by Sarah Bryant
Saturdays were the best, though. Most Saturday evenings we had engagements. My grandfather wouldn’t leave me at home, despite Emmeline’s protests that he was ruining me by exposing me to a Bohemian lifestyle. He laughed at her and swept me into the carriage, off to one elegant townhouse or another. There were dinners, dances, receptions of honor, all in the homes of the richest and most eccentric of Boston society. These parties were never without their share of exotic guests: foreign emissaries, European nobility, the latest names in art and music. I listened under tables and behind curtains while the adults talked of Nietzsche and Cubism and the first stirrings of unease in Europe. Later, these parties inevitably included a performance. I would sit at the piano like the child Mozart and play for the adults who watched, amazed, as I rattled off Bach fugues and Beethoven sonatas as other children poked out “Chopsticks.”
That was my childhood. It ended the night of my twenty-first birthday, the twenty-first of December, 1924. My grandfather had reserved our favorite table at the Ritz and a box at Symphony Hall for the two of us and his best friend, Mary Bishop. She was a widow in her mid-fifties who had come into our lives as my first piano teacher and over the years had evolved into a kind of surrogate mother to me.
We had taken a chance on the symphony that night, as the showcase was the American premiere of a newcomer of whom I knew little and my two companions less: a Russian pianist who had only recently immigrated to America. “Alexander Trevozhov,” I read to Mary, whose eyesight was poor in good light and not equal to deciphering small print in the dimness of the concert hall. He would play Chopin: the first sonata, a selection of études and nocturnes, and the G minor ballade.
“The G minor!” Mary repeated. She was wearing a variation on Chinese pajamas made of cornflower-blue silk, which matched her eyes. Her sleeves fluttered like the wings of a tropical butterfly when she moved.
“Yes . . .” I paused and read it again. “Yes, definitely the first. Opus 23 in G minor.” I flashed a smile in her direction, meant more for the man in the next box. “Do you like that one particularly?”
“It’s exquisite! You know how I love Chopin”—she pronounced the name with the proper French accent—“but this one in particular, I believe it might be the closest any musician ever has come to perfection. I imagine you’ve played it, Eleanor?” Her voice and manner were serene as always, but if I had been a little older and wiser, I might have seen the depth of the emotion moving behind her watercolor eyes.
Instead I tossed the golden curls that I had refused to allow current fashion to shear, carefully noting the reaction of the man in the next box. “Oh, I played all of the ballades, long ago.”
“Don’t you think them beautiful?”
I shrugged. “I suppose. For the work of a feeble, dying man.” And if the lights had not been lowered just then, if the musicians had not begun to tune their instruments, I might have caught the look of gentle rebuff on Mary’s face or the intensity with which my grandfather was studying the program.
I fidgeted through the first two pieces: a Bach concerto and a Mozart sonata, both for violin. Then came the intermission, where I thought mostly of being seen and introduced. When we reentered the hall, I was caught off guard by a new singing tension, twining erratically with the billows of low voices floating up to us on the close air. There was a long delay, during which the crowd’s murmur grew oddly strained. I knew that I was leaning forward in my seat but could neither understand why nor make myself stop.
The moment he walked onstage the tension erupted into applause, and I began to understand. As long as I live, I will never forget that first image of him. He stood in the smoky footlights, looking hapless and embarrassed by so much attention. His face was white against his black jacket, except for two flushed patches on his cheeks. His hair and eyes were dark, his features as clean and even as a statue’s.
“William,” Mary asked, “what is it? What’s the commotion?” She squinted at the light from the stage.
“I don’t see any cause for commotion,” my grandfather answered gruffly. This time I noticed the unnatural perplexity in his manner: he was generally the picture of genteel cool.
Mary rolled her eyes and turned confidingly to me. “Eleanor? Surely something’s causing the excitement?”
“It’s for him,” I said softly. “The pianist. I’ve never in my life seen someone who looked so . . . Mary, he’s more than handsome.” She looked at me in surprise, unused to my complimenting anybody’s looks. I ignored both her inquisitive eyes and my grandfather’s perverse mood. All my attention was on the man on the stage below.
As he looked up and around the hall with an air of dislocation I was certain that, for a second, his roving eyes locked with mine. And I, who had always scorned sentimentality, was instantly smitten. I sat on the edge of my seat, entranced, as he took the bench, paused for a moment with his hands hovering over the keys, and then sank into the music.
He played the sonata first, with more skill and grace than I could ever hope to achieve. The études were so fluid that the precise mechanical workings beneath their tissue-thin veneer never once showed through. Yet none of the short pieces merited the rave reviews I had heard of his playing.
He paused before he began the ballade, clasping his hands together for a moment. When he released them, the tension in the hall seemed to mount inversely, straining the limits of oppressiveness. Inexplicable panic pushed into my throat, and I could think only of escape. I stood up, found myself fenced in by legs, skirts, handbags.
“Eleanor,” Mary whispered in my ear. She was standing, too. People nearby were hissing for us to sit down. Her arm was around my shoulders, light as a bird’s wing but solid, comforting. “Are you ill?” she asked, drawing me gently back to my seat. The sound of her voice, the calm of her familiar presence next to me, cleared my head a bit. I drew a deep breath and whispered to her that I would be all right, though panic still skirted the edges of my mind. I closed my eyes, trying to ignore the feeling around me. It was several moments before I realized that it had shifted, and in the space it left, music had filled in.
To say the least, Alexander Trevozhov’s was an unusual interpretation of the ballade’s beginning. He did not play the opening chords forte and pesante, as is written, but so softly that they were almost inaudible. In any ordinary concert they would have been, but his unexpected use of understatement, along with his formidable presence, had commanded absolute silence in his audience. I began to understand the praise of him I had heard.
I did not open my eyes, but I listened intently. It was impossible not to: the music caught and bound me, as it had caught and bound the entire house. The anxiety accrued during Mr. Trevozhov’s long delay may have shifted as he began to play, but it had not abated. It seemed that the tension his presence had unfurled was slowly weaving into the music, becoming so ingrained that the familiar score sounded entirely alien.
Technically, he was perfect. But the pain emanating from every note he played was something significantly more potent than the regretful melancholy Chopin had written into the piece. Each note was askew, its emotion turned inward on itself to reverberate as something close to horror. I wanted the music to end but also to go on forever. My intense desire to run away had not dissipated, but equally strong was the ridiculous desire to run to him. I was unaware of having heard the final chords until I realized that we had been sitting for several moments in absolute silence—a sound I had never heard in that hall in my life, and which I doubt will ever be heard there again.
The hush dangled, as unresolved as the music had been. Then, all at once, it was filled with uproarious applause, a standing ovation. But I could not clap, nor stand; I could only sit staring at the light-box of the stage, for once completely unaware of myself. I did not even sense the tears streaming down my face. My grandfather looked down at me with troubled eyes. At his side, Mary looked hazily triumphant.
“Still think it’s only the best that a dying man could do, l
ove?” she asked.
Although I knew that it was only her way of telling me that I did not yet know everything there was to know, I shook my head. “No,” I said softly, but with more vehemence than her mild gibe deserved. “It’s not the music. He could have played scales, and it would have been the same. That’s no ordinary man on that stage. His music isn’t human.”
Before either of them could answer, Mr. Trevozhov was playing again, this time Debussy. Again I was listening to a sound that transcended, even ridiculed the lines and notes composing the music spilling from beneath his fingers. All too soon the incredible sound had been swallowed again by applause.
When the concert ended, I insisted on meeting him, but the crowd around his dressing room was impenetrable. Mary and my grandfather wanted to go, she complaining of weariness, he of an ache in his arms and chest; grudgingly I agreed. I turned once, though, as we retreated, to have a last look at Mr. Trevozhov. By fate or chance he turned as well. His eyes snagged for a moment on my grandfather’s fragile form, then moved on to me. Recovering from what seemed a great surprise, he smiled. He gestured as though to move toward us, but at the same moment my grandfather stepped between us, blocking my view of him.
“The car’s waiting, Eleanor,” he said. There was no question of contradicting the steely authority in his voice; it was a tone he used with me seldom, and never without good cause. I looked at him, puzzled, but he wouldn’t meet my eyes. Mary tugged gently at my hand, urging me toward the lobby, and though I tried again to catch the pianist’s eye, the crowd had closed around him once more, sealing him off from me as effectively as my grandfather could have wished.
“Do you know him?” I asked, as we made our way out into the snowy night.
“No,” he answered shortly, looking straight ahead.
“He seemed to know you—or to have something to say to us, anyway.”
He didn’t answer, nor look at me. Mary smiled sympathetically as we climbed into the car, but the truth was, I had nearly put the incident out of my mind again, turning instead to more frivolous thoughts. I had not begun to examine the intricacies of the feeling the foreign pianist’s eyes had stirred in me. It seemed enough, at the time, that he had noticed me. Yet I would find myself replaying the scene many times in the months to come, sometimes with regret, sometimes with pleasure, but always with a recondite feeling of emptiness and longing.
With the lightest heart I was to have for many months, we rode through the softly falling snow, past the Public Garden, serene under its pale blanket and home to our townhouse. I saw Mary on her way home, then kissed my grandfather good night and thanked him for a wonderful birthday.
The next morning I found him dead of a heart attack, leaving me an orphan once more.
Two nights later, amidst silence still ringing with too many sympathetic voices, I finally fell into an exhausted sleep. That night I dreamed of Eve for the first time in many years. She rocked me while I cried, as she had not rocked me since the night my mother died, and spoke softly of a place called Eden.
TWO
EDEN’S Meadow was its full name. I had heard it mentioned during my childhood but had filed the name away with the memory of one briefly glimpsed, badly faded photograph of my grandmother’s ancestral home. We had never visited the plantation, and I had never had any interest in it. All I knew of the place, situated at the edge of the Atchafalaya wilderness, was that it had once been a cotton plantation.
Yet it was there that I wanted to go as soon as I learned that it was part of my inheritance. A different place, a different life: I kept repeating the words to the friends and acquaintances who asked why I would leave my past, my future, all I had always known. I could not explain to them that I could see no future in Boston, and only the broken pieces of a past. Everything seemed grey, a husk of itself. Familiarity had died with my grandfather, leaving me an uncomfortable guest in my own empty house, a stranger in my own city. Besides that, it was the dead of winter in New England. Eden’s Meadow—the words themselves sounded tropical, vital.
I spent the day after the funeral wandering from room to room of the old townhouse, feeling nothing but a leaden emptiness, that gradually settled like a sea burial into the pit of my stomach. From the old nursery I looked down through the tangled web of ivy and bare rose branches to the angel in the garden. His hair and wings were covered with snow; he stared down at the frozen ground, pensive in the last of the twilight. It wasn’t for guidance that I looked to that old friend, for the decision was already made. I touched the cold windowpane in farewell.
AT the beginning of February, I was on a train headed for Baton Rouge and a life I could not begin to imagine. It hadn’t taken much to convince Mary to come with me; since her husband’s death, her closest ties in Boston had been to me and my grandfather.
Despite the initial reckless sense of adventure that had made me heed Eve’s dream words and seek out a new life, I was glad enough for Mary’s quiet companionship when it came to the actual journey. It made the fact that we were leaving everything familiar behind us oddly comforting. Perhaps it should not have, for Eden’s Meadow was the antithesis of every expectation from the very beginning.
Yankee-born and -bred, I was unprepared for the ponderous beauty of the Deep South: the superficial vibrancy, the intense, submerged energy. I could feel the roots of the grass and trees seeping their undomesticated vigor into my body the minute I set foot on its soil. My initial feeling for the place was an attraction, but one that I could not categorize as either healthy or morbid, no matter how practically I tried to look at it. With the egotism of the young, I imagined that this feeling was unique to myself, and for that reason I didn’t share it with Mary. I now suspect that her feelings were much the same as mine, though her impetus in keeping them from me was far more selfless than my own. I even wonder if we might have admitted defeat then and there had we spoken to each other of our unease, gone home and spared ourselves so much grief.
Needless to say, Mary and I kept our silence, she out of concern for my well-being, myself out of pride, and I was able to live for some weeks under the delusion that it was only the newness of the surroundings that made me uneasy. Yet as the novelty of the place began to subside into familiarity, I could no longer ignore the fact that something was missing in the array of feelings it evoked in me. The more accustomed to the place I became, the more unsettled I felt, until the day I realized that what lacked was affection. I did not love Eden’s Meadow as I felt I ought to; I could not, although I told myself that the reason for this was nothing but my own silly superstition. I had always been straightforward in receiving impressions, and consequently in forming opinions. Yet it didn’t take me long to realize that I was afraid of Eden’s Meadow in a nervous, nebulous manner completely foreign to my nature, and moreover, when I found the courage to admit it to myself, that I had been afraid from my first day there.
I remember that arrival clearly. There was little to see on the long drive from the main road to the heart of Eden’s Meadow but the surreal shapes and vibrant hues of southern forest, interspersed sporadically with drowsing meadows. I was lulled by that drive. I suppose I thought that the house, when we reached it, would slip seamlessly into its dreamy surroundings.
Even as I thought it the wilderness parted, and the house stood before us in all its decrepit splendor, shattering all delusions. Over the years of disuse, the rampant foliage had nearly swallowed the house. Bougainvillea, ivy, and kudzu hung in swaying curtains from the roof, tangling with honeysuckle and roses climbing from below. The walls beneath appeared to be made of whitewashed brick, pitted and cracked with time. Thick columns supported a heavy entablature, and arched French doors ran along the upper and lower galleries, a few retaining their black wooden shutters.
The driveway curved in a slow, white-pebbled circle, heavily invaded by tough crabgrass and creeping weeds. In the centre of the circle, its buds still pale green and tightly furled, an ancient magnolia spread its bare branches ov
er the grassy island. At the far end of the lawn a grove of black cypress marked the rim of the lake, preceded by more moss-hung oaks and sycamores. The double front doors with the stained-glass seal of my grandmother’s family—an apple tree ringed with water—had been opened to let in the morning breeze but were covered by screens to keep out insects.
Beautiful as the house was—or rather, would be, with some care—I felt repulsion at that first sight of it. There was something hollow and rotten about it, some abstract sadness that bordered on hostility. At that moment all I wanted was to go back to the North, to the solidity of a place I understood.
Instead, I stepped out of the car. As soon as I set foot on the soil of Eden’s Meadow, I could feel its lethargy sending out creepers that tightened quickly into unease, and it became a battle of wills. I knew that it was Eden my mother had run away from, never again to see her family. I also knew that Eden was where my grandmother had fallen ill, languished for five years in a state of mental discomfiture, and then died. I could not help but compare my mother’s and grandmother’s unhappiness with the feelings Eden was stirring in me, and remembering that first promise I had made to my grandfather, I vowed I would not let the place defeat me.
In time the fear settled, though it did not diminish. I had long hours to spend at the piano, a particularly fine Bechstein, which had been my grandmother’s. This did much to soothe the pain of losing my grandfather. Mild winter eased into early spring, and by April we were calling it hot, to the amusement of the maids and gardeners we had employed. By May full-blooded Louisiana summer had descended, with its slack air and afternoon rainstorms. The jungle devoured it all.
