* * *
Helen lay in her bed staring at the ceiling as she had been for the past couple of hours. She knew Michael was in the house. She'd heard him at Rachel's window, and it warmed her heart to know they were together.
She had not felt this sort of love for other human beings in so very long. She would look at her granddaughter and her beautiful great-grandson and be filled with an almost foreign sense of joy and caring. But that joy was tinged with sorrow, because she knew she was a disappointment to them. They thought she was being selfish and unreasonable, and there was no way she could make them understand. Rachel and Chris were both too young to know that integrity and love and sacrifice could be more important than a simple piece of land.
She thought of Peter often these days. She'd known him better than anyone, known his kind heart and his compassion. And she'd known all too well the core of self-doubt that had festered inside him.
She rolled onto her side and closed her eyes. The land would be developed or not, she thought. And Rachel and Chris would either love her or loathe her. She would do nothing to change either outcome—not because she couldn't, but because she knew in her heart that the path she had chosen was the honorable one.
–38–
Rachel was reading about Rwanda in the two-day-old issue of the Sunday Times when Chris walked into the kitchen.
"Is Gram up yet?" he asked as he sat down across the table from her. He plucked a bran muffin from the open tin and took a bite.
"Not yet." She knew he was anxious to get his great-grandmother's permission to play Reflections on the piano.
"I was up practically all night," Chris said, "but I didn't get to look through that box of pictures and stuff yet."
He'd been up all night studying the music, she thought. She watched his face as he chewed his muffin. He looked like a perfectly happy, healthy twenty-year-old. Her fears of the night before seemed silly in the light of day.
"Well," Chris said casually, eyes on his muffin, "was Michael sneaking around last night for my sake or Gram's?" A small smile played at the corners of his mouth.
Rachel caught her breath, let it out. "Yours," she said.
"Tell him he doesn't need to do that. It's okay. As a matter of fact, I think it's cool you two are together."
Rachel felt the color in her cheeks. "Thank you," she said. "It's very difficult, though, Chris. He and I don't feel as though we're doing anything wrong, but the rest of the world might. His congregation definitely would. It's not a very good situation."
"Yeah, I know, but you told me once to do what feels right to me and not worry about what the rest of the world thinks. You should do the same."
Had she actually said that to him? She didn’t recall.
Chris stood up, wolfing down the last of his muffin as he grabbed another. "There's something really weird about that music," he said as he headed toward the living room.
"What do you mean, 'weird'?"
He shrugged. "I don't know. Not sure. But I can't wait to play it. Call me when Gram gets up, okay?"
"I will," she said.
She returned her attention to the paper after Chris left the room, forcing herself to face the new pictures from the refugee camps. The cholera-stricken children looked dazed and flat, lifeless versions of the children she'd taught. At least she was finally doing something to help—not much, but it was better than nothing.
"Good morning." Helen walked into the room.
"Hi." Rachel folded the paper and carried her teacup to the sink. "Can I get you something for breakfast?" she asked.
"No, this will be fine," Gram said as she sat down at the table and pulled a bran muffin from the tin. Rachel took the jar of marmalade from the refrigerator and handed it to her.
"I'm sorry we fought last night, Rachel," Gram said. "I love you very much. But I ask you to please respect my wishes regarding the music."
Rachel sat down. "I want to, Gram, but it's hard when I don't understand the position you've taken. Especially when the stakes are so high." She picked up a crumb from the table with the tip of her finger and dropped it onto a napkin. "I told Michael I found the music. I know he wants to talk with you about it."
"He can talk to me until his lips are blistered, I'm not going to bend."
"If you could tell me why, Gram." She leaned toward her grandmother. "The bulldozers are set to roll as soon as the board casts its vote, and everyone knows the vote is nothing more than a formality at this point. Everyone—"
"Gram?" Chris appeared at the door to the kitchen. "May I play Reflections on the piano? Please?"
Gram studied his face as if she might find her answer there, and Rachel saw the love in the older woman's eyes. Gram wouldn't be able to resist her great-grandson's request.
"When I'm done with my breakfast and out the door, you may," Gram said. She looked at Rachel as Chris disappeared from the doorway. "I'm going into town this morning," she said. "I need to return those library books and get some more."
"Do you want me to take you?"
"No, thank you. I feel up to the drive, and I'd just as soon be by myself today." She narrowed her eyes at her granddaughter. "I trust you'll keep that music in the house?" she asked.
"I won't do anything with it without your okay," Rachel answered.
Chris was at the piano the instant Gram left the house. Rachel sat in the chair by the window, sipping a cup of tea, listening. He played smoothly, humming the orchestral parts, playing the piece as if he'd performed it many times before. Most likely he had, in his head, throughout the night. Already there was emotion in the playing, passion, and she tightened her hands around her cup. It had been a while since she'd heard him play anything classical. Chris had inherited something powerful from his great-grandfather, no doubt about it.
It was a long piece, with very few places that gave Chris pause. It was only near the end of the second movement that Rachel realized she would not have recognized the composition as a Huber. There was something different about it. And the middle of the third movement was, as Chris had said, weird. The notes spilled on top of one another without harmony. She thought of those artists who threw paint on a canvas with no method to their madness.
When he finished playing, Chris turned to face her. She could see the glistening of perspiration on his forehead. He was smiling.
"Nice, isn't it?" he asked.
She nodded. "You play beautifully."
He picked up a sheet of the music and looked at it. "It's different, though. Different from his other stuff."
"I thought so, too. Though I really couldn't say in what way."
"This third movement is downright bizarre."
"It was a little…cacophonous there for a while."
"Good word, Mom!" He looked impressed, then began leafing through the music again. "I don't think I could ever memorize that passage," he said. "This climax"—he played a few notes—"leads to a fortissimo unison on the B-A-C-H theme. Then he starts this weird six-page cadenza with a statement of the main theme in the bass, F major. But after that, he goes right into new material. It's like someone else wrote these few pages."
Rachel laughed. "If you say so, sweetie. You lost me somewhere around the fortissimo bit."
"He must have been experimenting," Chris said. "Maybe that's why this piece was special to him. This is my favorite part." He played the theme from the first movement. It was lovely. "Awesome," he said.
"It's beautiful," she agreed.
"I want to put this into my computer. I have a really cool music program. Maybe I can adapt some of this to my band."
She nearly vetoed the idea; she'd just told Gram she wouldn't let the music leave the house. But she wanted Reflections in Chris's computer. She wanted it someplace other than in that tan folder where it could be burned or lost or thrown away. "Put it in the computer," she said. "But you'll need Gram's permission to use any of it publicly."
"Right." His voice told her that he would worry about that later. He jump
ed up from the piano bench and raced off to his room. Michael was right—Chris had a passion.
She spent the afternoon in the basement of the church with Celine and the same two women she'd worked with the last time. Members of the congregation had donated health kits and layettes, and Rachel packed them into boxes to be shipped to the Mennonite Central Committee in Ohio. From there, the supplies would go to the camps.
The women worked quietly, and Rachel figured that she was the damper on their conversation. They thanked her for her help, but she was certain they wished she hadn't joined them.
"Did you see the pictures from the camps in the New York Times this Sunday?" she ventured to ask when they'd been working for over an hour.
The women didn’t answer her right away, and Rachel chewed the inside of her cheek in the silence.
"I didn't," Celine said finally. "I don't get the paper."
The other women shook their heads without looking up from their work, and Rachel waited a moment before speaking again. "Does the Mennonite Central Committee require a volunteer to be a Mennonite?" She told herself she wanted the answer to that question merely out of curiosity, nothing more.
"No, but they'd have to be a member of some church," Celine said. "And they have to be screened."
Would they take a Unitarian? she wondered.
* * *
She returned home at six. There were two messages from Michael on the answering machine, the first telling her that he would be working with the youth group on the Reflection Day presentation that night and wouldn't get to see her again until the following day. The second message was for Gram, merely asking her to return his call.
She found her grandmother on her knees in the garden, pulling weeds from around the tomato plants. "Did you call Michael back?" she asked.
Gram looked up, shading her eyes from the sinking sun with her hand. "Does a cat go into a doghouse?" she replied.
Rachel felt a flash of impatience. She turned and walked back to the house before she could say anything she might regret.
She found Chris still in his room, sitting on the bed, bent over his laptop computer. "Pasta for dinner?" she asked.
"I'm not hungry." He barely looked up from the computer screen. "Maybe later."
She made pasta for herself and Gram, and they ate in silence. She didn't know what to say. Her grandmother's stubborn selfishness was starting to irritate the hell out of her.
"I'm tired," the older woman said when they'd finished dinner. "I get tired too easily these days."
"Well, you've had a very full day," Rachel said. "A trip to town. All that work in the garden."
Gram nodded. "I think I'll go to bed early. Read a little."
Rachel felt helpless as she watched her grandmother leave the room. There was nothing she could do. She couldn’t make her return Michael's call or force her to send the music to Karl Speicer. Gram had all the power in this situation.
She cleaned up the kitchen, wishing she could see Michael, wishing her son would come out from the cave of his room. She was fighting a pang of loneliness when she heard Chris's bedroom door open. In a moment he stood at the door of the kitchen. He looked ashen, ill, and she set the dish towel down on the counter.
"Are you all right?" she asked.
"You won't believe this, Mom. I…" He shook his head. "There's a code in the music. A cipher."
She didn’t understand what he meant. "A cipher?"
"Some composers put messages in their music—although not usually this elaborate. This is…" He shook his head again.
"You mean, Grandpa put a message in his music? He says something?"
"He says something unbelievable."
"What?"
"Come here."
She followed him into his room.
"Sit here."
She sat next to him on his bed, and he put the computer on his knees.
"It's only in this one section," he said. "You know, where it all sounded so weird?"
She nodded.
"He was trying to tell us something with that B-A-C-H theme. See, the Germans know B flat as B, and B as H. So where he has A- D-D-A-B-E-A-D, he's really saying 'add ahead' and what he really means—and believe me it took me about a millennium to figure this out—is to keep adding more alphabet. He does it twice. He already had A through H. Then he tells us to add I through P by using the next higher octave, then Q through X by going even higher. So he's got nearly the whole alphabet to work with, but that's why the music sounds so bizarre here. He didn't really care about the music, although he pads it with a few things, but he was primarily interested in getting his message across."
He had lost her again. "So what does he say?" she asked.
"Well, like I said, he padded it with some superfluous stuff, but when you take all that out and add some punctuation and some 'y's in the right places" —he hit a few keys on the computer—"here's what you're left with." He set the computer on her lap, and she read the message on the screen aloud.
"My dear Karl, this is my finest work. Yet you may listen to it and wonder how I can say that. You must believe me, this is my finest creation. But it doesn't approach Helen's poorest. "
Rachel looked at Chris. "What does that mean?"
"Keep reading."
"All the work passed off as mine was, in reality, Helen's." Rachel read the line again, chilled. "Didn't you ever guess?" she continued. "Helen was good at protecting me, but I thought you, of all people, would one day figure it out. I believe the world should know the truth. When you receive this work, I will be dead, and I ask you to make this fact known—that Helen Huber is one of this country's finest composers, that her husband, though a man of integrity despite this one major transgression, was a fraud. I composed a great deal, dear friend, but none of my work ever reached the public ear. I was no competition for my wife. The piece you hold in your hands now is the only work of mine you have ever seen, and you will know as you listen to it that I'm telling the truth. "
Rachel looked up from the computer. "This is ridiculous," she said. She thought of the institution that was her grandfather. She thought of all the music the world knew as his. "For some reason he wanted Gram to have some fame after he was gone. Or maybe he felt sorry for her because she'd been a composition student, too, and she essentially gave it up to marry him."
"Mom, he's telling the truth," Chris argued. "I was confused by this piece. I thought maybe he was in a different creative phase or something, and that's why it was so stylistically different. But it makes sense now. He wrote this"—he held up the music from his desk—"and Gram wrote everything else."
"How could he…why would she allow…?"
"I don't know," Chris said, "but that statue down by the pond? That should be Gram standing there in bronze, not Peter Huber."
Rachel still couldn’t grasp the obvious truth. Was this why her grandmother didn’t want Karl Speicer to see Reflections? Did she know or suspect a cipher in the music and want to protect her husband and his secret forever? Or did she simply know that this piece would not be as good as her own, that it would serve only to tarnish her husband's memory?
Suddenly she thought of the music in the box in the attic. "Come with me, Chris," she said.
He followed her into the attic. They opened the box and pulled out the sheets of yellowed music. Quickly, the two different handwritings made sense.
"She'd create it," Chris said, holding up one copy of a sonata. "And he'd copy it over in his own writing." He held up a second manuscript of the same piece, the handwriting neat and clean. "Maybe he'd change it a little here and there, but basically it was hers. Look here in the margins. These are her notes to him." He read one of them. "Remember, you're moving toward the climax of the cadenza," she'd written.
They went through two more boxes, until there was no doubt left in Rachel's mind that her grandparents had engaged in a lifelong ruse. For what reason, she couldn't guess. But Helen Huber was indeed one of the country's finest composers.
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* * *
Rachel awakened to the sound of the piano in the morning. At first she thought Chris was playing again, but once she entered the living room, she discovered it was her grandmother. Rachel stood next to the piano until Gram finally looked up, her hands coming to rest on the keys.
"Gram." Rachel folded her hands on the ebony lid of the piano. "Please play me something you wrote yourself. Play me one of your compositions."
Gram looked perplexed. "What do you mean?" she asked.
Rachel flattened her palms on the lid. They were sticky with perspiration. "Chris made a discovery last night," she began. "He found that Grandpa had put a coded message in the music of Reflections." She spoke very slowly, deliberately.
A swatch of color formed on her grandmother's cheeks, and the older woman lowered her hands from the keys to her lap.
"Then Chris and I went upstairs in the attic, and—I know this was against your wishes and I'm sorry—we looked through the boxes of music. Please, Gram," she pleaded, "play me something. Play me the piece you've written that you love the best."
Gram looked at her a long time before finally lifting her hands to the keys once more. The opening notes of Patchwork filled the room, and Rachel sat down in the chair by the window to listen to her grandmother play her masterwork.
* * *
"You know I studied composition with him," Gram said.
"Yes." They were sitting in the wing chairs in the library, and Rachel was relieved that Gram finally seemed ready to talk.
"But my ambitions were tempered by the times," Gram continued. "I often felt torn between what I wanted as an artist and what I wanted as a woman, which was to be a supportive wife and mother. Also, there were precious few successful female composers."
Rachel shook her head. "I'm still stunned, Gram."