The Curfew (9 page)

Molly walked slowly to the windowsill and sat. She held the note up to the light. She turned it upside down. She put the corner in her mouth. She pulled it taut. She tossed it in the air and watched it fall. She picked it up again.

—It’s a good one, don’t you think?

*Too hard.

William shook his head. He thought then of his violin teacher, long dead.

There was a long oaken drive dancing between the road and the house and the shadows were mad for the trees and the sun and raged there as William ran to the house in those emptied years, summers, mornings, days. It was a hard discipline she had, and she would hurt him awfully, and his parents approved of it all, but she made him feel he was her main work, and raised him above all other things, explaining music to him not in terms of other things, but in their absences, in the places where things meet. A sonata is not the passing of geese, it is not a stream’s noise, not the sound of a nightingale. A violin does not speak, does not chatter. The catastrophe of a symphony’s wild end is not a storm breaking upon land. It is not the shuddering and sundering of a house. But it is in part, she would say, the understanding of these things. You must be brutal, terrible, but with great sympathy, sympathy for all things, and yet no mercy. Was that why the government wanted no music? Because music was the only thing with any religion to it?

In the night (for it was night now) a low keening sound came. William closed his eyes. It was the sound of the bridge vibrating in the distance. The wind must strike it just so, and then …

*Aha! I know!

And William was back in the room again.

Molly ran across, clattering and stamping, to where …

a PICTURE of LOUISA was on a HOOK.

And from the picture frame, she pulled a string. And on the string, a note.

In the picture, Louisa was standing in the foreground, holding a kite. William was sitting in a tree farther in. A long field stretched into the distance.

Molly was holding the note but looking at the picture.

*You said it would never fly?

—Never. We called it the Sledge, because it would always drag along the ground. No one could get it to work. Although to be fair, I never managed to get any kite to work.

*What about Mom?

—I never saw her operate a kite. She held one once. Someone else had gotten it into the air, though. I don’t think that counts.

*Doesn’t.

Molly opened this note.

Here we incarcerate the song and the one who makes it
.

Molly spelled it out.

*Incarcerate?

—Jail.

She ran to the birdcage (which was empty) and pulled out the next clue.

—This is the last one, said William.

Molly waved him off, and opened the note.

IT READ:

Once the province of lords, and at once, a favorite of beasts, I
delight as sugar does, but sate as water. Skinned, just as you,
I hang and await my turn, and drop to the merciless ground
.

*Sate?

—Rid of hunger or thirst.

*Province?

—Look it up.

Molly went to the dictionary, opened it, and found the word.

*Doesn’t make it much clearer, does it?

—No complaints now. I have to go. Solve it!

Molly’s eyes roamed the house and alighted upon the basket of fruit. She ran to it.

*The orange!

She picked up the first orange, but there was no note there. Nor on the second.

Then she spied the orange that William had been eating. He had peeled it perfectly and the round skin sat on the table. She snatched it up and it fell open in connected rings, revealing a white bead made of bone.

Molly untied the necklace she was wearing and strung the bead onto it. There were five already there. This was the sixth.

—Time, then, he said, and ran his hand through her hair.

William went to the door of their apartment and opened it in a slow, sweeping fashion, eyes down. Molly joined him there. He went through, and to the door opposite, and knocked three times.

Noise came from inside. Someone was coming to the door.

—Hello?

The door opened. It was a woman in her seventies.

—Would you mind, asked William, watching Molly for a few hours? I have to go out, and I can’t take her with me.

—I will do this, said Mrs. Gibbons. You are a good father and I will do this for you and your daughter because she is very wonderful, a very wonderful young woman and I am always glad to have her here, although she has not come before. There is always a place here in the house for a wonderful young woman who goes around with the name of Molly. But you must be careful, Mr. Drysdale, if you are going out at night, because I will tell you that Mr. Gibbons, who has just come home now this very moment, he told me that he saw a man dead not four streets over, and right in a crowd. So, you have a care. The ones who enforce the curfew, they are all at once watching everyplace both here and there. This man I say was dead, and that is one way that is always the same, dead.

William looked over his shoulder. Molly’s face was a bit drawn.

—Dead? he asked.

—Yes, hit with a brick. And the one who did it couldn’t be found.

Molly stamped her foot. William looked over.

*Be careful!

She went past him and into Mrs. Gibbons’s apartment.

—Here is a key, said William, so you can put her to bed.

Mrs. Gibbons nodded and shut the door.

He could hear her:

—A good girl like you should not make your father worry. You do not do anything to make him worry, do you? No, I thought not. I thought not. Well, would you like something to eat? Come with me.

THE CURFEW

had been in place both when the police could be seen and now when they were unseen. One could not be about in the nighttime past a certain hour. What hour that was many could not say. They simply stayed put in their houses and waited for the morning. There were others who went about secretly, skulking. Were some caught? Yes, and never seen again. The consensus was this: on a clear night, the point at which the moon becomes clear against the night sky—from this point on you were to be indoors. On a cloudy night, there was perhaps less latitude.

The government’s official word on the matter was nonexistent. There was no curfew. There was simply the declaration,
GOOD CITIZENS PASS THEIR NIGHTS ABED
.

In the street, the lamplight made avenues beyond the door and paths within the walks beneath the trees.

William walked there and he thought of Louisa, and of the plans they had made. What does dying do to plans one makes with one’s beloved? It is the advent of lost causes, of pointless journeys, empty rooms, quiet hours. He said this to himself, and he felt it was not right. It was true, but not right. We were to have a house ringed about by trees in the country, and we were to live there with no one nearby, and raise a daughter.

He had never seen Louisa dead. She had been removed, taken from the street. Her father had been a politician. He had always guessed that was the reason.

All his inquiries to find her had met with no success. Louisa Drysdale? We have no record of a Louisa Drysdale.

The day she disappeared it seemed impossible. He walked up and down in the house. He sat in the stairwell. He went down to the street and up again. He turned on the stove and turned it off. Finally, it happened that he was asleep, and then it was the morning and he woke and at first thought it was a dream, but it was not, and then he was looking for her again, but there was nowhere to look, and all the while he was terrified of trying too hard, of pushing too hard, and of being taken away himself and leaving Molly with no one. So, there had been days of waiting, expecting that she would return at any moment. But Louisa had not returned.

There was a redness on the right.

He came closer.

A building was on fire. Men were running out of it. It was a police station, it must be. The police no longer wore uniforms, but one could tell who they were, and whenever they stayed for a while in a single building, it was assumed that that building was a police station, and then someone set fire to it.

One could assume, therefore, that if a building was on fire then it might well be a police station.