And then it was as though a curious child pushed his centime into the slot and set all in motion. The heavy, bearded figure roared out aloud, braying with fury, and, wielding the honourable sword as if it were a matter of death or glory, charged us, all three.
On her eighteenth birthday, my mother had disposed of a man-eating tiger that had ravaged the villages in the hills north of Hanoi. Now, without a moment’s hesitation, she raised my father’s gun, took aim and put a single, irreproachable bullet through my husband’s head.
We lead a quiet life, the three of us. I inherited, of course, enormous wealth but we have given most of it away to various charities. The castle is now a school for the blind, though I pray that the children who live there are not haunted by any sad ghosts looking for, crying for, the husband who will never return to the bloody chamber, the contents of which are buried or burned, the door sealed.
I felt I had a right to retain sufficient funds to start a little music school here, on the outskirts of Paris, and we do well enough. Sometimes we can even afford to go to the Opéra, though never to sit in a box, of course. We know we are the source of many whisperings and much gossip but the three of us know the truth of it and mere chatter can never harm us. I can only bless the – what shall I call it? – the maternal telepathy that sent my mother running headlong from the telephone to the station after I had called her, that night. I never heard you cry before, she said, by way of explanation. Not when you were happy. And who ever cried because of gold bath taps?
The night train, the one I had taken; she lay in her berth, sleepless as I had been. When she could not find a taxi at that lonely halt, she borrowed old Dobbin from a bemused farmer, for some internal urgency told her that she must reach me before the incoming tide sealed me away from her for ever. My poor old nurse, left scandalized at home – what? interrupt milord on his honeymoon? – she died soon after. She had taken so much secret pleasure in the fact that her little girl had become a marquise; and now here I was, scarcely a penny the richer, widowed at seventeen in the most dubious circumstances and busily engaged in setting up house with a piano-tuner. Poor thing, she passed away in a sorry state of disillusion! But I do believe my mother loves him as much as I do.
No paint nor powder, no matter how thick or white, can mask that red mark on my forehead; I am glad he cannot see it – not for fear of his revulsion, since I know he sees me clearly with his heart – but, because it spares my shame.
1944
Ellen Gilchrist
Ellen Gilchrist (b. 1935) is an American author and poet who studied creative writing under Eudora Welty. Her 1981 collection of stories, In the Land of Dreamy Dreams, received immense critical acclaim and, in 1984, she won the National Book Award for her collection of stories, Victory Over Japan.
When I was eight years old I had a piano made of nine martini glasses.
I could have had a real piano if I had been able to pay the terrible price, been able to put up with piano lessons, but the old German spy who taught piano in the small town of Seymour, Indiana, was jealous of my talent.
“Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!” she would scream in her guttural accent, hitting me on the knuckles with the stick she kept for that purpose. “Stopping this crazy business. Can’t you ever listen? Can’t you sit still a minute? Can’t you settle down?”
God knows I tried to settle down. But the mere sight of the magnificent black upright, the feel of the piano stool against my plump bottom, the cold ivory touch of the keys would send me into paroxysms of musical bliss, and I would throw back my head and begin to pound out melodies in two octaves.
“Stop it,” she would be screaming. “This is no music, this crazy banging business. Stop on my piano. Stop before I call your momma!”
I remember the day I quit for good. I got up from the piano stool, slammed the cover down on the keys, told her my father would have her arrested, and stalked out of the house without my hat and gloves. It was a cold November day, and I walked home with gray skies all around me, shivering and brokenhearted, certain the secret lives of musical instruments were closed to me forever.
So music might have disappeared from my life. With my formal training at this sorry end I might have had to content myself with tap and ballet and public speaking, but a muse looked down from heaven and took pity on me.
She arrived in the form of a glamorous war widow, was waiting for me at the bar when I walked into the officers’ club with my parents that Saturday night.
There she sat, wearing black taffeta, smoking long white cigarettes, sipping her third very dry martini.
“Isn’t that Doris Treadway at the bar?” my mother said. “I can’t believe she’s going out in public.”
“What would you like her to do,” my father said, “stay home and go crazy?”
“Well, after all,” my mother whispered. “It’s only been a month.”
“Do you know that lady?” I asked, wondering if she was a movie star. She looked exactly like a movie star.
“She works for your daddy, Honey,” my mother said. “Her husband got killed in the Philippines.”
“Go talk to her,” my father said. “Go cheer her up. Go tell her who you are.”
As soon as we ordered dinner I did just that. I walked across the room and took up the stool beside her at the bar. I breathed deeply of her cool perfume, listening to the rustling of her sleeves as she took a long sophisticated drag on her Camel.
“So you are Dudley’s daughter,” she said, smiling at me. I squirmed with delight beneath her approving gaze, enchanted by the dark timbre of her voice, the marvelous fuchsia of her lips and fingertips, the brooding glamor of her widowhood.
“I’m Rhoda,” I said. “The baby-sitter quit so they brought me with them.”
“Would you like a drink?” she asked. “Could I persuade you to join me?”
“Sure,” I said. “Sure I’ll join you.”
She conferred with the bartender and waved to my parents who were watching us from across the room.
“Well, Rhoda,” she said. “I’ve been hearing about you from your father.”
“What did you hear?” I asked, getting worried.
“Well,” she said, “the best thing I heard was that you locked yourself in a bathroom for six hours to keep from eating fruit cocktail.”
“I hate fruit cocktail,” I said. “It makes me sick. I wouldn’t eat fruit cocktail for all the tea in China.”
“I couldn’t agree with you more,” she said, picking up her stirrer and tapping it on her martini glass. “I think people who hate fruit cocktail should always stick together.”
The stirrer made a lovely sound against the glass. The bartender returned, bringing a wineglass foil of bright pink liquid.
“Taste it,” she said, “go ahead. He made it just for you.”
I picked up the glass in two fingers and brought it delicately to my lips as I had seen her do.
“It’s wonderful,” I said, “what’s in it?”
“Something special,” she said. “It’s called a Shirley Temple. So little girls can pretend they’re drinking.” She laughed out loud and began to tap the glass stirrer against the line of empty glasses in front of her.
“Why doesn’t he move the empty glasses?” I asked.
“Because I’m playing them,” she said. “Listen.” She tapped out a little tune. “Now, listen to this,” she said, adding small amounts of water to the glasses. She tapped them again with the stirrer, calling out the notes ina very high, very clear soprano voice. “Do, Re, Mi, Fa, So,… Bartender,” she called, “bring us more glasses.”
In a minute she had arranged a keyboard with nine perfect notes.
“Here,” she said, moving the glasses in front of me, handing me the stirrer, “you play it.”
“What should I play,” I said. “I don’t know any music.”
“Of course you know music,” she said. “Everyone knows music. Play anything you like. Play whatever comes into your head.”
I began to hit the glasses with the stirrer, gingerly at first, then with more abandon. Soon I had something going that sounded marvelous.
“Is that by any chance the ‘Air Corps Hymn’ you’re playing?” she said.
“Well… yes it is,” I said. “How could you tell?”
She began to sing along with me, singing the words in her perfect voice as I beat upon the glasses. “Off we go,” she sang, “into the wild blue yonder, climbing high into the sky, dum, dum, dum. Down we dive spouting a flame from under, off with one hell-of-a-roar, roar, roar…”
People crowded around our end of the bar, listening to us, applauding. We finished with the air corps and started right in on the army. “Over hill, over dale, as we hit the dusty trail, and those caissons go marching along, dum, dum, dum… In and out, hear them shout, counter march and right about, and those caissons go rolling along. For it’s hie, hie, hee, in the field artilll-a-reeeee…”
A man near me began playing the bass on a brandy glass. Another man drummed on the bar with a pair of ashtrays.
Doris broke into “Begin the Beguine.” “When they begin the beguine,” she sang, “it brings back a night of tropical splendor. It brings back die sound of music so te-en-de-rr. It brings back a memorreeeeee ever green.”
A woman in a green dress began dancing, swaying to our rhythm. My martini glasses shone in the light from the bar. As I struck them one by one the notes floated around me like bright translucent boats.
This was music! Not the stale order of the book and the metronome, not the stick and the German. Music was this wildness rising from the dark taffeta of Doris’s dress. This praise, this brilliance.
The soft delicious light, the smell of perfume and gin, the perfection of our artistry almost overwhelmed me, but I played bravely on.
Every now and then I would look up and see Doris smiling at me while she sang. Doris and I were one. And that too was the secret of music.
I do not know how long we played. Perhaps we played until my dinner was served. Perhaps we played for hours. Perhaps we are playing still.
“Oh, just let them begin the beguine, let them plaaaaay… Let the fire that was once a flame remain an ember. Let it burn like the long lost desire I only remember. When they begin, when they begin, when they begi-i-i-i-i-in the begui-i-i-i-ine…”
The Lover
Alice Walker
Alice Walker (b. 1944) is an American author, poet, feminist and activist. She is best known for the critically acclaimed novel The Color Purple, published in 1982, for which she won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Walker’s published works include seven novels, four collections of short stories, four children’s books and volumes of essays and poetry.
Her husband had wanted a child and so she gave him one as a gift, because she liked her husband and admired him greatly. Still, it had taken a lot out of her, especially in the area of sexual response. She had never been particularly passionate with him, not even during the early years of their marriage; it was more a matter of being sexually comfortable. After the birth of the child she simply never thought of him sexually at all. She supposed their marriage was better than most, even so. He was a teacher at a University near their home in the Midwest and cared about his students – which endeared him to her, who had had so many uncaring teachers; and toward her own work, which was poetry (that she set very successfully to jazz), he showed the utmost understanding and respect.
She was away for two months at an artists’ colony in New England and that is where she met Ellis, whom she immediately dubbed, once she had got over thinking he resembled (with his top lip slightly raised over his right eye-tooth when he smiled) a wolf, “The Lover.” They met one evening before dinner as she was busy ignoring the pompous bullshit of a fellow black poet, a man many years older than she who had no concept of other people’s impatience. He had been rambling on about himself for over an hour and she had at first respectfully listened because she was the kind of person whose adult behavior – in a situation like this – reflected her childhood instruction; and she was instructed as a child, to be polite.
She was always getting herself stuck in one-sided conversations of this sort because she was – the people who talked to her seemed to think – an excellent listener. She was, up to a point. She was genuinely interested in older artists in particular and would sit, entranced, as they spun out their tales of art and lust (the gossip, though old, was delicious!) of forty years ago.
But there had been only a few of these artists whose tales she had listened to until the end. For as soon as a note of bragging entered into the conversation – a famous name dropped here, an expensive Paris restaurant’s menu dropped there, and especially the names of the old artist’s neglected books and on what occasion the wretched creature had insulted this or that weasel of a white person – her mind began to turn about upon itself until it rolled out some of her own thoughts to take the place of the trash that was coming in.
And so it was on that evening before dinner. The old poet – whose work was exceedingly mediocre, and whose only attractions, as far as she was concerned, were his age and his rather bitter wit – fastened his black, bloodshot eyes upon her (in which she read desperation and a prayer of unstrenuous seduction) and held her to a close attention to his words. Except that she had perfected the trick – as had many of her contemporaries who hated to be rude and who, also, had a strong sense of self-preservation (because the old poet, though, she thought, approaching senility, was yet a powerful figure in black literary circles and thought nothing of using his considerable influence to thwart the careers of younger talents) – of keeping her face quite animated and turned full onto the speaker, while inside her head she could be trying out the shades of paint with which to improve the lighting of her house. In fact, so intense did her concentration appear, it seemed she read the speaker’s lips.
Ellis, who would be her lover, had come into the room and sat down on a chair by the fire. For although it was the middle of summer, a fire was needed against the chilly New England evenings.
“Have you been waiting long?” he asked.
And it suddenly occurred to her that indeed she had.
“But of course,” she answered absently, noting the crooked smile that reminded her of a snarling, though not disagreeable, wolf – and turned back just as the old poet jealously reached out his hand to draw her attention to the, for him, hilarious ending of his story. She laughed and slapped her knee, a gesture of such fraudulent folksiness that she was soon laughing in earnest. Catching Ellis’s eye as she thus amused herself she noticed therein a particular gleam that she instantly recognized.
“My lover,” she thought, noticing for the first time his head of blue-black curls, his eyes as brown as the Mississippi, his skin that was not as successfully tanned as it might have been but which would definitely do. He was thin and tall, with practically no hips in the beige twill jeans he wore.
At dinner they sat together, looking out at the blue New England mountains in the distance, as the sun left tracings of orange and pink against the pale blue sky. He had heard she’d won some sort of prize – a prestigious one – for her “jazzed-up” poetry, and the way he said it made her glance critically at his long fingers wrapped around his wine glass. She wondered if they would be as sensitive on her skin as they looked. She had never heard of him, though she did not say so, probably because he had already said it for her. He talked a good deal – easily and early – about himself, and she was quite relaxed – even entertained – in her listener’s role.
He wondered what, if anything, younger poets like herself had to say, since he was of the opinion that not much was learned about life until the middle years. He was in his forties. Of course he didn’t look it, but he was much older than she, he said, and the reason that he was not better known was because he could not find a publisher for his two novels (still, by the way, unpublished – in case she knew publishers) or for his poetry, which a
n acquaintance of his had compared to something or other by Montaigne.
“You’re lovely,” he said into the brief silence.
“And you seem bright,” she automatically replied.
She had blocked him out since his mention of the two unpublished novels. By the time he began complaining about the preferential treatment publishers now gave minorities and women she was on the point of yawning or gazing idly about the room. But she did not do either for a very simple reason: when she had first seen him she had thought – after the wolf thing – “my lover,” and had liked, deep down inside, the illicit sound of it. She had never had a lover; he would be her first. Afterwards, she would be truly a woman of her time. She also responded to his curly hair and slim, almost nonexistent hips, in a surprisingly passionate way.
She was a woman who, after many tribulations in her life, few of which she ever discussed even with close friends, had reached the point of being generally pleased with herself. This self-acceptance was expressed in her eyes, which were large, dark and clear and which, more often than not, seemed predisposed to smile. Though not tall, her carriage gave the illusion of height, as did her carefully selected tall sandals and her naturally tall hair, which stood in an elegant black afro with exactly seven strands of silver hair – of which she was very proud (she was just thirty-one) – shining across the top. She wore long richly colored skirts that – when she walked – parted without warning along the side, and exposed a flash of her creamy brown thigh, and legs that were curvaceous and strong. If she came late to the dining room and stood in the doorway a moment longer than necessary – looking about for a place to sit after she had her tray – for that moment the noise from the cutlery already in use was still.
What others minded at the Colony – whether too many frogs in the frog pond (which was used for swimming) or not enough wine with the veal (there was talk of cutting out wine with meals altogether, and thereby ending a fine old Colony tradition!) – she did not seem to mind. She seemed open, bright, occasionally preoccupied, but always ready with an appreciative ear, or at times a humorous, if outdated joke of her own (which she nevertheless told with gusto and found funny herself, because she would laugh and laugh at it, regardless of what her listeners did). She seemed never to strain over her work, and literally never complained about its progress – or lack thereof. It was as if she worked only for herself, for her own enjoyment (or salvation) and was – whether working or simply thinking of working – calm about it.
The Story: Love, Loss and the Lives of Women: 100 Great Short Stories Page 17