White Wind Blew (14 page)

“So after she died you ran back to the priesthood?”

“I’m here, aren’t I?”

“I meant figuratively, Wolf. We know why you’re still here. But otherwise you would be there?”

“I…” Wolfgang buried his thoughts. He tilted his glass until the last drop hit his tongue.

Susannah cleared her throat and winced as if her head ached. She looked tired, her eyes finally touched by the wine. “Will you play for me?”

Wolfgang spun quickly around and faced the piano. “Love to.” He looked over his shoulder and noticed she’d stretched out on the couch, lying as if ready to be painted. “What shall I play?”

She closed her eyes. “You choose.”

Wolfgang played bits of Beethoven, Bach, and Chopin for nearly an hour, occasionally checking over his shoulder to see if she was asleep. Her eyes stayed closed, but every so often she’d shift and give off the slightest sound. Her glass of wine rested empty on the floor before the couch. He wasn’t sure when she’d finished it. The firelight cast a halo around her torso and head. He smiled and faced the piano again, and just before his fingers eased down on the keys once more, she spoke.

“Wolf, how did your father die?”

In September 1905, when Wolfgang was seven, he guessed something was wrong with his father. Charles Pike normally played his violin four hours without tiring, but he began taking naps in the middle of the day. Wolfgang wasn’t used to seeing him rest. Three days in a row his father had slept in late, skipping daily Mass, something Wolfgang had never seen him do. Wolfgang had watched him from the hole in the bedroom wall, wondering when he would wake up. When Charles did finally get up, he failed to get dressed. Instead, he sat at the kitchen table for an hour, drinking coffee.

On an afternoon in October, Charles came home from the factory, sweating and holding his stomach. He removed all eight of his violins from the couch, one at a time, and leaned them against the far wall. He dropped to the cushions and stretched out while Wolfgang watched from the dining room. Charles blinked as he stared at his son and then doubled over into a fetal position.

Wolfgang took a step toward the couch. “Daddy?”

Charles grunted and straightened, wincing. “Play the piano for me, Wolfgang.”

Wolfgang sat on the piano bench, still watching his father. Seeing him in pain made Wolfgang want to cry. Charles had shown his son nearly every emotion over the years except pain. Often Wolfgang had wished pain on his father, when Charles would slap him across the wrist with a violin bow every time he missed a key on the piano. Or when he’d spy on his mother and see her crying. Wolfgang would secretly pray some kind of small pain on his father, nothing too harsh, just enough to get his attention.

He’d only fully begun to understand prayer months before, when he’d asked his father why Minister Ford’s wife, Cecelia, hadn’t been at church two weeks in a row.

“She’s sick, Wolfgang,” Charles had told him. “Which is why we pray for her every day. Go ahead, talk to God and tell Him you want Mrs. Ford to get to feeling better.”

And so Wolfgang prayed for Mrs. Ford, along with everyone else in the congregation. He missed seeing her at church. She was wide with a hefty bosom, and every time she hugged him she pulled him close. And she smelled good. Every night for a month he prayed to God for Mrs. Ford to feel better. And it worked. Cecelia Ford walked into church one morning looking the same as if she’d never gotten sick. Wolfgang felt as if he’d been involved in the greatest miracle on earth. That night Wolfgang went home and prayed that his mother would fry bacon in the morning. When the sun rose, the smell of frying bacon came with it.

Wolfgang looked to the cross on the wall above the piano and held back tears. What had he done, wishing pain on his father?

“Play, Wolfgang.” His father winced on the couch.

Wolfgang focused on the white and black piano keys before him. He started to warm up with scales.

“Good,” coached Charles. “Good…tempo…tempo…” He screamed out. Doris was at the grocery. It was just the two of them. Charles gripped his stomach. His eyeballs bulged.

Tears formed in Wolfgang’s eyes at the piano. “Daddy—”

“Keep playing,” hissed Charles Pike. “And God damn it, watch your tempo.”

Wolfgang looked to the cross above the piano.
Stop
it,
his mind cried.
God, please stop my father’s pain. I should never have prayed for such a thing. I take it all back.

“Damn it!” Charles screamed.

“Daddy—”

“Keep playing.”

Wolfgang glared at the cross.
Stop
it…stop it…stop it.

***

Wolfgang prayed for his father to feel better. The next week Charles seemed to improve. The lethargy had passed. He stood with Wolfgang in the center of the living room floor. Wolfgang had the violin craned between his neck and left shoulder. He held the bow in his right hand and awaited the next instruction. Charles had his hair down, and it fell over his shoulders and hid his loopy ears. His red cravat hung loosely around his neck. He’d taken off his jacket and vest, so all that remained was his fluffy white shirt rolled to his elbows. In his left hand was his favorite violin, the one with the carefully burned letter
P
on the base of the wood—a signature-type letter, sprawling and slanted, a letter he’d spent hours practicing. It was how he would sign all of his instruments in his Vienna music store—such a dreamer. He slapped the violin bow across Wolfgang’s knees and warned him about his posture.

Just as Wolfgang raised his bow across the strings, he noticed a look in his father’s eyes. The same look he’d seen on the couch the previous week. Charles dropped his violin and bow, doubled over, and ran that way into the bathroom down the hall. Wolfgang, still clutching his own violin, followed his father until the bathroom door slammed in his face. On the other side of the door, Charles grunted in discomfort and breathed heavily. A minute later Charles screamed. “Jesus. What the— Doris! Doris!”

Wolfgang’s mother ran down the hall, wiping her hands on a dish towel. She backed Wolfgang away from the door and tried the knob. It was locked. “Open up, Charles.” The lock clicked. Doris Pike grimaced and forced her way inside. Wolfgang heard her gasp: “Charles, you’re bleeding.”

Over the next several months, Charles lost weight at an alarming rate. There were mornings when Wolfgang hardly recognized his father from the day before. During school Wolfgang often lost focus as his mind drifted to his father’s health. He prayed when he should have been studying. He’d imagine his father getting better during the day, the Lord’s hand reaching down through their roof and healing him. But he’d return home and his father would look much the same. His face showed the angled form of the skull underneath his skin. His eye sockets darkened. His hair began showing signs of gray. Still he refused to see any doctor. “The Lord will heal me if he so chooses.”

Wolfgang cursed his father’s stubbornness, and he couldn’t understand why the Lord was waiting so long. He’d been praying to Him for over a month. By November Charles had stopped going to work. He was too weak to play his instruments. He and Doris fought over money. They fought over his declining health. Every day she urged him to go see a doctor, but still he refused. His clothes hung from his thin frame. He’d had Wolfgang cut a new notch in his leather belt to keep his suit pants from falling. Charles spent most of his evenings in bed, especially after the nausea began to set in. He’d lay with his legs under the covers, his composition on his lap and his inkwell propped in the folds of the bed sheets beside him.

One night Wolfgang knocked on his parents’ bedroom door. His mother was in the kitchen and would have scolded him had she known he was disturbing Charles while he was writing.

“Come in,” he said weakly.

Wolfgang slid inside the cramped room, which smelled thick with sickness—sheets that needed to be washed, clothes that needed to be cleaned, and pillows stained. Wolfgang wore a stethoscope around his neck. He’d been secretly playing doctor. Charles gave him a warm smile and beckoned him closer. His fingernails needed to be clipped. Wolfgang approached slowly, staring at the man he’d once known as his father. Charles put his pen on the top page of his work and ruffled Wolfgang’s hair. “The greatest fugue ever written.” He tapped his work with a crooked index finger. “Right here.” His favorite violin, the model for Pike Music, rested on the pillow beside him.

Charles reached out and yanked the stethoscope from Wolfgang’s neck. He stared at it and then dropped it to the floor. “I don’t need a doctor, Wolfgang. God will do with me as He wishes. Nothing science or medicine can do.” Charles laughed. “From monkey to man? Can you believe that, Wolfgang? From monkey to man.” He pouted out his lower lip and scrunched his face. “Do I look like a monkey to you?”

Wolfgang didn’t know whether to laugh or be afraid. “No, Father, you don’t look like a monkey.” It was during the time of sickness that Wolfgang had begun to call Charles “Father” instead of “Daddy.” This sick man wasn’t his daddy. “Did God make you sick?” asked Wolfgang.

Charles nodded. “Yes, He did. But He had his reasons, Wolfgang. He always has his reasons.” He ruffled his son’s hair again. “Do you have dreams?”

Wolfgang shook his head.

“Someday you will.”

Wolfgang stared at him, confused.

***

The vomiting started in December. And the fevers after that. His mother cried a lot when she thought Wolfgang wasn’t looking. Sometimes she’d cry at night, knitting in a rocking chair next to their bed while Charles worked by candlelight. Wolfgang would watch them from his bedroom wall. Whenever his father would lean his head back against the headboard and moan, she would stand up and wipe his brow with a wet cloth. When he’d lean over the side of the bed and vomit into a metal pail, she’d empty it and wipe his mouth. Sometimes his mother would leave at night and return a few hours later with food. Fruit and vegetables. She’d fix him a plate of carrots and celery, apples and oranges, and take them up to their bedroom so he could nibble on them while he composed.

One night Wolfgang heard her feet on the stairs. He knelt on his mattress, peered into their room through the hole and watched her enter with a plate of vegetables. It was all she could get Charles to eat. She placed the plate on the bed beside him, but she was clumsy taking her hand away. Her fingers clipped the well of ink, spilling some of it on the sheet. A few spots splattered on his work. He grabbed her hair, yanked her down, and shoved her nose in the spilled ink. He lifted the inkwell and rammed it against the side of her head, cutting her above the left eye. She staggered back with ink covering her face.

It was the first and last time Charles had ever raised a hand in anger to either one of them. Perhaps if he had, at least his behavior over the years might have been easier to understand. But later, before they went to bed, he kissed her forehead and told her he loved her. And that they would jump on a boat and sail to Vienna as soon as they had enough money stashed away. He would open his own music store. Doris nodded obediently, some of the ink still staining the creases of her face. Charles moved a strand of her red hair from her eyes, kissed the cut he’d made above her left eye, and tucked the hair behind her left ear. “You’ve got ink in your hair.”

As if he never remembered hitting her.

***

A few days later the stench from his parents’ bedroom was nearly toxic. Charles lay in bed. His inkwell and papers were still on the bedside table. His feet were bare, the bottoms facing Wolfgang. Wolfgang heard his mother in the hallway. He quickly hopped into his bed and pretended to be asleep when she quietly stuck her head into his room. When she left, he returned to the wall and peered through.

His mother closed her bedroom door, paused for a moment with her nose against the grains of the wood, and locked it. She approached the bed and kissed Charles on the forehead. She stroked his hair for a moment and said something to him that was not audible to Wolfgang. She handed him the King James Bible, and he clutched it tight against his chest. Then she took a pillow and, with both hands, pressed the pillow down over her husband’s face. Wolfgang could see her back straining. She let out a soft grunt. She stood on her tiptoes. Her calf muscles strained as her slight body pressed down on the pillow. Charles moaned and grunted against the pillow, his right hand held on to the Bible while the fingers of his left hand clawed at the tangled bed sheets. His bare feet rose several inches off the mattress, kicking and falling, kicking and falling, until finally they stopped.

Wolfgang watched, wide-eyed. What was she doing? He tried to scream, but the sound got caught up inside his throat. He froze. He couldn’t breathe. His mother moved the pillow from his father’s face and dropped it to the floor. She checked for a pulse at his father’s neck. She knelt to the floor, rested her face against his chest, and started crying.

***

That night, Wolfgang lay in bed, his covers pulled up to his neck, and stared at the ceiling. His mother cried on the other side of the wall for hours. He watched the tree limbs outside his bedroom window. Shadows moved everywhere. He was too scared to close his eyes. He felt like he was wheezing. He prayed for his own safety. How could she? He’d been praying for him. It could have worked. It had taken some time with Mrs. Ford, but eventually praying had worked on her. He waited all night for his bedroom door to creak open and for his mother to walk into his room with a pillow. He waited, but she never came. When he finally fell asleep, he startled awake.

Do
you
have
dreams? Someday you will…

Even after the sun shone into his room, he was slow to get up. He’d convinced himself that it had all been a dream. A terrible nightmare. His father would be alive and writing in the living room when he came downstairs, his favorite violin tucked to his neck, the bow moving back and forth over the strings.

But the living room was empty and silent. Wolfgang found his mother sitting alone at the kitchen table. Maybe he’d gone to work? Or off to the Baroque for an early drink?

Doris Pike sniffled into her fist as Wolfgang showed himself. “Come here, honey.” She patted her right thigh. Her eyes were red and swollen from crying. Wolfgang didn’t budge. He stood ten paces away from her and stayed there. She sniffled again. “I’m sorry, honey, but you know how sick your father was?”

Wolfgang nodded.

“Well, God took him away during the night.”

***

Wolfgang sat on the piano bench with his hands folded between his legs, staring down at the floor of his cottage, the splintered slats between his boots. Only Rose had known. And now Susannah.

Wolfgang waited for her to say something, but the room was silent. She sniffled much like his mother had that morning in the kitchen. Flames snapped against the charred stones of the fireplace. His face felt slack. He didn’t look up, afraid to look into Susannah’s eyes.

The couch creaked as Susannah shifted her position. Her bare feet padded against the wood floor, coming closer, her shadow combining with his own. He didn’t look up. She draped her arms around his shoulders and kissed the top of his head. His face brushed against the buttons of her dress, pressed against her chest. Her heart beat into his ear.