“Your ancestor does seem to have been a trifle eccentric,” I said. “But it was a romantic and morbid age.”
His large, bright eyes dwelt on my face. “You are very understanding,” he murmured, his voice thrilling in my ear.
“Not at all,” I said briskly. “Is there more to the story?”
He seemed to collect himself. “Very little of substance. Yet, a piano with such a history is likely to attract rumors as a corpse attracts worms. Most pertinent of these is that, under certain circumstances, it plays in sympathy with its mate.”
“And do you believe in such rumors?
“I believe in everything,” Roderick Hawthorne said. Shrugging away his melancholy, he turned a hospitable smile on me. “As long as you are here, will you take a glass of sherry, and hear me play?”
It was clear from his nervous hands, his febrile eye, the urgent note in his plangent voice, that Roderick Hawthorne was utterly convinced that the music I was hearing was the result of a species of supernatural possession. I myself place little credence in ghosts and hauntings, yet the charms of his person and his voice were such that I accepted both sherry and invitation and sat upon the sofa while he laid his beautiful pale hands upon the red piano’s ebony keys and began to play.
How shall I describe Roderick Hawthorne’s playing? I am, as I have said, a woman whose passions are primarily intellectual, whose reason is better developed than her emotions. My host’s music delved into the unplumbed depths of my psyche and brought up strange jewels. The nut-sweet sherry blended with salt tears as I wept unashamedly, drunk on music and the deep rumble of my host, humming as he played.
Afterwards, we sat in the parlor with warm lamplight playing across Chinese urns and Renaissances bronzes and talked of a subject precious to us both: the wide range of humanity’s response to the ineluctable fact of death. By the time I left him, long after midnight, I was well on my way to a state I had never before experienced and was hardly able to identify. I was infatuated.
In taking leave of me, Roderick proposed that I call upon him soon. “I have no telephone,” he said. “Nor do I often leave my house. I would not like to think that my eccentricity might prevent the deepening of a promising friendship.”
Even in the face of such clear encouragement, I waited almost a week before calling on him again. Out of his presence, I found myself as disquieted by his oddities as charmed by his beauty. I was reasonably sure that the use of gas for household lighting was against all current city building codes. And his superstitious belief in the haunted bonds between our twin pianos and the supernatural origin of the sounds I heard, combined with the fact that he himself was (I presumed) recently widowed and not yet recovered from his loss, made me reluctant to further the acquaintance. Still, there was his playing, and the intoxication of conversation with one whose obsessions so perfectly complemented my own. And there was my piano, singing softly at the edge of my hearing in the deep of the night, reminding me of the emotions I had experienced hearing him play its mate, and could experience again, if only I should take the trouble to go next door.
Unable at last to resist any longer, I put aside my reservations, rang the rusty bell, and saw again his large, mild eyes, his sweet mouth nested like a baby bird in the riot of his beard, felt his cold, smooth hand press my own, heard his voice like an oboe welcoming me, questioning me, talking, talking, talking with delight of all the things that were closest to my heart.
On this second visit, it seemed to me that the house was cleaner than it had been when I’d first seen it—the hangings brighter, the air clearer. The change was most apparent in the music room, where the piano gleamed a deep crimson and candlelight sparkled off the new-polished glass of the gallery of pictures. When Roderick began to play, I rose from the sofa to examine them.
They were sketches, in pencil or charcoal, of a female figure surrounded by shadowed and threatening shapes. Sometimes she fled across a gothic landscape; more often she sat in intricately rendered interiors that I recognized at once as my host’s parlor and music room, alone save for demonic shapes that menaced her from the shadows. The figure bore only the faintest resemblance to an actual woman, being slender to the point of emaciation, overburdened with dark curly hair inclined to dishevelment, and possessed of eyes stretched in an extremity of terror. It was not until I came upon a head and shoulders portrait, that I realized, with a feeling of considerable shock, that the face gazing out so anxiously from the gilded frame was, when seen in relative repose, very like mine. Had I allowed my hair to grow out of the neat crop I had adopted to tame its natural wildness, lost twenty pounds or so, and assumed clothing over a century out of fashion, there would have been no appreciable difference between us.
Behind me, the music modulated into a melancholy mode. “The first Mrs. Hawthorne,” Roderick said. “Drawn not long before her death, by her husband. The others were drawn later. He became obsessed by the idea that demons had sucked the life from her. There are boxes full of such sketches in the attic.”
“They seem a very gloomy subject for a music room,” I commented.
“They have always been here,” he said simply. “I do not choose to move them.”
“And your own wife,” I asked diffidently. “Have you any pictures of her?”
Under Roderick’s long, pale fingers, the ebony keys of the red piano danced and flickered in an unquiet Mazurka. “My wife,” he said precisely, “died some while ago. She, too, was pale, with dark eyes and dark hair. Isabella Lorenzo, who last owned your stable, was of similar coloring. So are you.”
For a moment, I was both frightened and repelled by the intensity of his gaze over the crimson-stained music stand, the throb and tremor of his beautiful voice. I felt that I had intruded unpardonably upon a grief too terrible and private for my eyes. Embarrassed almost beyond bearing, I was on the point of quitting his music room and his house, never to return. But then he smiled, and the tune beneath his fingers grew bright and gay and light. “But all that is past now, lovely Arantxa,” he said softly, “and has nothing to do with you and me.”
Foolishly, I believed him.
The subject of Roderick’s lost wife did not arise again between us, as fearful to me as it must have been painful to him. Nor did I learn anything more of the history of the first Mrs. Hawthorne, my long dead doppelganger. These shadows on his past did nothing to decrease my fascination with him, which only grew more intense as the year faded toward winter.
Over the next weeks, I came by insensible degrees to spend almost every evening in his company. I always went to him; he would not venture even so far from his house as my adjacent stable. No stranger to the terrors that acute agoraphobia can visit on a sensitive spirit, I did not press him, but returned his hospitality by providing our nightly dinners. An unenthusiastic cook, I provided take-out from one of the local restaurants, but I will never forget the first time I descended to his kitchen in search of a teapot and hot water, only to discover that the stove was wood-fed, the water pumped by hand into the sink, and the milk kept in an icebox chilled by an actual block of ice.
“It has always been that way,” he said when I came up again, defeated by the primitive technology. “I do not choose to change it.”
On subsequent visits, I found the stove had been lit and water pumped ready in the kettle for our nightly cup of tea. Indeed, Roderick showed himself unfailingly solicitous of my comfort. When I complained that I was too tired, on returning home late each night, to keep up with my work, he gave me the room across the hall from the music room as a study. There I would sit, lapped in fur and velvet against the chill, grading papers by gaslight while the glorious waves of Roderick’s music washed over my senses. Often, emotion so overcame me that I would have granted him whatever he might ask, even to those intimacies I could hardly bring myself to contemplate. But every night, when the great clock at the foot of the steps chimed midnight, he would lower the keyboard cover, wish me goodnight, and escort me to the door.
I soon became aware of an inconvenient lack of energy. At first I blamed my growing enervation on too little sleep and the extreme stimulation of Roderick’s conversation and music. I confided my state to Roderick, who insisted that I leave at eleven, so that I might retire earlier. “For now that I’ve found you, Arantxa, I cannot do without you. I might have sunk into melancholy altogether, and my house with me, had it not been for you.”
Indeed, both Roderick and his house had improved since I’d first seen them. Someone had cleaned and dusted, washed and polished everything to the well-cared-for glow that bespeaks a truly dedicated housekeeper. When I asked where he’d unearthed such a jewel, he smiled and turned the subject. I got more sleep, and for a time, felt a little better. But my classes remained a struggle to prepare and my students a constant irritation.
Early in the spring semester, my department chair called me into his office. He was concerned about my health, he said. I seemed languid, forgetful of meetings and deadlines. There had been complaints. It was all very troubling. To silence him, I made an appointment with a doctor at the University Health Services, who subjected me to a series of annoying and expensive tests, and in the end confessed himself no wiser than when he started. He diagnosed me with non-typical chronic fatigue, and prescribed a stimulant.
Roderick laughed when he heard this diagnosis. “Chronic fatigue? Nonsense. You possess more vitality than any woman I have known.” He took my hand and raised it to his lips. “Dear Arantxa,” he murmured, his breath warm on my knuckles. “So strong, so utterly alive. You must know that I adore you. Will you marry me?”
My heart stuttered in my breast with fear or passion—I hardly knew which. His bright and fixed gaze filled my mind and my senses, leaving room for nothing else. Words of acceptance trembled on my lips, but were checked at the last moment by inborn caution.
“You overwhelm me, Roderick,” I said shakily. “I have never thought of marriage. You must give me time to consider your proposal.”
Releasing my hand, Roderick shrank back into his chair. “You do not love me as I love you,” he said, his oboe-like voice clouded with disappointment.
I leaned forward, and for the first time, touched his softly curling beard. “I might,” I said truthfully. “I don’t know. I need to think what to do.”
He nodded, his beard sliding under my fingers. “Then you shall think. But please—think quickly.”
That night, he played the red piano with unsurpassed passion. I lay on the music room sofa overwhelmed with sound, my arm flung over my eyes to hide my slow, helpless tears. Of course I loved him. I had never found anyone who listened to me as he did, looked at me with such hunger. Why then did I hesitate? In my extreme perturbation, I could hardly find the energy to rise from the sofa, and was forced to accept his arm to support me to the door. “Are you well?” he asked anxiously. “Shall I help you home?”
Knowing what the offer must have cost him, I was deeply moved. “My goodness,” I said, forcing a light tone through my deadly fatigue. “Do I look that bad? No, I’ll be fine by myself.”
“I will see you tomorrow, then,” he said, and for the first time, laid his lips against mine. His kiss, both passionate and cold, excited my nerves, lending me the strength to traverse the short distance to my own door.
I slept fitfully that night. Whenever I fell asleep, I was haunted by a groaning, as of pain unbearable, echoing up the spiral stairs. I would wake with a start and lie quivering in the darkness, ears straining to hear past the beating of my heart. The next day passed in a kind of stupor. I could barely totter down to the kitchen to boil water for tea and recruit faltering nature with soup and toast. By evening, I was simultaneously exhausted and restless beyond bearing. Which was, perhaps, why I found myself sitting on the piano bench.
I had not come near the piano in some time. As I sat before it, I noticed that the little carved faces were familiar. I knew that domed brow, that coolly sensual mouth in its nest of hyacinthine curls. My exhaustion was such that I saw nothing odd in finding Roderick’s visage carved upon his ancestor’s piano. It only inspired in me a desire to touch him, speak to him, draw comfort from him. Impulsively, I raised the cover, lifted my hands to the ebony keys and ran my fingers from treble to bass. If I was far too weak to drag myself to him, perhaps I could touch him through our linked instruments.
Tentatively, I embarked upon a simple song I had learned as a girl. Though I stumbled at first, sense memory soon took over. My fingers began to move as of their own accord, progressing from the song into a nocturne, and then into improvisation. As I played, I forgot my fatigue, my undone work, even Roderick and his proposal. The music I made lifted me into a realm of beautiful abstraction, spirit without substance, clean and pure and bright. When at last I stopped playing, it was a little after midnight. Strangely, I felt better—tired certainly, but not exhausted. My mind was clearer than it had been for months.
That night I slept soundly, never stirring until early afternoon, when I rose well-rested and able to eat a proper meal and do some real work. When I looked up from my papers at last, it was far too late to go to Roderick’s. Wanting to recapture that feeling of perfect communion, I sat down once again at the red piano, and rose some hours later, strong, refreshed, and as sure as I could be that I loved Roderick Hawthorne and wanted to be his wife.
The next afternoon, I dressed myself with more than usual care. I brushed out my hair, which had grown during my illness, into a dark cloud that made my face more delicate and white in contrast. I put on a dress I had not worn since college—black velvet cut tight to my hips, the skirt full and sweeping below. I clasped my mother’s pearls around my neck, and thus bedecked, once again rang the bell of Hawthorne House.
No sooner had my hand fallen from the pull than the door opened on a haggard figure I hardly recognized. Roderick Hawthorne’s hair was uncombed, his collar unbuttoned, his cheeks gaunt and his eyes reddened. “Arantxa!” he exclaimed. “I have not slept or eaten in two days, waiting for your answer, fearing what it must be when you did not return.”
My heart contracted with pity. “Oh, my dear.” He smiled at the endearment, the first I’d ever used. “I could not come. I was so tired. And I did need to think.”
“My poor angel. Of course. I’m glad you’re better. And you are here now. It is yes, isn’t it? Your answer?”
Something in his voice—satisfaction? Triumph?—stifled my agreement on my lips. I smiled, but said nothing.
Dinner was a depressing meal. The dining room was cold, the fire sullen and low, the food indifferent. Both of us avoided the subject most pressingly on our minds, every other topic of conversation an unexpected minefield of references to love or matrimony. At length, we rose from an unaccustomed silence.
“I will not plead for myself,” he said. “Perhaps you will let my music plead for me.” He took my hand; his was colder than ice. As we walked from the dining room to the music room, I noticed that the whole house was cold, neglected, dusty, as though none had swept or polished or built a fire there for weeks rather than the two days I’d been absent. As Roderick hurried me up the stairs, fear grew in my breast. On the threshold of the music room, I hesitated, searching for some way to excuse myself from a situation grown suddenly intolerable, but Roderick’s cold hand grasped mine more tightly, drawing me inexorably toward the red piano and down onto the bench beside him.
The carved faces peered at me from the music stand. It was the first time I had seen them close up, but I was not astonished to discover that they were as like the first Mrs. Hawthorne, like me, as the faces on my piano were like Roderick. In a flash, I understood everything. It utterly defied rational belief, but I could not afford the luxury of disbelief. My very life depended on acting quickly.
I took a deep, calming breath and smiled deliberately into his face. Roderick Hawthorne smiled back, predatory as a wolf, then released me, rubbed his long hands together, and flexed his fingers. He disposed them gently on the ebony k
eys, and prepared to play me to utter dissolution.
Before he could sound a single note, I seized the heavy wooden cover and slammed it shut on his fingers with all my force.
He screamed like a wild animal, a scream with a snarl in it, rage and pain mingled. Springing to my feet, I ran from the music room, snatching up my cumbersome skirts. Weak and in pain, he was still stronger than I, infinitely older and wise in the terrible sorcery that had animated him so far beyond his natural span of years. If I fell into his hands, I knew I could not escape him a second time. I ran headlong down the stairs, resisting the impulse to look behind me, knowing he must follow me, clumsy with pain, utterly determined to catch me and drain me of my strength and my life.
Tearing open the door, I stumbled into the open air a step ahead of him, and down the stoop into the alley. I knew now that his life must be intimately intertwined with the house he had inhabited for so long. He might not be able to step over the threshold; then again, he might. I could not afford to take the chance.
In the light of a single lamp, my living room seemed calm and homelike. I clicked on the overhead, and there was the red piano, squatting beside the stair, oversized, over-decorated, garish, out of place among the beautiful simplicities of my collections.
A scream of rage at the end of the alley sent me flying to the box I kept under the stairs. Screwdriver, hammer, pliers, wire cutter—inadequate tools for the task ahead, but all I had at my disposal. I splintered the ebony keys and the music stand with the hammer. An inhuman howling came from the alley. I moved on to the carved faces on the legs and case and something heavy began to slam against my front door, causing it to quiver in the frame. Furiously I hammered at the carved wood, squinting against the splinters stinging my cheeks and chest.
With a great crack, the door burst inward. I looked up, and there was Roderick Hawthorne, framed in darkness, his face stark in the electric glare. If I had harbored any lingering doubts as to the uncanny nature of the night’s events, I did so no longer. His face was scored and bleeding, his beard ragged and clotted with gore, his eye a bloody ruin, his mouth swollen and misshapen. I glanced down at my hammer, half expecting to see it smeared with blood. In that moment of inattention, he sprang toward me, gabbling wildly, his beautiful voice raw and ruined, his beautiful hands bruised, swollen, bleeding, reaching for me, for the broken piano keys.
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