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Show 7-a 234 THE WESTERN HUMANITIES REVIEW important. Having foreseen modest fame and fortune in it, probably like Caruso's, I began rehearsals a clear confident soprano, only to have a sudden change grasp my throat so diat soon I was singing both soprano and a baritone cross between a bellow and a gargle - widiout the slightest advance warning of which would issue forth. I can still remember Miss Puttie at die piano: every time we approached die part where I opened my mouth to sing she would brace herself as if I were a time bomb coming up to my last tick. But compared to me she was calm. I tell you innocence is hard; I was hopping inside like a barefoot boy on a hot sidewalk and no wonder it was nearly summer before I even noticed her. Between my window and hers was our driveway and a stretch of lawn and I'm sure it was partly that distance which made her careless. Not at night, her shade was drawn then, but in the mornings she dressed at her window after the shade was up. Yet months went by before I even noticed, months of mornings forever lost, and still I sometimes agonize for my blind unnoticing thirteen-year-old eyes: did I never look out my window? did I see nothing? The fact is, I cannot remember seeing her inside or outside her house until one fine blood-rousing spring day when my father and I turned into our driveway in our old '29 Pontiac and saw her out back of her house hanging laundry. She wore a cotton housedress and the bright golden sun beyond her shone through it and outlined her legs with such clarity that my father stopped the car short of the back door. We sat there and she glanced around with a sullen defiant look, then raised a piece o f laundry to the line, legs spread. "That sure is a thin dress," said my father in a new tone, "for such a cold day." It wasn't that cold and, pained by his coarseness, I looked away from her. But I quickly glanced back. I don't believe she was beautiful. At least her face didn't strike me as die movie star kind and since she was around twenty I saw in it none of the pure girlish delicacy which was my other standard. Yet without a precise memory of her features I do know she was not unattractive, or was pretty, however it's best said, and I certainly remember a sullenness which I liked, a go-to- hell in her look at the world which was not exactly hostile, not aggressive, but the look of a person who expected to be preached to and wasn't having any of that crap any longer. Her hair I remember well because it was long and most young women weren't wearing their hair long, and because of its color, the pale yellow of good butter. I mean different from the brassy yellow of butter artificially and too highly colored; I mean creamy yellow, the true yellow that's as soft as rainwater. And I remember it too because out hanging clothes like diat she would have it pinned up loosely in back, the fine ends curling and loose hairs |