by Suzy Vitello
Engage, Lizbeth!
But, just as I’m about to start, Jewellee’s red lips and the sound of her cloying, fake voice punctures my concentration. She and Cory are no doubt making out right this minute. I slam my hand down on the keys, and then my other hand. Frankenstein music reverberates off the cold, concrete walls. What’s the use? This piano is part of my old life.
I look around the boxlike space. The smooth granite countertops, the impeccable décor. Every painting hung level. Coasters are placed carefully on the coffee table, even though there’s nobody here to set down a glass. No cobwebs. No mouse droppings. No cat licking feces from its fur.
The piano tuned perfectly.
Mom worried that I was too obsessed with getting the notes just right, sometimes sitting on the bench for three hours straight until the tips of my fingers went numb.
Thinking about Mom, how angry I am with her, I pound out “Für Elise.” How could she just leave me like this? She wept that last morning, telling me that when it came to raising me, she had to admit defeat. She’d failed, she sobbed, botched it—this motherhood thing. Motherhood thing? What was she, a goat? And am I a pain-in-the-ass kid who needs to be removed in order to keep things going with production?
I slam my fingers through “Reuben and Rachel.” “Ta-ra-ra Boom-der-e.” “Pomp and Circumstance.” My entire recital in one fell swoop. And after that, I keep going, like an insane Tchaikovsky, sweat dripping from my forehead, my crazy, patchy hair bouncing off of my head in the reflection in the darkened window glass. Music will always be mine. Even if I suck at producing it, it won’t leave—can’t leave.
I can control this. If I miss a note, I start again. Every time I play a sharp instead of a flat, when my finger hits a crack, causing two keys instead of one to sound out, I make myself play the piece three more times with perfection, or another three will be added. On and on and on I play until eventually, I feel the keys beneath my cheek.
I awake to the sound of my father’s voice. Dad: distressed, tired, relieved. It’s funny how all of that can come through in one micro-sentence. “Liz, thank God.”
I blink my eyes open and realize that it’s no longer night; my cheek is resting in a small puddle of saliva. I look up at Dad but keep my face against the keys, wondering if my neck is paralyzed now. Dad has Cory’s trench coat draped over his arm. His face is multi-colored, the blood in his cheeks lipstick red. Jewellee lipstick red. He looks even more rumpled than the coat.
“I don’t feel very well,” I say, slowly working my head up off the piano.
Dad’s eyes are pink and puffy. “Really?” he says. “Well, that’s too bad. I feel like a million bucks.” He sits down next to me, on the glistening bench.
I put my arm around his shoulder. “I didn’t mean to worry you.”
Dad stares at the puddle of drool on the piano. “Uh-oh.”
I slop the cuff of my sleeve over my spit. “On a scale of one to ten? How mad are you at me?”
“I think we need to go up to twelve,” Dad says, and he reaches down over my fingers and guides them to the middle C.
I look at him. He’s serious.
“You missed the performance,” I say. “They gave me an ovation and everything.”
Dad smiles. “One more encore for your old man?”
My neck all the way down to elbows ache like they’ve been used as a crowbar all night. I shake my head.
“C’mon, Princess. A little Chopin? ‘Chopsticks’? ‘Carry Me Back to Old Virginny’?”
My fingers have calloused overnight. My scraped-up hand throbs. I sigh, say, “I will if you will.”
Dad sets my coat down on the floor beside us. His knuckles facing him, he weaves his fingers together and his joints crack as he stretches out. He sits up straight, as though a master has a baton at his back, clears his throat, and then he begins.
My father’s hands, the stubby mechanic’s fingers, discolored with motor oil at the nail beds, they fly over the keys and scale up and down the length of the piano. And then, as if he’s reading my mind, he launches into Pachelbel. The high notes with his right hand way up the keyboard while with his left he keeps the bass line, ostinato, steady, a predictable two-bar line. I could never do that.
I am absolutely mesmerized as the air fills with music. Dad’s face is completely at ease—no tension around his jaw. Effortless. He finishes the canon and then plays something bigger. Haydn, maybe. Or Schubert. His hands crisscross and uncross up and down the keys, and still his face is calm, his eyebrows slightly raised, no hunch at all in his shoulders. He is so good. And this wasn’t even his primary instrument. If I were half as good at anything, I’d never stop loving it. How could he have just up and quit?
I sit beside my father in awe. His eyes are closed and he begins to sway his head softly. I’ve never seen him like this. And then, at last, he plays his final chords and rests those bulky, hairy-knuckled hands at the edge of the ivories. Open-eyed and stock still, he stares ahead through the raised top of the vast instrument while I beat my hands together loud as a snare.
“Bravo!” I shout into the suddenly quiet room. My voice bounces back at me, engaged, happy. The sound so foreign. It’s really me.
Outside, it’s a bright, sunny morning and my eyes are mole eyes, blinking and fuzzy, the trench coat and all its secrets folded over my arm. I follow behind Dad to the very car he loaned us last night, parked halfway on a curb in front of a loading zone with the bright yellow craft paper of a parking ticket flapping out from behind a windshield wiper.
“Great,” Dad says. “Two citations in twenty-four hours.”
Two?
He snatches the ticket and we climb into the front seats of the Volvo and start our long wind back up the hill to Willow Creek. Dad’s hands still one on top of the other on the steering wheel, a replica of his piano posture, crisscross, uncross.
Silence in the car.
And then, finally, a mile from the gravel drive, he says to me, “When you were born, Liz, I finally understood what it meant—that phrase ‘I’d take a bullet for her.’”
The numb of me, how I’d felt like nothing last night, I didn’t want to let that go. But the sound of my Bravo! and the way it had just forced itself up and out of me begged for me to hear it again. Even now.
My father’s eyes are fully on the road, not one bit looking at me, and he says, “The only real thing in my life, the only thing that will never change is that I’m your father.”
My stomach growls loudly. A lump of something like a tumor grows in my throat. Pressure in my sinuses. I’m going to sneeze, like I do when feeling pushes its way into my nose. I’m afraid to, but I do it anyway. Ask, “Where’s Cory?”
Dad balls up his crisscrossed hands when I say Cory. “Minor in possession,” he says. “The party he was at was busted. I was ready to kill him, but all he kept asking was if we found you.”
“He got arrested?”
Dad finally glances my way. “Cited. You surprised?”
“I need my meds.”
Dad sighs a big sigh and now I’m wondering how much he knows about the night before. What did Cory tell him? But under that wondering, I hold on to the tiniest, tiniest light and replay the words: All he kept asking was if we found you.
Chapter Twenty-four
By the time Papa returned from his travels, the entire household was in an uproar. The scandal of Count Sebastian (and the lies that were spread about the two of us) had reached as far as Vienna.
Needless to say, this caused my ever-sour sister to become sourer yet. One could hear her laments in the hall replacing her faulty French recitations. “It is not enough that Sisi brings shame on the House of Wittelsbach with her boyish pranks and unladylike behavior; now she’s set upon ruining my chances to become Empress by behaving like an outright tart!”
Mummi was beside herself. She’d locked my journal in her curio cabinet and was in consultation with the baroness as to
what had to be done. For once, however, my governess was not in agreement with the excruciating consequences Mummi suggested.
“I should burn this unholy diary, these nasty poems,” Mummi muttered.
Wilhelmine responded, “You must share them with Duke Max. It is, after all, his duty to decide how to punish his daughter.”
I, meanwhile, had been consigned to the nursery. It felt as though a wicked witch had walled me up in a turret. My meals were brought on a tray. I was disallowed the fresh air of the garden, even though the warmth of summer surrounded us now.
“For your own protection,” Mummi claimed.
My darling, Count Sebastian, was banished from the Herzog; I had no official bodyguard.
At night I wept into my pillows, underneath which I had hidden the only gift from my true love—the severed fox brush of long ago. At morning’s light I faced an entire day as a prisoner—both in body and spirit. The days passed slowly. I stopped brushing my hair or caring about the yellow condition of my teeth. I was only fifteen and already turning into a wretch.
At last, Papa returned, and my heart held the merest flicker of hope. He might listen to reason. After all, Count Sebastian had done nothing wrong.
But hope was dashed the moment I heard his thunderous voice. He had, in fact, heard of the scandal as far as the Black Forest, where a beggar woman approached him for alms in exchange for the news. “Your lovely girl has been raped by your very own privy,” this crone apparently told him.
“I’ll kill him!” shrieked Papa. For it was one thing to commit the sin of wanton lust oneself; it was another to have one’s daughter violated.
At this horrible twist of truth I could not remain unheard. When Papa burst into my room and flung my journal upon my bed, screaming rage-filled words at me, I screamed back. “How dare you question my honor, Papa! There has been no violation whatsoever.”
“I saw with my own eyes what you wrote in your book. That bastard has turned you into a whore.”
I pulled apart the cover of my journal and read aloud a line:
I send to you, my dear love,
The moon as a whisperer.
“This verse is not any different than something Heine would write. The poet you pretend to revere. It is my voice, not my body on this page. I remain chaste as the day I was born.”
Papa paced the room. “He must go. For if he does not leave Munich, he must die. Count Sebastian must die.”
Papa stormed from my room, every muscle in his gait tense with fury. Why, oh why, would he not listen to reason? Why would he not believe me? I threw myself upon my bed and sobbed for the rest of the day.
Finally, darkness replaced the summer sun through my window, and I arose, my journal in hand. I would hide it. I had my own locked box buried beneath my dainties in my chest of drawers. They might take my love from me, but they could not have my voice. It was then that the words of the faerie, of Lola, echoed in my ears. Virtue. Vision. Voice.
My virtue had been sullied. My vision was blurred with the force of tears I could not quell. But in the very pages of my book, there dwelt my voice. Lola, I thought. Lola Montez, come to me. Tell me what to do.
And as I opened the drawer of my credenza, there they were. The white gloves from so many months past. I peeled them up from their tucked place in the drawer and walked over to my window to consider them by the moon’s very light. Silky, slender, magic. So soft that I was moved to bring them to my cheek—which felt bruised from tears.
If you find your virtue in jeopardy, you may toss one of the gloves from your bedroom window, and I will come.
With all my might, I cranked the heavy latch upon the one window that would open. I kissed a glove and flung it out into the night. Aloud this time, I beseeched the faerie that Amalie and Little Ludwig had warned me not to entertain. Perhaps they’d been mistaken to cast Lola in such an evil light. Perhaps, like me, she was merely misunderstood and falsely accused?
“Lola,” I whispered, “help return my true love to me.”
A faint breeze, as often accompanies a thunderstorm, blew in the window and chilled my very bones. On this breeze a small whisper, an echo of a voice, came my way. Your voice has been heard. Your voice has been answered. Look!
My voice?
I ran to my drawers and wrestled my diary from its secret box, shifting the pages and scanning for a message. My last entry had been mean-spirited:
Oh my sister, how you glint and shine
Getting ready for your Valentine
Little do you know that your life will turn sour
Sitting in your ivory tower.
I turned the page to write the beginning of a remorseful passage, embarrassed that I had ridiculed Nené. But there, in the fancy script of a memorial scroll, were these words:
Your virtue has abandoned you
Your vision is obscured
If you wish to spend your life in love,
Let not your voice go unheard.
The ink was as red as the deepest blood, and I was afraid to touch my finger to it, lest the blood-red stain me as a sinner. But that was not all. Below the poem, in the hand of someone far more delicate, was this:
Meet me on the morrow, at the time and place
Where you once had blood marked upon your face.
I did not need the anonymous missive to bear a signature. I knew who the author was. And if I had any doubt at all, my suspicions were confirmed once I noticed, underneath my pillow, next to my token fox brush, in its stead lay the very glove I’d tossed.
I had a hard time waiting until after breakfast to set off beyond the English Garden in search of Lola Montez. I would have to scale the oak branches that tickled my window—an activity I had enjoyed for many years with my brother Gackl—for there was no sneaking out the front door of the Herzog. I would feign a stomach ailment. After so many years studying Baroness Wilhelmine’s autointoxication spells, I would have no trouble.
Once my breakfast tray was cleared and Mummi stepped in to admonish me anew, I roared in phantom pain. So fantastic was my deceit, I almost believed that I did, indeed, have a case of poisoned bowels.
“Well, all right, Sisi,” huffed Mummi. “Lie in your bed and contemplate your sins. We will speak of this later in the day.”
With that she tore out of my room, the spaniels at her skirts, and I flew from my bed, donned a mourning cape that served as a disguise, and made ready to meet my fate.
The grace and joy in my limbs surprised me as I climbed out my window, onto the tree branch and into the garden. In the weeks I’d been sequestered, the linden trees had leafed out, their heart-shaped leaves so sanguine, fluttering in the gentle breeze. I could hear the horses whinnying in the far off, and this warmed me like no other sound. I was meant for the out-of-doors, the fresh air and the grass. Even in my high boots I could run faster than any of my brothers, and I did so now, in defiance of everyone and everything that conspired to turn me into a fat old goose of a lady.
Through the woods I galloped, over the walls and brush, as if I were a horse myself. I ran faster and faster, the air catching the hood of my cape and launching it backward. So much freedom in all of this. Whatever lay ahead, it mattered not, for in this very moment I felt so alive.
Before I knew it, I’d reached the fateful clearing. A great horizon lay before me, and in that expanse was the very place the vixen had left the world and its viscera had been written upon my cheek. And beside that hard, flat piece of granite in the clearing was my faerie.
I slowed to a walk, my heart beating behind my locket. Lola kept still and squatted beside the rock, her head tucked down and her arms folded over her. She was like a great bird, roosting there as though it were still dark, and it occurred to me that I had not seen her in the daylight before. She seemed to need to shield her eyes, and as I approached I could see she wore a black veil, as if she, too, were mourning some death of the heart.
As I came close, she unwound her arms and crooked a finger at me. “Child,” she whispered in a hoarse gasp. “You bad, bad child.”
Behind her veil I saw nothing of the seductress in the Gallery of Beauties painting. I saw not those majestic deep blue eyes from that night at the Residenz. She had aged in these months as though fifty years had passed. She was a crone, this witch, and her voice belied her advanced age. I recoiled, and she hissed.
“What? What are you thinking, Elisabeth Wittelsbach, you wicked, careless girl? Did you expect sweets and smiles?”
“Mercy,” I said, curtseying in front of this dark shape, this hissing viper. “Please tell me what to do in order to right this terrible wrong.”
She struck out at me, her whole body stabbing toward me like a spear. I flinched but held my ground. This was my punishment, and I would take it. I would do the penance.
“You would like things as they were, yes?” she screeched.
I nodded.
“I bet you would, you self-centered duchess. You, who need only be born in order to receive graces undeserved.”
It was not unfair what Lola was saying. I knew I was spoiled. My father’s bastard daughters, though they had his love, would never live in his palace or marry an emperor or a king, or even a lowly count. “Tell me what I need to do.”
“Let me see your necklace,” Lola commanded, outstretching a veiny hand.
I drew the locket from my cape but kept it round my neck.