by Sue Miller
And Annie would find some eleven-year-old’s way of agreeing, while feeling confused, ordinary, ungifted. Dull.
17
The door swung open on the airless, silent front hallway. Annie set her bags on the bench there. She carried the few groceries from Vermont back to the kitchen to put them away. She took her overnight bag upstairs. In spite of her impulse to lie down yet again, she made herself do the responsible, orderly things—dirty clothes in the hamper in the closet, clean ones put away, toiletries returned to the bathroom.
Then she went to Graham’s study and checked the messages on the phone there. There were a half dozen or so from various friends. But it was too late, she thought, to start calling tonight.
Instead, she went online and googled Sofie Kahn.
And there she was. There were five or six photos of her on her website. One was of her on a stage somewhere, playing with the other members of the quartet, but the others were publicity photos of her alone. Portraits, really. In two her hair was gray, pulled back in a bun. In the others she was younger, with the luxuriant dark hair Annie remembered tumbling over her shoulders. She was always posed with the cello.
As she moved around the website, Annie was able to guess a little of Sofie’s life. Playing with various orchestras around the world. Appearing with the quartet at music festivals, at concert halls in distant countries, at colleges. Giving master classes here and there. Annie knew enough to understand that this was a hard life in some ways. But she presumed the music made it worthwhile, was the counterweight against everything that was difficult. She hoped so.
She looked under the “Recordings” category. Annie was sure that she and Graham had CDs of at least two of the pieces in the quartet’s repertoire. She went downstairs and found a bottle of white wine in the refrigerator. She opened it with Graham’s fancy corkscrew and poured herself a glass. Then, carrying the wine, she went into the living room. She opened the CD cupboard.
Graham had separated the small plastic cases into categories—jazz, blues, rock ’n’ roll, classical. Within these categories the CDs were arranged alphabetically, the classical ones by composer, the others by performer. A bookstore man to his core, Annie thought. She felt a pulse of urgent, sorrowful affection for him.
They did have one of the pieces—a quartet by Schumann, in this case performed by members of the Emerson String Quartet with Menahem Pressler on the piano. Annie put it on, conscious as she did this that she hadn’t listened to music since before Graham died. She turned off the lamp.
She sat in the dark room in Graham’s old chair and listened with great attentiveness for ten minutes or so. But then she found herself overtaken by memories. Memories of Sofie again, of her childhood with Sofie—of the large, gracious apartment, the vast green lake stretched to the horizon beyond the windows, the sense of admiration mingled with sadness on her part, something she was aware of feeling even now, listening—the retroactive wish for some parallel sense of beauty, of purpose, on her part. Even now, she thought. Sad indeed.
She and Sofie had drifted apart after elementary school. Sofie went to a private high school on the North Side that focused on the arts; Annie went to the Laboratory High School, connected to the university. They saw each other a few times, but there was less and less to talk about. Annie was busy anyway, and Sofie even more so, with practice and performances in addition to the heavy standard course load of the school.
But the residue of that friendship lingered for Annie, lingered especially in the newly sharp eye with which she regarded her own family—that gift that often comes in adolescence, when you’re suddenly old enough to be conscious of how another family works, of the possibility of other rules, other ways of living, from those you grew up with. The gift that can open a window, a door, into the world. Let air in.
Let you out.
As this gift was at work in Annie, she slowly came to understand that what she had been feeling in her family for a long time was I don’t belong here. That had helped to free her, to end her puzzlement about her family and her place in it. It had opened up her life, though she hadn’t known for years what that would mean for her.
It lingered too in the sense she had that she wanted a life that felt as impelled by beauty as Sofie’s was, as Sofie’s mother’s had apparently been. It lingered in the sense that she might be able to.
The same sense that her first husband, Alan, had specialized in mocking, but which had caused his parents to give her as a wedding present a camera. The camera with which she shot her first serious photographs, the camera that led her to the courses she took, to the growing ambition that did, indeed, push her out into the world.
When the achingly beautiful andante began now in the dark of the living room, Annie came back to the music and listened intently through to the ending, tears in her eyes, tears for Graham’s death, yes, and for her aloneness, but also for the beautiful yearning sound singing in the big room. In herself.
Music. Why hadn’t she thought of it earlier?
18
Week after week, the summer passed. Time itself felt thick to Annie, as if it were a fog she was living in. She would find herself standing someplace in the house—in front of the half-empty closet or in Graham’s study or facing the bathroom mirror or at the kitchen windows, looking out—and have no idea what impulse had brought her there, or how long before.
She saw Edith often, sitting with her in her large, airy front parlor on Avon Hill; and Frieda a bit less. She spent a day up in Newburyport with Natalie, walking up and down the dunes on Plum Island, Natalie pointing out the birds they saw. She talked on the phone to Sarah, to Lucas. Friends came by. She went once again to Vermont for a few days, but quickly grew restless there, too. Nothing seemed to matter, really. Even the news that the show had done well, that it had had a quick mention in the Globe, singled out in a summary of local shows, didn’t awaken her interest.
She waited for evening, when, after a minimal dinner, she allowed herself several glasses of wine while she sat listening to music. Often it was classical—she had bought one version or another of all of the music Sofie had listed on her website as being in her repertoire—but she listened also to the jazz she and Graham had assembled over the years. And to the box of CDs that Sarah had sent her when she told Sarah that listening to music was one of the few things she actually took pleasure in at this point. Then it would be nine thirty or so, and she’d let herself go to bed.
Bed, where, if she wasn’t swamped by memories of Graham—of the happy moments, of the shared sorrows, of the occasional argument, of the details (over and over) of the morning she found him dead—she fell into a leaden sleep.
One night, listening to a CD of Sofie’s, she was thinking again of the shape of their friendship, the elements she remembered of it—Sofie’s mother playing the piano in the afternoons, the lake behind the windows, Sofie herself, her eyes closed as she moved the bow over the cello, almost embarrassingly lost in what she was creating.
She remembered the differences—and the distance—between their two homes. The long walk in either direction.
She was tracing that walk in her mind—now I go into the tunnel under the train tracks, now I cross Stony Island to Jackson Park—when she was stopped by a sudden image, another memory. The memory of the bridle path in Jackson Park, the bridle path that was part of the shortcut through the park. And the man there. The man in the park, on the bridle path, when she was walking with Sofie.
Jackson Park was wild and lush at that time, so overgrown that when you stepped into it from the sidewalk, you entered an entirely different world, thick with green.
The bridle path cut through this thick growth perhaps only ten feet in from the sidewalk, but completely hidden from it. She had thought of it then as a glade—in her childhood, the word meant exactly that open, sunlit space to her, with the dense green pushing in from both sides. Annie and one or another of her older siblings often cut through the undergrowth and across that bridle path to
get to The Museum of Science and Industry or to the lagoon behind the museum, where you could wade in the murky waters and catch pollywogs, or to the bridge over the Outer Drive that led to the Fifty-Seventh Street beach.
By the time Sarah went to college at the University of Chicago, the park had been completely cleared; Annie had noted that when she was driving around on her visits. They’d civilized it, they’d removed all the underbrush to make a kind of grassy plain between Stony Island Avenue and The Museum of Science and Industry. A plain, studded with large, isolated trees here and there, the lake rising beyond it.
But in her youth—and in Sofie’s youth—it was different. It was secret. Special.
And one day, when she was walking Sofie partway home, they met a man there. A man, a young man in blue jeans. He had stopped them and asked them to watch the path for a moment for him. He must have seen us on the sidewalk when we turned in, she thought, two delicious little girls. He must have followed us. He’d stepped a few yards away then, Annie remembered, and turned his back to them. They heard the splash of his urine on the undergrowth and looked at each other, trying to contain their laughter. It was naughty. It was funny.
When he came back, he squatted in front of them, talking steadily, asking questions— Where did they live? What were they doing on the bridle path? Had they been to the museum? What exhibits did they like there? They had both been answering at first, but Sofie had stopped, Annie realized. She was looking down, not at the man’s face. Annie had looked then too, she’d looked where Sofie was looking, and she saw that the man’s penis was out of his pants, that he had an erection.
Annie had seen penises before, because she had brothers. They were careless about their bodies, and there was only one bathroom on the bedroom floor of their house—you couldn’t help catching a glimpse every now and then. And one of the brothers—Glen, the older—used to like to startle his sisters when they were small by unzipping his pants and waving his penis around. The girls would run away, screaming.
But this was different, this strange, rubbery-looking thing.
He asked them to touch it. To touch his erection.
Sitting in the living room in Graham’s chair, the music swelling in the air around her, she recognized this memory. She had known this, she realized. It was familiar to her. It was almost as if it were a film she’d seen. Or perhaps a book—a scene in a memoir of abuse, or a piece of fiction. She had remembered it, at least some parts of it, before. But she had done an odd thing with it, with the memory—she had taken the danger away. She had made it somehow simply a strange event from her childhood, something she had only a vague sense of. It didn’t seem real.
He had asked them to touch his penis, and they had, they were such obedient girls. She remembered that. That they had to obey—he was a grown-up.
They touched him, as they were asked to. Quickly. Lightly. But by now, she was uncomfortable. Frightened. When he asked if they wanted to play a game—maybe he’d suggested hide-and-seek, or maybe he said any game, they should choose—Annie had said no. Or something like no. “No, sir,” maybe.
And astonishingly, he had let them go. Maybe because there were two of them? Because he couldn’t have managed to keep both of them there? Because they wouldn’t agree to be separated by the games he’d asked them to play?
In any case, their kindly predator had let them go. It seemed impossible, but it had happened. She had said no, she had taken Sofie’s hand, and they had walked together back out of the wooded park and onto the sidewalk that had been right there all along, busy with people, with traffic.
Maybe that was the veil she’d drawn across this event. That it wasn’t worth remembering because it had ended well. Happily ever after. The danger they’d escaped from was nothing, in the end. Like Glen, running down the stairs after her and her sisters, clutching his penis while they shrieked and ran away.
The music in the room had stopped by now, but Annie sat as motionless, as if she were still listening. She found herself mentally tracing her footsteps away from the bridle path this time. Away from the park, away from Stony Island Avenue, into the dark of the viaduct under the train tracks and out again into daylight on Fifty-Seventh Street, then around the corner to her street and safely home, home to her old house.
Her house, which Sofie hadn’t wanted to visit.
Not because of the life within it, as Annie had remembered it. No. Instead, because of the dangerous park and the bogeyman living there, between her house and Sofie’s.
Maybe, she thought now, they hadn’t drifted apart because they went off to separate schools, separate lives. Maybe they just didn’t have a way they could speak together about what had happened to them.
She shook her head, rapidly. How strange, what she had done with it, this event. She’d altered it, transformed it, made it something easy to forget.
How long had it taken, she wondered, before its transformation was complete? Before it was forgettable? Before she forgot it?
Did it matter? She had said no, after all. No, thank you.
She heard herself whisper this aloud, “No!”—and abruptly, strangely, she was remembering, not the man on the bridle path anymore, but the night that she and Graham and Sarah had shouted no, over and over again, to the imaginary man who might want to touch Sarah.
How odd. This memory again, the same memory that had come to her in the kitchen the day after Graham died, thinking of him in his apron, shouting, “No way, José!” And of herself shouting “No sir!” to Sarah’s imaginary man, the imaginary man who was so like the real man, the man in the park.
Maybe, she thought, she’d been shouting “No” to this, to this buried, lost memory. Maybe she’d been shouting a refusal to be again that girl, that frightened girl. Had she shed the memory in order to escape that self, that version of herself? That fear?
Were you in charge of your memory? Could you will yourself to forget?
It didn’t matter. She had said no to him. She had rescued herself, she had rescued Sofie. That was what was important.
Remember that. Frightened as she was, as she must have been, she had said no.
No.
Ixnay, she whispered in the dark, silent room.
Over the next days, the long weeks, she returned to this event over and over. Not even so much the event itself, but the way she’d forgotten it. It seemed threatening, somehow—the notion that you could lose something that at one time must have seemed so central to your understanding of the world around you, to your sense of who you were in it. It seemed connected to the loss of Graham and her almost daily fear of losing him further, in memory—in lost memory. Of losing the sharp, clear sense of who he was, of losing the sureness of her feeling for him.
Could you will it the other way too, memory? Could you make yourself hold it, as much as you could make yourself lose it? She found herself taking Memoir with Bookshop out again and again in these evenings, sitting on the couch and poring over the pictures. Using them to remind herself of what she was frightened of losing, what she felt might already be slipping away; and listening over and over to Sofie’s music, as if it were memory itself.
19
The night before Sarah arrived to help scatter Graham’s ashes, Annie had finally opened the box they came in—the wooden box that had been sitting at the back of her closet for the long summer months. They ashes were held inside it in a medium-size clear plastic bag that someone had closed with a twister seal. This seemed so utilitarian, so honest, such a contrast with the fancy box, that she nearly laughed aloud. It made her remember what Graham had said about his ashes when they were talking one day about their final wishes—that he wanted them scattered in what he and Annie jokingly called “the garden” at the back of the cottage—a stand of irises and roses slowly being overrun by Queen Anne’s lace and daylilies. “Think of it as bonemeal,” he’d said to her then. “Very expensive soil amendment. That will be me at that point, finally able to be of some use to you.”
There had been no surprise, no shock, for Annie in what was in the bag. With one or the other of her siblings, she’d dealt with both her parents’ ashes before this, and it was only with the first of them to die—her mother—that she’d been startled by the mealy quality of the ash, and the odd small bits of bone scattered like pebbles throughout it.
It seemed to her now that Lucas and Sarah were both surprised—or at least hesitant—as she held the plastic bag out. To make it easier for them, she plunged her own hand in first and then opened her fingers out, letting the ashes filter between them and fall into the mounding clumps of the daylilies, into the weeds. Lucas followed suit, and then Sarah. Jeanne stood at a little distance—she had said ahead of time that while she wanted to be there, she would let them do this. She had loved Graham, she said, but she didn’t feel this was something she should have a part in. “It belongs to you,” she’d said to them.
Annie had assumed she might feel more with Graham’s ashes than she had with her parents’, but that didn’t happen. She simply didn’t have a sense of connection to him through the ashes, or in them. Bonemeal, indeed. It made her recall again the feeling she’d had the morning he died, the feeling that he was not there in the body that was left lying in the bed with her. That the body had no meaning for her anymore.
Lucas and Sarah clearly did have some sense of Graham’s presence—or absence, perhaps. Their faces were somber as they passed the bag back and forth. Annie took her turn once again, and then stepped back a few feet to let them take over—Graham’s children, after all. She felt a bit like an intruder, watching. She turned away to look at the lake through the trees, busy with boats on this late-summer day.
