And then suddenly, apropos of nothing except the sweet ache of Lilly's
little soul, the second movement would freeze itself into a proscenium
arch of music, herself, like a stalagmite, its slim center.
At this point, "Melody in F" veils itself in a mist of arpeggios, and
Mrs. Becker, who invariably, during the after-school practice hour, sat
upstairs with Mrs. Kemble in her sunny second-story back, would call
down through the purposely opened floor register.
"Lilly, not so fast on that part."
"Yes'm."
Were it not that the salient spots, the platform places in experience,
are floored over in little more or less identical mosaics of all the
commonplace day by days, Lilly Becker, at the rented-by-the-month piano
in her parents' back parlor in Mrs. Schum's boarding house, her two
chestnut braids rather precociously long and thick down her back, her
mother rocking rhythmically overhead, were spurious to this narrative.
Yet how much more potently than by the mere exposition of it and because
you have looked in on the nine-year-old chemistry of a vocal and blond
dream in the dreaming, are you to know the Lilly of seventeen, who
secretly and unsuccessfully washed her hair in a solution of peroxide,
and at eighteen, through the patent device of a megaphone inserted
through a plate-glass window, was singing to--But anon.
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