Summer People
Page 50
Willie was beaming. As he leapt from his chair, his white hair seemed to rise like a mane. ‘That’s splendid!’ he sang out. ‘Let’s have a toast! This is the greatest thing that’s happened around here in ages! Where’s my boy Chris?’
‘It’s his nap time at home. I think we should let him sleep,’ Lisa said firmly.
Jimmy looked quite pleased with himself. He had a gift for making do. He was happy with Laurie while she treated him decently; he was happy with Lisa if they didn’t fight too much. He was an opportunist, but not for money or power. He wanted to be comfortable.
Toby came by after supper. He was looking portly in a three-piece suit made of good wool but tight across the back. He and Jimmy talked seriously in a corner. While Dinah was bringing in glasses and cordial, he caught her in the kitchen. ‘Just tonic for me. So you’re with that musician these days. You like living in the city?’
‘I’m back and forth.’
‘Well, you get tired of commuting and your flute player, you let me know. I never felt I had anything to offer a woman. But I’m straight these days, no drugs, no alcohol; and I’ve always had an eye out for you. I used to watch you in the spring.’
She did not tell him how he had scared her. Instead she said, ‘You’re a little late, Toby. I’m taken. And pregnant besides.’
‘If you change your mind, look me up.’ He took a card from his pocket, a printed business card, and presented it to her. She felt like giggling but tucked it in the pocket of her wool slacks and went back to the livingroom where Itzak was watching for her. The tree was being trimmed. This year she decided she could skip that ritual, for it reminded her too strongly of Susan. ‘I’m a little tired. Would you like to go home?’
‘Home.’ Itzak nodded. He could enjoy visiting this house, but they would never engage him the way for instance Nita did. ‘To celebrate.’
‘To celebrate. And give the cats some supper.’ She had forgotten before. Time to talk, to sketch plans. She tried to tell as they crossed the yard slowly with arms around each other’s waists whether she could feel the baby. Nothing physical was obvious. Nonetheless all the furniture of her mind had been turned around.
‘I was just thinking how happy I am that we’re going to have a baby, and how relieved I am it didn’t happen with my first wife. I’d feel guilty. I’d probably have stayed and been miserable all my life.’
My first wife, he said. She supposed they would start talking about marriage, gradually. She had a sudden take of all the members of the chorale crying like babies, crying at the top volume. Throttle full open. Stretched wide as the beaks of baby birds. That would be an interesting sound. Cry out loud but stop at the conductor’s signal. Twenty-four bars of baby’s crying. A chorus, a chorale of babies.
Or suppose right after that she divided the chorus into four parts, soprano babies and alto babies. Then tenor and baritone babies. Wah! Wah! Wah! Wah! The voice used percussively. Then drawn out long. Different rhythms of crying set against each other. It would be amusing. It would be fresh and fascinating in texture. That was another way she would celebrate continuance. Even her pregnancy would issue into music.
As a gardener she loved the seasons. She had resisted the changes in her life, but everything had changed anyhow into a different kind of loving, a different kind of ripeness, new ideas for her music. If she had a daughter, maybe they’d call her Shoshana. Finally she was growing the baby that carried on for her father and all the other dead whose memory spread over the sky like the smear of stars up in the cold black night. A seed of light grew in her. If she had never been a dutiful daughter, as her mother had often said (Shirley, whom she must call tomorrow), she at least was a daughter who was doing her duty to the dead. No doubt this child travelling on that long trajectory through her body toward birth was coming into trouble, into a bumpy and less than idyllic childhood. The choices we make resonate and rebound, she thought. But mostly her own fierce self would be making what she had to, weaving traps of sound to catch the mind.
Acknowledgments
I’d like to thank Irwin (Bud) Bazelon and Herschel Garfein for all their help in answering questions and trying to explain the world of the composer to me. At very different points in their careers and with widely differing orientations, each was generous with his time and attention. Caleb Morgan has my gratitude for being clear and uncondescending in demonstrating the electronic options of composers and letting me into his studio.
I would especially like to thank Yo-Yo Ma for his unfailingly good-natured fielding of questions from the philosophical to the minutiae of premières, and his generosity and patience with a curiosity and informational greed that must have appeared bottomless.
Once again I have prevailed upon the kindness of Elaine McIlroy and Claire Beswick of the Wellfleet Public Library to locate biographies and critical books on music that I needed. My continuing thanks to my bright and hardworking assistant Kathy Shorr, who learned perhaps more than she truly wanted to know about yet another subject while transcribing notes from reading, research, observation and interviews into our family of fat data bases.
Finally I want to thank, as always but never pro forma, my husband, Ira Wood. We share our work from the moment we have the first idea through all the rough and scaly drafts, the travelling and the talking through of problems. All our work is in some sense a collaboration, at the same time that we each have a distinct and quite separate vision, talents and approach. We keep each other on course. I live and work in a network of caring and cooperation that makes the writing both possible and worthwhile.
About the Author
Marge Piercy (b. 1936) is the author of nineteen poetry collections, including The Hunger Moon and Made in Detroit, and seventeen novels, including the New York Times bestseller Gone to Soldiers and He, She and It, winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction. She has also written a memoir, Sleeping with Cats; a collection of short stories, The Cost of Lunch, Etc.; and five nonfiction books. A champion of feminism, antiwar, and ecological movements, Piercy often includes political themes in her work and features strong female characters who challenge traditional gender roles. Her book of poetry The Moon Is Always Female is considered a seminal feminist text. Piercy’s other works include Woman on the Edge of Time, The Longings of Women, and City of Darkness, City of Light. She lives in Massachusetts with her husband, radio personality and author Ira Wood, with whom she cowrote the novel Storm Tide.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1989 by Middlemarsh, Inc.
Cover design by Andy Ross
ISBN: 978-1-5040-3342-8
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