House of Rougeaux(60)
It was over before she knew it.
The panel thanked her and called another name. How she had done, she couldn’t say. She had made one or two small mistakes, but thought perhaps it hadn’t gone too badly overall. Eleanor and Alma found each other later amid the thinning crowds leaving the Conservatory.
“I’m so glad to see you,” Alma said, seizing Eleanor’s arm. “How’d it go?”
“Okay, I guess,” said Eleanor. “How was yours?”
“Just awful,” Alma said. “Let’s go get something to eat. Are you hungry?”
First they went back to the Vance and found that another shared room was available.
“Oh, thank Goodness,” Alma said, dancing Eleanor in a quick hug. “Someone is watching over me, I know it.”
“Me too,” said Eleanor. “Let’s take it as a good sign.”
Around the corner they found a small eatery that served great plates of potato salad and beans with pork, a place that would become their regular haunt. Eleanor was amazed at how much Alma could eat. Elbows on the table and cutlery waving she swallowed slice after slice of bread with her meal, guzzling it all down with glasses of milk. Where it all went in that thin frame Eleanor couldn’t guess, though she did learn that Alma had arrived from Kansas City that very day, and hadn’t had a bite since the day before. So Alma had come to the city alone, just as Eleanor had, and from even farther away. She also had been encouraged by her church, the pastor’s wife in her case. Alma’s greatest fear was not making it in and letting her mentor down. Eleanor was not so much afraid of disappointing another as she was of having to return to where she started. Now that she’d taken flight, the plain old ground looked awfully dry and bare.
After their meal the girls walked to a nearby park. The sun hung low in the sky. Eleanor had watched the sunrise that morning through the dusty windows of the train. It seemed ages ago.
“Do you know Home, Sweet Home?” Alma asked.
Eleanor did not. “Let me hear you sing it,” she said.
Alma looked up and then down, as if gathering her voice, a gesture Eleanor would quickly come to know.
“Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam,” Alma sang, her voice soft but so clear it seemed to arc in the air.
...A charm from the skies seems to hallow us there
Which seek thro’ the world, is ne’er met elsewhere
Home, home
Sweet, sweet home
There’s no place like home…
And exile from home splendor dazzles in vain
Oh give me my lowly thatched cottage again
The birds singing gaily that came at my call
And gave me the peace of mind dearer than all
“That was beautiful!” said Eleanor with feeling. “Oh, you are sure to get a place.”
“Do you really think so?”
“Oh, yes.”
A pang struck Eleanor as she imagined all her family back at home, so far away. But just as quickly the shadowed, white halls of the Conservatory rose up and she was filled with a terrified longing. Music played her heart, a powerful instrument to be sure.
* * *
Early the next morning the girls dressed and readied themselves to return to the Conservatory. The list of names for the second auditions would be posted on the doors. Folks were lined up again on both staircases when they arrived, huddled together in front of the lists. There were cries of joy and indignation and sorrow as people found their names, or didn’t. Eleanor now had a friend to hope for, and was elated to see both her and Alma’s names on the list.
When the heavy oak doors opened a group of some two hundred prospective students were allowed inside and divided into six large classrooms. Cole and Rougeaux being near opposite ends of the alphabet, the girls went in different directions, but not before gripping hands and whispering “Good luck.”
The panel of judges behind the table introduced to Eleanor’s group were four black professors–three men in long coats and a woman in a charcoal dress–and a beautiful, young-looking white woman of regal bearing who turned out to be the founder of the institution, Mrs. Jeannette Meyers Thurber. One by one the auditioners took their turns, playing their prepared pieces and performing sight and ear tests. There was no clumsy playing this time, with more than a few auditioners playing brilliantly. When it was Eleanor’s turn she began the piece with her customary quiet attack, and found the sight and ear tests not too difficult. When she stepped up to the table to return the sheet music to the leading professor, she saw that Mrs. Thurber smiled at her approach, gave a little clap of her hands and murmured, “Un diamant brut!” Eleanor’s hope rose a notch. She prayed that she had enough of the diamant and not too much of the brut to make it in.
She found Alma in the hallway looking dejected, certain again her audition was terrible.
“That’s what you said last time,” said Eleanor, “and it wasn’t true.”
And indeed it was not, as they learned the next morning when both their names appeared on the short list of the one hundred new students accepted.
Eleanor sat, disbelieving, in the Conservatory’s auditorium, together with Alma and the other lucky young musicians, as they listened to words of welcome and instruction from Mrs. Jeannette Thurber, two of the senior professors, and the somber, gray-haired Conservatory Director. When the new students were dismissed, the group milled about making acquaintances. Among the new students, Eleanor counted some twenty other colored folks, besides herself and Alma. One of these, a young man with large, kind eyes approached and introduced himself as “Sam Higgins, clarinet and oboe.” He was from Baltimore, and just like that their duo became a trio. They found a place nearby to celebrate with dishes of ice cream, swapping stories about their audition moments, in order to relive the magic of the day.