To Hear a Nightingale Read online

  The rain fell more and more heavily.

  ‘What’s happened to Prince, Mrs Christiansen?’ Cassie suddenly asked.

  Mary-Jo’s mother – Sister Teresa’s mother – leaned forward and wiped the back of the windscreen with her glove.

  ‘Mary-Jo gave him away, Cassie,’ she replied. ‘She gave all her possessions away, and Prince was the last to go.’

  ‘I see,’ Cassie said.

  ‘He’s gone to a very good home, Cassie,’ Mrs Christiansen assured her. ‘She made sure of that.’

  They were talking about her as if she was dead, or as if she had become a totally different person. Yet Cassie remembered Sister Joseph laughing and telling Cassie about the last cigarette she had smoked on her way to becoming a nun, and Sister Margaret had told her about her last drink, and her last ride in her brother’s supercharged Cord Roadster. So she knew they were still girls at that moment in their lives, and that underneath that starched and forbidding habit, they mostlike still were. It was just that instead of falling in love with someone called Tom, or Dick, or Harry, or Dex, they had fallen in love with someone called God.

  Mrs Christiansen turned to Cassie, and Cassie could see that despite her smile, her eyes were sad.

  ‘You’ll still come and see us, Cassie, of course,’ she said, taking her hand off the steering wheel for a moment and pressing Cassie’s.

  ‘Sure,’ said Cassie, attempting a smile. ‘Try and stop me.’

  But they both knew that it would never and could never be the same again. Cassie would come and see them, as regular as clockwork, but then the visits would grow fewer as the distance between them all grew more. Mary-Jo had been their touchstone, and with her gone the fabric of all their relationships would fall apart. There’d be no more sleeping in the bunks in summer, no more dare-devil rides in patched jeans and open-necked check shirts, no more barbecues out under the stars. Instead, as Cassie grew older, her relationship with Mrs Christiansen would grow more formal, and as they sat round the kitchen table, they would be finding other things to talk about, rather than their beloved Mary-Jo. Of course Cassie would ask how Mary-Jo was, and her mother would tell her fine, and in return ask Cassie how she was doing. And Cassie would tell her fine. But nothing would ever take away that ache in their hearts, nothing would ever fill that void that Mary-Jo’s transformation into Sister Teresa had left in their lives.

  Everyone in the car fell silent again, as they neared Westboro Falls. Cassie tried to imagine what that first evening was going to be like for Mary-Jo, for a girl so used to being outside, for someone who seemed to have spent most of her young life on the back of a horse. It would be an evening of prayers, as would every subsequent evening for as long as Mary-Jo lived. They would pray for people like her family and for people like Cassie, and for people who had never spared a second thought in their lives for those who had sacrificed everything they loved in life, except for their love of God, in order to pray for them. Then Sister Teresa would go to bed in a simple rough nightdress with a cross sewn on the back, and fold her arms across her chest in the sign of the Cross as she waited for the blessed gift of sleep.

  Cassie leant her face against the car window, watching the rain run down the glass in incessant tears.

  Chapter Eight

  Cassie’s life had changed in other ways as well, since that fateful day she was returned in disgrace from the Von Wagner house on Long Island. Her grandmother had promptly, to Cassie’s great but hidden relief, removed her at once from Miss Truefitt’s Academy, even though it meant the forfeit of the next term’s fees. She had then found her a job in the town printing works, where Cassie toiled from nine to half past five every day for the next year to pay her grandmother back the money for the forfeited school fees. Once they had been repaid, Cassie was allowed to keep one half of her weekly wages, the other half going to her grandmother for board and lodging.

  But most important of all, she had met a boy called Joe.

  For a long time after she had returned from Leonora’s, Cassie could barely eat or sleep, so much did her young heart ache at the thought of Dex, now lost to her. She had tried writing to Leonora for his address, but Leonora had never even bothered to reply. She had even written to the head groom, who had been so kind to her, but that letter was returned with a message scribbled on the back to the effect that he too had left the house on Long Island. So Cassie had no idea where Dex had gone, and Dex had no idea where Cassie lived.

  Then gradually over the months the pain lessened, as it does in the young, and a year later, Cassie found herself now and then looking at some of the boys she was growing up with in Westboro, as she sat in the drug store on Saturday mornings having an ice-cream soda and listening to the jukebox. One morning when she was in the store with some friends from the printing works, she noticed a boy sitting by himself in the window, waiting for his date. One hour later he was still there by himself, but by now he was looking around. He noticed Cassie, sitting reading at the bar long after her friends had left, and he came and sat beside her. Cassie had never been picked up before, so she blushed, and wasn’t sure that she should answer this stranger’s questions.

  But the young man seemed so very respectable, which he in fact was, as Cassie discovered when he introduced himself as Joe Harris, the son of the foremost solicitor in the town. As they got talking, Cassie soon found how easy it was to joke and tease with him, and for the first time since she had spent those wonderful afternoons riding with Dex, she once again found herself laughing and joking.

  ‘So I’m second best, am I?’ she asked him, as he bought her yet another milk shake. ‘Since your number one choice didn’t show up.’

  Joe grinned and looked up from his straws.

  ‘As a matter of fact I was waiting for my buddy Pete,’ he told her. ‘We were going to play some ball, but as usual he didn’t show.’

  Cassie was secretly pleased, though she couldn’t imagine why, since she had only met this boy half an hour ago.

  ‘May I call you tonight?’ he asked her as he walked back home towards her grandmother’s.

  ‘Sure,’ said Cassie. ‘But call me between six and seven if that’s OK, because I have to go out later.’

  She didn’t, but her grandmother would be out playing cards at that time, so she could spend as long as she liked talking to Joe on the telephone.

  Joe shook her hand when they reached Cassie’s house, and said he most certainly would call, right between those times. Probably at twenty nine and a half minutes past six. Cassie laughed and went inside.

  Grandmother was waiting for her, and called her into the living room the moment she shut the front door.

  ‘Who was that you were talking to outside?’ she asked.

  ‘Just a boy,’ Cassie replied. ‘Someone I met down the drug store.’

  ‘That was Fred Harris’s boy, Joe,’ Grandmother said, taking some of the latest pills Dr Fossett had prescribed for her.

  ‘If you knew who it was, Grandmother,’ Cassie replied, ‘I don’t know why you bother to ask me.’

  She turned to go, but her grandmother called her back.

  ‘And I don’t know what’s gotten into you of late,’ she complained. ‘You haven’t a civil word to say to me.’

  Cassie thought was it any wonder, but declined stating it out loud.

  ‘If you’ll excuse me’, she said instead, ‘I want to go and wash up and change. I’m playing tennis with Eleanor Greene this afternoon.’

  ‘You’ll miss me when I’m gone, mark my words!’ Grandmother called after her as Cassie went upstairs. ‘You’ll miss me, don’t you worry!’

  Cassie went into her bedroom and closed the door. She wouldn’t miss her grandmother when she was dead. Not one bit. In fact she could hardly wait for the moment.

  Joe called her at exactly twenty nine and a half minutes past six o’clock, as promised, and asked her out the following evening. Cassie pretended she already had a date, so Joe asked her out the day after. Cassie ma
de it sound as if that day was going to be pretty difficult too, then after a little more pleading from Joe, had second thoughts and agreed after all. After they had talked on the phone for half an hour, Cassie said she had to dash or she’d be late for her date, and hung up. She sat staring at the telephone for a couple of minutes, then ran upstairs singing. She stopped halfway up the stairs when she remembered that the last time she had sung had been the evening when she ran back to Leonora’s house from the stables after Dex had kissed her.

  Joe and she started dating pretty regularly. Joe had an old 1950 Packard Super 8 ragtop, whose hood took a year to put up if it suddenly rained, but which was enormous fun to drive around in when the sun shone. They dated the way kids always dated, going to drive-in movies, dancing to the touring big bands in the dance halls way out of town, and cheering on the home team at Joe’s college ballgames. Joe was fun. He was tall, with dark hair, and Cassie didn’t mind one bit that he wore glasses which he always removed whenever he was going to kiss her. Joe was a great kisser, too. As good a kisser as he was a dancer. He was also very attentive and loving, and he made Cassie feel safe, and wanted. He told Cassie that from the moment he had turned round from his window seat in the drug store and seen Cassie at the bar, that had been it. He had known that moment that Cassie was the girl for him.

  Cassie hadn’t been as sure as Joe was. Despite the fact that he made her laugh so much, and that he was so kind and gentle, Cassie took much longer to fall in love with Joe than he had with her. In a way she fought it. Not because she didn’t want Joe, but because in the back of her mind she could always hear her grandmother’s constant warnings.

  ‘He’s a nice enough young man all right,’ she’d say, more than occasionally. ‘But you’ll never get his mother and father to accept you, not ever.’

  Cassie would ask her grandmother what she meant by that, but her grandmother would just shake her head and repeat:

  ‘Not ever.’

  Cassie finally decided that this was just another of her grandmother’s ploys to try and put Cassie off someone to whom she was quite obviously deeply attracted. With the result that very soon, Cassie became deaf to her grandmother’s warnings. In fact, it was these prognostications which finally decided Cassie in the other direction. If Grandmother was so sure she was unacceptable, then Cassie would show her quite how wrong she was. And with her mind thus made up, she surrendered happily to her feelings.

  And now she and Joe were going to the coming-out dance for Gina and Maria’s cousin Jennifer, who lived in the small town of Ashburn, not far out of Westboro Falls. Cassie stood in front of her mirror and adjusted her new dress for the hundredth time, and turned herself around to check the hem for the hundredth and first. Cassie was a modest girl, but she had to admit to herself that evening she reckoned she’d never looked better.

  Going downstairs, she went next door to show Mr O’Reilly the finished product. He had found the dress material up in his attic and had given it to her as a present for Mrs Laxman the town dressmaker to fashion into shape from a pattern Cassie had got from McCall’s.

  ‘She’s done an excellent job,’ Mr O’Reilly said, as Cassie twirled round and round in his living room. ‘Better than anything you could get from Macy’s, I’ll bet. What does your grandmother think of it?’

  ‘She didn’t say,’ Cassie answered. ‘She’s in bed, not very well at the moment.’

  ‘Wouldn’t she just be?’ Mr O’Reilly said, relighting his pipe. ‘Doesn’t she always take to her bed when you’re about to go out enjoying yourself?’

  Cassie smiled but didn’t reply, as she adjusted her hair in the mirror above Mr O’Reilly’s cluttered mantelpiece.

  ‘I don’t know what I’d have worn if you hadn’t found this material,’ Cassie told him. ‘Joe’s seen all my other dresses, and I’m too broke to buy a new one.’

  And with that Cassie turned and gave Mr O’Reilly a kiss on the cheek. Mr O’Reilly’s eyes swam a little, and he blushed.

  ‘Careful now, Cassie McGann,’ he said. ‘Or I’ll propose to you myself.’

  ‘Joe won’t propose tonight,’ said Cassie. ‘Don’t you worry.’

  ‘If he doesn’t,’ Mr O’Reilly replied, ‘I’ll eat my hat.’

  Cassie and Mr O’Reilly had become even closer friends since the incident with the dog book. Cassie had talked to him about it, and explained what she had done and why, and Mr O’Reilly had thoroughly approved, saying anyway if he hadn’t approved, so what? He had given the book to Cassie, and it had been hers to do what she liked with. He was only too glad to think of it helping to feed black babies, rather than sitting gathering dust on a shelf. And he’d told as much to her grandmother.

  ‘You’re a beautiful young woman, Cassie,’ he said to her as she stood at his window, waving to Joe who had just pulled up. ‘Don’t let anyone ever tell you different.’

  Then Cassie kissed him again, and ran off down the path to Joe, who was standing by his newly washed Packard, adjusting his bow tie.

  Mr O’Reilly watched her go, as proud as if she had been his own daughter. If he and his late wife had been able to have children, they’d have been more than proud to have had a little dark-haired girl as pretty and as personable and as popular as young Cassie McGann.

  On the way, Joe stopped to pick up George West, Maria’s beau, who got in the front of the car with Joe. Maria and Cassie sat in the back, giggling and trying to hold their bouncing skirts down. The yards of tulle underskirt made this practically impossible, and their skirts rose high in the air every time the Packard went over a bump. Both the boys, looking very smart in white tuxedos, talked seriously to each other about the forthcoming intercollegiate ballgame; while Cassie and Maria talked excitedly about Gina, who was coming up from New York specially for the dance, with the promise that she’d be wearing the Paris original which she had just modelled for the fashion house where she was now working.

  Back in Westboro, Grandmother had got out of her bed to watch Cassie, Maria and Joe leaving in the car, and had thought to herself how frightful the modern fashions had become, before settling down with a glass of warm milk and a copy of Pride and Prejudice. Feeling a twinge of pain in her chest, she slipped one of her new pills under her tongue, just to be on the safe side.

  Jennifer’s dance was fabulous. There were two name bands, one a sixteen-piece dance orchestra, the other a swing quintet. Rosemary Arlen had been booked to sing with the dance orchestra, and she wore a deep red sequinned dress which caught multiple reflections of the hundreds of fairy lights which hung from the trees.

  As Joe and Cassie sat a number out, well away from the dance floor, Joe told Cassie how wonderful she looked, and Cassie gave him a present of a small gold heart on a chain, upon which she’d spent the last of her savings. Joe kissed her without smudging her make-up, and grinning, said he might have something for her later. Then they heard the quintet strike up ‘Moonglow’, which they had made into ‘their’ tune, since it had been playing on the jukebox in the drug store that Saturday morning when Joe had first come and sat down beside her.

  Joe was a wonderful dancer. Cassie thought so every time he took her in his arms. He seemed to have a way of holding a girl so that she felt she was floating. He also held her hand in a special sort of way, tucked tightly into his and then resting on his shoulder. Cassie knew she wasn’t as good a dancer as Joe, but by the way he held her and turned her, he always made her feel that she was.

  As they danced, silently and cheek to cheek, Cassie knew that this was the moment for which she had always longed. It was no good pretending otherwise. Like most children who have had to endure an unhappy childhood, she had an intensely romantic idea of how life should be, and was determined that her dream of a better life should be fulfilled. After she had lost Dex, and for the year which followed that unhappy incident, she had almost given up the hope that anything wonderful would ever happen to her again. She firmly believed while her heart was breaking that she had been given one ch
ance to escape and be happy, and that it had been snatched away from her. Then she met Joe, whom she at once thought was wonderful, and who, miraculously, unbelievably, thought the same about her.

  ‘It’s not as if I hadn’t heard about you,’ he’d told her on their first or second date. ‘I’d heard some of the guys discussing you, and Gina and Maria. But what I imagined was this mousey little girl, living all locked up with her wicked grandmother. Not a beautiful dark-haired girl, with blue-grey eyes and a wonderful laugh.’

  Rosemary Arlen stepped back in front of the quintet to reprise the chorus of the song.

  I still hear you saying –

  Dear one, hold me fast –

  And I start in praying –

  Oh Lord, please let this last.

  Joe held Cassie even tighter and kissed her hair. As she moved against him, Cassie could feel against her shoulder, behind the handkerchief in Joe’s top pocket the shape of something small and hard. Like a little box. A little box which engagement rings came in. Her heart started to pound, and her mouth went dry with excitement.

  And now when there’s Moonglow –

  Way up in the blue –

  I always remember –

  That Moonglow gave me to you.

  Yes –

  That Moonglow gave me to you.

  Yes –

  That Moonglow gave me to you.

  The dancers all turned to the band and applauded. Except Joe and Cassie, who under the shadow of a large pine tree at the corner of the dance floor, stood kissing.

  ‘Let’s go walk by the lake, Cass,’ Joe said. ‘There’s something I want to ask you.

  Cassie held back, momentarily. She knew once she stepped off the floor and into the shadows of the treelined walk which led down to the lake, there would be no looking back. Joe was going to ask her to marry him, and she would answer yes for sure. Yet how could she be sure? How could anyone be sure? She was going to say yes to the rest of her life quite blindly. She was going to agree to spend what could be over fifty years with someone she had known for three months. For one brief moment she felt a flood of panic engulf her, and it was only Joe holding her hand so firmly which stopped her from turning and running away.