374
PARTISAN REVIEW
call the songs that she and Virginia Ann had sung together when they
wa<>hed dishes on Sunday night. They were the only popular songs
he had ever seemed to catch on to. He would speak of her as the
"Sleepy Time Gal," for she had called herself that whenever she
came down to breakfast later than the rest of the family or whenever
she went up to bed earlier. You could hear her on the stairs singing
in a voice that mimicked the blues-singers we heard on the radio :
...
you're turning night into day
My little stay at home, play at home, sleepy time gal.
At night especially her voice seemed to drift through the whole
house like a wisp of smoke. Sometimes before bed she and Virginia
Ann would don their most outlandishly faded and ragged wrappers
and with cold-cream on their faces and with their hair in a hundred
metal curlers they would waltz about the bare floor of the upstairs
hall singing. They would sing "I'd Climb The Highest Mountain"
or "It's Three O'Clock In The Morning." But the song that Uncle
Jake said he could not help liking best of all was called, "Melancholy
Baby." Mother and Father said it was no better than other new songs.
Father would say, "I think maybe it's even a little
more
suggestive,
Jake, than the usual run." But Uncle Jake said that it had more of
the old time feeling in it and that it put one in a mood the way music
was supposed to do. So he would sit and listen while Virginia
Ann
accompanied herself and Aunt Grace on the piano:
Every cloud must have a silver lining.
Wait until the sun shines through.
So smile, my honey dear,
While I kiss away each tear,
Or else I shall be melancholy too.
Yet it wasn't Aunt Grace alone that Uncle Jake remembered
kindly. He had a good word even for Uncle Bazil, if it was only to
say, "Bazil has a way with him that you can't help liking."
Whenever Father and Mother were out for dinner Uncle Jake
was likely to spend the whole meal talking to us about our good
fortune at having such splendid parents. "Your father," he'd say,
"puts all of his brothers and sisters to shame, and your mother is
certainly the choice of her mother's brood ... There
is
no finer woman
in the South than your mother, and no business man in town is res-
