Violin (5 page)

I don’t even think they hear it. This is my voice in my head and his violin is his voice out there, and together we keep the secret, that this grave is my vision, and that I can’t really be with you now, my dead ones. The living need me.

The living need me now, need me so, as they always need the bereaved after the death, so needy of those who have nursed the most, and sat the longest in the stillness, so needy with questions and suggestions and assertions and declarations, and papers to be signed. They need me
to look up at the strangest smiles and find some way to receive with grace the most awkward sympathies.

But I’ll come in time. I’ll come. And when I do, the grave will hold us all. And the grass will grow above all of us.

Love and love and love I give you—let the earth grow wet. Let my living limbs sink down. Give me skulls like stones to press against my lips, give me bones to hold in my fingers, and if the hair is gone—like fine spun silk, it does not matter. Long hair I have to shroud all of us, isn’t that so. Look at it, this long hair. Let me cover us all.

Death is not death as I once thought, when fear was trampled underfoot. Broken hearts do best forever beating upon the wintry windowpane.

Hold me, hold me, hold me here. Let me never never tarry in another place.

Forget the fancy lace, the deftly painted walls, the gleaming inlay of the open desk. The china that they take with such care now, piece by piece, to place now all over the table, cups and saucers ornamented with blue lace and gold. Karl’s things. Turn around. Don’t feel these living arms.

The only thing important about coffee being poured from a silver spout is the way that the early light shines in it; the way that the deep brown of the coffee becomes amber and gold and yellow, and twists and turns like a dancer as it fills the cup, then stops, like a spirit snatched back into the pot.

Go back to where the garden breaks to ruin. You will find us all together. You will find us there.

From memory, a perfect picture: twilight: the Garden District Chapel; Our Mother of Perpetual Help; our little church within an old mansion. You have only to walk a block from my front gate to reach it. It is on Prytania
Street. The tall windows are full of pink light. There are low guttering candles in red glass before a saint with a smiling face whom we love and revere as “The Little Flower.” The darkness is like dust in this place. You can still move through it.

Mother and my sister Rosalind and I kneel at the cold marble Altar Rail. We lay down our bouquets—little flowers picked here and there from walls, through iron fences like our own—the wild bridal wreath, the pretty blue plumbago, the little gold and brown lantana. Never the gardeners’ blooms. Only the loose tangle no one might miss from a viny gate. These are our bouquets, and we have nothing to bind them with, save our hands. We lay our bouquets on the Altar Rail, and when we make the Sign of the Cross and say our prayers, I get a doubt.

“Are you sure that the Blessed Mother and Jesus will get these flowers?”

Beneath the altar before us, the carved wooden figures of the Last Supper are set in their deep glass-covered niche, and above on the ornate cloth stand the regular bouquets of the Chapel which have such size, authority, giant spear-like flowers with snow-white blooms. These are powerful flowers! Flowers as powerful as tall wax candles.

“Oh, yes,” says Mother. “When we leave, the Brother will come and he’ll take our little flowers and he’ll put them in a vase and he’ll put them before the Baby Jesus over there or the Blessed Mother.”

The Baby Jesus stands to the far right, dark beside the window now. But I can still see the world He holds in his hands, and the gold that glints on His crown, and I know that His fingers are raised in blessing, and that he is the Infant Jesus of Prague in that statue, with His fancy flaring pink cape and lovely blooming cheeks.

But about the flowers, I don’t think it’s so. The flowers are too humble. Who will care about such flowers left like that in the gloaming, the chapel now full of shadows that I can feel because my Mother is a little afraid, clutching the hands of her two little girls, Rosalind and Triana, come, as we make our genuflection and then turn to go out. We are wearing Mary Janes that click on a dark linoleum floor. The holy water is warm in the font. The night breathes with light, but not enough anymore to come inside among the pews.

I worry for the flowers.

Well, I worry not anymore for such things.

I cherish only the memory, that we were there, because if I can see and feel it and hear this violin that sings this song, then I am there again, and as I said—Mother, we are together.

I worry not for all the rest. Would she, my child, have lived had I moved Heaven and Earth to take her to a faraway clinic? Would he, my Father, have not died if the oxygen had been adjusted just so? Was she afraid, my Mother, when she said, “I’m dying” to the cousins who cared for her? Did she want one of us? Good God! Stop it!

Not for the living, not for the dead, not for the flowers of fifty years ago, I won’t relive the accusations!

Saints in the flicker of the chapel do not answer. The icon of Our Mother of Perpetual Help only gleams in solemn shadow. The Infant Jesus of Prague holds court with a jeweled crown and eyes with no less luster.

But you, my dead, my flesh, my treasures, those whom I have completely and totally loved, all of you with me in the grave now—without eyes, or flesh to warm me—you are with me!

All partings were illusions. Everything is perfect.

“The music stopped.”

“Thank God.”

“Do you really think so?” That was Rosalind’s soft deep voice, my outspoken sister. “The guy was terrific. That wasn’t just music.”

“He is very good, I’ll give him that much.” This was Glenn, her husband and my beloved brother-in-law.

“He was here when I came.” Miss Hardy speaking. “In fact, if he hadn’t come playing his violin, I would never have found her. Can you see him out there?”

My sister Katrinka:

“I think she should leave now for the hospital for an entire battery of tests; we have to make absolutely sure that she did not contract—”

“Hush, I won’t have you talk this way!” Thank you, perfect stranger.

“Triana, this is Miss Hardy, dear, can you look at me? Forgive me, dear, for quarreling so with your sisters. Forgive me, dear. But I want you to drink this now. It’s just a cup of chocolate. Remember when you came that afternoon, and we drank chocolate and you said you loved it, and there’s lots of cream and I’d like you to have this …”

I looked up. How fresh and pretty the living room was in the early sun, and how the china shone on the table. Round tables. I have always loved round tables. All the music disks and cookie wrappers and cans had been taken away. The white plaster flowers on the ceiling made their proper wreath, no longer degraded by detritus beneath them.

I got up and went to the window, and lifted back the heavy yellowing curtain. The whole world was outside, right up to the sky itself, and the leaves scuttling on the dry porch right in front of me.

The morning race for downtown had begun. There came the clatter of trucks. I saw the leaves on the oak
above shiver with the thunder of so many wheels. I felt the house itself tremble. But it had trembled so for a hundred years or more, and would not fall down. People knew that now. They didn’t come to tear down the splendid houses with the white columns now. They didn’t vomit out lies about these houses being impossible to keep, or heat. They fought to save them.

Someone shook me. It was my sister Katrinka. She looked so distraught, her narrow face bitter with anger; anger was so much her friend. Anger just jumped up and down in her, waiting any second to get out, and it was out now, and she could barely speak to me she was so furious.

“I want you to go upstairs.”

“For what?” I said coldly. I haven’t been afraid of you for years and years, I thought. Not since Faye left, I suppose. Faye was the smallest of us all. Faye was the one whom we all loved.

“I want you to wash again, wash all over, and then go to the hospital.”

“You’re a fool,” I said. “You always were. I don’t have to.”

I looked at Miss Hardy.

At some time or other during this long and cacophonous night, she’d gone home and changed into one of her pretty shirtwaist dresses, and her hair was freshly combed. Her smile was full of comfort.

“They took him away?” I asked Miss Hardy.

“His book, his book on St. Sebastian, I put all of it away, except the last pages. They were on the table near the bed. They—”

My sweet brother-in-law Glenn spoke: “I put them downstairs; they’re safe, with the rest.”

That’s right, I had showed Glenn where Karl’s work was stashed, just in case … 
burn everything in the room.

Behind me, people quarreled. I could hear Rosalind trying to quiet the younger ever anxious Katrinka’s long clench-teeth diatribes. Someday Katrinka will break her teeth in mid-speech.

“She’s crazy!” said Katrinka. “And she’s probably got the virus!”

“No, now stop it, Trink, please, I’m begging you now.” Rosalind didn’t know anymore how to be unkind. Whatever she had known in childhood had long ago been weeded out, and replaced.

I turned around, looked at Rosalind. She sat slumped at the table, large and sleepy looking and with her dark eyebrows raised. She made a little gesture and said in her frank deep voice:

“They’ll cremate him.” She sighed. “It’s the law. Don’t worry. I made sure they didn’t cart out the room board by board.” She laughed, a smug, smart-alecky laugh, which was perfect. “You leave it to Katrinka, she’ll have the whole city block torn down.” She shook with her laughter.

Katrinka began to roar.

I smiled at Rosalind. I wondered if she was afraid about money. Karl had been so generous with money. No doubt everyone was thinking about money. Karl’s effortless doles.

There would be some quarrel about funeral arrangements. There always is, no matter what is done before, and Karl had done everything. Cremation. I could not think of this! In my grave, among those I love, are no undifferentiated ashes.

Rosalind would never say it but she
had
to be thinking of money. It was Karl who gave Rosalind and her husband, Glenn, the money to live, to run their small vintage
book and record shop which never actually made a dime, not so much as I know. Was she afraid the money would stop? I wanted to reassure her.

Miss Hardy raised her voice. Katrinka slammed the door. Katrinka is one of only two adults I know who actually slams doors when she is angry. The other was miles away, long gone out of my life, and dearly remembered for better things than such petty violence.

Rosalind, our eldest, the heaviest, very plump now with her hair all white yet beautifully curly as it had always been—she had the loveliest richest hair—just sat there still making that shrug, that smirk.

“You don’t have to rush to the hospital,” she said. “You know that.” Rosalind had been a nurse for too long, lugging oxygen tanks and cleaning up blood. “No rush at all,” she assured me with authority.

I know a better place than this, I said or thought. I had only to close my eyes and the room swam and the grave came and there was that painful wonder: Which is dream and which is real?

I laid my forehead on the windowpane, and it was cold, and his music … the music of my vagabond violinist … I called to it.
You’re there, aren’t you? Come on, I know you didn’t go away. Did you think I wasn’t listening
…? It came again, the violin. Florid yet low, anguished, yet full of naive celebration.

And behind me Rosalind began to hum in low tune, a phrase or so behind him … to hum along, to join her voice to his distant voice.

“You hear him now?” I said.

“Yeah,” she said with her characteristic shrug. “You’ve got some friend out there, like a nightingale. And the sun didn’t drive him off. Sure, I hear him.”

My hair was dripping water on the floor. Katrinka was
sobbing in the hallway and I could not make out the other two voices, except to know that they were women’s voices. “Just can’t go through this right now, I can’t go through this,” Katrinka said, “and she’s crazy. Can’t you see? I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.”

It seemed a fork in the road. I knew where the grave was and just how deep, and I could go there. Why didn’t I?

His music had moved into a slow but lofty melody, something merging with the morning itself, as though we were leaving the graveyard together. In a disquieting yet vivid flash I saw our little bouquets on the white marble Altar Rail of the Chapel as I looked back.

“Come on, Triana!” My mother looked so pretty, her hair in a beret, her voice so patient, her eyes so big. “Come on, Triana!”

You’re going to die separated from us, Mother. Beautiful and without a gray hair in your head. When the time comes I won’t even have the sense to kiss you goodbye the last time I see you. I’ll only be glad you’re going because you’re so drunk and sick and I’m so tired of taking care of Katrinka and Faye. Mother, you will die in a terrible, terrible way, a drunken woman, swallowing her tongue. And I will give birth to a little girl who looks like you, has your big round eyes and lovely temples and forehead, and she’ll die, Mother, die before she’s six years old, surrounded by machines during the few minutes, the very few minutes, Mother, when I tried as they say to catch some sleep. I caught her death, I—

Get thee behind me, all such torment. Rosalind and I run ahead; Mother walks slowly on the flags behind us, a smiling woman; she’s not afraid in the dusk now, the sky is too vibrant. These are our years. The war has not come to an end. Cars passing slowly on Prytania Street look like humpback crickets or beetles.

“I said, Stop it!” I talked to my own head. I put my hands on my wet hair. How dreadful to be in this room with all this noise, and dripping with water. Listen to Miss Hardy’s voice. She is taking command.

Outside, the sun fell down on the porches, on the cars streaking by, on the old peeling wooden streetcars as they crossed right in front of me, the uptown car clanging its bell, with all the drama of a San Francisco cable car.