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?”
Katherine shook her head. “Nothing. Nothing at all. It is just that I always marvel at my hands because there was a time when it looked as though arthritis was going to cripple them.”
The doctor took Katherine’s hands in her own and studied them. “There’s no sign of it, no untoward thickening in the joints—”
Katherine withdrew her hands. “They are my miracle. I have some small arthritis in my knees and one hip, but not enough to bother me.”
“Thank God, then,” Dr. Oppenheimer said briskly. “Your hands have given solace as well as pleasure to a great many people.” She smiled. “Would you call me Mimi, please?”
“Thank you. I’d like to. And I’m Katherine.”
“I’m grateful for the gift of your name. I used to go to all your New York concerts. I thought of you as belonging to the older generation, but as the years increase, the distance between generations decreases. I, too, am pushing toward retirement.” She moved to the kitchen with her cup, pausing at a bookcase where several framed photographs were propped on the shelves. “Your husband was older than you, wasn’t he?”
“Fifteen years. But, as you say, chronologies make less and less difference.”
Mimi picked up the photograph to study it. “Handsome, your Justin. Christ, he’s attractive, the kind of pensive eyes and fine-bridged nose with those lines of tension moving to the mouth which make me a pushover. But a bit moody, I’d say, and not easy to live with on a day-to-day basis.”
Katherine’s laugh pealed out. “He was impossible! Moody is hardly the word for it. But then, I am impossible, too. How we managed to have so much fun together I’m not sure, but we did. We loved having people in for small dinners, and talking long into the night—music, of course, but politics, books, philosophy—and we two could talk about anything.”
“That’s it, isn’t it?” Mimi asked. “Someone to talk with. Someone who can talk about the things in our own concerns. We need that.” A bleak expression flitted across her face. “I did a hip replacement a few weeks ago on a delightful woman who’s been widowed for a few years, and she talked about how much she missed someone to talk with about the silly little things, the small diminishments and wearings out of the body, someone to look at in the morning and say, ‘Did you have a good B.M.?’ And then to argue with—Did you and your Justin ever fight?”
“Of course. Enormous, shouting battles. When we were working up a program for me we would quarrel violently—about interpretation, about presentation—but the important thing was that in the end I always understood the music better and so, I think, did he. Music in a sense started the battles and, in the end, resolved them. A good argument is a splendid thing.”
Mimi looked pensively at the photograph of Justin. “A good clean one. I can see that you did not indulge in bitterness or recriminations.”
“What for? Neither Justin nor I was capable of going to bed mad. We couldn’t stand it. Everything was all right at the end of the day.” Not quite true. Or at least more true about herself than about Justin. If he started to ‘go to bed mad,’ it was she who could not stand it and who managed to resolve whatever had been the cause of the anger.
Mimi put the picture back in its place. “And these are your children?” She indicated a photograph of a boy and a girl, the blond little boy perhaps seven, the dark-haired little girl younger, standing one on each side of Justin, holding his hands.
“Yes. I love that picture. Justin adored the children, and he was a wonderful father, romping with them, listening to them, while I, too often, was away on tour. That’s Julie a few years ago.” Katherine nodded toward a snapshot of a handsome woman standing with a tall Viking of a man, both carrying skis.
“Her husband?”
“Yes. Eric Olaffsen. They live in Norway. Eric’s a stepnephew of Erlend Nikulaussen—the conductor. Eric himself has a shipping business, and they have a house on one of the fjords. I don’t see them nearly enough, though we’re appallingly extravagant with the phone. I’m nowhere near finished nesting. I’ll get the more current pictures out eventually. Julie’s middle-aged now, and her hair’s as white as mine, and my eldest grandchild is well in the twenties. I have four grandchildren, charming young people. They, too, add to my phone bill, especially Kristen, who’s a flautist with the symphony in Oslo. We talk music too often—no, not too often. It’s a great joy to me.”
Mimi turned to the picture of the small boy
and girl. “Your son—who on earth does he remind me of?”
“His father.” Katherine’s voice was sharp.
Mimi looked at the snapshot of Justin Vigneras, dark and hawk-like, and at the fair boy, and shook her head. “Where is he now?”
“He is dead,” Katherine said, and Dr. Oppenheimer did not pursue the question.
She said, “You have a gracious apartment, very much reflecting your personality. But all those bookshelves! Do you realize that a plethora of bookshelves lowers the real-estate value of your house?”
“Not true, surely?”
“Very true, alas.”
“Fortunately, I have no intention of selling.” Katherine put her hand to her mouth to stifle a yawn.
“I’ve stayed too long,” Mimi said. “Thank you for letting me come. Sleep well.”
“You, too. Good night.” Katherine saw her out by the kitchen door. The tisane, or the hour, had made her sleepy and she yawned again, fully. Then she turned out the lights and went to her bedroom. The long windows looked down on the garden in the back, charmingly kept by the young couple. There was a small fountain playing, and the sound was cool and springlike.
3
She turned down her bed, not the big bed she had shared with Justin, which had been sold with most of the furniture from the house in Paris, but a smaller mahogany bedstead which had been her mother’s. The head and footboards were beautifully carved, with swans curving in graceful intertwining. The furniture for the bedroom had come from Connecticut, where it had been stored in one of Manya’s barns. It, too, gave her a feeling of continuity. Both her mother and her stepmother had used the graceful highboy, had sat at the low dressing table and looked in the mirror, perhaps had even lighted the candles in silver holders which branched from the oval frame. The rug, Chinese, soft blues and silvers, had come from Manya’s apartment on the East River. It was a quiet room, a restful room.
She removed the light summer spread and pulled down the cotton blanket. Likely she would need to pull it up during the night. This weather was absurd for April. Nevertheless, she took a hot bath. When she was on tour she was always drained and chilly after a concert, and a hot bath was needed to warm and relax her enough for sleep. It had become part of her evening ritual, of shedding the tensions which had built during the day. Michou and Julie had had their evening rituals, too, as small children. Perhaps we never lose the need to put a frame of quiet and comfort around the events of the day.
It was too warm for bath oil, so she sprinkled in a handful of lightly scented lavender salts, and climbed into the tub, dropping with a small splash into the water. Her creaky knees and aching hip made getting in and out of the tub no easy matter. Here, as in Paris, she had installed a handgrip, without which she did not think she could have managed. When she was on tour she had often had to ask her maid to help her out of difficult and unfamiliar tubs. She would miss Nanette, for that and many reasons, Nanette who had come to her as a fresh-cheeked, still-adolescent Breton girl, to be a nurse for the children, and then had stayed on to take care of Katherine. It was nothing for Nanette to pick Katherine up in her arms, as she had earlier picked up Michou and Julie, and carry her across a filthy stage-door alley. So, too, she had lifted her from the tub, as she had lifted the children.
The water, she noted with irritation, was slightly muddy, but she had been informed that this was now taken for granted in the city. The bath salts, however, smelled clean and fresh, and she lay back and closed her eyes and let the warm water soothe her.
But her mind would not relax. She tried to quieten it with trivia: she would wash her hair in the morning under the shower. After Justin’s death she had had it cut short, and felt that it was more becoming than the heavy masses of long hair he had loved, and which took forever to dry and dress. The short, well-styled hair toweled dry in a few minutes, and fell in becoming waves over her high forehead, her small delicate ears, showing the graceful curve of her neck.
She could not keep her mind on anything as simple as a shampoo. Whether it was seeing Felix after all these years, she did not know.
The bath water suddenly felt cold and she turned on the hotwater tap. Going to Paris after the bitter breakup with her young man had been the first step into what she considered reality, the world of the serious artist. How gently Justin had guided her then, when she was barely more than an overgrown adolescent, working with her through the music, relaxing the rigidity which had been her instinctive defense against rejection. After a few months he had started taking her out to dinner, to this favorite bistro or that, and then they would go back to his attic rooms and she would play—or, rather, he would seat her at the piano and demand that she repeat something he had not been satisfied with at her last lesson. Ultimately, when she had corrected the phrase which she had not, during the cold light of day, been able to master, he would walk her home to her small studio.
It was difficult for people now to realize that she had ever been so shy that she spoke in a mumble, looking down at her feet, so insecure that she came to life only at the keyboard. Justin had grown her up, she thought, and that is no small thing.
She wondered what had grown Felix up. And what—or who—had turned him from the self-indulgent young man to the far more interesting person he was now. She was vaguely relieved that he had not talked about religion, and yet she found herself wondering what he believed.
With the help of the handrail she pulled herself out of the tub and put on a white terry robe. She moved slowly about the apartment, making sure the doors were locked: the door from the kitchen into the front hall; her private door into the vestibule. She could leave the windows open because of the iron grillwork which protected them. Although she had had the beautifully wrought grilles sent over from Spain, she still resented the necessity for barring herself in.
She paused in the kitchen to pour a glass of water from the large bottle which was replaced weekly. It was tepid, but she had been away from New York long enough so that she had become indifferent to iced drinks, just as they were becoming de rigueur in Europe. Back in the bedroom, she put on her reading glasses and stretched out on the chaise longue by the windows to read until she was dry. In the garden below, two couples were lingering over coffee. Candles burned in glass globes, and voices and laughter came up to her. It was still not eleven o’clock and they were not being noisy.
She was hot in the terry robe, so she moved back into the bathroom, finished drying with dusting powder, and put on a light cotton-batiste nightgown. Getting her book from the chaise longue, she lay on the bed, throwing off the sheet. She felt too tired to read, and after a few pages put the book on her nightstand and turned off the light.
4
The sound of the phone, raucous as the peacocks, broke across her.
Automatically she reached for it, first on the wrong side of the bed, the side it had been on in Paris. She rolled over, groping for the light, then the phone. A phone call after she had gone to sleep could well be her daughter, Julie, or one of the grandchildren, knowing that this was the one time she could surely be reached. Or it could mean something wrong, an accident to one of the children, to …
During Justin’s last years, when he was not well enough to travel, it could be her husband calling to chat. Or it could be, as it had been several times before the final call, a summons to his bedside.
As she said “Hello,” chronologies swirled. She did not know when she was, or where.
“Katherine, did I wake you?”
“Yes. Who is it?”
“Katya—”
Chronology still had not settled. She almost called out, “Aunt Manya!”
“It’s Felix.”
The past, like a weary bird, dropped into place. She was in the bedroom of her house on Tenth Street, in New York. “Felix, what on earth—”
“I’m sorry I woke you. I don’t sleep much nowadays.”
“I do. Eight hours—when the phone doesn’t interrupt.” She looked at the traveli
ng clock. Nearly one in the morning. He was presuming on friendship, on old times. She was not feeling apologetic for sounding angry.
“Katya, please don’t be cross, I need you.”
“Felix, I told you not to badger me about that benefit.”
“Not the benefit. I need you. I need to hear your voice. I need to know there’s someone at the other end of the phone.” His voice rose in anxiety.
“Surely I’m not the only person you know in the City of New York.”
“Katherine. I’m afraid.”
She sat up in bed. “Felix, what on earth is this? Why are you calling me?”
“You’re not involved.”
“In what?”
“The Church. The Cathedral. And you could call Dr. Oppenheimer if—”
“If what?” Felix had always tended to theatricality. She could not tell if the terror in his voice was feigned or real.
“I had a nightmare …”
“Why tell me?” She did not know why she did not hang up.
“I don’t want to bother Dave—the dean. He has enough on his hands. I’d wake Suzy and the kids. And Llew is too involved in himself. And the others—I don’t want to be laughed at—”
Had he been drinking? He had never had much of a head for alcohol. Even if he’d only finished the Frascati—“What is all this about? Why are you calling me at this hour?”
“I’m afraid,” he repeated, and there was no doubting that his fear was real.
Her voice softened. “Are you ill?”
“No, I’m not ill.”
“You’re not in pain? Your heart’s all right?”
“My heart is fine. It’s thumping only because I’m frightened.”
“Of what?”
“There are noises … I thought if they heard me talking on the phone …”
“Who?”
There was a small, choking sound.
She tried to be gentle with what sounded close to hysterical panic. She had known terror in the night, although she could not imagine what was frightening the bishop. “Isn’t there somebody closer you could call? Someone who could come over?”
The Small Rain Page 37
