Violin (7 page)

I
T WAS
three days of sleepless hospital sleep, thin and filled with annoyances and horrors.

Had they cremated Karl yet? Were they absolutely sure he was dead before they put him in that horrible furnace? I couldn’t get this question out of my mind. Was my husband ashes?

Karl’s mother, Mrs. Wolfstan, back from England, cried and cried by my bed that she had left me with her dying son. Over and over I told her that I had loved taking care of him, and that she must not worry. There was a beauty in the birth of the new child, so close to Karl’s death.

We smiled at pictures of the new baby born in London. My arms ached with needles. A blur.

“You’ll never never have to worry about anything again,” Mrs. Wolfstan said.

I knew what she meant. I wanted to say thank you, that Karl had once explained it all, but I couldn’t. I started to
cry. I would worry again. I would worry about things that Karl’s generosity could not alter.

I had sisters to love and lose. Where was Faye?

I had made myself ill—a person drifting for two days with no more than gulps of soda and occasional slices of bread could create in herself an irregular heartbeat.

My brother-in-law Martin, Katrinka’s husband, came and said she was so concerned, but just couldn’t set foot in a hospital.

The tests were run.

In the night I woke sharply, thinking, This is a hospital room, and Lily is in the bed. I’m sleeping on the floor. I have to get up and see if my little girl is all right. And there came one of those broken-glass-shard memories so abrupt it drew all my blood—I had come in out of the rain drunk and looked at her lying there on the bed, five years old, bald, wasted, almost dead, and burst into tears, a flood of tears.

“Mommie, Mommie, why are you crying? Mommie, you’re scaring me!”

How could you have done that, Triana!

Some night, high on Percodan and Phenergan and other opiates to make me calm and make me sleep, and to make me stop asking stupid questions as to whether the house was locked and safe, and what had become of Karl’s study of St. Sebastian, I thought the curse of memory is this:
Everything is ever present.

They asked if they could call Lev, my first husband. Absolutely not, I said, don’t you dare bother Lev. I’ll call him. When I want to.

But drugged I couldn’t really go down.

The tests were run again. I walked and walked one morning in the hall until the nurse said, “You must go back to bed.”

“And why? What is wrong with me?”

“Not a damned thing,” she said, “if they’d stop shooting you full of tranquilizers. They have to taper them off.”

Rosalind put a small black disk player by my bed. She put the earphones on my head, and softly came the Mozart voices—the angels singing their foolishness from
Così Fan Tutte.
Sweet sopranos in unison.

I saw a movie in my mind’s eye.
Amadeus.
A vivid marvelous film. I saw this movie in which the evil composer Salieri, admirably played by F. Murray Abraham, had driven to death a laughing, childlike Mozart. There had been a moment when, in a gilded, velvet-lined theater box, Salieri looked down upon Mozart’s singers and the little cherubic and hysterical conductor himself, and the voice of F. Murray Abraham had said: “I heard the voice of the angels.”

Ah, yes, by God. Yes.

Mrs. Wolfstan didn’t want to leave. But all was done, the ashes in the Metairie Mausoleum, and every test on me had been negative for HIV, for anything really. I was the picture of health and had lost only five pounds. My sisters were with me.

“Yes, do go on, Mrs. Wolfstan, and you know I loved him. I loved him with all my heart, and it never had anything to do with what he gave me or anyone.”

Kisses, the smell of her perfume.

Yes, said Glenn. Now, stop going over it. Karl’s book was in the hands of the scholars Karl had designated in his will. Thank God, no need to call Lev, I thought. Let Lev be with the living.

Everything else was in Grady’s hands, and Althea, my beloved Althea, had gone right to work on the house, and so had Lacomb, polishing silver for “Miss Triana.” Althea
had my old bed on the first floor in the big northerly room all full of nice pillows the way I liked it.

No, the Prince of Wales marriage bed upstairs had not been burnt! No, indeed. Only the bedding. Mrs. Wolfstan had had the charming young man from Hurwitz Mintz come out with new pillows of watered silk and comforters of velvet and create a new band of scalloped moiré from the wooden canopy.

I’d go home to my old room. My old rice bed, with the four-posters carved with rice, the symbol of fertility. The first-floor bedroom was the only real bedroom the cottage had.

Whenever I was ready.

One morning I woke up. Rosalind slept nearby. She dozed in one of those big sloping, dipping wooden-handled chairs they give in hospital rooms for the vigilant family.

I knew four days had passed, and that last night I’d eaten a full meal and the needles felt like insects in my arm. I pulled back the tape, removed the needles, got out of bed, went to the bathroom, found my clothes in the locker and dressed completely before I woke Rosalind.

Rosalind woke dazed, and dusted the cigarette ashes off her black blouse.

“You’re HIV negative,” she said at once, as if she’d been just dying to tell me and couldn’t remember that everyone already had, staring wide eyed through her glasses. Dazed. She sat up. “Katrinka made them do everything but remove one of your fingers.”

“Come on,” I said. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

We hurried down the hall. It was empty. A nurse passed who didn’t know who we were or didn’t care.

“I’m hungry,” Rosalind said. “You hungry, for real food I mean?”

“I just wanna go home,” I said.

“Well, you’ll be very pleased.”

“Why, what do you mean?”

“Oh, you know the Wolfstan tribe; they bought you a stretch limousine and hired you a new man, Oscar, and this one can read and write, no offense to Lacomb—”

“Lacomb can write,” I said. This is something I’d said a thousand times because my man Lacomb can write, but when he talks it’s a deep black jazz musician’s dialect that almost no one can understand a word of.

“—and Althea’s back, and jabbering away and calling the hired cleaning lady names and telling Lacomb not to smoke in the house. Can anyone understand what she says? Do her kids understand what she says?”

“Never figured it out,” I said.

“But you should see that house,” said Roz. “You’ll love it. I tried to tell them.”

“Tell who?”

The elevator came; we went inside. Shock. Hospital elevators are always so immense, big enough to hold the living or the dead stretched out full length and two or three attendants. We stood alone in this vast metal compartment gliding down.

“Tell who what?”

Rosalind yawned. We moved rapidly to the first floor.

“Tell Karl’s family that we always go home after a death, that we always go back, that you wouldn’t want some fancy condominium downtown or a suite in the Windsor Court. Are the Wolfstans really so rich? Or just crazy? They’ve left you cash with me, cash with Althea, cash with Lacomb, cash with Oscar.…”

The elevator doors opened.

“You see that big black car? You own that damn thing. That’s Oscar out there, you know the type, old-guard
chauffeur; Lacomb raises his eyebrows behind Oscar’s back, and Althea has no intention of cooking for him.”

“She won’t have to,” I said with a little smile.

I did know the type, caramel skin not quite as light as Lacomb’s, a voice like honey, grizzled hair, and sparkling silver-framed glasses. Very old, too old perhaps to be driving, but so fine, and so traditional.

“You just get right in, Miss Triana,” said Oscar, “and you rest yourself and let me take you home.”

“Yes, sir.”

Rosalind relaxed as soon as the door was closed. “I’m hungry.” The privacy panel had gone up between us and Oscar in the front. I liked that. It would be nice to own a car. I couldn’t drive. Karl would not. He had always rented limousines, even for the smallest thing.

“Roz,” I asked as gently as I knew how. “Can’t he take you to eat after I’m settled in?”

“Gee, that would be nice. You sure you want to be alone there?”

“Like you said, we always go home afterwards, don’t we? We don’t run. I’d sleep in that upstairs bed, except that was never mine. That was our bed, Karl’s and mine, in sickness and in health. He wanted to be where the afternoon sun hit the windows. I’d curl right up in his bed. I want to be alone.”

“I figured it,” said Roz. “Katrinka’s silenced for a while. Grady Dubosson produced a paper that said everything Karl had ever given you was yours, and he had signed away any possible claim on your house the day he moved into it, and so that shut her up.”

“She thought Karl’s family would try to take the house?”

“Some crazy thing like that, but Grady showed her the quick claim or the quitclaim. Which is it?”

“I honestly don’t remember.”

“You know what she really wants, of course.”

I smiled. “Don’t worry, Rosalind. Don’t worry at all.”

She turned to me, hunched forward and took on her most grave manner, a hand both rough and soft as she held mine. The car moved up St. Charles Avenue.

“Look,” she said, “Don’t worry about the money Karl was giving us. His old lady laid a pile in my lap, and besides it’s time that Glenn and I tried to make a go of the shop, you know, to actually sell books and records????” She laughed her deep throaty laugh. “You know Glenn, but we are going to be on our own, if I have to go back to nursing, I don’t care what it takes.”

My mind drifted. It was irrelevant. It had only been one thousand a month to keep them afloat. She didn’t know. Nobody knew how much Karl had really left, except Mrs. Wolfstan perhaps, if she had changed all of it.

Over a hidden speaker there came a polite voice.

“Miss Triana, ma’am, you want to drive by the Metairie Cemetery, ma’am?”

“No, thank you, Oscar,” I said, seeing the small speaker above.

We have our grave, he and I, and Lily and Mother and Father.

“I’m just going to go home now, Roz. You are my darling, always. You call Glenn. Go get him, close up shop, and go to Commander’s Palace. Eat the funeral feast for me, will you? Do that for me. Do the eating for both of us.”

We had crossed Jackson Avenue. The oaks were fresh with spring green.

I kissed her goodbye and told Oscar to take her on, do whatever she said, stay with her. It was a nice car, a big gray velvet-lined limousine such as they used at funeral parlors.

“And so I got to ride in it after all,” I thought as they pulled away. “Even though I missed the funeral.”

How radiant my house looked. My house. Oh, poor poor Katrinka!

Althea’s arms are like black silk, and when we hug, I don’t think anything in the world can hurt anybody. No use trying to write here what she said, because she’s no more understandable than Lacomb and says perhaps one syllable of every multisyllable word that she speaks, but I knew that it was Welcome home, and worried, missed you so, and would have done anything in those last days, should have called me, washed them sheets, not afraid to wash them sheets, just you lie down, you let me make you some hot chocolate, you, my baby.

Lacomb skulked in the kitchen door, a short bald man who’d pass for white anyplace but in New Orleans, and then the voice, of course, was always the dead giveaway.

“How you doing, boss? You looking thin to me, boss. You better eat something. Althea, don’t you dare cook this woman any of your food. Boss, I’ll go out for it. What you want, boss? Boss, this house is full of flowers. I could sell them out front, make us a few dollars.”

I laughed: Althea read him some rapid form of the riot act with appropriate rises and falls of tone, and a few good gestures.

I went upstairs just to make sure the Prince of Wales four-poster bed was still there. It was, and with its new fine satin trimmings.

Karl’s mother had put a framed picture of him by the bed—not the skeleton they carted away, but the brown-eyed frank-hearted man who had sat with me on the steps of the uptown library, talking about music, talking about death, talking about getting married, the man who took me to Houston to see the opera and to New York, the man
who had every picture of St. Sebastian ever done by an Italian artist or in the Italian mode, the man who had made love with his hands and his lips and would brook no argument about it.

His desk was clean. All the papers gone. Don’t worry about this now. You have Glenn’s word, and Glenn and Roz have never failed anyone.

I went back down the stairs.

“You know, I could have helped you with that man,” Lacomb said. And Althea replied that he had said it enough, and I was back and go be quiet, or mop a floor, just shoo.

My room was clean and quiet, the bed turned down, the most tender and fragrant Casablanca lilies in the vase. How had they known? Or of course, Althea told them. Casablanca lilies.

I climbed into the bed, my bed.

As I have said, this bedroom is the master bedroom of the cottage and the only real bedroom, and it is on the first floor on the morning side of the house, an octagonal wing extending out into the deep dark grove of cherry laurels that hide the world away.

It is the only wing which the house has, which is otherwise a rectangle. And the wraparound galleries, our deep deep porches that we so love, come round and out along this bedroom, whereas on the other side of the house, they merely stop before the kitchen windows.

It’s nice to walk from your bed out a tall window onto a porch, back away from the street, and look through the ever glossy leaves of cherry laurels at a comforting commotion that doesn’t take note of you.

I wouldn’t give the Avenue for the Champs Elysées, for the Via Veneto, for the Yellow Brick Road, for the Highway to Heaven. But it’s nice sometimes to be way back here in
this easterly bedroom or to stand at the railing, too far from the street to be noticed, and peer out at the cheerful lights as they go by.

“Althea, honey, pull back my curtains so I can look out my window.”