Chapter 21

Christmas Eve, the family sat in our lounge to watch it. I had put some serious money into the family coffers and Dad had bought a giant flat screen TV and sound bars.

That night, Jordan and I cuddled on one sofa with Ali on our laps. Jordan had finally admitted to his mother that we were a couple. She, surprisingly, was happy to go along with it, considering that many in the wide world thought we already were Ali’s parents.

He and I would be spending the night in the stable.

Mom and Dad were on one two-seater while Ma and Pa were on another. Doris was on a single chair. We had eaten a good meal and were all ready to snooze when Dad put the DVD into the machine and the screen lit up.

I sat and watched Pet do her part, and then myself on the screen with the violin first, and later coming out to sit at the piano.

The sound through our new system was fantastic. I was almost crying listening to my piano playing and remembering the sheer exultation of the moment. Finally, there were the encores, and I introduced the Swan Trio.

When the credits rolled as we left the stage, I could hear sobbing. When I looked around Doris was weeping and, strangely, so was Alicia, who was being comforted by Brad.

Now that was a way to end a year!

Mom got up and went to Doris, while Jordan handed me Ali to go and help his own mother. Brad was at a loss and Dad took him aside to get something hot for both women, once they’d recovered. I went and sat on one side of Alicia to hold her hand while Jordan held her and told her that he understood. I looked down at Ali, who had tears in her own eyes.

When the tears had slowed down, we sat at the kitchen table while the Sanders were brought up to speed on the “Swan Effect.”

Alicia looked at Brad.

“Darling Brad, before you I’d been a tramp like Josie. You were my saviour but before you came along, I’d already had two abortions. It’s lucky that I was still able to have Josie and Jordan.”

He kissed her.

“I knew, my love. I was told by one of your friends that you were a tramp and to stay away. I was certain that you were the woman for me, and for life.”

“I’ve had that bottled up for twenty-five years and stressed the whole time for nothing?”

She sobbed. They clung to each other and kissed.

Doris, it turned out, was like Helen and Mom. All three had seen things when they had been in the military that had followed them in their dreams. Mom told her that she’ll now be able to sleep at night.

Dad and Jordan carried the cot over to the stable. It looked like our first night there, together, will have a little spectator. Mom helped Doris into the bedroom and then came back to give me another hug and a thanks for helping her friend.

Alicia also hugged me firmly and told me she was happy for tonight as it freed her to live the rest of her life. She went off to the bedroom to get ready for bed. Brad came over to give me a big hug, telling me that it was my magic that gave him his love back.

Jordan held Ali while I went and got her things for the night. When I got back, he was smiling.

“Ali just said her first word to me. She called me Daddums.”

She and I had been reading and looking at picture books - but so far, her speaking had only been approximations of the animal names. I took Ali from him, and he carried her things over to the stable. When she saw the cot, she distinctly said. “Sleepies, Mommy” which made me start crying as I undressed her. I made sure she was clean before I put her in her sleepsuit and laid her in the cot.

I kissed her forehead, “Goodnight, Alicia, sweet dreams.”

“Night, Mommy”.

I stood there dumbfounded.

“I wonder if the Swan did some magic on her tonight?” Jordan asked. “That was the first time she’d heard it and she has been a little slow in talking up to now.”

He had to hold me as I sobbed. Then we undressed and went to bed to make the most passionate love. We kept it quiet in case we woke the baby. It seemed lovelier because we held back and took it slow and easy. I think that if I’d been a real girl that night, I might have made a baby of my own.

Christmas day was wonderful. Presents were given and received with a lot more love and feeling than I’ve ever known. I was here, with people who had all had the Swan treatment, all bright and cheerful. Only Brad had been unaffected, but he was a strong, silent type already, with a grounded outlook. Mom, Dad, and Doris had all been stripped of their bad dreams and Jordan had had his youthful fears removed and was a better man for it.

Alicia had her guilt leave her and my Alicia had whatever had stopped her talking totally removed. She had become a baby chatterbox and laughed a lot when she played with her toys. In fact, for her age, she was positively precocious.

We all stayed happily together until January. On the first day of the New Year Brad and Alicia needed to go home to start the year and get Brads’ business back into life.

Jordan told them that he was staying with me and would be home later in the week to pick up his things.

His parents said that they were happy for him and when they left, they both held Ali and she gurgled. “Bye, Gran, bye Gramps.”

Doris was also going to leave as she now felt strong enough to go and visit her family, something she said she couldn’t do before. Her bad dreams had been likely to wake them up.

I told her to take my old car and use it as her own.

“Just let me know when it needs any servicing, I’ll pay for it.”

She told us that being with us over the last year had been wonderful, but Christmas Eve had been extra special.

By the end of the day, Dad, Jordan, and I had taken out the single beds in the big bedroom and replaced them with the big one from the stable.

Ali had her cot back in her room and said, “Thank you, Mommy,” when I reset her hanging mobile over it. We made up the singles in the stable. Mom made us a family dinner for the three generations: my parents, my husband to be, and my baby. It was perfect.

With the New Year came new commitments. I needed to start working on the next Sisters album to be recorded for release later in the year. We had decided most things but felt that we wanted to add more instruments. We had to discuss what session players we would need and set aside time for them to try out the pieces.

I knew that Pet and Anton would have that in hand. In the meantime, I had to find somewhere with a concert grand where I could practice my concert piece.

I discussed this with Jordan, who suggested that we simply extend one wall of the studio, yet again. We could put a grand in before we rebuilt the wall. It looked easy and when Brad was at the farm again, I asked him if it was possible.

He smiled and told me that the original extension had been built with that sort of thing in mind. It would only take a month.

Kelly had requested Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto Number 2. It lasted about forty minutes. Rachmaninoff had big hands and his chords were often difficult for women. With my hands also a bit larger, and a bit stronger, they helped me with some of the more aggressive chords.

I got on to my favorite music store to order a concert grand and Brad gave me a time window in which it could be installed. By the end of February, the new studio had been doubled in size and the old upright looked dowdy with a concert grand gleaming in the lights.

I didn’t play it until the acoustic tiles had been put up. Then only with the store’s tuner on hand to see if it needed tweaking. While the studio was being extended, I also had a proper mixing board with multi-track tape and digital recording equipment installed. All we needed was a producer, and we could make our own masters in future.

The day I played the piano, my father was on hand to operate the recording gear, having taken a course with the suppliers.

Ali cried when she saw the grand and wanted one her size, so we went to a toy shop and I bought her one in her size, with sixteen keys. The tuner restrung it with proper strings and she was happy when I showed her how to play Chopsticks.

With the set-up we now had it was a breeze to record the next album in-house with me at the piano, and a few session players from the local orchestra to round out the sound. Stability turned out to be the best seller to date and found a place on the M.O.R. charts as well.

We could buy off-the-shelf backing of the orchestral parts of concertos. This allowed me to play almost anything I wanted with a full orchestra. If the orchestra opened, I just followed.

If the piano opened, Dad would start the backing at the right point. We got the similar backing for single and double violin concertos, especially the Mozart in C and the Bach in D minor that Kelly had suggested. With this it was easy for Pet and me to be concert ready before we even got to rehearse with the live orchestra.

Another thing that had a future effect was that I now had room in the control room to get a load of shelves installed for our CDs and for my own collection. It had been in drawers, boxes, and cupboards all over the place. It was quite an impressive collection when it was put in the shelves as it amounted to several hundred CDs.

Joyce was still coming around to learn classic guitar, something she was getting very good at. We had the backing disc to the Rodrigo Concierto de Aranjuez which we were very close to have mastered as a double guitar piece.

We were relaxing with a cup of coffee, and she was gazing at my CD collection and pulled one off the shelf.

“What on earth is this? I’ve never heard of these guys.” She asked.

I took it from her and put it into the player.

“This was a line of music that I explored when I was about ten or eleven, but it didn’t resonate as much as classics. I tried listening to jazz guitar but, now you’ve pulled this out, we can listen to one of the most famous duos between the two world wars.”

I pressed the start button, and she heard Stephane Grappelli and Django Reinhardt recorded in Paris at “The Hot Club.”

She had a look of wonder as she listened, and I could see that she loved it. As a violin player it’s straight forward if you can play gypsy style. As a guitar player I was waiting for her to ask the obvious question, which she did at the end of the third track.

When she finally asked about some odd sounds with the chording, I went and held her ring and small finger of her left hand together.

“How would you play if that was permanent?”

I than explained that Django was of Romani descent and had been in a fire when he was younger which badly burned him. He started playing the guitar again, but those two fingers were almost useless to him. I explained that he had other bad injuries, especially on one leg, and it had taken some years before he could walk with a stick.

We listened to the CD right through and she wanted it piped into the studio for us to accompany. I could see that we needed to get this out of the way before we got back to the Rodrigo.

I’d last listened to this music while I was in my guitar days and before I’d taken up violin myself. As we jammed along with the album, I realized that it was something I should have gone back to. We didn’t get back to playing classics that day but mastered a couple of the tracks, her on guitar and me on violin, and it was a lot of fun.

Before we finished for the day, she wanted to try out one of our Sisters’ songs in that style and it seemed to work. We ended by playing the ones we’d got right plus the Sisters’ one with her singing and recording to the computer. I cut a couple of CDs, one for her to take home.

She also borrowed the “Hot Club” CD so she could listen to it again at home. She joked that the two of us could write new pieces in the same style and record a jazz album.

I laughed.

“Django played in Cleveland in the forties. We could call it The Hot Tub de Cleveland.”

I wouldn’t have made that joke if I’d foreseen the result of our fun afternoon.

I made the mistake of playing the tracks for Jordan, Ali, and my parents after dinner that night, thinking that they would have a laugh. They all loved it. Even Ali had a big smile on her face and whispered. “Groovy, Mommy”

I gave my mother a stern look.

“What on earth have you been teaching my daughter during the day?”

“Lots of things, Edie,” she laughed. “We chatter along like a couple of pals, don’t we, sweetie?”

Ali smiled. “Groovy, Grannie.”

By the time we got together as a group again Joyce had listened to the CD and had worked out most of the guitar parts. She had loaned it to Pet who had mastered the violin style. She had passed it to Emily and Janet who had loved it as well. They all wanted us to do something along the same lines as a fun piece.

Pet and Abigail came up with some lyrics. We played around with the tunes and came up with a dozen jazz tracks. We brought in the producer who had recorded the Stability album to run the recording.

We did the whole set in a single day. He had a big grin on his face when we finished. He came back the next day and we did a set of about ten of our Sisters’ numbers in the same vein.

He output the two sets of masters for two CDs and made us twenty copies. For a laugh we sent Allan a half a dozen copies. We added a covering note to say that they were samples for an up-coming album, which we would call “Instability at the Hot Tub of Cleveland” and waited for the laughter.

At the beginning of March, we were finalizing our set for the tour that would be starting in the middle of May. We had stipulated that we didn’t want to do huge stadiums, and to keep the seating down to five thousand or less.

That way we could use smaller amps and didn’t need to lug tons of equipment around, making it much easier on us, and ensuring that the venues would be sold out. We were popular, but not huge, and this allowed us to travel a little way under the radar. It made our lives easier.

That would leave most of March and into May for me to get the Rach under control and for Pet and me to get the two double violin concertos down pat. Allan turned up with Matt Dover, the hall owner from Cleveland, and another guy. They waited until we had finished the song we were doing, and then Allan asked us to sit down while he outlined a proposition.

Well, it was the new guy, Gerry, who had the proposition. He owned a jazz club in Cleveland, and he wanted us to do the jazz material, live on his stage. He also said that he would arrange, and pay for, a proper video and audio recording of it as a one-off event. He said that he had made an offer which Allan had thought was all right. He also told us that the club was called the Hot Club after the French one and the date he wanted was the anniversary of Django playing in Cleveland.

His proposed date was a weekend at the end of July, in between one of our tour dates and the three weeks set aside for Pet and me to be in Boston for the August concert.

I thought it was madness, but the rest of the girls thought it would be fun, so we agreed to do it. We stipulated a good hotel. He told us that we drove a hard bargain, shook hands with Allan on the deal and hung around while we finished doing the set that we were working on.

He then took us all out for a meal and laughed when we told him where we wanted to go. We knew that our favorite Italian place would fit us in even if they had to hire a marquee.

Brad had been busy with the shed conversion and the old vet came to have a look at it in March, to declare it was great. The building itself was like a big box with windows, plain, but inside was all smooth surfaces that could be cleaned easily. There was a waiting room and reception either side of the entry, a short corridor with a kitchen, toilets, and storeroom on one side and the surgery and operating room on the other, the last having no windows and positive pressure ventilation.

At the end of the corridor was a door to the shed and steps that led up to a two- bedroom apartment and a home office. The vet formally gave us permission to use “Elmstead Veterinary Clinic”. That went up over the door the following week with a signboard outside at the roadway.

Jordan was finishing the third year of a four-year course and it worked out well that he would be on-site in case of emergencies. Most of his fourth year was work experience and we were visited by the college to ensure that the site could provide the right training.

By that time the old vet was working from our farm and Jordan was already doing a lot of the consulting under his supervision. At the end of that month, the last of the chickens were shipped out and we had to go back to buying eggs again for our own table.

The end of the shed got a similar treatment to the other two. The flooring was picked up with a front-end loader and dumped in the back lot. The interior was steam-cleaned and repainted. Instead of the hydro conversion, we added a load of skylights and cages for sick animals, as well as putting down a gravel floor. There were big doors at the end to allow the vet to park his own car and the pet ambulance, leaving plenty of room for anything else that would come up in the future.

In the meantime, I’d been working with the backing of the Rachmaninoff and, by the time I went to Boston at the beginning of April, I was happy with it. Kelly had sent a message that both Pet and I were needed but she assured Allan that Pet would not be needed on stage.

We were both formally asked to go on the board of the Grove Institute, alongside Kelly, Fiona, Algernon, Antonio, and two other members from the research staff.

On top of that, we were also asked to go on the board of the “For Those Who Serve” office which now had a dozen staff who were working on the government to get venues, dates, and funding for shows to start next year.

Someone, I suspected Allan, had sent Kelly the two jazz CDs. She said that she loved them, being so refreshing in this age of electronica and rap. She told us that she, and a bunch of her friends, had already booked a table at the night club on that date.

As far as the rehearsals went, my time at home worked its magic and we only needed three days with the orchestra to nail it. They were opening with the Beethoven Pastorale, which is a good hour long. With mine going over the hour in the second half, made for a good night.

Washington had said that they would be opening with Dvorak New World which is also about an hour long.

We spent a couple of days with Pet and me on violins rehearsing the two double violin concertos and the encore for the August concert. We had worked on those in the studio with backing, so it was another easy session.

Kelly said that they would use the New World as the first half, because, even with an encore that we had planned, the second half would be about an hour and a quarter.

By the time we got to the concert nights it was almost business as usual. The crowd seemed expectant as they sat waiting for the opening half and they were good with the applause at the end.

When Richard led me onto the stage there was more applause and a few stood, which was nice. The Rach 2 was a very spirited piece, and I did it with as much flourish as I could muster, and they were on their feet and calling for an encore, so I did a couple of Chopin pieces which seemed to satisfy them.

The write-up in the Saturday paper was very nice and the Saturday concert was a rerun but at a slightly louder level at the end. That one was also filmed and recorded by the TV station.

Our dress supplier had outshone herself with my gorgeous long dresses and I felt like a queen as I took my bow and was given flowers. Pet told me afterward that it was a lovely performance, and that my technique was getting better with every concert.

Sunday, we flew home and spoke about the July concert in New York. Anton and Pet had just about finished the scores for it and would send them to the orchestra next week so that they could comment. She had put together our parts to rehearse when we could, as the songs would be played a little slower and more “night clubby”.

In May, we went on the road for the early part of our tour as Stable Sisters. We did ten shows in three weeks down the eastern coast and then went home to get ready for the Washington concert, which gave the others a bit of a break.

I had a week off because the Washington orchestra only wanted me around for a week, so I caught up with the events at home. I spent a lot of time with Ali. We played together with me on the upright and her on her toy one. I was impressed, for a nearly two-year-old child she had developed some interesting techniques.

She was talking quite sensibly now, in short sentences, and we spoke about lots of things. I told her about being on stage. I’d gotten tickets for Mom and Dad to come to Washington and look after Ali when I was on stage. I took her with me when I flew there the week before.

She loved the plane ride and looked out of the window when we took off and landed, declaring that she had seen sheep, cows and even a pack of big pussy cats.

I’d told the orchestra that I was bringing my daughter and they were very good, having someone to look after her while I rehearsed. After the first run-through Ali was full of the wonderful sounds she had heard and the girl that looked after her told me that I had a budding prodigy on my hands, if her future playing was on the same level as her enthusiasm.

They had a small piano that they used in competitions, and she sat at that and wowed everyone with her version of Chopsticks and a few other songs that had no chords, her little hands not big enough yet to reach multiple keys.

I was told that we had to come back in a couple of years and do a mother / daughter piano concert. The thing that floored me was that there was some sheet music on the piano, and she looked at it, getting about eighty percent right. She was sight reading before she was able to read.

When my parents arrived, they took over and she sat on Mom’s lap on the two nights of the concerts. She declared that the New World was “dreamy groovy” while my bit was “wild!”

Marianne Gregory © 2023