“If he’s alive. If any ‘Schwarts’ are alive.”
She began to be anxious as she had not been anxious before the earlier competitions reasoning He is young, he has time for now her son was nearly eighteen, rapidly maturing. A taut tense sexual being he was. Impulsive, irritable. Nerves caused his skin to break out, in disfiguring blemishes on his forehead. He would not confide in his parents, that he suffered indigestion, constipation. Yet Hazel knew.
She could not bear it, that her gifted son might yet fail. It would be death to her, if he failed after having come so far.
“The breath of God.”
That roadside café in Apalachin, New York! The hot-skinned child on her lap snug in Mommy’s arms reaching up eagerly to play the broken keyboard of a battered old upright piano. Smoke haze, the pungent smell of beer, drunken shouts and laughter of strangers.
Jesus how’s he do it, kid so little?
She smiled, they’d been happy then.
He was an affably drunken older man acquainted with Chet Gallagher eager to meet Gallagher’s little family.
Introduced himself as “Zack Zacharias.” He’d heard that Gallagher’s stepson was a pianist named “Zacharias,” too.
This was at the Grand Island Yacht Club to which Gallagher took his little family to celebrate, when Zack was informed he’d been selected as one of thirteen finalists in the San Francisco competition.
Gallagher’s philosophy was: “Celebrate when you can, you might never have another chance.”
Weaving in the direction of their riverside table was the affably drunken man with stained white hair in a crew cut, lumpy potato face and merry eyes reddened as if he’d been rubbing them with his knuckles.
He’d come to shake Gallagher’s hand, meet the missus but mostly to address the young Zacharias.
“Coincidence, eh? I like to think coincidences mean something even when likely they don’t. But you’re the real thing, son: a musician. Read about you in the paper. Me, I’m a broke-down ol’ d.j. Twenty-six friggin’ yeas on WBEN Radio Wonderful broadcasting the best in jazz through the wee night hours”�his voice pitched low into a beautifully modulated if slightly mocking Negro radio voice�“and the lousy sonsabitches are dropping me from the station. No offense, Chet: I know you ain’t to blame, you ain’t your old man friggin’ Thaddeus. My actual name, son”�stooping over the table now to shake the hand of the cringing boy�“is Alvin Block, Jr. Ain’t got that swing, eh?”
Shaking his hips, wheezing with laughter as the white-jacketed maître d’ hurried in his direction to lead him away.
(The Grand Island Yacht Club! Gallagher was apologetic, also a bit defensive, on the subject.
As a local celebrity Chet Gallagher had been given an honorary membership to the Grand Island Yacht Club. The damned club had a history�invariably, Gallagher called it a “spotty history”�of discrimination against Jews, Negroes, “ethnic minorities,” and of course women, an all-male all-Caucasian Protestant private club on the Niagara River. Certainly Gallagher scorned such organizations as undemocratic and un-American yet in this case there were good friends of his who belonged, the Yacht Club was an “old venerable tradition” in the Buffalo area dating back to the 1870s, why not accept their hospitality that was so graciously offered, so long as Chet Gallagher wasn’t a dues-paying member.
“And the view of the Niagara River is terrific, especially at sunset. You’ll love it, Hazel.”
Hazel asked if she would be allowed into the Yacht Club dining room.
Gallagher said, “Hazel, of course! You and Zack both, as my guests.”
“Even if I’m a woman? Wouldn’t the members object?”
“Certainly women are welcome at the Yacht Club. Wives, relatives, guests of members. It’s the same as at the Buffalo Athletic Club, you’ve been there.”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why’d women be ‘welcome,’ if they aren’t? And Jews, and Ne-groes?” Hazel gave Ne-groes a special inflection.
Gallagher saw she was teasing now, and looked uncomfortable.
“Look, I’m not a dues-paying member. I’ve been there only a few times. I thought it might be a nice place to go for dinner on Sunday, to celebrate Zack’s good news.” Gallagher paused, rubbing his nose vigorously. “We can go somewhere else, Hazel. If you prefer.”
Hazel laughed, Gallagher was looking so abashed.
“Chet, no. I’m not one to ‘prefer’ anything.”)
Sometimes I’m so lonely. Oh Christ so lonely for the life you saved me from but he would have stared at her astonished and disbelieving.
Not you, Hazel! Never.
In Buffalo they lived at 83 Roscommon Circle, within a mile’s radius of the Delaware Conservatory of Music, the Buffalo Historic Society, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. They were invited out often, their names were on privileged mailing lists. Gallagher scorned the bourgeois life yet was bemused by it, he acknowledged. Overnight Hazel Jones had become Mrs. Chet Gallagher, Hazel Gallagher.
As, young, she’d been an able and uncomplaining chambermaid in an “historic” hotel, now in youthful middle age she was the caretaker of a partly restored Victorian house of five bedrooms, three storeys, steeply pitched slate roofs. Originally built in 1887, the house was made of shingle-board, eggshell with deep purple trim. Maintaining the house became crucial to Hazel, a kind of fetish. As her son would be a concert pianist, so Hazel would be the most exacting of housewives. Gallagher, away much of the day, seemed not to notice how Hazel was becoming overly scrupulous about the house for anything Hazel did was a delight to him; and of course Gallagher was hopeless about anything perceived as practical, domestic. By degrees, Hazel also took over the maintenance of their financial records for it was much easier than waiting for Gallagher to assume responsibility. He was yet more hopeless with money, indifferent as only the son of a wealthy man might be indifferent to money.
With the instinct of a pack rat, Hazel kept receipts for the smallest purchases and services. Hazel kept flawless records. Hazel sent by registered mail photocopied materials to Gallagher’s Buffalo accountant on a quarterly basis, for tax purposes. Gallagher whistled in admiration of his wife. “Hazel, you’re terrific. How’d you get so smart?”
“Runs in the family.”
“How so?”
“My father was a high school math teacher.”
Gallagher stared at her, quizzically. “Your father was a high school math teacher?”
Hazel laughed. “No. Just joking.”
“Do you know who your father was, Hazel? You’ve always said you didn’t.”
“I didn’t, and I don’t.” Hazel wiped at her eyes, couldn’t seem to stop laughing. For there was Gallagher, well into his fifties, staring at her gravely in that way of a man so beguiled by love he will believe anything told him by the beloved. Hazel felt she could reach into Gallagher’s rib cage and touch his living heart. “Just teasing, Chet.”
On tiptoes to kiss him. Oh, Gallagher was a tall man even with shoulders slouched. She saw that his new bifocals were smudged, removed them from his face and deftly polished them on her skirt.
Mrs. Chester Gallagher.
Each time she signed her new name it seemed to her that her handwriting was subtly altered.
They traveled a good deal. They saw many people. Some were associated with music, and some were associated with the media. Hazel was introduced to very friendly strangers as Hazel Gallagher: a name faintly comical to her, preposterous.
Yet no one laughed! Not within her hearing.
Gallagher, the most sentimental of men as he was the most scornful of men, would have liked a more formal wedding but saw the logic of a brief civil ceremony in one of the smaller courtrooms of the Erie County Courthouse. “Last thing we want is cameras, right? Attention. If my father found out…” The ten-minute ceremony was performed by a justice of the peace on a rainy Saturday morning in November 1972: the exact tenth anniversary of Gallagher and Haze
l meeting in the Piano Bar of the Malin Head Inn. Zack was the sole witness, the bride’s teenaged son in a suit, necktie. Zack looking both embarrassed and pleased.
Gallagher would believe he’d been the one to talk Hazel Jones into marrying him, at last. Joking that Hazel had made an honest man of him.
Ten years!
“Someday, darling, you’ll have to tell me why.”
“Why what?”
“Why you refused to marry me for ten long years.”
“Ten very short years, they were.”
“Long for me! Every morning I expected you to have disappeared. Cleared out. Taken Zack, and left me heartbroken.”
Hazel was startled, at such a remark. Gallagher was only joking of course.
“Maybe I didn’t marry you because I didn’t believe that I was a good enough person to marry you. Maybe that was it.”
Her light enigmatic Hazel Jones laugh. She’d tuned to perfection, like one of Zack’s effortlessly executed cadenzas.
“Good enough to marry me! Hazel, really.”
As Gallagher had arranged to marry Hazel in the Erie County Courthouse, so Gallagher arranged to adopt Zack in the Erie County Courthouse. So proud! So happy! It was the consummation of Gallagher’s adult life.
The adoption was speedily arranged. A meeting with Gallagher’s attorney, and an appointment with a county judge. Legal documents to be drawn up and signed and Zack’s creased and waterstained birth certificate issued as a facsimile in Chemung County, New York, to be photocopied and filed in the Erie County Hall of Records.
Legally, Zack was now Zack Gallagher. But he would retain Zacharias Jones as his professional name.
Zack joked he was the oldest kid adopted in the history of Erie County: fifteen. But, at the signing, he’d turned abruptly away from Gallagher and Hazel not wanting them to see his face.
“Hey, kid. Jesus.”
Gallagher hugged Zack, hard. Kissed the boy wetly on the edge of his mouth. Gallagher, most sentimental of men, didn’t mind anyone seeing him cry.
Like guilty conspirators, mother and son. When they were alone together they burst into laughter, a wild nervous flaming-up laughter that would have shocked Gallagher.
So funny! Whatever it was, that sparked such laughter between them.
Zack had been fascinated by his birth certificate. He didn’t seem to recall ever having seen it before. Hidden away with Hazel Jones’s secret things, a small compact bundle she’d carried with her since the Poor Farm Road.
Zack asked if the birth certificate was legitimate, and Hazel said sharply Yes! It was.
“My name is ‘Zacharias August Jones’ and my father’s name is ‘William Jones’? Who the hell’s ‘William Jones’?”
“‘Was.’”
“‘Was’ what?”
“‘Was,’ not ‘is.’ Mr. Jones is dead now.”
Secrets! In the tight little bundle inside her rib cage in the place where her heart had been. So many secrets, sometimes she couldn’t get her breath.
Thaddeus Gallagher, for instance. His gifts and impassioned love letters to Dearest Hazel Jones!
In fall 1970, soon after Hazel received the first of these, an individual wishing to be designated as an anonymous benefactor gave a sizable sum of money to the Delaware Conservatory of Music earmarked as a scholarship and travel fund for the young pianist Zacharias Jones. Money was required for the numerous international piano competitions in which young pianists performed in hope of winning prizes, public attention, concert bookings and recording deals, and the donation from the anonymous benefactor would allow Zacharias to travel anywhere he wished. Gallagher who intended to manage Zack’s career was keenly aware of these possibilities: “André Watts was seventeen when Leonard Bernstein conducted him in the Liszt E-flat concerto, on national television. A bombshell.” And of course there was the legendary 1958 Tchaikovsky Competition in which twenty-four-year-old Van Cliburn took away the first prize and returned from Soviet Russia an international celebrity. Gallagher knew! But he was damned suspicious of the anonymous benefactor. When administrators at the Conservatory refused to tell him the benefactor’s identity, Gallagher became suspicious and resentful. To Hazel he complained, “What if it’s him. God damn!”
Naively Hazel asked, “Who is him?”
“My God-damned father, who else! It’s three hundred thousand dollars the ‘anonymous benefactor’ has given the Conservatory, it has to be him. He must have heard Zack play in Vermont.” Gallagher was looking fierce yet helpless, a man cut off at the knees. His voice pitched to a sudden pleading softness. “Hazel, I can’t tolerate Thaddeus interfering in my life any more than he has.”
Hazel listened sympathetically. She did not point out to Gallagher It isn’t your life, it’s Zack’s life.
It was a mother’s predatory instinct. Seeing how her son’s skin glowed with sexual heat. His eyes that guiltily eluded her gaze, hot and yearning.
Restless! Too many hours at the piano. Trapped inside a cage of shimmering notes.
He went away from the house, and returned late. Midnight, and later. One night he didn’t return until 4 A.M. (Hazel lay awake, and waiting. Very still not wanting to disturb Gallagher.) Yet another night in September, with only three weeks before the San Francisco Competition, he stayed away until dawn returning at that time stumbling and disheveled, defiant, smelling of beer.
“Zack! Good morning.”
Hazel would not rebuke the boy. She would speak only lightly, without reproach. She knew, if she even touched him he would recoil from her. In sudden fury he might slap at her, strike her with his fists as he’d done as a little boy. Hate you Momma! God damn I hate hate hate you. She must not stare too hungrily at his young unshaven face. Must not accuse him of wishing to ruin their lives any more than she would plead with him or beg or weep for that was never Hazel Jones’s way smiling as she opened the back door for him to enter, allowing him to brush roughly past her beneath the still-burning light breathing harshly through his mouth as if he’d been running and his eyes that were beautiful to her now bloodshot and heavy-lidded and opaque to her gaze and that smell of sweat, a sex-smell, pungent beneath the acrid smell of beer, yet she allowed him to know I love you and my love is stronger than your hatred.
He would sleep through much of the day. Hazel would not disturb him. By late afternoon he would return to the piano renewed, and practice until late evening. And Gallagher, listening in the hallway would shake his head in wonder.
She knew!
(He had to wonder what she’d meant in her playful teasing way Mr. Jones is dead now. If she meant that his father was dead? His long-ago father who had shouted into his face and shaken him like a rag doll and beat him and threw him against the wall yet who had hugged him too, and kissed him wetly on the edge of his mouth leaving a spittle-taste of tobacco behind. Hey: love ya! As his fingers executed the rapidly and vividly descending treble notes in the final ecstatic bars of the Beethoven sonata he had to wonder.)
Strange: that Chet Gallagher was losing interest in his career. Had lost interest in his career. Following the abrupt and shameful ending of the Vietnam War the most protracted and shameful war in American history strange, ironic how bored he’d become almost overnight with public life, politics. Even as his career as Chet Gallagher soared. (The newspaper column, 350 words Gallagher boasted he could type out in his sleep with his left hand, was nationally reprinted and admired. The TV interview program he’d been asked to host in 1973 was steadily gaining an audience. Also in 1973 a collection of prose pieces he’d cobbled together whimsically titled Some Pieces of (My) Mind became an unexpected bestseller in paperback.)
Losing interest in Chet Gallagher in proportion as he was becoming obsessed with Zacharias Jones. For here was a gifted young pianist, a truly gifted young pianist Gallagher had personally discovered up in Malin Head Bay one memorable winter night…
“It happens, he’s my adopted son. My son.”
Gallagher had to concede
this was a phenomenon his own father had been denied. For he’d let his father down. He had failed as a classical pianist. Maybe to spite his father he’d failed but in any case he had failed, all that was finished. He played jazz piano only occasionally now, local gigs, fund-raisers and benefits and sometimes on TV, but not serious jazz any longer, Gallagher had become so Caucasian bourgeois, damned boring middle-aged husband and father, and happy. There’s no edge to happy. There’s no jazz-cool to happy. So devoted to his little family he’d even given up smoking.
How strange life was! He would manage the boy’s career for the responsibility lay with Chet Gallagher.
Not to push the boy of course. From the first he’d cautioned the boy’s mother.
“We’ll take it slow. One thing at a time. Must be realistic. Even André Watts, after his early fantastic success, burned out. And so did Van Cliburn. Temporarily.” Gallagher was not seriously expecting Zack to win a top prize at the San Francisco Competition: for one so young and relatively inexperienced, it was a remarkable honor simply to have qualified. The judges were of various ethnic backgrounds and would not favor a young Caucasian-American male. (Or would they? Zack was playing the “Appassionata.”) Zack would be competing with prize-winning pianists from Russia, China, Japan, Germany who had trained with pianists more distinguished than his teacher at the Delaware Conservatory. To be realistic, Gallagher was planning, plotting: the Tokyo International Piano Competition in May 1975.
Her name was Frieda Bruegger.
She was a student at the Conservatory, a cellist. Beautiful blunt-featured girl with almond-shaped eyes, thick dark bristling hair exploding about her head, a young animated very shapely body. Her voice was a penetrating soprano: “Mrs. Gallagher! Hello.”
The Gravedigger's Daughter: A Novel Page 54