It had come into me ... I love you, I 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 Stradivarius, 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 pretty 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 shamed 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 herself, 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."
"No."
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."
"No."
"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 him 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 grief, 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 but 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 clef, 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 magenta 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 itself, 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 ... I 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 e
yes 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 you. 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.