Strum

by Nancy Young

  In a single motion her body spun around to face him, brought the crest of the mandolin up against her stomach beneath her breasts and plucked a tremolo chord from its taut strings with her right hand before opening into an andante with a series of legato scale passages and more sustained tremolos. The first chord and every note following was in perfect tune, for she had that morning, as she did every morning, begun her day after her morning prayer with a slow methodical round, circling that tower tuning every instrument and playing an equal measure of music on each to season them, a nurturing mother lavishing her love upon her many children.

  Tomàs listened intently to Adrienne’s tremolo, admiring the purity of the sound and her controlled passion. He could tell that she had never taken a lesson and very likely was not a reader of music, but her own compositions were exalted and if angels could herald music with the flutter of their golden wings, the glide of her harmonic scale and hypnotic chords progressions would certainly be of the angels. He longed to stroke the alabaster arm that held the mandolin to her body and the serpentine fingers that shifted gracefully up and down the length of the elegant neck. He longed to release the full power of that silent and reticent passion with a kiss. But with solemn restraint he returned his attention to the familiar guitar in his hands. His first rolled chord resonated through his body like an emotional response. It rose from him and joined her rising arpeggio, his next falling with it in perfect sumptuous harmony.

  For an eternity they exchanged and interchanged melodies in faultless union, their harmonies intertwining with ease as if they had played together since childhood. They changed instruments and sampled the entire collection, varying and experimenting with the tempo, harmonics and chord progressions to adapt to the new instruments and combinations they invented. When the candle finally flickered and drew its last breath, he put down the colascione and drew her to him in an impassioned kiss. She yielded completely to him, her lute keeping them only for a moment chastely divided in its position between their aching loins.

  The memory of their impassioned and unbridled coupling now embattled her. With her instruments as silent witnesses, they had fallen to the floor in an embrace that made the rock-solid tower and world around them melt away, as her perpetual veil was removed by tender hands followed by urgent lips. Intertwined as they were, the strange yet familiar exultation they experienced together was a new kind of enlightenment not unlike a trance achieved through prolonged prayer and meditation, combined with the arousing highs of a perfect rapturous harmony.

  But, as the light of a cold moon shut down the last quiver of passion and gave rise to the guilty agony of abandoned vows, they rose in sudden shame nearly stumbling as they moved away from one another to opposite sides of the round tower. Adrienne slowly turned her back to Tomàs and began a ritual straightening of the instruments, returning them solemnly to their rightful positions without a word. At the last, tears sprang to her eyes and streamed hot down cheeks; shoulders collapsed shaking beneath her tousled hair.

  Tomàs watched her achingly, the stone in his heart hammering an unholy void in his soul.

  “Please tell me something that will free me from the remorse of what we have just done … what I have done.”

  But still, no words could break free through her wretched silence. The pair stood silent in remorse for what seemed an eternity equally to each.

  “If you cannot speak,” he finally moaned in a half whisper, “then I must leave.” His heart hung heavier still with the guilt of his trespass. Only moments had transpired since they were entwined in an ecstasy he had never before experienced, but he knew that this act would be his soul’s torture of the rest of his days. His body ached to hold her in his arms again and feel the softness of her reluctant yet yielding lips. His mind continued to whirl with thoughts on how he could make it right for her, right for them, and right for God. But it was no use. He could see in her silent and angled repose that she found no sanctuary in his words. “You shall never see me again,” he sighed, barely able to move or turn away.

  The young man walked for two days in a clouded state before he even realized that he had abandoned his guitar at the convent. Knowing that he would never be allowed to enter those reclusive gates again, he spent that night in anguished remorse and in the morning, in the cold cradle of an alpine river, he found his passage back to God’s Holy Kingdom, a helpless and repentant soul adrift in the bulrushes reclaimed and at last forgiven by the Holy Spirit.

  But Adrienne would never know of this, and now poised at the precipice of a new beginning, the young woman cast aside the last vestiges of her cloistered and other-worldly existence. Her heart wrenched silently with the memory of her mortal sin — her sordid moment of digression played over and over again in her mind like a spinning wheel weaving a yarn so rich and lavish she dared not look. The instinctive actions of two young creatures coming together in the fumbling heat of animal passion had transported them both to an extraordinary place filled with sensations and sounds tantalizingly close to the real substance of salvation.

  Yet those unsanctioned actions were aberrant to her cloistered world of rosaries, prayer and virtue. In the morning she was expected to renew her vows of silence and chastity in a profession of obedience. But how could I do this now? My hypocrisy is writ large on the wretched scorecard of my soul.

  A long abject silence had ensued after their passions had been played out in coitus and Tomàs stumbled out into the darkness before she could turn around to face him — perhaps even forgive him. He had slipped out, leaving behind his only possession as if he were ready for the next world. Had she murmured a word his heart would have lightened, but her silence gripped him with the severity of its seeming reproof.

  As Adrienne passed through the gates with her erstwhile lover’s abandoned guitar and her sparse belongings, the profound remorse in her heart battered against her like gale-force winds against the tattered sails of a lost ship at sea. But miraculously, as soon as she stepped into the open arms of the broad reaching pines that edged the convent and swept through the hills and countryside around her, the winds abated. All of a sudden her lungs no longer felt they were squeezed in a vise, rather they felt as if the trees were breathing life into her as they surrounded her with an unconditional and unqualified acceptance akin to absolution.

  5

  Lorraine (Paris); Ellen (St.-Gérard and Bangkok), 1959

  Passengers on the diplomatic flight between Québec and Paris were uncharacteristically sparse due to it being New Year’s Day, and Lorraine felt conspicuous as the only passenger not suited in gray Pierre Cardin or sporting a cravat. The small cohort of traveling bureaucrats from the French and Québécoise diplomatic corps fell silent for a fleeting second as she entered the cabin. In front and behind her, the men rose briefly from their seats as she moved down the aisle. Once she was seated, they returned to their lively comments about the recent election of Général Charles de Gaulle, the new President of the Fifth Republic of France.

  She was painfully aware that she was the only female in the sparsely populated plane, but the empty row of seats beside her was a relief. She did not desire conversation at this moment, and was grateful for the opportunity to be alone with her thoughts, which immediately dropped down to the plane’s cargo hold, to the guitar sequestered there in the cold cabin below. She wondered at the rationality of her last-minute decision to take it with her to Europe. With her bags already delivered into the waiting car, she had unexpectedly asked the driver to wait in the limousine as she re-entered her apartment and retrieved the instrument. Bernard was still asleep — or pretending to be — and she gently closed the door so as not to wake him, and carried the case like a sleeping child in her arms out to the waiting car.

  As she had descended onto the pavement in front of her apartment, a distinct rustle of skirts and the name Isabelle suddenly sounded in her ear, forcing her to glance briefly behind her to
see if someone, perhaps Bernard, had crept up behind her and whispered the name in her ear. But no one was there and the driver looked on curiously as she swiveled her head around again surreptitiously, as if she might catch someone deliberately hiding from her.

  “Mademoiselle,” the chauffeur said curiously, “have you forgotten something again?”

  “No, no. I just thought I heard someone say something. Did you hear it?”

  “Non, Mademoiselle, I heard nothing. Would you like to go to the airport now?”

  “Yes, thank you. À l’aéroport, s’il vous plâit.” But soon her mind returned to the voice, the name. Isabelle. She considered the two women she knew by that name. There was one in her French military history class last year with whom she shared a few study hours before the exam, but she was not a lasting friend. The other was an ancient friend of her mother, but she had met the old lady only once and nearly ten years ago. There was no one in her neighborhood or her family by that name, so why had it sprung up so abruptly and urgently just now? And so clearly? It was a mystery — like that guitar. She thought back to Bernard’s efforts that first time she saw him with it. She had strung the instrument at his cabin before Christmas. She could not be sure if it was this guitar, or the other that he played, but it was miraculous that someone without any music experience could play as if he had been immersed in music since childhood. She had to admit it was only some basic chords he had strummed, but the other factor was his deafness.

  Could he have heard the song she was playing? Could he have felt a resonance that echoed his own strumming? And what about the fingering of the chords? How could he have known? Could he have mastered them in the intervening years between when she first knew him and now?

  She momentarily put aside the mysterious and unfathomable thoughts and focused her attention on the passing landscape as the limousine glided swiftly over the precipitous lanes of the City, absorbing the undulation of the cobbled streets without effort. The battlements were now above the level of her eyes and the morass of French colonial and English Tudor–style houses and commercial establishments sprang up at various angles from the oblique streets like a spread of toy building blocks strewn about the foot of a childish monolith. A taxi jostled with the limousine for space on the narrow streets and several young men on bicycles riding in convoy across the lane ahead of them made the trip painstakingly slow.

  Lorraine wished for the car to speed away as quickly as possible so she could not dwell on the possibility of turning around and going back to her apartment. He was back there, but her life was ahead of her, on that diplomatic plane, in a one-carat diamond ring in her bags in the trunk of the car, in an elegant hotel on the Left Bank in Paris.

  “Notre hotel-appartement est situé sur la Rive Gauche,” he had written to her. “Dans une rue calme du cœur historique de Paris. A courte distance à pied du Panthéon, du Jardin des Plantes et des Arènes de Lutèce...Tu peux ainsi découvrir ma Paris et ses nombreuses curiosités.”

  As she read that letter, she became excited about the possibility of discovering not only Paris’s numerous sights, but conquering his milieu and the whole of Parisian society. In her arms, however, was his gift. And it had spoken to her. As the car approached the wide open and spare gray avenues of the airport terminus, her thoughts wandered aimlessly through the nearly unspoken conversations and high emotions of last night — her last night in Québec, filled as it was with the silent but impassioned entreaties of her heartbroken lover. Her guilt over choosing a life of abundance with a man born into means — Joël, the avocat son of the French cultural attaché — over an unknown future with her achingly beautiful and soulful first love.

  For a moment she pondered the possibility that she was marrying the wrong man, that he was her soul mate. But Lorraine did not believe in soul mates, miracles, magic, superstition, or the supernatural. No, she told herself, surely all those things have no place in the reality of this world. No nun or Sunday school priest could ever convince her that the miracle of the Creation story — Adam, Eve, the Garden of Eden, the apple, and most of all, the pestilent snake — was more than a metaphorical morality tale. No trance-inducing incantations of thirty-five Hail Mary’s or Glory-be’s with the assistance of an artillery of rosaries could bend her pragmatic, almost scientifically rigid mind from her logical truths.

  Fortunately, she had learned very early on in her girlhood that she was better off to keep these truths to herself. She was accustomed to remaining silent against the contradictory possibility of dialogue with more devout and fanatical members of her own convent school’s nuns and cohorts, notwithstanding her own devout parents. She sometimes felt she was a fraud, but in her mind her dedication to her studies and to her music was as true a devotion to God as any other.

  In the hold of the plane beneath the high-speed chattering of the passengers, below the deliberate wandering of the flight crew up and down the wide single aisle of the plane with a silver tray of liquid, savory, and sweet refreshments, under the unsettled heart of a young woman about to marry a privileged son of a diplomat she hardly knew, the guitar that held Isabelle’s passions sighed a bass-heavy vibrato of solemnity and passing sadness. No one was there to hear the groan, but it raised an echoed companion complaint in a guitar many far-away miles in St.-Gérard, leaning all alone against the cold hearth of the Tenderfield home.

  •

  Col Tenderfield stood transfixed before the barren fireplace in his spacious living room. It was the first morning of the New Year and he thought he heard a sad lowing sound emitted by Bernard’s gift as it stood leaning against the cold granite. Could he have been mistaken? No, there it was again … in the clear light of day, no doubt about it this time. The low-register humming had now graduated to a slow rising aria of an angelic choir. The disbelieving man braced himself against the mantelpiece and shook his head as the musical tones completed their summit and fell again. No, it can’t be … Oh, the madness of it!

  The remains of last night’s fire lay inert like the blackened stumps of a landmine victim. As his eyes fell on them, the shock of the horrendous vision left the elderly man utterly agitated and nearly breathless. He had lived through two World Wars — been at the front in the First and seen firsthand the travesty of war, and then lost a son to the Second. The corrosive edging-ahead of time left Col Tenderfield morbidly aware of his own mortality. His observation of the unnerving foreshortening of time during these latter years of his life was also disturbing. And now, to suddenly hear things that are not there? What hope is there for me now — nowhere to go but down, and then further down again that slippery slide toward senility?

  Grasping the guitar tightly with his hand, Col Tenderfield brought the unbelievably light instrument closer to his face to examine the phenomenon. Its lightness was surreal; he had expected more weight from the guitar, human-scale heaviness at least. As soon as his hands closed on the neck and strings the sound began to diminish and by the time it reached his temple the music had ceased completely. Only a small vibration remained encased in the instrument, but as for sound there was nothing to assure him that any music had ever come from it. But from where else could that melody have come? Then from behind him a small wave of cool air brushed past the back of his neck and disappeared. He felt all the hairs on the back of his neck bristle and stand on end as he slowly turned around. Surely that was a draft from the window, he thought, but there’s no movement in the curtains and the windows are tightly closed.

  There was no indication of a breeze from within or without. Outside of the window it was still and white, as he would have expected. But then, in the corner of his eye, he saw a person walking just outside the window between the bare trunks of the silver-leaf maples. Moving quickly over to the window, he could just make out a tall black-haired man, perhaps an Indian, disappearing into the grove of trees. From behind it looked like it could have been Bernard, but he was almost certain the man w
as wearing buckskin and moccasins, and nothing else. In this weather? He must be crazy. Or am I?

  While her husband was lamenting the tribulations of aging and its afflictions, Ellen Tenderfield was making the short drive with five grandchildren to Bernard’s cabin. She had recently learned to drive and found an opportunity to practice that skill — taking the young ones ice skating on the frozen lake. His fireplace would be ablaze and he would obligingly escort the children down to the lake, where the frozen pale blue and gray cover of ice would be perfect. She expected he would be at home working in his studio; like every other year before this, New Year’s Day would be like any other twenty-four hours on his calendar, if he had had a calendar. Her youngest son seemed to have a timepiece built into his head; he knew instinctively the exact moment of dawn, dusk, mid-day, midnight, and the day of the week, regardless of the fact he wore neither a watch nor owned a calendar. She was so certain that he would be home that she quietly panicked when she found his cabin door unlocked and no one inside.

  The eldest of the grandchildren, Aidan’s fourteen-year-old daughter Jocelyn, found a note on the kitchen table beneath a ceramic cup and read it out loud.

  I am only gone a few days, a week at the most, so no one will probably notice. But if you are looking for me, I must be on my way back from Québec right now.

  B. Dec 31.

  Ellen felt a wave of relief wash over her. She guessed that his visit to Québec was to see Lorraine, who she knew had been visiting recently. She wondered why he had not thought to inform her he would be absent for their annual New Year’s Day ice skating? It was not like him to go away for more than a day without letting her know. But then, she realized that those were the days before he built his house here on the lake. She could no longer know his comings and goings as before. It was only after this revelation that she realized he had grown into a fully independent adult. She felt abruptly redundant.