The O. Henry Prize Stories 2005

by Laura Furman

  A few weeks after the birth, Roberto and Rosario held an intimate soirée where Miguel and I were the only guests—if one could apply that term to Miguel, a virtual member of the family in his capacity of tireless volunteer sitter, burper, bather, and diaper-changer. No sooner was my coat off than the two men bustled me into the nursery to behold the gurgling scion. Roberto urged me to offer him a pinkie: “He has the grip of a rock climber.” Miguel fussed with Tito's bedding and got him to smile. I noticed that he was neglecting his pose. Over dinner, he slipped back into it to act out the befuddled reactions of various hospital personnel who, on the night of the delivery, had taken him for Rosario's spouse and were at a loss to fathom how “this hysterical peacock,” as he described himself, could have managed to sire an heir. His mimicry had Roberto in stitches.

  Rosario gave a recital in Roberto's honor, surprising him with Scriabin's Prelude and Nocturne for the Left Hand, along with several études by Kessler. Roberto, a stranger to all of these pieces, sat beside Miguel on the sofa, with Lilí, in her nightgown, on his lap. His face assumed its satisfied cast. Miguel's was set in an identical expression.

  Toward the tail of the evening, Rosario pulled me aside: “I don’t know how to laugh.”

  “I’ve never seen you laugh. It's true.”

  “Can’t you teach me?”

  “Are you happy?”

  “How could I not be!”

  “Then you don’t need to laugh.”

  At the time I accepted Rosario as a student, we settled on the fee for my services. Week after week elapsed without my receiving any payment. I had to tell her: “This cannot go on.”

  “You mustn’t think I don’t value your…”

  “It violates your orderliness, Rosario.”

  “The one thing I haven’t ever been able to keep straight is my accounts,” she owned. “I stick my bills in an old hatbox. I always mean to get to them, but the pile just grows, and I can’t deal with it.”

  “Before our next session, you’ll send me what you owe me. The rule will be: you pay me first thing.”

  Rosario respected this disposition faithfully for as long as she remained my pupil. Otherwise, she did not mend her ways. Eventually Roberto took over the administration of her finances. “If she wasn’t so good-looking, she’d be in debtor's prison,” he joked.

  Soon after the evening of my audience with Tito, Rosario asked to come to me for her lesson. She moved listlessly, seemed to peer out through an indigo haze. Having played a few notes, she thumped a sour chord and let her hands plummet to her lap. “Fool!” she muttered.

  “What is it?”

  “While Roberto was gone, I vowed that I would surprise him by keeping up with the bills. I did stay on top of the really dire ones, but most of them were still unopened when he got home. He didn’t rebuke me—just shook his head. The other night, he sat down to pay them. I was in bed. He stalked in, snapped on the light, flung one at me with ‘Third Notice’ stamped on it: ‘What's this?’ I supposed he was angry because we might be dunned. I apologized. ‘No, read it.’ It was for the pregnancy test I’d had a couple of weeks before my first trip to visit him. ‘What's the meaning of this!’ he shouted. For months I’d been considering how best to present the facts to him. I was positive I could make him understand. But I didn’t take enough time—I blurted out: ‘He's not yours.’ Roberto looked like he’d been stabbed.”

  The next morning Miguel appeared at my door, though it wasn’t the day for his lesson. He begged me to spend a few minutes with him. Since I was just leaving, I suggested that he walk with me to an appointment I had. I set a brisk pace and he jounced along at my side, fitfully grasping me by the arm as he spoke.

  “Rosario talked to you—I know. Listen, the last thing I wanted to do was to hurt Roberto. I never thought there’d be consequences. I never thought he’d find out. If it had been me Roberto confronted with that bill, I’d have invented a story. But Rosario did what she did—which upset everything. I couldn’t let Roberto simply hang like that, not knowing who the father was. I was sure I could break it to him in a way so he’d feel—not excluded. I had this idea I could tell him the truth as if I were lying….”

  He stepped off the curb and I yanked him back as a bicycle whizzed by. He didn’t seem to notice.

  “I reached him at the office: ‘Can you come over, it's urgent.’ Ten minutes later, we were both standing in my alcove. It just popped out of me. ‘I’m the father.’ He glared: ‘Ah, so Rosario told you. Who are you trying to cover for?’ He started getting all worked up: ‘Don’t hide this from me!’ ‘I am the father.’ ‘You’re mocking me!’—and he stomped out. I called Rosario to tell her what had happened. She was angry: ‘Why didn’t you speak to me first? There was no reason for him to know.’”

  We were at my destination. I reached out and thrummed on his shoulder a theme from the rondo he was studying. “Tomorrow at five.”

  It was seventeen after the hour when an elated Miguel sailed in. “I’ve just left Roberto. Do you know what he did? He hugged me—hugged me!— and asked me to forgive him. He said: ‘With Rosario so attractive… even for you, Miguel. You needed to have a son, man! Besides—aren’t two fathers better than one?’ What a friend! I would give my life for him!”

  “Your life, Miguel?”

  “Yes!”

  I had to handle Miguel sternly for several weeks to get him back in harness. Rosario settled down of her own accord. Roberto did not alter his demeanor, except to introduce a shade of punctilio into our relations, a heightened sense of his own dignity. A different tone crept into his remarks about Rosario and Miguel: not so much paternal as paternalistic, a benevolent grandfather speaking of slightly errant grandchildren. He had lost ground pianistically while away, and drove himself to catch up with Miguel. They kept on meeting regularly to critique each other, and we had a joint lesson monthly.

  One of these took place at Roberto’s. I was struck by his warmth as a host. In a hundred gracious ways he had insinuated Miguel as an orna- ment of the household. A favorite armchair was reserved for him. He was encouraged to regard the kitchen as his own, and sometimes on the maid's day off he cooked dinner. When I got there that evening, Lilí was bawling over some grievance. Roberto, who was building a fire in the grate, let Miguel assuage her. Rosario, placidly ensconced on the sofa, suckled Tito.

  At random intervals, I would ask my students to play something they had not practiced for many months, to ascertain whether it had stayed in their fingers. During one of his private lessons, I said to Roberto: “Let's hear that Schumann piece you were affected by.”

  “I’ve forgotten it,” he snapped.

  “Go ahead, give it a try. You may be surprised how much of it comes back.”

  Reluctantly, he complied. He acquitted himself so well, one would almost have sworn he had been reviewing the score.

  “Excellent.”

  He scowled. “Never again!”

  “Roberto—”

  “Schumann. Bah! If he had such a happy hearth, why was he obsessed with death? Those dancing skeletons in Car-naval? I see them every day around my house. Grimacing.” He mashed some keys cacophonously “Don’t mind me. I still haven’t recovered from the strain of that job.”

  To disperse the gloom, I served tea with cakes and played him Mac-Dowell's Dance of the Gnomes.

  “Ah,” said Roberto, “a piece with nothing but charm.”

  It was as though I had unwittingly opened a drawer deep inside Roberto and glimpsed some venomous insect feeding on the darkness. Whatever that noxious energy may have been, he seemed to harbor it as a mortifying reminder of hazards to be shunned. He showed Miguel and Rosario the most exquisite consideration. They, in turn, deferred to him as the generous ruler of their garden.

  Miguel was ambushed by the ferocity of his attachment to the baby. Tito's smiles and yawns, imperious appetites, budding quirks became his only topic. He buttonholed everyone he met to flaunt photos of his “godson.” To me,
he chafed at the façade he had adopted: “Will I always have to talk to my boy through this mask?” When an earache set the child wailing in agony, Miguel couldn’t eat or sleep; he later confessed to me that the ordeal had brought him a guilty relief, since it supplied him a pretext to haunt the nursery at all hours, wring his hands, moan, and for once vent his feelings for Tito with fully licensed abandon.

  I remember the coziness of the household throughout that wintry season: dense crystal vases spilled over with flowers that sunned in the blaze of the fireplace, and the vista of snowcapped peaks made the living room all the more snug. Rosario seemed burnished with well-being. Roberto, prospering in his business, bought for her any number of expensive outfits, which soon had their fronts stained with mothers milk. Rosario said that she was “addicted” to feeding the baby. One evening, as Tito gorged, Roberto poked Miguel in the ribs: “Don’t you wish you were him? When Rosario nursed Lilí, she was ravishing enough, but the boy stimulates a whole other set of glands in her. What a pity it would have been to miss this, eh? It sometimes seems to me that I was destined to have only a daughter, but that Fate had the good sense to change its mind.”

  Rosario told me: “Before I married Roberto, I asked him: ‘What if I fall in love with someone else?’ He answered: ‘Just so you don’t stop loving me….’ ‘It's impossible for me to stop loving you,’ I said. And that's how it's turned out.

  “There's something incestuous in me. Roberto excites me more as a brother. With Miguel, it's different. He's more of a son. What would it be like with a real son! That's what I’ve secretly dreamed of, ever since I began to desire men. Maybe that's why I had a boy.” She gave a quick smile: “It's not going to happen, though.” Suddenly earnest: “I’ll die soon.”

  “Rosario!”

  “Today I’m crazy.”

  Weeks before Tito's first birthday, Roberto set about planning a party. He liked to ruminate the guest list out loud. A legion of relatives, colleagues, and neighbors had to be included, especially those with tots of their own. He petitioned Miguel for the names of his muchachos. “I’m in a bind,” Miguel told me. He managed to extricate himself by claiming that they were such a jealous bunch, to invite any of them would cause hostilities.

  Roberto was determined that I too should attend. I had a conflicting engagement. “In that case,” he said, “you might help celebrate the occasion in another way. Would you, one evening, give us the Liszt sonata?”

  Roberto and Miguel wore dinner jackets; Rosario, a hyacinth sheath. Candles shone; a tall vase on the Blüthner bristled with gladiolas. A few streamers, some stray specks of confetti, and a balloon lolling in an upper corner testified to the recent festivity.

  As I entered, a small pink whirlwind darted at me and enfolded my legs.

  “Lilí just wanted to welcome you,” Rosario explained.

  “My mommy said I can’t stay.”

  “Then we have to obey her.”

  “But why can’t I hear the music?”

  “Another time, I’m going to play something specially for you.”

  “You are? What?”

  “Wait and see.”

  Lilí contemplated this briefly, then went to kiss Roberto and Miguel good night. Tripping back to me, she motioned me down and mouthed: “Don’t forget.” Rosario led her off.

  “We missed you at the party,” said Roberto. “A resounding success, wouldn’t you say, Miguel?”

  “Tito howled through most of it, that's for sure,” Miguel laughed. “What a pair of lungs that kid has!”

  I offered my score to Roberto: “You might like to follow—though it may be awkward for the three of you together….”

  “Not to worry.” With a flourish, he drew a tight new edition from a stack on the coffee table. I passed my wilted old folio to Miguel, who nestled into “his” armchair and leafed through the pages. Moving to the piano, I adjusted the bench and took some deep breaths. Rosario came back and sat down on the sofa beside Roberto. At that moment, I pounced.

  The whole piece is daunting, but the first two notes are nearly insuperable: terminal heartbeats. How to play those? The keys have to be touched as if they were red-hot irons. I pinged off that opening salvo—vitality's parting shots—and plunged ahead, in a kind of conscious trance… until at last, in the closing measures, the dawn appeared and outfaced the destroyer. The final note whispered: Death, even you will die.

  Miguel stood up and began to pace: “This never sank in before—yet I can’t say I didn’t know.”

  Roberto, who had been lost in scrutiny of the ceiling, bent forward and addressed me: “Rosario was right. You really put it across. I almost wish you hadn’t….”

  “The beauty transforms it into something tolerable,” said Miguel.

  Borne on her own current, Rosario reflected: “People live such different lives. Why shouldn’t they experience death differently? For one it might be an eternal catastrophe…. For another, nothing at all.” She stood up; I thought she was going to leave. Instead, with a soft gesture she signaled for me to surrender the bench. She occupied my place with such a magisterial posture that an electric hush seemed to descend upon a crowded hall. “Number Five, from Schoenberg's Six Little Piano Pieces” she announced. “In celebration of our heartbeats.”

  An hour before her next lesson, Rosario telephoned me, asking to have it at my house. She turned up well-groomed as always but had circles under her eyes. She was quiet, rather stiff. We worked on a Prelude and Fugue. At the end, I fetched her coat from the closet.

  She wrapped it about her as if suddenly chilled, and sniffed sharply. “Roberto delivered an ultimatum: ‘If Miguel ever tries to see Tito again, I’ll kill him.’”

  “Kill Miguel?”

  “No, Tito.” She clawed her hair back. “All this time. Engineering it.”

  The bell jangled. I opened the door: Miguel, unshaven, bedraggled. Rosario manifested no surprise at his apparition. He seemed on the verge of pleading for something. She laid her hand over his mouth.

  The following day, I got in at four o’clock from doing errands. Two students of mine, teenage twin sisters, were waiting outside my apartment in their matched jumpers, stealing glances at Miguel, who leaned against a wall, weeping.

  “Miguel, what is it?”

  “How can he cut me off from my head? Never? I don’t want to live!” “Come in, why don’t you? I have to give these girls their lesson. Yours isn’t till five.”

  “I’ll stay here.”

  The twins were unabashedly gawking. I shooed them in.

  When I ushered them out, Miguel was standing in the same spot, more composed. I led him in to the piano. He said nothing—for fear, I guessed, of dissolving again. His hands shook so, he could scarcely play. Midway through the hour, he sprang up, embraced me, and bolted.

  Roberto requested that I come to him for his lesson. It was dusk; he left the lamps unlit. No one else seemed to be around. The gladiolas, still in their tall vase, exhaled a sickly smell.

  He worked attentively. At one moment he mumbled to no one in particular: “Even flirted with me.”

  At the end, he pressed down middle C with his fifth finger and intoned, “Good-bye.” Was he saying this to me or to the piano?

  As I walked home, I remembered that once, at a gathering, I had seen Miguel clasp Roberto around the waist, dance a few steps with him, and yell, “How hot this man is!” Roberto joined in the act, stroking Miguel's chin: “Look who's talking!” Everybody had laughed, except Rosario, who asked me, “Why are they laughing?”

  I recalled one of Miguel's first lessons. A stifling summer day. He had on a fitted silk shirt, shorts, espadrilles. I got up to pour him some water. When I turned around, he had unbuttoned his shirt. He flashed me a broad grin.

  “Is something funny?’

  “Sorry.” He buttoned up.

  Another time—I’d praised him for having performed a piece well—he took my index finger and put it to his lips.

  “What are yo
u doing?”

  He held my finger there for a few more seconds and, with a subtle smile, answered: “Shushing my pride.”

  I was expecting Rosario at three o’clock. Three thirty came, and no sign of her. I phoned. The maid answered: “Something terrible, Dios mío… Lilí fell off the balcony.”

  “What?”

  “Dead.”

  The day after the funeral, Rosario arrived punctually for her lesson. She was dressed in a gray suit and had on dark glasses, which she did not remove.

  “Just Bach,” she said.

  Every so often, a shudder convulsed her and she had to stop. At one point she retired to the other room for a few minutes. She strode back in: “I need to play.”

  Week by week, she made progress.

  From her spring, she passed directly to her autumn. Her red foliage turned gray. She took to wearing a hat, and gray weeds. More stunning than ever. She reminded me of the elm in the field behind the house where I grew up. A squall of hailstones fractured its branches, yet the tree stood firm.

  Roberto decided to relocate to another city. Rosario moved with him. At our last meeting, she clutched my hands. “You’ve taught me to take care with endings,” she said. “We’ll probably never see each other again. I am not an unfinished symphony. The double bar has come.”

  The metronome tapped away, prestissimo. Six years? Seven?

  One summer afternoon, the sun closed down like an iris, the sky let loose a barrage, and I, who had been trying to outrun the storm, found myself huddling beneath a leaky cornice. Each time the blast seemed to have reached its utmost vehemence it would swell anew. I was thinking of a three-legged mongrel I’d seen, hoping the poor cur hadn’t drowned, when suddenly a shape bodied forth out of the swirl. A bald shape, with an umbrella. It slowed, squinted through the murk, advanced, halted, pushed its nose almost up to mine.

  “Roberto!”

  He glowered, brought the drumming black canopy over my head. “Music!” His jaw quivered. “The best music is silence.” His incisors dug into his lower lip till it bled. He planted his umbrella in my hand with a solicitous squeeze, and tromped off into the deluge.