Violin (12 page)

He vanished.

He did most obviously and completely vanish, and he did it with a smile, leaving me with my outstretched emotions. He did it cunningly to let me stand alone with that moment of pain and worse, alone with the awful appalling need to share it!

I gave a moment to the shadows. The soft sway of the trees outside. The occasional rain.

He was gone.

“I know your game,” I said softly. “I know it.”

I went to the bed, reached under the pillow and picked up my Rosary. It was a crystal Rosary with a sterling silver cross. It was in the bed because Karl’s mother had always slept in the bed when she came, and my beloved godmother, Aunt Bridget, always slept in it, after the marriage with Karl, when she came, or the Rosary was actually in the bed because it was mine and I had absently put it there. Mine. From First Communion.

I looked down at it. After my mother’s death Rosalind and I had had a terrible quarrel.

It was over our Mother’s Rosary, and we had literally torn apart the links and the fake pearls—it was a cheap thing but I had made it for Mother and I claimed it, I, the
one who made it, and then after we tore it apart, when Rosalind came after me, I had slammed the door so hard against her face that her glasses had cut deep into her forehead. All that rage. Blood on the floor again.

Blood again, as if Mother had been living still, drunk, falling off the bed, striking her forehead as she had twice on the gas heater, bleeding, bleeding. Blood on the floor. Oh, Rosalind, my mourning, raging sister Rosalind! The broken Rosary on the floor.

I looked at this Rosary now. I did the childlike unquestioning thing that came to my mind. I kissed the crucifix, the tiny detailed body of the anguished Christ, and shoved the Rosary back under the pillow.

I was fiercely alert. I was like prepared for battle. It was like an early drunk in the first year, when the beer went divinely to my head and I ran down the street with arms outstretched, singing.

The pores of my skin tingled and the door opened with no effort whatsoever.

The finery of the alcove and the dining room looked brand new. Do things sparkle for those on the verge of battle?

Althea and Lacomb stood far across the length of the dining room, hovering in the pantry door, waiting on me. Althea looked plain afraid and Lacomb both cynical and curious as always.

“Like if you was to scream one time in there!” said Lacomb.

“I didn’t need any help. But I knew you were here.”

I glanced back at the wet stains on the bed, at the water on the floor. It wasn’t enough to bother them with it, I thought.

“Maybe I’ll walk in the rain,” I said. “I haven’t walked in the rain for years and years.”

Lacomb came forward. “You talking about outside now tonight in this rain?”

“You don’t have to come,” I said. “Where’s my raincoat? Althea, is it cold outside?”

I went off walking up St. Charles Avenue.

The rain was only light now and pretty to look at. I hadn’t done this in years, walk my Avenue, just walk, as we had so often as children or teenagers, headed for the K&B drugstore to buy an ice cream cone. Just an excuse to walk past beautiful houses with cut-glass doors, to talk together as we walked.

I walked and walked, uptown, past houses I knew and weedy barren lots where great houses had once stood. This street, they ever tried to kill, either through progress or neglect, and how perilously poised it always seemed—between both—as though one more murder, one more gunshot, one more burning house would set its course without compromise.

Burning house. I shuddered. Burning house. When I’d been five a house had burned. It was an old Victorian, dark, rising like a nightmare on the corner of St. Charles and Philip, and I remember that I’d been carried in my Father’s arms “to see the fire,” and I had become hysterical looking at the flames. I saw above the crowds and the fire engines a flame so big that it seemed it could take the night.

I shook it off, that fear.

Vague memory of people bathing my head, trying to quiet me. Rosalind thought it a wonderfully exciting thing. I thought it a revelation of such magnitude that even to learn of mortality itself was no worse.

A pleasant sensation crept over me. That old horrific fear—this house will burn too—had gone with my young years, like many another such fear. Take the big lumbering
black roaches that used to race across these sidewalks: I used to step back in terror. Now that fear too was almost gone, and so were they, in this age of plastic sacks and icebox-cold mansions.

It caught me suddenly what he had said—about my young husband, Lev, and even younger sister, Katrinka, that he, my husband whom I loved, and she, my sister whom I loved, had been in the same bed, but I’d always blamed myself for it. Hippie marijuana and cheap wine, too much sophisticated talk. My fault, my fault. I was a cowardly faithful wife, deeply in love. Katrinka was the daring one.

What had he said, my ghost?
Mea culpa.
Or had I said it?

Lev loved me. I loved him still. But then I had felt so ugly and inadequate, and she, Katrinka, was so fresh, and the times were rampant with Indian music and liberation.

Good God, was this creature real? This man I’d just spoken with, this violinist whom other people saw? He was nowhere around now.

Across the Avenue from me as I walked, the big hired car crept along, keeping pace, and I could see Lacomb muttering as he leant out the rear window to spit his cigarette smoke into the breeze.

I wondered what this new driver, Oscar, thought. I wondered if Lacomb would want to drive the car. Lacomb doesn’t do what Lacomb doesn’t like.

It made me laugh, the two of them, my guards, in the big crawling black Wolfstan car, but it also gave me license to walk as far as I wanted.

Nice to be rich, I thought with a smile. Karl, Karl.

I felt as if I were reaching for the only thing that could save me from falling, and then I stopped, “absenting myself from this dreary felicity a while” to think of Karl and only Karl, so lately shoved into a furnace.

“You know it’s not at all definite that I will even become symptomatic.” Karl’s voice, so protecting. “When they notified me regarding the transfusion, well, that was already four years, and now another two—”

Oh, yes, and with my loving care you will live forever and ever! I’d write the music for it if I were Handel or Mozart or anyone who could write music … or play.

“The book,” I said. “The book is marvelous. St. Sebastian, shot full with arrows, an enigmatic saint.”

“You think so? You know about him?” How delighted Karl had been when I told the stories of the saints.

“Our Catholicism,” I had said, “was so thick and ornamented and rule-ridden in those early days, we were like the Hasidim.”

Ashes, this man! Ashes! And it would be a coffee table book, a Christmas gift, a library staple that art students would eventually destroy by cutting out the prints. But we would make it live forever. Karl Wolfstan’s
St. Sebastian.

I sank to dreariness. I sank to the sense of the small scope of Karl’s life, a fine and worthy life, but not a great life, not a life of gifts such as I had dreamed up when I tried so hard to learn the violin, such as Lev, my first husband, still struggled to maintain with every poem he wrote.

I stopped. I listened.

He wasn’t about, the fiddler.

I could hear no music. I looked back and then up the street. I watched the cars pass. No music. Not the slightest dimmest sound of music.

I deliberately thought of him, my violinist, point by point, that with his long narrow nose and such deep-set eyes he might have been less seductive to someone else—perhaps. But then perhaps to no one. What a well-formed mouth he had, and how the narrow eyes, the
detailed deepened lids gave him such a range of expression, to open his gaze wide, or sink in cunning secret.

Again and again, old memories threatened, the most agonizing and excruciating bits of recollection drifted at me—my Father, crazed and dying, tearing the plastic tube from his nose, and pushing the nurse away … all these images came as if flung in the wind. I shook my head. I looked around me. Then the full fabric of the present wanted to enwrap me.

I refused it.

I thought again very specifically of him, the ghost, refurbishing in my imagination his slender tall figure and the violin which he had held, and trying as best as my unmusical mind could do to recall the melodies he’d played. A ghost, a ghost, you have seen a ghost, I thought.

I walked and walked, even though my shoes were wet and finally soaked, and the rain came heavy again, and the car came round, and I told it to go away. I walked. I walked because I knew as long as I walked, neither memory nor dream could really take hold of me.

I thought a lot about him. I remembered everything that I could. That he had worn the common formal clothes you pick up in the thrift shops more easily than casual or fashionable clothes; that he was very tall, at least six foot three I calculated, remembering how I had looked up at him, though at the time I had not been very dwarfed or in any way intimidated.

It must have been after midnight when I finally came back up the front steps, and heard, behind me, the car sliding before the front curb.

Althea had a towel in her hands.

“Come in, my baby,” she said.

“You should have gone to bed,” I said. “You seen my fiddler? You know, my musician friend with his violin?”

“No, ma’am,” she said, drying my hair. “I think you run him off for good. Lord knows, Lacomb and I were ready to break down that door, but what you got to do you did. He’s gone!”

I took off the raincoat and entrusted it to her, and went up the stairs.

Karl’s bed. Our upstairs room, ever illuminated by the red light of the florist across the street through lace and lace and lace.

A new mattress and pillows, of course, no indent of my husband here, no last bit of hair to find. But the delicate carved wooden frame in which we’d made love, this bed he’d bought for me in those happy days when buying things for me had been such pleasure for him. Why, why, I had asked, was it so much fun? I had been ashamed that fine carved furniture and rare fabric had made me so happy.

I saw the fiddler ghost distinctly in my mind, though he was not here. I was alone in this room as a person can be.

“No, you’re not gone,” I whispered. “I know you’re not.”

But then why shouldn’t he be? What debt had he to me, a ghost I’d called names and cursed? And my late husband burnt up even three days ago. Or was it four?

I started to cry. No sweet smell of Karl’s hair or cologne lingered in this room. No smell of ink and paper. No smell of Balkan Sobranie, the tobacco he would not give up, the one my first husband Lev always sent him from Boston. Lev. Call Lev. Talk to Lev.

But why? What play did it come from, that haunting line?

“But that was in another country; And besides,
the wench is dead.”

A line from Marlowe that had inspired both Hemingway and James Baldwin and who knows how many others.…

I began to whisper a line from
Hamlet
to myself, “…   ‘the undiscover’d country from whose bourn no traveler returns.’ ”

There came a welcome rustling in the room, the mere stir of the curtains and then those creaks and noises in the floor of this house which can be brought merely by a shift of the breeze against the dormers of this attic.

Then quiet came. It came abruptly, as if he’d come and gone, dramatically, and I felt the emptiness and the loneliness of the moment unbearably.

Every philosophical conviction I’d ever held was laid waste. I was alone. I was alone. This was worse than guilt and grief and maybe was what … no, I couldn’t think.

I lay down on the new white satin spread and searched for an utter blackness of body and soul. Shut out all thoughts. Let the night be for once the ceiling above, and beyond that a simple untroubled sky, with meaningless and merely tantalizing stars. But I could no more stop my mind than my own breath.

I was terrified my ghost had gone away. I’d driven him away! I cried, sniffling and wiping my nose. I was terrified that I’d never see him again, never, never, never, that he was gone as certainly as the living go, that I’d cast this monstrous treasure to the wind!

Oh, God, no, not so, no, let him come back. If the others you have to keep to yourself for all Time, I understand and always have, but he’s a ghost, my God. Let him return to me.…

I felt myself drop below the level of tears and dreams. And then … what can I say? What do we know when we know and feel nothing? If only we would wake from these states of oblivion with some certain sense that there was no mystery to life at all, that cruelty was purely impersonal, but we don’t.

For hours, that was not to be my concern.

I slept.

That’s all I know. I slept, moving as far away from all my fears and losses as I could, holding one desperate prayer. “Let him come back, God.”

Ah, the blasphemy of it.

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