The Hymn My Mother Still Knew
“You can’t,” I said. “That’s right, and I’m glad you thought of it. But I’m her daughter. I can tell anybody I please.” I got a pen out of my purse and turned over one of the paper place mats. “You don’t have to say a word about her. All I’m asking is whether your grandmother would take a telephone call from me.”
Marcy wrote the number down herself. Her sevens had little bars through them.
“Her name’s Judy,” she said. “Judy Halvorsen. She’s in Calmar. Call after five, she’s at the quilting until then.” She pushed the place mat across to me, and then she did not let go of it right away. “Mrs. Larson. Does she ever know you?”
“No, honey.”
“But she knew every word of that.”
“Every word,” I said.
I called at ten after five from my own kitchen, standing up, with the place mat flat on the counter.
A woman answered on the fourth ring. She had a brisk, pleasant voice, the kind that has chaired a lot of funeral lunches.
“Mrs. Halvorsen, you don’t know me,” I said. “My name is Anne Larson. I got your number from your granddaughter Marcy, and she didn’t tell you anything about me because she isn’t allowed to. I wonder if you remember a piano teacher you had when you were a girl. Out at the country church.”
There was a little pause.
“Miss Dorothy,” she said.
“She’s my mother.”
The line was quiet long enough that I thought we had been cut off.
“Well, for heaven’s sake,” Mrs. Halvorsen said, softer. “Is she living?”
“She is. She’s eighty-eight. She’s in memory care here in Decorah. Marcy is one of her aides and didn’t know it. Neither one of us knew it until this afternoon.”
I told her about Tuesday. I told her about the humming, and the fork, and all four verses, and the last note held for the full count.
When I finished I could hear her blowing her nose.
“You’ll have to excuse me,” she said. “I was seven years old and she was a grown woman of twenty-eight and I was scared to death of her. She couldn’t have weighed a hundred and ten pounds. She used to put a nickel on the back of my hand and make me play the whole piece without it sliding off. If it stayed on, I got to keep it. I believe I earned thirty-five cents in six years.”
I laughed out loud. I could not help it. I had done that same nickel, and I had never kept a single one.
“She’d had the choir nine years by then and she had it down to a science,” Mrs. Halvorsen said. “There were nine of us the year I started. She lined us up by height on the chancel steps. And she would not let us hold a book. She said if it was in the book it wasn’t in us yet.” She stopped. “I have hummed that hymn over a dishpan for sixty years, Anne. I hummed it to all four of my babies. I never once thought about where I got it. It was just mine.”
“It’s all through that girl of yours too,” I said.
“I suppose it is.” She was quiet, and then she asked what I had known she would ask. “Would she know me?”
I thought I owed her the truth.
“No,” I said. “She doesn’t know me, Mrs. Halvorsen. She hasn’t known my name in three years.”
“Oh, honey.”
“I’m not telling you so you’ll feel sorry for me. I just don’t want you to drive over there expecting something and get your feelings hurt.”