Violin (13 page)

T
HE FOLLOWING
day, the house was full of people. All doors were opened so that the two front parlors flanking the wide front hall were in clear view of the long dining room, and people could flow easily over the varied carpets, talking in cheerful voices as New Orleans people do after a death, as if it were what the dead person wanted.

A little cloud of silence surrounded me. Everybody thought I was mentally taxed, shall we say, having spent two days with a dead body, and then there was the question of slipping out of the hospital without a word, for which Rosalind was being blamed again and again by Katrinka, as if Rosalind had in fact murdered me when nothing could have been further from the truth.

Rosalind, in her deep drowsy voice, asked repeatedly if I was all right, to which I said repeatedly yes. Katrinka talked about me, pointedly, with her husband. Glenn, my beloved brother-in-law and husband of Rosalind, seemed a broken thing, hurt deep by my loss yet unable to do anything but stand rather close to me. I thought musingly
to myself of how much I loved them, Rosalind and Glenn, childless, the keepers of Rosalind’s Books and Records, where you could find Edgar Rice Burroughs in paperback or a song on a 78 disk recorded by Nelson Eddy.

The house was warm and sparkling, as only this house could sparkle, with its many mirrors and windows and a view in all directions. That was the great genius of this cottage, that, standing in the dining room as I did, you could look through open doors and windows to all four points of the compass, though they were tangled up with trees and the gusty afternoon. It was so lovely to have made a house of such openness.

A big supper was ordered. Caterers came, whom I knew. Some woman famous for a chocolate pie. And there was Lacomb with his hands behind his back looking sneeringly at the black bartender in his suit. Lacomb would make friends with him, however. Lacomb made friends with everybody, at least everybody who could understand him.

At one point, he slid up to me so silently I was startled. “You want something, boss?”

“No,” I said, throwing him a little smile. “Don’t get drunk too soon.”

“Boss, you’re no fun anymore at all,” he said, slipping away with his own sly smile.

We gathered around the long narrow oval table.

Rosalind, Glenn, as well as Katrinka, her two daughters and her husband, and many of our cousins ate lustily, carrying their plates about, because there were far too many for the chairs. My people mingled easily with the gregarious Wolfstan family.

Karl had begged these relatives not to visit him during his final months. Even when we married, he knew he was sick, and he had wanted it to be private. And now with his
mother already gone back again to England, and everything settled and done, these Wolfstans—all of them rather shiny-faced agreeable people of clear German descent—looked a bit surprised at things—a dazed kind of surprise as when you are awakened out of deep sleep, but nevertheless they were at home among all the fine furniture Karl had bought for me—the cabriole-legged chairs, the pearl-inlay tables, the desks and chests of intarsia made up of tortoiseshell and brass, and the timeworn genuine Aubusson rugs, so thin beneath our feet that they seemed sometimes made of paper.

It was all Wolfstan style, this luxury.

They all had money. They had always owned houses on St. Charles Avenue. They were descended from the rich Germans who migrated to New Orleans before the Civil War, and made big money in cigar factories and in beer, long before all the ragged Potato Famine crew hit our shores, the starving Irish and Germans who were my ancestors. These Wolfstan people had blocks of property in key places, and owned the leases on old stores and businesses.

My cousin Sarah sat staring at her plate. She was the youngest grandchild of Cousin Sally, in whose arms my mother had died. I had no mental picture of it. Sarah hadn’t even been born then. Other Becker cousins, and those of mine with Irish names, looked a bit baffled among this careful splendor.

The house seemed poignantly beautiful to me all during the afternoon. I kept turning to catch the reflection of the entire crowd of us in the big mirror along the dining room wall, the mirror which is in a direct line with the front door, and does embrace for all practical purposes the entire party.

The mirror was old; my Mother had loved that mirror.
I couldn’t stop thinking about her, and it occurred to me several times that she had been the first person I’d really hurt and failed, not Lily. I’d made an error in calculation, a terrible error, the error of a lifetime.

I sat deep in thought, sometimes whispering absolute nonsense to people just to make them stop talking to me.

I couldn’t get it out of my mind, my Mother leaving this house on that last afternoon—taken by my Father against her will to stay with her Irish godmother and cousin. She hadn’t wanted to be shamed. She’d been drunk for weeks and weeks, and we couldn’t stay with her then because Katrinka, a child of eight, had suffered a burst appendix and was, technically, though I never knew it then, dying at Mercy Hospital.

Katrinka didn’t die of course. I wonder sometimes if the fact that she missed our Mother’s death completely—that it happened during such a long illness when she was locked away—I wondered if that alone didn’t make her warped, and eternally doubtful of everything. But I couldn’t think about Katrinka. Katrinka’s insecurities I wore around always like a heavy necklace. I knew what she was whispering about in the corners of the rooms. I didn’t care.

I thought of my Mother, being taken down the side path out to Third Street by my Father, and begging him not to make her go to these cousins. She hadn’t wanted her beloved Cousin Sally to see her as she was. And I had not even gone to tell her goodbye, to kiss her, to say anything to her! I’d been fourteen. I don’t even know why I was walking up the path at that moment when he took her out. I couldn’t get it straight, and the horror of it kept thudding in on me, that she’d died with Sally and Patsy and Charlie, her cousins, and though she loved them and
they loved her, there had not been one single one of us with her!

I felt I was going to stop breathing.

People meandered about the sprawling cottage. They went out the open windows onto the porches. It seemed a lively and lovely thing, this delayed coming together for my sake, because that is what I supposed it was. I rather enjoyed the glow of the polished highboys and velvet high-back chairs which Karl had strewn everywhere.

Karl had bequeathed a highly polished surface to the old parquet, with coats and coats of lacquer, beneath the overwhelming Baccarat chandeliers that my Father had refused to sell in the old days, even when “we had nothing.”

Karl’s silver had been brought out for the meal. Our silver, I suppose I should say, as I was his wife, and he had bought this pattern for me. It is called Love Disarmed and was first made by Reed & Barton sometime very early in the century. An old company. An old pattern. Even the new pieces were finely etched because it had fallen from grace with brides somewhere along the line. You could buy it new or old. Karl had trunks of it that he had collected.

It is one of the few silver patterns that features an entire figure, in this instance a beautiful nude woman on each item, no matter how small or how large, of sterling.

I loved it. We owned more of it than we had ever used, because Karl collected it. I wanted to say something to them—about perhaps each taking a piece in remembrance of Karl, but I didn’t.

I ate and drank only because when you do this, you have to talk less. Yet to take food at all seemed a monstrous betrayal.

I’d felt that keenly after my daughter Lily’s death. After we’d buried her in Oakland, in St. Mary’s Cemetery,
a faraway and unimportant place, way away from here, we’d gone with my Mother- and Father-in-Law, Lev’s parents, to eat and drink and I had almost choked on the food. I remembered distinctly, the wind had begun to blow, and trees to thrash, and I couldn’t stop thinking of Lily in her coffin.

Lev seemed the strong one then, brave and beautiful with his long flowing hair, the wildman-poet-professor. He had told me to eat and be quiet, and he carried the conversation along with the bereaved grandparents, and included as well my somber Father, who said little or nothing.

Katrinka had loved Lily. I remembered that! How could I forget? It seemed wretched to have forgotten! And how Lily had loved her beautiful blond Aunt Katrinka.

Katrinka had suffered Lily’s death as bad as anyone could. Faye had been frightened by the whole affair of Lily’s sickness and death, generous sweet Faye. But Katrinka had been there, there with a knowing heart, in the hospital room, in the corridors, always ready to come. Those were the California years, encapsulated by the fact that we had all eventually returned.

We’d all left our California life in the cities by the Bay, and drifted either home or away. Faye was gone now, no one knew where, and perhaps forever.

Even Lev had left California finally, long after he had married Chelsea, his pretty girlfriend and my close friend. I think they’d had the first child before he went to teach in a college in New England.

I felt a sudden happiness thinking of Lev, that he had three children, boys, that even though Chelsea called frequently and complained that he was unbearable, he really wasn’t, and even though he called sometimes and cried, and said we should have stuck it out, I felt no regret, and
I knew he really didn’t. I liked to look at the pictures of his three sons, and I liked to read Lev’s books—slim, elegant volumes of poetry, which were published about every two to three years, to accolades.

Lev. My Lev was the boy I’d met in San Francisco and married in the courthouse, the rebellious student and wine drinker, and the singer of madly improvised songs and the dancer under the moon. He had only started to teach university classes when Lily got sick, and the truth was he never got over Lily’s death. Never, never was he ever the same, and what he had sought with Chelsea was consolation, and with me a sisterly approval of the warmth from Chelsea and the sexuality that he desperately needed.

But why, why think of all this? Is this so different from the tragedies of any other life? Is death more rampant here than in any other sprawling family?

Lev was a full professor, tenured, happy. Lev would have come had I asked him to. Why, last night when I’d been walking on the Avenue in the rain, stupid and crazy, I might have called Lev. I hadn’t told Lev that Karl died. I hadn’t talked to Lev in months, though a letter from Lev was lying on a desk now in the living room unopened.

I couldn’t shake all this. It was like tremors. The deeper I fell into these thoughts, of Mother, of Lily, of my lost spouse Lev—the more I began to recall
his
music again, the desperate violin, and I knew I was remembering all these utterly unbearable things compulsively, like one forced to look on the wounds of one’s own murder victims. This was a trance.

But maybe such trances would always follow death now, as death piled upon death. In grieving for anyone, I grieved for all. And again, I thought, how foolish to think that Lily had been my first awful crime—letting her die.
Why, it was perfectly clear that years before Lily ever died, I’d forsaken my Mother!

Five o’clock came. It was shadowy outside. The Avenue became noisier. All the big rooms had about them a more festive look, and people had drunk plenty enough wine that they were talking freely, as people do in New Orleans after a death, as if it would be an insult to the dead to go around whispering like they do in California.

California. Lily out there on a hill, why? There was no one to visit that grave. Dear God, Lily! But every time I thought of bringing Lily’s body home, I had this horrible notion—that when the coffin arrived here in New Orleans, I would have to look in it. Lily, dead before her sixth birthday, had been buried for over twenty years. I couldn’t imagine such a sight. An embalmed child covered in green mold?

I shuddered. I thought I was going to scream.

Grady Dubosson had arrived, my friend and lawyer, trusted advisor to Karl and Karl’s mother. Miss Hardy was here, had been here for the longest time, and so were several other women from the Preservation Guild, all of them elegant and refined creatures.

Connie Wolfstan said, “We want something, just some little thing, you know, that you wouldn’t mind us keeping, to remember him by … I don’t know … just the four of us.”

I was so relieved. “The silver,” I said. “There’s so much of it, and he loved it. You know, he corresponded with silver dealers all over the country to buy up Love Disarmed. Look, see that, that little fork, that’s actually what you call a strawberry fork.”

“You really wouldn’t mind if we each took—”

“Oh, God, I was afraid, afraid that you would be afraid
because of his illness. There is so much of it. There’s enough for all of you.”

A loud noise disturbed us. Someone had fallen over. I knew this cousin was one of those few that was kin to both the Beckers of my family and the Wolfstans of Karl’s, but I couldn’t remember his name.

He was drunk, poor guy, and I could see his wife was furious. They helped him up. There were long wet stains on his gray trousers.

I wanted to speak, to form words about the silver. I heard Katrinka say, “What are they trying to take?” and it came out of my mouth to Althea as she passed, “His silver, you know all that silverware, let his family all take a piece of it.”

I felt my face color as Katrinka glared at me. She said that it was community property, the silver.

For the first time I realized that sooner or later all these people would be gone and I’d be alone here and maybe
he
wouldn’t come back, and I saw desperately how his music had comforted me, how it had guided me through memory after memory, and now I was bedeviled, and shaking my head, and obviously looking odd.

What was I wearing? I looked down. A long full silk skirt and a frilly blouse, and a velvet vest that disguised my weight—Triana’s uniform, they called it.

There was quite a commotion in the pantry. The silver had been brought out. Katrinka was saying something biting and terrible to poor sad Rosalind, and Rosalind, with her dark eyebrows pointing up and her glasses sliding down her nose, looked lost and in need of help.