Works and Days
Chapter Six
Spent Hen
“Stop!” Chayne shouted, slicing his hands down.
The choir crash landed into silence.
“Am I flat?” Faye demanded.
“No,” started Chayne. And then, “Well, yes, but so is everyone else. So that’s not the problem. The problem is that you’re an alto in the soprano section, and could we all get into out proper sections?”
“But Chayne,” said Robert Feldon, “I’m not sure if I’m a tenor or a bass.”
Chayne gave Robert Feldon a quizzical look, and then Robert opened his mouth and croaked out a note.
“Tenor,” Chayne told him. “Sort of.... People? Choir? May I tell you something? Two somethings?”
“Say it, Chayne!” Diggs cheered.
“Thanks, Diggs.”
“You’re welcome Chayne.”
Chayne swallowed and said. “We need serious practice. You all are really...”
“Bad?” Russell supplied.
“That would be the word,” Chayne said. “Who will be free tomorrow night?”
“Oh, Chayne, we’re having a girl’s night out,” Jackie said, though who the we was was not specified.
“Well then on Saturday afternoon, two o’clock,” an arbitrary enough time, “I want the women to come here. I’ll be training altos and sopranos.
“And for tonight, I’ll work with the tenors and basses and almost tenors and almost basses. That’s enough. Ladies, you may leave.”
“Thank God,” said Claire Ross, “my feet are killin’ me.”
“That’s what you get for wearing heels at eight o’clock on a Thursday,” Gladys Someral returned.
“I just got off work...”
Faye stood in front of Chayne long enough for him to ask her what she needed.
“I need the key to get into the house.”
“You know I don’t lock the house, Faye!”
“Now, Russell, bring me the song list. Thank you. We open with “Holy! Holy! Holy! That’s a good one. Offertory is... I don’t like that. We’ll do ‘It is Well.’”
“That’s not in the hymn book,” Russell told Chayne.
“I’ll get a copy of it by tomorrow so either the sopranos and altos can do it, or you guys can look it over on Sunday morning practice before Mass. Communion hymn, ‘I Am the Bread of Life’. Beautiful hymn, but difficult for tenor and bass voices I think. And then we close out with—oh, no we don’t,” Chayne scratched it out Father Geoff’s plans.
“We’ll do, ‘Now the Green Blades Rises’. Gentlemen?”
What was left of Chayne’s choir looked down at him in waiting expectation.
“Let’s start with ‘Holy! Holy! Holy!’ Alright? And remember, men singing should sound just like that, men singing. Not one long, sustained belch. Now first you tenors...”
It was past nine o’clock when they had finished, and Chayne and Russell were walking down Curtain Street with Diggs, passing a pool of white lamp post light when Diggs said, “You know what the choir really needs?”
“More practice?”
“Oh, come on, Chayne,” Russell said. “I think we were good tonight.”
“Yeah,” said Diggs. “Even Jeff Cordino opened his mouth and sang. Now what we really need is robes instead of just coming in jeans or whatever. We need to look world class if we’re gonna sound world class.”
“That’s an excellent idea!” Russell said, beaming.
“Yeah, Evervirgin’s choir has at least three sets of robes and we don’t even have one. How are we ever going to compete with them if we don’t have robes?”
“Who said anyhting about competing?”
“Oh, Chayne ,you know all the churches in the area have a sing off every year,” Russell said.
“Does Saint Adjeanet’s ever compete?” Chayne demanded.
“Every year,” said Diggs.
“Why?” Chayne looked truly puzzled, and then said, “And where would we get—” and stopped.
“What, Chayne?” Russell looked at his friend who had stopped talking as they approached the house, and now had a face full of conniving.
“We will sound good this Sunday,” Chayne decided. “And we will have robes.”
“Really?” Diggs looked excited, every inch the gerbil.
“Yes,” said Chayne. “We’re getting them tomorrow.”
“Where?” Diggs demanded.
Russell knew better than to ask Chayne anything when the man’s eyes were glazed over like this. Chayne folded his hands, marched up the stairs of 1421 Curtain Street, swung open the screen door, said hi to Faye and made a bee line for the telephone.
“Hello. Jackie? What are you doing tomorrow? Really? Great. Come with us, we’re getting choir robes.”
“Tonight! Tonight—!” Jackie Lewis sang, as she and Felice left Patti’s house on Friday morning.
“And wear something nice,” said Felice. “You might meet someone special.”
“I just met someone special,” said Patti, “and I’m not even divorced yet. Which reminds me—”
“The lawyer?” said Felice.
“Yes,” said Patti. “Need to meet with him for the first time today.”
Jackie’s stomach went queasy.
“I can’t really talk about this,” she said. “After all, it’s my brother you’re divorcing.”
Patti nodded. They were all quiet for a second, and then Felice said, “Oh, let’s stop all this frowning. Tonight we will paint Chicago red!”
They stopped at Sharon Kandzierski’s apartment, down the street from Jackie’s because Felice needed to pick up a suit.
“Now we have almost the same build in the shoulders,” Sharon said, “so you’ll look good in this.”
Felice spun in front of the mirror with the black top and jacket from the pants suit and approved of herself.
“Now if I can do something about this shelf growing off of my back...”
“Girl, no one wants a bone but a dog,” Sharon told her cousin, though Sharon had never had to worry about a shelf.
“Goin’ out on the town,” Sharon shook her head. “I remember when I used to run with the girls.”
“Come with us!” Jackie said spontaneously.
“No!” Sharon sounded like she’d been pinched.
“Yeah, Cousin Sharon,” Felice said in her rough voice.
“I haven’t—I haven’t been on the town in thirty years,” Sharon said.
“And Chicago no less!”
“Well, then you’re out of practice. Come on,” Felice cajoled.
“You might catch a man,” Jackie added. “You look good enough for someone half your age.”
“I already have a man, Jaclyn,” Sharon reminded the younger woman.
“No, you have a Graham,” Felice corrected her cousin.
Sharon snorted.
“Stop. No. you all have fun and let me know what happens when you get back. If you get back. If you can remember!”
Sharon shooed the girls—the women—they were both in their thirties by now, Sharon reminded herself—out the door. Graham heard her laughing as he came into the living room and sat on the sofa, under the large wicker sun which suddenly looked old and out of place.
“Graham, did you hear them?” Sharon said.
“No.” He didn’t appear interested as he turned on the television.
“They wanted me to go out on the town. Me an old woman running around Chicago hittin’ bars and what the not.”
“That is foolish,” Graham agreed. “Girls are girls. They don’t know we ain’t as young as we used to be. They don’t know how old they are either. Like Chayne,” Graham murmured.
“Jackie said I might mess around and end up getting hit on by a boy—”
Graham laughed.
“What young rooster would hit on an spent hen like you?”
Sharon stiffened. Inhaled. Exhaled. That’s how she dealt with thirty-seven years of Graham.
Sharon Kandzierski was shocked out of her self examination.
“Mother, what the hell are you doing?”
Chayne entered the bedroom, hands crossed over his chest, scowling at the woman who had been twisting in front of the mirror.
“Chayne, am I old?”
“Well, you’re not young,” he allowed, “but then I’m not anymore either, so...”
“Well, do I look nice?” she asked her son irascibly.
“Yes, Mama. You know you do. You don’t have a wrinkle on you, and there’s no grey hair. And—and you’re not old.”
Sharon moved away from the mirror and flounced down on the bed.
“Jackie and Felice said that I should go to Chicago with them-”
“That’s a great idea!”
“But I said I was too old to be running around.”
“You’re never too old—”
“And your father agreed.”
“I thought you’d stopped listening to Graham years ago.”
“Usually I don’t” Sharon admitted. “And he said, ‘What would a young rooster be hitting on an spent hen like you for? He said that—”
“And you listened?”
“Chayne, yes.”
“Mama, listen to me,” said Chayne, sitting down beside his mother. “Jackie’s in the living room right now. We came to borrow the station wagon because we’re going to get the choir robes and we need something that isn’t a hearse. Now I want you to go out there and tell Jackie that you’re going to Chicago tonight,”
“But what’ll I look like, a fifty-seven year old woman running around in the streets?”
“Look like to who, Mother?”
Sharon was quiet.
“Mother, the only way anyone ever becomes old is by letting themselves get old. Now you can live or you can die. One or the other, no in betweens. The trip’s four hours and I know they’ll be leaving at about four o’clock, so I suggest you tell someone something and make yourself pretty, or else you’ll be sitting around here tonight watching Graham snore in front of the television.”