleener’s in the Glendale Mall. Cafeteria-style dining had been invented in Indianapolis a couple decades earlier, but only now had achieved its full glory, thanks to improved heat lamps. Rusalka piled her tray high with corned beef and pickled beets and Jell-O, and took a second tray for desserts. Mary paid the cashier, while Rusalka plopped down at a table by the window, across from a gaggle of blue-hairs.
Rusalka said a silent prayer over her food. Rusalka’s makeup was heavily applied to accentuate her long, fake eyelashes.
“That be us someday, sister,” Rusalka whispered and nodded toward the elderly ladies, “when we happily living divorced.”
“When we’re what?” Mary said.
“My mother proud ‘divorcee,’ ” Rusalka said. “She call it very ‘cosmopolitan.’ ”
“That’s the first I’ve heard of your mother’s divorce,” Mary said. “Where was that, in Russia or France?”
Rusalka sniffed and changed the topic. She said, “I love corny beef here.” Her jangling bracelets brushed down into her creamed spinach. “Sheet,” she hissed loudly, wiping the spinach off on a napkin.
The blue-haired ladies glared and muttered. Mary felt an urge to join in their opprobrium, but forced herself to remember the purpose of this lunch.
“I’m sorry about what happened with Vincent and the sermon. I can understand why he and you were mad,” Mary proclaimed, “and I hope you can understand why I was upset about the Dexedrine pills.”
“Thank you, yes, of course, darling,” Rusalka whispered. “And not to worry. No more pills. I find something much better—marijuana. Really very smoothing.”
Mary, against her best intentions, leaned closer and whispered, “Oh, so is that why you felt smoothed enough to suggest swinging to my husband?”
“Men be swine,” Rusalka said.
Slightly puzzled, Mary prodded, “Are you saying Ward made that up?”
Rusalka’s collapse hit suddenly, rendering her child-like. The spinach-covered napkin went up over her face and she spoke from behind it in tears.
“My husband put me up to it. Elbert wants to be big swinger. I was afraid he leave me.”
“Elbert wants to be a swinger?” Mary exclaimed.
“It doesn’t matter now,” Rusalka sobbed. “He abandon us yesterday. Gone … gone!”
The soiled napkin slowly came down. Mary handed her a fresh one. Rusalka blubbered, “He must be planning it long time. Moving accounts and cutting wife out. The lawyer say he very clever. I now with two kids and little money. He gives me house but I can’t pay mortgage.”
“Sweetheart,” Mary said, her anger giving way to womanly condolence.
Rusalka sighed, “You right to be mad at me.”
“Ward should have never accepted the pills anyway,” Mary said.
“I must ask big, big favor,” Rusalka said.
Mary gulped her iced tea.
“I need job. Can Wangert Public Relations give me job?” Rusalka pleaded.
Mary shrugged. “I can certainly speak to Ward about it. His business could use some … help.”
“I promise not to give marijuana,” Rusalka whispered, diving into her lemon meringue.
“That would be a good start,” Mary said.
Ward agreed to take Rusalka on as a ‘probationer,’ under the tutelage of his father’s old secretary, who was retiring that summer. He rationalized that Rusalka’s presence in the office would allow him to catch any chinks in her armor.
To everyone’s surprise, Rusalka did very well. Where had she learned to operate a Dictaphone and change the notoriously finicky ribbon on a Selectric? Rusalka showed up early and left late. She kept the coffee fresh and introduced Ward’s staff to bagels. She pitched ideas, including one to get in on the endorsements racket by hosting the star Pacer players with the city’s car dealers.
Constance Wangert refused to attend the party, claiming that her late husband would be turning over in his grave. She banged around upstairs in her wheelchair. Ward hovered nervously by the fireplace, wondering if he had indeed sunk to a new low.
Everyone else had a wonderful time. The car dealers brought their roomiest models for the players to test drive. The kids dressed up as waiters with tea towels hanging over their arms. Robbie and Duncan and Vincent and Kayla solicited autographs from the basketball stars, and also from the car dealers, who were local celebrities in their own right. The kids imitated their popular commercials:
“Nobody, but nobody, will sell you a new car for cheaper than ol’ Buddy Anderson,” Kayla crooned, to applause from the guests. A lively discussion about the presidential campaign kicked up at the dinner table, initiated by the tallest basketball player, a supporter of Robert Kennedy. With the Indiana primary coming up, he encouraged everyone to attend a Kennedy speech the following month at a Baptist church downtown.
“Oh, those Kennedy brothers,” Rusalka said, cleaning up after the party. “Some things very good, some things very bad.”
“I would like to hear him,” Mary said.
“We will do no such thing,” Ward stated.
“And why not?” Mary demanded.
“You know the firm’s policy on matters like that. We can’t be seen at a political rally.”
Rusalka bit her lip and stayed out of the way. Mary didn’t. Either because it was one time too many, or because Ward had been such a grouch about the party, Mary raised her voice and said, “I am so tired of this neutrality crap. There is absolutely no reason why we can’t attend a speech by the late President’s brother!”
“Shhh! The children will hear you!” Ward chided. Vincent and Kayla were upstairs for a sleepover, which meant by definition that they were not asleep. Rusalka winked at Mary.
“I don’t care if the children hear me!” Mary continued. “They need to hear me, because you’re wrong! They need to know what’s going on in the world and that it’s okay to have an opinion. And, as for this nonsense about Wangert Public Relations always staying above the fray, it doesn’t seem to be doing much for your balance sheet, does it?”
Her comment hit below the belt. Ward threw his drink in the fireplace and stalked out of the room.
Mary collapsed back in her chair. Rusalka hurried over for a hug. “I sorry, sister,” Rusalka sighed. “I egg you on.”
“No, no,” Mary mumbled, “I’ve wanted to say that for years.”