Violin

Chapter 7

The following day, the house was full of people. All doors were opened so that the two front parlors flanking the wide front hall were in clear view of the long dining room, and people could flow easily over the varied carpets, talking in cheerful voices as New Orleans people do after a death, as if it were what the dead person wanted.

A little cloud of silence surrounded me. Everybody thought I was mentally taxed, shall we Say, having spent two days with a dead body, and then there was the question of slipping out of the hospital without a word, for which Rosalind was being blamed again and again by Katrinka, as if Rosalind had in fact murdered me when nothing could have been further from the truth.

Rosalind, in her deep drowsy voice, asked repeatedly if I was all right, to which I said repeatedly yes. Katrinka talked about me, pointedly, with her husband. Glenn, my beloved brother-in-law and husband of Rosalind, seemed a broken thing, hurt deep by my loss yet unable to do anything but stand rather close to me. I thought musingly to myself of how much I loved them, Rosalind and Glenn, childless, the keepers of Rosalind's Books and Records, where you could find Edgar Rice Burroughs in paperback or a song on a 78 disk recorded by Nelson Eddy.

The house was warm and sparkling, as only this house could sparkle, with its many mirrors and windows and a view in all directions. That was the great genius of this cottage, that, standing in the

dining room as I did, you could look through open doors and windows to all four points of the compass, though they were tangled up with trees and the gusty afternoon. It was so lovely to have made a house of such openness.

A big supper was ordered. Caterers came, whom I knew. Some woman famous for a chocolate pie. And there was Lacomb with his hands behind his back looking sneeringly at the black bartender in his suit. Lacomb would make friends with him, however. Lacomb made friends with everybody, at least everybody who could understand him.

At one point, he slid up to me so silently I was startled. "You want something, boss?"

"No," I said, throwing him a little smile. "Don't get drunk too soon."

"Boss, you're no fun anymore at all," he said, slipping away with his own sly smile.

We gathered around the long narrow oval table.

Rosalind, Glenn, as well as Katrinka, her two daughters and her husband, and many of our cousins ate lustily, carrying their plates about, because there were far too many for the chairs. My people mingled easily with the gregarious Wolfstan family.

Karl had begged these relatives not to visit him during his final months. Even when we married, he knew he was sick, and he had wanted it to be private. And now with his mother already gone back again to England, and everything settled and done, these Wolfstans-all of them rather shiny-faced agreeable people of clear German descent-looked a bit surprised at things-a dazed kind of surprise as when you are awakened out of deep sleep, but nevertheless they were at home among all the fine furniture Karl had bought for me-the cabriole-legged chairs, the pearl-inlay tables, the desks and chests of intarsia made up of tortoiseshell and brass, and the timeworn genuine Aubusson rugs, so thin beneath our feet that they seemed sometimes ma de of paper.

It was all Wolfstan style, this luxury.

They all had money. They had always owned houses on St. Charles Avenue. They were descended from the rich Germans who migrated to New Orleans before the Civil War, and made big money in cigar factories and in beer, long before all the ragged Potato Famine crew hit our shores, the starving Irish and Germans who were my ancestors.

These Wolfstan people had blocks of property in key places, and owned the leases on old stores and businesses.

My cousin Sarah sat staring at her plate. She was the youngest grandchild of Cousin Sally, in whose arms my mother had died. I had no mental picture of it. Sarah hadn't even been born then. Other Becker cousins, and those of mine with Irish names, looked a bit baffled among this careful splendor.

The house seemed poignantly beautiful to me all during the afternoon. I kept turning to catch the reflection of the entire crowd of us in the big mirror along the dining room wall, the mirror which is in a direct line with the front door, and does embrace for all practical purposes the entire party.

The mirror was old; my Mother had loved that mirror. I couldn't stop thinking about her, and it occurred to me several times that she had been the first person I'd really hurt and failed, not Lily. I'd made an error in calculation, a terrible error, the error of a lifetime.

I sat deep in thought, sometimes whispering absolute nonsense to people just to make them stop talking to me.

I couldn't get it out of my mind, my Mother leaving this house on that last afternoon-taken by my Father against her will to stay with her Irish godmother and cousin. She hadn't wanted to be shamed. She'd been drunk for weeks and weeks, and we couldn't stay with her then because Katrinka, a child of eight, had suffered a burst appendix and was, technically, though I never knew it then, dying at Mercy Hospital.

Katrinka didn't die of course. I wonder sometimes if the fact that she missed our Mother's death completely-that it happened during such a long illness when she was locked away-I wondered if that alone didn't make her warped, and eternally doubtful of everything. But I couldn't think about Katrinka. Katrinka's insecurities I wore around always like a heavy necklace. I knew what she was whispering about in the corners of the rooms. I didn't care.

I thought of my Mother, being taken down the side path out to Third Street by my Father, and begging him not to make her go to these cousins. She hadn't wanted her beloved Cousin Sally to see her as she was. And I had not even gone to tell her goodbye, to kiss her, to say anything to her! I'd been fourteen. I don't even know why I was walking up the path at that moment when he took her out. I couldn't get it straight, and the horror of it kept thudding in on me, that she'd died with Sally and Patsy and Charlie, her cousins, and though she loved them and they loved her, there had not been one single one of us with her!

I felt I was going to stop breathing.

People meandered about the sprawling cottage. They went out the open windows onto the porches. It seemed a lively and lovely thing, this delayed coming together for my sake, because that is what I supposed it was. I rather enjoyed the glow of the polished highboys and velvet high-back chairs which Karl had strewn everywhere.

Karl had bequeathed a highly polished surface to the old parquet, with coats and coats of lacquer, beneath the overwhelming Baccarat chandeliers that my Father had refused to sell in the old days, even when "we had nothing."

Karl's silver had been brought out for the meal. Our silver, I suppose I should Say, as I was his wife, and he had bought this pattern for me. It is called Love Disarmed and was first made by Reed & Barton sometime very early in the century. An old company.

An old pattern. Even the new pieces were finely etched because it had fallen from grace with brides somewhere along the line. You could buy it new or old. Karl had trunks of it that he had collected.

It is one of the few silver patterns that features an entire figure, in this instance a beautiful nude woman on each item, no matter how small or how large, of sterling.

I loved it. We owned more of it than we had ever used, because Karl collected it. I wanted to say something to them-about perhaps each taking a'piece in remembrance of Karl, but I didn't.

I ate and drank only because when you do this, you have to talk less. Yet to take food at all seemed a monstrous betrayal.

I'd felt that keenly after my daughter Lily's death. After we'd buried her in Oakland, in St. Mary's Cemetery, a faraway and unimportant place, way away from here, we'd gone with my Mother- and Father-in-Law, Lev's parents, to eat and drink and I had almost choked on the food. I remembered distinctly, the wind had begun to blow, and trees to thrash, and I couldn't stop thinking of Lily in her coffin.

Lev seemed the strong one then, brave and beautiful with his long flowing hair, the wildman-poet-professor. He had told me to eat and be quiet, and he carried the conversation along with the bereaved grandparents, and included as well my somber Father, who said little or nothing.

Katrinka had loved Lily. I remembered that! How could I forget? It seemed wretched to have forgotten! And how Lily had loved her beautiful blond Aunt Katrinka.

Katrinka had suffered Lily's death as bad as anyone could. Faye had been frightened by the whole affair of Lily's sickness and death, generous sweet Faye. But Katrinka had been there, there with a knowing heart, in the hospital room, in the corridors, always ready to come. Those were the California years, encapsulated by the fact that we had all eventually returned.

We'd all left our California life in the cities by the Bay, and drifted either home or away. Faye was gone now, no one knew where, and perhaps forever.

Even Lev had left California finally, long after he had married Chelsea, his pretty girlfriend and my close friend. I think they'd had the first child before he went to teach in a college in New England.

I felt a sudden happiness thinking of Lev, that he had three children, boys, that even though Chelsea called frequently and complained that he was unbearable, he really wasn't, and even though he called Sometimes and cried, and said we should have stuck it out, I felt no regret, and I knew he really didn't. I liked to look at the pictures of his three sons, and I liked to read Lev's books-slim, elegant volumes of poetry, which were published about every two to three years, to accolades.

Lev. My Lev was the boy I'd met in San Francisco and married in the courthouse, the rebellious student and wine drinker, and the Singer of madly improvised songs and the dancer under the moon. He had only started to teach university classes when Lily got sick, and the truth was he never got over Lily's death. Never, never was he ever the same, and what he had sought with Chelsea was consolation, and with me a sisterly approval of the warmth from Chelsea and the sexuality that he desperately needed.

But why, why think of all this? Is this so different from the tragedies of any other life? Is death more rampant here than in any other sprawling family?

Lev was a full professor, tenured, happy. Lev would have come had I asked him to.

why, last night when I'd been walking on the Avenue in the rain, stupid and crazy, I might have called Lev. I hadn't told Lev that Karl died. I hadn't talked to Lev in months, though a letter from Lev was lying on a desk now in the living room unopened.

I couldn't shake all this. It was like tremors. The deeper I fell into these thoughts, of Mother, of Lily, of my lost spouse Lev-the more I began to recall his music again, the desperate violin, and I knew I was remembering all these utterly unbearable things compulsively, like one forced to look on the wounds of one's own murder victims. This was a trance.

But maybe such trances would always follow death now, as death piled upon death.

In grieving for anyone, I grieved for all. And again, I thought, how f/olish to think that Lily had been my first awful crime-letting her die. why, it was perfectly clear that years before Lily ever died, I'd forsaken my Mother!

Five o'clock came. It was shadowy outside. The Avenue became noisier. All the big rooms had about them a more festive look, and people had drunk plenty enough wine that they were talking freely, as people do in New Orleans after a death, as if it would be an insult to the dead to go around whispering like they do in California.

California. Lily out there on a hill, why? There was no one to visit that grave.

Dear God, Lily! But every time I thought of bringing Lily's body home, I had this horrible notion-that when the coffin arrived here in New Orleans, I would have to look in it. Lily, dead before her sixth birthday, had been buried for over twenty years. I couldn't imagine such a sight. An embalmed child covered in green mold?

I shuddered. I thought I was going to scream.

Grady Dubosson had arrived, my friend and lawyer, trusted advisor to Karl and Karl's mother. Miss Hardy was here, had been here for the longest time, and so were several other women from the Preservation Guild, all of them elegant and refined creatures.

Connie Wolfstan said, "We want something, just some little thing, you know, that you wouldn't mind us keeping, to remember him by... I don't know... just the four of us."

I was so relieved. "The silver," I said. "There's so much of it, and he loved it. You know, he corresponded with silver dealers all over the country to buy up Love Disarmed.

Look, see that, that little fork, tha t's actually what you call a strawberry fork."

"You really wouldn't mind if we each took-"

"Oh, God, I was afraid, afraid that you would be afraid because of his illness. There is so much of it. There's enough for all of you."

A loud noise disturbed us. Someone had fallen over. I knew this cousin was one of those few that was kin to both the Beckers of my family and the Wolfstans of Karl's, but I couldn't remember his name.

He was drunk, poor guy, and I could see his wife was furious. They helped him up.

There were long wet stains on his gray trousers.

I wanted to speak, to form words about the silver. I heard Katrinka say, what are they trying to take?" and it came out of my mouth to Althea as she passed, "His silver, you know all that silverware, let his family all take a piece of it."

I felt my face color as Katrinka glared at me. She said that it was community property, the silver.

For the first time I realized that sooner or later all these people would be gone and I'd be alone here and maybe he wouldn't come back, and I saw desperately how his music had comforted me, how it had guided me through memory after memory, and now I was bedeviled, and shaking my head, and obviously looking odd.

What was I wearing? I looked down. A long full silk skirt and a frilly blouse, and a velvet vest that disguised my weight-Triana's uniform, they called it.

There was quite a commotion in the pantry. The silver had been brought out.

Katrinka was saying something biting and terrible to poor sad Rosalind, and Rosalind, with her dark eyebrows pointing up and her glasses sliding down her nose, looked lost and in need of help.

My cousin Barbara leaned down to kiss me. They had to go. Her husband couldn't drive anymore after dark, at least he really shouldn't. I understood. I held her tightly for a moment, pressing my lips into her cheek. when I kissed her, it was like I kissed her mother, my long gone great-aunt, and my grandmother who had been that woman S

sister.

Katrinka suddenly turned me around, hurting my shoulder. "They're sacking the pantry!"

I got up and made a gesture for her to be quiet, my finger to my lips, which I knew, positively knew, would make her boilingly furious. It did. She backed away. One of Karl's aunts came to kiss me and thank me for the small teaspoon she held.

"Oh, it would make him so happy-" I said. He was always sending Love Disarmed to people as gifts and writing, "Now, be sure to tell me if you do not like this pattern because I may inundate you with it." I think I tried to explain that, but clear words were so difficult for me to utter. I moved away, using this person in a way as a means of escape, escorting her to the door, and though others waved as they went down the steps, I went off along the porch and looked out over the Avenue.

He wasn't there. He probably had never existed. With a crashing force, I thought of my Mother, but it wasn't the day before she died. It was another time when I'd given a birthday party for one of my friends. My mother had been drunk for weeks, locked up in the side bedroom, sort of, dead drunk the way she always got, only becoming conscious in the very late hours to roam around, and somehow she'd come wandering out at this party!

She'd come wandering onto the porch, deranged and looking for all the world like Jane Eyre's strange rival, the mad woman in Rochester's attic. We'd taken her back inside, but was I kind, did I kiss her? I couldn't remember. It was too disgusting to think of being that young and that thoughtless, and then it hit me again with a mighty force that I'd let her go, let her die of drunkenness alone, with cousins before whom she was ashamed.

What was the murder of Lily, the failure to save Lily, compared to this?

I gripped the railing. The house was emptying.

The fiddler had been a piece of madness, music imagined! Crazy, lovely, comforting music, spun out of the subconscious by a desperate ordinary talentless person, too pedestrian in every respect to enjoy a fortune left to her.

Oh, God, I wanted to die. I knew where the gun was, and I thought, If you wait just a few weeks, everyone will feel better. If you do it now, then everyone will think it was his or her fault. And then what if Faye is alive somewhere and she comes home and finds her big sister has done such a thing; what if Faye were to take that blame on herself?

Unthinkable!

Kisses, waving hands. A sudden rain of delicious perfume -Karl's Aunt Gertrude, and then her husband's soft, crinkled hand.

Karl had whispered to me when he could no longer turn over without help, "At least I'll never know what it means to be old, will I, Triana?"

I turned and looked down over the side lawn. The lights of the florist blazed on the wet grass and the wet bricks beyond, and I tried to calculate where the path had been down which my mother walked on that last day that I saw her. It was gone. During the years in California, when my father was married to his Protestant wife-out of the church, saying his Rosary every night nevertheless, a damned soul, making her perfectly miserable, no doubt-they'd built a garage. The vogue of the automobile had descended even on New Orleans. And there was no old wooden gate now to be Mother's shrine, her gateway to eternity.

I was choking, trying to catch my breath. I turned around. I looked down the long porch. People everywhere. But I could picture my Mother the night she wandered out, perfectly. My Mother had been beautiful, much more good-looking in every respect than any of her daughters, it seemed; she'd had such a wild expression on her face, lost among all these partying teenagers, awakened from a drunken sleep, not knowing where she was, friendless, only weeks from death.

I tried to catch my breath.

"-all you did for him." A voice spoke.

"For whom?" I said. "Daddy," said Rosalind, "and then to take care of Karl."

"Don't talk about it. when I die I want to wander off into the woods alone." Or use the gun shortly.

"Don't we all?" Rosalind said. "But that's just it. You fall and break a hip like Dad and someone slaps you in bed with needles and tubes, or like Karl, they tell you one more go-round of drugs and maybe-"

She went on, being Rosalind, the nurse and the sharer with me of morbid things as we are two sisters both born in different years but in the month of October.

So vividly I saw Lily in a coffin, imagined now with green mold, her small round face, her lovely tiny hand, plump and beautiful on her breast, her country dancing dress, the last dress that I had ever ironed for her, and my Father saying, They will do that at the funeral parlor, but I had wanted to iron it myself, the last dress, the last dress.

Lev said later of his new bride, Chelsea, "I need her so much, Triana, I need her.

She's like Lily to me again. It's like I have Lily."

I had said I understood. I thi nk I was numb. Numb is the only way to describe how I'd feel when I sat in the other room and Chelsea and Lev made love, and then they'd come in and kiss me and Chelsea would say I was the most unusual woman she'd ever known.

Now that really is funny!

I was going to start to cry. Disaster! There were car doors closing, dark shadows against the florist shop of people waving farewell.

Grady called from inside the house. I could hear Katrinka. So the moment had come.

I turned and walked down the length of the wet porch, past the rocking chairs that were dappled with drops of rain, and I turned and looked into the wide hall. It was the most lovely view, because the great mirror at the far end, on the dining room wall, reflected both chandeliers, the small one of the hallway and the large one of the dining room, and it did seem you were looking down a truly grand corridor.

My Dad had made such speeches about the importance of those chandeliers, how my mother had loved them, how he'd never sell those chandeliers! Never, never, never.

Funny thing was, I couldn't remember who asked him to do it, or when or how. Because after my Mother's death, and with all of us gone eventually, he had done very well, and before that, my Mother would never have let anyone touch those treasures.

The house was almost empty.

I went inside. I was not myself. I was frozen inside an alien form and the voice that came out could not be trusted. Katrinka was crying and had made her handkerchief into a knot.

I followed Grady into the front room where the high-top desk stood, between the front windows.

"I keep remembering things, such things," I said. "Maybe it's to chase away the present, but he died at peace, he didn't suffer as much as we feared, he, we all . .

"Darlin', you sit down," said Grady. "Your sister here is determined to discuss this house here and now. Seems she was indeed piqued by your Father's will, just as you said, and feels she's entitled to a portion of the sale of this house."

Katrinka looked at him in amazement. Her husband, Martin, shook his head and glanced at Rosalind's sweet-hearted husband, Glenn.

"Well, Katrinka is entitled," I said, "when I die." I looked up. The words had silenced everybody. Slinging the word "die" with such abandon, I guess.

Katrinka put her hands to her face and turned away. Rosalind had only flinched.

And declared in her low stentorian voice, "I don't want anything!

Glenn made some sharp low remark to Katrinka, to which Katrinka's husband, Martin, violently objected.

"Look, ladies, let's come to the point," said Grady. "Triana, you and I have discussed this moment. We are prepared for it. Indeed, we are well prepared."

"We have?" I was dreaming. I wasn't there. I could see them all. I knew there was no danger of anyone selling this house. I knew it. I knew things that none of them knew except Grady, but it wasn't that that mattered; it was that my violinist had consoled me when I thought of all the dead in the soft earth, and I'd imagined the thing, imagined it!

There had been some conversation-surely the evidence of madness. And it was madness that he'd said he wanted, but that was a lie. It was a balm he brought to me, a salve, a covering of kisses. His music knew! His music didn't lie. His music-.

Grady touched my hand. Katrinka's husband, Martin, said this wasn't a good time, and Glenn said that it wasn't a good time, and these words made no impression.

Lord God, to be born with no talent is bad enough, but to have a macabre and febrile imagination as well is a curse. I stared at the big picture of St. Sebastian over the fireplace. One of Karl's most treasured possessions-the original of the print that would be put on the cover of his book.

The suffering saint was marvelously erotic, tied to the tree, pierced with so many arrows.

And there on the other wall, over the couch, the big painting of flowers. So like Monet, they said.

It was a painting Lev had done for me and sent from Providence, Rhode Island, when he'd been teaching at Brown. Lev and Katrinka. Lev and Chelsea.

Katrinka had been only eighteen. I should never, never have let it all come to that; it was my fault getting Katrinka into that with Lev, and he was so ashamed, and she, what did she say afterwards, that when a woman was as pregnant as I was, that these things-no.

I had said that to her, to tell her it was all right, that I was sorry, that I, that he-I looked up at her. She was so distant, this slender anxious woman, from my solemn and silent little sister Katrinka. Katrinka when she was little had come home once with my Mother, and my Mother, drunk, had passed out on the porch, with the keys to the house in her purse, and little Katrinka, only six, had sat there five hours waiting for me to come home, ashamed to ask anyone to help, sitting there, beside this woman lying on the porch, a little child just sitting there waiting. "She fell down when we got off the streetcar, but she got up."

Shame, blame, maim, pain, vain!

I looked down on the surface of the table. I saw my hands. I saw the checkbook lying there, blue vinyl, or some other slimy and fiercely strong and ugly material like that, a long rectangular checkbook of the simplest kind, with checks in one side, and in the other tucked a thin-lined ledger.

I am a person who never bothers to enter a check into a ledger. But that was of no importance anymore at all. No talent for numbers, no talent for music. Mozart could play backwards. Mozart probably was a mathematical genius, but then Beethoven, he was nothing as sharp, a wholly different kind of...

"Triana."

"Yes, Grady."

I tried to pay attention to Grady's words.

Katrinka wanted the house sold, he said, the inheritance divided. She wanted me to sign over my right to remain in the house until death-"usufruct," as it is called under the law-the use of the house until my death, a right in fact shared by me and Faye. Now, how was I supposed to do that, with Faye utterly gone, I thought, and Grady was addressing this in a long drawn out, beautifully drawling way, saying that various attempts had been made to reach Faye, just as if Faye was really all right. Grady's accent was part Mississippi and part Louisiana and always melodious.

One time Katrinka told me that Mother put Faye in the bathtub. Faye was not even two years old, just able to sit up. Mother went "to sleep," which meant drunk, and Katrinka found Faye sitting in the tub, and the tub was full of excrement, turds floating in the water, and Faye was happily splashing, well, that happens, doesn't it, and Katrinka so little at the time. I came home, I was tired. I slammed my school books down. I didn't want to know! I didn't. The house was so dark and so cold. They were too little, either of them, to turn on the gas heaters in this house then, which were without pilot lights and on the open hearths and so dangerous they could anytime set the house on fire. There was no heat! Don't! The danger of fire with them alone and her drunk-. Don't.

It's not like that now!

"Faye is alive," I whispered. "She is . . . somewhere."

No one heard.

Grady had written the check already.

He placed it in front of me. "Do you want me to say what you asked me to say?" he said. This was confidential and kind of him.

Suddenly it jolted me. Of course. I had planned it, in angst and coldness, on a dark shadowy day when Karl was hurting with every breath, that if she ever tried this, my sister, my poor lost orphaned sister, Katrinka, that I would do this to her. We had planned it. I had told Grady, and Grady had had no choice but to follow my advice, and thought it most prudent besides, and he had a small statement to read.

"How much do you calculate this house is worth, Mrs. Russell?" he asked Katrinka. "what would you say?"

"Well, at least a million dollars," Katrinka answered, which was absurd because there were many larger more beautiful houses in New Orleans for sale for less than that.

Karl used to marvel at it. And Katrinka and her husband, Martin, who sold real estate, knew this better than anyone, as they were fabulously successful uptown; they had their own company.

I stared at Rosalind. Back then, in the dark years, she had read her books and dreamed. She had taken one look at Mother drunk on the bed and then gone into her room with her books. She read Edgar Rice Burroughs, John Carter of Mars. She had been so beautifully proportioned then. Her dark curly hair was lovely. We were not a bad lot, and each with a different shade of hair.

"Triana."

My mother was beautiful till the moment she died. The funeral home called. They said, "This woman has swallowed her tongue." what did that mean? The cousins with whom she'd died had not even seen her for years, and in their arms she died, with all her long brown hair still brown, not a single gray strand, I remember that, her high forehead-it is not easy to be beautiful with a high forehead, but she was. That last day, as she went down the path, her hair was brushed and pinned. who had done it for her?

She had cut it short only once. But that had been years before. I had come home from school. Katrinka was a baby still, running around the flagstones in pink panties as children did then, all day in the southern heat. No one thought to outfit them in name -

brand suits. And my Mother told me quietly that she had cut her hair, that she had sold it.

What had I said to her? Had I reassured her that she was pretty, that it was fine? I couldn't remember her with short hair at all. And only years later did I understand; she sold her hair, sold her hair, to buy the liquor. Oh, God!

I wanted to ask Rosalind what she thought, if it had been a sin unforgivable not to say goodbye to our Mother. But I couldn't do such a selfish thing! There sat Rosalind in torment, looking from Grady to Katrinka.

Rosalind had her own terrible memories that hurt her so bad she drank and cried.

Once, before our Mother had died, Rosalind had run into Mother coming up the front steps. Our Mother had a package of liquor in her hand, a flat flask wrapped the way they did then at "package liquor stores," in brown paper, and Rosalind had called her a

"drunk," and later confessed to me sobbing, and I had said over and over, "She didn't know, she forgave, she understood, Rosalind, don't." My Mother, never in her life at a loss for words, had in this sad story only smiled at the young Rosalind who was then seventeen, only two years older than me.

Mother! I'm going to die!

I sucked in my breath.

"Do you want me to read the statement?" Grady asked. "You wanted closure. Do you want perhaps to...

"A modern word, that, closure," I said.

"You're crazy," said Katrinka. "You were crazy when you let Lev go-you just gave your own husband to Chelsea and you know it-you were crazy when you nursed Father, you didn't have to have all that medicine for Father, you djdn't have to have the oxygen machines and the nurses and use up every cent he had, you didn't have to do that, you did it out of guilt and you know you did, plain guilt because of Lily..." At Lily's name her voice broke.

Look at her tears.

She could hardly bear to say Lily's name even now.

"You drove Faye away," she said, her face red, swollen, childlike, frantic, "and you were crazy to marry a dying man! To bring a dying man in here, I don't care if he did have money, I don't care if he did fix up the house, I don't care if... You have no right, no right to do these things

A roar of voices came to shut her up. She looked so defenseless! Even her husband, Martin, was angry with her now, and he intimidated her; she couldn't bear his disapproval. How small she looked; she and Faye were eternal waifs. I wished that perhaps Rosalind would get up, go hug her, hold her. I couldn't... couldn't touch her.

"Triana," said Grady. "Do you want to go ahead and make this statement now, as we planned it?"

"What statement?" I looked at Grady. It was something mean and cruel and terrible. I remembered now. The statement. The all-important statement; the drafts and drafts I'd written of the statement.

Katrinka had no idea how much money Karl had left me. Katrinka had no idea how much money I might one day share with her and Rosalind and Faye, and I had made the vow that if she did this thing, this unspeakable thing, if she did this, we would hand her a check, the very impressive check for a million dollars and no cents, even, and that I would demand with her endorsement the promise that she would never speak to me again. A plot hatched in the dark unforgiving part of the heart.

She'd know then, how penny-wise and pound-foolish she'd been.

Yes, and I would look her straight in the eye for all the cruel things she'd ever said to me, the mean things, the little hateful sister things, and her affection for Lev, her

"comforting" Lev while Lily died, as surely as Chelsea. . . but no.

"Katrinka," I whispered. I looked at her. She turned to me, red faced, spurting tears like a baby, all the color washed out of her face but the red, so like the child. Imagine it, a child that little sitting in the school yard with her mother, and her Mother drunk and everyone knowing it, knowing it, knowing it, and that child clinging to her, and then coming home with that drunken woman on the streetcar and...

In the hospital one time I came in and Katrinka was like this, this red, this crying.

"They told Lily twenty minutes before that blood test that they were going to do it. Why did they do that! This place is a torture chamber. They should have never told her so long before they didn't have to-." For my daughter, how she had cried!

Lily's face had been turned to the wall, my tiny five-year-old child, almost dead, within weeks. Katrinka had loved her so much.

"Grady, I want you to give her the check," I said quickly, raising m~ voice.

"Katrinka, it's a gift. Karl arranged it for you. Grady, there's no speech, there's no point, there's no question now, just give her the gift that he wanted her to have."

I could see that Grady gave a huge heaving sigh of relief that there would be no acrimonious and melodramatic words, even though he knew full well that Karl had never laid eyes on Katrinka and had never arranged such a gift-"But don't you want her to know it's your gift?" "I do not," I whispered to him. "She couldn't accept it, she wouldn't. You don't understand. Give Rosalind her check, please," I said. That one had carried no conditions, meant only as a splendid surprise, and Karl had loved Rosalind and Glenn greatly, and leased for them their little shop, Rosalind's Books and Records.

"Say it's from Karl," I said. "Do it."

Katrinka held the check in her hand. She came towards the table. Her tears were still a childish flood, and I noticed how thin she had become, struggling now against age as we all did. She looked so like our Father's family, the Beckers, with her large slightly protruding eyes and her small pretty but hooked nose. She had the touch of the Semite beauty in her, a gravity to her tear-stained face. Her hair was fair and her eyes were blue.

She trembled and shook her head. Her eyes were squeezed shut, and the tears oozed out of her eyes. My father had told us countless times tha t she was the only one of us who was truly beautiful.

I must have lost my balance.

I felt Grady steady me. And Rosalind murmured something that was lost for lack of enough self-confidence. Poor Roz, to endure this.

"You can't write a check like this," Katrinka said. "You can't just write a check for a million dollars!"

Rosalind held the check Grady had put in her hands. She appeared stupefied. So did Glenn, who stood over her, peering down at it as if it were a wonder of the world, a check for a million dollars.

The statement. The speech. All those words rehearsed in anger for Katrinka, "that you never seek my company again, that you never cross this threshold, that you never..."

They all died and blew away.

It was the hospital corridor. Katrinka cried. In the room the strange California priest baptized Lily with water from a paper cup. Did my beloved atheist Lev think I was a perfect coward? And Katrinka was crying then as she cried now, real tears for my lost child, our Lily, our Mother, our Father.

"You were always . . ." I said, "so good to her."

"What are you talking about?" Katrinka said. "You don't have a million dollars!

What is she saying? What is this? Does she think that-"

"Mrs. Russell, if you will allow," Grady began. He looked to me. He rolled on even before I nodded.

"Your sister has been left most comfortable by her late husband, with all arrangements made before his death and with the knowledge of his mother, arrangements which do not involve any will, or any such instrument, which can on any grounds be contested by any of his family.

"And indeed Mrs. Wolfstan sigued numerous papers some time before Karl's death, that this arrangement would not in any way be questioned upon the loss of her son, Karl Wolfstan, and could and would be most speedily transacted."

He went on.

"There is no question as to the validity or the integrity of the check that you hold in your hand. This is your sister's gift to you which she would like you to accept, as your portion of whatever this house might be worth, and I must say, Mrs. Russell, I do not think even this house, charming as it is, would sell for one million dollars, and of course you have in your hand a check for the entire sum, though you also, as you well know, have three sisters.

Rosalind gave a little moan. "You don't have to," she said.

"Karl," I said. "Karl wanted me to be able to-"

"Ah, yes, to make it possible," said Grady, stumbling now to fulfill my last commission to him, realizing that he had failed to carry out my whispered instructions and now off the beat and for the moment lost. "It was Karl's wish that Triana be able to provide a gift to each of her sisters."

"Listen," said Roz. "How much is there? You don't have to give anything to us.

You don't have to give anything to her or me or anyone. You don't... Look, if he left you...

"You have no idea," I said. "Really, there is plenty. There's so much it's purely simple."

Rosalind sat back, drew in her chin, raised her eyebrows and peered through her glasses at the check. Her tall willowy husband, Glenn, was at a loss for words, touched, amazed, confused by what he saw around him.

I looked up at the wounded and quivering Katrinka. "Don't worry anymore, Trink,"

I said. "Don't worry ever again... about anything."

"You're insane!" Katrinka said. Her husband reached out to take her hand.

"Mrs. Russell," said Grady to Katrinka, "let me recommend you take the check to the Whitney Bank tomorrow and endorse and deposit it as you would any check, and I am certain you will be happy to discover that your funds are readily available to you. It is a gift and carries no tax penalty for you. No tax whatsoever. Now, I would appreciate some statement with regard to this house, that you will not in future-"

"Not now," I said. "It doesn't matter."

Rosalind leant towards me again. "I want to know how much. I want to know what this costs you to do this for me and for her."

"Mrs. Bertrand," said Grady to Rosalind, "believe me, your sister is amply provided for. In addition, and perhaps this will make my point as delicately as possible, the late Mr. Wolfstan had also endowed a new hall in the city museum to be entirely devoted to paintings of St. Sebastian."

Glenn in great distress shook his head. "No, we can't."

Katrinka narrowed her eyes as if she suspected a plot.

I tried to form words. They were just beyond my reach. I gestured to Grady and mouthed the word "explain." I made an open shrugging gesture.

"Ladies," said Grady, "let me assure you, Mr. Wolfstan left your sister very well off. These checks really, to be quite literal and frank with you, do not make a particle of difference."

And so the moment was over.

Just like that. It was over.

The terrible speech had not been made to Katrinka, take this million and never...

and there had been no stunning realization for her that she had forfeited forever in hate the possible share of something much larger.

The moment was gone. The chance was gone.

Yet it was ugly, uglier even than I could have planned it because she stood now, furious with hate, and she wanted to spit in my face and there was no way in the world she was going to risk losing one million dollars.

"Well, Glenn and I are grateful for this," said Roz in her low, earnest voice. "I honestly never expected one thin dime from Karl Wolfstan, it's kind, it's kind that he would even, but are you sure, Grady? Are you telling us the real truth?"

"Oh, yes, Mrs. Bertrand, your sister is well off, very well off-"

I saw a vision of dollar hills. A true vision of them flying towards me, each dollar bill with tiny wings on it. The most insane vision, but I think for the very first time in my life there was a relaxed realization of what Grady was saying, that that type of worry was no longer required, that that type of misery was no longer part of the larger picture, that the mind could turn now in perfect peace and quiet upon itself, Karl had seen to that, and his people, it had been nothing to them to see to it, the mind could turn to finer things.

"So that's how it was, then," Katrinka said, looking at me, her eyes tired and dull the way eyes get after hours of fury.

I didn't answer.

Katrinka said:

"It was just all a dry financial arrangement between you and him, and you never even had the decency to tell us."

No one spoke.

"With him dying of AIDS, you might have had the decency to let us know."

I shook my head. I opened my mouth, I started to say, no, no, that's abomination, what you're saying,I... but it struck me suddenly as just the perfect thing that Katrinka would do, and I began instead to smile and then to laugh.

"Honey, honey, don't cry," said Grady. "You're going to be all right."

"Oh, but you see, it's perfect, it's . .

"All this time," said Katrinka, her tears returning, "You let us worry and tear our hair out!" Katrinka's voice carried over Rosalind's pleas for quiet.

"I love you," Rosalind said.

"When Faye comes home," I whispered to Roz as if the two of us, sisterlike, had to hide from all the rest, at this round table in this front room. "When Faye comes home, she'll love the way the house looks now, don't you think, all of this, all that Karl did, it's so beautiful."

"Don't cry."

"Oh, I'm not, am I? I thought I was laughing. Where is Katrinka?" Several people had left the room.

I got up and left the room. I went into the dining room, the heart and soul of the house, the room in which so long ago Rosalind and I had had that terrible fight with the Rosary. Good Lord, it is a surfeit of memory that drives people to drink, I think so sometimes. Mother must have remembered such terrible, terrible things. We'd torn Mother's Rosary to pieces! A Rosary.

"I have to go to bed," I said. "My head aches, I keep remembering. I'm remembering bad things. I can't get them out of my mind. I must ask you something.

Roz, my love...

"Yes," she said at once, both hands extended, her dark eyes fixed firmly on me with utter sympathy.

"The violinist, do you remember him, the night that Karl died. There was a man out there on St. Charles Avenue and-"

The others crowded under the small chandelier in the hall. Katrinka and Grady were in a furious discussion. Martin was being stern with Katrinka, and Katrinka was almost screaming.

"Oh, him," said Roz, "that guy with the violin." Rosalind laughed. "Yeah, I remember him. He was playing Tchaikovsky. Of course he was really, you know, doing it up, as if anybody had to improvise on Tchaikovsky, but he was-" She cocked her head.

"He was playing Tchaikovsky."

I moved further with Rosalind across the dining room. She was talking . . . and I couldn't understand. In fact, it was so strange I thought she was making it up, and then I remembered-. But it was a wholly different kind of recollection, with none of the sting and heat of these other memories; it was pale and long ago released and generally let to slide away, or deliberately veiled under dust. I didn't know. But now I didn't fight it.

"That picnic, out there in San Francisco," she said, "and you know all you beatniks and hippies were there, and I was scared to death we were all gonna get busted and dumped in San Francisco Bay, and you took that violin and just played and played and Lev danced! It was like the Devil came into you, that time and the other time when you were little and you got a hold of that little three-quarter violin up at Loyola, remember that? And you just played and played and played but-"

"Yes, but I could never make it happen again. I tried and tried, after both those times...

Rosalind shrugged and hugged me close.

I turned and saw us in the mirror-not the hungry, thin, bitter girls fighting over the Rosary. I saw us now. Rubensesque women. Rosalind kissed my cheek. I saw us in the mirror, the two sisters, she with her beautiful white curly hair bouffant and natural around her face, her large soft body in flowing black silk, and I with my bangs and straight hair and ruffled blouse and thick hateful arms, but it didn't matter, the flaws of our bodies, I just saw us, and I wanted so to be here on this spot with her, in relief, to feel the glorious flow of relief, but I couldn't.

I just couldn't.

"Do you think Mother wants us in this house?" I stared to cry.

"Oh, for the love of God," said Rosalind. "Who gives a damn! You go to bed. You should have never stopped drinking. I'm going to drink a six-pack of Dixie beer. You want us to stay upstairs?"

"No." She knew the answer to that.

In the doorway of the bedroom I turned and looked at her.

"What is it?"

My face must have frightened her.

"The violinist, you do remember him, the one playing out there on the corner when Karl... I mean when everybody...

"I told you. Yes. Of course." She said again that it was definitely Tchaikovsky, and I could tell by the way that she lifted her head that she was very proud she could identif~ the music, and of course she was right, or so I thought. She looked so dreamy and sympathetic and sweet and gentle to me, as if nothing of meanness had survived in her at all, and here we were-and we were not old.

I felt no older today than any other day. I didn't know what it meant to feel old.

Old. Fears go. Meanness goes. If you pray, if you are blessed, if you try!

"He kept coming here, that guy with the violin," Rosalind said, "while you were in the hospital. I saw him this evening out there, just watching. Maybe he doesn't like playing for crowds," she said. "He's damned good, if you ask me! I mean the guy's as good as any violinist I ever heard in person or on any record."

"Yes," I said. "That he is, isn't he?"

I waited until the door was shut to cry again.

I like to cry alone. It felt so marvelously good, to cry and cry, totally removed from any hint of censure! No one to tell you yes or no, no one to beg for forgiveness, no one to intervene.

Cry.

I lay down on the bed and cried, and listened to them out there, and felt so tired suddenly, as if I had carried all those coffins to the grave myself... Think of it, scaring Lily like that, coming into the hospital room and bursting into tears and letting Lily see it, and Lily saying, "Mommie, you're scaring me!" And at that moment, when I'd come back late from the bar, I'd been drunk, hadn't I? I'd spent those years drunk, but never too drunk, never so that I couldn't and then that awful, awful moment of seeing her small white face, her hair all gone, her head cancer-bald yet lovely like the bud of a flower, and my stupid, stupid, ill-timed bursting into tears. Cruel, cruel. Dear God.

Where was that brilliant blue sea with its ghostly foam?

When I realized he'd been playing, it must have been after a long while.

The house had gone quiet.

He must have started low, and it did have the pure Tchaikovskian sweetness this time, the civilized eloquence, one might say, rather than the raw horror of the Gaelic fiddlers that had so enthralled me last night. I sank deep into the music, as it came nearer and grew more distinct.

"Yes, play for me," I whispered.

I dreamed.

I dreamed of Lev and Chelsea, of us fighting in the cafe and Lev saying, "So many lies, lies," and realizing what he meant, that he and Chelsea-and she so distraught, so basically kind, and naturally loving him, and wanting him, and my friend, and then the most terrible things came tumbling back, memories of Father's angry speeches and Mother crying in this house, crying in this very house, for us, and I not comi ng to her, but all this was wedded with sleep. The violin sang and sang and pressed for the pain, pressed as only Tchaikovsky might, deep into agony, into its ruby red sweetness and vividness.

Drive me mad, not a chance, but why do you want me to suffer, why do you want me to remember these things, why do you play so beautifully when I remember?

Here comes the sea.

The pain was wedded with drowsiness; Mother's poem of night from the old book:

"The flowers nod, the shadows creep, a star comes over the hill."

The pain was wedded to sleep.

The pain was wedded to his exquisite music.