When things were frosty between Tracey and me I found Saturdays hard, and relied on Mr. Booth for conversation and advice. I brought new information to him — which I got from the library — and he added to what I had or explained things I didn’t understand. Mr. Booth hadn’t known, for example, that it was not really “Fred Astaire” but “Frederick Austerlitz,” but he understood what “Austerlitz” meant, he explained it was a name that must have come not from America but from Europe, probably German or Austrian, possibly Jewish. To me Astaire was America — if he had been on the flag I would not have been surprised — but now I learned that he’d spent a lot of time in London, in fact, and that he had become famous here, dancing with his sister, and if I’d been born sixty years earlier I could have gone to the Shaftesbury Theater and seen him myself. And what’s more, said Mr. Booth, his sister was a far better dancer than him, everybody said so, she was the star and he was the also-ran, can’t sing, can’t act, balding, can dance, a little, ha ha ha, well he showed them, didn’t he? Listening to Mr. Booth, I wondered if it were possible for me, too, to become a person who revealed themselves later in life, much later, so that one day — a long time from now — it would be Tracey sitting in the front row of the Shaftesbury Theater, watching me dance, our positions reversed completely, my own superiority finally recognized by the world. And in later years, said Mr. Booth, taking my library book out of my hands and reading from it, in later years his daily routine was little changed from the life he had always led. He woke up at five a.m. and breakfasted on a single boiled egg that kept his weight at a constant hundred and thirty-four pounds. Addicted to television serials such as The Guiding Light and As the World Turns, he would telephone his housekeeper if he could not watch the soap operas, to find out what had happened. Mr. Booth closed the book, smiled and said: “What an odd fish!”
When I complained to Mr. Booth of Astaire’s one imperfection — that he couldn’t, in my opinion, sing — I was wrong-footed by how strongly he disagreed, usually we agreed about everything, and were always laughing together, but now he picked out the notes to “All of Me” in a minimal sort of way on the piano and said: “But singing isn’t just about belting it out, is it? It’s not just who has the most wobble or the highest note, no, it’s about phrasing, and being delicate, and getting just the right feeling from a song, the soul of it, so that something real happens inside you when a man opens his mouth to sing, and don’t you want to feel something real rather than just having your poor earholes bashed in?”
He stopped talking and played “All of Me” in full, and I sang along with him, consciously trying to deliver each phrase in the same manner that Astaire does in Silk Stockings—cutting some lines short, half speaking others — though it didn’t feel natural to me. Together Mr. Booth and I considered what it would be like to love the east, west, north and south of somebody, to gain complete control of them, even if they loved, in return, only a small percentage of us. Usually I performed with one hand on the piano, facing out, because that’s how the girls did it in the movies, and that way I could keep an eye on the clock over the church door and know when the last child had filed in and therefore when it was time to stop, but on this occasion the desire to try to sing in harmony with that delicate melody — to match Mr. Booth’s way of playing it, not just to “belt it out” but to create a real feeling — made me instinctively turn inwards, halfway through the verse, and when I did I saw that Mr. Booth was crying, very softly, but certainly crying. I stopped singing. “And he’s trying to make her dance,” he said. “Fred wants Cyd to dance, but she won’t, will she? She’s what you’d call an intellectual, from Russia, and she don’t want to dance, and she says to him: ‘The trouble with dancing is You go, go, go, but you don’t get anywhere!’ And Fred says: ‘You’re telling me!’ Lovely. Lovely! Now look, dear, it’s time for class. You’d best get your shoes on.”
As we tied our laces and prepared to get back in line, Tracey said to her mother, within my hearing: “See? She loves all them weird old songs.” It had the tone of an accusation. I knew that Tracey loved pop music, but I didn’t think the melodies were as pretty, and now I tried to say so. Tracey shrugged, stopping me in my tracks. Her shrugs had a power over me. They could end any topic. She turned back to her mother and said, “Likes old buggers, too.”
Her mother’s reaction shocked me: she looked over and smirked. At that moment my father was outside, in the churchyard, in his usual spot under the cherry trees; I could see him with his pouch of tobacco in one hand and the cigarette paper in the other, he didn’t bother to disguise these things from me any longer. But there was not a world in which I could make a cruel comment to another child and have my father — or mother — smirk, or side with me in any way. It struck me that Tracey and her mother were on the same side, and I thought there was something unnatural about this and that they seemed to know it, for in certain contexts they hid it. I felt sure that if my father had been present Tracey’s mother would not have dared to smirk.