Dark Plums

by Maria Espinosa

  “My husband,” said Adrianne, reddening.

  The teacher pursed her thin lips together and flicked a piece of lint from her skirt. Wisps of white hair escaped from her chignon. Embarrassed that the teacher had mistaken Max for her father, Adrianne faltered over the Bach prelude she was beginning to play. “I’m not interested in your personal relationships,” said her teacher in a dry voice. “I want to see what you can do with the music.”

  Occasionally after this, Max and Adrianne would drive to Boston for a concert and spend the night in a hotel. Adrianne would listen to the performers with rapt concentration, as she tried to absorb all that she could.

  Music began to fill her brain and the pores of her body. During that long winter and after the snow melted as summer approached, there was little else to do but play the piano, cook and clean up meals, take walks in the woods, tidy the house, and keep Max company. Her weekly lessons became the high point of her life.

  Max did not like jazz, so she played mostly classical music. But she loved jazz, and at times she would play a Billie Holiday song or some classical blues, or something by Ellington or Miles Davis.

  “This jazz is discordant, strange to me,” Max would say.

  “More than Schoenberg?”

  “Ah, I do not like the Schoenberg either! When you finish with the jazz music, please play some beautiful Brahms.”

  She wrote to her mother that she was working as a waitress and gave only a post office box address.

  About once a month her mother responded with notes on monogrammed paper, in which she described her activities at work as well as various social activities, such as dinner parties or theater.

  Adrianne continued to improvise fictional accounts of her life for Elena, just as she had done when she was with Alfredo.

  Ever since the time with Gerald, Adrianne had tried to shield herself from her mother. Odd as it was that a physician in his late twenties should seek out an eighteen-year old girl simply for companionship, her mother had appeared to believe this was the case. Finally, one evening after she and Gerald had broken up, in despair Adrianne had confessed the truth. However, she had omitted the part about her pregnancy and abortion.

  “You will suffer the consequences,” said her mother in a cold tone, pushing down hysteria. “May God forgive you. If Gerald does not want to marry you, perhaps you ought to go away.”

  During the next two weeks, Adrianne made preparations for her departure for New York. Elena never again referred to what had happened, but everything unspoken seemed to roll into an intangible mass of shame and guilt inside Adrianne. Adrianne felt her mother’s condemnation, mingled with a strange, secret kind of satisfaction at her daughter’s suffering.

  It was then that Adrianne had gone to confession (again omitting the part about her pregnancy.) But the priest’s coldness echoed her mother’s.

  During their second winter, Adrianne and Max were invited to a Christmas party by a couple who lived nearby and who were potters. Among the guests was an actor from Boston. As he and Adrianne talked, a sexual current began to flow between them. Perceiving this, Max grumbled, taking her by the arm, and insisting that they leave the party.

  That night, as she watched Max undress, she was struck anew by the whiteness of his body, his large chest, his spindly legs. He stood a little swaybacked. She was Max’s prisoner, she thought angrily. She was still a prostitute really, giving her body to Max in exchange for all that he could offer, but not giving herself out of desire.

  Yet Max could caress her in such a way that he almost mesmerized her at times. “Ah, my angel,” he would murmur. “How happy you make me. I do not deserve such happiness. Never did I think would have such joy.”

  That night when they got into bed, his warm hands crept along her spine, kneaded her buttocks, and moved on to her vagina. On other occasions, when she felt more kindly towards him, she would let herself sink under the spell of his hands. Now she stiffened in resistance as she thought of the actor.

  However, out of a sense of obligation she reached down between Max’s legs. His penis was limp. Expertly, she massaged it until it came to life, and then she guided him inside her. While he thrust deeper into her, she watched them both from a point high above her body, as she used to long ago when she fucked strangers.

  Finally he climaxed. “Ah, is so good,” he sighed. She hurried to the bathroom to wipe off the semen, just as she had done in the past with tricks. Unable to sleep, she gazed at the moonlight shining through the curtains while he snored.

  A few days later she came down with the flu, and painful memories of her life in Manhattan began to obsess her. One night she dreamed that the gypsy, Ramón, was plunging a knife into her heart.

  Thoughts of all the men she’d been with tormented her. She loosened herself from Max’s sleeping grip, got up, went into the kitchen, flicked on the light, took out a carving knife from the rack on the wall, and stared at it.

  In his bare feet and robe, Max tottered in. “My angel, what you are doing?”

  He wrenched the knife away from her. It fell to the floor. She, too, fell down on the icy linoleum and sobbed. Tenderly, he held her and caressed the nape of her neck. “Tell me, what is it, my angel?”

  In bed again beneath the warm goose down, she whispered it all to him—or almost all. So that was how she had been living when she came to visit him in the beautiful white wool dress. That was how she had acquired her sexual skill!

  “Is all right, meine liebe.”

  “I’m not worthy of you, Max,” she sobbed. He held her in his arms, filled with the sense that they were both impure. He, too, had used her young body and spirit. For her, perhaps he was no more than another trick. Did she love him at all, or had she only been pretending all along?

  “I can leave if you want,” she sobbed. “I can go back to New York, or Texas, or anywhere.”

  “No,” he said emphatically. “I do not want that you leave.”

  For the next few days and nights they barely touched each other.

  One morning as she was practicing a Brahms piece that he particularly liked, she faltered, then broke down and lay her head on the piano keys and sobbed. At that moment something in him melted. All along he had suspected something like this. Yet he had hidden this suspicion from himself. Poor child! A bird with a broken wing.

  “It’s all right,” he said. He came over to her and held her, gazing full into her face.

  With a shock, she realized the truth of his compassion. He loved her. He accepted her with all her faults. He forgave her the past. And perhaps she could forgive herself.

  Music was a ray of light, a sunbeam on which she could float out of the darkness of her former world. Some classical music had almost unbearably sad passages. By not evading the sadness, she developed strength. She discovered parts of herself which had lain dormant.

  Through the long winter, while the sky and hills were white with snow, she played the piano for hours on end. The harmony she found in music began to weave its way subtly between their bodies when she and Max were in bed. She would drift off to sleep listening to music in her mind, and sometimes felt as if she had been practicing in her sleep.

  A spasm of coughing came over Max as he rocked in his oak chair. He should be smoking fewer cigars. Far away from the people he had known for so many years in his congregation, he was lonely. He missed the synagogue. Out here in the country there were none.

  Adrianne does not love me as she would a younger man, he thought. She is kind to me, as she would be to a grandfather. She is nearly younger than my kinder. He stubbed out his cigar. Ah, but he liked what she was playing now, a Schubert piece. She faltered on a melodic phrase, played it again and again until she got it right, and the repetition soothed him.

  Now she was going into an arpeggio allegre, and he followed it. He believed that she had the touch of a true musician.

  His bank account was dwindling. However, he had enough set aside in stocks and bonds so that they could live
comfortably on the interest. He must teach her something about finance, show her what securities he had and how to manage them, so that after he died she could live comfortably.

  He sensed that he was going to die soon. In dreams a voice told him he was already dead and in a kind of gray no-man’s land waiting for something. He was silent about his premonition because he did not want to frighten her.

  One February evening when Adrianne came back from a long walk in the woods, she was so cold that she decided to take a bath immediately. The house was quiet. She thought that Max was probably dozing. After she finished her bath, it was still unusually quiet. Disturbed, she went into his study and there she found him slumped over in his chair. He was not breathing, and his skin felt icy.

  “Max!” she cried.

  Silence.

  When she lifted his head, it felt heavy, and he was rigid. Terrified, she pushed her hands hard against his chest again and again with a rhythmical movement to start him breathing, but nothing happened. Then she thought of opening his mouth to blow into it, but she could not pry open his lips.

  Although she knew it was too late, she called an ambulance.

  The coroner determined that Max had died of a heart attack. Adrianne moved around the house barely conscious, at times heaving with sobs and crumpling to the floor, at other times curiously calm as though someone else were living out this scenario.

  She gazed at Max’s empty chair. His presence hovered over her and she could sense him with her, angry and questioning. “Meine liebchen, I did not want to die, not yet.”

  Chapter 36

  She telephoned Rabbi Zimmerman at the synagogue Max had attended in Manhattan, and two days later Max was buried in a Jewish cemetery in Queens.

  Adrianne viewed Max for the last time after he had been prepared for burial at a funeral home on West 93rd Street. Wrapped in a white shroud with a tallis over him, a faint look of disappointment seemed to spread over his face. The plain pine coffin was quickly closed by the people who had prepared the body, and it was draped with a black cloth. Adrianne placed red roses on the coffin and asked for more flowers.

  “It’s not the custom with a Jewish burial,” said the funeral director.

  The rabbi, who had come with Adrianne to oversee the last stages of the burial preparation, pinned a piece of black ribbon on her fox coat. His melancholy eyes sat deep in his pinched face.

  It was raining when the hearse and two shiny black limousines carrying mourners drove from the funeral home on West 93rd Street to the cemetery. Inside the limousine with Adrianne were the rabbi and his wife, who was a small, nervous woman with a dark beehive hairdo, Max’s friend Morris, and a white-haired couple.

  “Will you sit shiva?” asked the rabbi’s wife.

  “Who, her, a shikse?” said the old woman, looking at Adrianne with sharp eyes that contrasted with her deeply lined face.

  “What is sitting shiva?” Adrianne asked.

  The rabbi leaned forward and gently explained that when a Jew died, it was the custom for people in the immediate family to mourn for seven days, seated on a low bench, while neighbors and friends brought food. However, since Adrianne was not Jewish and lived far away in the country up in Vermont, this would not be expected of her.

  “But I want to sit shiva,” she said.

  “Mourning takes place inside the heart. You can burn a candle for seven days and nights. That is part of the ceremony. It will be enough.”

  They were driving through snarled traffic on the Long Island Expressway, past factories and then past miles of ugly row apartment buildings.

  Finally, they reached the cemetery and drove through its grilled gates and onto a narrow concrete roadway, past miles of tombstones. Long ago Max had paid for this burial plot. “Max, why did you have to die? I don’t want you here! I wish I had never even told the rabbi. I wish I had buried you in the Vermont hills,” Adrianne thought.

  The ground was muddy, with patches of dirty snow. Bare tree branches swayed in the wind. It was raining hard, with occasional wet flakes. Adrianne shivered. The hole where Max would lie had already been dug out and covered with a tarpaulin.

  Standing a few feet from the burial plot, the rabbi put up his umbrella to protect himself from the driving rain. He opened a prayer book and cleared his throat, then began to chant the kaddish.”

  “… Baruch dayan emei…. Blessed is the righteous judge,” he chanted. “Man is like a breath … his days are like a passing shadow….

  Thou dost sweep men away; they are like a dream, like grass, like grass which is renewed in the morning, in the morning it flourishes … in the evening it fades and withers…. Teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom … dust returns to the earth as it was, but the spirit returns to God who gave it …”

  Adrianne wept.

  The rabbi closed the prayer book, placed it under his arm, and said, “Max Gottlieb had a hard life.”

  Several women sighed, and the mourners all seemed to look at Adrianne as if she were the cause of his hardship. Wind tore at their clothing, and sleet was pelting down.

  “Max was persecuted by the Nazis. He lost his wife—his first wife—and his children in the Holocaust. He worked hard all his life, and he had little joy.”

  “But Max was happy with me, you bastards,” Adrianne thought. Her heart pounded and tears surfaced as her grief found expression in rage. The rabbi went on talking, but she no longer heard his words, submerged as she was in her emotions.

  Then she saw that they were preparing to lower the casket and that the edge of the tarpaulin was flapping in the wind. She became aware once again of the cold wind and rain blasting her face.

  The cantor’s wife, bundled in her heavy cloth coat, galoshes, and plastic rainhood, said, “Poor man,” with a glance at Adrianne, as if it were she who had killed him. Adrianne could imagine them gossiping afterwards. “He died making love. Her fault. She provoked him … after his money … young enough to be his granddaughter.”

  Standing there in the cold, their faces wet with sleet, they all seemed to look at her with hostility, as if to question whether she had brought Max happiness or sorrow. They looked at her silver fox coat as if she had stolen it. “Yes, I hustled for it,” she told them with silent fury. “Maybe I even screwed some of you. I’m certainly more desirable than your frumpy wives.”

  She was horrified by her thoughts. But they kept rising up.

  The rabbi kept on chanting, sometimes in English and sometimes in Hebrew. The others wailed a mournful melody in Hebrew. Adrianne rocked back and forth, as some of the others were doing. She sobbed uncontrollably as the gravediggers lowered the casket and flung earth over it with their shovels.

  Until now, she had not realized she cared for Max so deeply.

  A gust of wind blew her silk scarf away. She watched it roll along the ground and land in a puddle. No one went after it.

  The rain pelted down harder, and she shivered with cold.

  Who will hold me at night, she wondered. Max, I love you, my darling. I love you, I love you, but it is too late. Can you hear me? Can you hear me after death?

  An almost imperceptible current of wind, a touch like Max’s hand touched her throat. She sensed his presence. Meine liebchen, you will not lose me.

  Was this also an illusion? Like the old illusion that Alfredo loved her? She was scarcely aware any longer of the people around her, although she heard their chanting. Then the rabbi looked at her and said, “It’s over. Time to go now.”

  She wanted to fling herself over the grave, but again she seemed to hear Max say gently, “Don’t make a fool of yourself. You’ll only get wet and cold and come down with pneumonia. I know you love me, as I love you, eternally. Ah, if only I had been a young man when we met.” There was sadness in him even after death.

  Afterwards, the others bombarded her with questions and superficial expressions of sympathy.

  The next day she returned to their empty house in Vermont. Almost as s
oon as she had taken off her coat, she sat down at the piano and began to play the Brahms ballade Max had loved. The piano keys pressed down against her sorrow, and the beauty of the music soothed her. “This is for you, Max,” she murmured.

  “Meine liebchen,” whispered his ghost, who caressed her hair as softly as a cool draft.

  Without Max, who had sustained her, the prospect of staying here in the house was lonely and terrifying.

  She decided to go back to New York.

  Accordingly, she gave their landlord notice. She could no longer bear to be in this house without Max. Some of the furniture she sold to neighbors, and the rest she gave away to the Salvation Army. She returned the piano to the store from which they had leased it.

  When she could finally bring herself to go through Max’s papers, the securities he owned, the stocks and bonds were all confusing to her. Morris Kaplan said that Max had left everything to her, except for a small sum for his synagogue and another small sum for the State of Israel.

  “If you manage these funds carefully, you will have enough money to go to college while you live on the interest. He loved you and wanted to be sure you would not have financial worries.

  “I don’t know what to do with all this money.”

  “For the time being, leave the funds invested as they are. He invested wisely. There’s enough interest for you to live on. When you know more about finances, then you can think about shifting investments around.”

  “He was so kind. I can’t believe it. It’s hard for me to accept that he’s gone, and that he’s left me all this.”

  Morris blew his nose and patted her hand. “He was a kind man. Accept it, and thank God for your good luck.”

  Chapter 37

  On a sunny afternoon in April, Adrianne loaded her suitcases into the the Chrysler. The house was bare of furniture and she had cleaned it for the last time. She took her clothes and a few personal effects, along with her music books and Max’s papers, after disposing of everything else.