Three Songs II

“Was that your father?” May asked the old woman. Romantic stories were the best.

“By now you should be old enough to not ask the ending of stories before I get there,” the old woman told May, but she looked amused. “You’ll find out. Anyway like I said my mother didn’t get out a lot back in those days and she certainly didn’t have the chance to catch up on the music of the day so everything was new to her. One song caught her attention the most; it was a happy song, like I said I won’t do any singing, and even if I did tell you the name you wouldn’t know it. It’s a very, very old song. She would talk about that night a lot, as one of the happiest nights of her life. It’s a very pretty, and very happy song though, and that was my first song.”

“But you didn’t tell me if the man she was with was your father,” May complained. “You said that I would find out.”

“That isn’t the end of the story,” the old woman chided. “I told you I had three songs. There are two left. The second song was my Uncle’s. That would be my father’s brother. My uncle fought in World War One and came back a little strange people said. I wouldn’t know, I never met him; he was there when I was born but disappeared after that and no one could say where it is he went. My father used to tell me about my uncle a lot though. They grew up very close, living like they did on a farm with not a lot of other families around. My uncle was older then my father was by several years so my father always looked up to him.”

“So is that song happy and romantic like your mother’s,” May asked hopefully.

“No, not at all, from what I hear my uncle wasn’t that sort of person. It was a song a man he had known in the army used to sing. It’s plaintive and homesick more then anything else.”

“So all that leaves us is the third song,” May said. “That’s your father’s right?”

“That’s right. He came to the city from a little farm with the idea that he wanted a life of excitement and he didn’t find it. What he hadn’t realized was that excitement cost money which wasn’t something that he had. He showed up in town with nothing with the strange idea that money was going to fall out of the sky for him or something. One too many of those Victorian rags to riches stories in my opinion. The dangers of reading without any knowledge of how the real world works, rich men don’t randomly decide to take you under their wing and cloth and feed you. Suddenly alone, without knowing anyone and without any money my father decided that it was important he found a job, and he finally did. He worked as a gardener for family and they paid him enough that he could live in a dingy little hotel and live off of cheap diner food.”

“Did the people he garden for happen to live next door to the people your mother was a nanny for?” May asked.

“Yes they did, a good guess, and he thought my mother was the prettiest woman that he had ever seen. She might have remembered a song from their first date, but he remembered the song he had been singing while he was trimming the hedges the first time he saw her. And that would be the third song.”

“That’s so sweet,” May said, standing again and stretching. “So is his song a happy song or a sad song?”

“It’s a love song,” said the old woman, “a very old love song. You could say that it isn’t happy or sad, or that it’s both. Those are the songs they sang when I was born and that’s what I’d like them to sing when I die.”

“But you hardly said anything about your uncle at all,” May complained.

“I told you, I don’t know a lot about him. This is real life my dear, not all of the lose ends are tied up.”

To be continued...