Violin (16 page)

“The violinist, do you remember him, the night that Karl died. There was a man out there on St. Charles Avenue and—”

The others crowded under the small chandelier in the hall. Katrinka and Grady were in a furious discussion. Martin was being stern with Katrinka, and Katrinka was almost screaming.

“Oh, him,” said Roz, “that guy with the violin.” Rosalind laughed. “Yeah, I remember him. He was playing Tchaikovsky. Of course he was really, you know, doing it up, as if anybody had to improvise on Tchaikovsky, but he was—” She cocked her head. “He was playing Tchaikovsky.”

I moved further with Rosalind across the dining room. She was talking … and I couldn’t understand. In fact, it was so strange I thought she was making it up, and then I remembered—. But it was a wholly different kind of recollection, with none of the sting and heat of these other memories; it was pale and long ago released and generally let to slide away, or deliberately veiled under dust. I didn’t know. But now I didn’t fight it.

“That picnic, out there in San Francisco,” she said, “and you know all you beatniks and hippies were there, and I was scared to death we were all gonna get busted and dumped in San Francisco Bay, and you took that violin and just played and played and Lev danced! It was like the Devil came into you, that time and the other time when you were little and you got a hold of that little three-quarter violin up at Loyola, remember that? And you just played and played and played but—”

“Yes, but I could never make it happen again. I tried and tried, after both those times …”

Rosalind shrugged and hugged me close.

I turned and saw us in the mirror—not the hungry, thin, bitter girls fighting over the Rosary. I saw us now. Rubensesque women. Rosalind kissed my cheek. I saw us in the mirror, the two sisters, she with her beautiful white curly hair bouffant and natural around her face, her large soft body in flowing black silk, and I with my bangs and straight hair and ruffled blouse and thick hateful arms, but it didn’t matter, the flaws of our bodies, I just saw us, and I wanted so to be here on this spot with her, in relief, to feel the glorious flow of relief, but I couldn’t.

I just couldn’t.

“Do you think Mother wants us in this house?” I stared to cry.

“Oh, for the love of God,” said Rosalind. “Who gives a damn! You go to bed. You should have never stopped drinking. I’m going to drink a six-pack of Dixie beer. You want us to stay upstairs?”

“No.” She knew the answer to that.

In the doorway of the bedroom I turned and looked at her.

“What is it?”

My face must have frightened her.

“The violinist, you do remember him, the one playing out there on the corner when Karl … I mean when everybody …”

“I told you. Yes. Of course.” She said again that it was definitely Tchaikovsky, and I could tell by the way that she lifted her head that she was very proud she could identify the music, and of course she was right, or so I thought. She looked so dreamy and sympathetic and sweet and gentle to me, as if nothing of meanness had survived in her at all, and here we were—and we were not old.

I felt no older today than any other day. I didn’t know
what it meant to feel old. Old. Fears go. Meanness goes. If you pray, if you are blessed, if you try!

“He kept coming here, that guy with the violin,” Rosalind said, “while you were in the hospital. I saw him this evening out there, just watching. Maybe he doesn’t like playing for crowds,” she said. “He’s damned good, if you ask me! I mean the guy’s as good as any violinist I ever heard in person or on any record.”

“Yes,” I said. “That he is, isn’t he?”

I waited until the door was shut to cry again.

I like to cry alone. It felt so marvelously good, to cry and cry, totally removed from any hint of censure! No one to tell you yes or no, no one to beg for forgiveness, no one to intervene.

Cry.

I lay down on the bed and cried, and listened to them out there, and felt so tired suddenly, as if I had carried all those coffins to the grave myself … Think of it, scaring Lily like that, coming into the hospital room and bursting into tears and letting Lily see it, and Lily saying, “Mommie, you’re scaring me!” And at that moment, when I’d come back late from the bar, I’d been drunk, hadn’t I? I’d spent those years drunk, but never too drunk, never so that I couldn’t … and then that awful, awful moment of seeing her small white face, her hair all gone, her head cancer-bald yet lovely like the bud of a flower, and my stupid, stupid, ill-timed bursting into tears. Cruel, cruel. Dear God.

Where was that brilliant blue sea with its ghostly foam?

When I realized he’d been playing, it must have been after a long while.

The house had gone quiet.

He must have started low, and it did have the pure Tchaikovskian sweetness this time, the civilized eloquence, one might say, rather than the raw horror of the
Gaelic fiddlers that had so enthralled me last night. I sank deep into the music, as it came nearer and grew more distinct.

“Yes, play for me,” I whispered.

I dreamed.

I dreamed of Lev and Chelsea, of us fighting in the café and Lev saying, “So many lies, lies,” and realizing what he meant, that he and Chelsea—and she so distraught, so basically kind, and naturally loving him, and wanting him, and my friend, and then the most terrible things came tumbling back, memories of Father’s angry speeches and Mother crying in this house, crying in this very house, for us, and I not coming to her, but all this was wedded with sleep. The violin sang and sang and pressed for the pain, pressed as only Tchaikovsky might, deep into agony, into its ruby red sweetness and vividness.

Drive me mad, not a chance, but why do you want me to suffer, why do you want me to remember these things, why do you play so beautifully when I remember?

Here comes the sea.

The pain was wedded with drowsiness; Mother’s poem of night from the old book: “The flowers nod, the shadows creep, a star comes over the hill.”

The pain was wedded to sleep.

The pain was wedded to his exquisite music.

8

M
ISS
H
ARDY
was in the parlor. Althea was just setting down the coffee when I came into the room.

“Ordinarily I wouldn’t think of disturbing you at this time,” Miss Hardy said, half rising as I bent to kiss her cheek. She wore a peach-colored dress, very becoming to her, her silver hair combed back into a perfect frame of disciplined yet yielding curls.

“But you see,” she said, “he’s requested it. He asked us specifically if we would invite you because he respects you so, your taste for music and your kindness to him.”

“Miss Hardy, I’m sleepy and dull-witted. Bear with me. Who is this we’re talking about?”

“Your violinist friend. I had no idea you even knew the man. As I said, to ask you to come out at a time like this is not something I would do, but he said you would want to come.”

“And where is that, I mean, I’m not clear, forgive me.”

“The Chapel around the block, tonight. For the little concert.”

“Ah.” I sat back.

The Chapel.

With a shock I saw all the familiar objects of the Chapel, as if a sudden discharge of memory had let loose details irretrievable until now—the Chapel. I saw it, not as it was now after the Vatican Council II and a radical remodeling, but as it had been in the old days, when we went there to Mass together. When Mother took us, Roz and me, hand in hand.

I must have looked perplexed. I heard the singing in Latin.

“Triana, if this upsets you, I’ll simply tell him that it’s too soon for you to be going out.”

“He’s going to play in the Chapel?” I asked. “Tonight.” I nodded with her in confirmation. “A little concert? A recital, sort of.”

“Yes, for the benefit of the building. You know how bad the building is. It needs paint, it needs a new roof. You know all that. It was all rather astonishing. He simply walked into the Preservation Guild office and said he was willing to do it. Have a concert with all proceeds for the building. We’d never heard of him. But how he plays! Only a Russian could play like that. Of course he says he is an émigré. He never lived in Russia as it is now, which is quite obvious, he’s quite the European, really, but only a Russian could play like that.”

“What is his name?”

She was surprised. “I thought you knew him,” she said, softening her voice, knitting her brows with concern. “Excuse me, Triana. He told us that you knew him.”

“I do, I know him very well. I think it’s wonderful that he’ll play at the Chapel. But I don’t know his name.”

“Stefan Stefanovsky,” she said carefully. “I memorized it, I wrote it down, went over the spelling with him.
Russian names.” She repeated it, said it in a simple unadorned way, with the accent on the first syllable of Stefan. The man had an undeniable charm, with or without the violin. Very distinctive dark eyebrows, very straight across, eccentric hair, at least in these days, for a classical musician.

I smiled. “It is all changed now. The longhairs are the rock stars, not the longhairs anymore, how odd. And you know the strange thing is when I look back on all the concerts I’ve ever attended—even the very first—it was Isaac Stern, you know—I don’t remember longhairs having any long hair.”

I was worrying her.

“I’m delighted,” I said gathering my thoughts. “So you thought him handsome?”

“Oh, everyone swooned when he walked in the door! Such a dramatic demeanor. And then the accent, and when he just raised the violin and bow and began to play. I think he stopped traffic outside.”

I laughed.

“It was something very different he played for us,” she said, “from what he played—” Politely she stopped, and lowered her eyes.

“…   on the night you found me here, with Karl,” I said.

“Yes.”

“That was beautiful music.”

“Yes, I suppose it was, and I really didn’t hear it, so to speak.”

“Understandable.”

She was suddenly confused, doubtful about the propriety or wisdom of this.

“After he played, he spoke very highly of you, said you truly were the rare person who understood his music.
And this to a room of fainting women of all ages, including half the Junior League.”

I laughed. It wasn’t merely to put her at ease. It was the image of the women, young and old, being swept off their feet by this phantom.

My, but this was a stunning shock, this turn of events. This invitation.

“What time tonight, Miss Hardy?” I asked. “What time will he play? I don’t intend to miss this.”

She stared at me for a moment in lingering discomfort and then with great relief plunged into the details.

I left for the concert at five minutes before the time.

I
T WAS
dark, of course, it being the season for darkness at eight o’clock, yet there was no rain tonight and only a friendly, gentle air, almost warm.

I walked out my own gate, turned left at the corner of Third and walked slowly all the way back to Prytania Street on the old, broken brick sidewalks, treasuring every bump, every hole, every hazard. My heart was thumping. In fact, I was so full of anticipation I could scarcely stand it. The last few hours had dragged and I had thought only of him.

I’d even dressed for him! How stupid. Of course for me that only meant a better white ruffled blouse with more and finer lace, and a better black silk skirt to the ankles and a light sleeveless tunic of black velvet. The better Triana Uniform. That’s all it meant. And my hair loose and clean. That’s all.

A dim street lamp burned ahead of me as I approached the end of the block, making the darkness all the more oppressive around me, and for the first time I realized there was no oak any longer on the corner of Third and Prytania!

It must have been years since I had walked back this block, stood here. There had been an oak, surely, because I could remember the streetlamp shining through it, down on the high black iron fence and on the grass. Strong, hefty, black oak branches, twisted and not so very thick, not so heavy as to fall down.

Who has done this to you? I spoke to the earth, the broken place in the bricks. I saw it now, where the oak had been, but all roots were gone. It was only earth, the inevitable earth. Who took this tree that might have lived for centuries?