His air of satisfaction over what he was about to say scared me.
“You’re dead, Kathy.”
I stared back at him, not knowing why but feeling a death chill around my heart.
“That’s right, when I took you from the hospital, that’s what I told the Masons. They think you died in childbirth, and that’s what they’ll tell Kathy. Your daughter will grow up thinking you’re dead.”
The cold spread through my body. I was dead.
Alarmed, Jack took a step toward me. But something warned him back.
When I spoke it came out a toneless whisper. “The Cree say there’s a death spot in each person. Touch it and the person dies. When you lied to the Masons you touched that spot in me. It’s not a lie anymore. If I’m dead to my daughter I am dead. You did this to me, Jack Sullivan, you murdered me.”
“You’re mad,” he muttered, “stark, raving mad.”
He stopped following us after that.
Knowing I was dead to Kathy produced a numbness when I thought of her. I was so upset that I turned to Abram. He would mull it over in typical Abram fashion. He did, and eventually came up with a solution. “You need to talk to someone about it. What about Mac?”
I couldn’t do it. I didn’t know him well enough. I couldn’t take him into my confidence or confess the terrible guilt I felt about my baby. My impulse to go get her was something I fought every day. But there was no way a two-year-old could fit into this rough-and-tumble life. I worked till one, didn’t get to bed until two in the morning, slept till noon, and then most likely we’d hit the road.
There was no help for it; Kathy would grow up thinking I was dead. In a way, that whitewashed me, made a good person of me. I was no longer a mother who deserted her child. I was a good mother because I was a dead mother.
This seemed a circular bit of reasoning and I wished I could explain it to Mum. Thinking of Mum brought my thoughts to Erich von Kerll, my father. Mum had thought he should know about me. And I thought he should know that he had a granddaughter.
On impulse I wrote what would be a crazy sort of letter to receive, and I didn’t know if he would receive it.
I wrote:
Dear Erich von Kerll,
I know it will come as a shock to learn you have a daughter, and recently, a granddaughter as well. We are both named Kathy, which won’t surprise you when you think back to another Kathy—Kathy Forquet, whom you married at the end of the war.
I’m sure you know the same stories I do about Mrs. Mike, and how we are all named for her. Mum told me many things about you too. I know you have gray eyes. I know you had a sailboat you used to take out on the Bodensee, and that you were second officer on U-186. I know you lost a leg, and I could hum you any number of little Austrian folk songs that you taught my Mum. And you know nothing about me.
That’s the way it has to be, for now at any rate. You are a very distinguished man, a government official. And I must tell you that right now I am nothing at all, except a mother. I did bring into this world a beautiful little girl. Did I tell you she has red hair? I hope someday to meet you, but that’s a long way in the future when I’m standing on my own feet. I won’t come to you in the way my husband wanted. I want us to be equals. In that way you’ll know I don’t want anything from you and we can be friends.
I hope you loved my Mum. I loved her very much. She’s dead now.
I hope this finds you well.
Yours sincerely,
Kathy
I was glad I wrote this new letter. I couldn’t send it, but I saved it to show him someday. I couldn’t send it because he could probably track me down. If you were rich you could do that kind of thing. And right now I didn’t want to be found.
I WAS sitting in a Denny’s with Mac, having a sandwich. He was discussing a makeover for me. “Get rid of the bangs,” he was saying. “Makes you look too much a kid.”
“I may look like a kid, but I’m not a kid. I have a kid.” I’d kept it bottled up so long that now it came spilling out. “A daughter. Her name is Kathy, and she lives with the Masons on Oakdale Street in St. Paul, Minnesota. They think I’m dead.”
He just looked at me. I hadn’t meant to let it out. But it was said, and nothing I could do about it.
“Is that true,” he asked, “or are you conning me?”
“It’s true. She’s two years old.”
“I’ll be damned.” It was meant as consolation.
“She thinks I’m dead,” I repeated.
“Hey, she isn’t old enough to think.”
“That’s what they’ll tell her when she is old enough. That’s what they believe.”
“Well now, that’s a shame.”
“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe it’s a good thing.” Why was I always posturing, posing, making a show of things when inside I felt miserable? Mac wasn’t the right person. I couldn’t really open my heart to him. I could tell him the bare facts, but nothing of the gnawing emptiness.
ONE spring day in 1966 as we drove along I heard my own voice coming to me from the country music station.
I grabbed Mac’s arm and he nearly went off the road. “Hey Kathy!” he whooped. “You did it!”
“Shhh,” I said, and settled back to listen. “I could have picked up the tempo a shade, but it was good.”
“It was damn good.” From the minute he bought my contract, Mac concentrated solely on me, putting his other enterprises on hold. He was fond of reminding me of all his expenditures: financing the trailer, food, gas and oil, clothes, photos, demos, fees, the works. So far the club dates brought us even, with a little extra. I had gone a notch higher in the class of clubs we played, although I usually didn’t get top billing. Mac didn’t agree with the old saying that it’s better to be a big frog in a small puddle than a small frog in a big puddle. We both knew I was going to be a big frog in the biggest puddle in the world, and the only way to get there was to dive in and fight it out with the best.
All we had to do was convince a couple hundred million people. Mac intensified his campaign, mailing my demos to deejays and, when possible, stopping to go into a studio and twist arms. He was always plugging me, and it was beginning to pay off.
“Being played on radio is the break we’ve been waiting for. The next thing on the agenda is to get some songs written for you. Most of your numbers are too old and beaten to death. And what’s worse, they’re identified with other voices. We need a hit that’s yours.”
“Oh Mac, there is music I want to sing.” And it came out that my Mum was Cree, that I used to spend time on the res and learned the songs of the earth. “I can bring a whole world to an audience. That’s what I want to do. Only people seem offended, they stiffen up, they’re afraid to hear, they don’t want to know there’s a world out there that they know nothing of.”
Right then Mac asked me to sing my Cree repertoire.
I did. I threw myself into it. But stopped short at the reprise. I’d lost him. He too didn’t know what to make of it. “Well, it’s different. Too different, that’s the trouble. Not enough melody. Hard to hum, too much of it off-key, strange.” Seeing the effect this was having on me, he stopped and went on in a more conciliatory tone, but it meant the same thing—he hated it.
“Later,” he said, “when you’re established, that’s the time to introduce something new. Who knows, it might be a novelty. Ethnic might be big by then.”
I nodded, accepting for now.
The problem of material remained. How were we to come by a good songwriter we couldn’t pay?
“We’ll be in Chicago in a couple of weeks,” Mac said. “Plenty of talent there. I have some friends at WGN. And I’ll drop by the Morris office. Of course the real action is New York, but Chicago is a big step. It might be easier to pick up an agent there.”
“You’re my manager. What do I need an agent for?”
Mac roared with laughter. “Kiddo, when you get there, you’re going to have a manager and an agent and a business manager a
nd an investment counselor and an advance man and a makeup gal and a costume designer and a voice coach and a driver and hey, your own private plane plus pilot. You’ll be cut up so many ways, you’ll be lucky to keep ten percent of you. But I’ll tell you something. That ten percent will make you rich. And my twenty percent of your ten percent will put me in offices in Beverly Hills and a condo in Acapulco. Never forget what I’m going to tell you. A hundred percent of nothing is nothing. Ten percent of a fortune is a fortune.”
All this maneuvering was new to me. I hoped it wasn’t new to Mac. I hoped he knew what he was doing. I hoped he could revive his old contacts. I knew he was counting on me as much as I counted on him. I was his ticket back.
We added my radio exposure to my credits, and I pulled down another twenty dollars a night. The latest club was a lot more elegant than any I’d sung in, and Mac persuaded a couple of people in the business to drive up from Chi to hear me.
Catastrophe.
I never get colds. But I woke up unable to swallow. Total panic. I put on my bathrobe and went into the middle section of the trailer, where the kitchen was. Tea with lemon, that’s what Mum had given us kids when we had sore throats. I filled the kettle and sat disconsolately waiting for it to boil.
Maybe it wasn’t a cold. More likely I’d strained my voice singing in all these smoke-filled bars. And Mac was always urging me to do more belting, get that earthy tone into it. That was hard on the voice, but the audience loved it and I kept doing it. What if I’d damaged my vocal cords? It happened.
Had it happened to me? The kettle began to whistle. I took it off the coils and poured it over a tea bag. I stirred a while, then sipped the tea from a spoon. At first it hurt awfully, but gradually my throat opened and felt better. What should I do about tonight, and the people coming from Decca?
Mac’s advice, when he got over being exasperated, was to give me a Smith Bros. cough drop and tell me to sing through it.
That’s what I did. As I heard those muffled, grainy notes fall like wounded soldiers, I wanted to break off—stop, run and hide somewhere. But you don’t do that. You finish. You pretend it’s all right. The Decca exec who listened with his eyes closed, pretended too. But he left before my next set.
So my big chance came and went.
Mac was worried now. He canceled right and left and, instead of reproaching me, tried to buck me up. But in the depths of me, trussed up in sargasso weed, were my dreams of singing. I wouldn’t allow myself to think past it; there was nothing past it.
At the end of the week I was able to coax a few of my sounds back. I did it cautiously, my heart leaping with a tentative joy at each note.
“We lost Decca,” Mac said, “but there are other labels out there.”
To prepare Chicago for us he ran an ad in the Tribune in the form of a songwriting contest, the winning song to be sung by me. With that as payment, we hoped no money would be required.
“We’ve got to find a name for you,” Mac said. “Something out of the ordinary. McCartney, Lennon, Harrison were going nowhere. They name themselves the Beatles, and bang! They own the world.”
“I had another name,” I said, thinking back. “Little Bird.”
“Little Bird…” He rolled it around. “Cree?”
“Yes.”
“Well, we’ll keep that part under our hat. Besides, you don’t look Indian…So that’s what they called you? Kathy Little Bird?”
“My friend on the res did, when I was eight.”
“I like it.”
So did I.
It brought Elk Woman and Mum and a little girl standing outside the church in the snow singing.
CHICAGO!
Mac sold the trailer and purchased a fourth-hand Buick. It looked impressive, but we had all sorts of trouble with it. However, we drove through the Loop, past the zoo, and came out on Michigan Avenue. Broad, beautiful, with trees planted in the cement of the sidewalk. Magnificent, stately hotels with doormen, awnings, and facades of fieldstone, brick, and glass.
Of course we didn’t stay in any of them, just looked. We looked at the lake, dancing with yachts and sailboats riding at anchor, bouncing over choppy little waves. Mac, who was embarked on a progam of educating me, recited a poem by Carl Sandburg. “Hog Butcher to the World.” It had the smell of stockyards in it, and the sweat of men and animals. It wasn’t the Chicago I saw.
We wound up in a shabby apartment in an Italian neighborhood on the city’s west side. “You won’t be here much,” Mac said apologetically, and it was true. We were on the go from the moment we got up in the morning.
Running around Chicago in August isn’t the most comfortable thing in the world. Half the population were trying for a little air by getting out of sweltering apartments onto the fire escapes. We saw them as we passed on the El, lounging on mattresses and beach chairs. One enterprising guy had dragged out a sofa. The rest of Chicago was fighting for a spot on the beach. Mac, the optimist, said it was off-season, our best chance to get in to see people.
Much to my surprise, several songwriters entered Mac’s contest, and the first thing I knew I had material to look over. With a nip here and a tuck there, they fit my style pretty well.
Meanwhile the Decca scout we thought we’d lost showed up with a Decca producer. Apparently there were some things he’d liked well enough to give it a second try. This time it went smoothly and an audition was arranged.
From that moment my world began spinning.
“From the top!” came the directive from the glass booth. “From the top,” because the balance was wrong.
Like the record I cut, it was all part of the Chicago Loop. The Loop spun round and round, Michigan Avenue, the Blackstone. We moved in to have a good address. It was awesome. The lobby was out of an MGM spectacular, enormous sprays of flowers in what Mac told me were Ming dynasty vases, and a fountain to throw pennies in. My room reflected none of this luxury; it was small, ordinary, and the view was the brick wall of the hotel next door. But I was just an elevator ride away from glamour. Studio technicians sat behind glass, twiddling dials, mixing my sound on a Gates board. I was getting close.
I’d never sung with a real band, just pickup musicians or me and my guitar. But, hey, this was big time. There were five instrumentalists backing me. I loved the beat of the drum and the unexpected cry you get out of amplified guitars and a slap bass. I had my mike, they had theirs, and in the booth they mixed and matched.
That first session they didn’t get what they wanted in their cans. “Cans” was the name for the earphones we were all plugged into. They sent everybody home with an early-morning call.
I’d sung my heart out and it hadn’t been right. They’d drowned me out, the drums that I’d jived to, and the electrified stuff. “What do they expect?” I stormed at Mac. “Five to one, and I’m up against drums. It’s impossible. I can’t do it. I’m not going back. Tell them that. Tell them no singer on God’s earth can compete with drums. Do you want me to tear my throat out again? No good to anyone, washed up, through?”
“It’s tough with house musicians,” Mac soothed. “You’ll get the hang of it. It will go better tomorrow.”
“There isn’t going to be a tomorrow. Don’t you listen when I talk to you? If I belt the way they want, I won’t have a voice. Don’t you remember what it was like? I couldn’t even whisper. I won’t wreck my voice—to please you or them or anybody.”
We both knew I was letting off steam, that I wasn’t about to tell off a booth full of Decca executives. No way was I going to spoil my big chance. Still, I was frightened. Most other musicians wrapped their instruments in silk scarves and warm flannels, kept them safe in cases, while a singer exposes her voice to all manner of hazards. No matter how vulnerable and fragile, it goes where she goes and is not shielded from weather, illness, pollution, or accident.
In the morning when I walked onto the soundstage, not only was the band there, but they were affable and friendly, as though they had not drowned me o
ut. The guy on steel who had dragged the tempo and thrown me off offered me a Styrofoam cup of coffee. But I was still leery. I had my eye on half a dozen female singers. Were they here to replace me?
“Your backup,” Mac whispered.
I was utterly panicked; probably most of them were better than I was. One of the Decca officials confirmed this by telling me they were from the Chicago Lyric Opera chorus.
That was it, that was the last straw. They were out to show me up, to make me look ridiculous, to scuttle me before I started.
I took an unobtrusive breath from the waist, from the diaphragm, a singer’s breath. I took another. And another. It was the best way to fight nerves. I knew I had to psych myself up.
Don’t let them get to you, I told myself. They may be from the Lyric Opera, but they’re here to back you up. They are just backup sound—to you.
Having talked myself into the Kathy Little Bird persona, I went over to my mike and tapped it with my finger to see if it was live. I’d been waiting for a chance to do that.
The QUIET sign flashed. The bandleader, who looked like an animated blowup of a fly—small, hairy, and ugly—lifted his stick, and we started to make music. The backup singers produced an echo effect. It sounded good.
In fact it was great, really compelling. Once again I sang my heart out. Let them sit behind glass, let them twiddle the dials. I didn’t care what they did. I was doing what I did, and I was doing it well.
Decca records signed me, and Mac said we could stay on at the Blackstone. I still hadn’t time to explore the lobby, stand before Ming vases, sink into plush divans, gawk in front of shops and elegant boutiques, toss pennies in the fountain. “Loop the loop,” I murmured, singing it all under my breath. I was evolving a plan. A great and wonderful plan.
Now that money was coming in I wanted to set aside enough for Kathy to go to college. I wanted her to have things, advantages like piano lessons, whatever she wanted. After all, she was almost three years old. She’d need nice things, clothes, a good warm coat. Stuff like insurance to cover medical and dental bills.