He made a face. “Why would anyone want to be the largest-selling anything?”
“Honestly?”
“Wouldn’t you rather be the best-sounding instead?”
I sized him up. A little nervous, he had black marks on his fingertips, like he held a pencil all day. Not an indicator of musical passion, I’d say. Back then, I was constantly assessing people, measuring them. The fact that I always found myself superior had not yet dawned on me. “The sales are a sign of sound quality, sir. Of the public’s appreciation.”
“I see. But if you would please play—”
“Of course.” I slipped out of my shoes, so as not to scuff the bass pedals. “There are percussion and vibrato controls, plus drawbars for each manual, so you can customize your tone.”
“Thank you, but I only want to hear it.”
“Coming right up.” He was an odd one, all right, but sales were slow and I wasn’t going anywhere. I switched the instrument on again—which meant I had to stall while it warmed up. That little delay is one of the pleasures of the organ, how it reminds you that it is a machine, air filling the bellows, organizing itself for you. “Hammond uses ninety-one tone wheels, sir, machined to a mere one-thousandth of an inch. The transformers are sealed in wax, so the organ stays in tune regardless of changes in humidity.”
He nodded, too polite to expressly tell me to shut up, but if you’re paying attention, customers give plenty of signals when they want less talk, more music.
By then the spinet model was ready anyhow. I adjusted this and that drawbar, eased back the volume pedal, and sat up straight—posture always the last thing to check before playing—then trotted into my usual demonstration repertoire: “Isn’t This a Lovely Day,” “Monkey on a String,” “Cheek to Cheek.” He stood close by, watching my fingers move, maybe my feet on the pedals, nodding a little with the beat.
“No no,” he said after I stopped. “I mean, very nice. But do you have something slower, please? Maybe more sonorous?”
Sonorous. I didn’t know what the word meant, but I was certainly not going to say so. Maybe I had a sale on the hook, and here it was only Monday.
Business wasn’t great, to be honest. As a hobby, my father belonged to the Chicago Amateur Radio Operators Club. Most guys were interested in broadcasting, or finding other radio buffs hundreds of miles away, but Daddy’s pleasure came from repairing the club members’ radios—tinkering and soldering in our basement. The armed forces decided that his skills could be put to better use. He’d left early that year to serve in a communications center near San Diego.
So, with my mother at the helm of the cash register, I went to work at my father’s store in Hyde Park: Dubie’s Music, selling accordions, pianos, and organs for the few buyers who remained in that corner of sweet home Chicago.
Of course that put all my hopes on hold. I’d been accepted to the Oberlin Conservatory of Music in Ohio, a premiere organ school with two dozen instruments to learn on. Which was thin ice all around: My family had no money for college, if anyone had gone it would have been my brother as a future breadwinner, and deep down I doubted I was good enough to play at that level. I might dream about a scholarship, or a loan of some kind, but only after the war was over. Meanwhile, any skinny guy who played a decent G chord was definitely worth my time.
“Happy to,” I said. “Sonorous it is.” I pulled out some sheet music, flipped through, and saw Chopin’s Nocturne no. 2. Now that’s a sentimental old sop, I know, and I’m no great fan of the key of E-flat major. But the composition has lots of room, air all through the melody, then busy little bursts before everything spreads out again. I started at a nice, brisk pace.
“See how responsive the spinet model is, sir?” I kept playing while I talked. “All the sustain you want for long notes, all the precision for the trills.”
Then we were both quiet. It had been a while since I’d played that piece, so I was busy reading the pages. It actually was a pretty enough composition after all. I struck the last notes, a pair of E-flats three octaves apart, and sat back with a sigh.
Skinny guy didn’t say a word. He just pulled out a handkerchief, reaching past me a little too close for a stranger, until I realized he was wiping a bit of blood off the keys, from my finger that had been poked by the scissors. He stepped back, folding the handkerchief into a neat square before tucking it away in his pocket without a word.
I closed the sheet music. “How’s that for sonorous? Are you falling in love?” That was as flirty as I knew how to be.
“It’s all right,” he announced. “I was curious about what a noncathedral organ would sound like. What you have here is a well-made calliope.”
“A calliope? Does this place look like a circus?”
“In Atlantic City, for example,” skinny guy continued, “there is an organ with seven manuals, one thousand two hundred and thirty-five stops, and thirty-three thousand, one hundred and twelve pipes. It took eight years to build, ending in 1932.” He looked smug as a dog with a fresh bone.
“I bet it sounds horrible, something that giant and noisy. I bet it’s deafening.”
“It is a bit muddy,” he admitted, “or so I’ve been told.”
“Oh, so you’ve never heard it for yourself. What makes you so all-fired opinionated about organs, anyhow?”
“Until recently I was a chorister at Christ Church Cathedral in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Which has a lovely, two-manual pipe organ.”
Well, la-di-da, I thought, easing down from the bench, sliding my shoes back on. “For a nonpiped instrument, mister, this one here is a beauty. Perfect for churches, concert halls, recording studios, and the finest homes. There’s nothing better for sale anywhere.”
“Oh, I didn’t come in to buy anything.” He smiled. “I wanted to listen.”
I put my hands on my hips. “Well, then you’re wasting my time.”
His face made a surprised expression, eyes wide and the eyebrows way up. “I suppose I am,” he said. “I’m sorry. How might I make it up to you?”
That was how he wound up in the back room with me. He took the scissors from the unopened box and put them aside gently, as if they were a sleeping cat. We made conversation. Turning eighteen in three months, he was sure to be drafted.
“You aren’t going to enlist?” I asked him. Lots of fellas made a big boast about doing such a thing. That was my kind of guy.
“Look at me,” he said, holding his bony arms wide. “Not exactly a born warrior. The only way I’d survive beyond an hour is if I stood sideways, and made too thin a target for a rifleman to hit.”
But, he said, he was a bit of a math whiz. His uncle, a professor at the university, had brought him into a team of young guys doing calculations for the government.
“They try to make it sound manly, saying it’s classified and so on,” skinny guy continued, all the while using his fingernails to pick one corner of the thick brown tape upward. “But really it’s plain mathematics all day.”
I’d been no slouch at math myself, in high school, which I had only graduated from that June, and probably would have won the math award if I hadn’t been a girl. But it was not like today, with calculators and computers and so on. We had slide rules, and long-form division. Not to mention that any student skilled at math, boy or girl, gets the award now. Well, some of the time.