Thanks, Judge, thanks to your obscene simulacrum for reminding me of several things I must not do. Terence Mann flexed his hands to relieve a tension; then he played the third Fugue, to completion this time, and well enough. Mr. Brooks would have rubbed his fleshy nose and said: “Mmm.”
Then he was compulsively searching through a pile of long unused material, until he unearthed the beginner’s book, the first-grade instruction prescribed by Michael Brooks. He remembered insisting, eight years old, that he must pick out the book personally, so off to Simms’ Music Store in Winchester with the tickled, slightly bumbling Doctor, who knew everybody and took occasion to introduce him to the lantern jaw and slow-motion smile of Hubert Q. Simms; and embarrassed the toe-twisting bejesus out of the boy with some well-meant cockadoodle about “latest threat to Josef Hofmann.” Then four blocks down Court Street to (Terence hadn’t quite believed it) Judson’s Piano Store. This same piano now standing here thirty-nine years later, rather old as such things go but good as new. The Doctor’s way, taking such a plunge out of nothing but faith in a small boy’s dream. Probably that year he’d been just barely able to afford it. He should have lived another forty.
But Dr. Carl Mann, in the early winter of 1930, not drunk for he never was, a blue ugliness of ink still visible in the long seam of scar tissue across his face, his financial affairs well in order—in fact very little hurt by the smash of 1929, for country people still got sick and still paid for it as well as they could—and the night cloudy, yes, but no rain or ice on the roads, happened somehow to drive his car into the concrete abutment of the railroad overpass at Pritchett. His only unkindness the matter of uncertainty. It could easily have been a syncope as the coroner decided, or a mechanical failure of the car concealed by the total smash. Or the Doctor might have been uncertain himself, up to the last blind instant of no return.
Here anyway was the instruction book, pages gone brown at the rims, and with the script of Michael Brooks. Eyes on the notes! Get rid of that shoulder-arm tension!!
Judge Mann carried it to the armchair, with a go-to-bed glass of brandy. Not all those careful fingerings had been written in by Mr. Brooks. The last half of the manual (he had forgotten) had quite a few figures in an eight-or nine-year-old hand (correct too!) placed there after he had got by the first few hurdles with his enthusiasm still afire. The book would be more or less out of date, Judge Mann reflected: modern pedagogy had new notions, some good, some not.
He wondered if he was examining this relic from a middle-aged need to get nearer somehow in time to the mind of Callista Blake. Partly, maybe. Certainly the dignified black notes before his eyes, the passages of the third Fugue remembered, The Express, the first discovery of Huck Finn, Moby Dick, Beethoven Opus 57, the embrace of a Filipino girl whose body was a little golden candle flame—certainly none of all that had the effect of shutting away Callista Blake. She was very present. (“Which is the Clerk?”) But more than anything else, here at the frayed, tired, lonely end of the evening, he was wondering—practically too, and with the special fascination of such practical problems—how he would go about helping a child beginner to free the fourth finger, strengthen the fifth, accomplish the small-immense passage from the five-finger cage to the wide-open country of the octave. And he found that he meant just that: how he would do it, he, Terence Mann, age forty-seven, not merely Judge of the Court of General Sessions in and for the County of Winchester, but also a pianist of more than decent competence.
If in the habit of speaking aloud in loneliness, he supposed he could have said reasonably to the imagined presence of Callista beyond the bright amber of the brandy: Not now, not while your life is proposed for burning, Callista. But afterward, maybe. Afterward. Possibly a letter to the New Essex Bar Association, explaining how for me the law has been an interlude of a quarter-century, and interesting, but now I would rather attempt something that I find more important. Which would annoy the holy hell out of them, Callista, but all the same I may write it.
A curious thought which he took to bed; sleeping quite soon, to encounter the inner voices of sleep, with moments of tranquillity.
III
She saw it behind her eyelids, a small cloud but deep, suddenly come, suddenly gone. The light strengthened; there was the rock, and a whiteness in the water. How could you know, Callista, that she was dead?
She had, as usual, dared to move her cot nearer the wall with the barred door and the graffiti, so that if she crouched at that end of the cot a triangle of shadow protected her from the glare of the naked bulb in the corridor. Matron Kowalski on night duty had a habit of turning that light off and on at chancy intervals after midnight. Regulations probably said it should burn steadily, but Kowalski was a zealous screw when not deep in a comic book, and doubtless hoped to catch her charges in bottomless wickedness by playing cute with the switch. Short-sighted as well as thick-witted, Kowalski had apparently never caught on to Callista’s crime of moving the cot. Callista generally tried to retrieve the sin before Matron Flannery came on in the morning, though whenever she forgot, Flannery just looked sad and grumbled: “Now dearie, we gotta put that back where it belongs or it’s my arse.” And sometimes even shoved it back herself with a heave of a massive thigh.
Interesting but maybe unprofitable, to contrast that kindness with the satisfaction Flannery had shown a week ago in disciplining a shouting and clawing wench who didn’t want to go downstairs. Flannery had caught the girl from behind with an arm like a side of beef, in the pattern of rape, a stiff block of finger jabbing at nerve clusters here and there, leaving no mark. And if Callista Blake the Weird Woman, Cold Callie the Monkshood Girl, were to create a disturbance, Flannery would be ready, would spread her flat feet and grunt in the same way, like a boar in rut, in the interest of law and order.
“I want more heat, I want more foodibles. I want more heat, I want more foodibles.” The old woman down the corridor had been silent a while, the interval like the recession of a toothache. Hearing her resume, Callista dropped her face on her knees, listening more or less. Listening is an act of living. Listening, the human unit can at least say: I am not dead, I am here, I can prove it, the current of life is dancing in the delicate nerves, the brain recording, comparing, remembering—understand, I am not dead!
“I want more heat, I want more foodibles.” She sounded plaintive at the moment, harping on a single string, a note in it much resembling enjoyment. The name was Watson; the nearly baritone voice brought the image of a body shriveled and small, crowding seventy perhaps. “I want more heat, I want more foodibles.” Watson must have been picked up Sunday as a D&D, Callista supposed, raising hell somewhere in the chilly streets until somebody called the wagon. She couldn’t be drunk now, two nights later, but the noise continued unchanged. She didn’t belong here of course. “Ya-hoo! Kiss my cold aching ass, you dirty-dirty-dirty—all rise! All rise! I want more heat, I want more foodibles.” Sooner or later the fumbling dustmop of the law would pick her up, shake her out into a different sort of institution. Or back to the streets and whatever dim hole of a room she lived in—with small possessions? Old photographs? Sewing-basket? Rocking-chair? “All rise!”
“You Watson, you shaddap.” The voice of Kowalski.
“Fuck you, Polack, I want more heat, I want more foodibles.”
“Listen here, you don’t shaddap, I’m coming in there again.”
“Yah!” Weary, diminuendo, but not actually a sound of yielding. Silence followed, as dust settles after an eddy of wind.
Callista tried to review the course of the day, long in retrospect. Maud Welsh all morning. Sergeant Shields, sober, exact, not unkind: four bobby pins and a paper clip. Sergeant Peterson a bleached mechanism for the production of not very good photographs, including one of the rock and the pond by daylight, not the light of a troubled and hazy moon. Trooper Curtis, plaster casts and fingerprints and so what? Sutherland
R. Clipp who did everything. Trooper Carlo San Giorgio the nice boy. And Dr. Devens. None of them except Maud Welsh had remained very long on the stand; Cecil who understood the nature of the conflict had let most of them pass by with little or no questioning. Callista found she was remembering too mechanically; names and faces would not coalesce to any rationally useful larger pattern. Yet at some point—she thought it was during the testimony of Cousin Maud—something had been done or said that had lessened the opacity of the Blank, like a hint of dawn or false dawn beyond a dirty window.
Or was it anything done or said? Cousin Maud of the Plum Jam understood nothing of the interview with Ann at Covent Street, a happening far outside the cage where the life of Cousin Maud fluttered and squeaked. Perhaps this was the way of it: during the examination of Cousin Maud the Blank had thinned temporarily, of itself; a coincidence in time, maybe nothing to do with any word spoken. Probably during the cross-examination, when Cecil was questioning Maud about the Saturday night, the bedroom scene—A sorry Hamlet I made!
“Fuck your stinking jail too! We got rights, Polack. You ain’t saving the taxpayers nothing, we all die of pee-neumo-nia, they gotta pay for a box. Listen, I been flang out of better jails before you was old enough to shove a finger up it. I want more heat, I want—”
Callista winced at the smack of Kowalski’s feet passing her cell. She heard the clash of keys, clang of the iron door, high anticipatory whimpering (still that note of enjoyment?) broken off by the crack of a flat hand against flesh, repeated and repeated, Callista’s body clenching in misery at each repetition of the sound, her scream of protest choked into silence by a bitten lip. They can’t! Stop it! But it had happened the same way last night, would happen again and again, maybe always, here and there in the world, throughout the extent of foreseeable time: how long is that? Callista’s fingernails were hurting her legs. Her mind held firm somewhere, listening.
Watson wasn’t yelling much. She hadn’t last night either, only a small rhythmic outcry. Mouse in a trap. “You gonna quiet down now?”
“Uh-huh. I’m sorry, Kowalski.”
“Mrs. Kowalski.”
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Kowalski. Gi’ me a butt.”
“This ain’t no charity ward.” Anger spent, Kowalski probably just wanted to get back to her comic book. “Nor you ain’t no psycho, you’re putting on to get attention, beat the rap for what you done wit’ your busted bottle. All the jerks on Mullen Street, you had to stick it into plain-clo’es cop. That was crazy, but now you’re crazy like a fox. You know that t’ing punt’red his intestyne? Still in hospital, and that ain’t good news for you, Crazy-like-a-fox.”
Watson giggled. “Couldn’t he’p it, he wasn’t nothing head to foot on’y one big turd. Gi’ me a butt. Just one, huh, please?”
“God give me patience!” That noise of Kowalski’s was mechanical, a kind of breathing, blurred by the iron clang. Callista was standing by her own cell door. “Matron—”
Kowalski’s square bulk swung about, her flat face slipping into shadow as her head turned from the light. “You, huh?”
“Will you take her a pack of mine? I don’t use ’em much.”
“Got plenty, huh?”
“Yes.” Callista held the pack through the bars. Kowalski made no move to take it. “I’d like her to have it.”
“You’d like.… You feel pretty big, don’t you, Miss Blake? You feel real big wit’ them cigarettes. I t’ought we was just dirt, now everyt’ing’s okay, you can bend low ’n’ give an old woman a pack of your butts.” She held her voice down; Watson was mumbling and crooning to herself, perhaps not listening. “Maybe it wouldn’t occur to you, Miss Blake, but that old trot’s got pride. She ain’t lickin’ up no at’eist prisoner’s dirty leavings. Me neither. Miss Blake, I wouldn’t touch you not by a ten-foot pole.” Callista saw thumb and forefinger of the woman’s hand pinched in a circle at the shelf of her breasts. Her soft tones had lost distinctness, slipping back into the vaguer argot of a South Winchester childhood. “Ain’t comin’ in ’ere, not ’less Sheriff or somebody gives me direc’ order, you can drop dead. You ain’t human, you’re a stinkin’ t’ing, you can hang yourself I won’t go in, leave you for Flannery to find by the morning.”
Callista put the cigarettes away and sat on her cot gazing at interlaced fingers, trying (as if the time allowed were not short but the need urgent) to grasp the nature of hatred, especially in this new guise. Kowalski had not displayed it before, had seemed only an indifferent mechanism busy with her job. It occurred to Callista that she herself must have been shamefully unobservant. Did others unsuspectedly ache with this kind of loathing for her? T. J. Hunter? Cousin Maud? Jim? Why?
“I guess you don’t talk, you can’t be bod’ered.”
“No, Mrs. Kowalski, I’d rather not talk.”
“Oh, you’d rather not. Much too good to talk to a dumb Polack. Let me tell you somet’ing, Miss Blake, what they do after they pull the switch in that little room—what they do, they take out the heart, doing the oddopsy, understand? No matter you got lots of money, ’r’ gonna be buried fancy somewheres, they take out the heart. They got a reason. All right, you don’t talk.”
Kowalski stood there a while longer, exercising great courage perhaps, or having faith in the cold iron of the bars. Then Callista sensed that the woman had gone away. I will think about the night of Saturday, the 15th of August.
Cousin Maud must have been telling the truth about that episode on the front porch. Callista could not remember seeing or hearing Ann then, but Cousin Maud would not have lied.
How unmistakably the bedroom was Mother’s! Nothing there of Herb, who slept at the far end of the upstairs hall in a room Mother indulgently called “his den,” as one might refer to a cat’s favorite basket. Well, the entire house merely tolerated Herb Chalmers, who after all did nothing except own it, pay taxes and upkeep, and exist there. Poor Herb! If only he wasn’t so inclined to agree with that estimate himself! By contrast, the spook of The Professor, the great Malachi Chalmers so respectably dead, was quite at home. Cousin Maud liked to behave as though all major directives were announced jointly by The Professor and Victoria.
The room smelled of Victoria, a scent resembling dilute vinegar now and then penetrating the ordinary flavor of sachet and face powder. That night, without asking, Callista knew her mother had been sitting for some time at the antique secretary desk, dealing with correspondence of the Thursday Society of Shanesville. And Victoria, after her absent-minded greeting, would go on sitting there preoccupied, long enough to make the point. “I’m sorry I didn’t know you planned to come out tonight, dear.”
“No plan—impulse. I wanted to talk to you, Mother.”
“Oh, something terribly important? Well, dear, just make yourself comfortable till I’m through here and we’ll have a nice little visit.” Callista stood near the desk, where Victoria must at least be aware of her. “I wish you would sit down, Callista. It is a little trying to be stared at when one is attempting to concentrate.”
“Sorry. But I wasn’t staring at you, Mother.” That was true. Her mind, too swiftly to be caught in the act, had generated an image perhaps well worth staring at: a thing approximately sixty days old (for it must have been conceived in the deep middle days of June) possessing a bent head larger than the blob of body, stubs with a blind intent to become legs and arms; a thing charged with the strain and pressure of life, and yet finger and thumb (if they could reach it) might pinch it out of existence like a soft bug: Mrs. Chalmers’ grandchild. Callista’s hand, driven by involuntary thought, dropped to rest at the level of her womb where the thing sheltered inaccessible—whether a motion of hostility or protectiveness or both, impossible to say; and Mother would never notice. “I was staring at something that happened a long time ago. You may not remember it. I wanted to find out if you did.”
Resignedl
y, Victoria capped her pen and laid it on the unfinished letter; took off her amber-rimmed reading glasses and retired them deliberately to their case. “Callista, I must say that for anyone so young this habit of mulling over past events is not healthy, not the way to become adjusted to reality.”
“I know, Mother. I’m not in tune with the times, am I?”
“If you realize it, I dare say that’s a step in advance.”
The Edgar Pangborn Megapack Page 46
