9
THE INVITATION APPEARED in the mailbox, in a square envelope of heavy, cream-colored paper. Samuel’s name was written on the front in very precise girl handwriting.
“What’s this?” Faye said. “Birthday invite?”
He looked at the envelope and then at his mother.
“Pizza party?” she said. “At the roller rink?”
“Stop it.”
“Who’s it from?”
“I don’t know.”
“Maybe you should open it.”
Inside was an invitation printed on expensive card stock. It shimmered, as if flecks of silver had been added to the pulp. The writing looked like it was pressed in gold leaf, a swirling, swooping cursive that said:
Please join us at the Blessed Heart Academy Cathedral
as Bethany Fall performs
the Bruch Violin Concerto no. 1
Samuel had never been invited to anything in this manner: lavishly. At school, the invitations to birthday parties were generic, slipshod affairs, cheap thin cards with animals on them, or balloons. This invitation felt actually physically heavy. He handed it to his mother.
“Can we go?” he said.
She studied the invitation and frowned. “Who’s this Bethany?”
“A friend.”
“From school?”
“Sort of.”
“And you know her well enough to get invited to this?”
“Can we go? Please?”
“Do you even like classical music?”
“Yes.”
“Since when?”
“Since I don’t know.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“Mom.”
“The Bruch Violin Concerto? Do you even know what that is?”
“Mom.”
“I’m just saying. Are you sure you can appreciate it?”
“It’s a very difficult piece and she’s been practicing for months.”
“And you know this how?”
Samuel then made an angry, abstract sound meant to convey his frustration and unwillingness to further discuss the matter of the girl, which came out something like “Gaarrgh!”
“Fine,” she said with a satisfied little grin. “We’ll go.”
The night of the concert she told him to dress nice. “Imagine it’s Easter,” she said. So he put on the fanciest things in his closet: a stiff and itchy white shirt; a black necktie bound noose-tight; black slacks that popped with static electricity when he moved; a shiny pair of dress shoes that he shoehorned himself into, so granite-hard they removed a layer of skin on his heel. He wondered why adults felt they needed to be at their most uncomfortable for their most cherished events.
The Blessed Heart Academy Cathedral was already buzzing when they arrived, people in suits and flowery dresses filing into the large arched doorway, the sounds of musicians practicing audible even from the parking lot. The cathedral was built to mimic the great churches of Europe, at about one-third scale.
Inside, a wide central aisle was flanked on both sides by pews made of heavy and thick and ornately carved wood, polished and shining wetly. Beyond the pews were stone columns with torches attached about fifteen feet above the crowd, each lit with glowing fires. Parents chatted with other parents, the men giving soft platonic kisses to the cheeks of women. Samuel watched them, these small pecks, and realized the men weren’t really kissing the women but instead miming a kissing action into the area around their necks. Samuel wondered if the women were disappointed about this—they’d been expecting a kiss and all they got was air.
They took their seats, studied the program. Bethany would not go on until the second half. The first half was all smaller works—minor chamber pieces and quick solos. It was clear Bethany’s piece was the showstopper. The big finale. Samuel’s feet bounced nervously on the soft, carpeted floor.
The lights dimmed and the musicians stopped their chaotic warm-ups and everyone took their seats and after a lengthy pause there came a sturdy note out of the woodwinds, then everyone else following it, tuning to that note, anchoring themselves to that spot, and something seemed to catch in his mother’s throat. She inhaled sharply, then put her hand on her chest.
“I used to do that,” she said.
“Do what?”
“The tuning note. I was the oboe. That used to be me.”
“You played music? When?”
“Shh.”
And there it was, another secret his mother had kept. Her life was a fog to him; whatever happened before he came along was all mysterious, locked behind ambiguous shrugs and half answers and vague abstractions and aphorisms—“You’re too young,” she’d say. Or “You wouldn’t understand.” Or the particularly infuriating “I’ll tell you someday, when you’re older.” But occasionally some secret would crack free. So his mother was once a musician. He added it to the mental inventory: Things that Mom is. She’s a musician. What else? What other things didn’t he know about her? She had acres of secrets, it was obvious. He always felt there was something she wasn’t saying, something behind her bland partial attention. She often had that disassociated quality, like she was focusing on you with maybe one-third of herself, the rest devoted to whatever things she kept locked inside her head.
The biggest secret had slipped years earlier, when Samuel was young enough to be asking his parents ridiculous questions. (Have you ever been in a volcano? Have you ever seen an angel?) Or asking because he was still na?ve enough to believe in stupendous things. (Can you breathe underwater? Can all reindeer fly?) Or asking because he was fishing for attention and praise. (How much do you love me? Am I the best child in the world?) Or asking because he wanted to be reassured of his place in the world. (Will you be my mom forever? Have you been married to anyone besides Dad?) Except when he asked this last question his mother straightened up and looked at him all tall and solemn and serious and said: “Actually…”
She never finished that sentence. He waited for her, but she stopped and thought about it and got that distant, bleak look on her face. “Actually what?” he said.
“Nothing,” she said. “Never mind.”
“You’ve been married before?”
“No.”
“Then what were you going to say?”
“Nothing.”
So Samuel asked his father: “Was Mom ever married to anyone else?”
“What?”
“I think she might have been married to someone else.”
“No, she wasn’t. Jesus. What are you talking about?”
Something had happened to her, Samuel was sure of it. Some profound thing that even now, years later, occupied her attention. It washed over her sometimes and she’d disengage from the world.
Meanwhile, there was a concert happening. High-school boys and girls playing important senior-year recitals, five-to ten-minute pieces that were right in the strike zone of each student’s ability. Loud clapping after every performance. Pleasant, easy, tonal music, mostly Mozart.
Then it was intermission. People stood and made their way elsewhere: outside, to smoke, or to a nearby buffet table, for cheese.
“How long did you play music?” Samuel asked.
His mother studied the program. She acted like she didn’t hear him. “This girl, your friend, how old is she?”
“My age,” he said. “She’s in my grade.”
“And she’s playing with these high schoolers?”
He nodded his head. “She’s really good.” And he felt this surge of pride just then, as if being in love with Bethany meant something important about him. As if he were rewarded for her accomplishments. He would never be a musical genius, but he could be a person a musical genius loved. Such were the spoils of love, he realized, that her success was also, by some odd refraction, his.
“Dad’s really good too,” Samuel added.
She looked at him, puzzled. “What are you talking about?”
“Nothing. It’s just, you know, he’s really good. At his job.”
“That’s an odd thing to say.”
“It’s true. He’s very good.”
She stared at him a moment, mystified.
“Did you know,” she said, looking down at the program again, “that the composer of this piece never made any money from it?”
“Which piece?”
“The piece your friend is going to play. The guy who wrote it, Max Bruch, he never earned a penny.”
“Why not?”
“He was cheated. It was around World War I, and he was bankrupt, so he gave it to a couple of Americans who were supposed to send him the money, but they never did. The score disappeared for a long time, then ended up in the vault of J. P. Morgan.”
“Who’s that?”
“A banker. Industrialist. Financier.”
“A really rich guy.”
“Yes. From a long time ago.”
“He liked music?”
“He liked things,” she said. “It’s a classic story. The robber baron gets more stuff, the artist dies with nothing.”
“He didn’t die with nothing,” Samuel said.
“He was broke. He didn’t even have the score.”
“He had his memory of it.”
“His memory?”
“Yeah. He could still remember it. That’s something.”
“I’d rather have the money.”
“Why?”
“Because when all you have is the memory of a thing,” she said, “all you can think about is how the thing is gone.”
“I don’t think that’s true.”
“You’re young.”
The lights dimmed again, and people around them took their seats, and the buzz of small talk quieted, and everything went dark and silent and the whole cathedral seemed to distill itself into one small circle of light at the front of the altar—a spotlight illuminating an empty bit of floor.
“Here we go,” his mother whispered.
Everyone waited. It was agony. Five seconds, ten seconds. It was taking too long! Samuel wondered if someone had forgotten to tell Bethany she was on. Or if she’d left her violin at home. But then he heard the click of a door somewhere in front of him. Then footsteps, soft shoes on the hard floor. And finally there she was, Bethany, gliding into the light.
She wore a slim green dress and her hair had been done up and she looked, for the first time, tiny. Around all these adults and high schoolers, way up in front, it was as if Samuel’s normal scale was thrown off. Bethany now looked like a child. And he was worried for her. This was too much to ask, all this.
The audience politely clapped. Then Bethany put her violin under her chin. She stretched her neck and shoulders. And without a word, the orchestra began to play.
It started with a low thrum, like thunder very far away, a faint drumming from beyond the light. Samuel could feel it in his torso and fingertips. He was sweating. Bethany didn’t even have her music! She would do this from memory! What if she forgot? What if she blanked? He realized now how terrifying music is, how inevitable—the drums would keep driving forward, whether or not Bethany knew her part. And now, softly, the woodwinds came in—nothing dramatic, but three simple notes, each lower than the last, repeated. It wasn’t a melody; more like a preparation. Like they were readying the sanctuary for sound. Like these three notes performed the ritual necessary to be in the presence of music. It wasn’t the music yet but rather its leading edge.
Then Bethany straightened herself and placed her bow at the proper angle and it was clear something was about to happen. She was ready, the audience was ready. The woodwinds held a single long hovering note that gradually faded away, that sounded like taffy stretched to nothingness. And just as that note disappeared, just as it was swallowed by the darkness, a new note leaped from Bethany. It grew stronger and louder and then she was the only one speaking in that huge hall.
There was nothing more lonely than that sound.
Like all the heartbreak in someone’s long life gathered and distilled. It began low and moaned higher, slowly, a couple of steps up, a few steps back, and so on, like a dancer, whirling its way to the top of the scale, more quickly now, to announce, at the very peak, a kind of forsakenness, a desolation. The way Bethany bent that last note as she climbed into it—it sounded like a cry, like somebody crying. An old familiar noise, and Samuel felt himself falling into the note, gradually folding himself around it. And just when he thought she’d reached the top, another note came, even higher, a wisp of music, the barest edge of the bow meeting the thinnest string, just the finest sound: clean, noble, soft, a slight quiver from Bethany’s rolling finger, like the note itself were alive and pulsing. Alive, but dying, it seemed now, as the note diminished and decayed. And it didn’t sound like Bethany’s playing softened but rather like she was moving quickly away from them. Like she was being stolen. And wherever she went, they could not follow. She was a ghost passing into another realm.
Then the orchestra answered back, a full and deep barrel of sound, like they needed all the numbers they could muster to match this one tiny girl in her little green dress.
The concert passed in a kind of blur after that. Occasionally Samuel would be newly amazed by one of Bethany’s maneuvers: how she could play on two strings at once and make them both sound good; how she could play so many hundreds of notes perfectly from memory; how fast her fingers moved. It was inhuman, what she could do. By the middle of the second movement, Samuel had concluded there was no way he deserved her.
The audience went mad. They stood and cheered and gave Bethany bouquets of roses so large they impeded her balance. She carried them in both arms and was barely visible behind them, waving and curtseying.
“Everyone loves a prodigy,” his mother said, herself also standing and clapping. “Prodigies get us off the hook for living ordinary lives. We can tell ourselves we’re not special because we weren’t born with it, which is a great excuse.”
“She’s been practicing nonstop for months.”
“My dad always told me I was nothing special,” she said. “I guess I proved him right.”
Samuel stopped clapping and looked at his mother.
She rolled her eyes and patted him on the head. “Never mind. Forget I said that. Do you want to say hi to your friend?”