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The Red Piano
By Delia Sherman
Amongst my University colleagues, I have a reputation for calm. Whatever the emotional upheaval around me, I can be counted on to keep my head, to make plans, to calculate the cost and consequences, and then to act. If they also say that I live too much in my head, that I lack passion and perhaps, compassion, that is the price I must pay for being one of those still waters that run much deeper than they appear.
It is perhaps no surprise that I remained single all through my younger years. No male who shared a classroom with me ever asked me on a date, although some were glad to debate with me over endless cups of coffee and too-sweet muffins in smoky little cafes near the University. My discipline was archaeology, my area of concentration the burial customs of long-dead societies, my obsession the notion of a corporeal afterlife, rich with exotic foods and elaborate furniture, jewels and art and books and servants to wait upon the deceased as they had in life. Wherever they began, all conversations circled back to the same ever-fascinating questions: whether such preparations reflected some post-mortem reality, or whether all the elaborated pomp of preservation and entombment were nothing but a glorified whistling in the dark of eternity.
In the course of these debates, I gained a reputation for an intensity of focus that discouraged my cafe companions from seeking more intimate bonds of friendship or romance. I did not mind; my own silent communion with dead worlds and languages gave me intimacy enough.
Thanks to my attention to study, I throve in my field, finally rising in my thirties to the position of a Full Professor of Archeology at a prominent University situated in a great city. Armed with the income this position offered me and a comfortable sum left to me by a great-aunt, I set out to look for a house to buy.
It was not an easy quest. In a city of apartment buildings and bland new construction, a detached dwelling of historical interest and aesthetic character is not easy to come by. At last, my realtor showed me an old stable, renovated as a townhouse late in the last century by an eccentric developer. It sat on the market for some time before going to an equally eccentric ballerina, recently retired from the stage. After she had suffered a crippling accident on the circular iron staircase, the stable had come back on the market, where it had remained ever since.
The realtor showed me this property with some reluctance, evincing considerable surprise when I told him that I would take it. Like a man in the grip of leprosy checking each limb in fear of discovering an unsuspected infection, he pointed out the inconvenient kitchen, the Pompeian master-bath, the unfinished roof deck with its unpromising view of a back alley and the sheer brick sides of the adjoining houses, and, worst of all, the grand piano that was attached to the sale and could not, by deed, be destroyed or removed from its position in the darkly paneled living room. Enchanted with the very eccentricities that had scuttled all previous negotiations, I made my offer, arranged for a mortgage, and hired a lawyer to draw up the papers.
I well remember the day I took possession. I’d thought my realtor the kind of small, dark, narrow man who shivers on even the hottest day. But as he handed me the key to the front door, he stopped shivering and smiled the first genuine smile I’d seen on his face.
“Here you are, Dr. Waters,” he said. “It’s all yours. I sure hope you know what you’re getting into.”
I thought this an odd thing to say, but I was too dazed with legal complexities to comment on his choice of words. Not that it would have changed anything. Once the papers were signed, so was my fate.
I have said my new house was flanked by larger houses—two mansions of ancient aspect and noble proportions that had shared, in their vanished youth, the stable I now called home. One of these had been refurbished, renovated, and repurposed to a glossy fare-thee-well, losing much of its character in the process. The other was infinitely more charming. There was a vagueness about its soot-streaked brownstone and clouded windows, an aura of fogs and mists that spoke of gaslight and the clop of horses’ hooves on cobblestones, as if it somehow occupied an ancient lacuna in the roar and clatter of the modern city.
Accustomed as I am to keeping to myself and mindful of the ancient city habit of never acknowledging that one has neighbors at all, I did not knock on either door. I moved into my stable, arranged my books and my great-aunt’s antique furniture, my Egyptian canopic jars and Roman armbands, my Columbian breastplates and Hellenic funerary steles in the wide wooden spaces where the horses of my neighbors’ predecessors had drowsed and fed.
I also had the piano tuned. It was an unusual instrument, made of close-grained wood stained a deep, ox-blood red, its keys fashioned of a uniform polished ebony. Its tone was resonant and full, more akin to an organ than the tinkling parlor uprights I had played as a girl. It was intricately carved with a myriad of identical faces clustered around its legs and above its pedals and around the music stand. I had lost all interest in practicing the piano when I discovered archeology. But I could not feel settled in my new home until I had not only dusted and waxed all the many whorls and complexities of its ornamentation, but also restored its inner workings to their original state.
After a lengthy and expensive tuning, this was accomplished. To my surprise, the piano continued to unsettle me. Waking in the small hours of the night, grading papers or reading or laboring on my comprehensive analysis of the Egyptian Book of the Dead, I sometimes fancied that I heard it playing a melancholy and meditative concerto. More than once, I crept downstairs, my heart in my throat and a sturdy brass candlestick in my hand, intent on surprising the midnight musician. But on each occasion, I found the living room empty and dark, the piano silent. After a month or more of increasingly disturbed and sleepless nights, I formed the idea that the sounds haunting me must come from the house next door, the house whose antique air had so enchanted me. I decided to break the habit of years and introduce myself to my neighbor with the intention of asking him to remove his piano from the wall it must share with my study, or failing that, to confine his playing to daylight hours.
Accordingly, on my return next day from a seminar in reading papyri, I mounted the six steps of the ancient brownstone and tugged the rusted bell-pull hanging beside the banded oaken door. Deep within the house, a bell tolled, followed by a listening silence. Again I rang, determined to rouse the inhabitants, from sleep if need be, as they had so often roused me. The echoes of the third and last ring had not yet died away when the door opened.
My first impression of Roderick Hawthorne was that he was very beautiful. He was tall, over six feet, and slender as a reed, with long, prominent bones. His forehead was broad and domed under an unruly mass of bronze-dark curls like chrysanthemum petals that rioted over his head and down his long and hollow jaw in an equally unruly beard. His nose was Egyptian in the spring of its nostrils, pure Greek in its high-arched bridge; his eyes were large and dark and liquid behind round gold-rimmed spectacles. His gaze, mildly startled at first, sharpened when it fell upon me, rendering me sufficiently self-conscious that I hardly knew how to begin my complaint.
“Your piano,” I said at last, and was startled when he laughed. He had a laugh as beautiful as his person, deep and musical as an organ’s Vox Humana. Then he said, “At its old tricks again, is it?” and I was lost. His voice was oboe and recorder, warm milk and honey. I could have listened to that voice reading the phone book with undiminished pleasure and attention. He spoke again: “Do come in, Miss... ?”
I realized that I was staring at him with my mouth ajar, more like a cinema fan in the presence of a celluloid celebrity than an Associate Professor of Archeology at a major American university. “It’s Doctor, actually. Dr. Arantxa Waters.”
“Dr. Waters.” He held out a long hand, the fingers pale and smooth as marble, delicately veined with blue. Cold as marble, too, when I laid my own within it. “I am Roderick Hawthorne,” he said. “Welcome to Hawthorne House.”
The interior of Hawthorne House
was as untouched by the modern world as its exterior. The walls were hung with richly figured papers and the windows with draperies of velvet and brocade in crimson, ultramarine, and the mossy green of a forest floor. The furniture was massive, dark, ornamented with every kind of bird and fruit and animal known to the carver’s art. Precious carpets covered the floors, and precious objects crowded every surface not claimed by piles of books. Everything was illuminated by the soft yellow glow of gaslights hissing behind etched glass shades. It would have been perfect, if it hadn’t been for the dust and neglect that lay over it all like a pall. Still, I complimented him on the beauty of his home with complete sincerity.
“Do you like it?” he asked, a touch anxiously. “It’s gone woefully to seed, I’m afraid, since my wife’s death. I suppose I could hire a housekeeper, but the truth is, I hardly notice the mess. And I do value my privacy.”
I felt an unaccustomed color climb my cheeks, shame and irritation combined. “I shall conclude my business quickly,” I said, and explained that his piano playing at night was disturbing my studies. As I spoke, it seemed to me that the intensity of his gaze grew ever more concentrated, so that I could almost imagine my blush rather ignited by the fire of his eye than my own self-consciousness.
“I understand,” he said when I fell silent. “Although I am somewhat at a loss as to the remedy. Come, see for yourself.”
He led me from the parlor, where we had been talking, up a wide and sweeping staircase to the floor above, where he turned away from the direction in which my own house and its study lay, into a room across the landing, illuminated, like the parlor, by gas and oil lamps. The soft golden light showed me a formal music room, furnished with a gilded floor-harp and a cello as well as a brocade sofa, a gallery of shadowy pictures in filthy glass—and a piano, the precise twin of mine, down to the carved heads and the unusual deep crimson stain.
“As you can see,” he said as I stared at the piano, “the sound of my playing is unlikely to carry across the landing and through two brick walls to disturb you in your study. But I do believe that you have been so disturbed.” Observing my look of bewilderment, he gestured towards the sofa. “Sit down, please, and I shall tell you the story.
“You have noticed, of course, that our pianos are a matched pair. Your piano was, in fact, made for the wife of the Hawthorne who built Hawthorne House, not long after she entered it as a bride. In this very room they played duets until her untimely death caused him, in the extremity of his grief, to banish her piano to the stable.”
Feeling I should make some observation, I said, “A very natural response, under the circumstances.”
“Oh no,” Hawthorne said seriously, “he was quite mad. And went madder with time. A sane man might have given the piano to charity or sold it or even caused it to be destroyed. The founder of Hawthorne House had his lawyers draw up a rider to the deed preventing the piano from being moved from the stable or destroyed, in perpetuity, no matter who might come to own the stable or what might be done to it.”
“Your ancestor does seem to have been a trifle eccentric,” I said. “But it was a romantic and morbid age.”
His large, bright eyes dwelt on my face. “You are very understanding,” he murmured, his voice thrilling in my ear.
“Not at all,” I said briskly. “Is there more to the story?”
He seemed to collect himself. “Very little of substance. Yet, a piano with such a history is as likely to attract rumors as a corpse attracts worms. Most pertinent of these is that, under certain circumstances, it plays in sympathy with its mate.”
“And do you believe in such rumors?
“I believe in everything,” Roderick Hawthorne said. Shrugging away his melancholy, he turned a hospitable smile on me. “As long as you are here, will you take a glass of sherry and hear me play?”
Although I myself place little credence in ghosts and hauntings, it was clear from his nervous hands, his febrile eye, the urgent note in his plangent voice, that Roderick Hawthorne was utterly convinced that the music I was hearing was the result of a species of supernatural possession. Nevertheless, the charms of his person and his voice were such that I accepted both sherry and invitation and sat upon the sofa while he laid his beautiful long hands upon the red piano’s ebony keys and began to play.
How shall I describe Roderick Hawthorne’s playing? I am, as I have said, a woman whose passions are primarily intellectual, whose reason is better developed than her emotions. My host’s music delved into the unplumbed depths of my psyche and brought up strange jewels. The nut-sweet sherry blended with salt tears as I wept unashamedly, drunk on music and the deep rumble of my host, humming as he played.
Afterwards, we sat in the parlor with lamplight playing on Chinese urns and Renaissance bronzes and talked of the subject precious to us both: the wide range of humanity’s response to the ineluctable fact of death. By the time I left him, long after midnight, I was well on my way to a state I had never before experienced and was hardly able to identify. I was infatuated.
In taking leave of me, Roderick proposed that I call upon him soon. “I have no telephone,” he said. “Nor do I often leave my house. I would not like to think that my eccentricity might prevent the deepening of a promising friendship.”
Even in the face of such clear encouragement, I waited almost a week before calling on him again. Out of his presence, I found myself as disquieted by his oddities as charmed by his beauty. I was reasonably sure that the use of gas for household lighting was against all current city building codes. And his superstitious belief in the haunted bonds between our twin pianos and the supernatural origin of the sounds I heard, combined with the fact that he himself was (I presumed) recently widowed and not yet recovered from his loss, made me reluctant to further the acquaintance. Still, there was his playing, and the intoxication of conversation with one whose obsessions so perfectly complemented my own. And there was my own piano, singing softly at the edge of my hearing in the deep of the night, reminding me of the emotions I had experienced hearing him play its mate, and could experience again, if only I should take the trouble to go next door.
Unable to resist longer, I put aside my reservations, rang the rusty bell, and saw again his large, mild eyes, his sweet mouth nested like a baby bird in the riot of his beard, felt his cold, smooth hand press my own, heard his voice like an oboe welcoming me, questioning me, talking, talking, talking with delight of all the things that were closest to my heart.
On this second visit, it seemed to me that the house was cleaner than it had been when I’d first seen it—the hangings brighter, the air clearer. The change was most apparent in the music room, where the piano gleamed a deep crimson and candlelight sparkled off the new-polished glass of the gallery of pictures. When Roderick began to play, I rose from the sofa to examine them.
They were sketches, in pencil or charcoal, of a female figure surrounded by shadowed and threatening shapes. Sometimes she fled across a gothic landscape; more often she sat in intricately rendered interiors that I recognized at once as my host’s parlor and music room, alone save for demonic shapes that menaced her from the shadows. The figure bore only the faintest resemblance to an actual woman, being slender to the point of emaciation, burdened with dark curly hair inclined to dishevelment, and possessed of eyes stretched in an extremity of terror. It was not until I came upon a head and shoulders portrait that I realized, with a feeling of considerable shock, that the face gazing out so anxiously from the gilded frame was, when seen in relative repose, very like mine. Had I allowed my hair to grow out of the neat crop I had adopted to tame its natural wildness, lost twenty pounds or so, and assumed clothing over a century out of fashion, there would have been no difference between us.
Behind me, the music modulated into a melancholy mode. “The first Mrs. Hawthorne,” Roderick said. “Drawn not long before her death, by her husband. The others were drawn later. He became obsessed by the idea that demons had sucked the life from her. There are
boxes full of such sketches in the attic.”
“They seem a very gloomy subject for a music room,” I commented.
“They have always been here,” he said simply. “I do not choose to move them.”
“And your own wife,” I asked diffidently. “Have you any pictures of her?”
Under Roderick’s long, pale fingers, the ebony keys of the red piano danced and flickered in an unquiet mazurka. “My wife,” he said precisely, “died some while ago. She, too, was pale, with dark eyes and dark hair. Isabella Lorenzo, who last owned your stable, was of similar coloring. So are you.”
For a moment, I was both frightened and repelled by the intensity of his gaze over the crimson-stained music stand, the throb and tremor of his beautiful voice. I felt that I had intruded unpardonably upon a grief too terrible and private for my eyes. Embarrassed almost beyond bearing, I was on the point of quitting his music room and his house, never to return. But then he smiled, and the tune beneath his fingers grew bright and gay and light. “But all that is past now, lovely Arantxa,” he said softly, “and has nothing to do with you and me.”
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