The Funniest Story I have Ever Read - Part 1

An Excerpt from the book, "My Sister Eileen" by Ruth McKenney (a collection of short stories about the author and her sister Eileen) Published in 1938

"Hun-gah"

When my sister and I were ten and eleven, our six aunts on the lace-curtain-Irish, or Farrel, side of the family got up a little fund to make their nieces cultured.

In their dreams, they could see, these amiable ladies who loved us so dearly, Eileen at the piano bringing tears to the eyes of her relatives with a splendid performance of "Narcissus," the selection where you cross your hands on the keyboard. They could see me, too, in their affectionate musings, spreading a fluffy organdie skirt for a polite curtsy to a parlor full of admiring Farrels and Murphys and Flannigans, and then launching into a moving recitation of "Trees."

After all, our second cousins, the Murphy children, aged only eleven and twelve, could already recite "Trees" and play "The Rose of No Man's Land," not to speak of "Humoresque," on the piano. If the Murphys could be cultured, so, my aunts said grimly, could the McKenneys. If they had secret misgivings, they never said so. They started off the big culture program by getting Eileen a music teacher, a nervous, angular lady who wore her eyeglasses on a black ribbon and sniffed.

"One," she used to say, "two,three," and then a long sniffle, "four. One, two," then another short, ladylike sniffle, "three, four."

The sniffles and the black ribbon for the eyeglasses fascinated my sister. She used to keep time to the sniffles instead of counting, and as a result her scales went from bad to worse. Eventually, though, she learned to read simple sheet music. She also learned a bass which consisted mostly of fearful thumping and a rolling sound like kettledrums, all in the lowest octave of the keyboard. With this equipment, whe was able to play "Chloe," a popular song of the early nineteen-twenties. She was never able to play anything except "Chloe," but she certainly could play that.

She used to stalk to the piano and seat herself firmly, with quite a thump, at the bench. Then, swaying largely from the waist, she picked up the melody, not without some difficulty. Finally, when the preliminaries were over, she burst into song, accompanying herself as she went along.

"Thr---ooo the bu-la-ck of NIGHT," Eileen used to intone in a deep bass growl, "I got-tuh go wheah yew are."

The climax of the song, where the melody goes up, always used to baffle my sister, who, like myself, is absolutely tone-deaf and has never been able to carry a tune, even the simplest one, in her whole life. She solved the difficulty by simply pounding so hard in the bass that she drowned herself out. Her voice emerged triumphantly just at the end: "I GOT-TUH go wheah YEW are."

While Eileen was learning to play a bayou chant, I, too, was busy with culture. I was taking what my aunts thought were elocution lessons. These thoughtful ladies, after a solemn family conclave, had decided I should study public speaking because I stuttered over the telephone. I still do. It is very humiliating.

How my conservative, respectable aunts fell afoul of Madame DuLak and her Studio of the Voice I cannot imagine. Certainly she was not the teacher they thought she was. The hoped I would learn how to recite "Trees." Madame DuLak told me the first time I met her that Joyce Kilmer "stank." That was the word she used. I was eleven years old, and I certainly was suprised to hear that about Joyce Kilmer.

(Tune in tomorrow for Part 2...)