A Severed Wasp

by L'Engle, Madeleine;

  But Katherine had risen. “Felix, I must go.”

  “No coffee, my dear?”

  “No, thanks. I have long been too old for coffee at this time of night—even decaffeinated.”

  He set the pot on a trivet and came round the table to her, taking her hands in his. “I may keep in touch?”

  “If you wish.”

  “You will consider my request?”

  “I will consider it, Felix, but please don’t be optimistic. I heard Paderewski’s last concert.”

  “I know,” he said quickly. “I was there with you listening to the radio.”

  “People laughed.”

  “Oh, Katya, Katya, you still play as well as ever, you know that. Come. I’ll see you to a taxi.”

  “Don’t bother. I can manage.”

  “You don’t know this neighborhood. Taxis are almost impossible to come by on Amsterdam. We’ll have to go to Broadway.”

  She put her hand lightly on his. “I’m capable of going to Broadway on my own. As you said, Felix, you tend to get tottery.”

  “You will be careful?”

  “Of course. I am well aware that the streets of New York are not safe, but then there is no longer any place in the world which is safe. One cannot live in perpetual fear. One has to be as prudent as possible, and get on with life. Don’t worry about me.”

  He sighed, “In the old days I’d have called one of the guards to get a cab for you. But now—there’s so much vandalism and petty thievery, we can’t spare a guard for even a few minutes. Anyhow, the Church becomes more and more a business and can’t spare time for Good Samaritan acts. Let me at least see you across the street.”

  He kissed her lightly after they had crossed Amsterdam, the bishop still bobbling, she walking calmly. She was certain he had never kissed her before. Auld Lang Syne does strange things.

  She felt she ought to wait to see that he got safely back across the dangerous intersection and to his building, but decided that would be discourteous, so she walked west without looking back. Swinging her cane loosely, she walked at a brisk pace. She had long held a theory that if you looked vague, at any age, or old and frail, you stood a good chance of being mugged. But if you moved along as though you knew where you were going and what you were doing, you were apt to be let alone.

  Gutters and sidewalks were littered with papers, broken bottles, dog turds (in disregard of signs), general filth. A shadow moved swiftly across a pile of garbage; a rat, she thought. She shuddered. She had a horror of rats. There was a pervasive, unpleasant stench of decay. Just as she was beginning to despair of getting a taxi, she felt a light touch on her arm and looked down to see a young boy.

  “Want a taxi, lady?”

  His skin was a clear olive, his eyes huge and lashed with a thick, dark fringe. There was something endearing about him, and she would be glad of his help. “Yes, and they all seem to be filled.”

  “Topaze will get you one. Topaze can do lots of things. You want to know anything?”

  She looked at him with amusement. She suspected that he was small for his age, and wise with the ways of children of the street, though he was less grubby than most, and his dark curls were clean. “All I want at this moment is a taxi to take me home.”

  He was scanning the street. “You don’t want to know anything about anybody? Anybody at the Cathedral? I could tell you lots.”

  She continued to search for a taxi with the roof light lit. “Why would I want to know anything about anybody at the Cathedral?”

  “Saw you with Bishop Bodeway. The peacock came and spread out his tail for you. Saw you talk to the dean, and to the other bishop, too. So you want to know anything?”

  What was this? “No, thanks, Topaze.”

  “My sister and I know lots. She knows who goes to St. Martin’s chapel to make confession to who.”

  Katherine turned her eyes from the street to look at the boy, who was gazing up at her with large, innocent eyes, like a Renaissance angel. “That’s nobody’s business.”

  “Sez who?”

  His cynicism was distressing to her. “Topaze, if you can get me a taxi, I’ll be glad to give you a quarter.”

  “Mrs. Bishop gives my sister a dollar.”

  She looked at him severely. “I’m looking for a taxi, not information.”

  “Hey, lady, don’t be mad. I was just trying to help.”

  At that moment an empty taxi came by and she waved at it. Topaze sprang forward to open the door. She took a quarter out of her change purse, gave it to him, and gratefully got in. There was no reason to be disturbed by the child. Small children all over the city picked up money any way they could, standing with soapy sponges at the entrances to bridges, waiting to wipe windshields, selling wilted flowers that had probably been filched, running errands—it was surely better than groups of children, many of them no older than Topaze, who mugged and sometimes killed the old and weak.

  She directed the taxi driver to her home downtown.

  Tenth Street

  1

  Home.

  Home was arbitrary, the place she had designated as home, the house on Tenth Street, rather than the farm in Connecticut, or the house in Paris; New York, rather than France, where she and Justin had shared so many years of their married life.

  As soon as she had been able to afford it, she had bought the brownstone on tree-lined Tenth Street where she had lived briefly with her mother. It was as close to roots as she could get, this building she had lived in when she was a child, closer to roots than the old farmhouse which she had inherited from her Russian stepmother, and where she had spent far more time than in the city. Odd, how the heart will put down roots in what was, at the time, only a temporary shelter.

  Tenth Street had not changed much over the years. The trees were taller, that was about all. It was still a street of well-kept brownstones. Nearer Fifth Avenue, men still sat solemnly at tables in the windows of the Marshall Chess Club. The sameness was comforting to her. Despite all that had happened in the intervening years, Tenth Street between Fifth and Sixth was an affirmation of constancy. She had a home which bridged chronology.

  However, the brownstone on Tenth Street was an investment as well as continuity, and rents from the upper stories and from the garden apartment were a welcome supplement to her income. Often she had rented her parlor-floor apartment for years at a time. Now it was hers. She would not rent it again.

  She climbed the outside steps slowly, annoyed at not being able to run up lightly. Yes, she was tired, but by no means as tottery as Felix. She took out her keys; her apartment had its own separate entrance in the vestibule, to the left of the main inner door.

  She had left on the piano lamp; continuing energy crisis or no, she was not willing to come home to a dark house. She moved immediately to the familiar instrument, pausing only to turn on one or two lights on the way. For a moment she stroked her fingers lovingly over the polished wood. Then she sat, and scretched her fingers over the keyboard. Her hands were broad and strong; the true pianist’s sledgehammer hands, they had been called. They still moved to her bidding, but the memory of the old master’s last broadcast was, for some reason, in the forefront of her mind, probably because Felix had been one of the group when they turned the radio to the Boston station from which the program was being transmitted. She had been sitting on the floor, next to the young man she had expected to marry, waiting in eager anticipation for the first notes.

  And the old man could no longer play. The authority was gone. The fingers fumbled. The insensitive laughter had made her furious, and she had left the group, sick with shame, and retreated to the bathroom. Had Felix laughed? She did not think so. If he had laughed, she would have remembered. But the others had. Even the young man who …

  She started to play. Bach. Always Bach when she needed reassurance. Her fingers did not fumble. No matter to what she likened them—turnips, carrots—they were still as nimble as ever. The notes came clear and true. Years after P
aderewski’s last devastating concert, she had also heard Rubinstein play on television, when he was older than she was now, his fingers, too, looking gnarled and knotted, but fleet and swift and potent. There had been no diminishment there.

  The notes of the Fifth French Suite dropped from her fingers. That would get one through almost anything, memories, strange resemblances, echoes of sounds better forgotten …

  She came to the gigue, the notes merry and lighthearted and young. How old was Bach when he wrote that? Not very young. Old enough to be able to write about youth. The promise of youth was in the music and her fingers, the future open and available and changing as it always must be, regardless of age.

  Age—Felix had brought it to the forefront of her mind, but most of the time she did not think about it. She was Katherine Forrester Vigneras, not a chronological digit. She did not want to lose any part of herself. In her seventies she was still seven, and seventeen, and thirty-seven, and fifty. She was the music she played. She had been formed as much by Bach and Brahms as by her parents. No doubt the fact that her father had been a composer and her mother a pianist had made her awareness of herself as being part of music come far sooner than it might otherwise have come; but they were too preoccupied with their own careers to give her the kind of day-to-day guidance which is part of the life of most American children. Perhaps it was her lonely childhood which had made her, with Justin’s full cooperation, try to give Michou and Julie all the family love possible. And there, she thought, she had failed, as much as, if not more than, her parents had failed her, and for much the same reason. She had often been off on the road giving concerts when her heart longed to be at home; but she had not stayed home; she had gone.

  She looked above the mantelpiece. The wall was bare; her pictures were not yet uncrated. The one which would hang above the fireplace was a portrait of herself and Michou, her firstborn, when he was an infant.

  She sighed and turned her thoughts to her daughter. Julie, named after Katherine’s mother, black of hair and fair of skin like Katherine. Married, mother of four, a tall, vibrant woman. Who was Julie? Does a mother ever know her daughter? Katherine had been fourteen when her mother died, mature physically, but young in every other way, too young to have reached the time when she would have needed to separate herself from her mother. Parents fail their children and children fail their parents, but is it really failure? When people love each other, they hurt each other, parents, children; husbands, wives; friends, lovers.

  And was a normal, happy childhood really desirable for an artist? The pain of her parents’ separation, her father’s remarriage to the volatile actress, Manya Sergeievna, her mother’s death—all these griefs had been exorcised and redeemed through music. How does one survive even the normal vicissitudes of life without a driving passion and its concomitant demanding work?

  Was she going to be able to keep herself going now, with no more concerts to prepare for? Was her own discipline of daily practicing going to satisfy her? It would have to. She might feel like a young woman in an old body, but there was no denying that the body was old, and she had little patience with people who could not face their own aging. She had had a full, rich life—surely that should be enough.

  2

  At first she did not hear the knock at her door, the inside door that led from her small kitchen into the main hall. It was only as the last, joyous notes of the gigue died away that her attention was caught. She moved slowly from the piano, her knees less flexible than her fingers and wrists. “Who is it?”

  “Mimi Oppenheimer. I heard you playing, so knew you were still up. My God, you play superbly.”

  Mimi Oppenheimer rented the third- and fourth-floor duplex. A young couple had the garden apartment, and a man who was abroad most of the time rented the second floor. Dr. Oppenheimer was an orthopedic surgeon, fifteen or so years younger than Katherine, a tall, distinguished woman, big-boned; not overweight, just amply proportioned. Her rather wild blond hair was barely touched with grey.

  “Don’t hesitate to send me upstairs if you want to get rid of me. But something about your playing—not the gigue, but the more pensive movements … Perhaps you might enjoy relaxing for a few minutes over a cup of tea?”

  Katherine glanced at Dr. Oppenheimer’s astute surgeon’s eyes. “Relaxing for a few minutes would be pleasant; but no tea, this late in the evening.”

  “Herb tea,” the doctor stated. “I have an excellent tisane which is far better than a synthetic tranquilizer. Will you come up? Or shall I bring it down? Yes, I’ll bring it down. Go back to your piano. I’ll keep the kitchen door ajar.” She left in her wake a faint scent of perfume—chypre?—and of freshness.

  Katherine returned to the piano. Dr. Oppenheimer had rented the duplex apartment ever since Katherine had owned the building, and they were comfortable, if casual, acquaintances. She had often thought that, when there was time, they might be friends.

  A spring breeze stirred the light curtains at the long front windows. She began to play her husband’s best-known concerto, written at the time of the Vietnam war, in memory of the village which had had to be totally destroyed in order to be saved. The hideous irony ran through the piece, which had spoken to a generation dismayed and confused by the series of incomprehensible wars and violences spreading like plague across the planet, but its genesis had been Justin’s own experiences during the occupation of France and, later, in Auschwitz.

  Sometimes the music, which touched deeply on her own experience, was more than Katherine could bear, and she was not sure why she had turned to it now. It might be because it had been a day for recalling the past; first, the meeting with Felix; and then seeing the bishop who was so reminiscent of Lukas von Hilpert, who, like the war, had exploded into her life not more than a short time after she had left New York and the young man she did not marry; and had said what she thought was a final goodbye to Felix.

  She heard Dr. Oppenheimer come in and close the door gently. “Don’t stop playing. I’ll make the tea.”

  But Katherine took her hands from the keys. “It’s time for those few minutes of relaxing you promised me. I don’t think I’m over jet lag yet.”

  Dr. Oppenheimer splashed water into the kettle. “It takes me two weeks coming to New York. It’s supposed to be the other way around, what with the direction the planet turns and the prevailing winds, but I find it easier to go to Europe than coming home.”

  Katherine sat in a silver-grey wing chair, leaning back wearily, watching the doctor deftly preparing the tisane.

  “That was your husband’s music?”

  “Yes. It’s thin without the orchestra.”

  The doctor opened cupboards until she found cups. “Music is one of my best ways of unwinding. But for the past year or so I’ve been too tired to go out to concerts in the evening as I used to. So I depend on records and tapes. Now that I’m doing more teaching and spend less time operating, I must start getting out again.” She set a steaming cup of something nostalgically fragrant on the small table by Katherine’s chair. “I like your apartment. All soft greys and silvers. Peaceful.”

  “Thanks. I’m not nearly settled in yet. The pictures aren’t up, except for a few snapshots. Half the silver and china is still in crates. I have some rather lovely sea-green damask curtains for winter, but for the summer I think the shutters and glass curtains are all I need. I’m glad you like it.” She took a sip from her cup. “Ah, that’s lovely. Justin was fond of tisanes.”

  “How long since his death?” The question was concerned, rather than abrasive.

  Katherine looked into the cup, pondering. “Nearly twenty years, I suppose. Chronology has less and less meaning as I grow older. Things that happened only a short while ago—like closing the house in Paris—can seem longer ago than events in the dim past. Actually, I met someone this evening I hadn’t seen since the days of my extreme youth. He was a bohemian type who thought he played the violin better than he did. And now he’s a bishop.”


  Mimi smiled. “Bishop Bodeway. Funny and appealing old gent.”

  Katherine turned in surprise. “How—”

  “How would Mimi Oppenheimer, with her name and profession, be conversant with Episcopal bishops? Well might you ask. One of my late interns and roommates is married to the present dean, Dave Davidson, and I sometimes go up to the Close for a meal or a concert with them, and Bishop Bodeway is often there. I’m very fond of the dean. Those of my girls who marry make interesting choices of mates, and do not neglect their own careers. Suzy is an excellent cardiologist. She’s on the staff at St. Luke’s, and they’re lucky to have her. It’s convenient for her, too, 113th Street, just above the Cathedral. Even so, Dave doesn’t like her coming home alone at night.”

  Katherine remembered vaguely that, throughout the years, Dr. Oppenheimer had had a series of roommates—or women tenants—living in the back bedroom of the duplex.

  The doctor rose and refilled Katherine’s cup. “You’ve moved back for good, now?”

  “I think so. My house in Connecticut is still rented. If I find I can afford it, I may keep it open for myself for the summers. I find this spring heat bothersome, so how am I going to feel in July and August?”

  “You’re home for good?”

  “Yes. No more concert tours.”

  “But you loved them.”

  “Yes, I loved them. But I don’t want to go on beyond my prime.”

  It was apparent that Katherine considered herself still within her prime. Dr. Oppenheimer smiled. “You’ll never stop playing.”

  “Not until I stop breathing.”

  The younger woman took the teapot back to the kitchen, returned to the living room, and held out her hands. Like Katherine’s, they were broad and strong, though her fingers were more tapered. “Good hands for a surgeon. As yours are for the piano.” Katherine looked at Dr. Oppenheimer’s outstretched hands, then at her own, and the surgeon said quickly, “My dear, have I touched a sore spot? What’s wrong?”