The Silver Swan (25 page)

The next morning, he woke to the telephone’s ring; it was early and the night before he’d had far too much to drink. Head throbbing, he reached for the phone.

“Claude? I’ve been trying to reach you,
chéri
.” His mother was breathless. “I couldn’t sleep all night. If you haven’t heard from Mariana, I think we really must call Interpol.”

He swallowed. His ears were ringing, his mouth was dry.

“No.”

“Do you have a better idea?”

“I don’t think you’ll want me to call anyone” — his voice was hoarse — “when you hear what I’m going to say.”

“Excuse me?”

“Feldmann wrote his daughter a letter about you and your long affair. At least you will be gratified to know he called you his great love, even if he never wanted more from you than occasional pleasure.” Claude was caustic. “He wrote this letter before he died. She has sent me a copy. In her fragile state, she might be tempted to show it to Papa, which you would
not like, would you? Unless, that is, you’ve already told Papa about your affair with Alexander Feldmann?”

“I don’t understand you, Claude. Are you drunk? What are you talking about?”

Bitterly, he told her of the FedEx delivery and read her Alexander’s letter, sparing her nothing. Francine was silent.

“What have you to say for yourself?” Claude asked.

“Claude,” Francine said at last, “please let us talk about this. Don’t be harsh.” He heard her beginning to cry. “We were very much in love,
chéri
. It was not trivial. In the end, he came back to ask me to marry him, and I said no, I would never leave you and your father.”

“I don’t care. I don’t want to hear about it.”

“It was wrong of Mariana to tell you.”

His tongue felt hard and thick. He was parched. “Mariana has turned against me. We’d been becoming friends, even though she knew all this, and now she wants the Strad.”

“You’re being unfair, Claude. You can’t understand, and of course you’re upset. Perhaps I do owe you an explanation — but you mustn’t lose the Swan. Not just because you’re angry with me. It’s so important to your career —”

He cut her off. “My career is not your business. Not any longer. Feldmann is dead. You can retire.”

“Did he say anything else in this letter to Mariana?”

“Wasn’t that enough?”

“Mariana has wronged us all.”

“No, Maman, you have.”

Claude rose from his bed, holding his phone to his ear, and went to the bathroom to pour himself a glass of water. “I do have one question to ask you, and you had better tell
me the truth. What did you tell Mariana when she called you several weeks ago, looking for me? Did you say anything about Sophie, about her pregnancy?”

It took Francine a moment to answer. “I did, Claude. I thought it was the right thing to do — because I thought you would do the right thing for Sophie.”

“What did you
tell
her?” he roared. He would have shaken her had they been in the same room.

“I told her you were getting married.”

This too took his breath away. Claude was aghast. “But I’m not. I’m not getting married to Sophie.”

“Oh, but you must. She’s carrying your child!”

“I’m not in love with her. Our marriage would be like yours. Would you want that for me?” It gave Claude great satisfaction to say this. “You should know that I
am
in love with Mariana.” In the ensuing silence, he wondered if this were true.

“You’re not acting honorably,” Francine said, sobbing.

“Look in the mirror, Madame.” He slammed the telephone down.

The morning after she sent the letter, Mariana packed up, put the Silver Swan in the Vuillaume’s empty case, and drove to Stockbridge. She stopped in town to buy groceries at the Public Market and gin at Good Wines and Spirits. At Swann’s Way, the borders of the rutted driveway were overgrown, the flower beds a wild tangle of weeds and vines and drooping blooms. She got out of the car and, carrying the cello, let herself into the airless house. As she opened windows, clustered dust balls blew along the floor.

She took the Silver Swan out of the case and carried it to the safe, where she hung it on the last remaining strap, next to all its imitators. She closed the heavy door. Only her Vuillaume was absent. She missed it, despite the presence of the original.

The dining room table wore a layer of dust, as did the marble-topped sideboard. The chandelier was swathed in cobwebs. Opening the French doors that gave out onto the terrace, where at night she could watch the purple fading light as the moon rose over the mountains, she felt Claude’s
presence everywhere. She wished he would step from the garden’s edge into her arms. How could she have thought he might love her? What was he thinking now? How would he feel when he read Alexander’s letter? Would he reproach himself for lying to her about Sophie von Whatever?

The drive had tired her. She went back to Alexander’s studio and closed the doors. Settling on the suede couch where her father had taken his afternoon naps, she kicked off her shoes. His plaid mohair throw blanket hung over the arm of the couch, folded. Her mother had made it. Mariana pulled it around her shoulders and lay down, enveloped by memories of her mother at work with her crochet hook and knitting needles in the living room while her father gave lessons.

This Mariana had understood: no one could make the music Alexander made without drawing from a well of sensitivity and emotional intelligence. In his last years, because he had shared his time so generously, students and colleagues came back to visit or play for him, to take lessons or make movies, to tape or talk to him about music. So many asked to come that visits had to be carefully scheduled so as not to exhaust him. As he joked with Mariana, “They come to touch the hem of my robe.”

Even such devotion failed to compensate Alexander for the loss of his strength and agility on the instrument — the daily diminution of prowess. He practiced every morning and grew frustrated and then pained by the sound he produced, by how quickly he tired, how everything hurt. And, in his late eighties, when his eyesight, like his mother’s, began to fail, he could play only what he remembered, often stopping in the middle of a passage. The look of despair and confusion on his face at those moments so distressed Mariana that she
would rush to him to hum the rest of the phrase or go to the piano to play it. Together, they would work their way through music he once knew by heart.

One day, while in the kitchen making lunch for Alexander, she heard him stop playing abruptly. When he didn’t come to the dining room, she went to see if something had happened — or what the distraction had been. Entering his studio, she saw that he was sitting with the cello, head resting against the fingerboard, eyes closed. Tears streamed down his old face. “I can’t, Mariana, I can’t go on without my music. I can’t see anymore, I can barely lift my arms. It’s not possible.” She had gone to stand behind him, stroking his shoulders. “No use,” he kept saying. “No use.”

As he declined into helplessness, the reverence she had always felt for him was no longer tempered by fear. Now she could tell him she loved him, knowing, even though he did not say it, that he felt love for her too. She sat with her father as he slept, reading in a rocking chair beside his bed. With his head nestled on his favorite old pillow, he would move the fingers of his left hand on his cheek, playing, always playing his cello. His dreams were often violent and frightening. He would wake up, terror in his lined face, and look at Mariana until he understood who she was. Then he would reach for her hand and sigh. “This is no longer useful,” he would say, “this life I’m living — no use to it, sweetheart.”

That night, she dined alone, listening to NPR and treating herself to a good bottle of Bordeaux from Alexander’s excellent cellar. She had come to settle his affairs. Over dinner, she made lists of all the tasks ahead. The next morning, she went
to work. Sitting on the floor of Alexander’s studio, she opened the first carton of his papers and began to sort. There were reviews and testimonials and accolades, letters of gratitude from students, contracts and royalty statements and programs and posters — a paper monument to Alexander’s eminence and to his self-love. He had saved everything, bringing home every last bit of evidence from all over the world that his career was a success, that he was idolized. Pilar had not organized these documents by category or year; she had simply thrown them in boxes. When a box was full, she taped it up and stacked it on the studio shelves, with not so much as a date. To Mariana, this represented her mother’s small rebellion against the tyranny of Alexander’s self-importance.

Interspersed among the yellowed newspaper clippings and photographs dating back to Alexander’s days at Juilliard, Mariana found the deed to Swann’s Way, contracts with those luthiers who had fashioned copies of the Stradivarius, tax statements, bills of sale, and her own birth certificate. She realized she would have to go through every sheet in these mountains of paper or risk throwing out documents she would need in the future. Working her way through box after box, slicing the brittle tape, she sifted and read. Hour after hour, her anger mounted at the sheer disorder of his so-called legacy. If he cared so much, why had he not hired someone to organize it?

Once in a while, she found a personal letter. These she read carefully. The bulk of them were dull. A few — such as the letters from Zena Padrova — were witty and charming. But there was a common theme to all the correspondence — everybody flattered Feldmann, everyone wanted his help. Perhaps, she thought, he had actually discarded anything less than flattering.

Slowly, it grew clear to Mariana that she was hunting for something — a shard of evidence, however small in this accumulation of an entire life, that she herself existed — something he might have written about her or saved: a letter or a school report card, or even a program from one of her own concerts. Between that tattered certificate marking her birth and the letter she’d received in Boston upon his death, apparently Alexander had deemed nothing about her important enough to save among his papers. Absolutely nothing.

Mariana closed her eyes. She rolled her shoulders and neck. She could refuse to be consumed by Alexander’s earthly afterlife, she told herself, as she had been by the man while alive.

Days later, as she approached the end of her task, sorting through one of the few remaining boxes, she found a large sheaf of documents from Alexander’s concert management, dated 1983. While she was flipping through the stapled contracts, an envelope fluttered to her lap. It had been sent to her father care of the office and was marked on the outside: “Please deliver to Mr. Feldmann. Confidential.” The envelope had been opened. Mariana withdrew the letter, handwritten on onionskin grown fragile with age.