Childgrave Page 2

  “Yes. We charge extra for that,” Harry said. He was looking at me carefully. I realized that—as was often the case—he was more serious than he seemed. I rolled my eyes, wondering what new phase he was leading me into.

  If loud is good, my would-be client—Arianella Stradellini—was a good singer; if accuracy of pitch is good, her status was arguable. Harry and I sat in the third row and did more watching than listening. Stradellini was not what I had expected to see. She was young—in her late twenties, probably—but with the type of presence and dignity usually associated with maturity. There was a striking darkness about both her voice and her appearance, and the frantic applause and yelping that the audience produced following her arias seemed more justifiable than usual.

  Nevertheless, my attention soon began to wander. Gluck’s music is not complex as music goes, but even the simplest music confuses me. I studied piano once, attracted by the symmetry of the keyboard: the neat groups of black keys on the white field. Eventually I was told that the black key that supposedly produces both G sharp and A flat actually produced neither tone, but a tone similar to each of them. At first I was intrigued. G sharp and A flat were in reality—and inexplicably—not the same note. To avoid the inexplicable, the tempered scale was introduced, and since then, all music has been based on an acoustical lie. Bach; Mozart, and Beethoven were all liars. I was upset for weeks. I am still upset. The other odd thing that happened to music was the decision to allow two different melodies to be played at the same time. People shouldn’t complain about the chaos of modern music. It was inevitable.

  I was growing restless. The contralto who sang the role of Orfeo had stood up, her large face apparently trying to express some strong but unidentifiable emotion. There was a pause while the conductor waited for her to maneuver into position.

  I whispered to Harry: “What happens next?”

  He answered, without bothering to whisper: “Orpheus is about to enter hell—and so are we all, I suspect.”

  The contralto’s hearing was more acute than her singing had led one to suspect. She was glaring at Harry. The conductor had his baton hand raised, and he was looking to his left. He was looking at Sara Coleridge.

  Sara was seated at a large golden harp, the curve of which rested against her left shoulder. Her arms were extended around the instrument as if in embrace, and her legs were parted slightly to receive the soundboard. I had never seen anyone or anything more attractive.

  The conductor lowered his arm, and Sara began to play the music that represents the sound of Orfeo’s lyre. I watched Sara avidly through the rest of the performance, never glancing away from her and possibly never even blinking. As I watched Sara I knew that my standards of beauty and excitement were being changed. I had no doubt that in the last few minutes my life had been influenced in a fundamental way, but there was no way I could have known how far-reaching that influence would become. I thought I was having a profound but simple experience—perhaps the kind that Albert Einstein had the first time he saw an equation.

  I tried to figure out why Sara was so attractive to me. She was beautiful—but I saw dozens of beautiful women every day, and I sometimes spent hours photographing them. I never had any difficulty turning away from any of them. But I would not have turned away from Sara even if someone had announced that the auditorium was on fire. For one thing, I wouldn’t have heard the announcement—just as I no longer heard the music.

  Sara’s beauty was the kind that results from balance and symmetry. Nothing about her appearance was spectacular—no violet eyes or regally high cheekbones. Her hair was the feature that most people would have looked at first. It was unevenly cropped and the color of the gilding on her harp, like a cap of bright feathers.

  It wasn’t Sara’s hair that had captivated me, though. And I certainly wasn’t impressed by her apparent mastery of the harp—an instrument that had always seemed to me slightly ridiculous. What I found so overwhelming in Sara was simply her presence: that total impression that people instantly and so mysteriously create; that revelation of personality. I knew that Sara was the kind of person who would often be amused but would seldom smile. She would not seek people out, but could be a devoted friend. She was intelligent, but she mistrusted her mind. All my impressions of her, however, were overridden by a sense of her strong calmness—a calmness that grew out of some central mystery. I was somehow certain that Sara had a type of knowledge that few other people possessed. I had always believed that there were a few people who knew remarkable things—people who had a kind of knowledge that never shows up in textbooks or even in scriptures. According to my theory, these people were never rich or famous; it might even be that there was nothing they could do particularly well. The only reason you might think they were anything but ordinary was that they looked as though someone had just told them an incredibly pleasing secret.

  I hadn’t had much of a chance to prove my theory before I met Sara. But I could tell as soon as I saw her that she knew some important secrets. I decided that I wanted to share some of her secrets—if not her life. I was gratified to see that she wore no rings.

  Sara seemed to wear no makeup, either. There were things that were more important to her than her appearance. One of those things was obviously music. I wondered whether another of those things was a man. I wanted to be that man.

  During the intermission I found Sara’s name in the program’s list of orchestra members. I don’t remember much else that Harry said to me that evening. I think he assumed I was ill. He mentioned acute contraltoitis. He put me in a cab, and, oddly enough, I didn’t resist. It didn’t occur to me to go backstage or to wait for Sara at the artists’ entrance.

  When I got home, Nanny Joy was sitting up as always, sipping Southern Comfort and listening to music. Sixty and pensive, she loved and nurtured my daughter, Joanne. The three of us made a home of sorts in the vastness of my studio.

  After the death of my wife I had interviewed dozens of women, looking for someone who could comfort Joanne and who wasn’t contemptuous of life. It seemed to be an impossible task. Applicants assured me of their inexhaustible virtues. They smiled, unfolded references, touched my arm, demonstrated their French, and terrified me and Joanne.

  I decided to wait for a sign.

  Nanny Joy had come unannounced. The agency had not sent her; she had heard of the job through an acquaintance.

  She had little to tell me about herself: her name was Joy Ory, she had been born in Louisiana and raised in Harlem.

  “From what I heard about the job, I thought I might be the right one for it,” she had said. Her voice was quiet but husky and dramatic. She made the statement sound like lyrics from a song.

  I didn’t know what to ask her. For no particular reason I said, “Are you a patient woman?”

  “I’ve learned to be.” Her answer was casual. Then she looked at me carefully and added: “If you’re serious, I could show you.”

  I hadn’t been serious, but now I was intrigued. “I’m serious,” I said.

  Joy stood up, turned her thin body away from me, and kicked off her shoes. I wondered if she had once been a dancer. She made a quick, confusing movement, bending over and then straightening up. She was holding a pair of panty hose, which she draped over a chair. Then she turned and walked to where I was sitting. She raised the right side of her skirt, revealing a slack-muscled thigh that at one time must have been admirable. Her brown skin was light enough so that the tattooed inscription stood out clearly: I CAN WAIT. Then I realized that the tattoo had been altered at some time. A letter had been unskillfully removed. The wording had originally been I CAN’T WAIT.

  A sign had been given, and with Joanne’s unhesitating approval, Joy Ory became Nanny Joy. There had been no regrets. Nanny Joy had never heard of Dr. Spock, but she had borne a daughter of her own, who “got away from me while I was letting the good times
roll.” The good times apparently stopped rolling fairly quickly, and Joy stopped trying to live up to her name. She claimed she had lived for a time with Billie Holiday, “trading sadness.” I wasn’t sure I believed the part about Billie Holiday. Lately, a lot of people were claiming to have known Billie—people who weren’t available when she needed a marker for her grave. But whether Nanny Joy had known the singer or not, she knew the music and the sadness. But now she was bringing happiness to me and to Joanne in an inexplicable way.

  Joanne had learned to sing “Miss Brown to You” and was developing a quiet dignity that I never could have given her.

  When I got home from the opera that night, I went to sit with Nanny Joy. She was listening to her favorite music, a tape she had made of all the slow-tempo blues recordings that Charlie Parker had ever made. It sounded to me like a monument to suffering, and it made me uneasy.

  Whenever I was home, Nanny Joy usually kept to the bedroom and sitting room I had had built for her in a corner of the studio. She listened to music and she telephoned friends. I never saw her read anything except the books we got for Joanne, and she said she didn’t want a television set. On the evenings I was away she would sit out in the main apartment and play the stereo set I had there, which was bigger than the one in her room.

  I sat down next to her. “You want to listen to your angel music?” she asked. She meant the few recordings of Gregorian chant and plainsong that I would play occasionally.

  “No,” I said.

  “Good. That music’s bad for you.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Because angels never get laid.”

  I could see what she meant. Most plainsong had been composed and performed by people with no sex lives, and it couldn’t be called passionate music.

  “We don’t get laid very often either, Nan,” I reminded her.

  She allowed herself one of her rare smiles. “Yeah, that’s the truth,” she said. “But damned if I’m going to give up remembering those times.”

  She got up to turn off the Charlie Parker tape.

  “That’s all right,” I said. “Let’s listen for a while.” Nan sat down gratefully and began to sip her drink, glancing at me occasionally.

  Had I stopped remembering? Probably. I almost never thought of my wife, but there were good reasons for that. What was more important was that I had stopped thinking of everything that had happened before her death. I had lost some skills of emotion. Now there were occasional seductions in the studio: scufflings, maulings, or displays when they were invited or allowed. But that seemed like part of my work. A little bonus. Thank you, ma’am.

  When the music stopped, Nanny Joy asked: “Something strange happen to you tonight, Mr. B.?”

  “Does it show?”

  “Oh, yes, it shows. Something to do with a woman?”

  “I looked at a woman. Just looked.”

  “You think you might want to take another look?”

  “I definitely think I might. But maybe I shouldn’t. In the opera I saw tonight, the hero lost his wife because he got impatient and looked at her when he wasn’t supposed to. But nobody has warned me not to look.”

  “Maybe the opera was a warning.”

  “It’s an old opera and a very old story. Lots of men have had the warning.”

  “Lots of men have lost their wives.”

  Nanny Joy wasn’t being tactful, but she was being accurate. I went to bed.

  I have always gone gratefully to my bed, my eyeballs eager to do their little dance. Yet there have been surprising, sleepless nights. The night I first saw Sara Coleridge was one of them. I was cursed with thought, and, unexpectedly, the thought concerned Barbara, my bizarrely departed wife.

  Barbara was a connoisseur of glamour. Articulate and observant, she came to New York from a midwestern suburb, determined to make a living by telling certain thoughtless people how they should look. The city welcomed her. She was soon on the underpaid staff of a smug magazine, waiting each day for the happy hour to begin so she could sit muzzily in the currently approved bar, certain that people sensed she was ingenious enough to be wearing the kind of panties Jean Harlow had worn.

  I’m being unkind, of course, and probably inaccurate. Most likely, she was what I imagined her to be when she first came to my studio to interview me: as handsome as a dik-dik and totally deserving of love.

  I set siege to her consciousness, listening with approval as she praised the cleverness of people I had thought of as cloddish and pea-brained. I nourished her romantic energy with anecdotes I had once found offensive.

  I learned to play backgammon and told her what my sign was (Leo), and I blushed gratefully when she announced we were compatible. I photographed her, explaining how I captured souls and hoped desperately to capture hers.

  I demonstrated my modest virility, but only after I was asked, and honoring the old-fashioned convention that ladies should come first.

  But to be truthful, I had no notion of what Barbara expected—of me or of the world. She often said she loved me, but in the same tone that she said she loved feathered boas. We both knew I was not what she needed. We decided to get married.

  It was during the marriage ceremony that Barbara discovered what she needed: God and the Reverend Elliott Mason, although maybe not in that order.

  Barbara had assured me that frivolous ceremonies had been fully discredited. No sunrise on the mountainside, no Kahlil Gibran for us. A fan-vaulted chapel and the Book of Common Prayer were required, even though neither of us had been inside a church since squirmy childhood.

  Pastor Mason, who performed the ceremony, was the handsomest white-haired man I had ever seen, and he dealt in presence. Barbara thought it was God’s presence, but I suspect it might be something closer to stage presence. In any case, after we were pronounced man and wife, Barbara kissed first me and then Elliott Mason. Elliott got the better of the two exchanges, and I had thought of walking up the aisle by myself and leaving them at the altar in their spiritual embrace.

  Barbara announced that she had become a Christian, which was as incomprehensible to me as if she had said she had become Chinese. She became a member of the pastor’s flock, as the saying has it. I suspect the saying was particularly appropriate in this case. She began taking private instruction with Mason—learning about the Christian mystics, she said. I would find her at bedtime weeping over St. John of the Cross. I did some weeping myself.

  But I was not contemptuous. The change in Barbara was too profound for me to be nasty about—or to allow me any hope for change. But despite my tolerance, I saw no reason to thank God for the development, and I sure as hell saw no reason to thank Elliott Mason.

  Shortly after Joanne was born, the Reverend Mason’s car was found crushed against the support of a highway overpass. In the car was the dead body of my wife and the mangled but breathing body of Elliott Mason. When the pastor regained the use of his arm, he wrote me a letter. I weighed the letter in my hand and held the envelope to the light: a succinct letter, a single page, most likely. I supposed it was an explanation. I tore it in half but then put the two pieces in the bottom of a drawer on the improbable chance that someday explanations would appeal to me.

  Such was my introduction to the mysterious ways of the Lord. I decided I would continue to seek my mysteries elsewhere.

  Nice memories to have available for sleepless nights. And the night I first saw Sara Coleridge was entirely sleepless; it was a night lived not in the present but in the grotesqueries of my past and in hopes for the future. Two of my hopes were that Sara was not married and that she was not a churchgoer.

  Chapter 2

  At seven-thirty each morning, my daughter Joanne would enter my bedroom, recklessly offering me a mug of orange juice and taking me into her surprising world. She was four and a half years old, and the qu
iet orderliness and charm she had shown in the previous year were being interrupted more and more often by sinister smiles and messy selfishness. Her first words to me were usually: “You must be . . .” “You must be the baby. I’m the mommy.” Her eyes narrowed, and the smile appeared.

  I resisted. “Don’t we say good morning first? Kissy-kissy?”

  She ignored me. “Baby has been naughty. Baby knows she mustn’t be hostile, doesn’t she?”

  The “hostile” must have originated with Ms. Abraham at the nursery school. Nanny Joy and I didn’t talk that way. Enrolling Joanne in nursery school had probably been a mistake. Ms. Abraham’s thoughts were obviously about theories of education rather than about children, and she thought of Joanne merely as a footnote in a college of education thesis. But I thought Joanne should spend some time around other children, and the nursery school was the only practical way to arrange that. It was a swift crowd, apparently. Arnold showed Joanne what he called his wee-wee, and Kimberley electrified everyone in the sandbox by putting a little sand on her thumbnail, raising it to her tiny nostril, and announcing that she was “getting off a snort.”

  “Daddy. You’re not playing with me.” Joanne had managed the difficult task of furrowing her porcelain-smooth brow.

  “Daddies can’t be babies.” I reached out and lifted Joanne onto the bed. I kissed her brow and then opened the drawer of the bedside table, where I kept a supply of candy. I pulled out the UN Jelly Babies (white, black, yellow, red). “Here are some babies.”

  Joanne took the candies hesitantly. She was still not pleased. “This baby is you,” she said, selecting a white one. “I’m going to eat your face . . . and your toes . . . and your heart.”

  She ate the candy ferociously, and I tried not to be disturbed. I said, “Oh, don’t chomp me up. Oh, it tickles.” But I wasn’t tickled. I thought of one of the gruesome nursery rhymes she loved to recite: