The Silver Swan (10 page)

As they finished dessert, William Rossen asked if anyone had noticed that the floral arrangements on the table mysteriously matched those in the paintings. “Ah, you have discovered my secret!” Mrs. Libbey exclaimed, clapping her hands. “I always wait to see if anyone will notice. The florist
has standing instructions to make a Renoir and Fantin-Latour. It is my little test, and, sir, tonight, you win.”

They applauded the pianist and studied the beautiful flowers — on both the table and walls. With that, Mrs. Libbey stood up and made it clear she was weary, quite ready for them to depart. Claude looked at his watch. It was two a.m.

At the elevator door, he went to Mariana and said, “I have a week in New York, before I start my tour. I would like to know you better, Mariana. I feel our lives have become entwined, thanks to the Swan and all the other things we share. Would you have dinner with me tomorrow?”

“The three of us?” She looked at him intently.

Standing closer, he whispered, as his mother approached. “No. I’ll make a reservation for two wherever you choose.”

Now she did not hesitate. “Cafe Luxembourg at seven thirty.”

“Thank you, Mariana.
À demain
.”

Leaving the party at two fifteen, Mariana tipped the hotel doorman who hailed her cab, and threw herself back against the vinyl seat. “The bastard,” she muttered several times, “the absolute bastard.” The cabdriver, alarmed, looked at her in the rearview mirror. She gave him her address. How clear it was that Francine Roselle had often been in America with Alexander — and that they had shared friends and restaurants and possibly even hotels many times in the city. And he had written that she
never
came here. The lies — even as he wrote his last letter to her.

Had he truly loved anyone? She could think of only one person Alexander had treated with absolute respect and tenderness. That was his own mother, her grandmother Rosa. He had been devoted to her. When Rosa was alive, they would travel, as a family, to visit her in the nursing home in Albany, for which Alexander paid. They saw her as often as his hectic schedule allowed. Driving up from the city on the thruway, they stayed only for the afternoon. Mariana had felt sad and frightened in the nursing home. Old people in wheelchairs in the corridors clamored for her attention or slept with their
toothless mouths hanging open. Rosa herself was alert and sharp of mind, though she had gone blind in her late eighties. “All that knitting she did in her youth, in poor light,” Alexander complained angrily to Pilar. “My father kept her at it to raise capital for his business.”

Alexander would sit at his mother’s side, holding her hand, telling her about his concerts and reading aloud his reviews. Always, when it was time to go, Rosa’s sightless eyes would fill with tears. Alexander would tell her exactly when he could come again and she would always answer, “With luck, I’ll still be here.” Perhaps he really had cherished his mother, Mariana thought. But she wasn’t sure.

The morning after the concert, she slept late. Exhausted when she came home, she had kicked off her shoes and thrown her gown onto the small chair in the corner. It slipped to the floor, a mountain of taffeta. The slanting morning sunlight that briefly lit the room had moved on by the time she awoke. Her bedroom could barely contain the queen-size bed she’d bought when she returned from Swann’s Way after Alexander’s death. Over her head hung a painting from her parents’ apartment, the only one Alexander had been willing to part with when Pilar died. The Chaim Gross landscape had been her mother’s favorite — a gift from Gross’s widow, an old friend. She reached for her bedside lamp, switched it on, and looked at the clock. Eleven thirty.

She thought about the way Claude had come up behind her at the party. He was brash, seductive, and self-confident — qualities she’d always found irresistible. She liked to be touched by an attractive man before she had given
permission. At the window the night before, she had stepped backward and pressed herself against him. She could feel him stiffen. Seeing his face reflected in the glass, she had almost turned to kiss him. She’d felt wild and out of control, though she had remained cool to him. Now, conjuring him in her mind, her breath quickened. She ran her hands over her naked body, under the covers. After a while, she made herself get out of bed to make coffee.

Claude would carry the Swan back to Switzerland after Fernand finished the restoration. He had told her this. She wondered how long it would take Fernand to do his work. Was it possible she would never play it again? She couldn’t let that happen. Seized with longing, she picked up the phone and called Baum & Fernand to make an appointment.

That afternoon, Mariana took the subway downtown to Fifty-seventh Street and walked east to the dealer’s showroom. As she entered the shop, the smell was intoxicating. She had visited these rooms often as a child. Now, for a moment, she missed her father acutely, missed holding his hand, standing close to him and listening to the strange accents, shoptalk about past and current dealers in Europe and America, the price of instruments at auction, the values of particular violins, violas, violoncellos, who had restored or “butchered” — Fernand’s word — which instrument in what shop. There would be laughter and gossip, talk of back cracks and sound post adjustment and the quality of repair. Mariana, listening, had learned.

The young receptionist, applying lipstick, looked up to say she was expected and could go directly to Baum’s private office. He greeted her, dressed immaculately in a navy blazer.

“I’ve come to play the Swan one final time,” she announced, not meeting his eyes.

He gazed at her with evident sympathy. She chose to say no more. He went back to the workshop and soon reappeared with the instrument in hand. “Come,” he said, “there’s an empty room for you.” She followed him down the darkened passageway.

In the tiny, soundproofed space, Mariana played the simple pieces Casals had taught her father, who in turn had taught her. Then she played Bach. After half an hour, she stopped, too unhappy to continue. She stroked the instrument’s ribs and back, caressed the pegs, pressed her fingers to the silver ornamentation of the scroll and ran her lips along the smooth neck, remembering her last public performance with her father. They had played together at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2000 at a black-tie event for donors to the rare instruments collection.

When he accepted the invitation, Alexander had said, “You know, Mariana, this exposure will only increase the value of the Swan. To play it in the Mertens Gallery — with all those donors watching — raises its level yet another notch in the collector’s eye. Though I myself don’t care for such publicity, I must do this for you. Should you ever decide to part with it, you’ll get an even higher price. I must secure your future.”

Mariana sighed. “Don’t do this for
me
, Papa. You’ve already done so much.”

Alexander heard no irony in her answer. “You will, of course, join me there. I absolutely insist.”

On that clear winter night, after the curator of the collection, Andrew Macintosh, introduced the evening, Alexander sat with his head bowed, Mariana beside him in a flowing silver gown. He stood and began to speak.

“Here is the magnificent Swan.” Alexander removed the velvet drapery from the instrument and carried it forward. “It’s still a mystery — one we may never solve — why
this
particular shape and
this
particular thickness of wood are calculated to produce such acoustical sonority. No experts have ever quite explained it and no one has ever improved on it. Let me play for you.”

After, turning to Mariana, he had said, “Come, sweetheart, sit here next to me. Let’s give our listeners the chance to compare. We shall play the first movement of the Bach D-Minor Suite, as I studied it with Casals.”

He closed his eyes and waited for silence. When he lifted his bow, she lifted hers and, together, they played, in perfect unison of tone, fingering and bowing. When they came to the final note, Alexander rested his bow at his side and lowered his chin to his chest. Mariana, tears glistening on her cheeks, reached down to take his left hand. She raised it and kissed his fingers as the audience came to its feet.

Mariana opened the door of the small, windowless room and went to return the instrument to Baum.

He invited her to sit. “Coffee?”

“Thank you, no.”

Then, resuming the conversation he had started in the lobby at Tully Hall, Baum leaned across his desk and said, “What a disappointment for both of us that your father left the cello to this young man, Roselle. This is not what we envisioned, is it?”

Mariana shook her head.

“Alexander always told me he would leave the Swan to you,”
Baum continued. “And after you stopped playing, he particularly asked me to help by brokering a profitable sale. He trusted me and wanted me alone to handle the transaction. I, of course, had already begun the task of finding a buyer. In fact” — Baum leaned forward and lowered his voice — “I confide in you that I did make contact with a gentleman abroad who was interested in the whole collection — the Swan and all its copies — nothing less. This Roselle gift comes now as quite a surprise. My client will be disappointed, though I have not yet told him the deal is off.” He paused, studying her face. “And you too must be very unhappy.”

There was something in his manner Mariana did not trust. “My father spoke to me about it in advance,” she lied. “There’s nothing more to say. I understood his desire to place the instrument in the hands of a fine performer.”

“And,” Baum continued, “when he repaid the money I lent him to finance the purchase of the Swan, I offered to let him keep the funds and give me part ownership. He insisted he could not do this because the Swan would be yours one day, Mariana, and would give you financial security. He said he couldn’t compromise that.”

Mariana looked down and said nothing.

“The reward for my generosity, your father claimed, would come after his death, when I brokered the sale of the cello on your behalf.”

“He paid you what he owed you,” she said sharply. “And at the time, he had no idea I would no longer be playing. I understand his choice.”

“Well, then, you’ve both made the right decision,” Baum responded sourly. He was terse and she could see he did not believe her. “In Roselle, you’ve chosen well. Have you seen the
Times
review of the concert last night?”

He handed her the Arts section and Mariana read what she had to admit was a magnificent review. It made much of Claude’s musical inheritance from her father and praised his sensitive interpretation of Brahms: “both impeccable and passionate, exultant and restrained.” It called him a major — “arguably
the
major” — European talent on the instrument. And at the very end, it said, “To make up for the music world’s loss of Alexander Feldmann, we are fortunate that Claude Roselle has donned his mentor’s mantle on the concert stage.” The Roselles would have a lot to celebrate, she thought with renewed resentment.