The Afterlife (10 page)

The door was ajar. He pushed it open lightly, and saw first an empty bed and a big metal-framed window overlooking the city from a height even greater than that of the artist’s loft many months ago. But the prospect was dominated by a great ugly iron bridge spotted with red rustproofing paint and crawling with cars.

She was around the edge of the door, sitting in a chair by the bed. Her close-cut hair seemed mostly white, and a catastrophe had overtaken her face: one side of it, eyelid and mouth-corner, had been pulled sharply down. Her Macedonian eyes burned at him from within a startled, stony fury. She could not speak. The stroke had taken away her nimble power of speech. In her lap and scattered on the bed were a number of children’s books and some handmade cards each holding a letter of the alphabet.

Fredericks understood. She was trying to learn to read, to express herself. Her children—parents, now, with children of their own—had lovingly made the alphabet cards, and provided the books. He understood all this but he could not speak,
either. His tongue froze after a few words, much too loud, of greeting, and when she held up some of the letters as if to indicate words, he could not make out what she was spelling.

Frantically he tried to make conversation for them both. “Harriet told me you were here. I’m so sorry. It must be—it must be hard. When will you be getting out? You have a terrific view.”

In an attempt to respond to his question—he blushed at his own stupidity in asking a question she must try to answer—she pointed at the clock on her bedside table, and then shuffled the cards in her lap, looking for one she could not find. She held one up the wrong way around, and then with a grimace on the side of her mouth that was not dead she flipped it away. He remembered the gesture.
Phooey
.

In a virtual panic, blushing and stammering, he talked inanely, finding, when he reached into himself for a subject that he and Arlene had in common, only the hospital itself, its complexity and strangeness to him, and the grim comedy of being crushed in the elevator by the wheelchair and the pushing fat man. “We all could have been squeezed to death. One girl had a cardboard tray full of coffee cups and had to hold it up toward the ceiling.” He imitated the heroic, Statue of Liberty–like pose, and then lowered his arm, shamed by the shining unblinking fury of Arlene’s eyes, one eye half shut. The dead hate us, and we hate the dead.
I went pale with fear, lest awful Persephone send me from Hades the Gorgon’s head, that fabulous horror
. Standing, he felt some liquid otherworldly element spill from him rapidly, cooling the skin of his legs. “I’m afraid I have to, as they say, split.” Fredericks wondered if she would remember his saying that long ago, with faint sarcasm, and try to smile. Arlene unsmilingly stared.
None of your sudden stops and starts
. He promised, insincerely, to come again, and, like heroes before him, fled.

All things have a beginning and an end. The recorder group began in the domestic warmth of the Weisses’ marriage, a model marriage of dark and light, firmness and delicacy, shining on top of their little hill as if for all the town to see. Andrea was a slightly skinny blonde with ironed-looking long straight hair both before and after such hair was the fashion, and pale-blue eyes that developed pink lids when she was tired or emotionally stimulated. Fritz was a dark, almost heavy man with wide hairy-backed hands that, like his tenacious scientist’s mind, took up everything in a grip of steel. From a musical family of physicists, he had played the bass recorder since childhood, having been trained in this instrument to round out a quartet consisting of his father (tenor), mother (soprano), and sister (alto). But the bass was a doleful mumbly instrument played alone, and for their seventh anniversary he bought Andrea a quality soprano recorder, of dark-striped pale pearwood—a Moeck. Slowly, obediently, she learned to play it, her hesitant piping echoing through the boxy bare rooms of their white, clapboarded house—rooms rather underfurnished, their friends thought, with an austere mix of glass tables and Danish modern (Fritz’s taste) and imitation-Shaker chairs and handwoven wool rugs (Andrea’s).
She owned a loom as big as a small room, and spent afternoons at it, before the three children (girl, boy, girl) came home from school. There was a shy and stubborn expertise to all she did, though on the soprano recorder she tended to panic at any note higher than the G at the top of the staff, and when a trill involved moving more than one finger on the stops, she fluttered off into blushing silence. When she blushed, her cheeks suddenly matched the tint of her lids and lips, and the rose color sank into her throat and the décolletage of her peasant blouse.

There is little music arranged for the bass and the soprano in duet, though some of the Bach fugues build to a certain passion without the middle voices. The Weisses’ three children, some nights, would be kept awake as the couple moved the theme back and forth, from low to high to low, and at intervals beat time in silence, or held harmonic whole notes, while the absent instruments possessed the melody. The sounds carried beyond the house. Another couple, the Bridgetons, had moved to town, and lived along the beach road at the base of the Weisses’ hill, close enough to hear them these spring nights, now that the storm windows were off. In the crowded high-school corridor as they waited to be checked in at the May town meeting, Terry Bridgeton mentioned the music to Fritz (they knew each other by sight, from the train platform and Little League games) and said how lovely it sounded from afar. Terry allowed that he was a musical ignoramus but his wife, Jessie, was a kind of marvel; she could play anything—piano, guitar, church organ, even the clarinet when she was a girl.

Fritz told him, “The recorder is the easiest instrument in the world to learn, next to the triangle and the tambourine. And I suppose the maracas.” There was a German pedantry to Fritz.

“Well,” Terry said, blushing with his own effrontery, or from the heat of the high-school hall, “we could both try to learn, if you’d tell us what instruments to get.”

“Alto and tenor,” Fritz said, firmly, then, suspecting he had allowed himself to get in too deep, added, “Of course, you and your wife may not take to the instruments.”

Jessie, an olive-skinned, short, plumpish, eagerly smiling woman in bangs, somewhat alarmingly clad in a fringed shawl and a tangle of gold and turquoise pendants, spoke up behind them. “Oh, we’ll take to them. We’re desperate to do
some
thing and meet some
peo
ple.”

It was high summer before the Bridgetons, having put themselves to school with Mario Duschenes’s
Method for the Recorder
and Marguerite Dubbé’s
First Recorder Book
, dared present themselves to the Weisses one agreed-upon evening; Andrea had suggested they come for dessert and coffee and then “give it a try.” The newborn quartet was able to make its way, with many halts and restarts, through a Bach fugue without flats and sharps, several Corelli gigues, and the first sheet of a Byrd fantasia before the clock struck ten and it was time for cigarettes and beer and a social exchange. After their immersion in music, a warmth remained. The two couples had more in common than their relaxed costumes—Terry was an artist in an ad agency, and dressed after work in frayed jeans and logo’d T-shirts. But, though they promised to meet again, and again, it was uncomfortable—somehow too naked. Each player, alone on his or her part, was embarrassed whenever he or she became lost and the whole quartet had to stagger to a halt. Musical Jessie, confidently warbling on her alto, rarely slipped and tried to keep the tempo up, and Fritz in his steely way persevered on the bass, which made so low and indistinct a noise that it scarcely mattered if he was in time with the others or not. But Terry, as he had admitted, was a musical novice,
and sometimes intently went along measure after measure on his tenor without realizing that he was a beat behind and generating dissonance on every chord. Andrea, though more practiced than he, was almost too sensitive to play the soprano, which by virtue of its pitch had to carry the melody, and yet whose high notes she heard as painfully shrill, a wet strained squeaking she preferred to put out of its misery, lowering her recorder to her lap and enfolding it with her long, pale, pink-knuckled hands. Terry loved her in those moments, grateful that someone else was causing the quartet to founder. They had become the clumsy children, and their spouses the formidable parents.

The group needed more players; and, magically, more did appear, like dewdrops on a spider web. Carolyn Homer, a tall auburn-haired woman who held aerobics classes in the parish hall of the Congregational church, turned out to have taught herself the recorder while enrolled, years ago, in a course at the New England Conservatory in Renaissance music; she brought a well-exercised alto instrument, the color worn from its mouthpiece and finger-holes, to the group. Dick McHoagland, the squat and scowling leader of the local high-school band (and the typing instructor as well), brought a tenor instrument; he and Fritz, both being martinets, hit it off well and played side by side, leaving Terry next to the alto section. Both Dick and Carolyn were married, to unmusical spouses, but the town was rich in divorcées and men on the loose, and now these began to adhere. Alice Arsenault, a nervous little rounded thing who for some reason had been married to Skip Arsenault, an uproarious town fireman, former athlete, and hard drinker, showed up one night in Carolyn’s shadow with a soprano recorder and an earnestly annotated copy of the Trapp Family Singers’ instruction manual. Maury
Sutherland, a stooping, sexually undecided country gentleman (whom Terry had always supposed, from the way he tilted his head and spoke in cautious fragmented sentences, to be hard of hearing), produced from his inherited treasures an alto recorder acquired by his great-aunt Esther—on the Jekyll side—while sightseeing in Austria and northern Italy before the First World War. “Do tell,” he would say in response to a lengthy disquisition, with an expression of amiable bafflement. “Beats me.”

This made three altos, and soon there were three sopranos, since somehow in Maury’s orbit there materialized, one bitterly cold night just before Christmas, a vivid woman newly escaped from Boston, propelled into this far suburb by the repulsive force of the crack-up of her long-term relationship with an anchorperson whose handsome ochre visage was known from Provincetown to Pittsfield, from Salisbury to South Dartmouth. Toula Jaxon, as she presently called herself, had emerged with a cathode-ray glow from her discontinued relationship—a luminosity that made the men of the group stare and the women squint. She was a study in high contrast; her white forehead flashed between her eyebrows and hairline, her eyes were black lights encircled by ink, even the parting in her blue-black hair seemed incandescent. Her lips and fingernails were painted in slashes of purple. Her clothes, though she tried to tone them down as the sessions ensued through the drab winter, were city-slick—tight skirts well above the knee, and rippling silk blouses, and Hermès scarves swirled at the throat. As if colorized, she jarred among the earth-tones of the suburban women, and although there was something chastened and shyly willing to please about her social manner, she played the recorder the way she looked—loud and too expressive. Much defter than one
would have thought possible from the length of her fingernails, Toula had no fear of high fast notes; her flair, mounted between Andrea’s perfectionist reserve and Alice’s novice awkwardness, seemed all too
displayed
. Her recorder, a stylish artifact of high-density plastic produced in Japan, didn’t sound like the other instruments and glistened above their resonant merge like oil making its rainbows on water.

In the alto section, tweedy Maury Sutherland did indeed prove to be hard of hearing, or blunderingly insensitive, for his alto, fed out of his large male lungs, arrhythmically overpowered the instruments of the two females; Jessie had to sit next to him, since Carolyn from the start assumed the position of priority, next to the sopranos. Terry, glancing over past Maury, saw an expression of suppressed wincing on his wife’s usually cheerful face, with its long bangs and gypsy complexion. In the privacy of their home Jessie almost wept. “He just
blows
,” she complained, “every note, as loud as he can. Tonight, on the little Purcell, I
very
tactfully pointed out to him all the pianissimos and diminuendos, and he nodded, that obtuse handsome way he has of nodding, and then when the time came blasted away as if he was pouring buckshot into some poor trembling quail. And on top of everything else he’s a disgusting racist fascist!” During the beer and cigarettes tonight they had discussed politics; these after-sessions, as they all got to know each other, were getting longer and longer, so that sometimes they broke up not short of midnight, even though the recorder playing always ended on the stroke of ten, as chimed by the clock in the hall—a tall case clock of walnut and pine, with a pewter face, that Terry associated with Andrea’s half of the furnishings, and that he loved for having her quiet elegance and soft severity.