Violin

Chapter 10

We began together. I let myself drift; this particular torment is private, heated with shame, so debased that one can't even connect it with sadness.

Sadness.

It was the same house in which we stood now. He played a sonata for me in the lower pitch, drawing his bow with such skill on the deep notes that it seemed my eyes saw an earlier time as visibly as my mind.

But I was on the other side of the long dining room.

I smelled the summer before machines had come to cool houses such as this, when wood took on that special baked smell, and the stench of the kitchen's common foods, cabbage and ham, lingered for eternity. Was there a house then that I knew that didn't smell of boiled cabbage? But I was thinking of little houses then, the small gingerbread shotgun houses in the Irish-German waterfront whence my people came -well, some of them-and where often I went with my Mother or Father, hand held tight, gazing on narrow barren sidewalks, wishing for trees, wishing for the soft jumbled mansions of the Garden District.

This after all was a big house; a cottage yes, of only four great rooms on its main floor, with children sleeping in small bedchambers beneath a dormered attic. But each of those four rooms was large, and on that night, the night I remembered, or could never privately forget, the unsharable night, the ugly night, the dining room that lay between me and the master bedroom seemed so vast that surely I was no more than eight years old, if that.

Yes, eight, I remembered, because Katrinka had been born, and somewhere upstairs she slept, a baby who knew how to crawl, and I had become frightened in the night and wanted my mother's bed, which wasn't all that uncommon. I had just come down the stairway.

My Father, long home from the war, had begun his nighttime jobs, as had his brothers, all of them working feverish hours to keep their families, and was gone where on this evening it didn't matter.

Only that she had begun to drink, that's what mattered, and that my Grandmother was dead, and fear had come, the dull terrible misery of dread; I knew it, knew the gloom that threatened to consume all hope, as I had come creeping down the stairs and into this dining room, hoping for the light in her bedroom, because even if she was

"sick," as we called it then, and had that sour taste (read liquor) on her breath, and slept so soundly that one could shake her head and nothing would happen, still, she'd be warm, the light would burn; she hated the dark, she was afraid of it.

There was no electric light, none that I could see. Let your music speak offrar, overwhelming child's frar, frar that the entire fabric of things is rent and will never be whole. It was possible even then to wish I'd never been born; I just didn't have the words to explain it.

But I knew I'd been launched on an awful existence of anguish and peril, of wandering beyond the range of comfort again and again, closing my eyes, wishing only for the morning sun, for the company of others, seeking solace in the sight of the headlamps of the passing cars, which each had such a distinct shape.

Down the narrow curving stairs I had come and into this dining room.

Look, that was the black oak buffet we had in those days, carved by machines, bulbous and grand. That was the one Father gave away when she died, saying he had to give her furniture to "her family" as if we, her daughters, were not her family. But this, this particular night, was long before her death. The buffet was an eternal landmark on the map of dread.

Faye was yet to come, tiny, starved out of the black water of the rotten womb, beloved tiny Faye had not yet come like something sent from Heaven to make warmth, to dance, to distract, to make us all laugh, Faye who walked in beauty like the day and would forever, no matter what pain was thrust upon her, Faye who could lie for hours watching the movements of the green trees in the wind, Faye, born in poison and offering everyone only boundless sweetness forever.

No, this was just before Faye, and this was cheerless, and without safety; this was as dark as the world would ever get, perhaps, even more nearly hopeless than the realizations that come with age, because there was no wisdom to help me. I was afraid, afraid.

Maybe Faye was in Mother's womb that night, already. Could have been. Mother bled all the time she carried Faye. If so, Faye was floating in the drunken contaminated sightless world, penetrated perhaps with misery? Does a drunken heart beat as strong as any other heart? Is a drunken mother's body just as warm to a tiny speck of a being like that, floating, waiting, groping towards a consciousness of dark and chilled rooms where fear stands on the threshold? Panic and hand in hand in one timid guilty child peering across a dirty room.

Behold, the intricately carved fireplace, roses in the reddish wood, a painted frame of stones, a dead gas heater that could scorch the mantel. Behold the moldings above, the lofty framework of grand doors, shadows flung hither and thither by the gliding traffic.

Filthy house. It was then, who could deny it? It was before vacuum cleaners or washing machines, and the dust was always in the corner. The iceman lugged his shining magical load up the steps each morning, a man always on the run. The milk in the icebox stank. Roaches crisscrossed the white enameled metal of the kitchen table.

Khock, knock before you sat down, to make them flee. Always a glass was rinsed before it was used.

Barefoot, we were dirty all summer long. Dust hung in the window screens that rusted to a dark black color after a while. And when the window fan was turned on in summer, it brought the dirt itself right into the house. The filth flew through the night, hung safe from every curlicue and brace as natural as moss from the oaks outside.

But these were normal things; after all, how could she keep such huge rooms clean? And she with all her dreams of reading poetry to us, and that we must not be troubled with chores, her girls, her geniuses, her perfectly healthy children; she would leave the mounds of dirty laundry on the bathroom floor, reading to us, laughing. She had a beautiful laugh.

The scope of things was overwhelming. Such was life. I remember my Father atop the ladder reaching all the way with his arm to paint the fourteen-foot ceilings.

Talk of plaster falling. Rotted beams in the attic; a house sinking, sinking year after year ever deeper into the earth, an image that strangled my heart.

It was never all clean or finished, the house, never all straight; flies crawled on dirty plates in the pantry, and something had burnt on the stove. Sour, dank, that was the motionless night air through which I moved, barefoot, disobedient, out of bed, downstairs, terrified.

Yes, terrified.

What if a roach came, or a rat? Or what if the doors were unlocked and someone had broken in, and there she was, drunk in there, and I couldn't wake her? Couldn't lift her? What if the fire came, oh, yes, that terrible, terrible fire of which I was in some delirious fear that I could never stop thinking of it, fire like the fire that had burned that old Victorian house on Philip and St. Charles, fire that had seemed in my earlier mind, earlier than this memory, born of the very darkness and wrongness of the burned house itself, our world itsel£ our teetering world in which kind words were followed by stupor and coldness, and rank neglect; where things accumulated eternally and made for a universe of disorder~oh, that any place should be so shadowy and cheerless as that old Victorian house, a hunkering monster on the corner of that block, which went up into the greatest flames I'd ever seen.

But what was to stop such a thing from happening here, in these more spacious rooms, behind white columns and iron railings? Look, her heater burned. Her fat-legged gas heater burned, a little blazing flame of ornamented iron squatting at the end of its gas pipe, too near the wall. Too near. I knew. I knew the walls got too hot from all the heaters in this house. I knew already.

It couldn't have been summer then, and it wasn't winter, or was it? It was knowledge that made my teeth chatter.

In the memory and now, as Stefan played and I let this old childhood misery unfold, my teeth chattered.

Stefan played a slow, walking music, like the music of the Second Movement of Beethoven's Ninth, only more somber than that, as if he walked with me over this parquet which had no shine then and was thought to be hopeless, given the chemical and mechanical possibilities of that era-was it 1950 yet? No.

I saw the gas heater in her room, even the sight of the orange flames making me wince and cover my eyes, though I stood a full room and alcove away; think of fire, fire and trying to get Katrinka out, and her drunk, and Rosalind, where was she? She didn't figure in memory or in phobia. I was alone there, and I knew how old the wiring was; they spoke of it carelessly enough at dinner tables:

"This place is so dried out," my Father said once. "It would burn like kindling."

"What did you say?" I had asked.

She had come with the lying reassurances. But every dull 60-watt bulb of those days blinked when she ironed, and when she was drunk, she could drop her cigarette, or forget a hot iron, cords were frayed, sparks flew from old plugs, and what if the fire burned and burned and I couldn't get Katrinka out of the baby bed, and Mother would be coughing, coughing in the smoke but unable to help, coughing as Mother was now.

And eventually, as we both know, I did murder her.

That night, I heard her struggling with that endless, hacking smoker's cough that never stopped for too long, but it meant to me that she was awake beyond the dark length of this room, awake enough to clear her throat, to cough, perhaps to let me under the covers to curl up beside her, even though all day she'd slept in her drunken trance, yes, now I knew it had been that way, that she had-because she had never dressed-merely lain there under the covers in her underwear, pink panties, and braless, her breasts small and empty, though she had nursed Katrinka for a year, and her naked legs down over which I'd pulled the covers were so ropy with swollen veins in back that I couldn't dare look at them. It looked like pain, calves that were clusters of swollen veins, from "carrying three children," she'd said to her sister Alicia on the phone long distance once, once. .

Walking across this floor, I feared disintegration, that something so terrible would come out of the dark that I would scream and scream. I had to get to her. I had to ignore the orange flames and the constant thump thump thump fear of fire, the images that recurred and went round and round, the house filled with smoke as I'd seen it when she'd set the mattress on fire and put it out herself once, and I had to get to her. Her coughing was the only sound in the house, the house rendered all the more empty by its immense black oak furniture-the table with its five bulbous legs-this grand old buffet with its thick lower carved doors and high spotted mirror.

Rosalind and I had crawled inside the buffet when we were small, amongst the china left and even a glass or two from her wedding. That was when she let us write or draw on the walls, and break everything. She wanted her children to be free. We pasted our paper dolls to the wall with glue from the five-and-dime on Canal. We had a dream world of many characters, Mary, Madene, Betry Headquarters, and later came Katrinka's favorite, Doan the Stone, over whom we laughed and laughed for the sheer tickle of the sound, but that was later.

There was no one in this memory but Mother and I. . . and she coughed in the bedroom and I came tiptoeing towards her, frightened that she might be so drunk, her head would swing and smack the wood of the door, and her eyes would swim like cow's eyes in pictures, big and dumb, and it would be ugly, but I didn't really care that much, I mean it would be worth it, if I could just reach her, and sneak into the bed beside her. I didn't mind her body, with the potbelly and the varicose veins and the sagging breasts.

She often wore nothing but her underpants and a man's shirt around the house; she liked to be free. There are things you never, never, never tell anyone.

Just ugly awful things, like that when she sat on the toilet to have a bowel movement, she kept the bathroom door wide open, and her legs wide apart and liked us to be there with her as she read, a display of pubic hair, white thighs, and Rosalind would say, "Mother, the smell, the sme ll," as this defecating went on and on, and Mother with the Reader's Digest in one hand and the cigarette in the other, our beautiful Mother of the high domed forehead and the big brown eyes would laugh at Rosalind, who wanted to bolt, and then our Mother would read us one more funny story from the magazine, and we would all laugh.

All my life I knew people had their favorite comfort modes for the working of their bowels-that all doors be locked, that no one be near; or that there be no windows to the small room; and some like her, that wanted someone to be near, someone to be talking.

Why?

I didn't care. If I could just get to her I could take any ugly sight. Never in the midst of any state had she herself seemed anything but clean and warm, her shining hair growing from a white, white scalp, through which I'd run my fingers, her skin smooth.

Perhaps the filth accumulating around her could smother her but never corrupt her.

I crept to the door of the alcove. Her bedroom, which was now mine, had only an iron bed then with a naked coiled spring beneath the striped mattress, and she would put a thin white spread over it now and then, but mostly only sheets and blankets. It seemed the normal course of life, big thick white cups for coffee, always chipped; frayed towels; shoes with holes; the green scum on our teeth, until our Father said, "Don't any of you ever brush your teeth?"

And there might be a toothbrush for a while or even two or three and even some powder with which we could brush our teeth, but then those things would fall on the floor, or get lost or go away, and on went the pace of life, covered with a thick gray cloud. In the kitchen tubs, my Mother washed by hand as our grandmother had done till she died.

Nineteen forty-seven. Nineteen forty-eight. We carried the sheets out into the yard in a big wicker basket; her hands were swollen from wringing them out. I liked to play with the washboard in the tub. We hung the sheets on the line, and I carried the end so it didn't fall in the mud, I love it, running through clean sheets.

She had said once to me right before she died, and mark, I'm jumping now ahead some seven years, she said that she had seen a strange creature in the sheets in the yard, two small black feet, she hinted of a demonic thi ng, her eyes wide. I knew she was going crazy. She'd die soon. And she did.

But this was long before I thought she could die, even though our grandmother had. At eight, I thought people came back; death hadn't struck the deep fear in me. It was she who struck the fear, perhaps, or my Father gone on his nighttime jobs, delivering telegrams on a motorbike after his regular hours at the post office, or sorting mail at the American Bank. I never fully understood the extra things he did, only that they kept him away, only that he had two jobs, and on Sunday, he went with the Holy Name Men who went through the parish and gave to poor children, and I remember that because one Sunday he took my crayons, my only crayons, and gave them to a "poor child" and was so bitterly disappointed in me for my selfishhess that he sneered as he turned and left the house.

Where was the certain source of crayons in such a world? Way way off over the stony field of lassitude and sloth, in a dime store to which I might never drag anybody for years and years again, to get more crayons!

But he wasn't there. The heater was the light. I stood in the door of her room. I could see the heater. I could see something by it, something white, indistinct, white and dark, and glittering. I knew what it was but not why it was glittering.

I stepped into the room; the warm air hung there imprisoned by the door and the transom shut above it, and on the bed to my left, its head to the wall nearest me, she lay; the bed was where it was now, only it was old and iron and sagged and creaked and when you hid under it, you could see such dust in the coils of springs; it seemed quite fascinating.

Her head was raised, her hair, not yet shorn or sold, was long and dark all over her naked back and she shook with the cough, the light of the heater showing the thick ropy veins collected on her legs, and the pink panties over her small bottom.

What was that lying by the heater, dangerously, oh, God, it would catch fire like the legs of the chairs that were charred black when someone pushed them up against the heater and forgot about them and there was that smell of gas in the room, and the flames burnt orange, and I shrank up against the door.

I didn't care now if she was angry that I'd come down, if she told me to go back to bed, I wouldn't go, I couldn't go, I couldn't move.

Why did it glitter?

It was what they called a Kotex, a pad of soft white cotton fibers that she wore in her panties with a safety pin when she bled, and it was pinched in the middle from being worn and all dark with blood, of course, yet the glitter, why the glitter?

I stood at the head of her bed, and saw her, in the corner of my eye, sit up. Her coughing was now so bad, she had to sit up.

"Turn on the light," she said in her drunk voice. "Pull the shade, Triana, turn on the light."

"But that," I said, "but that." I moved closer to it, pointing, the Kotex white cotton pad creased in the middle and clotted with blood. It was swarming with ants! That's why it glittered! Oh, God, look at

Mother! Ants, ants everywhere over it, ants, you know, the way they could come and take over a plate left outdoors, swarming, devouring, tiny, impossible to kill.

"Mother, look, it's covered with ants, the Kotex!"

Now if Katrinka saw that, if Katrinka crawled and found something like that, if anyone saw-I went closer and closer. "Look," I said to her.

She coughed and coughed. She waved her right arm as if to say, Leave it alone, but you couldn't leave something like this alone, it was a Kotex covered with ants, just thrown in the corner. It was near the heater. It could catch fire, and the ants, you stop ants. Ants could get all over everything. You locked up the old world of 1948 or '49

tight from ants, you never let them get a head start; they ate the dead birds as soon as they fell in the grass; they made a line creeping under the door and up the kitchen counter to find the one spill of molasses.

"Ah," I made some noise of disgust. "Look at it, Mother." Oh, I didn't want to touch it.

She stood up, wobbling, coming behind me. I bent down pointing at it, crinching up the features of my face.

Behind me she struggled to speak, to say, Stop, Stop. She said, “Leave it alone,"

and then coughed so hard she seemed to strangle.

She grabbed my hair, slapped me.

"But Mother," I said. I pointed at it.

Again, she slapped, and again, so that I cowered, arms up, slap after slap coming down on my arm. "Stop it, Mother!"

I went down on my knees on the floor, where the heater made a laming reflection even in the dusty boards with their old shellac, and I melled the gas and saw the blood, the thick collection of blood covered with ants.

She slapped me again. I put out my right hand. I screamed. I broke my fall, but my hand almost touched it, and the ants swarmed, the ants went into a frenzy, racing at ant speed over the thick blood. "Mamma, stop!"

I turned around; I didn't want to pick it up, but somebody had to pick it up.

She stood looming over me, unsteady, the thin pink panties stretched high over her little belly, her breasts sagging and brown-nippled, and her hair a big tangle over her face, coughing and waving furiously for me to get away, to go out, and then she lifted her knee and her naked foot and she kicked me, hard in the stomach. Hard.

Hard, hard.

Never in all my living life had I known this!

This wasn't pain. This was the end of everything.

I couldn't breathe. I couldn't breathe. I wasn't alive. I couldn't reach or find my breath. I felt the pain in my stomach and chest and I had no voice to scream and I thought I will die, I would die, I would die. Oh, God, that she did that, you kicked me, I wanted to say, you kicked me, you didn't mean to do it, you couldn't mean it, Mother!

But I couldn't breathe, let alone speak, I was going to die and my arm brushed the hot heater, the burning iron of the heater.

She grabbed for my shoulder. I did scream. I did. I panted and panted and screamed and screamed-and I screamed now, as I had then, but now-that Kotex glittering with the swarming ants and the pain in my stomach and the vomit coming up in my scream, that was all there was, You didn't mean, you didn't... I couldn't get up.

No. Put an end to it!

Stefan.

His voice. Ethereal and loud.

The cold house of present time. Any less haunted?

He stood crumpled beside the four-poster bed. It was now, forty-six years later after that moment, and all of them gone to the grave, but me and the baby upstairs who grew up to be so full of dread, and so full of hatred of me that I couldn't save her from these things, and didn't-and he, our guest, my ghost-bent double, grabbing the fancy carved post of the mahogany bed.

Yes, please let it all come back, my counterpanes of lace, my cur tains, my silk, I never, my Mother, she didn't mean, she couldn't …that pain, absolutely unable to breathe, then hurt, hurt, hurt and nausea, can't move!

Vomit.

No! No more, he said.

And he hooked his right arm around the post of the bed, and let go of the violin safely on the big soft mattress of the bed, atop the feathered counterpane. With both hands, he held the bedpost and he cried.

"Such a little thing," I said, "She didn't cut me with a knife!"

"I know, I know," he cried.

"And think of her," I said, "naked like that, how ugiy she looked, and she kicked me, she kicked hard with her naked foot, she was drunk, and my arm got burned on the heater!"

"Stop it!" he pleaded with me. "Triana, stop." He lifted both hands to his face.

"Can't you make music of that," I said drawing near. "Can't you make high art of something so private and shameful and vulgar as that, as that!"

He cried. Just like I must have cried.

The violin and the bow lay on the counterpane.

I rushed at the bed, grabbed both of them-violin and bow-and stepped back away from him.

He was astonished.

His face was wet and white. He stared at me. For a moment, he couldn't grasp what I'd done, and then his eyes fixed on the violin and he saw it and he understood.

I lifted the violin to my chin; I knew how; I lifted the bow and I began to play. I didn't think on it or plan or dread to fail; I began to play, to let the bow, barely grasped between two fingers, fly against the strings. I smelled the horsehair and the resin of the bow, I felt my left fingers stomping up and down the neck of it, damping down the throbbing strings, and I tore at the strings wildly with the bow, and in the stroking and in the pound of my fingers, it was a song, a coherent song, a dance, a drunken frenzied dance, with note following too fast upon note for the mind to direct, a devil's dance, like that long ago drunken picnic, when Lev had danced and I'd played and played, and could let the bow and my fingers move without stopping. It was like that, and more, and it was a song, a crazed, plunging discordant rural song, wild, wild, like the songs of the Highlands and the dark mountain places, and grim weird dances in memory and in dreams.

It had come into me . . .1 love you, 1 love you, Mamma, I love you, I love you, I love you. It was a song, a real true bright and shrieking and throbbing song coming out of his Stradivari5s, unbroken, streaming out as I rocked back and forth, the bow sawing wildly and my fingers prancing. I loved it, loved it, this untutored dark and rustic song, my song.

He grabbed for the violin.

"Give it back to me!"

I turned my back on him. I played. I went motionless, then drew the bow down in a long low mournful wail; I played the saddest slowest phrase, dark and sweet, and in my eyes I dressed her and made her pretry and saw her in the park with us, her brown hair combed, her face so beautiful; we never, any of us, ever had her beauty.

Years and years wrapped round all this and meant nothing as I played.

I saw her crying in the grass. She wanted to die. During the war, when we were so small, Rosalind and I, we always walked beside her, holding her hands, and one evening, we were locked by mistake in the dark museum of the Cabildo. She wasn't afraid. She wasn't drunk. She was full of hope and dreams. There was no death. It had been an adventure. Her smiling face as the guard came to our rescue.

Oh, draw the bow out long and let the notes go deep, so deep that they scare you that anything could make this sound. He reached for me. I kicked him! I kicked him as sure as she had kicked me, only my knee came up and he went whirling back.

"Give it to me!" he demanded, struggling to regain his balance.

I played and played so loud I couldn't hear him, turning away from him again, seeing nothing but her, I love you, I love you, I love you.

She said she wanted to die. We were in the park, and I was a young girl and she was going to drown herself in the lake. Students had drowned themselves in the lake of the park-it was deep enough. The oaks and fountains hid us from the world of the Avenue, the streetcars. She was going to go down into that slimy water and drown.

She wanted to, and desperate Rosalind, pretty Rosalind of fifteen years old, with her glossy perfect frame of curls, begged her and begged her not to do it. I had breasts under my dress but no brassiere. I had never even put one on.

Forty years later or more, I stood here. I played. I slashed and slashed at the strings with the bow. I stamped my foot. I drew out the sound, I made it scream, this violin, twisting this way and that.

In the park, near the filthy gazebo where the old men made urine and would always stand, leering, near there, eager to show a limp penis in a hand, pay them no mind, near there I had Katrinka and little Faye in the swings, those small wooden swings they had for the little little kids with the slide bar in front so they wouldn't fall out, but I could still smell the urine, and I was pushing both of them in the swings, taking turns, one push for Faye, one push for Katrinka, and these sailors wouldn't leave me alone, these boys, who were hardly any older than me, just the teenager sailor boys who were always in port in those days, English boys maybe or boys from up north, I don't know, boys walking along Canal Street, smoking their cigarettes, just boys.

"Is that your mother? What's wrong with her?"

I didn't answer. I wanted them to go away. I didn't think anything even in answer.

I just stared and pushed at the swings.

He had forced us out, my Father; he had said, You have got to get her out of this house, I have to get her out of here and clean this place, I can't stand it, you're taking her out, and we knew she was drunk, stinking drunk, and he made us take her; Rosalind said, I will hate you till the day I die, and we had all together gotten her on the streetcar and she had nodded and wagged, drunken and half asleep as the streetcar rocked uptown.

What did people think of her then, this lady with her four girls; she must have worn some respectable dress, yet all I can recall is her hair, prettily combed back from her temples and her lips pursed and the way she shook herself awake and straightened up, only to wag forward again, eyes glazed, little Faye clinging tight to her, tight, tight.

Little Faye, head against her Mother's skirts, little Faye, unquestioning, and Katrinka, solemn and sha med and mute and staring with numbed eyes already at that tender age.

When the streetcar came to the park, she said, "Here!" We all went with her to get off the streetcar by the front door, because we were nearer to the front. I remember.

Holy Name Church across the street and on the other side the beautiful park with its balustrades and fountains and the green, green grass where she used to take us all the time, years before.

But something was wrong. The streetcar stood still. The people in the wooden seats stared. I stood on the pavement looking up at her. It was Rosalind. Rosalind sat in a back seat looking out the window pretending that she wasn't one of us, ignoring Mother, as Mother said so ladylike you would have never dreamt she was drunk,

"Rosalind, dear, come on."

The driver waited. The driver stood there as they did at that time, in the front window of the car, with the controls, the two knobs, and waited, and everyone on the streetcar stared. I grabbed Faye's hand. She almost wandered into the traffic. Katrinka, sullenly, sucking her thumb, round-cheeked and blond, and lost, stared dully at all that took place.

My mother walked back down the length of the car. Rosalind couldn't hold out.

She had to get up, and she came.

And now, in the park, as Mother threatened to drown hersel£ as she fell back on the grass sobbing, Rosalind begged her and begged her not to do it.

The sailor boys said, "How old are you? Is that your Mother? What's wrong with her? Here, let me help with that little girl."

I didn't want their help! I didn't like the way they looked at me. Thirteen. I didn't know what they wanted! I didn't know what was wrong with them, to crowd around me like that, and two little children, and over there, she lay on her side, her shoulders shaking. I could hear her sobs. Her voice was lovely and soft as the pain perhaps grew less sharp, the prick of it that Rosalind had tried to stay on the car, that Mother was drunk, that my Father had forced her out, that she was drunk, that she wanted to die.

''Give it back to me!'' he roared, ''give me the violin.''

Why couldn't he take it? I didn't know. I didn't care.

I went on and on with the chaotic dance, the jig, my feet moving, prancing like the feet of the deaf mute Johnny Belinda in the movie, to the vibrations of the fiddle she could only feel, dancing feet, dancing hands, dancing fingers, wild, mad, Kerry rhythm, chaos. Dancing on the bedroom floor, dancing and playing and letting the bow dip to the left then bringing it down, fingers choosing their own path, bow its own time, yes, jam, jam, as they said at the picnic, let it go, jam.

Blow it Out, let it go. I played and played.

He grabbed at me, clutching me. He wasn't strong enough to overpower me.

I backed up against the window, and wrapped my arms over the violin and the bow against my chest.

"Give it back," he said.

"No!"

"You can't play it. It's the violin that's doing it; it's mine, it's mine.

"Give it to me, it's my violin!"

"I'll crush it first!"

I crunched my arms tight against it, I didn't want to make the bridge collapse, but he couldn't tell how hard I held it. I must have been all elbows and huge eyes to him, holding it.

"No," I said. "I played it, I played it that way before, I played my song, my version of it.

"You did not, you lying whore! Give me the violin now, damn you, I tell you, it's mine! You can't take such a thing."

I shivered all over staring at him. He reached for me, and I shrank in the corner and tightened my grip.

"I'll smash it!"

"You wouldn't do that."

"Why should it matter? It's a spectral thing, is it not? It's a ghost as you are ghost?

I want to play it again. I want... just to hold it. You can't take it back. .

I lifted it and put it under my chin again. His hand came out and I kicked hi m again. I kicked at his legs as he tried to get away. I put the bow to the strings and played a wild cry, a long awful cry and then slowly, with eyes closed, ignoring him, holding tight to it with every finger and every fiber of my being, I played, I played soft and slow, a lullaby perhaps, for her, for me, for Roz, for my wounded Katrinka and my fragile Faye, a song of twilight like Mother's old poem, her soft voice reading to us before the war ended and Father came home. I heard the tone rise, the rich and rounded tone; ah, this was the touch, this was the very touch-the way to bring the bow down with no conscious thought of pressure on the strings, and then it was just one phrase following another. Mother, I love you, I love you, I love you. He'll never come home, there is no war, and we'll always be together. These higher notes were so thin and pure, so bright yet sad.

It weighed nothing, the violin, it hurt my shoulder bone only a little, and I felt a dizziness, but the song was the compass. I knew no notes, no tunes. I knew only these wandering phrases of melancholy and grie£ these sweet Gaelic laments without ending, one twining into the next, but it flowed, dear God, it flowed, it flowed like-what, like blood, like blood on the filthy rag on the floor. Like blood, the never ending flow of blood from a woman's womb and a woman's heart, I don't know. In her last year, she bled month in and month out, and so had I at the end of my fertile life, and now childless, no more ever to be born out of me at this age now, like the living blood, let it go.

Let it go.

It was music!

Something brushed my cheek. It was his lips. My elbow rose and I threw him over, past the bed. He was awkward, hopeless, grabbing for the bedpost and glowering at me as he struggled to stand.

I stopped, the last notes shimmering. Good God, we had spent the long night in our wanderings, or was it just the moon, yes, the moon in the cherry laurels and the big obliterating darkness of that building next door, a wall of the modern world that could shadow tut never destroy this paradise.

The sorrow I felt for her, the grief, the grief for her in that moment when she had kicked me, the eight-year-old girl here in this room, the grief I felt was flowing with the resonance of the notes in the air. I had only to lift the bow. It was natural.

He stood in fear of me against the far wall.

"You either give it back, or I warn you, I'll make you pay for this!"

"Did you cry for me? Or for her?"

"Give it back!"

"Or was it the sheer ugliness? What was it?"

Was it a little girl unable to breathe, in panic, clutching at her belly, her arm brushing the hot iron of the open heater, oh, this is such small sorrow in a world of horrors, and yet of all memories there had been nothing more secret, more awful, more untold.

I hummed. "I want to play." I began softly now, realizing how simple it was to glide the bow gently on the A string and the G, and to make a song all on that one lower string if I wanted, and let the soft grinding sound come up and into it; oh, weep, weep for the wasted life, I heard the notes, I let them surprise and express my soul in stroke after stroke, yes, come to me, let me know, let my mind reach out through this to find my mind; she did not live another year after she cried in the park, not even another year, her hair was long and brown, and on that last day no one went with her to the gate.

I think I sang as I played. Whom did you cry for, Stefan, I sang. Was it for her, was it for me, was it for shabbiness and ugliness? How good this felt to my arm, my fingers so flexible and exact, as if my fingers were tiny hooves stomping on the strings, and the music building upon my ear without a bass or treble cle{ such poor script for sound, such ancient inadequate code for this, I could command this tone, yet be astonished and swept up by it as I'd always been swept up in the song of the violin, only it was in my hands!

I saw her body in the coffin. Rouged like a whore. The undertaker said, "This woman has swallowed her tongue!" My father said to us, "She was so malnourished that her face turned black and collapsed, he's had to put on too much makeup. Oh, no, look, Triana, this isn't right, look, Faye won't recognize her."

And whose dress was that? That was a dark red dress, a ma genta dress. She never had such a dress. Aunt Elvia's dress, and she did not like Aunt Elvia. "Elvia said she couldn't find anything in her closet. Your Mother had clothes. She must have had clothes. Didn't she have clothes?"

It was so light, the instrument itsel£ so easy to keep in place, to tap, tap, tap for the flood of sound, familiar, embraced, easy as it was to the men and women of the hills who pick it up and dance with it in childhood before they can read or write, or even speak perhaps, I had yielded to it, and it to me.

Aunt Elvia's dress, but that seemed an abomination, not so very great, only unforgettable, a final disgusting irony, a bitter, bitter figure of neglect.

Why didn't I buy her dresses, wash her, help her, get her on her feet? What was so wrong with me? The music carried the accusation, and the punishment, in one unbroken and coherent current.

"Did she have clothes?" I'd said coldly to my Father. A black silk slip I remember, yes, when she sat under the lamp with her cigarette in her hand, a black silk slip on summer nights. Clothes? A coat, an old coat.

Oh, God, to let her die like that. I was fourteen. I was old enough to have helped her, loved her, restored her.

Let the words melt. That's the genius of it, let the words go; let the great rounded sound tell the tale.

"Give it back to me!" Stefan cried. "Or, I warn you, I'll take you with me."

Dazed, I stopped.

"What did you say?"

He didn't speak.

I began humming, holding the violin still so easily between shoulder and chin.

"Where?" I asked, dreamily, "where will you take me?"

I didn't wait for his answer.

I played the soft song that needed no conscious goad at all, just sweet and tumbling notes following as easy as kisses to a baby's hands and throat and cheeks, as if I held little Faye in my hands and kissed her and kissed her, so tiny, good God, Mother, Faye's slipped through the slats of the baby bed, look! I have her. But this was Lily, wasn't it?

Or Katrinka alone in the dark house with tiny Faye when I came home.

Vomit on the floor.

And what has become of us?

Where had Faye gone?

"I think. . .1 think perhaps you should start calling," Karl had said. "Two years your sister Faye has been gone. I don't think... I don't think she's coming back."

"Coming back." Coming back, coming back, coming back.

That's what the doctor had said when Lily lay still beneath the oxygen mask.

"She's not coming back."

Let the music cry this, and boil, and ease the fit of all this grief by giving it a new form.

I opened my eyes, playing on, seeing things, the world shining, strange and wondrous, but not naming the things as I saw them, merely seeing their shapes as inevitable and brilliant in the glow from the windows, the skirted dressing table of my life with Karl, and the picture there of Lev, and his beautiful son, the tall oldest boy with the light hair like Lev's and Chelsea's, the one named Christopher.

Stefan rushed at me.

He grabbed on to the violin, and I held it firm. "It's going to break!" I said, and then I whipped it free. Solid, light, a shell of a thing, as full of vibrant life as a cricket's shell before it was detached, was left behind, and could be crushed quicker than glass.

I backed up to the windowpanes. "I'll smash it, and who will be the worse off when I do!"

He was frantic.

"You don't know what a ghost is," he said. "You don't know what death is. You mutter about death as though it were a rocking cradle. It's stench and it's hate and it's rot. Your husband is ashes now, Karl. Ashes! And your daughter, her body bloated by gases and..."

"No," I said. "I have it, this violin, and I can play it."

He came towards me. He drew himself up, face soft with wondering but only for a moment. His dark smooth eyebrows were clear of any frown, and his long, darkly lashed eyes peered at me.

"I warn you," he said, voice deepening, hardening, though his eyes had never been so open and full of pain. "You have a thing that comes from the dead," he said to me.

"You have a thing that comes from my realm which is not yours. And if you don't give it back, I'll take you with me. I'll take you into my world and my memories and my pain, and you'll know what pain is, you wretched fool, you worthless bitch, you thief, you greedy, brooding, desperate human; you hurt all those who loved you, you let her die, and Lily, you hurt her, remember that, her hip, the bone, you remember that, her face as she looked up, you were drunk and you laid her down on the bed and she was...!"

"Take me into the realm of the dead? And that's not Hell?"

Lily's face. I'd thrown her too roughly on the bed; the drugs had eaten up all her bones. I'd hurt her in haste, she had looked up, did look up, saw me, bald, hurt, afraid, candle flame of a child, beautiful in sickness and in health; I had been drunk, dear God, for this I will burn in Hell, forever and ever because I myself will fan the flames of my own perdition. I sucked in my breath. I didn't do that, I didn't.

"But you did, you were rough with her that night, you pushed her, you were drunk, you who swore you'd never let a child suffer what you had with a drunken mother-"

I lifted the violin, and brought the bow down in a searing cry over the E string, the high string, the metal string, maybe all song is a form of crying out, an organized scream; a violin as it reaches for a magic pitch is as sharp as a siren.

He couldn't stop me, simply wasn't strong enough; his hand fluttered on top of mine, he couldn't. Haunt, specter, the violin's stronger than you!

"You've broken the veil," he swore. "I warn yo u. The thing you hold in your hands belongs to me and neither it nor I are of this world and you know it. To see it is one thing, to come with me is another."

"And what will I see when I come with you? Such pain that I will give it back?

You come in here, offering me desperation rather than despair, and you think I'll weep for you?"

He gnawed his lip, and he hesitated, not to cheapen what he meant to say.

"Yes, you will see that, you will see . . . what distinguishes pain . what, it's .

.they “

"And who were they? Who were they that were so terrible they could propel you right out of life with a shape and taking this violin with you so that you come to me, in the guise of comforter, and cast me down, to see those weeping faces, my Mother, oh, you, I hate you-my worst memories."

"You reveled in tormenting yourself, you made your own graveyard pictures and poems, you sang out for death with a greedy mouth. You think death is flowers? Give me my violin. Scream with your vocal cords, but give me my violin."

Mother in a dream two years after her death, "You saw flowers, my girl."

"You mean you're not dead?" I had cried out in the dream, but then I knew this woman was a fake, not her, I knew by the crooked smile, not my Mother, my Mother was really dead. This imposter was too cruel when she said, "The whole funeral was a sham," when she said, "You saw flowers."

"Get away from me," I whispered.

"It's mine."

"I did not invite you!"

"You did."

"I do not deserve you."

"You do."

"I made up prayers and fantasies, as you said. I laid the tributes on the grave, and they had petals, these tributes. I dug graves that were cut to my size. You took me back, you took me to the raw and the unframed, and you made my head sick with it.

You kicked the breath out of me! And now I can play, I can play this violin!"

I turned away from him and I played, the bow rising and falling with ever greater grace, song. My hands knew! Yes, they did.

"Only because it's mine, because it's not real, you shrew, give it up!"

I stepped back, playing the melody down deep and harsh, ignoring the repeated thrust of his desperate hands. Then I broke off, shivering.

The magical link was made between my mind and my hands, between intent and fingers, between will and skill; God be praised, it had happened.

"It's coming from my violin because it's mine!" he said.

"No. The fact that you can't snatch it back is clear enough. You try. You can't.

You can pass through walls. You can play it. You brought it with you into death, all right. But you can't get it away from me now. I'm stronger than you. I have it. It stays solid, look. Listen, it sings! What if it was destined somehow for me? Did you ever think of that, you evil predatory creature, did you ever love anyone before or after death yourself, enough to think that perhaps-"

"Outrageous," he said. "You are nothing, you are random, you are one in hundreds, you are the very epitome of the person who appreciates all and creates nothing, you are merely one-"

"Oh, you clever thing. You ma ke your face so full of pain, just like Lily, just like Mother."

"You do this to me," he whispered. "It's not right, I would have moved on, I would have gone if you had asked me. You tricked me!"

"But you didn't move on, you wanted me, you tormented me, you didn't go until it was too late and I needed you; how dare you tear at wounds that deep, and now I have this and I'm stronger than you! Something in me has claimed it and won't let it go. I can play it."

"No, it's part of me, as much as my face or my coat or my hands, or my hair.

We're ghosts, that thing and I, you can't begin to imagine what they did, you have no authority, you cannot come between me and that instrument, you don't begin to understand this perdition, and they..."

He bit his lip; his face gave the illusion of a man who might faint, so white it went, all the blood that wasn't blood rushing from it. He opened his mouth.

I couldn't bear to see him hurt. I couldn't. It seemed the final error, the ultimate wrong, the last defeat, to see him hurt, Stefan, whom I scarcely knew and had robbed.

But I would not give the violin back to him.

I let my eyes mist. I felt nothing, the great cool blankness of nothing. Nothing. I heard music in my mind, a replay of the music I'd made. I bowed my head and shut my eyes. Play again-.

"All right, then," he said. I waked from this blankness, and looked at him, and my hands tightened on the violin.

"You've made your choice," he said, eyebrows lifted, face full of wonder.

"What choice?"