The Gravedigger’S Daughter (54 page)

Through the summer and fall of 1974 the house rang with Beethoven’s “Appassionata.” That music!

As in a dream she who was the mother of the young pianist moved open-eyed and unseeing. Lovesick she found herself standing outside the closed door of the music room, entranced.

“He will. He will play it. This is his time.”

She who lacked an ear for the subtleties of piano interpretation could not have said if the sonata she heard bore a profound or a merely superficial relationship to the recording by Artur Schnabel she’d heard twenty-five years before in the parlor of the old stone cottage in the cemetery.

Inside the music room her exacting son was forever starting, and stopping. Starting, and stopping. Now the left hand alone, now the right. Now both hands together and back to the beginning and ceasing abruptly and returning again to the beginning in the way of a small anxious child beginning to walk upright, stumbling and flailing for balance. If he had wished, Zack could play the sonata unimpeded: he could play it straight through, striking every note. He had that ability, the mechanical facility of the piano prodigy. But a deeper resonance was required. A deeper desperation.

The desperation beneath, Hazel supposed to be inside the music itself. It was that of the composer, Beethoven. It was the man’s soul into which the young pianist must descend. She listened, wondering if the choice of the sonata had been a mistake. Her son was so young: this was not music for youth. She became excited, almost feverish in listening. Stumbling away exhausted not wanting Zack to know she’d been listening outside the door of the music room for it would annoy and exasperate him, who knew his mother so intimately.

Bad enough I’m trying not to go crazy myself, Mother I don’t intend to be responsible for you going crazy too
.

He was restless! At the age of fifteen he’d placed second in the 1972 Montreal Young Pianists Competition, and at the age of sixteen he’d placed first in the 1973 Philadelphia Young Pianists Competition, and now nearing his eighteenth birthday he was preparing for the 1974 San Francisco International Piano Competition.

Hours. Each day at the piano. At the Conservatory, and at home. And into the night hours and through the night in the throes of music rushing through his sleep-locked brain with the terrible power of cascading water over a falls. And this music was not his and must not be impeded, choked-back. A vast tide to the very horizon! It was a tide that encompassed time as well as space: the long-dead as well as the living. To choke back such a force would be to suffocate. At the piano sometimes leaning into the keyboard suddenly desperate for air, oxygen. That piano smell of old ivory, fine wood and wood polish, this was poison. Yet at other times away from the piano knowing he must take a break from the piano for sanity’s sake at such times in even the outdoor air of Delaware Park and in the presence of another (Zack was in love, maybe) a sensation of helplessness came over him, the panic that he would suffocate if he could not complete a passage of music struggling to make its way through him except: his fingers were inadequate without the keyboard and so he must return to the keyboard or he would suffocate.

Trying not to go crazy Mother
.
Help me!

In fact he blamed her.

Rarely allowed her to touch him, now.

For Zack was in love (maybe). The girl was two years older than he was, in his German language class and a serious musician: a cellist.

Except not so good a cellist as you are a pianist, Zack
.
Thank God!

It was this girl’s way to speak bluntly. Her way to laugh at the expression on his face. They were not yet intimate, they had not yet touched. She could not console him with a kiss, for the shock she’d caused him. For he was one to whom music is sacred, no more to be laughed at than death is to be laughed at.

You could laugh at death though
.
From the farther side
recalling the grassy canal bank they’d walked along, how on the farther side was the towpath but the nearer side where no one walked except Mommy and him (so little, Mommy had to grip his hand to keep him from stumbling!) was grassy and overgrown.

Laugh at death if you could cross over why the hell not!

She knew. A mother knows.

Beginning to be wary, anxious. Her son was growing apart from her.

It wasn’t the piano, the demands of practice. Hazel was never jealous of the piano!

Thinking when she heard him playing
He is in the right place now of all the world
.
Where he was born to be
. Taking comfort knowing he was hers. Rather, it was a reaction against the piano she feared.

Against his own talent, “success.” His own hands she saw him studying sometimes, examining with a clinical and faintly bemused detachment.
Mine?

If he injured his hands. If somehow.

He was interested in European history: World War II. He’d taken a course at the university. He was interested in philosophy, religion. There was a feverish tone to his voice, an uneasy tremor. As if the world’s secrets might yield to him, if only he had the key. To Hazel’s dismay Zack began talking of the most preposterous things! One day it was the ancient Indian Upanishads, one day it was the nineteenth-century German philosopher Schopenhauer, one day it was the Hebrew Bible. He began to be argumentative, aggressive. Saying suddenly at the dinner table, as if this were a crucial issue they’d been avoiding: “Of all the religions, wouldn’t the oldest be closest to God? And who is ‘God’? What is ‘God’? Are we to know this God, or only just one another? Is our place with God or with one another, on earth?” His expression was quizzical, earnest. He was leaning his elbows on the table, hunched forward.

Gallagher tried to talk with his stepson, more or less seriously. “Well, Zack! Glad you asked. My personal feeling is, religion is mankind trying to get a handle on what’s outside ‘man.’ Each religion has a different set of answers prescribed by a self-appointed priestly caste and each religion, you can be sure, teaches it’s the ‘only’ religion, sanctified by God.”

“But that doesn’t mean that one of the religions isn’t
true
. Like if there are twelve answers to an algebra problem eleven might be wrong and one
right
.”

“But ‘God’ isn’t a provable math problem, Zack. ‘God’ is just a catchall term we give to our ignorance.”

“Or even, maybe,” Zack said excitedly, “the different ways of human speech are crude and clumsy and are actually pointing toward the same thing, but different languages make them confused. Like, ‘God’ is behind the religions, like the sun you can’t look at directly, you’d go blind, except if there was no sun, see, then you would really be blind, because you couldn’t see a damned
thing
. Maybe it’s like that?”

To Hazel’s knowledge, Zack had never spoken so passionately about anything before, except music. He was leaning his elbows onto the table clumsily so that the lighted candles wavered, screwing up his face in a way that reminded Hazel horribly of Jacob Schwart.

Her son! In hurt and chagrin Hazel stared at him.

Gallagher said, trying to joke, “Zack, I had no idea! What a budding theologian we have in our midst.”

Zack said, stung, “Don’t condescend to me, ‘Dad,’ O.K.? I’m not somebody on your TV show.”

Now Zack was Gallagher’s legally adopted son sometimes he called Gallagher “Dad.” Usually it was playful, affectionate. But sometimes with a twist of adolescent sarcasm, like now.

Gallagher said quickly, “I don’t mean to condescend, Zack. It’s just that discussions like this make people upset without enlightening them. There is a similarity between religions, isn’t there, a kind of skeleton in common, and like human beings, with human skeletons�” Gallagher broke off, seeing Zack’s look of impatience. He said, annoyed, “Believe me, kid, I know. I’ve been there.”

Zack said sullenly, “I’m not a kid. In the sense of being an idiot I’m not a fucking
kid
.”

Gallagher, smiling hard, determined to charm his stepson into submission, said, “Intelligent people have been quarreling over these questions for thousands of years. When they agree, it’s out of an emotional need to agree, not because there is anything genuine to ‘agree’ about. People crave to believe something, so they believe anything. It’s like starving: you’d eat practically anything, right? It’s been my experience�”

“Look, ‘Dad,’ you aren’t
me
. Neither one of you is
me
. Got it?”

Zack had never spoken so rudely in the past. His eyes glittered with angry tears. He’d had a strained session with his piano teacher that day, perhaps. His life was complicated now in ways Hazel could not know, for he kept much to himself, she dared not approach him.

Gallagher tried again to reason with Zack, in Gallagher’s affably bantering way that was so effective on television (Gallagher now had a weekly interview show on WBEN-TV Buffalo, a Gallagher Media production) but not so effective with the boy who squirmed with impatience and all but rolled his eyes as Gallagher spoke. Hazel sat forlorn, lost. She understood that Zack was defying her, not Gallagher. He was defying her who had taught him since childhood that religion was for
those others
, not for them.

Poor Gallagher! He was red-faced and breathless as a middle-aged athlete grown complacent in his skills who has just been outmaneuvered by a young athlete whom he has failed to take seriously.

Zack was saying, “Music isn’t enough! It’s only a part of the brain. I have a whole brain, for Christ’s sake. I want to know about things other people know.” He swallowed hard. He shaved now, the lower half of his face appeared darker than the rest, his short upper lip covered in a fine dark down. Within seconds he was capable of childish petulance, good-natured equanimity, chilling hauteur. He had not once glanced at Hazel during the exchange with Gallagher nor did he look at her now, saying, in a sudden rush of words, “I want to know about Judaism, where it comes from and what it
is
.”

Judaism
: this was a word never before spoken between Hazel and Zack. Nor even the less formal words
Jews
,
Jewish
.

Gallagher was saying, “Of course, I can understand that. You want to know all that you can know, within reason. Beginning with the old religions. I was the same way myself…” Gallagher was fumbling now, uncertain. He was vaguely conscious of the strain between Hazel and Zack. As a man of the world with a certain degree of renown he was accustomed to being taken seriously, certainly he was accustomed to being deferred to, yet in his own household he was often at sea. Doggedly he said, “But the piano, Zack! That must come first.”

Zack said hotly, “It comes first. But it doesn’t come second, too. Or third, or fucking
last
.”

Zack tossed his crumpled napkin down onto his plate. He’d only partly eaten the meal his mother had prepared, as she prepared all household meals, with such care. She felt the sting of that gesture as she felt the sting of the purposefully chosen expletive
fucking
, she knew it was aimed at her heart. With quavering adolescent dignity Zack pushed his chair back from the table and stalked out of the room. The adults stared after him in astonishment.

Gallagher groped for Hazel’s limp hand, to comfort her.

“Somebody’s been talking to him, d’you think? Somebody at the university.”

Hazel sat still and unmoving in her state of shock as if she’d been slapped.

“It’s the pressure he’s under, with that sonata. It’s too mature for him, possibly. He’s just a kid, and he’s growing. I remember that miserable age, Christ! Sex-sex-sex. I couldn’t keep my mind on the keyboard, let me tell you. It’s nothing personal, darling.”

To spite me
.
To abandon me. Because he hates me. Why?

She fled from both the son and the stepfather. She could not bear it, such exposure. As if the very vertebrae of her backbone were exposed!

She was not crying when Gallagher came to comfort her. It was rare for Hazel Jones to cry, she detested such weakness.

Gallagher talked to her, tenderly and persuasively. In their bed she lay very still in his arms. He would protect her, he adored his Hazel Jones. He would protect her against her rude adolescent son. Though saying of course Zack didn’t mean it, Zack loved her and would not wish to hurt her, she must know this.

“Yes. I know it.”

“And I love you, Hazel. I would die for you.”

He talked for a long time: it was Gallagher’s way of loving a woman, with both his words and his body. He was not a man like the other, who had little need of words. Between her and that man, the boy’s father, had been a deeper connection. But that was finished now, extinct. No more could she love a man in that way: her sexual, intensely erotic life was over.

She was deeply grateful to this man, who prized her as the other had not. Yet, in his very estimation of her, she understood his weakness.

She did not want to be comforted, really! Almost, she preferred to feel the insult aimed at her heart.

Thinking scornfully
In animal life the weakest are quickly disposed of
.
That’s religion: the only religion
.

Yet she’d returned in secret several times to the park where the man in soiled work clothes had approached her and spoken to her.

My name is Gus Schwart
.

Do I look like anybody you know?

Of course, she had not seen him again. Her eyes filled with tears of dismay and indignation, that she might have hoped to see him again, who had sprung at her out of nowhere.

How it had pierced her heart, that man’s voice! He had spoken her name, she had not heard in a very long time.

My sister Rebecca, we used to live in Milburn
…

She’d looked up
Schwart
in the local telephone directory and called each of the several listings but without success.