Acquainted With The Night Part 3

"Oh, did I say that? I don't remember. I wanted to see Paul. Nan, we can still see each other, after all-"

"Richard, you're insane." It was that voice again.

"Now let's not get started like that. Can't we even meet without accusations? Always the same old story. G.o.d, how did I ever put up with it for so long," he grumbled bitterly, turning away and walking to the window with his hands thrust in his pockets.

Nan straightened up. "All right. Dinner." Her voice was charged now with an eerie brightness. "What's for dinner? Anyone have any ideas? What can we serve on short notice for our distinguished guest?"

"I'll get dinner," said Paul.

They stared at him in surprise, as if they had forgotten he was there.

"I'll get dinner," he repeated in a loud, hoa.r.s.e voice. Paul shoved past Nan into the kitchen. His hands were shaking again. He yanked open a drawer and took out the carving knife. Clutching its handle tightly to steady the trembling, he held it out straight in front of him and returned to the doorway. He looked from one to the other. They were standing in the same places, Nan slumped against the doorframe and Richard farther away, at the window, hands in his pockets. They didn't know yet. Nan was not looking at him but at Richard.

His father noticed him first. "Paul?" he said quietly, and started towards him. Then Nan saw too and gasped. Her hand jerked up to her mouth.

"Don't come near me," said Paul. Nan stepped aside, but Richard moved closer to grab his wrist. Paul flicked the knife upward so it grazed the sleeve of Richard's jacket.

"I'm going to solve all your problems for you," Paul said.

"Paul, no, put it down, please," said Nan. He ignored her. Richard was affecting nonchalance now, standing nearby in a relaxed pose, waiting for Paul to lose his nerve and drop the knife.

Paul imagined the thrust, how hard and deep he would have to push, the resistance of the flesh and then the crowning surge of warm blood. It would be the greatest release of his life, a great flow, a torrent. He stepped toward Nan, who cringed, then he stepped back. He moved toward Richard, who inched back cautiously. To Nan again. Then Richard. Then Nan. They were holding their breath, terrified of him. Whose blood? The question darted through his head, in and out of turns and dark corridors, a maze with no exit, and then suddenly balked, up against a flat wall of flaming red, he swiveled the knife and sliced inside his own wrist. A path opened, a thin red line, then an ooze, a stream, dripping from his trembling arm onto the green carpet. He dropped the knife. They were upon him, Nan whimpering and rocking to and fro, Richard embracing him and sobbing. Nan ran for a dish towel and bound it tightly around his wrist.

"Quick, let's get him into the car," she cried. "Get his coat."

Richard stood sobbing in choking gulps. "Oh my G.o.d. Oh my G.o.d."

Nan threw a coat over Paul's shoulders and pushed them both towards the door. She was swift and efficient.

"I did this," moaned Richard. "This is my doing."

She had a moment, at the elevator, to place a hand on his shoulder and lean against him. "Oh, Richard," she said gently in a soft wail, "you can't leave now. Oh, you can't. You see how much he needs you."

Richard nodded again and again, wiping his eyes with his fist.

The towel was sopping with blood, but luckily Nan had remembered to bring along extras. She changed the bandage and dropped the dripping red towel in a trash can outside the front door.

"Poor child," she murmured. "Oh, my poor baby."

"I'll do anything for him now," said Richard. He had stopped crying and was slamming the car door shut and starting the engine. "He'll need more intensive treatment. I'll have a consultation with Dr. Crewes. Can you stand to have me-"

"We'll work everything out, everything. Just so long as he's all right," said Nan from the back seat, where she sat cradling Paul's head in her lap.

THE MIDDLE CLa.s.sES.

THEY SAY MEMORY ENHANCES places, but my childhood block of small brick row houses grows smaller every year, till there is barely room for me to stand upright in my own recollections. The broad avenue on our corner, gateway to the rest of the world, an avenue so broad that for a long time I was not permitted to cross it alone, has narrowed to a strait, and its row of tiny shops-dry cleaners, candy store, beauty parlor, grocery store-has dwindled to a row of cells. On my little block itself the hedges, once staunch walls guarding the approach to every house, are shrunken, their sharp dark leaves stunted. The hydrangea bush-what we called a s...o...b..ll bush-in front of the house next to mine has shrunk; its s...o...b..a.l.l.s have melted down. And the ledges from each front walk to each driveway, against whose once-great stone walls we played King, a kind of inverse handball, and from whose tops we jumped with delectable agonies of fear-ah, those ledges have sunk, those leaps are nothing. Small.

In actuality, of course, my Brooklyn neighborhood has not shrunk but it has changed. Among the people I grew up with, that is understood as a euphemism meaning black people have moved in. They moved in family by family, and one by one the old white families moved out, outwards, that is, in an outward direction (Long Island, Rockaway, Queens), the direction of water-it seems not to have occurred to them that soon there would be nowhere to go unless back into the surf where we all began-except for two of the old white families who bravely remained and sent reports in the outward directions that living with the black people was fine, they were nice people, good neighbors, and so these two white families came to be regarded by the departed as sacrificial heroes of sorts; everyone admired them but no one would have wished to emulate them.

The changes the black families brought to the uniform block were mostly in the way of adornment. Colorful shutters affixed to the front cas.e.m.e.nt windows, flagstones on the walkways leading to the porch steps, flowers on the bordering patches of gra.s.s, and quant.i.ties of ornamental wrought iron; a few of the brick porch walls have even been replaced by wrought-iron ones. (Those adjacent porches with their low dividing walls linked our lives. We girls visited back and forth climbing from porch to porch to porch, peeking into living room windows as we darted by.) But for all these proprietary changes, my block looks not so very different, in essence. It has remained middle cla.s.s.

Black people appeared on the block when I lived there too, but they were maids, and very few at that. Those few came once a week, except for the three families where the mothers were schoolteachers; their maids came every day and were like one of the family, or so the families boasted, overlooking the fact that the maids had families of their own. One other exception: the family next door to mine who had the s...o...b..ll bush also had a live-in maid who did appear to live like one of the family. It was easy to forget that she cleaned and cooked while the family took their ease, because when her labors were done she ate with them and then sat on the porch and contributed her opinions to the neighborhood gossip. They had gotten her from the South when she was seventeen, they said with pride, and when her grandmother came up to visit her the grandmother slept and ate and gossiped with the family too, but whether she too was expected to clean and cook I do not know.

It was less a city block than a village, where of a hot summer evening the men sat out on the front porches in s.h.i.+rtsleeves smoking cigars and reading newspapers under yellow lanterns (there were seven New York City newspapers) while the wives brought out bowls of cherries and trays of watermelon slices and gossiped porch to porch, and we girls listened huddled together on the steps, hoping the parents would forget us and not send us to bed, and where one lambent starry summer evening the singular fighting couple on the block had one of their famous battles in the master bedroom-shrieks and blows and cras.h.i.+ng furniture; in what was to become known in local legend as the balcony scene, Mrs. Hochman leaned out of the open second-floor cas.e.m.e.nt window in a flowing white nightgown like a mythological bird and shouted to the a.s.sembled throng, "Neighbors, neighbors, help me, I'm trapped up here with a madman" (she was an elocution teacher), and my mother rose to her feet to go and help but my father, a tax lawyer, restrained her and said, "Leave them alone, they're both crazy. Tomorrow they'll be out on the street holding hands as usual." And soon, indeed, the fighting stopped, and I wondered, What is love, what is marriage? What is reality in the rest of the world?

The daughters of families of our station in life took piano lessons and I took the piano lessons seriously. Besides books, music was the only experience capable of levitating me away from Brooklyn without the risk of crossing bridges or tunneling my way out. When I was about eleven I said I wanted a new and good piano teacher, for the lady on Eastern Parkway to whose antimaca.s.sared apartment I went for my lessons was pixilated: she trilled a greeting when she opened the door and wore pastel-colored satin ribbons in her curly gray hair and served tea and excellent shortbread cookies, but of teaching she did very little. So my mother got me Mr. Simmons.

He was a black man of around thirty-five or forty recommended by a business acquaintance of my father's with a son allegedly possessed of musical genius, the development of which was being entrusted to Mr. Simmons. If he was good enough for that boy, the logic ran, then he was good enough for me. I was alleged to be unusually gifted too, but not quite that gifted. I thought it very advanced of my parents to hire a black piano teacher for their nearly nubile daughter; somewhere in the vast landscape of what I had yet to learn, I must have glimpsed the springs of fear. I was proud of my parents, though I never said so. I had known they were not bigoted but rather instinctively decent; I had known that when and if called upon they would instinctively practice what was then urged as "tolerance," but I hadn't known to what degree. As children do, I underestimated them, partly because I was just discovering that they were the middle cla.s.s.

Mr. Simmons was a dark-skinned man of moderate height and moderate build, clean-shaven but with an extremely rough beard that might have been a trial to him, given his overall neatness. A schoolteacher, married, the father of two young children, he dressed in the style of the day, suit and tie, with impeccable conventionality. His manners were also impeccably conventional. Nice but dull was how I cla.s.sified him on first acquaintance, and I a.s.sumed from his demeanor that moderation in all things was his hallmark. I was mistaken: he was a blatant romantic. His teaching style was a somber intensity streaked by delicious flashes of joviality. He had a broad smile, big teeth, a thunderous laugh, and a willing capacity to be amused, especially by me. To be found amusing was an inspiration. I saved my most sophisticated att.i.tudes and phraseology for Mr. Simmons. Elsewhere, I felt, they were as pearls cast before swine. He was not dull after all, if he could appreciate me. And yet unlike my past teachers he could proclaim "Awful!" with as much intrepidity as "Beautiful!" "No, no, no, this is how it should sound," in a pained voice, shunting me off the piano bench and launching out at the pa.s.sage. I was easily offended and found his bluntness immodest at first. Gradually, through Mr. Simmons, I learned that false modesty is useless and that true devotion to skill is impersonal.

Early in our acquaintance he told me that during the summers when school was out his great pleasure was to play the piano eight hours in a row, stripped to the waist and sweating. It was January when he said this, and he grinned with a kind of patient longing. I recognized it as an image of pa.s.sion and dedication, and forever after, in my eyes, he was surrounded by a steady, luminous aura of fervor. I wished I were one of his children, for the glory of living in his house and seeing that image in the flesh and basking in the luxuriant music. He would be playing Brahms, naturally; he had told me even earlier on that Brahms was his favorite composer. "Ah, Brahms," he would sigh, leaning back in his chair near the piano bench and tilting his head in a dreamy way. I did not share his love for Brahms but Brahms definitely fit in with the entire picture-the hot day, the long hours, the bare chest, and the sweat.

Mr. Simmons had enormous beautiful pianist's hands-they made me ashamed of my own, small and stubby. Tragicomically, he would lift one of my hands from the keyboard and stare at it ruefully. "Ah, if only these were bigger!" A joke, but he meant it. He played well but a bit too romantically for my tastes. Of course he grasped my tastes thoroughly and would sometimes exaggerate his playing to tease me, and exaggerate also the way he swayed back and forth at the piano, crooning along with the melody, bending picturesquely over a delicate phrase, clattering at a turbulent pa.s.sage, his whole upper body tense and filled with the music. "You think that's too schmaltzy, don't you?" laughing his thunderous laugh. The way he p.r.o.nounced "schmaltzy," our word, not his, I found very droll. To admonish me when I was lazy he would say, "Play the notes, play the notes," and for a long time I had no idea what he meant. Listening to him play, I came to understand. He meant play them rather than simply touch them. Press them down and make contact. Give them their full value. Give them yourself.

It seemed quite natural that Mr. Simmons and I should come to be such appreciative friends-we were part of a vague, nameless elite-but I was surprised and even slightly irked that my parents appreciated him so. With the other two piano teachers who had come to the house my mother had been unfailingly polite, offering coffee and cake but no real access. About one of them, the wild-eyebrowed musician with the flowing scarves and black coat and beret and the mock-European accent, who claimed to derive from Columbia University as though it were a birthplace, she commented that he might call himself an artist but in addition he was a slob who could eat a whole cake and leave crumbs all over the fringed tapestry covering her piano. But with Mr. Simmons she behaved the way she did with her friends; I should say, with her friends' husbands, or her husband's friends, since at that time women like my mother did not have men friends of their own, at least in Brooklyn. When Mr. Simmons arrived at about three forty-five every Wednesday, she offered him coffee-he was coming straight from teaching, and a man's labor must always be respected-and invited him to sit down on the couch. There she joined him and inquired how his wife and children were, which he told her in some detail. That was truly dull. I didn't care to hear anecdotes ill.u.s.trating the virtues and charms of his children, who were younger than I. Then, with an interest that didn't seem at all feigned, he asked my mother reciprocally how her family was. They exchanged such trivia on my time, till suddenly he would look at his watch, pull himself up, and with a swift, broad smile, say, "Well then, shall we get started?" At last.

But my father! Sometimes my father would come home early on Wednesdays, just as the lesson was ending. He would greet Mr. Simmons like an old friend; they would clap each other on the shoulder and shake hands in that hearty way men do and which I found ridiculous. And my father would take off his hat and coat and put down his New York Times and insist that Mr. Simmons have a drink or at least a cup of coffee, and they would talk enthusiastically about-of all things-business and politics. Boring, boring! How could he? Fathers were supposed to be interested in those boring things, but not Mr. Simmons. After a while Mr. Simmons would put on his hat and coat, which were remarkably like the hat and coat my father had recently taken off, pick up his New York Times, and head for his home and family.

And my father would say, "What a nice fellow that Mr. Simmons is! What a really fine person!" For six years he said it, as if he had newly discovered it, or was newly astonished that it could be so. "It's so strange," he might add, shaking his head in a puzzled way. "Even though he's a colored man I can talk to him just like a friend. I mean, I don't feel any difference. It's a very strange thing." When I tried, with my advanced notions, to relieve my father of the sense of strangeness, he said, "I know, I know all that"; yet he persisted in finding it a very strange thing. Sometimes he boasted about Mr. Simmons to his friends with wonder in his voice: "I talk to him just as if he were a friend of mine. A very intelligent man. A really fine person." To the very end, he marveled; I would groan and laugh every time I heard it coming.

Mr. Simmons told: things to my father in my presence, important and serious things that I knew he would not tell to me alone. This man-to-man selectivity of his pained me. He told my father that he was deeply injured by the racial prejudice existing in this country; that it hurt his life and the lives of his wife and children; and that he resented it greatly. All these phrases he spoke in his calm, conventional way, wearing his suit and tie and sipping coffee. And my father nodded his head and agreed that it was terribly unfair. Mr. Simmons hinted that his career as a cla.s.sical pianist had been thwarted by his color, and again my father shook his head with regret. Mr. Simmons told my father that he had a brother who could not abide the racial prejudice in this country and so he lived in France. "Is that so?" said my mother in dismay, hovering nearby, slicing cake. To her, that anyone might have to leave this country, to which her parents had fled for asylum, was unwelcome, almost incredible, news. But yes, it was so, and when he spoke about his brother Mr. Simmons' resonant low voice was sad and angry, and I, sitting on the sidelines, felt a flash of what I had felt when the neighbor woman being beaten shrieked out of the window on that hot summer night-ah, here is reality at last. For I believed that reality must be cruel and harsh and densely complex. It would never have occurred to me that reality could also be my mother serving Mr. Simmons home-baked layer cake or my father asking him if he had to go so soon, couldn't he stay and have a bite to eat, and my mother saying, "Let the man go home to his own family, for heaven's sake, he's just done a full day's work." I also felt afraid at the anger in Mr. Simmons' voice; I thought he might be angry at me. I thought that if I were he I would at least have been angry at my parents and possibly even refused their coffee and cake, but Mr. Simmons didn't.

When I was nearing graduation from junior high school my mother suggested that I go to the High School of Music and Art in Manhattan. I said no, I wanted to stay with my friends and didn't want to travel for over an hour each way on the subway. I imagined I would be isolated up there. I imagined that the High School of Music and Art, by virtue of being in Manhattan, would be far too sophisticated, even for me. In a word, I was afraid. My mother wasn't the type to press the issue but she must have enlisted Mr. Simmons to press it for her. I told him the same thing, about traveling for over an hour each way on the subway. Then, in a very grave manner, he asked if I had ever seriously considered a musical career. I said instantly, "Oh, no, that sounds like a man's sort of career." I added that I wouldn't want to go traveling all over the country giving concerts. He told me the names of some women pianists, and when that didn't sway me, he said he was surprised that an intelligent girl could give such a foolish answer without even thinking it over. I was insulted and behaved coolly towards him for a few weeks. He behaved with the same equanimity as ever and waited for my mood to pa.s.s. Every year or so after that he would ask the same question in the same grave manner, and I would give the same answer. Once I overheard him telling my mother, "And she says it's a man's career!" "Ridiculous," said my mother disgustedly. "Ridiculous," Mr. Simmons agreed.

Towards the end of my senior year in high school (the local high school, inferior in every way to the High School of Music and Art in Manhattan), my parents announced that they would like to buy me a new piano as a graduation present. A baby grand, and I could pick it out myself. We went to a few piano showrooms in Brooklyn so I could acquaint myself with the varieties of piano. I spent hours pondering the differences between Baldwin and Steinway, the two pianos most used by professional musicians, for in the matter of a piano-unlike a high school-I had to have the best. Steinways were sharp-edged, Baldwins more mellow; Steinways cla.s.sic and traditional, Baldwins romantically timeless; Steinways austere, Baldwins responsive to the touch. On the other hand, Steinways were crisp compared to Baldwins' pliancy; Steinways were st.u.r.dy and dependable, while Baldwins sounded a disquieting tone of mutability. I liked making cla.s.sifications. At last I decided that a Baldwin was the piano for me-rich, lush, and mysterious, not at all like my playing, but now that I think of it, rather like Mr. Simmons'.

I had progressed some since the days when I refused to consider going to the High School of Music and Art in Manhattan. If it was to be a Baldwin I insisted that it come from the source, the Baldwin showroom in midtown Manhattan. My mother suggested that maybe Mr. Simmons might be asked to come along, to offer us expert advice on so ma.s.sive an investment. I thought that was a fine idea, only my parents were superfluous; the two of us, Mr. Simmons and I, could manage alone. My parents showed a slight, hedging reluctance. Perhaps it was not quite fair, my mother suggested, to ask Mr. Simmons to give up a Sat.u.r.day afternoon for this favor. It did not take an expert logician to point out her inconsistency. I was vexed by their reluctance and would not even condescend to think about it. I knew it could have nothing to do with trusting him: over the years they had come to regard him as an exemplar of moral probity. Evidently the combination of his being so reliable and decent, so charming, and so black set him off in a cla.s.s by himself.

I asked the favor of Mr. Simmons and he agreed, although in his tone too was a slight, hedging reluctance; I couldn't deny it. But again, I could ignore it. I had a fantasy of Mr. Simmons and myself ambling through the Baldwin showroom, communing in a rarefied manner about the nuances of difference between one Baldwin and another, and I wanted to make this fantasy come true.

The Sat.u.r.day afternoon arrived. I was excited. I had walked along the streets of Manhattan before, alone and with my friends. But the thought of walking down Fifty-seventh Street with an older man, clearly not a relative, chatting like close friends for all the sophisticated world to see, made my spirits as buoyant and iridescent as a bubble. Mr. Simmons came to pick me up in his car. I had the thrill of sliding into the front seat companionably, chatting like close friends with an older man. I wondered whether he would come around and open the door for me when we arrived. That was done in those days, for ladies. I was almost seventeen. But he only stood waiting while I climbed out and slammed it shut, as he must have done with his own children, as my father did with me.

We walked down broad Fifty-seventh Street, where the glamour was so pervasive I could smell it: cool fur and leather and smoky perfume. People looked at us with interest. How wondrous that was! I was ready to fly with elation. It didn't matter that Mr. Simmons had known me since I was eleven and seen me lose my temper like an infant and heard my mother order me about; surely he must see me as the delightful adult creature I had suddenly become, and surely he must be delighted to be escorting me down Fifty-seventh Street. I would have liked to take his arm to complete the picture for all the sophisticated world to see, but some things were still beyond me. I felt ready to fly but in fact I could barely keep up with Mr. Simmons' long and hurried stride. He was talking as companionably as ever, but he seemed ill at ease. Lots of people looked at us. Even though it was early April he had his overcoat b.u.t.toned and his hat brim turned down.

We reached the Baldwin showroom. Gorgeous, burnished pianos glistened in the display windows. We pa.s.sed through the portals; it was like entering a palace. Inside it was thickly carpeted. We were shown upstairs. To Paradise! Not small! Immensely high ceilings and so much s.p.a.ce, a vista of l.u.s.trous pianos floating on a rich sea of green carpet. Here in this grand room full of grand pianos Mr. Simmons knew what he was about. He began to relax and smile, and he talked knowledgeably with the salesman, who was politely helpful, evidently a sophisticated person.

"Well, go ahead," Mr. Simmons urged me. "Try them out."

"You mean play them?" I looked around at the huge s.p.a.ce. The only people in it were two idle salesmen and far off at the other end a small family of customers, father, mother, and little boy.

"Of course." He laughed. "How else will you know which one you like?"

I finally sat down at one and played a few timid scales and arpeggios. I crept from one piano to another, doing the same, trying to discern subtle differences between them.

"Play," Mr. Simmons commanded.

At the sternness in his voice I cast away timidity. I played Chopin's "Revolutionary Etude," which I had played the year before at a recital Mr. Simmons held for his students in Carl Fischer Hall-nowadays called Cami Hall-on Fifty-seventh Street, not far from the Baldwin showroom. (I had been the star student. The other boy, the musical genius, had gone off to college or otherwise vanished. I had even done a Mozart sonata for four hands with Mr. Simmons himself.) Sustained by his command, I moved dauntlessly from Baldwin to Baldwin, playing pa.s.sages from the "Revolutionary Etude." Mr. Simmons flashed his broad smile and I smiled back.

"Now you play," I said.

I thought he might have to be coaxed, but I was forgetting that Mr. Simmons was never one to withhold, or to hide his light. Besides, he was a professional, though I didn't understand yet what that meant. He looked around as if to select the worthiest piano, then sat down, spread his great hands, and played something by Brahms. As always, he played the notes. He pressed them down and made contact. He gave them their full value. He gave them himself. The salesmen gathered round. The small family drew near to listen. And I imagined that I could hear, transmogrified into musical notes, everything I knew of him-his thwarted career, his schoolteaching, his impeccable manners, his fervor, and his wit; his pride in his wife and children; his faraway brother; his anger, his melancholy, and his acceptance; and I also imagined him stripped to the waist and sweating. When it was over he kept his hands and body poised in position, briefly, as performers do, as if to prolong the echo, to keep the spell in force till the last drawn-out attenuation of the instant. The hushed little audience didn't clap, they stood looking awed. My Mr. Simmons! I think I felt at that moment almost as if he were my protege, almost as if I owned him.

We didn't say much on the way home. I had had my experience, grand as in fantasy, which experiences rarely are, and I was sublimely content. As we walked down my block n.o.body looked at us with any special interest. Everyone knew me and by this time everyone knew Mr. Simmons too. An unremarkable couple. At home, after we reported on the choice of a piano, Mr. Simmons left without even having a cup of coffee. He was tired, he said, and wanted to get home to his family.

Later my mother asked me again how our expedition had been.

"Fine. I told you already. We picked out a really great piano. Oh, and he played. He was fantastic, everyone stopped to listen."

My mother said nothing. She was slicing tomatoes for a salad.

"I bet they never heard any customer just sit down and play like that."

Again no response. She merely puttered over her salad, but with a look that was familiar to me: a concentrated, patient waiting for the proper words and the proper tone to offer themselves to her. I enjoyed feeling I was always a step ahead.

"I know what you're thinking," I said nastily.

"You do?" She raised her eyes to mine. "I'd be surprised."

"Yes. I bet you're thinking we looked as if he was going to abduct me or something."

The glance she gave in response was more injured than disapproving. She set water to boil and tore open a net bag of potatoes.

"Well, listen, I'll tell you something. The world has changed since your day." I was growing more and more agitated, while she just peeled potatoes. Her muteness had a maddening way of making my words seem frivolous. She knew what she knew. "The world has changed! Not everyone is as provincial as they are here in Brooklyn!" I spit out that last word. I was nearly shouting how. "Since when can't two people walk down the street in broad daylight? We're both free-" I stopped suddenly. I was going to say free, white, and over twenty-one, an expression I had found loathsome when I heard my father use it.

"Calm down," my mother said gently. "All I'm thinking is I hope it didn't embarra.s.s him. It's him I was thinking about, not you."

I stalked from the room, my face aflame.

I went to college in Manhattan and lived in a women's residence near school. For several months I took the subway into Brooklyn every Wednesday so I could have a piano lesson with Mr. Simmons, it being tacitly understood that I was too gifted simply to give up "my music," as it was called; I slept at home on my old block, then went back up to school on Thursday morning. This became arduous. I became involved with other, newer things. I went home for a lesson every other Wednesday, and soon no Wednesdays at all. But I a.s.sured Mr. Simmons I would keep renting the small practice room at school and work on my own. I did for a while, but the practice room was very small and very cold, and the piano, a Steinway, didn't sound as lush as my new Baldwin back home; there was an emptiness to my efforts without the spur of a teacher; and then there were so many other things claiming my time. I had met and made friends with kindred spirits from the High School of Music and Art, and realized that had I listened to my mother I might have known them three years sooner. The next year I got married, impulsively if not inexplicably; to tell why, though, would take another story.

Naturally my parents invited Mr. and Mrs. Simmons to the wedding. They were the only black people there, among some hundred and fifty guests. I had long been curious to meet Mrs. Simmons but regrettably I could not get to know her that afternoon since I had to be a bride. Flitting about, I could see that she was the kind of woman my mother and her friends would call "lovely." And did, later. She was pretty, she was dressed stylishly, she was what they would call "well-spoken." She spoke the appropriately gracious words for a young bride and one of her husband's long-time students. In contrast to Mr. Simmons' straightforward earnestness, she seemed less immediately engaged, more of a clever observer, and though she smiled readily I could not imagine her having a thunderous laugh. But she fit very well with Mr. Simmons, and they both fit with all the other middle-aged and middle-cla.s.s couples present, except of course for their color.

Mrs. Simmons did not know a soul at the wedding and Mr. Simmons knew only the parents of the boy genius and a few of our close neighbors. My mother graciously took them around, introducing them to friends and family, lots of friends and lots of family, so they would not feel isolated. I thought she overdid it-she seemed to have them in tow, or on display, for a good while. I longed to take her aside and whisper, "Enough already, Ma. Leave them alone." But there was no chance for that. And I knew how she would have responded. She would have responded silently, with a look that meant, "You can talk, but I know what is right to do," which I could not deny. And in truth she was quite proud of knowing a man as talented as Mr. Simmons. And had she not introduced them they certainly would have felt isolated, while this way they were amicably received. (Any bigots present successfully concealed their bigotry.) My mother was only trying to behave well, with grace, and relatively, she succeeded. There was no way of behaving with absolute grace. You had to choose among the various modes of constraint.

For all I know, though, the Simmonses went home and remarked to each other about what lovely, fine people my parents and their friends were, and how strange it was that they could spend a pleasant afternoon talking just as they would to friends, even though they were all white. How very strange, Mr. Simmons might have said, shaking his head in a puzzled way, taking off his tie and settling down behind his newspaper. It is a soothing way to imagine them, but probably false.

I had always hoped to resume my piano lessons someday, but never did. And so after the wedding Mr. Simmons disappeared from my life. Why should it still astonish me, like a sc.r.a.pe from a hidden thorn? There were no clear terms on which he could be in my life, without the piano lessons. Could I have invited the Simmonses to our fifth-floor walk-up apartment in a dilapidated part of Manhattan for a couples evening? Or asked him to meet me somewhere alone for a cup of coffee? At what time of day? Could my parents, maybe, have invited the Simmonses over on a Sunday afternoon with their now teen-aged children and with my husband and me? Or for one of their Sat.u.r.day night parties of mah-jongg for the women and gin rummy for the men and bagels and lox for all? Could Mr. Simmons, too, have made some such gesture? Possibly. For I refuse to see this as a case of n.o.blesse oblige: we were all the middle cla.s.ses.

But given the place and the time and the dense circ.u.mambient air, such invitations would have required people of large social imagination, and none of us, including Mr. and Mrs. Simmons, had that. We had only enough vision for piano lessons and cups of coffee and brief warm conversations about families, business, politics, and race relations, and maybe I should be content with that, and accept that because we were small, we lost each other, and never really had each other, either. Nonetheless, so many years later, I don't accept it. I find I miss him and I brood and wonder about him: where is he and does he still, on summer days, play the piano for eight hours at a stretch, stripped to the waist and sweating?

SOUND IS SECOND SIGHT.

A FARMER OF AUSTERE habits lived some ways from town in a ramshackle farmhouse, and he looked as forlorn and ramshackle as his house with its weatherbeaten wooden slats and cracked s.h.i.+ngles. Tall, taciturn, dressed in drab, loose-fitting clothes, he would gaze down at the ground as he walked. He carried a gnarled walking stick and let his mud-colored hair droop around his face, and so he appeared older than he was. Actually he was not old at all, nor crabbed as some believed, merely a solitary. Out of habit he kept his distance, and the people of the town thought it best to keep their distance as well.

His only companion was a greyhound dog, slender, blond, and frolicsome after the manner of her kind. She was fiercely devoted to the farmer and, unlike the townspeople, not frightened off by his gnarled walking stick or his silence or his gaunt, s.h.i.+elded face. Outdoors, in the fields or in town, the farmer and his dog were silent and undemonstrative, yet they had the air of creatures very much attuned and in comfort together. The townspeople were puzzled by the dog. Not a farm dog by any means. Not a dog that could be useful. Her very prettiness and uselessness seemed out of place in that stony countryside, and when she strutted down the main street she drew hostile glances. Rumors sprang up that the dog, for all her prettiness, had sinister powers; possibly even the farmer did. Her origins were mysterious: all anyone knew was that after vanis.h.i.+ng for several days the farmer had returned with the dog perched in the front seat of his truck, sniffing in her disdainful way.

In fact he had found her in a nearby and larger market town. The dogcatcher had seemed hesitant to sell her: a well-meaning fellow, he hinted that the dog had brought bad luck to former owners, best leave her to her fate. But the farmer had a sudden craving for the pretty creature, whom he had spied standing in a corner of the yard apart from the pack of other animals; she reminded him of himself, isolated, the b.u.t.t of nasty tall tales, perhaps even ill-treated when young, as he had been. She had an unearthly howl, the dogcatcher also warned, wild enough to rouse the dead. But she made no sound at all in her corner of the cluttered yard, so the farmer paid no heed and bought her.

Evenings, alone in the house, they romped together in front of the fire, the farmer bellowing and laughing, the dog yelping and snapping playfully. She barked seldom. Her bark was indeed loud and piercing, almost a howl, and it was as if she held it in out of deference to human ears. Despite his carelessness about the outside of the house, the farmer kept the inside pleasant and tidy: the wood floors, with their wide planks, were swept clean, the logs piled near the fireplace had a sweet smoky smell, and the soft cus.h.i.+ons on the floor were inviting. Besides all that, the dog got good food to eat; she made a contented, obedient housemate.

And then one day after spending almost a week away at the nearby market town, the farmer and his dog came home with a bright-eyed wife, who also excited curiosity among the townspeople, and a few of the more outspoken wondered slyly whether he had found her in the same mysterious way as he had found the dog. She was small and rounded, with rosy cheeks, milky skin, and black curls. She smiled indulgently at the confusion of the dog, who bristled when she stroked her blond fur. She laughed at the farmer's long s.h.i.+eld of hair and brushed it off his really rather handsome face with a tender gesture. Nor was she much bothered by the ramshackle appearance of the house, for she saw that the inside was cheerful and tidy. The vegetable garden behind the house was her delight: under the farmer's care, tomatoes and beans and peas were flouris.h.i.+ng in such abundance she could hardly pick them fast enough. The people of the town, who could find nothing to fault her with since she was unfailingly courteous and proper, were astonished that so sprightly a creature could be happy living with the taciturn farmer, yet she appeared quite happy. When the three of them walked down the main street, it was the farmer and his wife, now, who were silent and undemonstrative, yet seemed very much attuned and in comfort together. The dog fretted alongside. Occasionally she gave out her lacerating howl, which made pa.s.sersby start, and startled even the farmer, who hastened to quiet her. The dog was not neglected-the farmer still stroked her and spoke kindly to her and took her along daily to the fields, but in the nature of things it was not the same.

Evenings, in the broken-down house, the farmer and his wife lay on rugs in front of the fire, while the dog fussed in a cold corner, ignoring their beckonings. The farmer had never been so happy in his life. He had grown up lonely and lived lonely, and, given the awkward shyness that no one till now had found appealing, had never expected to be other than lonely till the day he died. He was no less astonished than the townspeople that this pretty, loving wife welcomed his company and settled so easily into his house. It was a gift he could not fathom, dared not even question, and while it did not change his appearance-he still dressed in drab, nondescript clothing-or the appearance of his house-still forlorn and ramshackle-he felt himself a changed man. For this his heart was full of grat.i.tude to his wife, and in his innocence, he envisioned living with her serenely to the end of his days.

What the farmer loved most about his wife was not her prettiness or her sweet nature, but her voice. It was like music; it could sing out low like a cello or high like a flute, and flit through the whole range in between. When she called to him in the fields, midday, her pure long-lasting note cut a path through the air. When she rushed to greet him or tell him news of the garden her voice was full, impelled by energy. And when she lay with him before the fire its timbre was more than deep-dense, as if the sound itself might be grasped and held, caressed. To the farmer her voice expressed all moods and possibilities; living with her after living silent for so long with the dog was like embracing another dimension, having a sixth sense.

The dog clearly did not love the sound of the wife's voice, although it was never anything but gentle and cajoling, in a futile effort to win her trust. The dog still bristled at her touch and took food grudgingly from her hands. If the farmer whistled her over while his wife was nearby, she hung back and needed to be coaxed. And when the two were alone, the dog would snap at her skirts, or snarl, or set up a howling the wife could not stop. In the garden she stepped across the wife's path to trip her up. In the kitchen she knocked over a tureen of soup-the wife had to jump aside so as not to be scalded. She reproached the dog softly, in dismay more than anger. The wife did not mention these incidents to the farmer-they seemed, after all, so petty. She was a tolerant soul who took what came along. She too had been lonely and ill-treated as a child, and also, because of her prettiness, suspected of evils she did not commit, so she found herself fortunate in her new life; her thoughts were rooted in its daily pleasures. She was hardly one to brood over the fussing of a dog: surely the creature would come round in time.

This happy period in the farmer's life lasted for three years, and then the wife took sick with a mysterious illness, not painful but enervating. It had never been seen before in that region, and there seemed nothing anyone could do to save her. The farmer fed her with his own hands and pleaded with her to rally, if only for his sake, but she shook her head gravely, like one already past the threshold. In despair he wanted to take the very strength from his own body and feed it to her. But she was doomed. Stunned with grief, he buried her some distance from the house. After a time, though his grief remained acute, there mingled with it a feeling that, just as he had grown up lonely and lived lonely, so he was to remain lonely till the day he died, and that the time with his wife was a fleeting interlude given to him unfathomably. He sought solace in the company of his dog, who became frolicsome and good-tempered as in the early days. When they walked together in the town they once again had the air of creatures very much attuned and in comfort together. As for the townspeople, after paying their condolences they kept their distance as before.

One moonlit summer night as he lay awake with the windows wide open, the farmer heard his wife's voice calling his name far out across the fields. He rushed to the window and called back into the night. Over and over her voice called, now closer, now farther off, as if it were drifting about, seeking him in the dark but powerless to find the way. Then the dog went to the window and began to bark. As the shrill howling persisted, the voice came closer and closer until at last it was there in the room, that voice he used to feel was almost palpable. The farmer was overjoyed. All night long his wife's voice talked with him and kept him company, while the dog crouched silent in a corner. They talked, as always, of small daily things-the farm and the town, the vegetable garden-and of love. The range and timbre of the wondrous voice were unaltered by death. As day broke she left.

She came often after that. Each time, the farmer pa.s.sed the whole night with her, talking of daily things and feeling joyful, if baffled, at this great gift given back to him, at least in part. Whenever her voice sounded from far off, the dog would go to the open window to help her find her way. For only that horrible howling, puncturing the night like an arrow, could guide her; the farmer's own, human, voice was of no avail.

For a long time the farmer lived thus, enjoying the mild companions.h.i.+p of the dog by day and the beloved voice of his dead wife by night. But the dog was growing old. During their walks through the fields he noticed that she trudged ever more slowly, breathing with effort. Yet fiercely devoted, she strove to keep up with him, would not desert his path. One day the farmer sensed she was no longer behind him; he went back a short distance and found her collapsed on the ground. He carried her back to the house, settled her on a rug in front of the fire, and gave her water from his cupped hand till she closed her eyes and died. He buried her under a tree near the barn.

Now the farmer suffered an excruciating loneliness. In daylight he walked alone and in the dark he knew the agony of hearing his wife's voice calling out there, unable to find him without the howling to guide her. Many nights the voice called, raw with pleading, while the farmer shouted out the window to no avail. As the voice despaired and faded he would shut the window with bitter tears in his throat. The voice stopped seeking him. He pondered whether it was worse to have no gifts at all, or to have gifts given and so cruelly withdrawn.

Then one night as he lay sleepless, there came the awful voice of the dog, howling far across the fields. The farmer rushed to the window. The dog's voice came steadily closer, finding its way with ease. Although he could neither stroke her nor play with her, and although she kept silent once in the room, the farmer took comfort and rested more calmly, feeling her presence. He reflected, though, how strange it was to have as companion a voice that had best not make itself heard, for very ugliness.

On a moonlit night when the dog had come, the farmer was sitting at the window when he heard his wife's voice again, calling over the fields. He leaped to his feet and called back as loudly as he could. Suddenly from right beside him came the lacerating howl of the dog, slicing into the still night. He longed to hug her in grat.i.tude, but there was nothing to the touch. Just as before, the dog's voice howled until the wife's voice found its way into the room. The farmer was trembling with emotion; he longed to embrace her, but again he had to content himself with what he was given.

His wife's voice was joyous too; but scarcely had she begun to speak of this recovery of each other than her voice was overpowered by the dog's insistent howl. Sternly, the farmer commanded the animal to be silent, but for the first time she refused to obey him. The wife's voice grew higher, urgent: she was calling for help. Her words became screams, then pure shrieks of sound swooping through the air; meanwhile the howling reached an unearthly pitch, filling up the room, exulting in its rough, wild fury kept at bay so long. The farmer veered about in a frenzy of helplessness, arms outstretched and flailing for something to touch. The wife's terrified shrieks got short and staccato, like the plucking of a taut string against the prolonged howls tearing into the dark. Madly, the farmer raced about, hands plunging and stabbing at the empty night. Till at last there was one drawn-out, descending note wailed in unison with the dog's rapid panting, and then both voices sank and subsided, and there was nothing.

When the townspeople came to investigate they found the farmer gone, the house abandoned. The bedroom was all in disorder, as if a rampaging wind had whipped things up and left them to fall where they might. From near the window, reported some, came now and then a hoa.r.s.e, panting noise, like a beast out of breath.

MRS. SAUNDERS WRITES TO THE WORLD.