But he would wear sardonic detachment.
He experimented. “The Mendelssohn should be interesting as hors d’oeuvre.”
His wife smiled.
“Oh Edward.” Con poco vibrato.
She spoke of dreams fulfilled, not Mendelssohn.
They will exclude me, he thought, casting about to staunch incipient bleeding. Over dinner they will discuss shadings I have never suspected in the second movement, and whether woodwinds gave adequate support.
Not that he should care. He was expert at losing children, he could do it blindfold. An elder daughter marched to mad drummers, communing with strange voices. He had been crawling, when his son was born, on his belly through the world’s yeasty private parts. What good could come of this?
His son would be somewhere in the concert hall. With that woman.
There was, in spite of all, a memory of passion from which all of them, wife and children, were excluded. He kept it like a relic in a sacristy of his mind. It’s glow sustained him. Probably, here and there, people existed who made do with less.
For the Mendelssohn his daughter did not appear, nor for the Beethoven. He endured the intermission, the birdlike rustle and stir, the moult of broken chatter falling about him: the first violins a trifle out, I thought; admirable adagio, though I question; wouldn’t you say the oboe passage; western music, well really, Zubin Mehta, Seiji Ozawa, what can one think?
Lights blinking, the flock — the congregation — returning, kneelers lowered, hymn books taken up. As it were. Awaiting the sacrament. His wife reached out and placed her hand over his. From her sleeve an arm ivory and creased as the page of a prayer book exposed itself. As a sheep before its shearers, he thought, as a lamb to the slaughter. He was surprised by tenderness: We made this event. Ex nihilo, our bodies coming together.
Gruffly godlike, he whispered: “All those practices, you accompanying, me grumbling about the noise and the cost of lessons.” Squeezing her hand.
She raised his fingers to her lips and kissed them, a shocking public act. He had never approved, but now found his eyes as foolishly damp as hers.
There was a hush now, the orchestra fully reassembled, its discourse of tuning, the mating cries of instruments, subsided. And then his daughter entered. He could hear a sort of communal gasp, a glottal stop within the silence, for her beauty. An explosion of applause. She is my daughter, he said to himself, my daughter, my youngest child. As though reiteration would prove: flesh of my flesh.
He felt a confused incestuous rush of desire and guilt. It was not that she looked anything like Marta, his icon, who had been dark, a gypsy memory. Nevertheless something, a translucence, a fragility, was common to them. In this way, as father and lover, he was exalted above other men. He had a finer taste, a Renaissance instinct (in spite of the rented evening suit). Generous, he stroked his wife’s black silken sleeve and touched her wrist.
The Sibelius began, the Concerto in D Minor. If she had chosen something in a major key, something wholesome and sunny he might have been able to reinstate detachment. But from that first keening solo note, that mournful exquisite sound that might have been the voice of Francesca singing love to Paolo in infernal shadows, he was lost. From the cellos, from Paolo’s fire-slaked throat, the guttural response; Passion is eternal. Across all the circles of Dante’s hell, across time, across the old man’s memories. And the whole orchestra confirming, a haunting chorus, now mournful, now shrill with exhilaration, celebrating impossible losses and glories and obsessions. Acknowledging the passion for passion — of parents for their remote children, of lovers for unattainable loves.
In the third movement, he slumped back into his seat from the energy demanded of his heart. There was a rondo of such lunatic ecstasy that the arteries in his temples thudded. And that thin seductive call of Francesca, unbearably otherworldly. He did not realise, until he brushed his perspiring brow, that his face was streaked with tears.
So brilliant, so abrupt, was the ending that the audience was winded with surprise. There seemed to be a general sensation of having been dumped down a chute at a fun fair. In the quivering silence Emily lowered her violin and bow and stood fragile, almost with diffidence, as though covering her nakedness with the instrument. For the second time her father thought of Botticelli’s Venus. And then the ocean broke around her shell, the surf of bravos and applause. Roses presented, a kiss from the conductor. Exits, returns, applause.
They did not move, the old man and his wife, as chairs folded themselves in two, as people surged. This was partly from depletion of energy. A young woman, sucking herself in to get by them, thought of the word beatitude without exactly knowing why. Also, however, there was something of pride. Having become venerable, why should they scurry like ordinary concertgoers?
Edward Carpenter, he thought to himself School principal emeritus. He had a sense of amounting to Latinate distinction.
When the crowd thinned, they walked slowly down the aisle, arm in arm.
The old man demurred: “Suppose they don’t let us past?”
“Oh Edward. Of course they will.”
Before him, she had had a life where it was natural to go backstage after performances. He felt bewildered, like a child in a new school, among the hubbub of music stands and cases and instruments being dismantled. What came to him was another memory of disorder, of nurses and trolleys, of pacing outside a labour room, of waiting helplessly to be shown his baby daughter through glass. His hands trembled now with the same yearning to hold, to whisper: my child.
“There!” his wife cried, flying on maternal wings.
And he would have flown too, would have folded his arms around that luminous figure as around a rare treasure or a newborn baby, with abandon. Except that his son was there before him. His son’s woman was not, at the moment, in evidence.
Jason and Emily were holding each other at arm’s length, as two people do who have just embraced but can scarcely believe they have met again. They were laughing and crying. Into the charmed circle flew his wife and was absorbed.
The old man waited, the momentum of his love baulked. He could not, in front of Jason, display himself. After his son left, the reined-in desire would leap again.
Emily’s eyes swept the room.
“Father!” She came to him and took both hands and kissed his cheek.
“Emily,” he said shakily. And because Jason looked: “Your Mother and I are very proud of you.”
He caught Jason’s grimace, heard him thinking: Stiff, as always.
“Father” Jason said, acknowledging a regrettable given. They shook hands like polite acquaintances. “How are you keeping?”
Just in time he checked himself from responding: On Fortune’s cap we are not the very button. But evidently too late, and to little avail.
“No quotations, Father? No sweets for the sweet or music, when soft voices die?” Having drawn blood, he added lightly: “Just teasing.”
“Jason,” his mother warned. She touched his wrist in gentle reproach and he, instinctively, leaned over and kissed her on the forehead.
The old man felt a dangerous agitation in his hands. How all occasions do inform against me. I have not, he wanted to point out, aggrieved, recited anything aloud for ten years. Not since you were in college. Not since you so wittily pointed out.
He said: “Your woman is not with you?” It came out mildly evening the score.
“Waiting in the lounge, Father. She thought this should be a family moment. She has delicacy.” With only the faintest emphasis. He smiled. “Did you wish to see her?”
“Jason.” Emily made a gesture which might have been that of a weary arbitrator in a protracted union dispute. “You and Ruth are joining us for dinner?”
“Delicacy forbids. We decided you three should have this evening to yourselves.” Graciously condescending to permit. “Pick you up in the morning as arranged, Emily.” Prior collusion, like territorial rights, must of course be established. “Bye, Moth
er.” He displayed his ascendant manhood, lifting her slightly in his embrace. “Take care.”
“Father.” The hand proffered again.
Like duellists’, their manners were impeccable.
In the restaurant alcove there was a single rose and candlelight. His wife and daughter were talking in little rushes of excitement, rummaging through a box of memories like children through old clothing trunks at Hallowe’en. Edward watched them and felt the tide of poison recede.
His daughter, his wife, one fair, one formerly dark, both vibrant. Always, for him, they had had that charged stillness that reminds of herons or gazelles. And Marta also. Such women, he thought, in my life. It set him apart. But then he remembered his other daughter, disfigured with madness, and found it necessary to drain his wine glass.
He filled it again — a dry red — and raised it so that the candle flame glowed through, a burning jewel in his hands. Through the upper clear curve of glass he continued to watch his daughter, appraising, with one eye closed. She was indeed extraordinarily beautiful, with hair like flakes of gold. (Thirty, was it now? Thirty-one. Yet who would possibly guess?) And held an auditorium of people in her hand like so much confetti.
In a moment, in just another moment as the wine washed away Jason, he would be able to say he loved and adored her. He would be able to weep openly, to propose a toast, to take her — even in this public place — in his arms. His child, untainted and pure, the hope of his old age.
“Emily” he ventured, and she turned, her glass poised in mid-air.
He could not continue.
“Oh Daddy!”
His tears had some irrevocable impact. A decision was reached.
He could see it in the impress of her lips, the fluttering lashes. She put down her glass and reached across the table to take a hand of each parent. In a moment he would be indifferent to waiters. In a moment he would rise and clasp her to hiinself. He saw it as in a Burne-Jones tableau: the gnarled old king and his virgin daughter lambent as candlelight on snow; Pericles and Marina.
“I have to tell you both about Adam,” she said.
He withdrew his hand from hers, but gently, not wanting to mar with his spasm of jealousy. To lose her again so soon. Yet it would be a splendid thing, giving her in marriage. He warmed to his vision.
She turned her glass with the released hand, twirling the stem like a top. She raised it and sipped, held it suspended like a shield or charm. Afterwards, this was the moment he always returned to: her raised wine glass, still intact. The last moment of innocence, Eves hand extended toward the apple.
“He is five now,” she said. “Of course it’s unforgivable, not telling you all these years. But you know how things were. I was in Montreal and the affair itself was … complicated. I couldn’t have talked about it. A married man, naturally. That’s insignificant now. By the time Adam was due I was in Australia and it seemed so remote. It was easy to believe it didn’t concern you. Dave wanted to, actually, but I wouldn’t let … for one thing, I didn’t want to have to explain him. You did always make that sort of thing difficult, Daddy. Actually” — the stillness of a lull in battle, the wine glass still raised like a truce flag, the old man’s hands not visible below the table — “you and Dave would enjoy each other. Adam adored him. Still, that’s over now, and since we’re in England … Next time, I’ll bring him. He’s” — she took a deep shuddering breath — “he’s my life. He is quite simply a beautiful and amazing child, your grandson.”
A thin high note of the kind that shatters crystal had begun to sound inside the old man’s skull, had risen to a disorienting crescendo so that as he rose to his feet he had difficulty keeping his balance. He was aware of the backward crash of the chair but otherwise there was no time to gauge or plan, no chance to rehearse the sweep of his arm.
A word flew from his mouth like a stone. Slut, perhaps. Or tramp. He did not so much formulate it as see the white laceration it made on her cheek.
The wine glass had been struck free of her hand and soared like a falcon released, its droppings of wine splashing them. It dipped, quivered, plummeted to the tablecloth. Splinters everywhere. He saw blood on Emily’s hands, the ashen face of his wife.
He could not stop himself. It seemed to him he was coughing blood, not vitriol.
“Dear God, dear God,” his wife moaned, a hand at her throat. As though in sleep, not quite believing, she moved to him, a butterfly against a tank.
“Edward, dearest, please don’t. Your heart, Edward. Oh please don’t.”
Other chairs were being pushed back, people rising, waiters gathering like ushers at a funeral, obsequious yet forceful. A public performance. How Jason would sneer.
The old man put his hand to the tumult at his temple and felt the artery cavorting like a gymnast. In another second, strong hands would be laid on him.
He leaned close to Emily and whispered: “I will not have a bastard in my house. I never wish to see him. Never.”
And then his screaming blood was in his eyes and ears and mouth, the strong hands descended, darkness fell.
“She visited,” his wife told him.
He was in a white bedroom, tied to tubes and a video screen.
“She sat with you through the first night. We all did. Jason too.”
And said: How are the mighty fallen, no doubt.
“But the doctor said there was no danger and she had concerts in England. She had to go”
No danger, he thought, not considering it a favour. He let her stroke his forehead, warming himself against this small flame. Beneath the sheet, his body felt to him cold and heavy as ice.
“It’s beating normally now,” she said, watching a palsied line jerk across the screen. “They’ve put a pacemaker in.”
He lay silent with the appalling weariness of seventy years, watching his wife, thinking: she is like tissue over a fine steel frame. Perhaps it has exhausted her, all these years as go-between.
Yet she seemed immortal, buttressed as always with quiet self-possession, dispensing small comforts.
Suddenly before his eyes she crumpled. Dissolved. Laid her grey head beside his on the pillow. Noiselessly she sobbed; he could feel the heaving like an earth tremor in his bed. After this subsided, after her chafing of his newly sluggish hands, she consoled: “She understands, you know. I told her it was just the shock. We’re not used to so much event, living out in the country. And the concert was so … it made us more vulnerable.” Pleading with him to confirm. “I told her you didn’t mean it.”
If I could just nod, he thought. If I could simply say: “Forgive me.”
“A grandson,” she said. “Think of it.”
She put her fingertips to his lips, a sign of blessing.
If I could just smile. If I could kiss her fingers. If I could say Adam.
They both waited for his voice as though for an unpredictable celebrity habitually late.
Am I, he asked himself, evil or merely cursed?
There were two moments etched into sleep and waking: Marta’s arms (into which he did not walk) extended in the moonlight a lifetime ago; Emily’s glass raised in the candlelight.
There is a tide in the affairs of men. But he had never, alas, taken anything at the flood. Ahead of him stretched miles and miles of mud flats and in the remote distance, toward which he toiled dragging shackles, the inaccessible plea: “I want to see Adam. I want my grandson.”
He turned his face to the wall. Words were not pliant to his bidding. They went their own way as his children had done.
Sorrowfully his wife leaned over him and kissed his cheek. Some dampness at her eyes, the brine of an ebb tide, wet him. And still the words which would have saved him did not come.
XIV Elizabeth
Elizabeth is planting peonies. Extravagance is promised: double blossoms, a glut of petals, more translucence to the inch. Summer after summer after summer. She has a definite preference for perennials, anything that speaks of winter as brief intermission
.
Thursday, she thinks. They are on their way, somewhere over the Atlantic, entrusted to air. The elements, their magic properties, astonish. She uses a trowel and her bare hands, scooping out handfuls of soil. Sometimes she pauses to watch an earthworm undulate back into darkness — violated, she is aware, by the light she has unleashed. The gracefulness of its trauma takes her breath away. To move like that. Instinctively she transposes, composes: song of the earthworm. After the planting, she will commit it to notes.
She watches the last of it pull itself into safety. Like a lolling pink tongue sucked back into a mouthful of soil. She covers it with an extra handful of June’s warm earth, making amends, and in doing so lays bare its brother. How the light sears them. A ballet of shock, the exposed skin comforting itself in love knots.
Intrusions, adjustments, reparations, she thinks. Like gerbils on wheels, we go in circles. We move, we damage, we bind up and tend.
Behind her, troops of potted peonies await orders. Reinforcements. Though regiments already flourish in many directions. There cannot be too much white or pink, Elizabeth believes. Eloquent clusters, they sing of the light made flesh, dwelling miraculously among us.
Elizabeth baptises each plant, dangling the garden hose over it. She releases it from constriction with discreet prods and tappings, holds the potted earth intact around it, puts it to its mother’s breast. The tuberous roots slurp at nourishment.
A gentle place, Elizabeth thinks, feeling along the rootways. She touches bulbs busy with the brewing of next spring. It won’t be so bad, down there, when the time comes. Consorting with earthworms and birth.
She needs to see death that way. She acknowledges this freely to herself. She prefers perennials to annuals, evergreens to deciduous trees. She would like to minimise the finality of death.
Abstraction settles on her. On the way to connecting another peony with the earth, her soil-caked hands lose their way, forget, fold themselves in her lap. The potted plants huddle and wait.
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