“We’ll think of something,” Luellen said. “Commercial property rate?”
Beth nodded. When Uncle Bob’s mother died, the property was in the county, taxes low, and no one had given a thought to how it would be swallowed up by a city moving inexorably out in all directions. Now the property was within the city limits, and this was the sole residential tract in a commercial section. Although taxes had increased dramatically, due to Uncle Bob’s age and a long family history at the site, an allowance had been made for him, taxes had been deferred until the property changed ownership. Now they were due.
“We’ll think of something,” Luellen repeated. “You go freshen up. That man came to write his article. We’ll give him some lunch, too, I reckon. He’s out under the oak tree. When you come down, you can go fetch him, and we’ll talk about all this later.”
“No amount of talking will make it work, Luellen. I’ll be down in a minute.”
Beth felt defeated, and despised feeling that way. If they had not come to visit Uncle Bob the first time, she thought, if he had remained a family secret, she would still be in New York, still working for Green America, still unhappy, but not swamped by this new responsibility. Cindy had been two when Beth first entered the house that now belonged to her.
Luellen had opened the door and looked over the man and woman and the toddler that day, six years ago. “Can I help you?”
Beth nodded. “I think so. I’m Beth Stedman, this is my husband Daniel, and she’s Cindy. I’ve come to see Uncle Bob, my mother’s great uncle.”
“Well, for heaven’s sake! You folks come right on in. Bob’s around here somewhere.”
Beth had been hesitant about the visit, but had felt it was a necessary one. “He’s a degenerate, a pervert,” her mother had said when Beth asked about him a few weeks earlier. “The family disowned him decades ago, and hardly anyone even knows he’s still alive, I guess.”
Beth had come across his name in the family Bible, along with hundreds of cousins, aunts, uncles spread across the south. When Daniel said he had to go to Memphis for the group they both worked for, she had made the decision to meet Uncle Bob.
It was an awkward meeting. He was so old, she thought that day, his face crinkled, lined, tanned as brown as a nut, and his hands gnarled by arthritis. She had met Leo that day, too. A little younger than Uncle Bob, she guessed, he was very black, and he was stooped. Everything about him seemed to sag, shoulders, pouches under his eyes, cheeks. He chuckled, and Uncle Bob’s eyes sparkled with delight and he laughed without restraint as Cindy ran around the room touching things. She touched Uncle Bob’s gnarled hand, and Leo’s wrinkly hand, stroked Luellen’s arm, and ran on to a lamp, tables . . . whatever she could reach.
In a low voice Uncle Bob had said, “Little cat, she’s marking her own.”
Before Beth could catch her, Cindy ran from the room, down a hallway, and stopped at a door, trying to turn the door knob. Beth and Luellen reached her together, and when Beth picked her up, she struggled to get down again.
“It’s the basement,” Luellen said. “I reckon we don’t want her to fall down the stairs.”
Back in the family room Beth passed the squirming child to Daniel and turned to Uncle Bob. “I guess she isn’t very civilized yet.”
“She heard the music,” Uncle Bob said, to Beth’s bewilderment. Luellen and Leo nodded. Cindy had heard the music.
Upstairs, washing her hands, Beth drew in a long breath and said in a low voice, “We’ll think of something.”
Beth had not understood what Uncle Bob had meant that day. Now she did. Cindy had heard the music, was still hearing the music, and Beth could no longer deny it.
Jake was already heading back to the house when she went out to invite him to lunch. They met on the path and introduced themselves.
“That’s a beautiful area,” Jake said. “Peaceful and beautiful.”
“We like it,” she said. “Luellen says you should stay for lunch. You’re more than welcome.”
“It’s an imposition,” he said. “I’ve taken up a lot of her time already.”
“She’s pretty adamant,” Beth said. “She always said that no one walks away hungry from her house and she doesn’t intend for you to.”
She was smiling, but there was a forced quality to it. He sensed a worry, a problem, a deep unhappiness even. She was beautiful, young, wearing a wedding ring, and not at all what he had expected when Luellen said she had inherited the house.
“Are you going to live here?” he asked as they walked back to the house.
“We almost have to,” she said. “It’s a lovely piece of property, isn’t it?” she added quickly, as if to change the subject. “Even surrounded by car lots and dollar stores, it’s still lovely. As soon as you step inside, you forget what you had to pass to reach it.”
Almost have to? What did that mean, he wondered, but asked no more questions. They entered the house through a back door and she led him to a small room with a table spread for lunch.
Jake protested feebly when Luellen indicated a chair for him. “Don’t be silly,” she said. “Lunch time, lunch on the table, why walk away from such a deal? Ham and cheese sandwiches, but if you don’t like ham, you can have just cheese, same as Cindy.”
“Ham’s yucky,” Cindy said. “Do you write stories?”
“Articles about people,” he said. She looked disappointed. “Some day I’d like to do a real story about your Uncle Bob.”
“Isn’t that what you came here to do?” Luellen asked.
He began to explain his articles, stopped, and shrugged. “I couldn’t do justice to Bob, Leo and you in the kind of space they’ll give me. That tape you let me hear was terrific. Thank you.”
Luellen nodded. “I thought you might like it.”
Beth picked at a salad but ate little, and contributed nothing to the conversation. She could scrape together enough money to pay the taxes, she was thinking, but it would be scraping bottom, plus using her credit cards. Cindy’s bank account was off limits. Her future education depended on it. Beth’s parents always gave Cindy birthday money, Christmas money, and most of it went into that account. Beth and Daniel had worked for an environmental group, Green America, which paid very little, and she knew that her parents would not help out with managing expenses on this house. They had not forgiven her for marrying a New York Jewish lawyer, especially one who didn’t make a lot of money. She suspected they had rejoiced when Daniel was critically injured while hiking. He had died after three operations. The insurance had been insufficient and now, four years later, she was still paying off medical bills. She was free to marry a proper man, her mother had hinted, one who would fit in with them and their friends. She bit her lip, and looked up to see Jake Manfried’s gaze on her.
“I’ll help Luellen clean up in the kitchen,” she said to him, “and then if you have any more questions about Uncle Bob, we can tackle them.”
He nodded. “I’d like that,” he said. “I’ll help too.”
A few minutes later they went out to sit under the oak tree to talk. “This is a wonderful place,” Jake said. “So many flowers. Who did all this?”
“When Leo died,” she said after a moment, “my husband and I, and Cindy, of course, came. While Daniel was busy helping Uncle Bob write a will, I planted a few things. That was four years ago.”
The will had been necessary, she had come to realize when her mother said they would never allow Bob Wranger to be cremated and his ashes spread next to that black pervert’s remains. Bob would have a decent Christian funeral and be buried in the family plot next to his mother and father.
Another memory flashed into being. She had been with Luellen in the kitchen when she heard the piano on that visit following Leo’s death. Uncle Bob was in the family room, Daniel at the Memphis office, and no one else was in the house except Cindy. Startled, she had looked at Luellen, who had stopped her motions of making coffee. Beth had gone to the basement door, down a few steps, far enough to see Cindy on the piano bench, picking out a tune.
“Cindy! Stop that! Get up here this instant!” she had called.
Cindy had a preoccupied expression and took a moment to look up and acknowledge the order. With obvious reluctance she had slid off the bench, crossed the basement, and started up the stairs.
Beth moved aside to let her daughter leave the stairs, then closed the door hard.
“Cindy, you are not allowed to go down there and play the piano without permission. You know better than that.”
“He said I could,” Cindy said.
“Who said you could?”
“Uncle Leo,” the child answered, and looked past Beth to Uncle Bob, who had come into the hall. “He said it was all right,” she said to Uncle Bob.
“And it is,” Uncle Bob said. “Cindy, you can play that piano whenever you want to.”
Beth felt chilled, frightened, afraid for her daughter, and almost instantly decided it was Cindy’s imagination, her fertile and unpredictable imagination. She glanced at Uncle Bob, and the chill returned.
“If Leo said it’s all right, and I say it’s all right, that’s it,” Uncle Bob said, speaking in a sober voice, not his usual way to talking to Cindy. “You were playing his favorite song, honey.”
Beth could not have named the song her daughter had been picking out. It had sounded as if she were listening to a melody and choosing the right keys to accompany it. When she asked Luellen if she knew it, Luellen had shaken her head.
“Honey,” she had said that day, “Bob and Leo were making music before I ever knew them. That must have been one of the earlier songs they played.” She had paused, then added, “Bob told me once that some of the music he had wanted to play in the salon was music he had never heard, except in his head. He called it the other music.”
“Were you always close to your great uncle?” Jake asked, drawing her back from memories and worry.
“No. I met him for the first time six years ago, but we visited quite often after that.”
From the wide French doors there drifted the opening bars of “Bye, Bye, Blackbird.” It was being played slowly.
Beth smiled. “Luellen’s teaching Cindy some of the songs the group used to play. She plays it on the guitar and sings the words, Cindy learns the melody and they go on from there.”
“Cindy is very gifted,” Jake said.
Beth nodded. Then to her surprise she told him about Uncle Bob’s final days and his death.
“Cindy came home from school on Friday, terribly upset. She said we had to go see Uncle Bob. We had to. He had become frail, but there was no crisis. Luellen had not called or anything. I tried to talk her out of it, but she kept on, and we came on Friday night. Saturday and Sunday she and Luellen played some of the old songs. They left the basement door open so he could hear. It pleased him so much. On Monday I went to the kitchen to heat some soup for him. They were playing ‘Moon River,’ one of his favorite songs. Do you know it?”
Jake nodded, vaguely familiar with it.
“They were playing the phrase,” she said, and sang the words in a sweet, low voice, “We’re after the same rainbow’s end, right around the bend, my huckleberry friend--” She broke it off there and said, “They both stopped at that same instant.”
She paused with her head lowered for a second, then continued softly. “They came up together and we all went to the family room. He was dead. He was smiling.”
Neither spoke again for several minutes as they listened to the music coming from the basement. The tempo picked up, as if sheet music were being followed effortlessly.
“Mr. Manfried,” Beth said in a strained voice, “please, that isn’t for publication, what I just told you.”
“Of course not,” he said. “Completely off the record. It’s Jake,” he added.
She nodded. “Beth.” After a moment, she said, “You’re not a New Yorker, are you? Where do you come from?”
Jake told her about growing up in Muncie, about the job he had come to hate and the difficulty of finding anything else that he could live on. She talked a little about her proper Virginia family and their dismay when she went to New York to work for Green America, and their greater dismay when she married Daniel, and their evident relief when he died. She said Uncle Bob had been gentle and understanding, and Leo was one of the kindest men she had ever known. Over the years, they had pooled income, Social Security, a retirement plan that Luellen had set up for Uncle Bob and that he had outlived. One by one the sources of income had vanished, until now, following Uncle Bob’s death, Luellen’s small retirement account and her Social Security check were all she had. Beth made so little and her debts were such that she could not see any way to keep the house and to provide for Cindy. Insurance, taxes, Cindy’s education, and for the last several years music lessons . . . She would transfer to Memphis, she said, but the pay would not increase, and the expenses would only grow.
“But I have to keep it,” she said. “I promised Uncle Bob that Luellen would join him and Leo again when the time came.” After a moment she added, “And then there’s Cindy. She belongs here.”
Jake nodded. Cindy belonged here. She was playing “Moon River,” jazzing it up, improvising. Not the way Bob would have done, not yet, but as if she had cut her baby teeth on it, and was in the process of growing into a role foreordained for her. The thought made him uneasy.
“Any one of them could have become a big star,” he said. “The trio could have made big time. Why didn’t they go that route?”
“Uncle Bob told me that they were exactly where they wanted to be, doing exactly what they wanted to do, and more than that no one should ever ask for,” she said.
In the basement, Luellen stood and patted Cindy on the head. “I’m going on up now. And you’re supposed to practice for that recital next week. Remember?”
Cindy made a face.
“Honey, your face will freeze like that one of these days,” Luellen said.
“You always say than but it never does. I want it to.”
Smiling, Luellen went to the French door and up the ramp where she stopped to gaze at Beth and Jake under the oak tree, and to listen to Cindy start playing Chopin. Her smile broadened, and she laughed softly as Cindy played it her way. She returned to the basement and went up the stairs instead of interrupting the conversation under the tree.