Little Amelia’s spending grew to wondrous proportions. I come back to the hotel one day and found a grand piano, made of mahogany, in our parlor-room, and along with it some elderly German gentleman with a beard and eyeglasses, come from St. Louie along with the instrument to tune it and give lessons in the playing thereof. Not only did I owe for the piano and the shipping costs, but also for this individual’s wages and his room and board—so far as he was concerned, in perpetuity, I suppose, for though in time Amelia might learn to play unassisted, the instrument would need tuning for the rest of its life.
I never did figure out whether or not he was a confidence man, but he seemed a real German all right, and sure knowed his music, except it was hard as the devil to get the bastard to play any piece as such and not just the scales over and over, in the course of which he’d get out his set of tuning forks and monkey about with the wires and hammers.
The whole bill was well into four figures, though I don’t recall the precise sum, for I blacked out when I saw it. However, when I recovered from the shock, I was really kind of proud of Amelia for her initiative. Seems she had just got the address of the piano manufacturer, sent them a letter on the stationery of the hotel saying send your best model, and by God if they never, without even a deposit, upriver from St. Louie along with that German. Lucky for me, he didn’t care nothing for the nature of his accommodations, being a pure fanatic for his music, so I had him bunk down on a cot in the corner of my bedroom, and that was all right with him, and he lived on sausage and rye bread, when he remembered to eat at all, so I saved a little that way.
I must say though that Amelia never did learn to play the piano well. That was the one thing she did awkward, and the result wasn’t much more tuneful than had a cat got to walking on the keys. Used to drive the professor crazy, and he’d storm and yell and tear his beard, and once I recall when she was attacking a particular exercise for the ninety-ninth time and making the same mistake at every instance, the German cried like a baby.
After a couple months, Amelia come to me and says: “Uncle Jack, do you mind if I send the piano away? It has grown to be a dreadful bore.” That’s the way she talked now, sort of like an English person, with her mouth made small and sending the words through her nose. Sure classy it was.
And of course I agreed, for I wanted her to be happy, so I bought the German a return passage, a loaf of bread, and a hunk of cheese, and I hired some brawny fellows to take the piano out and crate it up and put it upon a riverboat back to St. Louie. But as it happened that boat got into a race with another craft, which they was always doing in them days, and fired up so high its boilers blowed and the son of a bitch burned right down to the waterline, the piano with it. I still owed something like $930 on that instrument, and was the frequent recipient of threatening correspondence on the subject, followed by duns wearing derby hats and carrying various types of documentation: dispossess papers and all, and when they found there wasn’t nothing to reclaim, they believed I ought to be imprisoned for it, but a lawyer I hired worked out some arrangement by which I would pay them fifty dollars a week for the rest of my life, so they eased off, and the lawyer charged me only two hundred dollars for his services.
And this at a time when I couldn’t get nobody to play poker with me. The hotel bill was run way up high again, the dress shops was sending statements around, and I owed the hairdresser, the livery stable, and two restaurants. Then too, Amelia was stuck on this idea of gaining musical accomplishment, so the next thing we had to replace that German and his piano was a huge woman with a chest on her that would have made Dolly look tubercular. She taught singing and claimed to be Italian, late of the opera in a place called Milano, according to her story: Signorina Carmella. She could sing all right, so it might have been true. Under a full head of steam she would crack every tumbler in our rooms, and when she tackled the scales we’d get complaints from guests as far away as the fourth floor rear.
So it was just as well she was drunk most of the time, for then she’d drop her bulk on the sofa and stay right quiet while giving the beat to Amelia with a fat finger stacked with cheap rings and after a while hiccup once or twice and fall dead asleep. Then I had my choice of leaving her to sleep it off, which might take hours—for which I was charged at the rate of three dollars per—or waking her up, at which moment she would clutch at me under the illusion I was some intimate acquaintance of hers called Vincenzo. This amused Amelia no end.
