The Vanished Child

by Sarah Smith

  “First,” he said. “What is required of you is to play the piano.” She nodded. “You have skill; you practice; you think about music. You’re very young, and of course you may stop caring about music, or not be good enough to want to go on. But it seems to me you are good enough to try.”

  “I’ll always want to go on,” she said in a trembling voice, too young to know about change.

  “You also have other wants, which may conflict with your need to do music. You want to marry Harry, to be a daughter- in-law to Gilbert, to be a good wife. Yes?”

  “To have children,” she said, barely breathing, and blushing all the way down into her high collar. A fully sighted woman would have lowered her eyes. Hers were focused on him. He had the sensation of intimacy he remembered from the garden: he was intensely alone with her. Girls’ clothes were designed to disguise the body, and one never knew what one would find under all the whipped-cream of white lace and cotton, but he had the distracting thought that if he set his imagination loose for an instant he would know what she looked like naked.

  “Do you want children for yourself, or because Harry wants them?”

  She spoke even lower: “For myself. Harry doesn’t, not so much.”

  Oh. When he thought of it he was not surprised. “Children and music, then.” Children and music, he wondered, or sex and music? One of the few thousand things one could not discuss with virgins. He wondered if anyone had told her that it was possible to have sex without having children. He didn’t think so. This was America, with one of the least civilized attitudes in the world.

  “Do you think that children and music are incompatible?” he asked her.

  “I don’t know.” She added, “Harry says that—” and blushed deeply.

  He could only imagine what misinformation Harry had. America had the Comstock laws and Boston had the Catholic Church, and young men like Harry got most of their information from the walls of urinals.

  “Is it true,” she asked, barely loud enough to hear, “that women who work—and think—can never have children?”

  “Good G-d.” He stared at her. “S. Weir Mitchell’s work. Don’t believe it.” Now he was on ground he knew. “Mitchell treated women who were physically exhausted and underweight, which will interfere. He put them on a regimen of bed rest, good diet, and no reading or other intellectual work. He got results. Conclusion: women should not read or write. If he’d done a double-blind—” He rephrased the jargon for her. “If he’d taken a similar group of women, given them rest and diet, and let them read and write what they pleased, he would have had something approaching an experiment. One of Mitchell’s unpublicized results, by the way, was the complete nervous breakdown of one of his patients. Don’t let it happen to you.”

  “He kept them from reading or writing?” said Perdita, shocked.

  “Just so. Tell me about your mother. How many children does she have and what else was she doing when she bore them?”

  She opened her mouth, then closed it again and grinned at him.

  “I have six brothers and sisters. Three of each. They’re all older and out in the West. And Mama was going up and down ladders on pueblos and riding donkeys and helping Papa with his books about the Indians all the time. She would explode without a pen in her hand. I suppose I don’t have to worry about Dr. Mitchell.”

  No, just use your brain. He filed away for reference that Perdita’s mother did scholarly work. Hereditary professional woman: very promising. “How does your mother handle having work and her children?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Ask her. Tell me, what do you have to do to be a professional musician?”

  “Practice, first, and learn music.”

  “How many hours a day?”

  “Seven or eight.”

  “Do you do that much?” he asked, surprised. He would have guessed five.

  She nodded. “Most days.”

  “And you take lessons? How many times a week?”

  “Twice.”

  “Do you give concerts?”

  “Yes, of course! Maybe ten a year.”

  Once a month or so. “That’s very good. What else will you have to do to develop yourself?”

  She hesitated. The port glass was still in her hands. She seemed to want to gesture, but—no, he realized suddenly, she didn’t know where to put it down, though the table was hardly four feet away. In the grey stormlight she was blind. He reached over. “Do you want your wineglass anymore? You don’t have to drink it; it was to get your attention.” She gave it to him gratefully. Her hands were freed, eloquent like most musicians’; they gestured angularly, gestures of dismay.

  “I would have to go to other places, just as Mademoiselle says.” Her voice was still very low. “I mean not Boston. I’ve learned almost what I can here. I would have to be away from Harry, really away, perhaps to Europe. I wouldn’t know where I was. I’m not really sighted. I can’t read street signs. I would always be lost in strange cities. Harry wouldn’t like it if I ever left him to go away even for a night. ”

  “Don’t blame Harry.”

  “No,” she said, her voice an edge of glass. “It’s me. I’m afraid.”

  “Of going to strange places. It’s odd you aren’t afraid of giving concerts.”

  “Oh, no, I can do that.” It was childish certainty. “I mean,” she said, “it might go awfully and I might get a half bar away from the orchestra and the audience might like me only because I’m little and blind. But I can still do it. Once I find the piano bench and middle C, I’m there.”

  “All right, then. What do you need not to be lost?”

  “Eyes,” she said bitterly.

  “Hire some.”

  She absorbed this in real puzzlement.

  Among the other few thousand things one cannot tell virgins is that they are economic beings. “Don’t tell me you can’t. You have already told me who you are. You’re a musician. Act like one. When you are married to Harry you’ll be a rich woman. You’ll have a personal maid. You’ll want to go somewhere for lessons, perhaps New York. That’s a few hours on the train. Take her with you. When you give concerts, the same.”

  “Harry wouldn’t let me go to New York,” she said. “He would think it’d be so wrong—a wife traveling without her husband.”

  Reisden sighed in exasperation. “Does he know you?” he asked patiently. “Does he know that you want to play music?”

  She shrugged, as if her wants in the matter had not quite come up between them.

  “Would you love him as much if you played music?”

  Yes, her nod said.

  “Would you love him as much if he helped you?”

  “I would love him even more!”

  “Do you think that will change when you marry him?”

  She shook her head but didn’t speak.

  “Does he?”

  Neither yes nor no. Her hesitation told it all. “As it happens,” Reisden said, “you are right and he is wrong.” Her dear Harry, who had minded when she had left him for a single piano lesson.

  Reisden got up from the sofa and went over to the window. “1 know how Harry feels,” he said. “It is survivable.” He didn’t know whether he wanted to say this to her. It was more suited to Harry, and there was no way to say it without talking about his own history, which he had not brought into this affair and didn’t want to. But she needed to know how Harry felt.

  “She went to Glasgow. My wife,” he began. “Just a week after we were married. You don’t know, I think, that I was married. Tasy—Anastasia—was a professional musician, a singer in the chorus of an opera company. Only in the chorus, so she didn’t actually have to go to Glasgow, they’d have found a substitute. But she went. I was very noble: Of course she had to go, it would help her career, I was busy at the lab anyway, I’d hardly miss her. My G-d, I was jealous. I’d been stung. She’d gone off and left me. I was alone without her. I’d never been so close to anyone as to be lonely without them. And
I didn’t like it. I was furious. Women shouldn’t go off like that.”

  “What did you do?”

  He was still looking out the window, remembering Scotland in winter, the coal-black trampled slush and the lashing rain. “I went to Glasgow. I didn’t think I should. Men don’t act like that. I didn’t think she’d respect me for it.” He had wondered if she wanted to see him, if the whole company would laugh at him.

  “It turned out . . . very well.” Tasy and he had made love in the manager’s icy cold office, in their clothes, she in costume, between the second and the third acts of Lakmé. After that they really had not needed to do much explaining; and after that, too, Tasy had begun to get roles: one only needs to be noticed. “She missed me too. So we never had much pride over wanting to be together.”

  “You loved her very much,” Perdita said.

  “She’s dead,” he said, closing the subject. “So. When you tell Harry that he is marrying a musician, expect him at first to be unsure what he is to do about it. Make him feel welcome in whatever you do. And make him do some of the work. Do you know what you will say to your music teacher now?”

  “Yes, I think so.”

  He took both her hands in one of his. “Excellent. Can you get to Boston and to her house?”

  “I always do. I take cabs.”

  “Of course you do. Get your coat and hat.”

  They smiled at each other.

  And at just that unfortunate moment, Harry opened the door.

  The two of them, Reisden and Perdita, stood frozen, for all the world like illicit lovers in a Victorian tableau. The room had all the elements: closed door, dimmed lights, and even a sofa on which the two of them had all too clearly been sitting.

  “Harry!” Perdita said.

  Reisden and she dropped hands and moved away from each other. Wrong move, Reisden thought inwardly; take it more slowly.

  “Pet!” Harry groaned.

  Reisden took charge; he had no interest in acting in French farce. “Miss Halley, you’re going to the station?—Yes, you are. Go. Harry, I’m glad you’re here; I want to consult you about the search. Sit down. Would you excuse us, Miss Halley?—Go,” he murmured at her. “We shall talk again,” he added for Harry’s benefit, “when you have had a chance to consult with Mademoiselle Brin.” He walked her to the door, not trusting that she knew where it was, and opened it for her. “I’ll explain,” he said for her ear.

  “Oh my.”

  “He loves you,” Reisden reassured her, still low; “but I will not if you don’t get yourself a teacher.” He closed the door behind her.

  Harry was standing up, fists clenched. “What were you doing embracing my fiancée?”

  Embracing. “Raping and pillaging, actually. We’d just done the rape part and I was trying to remember how to pillage.”

  Harry went completely white, as if Reisden had hit him in the stomach. Wrong move. Very wrong move. Harry brought his fists up. “Hit me, Harry, if you believe me.” Reisden sat wearily down on the sofa again. “Miss Halley was upset and I calmed her down.”

  “You were holding hands.”

  “She was upset.” Perdita would shake hands with both hands, kiss someone when meeting them. She held hands with Gilbert, which, when he’d first seen it, Reisden had thought peculiar. She was a person who touched. If Harry intended to be jealous of Perdita, he would have no trouble fulfilling his intentions. “You don’t ask why.”

  “I know it’s about Perdita’s lessons,” Harry said. “Miss Brin asked me a while ago whether Perdita was going on with concerts after we were married. I told her of course not. She said she was going to stop giving Perdita lessons. ”

  I told her of course not. “You told her Perdita was giving up music,” Reisden said flatly.

  “Of course. She won’t have any time for it after we’re married. She’ll have to go on visits and give dinner parties. Her music isn’t important and she spends too much time on it.”

  “You did expect her to be upset.”

  “She’ll get over it.”

  Fool. Fool. Who was the fool? Reisden had known essentially what kind of person this boy was. Not unkind. Too unimaginative to know when he was being cruel. Harry could be changed, but it wouldn’t be a day’s work.

  “Girls have time for things like music. Wives don’t, Reisden. And Perdita will never give up me.”

  Harry said this with absolute certainty. And no, she wouldn’t. Harry stood by the window, blond, tall, and handsome. Between their children and her Harry’s love, Perdita would be very near happy. Unless she was a real musician—because what Harry proposed to deprive her of was all she really wanted. If she was real.

  Perdita came back very late, by the last train at ten o’clock in the evening. They were waiting for her, all three downstairs in the Clinic parlor, Gilbert peering out the window and murmuring wretchedly about derailments.

  “I didn’t go to Mademoiselle Brin’s at all,” she said quietly, still in the doorway. But in the dim front hall she shone. Her girl’s flat straw hat was pinned on crookedly; she pulled out the pin with one hand and simply let pin and hat fall on the floor as she shook out her hair. Unheard of. In her other hand she held a thick roll of music, nothing like the slim piece of Schumann she had been working on.

  “Mademoiselle Brin is the best teacher in town who will take women students. But there is a man I wanted to work with. As long as—well, never mind. I went to him.” Her face was lit inwardly. “I went to his office at Symphony and said ‘I need to be your pupil.’ I’ve been in Symphony Hall, playing the piano with him, for two hours, in Symphony Hall. Harry—oh, Harry!” She held out her arms. Harry walked into them stiffly. “I am happier than I have ever been in my life,” she said. She laid her head on Harry’s chest. His eyes and Reisden’s met over her head.

  Remember who she is, Reisden thought at him. Isn’t she worth more to you like this?

  “Sure. That’s great, Pet,” Harry said.

  The fourth of July; Votes for Women

  On the Monday before July the fourth, Gilbert, Harry, and Reisden moved back from the Clinic to Island Hill, and Gilbert took them on a tour of the house.

  “Oh, Uncle Gilbert, it’s really pretty!” Perdita said.

  No, child, Reisden thought, nothing could make Island Hill pretty except being seen in a blur, but it was comfortable. Pale rugs on the old dark floors, wallpaper in shades of cream and leaf green, wicker settees and painted pine dressers. Harry thought the painted pine was embarrassing because one of the Knight factories made it. Reisden thought, but did not say, that it was rather Gilbertian furniture, painted to blend with the wallpaper, shy furniture. The dark paneling and black marble fireplaces had been texture-painted by an artist from the same factory, so that they seemed to be made out of curly maple. Harry said nobody but a man-decorator would paint marble. Reisden could feel the black stone glowering underneath, like a vibration or the memory of a lie.

  One of the downstairs parlors had been turned into a music room with a piano. A pale, splendid Steinway dominated the room; everything else was delicately cream and ivory. If Gilbert were a man-decorator, he would have a future in it. Harry took one look around the room and frowned. Perdita sat down and made the piano speak, and was lost to them for the rest of the tour, but her piano music followed them into the other rooms.

  Nothing had happened to the murder room. The same white plaster, the same black marble fireplace. “You ought to have done something to it,” Harry complained. Reisden glanced at Gilbert.

  “I just didn’t have a good idea what to do,” Gilbert said, distressed, as if forgetting were a matter of paint.

  Harry’s eyes met Reisden’s over Gilbert’s back, trying to stare Reisden down. “Do something,” Harry said. Give me Richard’s body. Reisden raised his eyebrows slightly and shrugged. Harry wheeled abruptly out of the room, and a moment later the piano music stopped.