The Gravedigger’s Daughter

1

Through the summer and fall of 1974 the house rang with Beethoven’s “Appassionata.” That music!

As in a dream she who was the mother of the young pianist moved open-eyed and unseeing. Lovesick she found herself standing outside the closed door of the music room, entranced.

“He will. He will play it. This is his time.”

She who lacked an ear for the subtleties of piano interpretation could not have said if the sonata she heard bore a profound or a merely superficial relationship to the recording by Artur Schnabel she’d heard twenty-five years before in the parlor of the old stone cottage in the cemetery.

Inside the music room her exacting son was forever starting, and stopping. Starting, and stopping. Now the left hand alone, now the right. Now both hands together and back to the beginning and ceasing abruptly and returning again to the beginning in the way of a small anxious child beginning to walk upright, stumbling and flailing for balance. If he had wished, Zack could play the sonata unimpeded: he could play it straight through, striking every note. He had that ability, the mechanical facility of the piano prodigy. But a deeper resonance was required. A deeper desperation.

The desperation beneath, Hazel supposed to be inside the music itself. It was that of the composer, Beethoven. It was the man’s soul into which the young pianist must descend. She listened, wondering if the choice of the sonata had been a mistake. Her son was so young: this was not music for youth. She became excited, almost feverish in listening. Stumbling away exhausted not wanting Zack to know she’d been listening outside the door of the music room for it would annoy and exasperate him, who knew his mother so intimately.

Bad enough I’m trying not to go crazy myself, Mother I don’t intend to be responsible for you going crazy too.

He was restless! At the age of fifteen he’d placed second in the 1972 Montreal Young Pianists Competition, and at the age of sixteen he’d placed first in the 1973 Philadelphia Young Pianists Competition, and now nearing his eighteenth birthday he was preparing for the 1974 San Francisco International Piano Competition.

Hours. Each day at the piano. At the Conservatory, and at home. And into the night hours and through the night in the throes of music rushing through his sleep-locked brain with the terrible power of cascading water over a falls. And this music was not his and must not be impeded, choked-back. A vast tide to the very horizon! It was a tide that encompassed time as well as space: the long-dead as well as the living. To choke back such a force would be to suffocate. At the piano sometimes leaning into the keyboard suddenly desperate for air, oxygen. That piano smell of old ivory, fine wood and wood polish, this was poison. Yet at other times away from the piano knowing he must take a break from the piano for sanity’s sake at such times in even the outdoor air of Delaware Park and in the presence of another (Zack was in love, maybe) a sensation of helplessness came over him, the panic that he would suffocate if he could not complete a passage of music struggling to make its way through him except: his fingers were inadequate without the keyboard and so he must return to the keyboard or he would suffocate.

Trying not to go crazy Mother. Help me!

In fact he blamed her.

Rarely allowed her to touch him, now.

For Zack was in love (maybe). The girl was two years older than he was, in his German language class and a serious musician: a cellist.

Except not so good a cellist as you are a pianist, Zack. Thank God!

It was this girl’s way to speak bluntly. Her way to laugh at the expression on his face. They were not yet intimate, they had not yet touched. She could not console him with a kiss, for the shock she’d caused him. For he was one to whom music is sacred, no more to be laughed at than death is to be laughed at.

You could laugh at death though. From the farther side recalling the grassy canal bank they’d walked along, how on the farther side was the towpath but the nearer side where no one walked except Mommy and him (so little, Mommy had to grip his hand to keep him from stumbling!) was grassy and overgrown.

Laugh at death if you could cross over why the hell not!

She knew. A mother knows.

Beginning to be wary, anxious. Her son was growing apart from her.

It wasn’t the piano, the demands of practice. Hazel was never jealous of the piano!

Thinking when she heard him playing He is in the right place now of all the world. Where he was born to be. Taking comfort knowing he was hers. Rather, it was a reaction against the piano she feared.

Against his own talent, “success.” His own hands she saw him studying sometimes, examining with a clinical and faintly bemused detachment. Mine?

If he injured his hands. If somehow.

He was interested in European history: World War II. He’d taken a course at the university. He was interested in philosophy, religion. There was a feverish tone to his voice, an uneasy tremor. As if the world’s secrets might yield to him, if only he had the key. To Hazel’s dismay Zack began talking of the most preposterous things! One day it was the ancient Indian Upanishads, one day it was the nineteenth-century German philosopher Schopenhauer, one day it was the Hebrew Bible. He began to be argumentative, aggressive. Saying suddenly at the dinner table, as if this were a crucial issue they’d been avoiding: “Of all the religions, wouldn’t the oldest be closest to God? And who is ”God‘? What is “God’? Are we to know this God, or only just one another? Is our place with God or with one another, on earth?” His expression was quizzical, earnest. He was leaning his elbows on the table, hunched forward.

Gallagher tried to talk with his stepson, more or less seriously. “Well, Zack! Glad you asked. My personal feeling is, religion is mankind trying to get a handle on what’s outside ”man.“ Each religion has a different set of answers prescribed by a self-appointed priestly caste and each religion, you can be sure, teaches it’s the ”only‘ religion, sanctified by God.“

“But that doesn’t mean that one of the religions isn’t true. Like if there are twelve answers to an algebra problem eleven might be wrong and one right.”

“But ”God‘ isn’t a provable math problem, Zack. “God’ is just a catchall term we give to our ignorance.”

“Or even, maybe,” Zack said excitedly, “the different ways of human speech are crude and clumsy and are actually pointing toward the same thing, but different languages make them confused. Like, ”God‘ is behind the religions, like the sun you can’t look at directly, you’d go blind, except if there was no sun, see, then you would really be blind, because you couldn’t see a damned thing. Maybe it’s like that?“

To Hazel’s knowledge, Zack had never spoken so passionately about anything before, except music. He was leaning his elbows onto the table clumsily so that the lighted candles wavered, screwing up his face in a way that reminded Hazel horribly of Jacob Schwart.

Her son! In hurt and chagrin Hazel stared at him.

Gallagher said, trying to joke, “Zack, I had no idea! What a budding theologian we have in our midst.”

Zack said, stung, “Don’t condescend to me, ”Dad,“ O.K.? I’m not somebody on your TV show.”

Now Zack was Gallagher’s legally adopted son sometimes he called Gallagher “Dad.” Usually it was playful, affectionate. But sometimes with a twist of adolescent sarcasm, like now.

Gallagher said quickly, “I don’t mean to condescend, Zack. It’s just that discussions like this make people upset without enlightening them. There is a similarity between religions, isn’t there, a kind of skeleton in common, and like human beings, with human skeletons-” Gallagher broke off, seeing Zack’s look of impatience. He said, annoyed, “Believe me, kid, I know. I’ve been there.”

Zack said sullenly, “I’m not a kid. In the sense of being an idiot I’m not a fucking kid.”

Gallagher, smiling hard, determined to charm his stepson into submission, said, “Intelligent people have been quarreling over these questions for thousands of years. When they agree, it’s out of an emotional need to agree, not because there is anything genuine to ”agree‘ about. People crave to believe something, so they believe anything. It’s like starving: you’d eat practically anything, right? It’s been my experience-“

“Look, ”Dad,“ you aren’t me. Neither one of you is me. Got it?”

Zack had never spoken so rudely in the past. His eyes glittered with angry tears. He’d had a strained session with his piano teacher that day, perhaps. His life was complicated now in ways Hazel could not know, for he kept much to himself, she dared not approach him.

Gallagher tried again to reason with Zack, in Gallagher’s affably bantering way that was so effective on television (Gallagher now had a weekly interview show on WBEN-TV Buffalo, a Gallagher Media production) but not so effective with the boy who squirmed with impatience and all but rolled his eyes as Gallagher spoke. Hazel sat forlorn, lost. She understood that Zack was defying her, not Gallagher. He was defying her who had taught him since childhood that religion was for those others, not for them.

Poor Gallagher! He was red-faced and breathless as a middle-aged athlete grown complacent in his skills who has just been outmaneuvered by a young athlete whom he has failed to take seriously.

Zack was saying, “Music isn’t enough! It’s only a part of the brain. I have a whole brain, for Christ’s sake. I want to know about things other people know.” He swallowed hard. He shaved now, the lower half of his face appeared darker than the rest, his short upper lip covered in a fine dark down. Within seconds he was capable of childish petulance, good-natured equanimity, chilling hauteur. He had not once glanced at Hazel during the exchange with Gallagher nor did he look at her now, saying, in a sudden rush of words, “I want to know about Judaism, where it comes from and what it is.”

Judaism: this was a word never before spoken between Hazel and Zack. Nor even the less formal words Jews, Jewish.

Gallagher was saying, “Of course, I can understand that. You want to know all that you can know, within reason. Beginning with the old religions. I was the same way myself…” Gallagher was fumbling now, uncertain. He was vaguely conscious of the strain between Hazel and Zack. As a man of the world with a certain degree of renown he was accustomed to being taken seriously, certainly he was accustomed to being deferred to, yet in his own household he was often at sea. Doggedly he said, “But the piano, Zack! That must come first.”

Zack said hotly, “It comes first. But it doesn’t come second, too. Or third, or fucking last.”

Zack tossed his crumpled napkin down onto his plate. He’d only partly eaten the meal his mother had prepared, as she prepared all household meals, with such care. She felt the sting of that gesture as she felt the sting of the purposefully chosen expletive fucking, she knew it was aimed at her heart. With quavering adolescent dignity Zack pushed his chair back from the table and stalked out of the room. The adults stared after him in astonishment.

Gallagher groped for Hazel’s limp hand, to comfort her.

“Somebody’s been talking to him, d’you think? Somebody at the university.”

Hazel sat still and unmoving in her state of shock as if she’d been slapped.

“It’s the pressure he’s under, with that sonata. It’s too mature for him, possibly. He’s just a kid, and he’s growing. I remember that miserable age, Christ! Sex-sex-sex. I couldn’t keep my mind on the keyboard, let me tell you. It’s nothing personal, darling.”

To spite me. To abandon me. Because he hates me. Why?

She fled from both the son and the stepfather. She could not bear it, such exposure. As if the very vertebrae of her backbone were exposed!

She was not crying when Gallagher came to comfort her. It was rare for Hazel Jones to cry, she detested such weakness.

Gallagher talked to her, tenderly and persuasively. In their bed she lay very still in his arms. He would protect her, he adored his Hazel Jones. He would protect her against her rude adolescent son. Though saying of course Zack didn’t mean it, Zack loved her and would not wish to hurt her, she must know this.

“Yes. I know it.”

“And I love you, Hazel. I would die for you.”

He talked for a long time: it was Gallagher’s way of loving a woman, with both his words and his body. He was not a man like the other, who had little need of words. Between her and that man, the boy’s father, had been a deeper connection. But that was finished now, extinct. No more could she love a man in that way: her sexual, intensely erotic life was over.

She was deeply grateful to this man, who prized her as the other had not. Yet, in his very estimation of her, she understood his weakness.

She did not want to be comforted, really! Almost, she preferred to feel the insult aimed at her heart.

Thinking scornfully In animal life the weakest are quickly disposed of. That’s religion: the only religion.

Yet she’d returned in secret several times to the park where the man in soiled work clothes had approached her and spoken to her.

My name is Gus Schwart.

Do I look like anybody you know?

Of course, she had not seen him again. Her eyes filled with tears of dismay and indignation, that she might have hoped to see him again, who had sprung at her out of nowhere.

How it had pierced her heart, that man’s voice! He had spoken her name, she had not heard in a very long time.

My sister Rebecca, we used to live in Milburn…

She’d looked up Schwart in the local telephone directory and called each of the several listings but without success.

In Montreal, and in Toronto, where they’d traveled in recent years, Hazel had also looked up Schwart and made a few futile calls for she had the vague idea that Herschel was somewhere in Canada, hadn’t Herschel spoken of crossing the border into Canada and escaping his pursuers…

“If he’s alive. If any ”Schwarts’ are alive.“

She began to be anxious as she had not been anxious before the earlier competitions reasoning He is young, he has time for now her son was nearly eighteen, rapidly maturing. A taut tense sexual being he was. Impulsive, irritable. Nerves caused his skin to break out, in disfiguring blemishes on his forehead. He would not confide in his parents, that he suffered indigestion, constipation. Yet Hazel knew.

She could not bear it, that her gifted son might yet fail. It would be death to her, if he failed after having come so far.

“The breath of God.”

That roadside café in Apalachin, New York! The hot-skinned child on her lap snug in Mommy’s arms reaching up eagerly to play the broken keyboard of a battered old upright piano. Smoke haze, the pungent smell of beer, drunken shouts and laughter of strangers.

Jesus how’s he do it, kid so little?

She smiled, they’d been happy then.

He was an affably drunken older man acquainted with Chet Gallagher eager to meet Gallagher’s little family.

Introduced himself as “Zack Zacharias.” He’d heard that Gallagher’s stepson was a pianist named “Zacharias,” too.

This was at the Grand Island Yacht Club to which Gallagher took his little family to celebrate, when Zack was informed he’d been selected as one of thirteen finalists in the San Francisco competition.

Gallagher’s philosophy was: “Celebrate when you can, you might never have another chance.”

Weaving in the direction of their riverside table was the affably drunken man with stained white hair in a crew cut, lumpy potato face and merry eyes reddened as if he’d been rubbing them with his knuckles.

He’d come to shake Gallagher’s hand, meet the missus but mostly to address the young Zacharias.

“Coincidence, eh? I like to think coincidences mean something even when likely they don’t. But you’re the real thing, son: a musician. Read about you in the paper. Me, I’m a broke-down ol‘ d.j. Twenty-six friggin’ yeas on WBEN Radio Wonderful broadcasting the best in jazz through the wee night hours”-his voice pitched low into a beautifully modulated if slightly mocking Negro radio voice-“and the lousy sonsabitches are dropping me from the station. No offense, Chet: I know you ain’t to blame, you ain’t your old man friggin‘ Thaddeus. My actual name, son”-stooping over the table now to shake the hand of the cringing boy-“is Alvin Block, Jr. Ain’t got that swing, eh?”

Shaking his hips, wheezing with laughter as the white-jacketed maître d‘ hurried in his direction to lead him away.

(The Grand Island Yacht Club! Gallagher was apologetic, also a bit defensive, on the subject.

As a local celebrity Chet Gallagher had been given an honorary membership to the Grand Island Yacht Club. The damned club had a history-invariably, Gallagher called it a “spotty history”-of discrimination against Jews, Negroes, “ethnic minorities,” and of course women, an all-male all-Caucasian Protestant private club on the Niagara River. Certainly Gallagher scorned such organizations as undemocratic and un-American yet in this case there were good friends of his who belonged, the Yacht Club was an “old venerable tradition” in the Buffalo area dating back to the 1870s, why not accept their hospitality that was so graciously offered, so long as Chet Gallagher wasn’t a dues-paying member.

“And the view of the Niagara River is terrific, especially at sunset. You’ll love it, Hazel.”

Hazel asked if she would be allowed into the Yacht Club dining room.

Gallagher said, “Hazel, of course! You and Zack both, as my guests.”

“Even if I’m a woman? Wouldn’t the members object?”

“Certainly women are welcome at the Yacht Club. Wives, relatives, guests of members. It’s the same as at the Buffalo Athletic Club, you’ve been there.”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why’d women be ”welcome,“ if they aren’t? And Jews, and Ne-groes?” Hazel gave Ne-groes a special inflection.

Gallagher saw she was teasing now, and looked uncomfortable.

“Look, I’m not a dues-paying member. I’ve been there only a few times. I thought it might be a nice place to go for dinner on Sunday, to celebrate Zack’s good news.” Gallagher paused, rubbing his nose vigorously. “We can go somewhere else, Hazel. If you prefer.”

Hazel laughed, Gallagher was looking so abashed.

“Chet, no. I’m not one to ”prefer‘ anything.“)

Sometimes I’m so lonely. Oh Christ so lonely for the life you saved me from but he would have stared at her astonished and disbelieving.

Not you, Hazel! Never.

In Buffalo they lived at 83 Roscommon Circle, within a mile’s radius of the Delaware Conservatory of Music, the Buffalo Historic Society, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. They were invited out often, their names were on privileged mailing lists. Gallagher scorned the bourgeois life yet was bemused by it, he acknowledged. Overnight Hazel Jones had become Mrs. Chet Gallagher, Hazel Gallagher.

As, young, she’d been an able and uncomplaining chambermaid in an “historic” hotel, now in youthful middle age she was the caretaker of a partly restored Victorian house of five bedrooms, three storeys, steeply pitched slate roofs. Originally built in 1887, the house was made of shingle-board, eggshell with deep purple trim. Maintaining the house became crucial to Hazel, a kind of fetish. As her son would be a concert pianist, so Hazel would be the most exacting of housewives. Gallagher, away much of the day, seemed not to notice how Hazel was becoming overly scrupulous about the house for anything Hazel did was a delight to him; and of course Gallagher was hopeless about anything perceived as practical, domestic. By degrees, Hazel also took over the maintenance of their financial records for it was much easier than waiting for Gallagher to assume responsibility. He was yet more hopeless with money, indifferent as only the son of a wealthy man might be indifferent to money.

With the instinct of a pack rat, Hazel kept receipts for the smallest purchases and services. Hazel kept flawless records. Hazel sent by registered mail photocopied materials to Gallagher’s Buffalo accountant on a quarterly basis, for tax purposes. Gallagher whistled in admiration of his wife. “Hazel, you’re terrific. How’d you get so smart?”

“Runs in the family.”

“How so?”

“My father was a high school math teacher.”

Gallagher stared at her, quizzically. “Your father was a high school math teacher?”

Hazel laughed. “No. Just joking.”

“Do you know who your father was, Hazel? You’ve always said you didn’t.”

“I didn’t, and I don’t.” Hazel wiped at her eyes, couldn’t seem to stop laughing. For there was Gallagher, well into his fifties, staring at her gravely in that way of a man so beguiled by love he will believe anything told him by the beloved. Hazel felt she could reach into Gallagher’s rib cage and touch his living heart. “Just teasing, Chet.”

On tiptoes to kiss him. Oh, Gallagher was a tall man even with shoulders slouched. She saw that his new bifocals were smudged, removed them from his face and deftly polished them on her skirt.

Mrs. Chester Gallagher.

Each time she signed her new name it seemed to her that her handwriting was subtly altered.

They traveled a good deal. They saw many people. Some were associated with music, and some were associated with the media. Hazel was introduced to very friendly strangers as Hazel Gallagher: a name faintly comical to her, preposterous.

Yet no one laughed! Not within her hearing.

Gallagher, the most sentimental of men as he was the most scornful of men, would have liked a more formal wedding but saw the logic of a brief civil ceremony in one of the smaller courtrooms of the Erie County Courthouse. “Last thing we want is cameras, right? Attention. If my father found out…” The ten-minute ceremony was performed by a justice of the peace on a rainy Saturday morning in November 1972: the exact tenth anniversary of Gallagher and Hazel meeting in the Piano Bar of the Malin Head Inn. Zack was the sole witness, the bride’s teenaged son in a suit, necktie. Zack looking both embarrassed and pleased.

Gallagher would believe he’d been the one to talk Hazel Jones into marrying him, at last. Joking that Hazel had made an honest man of him.

Ten years!

“Someday, darling, you’ll have to tell me why.”

“Why what?”

“Why you refused to marry me for ten long years.”

“Ten very short years, they were.”

“Long for me! Every morning I expected you to have disappeared. Cleared out. Taken Zack, and left me heartbroken.”

Hazel was startled, at such a remark. Gallagher was only joking of course.

“Maybe I didn’t marry you because I didn’t believe that I was a good enough person to marry you. Maybe that was it.”

Her light enigmatic Hazel Jones laugh. She’d tuned to perfection, like one of Zack’s effortlessly executed cadenzas.

“Good enough to marry me! Hazel, really.”

As Gallagher had arranged to marry Hazel in the Erie County Courthouse, so Gallagher arranged to adopt Zack in the Erie County Courthouse. So proud! So happy! It was the consummation of Gallagher’s adult life.

The adoption was speedily arranged. A meeting with Gallagher’s attorney, and an appointment with a county judge. Legal documents to be drawn up and signed and Zack’s creased and waterstained birth certificate issued as a facsimile in Chemung County, New York, to be photocopied and filed in the Erie County Hall of Records.

Legally, Zack was now Zack Gallagher. But he would retain Zacharias Jones as his professional name.

Zack joked he was the oldest kid adopted in the history of Erie County: fifteen. But, at the signing, he’d turned abruptly away from Gallagher and Hazel not wanting them to see his face.

“Hey, kid. Jesus.”

Gallagher hugged Zack, hard. Kissed the boy wetly on the edge of his mouth. Gallagher, most sentimental of men, didn’t mind anyone seeing him cry.

Like guilty conspirators, mother and son. When they were alone together they burst into laughter, a wild nervous flaming-up laughter that would have shocked Gallagher.

So funny! Whatever it was, that sparked such laughter between them.

Zack had been fascinated by his birth certificate. He didn’t seem to recall ever having seen it before. Hidden away with Hazel Jones’s secret things, a small compact bundle she’d carried with her since the Poor Farm Road.

Zack asked if the birth certificate was legitimate, and Hazel said sharply Yes! It was.

“My name is ”Zacharias August Jones’ and my father’s name is “William Jones‘? Who the hell’s ”William Jones’?“

“”Was.“”

“”Was’ what?“

“”Was,“ not ”is.“ Mr. Jones is dead now.”

Secrets! In the tight little bundle inside her rib cage in the place where her heart had been. So many secrets, sometimes she couldn’t get her breath.

Thaddeus Gallagher, for instance. His gifts and impassioned love letters to Dearest Hazel Jones!

In fall 1970, soon after Hazel received the first of these, an individual wishing to be designated as an anonymous benefactor gave a sizable sum of money to the Delaware Conservatory of Music earmarked as a scholarship and travel fund for the young pianist Zacharias Jones. Money was required for the numerous international piano competitions in which young pianists performed in hope of winning prizes, public attention, concert bookings and recording deals, and the donation from the anonymous benefactor would allow Zacharias to travel anywhere he wished. Gallagher who intended to manage Zack’s career was keenly aware of these possibilities: “André Watts was seventeen when Leonard Bernstein conducted him in the Liszt E-flat concerto, on national television. A bombshell.” And of course there was the legendary 1958 Tchaikovsky Competition in which twenty-four-year-old Van Cliburn took away the first prize and returned from Soviet Russia an international celebrity. Gallagher knew! But he was damned suspicious of the anonymous benefactor. When administrators at the Conservatory refused to tell him the benefactor’s identity, Gallagher became suspicious and resentful. To Hazel he complained, “What if it’s him. God damn!”

Naively Hazel asked, “Who is him?”

“My God-damned father, who else! It’s three hundred thousand dollars the ”anonymous benefactor‘ has given the Conservatory, it has to be him. He must have heard Zack play in Vermont.“ Gallagher was looking fierce yet helpless, a man cut off at the knees. His voice pitched to a sudden pleading softness. ”Hazel, I can’t tolerate Thaddeus interfering in my life any more than he has.“

Hazel listened sympathetically. She did not point out to Gallagher It isn’t your life, it’s Zack’s life.

It was a mother’s predatory instinct. Seeing how her son’s skin glowed with sexual heat. His eyes that guiltily eluded her gaze, hot and yearning.

Restless! Too many hours at the piano. Trapped inside a cage of shimmering notes.

He went away from the house, and returned late. Midnight, and later. One night he didn’t return until 4 A.M. (Hazel lay awake, and waiting. Very still not wanting to disturb Gallagher.) Yet another night in September, with only three weeks before the San Francisco Competition, he stayed away until dawn returning at that time stumbling and disheveled, defiant, smelling of beer.

“Zack! Good morning.”

Hazel would not rebuke the boy. She would speak only lightly, without reproach. She knew, if she even touched him he would recoil from her. In sudden fury he might slap at her, strike her with his fists as he’d done as a little boy. Hate you Momma! God damn I hate hate hate you. She must not stare too hungrily at his young unshaven face. Must not accuse him of wishing to ruin their lives any more than she would plead with him or beg or weep for that was never Hazel Jones’s way smiling as she opened the back door for him to enter, allowing him to brush roughly past her beneath the still-burning light breathing harshly through his mouth as if he’d been running and his eyes that were beautiful to her now bloodshot and heavy-lidded and opaque to her gaze and that smell of sweat, a sex-smell, pungent beneath the acrid smell of beer, yet she allowed him to know I love you and my love is stronger than your hatred.

He would sleep through much of the day. Hazel would not disturb him. By late afternoon he would return to the piano renewed, and practice until late evening. And Gallagher, listening in the hallway would shake his head in wonder.

She knew!

(He had to wonder what she’d meant in her playful teasing way Mr. Jones is dead now. If she meant that his father was dead? His long-ago father who had shouted into his face and shaken him like a rag doll and beat him and threw him against the wall yet who had hugged him too, and kissed him wetly on the edge of his mouth leaving a spittle-taste of tobacco behind. Hey: love ya! As his fingers executed the rapidly and vividly descending treble notes in the final ecstatic bars of the Beethoven sonata he had to wonder.)

Strange: that Chet Gallagher was losing interest in his career. Had lost interest in his career. Following the abrupt and shameful ending of the Vietnam War the most protracted and shameful war in American history strange, ironic how bored he’d become almost overnight with public life, politics. Even as his career as Chet Gallagher soared. (The newspaper column, 350 words Gallagher boasted he could type out in his sleep with his left hand, was nationally reprinted and admired. The TV interview program he’d been asked to host in 1973 was steadily gaining an audience. Also in 1973 a collection of prose pieces he’d cobbled together whimsically titled Some Pieces of (My) Mind became an unexpected bestseller in paperback.)

Losing interest in Chet Gallagher in proportion as he was becoming obsessed with Zacharias Jones. For here was a gifted young pianist, a truly gifted young pianist Gallagher had personally discovered up in Malin Head Bay one memorable winter night…

“It happens, he’s my adopted son. My son.”

Gallagher had to concede this was a phenomenon his own father had been denied. For he’d let his father down. He had failed as a classical pianist. Maybe to spite his father he’d failed but in any case he had failed, all that was finished. He played jazz piano only occasionally now, local gigs, fund-raisers and benefits and sometimes on TV, but not serious jazz any longer, Gallagher had become so Caucasian bourgeois, damned boring middle-aged husband and father, and happy. There’s no edge to happy. There’s no jazz-cool to happy. So devoted to his little family he’d even given up smoking.

How strange life was! He would manage the boy’s career for the responsibility lay with Chet Gallagher.

Not to push the boy of course. From the first he’d cautioned the boy’s mother.

“We’ll take it slow. One thing at a time. Must be realistic. Even André Watts, after his early fantastic success, burned out. And so did Van Cliburn. Temporarily.” Gallagher was not seriously expecting Zack to win a top prize at the San Francisco Competition: for one so young and relatively inexperienced, it was a remarkable honor simply to have qualified. The judges were of various ethnic backgrounds and would not favor a young Caucasian-American male. (Or would they? Zack was playing the “Appassionata.”) Zack would be competing with prize-winning pianists from Russia, China, Japan, Germany who had trained with pianists more distinguished than his teacher at the Delaware Conservatory. To be realistic, Gallagher was planning, plotting: the Tokyo International Piano Competition in May 1975.

Her name was Frieda Bruegger.

She was a student at the Conservatory, a cellist. Beautiful blunt-featured girl with almond-shaped eyes, thick dark bristling hair exploding about her head, a young animated very shapely body. Her voice was a penetrating soprano: “Mrs. Gallagher! Hello.”

Hazel was smiling and fully in control but staring rather vacantly at the girl Zack had brought home, whom he had introduced to her as a friend he was preparing a sonata with, for an upcoming recital at the Conservatory. Hazel was admiring the beautiful gleaming cello in the girl’s hands, she would ask questions about the instrument, but something was wrong, why were the young people looking at her so oddly? She realized she hadn’t replied. Numbly her lips moved, “Hello, Frieda.”

Frieda! The name was so strangely resonant to her, she felt almost faint.

Realizing that she’d seen this girl before, at the music school. She had even seen the girl with Zack though the two had not been alone together. Following a recital, among a group of young musicians.

It’s her. She’s the one. He is sleeping with her. Is he?

So without warning Zack had brought the girl home with him, Hazel wasn’t prepared. She’d expected him to be secretive, circumspect. Yet here the girl stood before Hazel calling her “Mrs. Gallagher.” Really she was a young woman, twenty years old. Beside her Zack was still a boy, though taller than she was by several inches. And awkward in his body, uncertain. In personal relations Zack had not the zestful agility and grace he had at the piano. He was swiping at his nose now, nervously. He would not look at Hazel, not fully. He was excited, defiant. Gallagher had told Hazel it was the most natural thing in the world for a boy Zack’s age to have a girlfriend, in fact girlfriends, you had to assume that kids were sexually active today as they generally had not been in Hazel’s generation, hell it was fine as long as they took precautions and he’d had a talk (how awkward, Hazel could only imagine) with Zack so there was nothing to worry about.

And so Zack had brought home this bluntly beautiful girl with almond-shaped eyes and rather heavy dark unplucked eyebrows and the most astonishing explosive hair: Frieda Bruegger.

Informing Hazel that they would be performing a Fauré sonata for cello and piano at a Conservatory recital in mid-December. This was the first Hazel had heard of it and did not know how to respond. (What about the “Appassionata”? What about San Francisco, in eight days?) But Hazel’s opinion was not being sought. The matter had been decided.

“It will be my first recital in that series, Mrs. Gallagher. I’m very nervous!”

Wanting Hazel to share in her excitement, the drama of her young life. And Hazel held back from her, resisting.

Yet Hazel remained in the music room longer than she might have expected. Busying herself with small housewifely tasks: straightening the small pillows on the window seat, opening the venetian blinds wide. The young people talked together earnestly about the sonata, looking through their photocopied sheets of music. Hazel saw that the girl stood rather close to Zack. She smiled frequently, her teeth were large and perfectly white, a small charming gap between the two front teeth. Her skin was beautifully smooth, with a faint burnished cast beneath. Her upper lip was covered in the faintest down. She was so animated! Zack held back from her, just perceptibly. Yet he was amused by her. Zack had several times brought other young musicians home to practice with him, he was a favored piano accompanist at the Conservatory. Possibly the girl was only a friend of his, a classmate. Except less experienced musically than Zack and so she would depend upon his judgment, she would defer to him musically. She brandished her beautiful cello as if it were a simulacrum of herself: her beautiful female body.

Hazel was forgetting the girl’s name. She felt a vague fluttery panic, this was happening too quickly.

For a student at the Conservatory, the girl was provocatively dressed: lime green sweater that fitted her ample breasts tightly, metal-studded jeans that fitted her ample buttocks tightly. She had a nervous mannerism of wetting her lips, breathing through her mouth. Yet she did not seem truly ill-at-ease, rather more self-dramatizing, self-displaying. A rich girl, was she? Something in her manner suggested such a background. She was assured of being cherished. Assured of being admired. On her right wrist she wore an expensive-looking watch. Her hands were not extraordinary for a cellist, rather small, stubby. Not so slender as Zack’s hands. Her nails were plain, filed short. Hazel glanced at her own impeccably polished nails, that matched her coral lipstick…Yet the girl was so young, and suffused with life! Hazel stared and stared lost in wonder.

She heard herself ask if the young people would like something to drink? Cola, coffee…

Politely they declined, no.

The terrible thought came to Hazel They are waiting for me to leave them alone.

Yet she heard herself ask, “This sonata, what is it like? Is it-familiar? Something I’ve heard?”

Frieda was the one to answer, bright and enthusiastic as a schoolgirl: “It’s a beautiful sonata, Mrs. Gallagher. But you probably haven’t heard it, Fauré‘s sonatas aren’t very well known. He was old and sick when he wrote it, in 1921, it’s one of his last compositions but you would never guess! Fauré was a true poet, a pure musician. In this sonata there’s a surprise, the way the mood shifts, the ”funeral theme’ becomes something you wouldn’t expect, almost ethereal, joyous. Like, if you were an old man, and sick, and soon to die, still you could lift yourself out of your body that is failing you…“ The girl spoke with such sudden intensity, Hazel felt uneasy.

Why is she talking to me like this, does she believe that I am old? Sick?

As it had been Hazel’s custom to place flowers on the Steinway grand piano in the display window at Zimmerman Brothers, so it was Hazel’s practice to place flowers on the piano in the music room. Zack took no notice of course. In the Gallagher household Zack seemed to take notice of very little, only music fully absorbed him. But his friend would notice the flowers. Already she had noticed. She had noticed the polished hardwood floor, the scattered carpets, the brightly colored pillows arranged on the window seat, the tall windows overlooking the vividly green back lawn where in wet weather (it was raining now, a fine porous mist) the air glowed as if undersea. Brought into the house and led through the downstairs by Zack she would certainly have noticed how beautifully furnished the Gallaghers’ house was. She would go away marveling Zack’s mother is so…

Hazel stood forlorn, uncertain. She knew she should leave the young musicians to their practice but another time she heard herself ask if they needed anything from the kitchen and another time they politely declined no.

As Hazel left, Frieda called after her, “Mrs. Gallagher, thanks! It was so nice to meet you.”

But you will meet me again won’t you? You will.

Yet Hazel lingered outside the door of the music room, waiting for the practice to begin. The cellist tuned her instrument: Zack would be seated at the piano. Hazel felt a pang of envy, hearing the young musicians begin. The cello was so rich, so vivid: Hazel’s favorite instrument, after the piano. She much preferred the cello to the violin. After a few bars, the music ceased. They would return to the beginning. Zack played, the girl listened. Zack spoke. Another time they began the sonata, and another time ceased. And another time began…Hazel listened, fascinated. For here was beauty she could comprehend: not the thunderous cascading of piano notes that left the listener breathless, not the strongly hammered repetitions, the isolation of the great Beethoven sonata but the more subtle, delicately entwined sounds of two instruments. The cello was predominant, the piano rather muted. Or so Zack chose to play it. Twined together, cello and piano. Hazel listened for some time, deeply moved.

She went away. She had work to do. Elsewhere in the house, her own work. But she could not concentrate, away from the music room. She returned, lingering in the hall. Inside, the young musicians were talking together. A girl’s quick robust laughter. A boy’s low-pitched voice. Was the practice over for the day? It was nearing 6 P.M. And when would they practice again? On the other side of the door, the youthful voices were animated, melodic. Zack’s voice was so warmly entwined with the girl’s, they were so at ease together, as if they spoke together often, laughed together. How strange: Zack had become wary with Hazel, guarded and reticent. She was losing him. She had lost him. It was very recent in her memory, when Zack’s voice had changed: his voice that had been a child’s thin high-pitched voice for so long. Even now sometimes it wavered, cracked. He was not yet a man though no longer a boy. Of course, a boy of seventeen is sexually mature. A girl of Frieda’s type, full-bodied, sensual, would have matured sexually at a much younger age. Hazel had not seen her son naked in a very long time nor did she wish to see him naked but she had occasional glimpses of coarse dark hair sprouting in his armpits, she saw that his forearms and legs were covered in dark hairs. The girl would be less of a stranger to Hazel than Zack: for the girl’s body would be known to her, familiar as her own lost girl’s body.

Frieda must have been answering a question of Zack’s, she was speaking now of her family. Her father was an eye surgeon in Buffalo, he’d been born in that city. Her mother had been born in a small German village near the Czechoslovakian border. As a girl she’d been transported to Dachau with all of her family, relatives, neighbors but later she was reassigned to a labor camp in Czechoslovakia, she’d managed to escape with three other Jewish girls, she’d been a “displaced person” after the liberation and she’d emigrated to Palestine and in 1953 she’d emigrated to the United States, aged twenty-five. The Nazis had exterminated all of her family: there was no one remaining. But she had this belief: “There should be some reason why she survived. She really believes it!” Frieda laughed to show that she understood that her mother’s belief was naive, she wished to dissociate herself from it. Zack said, “But there was, Frieda. So that you can play Fauré‘s second sonata, and I can accompany you.”

Hazel went away from the music room feeling as if her soul had been annihilated, extinguished.

So lonely!

She could not cry, there was only futility in crying. With no one to witness, a waste of tears.

Made your bed now lie in it.

Made your bed your bed. Now lie in it, you!

The coarse, crude voices of her childhood. The old voices of wisdom.

On the third floor of the house in the sparely furnished attic space that had become Hazel’s private space she hid away like a wounded animal. At this distance she could not hear if the young couple resumed their practice. She could not hear when the girl left. She could not hear if Zack left with her. If he’d called out to her on his way out of the house, she had not heard. If the girl called out to her in that warm penetrating voice Goodbye Mrs. Gallagher! she had not heard.

Never what you’ve told yourself. Never escaped from him. Pa was too smart, and too quick. Pa was too damned strong. Aimed the shotgun at your scrawny girl-chest and pulled the trigger. And that was it. And afterward turning from what lay bleeding and mangled on the bedroom floor like a hunk of butchered meat triumphant his enemies would not subdue and humiliate him another time he reloaded the shotgun that like the console model Motorola radio was one of the astonishing purchases of his American experience awkwardly he turned both barrels on himself and fired and in the aftermath of that terrible blast there was only silence for no witness remained.

Laugh at death. Why not and yet he could not bring himself to laugh.

The earth’s soil was steeped in blood. He knew, before he’d met Frieda Bruegger. He knew of the Nazi death camps, the Final Solution. Seemed already to know what he might spend years learning. Laugh at death was not possible this side of death.

How airy, how ephemeral and trivial music seemed, of all human efforts! Fading into silence even as it’s performed. And you had to work so very hard to perform it, and very likely you would fail in any case.

Revolted by his own vanity. His ridiculous ambition. He would be exposed, on a brightly lighted stage. Like a trained monkey he would perform. Before a panel of “international judges.” He would desecrate music, in the display of his own vanity. As if pianists were racehorses to be pitted against one another, that others might wager on them. There would be a “cash prize” of course.

Six days before they were scheduled to fly to San Francisco he informed the adults who surrounded Zacharias Jones: he wasn’t going.

What a commotion! Through the day the telephone rang, Gallagher was the one to answer.

The young pianist refused to listen to his piano teacher. Refused to listen to other musicians at the Conservatory. Refused to listen even to his stepfather whom he adored who pleaded with him, begged and cajoled and bartered: “This can be your last competition, Zack. If you feel so strongly.”

The young pianist’s mother did not plead with him, however. She knew to keep her distance. Perhaps she was too upset, she avoided speaking with anyone. Oh, the boy knew how to wound his mother! If Hazel had tried to plead with him as Gallagher did, he’d have laughed in her face.

Fuck you. Go play yourself. Think I’m your fucking trained monkey, well I am not.

In this way three days passed. Zack hid away, he was beginning to be ashamed. His decision was coming to seem to him like mere cowardice. The moral revulsion in his soul was coming to seem like mere nerves, stage fright. His face was inflamed. His bowels now spat liquid shit in a scalding cascade. He could not bear his exhausted reflection in any mirror. He could not even speak with Frieda, who had begun by being sympathetic with him but was now not so certain. He had not meant to draw attention to himself. He had meant to remove himself from attention. He had been reading the Hebrew Bible: All is vanity. He had been reading Schopenhauer: Death is a sleep in which individuality is forgotten. He had meant to withdraw himself from the possibility of acclaim and “success” as much as from the possibility of public failure. Now, he was beginning to reconsider his decision. He had tossed something very precious into the dirt, now he must pick it up and wash it off. Maybe it would be better to kill himself after all…

Or he might run away, disappear across the border into Canada.

The Conservatory had not yet notified the organizers of the competition, that Zacharias Jones had decided to drop out. And now he was reconsidering his decision. And there was Gallagher to speak reasonably saying that nobody expected him to win, the honor was in qualifying. “Look, you’ve been playing the Beethoven sonata here for months, so play it out there. What’s the difference, essentially? There is no difference. Except Beethoven composed his music to be heard, right? He kept the ”Appassionata‘ from being published prematurely because he didn’t believe that the world was ready for it yet, but we’re ready for it, kid. So play your heart out. And for Christ’s sake stop moping.“

Taken by surprise, Zack laughed. As usual, Dad was right.

2

In San Francisco the streets shone wetly. So steep, as in an ancient cataclysm. The air was harshly pure, blown inland from the fog-obscured ocean.

And the fog! Outside the windows of their twentieth-floor suite in the San Francisco Pacific Hotel the world had collapsed to a few feet.

The world had collapsed to a gleaming piano keyboard.

“The breath of God.”

It was so. There could be no other explanation. That he’d become at the age of seventeen a young pianist named Zacharias Jones, his thumbnail-sized photograph in the glossy program of the 1974 San Francisco International Piano Competition. And she’d become Hazel Gallagher.

In their hotel suite, a dozen red roses awaited. A cellophane-wrapped wicker basket stuffed with gourmet foods, bottles of white and red wine. They would have laughed wildly together like conspirators except they’d grown wary of each other in recent months. The son had aimed at the mother’s heart, he’d struck a deep stunning blow.

Unknowing, Gallagher had become the mediator between them. He had not the slightest awareness of the tension between mother and son. Nudging Hazel, when they heard Zack whistling in his adjoining hotel room, “Listen! That’s a good sign.”

Hazel did not know if it was a good sign. She, too, had become strangely happy in San Francisco, in the fog. It was a city of wetly gleaming near-vertical streets and quaintly clamorous “trams.” It was a city utterly new to her and Zack. It had a posthumous feel to it, a sense of calm. The breath of God had blown them here, as whimsically as elsewhere.

Downstairs in the hotel gift shop, Hazel bought a deck of cards.

Alone in the suite she tore the cellophane from the deck and rapidly shuffled the cards and slapped them out onto a glass-topped table facing a window, for a game of solitaire.

So happy, to be alone! Gallagher had badly wanted her to come with him and Zack, to the luncheon honoring the pianists. But Hazel remained behind. On the plane, she’d seen two teenaged girls, sisters, playing double solitaire.

So happy. Not to be Hazel Jones.

“Hazel? Why the hell are you wearing black?”

It was a new dress of softly clinging jersey, graceful folds of cloth at the bodice. Long-sleeved, long-waisted. The skirt fell to mid-calf. She would wear black satin pumps with it. The October night was cool, she would wrap herself in an elegant black wool shawl.

“Shouldn’t I? I thought…”

“No, Hazel. It’s a gorgeous dress but too damned funereal for the occasion. You know how Zack interprets things. Especially coming from you. A little more color, Hazel. Please!”

Gallagher seemed so serious, Hazel gave in. She would wear a cream-colored suit in light wool, with a crimson silk scarf, one of Thaddeus Gallagher’s more practical gifts, tied around her neck. It was all a masquerade.

Outside the tall windows, the fog had cleared. San Francisco emerged at dusk, a city of stalagmites glittering with lights to the horizon. So beautiful! Hazel wondered if she might be forgiven, remaining in the room. Her heart clenched in terror at the prospect of what lay ahead.

“Hey Dad? Come help.”

Zack was having trouble with his black tie. He’d been in and out of his own room, lingering in their bedroom. He had not been very comfortable that day, Gallagher had said. At the luncheon, and afterward. The other pianists were older, more experienced. Several exuded “personality.” Zack had a tendency to withdraw, to appear sullen. He had showered now for the second time that day and he had combed his hair with compulsive neatness. His blemished forehead was mostly hidden by wings of fawn-colored hair. His angular young face shone with a kind of panicked merriment.

The men were required to wear black tie. Starched white cotton dress shirts with studs, elaborate French cuffs. Gallagher helped Zack with both the necktie and the French cuffs.

“Chin up, kid. A tux is a ridiculous invention but we do look good. Dames fall for us.” Gallagher snorted with laughter at his feeble joke.

Through a mirror Hazel observed. She could not help but feel that the little family was headed for an execution and yet: which one of them was to be executed?

Gallagher fussed with Zack’s tie, undoing it entirely and trying again. Almost, you would see that the two were related: middle-aged father with a high bald dome of head, adolescent son nearly his height, frowning as the damned tie was being adjusted for him. Hazel guessed that Gallagher had to restrain himself from wetly kissing the tip of Zack’s nose in a clown’s blessing.

The more edgy Gallagher was, the more jocular, antic. At least he wasn’t doubling up with gastric pains, vomiting into a toilet as he’d done at his father’s house. In semi-secrecy (Hazel knew, without having seen) he’d unlocked the minibar in the parlor and taken a swig or two of Johnnie Walker Black Label Whiskey.

It was believed to be contrary to nature, that a man might love another man’s son as if he were his own son. Yet Gallagher loved Zack in this way, Gallagher had triumphed.

Of five pianists scheduled to perform that evening in the concert hall of the San Francisco Arts Center, Zacharias Jones was the third. Next day the remaining eight pianists would perform. The announcement of the first, second, third prize winners would be made after the last pianist played that evening. The Gallaghers were relieved that Zack would play so soon, the ordeal for him would be more quickly over. But Gallagher worried that the judges would be more inclined to favor pianists who played last.

“Still, it doesn’t matter,” Gallagher told Hazel, stroking his chin distractedly, “how Zack does. We’ve said this.”

Their seats were in the third row, on the aisle. They had a clear, unimpeded view of the keyboard and the pianists’ flying hands. As they listened to the first two pianists perform, Gallagher gripped Hazel’s hand tightly, leaning heavily against her. He was breathing quickly and shallowly and his breath smelled of a lurid mixture of whiskey and Listerine mouthwash.

After each of the performances, Gallagher applauded with enthusiasm. He’d been a performer himself. Hazel’s arms were leaden, her mouth dry. She’d heard hardly a note of music, she had not wanted to realize how talented her son’s rivals were.

Abruptly then Zack’s name was announced. He moved onto the stage with surprising readiness, even managing to smile toward the audience. He could see nothing but blinding lights and these lights made him appear even younger than he was, contrasting with the preceding pianist who’d been in his early thirties. At the piano, Zack seated himself and leaned forward and began playing the familiar opening notes of the Beethoven sonata without preamble. Though Hazel had seen Zack perform in numerous recitals it was always something of a shock to her, how abruptly these performances began. And, once begun, they must be executed in their entirety.

There were only three subtly contrasting movements to the intricate sonata, that would pass with unnerving swiftness. Ever more swiftly Zack seemed to be playing it, than at home. So many months in preparation, less than a half-hour in performance! It was madness.

Gallagher was leaning so heavily against Hazel, she worried he would crush her. But she dared not push him away.

She was in a state of suspended panic. She could not breathe, her heart had begun to pound so rapidly. She had told herself repeatedly, Zack could not possibly win in this competition, the honor was in simply qualifying. Yet she feared he would make a mistake, he would blunder in some way, he would humiliate himself, he would fail. She knew that he would not, she had absolute faith in him, yet she was in dread of a catastrophe. Vivid crystalline notes exploded in the air with hurtful volume yet seemed almost immediately to fade, then to swell, and to fade again out of her hearing. She was becoming faint, she’d been holding her breath unconsciously. Gallagher’s hand was so very heavy on her knee, his fingers so tight squeezing hers she felt he would break the bones. The music that had been familiar to her for months had become suddenly unfamiliar, unnerving. She could not recall what it was, where it was headed. There was something deranged, demonic about the sonata. The swiftness with which the pianist’s fingers leapt about the keyboard…Hazel’s eyes filled with moisture, she could not force herself to watch. Could not imagine why such a tortuous spectacle was meant to be pleasurable, “entertaining.” It was sheerly hell, she hated it. Only during the slower passages, which were passages of exquisite beauty, could Hazel relax and breathe normally. Only during the slower passages when the demonic intensity had ceased. Truly this was beautiful, and heartrending. In recent weeks Zack’s interpretation of the “Appassionata” had begun to shift. There was less immediate warmth to his playing now, more precision, percussion, a kind of restrained fury. The rapid, harshly struck notes tore at her nerves. Zack’s piano teacher had not liked the newer direction in which Zack had been moving, nor had Gallagher. Hazel could hear it now, the fury. Almost, there was a disdain for the fact of the sonata itself. There was disdain for the showy act of “performance.” Hazel saw that Zack’s jaws were tight-clenched, his lower face was contorted. A patch of oily moisture gleamed on his forehead. Hazel looked away, flinching. She saw that others in the audience were staring at the pianist, fascinated. Rows of rapt listeners. The hall had five hundred seats in the orchestra and balcony, and appeared to be full. It was a musical audience, familiar with the pieces the pianists would perform. Many were pianists themselves, piano teachers. There was a contingent of supporters from the Conservatory, Frieda Bruegger among them: Hazel sought out the girl’s face but could not find it. Here and there in the elegantly appointed concert hall with its plush seats and mosaic wall tiles were faces you would not expect to see in such a setting. Very likely they were relatives of the performers, ill-at-ease among the other, more knowledgeable listeners. A crack of memory opened, sharp as a sliver of glass. Herschel telling her that their parents had once sung arias to each other, long ago in Europe. In Munich, it would have been. In what Anna Schwart had called the Old Country.

Blurred with distance as with time, their faces hovered at the rear of the concert hall. The Schwarts!

They were stunned, disbelieving. They were immensely proud.

We always had faith in you Rebecca.

No. You didn’t.

We always loved you Rebecca.

No. I don’t think so.

It was hard for us to speak. I did not trust this new language. And your father, you know what Pa was like…

Do I!

Pa loved you Rebecca. Used to say he loved you most, you were most like him.

Hazel’s face was a brittle doll-face, covered in cracks. She was desperate to hide it, that no one would see. Tears gushing from her eyes. She managed to cover part of her face, with one hand. Seeing the neglected and overgrown cemetery. Always the cemetery was close behind her eyelids, she had only to shut her eyes to see it. There, grave markers were toppled over in the grass, cracked and broken. Some of the graves had been vandalized. The names of the dead had been worn away. No matter how carefully engraved into the stone the names of the dead had vanished. Hazel smiled to see it: the earth was a place of anonymous graves, every grave was unknown.

She opened her eyes that were flooded with tears. On the stage, the pianist was completing the final, turbulent movement of the Beethoven sonata. All of his young life was being channeled into this moment. He was playing his heart out, that was clear. Hazel’s face must have shone with happiness, that had been strained and hard for so long. There came the final chord, and the pedal holding. And the pedal released. At once, the audience erupted into applause.

With childlike eagerness the pianist bounded from his seat to bow to the audience. His young, vulnerable face gleamed with perspiration. There was something glaring and fanatic in his eyes. Yet he was smiling, a somewhat dazed smile, he bowed as if stricken with humility like sudden pain. By this time Gallagher was on his feet, lifting his hands to applaud with the rest.

“Hazel, he did it! Our son.”

There should be some reason why she survived.

She knew. She knew this fact. Yet she did not know what the reason was, even now.

So restless!

It was 2:46 A.M. Though exhausted she could not sleep. Though spent with emotion she could not sleep. Her eyes burned as if she’d rubbed them in sand.

Beside her Gallagher slept, heavily. In sleep he was childlike, strangely docile. Leaning his hot, humid body against her, nudging her like a blind creature ravenous for affection. Yet his breathing was so loud, labored. Sounds in his throat like wet gravel being shoveled, scraped. In such breathing she foresaw his death: then, she would know how deeply she loved this man, she who could not articulate that love now.

She was one whose childhood language has been taken from her, no other language can speak the heart.

Must get out! Slipped from the bed, left the darkened bedroom and the sleeping man. Insomnia drove her like red ants swarming over her naked body.

In fact, she wasn’t naked: she was wearing a nightgown. Sexy-silky champagne-colored nightgown with a lace bodice, a gift from Gallagher.

In the parlor she switched on a lamp. Now it was 2:48 A.M. By such slow degrees a life might be lived. It was five hours since Zack had played the “Appassionata.” At the reception afterward the girl with the blunt beautiful face had embraced Hazel as if they were old friends, or kin. Hazel had held herself stiff not daring to embrace the girl back.

Zack had gone away with her. Her, and others. He’d asked Gallagher and his mother please not to wait up for him, they’d promised they would not.

Rain was pelting against the windows. In the morning again there would be fog. The nighttime city was beautiful to Hazel but not very real. At this height of twenty floors, nothing seemed very real. In the near distance there was a tall narrow building that might have been a tower. A red light blurred by rain rotated at its pinnacle.

“The eye of God.”

It was a curious thing to say. The words seemed to have spoken themselves.

She wouldn’t take time to dress, she was in too great a hurry. Her trench coat would do. It was a stylish olive-green coat with a flared skirt and a sash-belt to be tied at the waist. The coat was still damp from that evening’s rain. Yet she would wear it like a robe over the nightgown. And shoes: she could not leave the room barefoot.

Looking for her flat-heeled shoes she found a single shiny black dress shoe of Gallagher’s lying on the carpet where he’d kicked it. She picked it up and placed it in a closet beside its mate.

They had returned to the hotel suite to celebrate, together. Gallagher had called room service to order champagne. On the marble-topped coffee table was a silver tray and on the tray a spillage of wrappers, bottles, glasses. Remains of Brie cheese, rye crackers, kiwi fruit and luscious black Concord grape seeds. And almonds, Brazil nuts. After the emotional strain of that evening’s program Gallagher had been famished but too excited to sit still, he’d paced about the parlor as he ate, and talked.

He had not expected Zack to play so well, perhaps. He, too, had expected some sort of catastrophe.

In May, the elder Gallaghers had had a medical scare. Gallagher’s gastric pains continued, something cloudy had showed up on an X-ray but was not malignant. An ulcerous condition, treatable. They’d decided not to tell Zack, this would be their secret.

Zack had gone off with friends from the Conservatory and other young musicians they’d met in San Francisco. After his controversial performance Zack would be something of a hero, among pianists of his own generation at least.

Hazel would not approach the door to Zack’s adjoining room. She would not turn the knob, gently: she knew it would be locked.

Yet surely the girl would not be in that room with Zack. In that bed. In such proximity to the Gallaghers. She had a room elsewhere in the hotel and she’d come alone to San Francisco and if she and Zack were alone together in any bed, exhausted now in the aftermath of lovemaking, they would be in her room. Probably.

She would not think of it. She was no one’s daughter now, and she would be no one’s mother. All that was over.

She would say, You can live your own life now. Your life is your own, to live.

She’d brought with her, to San Francisco, the most recent of Thaddeus’s letters. Love letters they were, of increasing passion, or dementia. Opening the stiff, much-folded sheet of stationery, to read by lamplight as her husband slept oblivious in the adjoining room. The letter was clumsily typed as if in lunges, in the dark; or by one whose eyesight is dimming.

Dearest Hazel Jones,

You wld tickel an old mans vanity if youd replied to my appeals but I see now, you are Hazel Jones and a good wife and you are a worthy Mother to your son. So you wld not reply, I rever you for it. I think that I will not write to you agin this side the grave. You & the boy will recieve a consumat Reward for your fathfulness & goodness. Your shallow husband the Mouth of Liberal Consience does not have a clue! He is a fool unworthy of you & the boy, that is our secret Hazel Jones isnt it. In my will you will all see. The scales will fall from the eyes of some. God bless you Hazel Jones & the boy whose music of beauttu is to outlive us all.

Hazel smiled, and folded up the letter again, and put it away in her handbag. A voice echoed faintly as if in rain beating against the windowpanes You-you are born here. They will not hurt you.

Pushed her arms into the sleeves of the still damp trench coat, and tied the belt tight around her waist. No need to glance at herself in the mirror: she knew her hair was disheveled, the pupils of her eyes dilated. Her skin smarted with a kind of erotic heat. She was excited, jubilant. She would take money with her, several twenties from her purse. She would take several items from the mini bar: miniature bottles of whiskey, gin, vodka. She would take the playing cards, dropping them loose in a pocket of her coat. And she must not forget the key to room 2006.

She stepped into the empty corridor. Shut the door behind her waiting for the lock to click into place.

The corridor leading to the elevators was longer than she recalled. Underfoot were thick crimson carpets and on the walls beige silk wallpaper in an Oriental design. At the elevators she punched down. Swiftly she would descend from 20 to G. Smiling to recall how in the past elevators had moved much more slowly. You had plenty of time to think, descending in one of those.

At this hour the hotel appeared deserted. Floor G was very quiet. The piped-in Muzak of daytime, a chirping of manic sparrows Gallagher called it, had been silenced. Though she had never been in this hotel before Hazel moved unerringly past windowless doors marked employees only and private: no admittance. At the end of a long corridor smelling of food was kitchen: employees only. And room service: employees only. Twenty-four-hour room service was a feature of the San Francisco Pacific Hotel. Hazel heard voices on the other side of the door, a sound of dishes being stacked. Radio music with a Latino beat. She pushed open the door, and stepped inside.

How the eyes snatched at her, in astonishment! Yet she was smiling.

There were kitchen workers in soiled white uniforms, and a man in a dark, neatly pressed uniform who had just returned to the kitchen pushing a cart loaded to capacity with trays of dirtied plates, glasses and bottles. The kitchen lights were very bright, the air much warmer than the corridor had been. Amid the strong kitchen odors of grease and cleanser was a sharp garbagey odor. And a beery odor as well, for some of the kitchen workers were drinking beer. Even as the alarmed-looking man in the dark uniform began to speak, “Ma’am, excuse me but-” Hazel was saying quickly, “Excuse me, I’m hungry. I can pay you. I have my own drinks but I don’t want to drink alone. I didn’t want to order room service, it takes too long.” She laughed, they would see that she was in a festive mood and would not send her away.

Hazel would not afterward recall the sequence of events. She would not recall how many men there were for at least two continued working, at sinks; another came in later by a rear door, yawning and stretching. Several befriended her, cleared a place for her at their table setting aside tabloid papers, a crossword puzzle book, emptied Coke, 7-Up, beer cans. They were grateful for the miniature bottles she’d brought from the room. They would not accept her offer of $20 bills. They were: César, a youngish Hispanic with pitted skin and liquidy eyes; Marvell, a black man with skin the color of eggplant and a fleshy, tender face; Drake, a Caucasian of about forty, with an oddly flat face like a species of fish and glinting wire-rimmed glasses that gave him the look of an accountant, you would not take for a nighttime cook. And there was McIntyre, suspicious of Hazel initially but by quick degrees her friend, in his fifties, the man in the hotel uniform who made room service deliveries on call through the night. They were so curious of Hazel! She would tell them only her first name which was a name strange to them: “Haz-el” pronounced as if it were an exotic foreign word. They asked where she was from and she told them. They asked was she married, was her husband sleeping up in their room, what if he woke and saw that she was gone?

“He won’t wake. When he wakes, I will be there. It’s just I can’t seem to sleep now. This time of night…They say that people check into hotels who are planning to commit suicide. Why is that? Is it easier, somehow? I used to work in a hotel. When I was a girl. I was a chambermaid. This was back east, in upstate New York. It was not so large and luxurious a hotel as this. I was happy then. I liked the other hotel workers, I liked the kitchen staff. Except…”

The men listened avidly. Their eyes were fixed upon her. The Latino music continued. Hazel saw that the kitchen was vast, larger than any kitchen she had ever seen. The farther walls were obscured in shadow. Numerous stoves and all the stoves were mammoth: a dozen gas burners on each. There were large refrigerators built into a wall. Freezers, dishwashers. The space was divided into work areas of which only one was currently lighted and populated. The linoleum floor shone wetly, recently mopped. Plates were removed from carts and garbage scraped into plastic bags, the bags were tightly tied and placed inside large aluminum cans. The mood of the kitchen workers was heightened, jocular. Hazel might wonder if her presence had something to do with it. She’d taken the playing cards out of her pocket and stacked and shuffled them. Did they know gin rummy? Would they like to play gin rummy? Yes, yes! Very good. Gin rummy. Hazel shuffled the cards. Her fingers were slender and deft and the nails had been lacquered deep crimson. Skillfully Hazel dealt the cards to the men and to herself. The men laughed, their mood was exuberant. Now they knew Hazel was one of them, they could relax. They played gin rummy laughing together like old friends. They were drinking chilled Coors beer, and they were drinking from the miniature bottles Hazel had brought them. They were eating potato chips, salted nuts. Brazil nuts like those Gallagher had devoured up in the room. A phone rang, a hotel guest calling room service. McIntyre would have to put on his jacket, and make the delivery. He went away, and within a few minutes returned. Hazel saw that he was relieved she hadn’t left yet.

Cards were tossed onto the table, the set was over. Who had won? Had Hazel won? The men didn’t want her to leave, it was only 3:35 A.M. and they were on room-service duty until 6 A.M. Hazel stacked the cards together and shuffled and cut and shuffled again and began to deal. The front of her trench coat had loosened, the men could see the tops of her breasts pale and loose in the silky champagne-colored nightgown. She knew that her hair was disheveled, her mouth was a cloudy smear of old lipstick. Even one of her fingernails was chipped. Her body exuded an odor of old, stale panic. Yet she supposed she was an attractive woman, her new friends would not judge her harshly. “D’you know ”gypsy gin rummy‘? If I can remember, I’ll teach you.“