Entanglements

by Rachel McMillan

  “Father Francisco says you play.” Mrs. Mayweather had retreated, clearly happy with the sound Nic’s clear notes had made.

  Nic ran a scale, pressed his foot to the pedal, allowed a slight, haunting vibrato to linger in the drawing room before removing his fingers from the keys. He smiled at her. “I enjoy playing, yes.”

  “Play me something.” Mrs. Mayweather flounced her skirt beneath her as she settled into a wing-backed chair upholstered with a bird pattern that made him think of the Common in Spring.

  Nic fanned out his fingers and inhaled. He couldn’t play on such a beautiful instrument with anything but reverence, so he closed his eyes and gently began the first wistful notes of the second movement of Beethoven’s Pathetique sonata. Mrs. Mayweather was enraptured.

  Nic flourished the piece slowly, happy that each somber note displayed how well he had tuned the keys under his fingerpads.

  Finally, he finished.

  “Yes. You will do, Mr. Ricci. You will do very nicely.”

  “I will do what, Mrs. Mayweather?”

  Mrs. Mayweather clapped her hands together. “Let’s just say I love an opportunity to play Fairy Godmother. And I have quite the opportunity for you.”

  “So, in short, you are sending me to a dustbin?” Esther fumed. “I thought you wanted this recital to be the most magnificent piece of amateur musicianship the Boston set has ever seen.”

  “Surely I wouldn’t use all of that hyperbole.” Thomas swished the brandy in his glass.

  “It was a direct quote from you, Thomas!”

  Thomas stroked the skin through the lace shrouding Esther’s forearm. “Not a dustbin, my love. An opportunity to save money by having you rehearse in a prudent and practical manner. Get this little dream out of your system while saving for your trousseau.”

  Esther enjoyed a few bits and bobs as much as the next woman. But, the antiquated idea of a trousseau was the furthest thing from her mind. She would splurge, barter, pawn for the ability to have one night to live her dream. To stand under the flush of footlights and interpret every song she held close to her heart. She asked Thomas when they were first betrothed about the musical opportunities available when they moved upstate.

  “I will buy you a beautiful grand piano and you can sing to your heart’s content. And, of course, there can be concerts. In New York. In Washington.” He promised her what he inevitably thought was the moon in these instances and Esther convinced herself it would be enough. It would be perfect and she would be happy.

  “And you found me a rehearsal pianist?” she asked after Thomas told her about the small studio in the North End. He even provided a few photographs that had inspired Esther’s initial proclamation of dust bin.

  “Mrs. Mayweather has found someone. Fellow doesn’t have a lot of references but apparently played quite well while he tuned her piano. That should be sufficient enough for your purposes.”

  “A piano tuner is not a rehearsal pianist, Thomas. The only thing in common with the two occupations is the instrument.”

  Thomas didn’t hear her. “And you must take Widow Barclay, my dear. I cannot have you alone with a man. He’s some wretched gutter snipe she knows through a priest. So he’ll be of a sort to be sure.” Thomas didn’t elaborate on what sort. “But I would rather not sink money into this. You’ll be magnificent. You already know how to sing.”

  “Is Widow Barclay amenable?” She knew the Widow as a friend to her mother who had emigrated to America after the death of her husband and appeared at holidays as certainly as unpacked decorative ornament. Esther was a little surprised she would offer to be companion for this purpose. Maybe Thomas offered to pay her well. Perhaps better than the pianist.

  “She said she will bring her knitting.”

  “Well, then.” Esther’s voice strangled with sarcasm. “As long as she has her knitting.”

  3

  It turned out Mrs. Mayweather’s act of fairy godmothering was a stint as a rehearsal pianist for a young heiress giving a concert at a fashionable address on Tremont Street. When Nic protested that he wasn’t trained in this line of work, she said his playing was all he needed to commend him and handed him a list of the songs the young woman wanted to sing. Nic looked them over with a nod. They were somewhat tricky at times, but pretty standard and he didn’t have to perform them with her on the grand night, just help her practice for the next several weeks.

  “Her name is Esther Hunnisett.” Mrs. Mayweather explained. “She is soon to be married to Thomas Weatherton.”

  Nic whistled lowly. “That Weatherton?” The Weatherton name seemed to be on half of the barges and skiffs tugging in and out of the wharfs rimming the North End.

  “The very one.”

  “With all due respect, are you sure there isn’t a more qualified…” But Nic never got to the end of the sentence as Mrs. Mayweather pressed an address in his hand and then turned and left with a wave in lieu of a goodbye.

  So, before the appointed hour at a communal space just beyond the enterprise and bustle of Hanover Street, Nic tugged at his vest and fixed his collar and hoped he was appropriately attired for a woman affiliated with the Weatherton fortune. He tried his best to tune the ancient and rickety instrument into some level of submission, but failed. If Father Francisco didn’t hold confession at this very hour, he would have asked to borrow the piano in the rectory for the purpose. Surely a young, well-bred woman attached to such a magnanimous fortune deserved more than a few clunky keys.

  When she arrived, she did so with shoulders erect and a polite smile. Miss Esther Hunnisett was pretty. She wore pearl baubles at her ears and draped over her ivory collarbone. Her sumptuous blonde hair was swept into an up-do that must have weighed quite a bit given texture and length he surmised even in its fashionable constraint.

  Behind her, a sweet-faced and somewhat matronly woman was in tow, head down and hands folded over a small hand bag.

  “Mr. Ricci?” Miss Hunnisett asked

  Nic liked her voice: it was a throaty alto and boded well for the timbre of her singing. But, he didn’t know whether he should take her hand in a firm shake or accept a few dangled fingers as he had once seen in a movie featuring a Queen. He settled for ducking his head in a slight nod.

  “How do you do, Miss Hunnisett?”

  “I am very well. I hope you don’t mind that my chaperone is with me.”

  Nic didn’t know a lot about fancy rich girls; but he thought the world had chugged a little far ahead for chaperones. “Of course not.” He took the chaperone’s offered hand. “Nic Ricci.”

  “I am Widow Barclay.”

  Widow Barclay trundled off to a chair in the corner that expelled a cloud of dust as she lowered her rounded figure into it. She took out knitting needles and a bundle of yarn and set to busy work clacking with the precision of a metronome.

  Nic turned back to Esther. Mrs. Mayweather had not listened to his reservations, but maybe she would.

  “Pardon me, Miss Hunnisett. You are a fine lady with a chaperone. And I am … don’t get me wrong, I am a more than proficient pianist. I am not saying that to boast, rather to assure you. But I am certain a lady of your situation could well afford a rehearsal studio and a much more qualified pianist.”

  Esther Hunnisett studied him a moment. “You don’t speak how I thought you would.”

  Nic kept a defensive tone from creeping into his voice. “I was born in America, Miss Hunnisett. I am more American than you are.” Her consonants were crisp British. “In this very city, no less.”

  “I do beg your pardon.” Esther leaned in to him a little and lowered her voice for the seemingly dozy Widow Barclay. “My fiancé, who has all of the charm and diplomacy of a sunken swan boat in the Public Garden, assured me you were little more than an uncouth guttersnipe. Thus perfect because he promised me this little lark but is unwilling to spend more than a pittance on this musical interlude of mine.” She raised a gloved hand to the drab interface of the warehouse-like hovel.
“Which very much explains our residence in this Versailles look-a-like.” She raised an eyebrow in irony before she looked at the dreary walls and over the slightly slumped Widow Barclay and then back at him. She shrugged. “So if neither of us perishes from a deathly opposition to the dust and windowless nature of this prison, perhaps we can fill it with music.”

  Nic blinked his surprise. He liked her. She was clearly waiting for him to respond, a challenge sparkling her eyes.

  “Not quite a guttersnipe, Miss Hunnisett. I make my living as a high school math teacher in the North End. I was educated thanks to a kind priest who thought that I could make something of myself. I was studying to pursue post graduate studies when my father was injured in the molasses factory disaster.”

  Miss Hunnisett’s sharp eyes dulled with sympathy. “I am truly sorry about that. What a devastating waste.”

  “He is still alive and that is all that matters.” Nic moved toward the piano and pulled out the three legged stool from under the keyboard. This place seemed to house old furniture sentenced to slow, abandoned death. He lowered his tall frame and banged his knee cap on the side of the board with the movement.

  “Off to a running start.” he said against a hint of a smile. Esther stepped to the opposite side of the upright piano.

  “I have one chance at this,” she explained. “I will be spirited upstate after our wedding to some useless estate where the only audience will be the monthly assembly of the glorious daughters of the revolution and acres of sheep and cows. So, we have to go all in, Mr. Ricci.”

  Nic smiled. “I vow I will do my utmost to be worthy of this momentous occasion. The contract mentioned you would be selecting your own pieces? Mrs. Mayweather showed them to me.”

  Esther nodded. “I have the music with me. I have copies so that you can have your own.”

  “Thank you.” He accepted the folder and opened an array of Bizet, Schubert, Verdi and Puccini. Then, Mozart. smiled.

  “Mozart,” Nic’s voice held a smile.

  Esther grinned. “There is part of me that thinks Mozart was just out to torture poor, unsuspecting female vocalists. But, there is such calculated passion, too.”

  Nic shifted so quickly to make eye contact he thought he might topple the stool over. “Calculated passion?”

  “He clearly wants to rein it in just a bit. It’s clever of him. Puccini is all over the place. Mozart wants us to color it in a little. He gives us the lines and I think he expects us to embroider them. It’s like… it’s like this…” She leaned a little over the piano in what Nic could only assume was an affront to every last finishing school directive she might ever have been given. “We have all the pieces… the chess pieces…on the board and they’re all lined up but we have to move them. We make the decision even though everything is all there for us. The general rules. It won’t ever look the same twice.” She stopped. “You’re staring at me, Mr. Ricci. Did I say something that… I am sorry. Blame Mozart for the fact that I get carried away.”

  “I quite enjoy playing chess, Miss Hunnisett. And I often connected those two things-- the composer and the game-- and I had never heard another human soul on the planet express the same sentiment.”

  Suddenly, the attractive lady who stepped in like a comet from a far galaxy, was a little further down to earth. And ever more attractive than she had been when he had first clapped eyes on her. Now, the drab walls made her brown eyes light and the dangling bulb from the cobwebbed boards above them off set the slant of her cheek bone and her lips which had been pert and pretty in their dusky rose were now a perfect cupid’s bow. The more she talked, the more affinity he felt with what she said, the more she became the most beautiful woman he had seen in his life.

  She gracefully lifted her chin and took in Widow Barclay a few feet beyond the piano and evidently quite comfortable in the threadbare wing backed chair. For her knitting was in a clump on the floor and the widow was dozing. “Clearly the Widow Barclay is not as attached to Mozart as we are.”

  Nic pumped the pedal with his scuffed Sunday best shoe and creaked it into submission. Then he ran a rusty major scale with his right hand, the poorly tuned piano clanging to some kind of life.

  “You’ll just have to sound beautiful and muffle the sound of this tin can.” He said in response to her wrinkled nose. “I hope she can sleep through anything.”

  “It’s dreadful.”

  He held up a piece of music. “It’s Mozart.”

  Esther had looked forward to the music. To the freedom from Thomas. To the air and the walk from Beacon Hill. To passing the Conservatory and imagining its sculpted stone before entrapping herself into the mouse hole of a rehearsal space. She had not known she should have also been looking forward to Mr. Ricci. They were running through the lower scales comfortably situated in her range. Esther engaged and activated her diaphragm, rose a little on the balls of her feet and aligned her shoulders and back to proper position. Her tongue was tucked behind her teeth and throat open to elicit the best sound. This part was second nature, so she allowed herself a study of Mr. Ricci. The moment she stepped over the dusty, creaking boards of the dismal rehearsal space she had noted the way the slightly swinging bulbs overhead courted the midnight black of his hair. He hadn’t shaken her hand. Truly she wasn’t sure what the protocol was in this instance, but she noticed that the hand with which he took Widow Barclay’s contained long fingers and the sort of grace an artist might spend a little extra time to capture when sweeping pencil over paper in deft grooves and lines.

  He was a tall man with broad shoulders and a distinctive profile. His chin was strong and his eyes as black as his hair. His smile had a secret that whispered around the edges as if the corners of his mouth always wanted to turn up a little but were kept in check.

  The bearing with which he lowered his tall frame to the teetering stool behind the age old upright might well have seen him behind a shiny Bösendorfer Grand at the Symphony Hall.

  Esther swallowed. Her cheeks flamed a little and she sloped into a sharp end of the scale, vibrato uneven. He was attractive. Very attractive.

  “My apologies,” she said in response to his look.

  “Would you like to try again? In F#?”

  “Please. I lost my train of thought. Not very professional of me.”

  Nic swept a scale on the tinny piano. “You are only acting in response to the venue.” He smiled. “No, truly, you sound quite wonderful.” There was something in his voice evading her, but his smile was genuine.

  He opened the Schubert piece, An de Musik, and she spun the German words that often filled the corners of her brain into a heady, rich sound. She kept the tone sweet and yet with a trained richness her childhood teacher referred to as her chocolate topping. Something that set her voice apart and imparted the tone of the speaking voice that set her apart from a dozen high-voiced school girls of her ilk. The quality that loaned her distinction.

  She knew her German was perfect. She had enough diction classes to assure that certainty. So, she wasn’t quite sure why Nic was staring at her as he was: eyes completely focused on her profile even as his fingers moved in deft memorization over the keys.

  Esther tried not to look at him, instead focusing on a spec of a hole in the back wall, just beyond snoozing Widow Barclay. But it was hard: his eyes had a power to them. They were a living, black thing like a magnet. She blinked and refocused. Finished the song and let her rich chocolate sound soften into a clear trill of a vibrato which she held and held as long as her breath would let her. For, surely, she would have no idea what to say to him when it was over.

  “It has surprisingly good acoustics.” Esther said. Nic swallowed a lump the size of the Rock of Gibraltar in his chest.

  He was somewhere between the stars and feeling perfectly ridiculous so, of course, he nodded enthusiastic agreement. Of course there was a good acoustic space, how else could there be when they were high in a different stratosphere? She sang like an angel. But an intelligent and
smart and rather funny angel. And the first preliminary moments of attraction deepening with the connection he felt the moment she spoke to him had burst into something like a sonnet when she sang.

  How could this voice be contained to a horrible dust pile of a room and then sent to a congregation of cows in upstate Massachusetts? Whomever this fiancé was, he loathed him.

  “You have a magnificent voice.” Nic said plainly. She was too good for false panderings of praise.

  Esther brightened. “Truly? You’re a wonderful player, too. You follow me so well. It’s like we are having our own conversation, isn’t it? You seem to anticipate when I was going to change my tempo and …”

  “That in short is the definition of an accompanist, Miss Hunnisett. As you well know.” He risked a small wink at her.

  “I know that. I have had dozens before. It’s just… with you…” she caught her breath.

  They tried another song and again, Nic was light headed and very attentive to her face and less to the keys. He blessed the Holy Lord above that his fingers knew Mozart better than his wandering brain did.

  They continued and fell into an easy rhythm. She got frustrated and he fudged a note. She laughed at a mouse scurrying over the floorboards and Nic delighted in the fact that she didn’t squeal and retreat as he assumed most ladies of her station would at a rodent. All too soon, their first rehearsal ticked to a halt.

  “You know, Miss Hunnisett”, Nic gathered his music, “I am proficient at transposition. If there is a piece out of your range, I can work with it.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Ricci.”

  “We can’t always change our fate.” He lowered his voice to her ear, noting the now awake and quite attentive Widow Barclay. “But we can change a key.”

  4

  Nic wiped the chalk from his palms having imprinted several shapes and their definitions for tomorrow’s geometry lesson on the board.