The Music Lesson (18 page)

Katie’s funeral was a graveside service. Our friends had gathered under the trees in the cemetery on that terrible day, and what I remember most clearly about it is the sound of the clods of earth hitting the wooden lid of her little casket, knowing she was inside it, cold and alone. They tell me I grabbed a spade and shoveled frantically, as if to fill the hole by myself, until Sam took the spade from my hands and then our friends took turns filling the grave with dirt while Sam held me. What sour despair. We were two wretched people, each of us alone in our grief. We just never could fit back together.

For a moment I pictured Mary. I tried to imagine the interior of her coffin, the utter darkness, where no light would ever penetrate again. I didn’t walk away until I had seen the grave diggers shovel enough dirt back into the hole to cover the coffin completely. Everyone had left. Nora’s family was waiting in the car, staring at me
through fogged windows. “ ’Tis not our custom to watch the actual burial,” Nora said reprovingly as I got in.

I walked down to Gortbreac Cove from the O’Driscolls’ farm. There was a muddy car parked in front of the cottage, the kind Nora calls an old banger, with hideous, filthy-looking tiger-striped seat covers and one of the back windows filled in with corrugated plastic and duct tape. I went in, and Mickey was sitting at the table with two other men, drinking tea and eating Hob Nob biscuits. (“One nibble and you’re nobbled.”) One of them was the Telecom Eireann man, and the other one was Willy Hayes, the postman. What’s one more disappointment?

The painting was on the table.

The three men each raised a finger in laconic greeting, a characteristic Cork salute, the way they wave at one another when they meet on the road on their tractors or in their cars. I will miss this place. Ignoring the Telecom guy, I looked questioningly at Willy for a moment, and he nodded with a small shrug of acknowledgment.

“Change of plan,” Mickey said. What now? I was suddenly frightened. I really thought for that moment that they had decided to kill me. “Back to plan A. We can’t risk the noise factor. Though your suggestion was a good one. So we’ve got the petrol organized with some old hay from the shed.”

“You’re going to burn it?”

“Yes, that’s what I’m saying. We’ve been waiting for you. Did they do the old girl up nicely?”

I didn’t answer him. I took the painting off the table and walked across the room to see it in the light by the window.

“I’m taking the glass off—you don’t want glass for this,” I said.

I followed them, carrying the painting. We went in a silent procession out to the side yard, where I had seen indications of past bonfires. It was very still. Most everybody in Gortbreac was probably sitting down to their dinner, their midday meal.

A moldy bale of hay and a red plastic gasoline container stood beside one of the ash heaps. The Telecom guy took out a palm-sized camcorder from the pocket of his jacket and unscrewed the lens cap.

“For feck’s sake,” he instructed, “nobody speak—we want no voices on this tape. Nothin’ to distinguish location—I’m keepin’ a tight focus.”

Mickey spread the hay tenderly into a comfortable-looking loose nest and then Willy laid a copy of the day’s
Irish Times
with the headline showing on top of the hay. There had been a slurry spill in Mallow and the fish kill in the Blackwater was going to hurt the angling season.

I laid the painting down on the newspaper, gently,
as if I were putting a sleeping baby into a crib. The colors all looked muddy to me, worn thin, muted by a strange chiaroscuro sky of shifting clouds. Her eyes were empty. Her hands were flat and meaningless; there was no form, no grace. There was no magic in this painting. A dull afternoon wind seemed to rinse the air of clarity.

Mickey sluiced the petrol over everything. Willy struck a match. It was so quiet, I could hear the video camera humming. He threw the match down and a sheet of flame shot up at once, with ugly black smoke furling at its edge.

It was a very small painting, and it was gone in another moment. The blackened wood panel continued to burn for another few minutes. The Telecom man zoomed in close, kneeling down, to show the charred wafery pieces of frame that still boxed a rectangular form. I started to walk away. Mickey was shoveling the black remnants into a heap with a stick, then he splashed the rest of the petrol onto the remaining wisps of hay. I turned back for one last look at Mickey. His face was a blank. A spark ignited and flames leapt up. Whatever was left of the panel was soon pale ash, snowing upward on the breeze.

I had nothing more to say to Mickey. I have nothing to say to anyone right now. I can’t imagine that changing
for a long time. I am empty. I have seen the last of
The Music Lesson
. I changed my clothes and was out the door with my bag. I did not look back again.

I was only halfway to Ballyroe when I heard a tractor behind me, and as I stood aside to let it pass, I heard it slow and stop. I turned, and it was Billy Houlihan. I will never know if he was heading into the village anyway or if he saw me with my bag and followed me. Maybe it was just one of life’s chance symmetries. He gave me a ride into the village, where I could catch the bus to Clonakilty, where I would catch the bus to Cobh.

“Leavin’ us, are ya?” he shouted above the roar of his tractor as I climbed onto the back. I only nodded. When he left me off in Ballyroe a few minutes later, he gave me a hand down and I felt his rough calloused grip give me an extra squeeze. I held on tight for a moment, and then I let go. He was the only person to whom I said good-bye.

I am writing these final pages in a little bed and breakfast in Cobh. I’ve been up all night, and in a short while I’ll go in to my last Irish breakfast. I’m starved. I’m booked on a Panamanian freighter that sails this afternoon with mixed cargo—timber, coal, machine parts—bound for Halifax, which, given the patterns of history,
seems just right. It was a good idea of Mickey’s. Flying back to my old life in a matter of hours would have been an impossibly abrupt transition. I need this time. I’ve sent a postcard to Pete telling him where I am and the approximate day we’re likely to make landfall.

I will return to New York, back to a life where nothing will have changed and everything will have changed, a life in which nothing will be the same and everything will be the same. What I miss most about Mickey is possibility, what might have been. I will miss the way I was with him, the way I thought about the future. I will miss this land of eloquent storytellers who cannot distinguish truth from fiction.

Soon enough, I will return to my job at the Frick Art Reference Library. I have already figured out precisely where this little notebook will be safe for a very long time. Surely, reader, I don’t have to describe exactly which volume of bound duplicate publications concerning art forgeries I have chosen as the ideal resting place for this account, because if you are reading my words, you know where you found them. When you’ve finished reading, I can only hope that you will see the necessity of returning this account to its hiding place. Please have the grace and courage to put it back.

I hope I live long enough to make my peace with a world full of people who look but do not see, who listen but do not hear.

I will sail from this land, as Michael Dolan sailed, heading for the New World, hoping to make a better life. In truth, my days here will lead me to make a better life than the one I had before. My hand will heal. I hope I have a scar.

I will have one very brief conversation with Pete about Mickey, in which we will agree that we’ll never discuss it again, and then we won’t discuss it again. I hope Pete has a good few years left, and I hope he has an easy death.

I will probably become quite eccentric in my old age. I plan to have a lot of cats. Although I expect to live out my years alone, I am never alone. Some of the people I love the most aren’t alive in the world, but they are alive in me. I think of my mother, and the ways I might be like her. I can begin to think of Katie, and the ways she might have been like me. Even if life has to be a series of losses, then I still choose life.

I brought along my own
Music Lesson
reproduction, of course. One of the deluxe ones, purchased from the Frick gift shop with my employee discount. I kept it under the stair, with this notebook. I thought it might come in handy. It fit into the frame perfectly. It burned quite nicely, too. I was frightened for a moment there, when Willy struck the match and I realized that it could have an acrylic ground that would flare up in a telltale
way, or the panel might peel into plywood layers, or something awful like that. It would have cost me my life, I’m sure. But it burned true.

And I think of Mary Carew. She would have enjoyed, I believe, having
The Music Lesson
next to her heart for all eternity. Because that’s where it is, in the graveyard in Clonakilty, in County Cork, in the Republic of Ireland, in the world, in the universe.

Katharine Weber, on the Origins of
The Music Lesson

I’ve had in mind a story about a woman alone in a remote Irish cottage with a stolen painting since I first traveled to Ireland in 1976, on my honeymoon. In the tiny fishing village where we spent two rainy weeks, there was still much talk about the discovery and arrest, two years before, of the Anglo-Irish woman who had rented a local cottage in order to hide a cache of paintings stolen for ransom by the IRA from the Beit Collection in County Wicklow (a theft that made the Guinness Book of World Records for record value of stolen artworks at that time).

Among those paintings was a Vermeer. I remember tramping down a muddy lane in order to peer into the windows of what locals still called “the picture cottage.” At the time, I was intrigued by the notion of this woman in solitude at the edge of the sea with some of the great paintings of the world. Did she ever look at them? I wondered. What did they mean to her? The facts of the actual case have never been of enormous significance to me. Over the next twenty years, what stayed with me were those questions. In 1986, my husband and I bought a little house in that village, just across the little boreen that leads to “the picture cottage,” which I can see from
my window. We spent time there every summer with our two children when they were growing up, and I also spend time alone in Ireland. It is there that I have done some of my most concentrated writing, and it is there that I began to write
The Music Lesson
.

About This Book

Patricia Dolan is alone with a stolen Vermeer painting in an Irish cottage by the sea. How she got here is part of the story she tells: about her father, a Boston cop; the numbing loss of her daughter; and her charming Irish cousin, who has led her to this high-stakes crime.

Questions for Discussion

1. Katharine Weber’s first novel,
Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear
, considered appearance and reality, perception and perceptivity. How are those issues manifest in
The Music Lesson
?

2. There are many small and hidden spaces in this novel—fake compartments, hidden cupboards. What do they signify? There are also many characters who aren’t what they seem. Can you recognize all the characters whose identities shift in the course of the story?