Capriccio (2 page)

The closing bell chimed as I went back to the lobby. I saw Victor’s silver head among the last of the tourists on their way out. He must have gone to the Music Room while I was talking to Sean Bradley. The only ones left now were the little swarthy man in the shiny blue suit and a tall, blue-haired lady.

“Here it is—a good seat,” I said, handing Sean the ticket. “The concert’s at eight.”

“Thanks a lot. Maybe we can go out after and do something?” he suggested.

“We’ll see.” I waved goodbye and watched him leave. He looked like a football player as he swaggered away, shoulders rolling. A big man, but with an athletic stride.

If we went anywhere after the concert, it would be to the party Eleanor Strathroy was throwing for Victor at her house in prestigious Forest Hill. I had planned to attend the concert and the party with Eleanor’s son, Ronald, a Bay Street stockbroker, but he’d been called to Montreal on company business the night before. I’d been going out with him a little that month—nothing serious, or even very enjoyable, though Ronald was an extremely eligible bachelor.

The Strathroys were members of the elite WASP society in Toronto. His mother was very big on charity committees and in social affairs. Eleanor was a widow, and Victor’s current squeeze, so I met Ronald through Victor. He took me to all the right places: the Granite Club, the St. Lawrence Yacht Club, and to private parties where I could start training for my future life as a diplomat and sybarite. Caviar, for instance—I could now eat caviar without gagging, and I was learning a little something about wine. He drove the right car (Mercedes), wore the right clothes (tailor-made), and spoke good but incomprehensible English. His conversation was about guaranteed investment certificates and long-term annuities and such excruciatingly dull, but no doubt necessary things.

The stuffiness I didn’t mind as much as the tendency to show off. He never introduced me as Cassie Newton, but as “Cassie Newton, Victor Mazzini’s niece.” His dates had to be special in some way. We enjoyed a symbiotic social relationship; he only took me out because of Victor, I only went to get to the places he could take me. There was the added bonus that he wasn’t lecherous—in Ronald’s case, that was a bonus. You never had to fight your way out of the Mercedes. He was always there to hold the door and walk you to the elevator.

Well, tonight Victor’s niece would be going out with a far from perfect stranger she’d picked up at work. If I liked the way he behaved himself at the concert, and if he showed up in a decent jacket, I’d ask him to Eleanor’s party afterwards. If not, I’d hitch a ride with Victor.

I got a lift to the apartment with one of the tour guides, and hurried off bustling Bloor Street into the air-conditioned lobby to swish up on the elevator to the seventeenth floor. I enjoyed the elegant building as much as Victor—probably more, since he was used to such things. Victor had a maid who prepared dinner before she left at five. There was a note on the kitchen table. “Cold chick. and salad in frig, buns in oven to be heated. Fruit and cheese and leftover choc. cake for dessert. Enjoy.”

About five hundred calories of the choc. cake would be enjoyed before dinner. Nobody should go through life without reading Proust and without trying Rhoda Gardiner’s chocolate cake. It was sinfully rich, and definitely addictive. My mouth salivated at the very thought of it. I cut off a wedge, put it on a plate, and headed to the living room. I turned on the radio, then sank down on the sofa and leaned back, kicking off my shoes.

Doleful classical music moaned from the hi-fi, telling me that Victor had been the last listener. Rhoda liked country and western, and I preferred light rock. I switched the dial and luxuriated with the cake, thinking about the night. When I saw the Toronto Star on the coffee table, I opened it and flipped to the Entertainment Section to see what they had to say about the concert.

It was the usual stuff—a rehash of Victor’s career, his recent tours, his records, a few references to the more spectacular moments in his life. The time he walked off the stage in Boston due to a noisy audience was, as always, mentioned, along with a comment on his flamboyant affair with the soprano from the New York Met, and a discreet, non-libelous reference to his drinking problem—that would infuriate Victor. He was dry nowadays. Maybe I should hide the paper till after the concert.

In the accompanying picture, he held not his famous Guarneri violin, but a large cigar. His head was cocked to one side, and the famous Mazzini smile flashed. A close examination of the picture showed some resemblance to Mom—the eyes, the wide, warm smile—but Mom was a woman of a certain age and a certain weight and a certain rigid coiffure held in place by lashings of hair spray that robbed her of style.

The article described Victor’s violin. It wasn’t just any old Guarneri, but a Giuseppe del Gesù. Giuseppe was the greatest of all the Guarneris. One of them worked with Stradivari. In fact, a del Gesù was second only to a Stradivarius. “Like Paganini, I prefer the more robust tone of a Guarneri to the sweetness of an Amati or Stradivarius,” Victor often said to the press. I suspect his taste would change if he could ever get his hands on a Stradivarius.

There was also a tantalizing hint of the “surprise” Victor had been using as a gimmick for this show. I had an unconfirmed idea what that surprise might be but hadn’t mentioned it to anyone, not even Victor. When the cake and the article were finished, I set the table. We’d have to eat early to allow my uncle to get to the hall on time. He wouldn’t eat much tonight, but he’d make up for it later at Eleanor’s party. Shrimp and lobster, champagne, caviar—Eleanor threw the greatest gourmet bashes in town.

At six-fifteen, Victor still hadn’t arrived. I became a little worried and called the ball, but he wasn’t there, On his way home then. He’d grab a wing of cold chicken when he got here and call that dinner. I wished I had his will power, but rationalized that a woman who’d been on her feet all day required more nourishment. I took a peek in his room and saw his tux was gone. It had been there in its plastic bag from the cleaner’s yesterday. Actually my uncle hadn’t sounded very sure about eating at home. Maybe he’d gone on to the hall already, stopping on the way for a snack. He wasn’t a creature of habit. Lord, I hoped it wasn’t a glass of wine he’d stopped for, which had a way of multiplying to three or four glasses if the company was convivial. But really he had been very good lately. When he still hadn’t got home by six-thirty, I went ahead with my own dinner.

The only worry in my mind as I showered and dressed was whether I’d been wise to give that ticket to Sean Bradley. But a fellow American with those liquid eyes and overlapped teeth couldn’t be dangerous. He wasn’t really a cowboy, I thought. What was he, and where was he from? The accent wasn’t heavy enough for Texas, and the clothes weren’t good enough for him to be an oil baron. A school teacher, an engineer? He didn’t look like a magnificently successful professional; he’d be a toiler in one of the lesser but still worthy professions. Not one of the world’s great men, but he was all right for a casual date.

I brushed my tawny hair out loose and caught one side back with a white nacre barrette. For this grand occasion I had bought a wisp of white raw silk that made my Visa card tremble in shock. It looked like a fancy dust rag on the hanger, but much better on the body. A piece of the material was cut on the bias and draped over one shoulder, giving the effect of a toga, it fit fairly close around the waist, and draped again over the hips. It looked best on a long, lean body, which mine was in the process of becoming on those days when Rhoda didn’t bake a cake. It was lean enough that Victor included me in his condemnation of modern womankind, determined to destroy God’s greatest creation, the female body. He preferred full-figured Balzacian women.

I went back to my room to do my face. I have a bold, mannish face, with a square jaw and a long straight nose that is redeemed from masculinity by full lips. “The lips of a harlot,” Victor once said. He tries to be shocking but only sounds quaint. I colored my harlot’s lips, put some gel on my cheeks and a brush of frosted burgundy shadow over my dark eyes and was ready.

I picked a mauve mohair shawl and went down to the lobby. The doorman hailed a cab, and I drove off to Roy Thomson Hall with a tingling air of excitement hovering around me. I wondered if Sean would wear a jacket. In the heat of summer, some of the audience would be in shirt sleeves, but there would be no shirt sleeves at Eleanor’s party. If he came too casual, I just couldn’t invite him, that’s all.

Sean hadn’t arrived yet when I was ushered to my seat. Inside, the hall is shaped like a horseshoe. The mezzanine and balcony seats curve around the stage and are angled to give a good view. The ceiling is a dazzling collection of acoustical banners, acrylic discs, and stalactites with two big circles of lights in the middle. I passed the time by looking around at the hall and the audience while waiting for Sean. Victor says the acoustics could be plusher, especially for strings. He mentioned a lean, transparent sound, but added that it was “very intimate” for a hall of nearly three thousand seats. I didn’t think Sean would be enough of a connoisseur to worry about the acoustics, and I knew I wasn’t.

I got there at ten to eight. At two minutes to, Sean still hadn’t come. I was disappointed at first, then angry at the waste. The house was sold out, and any of my friends would have loved to get the ticket—or could have been coerced into using it anyway. He’d probably picked up some woman at a bar. Damn! My watch showed one minute to eight. An expectant hush permeated the hall as the audience waited for the lights to dim and the curtain to rise. I waited with the others, feeling an urge to tell my neighbor I was Victor’s niece. But first I’d make sure he turned up, and turned up sober. It was eight o’clock now, and the hush was deafening.

CHAPTER 2

The hush was broken by a muted pounding of feet on the carpeted aisle. One did not run in Roy Thomson Hall. Roy Thomson Hall is the kind of place where you find yourself calling a person “one.” My head slued around, like everyone else’s, to see what ill-bred specimen had escaped the ushers, and quickly turned to face the stage again, pretending I didn’t know him when I saw it was Sean. Yet I was glad he’d come. His running slowed to a trot as he drew nearer, his eyes scanning the rows for me. He lifted a finger, gave a kind of salute and a broad smile, and began wriggling his way in past the seated patrons.

He was wearing a jacket and tie, but the jacket wouldn’t feel at home at Eleanor’s party, and that tie! It looked as if it had been designed by Picasso in one of his more vibrant moments. “Sorry I’m late,” he boomed lowering himself into the seat. “Couldn’t find the darned place. I was sure I knew exactly where it was, but it moved on me.”

“These new buildings are all alike—undependable. One of those big acoustic tiles fell right off the ceiling the week the place opened.”

“Is that so?” he asked, glancing ceilingward with a doubtful face. “The show should be starting any minute now.”

We both looked expectantly to the closed curtains. The silence could reasonably have been filled by a compliment on my outfit. Sean said, “Was Victor nervous, or have you seen him since this afternoon?”

“I haven’t seen him. He was supposed to be home for dinner, but he didn’t show.”

“You live with him, do you? That must make for a lively time.”

“Oh, it does.”

“I was reading something in the paper about a surprise he has for us tonight. Care to let me in on it?”

“I would if I could, but I can’t. He didn’t tell me.”

“Maybe he’s got a new violin,” Sean suggested.

I smiled at his naiveté in musical matters. “He never uses anything but his del Gesù. It’s a famous old instrument. Kind of like the Duesenberg of violins. I have a hunch about the surprise, but I won’t even let myself think it,” I added mysteriously.

“Could you let yourself say it without thinking?”

“I think just maybe—but I’m probably wrong. It’s really conceited of me to even suggest it. Anyway, Victor’s written a little piece of music—he does that once in a while. He slaves over it for weeks, then suddenly plays it as a surprise at one of his big concerts to astonish the world, and lets on he wrote it in a day or something. He’s such a ham,” I added fondly.

Sean turned a puzzled face to me. “How does that contaminate you with conceit?”

“Didn’t I tell you? I think maybe he’s dedicating it to me. He’s mentioned half a dozen times that I’ve put him in touch with youth again. I make him listen to modern popular music and take him to the movies he wouldn’t go to alone. I’ve heard little snatches of something I don’t recognize floating through the door of his studio. He says it’s a capriccio, a free-form piece of music, kind of light and lively. He has a certain mischievous sparkle in his eyes when I ask him what he’s calling it. But I’m probably wrong,” I added. Yet I was sure enough to have bought the expensive wisp I wore, in preparation to take a bow here at the concert hall.

Sean’s brows lifted uncertainly. “I guess that’d be quite an honor.”

“It’d be fabulous—like having a poem written in your honor, or a perfume named after you, but I’m

“Probably wrong,” he said, nodding his head, while a crooked little quirk of a smile moved his moustache. “We’ll soon know. It’s five after eight. It should be starting soon.” We both checked our watches.

At ten after, it was my turn to say the same thing. The audience was becoming restive. The orchestra began playing soft background music to soothe the savage breasts. By eight-fifteen I had spotted Eleanor, waved to her, and pointed her out to Sean as Victor’s friend. When Sean lifted his Timex under my nose to show me it was eight-twenty and the curtains remained adamantly closed, I felt guilty and asked him to Eleanor’s party.

“I thought we might go out somewhere for dinner,” he parried. “You’ve already supplied the tickets. The least I can do is feed you.”

I was already feeling guilty about the concert, or lack thereof, so I shook my head derisively at his unliberated ideas. “You’re living in the dark ages. Women are no longer wined and dined as of yore. This time, the treat’s on me.”