Violin (4 page)

It was the most shamefully emotional music, so like Tchaikovsky just saying, Hell with the world, and letting the sweetest, saddest pain gush, in a way that my Mozart and my Beethoven never did.

I looked at the empty block, the far houses. A streetcar came slowly rocking towards the corner. By God, he was there! The violinist. He had crossed to the median and he stood on the car stop, but he didn’t get on the car. He was too far away for me to see his expression or know even that he could still see me, and now he turned and drifted off.

The night was the same. The stench was the same.

Miss Hardy stood in frightening motionlessness.

She looked so sad. She thought I was crazy. Or she just hated it, perhaps, to be the one to find me this way, the one to have to do something perhaps. I don’t know.

She went away, to find the phone, I thought. She didn’t have more words for me. She thought I was out of my mind and not worth another word of sense, and who could blame her?

At least it was true about the baby born in London. But I would have let his body lie there even if they’d all been home and here. It just would have been harder.

I turned around and hurried out of the parlor, and across the dining room. I went through the small breakfast room and ran up the steps. They are small, these steps—not a grand staircase as in a two-story antebellum house, but small delicate curved steps to go to the attic of a Greek Revival cottage.

I slammed his door and turned the brass key. He was always one for every door having its proper key, and for the first time ever I was glad of it.

Now she couldn’t get in. No one could.

The room was icy cold because the windows were wide open, and it was full of the smell, but I took deep gulping breath after breath and then crawled under the blankets and beside him for the last time, just one more time, just one more few minutes before they burn each and every finger and toe, his lips, his eyes. Just let me be with him.

Let me be with all of them.

From far off there came the clamor of her voice, but something else from a distance. It was the dim respectful pavane of a violin.
You out there, playing.

For you, Triana.

I snuggled up against Karl’s shoulder. He was so very dead, so much deader than yesterday. I shut my eyes and pulled the big gold comforter over us—he had such money, he loved such pretty things—in this our four-poster bed, our Prince of Wales-style bed which he had let me have, and now I dreamed for the last time of him: the grave dream.

The music was in it. It was so faint I couldn’t tell if I was only remembering it now from downstairs, but it was there. The music.

Karl. I laid my hand on his bony cheeks, all sweetness melted away.

One last time, let me wallow in death and this time with my new friend’s music coming to me as if the Devil had sent him up from Hell, this violinist, just for those of us who are so “half in love with easeful Death.”

Father, Mother, Lily, give me your bones. Give me the grave. Let’s take Karl down into it with us. What matter
to us, those of us who are dead, that he died of some virulent disease; we are all here in the moist earth together; we are dead together.

3

D
IG DEEP
, deep, my soul, to find the heart—the blood, the heat, the shrine and resting place. Dig deep, deep into the moist soil all the way to where they lie, those I love—she, Mother, with her dark hair loose and gone, her bones long since tumbled in the back of the vault, as other coffins came to rest in her spot, but in this dream I range them round me to hold as if she were here, Mother, in a dark red dress, with her dark hair and he—my lately dead father, wax probably still, buried without a tie because he had wanted none and I took it off him right there beside the coffin and unbuttoned his shirt, knowing how much he had hated ties, and his limbs were whole and neat with undertakers’ fluids or who knows, perhaps within they were alive already with all earth’s tender mouths, come to mourn, devour and then depart, and she, the smallest one, my beautiful one, cancer-bald yet lovely as an angel born hairless and perfect, but then let me give her back her long golden hair that fell out because of the drugs, her hair that was so fine to brush and brush, strawberry
blond, the prettiest little girl in all the world, flesh of my flesh—my daughter dead so many years now she’d be a woman if she had lived—

Dig deep … let me lie with you, let us lie here, all of us together.

Lie with us, with Karl and me. Karl’s a skeleton already!

Open lies this grave with all of us so tenderly and happily together. There is no word for union as gentle and total as this, our bodies, our corpses, our bones, so heavily snuggled together.

I know no separation from anyone. Not Mother, not Father, not Karl, not Lily, not all the living and all the dead as we are one—kin—in this damp and crumbling grave, this private secret place of our own, this deep chamber of earth where we may rot and mingle as the ants come, as the skin is covered over with mold.

That doesn’t matter.

Let us be together, no face forgotten, laughter of each one clear as it ran some twenty years ago or twice that long, laughter lilting as the music of a ghostly violin, an uncertain violin, a perfect violin, our laughter our music that blended minds and souls and bound us all forever.

Fall softly on this great soft secret snuggling grave, my warm and singing rain. What is this grave without rain? Our gentle southern rain.

Fall soft with kisses not to scatter this embrace in which we are living—I and they, the dead, as one. This crevice is our home. Let the drops be tears like song, more sound and lull than water, for I would have nothing here disturbed, but only lustrous sweet, among you all forever. Lily, snuggle against me now, and Mother let me burrow my face in your neck, but then we are one, and Karl has his arms round us all, and so does Father.

Flowers, come. There is no need to scatter broken stems or the crimson petals. No need to bring them big bouquets all tied with shining ribbon.

Here the earth will celebrate this grave; the earth will bring its wild thin grass, its nodding blooms of simple buttercups and daisies and poppies, colors blue and yellow and pink, the mellow shades of the rampant untended and eternal garden.

Let me snuggle against you, let me lie in your arms, let me assure you that no outward sign of death means anything to me as much as love and that we lived, you and I, once, all of us, alive, and I would not be anywhere now but with you here in this slow and damp and safe corruption.

That consciousness follows me down to this final embrace is a gift! I am intimate with the dead, and yet I live to know it and savor it.

Let trees bow down to hide this place, let trees form over my eyes a dense and thickening net, not green but black as if it snared the night, so shut away the last prying eye, or vantage point, as the grass grows high—so that we may be alone, just us, you and I, those whom I so adored and cannot live without.

Sink. Sink deep into the earth. Feel the earth enclose you. Let the clods seal our quietude. I want nothing else.

And now, bound up with you and safe, I can say, Hell to all that tries to come between us.

Come, the steps of strangers on the stairs.

Break the lock, yes, break the wood, and pull the tubes away, and pump the air with white smoke. Do not bruise my arms for I am not here, I am in the grave; and it is an angry rigid image of me that you intrude upon. Yes, you see the sheets are clean, I could have told you!

Wind him up, wind him thick, thick in the sheets, it does not matter one whit—you see, there is no blood,
there is no virulent thing that can get you from him—he died not from open cankers but he starved inside as those with AIDS are wont to do, so that it hurt him even to draw breath, and what do you have left now to fear?

I am not with you or with those who ask questions of time and place and blood and sanity and numbers to be called; I cannot answer to those who would Help. I am safe in the grave. I press my lips to my father’s skull. I reach for my mother’s bony hand. Let me hold you!

I can still hear the music. Oh, God, that this lone violinist would come through high grass and falling rain and the dense smoke of imagined night, envisioned darkness, to be with me still and play his mournful song, to give a voice to these words inside my head, as the earth grows ever more damp, and all things alive in it seem nothing but natural and kind and even a little beautiful.

All the blood in our dark sweet grave is gone, gone, gone, save mine, and in our bower of earth I bleed as simply as I sigh. If blood is wanted now for any reason under God, I have enough for all of us.

Fear won’t come here. Fear is gone. Jangle the keys and stack the cups. Bang the pots on the iron stove downstairs. Fill the night with sirens if you will. Let the water rush and rush and rush, and the tub fill. I see you not. I know you not.

No petty worry will come here, not to this grave where we lie. Fear is gone—like youth itself and all that old anguish when I watched them commit you to the ground—coffin after coffin, and Father’s of such fine wood, and Mother’s, I can’t remember, and Lily’s so small and white, and the old gentleman not wanting to charge us a nickel because she was just a little girl. No, all that worry is gone.

Worry stops your ears to the real music. Worry doesn’t let you fold your arms around the bones of those you love.

I am alive and with you now, truly only now realizing what it means that I will have you always with me!

Father, Mother, Karl, Lily, hold me!

Oh, it seems a sin to ask compassion of the dead, those who died in pain, those I couldn’t save, those for whom I didn’t have the right farewells or charms to drive off panic, or agony, of those who saw in the final careless, dissonant moments no tears perhaps or heard no pledge that I would mourn you forever.

I’m here now! With you! I know what it means to be dead. I let the mud cover me, I let my foot push deep into the spongy side of the grave.

This is a vision, my house. They matter not:

“That music, can you hear it?”

“I think she should get into the shower again now! I think she should be thoroughly disinfected!”

“Everything in that room should be burnt—”

“Oh, not that pretty four-poster bed, that’s foolishness, they don’t blow up the hospital room, do they, when somebody dies of this.”

“…   and his manuscript, don’t you touch it.”

No, don’t you dare
touch his manuscript!

“Shhh, not in front of—”

“She’s crazy, can’t you see it?”

“…   his mother is on the morning plane out of Gatwick.”

“…   absolutely stark raving mad.”

“Oh, please, both of you, if you love your sister, for God’s sake, be quiet. Miss Hardy, did you know her well?”

“Drink this, Triana.”

This is my vision; my house. I sit in my living room,
washed, scrubbed, as if I were the one to be buried, water dripping from my hair. Let the morning sun strike the mirrors. Toss the peacock’s brilliant feathers out of the silver urn and all over the floor. Don’t hang a ghastly veil over all things bright. Look deep to find the phantom in the glass.

This is my house. And this is my garden, and my roses crawl on these railings outside and we are in our grave too. We are here and we are there, and they are one.

We are in the grave and we are in the house, and all else is a failure of imagination.

In this soft rainy realm, where water sings as it falls from the darkening leaves, as the earth falls from the uneven edges above, I am the bride, the daughter, the mother, all those venerable titles forming for me the precious claims I lay upon myself.

I have you always! Never never to let you leave me, never never to go away.

All right. And so we made a mistake again. So we played our game. So we nudged at madness as if it were a thick door and then we slammed against it, like they slammed against Karl’s door, but the door of madness didn’t break, and that uncharted grave is the dream.

Well, I can hear his music through it.