“Only a few small things on occasion.”
“What else have you stolen?”
“Besides your heart?” Sylvia said, nudging a slice of pippin with a smear of Bucheron into Inez’s mouth.
After she swallowed, Inez said, “You didn’t steal my heart; I gave it to you freely.”
Sylvia had covered a large wooden crate with a pretty but washed-out cotton fabric and had set pillows for them to sit on at each side of the crate. She set the makeshift table with two mismatched china plates, silverware, a tall green bottle of Wente Grey Riesling that Inez had brought—her father’s wine—and two embossed jelly glasses. After the Bucheron, Sylvia brought plates of roasted quail with wild rice. Sliced in crisp brown halves on her plate, the bird’s tiny drumsticks seemed the size of a girl’s thumbs. “Did you steal these as well?”
“No, these I purchased. I make it a point never to steal fowl.”
“How do you eat them?”
“You pick them up with your hands. They’re like us—not quite as fragile as we’d like to imagine.”
“I’m more fragile than I like to imagine, Sylvia.” She actually said that. She felt immediately shy, afraid that Sylvia thought poorly of her.
Sylvia pulled the cork from the bottle of Riesling and filled the jelly jars. Inez sipped at the wine but still hadn’t touched the little bird. She watched Sylvia break off a drumstick. It didn’t exactly snap, but lifted away like a peach from its stem. Sylvia put it on her tongue and sucked on it. “Next,” she said, “I taste you.”
Right now, in the mad music room, the tip of Sylvia’s tongue, that beautiful sprite, is peeking at her. And, finally, Rose Carlentini returns to her seat and nods to Inez. It is quiet in the room, save for the occasional whimper from the third row. Bibi is sitting forward in her chair, her eyes open wide.
Inside her head, Inez hears two voices, the one reminding her of the Schubert lied: everything in this life is precious . . . the other the voice of her teacher: Play, already. All right, she will play. She lifts her violin and dives into Kreisler’s “Liebesleid.” Love’s sorrow. An impossibly sad song that has now found its way into the movies and is even being piped into the produce aisle of the supermarket. Isaac was always after her to play Kreisler’s romantic pieces. Sure, he’d say, they’re schmaltzy, but you could use a little schmaltz in your tone, from time to time, just like you could use a little schmaltz on your body. He’d wink at her, a pubescent girl scandalized by any reference to her body. How many years has it been since she’s thought of this? You know what schmaltz is? he said, finding the shock on her face hilarious. Schmaltz, it literally means chicken fat. You need some in your tone just like you need some on your body.
As she plays, she hears Isaac’s voice calling to her from decades ago. Vibrate, Inez, vibrate. You cannot play this music without vibrato. You want to sound like a Swede? Why would you want to play this music with ice in your tone? That’s right, relax. Vibrate.
Inez remembers what she’s managed so well to forget: Mr. Roseman, standing behind her as she played. His long fingers grabbing her breasts. Her mouth opened wide with the shock of it, but not a word came. Her job, as he reminded her over and over, was to keep playing.
Her greatest horror: she did what he told her. That’s right, keep the bow moving. Vibrate. Feel it inside, feel the pleasure, but keep the bow moving, continue to vibrate. You need to learn to keep your composure.
Mr. Roseman became bolder, as the weeks went by, and she still did whatever he asked. Today, let us consider your posture. Your legs, they are too close together. You cut off your power that way, you play sti f. Spread your legs apart. That’s right.
He came up behind her and put his hands on her waist. Just like a dance instructor, she told herself. But a week later he had a hand under her skirt, and soon after that he began fondling her between her legs. That’s right, keep the bow moving. Let yourself feel the pleasure, you must learn to keep your composure. That’s the point of this exercise.
This went on for more than a year. But one day—she must have been nearly fourteen—something in her snapped as she saw the bastard coming toward her. Don’t, she said, trembling more than she had when he’d first touched her. Never. Mr. Roseman backed away. Inez brought the violin down to her side. Neither of them spoke for a moment. It was as if a live power line dangled between them in the room. You mention this, he said, you ruin your career forever. Just like that, they made their pact: he stayed away from her and she never spoke a word about it. What she hadn’t accounted for was how skillfully she could push the trauma out of her head. By the time she and Jake began seeing each other, Jake’s father was again her beloved teacher.
Once Inez finishes with “Liebesleid,” a very short piece of music, she is drenched in sweat and wary of lifting her head toward the small audience. A few people applaud. For some reason, she curtsies like a girl would. She can hear Bibi crying in the front row. Inez turns away from her sister to take in the rest of the audience. The whimperer in the third row is now sucking his thumb. A woman with a pencil stuck in her nest of tightly coiled red hair noisily gets up from her chair, muttering, It’s just too sad. Too sad. It’s too sad for me. I don’t know why it has to be so sad. Inez makes a point of not looking out front, but listens to the voice trail away—It’s just so sad—as the woman leaves the room.
Inez notices Sylvia at the back of the room. She’s taken off her dark glasses and is rubbing her eyes. So much for the Kreisler. If she plays any more Kreisler, she’ll have everybody in tears.
It takes all she has to dig her way into Mendelssohn’s bittersweet concerto. She’d meant to start with the second movement, but for some reason launches directly into the Allegro molto appassionato at the beginning of the concerto. Apparently, she can’t let the death march alone. As a child practicing this concerto, or listening to her recording of Nathan Milstein playing it with the Philadelphia Orchestra—an album of five 78s whose weight she can still remember in her lap—she always associated its dominant motif with the death march. Something about E minor. All she had to do was hear an E-minor chord in her head and she could make herself cry on the spot.
Even as a child, she knew that the Mendelssohn was an exquisite piece of music. Once she’d learned the violin part satisfactorily, Mr. Roseman brought her the complete score, and she soon became so familiar with it that she could have conducted it. Whenever she practiced the concerto alone in her room, she heard the swell of the entire orchestra. This is what her teacher wanted to have happen. If she believed him, she’d play it someday with the major orchestras of the world. The Mendelssohn wove its way into her brain and muscle memory.
The concerto is a demanding piece and Inez’s bow arm begins to ache. Soon she is struggling with the the tight-bowing spiccato section at the end of the cadenza. The tips of her fingers start to throb.
BIBI, who’s sitting directly in front of her, begins to keen in the low, steady voice of a small engine. This, Inez decides, is her sister punishing her.
Inez becomes undone as soon as she draws the black musical thread through Mendlessohn’s glorious Andante.
This charming solo should be played in as flowing a style as possible, and without the least broadening pathos. But at the same time the interpretation must not in any way be an insignificant or expressionless one; it must be performed with warm feeling and with well-calculated tonal graduations for the climaxes, especially in the 15th and 29th bars.
Or so said the commentary Inez memorized thirty years ago. As she plays the Andante, mindful of climaxes and careful not to broaden Mendelssohn’s pathos or her own, she imagines that the composer is making love to her. As a teenager, during hours of practicing, she occasionally had such fantasies. Between movements, her left hand might sneak off the fingerboard and land in her crotch. How better to become one with the music?
Inez looks out at her audience at Napa State—lunatics and their caretakers. Everyone has his or her eyes closed, breathing with a ce
rtain rapture. Or so she imagines. Has she become crazed, too? Does she actually believe that she can send her audience into a fever with a bow and violin?
Before Felix Mendelssohn climbs on top of her, he strips off his forest-green velvet trousers. He chews on each of her fingers, his teeth as sharp as a wolf’s. Felix, dear Felix; if I had another child I’d name him Felix. He rides her hard, but she wants more of him than he has to give. She wishes that she had fingernails so that she could tear into his flesh. It doesn’t matter that her fingers ache.
At the crescendo, she closes her eyes and settles into a medium tempo, before forcing the accelerando. Everything falls away but the bare theme, which rises from her body, through the violin. It is an aria of plain majesty, a woman dashing through a fall garden, a woman who’s never cared much for asters and marigolds and chrysanthemums, but who is now persuaded, despite the speed at which she’s moving, to see the beauty of these flowers and their quiet testimony to living and dying.
THE Mendelssohn concerto has taken hold of the small audience. The music is no longer safe for her in this place, Sylvia knows that. She’s thankful for her straw hat and sunglasses. She knows how to keep the music from affecting her, knows how to shut it off. Even as an inveterate observer, mindful of her mother’s safety, she knew that she didn’t need to see and hear everything. That would be impractical. The goal was to be strategic, which entailed having a shutoff valve. One of her mother’s boyfriends suggested trying wax earplugs for those nights when her mother had a manic episode and sat at the kitchen table chanting three-and four-syllable words instead of sleeping. But Sylvia had tried to master a deeper form of not-hearing.
She could hear her mother chanting melanoma, melisma, mellifluous, melopoeia, just as she now hears Inez playing the Mendelssohn. The sound is distant, like something packed away in a bottle with a tight cap. Sylvia pictures a gallon of distilled water that glugs in its container as you carry it, but that’s ready to hiss dangerously as soon as you pour it into a heated steam iron.
Once, after her mother returned from the hospital, she talked about her life on the psychiatric ward. Sylvia listened with grim attention to the characters her mother described, the way she spoke about a typical day, the rituals of meals and medication, the leisure hours spent at card tables and around the flickering television. The staff provided her mother with writing implements and ample supplies of paper as long as she stayed in the common room, but they wouldn’t allow her to return to her bedroom with a pencil or a pen. Did they think that I was going to gouge myself to death with a ballpoint pen? Angela spent most of her days alone at a table in the common room working on lists of words. She made a list of fifty-six phobias and was cheered to realize that she truly suffered from fewer than a half dozen of them.
The most surprising thing on the ward, Angela Bran told her daughter, are the patients who’ve lost their sense of modesty and masturbate in public spaces. To Sylvia, who had just begun to appreciate the pleasure of touching herself, this was a terrifying image.
Now, as Inez plays with enough fury to save somebody’s life, or end it, the music room at Napa State Hospital has grown swampy with sex. People are actually touching themselves, in the light of day. Sylvia allows herself to listen to the Mendelssohn. She can do it without losing her balance. Her mind is strong, as is her heart. She will not end up in a place like this. She adjusts her sunglasses and dips the brim of her straw hat low over her eyes, a mild form of insurance.
INEZ can hear her small audience engaged in rhythmic breathing. She catches a glimpse of their strange ecstatic faces. She draws back into the music. Felix Mendelssohn has her circling the theme again—it might as well be her own sad life. Inez is becoming weary of these recapitulations, but here she goes again. She sees her father, his white head bent over his workbench. She sees his arthritic fingers, his crooked digits moving ceaselessly as he crafts his wooden frames. What would she frame? What wonders of this world? She thinks of sweet Joey, passionate Anna, even Jake. She thinks of dear Bibi, wilting in the front row, and of Sylvia, cloistered at the back of the room, Sylvia, whom she can’t see behind those dark glasses and the wide brim of that hat, Sylvia, petty thief and impostor, who clearly has stolen Inez’s heart, because there was no way that she would give it freely.
As the movement draws to a close, Inez wishes for her shell to crawl into. She conjures up a phrase of funeral splendor: her “loved ones.” How to explain to them that her instinct is true, that she is drawn more decidedly to death than to life?
The final movement with its glistening, brilliant passages of elf-like speed, is possessed of an unusually animated capricious character; at one moment graceful and cheerful in its flight, at the next with fiery, decided accent. Consequently its interpretation must neither be stiff and dry, nor one-sidedly brilliant.
The music is weaving its way through her sister’s heart. Bibi, who took care of her, who worshipped her. Bibi, her fingers sewn together with thick, black thread. Sweet Bibi, whom she abandoned. Inez strives to be graceful and fiery with the Mendelssohn as she thinks again of her children. Anna, smart Anna, do not follow me. Joey, my cello boy, find happiness apart from the music. How can she leave them? Is her heart sewn shut?
Inez does not look up, but she can hear the audience whimpering now. They have traveled with her from sorrow to sex to sorrow. By the time Inez plays the final, descending scale, she is weeping, but she is not alone. The whole room is in a virtual downpour. She forces herself to look out into the audience. Sylvia, at the back of the room, has dropped her face into her hands. Some of the patients are tossed into convulsive wails. A middle-aged patient chews the air, emitting a wild Indian chant. E-WAH, OH-WEE, AH-OH. An old woman in a strange hat is trying to shush him. The wiry-haired man in the third row is sucking both of his thumbs at once. All Inez needs now is for a baby to begin wailing. A thin, balding man suddenly stands up, flinging his arms around wildly. Inez wipes her tears with the back of her bow hand and watches as the wild man turns to face Sylvia, who, hatless now and without her dark glasses, is mopping her face with a scarf.
“It must be the Cuban missiles!” shouts the balding man. “They thought they stopped the missiles, but look what they’re doing to us!”
Inez feels inebriated. She holds the violin at her side, the fingers of her left hand pressed as hard as they can be against the strings and fingerboard. She doesn’t want the ache in her fingers to go away. Her bow arm does not understand the rest of her body. It’s poised to begin bowing the Allegro molto appassionato again, to start the concerto over like the girl on the frayed carpet of her bedroom. Finally, she forces her right arm to the side, and it flops like a fish on a pallet. If she had any sense, she’d bow her head and pack up her instrument. But she remains frozen. What is she waiting for? Applause? A call for an encore?
Rose Carlentini, who has ushered the balding missile man out of the music room, walks now toward Inez, teary-eyed, and with the nostrils of her broad nose flared. Inez expects an urgent message, perhaps a reprimand. Enough is enough. Look what you’ve done. Don’t you have any decency? But Rose Carlentini wraps her arms around Inez and holds on to her for a long moment. Once again, she and Bibi have the same mother. This one is living. Inez wishes she could drop the violin and give herself fully to the embrace, but too many years of holding on to the instrument prevent that. Inez glances at her sister, who sits quietly in prayer, her hands folded but, thankfully, not sewn together over her face.
ROSE Carlentini leads the three of them into a small room and brings tea. Along with the tea service, she leaves a plate of anise cookies, a favorite of Bibi’s when they were children. Bibi baked them all the time back then, but these are clearly store-bought.
Suddenly Inez is famished. Any appetite she has she owes to Sylvia. She counts: there are six cookies on the plate. She glances at Sylvia and at Bibi. Neither of them seems as cheered as she is to see the plate of cookies, which could be good since she feels like even two anise cookies
are not going to hold her. It strikes her as odd to have an appetite at the same time as her longing for her shell, the private cure of withdrawal, so dreadful and appealing. She feels she has one foot in each world. What can she ask of a world that she’s determined to protect herself from? A few anise cookies?
“I packed a little picnic, Bibi,” she says, facing her sister, and then Sylvia.
Bibi laughs a big guffaw. “You’re going on a picnic now?”
Apparently, the mental patient finds the two of them amusing. “We thought we’d take you outside, if we can,” Inez says, “and have a little picnic. Or we could eat right in here. Maybe Sylvia wouldn’t mind going out to the car.”
“Not at all,” Sylvia says, standing quickly.
“I’m not hungry,” Bibi says, without a trace of petulance, “but you two go.”
As Inez rifles through her purse to find her car keys for Sylvia, she has a chilling fantasy of Sylvia driving off in the Studebaker and leaving Inez behind at the hospital with Bibi—the two mad sisters together at last.
“Sylvia,” Bibi says, with surprising force, “would you mind staying here a little longer? I’m beginning to get tired. I’ll go back to my room soon and you two can have your picnic.”
“No, I wouldn’t mind at all.”
“By the way, I love your string tie, Sylvia,” says Bibi.
“Thank you.” Sylvia loosens the string tie’s treble-clef medallion. She thinks to offer the tie to Bibi—she’ll probably never see the poor woman again—but a fleeting image of Hy Myerson on the showroom floor changes her mind, and she slides the tie’s medallion closer to her throat.
Inez looks from Bibi to Sylvia, then plucks an anise cookie from the plate.
SYLVIA sits down again. She glances at Bibi, who seems to be thinking hard as she sips at her tea. Bibi has a little animal face. The face of a fox. Her small but sharp incisors, visible when she smiles, give her a feral look. For the first time, Sylvia can imagine her doing the thing Inez described, sewing the fingers of her hand together in a web. Sylvia notices Bibi’s left hand, how clearly it is scarred with the needled stigmata of her madness.
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