Violin (9 page)

And then there was the chorus of the family, “Triana’s making horrible noises on her violin!” And the dour advice of my father that the lessons cost too much, especially for one so undisciplined, lazy and generally erratic by nature.

That ought to be easy to forget.

Hasn’t enough common tragedy thundered down the road since then, mother, child, first husband long lost, Karl dead, the toll of time, the deepening understanding—?

Yet look how vivid the long ago day, the pawnbroker’s face, and my last kiss to the violin—my violin—before it slid across the dirty glass countertop. Five dollars.

All nonsense. Cry for not being tall, not being slender and graceful, not being beautiful, not having a voice either with which to sing, or even enough determination to master the piano sufficiently for Christmas carols.

I had taken the five dollars and added fifty to it with Rosalind’s help and gone to California. School was out. My mother was dead. My father had found a new lady friend, a Protestant with whom to have an “occasional lunch,” who cooked huge meals for my neglected little sisters.

“You never took care of them!”

Stop it, I won’t think on those times, I won’t, or of little Faye and Katrinka on that afternoon when I went away, Katrinka scarcely interested, but Faye smiling so brightly and throwing her kisses … no, don’t. Can’t. Won’t.

Play your violin for me, all right, but I will now politely forget my own.

Just listen to him.

It’s as if he were arguing with me! The bastard! On and on went the song, conceived in sorrow and meant to be played in sorrow and meant to make sorrow sweet or legendary or both.

The world of now receded. I was fourteen. Isaac Stern played on the stage. The great concerto of Beethoven rose and fell beneath the chandeliers of the auditorium. How many other children sat there rapt? Oh, God, to be this! To be able to do this! …

It seemed remote that I had ever grown up and lived a life, that I’d ever fallen in love with my first husband, Lev, known Karl, that he’d ever lived or died, or that Lev and I had ever lost a little girl named Lily, that I had held
someone that small in my arms as she suffered, her head bald, her eyes closed—ah, no, there is a point surely where memory becomes dream.

There must be some medical legislation against it.

Nothing so terrible could have happened as that golden-haired child dying as a waif, or Karl crying out, Karl who never complained, or Mother on the path, begging not to be taken away that last day, and I, her self-centered fourteen-year-old daughter utterly unaware that I would never feel her warm arms again, could never kiss her, never say, Mother, whatever happened, I love you. I love you. I love you.

My father had sat straight up in the bed, rising against the morphine and saying, aghast: “Triana, I’m dying!”

Look how small Lily’s white coffin in the California grave. Look at it. Way out there where we smoked our grass, and drank our beer and read our poetry aloud, beats, hippies, changers of the world, parents of a child so touched with grace that strangers stopped—even when the cancer had her—to say how beautiful was her small round white face. I watched again over time and space, and those men put the little white coffin inside a redwood box down in the hole, but they didn’t nail shut the boards.

Lev’s father, a hearty gentle Texan, had picked up a handful of earth and dropped it into the grave. Lev’s mother had cried and cried. Then others had done the same, a custom I’d never known, and my own father solemn, looking on. What had he thought: Punishment for your sins, that you left your sisters, that you married out of your church, that you let your mother die unloved!

Or did he think more trivial things? Lily was not a grandchild he had cherished. Two thousand miles had separated them, and seldom had he seen her before the cancer took her long golden streams of hair and made her
little cheeks soft and puffy, but there was no potion known to man that could ever dull her gaze or her courage.

He doesn’t matter now, your father, whom he loved and did not love!

I turned over in the bed, grinding the pillow under me, marveling that even with my left ear buried in the down, I could still hear his violin.

Home, home, you are home, and they will all someday come home. What does that mean? It doesn’t have to mean. You just have to whisper it … or sing, sing a wordless song with his violin.

And so the rain came.

My humble thanks.

The rain came.

Just as I might have wished it, and it falls on the old boards of the porch and on the rotting tin roof above this bedroom; it splashes on the wide windowsills and trickles through the cracks.

Yet on and on he played, he with his satin hair and his satin violin, playing as if uncoiling into the atmosphere a ribbon of gold so fine that it will thin to mist once it’s been heard and known and loved, and bless the entire world with some tiny fraction of glimmering glory.

“How can you be so content,” I asked myself, “to lie right between these worlds? Life and death? Madness and sanity?”

His music spoke; the notes flowed low and deep and hungering before they soared. I closed my eyes.

He went into a ripping dance now, with zest and dissonance and utter seriousness. He played so full and fierce, I thought surely someone would come. It’s what people call the Devil’s kind of music.

But the rain fell and fell and no one stopped him. No one would.

Like a shock it came to me! I was home and safe and the rain surrounded this long octagonal room like a veil, but I wasn’t alone:

I have you, now.

I whispered aloud to him, though of course he wasn’t in the room.

I could have sworn that far away and near at hand, he laughed. He let me hear it. The music didn’t laugh. The music was bound to follow its hoarse, perfectly pitched, driving course as if to drive a band of meadow dancers weary mad. But he laughed.

I began to fall into sleep, not the deep black beginning-less sleep of hospital drugs, but true, deep, sweet sleep, and the music rose and tightened and then gave forth a monumental flood as if he had forgiven me.

It seemed the rain and this music would kill me. I would die quiet without a protest. But I only dreamed, sliding down down into a full-blown illusion as if it had been waiting for me.

5

I
T WAS
that sea again, that ocean clear and blue and frothing wild into the flopping prancing ghosts with every wave that hit the beach. It had the spell of the lucid dream. It said, Yes, you couldn’t be dreaming, you are not, you’re here! That’s what the lucid dream always says. You turn around and around it and you can’t wake up. It says, You cannot have imagined this.

But we had to leave now from the soothing breeze off the sea. The window was closed. The time has come.

I saw roses strewn across a gray carpet, roses with long stems and each tipped with a sealed vial of water to keep it fresh, roses with petals darkened and soft, and voices spoke in a foreign tongue, a tongue I ought to know but didn’t know, a language made up, it seemed, just for this dream. For surely I was dreaming. I had to be. But I was here, imprisoned in this, as if transported body and soul into it, and something in me sang, Don’t let it be a dream.

“That’s right!” said the beautiful dark-skinned Mariana.
She had short hair, and a white blouse that didn’t cover her shoulders, a swan’s neck, a purring voice.

She opened the doors of a vast place. I could not believe my eyes. I could not believe that solid things could be as lovely as the sea and sky, and this—this was a temple of polychrome marble.

It’s not a dream, I thought. You couldn’t dream this! You haven’t the visions in you to make such a dream. You’re here, Triana!

Look at the walls inlaid with a creamy deep-veined Carrara marble, panels framed in gold and the skirting of darker brown stone, no less polished, no less variegated, no less wondrous. Look at the square pilasters with their golden scrolled capitals.

And now as we come to the front of the building, this marble moves to green, in long bands along the floor, the floor itself an ever changing and intricate mosaic. Look. I see the ancient Greek key design. I see the patterns dear to Rome and Greece for which I don’t remember names, but I know them.

And now, turning, we stood before a staircase such as I have never seen anywhere. It is not merely the scale and the loftiness, but again, the color: behold, O Lord, the radiance of the rose Carrara marble.

But attend first these figures, these bronze faces standing at attention, bodies of deeply carefully carved wood, curving into lion’s legs and paws on their plinths of onyx.

Who built this place? For what purpose?

I’m caught suddenly by the glass doors opposite, there is so very much to see, I’m overcome, look, three great Classical Revival doors of beveled glass and semicircular fanlights, mullions black and spoked above, such portals for light, though the day or the night, whichever it is, is locked out beyond them.

The stairs await. Mariana says, Come. Lucrece is so kind. The balustrade is green marble, green as jade, and streaked like the sea, with balusters of a lighter shade, and every wall paneled in rose or cream marble that is framed in gold.

Look up to these smooth, rounded columns of pink marble, with their gilded capitals of double rich acanthus leaf, and high high above, see the broken arches of the cove, and between each a painted figure; see the paneled frame around the high stained-glass window.

Yes, it is day. This is the light of day streaming through the stained glass! It shines on the artfully painted nymphs in panels high above, dancing for us, dancing too in the glass itself. I close my eyes. I open them. I touch the marble. Real, real.

You are here. You can’t be awakened or taken from this place; it’s true, you see it!

We climb these stairs, we move up and up amid this palace of Italian stone and stand on a mezzanine floor and face three giant stained-glass windows, each with its own goddess or queen, in diaphanous robes, beneath an architrave, with cherubs in attendance and flowers drawn in every border, festooned, garlanded, held in outstretched hands. What symbols are these? I hear the words, but I see; that is what makes me tremble.

And at each end of this long dreamy space there is an oval chamber. Come look. Look at these murals here, look at these paintings that reach so high. Yes, richly narrative, and once again the bold classical figures dance, heads are wreathed in laurel, contours full and lush. It has the magic of the pre-Raphaelites.

Is there no end to combination here, to beauty woven into beauty? No end to cornices and friezes, moldings
of tongue and dart, of proud entablatures, to walls of boiserie? I must dream.

They spoke in the angel language, Mariana and the other, Lucrece, they spoke that soft singing tongue. And there, I pointed: the gleaming golden masks of those I loved. Medallions set high upon the wall: Mozart, Beethoven; others …, but what is this, a palace to every song you’ve ever heard and been unable to endure without tears? The marble shines in the sun. Such richness as this can’t be made by human hands. This is the temple of Heaven.

Come down the stairs, down, down, and now I know, with heart sinking, that this must be a dream.

Though this dream can’t be measured by the depths of my imagination, it is improbable to the point of impossible.

For we have left the temple of marble and music for a great Persian room of glazed blue tile, replete with Eastern ornament that rivals the beauty above in its sumptuousness. Oh, don’t let me wake. If this can come from my mind, then let it come.

That this Babylonian splendor should follow on that bold Baroque glory cannot be, but I so love it.

Atop these columns are the sacrificial ancient bulls with their angry faces, and look, the fountain, in the fountain Darius slays the leaping Lion. Yet this is no shrine, no dead memorial to things lost.

Behold, the walls are lined in shining étagères that hold the most elegant glassware. A café has been made within these decorative reliefs. Once again I see a floor of incomparable mosaic. Small graceful gilded chairs surround a multitude of little tables. People talk here, move, walk, breathe, as if this magnificence were something they have taken utterly for granted.