Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 140, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 853 & 854, September/October 2012

Gymnopédie No. 1 by Susan Lanigan

The short fiction of Irish author Susan Lanigan has appeared in a variety of publications, including The Stinging Fly, Southword, The Sunday Tribune, the Irish Independent, and The Mayo News. She has been shortlisted twice for the Hennessy New Irish Writing Award and has won several other awards. Nature magazine’s science-fiction section recently acquired two of her stories and her work is featured in the science-fiction anthology Music For Another World.

Once again, the sunset. To be precise, the bit I am allowed to see: parallel gold diagonals streaking across the edge of my bunk and hitting the door, while the sink and privy stay in the dark and the mirror reflects nothing. I prefer the shadow. Since they moved me here five years ago, a kindly promotion from the cell that faced the prison’s north wall, I have seen too many sunsets, each one leading back to the same memory: my mother, long dead now, playing the piano.

She always became more girlish when she played; even then I noticed the shy hesitant smile when she made the odd mistake. I was five then, standing in the doorway of the study in a manner, Dearbhla told me afterwards, of a child self-consciously trying to be “cute.” I have no idea whether Dearbhla told me this out of malice — whether she already detected a resentment I could find no words to express — or because she was genuinely amused. Anyway, she was not there to witness it firsthand. By the time she was there on a regular basis, my mother and her orange kaftans and hair tied back with a grubby chenille ribbon had gone, gone forever.

My mother had few pieces in her repertoire but since I, at the age of five, was her primary listener, it should not have mattered too much. Yet I recall, in flashes, how her head would jerk upwards when my father pushed the creaking gate of our little garden open. The look of strained hope that crossed her face as she pushed the open window full out and started a few bars of the same piece. She started in medias res, I believe, to fool my father into thinking that she had been playing on for hours, unaware of his presence, in some sort of creative trance. I don’t believe he fell for it. He would come to the door and wink at me as she fingered the keys like alien objects, her eyes self-consciously shut.

It was always the same piece, Satie’s Gymnopédie No. 1, and she was never able to get all the way through without making a mistake. To me now, that seems absurd; unlike Dearbhla, I never had a great talent for music, but even I could pick my way through something of that level with no great difficulty. But my mother’s mistakes were always so small — a missed note when it unexpectedly changed to F minor on the second repetition, an E instead of a D in the bass — that somehow I could always hear the soft chords transcending the little awkwardnesses. I remember (this must have been earlier, I must have been even younger then) hearing the muffled ripple of bass and right-hand chords through the timber of the shivering piano as I curled myself into a ball at my mother’s feet. I nearly fell asleep with my cheek touching the cold bronze of the una corda pedal, spittle drooling down my cheek. The evening sun was coming through the two-paned window, shafts of it warming the wood, and warming my mother’s orange kaftan and warming the pale brown carpet where I lay my head. The soft pedal remained cold, unmoving. I don’t know how long I lay there until I was picked up and brought to bed. It seemed like infinity, but then again this happened long ago, before I learned to measure time, each begrudging second, hour, and year of it.

She never quite got it right. Each rendition was a diamond with a different flaw. I didn’t mind. Like an idiot savant, I craved routine. The routine of sun falling on my mother and the Gymnopédie, the routine of drizzle soaking the unmown grass in our front garden and the Gymnopédie, the dying elm shedding its last leaves as the Dutch beetle gnawed away at it from the inside — and the Gymnopédie—

“I’ll get it,” my mother would call out, “I will, you’ll see.” Then she would fling her head back and laugh, and the light would catch the fine hairs on her neck, her neck that was able to arch so elegantly and make my father catch his breath. Dearbhla says I don’t remember properly, after all I was very young and children idealise things a lot, don’t they? But then again, rare things are easy to recall by virtue of their rareness — and happy memories of my childhood are rare indeed.

I don’t know why Dearbhla still visits me, week in, week out. I should be the last person she wants to see. She is a joy to look at through the Perspex panel: those tapering, gloved fingers are still beautiful, their clasp of the thin, unlit cigarette irreproachably filmic. They will never touch a piano again. But even in late middle age she retains the proud cheeks and prominent eyes that captivated her audience as much as the pieces she performed for them. The last time she came, she brought a letter in a vellum envelope. Typed, of course; she can hardly write by hand now. I haven’t read it yet. I want to hold off as long as possible to make the anticipation all the keener. Prison has taught me discipline, the ability to ration pleasure. She arrives again tomorrow: I will have read it by then.

She has forgiven me much, Dearbhla, or perhaps she visits me out of need: I am the only surviving witness of the great tragedy of her life. As long as she blames me, she is safe. She can duck responsibility for her one failure.

Perhaps she is correct. Perhaps it is my fault.

When Dearbhla first came to the house, the laughter was different. It was laughter that sounded as if it were trapped in a bad sitcom and never let out. It banged crossly against the china my mother brought out for her visitor and rat-tatted irritably against the walls.

Dearbhla sat on the edge of one of our armchairs, her eyes eager, hands holding her cup in a way that spoke pure elegance. My mother, her face white and strained, her hair still pulled back in the grubby ribbon, had lost her look of girlishness. Her belly rounded out a little and her neck no longer arched the way it used to. When my father propelled me forward to Dearbhla and boomed at me to say hello, I was crushed in silk and perfume and Dearbhla’s slightly harsh voice breathed affectionately in my ear, “Well, there’s the darling.”

Her presence unsettled me. It was as if something alien, wondrous, and scary had come into our little cottage, enveloping it with an aura I had never experienced before. When I had lain under my mother’s feet back then, I had felt such security, but in Dearbhla’s arms I sensed danger and excitement. Her embrace was too cloying and yet delightfully warm, her fingers wrapped around me and dug in like claws. I looked over to my mother’s fingers, which were lacing and unlacing each other in tension. I saw how short and spatulate they were. Fingers that would get lost playing the difficult octave spans that Dearbhla was to show me, though I could not know that at the time.

It was my father who first suggested that Dearbhla play something. She smiled, but looked uncomfortable at the suggestion. “Oh David. Should I, really?” I could tell from the tautness of her body, still holding mine, that she longed for it, but did not dare say yes. Not openly. Not yet.

But my father, his voice queer and rough, said, “Yes. Play. Play!” His command was heavy with a weird ache.

“Well,” Dearbhla said. “If you insist.”

My mother’s eyes widened. The pupils in them had shrunk into tiny black dots and they were all iris. She stood up in a jerky, unlovely movement, walked over to Dearbhla’s chair, and pulled me out of her arms. I squeaked with alarm.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Dearbhla said good-humouredly, getting out of the chair.

I could tell my father was about to say something to my mother, but then Dearbhla sat down at the stool, her fingers running lightly over the keys without pressing them. I shuddered as they did so, imagining them clinging hard to me, even though her touch on the keyboard was delicate. I looked over at my father. His eyes were closed, lips parted open. Now it was he who looked as if he were in a trance.

“What shall I play?” Dearbhla asked gaily.

“Anything,” my father whispered.

I did not look at my mother.

After what seemed like an age, Dearbhla hit two black keys and then let loose. I was later to learn that the piece was a Fantasie-Impromptu in C sharp minor by Chopin, but at the time it was just a roaring tumble of notes, all pouring out sweetly and asynchronously into the air. The energy in the room changed as she played. Her eyes glazed over as left and right hand concentrated on maintaining the difficult cross signatures the composer demanded.

My limbs were stiff with awe, almost rooted, though I felt the urge to pee. I’d barely shifted when my father placed a hand on my shoulder. He shook his head briefly, curtly. I stayed to listen to Dearbhla play.

It ran down my leg. I felt the trickle seep through my red cord dungarees, warm, burning, immediate. The music enraptured me so that I felt no shame. Dearbhla and my father remained oblivious also. But Mother was not of that world, and saw.

“That child.” She pointed at me. “Look at those wet pants. Look at them.”

Dearbhla stopped playing.

“David,” my mother continued, glaring at my father. “Are you going to do something? Look at those wet pants. They’re disgusting.”

I was embarrassed, not for myself, though my thighs were beginning to chafe with the urinous sting, but for my mother. Even at that young age, I sensed that she, not I, was in the wrong, that her motives for humiliating me were suspect.

“Ah, don’t worry, Lily,” Dearbhla said, getting up. “It was an accident. It could happen to any child.”

My mother stood up too and faced Dearbhla. For a moment, it looked as if she were going to hit her. My father sat down, crossed his legs, and folded his arms. The moment seemed interminable. Then my mother crossed over to the piano and sat on the stool, breathing heavily.

“Lily, for God’s sake.” My father was angry now.

Ignoring him, my mother breathed in a sob, pulled her hair ever more fiercely into a ponytail, and launched into — yes, you guessed it, same old same old — the Gymnopédie. Her playing it all wrong made it even worse. As she made mistake after mistake, she started to cry openly. At the major seventh chord that resolves into the final D, she made the worst clanger of the lot, hitting an F sharp and then going to the wrong place in the bass. I prayed she would stop, but no, she kept going. Dearbhla, to give the woman her due, kept her face an emotionless cast as the whole miserable, cringe-inducing ritual dragged on.

“Lily, stop.”

“No, I won’t. I won’t stop. And I won’t have that woman telling me how to rear my children.”

Dearbhla gasped discreetly.

“Now,” my mother looked at me, “I’m going to finish my piece. Your favourite, honey, remember?”

I felt my voice come from a very faraway place.

“No. It’s not my favourite. I like Dearbhla’s better. And you were mean to me in front of people. Daddy told me not to go to the bathroom. And,” I felt my father’s and Dearbhla’s relief and satisfaction surge towards me even though their faces still betrayed nothing, “you don’t play it right. You make mistakes. Dearbhla never makes mistakes.”

For the last fifteen years I have regretted saying those words. Perhaps if I had stayed silent, none of this would have happened.

There is little else to remember about my mother. A few weeks later, I remember my father buying ice creams for everyone. She burst into tears. He asked her what was wrong with the ice cream. I joined in, also angry at her always crying and ruining our fun. We couldn’t do anything without her crying now. I came to dread her presence.

She puked up her ice cream. All of it, in a yellow-white mess, over the kitchen table. It had that sharp hydrochloric smell of vomited food and I couldn’t bear to eat any more of mine after that. I didn’t understand about morning sickness then. As my father cleaned up, his mouth was twisted in disapproval, a disapproval I shared.

Another day she shouted at him, in front of me, “Why won’t you love me? Why do you go to her all the time?”

I thought my father would shout back, the way he had once or twice before then, but no, he just cleared his throat and left the room. I didn’t understand why he wasn’t angry, but something in his demeanour made me terribly afraid all the same. As a child, I did not understand what it is to be indifferent to someone: I do now. The years I’ve spent in this place have flattened me out pretty well, to the point where I am pleased to say I am indifferent to almost everybody.

One day I opened the wrong door at the wrong time, and saw a pair of feet. Familiar feet in off-pink ballet pumps. They were at about eye-level, which looked rather strange, and swayed softly from side to side, as if they were performing a little dance, though they did not move or point.

Then a bulky body intervened. Pinching fingers grasped my shoulders; I was hurled away.

“Go back,” my father hissed. “Go back, for God’s sake, you silly boy.”

Later he told me about my mother. She had hung herself with one of those soft threads used to tie back the drawing-room curtains. I was a bit confused and asked if there would be any baby now. He said no, there wouldn’t be, that it had disappeared away. That it was all for the best.

It didn’t really make any sense to me, why she had done it. She was annoying, but I still didn’t want her to go away like that. For some reason I thought it had something to do with the ice cream.

Why does Dearbhla come? I want to ask her that every time I see her sit down and smile at me, curving the gloved fingers around her cigarette, still wincing with the difficulty of it, even though her maiming happened fifteen years ago last week.

In one afternoon I took everything from her, but still she comes, sometimes with CDs, sometimes with a book by someone like Milan Kundera or Charles Bukowski, or sometimes just by herself.

“Why?” I finally say.

Dearbhla takes off her gloves and puts her exposed, ruined hands against the glass. The fingertips whiten as she presses them close.

“I come here,” Dearbhla says, “because I have nowhere else to go. I have no one else to speak to who can understand what I have lost. Except you.”

I lift my own hands to touch the panel on the other side. But once my palm is raised, I pull back. The watching guard calls time; Dearbhla takes up her handbag and turns away towards the rush hour outside.

My father married her, of course, when a suitable period of time had elapsed. There was the funeral and the period of mourning to be observed. But somehow that all faded away pretty fast. Mother belonged to half-memories, a childhood buried beyond retrieval. The odd flashes of reminiscence would come, but they were less frequent. Dearbhla’s was the domain of reality, homework monitoring, meal preparation, discipline. Thinking back, I saw that it was a role for which she had probably been ill prepared. But, Dearbhla being Dearbhla, she threw herself into it with all the energy she could. Nor did she stop playing. The one row she and my father always had was the one where she wanted to go away on extended concert trips and my father was unwilling to let her.

The truth was, he had never known how to talk to me and was afraid of our being left alone. Dearbhla made most of the effort. She even tried to teach me the piano: For my tenth birthday I received the gift of a Hanon exercise book, endless streams of notes going up and down the C scale. I got to a point where I rather enjoyed them. I could bash them out without paying the slightest attention to what I was doing. Besides, there was a certain pleasure in playing Dearbhla’s Yamaha upright in itself. The shiny ebony lid had to be lifted, the red cloth respectfully removed, a light puff to take the dust off the keys, then the final touch of finger on ivory. Inevitably, after a half-hour of me foostering about the keys, Dearbhla would succumb to the temptation to play herself and entertain me for hours.

It could have gone on forever. Thinking back, we were happy. Or at least I thought I was, which is surely the same thing. After I grew older and went to college in the city, I could have gone back at weekends to visit Dearbhla and my father, loafing about in the study. You can live a perfectly satisfying life and never need to disturb the past.

Then Dearbhla spoiled everything.

The judge at my trial told me, in front of the assembled jury, lawyers, and public gallery (my case had attracted considerable interest), that my crime had been a dreadful one. What had possessed me to inflict such horrific punishment on the man who had brought me up, fed, clothed, educated, and cherished me? And then what I visited on my father’s wife, a talented musician who would never play again. What had driven me to it? I had indeed taken everything from her.

Bright-eyed court reporters were scribbling it all down. Ryder kept them stoked with a steady supply of melodrama.

I admit I harmed the woman when I slammed that old rosewood lid down on her knuckles, once, sharply. I believe I managed to sever her tendons as well as shattering her fingers. And never did I claim insanity: I knew exactly what I was doing. It gave me a blood rush to see her scream, her face growing ever more foreign to me until I saw the face of one younger than she, hair in a ponytail, smiling beatifically through the agonised mask. And then, by chance, my father turned up.

His reaction to the tableau before him was rather comical. His face contracted into an n shape at first, then he turned upon me a look of murderous anger. In that brief second, I realised that despite his learning he was as stupid as he was unforgiving. His reaction was not one of shock, but dumb, animal rage at this assault on his little kingdom. I saw he was capable of nothing more than that, and I hated him for it. I could see hatred in his eyes too. He was making for me; he would kill me without remorse, I could tell. I had to defend myself.

And so, instinct-driven, I flung the top piano lid open, my hand searching for and finding the taut metal wires that Dearbhla’s playing had sounded out so recently. I set my fist around them. They were almost intractable but with a supreme effort, I wrenched them out. The strings beside them groaned in sympathy as I roared. Oh God, the pain. I nearly tore the skin off my fingers. I’ve never felt anything like it since.

A fistful of bass notes, like wiry flowers. I did not dishonour her memory by missing a single one. The D, the E, perhaps even the A. Not a single one missed, Judge, on my honour.

But then, Mr. Justice Ryder thundered, then the defendant made for the victim, Dr. David Lukeman, and wrapped the piano wire around the said Dr. Lukeman’s neck, pulling so tightly that his vocal cords were severed on the first tug. But wait! Even with my stepmother watching, I did not stop there, indeed when I had finished with Dr. Lukeman, the victim’s neck was severed half the way through — the man was virtually decapitated. At the word decapitated, the reporters all bent to their notebooks as one, like a well-conducted choir.

The jury would be well advised to consider the nature of the killing, the judge added, before returning their verdict. Et voilà, here I am.

It is the hour before the evening meal, where prisoners are allowed to visit each other, wander in and out of each other’s cells or gather downstairs to watch TV and smoke, which they all do. I think about Dearbhla’s last visit, when she made a special request. The panel between us was removed and I was held in her clasp, my head lost in the blanket folds of her expensive cloak. When it was time for her to leave, she kissed me on the cheek and held me for a long time, not letting me go even when I tried to withdraw. They had to part us. The perfume was the same as the one she wore the first day we met, that stuff that managed to smell fresh, yet overpowering. I remember the smell, but cannot put a name to it.

The letter is in my hands, the thread of the envelope soft as a blanket, wherein will be contained a message on plain white paper which I can read cross-legged in my bed. My brief, weekly oasis in the midst of hell.

But I am interrupted by a tapping at my door. “Hey, Wirey,” a guard calls out to me. Wirey is short for Piano Wire, a nickname bestowed on me at the beginning of my sentence, which has degraded over the years to Wirey. (It is by no means an insult: My crime still elicits certain awe among some of my fellow prisoners.)

“Yes?”

“Peterson wants you in his office.”

Peterson is the screw I tolerate best. Thanks to him, I got a room to myself after two years, even if it did have the wall view. He is a confident, heavyset man, but in his small cubicle, he looks oversized and awkward.

“I’ve some bad news for you.” His fingers wiggle on the desk, beating out a little Hanon of their own. “That lady who comes to visit you — Dearbhla McKernan — she was found last night.”

She was found. I know what he means. Immediately my body responds: the coldness, the sweat prickling under the skin.

“Started the car in the garage and just sat in it, apparently. She looked perfectly peaceful.”

I nod.

“So obviously you won’t be seeing her tomorrow.”

Although on the surface it seems a stupid thing to say, I can tell that Peterson is trying to get through to me, past the fog of shock, get me to accept the truth in installments. He is being kind, kinder to me than my father had ever been.

“Thank you,” I say.

His beating fingers stop their rhythm, spreading flat on the table. “I’m very sorry.”

I rise to leave and he stretches his hand toward my shoulder. For a moment I fear he will embrace me — his sweat is rancid in my nostrils — but he thinks better of it and moves back. I am brought to my cell once more, where all is undisturbed. The letter is still lying on the bed for me to pick up. For a moment I hold it still, then I tear it open, ripping both envelope and paper in my frenzy.

I fold up the letter and put it away. Now grief should arrive — I have nobody in the world left to care for me — but it will not come, even though I repeat out loud: She’s gone, Dearbhla’s gone. Yes, I am still full of what passes for normal thought here: Is cabbage on for dinner again tonight? Should I go out for exercise tomorrow? It does not hit me, this new reality.

All the pieces Dearbhla played for me were beautiful: nocturnes, mazurkas, the Moonlight Sonata, a waltz called “Adieu” which Chopin wrote when he was dying of tuberculosis. But force myself as I may, I cannot recall any of them. Another piece intercedes, yes, that broken piece again, the Gymnopédie, replete with mistakes and laughter and sunset on the pedals. Dearbhla is overshadowed, just as she feared. She should never have played that piece, not even once.

Haven’t we both betrayed her for love? My mother plays on, her eyes shut and a little smile on her face. Nothing complex, nothing overwhelming. No cross-signatures or bombast. Just her playing, done for love. All of it done for love.

People like my father have it easy. They get rid of people the way balloons lose ballast, slowly chucking each one out until they can float free. They are never without somebody to want and need them — but are never truly happy until solitary and rid of all encumbrances. We had all given him so much, even I who killed him. I freed him from life’s inconveniences, from people’s needs. He would never have been content had he lived.

And Dearbhla is dead. But grief still isn’t breaking through, why should it, when she is nothing to me by blood? That tranquil Gymnopédie bars me from feeling. The best I can do is try to understand how she felt. Dearbhla’s pain is my mother’s pain, is my own. The pain of knowing that you have loved one person all your life and he does not give this love back, in full or at all. No — he frowns, forbids, withholds. He is always the person who has the last word; no logic can contradict him. The dancing feet are stilled; the piano wrapped up and sent to storage. My childhood is over. Mama gone.

The walls of my cell brighten: another sunset. Oh, I remember it all now. I have all the time in the world to do nothing else but remember.

Copyright © 2012 by Susan Lanigan