Violin

Chapter 4

It was three days of sleepless hospital sleep, thin and filled with annoyances and horrors.

Had they cremated Karl yet? Were they absolutely sure he was dead before they put him in that horrible furnace? I couldn't get this question out of my mind. Was my husband ashes?

Karl's mother, Mrs. Wolfstan, back from England, cried and cried by my bed that she had left me with her dying son. Over and over I told her that I had loved taking care of him, and that she must not worry. There was a beauty in the birth of the new child, so close to Karl's death.

We smiled at pictures of the new baby born in London. My arms ached with needles. A blur.

"You'll never never have to worry about anything again," Mrs. Wolfstan said.

I knew what she meant. I wanted to say thank you, that Karl had once explained it all, but I couldn't. I started to cry. I would worry again. I would worry about things that Karl's generosity could not alter.

I had sisters to love and lose. Where was Faye?

I had made myself ill-a person drifting for two days with no more than gulps of soda and occasional slices of bread could create in herself an irregular heartbeat.

My brother-in-law Martin, Katrinka's husband, came and said she was so concerned, but just couldn't set foot in a hospital.

The tests were run.

In the night I woke sharply, thinking, This is a hospital room, and Lily is in the bed.

I'm sleeping on the floor. I have to get up and see if my little girl is all right. And there came one of those broken-glass-shard memories so abrupt it drew all my blood-I had come in out of the rain drunk and looked at her lying there on the bed, five years old, bald, wasted, almost dead, and burst into tears, a flood of tears.

"Mommie, Mommie, why are you crying? Mommie, you're scaring me!"

How could you have done that, Triana!

Some night, high on Percodan and Phenergan and other opiates to make me calm and make me sleep, and to make me stop asking stupid questions as to whether the house was locked and safe, and what had become of Karl's study of St. Sebastian, I thought the curse of memory is this: Everything is ever present.

They asked if they could call Lev, my first husband. Absolutely not, I said, don't you dare bother Lev. I'll call him. When I want to.

But drugged I couldn't really go down.

The tests were run again. I walked and walked one morning in the hall until the nurse said, "You must go back to bed."

"And why? What is wrong with me?"

"Not a damned thing," she said, "if they'd stop shooting you full of tranquilizers.

They have to taper them off."

Rosalind put a small black disk player by my bed. She put the earphones on my head, and softly came the Mozart voices-the angels singing their foolishness from Cosi Fan Tutte. Sweet sopranos in unison.

I saw a movie in my mind's eye. Amadeus. A vivid marvelous film. I saw this movie in which the evil composer Salieri, admirably played by F. Murray Abraham, had driven to death a laughing, childlike Mozart. There had been a moment when, in a gilded, velvet-lined theater box, Salieri looked down upon Mozart's singers and the little cherubic and hysterical conductor himself; and the voice of F. Murray Abraham had said: "I heard the voice of the angels."

Ah, yes, by God. Yes.

Mrs. Wolfstan didn't want to leave. But all was done, the ashes in the Metairie Mausoleum, and every test on me had been negative for HIV, for anything really. I was the picture of health and had lost only five pounds. My sisters were with me.

"Yes, do go on, Mrs. Wolfstan, and you know I loved him. I loved him with all my heart, and it never had anything to do with what he gave me or anyone."

Kisses, the smell of her perfume.

Yes, said Glenn. Now, stop going over it. Karl's book was in the hands of the scholars Karl had designated in his will. Thank God, no need to call Lev, I thought. Let Lev be with the living.

Everything else was in Grady's hands, and Althea, my beloved Althea, had gone right to work on the house, and so had Lacomb, polishing silver for "Miss Triana." Althea had my old bed on the first floor in the big northerly room all full of nice pillows the way I liked it.

No, the Prince of Wales marriage bed upstairs had not been burnt! No, indeed.

Only the bedding. Mrs. Wolfstan had had the charming young man from Hurwitz Mintz come out with new pillows of watered silk and comforters of velvet and create a new band of scalloped moire' from the wooden canopy.

I'd go home to my old room. My old rice bed, with the four-posters carved with rice, the symbol of fertility. The first-floor bedroom was the only real bedroom the cottage had.

Whenever I was ready.

One morning I woke up. Rosalind slept nearby. She dozed in one of those big sloping, dipping wooden-handled chairs they give in hospital rooms for the vigilant family.

I knew four days had passed, and that last night I'd eaten a full meal and the needles felt like insects in my arm. I pulled back the tape, removed the needles, got out of bed, went to the bathroom, found my clothes in the locker and dressed completely before I woke Rosalind.

Rosalind woke dazed, and dusted the cigarette ashes off her black blouse.

"You're HIV negative," she said at once, as if she'd been just dying to tell me and couldn't remember that everyone already had, staring wide eyed through her glasses.

Dazed. She sat up. "Katrinka made them do everything but remove one of your fingers."

"Come on," I said. "Let's get the hell out of here.

We hurried down the hall. It was empty. A nurse passed who didn't know who we were or didn't care.

"I'm hungry," Rosalind said. "You hungry, for real food I mean?"

"I just wanna go home," I said.

"Well, you'll be very pleased."

"Why, what do you mean?"

"Oh, you know the Wolfstan tribe; they bought you a stretch limousine and hired you a new man, Oscar, and this one can read and write, no offense to Lacome-"

"Lacomb can write," I said. This is something I'd said a thousand times because my man Lacomb can write, but when he talks it's a deep black jazz musician's dialect that almost no one can understand a word of.

"-and Althea's back, and jabbering away and calling the hired cleaning lady names and telling Lacomb not to smoke in the house. Can anyone understand what she says?

Do her kids understand what she says?"

"Never figured it out," I said.

"But you should see that house," said Roz. "You'll love it. I tried to tell them."

"Tell who?"

The elevator came; we went inside. Shock. Hospital elevators are always so immense, big enough to hold the living or the dead stretched out full length and two or three attendants. We stood alone in this vast metal compartment gliding down.

"Tell who what?"

Rosalind yawned. We moved rapidly to the first floor.

"Tell Karl's family that we always go home after a death, that we always go back, that you wouldn't want some fancy condominium downtown or a suite in the Windsor Court. Are the Wolfstans really so rich? Or just crazy? They've left you cash with me, cash with Althea, cash with Lacomb, cash with Oscar.

The elevator doors opened.

"You see that big black car? You own that damn thing. That's Oscar out there, you know the type, old-guard chauffeur; Lacomb raises his eyebrows behind Oscar's back, and Althea has no intention of cooking for him."

"She won't have to," I said with a little smile.

I did know the type, caramel skin not quite as light as Lacomb's, a voice like honey, grizzled hair, and sparkling silver-framed glasses. Very old, too old perhaps to be driving, but so fine, and so traditional.

"You just get right in, Miss Triana," said Oscar, "and you rest yourself and let me take you home."

"Yes, sir."

Rosalind relaxed as soon as the door was closed. "I'm hungry." The privacy panel had gone up between us and Oscar in the front. I liked that. It would be nice to own a car. I couldn't drive. Karl would not. He had always rented limousines, even for the smallest thing.

"Roz," I asked as gently as I knew how. "Can't he take you to eat after I'm settled in?"

"Gee, that would be nice. You sure you want to be alone there?"

"Like you said, we always go home afterwards, don't we? We don't run. I'd sleep in that upstairs bed, except that was never mine. That was our bed, Karl's and mine, in sickness and in health. He wanted to be where the afternoon sun hit the windows. I'd curl right up in his bed. I want to be alone."

"I figured it," said Roz. "Katrinka's silenced for a while. Grady Dubosson produced a paper that said everything Karl had ever given you was yours, and he had signed away any possible claim on your house the day he moved into it, and so that shut her up."

"She thought Karl's family would try to take the house?"

"Some crazy thing like that, but Grady showed her the quick claim or the quitclaim.

Which is it?"

"I honestly don't remember."

"You know what she really wants, of course."

I smiled. "Don't worry, Rosalind. Don't worry at all."

She turned to me, hunched forward and took on her most grave manner, a hand both rough and soft as she held mine. The car moved up St. Charles Avenue.

"Look," she said, "Don't wo2ry about the money Karl was giving us. His old lady laid a pile in my lap, and besides it's time that Glenn and I tried to make a go of the shop, you know, to actually sell books and records????" She laughed her deep throaty laugh.

"You know Glenn, but we are going to be on our own, if I have to go back to nursing, I don't care what it takes."

My mind drifted. It was irrelevant. It had only been one thousand a month to keep them afloat. She didn't know. Nobody knew how much Karl had really left, except Mrs. Wolfstan perhaps, if she had changed all of it.

Over a hidden speaker there came a polite voice.

"Miss Triana, ma'am, you want to drive by the Metairie Cemetery, ma'am?"

"No, thank you, Oscar," I said, seeing the small speaker above.

We have our grave, he and I, and Lily and Mother and Father.

"I'm just going to go home now, Roz. You are my darling, always. You call Glenn. Go get him, close up shop, and go to Commander s Palace. Eat the funeral feast for me, will you? Do that for me. Do the eating for both of us."

We had crossed Jackson Avenue. The oaks were fresh with spring green.

I kissed her goodbye and told Oscar to take her on, do whatever she said, stay with her. It was a nice car, a big gray velvet-lined limousine such as they used at funeral parlors.

"And so I got to ride in it after all," I thought as they pulled away. "Even though I missed the funeral."

How radiant my house looked. My house. Oh, poor poor Katrinka!

Althea's arms are like black silk, and when we hug, I don't think anything in the world can hurt anybody. No use trying to write here what she said, because she's no more understandable than Lacomb and says perhaps one syllable of every multisyllable word that she speaks, but I knew that it was Welcome home, and worried, missed you so, and would have done anything in those last days, should have called me, washed them sheets, not afraid to wash them sheets, just you lie down, you let me make you some hot chocolate, you, my baby.

Lacomb skulked in the kitchen door, a short bald man who'd pass for white anyplace but in New Orleans, and then the voice, of course, was always the dead giveaway.

"How you doing, boss? You looking thin to me, boss. You better eat something.

Althea, don't you dare cook this woman any of your food. Boss, I'll go out for it. What you want, boss? Boss, this house is full of flowers. I could sell them out front, make us a few dollars."

I laughed: Althea read him some rapid form of the riot act with appropriate rises and falls of tone, and a few good gestures.

I went upstairs just to make sure the Prince of Wales four-poster bed was still there.

It was, and with its new fine satin trimmings.

Karl's mother had put a framed picture of him by the bed-not the skeleton they carted away, but the brown-eyed frank-hearted man

who had sat with me on the steps of the uptown library, talking about music, talking about death, talking about getting married, the man who took me to Houston to see the opera and to New York, the man who had every picture of St. Sebastian ever done by an Italian artist or in the Italian mode, the man who had made love with his hands and his lips and would brook no argument about it.

His desk was clean. All the papers gone. Don't worry about this now. You have Glenn 5 word, and Glenn and Roz have never failed anyone.

I went back down the stairs.

"You know, I could have helped you with that man," Lacomb said. And Althea replied that he had said it enough, and I was back and go be quiet, or mop a floor, just shoo.

My room was clean and quiet, the bed turned down, the most tender and fragrant Casablanca lilies in the vase. How had they known? Or of course, Althea told them.

Casablanca lilies.

I climbed into the bed, my bed.

As I have said, this bedroom is the master bedroom of the cottage and the only real bedroom, and it is on the first floor on the morning side of the house, an octagonal wing extending out into the deep dark grove of cherry laurels that hide the world away.

It is the only wing which the house has, which is otherwise a rectangle. And the wraparound galleries, our deep deep porches that we so love, come round and out along this bedroom, whereas on the other side of the house, they merely stop before the kitchen windows.

It's nice to walk from your bed out a tall window onto a porch, back away from the street, and look through the ever glossy leaves of cherry laurels at a comforting commotion that doesn't take note of you.

I wouldn't give the Avenue for the Champs Elysees, for the Via Veneto, for the Yellow Brick Road, for the Highway to Heaven. But it's nice sometimes to be way back here in this easterly bedroom or to stand at the railing, too far from the street to be noticed, and peer out at the cheerful lights as they go by.

"Althea, honey, pull back my curtains so I can look out my window."

"It's too cold for you to open it now."

"I know, I only want to see.

"-no chocolate, no books, you no want your music, your radio, I got your disks off the floor, I got all that put away, Rosalind come and put all that in order, she say Mozart with Mozart, Beethoven with Beethoven, she show me where.

"No, just to rest, kiss me."

She bent down and pressed her silky cheek to mine. She said:

"My baby."

She covered me with two big comforters, all silk, and no doubt filled with down, Mrs. Wolfstan's style, Karl's style, that everything be real goose down, loving the weightless weight. She pushed them around my shoulders.

"Miss Triana, why you never call Lacomb and me when that man was dying, we woulda come."

"I know. I missed you. I didn't want you to be frightened."

She shook her head. Her face was very pretty, much darker than Lacomb's, with big lovely eyes, and her hair was soft and wavy.

"You turn your head to the window," she said, "and you sleep. Ain't nobody comi ng in this house, I promise you."

I lay on my side looking straight out the window, through twelve shining clean panes at the distant trees and oaks, the color of traffic.

I loved again to see the azaleas out there, pink and red and white, crowded everywhere so luxuriantly along the fence, and the delicate iron railing painted so freshly black and the porch itself so shining clean.

So wonderful that Karl should give this to me before he died, my house restored.

My house with every door to properly click, and lock to work, and every faucet to run the proper temperature of water.

Perhaps five minutes I looked dreaming out the window, perhaps longer. The streetcars passed. My lids grew heavy.

And only out of the corner of my eye did I make out a figure standing there on the porch, my tall gaunt one, the violinist, with his silky hair hanging lank down on his chest.

He hung about the edge of the window like a vine himself, dramatically thin, almost fashionably cadaverous yet very alive. His black hair hung so straight and glossy. No tiny braids tied back this time. Only hair.

I saw his dark left eye, the strong sleek black eyebrow above it. His cheeks were white, too white, but his lips were alive, smooth, very smooth, living lips.

I was scared for a minute. Just a minute. I knew this was wrong. No, not wrong, but dangerous, unnatural, not a possible thing.

I knew when I dreamed and when I did not, no matter how hard the struggle to move between the two. And he was here, on my porch, this man. He stood there looking at me.

And then I was scared no more. I didn't care. It was a lovely burst of utter indifference. I don't care. Ah, it is such a divine emptiness that follows the desertion of fear! And this was a rather practical point of view, it seeme d at the mc~ment.

Because either way . . . whether he was real or not real . . . it was pleasing and beautiful. I fe[t the chills on my arms. So hair does stand on end, even when you are lying, all crushed in your own hair on a pillow, with one arm flung out, looking out a window. Yes, my body went into its little war with my mind. Beware, beware, cried the body. But my mind is so stubborn.

My voice, interior, came very strong and determined, and I marveled at myself, how one can hear a tone in one's head. One can shout or whisper without moving the lips. I said to him:

Play for me. I missed you.

He drew closer to the glass, all shoulders for a moment it seemed, so tall and narrow, and with such torrential and tempting hair-I wanted so to feel it and groom it-and he peered down at me through the higher windowpanes, no angry glaring fictional Peter Quint searching for a secret beyond me. But looking right at what he sought. At me.

The floorboards creaked. Someone trod the path right to the door.

AIthea came again. As easily as if it were any common moment.

I didn't turn over to look at her. She merely slipped into the room as she always did.

I heard her behind me. I heard her set down a cup. I could smell hot chocolate.

But I never took my eyes off him with his high shoulders and dusty tailored wool sleeves, and he never took his deep brilliant eyes off me as he stared without interruption through the window.

"Oh, Lord God, you there again," AIthea said.

He didn't move. Neither did I.

I heard her words in a soft near unintelligible rush. Forgive this translation. "You here right at Miss Triana's window. Some nerve you got. Why, you like to scare me to death. Miss Triana, he be waiting all this time, night and day, saying he would play for you, saying he couldn't get near to you, that you loved his playing, that you can't do without him, he say. Well, what's you gonna play now that she come home, you think you can play something pretty for her now, the way she is, look at her, you think you gonna make her feel all right?"

She came strolling around the foot of the bed, portly, arms folded, chin stuck out.

"Come on now, play something for her," she said. "You hear me through that glass.

She home now, she so sad, and you, look at you, you think I'm going to clean that coat for you, you got another think coming."

I must have smiled. I must have sunk a little deeper into the pillow.

She saw him!

His eyes never moved from me. He paid her no respect. His hand was on the glass like a great white spider. But there at his side in the other hand was the violin, with the bow. I saw the dark elegant curves of wood.

I smiled at her without moving my head, because now she stood between us, boldly, facing me, blotting him out. Again, I translate what is not a dialect so much as a song:

"He talk and talk about how he can play and he play for you. How you love it. You know him. I ain't seen him come up here on the porch. .Lacomb should have seen him come. I am 't scared of him. Lacomb can run him off right now. Just say so. He don't bother me none. He played some music here one night, I tell you, you never heard such music, I thought, Lord the police will be here and nobody here but Lacomb and me. I told him, You hush now, and he was so upset, you never saw such eyes, he looked at me, he say, You don't like what I play, I say, I like it, I just don't want to hear it. He say all kind of crazy things like he know all about me and what I got to bear, he talk like a crazy man, he just jabbering on and on, and Lacomb say, If you're looking for a handout we gonna feed you Althea's red beans and rice and you gonna die of poison! Now, Miss Triana, you know!"

I laughed out loud but it didn't make very much noise. He was still there; I could see only a little of the big lanky darkness of him behind her. I hadn't moved. The afternoon was deepening.

"I love your red beans and rice, Aithea," I said.

She marched about, straightened the old Battenburg lace on the night table, glared at him, apparently, and then smiled down at me, one satin hand touching my cheek for a moment. So sweet, my God, how can I live without you?

"No, it's perfectly fine," I said. "You go on now, AIthea. I do know him. Maybe he will play, who knows? Don't bother about him. I'll look out for him."

"Look like a tramp to me," she muttered under her breath, arms folded tight again most eloquently as she started out of the room. She went on talking, making her own song. I wish I could better render for posterity in some form her rapid speech, with so many syllables dropped, and above all her boundless enthusiasm and wisdom.

I nestled into my pillow; I crooked my arm under the pillow and snuggled against it, staring right up at him, his figure in the window, peering over the top of the sash through the double panes of glass.

Songs are everywhere you look, in the rain, in the wind, in the moan of the suffering, songs.

She shut the door. Double click, which means, with a New Orleans door, invariably warped, that she really closed it.

The quiet came back over the room as if it had never been mussed in the slightest.

The Avenue gave forth a sudden crescendo of its continued rumble.

Beyond him-my friend peering at me with his black eyes and showing me only a smileless mouth-the birds sang in a late-afternoon spurt that comes each day by their clock and always sur prises me. The traffic made its cheerful dirge.

He moved his tall unkempt form into the full window. Shirt white and soiled and unbuttoned; dark hair on his chest like a shadow or fleece. An opened vest of black wool because its buttons were all gone.

This is what I think I saw, at least.

He leaned very close against the twelve-paned frame. How thin he was, sick perhaps? Like Karl? I smiled to think it might all unfold once more. But no, that seemed very far away now, and he so vivid as he looked down at me, so very remote from the real weakness of death.

There came a chiding look from him, as if to say, You know better.

And then he did smile, and his eyes gave a brighter ever more secretive gleam, as he gazed at me possessively.

His forehead was pale and bony above his lids, but it gave the eyes their lovely sly shadowy depth, and his black hair grew so thick from his beautiful hairline with its widow's peak and well-proportioned temples that it lent him a hefty beauty even in his thinness. He did have hands like spiders! He stroked the upper panes with his right hand. He made prints that I saw in the dust, as the light made tiny inevitable shifts, as the garden beyond him with its dense cherry laurels and magnolias moved and breathed with breeze and traffic.

The thick white cuff of his shirt was soiled, and his coat gray with dust.

A slow change came over his expression. The smile was gone, but there was no animosity there and I realized now that there had never been. An air of superiority, of secretive superiority, had marked him before, but this expression was unguarded and spontaneous.

A baffled tender feeling passed over his face, held it and then released it to what seemed anger. Then he became sad, not publicly or artificially sad, but deeply, privately sad, as if he might lose his grip on this little spectacle of spookdom on the porch. He stepped back. I heard the boards. My house proclaims any movement.

And then he slipped away.

Just like that. Gone from the window. Gone from the porch. I couldn't hear him beyond the shutters at the far corner end. I knew he wasn't there. I knew he had gone away, and I had the most pure conviction that he had in fact vanished.

My heart thudded too loudly.

"If only it wasn't a violin," I thought. "I mean, thank God it's a violin, because there isn't any other sound on earth like that, there's .

My words died away.

Faint music, his music.

He hadn't gone very far. He'd just chosen some dark distant part of the garden way out in the back, near to the rear of the old Chapel Mansion on Prytania Street. My property meets the Chapel property. The block belongs to us, to the Chapel and to me, from Prytania to St. Charles along Third Street. Of course there is another side to the block, where other buildings stand, but this great half of the square is ours, and he had only retreated perhaps as far as the old oaks behind the Chapel.

I thought I would cry.

For one moment, the pain of his music and my own feeling were so perfectly wedded that I thought, I cannot be expected to endure this. Only a fool would not reach for a gun, put a gun in the mouth and pull the trigger-an image that had haunted me often when I was, in younger years, a hopeless drunk, and then again almost continuously until Karl came.

This was a Gaelic song, in the Minor Key, deep and throbbing and full of patient despair and ambitionless longing-he had the Irish fiddle sound in it, the hoarse dark harmony of the lower strings played together in a plea that sounded more purely human than any sound made by child, man or woman.

It struck me-a great formless thought, unable to take shape in this atmosphere of slow lovely embracing music-that that was the power of the violin, that it sounded human in a way that we humans could not! It spoke for us in a way that we ourselves couldn't.

Ah, yes, and that's what all the pondering and poetry has always been about.

It made my tears flow, his song, the Gaelic musical phrases old and new, and the sweet climb of notes that tumbled inevitably into an endless testimony of acceptance.

Such tender concern. Such perfect sympathy.

I rolled over into the pillow. His music was wondrously clear. Surely all the block heard it, the passersby, and Lacomb and Althea at it at the kitchen table with their playing cards or epithets; surely the birds themselves were lulled.

The violin, the violin.

I saw a day in summer some thirty-five years ago. I had my own violin in my case, between me and Gee, who rode his motorcycle, as I clung to him from the back, keeping the violin safe. I sold the violin to the man on Rampart Street for five dollars.

"But you sold it to me for twenty-five dollars," I said, "and that was just two years ago."

Away it went in its black case, my violin; musicians must be the mainstay of pawnshops. Everywhere there hung instruments for sale; or maybe music attracts many bitter dreamers such as me with grandiose designs and no talent.

I had only touched a violin two ti mes since-was that thirty-five years? Almost.

Save for one blazing drunken time and its hangover aftermath, I never even picked up another violin, never never wanted to touch the wood, the strings, the resin, the bow, no, not ever.

But why did I bother to think of this? This was an old adolescent disappointment.

I'd seen the great Isaac Stern play Beethoven's Violin Concerto in our Municipal Auditorium. I'd wanted to make those glorious sounds! I'd wanted to be that figure, swaying on the stage. I wanted to bewitch! To make sounds like these now, penetrating the walls of this room....

Beethoven's Violin Concerto-the first classical piece of music I came to know intimately later from library records.

I would become an Isaac Stern. I had to!

Why think of it? Forty years ago, I knew I had no gift, no ear, could not distinguish quarter tones, hadn't the dexterity or the discipline; the best teachers told me as kindly as they could.

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

That ought to be easy to forget.

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

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

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

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

"You never took care of them!"

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

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

Just listen to him.

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

The world of now receded. I was fourteen. Isaac Stern played on the stage. The great concerto of Beethoven rose and fell beneath the chandeliers of the auditorium.

How many other children sat there rapt? Oh, God, to be this! To be able to do this! ...

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

There must be some medical legislation against it.

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

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

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

Lev's father, a hearty gentle Texan, had picked up a handful of earth and dropped it into the grave. Lev's mother had cried and cried.

Then others had done the same, a custom I'd never known, and my own father solemn, looking on. What had he thought: Punishment for your sins, that you left your sisters, that you married out of your church, that you let your mother die unloved!

Or did he think more trivial things? Lily was not a grandchild he had cherished.

Two thousand miles had separated them, and seldom had he seen her before the cancer took her long golden streams of hair and made her little cheeks soft and pufy, but there was no potion known to man that could ever dull her gaze or her courage.

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

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

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

And so the rain came.

My humble thanks.

The rain came.

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

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

"How can you be so content," I asked myself, "to lie right between these worlds?

Life and death? Madness and sanity?

His music spoke; the notes flowed low and deep and hungering before they soared.

I closed my eyes.

He went into a ripping dance now, with zest and dissonance and utter seriousness.

He played so full and fierce, I thought surely someone would come. It's what people call the Devil's kind of music.

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

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

I have you, now.

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

I could have sworn that far away and near at hand, he laughed. He let me hear it.

The music didn't laugh. The music was bound to follow its hoarse, perfectly pitched, driving course as if to drive a band of meadow dancers weary mad. But he laughed.

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

It seemed the rain and this music would kill me. I would die quiet without a protest.

But I only dreamed, sliding down down into a full-blown illusion as if it had been waiting for me.