6. Music Lessons

The show grounds occupied a large pasture, more than a half-mile from the corner where we had stood to watch the parade. Uncle Worth inquired of a policeman whether there were eating places near the show, and he thought we had better have our dinner downtown.

In those days everybody that we knew had dinner at noon; so, by the time we had located a recommended restaurant, we found it not only packed with customers but nearly out of food. After some waiting we came upon two vacant stools at a long counter and were told that the only thing they had left was a grape pie. Uncle Worth asked me if I would like a piece of grape pie and I said I would. At that moment, such was my urgency, I could have eaten a pie filled with corn silk.

This grape pie was the largest, deepest and best-looking pie I had ever seen. Uncle Worth bought it in its entirety, and the waitress, a very tired and tousled lady, pushed it toward him in its pan, together with two pie plates, two wooden-handled knives, two forks and two large spoons. He returned the small plates and asked for a large one. Then he cut the enormous pie in two, slid half of it onto the big plate for himself and suggested that I eat my half from the pan. I may have forgotten to tell you much about my Uncle Worth, but he was a very understanding person. Occasionally (but not often enough) you will come upon a person who has a special instinct for knowing exactly what to do at any given moment. It is a sort of sixth sense. We have no word for it in the English language; perhaps because we so seldom have a need for it. The French call this talent savoir faire. Uncle Worth probably did not know what savoir faire meant, but he had it. He gave me my half of the pie in the pan swimming knee-deep in purple nectar.

Of course I knew better than to use a knife on my pie. My mama had taught me better manners than that. But my hunger now advised me that it would be sheer affectation to bother with a fork when the work to be done could be dealt with more effectively with this large spoon. In normal circumstances it is advisable, I think, to string along with the established rules for genteel conduct at the dining table; but this grape-pie dinner was no normal affair. This was an emergency! Only a craven coward would have taken counsel of conventional manners and customs at such a moment.

But, for the sake of my heirs (and let me explain that I use the word “heirs” playfully to designate my children, seeing that by the time the Estate Taxes are paid there is practically nothing left to inherit) I may say that I do have a proper respect for established law and order.

For example, at a formal dinner party for twenty, the lady dripping with diamonds and strangled with ropes of pearls, who has been doing a lengthy monologue on her current obsession, had better not put both elbows on the table and pick up her squab in her fingers and gnaw the meat off its frail little framework unless she is very, very sure that every one of her dinner companions knows that she knows her behavior is in the worst possible taste. If she is certain of that, she is free to take off her shoes, unbuckle her girdle and comb her hair. But it’s dangerous business to take liberties with rules unless you know what they are.

I feel the same about modern art. Many of these recent pictures disclose bad drawing. I hold that the modernist who violates the rules for correct drawing has no license to do so until he has proved that he knows what the rules are. If he prates about his independence of the rules when he has never learned them, he is a phony. And the same thing goes for the lower-case poet, the crooner and the groaner. Learn the rules, I say, before you take liberties with them.

* * * * *