Even as a small child he was shrewd enough to know It’s like she and I have died. And now nothing can hurt us.
At first it was play. He believed it must be play. Like singing, humming. Under your breath. In secret. A way of being happy, the two of them needing no one else.
Speaking to strangers in her quiet proud voice His name is Zacharias. A name from the Bible. He was born with a musical gift. His father is dead, we never speak of it.
He believed it had to do with keeping-going. She spoke of what their lives were as keeping-going, for now. The names of towns, mountains, rivers, counties ever changing. Never in one place for more than a few days. One day Beardstown, the next Tintern Falls. One day Barneveld, the next day Granite Springs. The Chautauqua River became the Mohawk River, the Mohawk River became the Susquehanna. He saw the signs beside the highway. He was eager to pronounce the names for he loved the sounds of new names strange in his mouth and he was eager too to learn their spellings but the names so frequently changed he could not remember and she seemed to have no wish that he remember as she had no wish that he remember his old name now that he was Zack, Zack-Zack she hugged and adored telling him solemnly Now you are Zack. My son Zacharias. Blessed of God for your father-her eyes vague, bemused-has returned to Hell where they’ve been waiting for him. Laughing, and lifting his hands inside hers in the patty-cake game she’d begun when he was a baby clapping the soft palms of his hands together inside hers so that he was made to laugh and their laughter mingled breathless, joyous.
As he could not recall when memory began. When first he’d opened his eyes. When first he’d drawn breath. When first he’d heard music, that startled him, quickened his pulse. When first she’d sung and hummed with him. When first she’d danced with him. Though recalling how in one of the cafés there had been a piano, a jukebox and a piano and the jukebox an old Wurlitzer, wide, squat, stained-glass colors darkened by a patina of grime through which a glaring light shone throbbing with the beat of simple loud percussive popular songs, when in the late evening the jukebox lapsed into silence Mommy led him (so sleepy! his head so heavy!) to the old upright yellow-keyed Knabe back beside the bar, Christmas tinsel and strings of red lights, a powerful smell of beer, tobacco smoke, men’s bodies, Mommy was saying in her excited voice clear as a bell for others to hear Try it, Zack! See if you can play piano gripping him in her strong warm arms so he would not slip from her lap, her sturdy knees, at such times he was a clumsy child, a stricken-shy-mute little rat of a child, the badly scruffed piano stool too low for him he could have barely reached the keyboard, there were men looking on, always there were men in these cafés, taverns, bars to which Mommy brought him, the men were uttering words of hearty encouragement Come on, kid! Let’s hear it and her breath was hot and beery against the back of his neck, trembling with excitement she seized his small pliant hands and placed them on the keyboard, never mind the ivory keys were stained and warped and their sharp edges hurt his fingers, never mind the black keys had a tendency to stick, the piano was stained and warped and out of tune, Mommy knew to place her son’s hands at the center of the keyboard, Mommy knew to place his right thumb at middle C, each of his fingers sought its key by instinct, there was comfort to it He was born with the gift, God has designated him special. He don’t always talk so well. At such times she spoke strangely, forcefully, with such certainty and her eyes unwavering and her mouth shaped in a smile of such raw hope, though he was hurt at her words, he felt the falsity of her words even as he supposed he understood their logic Feel sympathy for us! Help us he was frightened for her, not for himself that he had no gift, he had been born with no gift and no god had designated him special, it was for her sake he was frightened that the men who’d seemed captivated by her a few minutes before should suddenly laugh at her, but when he began to strike the keys at once he would cease to hear the men’s jokes and laughter, he would cease to hear his father’s low mocking outraged voice in the voices of these strangers, he would cease to be aware of the tension in his mother’s body and the heat radiating from her, depressing the keys, those that weren’t sticking, in a rapid run, the scale of C major executed with childish enthusiasm though he had no idea it was the scale of C major he played, almost harmoniously both hands together though the left trailed the right by a fraction of a second, now he was striking chords, trying to depress the sluggish keys, striking black keys, sharps, flats, no idea what he was doing but it was play, piano was play, play-for-Zack, what he did felt right, felt natural, out of the piano’s unfathomable interior (he imagined it densely wired and with a glowing tube, like a radio) these wonderful sounds emerged with an air of surprise, as if the old upright Knabe shoved into an alcove of a roadside café in Apalachin, New York, had been silent for so long, unused except for purposes of drunken keyboard banging for so long, the very instrument had been startled into wakefulness, unprepared.
What his mother meant by designated by God. Not his hands which were fumbling blind-boy hands, but the piano-sounds that were like no sounds he had ever heard so intimately. Out of the radio he’d heard music since infancy and some of this had been piano music but it was nothing like the strange vivid sound that sprang into life from his fingertips. He was dry-mouthed in wonder, awe. He was smiling, this was such happiness. Discovering the way individual notes fused with others as if his fingers moved of their own volition. Not a child to be at ease in the presence of strangers and the roadside places to which his mother brought him were populated exclusively by strangers and most of these were men perceiving him with the glazed-eyed indifference of the male for any offspring not his own. Except he had their attention now. For he was discovering in the maze of stained, warped, sticking and dead keys enough live keys to allow him to play a pattern of related notes he could not guess would be instantly familiar to these strangers’ ears, Bill Monroe’s “Footprints in the Snow” he’d been hearing repeated on the jukebox in that dreamy state between sleep and wakefulness his head lowered onto his mother’s folded coat in one of the café booths, he had no idea that the succession of notes constituted a song composed and performed by individuals unknown to him and that those who heard it would be drawn to marvel at it-“Jesus, how’s he do it? Kid so little, he don’t take lessons does he?”
He wasn’t listening to their voices. Eyes shut tight in concentration. The fingers of his right hand picked out the predominant pattern as if already it was familiar to him, the fingers of his weaker left hand provided chords, a filling-in of gaps in the sound. Play. Playing. This was happiness! The old piano’s notes running through him-fingers, hands, arms, torso-like an electric current.
“Ask can he play ”Cumberland Breakdown.“”
Mommy told them he could not. He could only play songs he’d heard on the jukebox.
“”Rocky Road Blues‘? That was on the jukebox.“
He was discovering that he could play a cluster of notes and then replay it as an echo, in a different key: raised by a half-note, or lowered. He could change the pattern of the cluster by playing the notes faster or slower or with emphasis upon certain notes and not on others, yet the pattern remained recognizable.
He could not reach a full octave of course, his hands were far too small. He could not reach the pedals of course. Had no idea what the pedals were. Nor would his mother know. The piano-sounds were choppy, broken up. This was not the smooth music you heard on the radio.
The men who’d been drawn by the child’s piano playing began to lose interest. Began to drift away. Soon their loud voices resumed, their braying laughter. One man remained, and came closer. He placed his foot on the right-hand pedal and depressed it. At once the choppy sounds melted into one another.
“You need the pedal. You pump it.”
This man, a stranger. But not like the others. He was smiling, he’d been drinking but he knew something the others didn’t know. And he cared, he appeared to be genuinely interested in the child fumbling to play an instrument he’d never touched before, astonishing how raw and instinctive the child’s playing was. And there was the child’s young mother holding him in her arms, smiling, so proud, a glisten of madness in her face.
Afterward asking who they were, where they were from. And the young woman said evasively, though she was still smiling, “Oh, up farther north. Nowhere you would know.” And the man persisted, “Try me, honey: where?” and the young mother laughed fixing the man with her calm dark seemingly imperturbable eyes shadowed with tiredness and yet beautiful to him, saying, as if she’d rehearsed these words many times, “Nowhere is where we are from, mister. But somewhere is where we are going.”
A roadside café in Apalachin, New York. Just south of the Susquehanna River and a few miles north of the Pennsylvania border. It was late winter 1960, they had been in flight from Niles Tignor for nearly five months.
It was the first time he’d played any piano. The first time she’d led him to any piano. Possibly she’d been drinking, she had seen the piano shoved into an alcove of the café and the idea came to her as so many ideas came to her now: “The breath of God.”
Not that she believed in any god. Hell, no.
Still there were these wayward breezes, sometimes. Sudden gust of wind. Whipping-wind of the kind she’d grown up with, rushing at the old stone cottage from the vastness of Lake Ontario. A cruel suffocating wind, you could not breathe. Laundry was torn from the line, sometimes the very posts collapsed. But there were gentler winds, there were breezes gentle as breaths. These she was learning to recognize. These she awaited eagerly. These she would guide her life by.
Beyond this night there would be other cafés, taverns and restaurants, hotels. There would be other pianos. If circumstances were right, she would lead her gifted child Zacharias to play. If circumstances were not so right, sometimes she would lead her gifted child Zacharias to play anyway. For he must be heard! His musical gift must be heard!
Each time Zack played there was applause.
You don’t look closely into the motive for applause.
And each time there would be a man who lingered afterward. A man who marveled, admired. A man who had money if only a few dollars to spend on the strange young mother and her spindly-limbed little boy with his pale, intense face and haunted eyes.
Tell me your name, honey. You know mine.
You know my son’s name. That’s enough for now.
No. I need to know your name, too.
My name is Hazel Jones.
“Hazel Jones.” That’s a pretty name.
Is it? I was named for someone. My parents kept the secret but now they are gone. But one day I will know, I think.
“If we haven’t been killed by now, no reason to think we ever will be.”
She laughed, such delicious wisdom.
Fleeing with the child she had not looked back. This would be her strategy for weeks, months, eventually years. Keeping-going she called it. Each day was its own surprise, and reward: keeping-going was enough. From the house on the Poor Farm Road she’d taken money thrown at her body in contempt of her very body and in repudiation of her love as a naive young wife defrauded in marriage. She had this money, these crumpled bills of varying denominations, she might tell herself she’d earned it. She would supplement it by working when necessary: waitress, cleaning woman, chambermaid. Ticket seller, movie theater “usherette.” Salesclerk, shopgirl. On her knees gracefully slipping shoes onto men’s stockinged feet, Hazel Jones with her dazzling American-girl smile: “Now, sir, how does that feel?”
Frequently men offered to buy her meals, drinks. Her and her little boy. Frequently they offered to give her money. Sometimes she refused, sometimes she accepted but she provided no sexual favors for money: her puritanical soul was revulsed at such a thought.
“I’d rather kill us. Zack and me. And that will never happen.”
She felt no remorse for leaving the child’s father as she’d done. She felt no regret, and no guilt. She did feel fear. In that vague fading way in which we contemplate the fact of our own deaths, not imminent but impending. So long as we keep going, he will never find us.
It did not occur to Rebecca that the man who had beaten her and the child had committed criminal acts. No more would she have thought to flee to Chautauqua Falls police than Anna Schwart would have fled to Milburn police in terror of Jacob Schwart.
You made your bed, now lie in it.
It was the wisdom of peasants. It was a gritty wisdom of the soil. It was not to be questioned.
Her wounds would heal, her bruises would fade. There remained a faint high ringing in her right ear at times, when she was tired. But no more distracting than the springtime trill of peepers or the midsummer hum of insects. There were angry reddened scabs on her forehead she fingered absently, almost in awe, a curious gratified pleasure. But these she could hide, beneath strands of hair. She worried more for the child than for herself, that the child’s father would be maddened with the need to reclaim him.
Hey you two: love ya.
There was Leora Greb shaking her head, saying you don’t step between a man and his kids, if you want to stay alive.
This was Rebecca’s plan: to abandon Tignor’s car in a public place, that it would be found by authorities immediately and its ownership traced and Tignor would come into possession of it and have less reason to pursue her. She knew, the man would be infuriated by the theft of his car.
She laughed, thinking of the man’s rage.
“He would kill me now, would he? But I’m out of his reach.”
She smiled. She touched the scabs at her hairline, that were nearly painless now. She would not speak of Tignor to the child nor would she ever again tolerate the child whimpering and whining after Dad-dy.
“There is Mommy now. Mommy will be all to you, now.”
“But Dad-dy-”
“No. There is no Dad-dy. No more. Only just Mommy.”
She laughed, she kissed the anxious child. She would kiss away his fears. Seeing that she laughed, he would laugh, in childish imitation. Wishing to please Mommy and to be kissed by Mommy, he would quickly learn.
Never again would she utter aloud the name of the man who had masqueraded as her husband! He had tricked her into believing that they were married, in Niagara Falls. It had been her stupidity that tricked her, she would think no more of it. The man was dead now, his name erased from memory.
The child’s name, that was the father’s. A diminutive of the father’s. A curious name, that made others smile quizzically. She would never call him by that name again. She must re-name the child, that the break with the father would be complete.
Leaving Chautauqua Falls she’d driven the stolen Pontiac on back roads north and east through the foothills of the Chautauqua Mountains and into and past the rolling farmland of the Finger Lakes region and at last into the Mohawk Valley where the river moved swift and sullen and steel-colored beneath shifting columns of mist. She had not dared to stop anywhere she and the child might be recognized and so she pushed on, pain-wracked and exhausted. In a shallow rocky stream beside one of the roads she washed the child and herself, tried to clean their wounds. She kissed the child repeatedly, overcome with gratitude that he hadn’t been seriously injured; at least, she didn’t believe he had been seriously injured. His small supple bones appeared to be intact, his skull that had seemed so delicate to his anxious mother, the eggshell-skull of infancy, was in fact tough and resilient and had not been cracked by the raging man.
Grateful too that the child couldn’t see his own swollen and blackened eyes, his distended scabby upper lip, his blood-edged nostrils. And that the child was so impressionable, he would take his emotional cues from her: “We got away! We got away! Nobody will ever find us, we got away!”
Strange how happy Rebecca was becoming, as the Poor Farm Road swiftly receded into the past.
Strange how jubilant she felt, despite her swollen face and aches in all her bones.
Leaning over to kiss and hug the child. Blow in his ear and whisper nonsense to make him laugh.
In cornfields they hid from the road and relieved themselves like animals. Afterward running and hiding from each other, shrieking with laughter.
“Mom-my! Mom-my where are you!”
Rebecca came up behind him, closed her arms about him in a swoon of happiness, possessiveness. She had saved her son, and she had saved herself. She would see that her life, though mauled and shaken as if in the jaws of a great beast, was blessed.
The child’s true name came to her then: “”Zacharias.“ A name from the Bible.”
She was so very happy. She was inspired. She would abandon the stolen car in Rome, an aging city beyond Oneida Lake of about half the size of Chautauqua Falls. This was a city that meant nothing to her except the man who’d masqueraded as her husband had business dealings there, he’d spoken of Rome often. She would leave the car there to confound him, as a riddle.
Parked the car, gas tank near-empty, near the Greyhound bus station. He will reason that we are traveling east. He will never find us.
She reversed the course of their flight. At the Greyhound station she bought two adult tickets to Port Oriskany, 250 miles back west.
Adult tickets in case the ticket seller was queried about a fleeing mother and her child.
Neither she nor the child had ever ridden on a bus before. The Greyhound was massive! The experience was exhilarating, an adventure. Nothing to do on a bus but stare out the window at the landscape: rapidly passing in the foreground beside the highway, slowly passing at the horizon. Though she was very tired and her bones ached yet she found herself smiling. The child lay sleeping beside her, snug and warm. She stroked his silky hair, she pressed her cool fingers against his swollen face.
Will you take my card at least.
If you should wish to contact me.
Accept from me your legacy. Hazel Jones.
“”Dr. Hendricks’ is the name. “Byron Hendricks, M.D.”“
The uniformed man, very dark skinned, with a narrow mustache and heavy-lidded eyes, regarded her with surprise.
“Fourth floor, ma’am. Except I don’t b’lieve he is there.”
Rebecca had not thought of this possibility. It had seemed to her since that evening on the canal towpath that the man in the panama hat had so sought her, of course he was awaiting her.
Rebecca stared at the wall directory. Wigner Professional Building. There was HENDRICKS, B.K. SUITE 414.
The child Zacharias was prowling about the ornate, high-ceilinged foyer of the Wigner Building, inquisitive and restless. Newly named, in this new city Port Oriskany beside an enormous slate-blue lake, he seemed subtly altered, no longer shy but frankly curious, staring rudely at well-dressed strangers as they pushed through the revolving doors entering from busy Owego Avenue. Until now he’d been a country boy, the only adults he’d seen had dressed and behaved very differently than these adults.
When he wasn’t staring at strangers rushing past him he was stooping to examine the polished ebony marble beneath his feet, so unlike any floor he’d ever walked on.
A dark mirror! Inside which, beneath his feet, the ghostly reflection of a boy whose face he could not see moved jerkily.
“Zack, come here with Mommy. We’re going up in an elevator.”
He laughed, the name Zack was so strange to him, like an unexpected pinch you didn’t know was meant to be playful or hurtful.
Zacharias meant blessed, his mother had told him. Already he was going for his first elevator ride. Though he still limped from what the drunken man had done to him, and his small pale face looked as if it had been used as a punching bag, he knew he was entering a world of unpredictable surprises, adventures.
The uniformed man had entered the elevator and taken his position at the controls. He said, “Ma’am, I can take you to Dr. Hendricks’s office. But like I say, I don’t b’lieve he is there. I ain’t seen any of ‘em for some time.”
It was as if Rebecca hadn’t heard this. In the elevator she gripped the child’s small-boned hand. A hot dry hand. She hoped that he wasn’t feverish, she had no time for such foolishness now. In Port Oriskany, about to see Byron Hendricks! He’d expressed surprise that Hazel Jones was married, what would he think that Hazel Jones had a child? Rebecca was feeling uncertain, confused. Maybe this was a mistake.
Her lips moved. She might have been talking to herself.
“Dr. Hendricks has to be there. He gave me his card only a few days ago. He’s expecting me, I think.”
“Ma’am, you want I should wait for you? Case you comin‘ right back down?”
The uniformed man loomed over her. She had to wonder if he was teasing her, that she might become shaken, tearful; and he might comfort her. Yet he appeared to be sincere. He was wearing white gloves to operate the elevator. She smelled his hair pomade. She had never been in such proximity to a Negro man before, and she had never been in a position of needing help from a Negro man before. At the General Washington Hotel the “Negro help” had mostly kept to themselves.
“No. That isn’t necessary. Thank you.”
The uniformed man stopped the elevator at the fourth floor and opened the door with a flourish. Quickly Rebecca stepped out into the corridor, pulling the child with her.
He is thinking I want Dr. Hendricks to examine my son. That’s what he is thinking.
“He down there, that dir’ection. You want for me to wait, ma’am?”
“No! I told you.”
Annoyed, Rebecca walked away without glancing back. The elevator doors clattered shut behind her.
Zack was fretting he didn’t want any old doctor, he did not.
Suite 414 was at the farther end of the medicinal-smelling corridor. On a door whose upper half was set with a sheet of frosted glass had been hand-lettered BYRON K. HENDRICKS, M.D. PLEASE ENTER. But the interior appeared to be darkened, the door was locked. There was a begrimed and derelict air to this end of the corridor.
Desperate, Rebecca knocked on the frosted glass.
She could not think what to do. In her fevered but vague fantasies of seeking out Byron Hendricks, anticipating that moment when the man’s eyes perceived her, when he smiled in delight in recognition of Hazel Jones, she had not anticipated him not being where he had promised he would be.
Zack was fretting he didn’t like the smell in this place, he did not.
Well, Rebecca had money. She had several hundred dollars in bills of varying denominations. She would not have to find work for a while, if she was careful with the money. She would find an inexpensive hotel in Port Oriskany, she and Zack would stay the night. They were badly in need of rest. They would bathe, they would sleep in a bed with clean, crisp sheets. They would lock themselves in a room in a hotel populated by strangers, they would be utterly safe. For three nights in succession they had slept in the Pontiac, parked beside a country road, shivering with cold. The bus trip from Rome had been five long hours.
“In the morning. I can telephone him. Make an appointment.”
Zack saw his mother was becoming anxious. Coming to nudge himself against her thighs murmuring Mom-my? in his plaintive child’s voice.
She was thinking it had been unwise to come directly to Dr. Hendricks’s office from the bus station. She should have telephoned to see if the doctor was in. She could look up his telephone number in a directory. It was what people did, normal people. She must learn from normal people.
Another time, Rebecca turned the knob of the locked door. Why wasn’t Hendricks here!
When he saw her, he would know her. She believed this. Whatever would happen next would happen without her volition. He had summoned her to him, he’d begged her. No one had ever begged her in such a way. No one had ever looked into her heart in such a way.
The man in the panama hat. He’d followed her from town, he had known her. He had altered the course of her life. She’d been a deluded young woman living with a man not her husband. A violent man, a criminal. She would not have had the courage to leave this man if she had not met Hendricks on the canal towpath.
Very possibly, she would not have aroused the jealousy of the man who’d masqueraded as her husband, if Hendricks had not approached her on the canal towpath.
“You see, you have changed my life! Now I’m here in Port Oriskany, and this is my son Zacharias…”
She would not lie to him. She would not claim to be Hazel Jones.
Though she could not absolutely deny it, either. For there was the possibility that she’d been adopted. Hadn’t Herschel suggested this, they’d found her, an infant, newly born on a ship in New York Harbor…“My parents are gone, Dr. Hendricks. I will never be able to ask them. But I never felt that I was theirs.” In her exhausted and deranged state this seemed to her more than theoretically possible.
The child frowned up at her. Why was Mommy talking to herself? And smiling, biting at her scabby lip.
“Mommy? C’n we go now? It smells bad here.”
She turned, numbly. She groped for the child’s hand. She was thinking hard and yet no thoughts came to her. In the wan reflective surfaces of frosted-glass doors they were passing her face was obscured and only her thick straggling hair was sharply defined. She looked like a drowned person.
One of the frosted-glass doors opened. The sickly medicinal smell was intensified. An individual was leaving suite 420, occupied by Hiram Tanner, D.D.S. On an impulse Rebecca entered the waiting room. Did D.D.S. mean dentist? A woman receptionist frowned at her from behind a desk. “Yes? Can I help you, miss?”
“I’m looking for Dr. Hendricks in suite four-fourteen. But the office seems to be closed.”
The receptionist’s crayon-eyebrows lifted in exaggerated surprise.
“Why, haven’t you heard? Dr. Hendricks died last summer.”
“Died! But…”
“All his patients were notified, I thought. Were you one of his patients?”
“No. I mean…yes, I was.”
“His office hasn’t been vacated yet, there’s some problem. It was left in pretty bad shape and has to be cleaned.”
The receptionist, middle-aged, tidily dressed, was looking from Rebecca to the child nudging against her thigh. She was staring at their battered faces.
“There’s other doctors you could see in the building. Down on floor two there’s-”
“No! I need to see Dr. Hendricks. It’s the son I mean, not the father.”
The receptionist said, “There hasn’t been anybody around that office since last summer, that I’ve seen. People say somebody comes in after hours. There’s things get moved around, there’s debris in boxes for the janitor to take away. I used to see the son, but not recently. It was a stroke that killed Dr. Hendricks, they said. He had a lot of patients but they were getting old, too. I never heard the son was a doctor.”
Rebecca protested, “But he is! ”Byron Hendricks, M.D.“ I’ve seen his card. I was supposed to make an appointment…”
“A man about forty, is he? Nervous, like? With a kind of strange way about him, and eyes? Always dressed kind of different, wearing a hat? In cold weather it was a fedora, other times it was a straw hat. He wa’n‘t never any M.D. that I ever heard of but I could be wrong. He might’ve gone to medical school but wasn’t practicing, there’s some like that.”
Rebecca stared at the woman, as Zack nudged and twisted impatiently against her legs. Seeing Rebecca’s shock, the woman laid her hand on her bosom: “See, miss, I don’t feel comfortable passing on rumors. Dr. Tanner was one to say hello to the old man, and they’d chat for a few minutes, but Dr. Tanner didn’t know them, either of them, real well.”
Rebecca said, confused, “Can you be a doctor and not ”practice‘? But…“ Seeing in the woman’s eyes a measure of pity, yet of satisfaction. She thought she had better get accustomed to it.
She thanked the receptionist, pulled Zack with her out of the office and shut the door behind her.
Out in the corridor Zack wrenched out of her grasp and ran limping ahead of her, flailing his arms foolishly and making a whistling-gagging noise as if he couldn’t breathe the stale air. He was becoming unruly, obstinate. He had never behaved this way in any public place in the past.
Rebecca half sobbed, “Zack! Damn you get back here.”
He was about to punch the elevator button down. Rebecca was surprised he knew to do such a thing, at his age. She slapped his hand away. She didn’t want to summon the elevator operator, the uniformed Negro with the neat narrow mustache and playful-brooding eyes, knowing how he would look at her with pity, too.
“We’ll take the stairs, honey. Stairs are safer.”
A windowless stairway three steep flights down, to a heavy door marked exit on a back street.
The ringing in her ear was louder, distracting. Almost, she thought there were nocturnal insects somewhere near.
Thinking Hendricks wanted you to believe him, trust him. On the towpath. At that time. He had no thought that you would ever try to find him here.
“Just the two of us. One night. My son and me.”
They would spend the night in a walk-up hotel in a brownstone, a few blocks from Owego Avenue. Rebecca checked several rooms before taking one: examined sheets and pillowcases, lifted a corner of the mattress from the box springs to check for bedbugs, lice. The desk clerk was amused by her, eyeing her long straggly hair and bruised face. “You want the Statler, honey, you’re in the wrong place.”
The double bed took up most of the space in the room between stained-wallpaper walls and a melancholy window looking out into an air shaft. There was no bath, the toilet was in the hall.
Rebecca laughed, wiping at her eyes.
“Five-fifty a night. This is the right place.”
When they were alone in the room, Zack poked about in imitation of his mother. Pretended to be a dog sniffing in corners. Stooped to peer beneath the bed.
“Mommy, what if Dad-dy-”
Rebecca raised a warning finger. “No.”
“But Mommy! If Da-”
“There is Mommy now, I told you. From now on only Mommy.”
She would not scold the child. She would never frighten him. Instead she embraced, tickled him.
Eventually, he would forget. She was determined.
She took him for a meal before bedtime at an automat on Owego Avenue. The bright-lit, noisy atmosphere and the way in which food was acquired, pushed along on shiny plastic trays, fascinated the child. After their meal she debated taking him across the wide, windy square to the Port Oriskany Statler which was the city’s most distinguished hotel. Wanting to show him the spacious, ornate lobby crowded with well-dressed men and women. Marble floor, leather sofas, potted ferns and small trees. An open atrium to the mezzanine floor. Uniformed doormen, bellboys.
The Port Oriskany Statler sparkled with lights. At least twenty-five floors. On the far side of the sandstone building was a waterfront park, and Lake Erie stretching to the horizon. Rebecca had a vague memory of a view from high windows. He’d brought her to stay at the hotel years ago, the man who’d masqueraded as her husband. She had been so deluded, believing she’d been happy at the time! Her role too had been a masquerade.
“I was his whore. Even if I didn’t know it.”
Zack glanced up at her quizzically. As if she’d been talking to herself, laughing. He was of an age to know that adults didn’t do such things in public.
She was trying to recall if it had been here in Port Oriskany, or in another city, she’d been followed from the hotel by a man in a navy jacket and navy cap. He’d turned out to be (she surmised, she had never been certain) someone sent to test her loyalty, faithfulness. She wondered for the first time what would have happened to her if she had smiled and laughed with the man, allowed herself to be picked up.
She wasn’t sure if that had been Port Oriskany, though. But she did recall that the man who’d masqueraded as her husband had taken her to an obstetrician in this city, who had examined her and run a test on her urine and told her the good news that she was going to have a baby in eight months’ time.
The man who’d masqueraded as her husband had said in his blunt bemused voice You’re pregnant are you, girl. He had not said You’re going to have a baby.
Years later, with her surviving child, she contemplated these words. The distinction between each statement.
“Mommy are you sad? Mommy are you crying?”
She wasn’t, though. She’d swear she was laughing.
Next morning was brightly cold, invigorating. In the night she’d decided not to try to telephone Byron Hendricks, M.D. She would make her own way, she had no need of him. Nor did she take time to scan the telephone directory for Jones.
She was in a very good mood. She had slept the sleep of the dead, and so had the child. More than nine hours! He’d wakened only just once, needing to be taken out into the hall to the toilet.
Shivering with cold. Sleep-dazed. She’d led him by the hand and helped him open his pajamas, afterward guiding his hand to flush the toilet. Kissing him tenderly on the nape of the neck where there was a pear-sized ugly bruise. “Such a big boy! Such a good boy.”
In hotels like this brownstone walk-up above a shuttered restaurant, as at the glamorous Port Oriskany Statler, it happened that individuals sometimes checked in with or without luggage, safety-locked their doors and pulled their blinds and in some way-clumsy, inspired, calculated, desperate-managed to kill themselves, usually by climbing into the bathtub clothed or naked and slashing their wrists with a razor blade. At the General Washington Hotel such incidents had been spoken of in whispers, though Rebecca had never been a witness to any bloody scene nor had she been asked to help clean up afterward.
Suicide in hotel rooms was not uncommon, but murder was very rare. Rebecca had never heard of anyone killing a child in any hotel.
Why do they do it, why check into a hotel, Rebecca had asked someone, possibly Hrube himself at a time when they must’ve been on reasonably good terms, and Hrube had shrugged saying, “To fuck the rest of us up, why else d’you think?” Rebecca had laughed, this was so inspired a reply.
Couldn’t remember why she was thinking of him now: Hrube? Hadn’t thought of that flat-faced bastard in years.
Back in the room she’d safety-locked the door, pulled the frayed blind farther down, hoisted the groggy child back into bed and climbed in beside him hugging him.
Sleep of the dead! Nothing sweeter.
In the morning using the tiny sink in the cubbyhole-toilet she managed to wash the child, including his hair. He resisted, but not vehemently. Thank God there was soap! She washed his fair fine thin hair and combed out of it the last remaining small snarls of dried blood.
Her own hair was too thick, too long and matted and snarled with dried blood to be shampooed in any sink. She hated it, suddenly. Heavy greasy rank-smelling dragging at her soul. Like her brother Herschel she was, you’d think was an Iroquois Indian.
She left the child at the automat instructing him not to move an inch, to wait for her. Hungrily he was eating a second bowl of hot oatmeal lavishly topped with milk and crystalline brown sugar of a kind he’d never before tasted. Rebecca went to have her hair shampooed and cut in Glamore Beauty Salon around the corner from the automat. She’d noticed the beauty salon on their walk the previous night, she’d studied the prices listed in the window.
How sick she was of Rebecca Schwart’s hair! Her former husband had loved her hair long, heavy, sexy twining in his fingers, burying his face in her hair as he made love to her, moaning and pumping his life into her, between the legs he’d greedily kissed and nuzzled her, the coarse wiry pelt of hair she could hardly bear to touch, herself. But that time was past. The time of her love-delusion was past. She’d come to hate her thick shapeless hair that was always snarled beneath, couldn’t force a comb through it, oily if it wasn’t shampooed every other day and of course it was not shampooed every other day, not any longer. And now the hopeless bits of dried blood snarled in it. She would have it cut off, all but a few inches covering her ears.
In the Glamore Salon she paged through Hair Styles until she found what she was looking for: Hazel Jones’s breezy short cut, with bangs scissor-cut just above the eyebrows.
There he sat in the automat, where she’d left him. Very still as if his thoughts had collapsed in upon themselves. His expression was intense, absorbed. He was gripping himself oddly, arms folded across his chest in a tight embrace. She thought He is playing piano, his fingers are making music for him.
He trusted her utterly. He had no doubt that she would return to him. Seeing her now he glanced upward, blinking.
“Mommy you’re pretty. Mommy you look nice.”
It was so. She was pretty, she looked nice. When her bruises and swellings faded, she would look more than nice.
The new feathery haircut drew eyes to her. Something in her walk, her manner. Purchasing two adult tickets at the Greyhound Bus counter, impulsively choosing a destination (“Jamestown” somewhere to the south of Port Oriskany) because the bus was leaving in twenty minutes and she was wary of lingering in this busy public place where she and the child might be observed. (Zack was wearing a cloth cap on his head. He was sitting where she’d positioned him, on the farther side of the crowded waiting room, his back to the room and to her. They would be seen together only outside at the curb as the bus loaded, and then briefly. And on the bus they would sit together as if by chance, at the very rear.) Rebecca was smiling at the ticket seller, rousing the man from his late-morning torpor. “A beautiful day, so sunny.” The ticket seller, male, youngish, rounded shoulders and morose eyes brightening in turn, seeing a pretty-breezy American girl with shiny dark bangs across her forehead, feathery strands of shiny dark hair lifting about her ears, smiled at her blinking and staring, “Yeah! Man it sure is.”
The remainder of her life. Maybe it would be easy.
The Greyhound to Jamestown was loading. She signaled the child to follow her. Made him a gift of two discarded comic books she’d found in the waiting room. Kissing and cuddling in their seat on the bus. “They didn’t find us, sweetie! We’re safe.” It was a game, only Mommy knew the rules and the logic behind the rules. By the time the bus was lumbering into the hilly countryside south of Port Oriskany the child had become absorbed in one of the comic books.
Cartoon animals! Walking upright, talking and even thinking (in balloons floating over their heads) in the way of human beings. They did not seem to the child any more bizarre or even illogical than the actions of those human beings he’d witnessed.
Waking later, alone in his seat. Mommy was in the back playing gin rummy with a couple sitting in the rear seat that ran the width of the bus.
The Fisks, they were. Ed and Bonnie. Ed was a flush-cheeked fattish bald man with sideburns and a genial laugh, Bonnie was big-busted, glamorously made up with flashing fingernails. Across Ed’s spread knees was a cardboard suitcase upon which Ed was dealing cards for himself and the women seated on either side of him.
It wasn’t like Mommy to behave like this. On the bus trip from Rome she’d kept to herself not meeting anyone’s eye.
“”Gypsy-gin-rummy.“ It’s a variation of the other but there are more options. With gypsy, you have ”wild cards’ and “free draw‘ if you earn it. I can show you, if you’re interested.”
The Fisks were interested. Bonnie said she’d heard of gypsy-gin-rummy but had never played.
Zack watched the game for a while. He liked it that his mother was smiling, laughing in the new way. He liked her pretty new haircut. From time to time she glanced up at him leaning over the back of his seat, and winked. He drifted off to sleep hearing the slap-slap-slap of cards, exclamations and laughter from the players. He took comfort from the immediate fact They didn’t find us, we’re safe. It was all he wished to know at this time.
Later, at another time, there would be other facts to know. He would wait.
Already Port Oriskany, that had been so exciting to arrive in, was receding into the past. The brownstone hotel with the creaky double bed. The automat! The surprise of Mommy returning to him, her hair so short and shiny, bangs across her forehead to hide the bruises and worry lines. The child was beginning to know the satisfaction of departure. You arrive in a city in order that you might leave that city at a later time. There is a thrill in arrival but there is a greater thrill in departure.
It was Mommy’s turn to deal. She laughed and joked with her new friends she would never see again after the bus deposited them at a farm just outside Jamestown. It was intoxicating to think that the world was crammed with individuals like the Fisks, good-natured, quick to laugh, ready for a good time. She said, “The world is a card game, see? You can lose but you can win, too.” She was Hazel Jones laughing in the new way, shuffling and dealing cards.
In Horseheads, New York, in late winter/early spring 1962 befriended Willie James Judd, state-licensed notary public and head clerk, Department of Records, Chemung County Courthouse. At that time waitressing at the Blue Moon Café on Depot Street, Horseheads. A young widow, just her and the little boy. A popular presence at the Blue Moon where most of the customers were men but the men quickly learned to respect the young widow. See, Hazel is like your own sister. You don’t come on to your own damn sister do you?
Willie James Judd was near to retirement from his longtime county employment. Ate most of his meals at the Blue Moon where he became acquainted with the new waitress Hazel Jones who was also known to him through his younger sister Ethel Sweet who’d married the owner of the ramshackle Horseheads Inn where the young widow and her child rented a room by the week. Ethel Sweet liked publicly to marvel how uncomplaining Hazel Jones was. Not like other boarders. Quiet, kept to herself. Never any visitors. Never wasted towels, linens, hot water, soap. Never went out without switching off all the lights in her room. Nor did she allow the child to run on the stairs, to play noisily even outdoors behind the Inn. Nor did she allow the child to sneak downstairs and watch TV in the parlor with other boarders.
Almost, Ethel said approvingly, you would not know a child was there.
And Hazel’s life had not been easy: gradually it was revealed to Ethel Sweet how the young widow had lost both her parents as a child, her father in a house fire when she was four years old, her mother to cancer-of-the-breast when she was nine. Taken in then by relatives up in Port Oriskany who were begrudging to her, never found room for her in their hearts made her quit school at age sixteen to work as a chambermaid till at last at age eighteen she ran away with a man twice her age, married him and realized her mistake afterward learning he’d been married twice before, had children he was not supporting, he was a heavy drinker, beat her and their child and threatened to kill them both so at last unable to bear it she’d run away one night taking the terrified child with her this had been three years now and she had not stopped running out of fear of the man finding her.
No they had not been divorced. He would never give her a divorce. He would wish to see her dead first. And their son, too.
Ethel Sweet reported how, telling this, Hazel began to tremble. It was so real to her!
But now, in Horseheads, she wished to remain. In Horseheads she’d made friends, she was happy. She was content. She wished to enroll Zacharias in the elementary school next fall. He would be almost six years old in September.
Saying to Ethel maybe she’d noticed, Zacharias is not like other boys? Doesn’t play with other children, he’s shy and fearful of being hurt, his father had beat him so often, only just needed to raise his fist and the child would become terrified so she had to shelter him from the roughness of men and boys, boys’ games and loud shouting, also Zacharias had a musical gift, he would be a concert pianist someday and so he must not injure his hands.
Ethel Sweet was so touched! That Hazel who had a reputation in Horseheads for keeping to herself and avoiding personal remarks and questions at the Blue Moon by simply smiling and saying not a word should suddenly open her heart to Ethel, whose own daughters were grown and gone and didn’t give a damn for their mother they’d always taken for granted.
Except Ethel saw that the young woman was nervous and worried-like. Asked what was wrong and Hazel says she don’t have the right papers to enroll Zacharias in school.
Like what kind of papers, Ethel asked. Birth certificate?
Hazel said yes. Birth certificate for her son but also one for her, too.
What had happened was: Hazel’s birth certificate had burned in the house fire when she was four years old. There was no record of her birth anywhere! The fire had been in some town upstate, Hazel did not even know for certain, for her mother had taken her away to live elsewhere in one town after another in the Chautauqua Valley. And her mother had died when Hazel was nine. And her relatives she lived with had no care for her. She had been told she’d been born on a boat from Europe, in New York harbor, her parents had been immigrants from Poland or maybe Hungary but she had not been told which boat, she wasn’t sure when it had crossed, she had seen no record of her birth. It was like they wished to erase me soon as I was born, Hazel told Ethel. But not complaining-like, only just stating a fact.
And Zacharias’s birth certificate was in the possession of his father unless it too had been lost or willfully destroyed.
Hearing this Ethel said hotly it was ridiculous, a person is alive in front of you she or him was certainly born. Why you’d need a document to prove this fact made no God-damn sense.
Saying hotly, What it is is just damn-fool lawyers. The law. Willie over at the Courthouse thirty-eight years could tell you tales to make you laugh like hell, or throw up you’d be so disgusted. And that goes for the judges, too.
Saying yet more hotly, What it is, Hazel, is men. Shooting off their mouths, and charging for it like you wouldn’t believe-seventy-five dollars an hour some of ‘em charge! If it was up to women, you would not need legal documents for any damn thing from buying or selling a henhouse to making out your own will.
Hazel thanked her for being so understanding. Hazel said she had gone a long time not confiding in another person. It was a thorn in her heart, she had no proof that either Zacharias or her had ever been born. It wasn’t like the old days now, you needed legal documents to make your way. There was no avoiding it. At the Blue Moon she was paid off the books and of course tips are off the books but if she kept on this way she would be retired someday and an old woman with no Social Security payments, not a penny.
Ethel said without thinking, “Oh honey you got to get married. That’s what you got to do, get married.”
And Hazel said biting her lower lip, looking like she wanted to cry and Ethel could’ve bit her own tongue speaking as she’d done, “I can’t. I am already married, I can never be married again.”
Right away then Ethel called her brother Willie. She knew Willie had a generous heart. In Horseheads he had a reputation for being a prickly old bastard liked to boss folks around but that was only toward individuals who rubbed him the wrong way. He was a decent man. Felt sorry for the girl Hazel Jones. And the little boy quiet like a deaf-mute. At the County Hall of Records Willie Judd was the man to see for any kind of document you required. Had access to any kind of document you could name. Birth certificate, wedding certificate, death certificate. Two hundred years of yellowing old wills in faded ink, real estate documents dating back to the 1700s, deeds executed with the Six Nations of the Iroquois. Legal forms of any damn kind you wished. And Willie was a notary public owning his own New York State notary seal.
In this way in spring 1962 Willie Judd took pity on Hazel Jones. Willie was not a man given to ease with others and very rarely to pity, sympathy. It would have to be secret. Invited the young woman to his office in the basement of the courthouse just at 5 P.M. closing time of a weekday to explain her situation to him which she did, carefully writing down for Willie certain facts. As she wrote these, she paused to wipe at her eyes. Her birth name was “Hazel Jones” but her married name of course was a different last name she did not care to say; Zacharias’s last name was not “Jones” of course but the name of her husband she was in terror would find the boy, if his legal name was revealed. That was why, Hazel said, they had always to keep going, to live in different places where they would not be known. But now in Horseheads they hoped for a permanent residence.
Willie brushed aside these details as he’d brush aside a swarm of gnats. Head clerk at the Hall of Records for thirty-eight years plus he was a notary public. Had the power of any damn judge in the U.S. almost. Could draw up any document he damn well wished and to anybody’s eye it would be legal.
So! A few swigs of good malt whiskey and Willie Judd was God-damn inspired.
Drew up surrogate birth certificates for Hazel Jones and her son. Willie’s imagination in full gear. There was a form, Chemung County Courthouse letterhead, allowed for such documents to replicate documents that had existed but had been lost or destroyed. Only in recent decades did you need “certificate of birth” anyway. Old-timers, nobody gave a damn. Like adoption. You’d take in a kid, any-age kid, he was yours, no formal adoption papers, none of that bullshit. Now it would be a matter of public record, she’d have the documents to prove it: Hazel Esther Jones born May 11,
1936 New York harbor, New York parentage unknown.
For Zacharias, he’d had to type in a name for the father. Could not see a way around it. Any suggestions? he asked Hazel and she said all smiling and without thinking-Willie? I mean, William.
William-what?
We could say Judd.
Christ he was pleased by this. Flattered to hell.
But that might make for complications, Willie observed. Maybe it would be wiser to reverse these. Hazel Judd, William Jones. And so, Hazel Jones when married.
Hazel laughed, a wild stricken cry. Her son’s birth certificate would read Zacharias August Jones born November 29, 1956 Port Oriskany New York mother Hazel Jones father William Jones.
Now her own name-her name-would be, not Hazel Jones, but Hazel Judd. Yet only on this stiff sheet of paper with the Chemung County Courthouse letterhead.
Thanking the old man, Hazel burst into tears. No one had been so kind to her in a long long time.
(Nobody was to know. Not Ethel, even. The woman had a mouth on her, she’d blab. She’d be proud of her brother interceding like he’d done on behalf of Hazel Jones, she’d blab and get them into trouble. This way, Hazel has the documents, nobody will challenge them, why’d anybody challenge them?
Each year he lived, Willie Judd came to see there was no clear logic to why things happened as they did. Could’ve just as easy happened some other way.
You typed out a form. You typed out another form. You signed your name. Administered the seal of the State of New York, Notary Public. That’s it.)
At the Blue Moon Café next evening Willie Judd came in earlier than usual for supper and stayed later. Ordered the chicken pot pie which was a Blue Moon special. Sat in Hazel Jones’s row of booths as always elbows on the table gazing smiling at the waitress with his tea-colored eyes. It was raining outside like hell, Willie’d worn his black oilcloth slicker people kidded him made him look like a sea lion. This enormous shiny garment he’d hung at the coatrack dripping wet onto the floor. He would ask Hazel Jones to marry him. He had not married, the only one in the family who had not and why exactly he’d never known. Shy, maybe. Beneath his Willie mask. He’d been damn proud of himself rising to head clerk. Only one of the family till then to graduate from high school. So it was a curse, maybe! Willie was the special son, hadn’t found a girl to marry him like the others had done with lower expectations. Time’s a whirlpool, Christ he was sixty-four. Would retire next birthday. Pensioned off by the county, that was a good thing but melancholy, too. Enough to sober you. He had seen in Hazel’s eyes a certain warmth. A certain promise. She’d made him the father of her son. Hazel was always so sweet and transparent smiling at everybody like who’s it Doris Day but there was a touch-me-not air about the girl, everybody remarked upon. A man had to respect. Bringing Willie a draft ale foaming to the top of the heavy stein and over. Bringing Willie one of the least flyspecked menus with blue moon specials stapled to the front like Willie who’d been coming to the Blue Moon half his lifetime needed to be reminded what to order. And bringing Willie extra butter to smear on his Parker House rolls, and the rolls piping-hot.
Somehow it happened. Willie must’ve had too much ale. Not like Willie who’d used to be a drunk but had reformed, to a degree. Could not burn off the alcohol like he’d done. Your liver starts to weaken. Once you turn fifty. Telling Hazel when she brought him his chocolate cream custard pie and coffee about the old days in Horseheads, when him and Ethel had been kids. And Hazel nodding and smiling politely though she had other customers to serve, and tables to clear. And Willie hears this loud old-man’s voice asking, “D’you know why Horseheads is named like it is, Hazel?” and the young woman smiles saying no she guesses she don’t, Willie is all but touching her elbow to keep her from running off saying, “There was actual horseheads here! I mean actual horse-heads. A long time ago, see. We’re talking like-1780s. Before the settlers came. Some of ‘ em were Judds, see. My people. Me and Ethel’s people. Great-great-great-great somethin’, if you figured it. A long time ago. There was this General Sullivan fighting the Iroquois. Had to come up from Pennsylvania. There was three hundred horses for the soldiers and to carry things. They fought the damn Indians, and had to retreat. And the horses collapsed. There was three hundred of ‘em. It was said the soldiers had to shoot ’em. But didn’t bury ‘em. You can see you wouldn’t, huh? You would not bury three hundred horses if you were near to collapsing yourself, huh? Fighting the Iroquois that’d as soon tear out your liver and guzzle it as look at you. They did that to their own kind, other Indians. Tried to wipe ’ em out. The Iroquois was the worst, like the Comanches out west. Sayin‘ then it was the white man brought evil to this continent, bullshit! The evil was in this continent in this actual soil when the white man showed up. My people came from somewhere in north England. Landed in New York right where you was born, Hazel, ain’t that a coincidence? ”New York harbor.“ There ain’t many folks born in ”New York harbor.“ I b’lieve in coincidences. The settlers pushed all the way out here. Damn if I know why. Must’ve been a wilderness then it ain’t exactly Fifth Avenue, New York, now, huh? Anyway, the settlers come out here, a year or so later, first damn thing they see is these horse skeletons all over. Along the riverbank and in the fields. Three hundred horse skulls and skeletons. They couldn’t figure what the hell it was, there was not much knowledge of history in those days. You’d hear things by rumor I suppose. You could not turn on the radio, TV. Three hundred horse skulls all bleached in the sun so they called it ”Horseheads.“” Willie was panting by this time. Willie had reached out to grasp the waitress’s elbow by this time. In the Blue Moon everybody had ceased talking and even the jukebox had gone abruptly silent where Rosemary Clooney had been singing just a minute ago. Could hear a pin drop it would be reported. Ethel Sweet would be stricken to the heart next day. Hearing how her big brother Willie had gotten drunk and lovesick over Hazel he’d done a favor for and would have reason to think she would do some favor for him not wishing to consider would a woman that young and pretty wish to marry a man his age, and girth.
So Willie starts to stammer. Flush-faced, knowing he’s made a spectacle of himself. But not knowing how to back out of it saying, guffawing, “Anyway, Hazel. That’s how ”Horseheads’ came to be. What you got to wonder, is why’d they stay here? Why the hell’d anybody stay here? Poke through the grass there’s not one or two or a dozen horse heads there’s three hundred. And you decide to stay, settle down and stake out a claim, build a house, plow the land and have your kids and the rest is history. That’s the twenty-four-dollar question, Hazel, God damn ain’t it?“
Hazel was startled by Willie’s vehemence. Loud-laughing and red in the face as she’d never seen him. Murmuring some muffled words not overheard by anyone except Willie, the waitress slipped away from his grasp and hurried through the swinging doors into the kitchen.
Willie’d seen the repugnance in her face. All that talk of horse skeletons, skulls, “Horseheads”-he’d ruined any beauty the moment might have had.
Next morning, Hazel Jones and the child were gone forever from Horseheads.
It was an early, 7:20 A.M. Greyhound bus they’d caught out on route 13 with all their suitcases, cardboard boxes, and shopping bags. The Greyhound was southbound from Syracuse and Ithaca to Elmira, Binghamton and beyond. Hazel would leave their room spic-and-span Ethel Sweet would report. Her bed and the child’s cot stripped of all linens including the mattress covers and these neatly folded for the wash. The bathroom Hazel and the child had shared with two other boarders, Hazel left equally clean, the bathtub scrubbed after she’d used it very early that morning, her towels folded for the wash. The single closet in the room was empty, all the wire hangers remaining. Every drawer of the bureau was empty. Not a pin, not a button remained. The wicker wastebasket in the room had been emptied into one of the trash cans at the rear of the Inn. On the bureau top was an envelope addressed to mrs. ethel sweet. Inside were several bills constituting full payment for the room through the entire month of April (though it was only April 17) and a brief note, heartbreaking to Ethel Sweet who was losing not just her most reliable boarder but a kind of daughter as she was coming to think of Hazel Jones. The neatly handwritten note would be shown to numerous individuals, read and reread and pondered in Horseheads for a long time.
Dear Ethel-
Zacharias and I are called away suddenly, we are sorry to leave such a warm good place. I hope this will suffise for April rent.
Maybe we will all meet again sometime, my thanks to you and to Willie from the bottom of my heart.
Your friend “Hazel”
It was an old river city on the St. Lawrence at the northeast edge of Lake Ontario. It looked to be about the size of the city of his earliest memory on the barge canal. On the far side of the river which was the widest river he’d ever seen was a foreign country: Canada. To the east were the Adirondack Mountains. Canada, Adirondack were new words to him, exotic and musical.
Observers would have assumed she’d traveled south with the child. Instead she’d changed buses at Binghamton, traveled impulsively north to Syracuse, and to Watertown, and now beyond to the northernmost boundary of the state.
“To throw them off. Just in case.”
That shrewdness that had become instinctive in her. In no immediate or discernible relationship with available logic or even probability. It was keeping-going, the child knew. He’d become addicted to keeping-going, too.
“Come on come on! God damn it hurry.”
Gripping his hand. Pulling him along. If he’d run ahead on the cracked and potholed pavement impatient after the long bus ride she’d have scolded him for she always worried he might fall, hurt himself. He felt the injustice of her whims.
She walked swiftly, her long legs like scythes. At such times she seemed to know exactly where she was going, to what purpose. There was a two-hour layover at the Greyhound station. In several lockers she’d stored their bulky possessions. The keys were safe in her pocket wrapped in tissue. She’d zipped up his jacket in haste. She’d tied a scarf around her head. They’d left the Greyhound station by a rear exit opening onto a back street.
He was out of breath. Damn he couldn’t keep up with her!
He’d forgotten the name of this place. Maybe she hadn’t told him. He’d lost the map on the bus. Much-folded, much-wrinkled map of New York state.
Keeping-going was the map. Staying in one place for so long as they’d done back there (already he was forgetting the name Horseheads, in another few days he would have forgotten it entirely) was the aberration.
“See, there’s been a sign. There might be more.”
He had no idea what she meant. The excited glitter of her eyes, the set of her jaws. She walked so quickly and so without hesitation people glanced at her in passing, curious.
Mostly men. There were mostly men here, at the river’s edge.
He was thinking again he’d never seen such a wide river. She’d told him there were a thousand islands in that river. He shielded his eyes against splotches of sunshine like fiery explosions on the choppy water.
Drowsing on the bus his head knocking against the smeared window and he’d seen through half-shut eyes long featureless stretches of countryside. At last farmland, human habitations. A cluster of mobile homes, tar paper shanties, auto graveyard, railway crossing and granary, Jefferson Co. Farm Bureau, banners wind-whipping at a Sunoco gas station, a railway crossing. Wherever they were traveling was less green than wherever they’d been hundreds of miles to the south.
Backward in time? There was a wintry glare to the sun here.
The countryside ended abruptly. The road descended between three-storey brick buildings steep-gabled and gaunt looking like elderly men. There was a jarring ascension to a hump-backed old iron bridge above a railroad yard. Quickly he told himself We are safe, it won’t fall in. He knew this was so because his mother showed no alarm, not the slightest interest or even much awareness of the old nightmare bridge across which the massive Greyhound was moving at less than ten miles an hour.
“See! Over there.”
She was leaning eagerly across him to look out the window. Always when they entered any town, any city, whether they were going to disembark or remain on the bus, his mother became alert, excited. In such close quarters she gave off a damp sweetish odor comforting to him as the odor of his own body in slept-in clothes, underwear. And there was the harsher smell of her hair in those days just after she’d had to dye it, not wanting Hazel Jones’s hair to be black but dark brown with “russet-red highlights.”
She was pointing at something outside the window. Below was a vast lot of freight cars BALTIMORE & OHIO, BUFFALO, CHAUTAUQUA & NEW YORK CENTRAL, ERIE & ORISKANY, SANTA FE. Words he’d long ago learned to recognize having seen so often though he could not have said what they meant. Exotic and musical such names seemed to him, the province of adult logic.
His mother was saying, “Almost I’d think we have been here before except I know we have not.”
She didn’t seem to mean the freight cars. She was pointing at a billboard erected above a giant oil drum. sealtest ice cream. A curly-haired little girl lifted a spoon heaped with chocolate ice cream to her smiling mouth. A flash came to him Ike’s FOOD STORE glimmering like a surfacing fish for the briefest of moments before sinking away again into oblivion.
She was saying people had been good to them. All through her life when she’d needed them, people had been good to her. She was grateful. She would not forget. She wished that she could believe in God, she would pray to God to reward these people.
“Not in heaven but here on earth. That’s where we need it.”
He had no idea what she meant but he liked it that she was happy. Entering a town or a city she was always edgy but the little curly-haired girl in the Sealtest billboard had made her smile.
“We’re actual people now, Zack. We can prove who we are like everybody else.”
She meant the birth certificates. On the long journey from Binghamton she’d shown him these official-looking documents several times as if unable to believe that they existed.
Zacharias August Jones born 1956. Hazel Esther Judd born 1936. He liked it that both birthdates ended in 6. He had not known that his middle name was August, that seemed strange to him, the name of a month like June, July. He had not known that his mother’s last name was Judd and wondered if this was so. And his father-William Jones?
Drawing his thumb slowly over the stamp of the State of New York that was slightly raised, whorled like a thumbprint the size of a silver dollar.
“That’s who we are?” He sounded so doubtful, Mommy had to laugh at him.
She’d begun to complain he was getting so damned independent-minded, and not yet six years old! And not yet in first grade! Her little billy goat he was. Sprouting horns she’d have to saw off, that was what you did with billy goat horns growing out of a naughty boy’s forehead.
Where was that, he’d asked. And Mommy had poked his forehead with two blunt fingers.
Though she’d relented, seeing his face. She’d relented and kissed him for Hazel Jones never scolded her child or scared him without a ticklish wet kiss or two to make everything well again.
“Yes. That’s who we are.”
By the time they filed off the bus, she had replaced the birth certificates carefully inside the zippered compartment of her suitcase, between pieces of stiff cardboard to keep them from tearing.
On the wharf was a weatherworn sign creaking in the wind.
MALIN HEAD BAY
He supposed that was the name of this town. He shaped the words silently malin head bay noting the rhythmic stresses.
“What is a ”bay,“ Mommy?”
She was distracted, not listening. He would look up bay in the dictionary, later.
She was walking more slowly now. She’d released his hand. She seemed to be sniffing the air, alert and apprehensive. On the massive river were fishing boats, barges. The water was very choppy. The barges were much larger than he’d ever seen on the canal. In the water fiery sun-splotches came and went like detonations. In the wind it was chilly but if you stood sheltered in the sun it was warm.
In front of a tavern men stood drinking. There were men fishing from a pier. There were run-down hotels rooms day week month and on the crumbling steps of these hotels sickly-looking men sprawled in the sun. He saw his mother hesitate, staring at a man on crutches fumbling to light a cigarette. He saw her staring at several men of whom one was shirtless, basking in sunshine drinking from brown bottles. They walked on. She reached for his hand again, but he eluded her. He kept pace with her, however. Wanting to return to the bus station but knowing that they would not, could not until she wished it. For her will was all: vast as a net encompassing the very sky.
Ma lin Head Bay. His fingers played the keys, the chords.
All that he could make music of was a consolation to him. And there was nothing however ugly he could not make music of.
His mother stopped suddenly. He nearly collided with her. He saw that she was staring at a grotesquely obese old man who sat sprawled in the sunshine, only a few feet away. He’d lowered his bulk onto an overturned wooden crate. His skin was white as flour, strangely whorled and striated, like reptile skin. His shirt was missing several buttons, you could see the scaly folds and creases of his flesh, warm-looking in the sun. In his fatty face his eyes were deep set and appeared to be without focus and when Hazel Jones passed before the man at a distance of no more than ten feet he gave no sign of seeing her only just lifted his bottle to his sucking hole of a mouth, and drank.
“He’s blind. He can’t see us.”
The child understood this to mean He can’t hurt us.
Which was how Zack knew they would stay in Malin Head Bay, for a while at least.
“You don’t look like you’re from around here.”
A slight emphasis on you. And he was smiling.
She didn’t seem to have heard, exactly. Poised yet childlike in her manner. The slightest flicker of attention directed upward at him as her red-lacquered nails took his ticket from him yet there came her blinding flash of a smile: “Sir, thank you!” As if he’d won a prize. As if for the late-afternoon half-price $2.50 he’d been granted entrance to a holy shrine and not the mildewy-smelling interior of the Bay Palace Theater where a rerun of West Side Story was showing.
Deftly she tore the green ticket in two and handed him back the stub already looking past his shoulder with that luminous smile at whoever was pushing close behind him: “Sir, thank you!”
New usherette at the Bay Palace Theater. Dove-gray trousers with flared legs, snug-fitting little bolero jacket with crimson piping. And, on the just-perceptibly padded shoulders, gold braid epaulettes. Prominent shiny bangs across her forehead, skimming her eyebrows. Dark brown, dark-red-brown hair. And the long-handled flashlight she took up with girlish zest, leading older patrons, or moms with young children, into the shadowy interior of the movie house where on the frayed carpet you might unknowingly kick a discarded box of popcorn or a part-eaten candy bar tangled in its wrapper: “This way, please!”
She might have been any age between nineteen and twenty-nine. He wasn’t a keen judge of ages as he wasn’t a keen judge of character: wishing to see the best in others as a way of wishing that others might see only the best, the crispy rind of surface charm and American decency, in him.
He couldn’t recall having taken notice of any usher/usherette at the local movie house before. It was rare for anyone to make an impression upon him. Nor was he a frequent patron of movies, in fact. American pop culture bored him to hell. The only twentieth-century music that engaged him was jazz. His was a jazz sensibility meaning at the margins. In a white man’s skin by accident of birth.
Here in Malin Head Bay at the northern edge of New York State in the off-season everyone was local. Few summer residents lingered beyond Labor Day. The usherette had to be local, but new to the area. Gallagher was himself a new local: one of those summer residents who’d lingered.
His family had had a summer place on Grindstone Island, a “camp” as such places were called, for decades. Grindstone Island was one of the larger of the Thousand Islands, a few miles west of Malin Head Bay in the St. Lawrence River. Gallagher had been coming to the island in the summer, for much of his life; since his divorce in 1959 he’d taken to spending more and more of the year in Malin Head Bay, alone. He’d bought a small house by the river. He played jazz piano at the Malin Head Inn two or three nights a week. He still owned property near Albany, in the suburban village of Ardmoor Park, where the Gallaghers lived; he remained a co-owner of the house in which his former wife lived, with her new husband and family. He did not think of himself in exile nor as estranged from the Gallaghers for that made his situation appear more romantic, more isolated and significant than it was.
What ever became of Chet Gallagher?
Moved away from Albany. Living up by the St. Lawrence.
Divorced? Estranged from the family?
Something like that.
He’d been seeing the new usherette in Malin Head Bay, he realized. Not gone looking for her but, yes he’d seen her. Maybe at the Lucky 13 over the summer. Maybe at the Malin Head Inn. Maybe on Main Street, Beach Street. In the IGA pushing a wobbly wire cart in the early evening when there were few customers for most residents of Malin Head Bay ate supper at 6 P.M. if not earlier. He seemed to recall that the girl had had a young child with her.
Hoped not.
They ever have children, Chet and his wife?
She does, now. But not his.
The usherette had smiled at him as if her life depended upon it but had tactfully ignored his inane remark. He was thinking now he might have alarmed her. He was thinking now he’d made her uneasy and he’d meant only to be friendly as an ordinary guy in Malin Head Bay might be friendly, maybe he should go back and apologize, yes but he wasn’t going to, he knew better. Leave this one alone was the wisest strategy as he groped for a seat in the darkened near-deserted smokers’ loge at the rear of the theater.
And a second time, a few weeks later at the Bay Palace Theater he saw her, he’d forgotten her in the interim and seeing her again felt a stab of excitement, recognition. A man might make the mistake in such a situation thinking the woman will know him, too.
This evening the usherette was selling tickets. In her pert little military-style costume, in the ticket booth in the brightly lighted lobby. He was struck as before by the young woman’s manner: her ardent smile. She was one whose face is transformed by smiling as by a sudden implosion of light.
Her hair was different: pulled back into a ponytail swinging between her shoulder blades, partway down her back. You could see that she liked feeling it there, took a childlike sensuous pleasure in shaking, shifting her head.
The mood came over Gallagher at once. Weak-jointed, swallowing hard as if he’d been drinking whiskey and was dehydrated. You ain’t been blue. No no no.
Yet, oddly he’d forgotten this young woman until now. Since the evening of West Side Story weeks ago. Now it was October, a new season. Though Gallagher was emotionally estranged from his father Thaddeus and had not been close to the family for much of his adult life, yet he was involved in some of the Gallagher Media Group properties: radio-TV stations in Malin Head Bay, Alexandria Bay, Watertown. He remained a consultant and sometime-columnist for the Watertown Standard and its half-dozen rural affiliates in the Adirondack region: the only liberal Democrat associated with Gallagher Media, tolerated as a renegade. And he had his jazz gigs which paid little except in pleasure and were coming to be the center of his unraveled life.
When he wasn’t actively drinking he had AA meetings in Watertown, forty miles south of Malin Head Bay. There, Chet Gallagher was something of a spiritual leader.
Which is why, Gallagher thought, waiting in the brief line to buy his ticket for The Miracle Worker, a man yearns to meet an attractive young woman who doesn’t know him. A woman is hope, a woman’s smile is hope. No more can you live without hope than you can live without oxygen.
“Hello! That’s two-fifty, sir.”
Gallagher pushed a crisp new five-dollar bill beneath the wicket. He’d vowed he would not make a fool of himself this time, yet heard his voice innocently inquire, “Do you recommend this movie? It’s supposed to be”-pausing not knowing what to say, not wanting to offend the dazzling smile-“pretty arduous.”
Regretting arduous. Really he’d meant tough going.
The smiling young woman took Gallagher’s money, deftly punched cash register keys with a flash of her red-lacquered nails, pushed change and green ticket toward him with a flourish. She was looking even more attractive than she’d looked back in September, her eyes were warmly dark-brown, alert. Her carefully applied red lipstick matched her nails and Gallagher saw, couldn’t prevent the rapid search of his gaze, she wore no rings on any of her fingers.
“Oh no, sir! It isn’t arduous it’s hopeful. It kind of breaks your heart, but then it makes you”-in her breathy downstate voice, almost vehement, as if Gallagher had challenged the deepest beliefs of her soul-“rejoice, you are alive.”
Gallagher laughed. Those intense dark-brown eyes, how could he resist. His heart, a wizened raisin, stirred with feeling.
“Thanks! I will certainly try to ”rejoice.“”
Without glancing back Gallagher walked away with his ticket. Already the young woman was smiling up into the face of the next customer, just as she’d smiled at him.
Beautiful but not very bright. Transparent (breakable?) as glass.
Her soul. Can see into. Shallow, vulnerable.
In the smokers’ loge in a rear seat. Ten minutes into the movie he became restless, distracted. He very much disliked the music score: obtrusive, heavy-handed. The stalwart melodrama of The Miracle Worker failed to engage him, who had come to see that failure is the human condition, not victory over odds; for each Helen Keller who triumphs, there are tens of millions who fail, mute and deaf and insensate as vegetables tossed upon a vast garbage pile to rot. In such moods the shimmering film-images, mere lights projected onto a tacky screen, could not work their magic.
Yet we yearn for the miracle worker, to redeem us.
Gallagher’s bladder ached. He’d had a few beers that day. He rose from his seat, went to use the men’s lavatory. This tacky tawdry smelly place. In fact he knew the owner, and he knew the manager. The Bay Palace Theater had been built before the war in a long-ago era. Art deco ornamentation, a slickly Egyptian motif popular in the 1920s. His father’s boyhood, adolescence. When the world had been glamorous.
Wanting to look for the ponytailed young woman. But he would not. He was too old: forty-one. She was possibly half his age. And so naive, trusting.
The way she’d lifted her beautiful eyes to his. As if no one had ever rebuffed her, hurt her.
She had to be very young. To be so naive.
He hadn’t wanted to stare at her left breast where a name had been stitched in crimson thread. He wasn’t that kind of man, to stare at a girl’s breasts. But he could call the manager, whom he knew from the Malin Head bar, and inquire.
That new girl? Selling tickets last night?
Too young for you, Gallagher.
He wanted to protest, he felt young. In his soul he felt young. Even his face still looked boyish, despite the lines in his forehead, and his receding hair. When he smiled, his pointed devil’s-teeth flashed.
In some quarters of Malin Head Bay he was known and respected as a Gallagher: a rich man’s son. Deliberately he wore old clothes, took little care with his appearance. Hair straggling past his collar and often didn’t shave for days. He ate in taverns and diners. He was one to leave inappropriately large tips. He had an absentminded air like one who has been drinking even when he has not been drinking only just thinking and taxing his brain. Finding his way back to his seat without drifting out into the lobby looking for the usherette. He felt a stab of shame for the way he’d spoken to her, as a pretext for provoking her into reacting; he hadn’t been sincere but she had answered him sincerely, from the heart.
When The Miracle Worker ended in a swirl of triumphant movie-music at 10:58 P.M., and the small audience filed out, Gallagher saw that the ticket seller’s booth was darkened, the young ponytailed woman in the usherette’s costume was gone.
“Hide most things you know. Like you would hide any weakness. Because it is a weakness to know too much among others who know too little.”
He was Zacharias Jones, six years old and enrolled in first grade at Bay Street Elementary. He lived with his mother for his father was no longer living.
“That’s all you need to tell anyone. If they ask more, tell them to ask your mother.”
He was a sly fox-faced child with dark luminous shifting eyes and a mouth that worked silently when other children spoke as if he wished to hurry their silly speech. And he had a habit, disconcerting to his teacher, of drumming his fingers-all his fingers-on a desk or tabletop as if to hurry time.
“If they ask where we’re from say ”downstate.“ That’s all they need to know.”
He didn’t have to ask who they were, it was they, them who surrounded. By instinct, he knew Mommy was right.
They lived in two furnished rooms upstairs over Hutt Pharmacy. The outdoors stairs ascended the churchy dark-shingled building at the rear. A sharp medicinal smell lifted through the plank floorboards of the apartment, Mommy said was a good healthy smell-“No germs.” There were three windows in the apartment and all three overlooked an alley bordered by the rears of garages, trash cans and scattered debris. Always a smudged look through the windowpanes which Mommy could wash only from inside. A mile and a half away was the St. Lawrence River, visible as a dull-blue glow at dusk that seemed to shimmer above the intervening rooftops. There were other tenants living above Hutt Pharmacy but no children. “Your little boy will be lonely here, no one for him to play with,” the woman next door said with an insincere twist of her mouth, but Hazel Jones protested in her liquidy movie-voice, “Oh no, Mrs. Ogden! Zack is fine. Zack is never lonely, he has his music.”
His music was a strange way of speaking. For never did he feel that any music was his.
Friday afternoons at 4:30 P.M. he had his piano lesson. Stayed at Bay Street Elementary (with his teacher’s permission, in the makeshift library where by November first he’d read half the books on the shelves including those for fifth and sixth graders) until it was time then hurried over tense with anticipation to the adjoining Bay Street Junior High where, in a corner of the school auditorium backstage, Mr. Sarrantini gave piano lessons in half-hour sessions of sharply varying degrees of concentration, enthusiasm. Mr. Sarrantini was music director for all public schools in the township, also organist at Holy Redeemer Roman Catholic Church. He was a wheezing big-bellied man with a flushed face and wavering eyes, of no age a six-year-old might guess except old. Listening to his pupils’ lessons, Mr. Sarrantini allowed his eyes to shut. Close up, he smelled of something very sweet like red wine and something very harsh and acrid like tobacco. By late afternoon of a Friday when Zacharias Jones arrived for his lesson, Mr. Sarrantini was likely to be very tired, and irascible. Sometimes when Zack began his scales Mr. Sarrantini interrupted, “Enough! No need to beat a dead horse.” At other times, Mr. Sarrantini seemed displeased with Zack. He discerned in his youngest pupil a deficient “piano attitude.” He’d told Hazel Jones that her son was gifted, to a degree; he could play “by ear” and would one day be able to “sight read” any piece of music. But the steps to playing piano well were arduous, and specific, “piano discipline” was crucial, Zacharias must learn his scales and study pieces in the exact order prescribed for beginning students before plunging on to more complicated compositions. When Zack played beyond his assignment in My First Year at the Piano, Mr. Sarrantini frowned and told him to stop. Once, Mr. Sarrantini slapped at his hands. Another time, he brought the keyboard lid halfway down over Zack’s fingers as if to smash them. Zack yanked his hands away just in time.
“One thing all piano teachers despise is a so-called ”prodigy‘ getting ahead of himself.“
Or, with a wet-wheezing laugh, “Here’s little Wolfgang. Eh!”
Hazel Jones had offended Mr. Sarrantini, Zack knew, by telling him that her son was meant to be a pianist. He’d cringed, hearing such a flamboyant statement put to the music director of the township.
“”Meant to be,“ Mrs. Jones? By whom?”
Another parent, addressed with such sarcasm by Mr. Sarrantini, would have said nothing further; but there was Hazel Jones speaking in her earnest, liquidy voice, “By what we all have inside us, Mr. Sarrantini, we can’t know until we bring it out.”
Zack saw with his shrewd child’s eye that Mr. Sarrantini was impressed by Hazel Jones. At least in Hazel Jones’s presence, he would behave in a more kindly manner with his pupil.
Scales, scales! Zack tried to be patient with the tedium of “fingering.” Except there was no end to scales. You learned the major keys, then came the minor keys. Didn’t your fingers know what to do, if you didn’t interfere? And why was timing so important? The formula was so prescribed Zack could hear every note before his finger depressed it. Even worse were the study pieces (“Ding Dong Bell,” “Jack and Jill Go Up the Hill,” “Three Blind Mice”) which provoked his fingers to swerve out of control in derision and mockery. Recalling the boogie-woogie piano pieces that made you smile and laugh and want to get up and jump around they were so playful, making-fun-of other kinds of music, he’d been so captivated by long ago hearing on the radio in the old farmhouse on the Poor Farm Road he wasn’t to think of for that would make Mommy unhappy, if Mommy knew.
If Mommy knew. But Mommy could not always know his thoughts.
Here in Malin Head Bay, in their apartment above Hutt Pharmacy, there was a plastic portable radio Mommy kept on the kitchen table. Restlessly turning the dial seeking “classical music” but encountering mostly loud jokey talk and news broadcasts, jingly advertisements, pop songs where the women were breathy-voiced and the men were bawling, and static.
He would play pieces by Beethoven and Mozart one day, Mommy said. He would be a real pianist, on a stage. People would listen to him, people would applaud. Even if he didn’t become famous he would be respected. Music is beautiful, music is important. In Watertown, there was a “youth concert” every Easter. Maybe not next Easter-that would be too soon, she supposed-but the following Easter maybe he might play at this concert if he followed Mr. Sarrantini’s instructions, if he learned his assignments and was a good boy.
He would! He would try.
For nothing mattered more than making Mommy happy.
Arriving twenty minutes early for his lesson with Mr. Sarrantini so that he could listen to the pupil who preceded him, a ninth grader whose spirited playing Mr. Sarrantini sometimes praised. She was one who executed her scales dutifully, doggedly; kept to the metronome’s pitiless beat almost perfectly. A husky girl with bristly braids and damp fleshy lips whose book was the blue-covered My Third Year at the Piano; she sounded as if she were playing piano with more than ten fingers, and sometimes with her elbows: “Donkey Serenade,” “Bugle Boy March,” “Anvil Chorus.”
At home Zack had no piano upon which to practice. This shameful fact Hazel Jones didn’t want anyone to know.
“We can make our own keyboard. Why not!”
They made the practice-keyboard together, out of white and black construction paper. They laughed together, this was a game. Between the keys they drew lines in black ink to suggest cracks. Zack’s hands were still too small to reach octaves but they prepared the keyboard to scale. “You’re practicing not just for Mr. Sarrantini, but for all of your life.”
Now, making supper, Hazel glanced over to watch Zack’s hands moving over the paper keyboard. He was a demon, executing scales!
“Sweetie. Too bad those damn keys don’t make any sound.”
Without pausing in his playing Zack said, “But they do, Mommy. I can hear them.”
Now they were no longer keeping-going there was danger. Even in Malin Head Bay at the northern edge of the state by the Canadian border hundreds of miles from their old home in the Chautauqua Valley there was danger. Now that Zacharias Jones was enrolled in elementary school and Hazel Jones was working six days a week at the Bay Palace Theater where anyone could walk up and buy a ticket there was danger.
He, him was the danger. His name unspoken he had become strangely powerful with the passage of time.
It was like a fair, cloudless sky. Here at the edge of the lake you glanced up to see that the sky has become suddenly mottled with cloud, thunderheads blown across Lake Ontario within minutes.
His mother’s games! Out of nowhere they came.
He would struggle to comprehend the nature of the game even as he was playing it. For always there were rules. Games have rules. As music has rules. Where such rules come from, he had no idea.
The Game-of-the-(Disappearing)-Pebbles.
Fifteen pebbles of varying size and shapes Hazel placed on the windowsill of the largest of the windows overlooking the alley behind Hutt Pharmacy. One by one, these disappeared. By early winter only three remained.
It was a rule of the game that Zack could note the absence of a pebble but not question who’d taken it, or why. For obviously his mother had taken it. (Why?)
In later years Zack would understand that these were childish games of necessity, not of choice.
They’d gathered the pebbles on the stony beach by the bridge to St. Mary Island. One of their favorite walking places, at the edge of the St. Lawrence River. The pebbles were prized as “precious stones”-“good luck stones.” Several were strikingly beautiful, for common stones: smooth and striated with colors like a kind of marble. Zack never tired of staring at them, touching them. Other pebbles were not beautiful but dense and ugly, clenched like fists. Yet they exuded a special power. These Zack never touched but took a strange comfort in seeing on the windowsill each morning.
In no discernible order, over a period of months the pebbles began to disappear. It seemed not to matter if a pebble was beautiful or ugly, one of the larger pebbles, or smaller. There was a randomness to the game that kept Zack in a state of perpetual uneasiness.
Obviously, his mother was taking the pebbles away. Yet she would not admit to it, and Zack could not accuse her. It seemed to be an unspoken rule of the game that the pebbles disappeared during the night by a kind of magic.
It was an unspoken rule, too, that Zack could not remove any of the pebbles. He’d taken one of the beautiful pebbles away to hide under the mattress of his bed but Mommy must have found it there for it, too, vanished.
“If he doesn’t find us by the time all the pebbles are gone, it’s a sign he never will.”
He, him. This was Daddy-must-not-be-named.
Now that Hazel Jones was an usherette at the movie theater, she had a way of speaking in mimicry of certain Hollywood actresses. As Hazel Jones she could allude to things that Zack’s mother would not wish to allude to. There was Mommy who’d had another name in that time living in the big old farmhouse on the Poor Farm Road close by the canal where he’d played and there was Daddy who’d had a name not to be recalled for Mommy now would be very upset, he lived in dread of upsetting Mommy.
There is Mommy now. Mommy will be all to you now.
And so whatever Hazel Jones said in her airy insouciant way was somehow not “real” yet it could be used as a vehicle for “real” speech. As one might speak through the mouth of a mask hidden by the mask.
The other game was the fearful game. For he could never be certain that it was a game.
Sometimes on the street. Sometimes in a store. In any public place. He would sense his mother’s sudden apprehension, the way she froze in mid-speech, or squeezed his hand so that it hurt, staring at someone whom he, Zack, had not yet seen. And might not see. His mother might decide no, there was no danger, or his mother might suddenly panic and push him into a doorway, pull him into a store and hurry with him to the rear exit, paying no heed to others staring at them, the white-faced young mother and her child half-running as if in fear of their lives.
Always it happened so quickly. Zack could not resist. He would not have wished to resist. There was such strength in Mommy’s desperation.
Once, she’d pushed him down behind a parked car. Tried clumsily to shield him with her body.
“Niley! I love you.”
His old name, baby-name. Mommy had uttered it without realizing in her panic. Later he would realize that Mommy had expected to be killed, this was her farewell to him.
Or, she’d expected him to be killed.
Only a few times did Zack actually see the man his mother saw. He was tall, broad-backed. In profile, or turned away from them entirely. His face wasn’t clear. His hair was close-cropped, glinting gray. Once he was coming out of the Malin Head Inn, pausing beneath the marquee to light a cigarette. He wore a sport coat, a necktie. Another time he was just outside the IGA as Mommy and Zack were leaving with their shopping cart so that Mommy had to reverse her direction, panicked, colliding with another customer just behind them.
(The cart containing their meager groceries, they’d had to abandon in their haste to escape by a rear exit. Fortunately by this time Hazel Jones was known to the IGA manager and her groceries would be set aside for her to retrieve the next morning.)
Zack was left shaken, frightened by these encounters. For he knew that any one of them might be he, him. And that he and Mommy would be punished for whatever it was they’d done, he would never forgive.
Back in the apartment, Mommy would pull down all the window blinds. At dusk she would switch on only a single lamp. Zack would help her drag their heaviest chair in front of the door that was locked, and double-locked. Neither would have much appetite for supper that evening and afterward practicing piano at the make-believe keyboard, Zack would be distracted hearing behind the sharp clear notes and chords of the imagined piano a man’s upraised voice incredulous and furious and not-to-be-placated by even a child’s abject terror.
“It wasn’t him, Zack. I don’t think so. Not this time.”
Hunched over the make-believe keyboard. His fingers striking the paper keys. The piano sound would drive out the other sound, if his fingers did not weaken.
In the morning, the pebbles on the windowsill.
If it was a clear day, sunshine flooded through the glass making the pebbles hot to the touch. Zack would realize the pebble-game was not a game merely. It was real as Daddy was real, though invisible.
Mommy would not allude to what had happened the day before, or had almost happened. That was a rule of the game. Hugging him and giving him a smacking wet kiss saying in her brisk Hazel Jones voice to make him smile, “Got through the night! I knew we would.”
A curious variant on the Game of He/Him gradually evolved. This was Zack’s game entirely, with Zack’s rules.
By chance, Zack would sight the man, not Mommy. A man who closely enough resembled the man of whom they could not speak, yet somehow it happened that Mommy did not see him. Zack would wait, with mounting tension Zack would wait for Mommy to see this man, and to react; and if Mommy did not, or, seeing the man, took no special notice of him, Zack would feel something snap in his brain, he would lose control suddenly, pushing into his mother, nudging her.
“Zack? What’s wrong?”
Zack seemed furious suddenly. Pushing her, striking with his fists.
“But-what is it? Honey-”
By this time the danger might have passed. The man, the stranger, had turned a corner, disappeared. Possibly there’d been no man: Zack had imagined him. Yet, in childish fury, Zack drew back his lip, baring his teeth. It was a facial mannerism of his father’s, to see it in the child was a terrifying sight.
“You missed him! You never saw him! I saw him! He could walk right up to you and blam! blam! blam! shoot you in the face and blam! he’d shoot me and you couldn’t stop him! I hate you.”
In astonishment Hazel Jones stared at her raging son. She could not speak.
Stunned. Struck to the heart. Somehow her son had known, his father had owned a gun.
Somehow, the son had memorized certain of the father’s expressions. That look of disgust. That look of righteous fury, you dared not approach even to touch in helpless love.
Fallin‘ in love with love.
Savin‘ all my love. For you.
It was in the early winter of 1962 that he began to see the young woman in the smoky piano bar of the Malin Head Inn. Where he was CHET GALLAGHER JAZZ PIANO advertised in a blown-up glossy photo on display in the hotel lobby.
At first half-disbelieving his eyes, it could be her. The usherette from the Bay Palace Theater.
The one whose name Gallagher had learned from his friend who managed the theater. (Though he had not made use of this information, and vowed he would not.)
She arrived early at the piano bar, about 8 P.M. Sat alone at one of the small round zinc-topped tables beside the wall. Left before the lounge became really crowded, shortly after 10 P.M. Always she was alone. Conspicuously alone. Declining offers of drinks from other, male patrons. Declining offers of company from other, male patrons. She smiled, to soften her refusal. You could see that she was resolved to listen to the jazz pianist, not to be drawn into conversation with a stranger.
Each time, she ordered two drinks. She did not smoke. She sat watching Gallagher, attentively. Her applause was quicker and more enthusiastic than the applause of most of the other patrons as if she wasn’t accustomed to applauding in a public place.
“Hazel Jones.”
He mouthed the name to himself. He smiled, it was so innocent and naive a name. Purely American.
The first time Gallagher saw her had been one of his brooding evenings. Picking his way through Thelonious Monk’s “Round About Midnight.” Minimalist, meditative. Like making your way through the dream of another person and it’s easy to lose your way. Gallagher loved Monk. There was a side of him that was Monk. Unyielding, maybe a little cranky. Eccentric. Beautiful music Gallagher believed it, this very cool black jazz. He wanted so badly for others to hear it as he did. To care about it as he did.
That’s the problem. To be supremely cool, you don’t care. But Gallagher cared.
It’s her. Is it her?
A woman by herself in the Piano Bar. You expect a man to join her, but no one does. This striking young woman in what appeared to be a cocktail dress of some cheaply glamorous dark red material threaded with silver. Her hair was feathery and floating at the nape of her neck. She smiled vaguely about her not seeing the frank stares of men and as the waiter approached she looked up at him, appealing. As if to ask Is it all right, that I am here? I hope I am welcome.
Gallagher fumbled a few notes. Finished the meandering Monk piece to scattered applause and his agile fingers leapt to something more animated, rhythmic, sexy-urgent “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love, Baby.” Which Gallagher hadn’t played in a very long time.
Hadn’t realized he’d been thinking of her. “Hazel Jones.” In a way, he resented thinking of any woman. He’d have thought that he was beyond that, the tight hot sensation in his chest and groin. Since The Miracle Worker that summer he’d returned to the Bay Palace Theater only once; and that evening he hadn’t allowed himself to seek out the pretty usherette, to inveigle her into speaking with him. No, no! Afterward he’d been proud of himself for avoiding her.
The compulsion to be happy only complicates life. Gallagher had had enough of complications.
That night, Gallagher took his break without glancing out at the young woman. He walked quickly away. When he returned, her table was occupied by someone else.
Too bad. But just as well.
Had to ask the waiter what the young woman had been drinking and was told Coke on ice. She’d left a thirty-five-cent tip, dimes and nickels.
This curious phase of Chet Gallagher’s life: woke up one morning to find himself an affable small-town eccentric who played jazz piano at the Malin Head Inn, Wednesday/Thursday/Friday evenings. (Saturday was a country-and-western dance combo.) He lived in a small wood-frame house near the riverfront, sometimes drove out to the family camp on Grindstone Island for a few days in seclusion. It was off-season in the Thousand Islands, there were few tourists. Locals who lived year-round on the islands were not exactly sociable. Not long ago Gallagher might have brought a woman friend to stay with him on the island. In an earlier phase, the woman would have been his wife. But no longer.
Too damned much trouble to be shaving every morning. Too much trouble to be warmly humorous, “upbeat.”
The compulsion to be upbeat only exhausts. He knew!
Gallagher’s family lived on the farther side of the state, in Albany and vicinity. In their own intense world of exclusivity, family “destiny.” He hadn’t spoken to any of them in months and not to his father since the previous Fourth of July, at the Grindstone camp.
And so he’d become an entertainer in the sometime hire of the Malin Head Inn, whose owner was a friend of Gallagher’s, a longtime acquaintance of his father Thaddeus Gallagher. The Malin Head was the largest resort hotel in the area, but in the off-season only about a fifth of its rooms were occupied even on weekends. Gallagher played piano Hoagy Carmichael style, loose-jointed frame hunched over the keyboard, long agile fingers ranging up and down the keys like making love, cigarette drooping from his lips. Didn’t sing like Carmichael but frequently hummed, laughed to himself. In jazz there are many private jokes. Gallagher was an impassioned interpreter of the music of Duke Ellington, Fats Waller, Monk. In the Piano Bar, he received requests for “Begin the Beguine,” “Happy Birthday to You,” “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” “Cry.” Smiled his fleeting polite smile and continued playing the music he liked, with strains of cruder music woven in. He was versatile, playful. Good-natured. Not mocking and not malicious. A man of youthful middle age whom most other men liked, and to whom some women were powerfully attracted. And not often drunk.
Some nights, Gallagher drank only tonic water on ice, spiked with lime gratings. Tall glass beading with moisture on the piano top, ashtray beside it.
Gallagher had local admirers. Some drove up from Watertown. Not many, but a few. They came to hear chet gallagher jazz piano, they were mostly men, like himself unmarried, formerly married, separated. Men losing their hair, gone flaccid at the waist, stark-eyed, needing to laugh. Needing sympathy. Men for whom “Stormy Weather,” “Mood Indigo,” “St. James Infirmary,” “Night Train” made perfect sense. There were a few local women who liked jazz, but only a few. (For how could you dance to “Brilliant Corners”? You could not.) The hotel guests were a mixed bag, especially during the tourist season. Sometimes there were true jazz enthusiasts. Most often, not. Customers came into the lounge to drink, smoke. Listened a while, became restless and departed for the less restrained atmosphere of the tap room where there was a jukebox. Or they stayed. They drank, and they stayed. Sometimes they talked loudly, laughed. They were not intentionally rude, they were supremely indifferent. You couldn’t help but know, if you were Chet Gallagher, that they were disrespectful of the musical culture that meant so much to him, Gallagher wasn’t so damned affable he didn’t feel the sting of insult not to himself but to the music. Privileged white sonsofbitches he thought them, having eased into the dark subversive skin of jazz.
It was one of the things his father detested in him. An old story between them. Gallagher’s politics, his “pinko”-“Commie”-tendencies. Soft-hearted about Negroes, voted for Kennedy not Nixon, Stevenson not Eisenhower, Truman not Dewey back in ‘48.
That had been the supreme insult: Truman not Dewey. Thaddeus Gallagher was an old friend of Dewey’s, he’d given plenty of money to Dewey’s campaign.
Lucky for Gallagher he didn’t drink much any longer. When his thoughts swerved in certain directions, he could feel his temperature rise. Privileged white sonsofbitches he’d been surrounded by most of his life. Fuck what do you care. You don’t care. The music doesn’t depend on you. A privileged white sonofabitch yourself, face it, Gallagher. What you do at the piano is not serious. Nothing you do is serious. A man without a family, not serious. Playing piano at the Malin Head isn’t a real job only something you do with your time. As your life isn’t a real life any longer only something you do with your time.
“Blue Moon” he was playing. Slow, melancholy. Maudlin raised to its highest pitch. It was mid-December, a snow-flurried evening. Languid flakes blown out of the black sky above the St. Lawrence River. Gallagher never allowed himself to expect Hazel Jones to turn up in the Piano Bar as he never allowed himself to expect anyone to turn up. She’d come several times, and departed early. Always alone. He had to wonder if she worked alternate Friday evenings at the Bay Palace or maybe she’d quit altogether. He’d made inquiries and knew that ushering paid pitifully little. Maybe he could help her find better employment.
His friend who managed the Bay Palace had told him that Hazel was from somewhere downstate. She knew no one in the area. She was somewhat secretive but an excellent worker, very reliable. Always friendly, or friendly-seeming. Very good selling tickets. “Personality plus.” That smile! Good with troublesome (male) patrons. You hired a good-looking girl to fill out the usherette uniform but you didn’t want trouble. Unlike the other female ushers Hazel Jones didn’t become upset when (male) patrons behaved aggressively with her. She spoke calmly to them, smiled and eased away to call the manager. Never raised her voice. The way a man might do, not letting on what he’s feeling. Like Hazel is older than she looks. She’s been through more. Anything now is chicken shit to her.
Gallagher glanced out into the smoky lounge, saw a young woman just coming in, heading for an empty table near the wall. Her!
He smiled to himself. He made no eye contact with her. He felt good! Improvising, liking how his lean fingers flashed. He eased from “Blue Moon” to “Honeysuckle Rose” playing vintage Ellington for one who he guessed knew little of jazz, still less of Ellington. Badly wanting her to hear, to know. The yearning he felt. Thinking She came to me. To me! In a showy run of notes to the top of the keyboard Chet Gallagher fell in love with the woman known to him as Hazel Jones.
At his break, Gallagher went directly to her table.
Looming over the surprised young woman who’d clapped with such childlike enthusiasm.
He thanked her, said he’d been noticing her. Introduced himself, as if she wouldn’t have known his name. And stooped to hear the name she told him: “”Hazel‘-what? I didn’t quite hear.“
“Hazel Jones.”
Gallagher laughed with the pleasure of a thief fitting a key into a lock.
“Mind if I join you for a few minutes, Hazel Jones?”
He could see that she was flattered he’d approached her. Other patrons had been waiting to speak with the pianist but he’d brushed past them heedless. Yet Gallagher would recall afterward to his chagrin that Hazel Jones had hesitated, staring at him. Smiling, but her eyes had gone slightly flat. Maybe she was alarmed by him, looming over her so suddenly. He was six foot three, whippet-lean and loose-jointed and his high balding dome of a head glowed warm with the effort of his stint at the piano; his eyes were shadowy, kindly but intense. Hazel Jones had no choice but to move her chair to make room for him. The zinc-topped table was small, their knees bumped beneath.
Close up, Gallagher saw that the young woman’s face was carefully made up, her mouth very red. Hers was a poster-face at the Bay Palace. And she was wearing the cocktail dress made of some dark red glittery fabric that fitted her breasts and shoulders tightly. The upper sleeves were puffed, the wrists tight. In the smoky twilight of the cocktail lounge she exuded an air both sexual and apprehensive. Politely she declined Gallagher’s offer to buy her something stronger than Coke: “Thank you, Mr. Gallagher. But I have to leave soon.”
He laughed, hurt. Protested, “Please call me Chet, Hazel. ”Mr. Gallagher‘ is my sixty-seven-year-old father way off in Albany.“
Their conversation was wayward, clumsy. Like climbing into a canoe with a stranger, and no oars. Exhilarating and also treacherous. Yet Gallagher heard himself laughing. And Hazel Jones laughed, so he must have been amusing.
How flattered a man is, that a woman should laugh at his jokes!
How childlike in his soul, wishing to trust a woman. Because she is attractive, and young. Because she is alone.
Gallagher had to concede, he was excited by Hazel Jones. In the Bay Palace in her ridiculous uniform, now in the Piano Bar in her glittery-red cocktail dress. Her eyebrows were less heavy than he recalled, she must have plucked and shaped them. Her hair was cut in feathery, floating layers, like a loose cap on her head. Brunette, streaked with russet-red highlights. And her skin very pale. It was like leaning toward an open flame, leaning toward Hazel Jones. The sensation Gallagher felt was tinged with dread for he was not a young man, hadn’t been a young man for a long time, and these feelings were those he’d had as a young man and they were associated with hurt, disappointment.
Yet, here was Hazel Jones smiling at him. She, too, was edgy, nervous. Unlike other women of Gallagher’s wide acquaintance, Hazel seemed to speak without subterfuge. There was something missing in her, Gallagher decided: the mask-like veneer, the scrim of will that came between him and so many women, his former wife, certain of his lovers, his sisters from whom he was estranged. With girlish aplomb Hazel was telling him that she admired his “piano playing”-though jazz was “hard to follow, to see where it’s going.” Surprising him by saying that she’d used to listen to jazz music on a late-night program on a Buffalo radio station, years ago.
Immediately Gallagher identified the program: “Zack Zacharias” on WBEN.
Hazel seemed surprised, Gallagher knew the program. Gallagher had to resist telling her that late-night jazz programming on a number of stations through the state was his, Chet Gallagher’s idea. WBEN was an affiliate of Gallagher Media, one of the stronger urban stations.
“Do you know him? ”Zack Zacharias‘? I always wondered if he was-you know, Negro.“
Delicately Hazel enunciated the word: Ne-gro. As if to be Ne-gro was a kind of invalidism.
Gallagher laughed. “His name isn’t ”Zack Zacharias’ and he’s no more Negro than I am. But he knows good jazz, the program is in its ninth year.“
Hazel smiled, as if confused. He didn’t want to seem to be laughing at her.
“You’re from Buffalo, are you?”
“No.”
“But western New York, right? I can hear the accent.”
Hazel smiled again, uncertainly. Accent? She had never heard the flat nasal vowels, herself.
Gallagher didn’t want to make her self-conscious. She was so vulnerable, trusting.
“Why’ve you come so far north? Malin Head Bay? Must’ve come here in the summer, yes?”
“Yes.”
“D’you know people here? Relatives?”
This blunt question Hazel seemed not to hear. Surprising Gallagher with a remark he’d have had to take as flirtatious, from another woman: “You haven’t been back to the movies for a long time, Mr. Gallagher. At least, I haven’t seen you.”
Gallagher was flattered, Hazel remembered him. And was willing to allow him to know that she remembered him.
Telling her again, poking at her arm, please call him Chet.
Now Gallagher leaned over Hazel feeling the blood course warm and exhilarated in his veins. How pretty she was! How desperately grateful he was, she’d come back! A man plays jazz piano hoping to attract a woman like this one. Telling her that really he didn’t like movies, much. He wasn’t very American, very normal in that regard. His family background was “media”-not films, but newspapers, radio, TV. Trading in images, dreams. Always the film industry had been primed to sell tickets, that was its aim. If you knew this, you were not so likely to be seduced. What Gallagher most disliked about Hollywood films was the music. The “score.” Usually it grated against his nerves. The sentimental employment of music to evoke emotions, to “set scenes” offended him. A holdover from silent films when an organist played in each theater. All was exaggerated, perverse. Sometimes he shut his ears against the music. Sometimes he shut his eyes against the images.
Hazel laughed. Gallagher was himself exaggerating, to be amusing. He loved seeing her laugh. He guessed that, in other circumstances, Hazel didn’t laugh much. A warm flush rose into her face. One of her mannerisms was to brush unconsciously at her hair, lifting and letting fall the neatly scissor-cut bangs that lay across her forehead. It was a childlike gesture that called attention to her serene face, her shining hair, ringless fingers and red-painted nails. Also, she shifted her shoulders in the tight dress, leaning forward, and back. Her body seemed awkward to her, as if she’d grown up too soon. The red-glittery dress was a costume like the usherette’s costume; Gallagher knew without needing to check that Hazel would be wearing very high-heeled shoes.
Gallagher wanted to protect this young woman from the hurt that such naiveté would surely bring her. He wanted to make her trust him. He wanted to make her adore him. Wanted to caress her cheek, her slender throat. That squirmy, partly bared shoulder. Wanting to cup her breast in his hand. He felt a swoon of desire, imagining Hazel naked inside her clothes. The shock of it, seeing a woman naked for the first time, such trust.
Gallagher was talking rapidly. This was all coming fast, careening at him. And he hadn’t had anything stronger than beer all evening. Just he was a little drunk with Hazel Jones.
That old familiar shiver of dread. Yet a perverse comfort in it. Never had Gallagher made love to a woman without that anticipatory sensation of dread. Except in his marriage, he’d become numbed to extremes of emotion. As soon as sex becomes companionable, habitual, it ceases to be sex and becomes something else.
This one, you won’t marry.
Wishing to comfort himself.
Gallagher heard himself ask Hazel how she liked movies?-having to see them continuously as she did.
He cared nothing for her reply. Her voice engaged him, not her words. Yet she surprised him, saying she saw only fragments of movies at the Bay Palace, never anything whole. And before working as an usherette she had not seen many movies-“My parents didn’t approve of movies.” So now she saw just broken parts of movies and these many times repeated. She saw the ends of scenes hours before she saw the beginnings. She saw the beginnings of movies soon after having seen their dramatic endings. Stories looped back upon themselves. No one got anywhere. She knew beforehand what actors would say, even as the camera opened upon a “new” scene. She knew when an audience would laugh, though each audience was new and their laughter was spontaneous. She knew what music cues signaled even when she wasn’t watching the screen. It gave you a confused sense of what to expect in life. For in life there is no music, you have no cues. Most things happen in silence. You live your life forward and remember only backward. Nothing is relived, only just remembered and that incompletely. And life isn’t simple like a movie story, there is too much to remember.
“And all that you forget, it’s gone as if it has never been. Instead of crying you might as well laugh.”
And Hazel laughed, a thin anxious girl’s laugh that ceased as abruptly as it began.
Gallagher was astonished by the young woman’s outburst. He had no idea what she was talking about. And her curious emphasis upon the word laugh as if English were a foreign, acquired language to her. He didn’t want to think he’d underestimated her intelligence yet he couldn’t quite grant to a young woman who looked like Hazel Jones any subtlety of analysis, reasoning; it had been Gallagher’s experience that most women spoke out of their emotions. He laughed again, as if she’d meant to be amusing. Took her hand in his, in a gesture that could be interpreted as gallant, playful. Her fingers, chilled from her cold glass, were unexpectedly strong, not small-boned or delicate; her skin was slightly roughened. Gallagher’s pretext to touch her was a handshake of reluctant farewell for he must return to the piano, his break was over.
It was nearly 9:30 P.M. More customers were entering the Piano Bar. Nearly all the tables were taken. Gallagher was feeling good, he’d have a sizable audience and Hazel would be further impressed.
“Any requests, Hazel? I’m at your command.”
Hazel appeared to be pondering the question. A small frown appeared between her eyebrows.
A young woman to take all questions seriously, Gallagher saw.
“Play the song that makes you happiest, Mr. Gallagher.”
“”Chet,“ honey! My name is ”Chet.“”
“Play what makes you happiest, Chet. That’s what I would like to hear.”
It was the New Year. Zack was made to understand by certain veiled and enigmatic remarks of his mother’s that there would be a surprise for him, soon.
“Better than Christmas. Much better!”
Much had been made of Christmas at school. Now in the New Year much was made of 1963. All first-graders had to learn to spell JANUARY not forgetting the U. Stony-faced Zacharias Jones drummed his fingers on his desk top lost in a trance of invisible notes, chords. Or, if his teacher scolded him, he folded his arms tight across his chest and depressed his fingers secretly, compulsively. Scales, formula patterns, contrary motions, arpeggio root positions and inversions. He didn’t know the names for these exercises, he simply played them. So vividly did he hear the notes in his head, he always heard a misstrike. When he made a mistake, he was obliged to return to the very beginning of the exercise and start over. Mr. Sarrantini was an invisible presence in the first-grade classroom. Out of Miss Humphrey’s sallow-skinned face emerged the fattish flushed face of the piano teacher. Neither Miss Humphrey nor Mr. Sarrantini was more than grudging in their praise of Zacharias Jones. Clearly, Mr. Sarrantini disliked his youngest pupil. No matter how fluently Zack executed his weekly lesson, always there was something less-than-perfect. This new scale, F minor with four flats. After only a day of intensive practicing Zack could play it as fluently as he played the scale of C major with no sharps or flats. Yet he knew beforehand that Mr. Sarrantini would make the wet chiding sound with his lips.
Smirking Here’s little Wolfgang. Eh!
Miss Humphrey was nicer than Mr. Sarrantini. Mostly she was nicer. Though sometimes she became exasperated and snapped her fingers under Zack’s nose to wake him causing the other children to giggle. She had not liked it when the entire class was instructed to make construction-paper Santa Claus figures and paste silky white fluff on them as “hair” and Zack had been clumsy-purposefully, Miss Humphrey believed-with scissors, paper, glue. She had told the child’s anxious mother that Zack read at the sixth grade level and his math skills were even better but Your son has problems of deportment, attitude. Social skills. Either he’s restless and can’t sit still or he goes into a trance and doesn’t seem to hear me.
He was six years old. Already the knowledge lodged in him sharp as a sliver in flesh that if people don’t like you it doesn’t matter how smart, how talented you are. Doesn’t seem to hear me was the charge.
Mrs. Jones apologized for her son. Promised he would “try harder” in the New Year.
In the New Year it was bitter cold. Minus-twenty degrees Fahrenheit “warming” to a high of minus-five if the sun appeared through layers of sullen cloud. At such times Hazel was practical-minded, uncomplaining. Laughed at the radio forecaster’s dour tone. It was comical, how the local radio station played the brightest, most cheerful music-“Sunny Side of the Street,” “Blue Skies,” “How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?”-on the darkest winter mornings.
Heavy mugs of steaming hot chocolate Mommy prepared for Zack and herself. It was the principle of the thermos bottle, Mommy said: hot liquid in your tummy, you’ll be kept warm until you get to where you’re going.
On blizzard days, no one was expected to go anywhere. What happiness! Zack was allowed to stay home from school luxuriating in snowy quiet and Hazel could stay home from the Bay Palace Theater. No need to make up her face like a movie poster or brush-brush-brush her hair till it gleamed like fire. Singing slyly under her breath Savin‘ all my love for you! glancing sidelong at her son so fiercely absorbed in piano practice at the kitchen table. On those blindingly sunny mornings that often followed blizzards, Mommy would bundle Zack up in long woollen itchy underwear, shirt and two sweaters, zip him into his stiff new sheepskin jacket from Sears, pull his woollen cap down low on his head and wrap a woollen muffler ’round and ‘round his neck covering his mouth as well so that if Zack breathed through his mouth outdoors, and not his nose, which he couldn’t help doing, the wool dampened, and smelled bad. Two pairs of winter socks inside his rubber boots, also newly purchased at Sears. And two pairs of mittens forced on his hands, the outer pair made of fake leather lined with fake fur. “Your precious fingers, Zack! Your little toes can freeze and fall off, honey, but not your fingers. These fingers will be worth a fortune someday.”
Laughing at what she called Zack’s pickle-puss, and kissing him wetly on the nose.
“You have a new friend, Zack! Come meet him.”
He had not seen his mother so breathless, excited. She was taking him into the brightly lighted hotel on the river, the Malin Head Inn, he’d seen only from the exterior when, in warm weather, it seemed long ago they’d gathered the special stones along the beach.
They were awkward together, stumbling into a single compartment of the revolving door. A blast of warm air struck their faces when they spilled out into the hotel lobby. So many people! Zack stood blinking. Mommy gripped his mittened hand tight and led him across the crowded floor. On all sides there was activity, movement. Too much to see. A rowdy party of skiers had only just arrived, moving to register at the front desk. They wore brightly colored canvas jackets and carried expensive skiing gear. Several of the young men observed Hazel Jones as she made her way through the lobby. Her cheeks smarted from the cold and she appeared distraught as if she’d been running. In a lounge area, she paused to unzip Zack’s sheepskin jacket and to remove her own shapeless coat which was made of a gray fuzzy material, with a hood. Beneath the coat, Hazel Jones was wearing one of her two “party” dresses as she called them. This one, Zack’s favorite, was dark purple jersey with tiny pearls across the bosom and a satin sash. Hazel had bought both dresses for nine dollars at a fire sale downtown. You’d have had to look close to see where the fabric of each dress was damaged.
“He’s waiting, sweetie. This way!”
Hazel grabbed Zack’s hand, now bare, and pulled him along. Zack liked it that there were no other children in the lobby. He was made to feel special for it was late for a child to be up: past 8:30 P.M. Zack rarely became sleepy until past ten o’clock, sometimes later if he was listening to music on the radio. He was hearing music now, and it excited him.
“It’s a wedding. But I don’t see the bride.”
Hazel had stopped outside an enormous ivory-and-gold ballroom where, on a raised platform against the farther wall, a five-piece band was playing dance music. This was music to make you smile, and want to dance: “swing.” Strange that most of the dressily attired men and women in the ballroom were not dancing but standing in tight clusters, holding drinks, talking and laughing loudly.
Zack wondered if this-the wedding?-was the surprise.
The surprise could not be Daddy, he knew. Now that the pebbles were gone.
But Daddy himself is gone. He had to remember that.
Zack nudged Mommy in the leg. Such a young-looking mother like one of the female faces in the posters at the Bay Palace Theater, and in her purple jersey party dress it scared him she wasn’t any mother at all.
“Why do people get married, Mommy? Is it the only way?”
“The only way what?”
Zack had no idea. Hoping that Mommy would finish his thought for him, as often she did.
They were walking then swiftly along a corridor of brightly lighted shop displays. Jewelry, handbags. Hand-knit Shetland sweaters. At the end of the corridor was a dimly-lit room, shadowy as a cave: piano bar. Zack heard a piano being played. Here was his surprise! Hazel pulled him inside shivery and excited. Across the room a man was sitting at a beautiful gleaming piano, not a small upright like the piano in the Junior High auditorium but a “grand” piano, the kind with an opened lid. The man was playing music Zack knew from the radio, long ago on the Poor Farm Road: “jazz.”
A number of people were sitting at small tables scattered across the smoky room. At a bar, more customers sat on stools. Some were talking and laughing among themselves but most were listening to the pianist play his quick bright startling music. Zack felt the glamor of the Piano Bar, his heart beat hard with happiness.
There was a small round zinc-topped table reserved for Hazel Jones, near the piano! Hazel positioned Zack where he could watch the pianist’s hands. He had never seen such long, supple fingers. He had never heard such music, close up. It was astonishing to him, overwhelming. Zack guessed that the man at the piano could reach twelve keys-fifteen!-with his long agile fingers. He watched, he listened enthralled. It would be one of the great memories of his life, hearing Chet Gallagher play jazz piano that night in January 1963 at the Malin Head Inn.
“If It Isn’t Love”-“A-Tisket, A-Tasket”-“I Ain’t Got Nobody” Fats Waller style: pieces Gallagher played that night, that Zack would come to know in time.
At the break, Gallagher came to sit at Hazel Jones’s table. Zack saw that they were known to each other: Gallagher was the “friend.” In that instant he understood the logic of the new sheepskin jacket and boots from Sears, the newly installed telephone in their small apartment, Hazel’s air of secrecy and well-being. He would not wonder at this for he’d long ago understood that it was futile to wonder at the logic of adult behavior. It was not astonishing that Chet Gallagher should know Hazel Jones, but that Chet Gallagher, the man who’d only now been playing the piano, should wish to know him, shaking his hand, smiling and winking-“H’lo, Zack! Your mother has been telling me, you play piano, too?” Zack was too stricken to speak, Hazel nudged him and said in an undertone to Gallagher, “Zack is shy with adult men,” and Gallagher laughed, in a way that allowed you to see how fond he was of Hazel Jones. “What makes you think I’m an ”adult man‘?“
Gallagher had an oversized, oblong head like something carved out of wood. His dark, crinkled hair framed a bald front and his nose was long and narrow with amazing dark holes for nostrils. His mouth was always smiling. His head was aimed forward. At the piano, his spine had looked like a willow, easily bent. Gallagher wore the strangest clothes Zack had ever seen on a man: a black silk shirt with no collar, that fitted his sinewy, narrow torso snug as a glove; suspenders made of a showy iridescent-blue fabric, you would associate with a party dress like Hazel Jones’s. Zack had never seen any man with a face like Gallagher’s, he supposed was an ugly face and yet the more you stared at this face, the more attractive it became. Nor had Zack ever seen such kind eyes on any man.
Gallagher rose. Time to return to the piano. He’d brought his drink to the table with him, a clear-looking liquid in a tall glass. As he turned away, his hand drifted against Hazel’s shoulder lightly, in passing. Zack would fall asleep listening to Gallagher’s fingers moving up and down the keyboard in a wild antic rhythm that made his own fingers twitch in emulation: “boogie-woogie.”
I knew then that a man could love.
A man can love.
With his music, with his fingers a man can love.
A man can be good, a man does not have to hurt you.
Zack was wakened, later. The Piano Bar had closed. The bartender was cleaning up. Chet Gallagher had ordered roast beef sandwiches for them: four sandwiches for three people of whom one was a six-year-old child dazed with sleep. Of course, Chet Gallagher was famished. He would eat two and a half sandwiches, himself. He was thirsty, too. After his stint at the piano he was in a mood to celebrate. Hazel was laughing protesting it was late, after 2 A.M., wasn’t he tired, Gallagher shook his head vehemently-“Hell, no.”
Zack went eagerly to the piano. Had to stand, for the piano stool was too low. At first he just touched the keys, depressed them cautiously, hearing the sudden sharp, clear tones, the notes out of the piano’s mysterious interior that always excited him, the wonder that any such sound might exist in the world and that it might be summoned out of silence by an effort of his own.
That was the wonder: that sound might be summoned out of silence, emptiness. That he might be an instrument of that sound.
Gallagher’s voice came teasing and fondly familiar, as if they’d known each other for a long time: “Go on, kid. Piano’s yours. Play.”
Zack played the scale of F minor, right hand alone, left hand alone and both hands together. His fingers fitted the keys as if he’d played this beautiful piano before! The tone was very different from the piano he played for Mr. Sarrantini, though. It was far clearer, the notes more distinctive. Here, his fingers began to take on the movements and syncopation of Gallagher’s fingers, jazz rhythms, boogie-woogie. He heard himself playing, trying to play, one of the catchy melodies Gallagher had played earlier in the evening: the one that sounded like a child’s song-“A-Tisket, A-Tasket.” Out of this, too, he fashioned a clumsy boogie-woogie. Gallagher came laughing to the piano to lean over him. There was a smell of Gallagher’s breath that was sweetish-stale, smoky. “Jesus, kid. You play by ear, eh? Terrific.” Gallagher’s enormous hands descended beside Zack’s small hands on the keyboard; his long black-sleeved arms enclosed Zack, without touching him. His fingers that were so long and supple moved with authority up into the treble keys, down deep into the bass keys, lower and lower until the notes were almost too deep to hear. Gallagher was snorting with laughter, it was so funny that Zack’s child-fingers tried to follow his, slipping and faltering, striking the wrong notes, yet not giving up, like a clumsy puppy running after a long-legged dog. Zack’s face was warm, he was becoming excited. Gallagher struck the keys hard, his hands leapt. Zack struck the keys hard, too. His fingers stung. He was becoming overly excited, feverish.
“Kid, you’re a firecracker. Where the hell’d you come from!”
Gallagher rested his chin on top of Zack’s head. Very lightly, as Hazel sometimes did when he was practicing piano at the kitchen table and she was in a playful mood. “Just a touch, kid. No need to pound. You draw the music out, you don’t beat it out. All you need is a touch. Then move quick, see?-the left hand is mostly chords. One-two-three-four. One-two-three-four. Keep the beat. Keep the beat. With the beat you can play any damn thing. ”St. James Infirmary.“”
Gallagher’s big hands struck the keys with dirge-like authority. To Zack’s astonishment Gallagher began to sing in a sliding, bawling, nasal voice, you didn’t know if you were meant to cry or laugh:
“Let ‘er go, let ’er go, God bless her-
Wherever she may be-
She can look this wide world over-
She’ll never find a sweet man like me.“
Gallagher returned to the table, to Hazel who laughed and applauded with childlike enthusiasm.
Zack remained at the piano, determined to play like Gallagher. Left-hand chords, right-hand melody. The melodies were rather simple when you knew them. Over and over, the identical notes. Zack began to feel a strange dizzying sensation, he was coming close to possessing the secret of the piano through these notes that Gallagher had played with such assurance, one day he would be able to play any music he heard for it would exist (somehow) in his fingers as it seemed to exist in this man’s superior fingers.
Hearing and not-hearing his mother confide in Chet Gallagher that she wasn’t happy with Zack’s piano teacher, Mr. Sarrantini was an older man who seemed to dislike teaching children and who was very critical of her son, often hurting his feelings. “And Zack tries so hard. It will be the purpose of his life, music.”
He didn’t have a piano at home, though. He had little opportunity to practice.
Quickly Gallagher said, “Hell, come by my place. I have a piano, he can use mine. All he wants.” Hazel said hesitantly, “You would do that for Zack?” and Gallagher said, in his warm easy way, “But why not? The boy is talented.”
There was a pause. Zack was playing piano, echoing Gallagher: “St. James Infirmary.” But his fingers were faltering, less certain now. With a part of his mind he heard his mother’s low anxious voice, “But-it could leave him, couldn’t it? ”Talent.“ It’s like a flame, isn’t it? Not anything real.”
Zack heard this, and did not hear. He could not believe that his mother was saying such things about him, betraying him to a stranger. Hadn’t she boasted of him, for years? Urging him to play piano in the presence of strangers, hoping for their applause? She had insisted upon the lessons with Mr. Sarrantini. She had told Zack more than once that his fingers would be worth a fortune someday. Why was she speaking so doubtfully now? And to Chet Gallagher of all people! Zack was angry, striking high treble notes and chords to accompany them. He’d lost the beat. God damn the beat. His fingers struck almost at random. He could hear his mother and her new friend speaking earnestly in lowered voices as if not wanting him to hear nor did he want to hear yet there was Hazel saying, protesting, “I-I don’t think I could do that, Mr. Gallagher. I mean-Chet. It wouldn’t be right,” and Gallagher saying, “Not right? In who the hell’s eyes?” and when Hazel didn’t reply he said, more sympathetically, “Are you married, Hazel? Is that it?”
Now Zack tried not to hear. His mother’s voice was almost inaudible, abashed.
“No.”
“Divorced?”
Zack’s fingers groped at the keys, fumbling a melody. He was searching for the melody. Strange how once you lose a melody it’s gone totally, though when you have it, nothing seems so easy and so natural. His eyelids were heavy. So tired! Hearing his mother in her glamorous purple jersey party dress confess to Gallagher that she was not married, and not divorced, she had never been married-“Not ever married to any man.”
This was a shameful thing, Zack knew. For a woman with a child, not to be married. Why this was, he had no idea. Just the words Having a baby pronounced in a certain insinuating tone provoked sniggering laughter. At school, older children teased him asking if he had a father, where was his father, and he’d told them his father had died, as Mommy had instructed him, and he’d backed off from them, their cruel jeering faces, he turned in desperation to run away. Mommy had told him never run away, like dogs they will pursue you, and yet he could not help it, he was frightened of them shouting after him gleeful and aroused, tossing chunks of ice at him. Why did they hate him, why did they shout Jo-nes as if the name was something ugly?
Mommy said they were jealous. Mommy said he was special, and she loved him, and nobody loved them the way she loved him that was why they were jealous, and because Zacharias really was special in the eyes of the world and all the world would know, one day.
Gallagher was saying, “Hazel, that doesn’t matter. For Christ’s sake.”
“It matters. In people’s eyes.”
“Not in mine.”
Zack was not watching the adults. Yet he saw the man lay his big hand over Hazel’s hand, on the zinc-topped table. And the man leaned forward awkwardly, brushing his lips against Hazel Jones’s forehead. Zack was striking keys with his left hand, low, and lower. High in the treble like a bird’s nervous chattering. Every damn melody he’d thought he knew, he’d lost. And the beat, he’d lost. His fingers began to strike the keyboard harder. He held his thumbs and fingers like claws, striking ten keys at once, as an ordinary ill-tempered child might do, banging at the keyboard he could no longer play, up and down the keyboard like thunder.
“Zack! Honey, stop.”
Hazel came to him, seizing his hands.
It was time to leave. Lights in the Piano Bar were being switched off. The bartender had departed. Chet Gallagher stood, taller than Zack had imagined him, stretching luxuriantly like a big cat, yawning.
“C’mon. I’ll drive you Joneses home.”
He was being helped into the rear of a car. Such a big car, wide as a boat! The backseat was cushioned like a sofa. His eyes kept closing, he was so sleepy. Seeing by the green-luminous clock in the dashboard that it was 2:48 A.M. Mommy was sitting in the front seat of the car beside Mr. Gallagher. Last thing Zack heard, Gallagher was saying extravagantly, “Hazel Jones, this has been the happiest night of my misspent life. So far.”
In the late winter of 1963 they would move from Malin Head Bay to Watertown, New York. This was keeping-going in a new way. Not by Greyhound bus and not poor and desperate but driven in Chet Gallagher’s comfortable 1959 Cadillac wide and floating as a boat.
“We have a new life, now. A decent life. No one will follow us, here!”
Over a flurried weekend it was arranged: Hazel would be employed as a salesclerk at Zimmerman Brothers Pianos & Music Supplies in Watertown. And Zack would be taking piano lessons with the older Zimmerman brother who gave lessons to serious pupils only.
From Malin Head Bay they would move forty miles south to the much larger city of Watertown, where they knew no one. From the cramped and ill-smelling apartment above Hutt Pharmacy they would move to a two-bedroom apartment with freshly painted white walls on the second floor of a brownstone on Washington Street, a five-minute walk from Zimmerman’s.
Hazel Jones would be paying her own rent for this apartment. Mr. Gallagher would not be paying her rent. Her salary at Zimmerman’s was almost three times as much as her usherette’s salary had been at the Bay Palace Theater.
“When you sell music, you are selling beauty. From now on, I will be selling beauty.”
From now on, Zack would be taking serious piano lessons. Zack would have his own piano. Zack was a child-not-a-child.
From Bay Street Elementary, Zack would be transferred to a new school, North Watertown Elementary. Here, he was enrolled in second grade. There was the possibility, too, that he might be advanced another grade if he continued to excel in school.
One day, Mr. Gallagher had driven Zack and his mother to the Watertown school, where Zack spent several hours taking tests: reading, writing, arithmetic, matching up geometrical figures. The tests were not difficult, Zack completed them quickly. Afterward was an interview with the principal of North Watertown Elementary, and this too seemed to go very well.
It must have been, Chet Gallagher had made these arrangements, too. Mommy hinted this was so. Mommy assured Zack he would be very happy in the new school, happier than he’d been at the old.
“Mrs. Jones, do you have your son’s birth certificate?”
“Yes. I do.”
Such a document was required in the Watertown public school district for all children seeking enrollment. Zack’s birth certificate declared that Zacharias August Jones had been born November 29, 1956, in Port Oriskany, New York. His parents were Hazel Jones and William Jones (now deceased).
The birth certificate, new-looking, was a fascimile, Hazel explained to the principal. For the original had been lost years ago in a house fire.
Goodbye to Malin Head Bay! Except he’d been tormented by older children, and never much encouraged by Mr. Sarrantini, Zack had liked living in the old river town.
Walking along the pebbly beach with Mommy, just the two of them. And snowbound days at home, just the two of them. And that night in the Malin Head Inn, that had changed their lives.
Chet Gallagher was Mommy’s friend, and Zack’s friend, too. No sooner had Mommy and Zack moved into the new apartment in Watertown than there was the possibility that they might move again: to a house that Mr. Gallagher was negotiating to buy, or had already bought.
Too excited to sleep Zack lay very still in his bed listening to the adults speaking together in another room of the new apartment.
Through the wall he heard them. His fingers twitched striking notes on an invisible keyboard.
For speech is a kind of music. Even when words are blurred, their tone, their rhythm prevails.
…but wouldn’t you want to, Hazel?
Yes, but…
What?
It wouldn’t be right. If…
Bullshit. That’s no reason.
People would talk.
So who gives a damn, if people talk? What people? Who even knows you here?
At Zimmerman’s, they know me. And they know you.
So what?
And there’s Zack.
Let’s ask him, then.
No! Please don’t wake him, it would only make him upset. You know how he admires you.
Well, I admire him. He’s a terrific kid.
He’s had so much upset in his life, he’s only six years old…
You want to get married, Hazel? That’s it?
I…I don’t know. I don’t think…
Marry me, then. What the hell.
They were not quarreling exactly. Hazel Jones was not one to quarrel. Her manner was soft, earnest. Her voice was liquidy and pleading like a song. Hearing Hazel Jones was like listening to a radio song. Gallagher, the man, was the one to lose his temper, unexpectedly. Especially when he’d been drinking. And often when he came to visit Hazel he’d been drinking. Zack would be drifting off to sleep, awakened suddenly by Gallagher’s raised voice, the sound of a fist striking something, a chair being pushed away from a table, Gallagher on his feet swearing and headed for the door and Hazel Jones’s voice pleading Chet, please. Chet! But away Gallagher would go like a waterfall of notes cascading along a keyboard, once the momentum begins it can’t be stopped, heavy footsteps on the stairs, a man’s pride wounded, wouldn’t return for days, holed up back in Malin Head Bay and would not even telephone allowing Hazel Jones to know God damn he could walk out of her life as he’d walked into it he could walk out of any woman’s life as he’d walked into it and then what?
“Because I’m not a whore. I am not.”
It was a small upright, the piano Gallagher bought for Zack. Insisting it was “secondhand”-“a bargain.” Not a new piano, Gallagher had bought it at Zimmerman’s at a discount. A gift for the boy, Gallagher said Hazel need feel no indebtedness.
“It isn’t a Steinway, it’s a Baldwin. Really, Hazel. It didn’t cost much.”
The keys were not ivory but plastic, glaring white. The wood was veneer, though very smooth, teak-colored. The piano was the size of the battered piano in the Bay Street Junior High School but had a far clearer tone. Zack was stunned by the gift. Zack had seemed almost to recoil from it, at first, overcome. Hazel had seen in the child’s face the stricken look of an adult woman. Like no normal child in such a circumstance, Zack had begun to cry.
Hazel thought uneasily He feels the burden of the gift. He won’t be equal to it.
The deliverymen had brought the piano to ZACHARIAS JONES. On a card prominently attached to the piano was Gallagher’s scrawl-
Gallagher spoke, in his teasing way, of the house he was buying in Watertown: “The feature that will attract you most, Hazel, is its two separate entrances: we can come and go without seeing each other for weeks.”
She hated it, the child was eavesdropping on her. No business of a child’s, Mommy’s private life. Nudging her with his elbow hard enough to hurt. “But why, Mommy? Don’t you like Mr. Gallagher?” and Hazel said evasively, “Yes. I like Mr. Gallagher.” And the child said, in that pleading-bullying way of a willful child, “He’s real nice, isn’t he? Mommy?” and Hazel said, “A man can seem nice, Zack. Before you come to live with him.”
Between mother and child there passed the shadow of that man. In their shared speech that man was never given a name and Hazel had to wonder if Zack remembered his father’s name.
It was not a name to be uttered aloud. Yet, still it haunted her in weak moments.
Niles Tignor.
Wondering if Zack recalled his own, early name. So many times uttered in Mommy’s voice, in love.
Niley.
As if somehow Niley had been her firstborn. And this older, more difficult and willful Zacharias was another child whom she could not love quite so much.
Zacharias was growing from her, she knew. His allegiance was shifting from Mommy to the adult man in their lives, Gallagher. She supposed it was inevitable, it was altogether normal. Yet she must protect her son, as she must protect herself.
Saying, as she stroked his warm forehead, “I don’t think that we are ready to live with a man, Zack. I don’t think that we can trust a man. Not yet.” Speaking so frankly was not Hazel’s favored mode of speech with her child, she worried she would regret it.
“But when, Mommy?”
“Someday, maybe. I can’t promise.”
“Next month? Next week?”
“Certainly not next week. I said-”
“Mr. Gallagher told me-”
“Never mind what Mr. Gallagher told you, he has no right to talk to you behind my back.”
“Wasn’t behind your back! He told me!”
Suddenly Zack was angry. It was like snapping your fingers, how quickly the child became angry. Demanding to know why couldn’t they live with Mr. Gallagher if he wanted them! Nobody else wanted them did they! Nobody else wanted to marry them! If Mr. Gallagher was buying a house for them! Hazel was stunned to see the rage in her son’s hot little face, a contorted little fist of a face, and the threat of violence in his flailing fists. He wants a father. He thinks I am keeping his father from him.
She tried to speak calmly. It was not Hazel Jones’s style to become emotional in response to others’ emotions.
“Honey, it’s none of your business. What passes between Mr. Gallagher and me is none of your business, you’re just a child.”
Now Zack was truly furious. Shouted outrageously he was not a child, he was not a damn stupid child he was not.
He pushed out of her arms and ran from her, trembling. He did not strike her with his fists but pushed from her as if he hated her, slammed into his room and shut the door against her as she stared after him dazed and shaken.
The tantrum passed. Zack emerged from his room and went at once to the piano. Already that day he’d practiced for two hours. Now he would play and replay his lesson for Mr. Zimmerman, then reward himself (Hazel supposed this was the logic, a bargain) with random playing, more advanced compositions in his John Thomson’s Modern Course for the Piano book or jazz/boogie-woogie Chet Gallagher style.
Hazel teased him: “Play ”Savin‘ All My Love For You.“”
Maybe. Maybe he would.
Hazel took comfort, hearing her son at the piano. Preparing dinner for the two of them. Even when Zack played loudly or carelessly or repeated sequences of notes compulsively as if to punish both himself and her she thought We are in the right place in all the world, Hazel Jones has brought us here.
“When you sell music, you are selling beauty.”
Never had Hazel Jones been so proud of any work of hers. Never so smiling, exalted. Light flashed from her young face like a shard of sunlight reflected in a mirror. Her eyes blinked rapidly overcome by the moisture of gratitude, disbelief.
Zimmerman Brothers Piano & Music Supply was an old Watertown establishment, housed in a shabbily elegant brownstone on South Main Street in a part-residential, part-commercial neighborhood of distinguished old apartment buildings and small shops. The first thing you saw, approaching Zimmerman’s, was the graceful bay window in which a Steinway grand piano was on permanent display. At dusk, and on dreary winter days, the bay window was lighted. The piano shone.
Hazel stopped to stare. The piano was so beautiful, she was left feeling weak, shaken. The thought came to her Not a one of them can follow you here.
From Milburn, she meant. That life. Soon she would be twenty-seven years old, the gravedigger’s daughter who had been meant to die at thirteen.
What a joke, her life! That good, decent, kindly man Gallagher believed he loved her, who had not the slightest knowledge of her.
She felt a pang of guilt, for deceiving him. But how much more powerfully, a strange giddy pleasure.
In the early morning especially, when she walked to the music store hearing her high heels strike the sidewalk in brisk Hazel Jones staccato, she found herself thinking of the stone house in the cemetery. Her brothers Herschel, August. How old would they be now, if they were living: Herschel in his mid-thirties, August nearly as old. She wondered if she would know them. If they would now recognize her in Hazel Jones.
They would be proud of her, she believed. Both her brothers had liked her. They would wish her well-wouldn’t they? Herschel would shake his head, disbelieving. But he would be happy for Hazel Jones, she knew.
And there were the adult Schwarts.
Jacob Schwart would be damned impressed with Zimmerman’s. The very look of the brownstone, the store. And it was a large store, with parquet floors in the piano display room, and piped-in classical music. Though Jacob Schwart despised Germans. As he despised the well-to-do. Never could Jacob Schwart resist mocking, belittling any accomplishment of his daughter.
You are ignorant now. You know nothing of this hellhole the world.
Hazel Jones did know. But no one in Watertown would guess Hazel Jones’s knowledge.
Anna Schwart would be proud of her! Working in a store that sold pianos!
Though Hazel Jones, like the other female salesclerks, was not entrusted with piano sales: that was the province of Edgar Zimmerman.
Hazel sold music instruction books, sheet music, classical records. Such musical instruments as guitars, ukeleles. Zimmerman Brothers was a major outlet for ticket sales for local concerts, recitals, musical performances of all kinds and these tickets Hazel proudly sold as well. Sometimes, she was given two free tickets to these events, and she and Zack went together.
“A new life, Zack. We have begun our new life.”
In honor of this new life Hazel often wore white gloves arriving at Zimmerman’s. In emulation of President Kennedy’s glamorous socialite wife she sometimes wore a black pillbox hat with a gossamer veil. Gloves and hat she removed when she arrived at the store. Of course she wore high-heeled shoes and nylon stockings without a run and always she was perfectly groomed as a young woman in an advertisement. Her hair was now a deep chestnut color, so clean and fiercely brushed it crackled with static electricity, worn shoulder-length with bangs across her forehead.
There were fine white scars at her hairline, hidden beneath the bangs. No one but her son had ever seen. And very likely, her son had forgotten.
At Zimmerman’s, there were two other female employees: middle-aged, busty Madge and Evelyn. Madge was a receptionist for Edgar Zimmerman who ran the store, and something of an accountant. Evelyn was a salesclerk specializing in lesson books and sheet music, known to every public school music teacher in the county. Both Madge and Evelyn wore shapeless dark dresses, often with cardigan sweaters draped over their shoulders. They were rather short women, hardly more than five feet tall. By contrast, Hazel Jones was a tall, striking young woman who wore only clothes that fitted her figure to advantage. She had not many clothes but understood shrewdly how to vary her “outfits”: a long pleated black wool skirt with a matching bolero top, embroidered in red rosebuds; a long gray flannel skirt with a kick pleat in back, waist cinched in by a black elastic belt; fussily feminine “translucent” blouses; crocheted sweaters with tiny jewels or pearls; tight-fitting dresses made of shiny fabrics. Behind her glass-topped counter Hazel sometimes resembled a Christmas ornament, all glittering innocence. Her employer Edgar Zimmerman was bemused to note how when a customer entered the store, if that customer was male, he would glance quickly at Evelyn, at Madge if she was out on the floor, and at Hazel, and make his way without hesitation to Hazel who stood pert and smiling in expectation.
“Hello, sir! May I be of assistance?”
Sometimes, Hazel was observed behind her counter in a posture of sudden unease. As if she’d heard someone calling her name at a distance or had glimpsed, through the store window, a passing figure that alarmed her. “Hazel? Is something wrong?” Edgar Zimmerman might ask, if he didn’t feel he was being intrusive at that moment; but Hazel Jones would immediately wake from her trance to assure him, smilingly, “Oh no! Nothing at all, Mr. Zimmerman. ”A goose walked over my grave‘-I guess.“
The remark was so silly, so senseless, Edgar Zimmerman exploded into laughter.
So funny! Hazel Jones had that rare gift, to make an aging melancholy-at-heart gentleman laugh like an adolescent boy.
Only Edgar Zimmerman sold pianos. Edgar Zimmerman’s life was pianos. (His more distinguished brother Hans was not involved in sales. Hans disdained “finances.” He appeared in the store only to give piano instructions to selected students.) Yet Hazel Jones was often in the piano showroom, eager to dust, polish, buff the beautiful gleaming pianos. She came to love the distinctive smell of the special brand of lemon polish favored by the Zimmermans, an expensive German import sold in the store. She came to love the smell of real ivory. Zimmerman Brothers had even acquired an antique harpsichord, a small exquisite instrument made of cherrywood inlaid with gilt and mother-of-pearl, which Hazel particularly admired. It may have been that Edgar Zimmerman, widower, a short dapper man with gray bushy hair in sporadic clumps and a spiky goatee which his fingers compulsively stroked, was flattered by his youngest employee’s enthusiasm for her work for often he was seen talking animatedly with her in the showroom; often, he would seek out Hazel Jones, and neither Madge nor Evelyn, to assist him in making a sale.
“Your smile, Hazel Jones! That cinches the deal.”
It was a little joke between them, rather daring on Edgar Zimmerman’s part. His fingers caressed the spiky goatee, with unconscious ardor.
Edgar Zimmerman, too, was a pianist: not so gifted as his brother Hans but very capable, demonstrating pianos for customers by playing favorite passages from Schubert, Chopin, the thunderous opening of Rachmaninoff’s “Prelude in C-sharp Minor” and the romantic-liquidy opening of Beethoven’s so-called “Moonlight Sonata.” Edgar spoke of having heard Rachmaninoff play the Prelude, long ago at Carnegie Hall, Manhattan. An unforgettable evening!
Hazel said, smiling her ingenuous smile, “You didn’t ever hear Beethoven, I guess?-in Germany? That was too long ago, I guess?”
Edgar laughed. “Hazel, of course! Beethoven died in 1827.”
“And when did your family come to this country, Mr. Zimmerman? A long time ago, I guess?”
“Yes. A long time ago.”
“Before the war?”
“Before both wars.”
“You must have had relatives. Back in Germany. It is Germany the Zimmermans came from, isn’t it?”
“Yes. Stuttgart. A beautiful city, or was.”
“”Was‘?“
“Stuttgart was destroyed in the war.”
“Which war?”
Edgar Zimmerman saw Hazel smiling at him, though less certainly. She was an awkward schoolgirl, twining a strand of hair around her forefinger. Her red-lacquered nails flashed.
He said, “Someday, Hazel, maybe you will see Germany. There are some landmarks that remain.”
“Oh, I would like that very much, Mr. Zimmerman! On my honeymoon, maybe.”
They laughed together. Edgar Zimmerman was feeling giddy, as if the floor had begun to tilt beneath him.
“Hazel, much said about Germany-about Germans-has been luridly exaggerated. The Americans make a fetish of exaggeration, like in Hollywood, you see?-for a profit. Always for a profit, to sell tickets! We Germans have all been tarred with the same brush.”
“What brush is that, Mr. Zimmerman?”
Edgar edged closer to Hazel, stroking his chin nervously. They were alone together in the lavish piano showroom.
“The Juden brush. What else!”
Edgar spoke with a bitter laugh. He was feeling reckless suddenly, this naive attractive girl staring at him with widened eyes.
“”Juden‘?“
“Jewish.”
Hazel was looking so perplexed, Edgar regretted he’d brought the damned subject up. It was never a subject that quite justified the expenditure of emotion it seemed to require.
He said, in his lowered voice, “What they have claimed. How they-Jews-have wished to poison the world against us. Their propaganda about ”death camps.“”
Still Hazel was looking perplexed. “Who is ”us,“ Mr. Zimmerman? Do you mean Nazis?”
“Not Nazis, Hazel! Really. Germans.”
He was very excited now. His heart beat in his chest like a deranged metronome. But there was Madge in the doorway, summoning Edgar to the telephone.
The subject would never again be brought up between them.
“Hazel Jones, you keep us all young. Thank God for people like you!”
It was Hazel’s idea to bring flowers in vases, to display on the most beautiful of the pianos in the showroom. It was Hazel Jones’s idea to organize a raffle for tickets to Hans Zimmerman’s annual student recital, held each May; and to offer “complimentary” tickets to customers who spent a certain sum of money at the store each month. Why not television advertisements, instead of just radio? And why not sponsor a competition for young pianists, it would be such wonderful publicity for Zimmerman Brothers…
Hazel grew breathless, expressing such ideas. Her older companions in the store smiled in dismay.
It was then Madge Dorsey made the remark about Hazel Jones keeping them all young. And thank God for people like her.
“”People like me‘? Who?“
Hazel seemed to be teasing, you never knew quite what she was getting at. Her girlish laughter was infectious.
Madge Dorsey made up her mind then not to hate Hazel any longer. These several weeks since the new salesclerk-lacking not only experience in sales, but totally ignorant of music-had been hired by Edgar Zimmerman, Madge had felt hatred blossoming inside her, in the region of her bosom, like a fast-growing cancer. But, to hate Hazel Jones was to hate the much-awaited spring thaw of upstate New York! To hate Hazel Jones was to hate the warm blinding flood of sunshine itself! And there was the futility, Madge conceded: Edgar Zimmerman had hired the girl, and Edgar Zimmerman was clearly taken with her.
Evelyn Steadman, salesclerk at Zimmerman Brothers for twenty-two years, was slower to be won over by Hazel Jones’s “personality.” At fifty-four, Evelyn was yet unmarried, with a waning and ever-waxing hope that Edgar Zimmerman, widower now for twelve years, in his early sixties, might take a sudden romantic interest in her.
Still, Hazel Jones prevailed. Thinking I will make you love me! So you will never wish to hurt me.
“How’s my girl Hazel doin‘ here, Edgar? Any complaints?”
A few weeks after Hazel began working at Zimmerman Brothers, Chet Gallagher began dropping by in the late afternoon, in the wintry dusk when the store was about to close. Out of nowhere Gallagher appeared. He was known to the Zimmermans, and he appeared to be known to Madge and Evelyn, who brightened at his appearance. Hazel was always taken by surprise. Hazel had no idea that Gallagher was in town, and planning to surprise her with a dinner invitation that evening; often, Gallagher had failed to call her for several days, in the aftermath of a temper tantrum.
At such times, entering the store, Gallagher was smiling and exuberant and very much in control. He wore an expensive, rumpled camel’s hair coat, his high forehead gleamed and his hair straggled over his shirt collar. Often he hadn’t shaved for a day or two, his jaws glinted like metal filings. Hazel felt the glamor of her friend’s sudden presence, the flurry of drama that accompanied his every gesture. In the tastefully decorated interior of Zimmerman Brothers Pianos & Music Supplies, on the polished parquet floor, Gallagher seemed somehow larger than life, like a figure that has stepped down off a movie screen. He made much of Edgar Zimmerman, zestfully shaking the man’s small hand. He seemed even to enjoy the attention of Madge Dorsey and Evelyn Steadman who fluttered about him, calling him “Mr. Gallagher” and imploring him to play the piano.
“Just for a few minutes, Mr. Gallagher. Please!”
It was a lively scene. If business at Zimmermans had been slow, Chet Gallagher’s appearance would end the day on a bright note. For it seemed that the jazz pianist was something of a local figure, and well liked.
Glancing at Hazel with a sardonic smile You see? Chet Gallagher is a big deal in some quarters.
Hazel removed herself to the side, not entirely comfortable. When Gallagher made one of his appearances she was obliged to show pleasure as well as surprise. Her face must light up. She must hurry to him in her high-heeled shoes, allow him to squeeze her hand. She could not hold back. She could not wound him. This was the man who had paid for her move to Watertown, who’d loaned her money for numerous items including the deposit on her apartment. (“Loaned” at no interest. And no need to repay him for a long time.) Gallagher insisted there were “no strings attached” to his friendship with them yet Hazel felt the awkwardness of her situation. Gallagher was becoming ever more unpredictable: driving from Malin Head Bay to Watertown on an impulse, to see her, and driving back to Malin Head Bay that night; capable of not turning up in Watertown when he’d made arrangements to see her, with no explanation. Though he expected explanations from Hazel, he refused to explain himself to her.
In the music store, Hazel saw Gallagher staring at her with an expression of confused tenderness and sexual arrogance and she was filled with anxiety, resentment. He wants them to think I’m his mistress. He owns Hazel Jones!
It was a masquerade. Yet she could not abandon it.
“Come play for us, Chester! You must.”
“Must I? Nah.”
Gallagher had been a pupil of Hans Zimmerman’s as a boy. There was an air of the renegade boy about him, amid these admiring elders. Implored to sit at a Steinway grand, Gallagher eventually gave in. Stretched and flexed his long fingers, lunged forward suddenly and began to play piano music of unexpected subtlety, beauty. Hazel had been expecting jazz and was surprised to hear music of an entirely different sort.
The adoring women identified Liszt: “Liebesraum.”
Gallagher was playing from memory. His playing was uneven, in sudden rushes and runs of showy dexterity, then again elegantly understated, dreamy. And then again showy, so that you were watching the man’s hands, arms, the sway of his shoulders and head, as well as listening to the sounds the piano produced. Yet Hazel was impressed, enthralled. If she and Zack lived with Chet Gallagher, he would play piano for them in this way…
You must love this man. You have no choice.
She felt the subtle coercion. If Anna Schwart could stand beside her now!
But Gallagher was striking wrong notes, too. Some of these he managed to disguise but others were blatant. Amid a virtuoso run of treble notes he broke off with “Damn!” He was embarrassed, making so many mistakes. Though the others praised him and urged him to continue, Gallagher turned obstinately on the piano stool like a schoolboy, his back to the keyboard, and fumbled to light a cigarette. His face was flushed, his prominent, pointed ears were flushed red. Hazel could see that Gallagher was furious with himself, and impatient with Edgar Zimmerman explaining fussily to the three women, “You see, it is the style of Liszt himself, how Chester plays the ”Liebesraum.“ How his arms roll with the notes, the strength in his arms, flowing from his back and shoulders. It is the revolutionary manly style Liszt made so famous, that the pianist could be equal to the composer’s art.”
To Gallagher, Zimmerman said with paternal reproach, “You should never have abandoned your serious music, Chester. You would have made your father so proud.”
“Would I.”
Gallagher spoke flatly. He was lighting a cigarette carelessly, Hazel dreaded sparks falling onto the piano.
Now Gallagher lapsed into teasing Edgar Zimmerman, as he teased Hazel asking how “my girl was doin‘” and so Hazel eased away with an embarrassed laugh. She knew, it was through Gallagher’s connection with Hans Zimmerman that she owed her job here, she must be grateful to Gallagher as to the Zimmermans and such gratitude was best expressed by not standing about idly like everyone else. Hazel had been shutting up the cash register when Gallagher had appeared and she returned to the task now. She would spend minutes deftly stacking nickels and dimes into rolls for the bank.
Such a tedious, exacting ritual! Neither Madge nor Evelyn could bear it but Hazel executed it flawlessly and without complaint.
“Hazel, my dear. Time to call it a day.”
There was Gallagher in his rumpled coat, advancing upon Hazel with her own coat opened to her, like a net.
Sorry for barging in on you like that, Hazel. You weren’t expecting me tonight I guess.
No.
But why’s it matter? You haven’t anything you’re hiding from me have you?
Not likely that he would follow them into this new life.
For this was keeping-going in their new way. She smiled to think how astonished he would be, if he could know!
Zimmerman Brothers Pianos & Music Supplies. In a row of brownstones on South Main Street, Watertown. The bay window, visible up and down the street, and the Steinway grand piano illuminated in the bay window. And a vase of tall white lilies on the piano waxy in perfection.
And the brownstone at 1722 Washington Street where H. Jones and her son lived in #26. Where in the vestibule beside the aluminum mailbox for #26 the name h. jones was neatly handprinted on a small white card as a concession to the U.S. Postal Service.
(Hazel protested to the mailman: “But I don’t get any mail except bills-gas, electric, telephone! Can’t bills be delivered just to ”occupant, #26‘? Is it a law?“ It was.)
She did remember: the Watertown Plaza Hotel.
Where as Mrs. Niles Tignor she had signed her name in the registration book. As Mrs. Niles Tignor she had been known. Only vaguely did she remember the rooms in which she and Niles Tignor had stayed and she could not remember at all his face, his manner or his words to her for a mist obscured her vision as, when she was tired, the faint high-pitched ringing was discernible in her (right) ear. Mostly Hazel avoided the regal old Watertown Plaza Hotel. Except, Gallagher liked the Plaza Steak House. Naturally, Gallagher liked the Plaza Steak House where he was known, his hand warmly shaken. Gallagher was a steak man: plank steak, onion rings, very dry martinis. When he visited Watertown he insisted upon taking Hazel and Zack to the Steak House. Hazel was conscious of the danger. Though instructing herself Don’t be ridiculous, Tignor isn’t a brewery agent any longer. All that is finished. He has forgotten you. He never knew Hazel Jones. For those evenings at the Steak House, Hazel dressed somewhat conspicuously. Gallagher was in the habit of surprising her with attractive “outfits” for such occasions. Ever vigilant of the roaming eyes of other men, Gallagher yet took a perverse pride in Hazel’s appearance at his side. In the lobby of the Watertown Plaza, holding Zack’s hand and walking close beside Chet Gallagher, Hazel felt the sickish sliding glissando of male eyes moving upon her yet surely there was no one here who knew her, who knew Niles Tignor and would report her to him.
She was certain.
A woman opens her body to a man, a man will possess it as his own.
Once a man loves you in that way, he will come to hate you. In time.
Never will a man forgive you for his weakness in loving you.
“Repeat, child.”
A Czerny study that was twenty-seven bars of allegretto sixteenth-notes in four flats. Zack had played it once, slightly rushed, in small anxious surges as his piano teacher beat out the time with a pencil exact as the antiquated metronome on the piano. Zack had not missed or struck any wrong notes at least. Now at Hans Zimmerman’s request, he played the study again.
“And another time, child.”
Again, Zack played the Czerny study. Half-shutting his eyes as his fingers flew rapidly up, up into the treble, up, up into the treble in repetitive gliding motions. It was a time, it would be months, years of such studies: Czerny, Bertini, Heller, Kabalevsky. Acquiring and refining piano technique. When Zack finished, he did not remove his slightly trembling hands from the keyboard.
“You have memorized it, yes?”
Mr. Zimmerman closed the exercise book.
“Again, child.”
Zack, half-shutting his eyes as before, replayed the study, twenty-seven bars of allegretto sixteenth-notes in four flats. The four/four time of the composition never varied. No compositions in the Royal Conservatory of Music Pianoforte Studies ever varied. When he finished, the elderly Hans Zimmerman murmured in approval. He’d removed his smudged eyeglasses, he was smiling at his youngest pupil.
“Very good, child. You have played it four times, it can be no mistake you have hit only right notes.”
In Watertown, New York, where Mr. Gallagher had brought them. Where days-of-the-week were crucial as they had not been crucial in Malin Head Bay. Where Saturday was so crucial that Friday, which was the day-before-Saturday, soon became for Zack a day of almost unbearable excitement and apprehension: he was distracted in school, at home feverishly practiced piano for hours not wanting to take time to eat supper and refusing to go to bed until late: midnight. For Saturday morning at 10 A.M. was his weekly lesson with Hans Zimmerman.
Saturday was Zack’s favorite day! All of the week built up to Saturday morning when his mother brought him with her to Zimmerman Brothers arriving at 8:45 A.M. and they would not leave until the store closed early Saturday afternoon at 3:30 P.M.
How old is he, Hazel?
Six and a half.
Only six and a half! His eyes…
There was the excitement of Zack’s lesson with the elder Mr. Zimmerman which sometimes ran over ten, fifteen minutes while the next pupil waited patiently in a corner of the music instruction room at the rear of the brownstone. But there was the excitement, too, of being allowed to remain behind to observe certain of Mr. Zimmerman’s advanced students at the keyboard for this, too, was a way of acquiring technique.
“So long as you promise to sit very still in the corner, child. Still as a little Maus.”
Zack thought A mouse is not still but nervous.
Zack found the other pupils’ lessons of great interest. For he understood that these more advanced lessons would be his one day. He did not doubt that this was so, Mr. Gallagher had set into motion a sequence of actions and his trust in Mr. Gallagher was absolute.
He’s allowing Zack to observe other pupils, Chet. Isn’t that wonderful!
If it isn’t too much for the kid.
Too much, how can it be too much?
Children turn against music if they’re pushed too hard.
Strange he felt no envy of the other piano pupils except envy of their larger hands, their greater strength. But these too would be his one day.
What relief, Hans Zimmerman never made personal or hurtful remarks to his students, as Sarrantini had done! He cared only for the execution of music. He seemed to make little distinction between older and younger pupils. He was a kindly teacher who praised when praise was due but did not wish to deceive, for always there was more work: “Schnabel took it as his ideal, he wished to play only those piano works that cannot be fully mastered. Only those pieces ”greater than they can be played.“ For what can be played, is not the transcendental. What can be played easily and well, is Schund.”
The disdainful expression on Hans Zimmerman’s face allowed his pupils to know what the German word must mean.
Zimmerman had himself studied with the great Artur Schnabel, Gallagher informed them. In Vienna, in the early 1930s. He was now retired from the Portman Academy of Music in Syracuse where he’d taught for decades. He was long retired from the concert stage. Gallagher surprised Hazel and Zack bringing several records Zimmerman had made in the late 1940s with a small prestigious classical record label in New York City.
The records were piano pieces by Beethoven, Brahms, Schumann, and Schubert. Hazel would have spoken to Hans Zimmerman about them except Gallagher cautioned her: “I don’t think Zimmerman wants to be reminded.”
“But why not?”
“Some of us feel that way about our pasts.”
At Zimmerman Brothers, Hans Zimmerman kept to the rear quarters of the brownstone while Edgar Zimmerman ran the business. The two were co-partners, it was believed, yet Hans had virtually nothing to do with the selling of merchandise, employees, finances; Edgar ran everything. Hans was known to be only four or five years older than his brother, but he appeared of another generation entirely: courtly in manner, rather detached and deliberate in his speech, with smudged bifocals that were often drooping out of his vest pocket, untrimmed steely whiskers, a habit of breathing noisily through his teeth when he was concentrating on a pupil’s playing. Hans who was tall, gaunt, noble in his bearing wore mismatched coats, sweaters, unpressed trousers. His favored footware was a pair of very old penny loafers. You could see that he’d been a handsome man once, now his face was in ruins. He was reticent, elliptical in criticism as in praise. From out of his corner Zack witnessed entire lessons when Mr. Zimmerman murmured no words except “Good. Move on” or “Repeat, please.” Several times Zack had heard the terrible words: “Repeat the lesson for next week. Thank you.”
It was common for Mr. Zimmerman to have Zack repeat pieces, but he had never yet asked Zack to repeat an entire lesson. He called him “child”-he didn’t seem to remember his name. For why should he remember a name? Why a face? His interest in his pupils was in their hands; not their hands exactly but their fingers; not their fingers exactly but their “fingering.” You could assess a young pianist by his or her “fingering” but you could make nothing of significance out of a name or a face.
The whole of the magnificent Hammerklavier Hans Zimmerman had memorized more than fifty years before remained in his memory intact, each note, each pause, each tonal variant yet Hans could not be troubled to remember the names of people he saw frequently.
And here was the gifted child, a rarity in Hans Zimmerman’s life now: out of nowhere he’d seemed to have come with his eager, somehow old-European eyes, not at all an American boy, to Zimmerman’s way of thinking. He would ask no personal questions of the boy’s mother, he did not want to know about the boy’s background, he did not want to feel anything for the boy. All that was extinguished in him now. And yet in weak moments the piano teacher found himself staring at the boy as he played his exercise pieces, one of the tricky little Czernys perhaps. Presto in six/eight time, three sharps. Left and right hands mirroring each other rapidly ascending, descending. In the concluding bars, left and right hands were nearly a keyboard apart, the little boy stretched his arms as in an antic crucifixion.
Hans Zimmerman surprised himself, laughing aloud.
“Bravo, child. If you play Czerny like Mozart, how will you play Mozart?”
Makes me happy. What makes me happy. O Christ what!
No idea in hell what to play. No one had ever made such a request of the jazz pianist before. His fingers fumbled at the keyboard. So much of his adult life had become mechanical, his will suspended and indifferent. The emptiness of his soul opened before him like a deep well, he dared not peer into it.
His fingers would not fail him, though. Chet Gallagher at the keyboard. That old classic “Savin‘ All My Love For You.”
And that turned out to be so.
A love ballad, a bluesy number.
Driving this snowswept landscape.
Gallagher drifting in a dream, at the wheel of his car. All his life he has been hearing music in his head. Sometimes the music of others, and sometimes his own.
Driving to Grindstone Island
in the St. Lawrence River floating
in reflected sky
Lovesick Gallagher redeemed
on Grindstone Island
in the St. Lawrence River floating
in reflected sky
“Anybody want to turn back? I don’t.”
They were driving to Grindstone Island. They were planning to spend Easter weekend at the Gallagher lodge. The three of them: Gallagher’s little family. For he loved them, out of desperation that the woman did not love him. The child he loved, who seemed at times to love him. But in the rearview mirror since they’d left Watertown, the child’s face was averted, Gallagher could not catch the child’s eye to smile and wink in complicity repeating his brash challenge, “Anybody want to turn back? I sure as hell don’t.”
What could the Joneses say. Captive in Gallagher’s car being driven at less than forty miles an hour on icy-slick Route 180.
Then Hazel murmured what sounded like No in her maddening way that managed to be both enthusiastic and vague, doubtful.
It was the way in which Hazel allowed Gallagher to make love to her. To the degree to which Hazel allowed Gallagher to make love to her.
In the backseat of Gallagher’s car the child Zack had disappeared from the rearview mirror entirely. He’d brought along his Royal Conservatory Pianoforte Studies and was lost in frowning concentration, oblivious of the snowy highway and occasional abandoned vehicles at the roadside.
Gallagher had assured him there was a piano at the lodge. He could practice at the lodge. Gallagher had banged on that piano plenty of times. He’d entertained his relatives. He’d played for himself. Summers on Grindstone Island, Gallagher’s happiest memories. Wanting to convey to the child as to the child’s mother how happiness is a possibility, maybe even a place you might get to.
Impulsively he’d bought the house in Watertown. But Hazel wasn’t ready for that yet.
Easter weekend on Grindstone Island. It had been a very good plan except on Thursday morning a freezing rain began and within a few hours the rain had become sleet and the sleet became a wet wind-driven snow howling across Lake Ontario. Nine to twelve inches by Friday morning, and drifting.
Still, the region was accustomed to freak storms. Snow in April, sometimes in May. Quick blizzards, and a quick thaw. Snowplows had been operating through the night. Roads into the Adirondacks would be impassable but Route 180 north to Malin Head Bay and the bridge to Grindstone Island was more or less open: traffic moved slowly, but was moving. By Friday afternoon the wind had blown itself out. Sky clear and brittle as glass.
God damn: Gallagher wasn’t going to change his plans.
The snow would melt by Sunday. Certainly it would melt. Gallagher was insisting. He’d been on the phone that morning with the caretaker who’d assured him that the driveway would be plowed by the time Gallagher and his guests arrived. The lodge would be open, ready for occupancy. The power would be on. (McAlster was sure there’d be power out at the camp, there was power elsewhere on the island.) In the lodge there was a kitchen, stocked with canned and bottled goods. Refrigerator and stove. All in working order. McAlster would have aired out the rooms. McAlster was a man you could rely upon. Gallagher had not wanted to change his plans and McAlster agreed, a little snow wouldn’t interfere with anyone. The island was so beautiful covered in snow. A shame such a beautiful place was deserted most of the year.
A shame it belongs to people like you.
McAlster, now in his sixties, had been entrusted with overseeing summer residents’ properties for decades. Since Gallagher had been a small child. Not once had McAlster spoken with the slightest air of reproach, in Gallagher’s hearing. It was Gallagher who felt shame, guilt. His family owned ninety acres of Grindstone Island of which less than five or six were actually used: the rest was woodland, pines and birches. There was a mile of river frontage, of surpassing beauty. Thaddeus Gallagher’s father had acquired the property and built the original hunting lodge in the early 1900s, long before the Thousand Islands region was developed for summer tourism. It had been a wilderness, at a remote northern edge of New York State. The small native population of Grindstone Island lived mostly in the area of Grindstone Harbor, in asphalt-sided houses, tar paper shanties, trailers. They owned bait-and-tackle shops, gas stations and roadside restaurants. They were trappers, guides, commercial fishermen and caretakers like McAlster, hiring themselves out to absentee residents like the Gallaghers.
Don’t you feel guilty, owning so much property you rarely see Gallagher had asked his father Thaddeus as a young man provoked to ideological quarrels and Thaddeus’s reply had been hotly uttered, unhesitating Those people depend upon us! We hire them. We pay property taxes to pay for their roads, schools, public services. There’s a hospital in Grindstone Harbor now, didn’t used to be! How’d that happen? Half the population in the Thousand Islands is on welfare in the off-season, who the hell d’you think pays for that?
Gallagher’s anger with his father so choked him, he had trouble breathing in the old man’s presence. It was like an asthma attack.
“My father…”
Beside him in the passenger’s seat of his car Hazel gave Gallagher a shrewd sidelong look. Unconsciously he’d been sucking in his breath. Drumming his fingers on the steering wheel.
“Yes?”
“…says he wants to meet you, Hazel. But that won’t happen.”
He’d told her very little about his father. Very little about his family. He supposed she’d heard, from others.
In fact, Thaddeus had telephoned Gallagher the previous week to inquire This new woman of yours, a cocktail waitress is she, a stripper, call girl with a bastard retarded son? Correct me if I’m wrong.
Gallagher had hung up the phone without speaking.
Prior to this call, Gallagher had not heard from his father since Christmas 1962 and then it had been Thaddeus’s private secretary calling, with the message that his father was on the line to speak with him and Gallagher had said politely But I’m not on this line. Sorry.
“Well. If you don’t want me to meet your father, I won’t.”
“You and Zack. Either of you.”
Hazel smiled uncertainly. Gallagher knew he made her uneasy, she couldn’t read his moods: playful, ironic, sincere. As she couldn’t interpret the tone of the more tortuous and meandering of his jazz piano pieces.
“You’re too good to meet the man, Hazel. In your soul.”
“Am I.”
“Hazel, it’s true! You’re too good, too beautiful and pure-minded to meet a man like Thaddeus Gallagher. You’d be despoiled by his eyes on you. By breathing the same air he breathes.”
Why Gallagher was so angry suddenly, he didn’t know. Possibly it had something to do with McAlster.
Hazel Jones, William McAlster. Individuals of the servant class. Thaddeus Gallagher would identify Hazel Jones at once.
Behind a slow-moving truck spreading salt on the highway, they were approaching Malin Head Bay. It was nearly 6 P.M. yet the sky was still light. There was an icy glaze over many trees, flashing sunlight like fire. Traffic moved sluggishly along Main Street where only a single wide lane had been plowed.
Gallagher didn’t want to think what Grindstone Island would be like.
McAlster had promised him, though. McAlster would never go back on his word.
McAlster would never disappoint Thaddeus Gallagher’s son.
Relenting, Gallagher said they could always stay at the Malin Head Inn, if the island didn’t work out.
“You aren’t worried, Hazel? Are you?”
Hazel laughed. “Worried? Not with you.”
She touched his arm to reassure him. A strand of her hair fell against Gallagher’s cheek. He felt a choking sensation in his chest.
She’d told him a man had hurt her. He supposed the man had been Zack’s father, who had left her, hadn’t married her. This would have been almost seven years ago. She’d kissed him and drew away from him telling him she had no wish to be hurt by a man again.
“I’ll make it up to you, Hazel. Whatever it was.”
Gallagher groped for Hazel’s hand and brought it to his lips. He kissed her fingers greedily. Not an erotic kiss unless you knew the desperate ways of Eros. Gallagher had not kissed Hazel that day. They had not been alone together for five minutes. He was weak with desire, and outrage mixed with desire. He would marry Hazel Jones, next time he crossed St. Mary Bridge to Grindstone Island she would be his wife.
McAlster was right, the island was beautiful in snow.
“Our property begins about here. That stone wall.”
Hazel was staring through the windshield. The child in the backseat was at last alert, watchful.
“All that is Gallagher property, too. Miles uphill. And along the river.”
The River Road had been plowed, if haphazardly. Gallagher drove very slowly. His car was equipped with chains, he was accustomed to driving on icy graveled surfaces. On the island, there were more trees covered in ice, tilted at sharp angles like drunken figures. Some of the birches had shattered and collapsed. Evergreens were tougher, not so extensively damaged. In the road there were fallen tree limbs, Gallagher drove carefully around them.
“You can tell it isn’t winter, can’t you. By the sun. Yet so much snow. Jesus!”
The river was choppy, wind-churned. Vast, and very beautiful. Before the sudden freeze, the river had thawed; now at the water’s edge amid enormous boulders there were jagged ice-spikes, jutting up vertically like stalagmites. Gallagher was conscious of the woman and her child seeing this for the first time.
“That’s the lodge, at the top of that hill. Through those evergreens. Over there are guest cabins. It looks as if McAlster has plowed us out, we’re in luck for tonight.”
The Adirondack-style lodge was the size of a small hotel, made of logs, fieldstone and stucco. Its roof was steep and shingled and it had two massive stone chimneys. Adrift in snow at the crest of a hill was a tennis court. There was a gabled three-car garage, a former stable. High overhead a hawk drifted, lazily dipped and turned on widespread wings. The sky looked like glass about to shatter. Gallagher was seeing Hazel Jones at last beginning to see He is rich. His family is rich.
That hadn’t been Gallagher’s reason for bringing them here. He didn’t think so.
A rough wild game! Driving her like a panicked animal along the rows of cornstalks. Drunk-looking cornstalks broken and dessicated in the heat of early autumn and the browned tassels slapping and cutting at her face. Herschel clapped his hands laughing his high-pitched heehaw laugh Git along little dawgie git along little weenie long-limbed and loose-jointed and he was breathing through his mouth as he ran, as she ran, a flame-like sensation in her belly, she too was laughing, clumsy and stumbling on her small legs so she fell to one knee, she fell more than once, scrambled to her feet before the scraped welt filled in with gritty blood, if she could make her way to the end of the row of cornstalks to the edge of the farmer’s field and to the road and to the cemetery beyond-
How the cornfield game ended, Rebecca could never recall.
“Momma? Are we?”
It was morning. The morning of Holy Saturday. Bright, and gusty with wind. Hazel Jones was brushing her hair in swift punishing strokes ignoring the fretting child pulling at her.
In the bureau mirror a face floated wan and indistinct as if underwater. Not her face but Hazel Jones’s young face smiling defiantly.
You! What right, to be here!
She’d gotten through the first night on Grindstone Island and she believed she would get through the second night on Grindstone Island and by that time it would be decided.
“Momma? Momma!”
The child had slept fitfully the night before. She’d heard him, in the room adjoining her own, whimpering in his sleep. Lately, he’d begun grinding his teeth, too. The wind!-the damned wind had kept him awake, unnerved him. Not a single wind but many winds blowing off the St. Lawrence River and across Lake Ontario to the west confused with human voices, muffled shouts and laughter.
You! you! such laughter seems to accuse.
Hazel had wakened early in the unfamiliar bed not knowing where she was at first and which time in her life this was and her heart pounded hotly in her chest as the voices grew bolder, jeering You! Jew-girl you have no right to be here.
She had not heard such voices in years. She had not had such a thought in years. She rose from bed shaken, frightened.
But it was Gallagher who’d brought her here. Gallagher, her friend.
Through the front windows of the room you could see another island floating in the glittery river. Beyond that the dense Canadian shore at Gananoque.
Gallagher’s family lodge was even larger than it appeared from the foot of the driveway. It had been built into a hill, three floors and a more recently constructed wing connected to the main house by a flagstone terrace, now drifted in snow.
Hazel Jones, seeing the lodge, had laughed. A private residence, of such dimensions!
For the briefest of moments seeing the Gallagher property as Jacob Schwart might see it. The man’s mocking laughter mingling with Hazel Jones’s laughter.
Embarrassed, Gallagher had said yes the place was large, but it was really very private. And most of the lodge was shut off for the winter, they’d be using only a few rooms.
Hazel understood that Gallagher was both ashamed of his family’s wealth, and vain of it. He could not help himself. He had no clear knowledge of himself. His hatred of his father was a sacred hatred, Hazel knew not to interfere. Nor would she believe in this hatred utterly.
Gallagher had brought her to this room that was more a suite than a room, with a child’s room adjoining, for Zack. His own room, he told her, was close by, down the hall. His manner was outwardly contained, exuberant. This was the first time the three of them had gone away together, he was their host and responsible for their well-being. Setting Hazel’s lightweight suitcase onto her bed-old, brass, four-poster, with a quilt coverlet in pale blues and lavenders-he stood staring at it for a long moment his breath quickened from the stairs and his face flushed and uncertain and Hazel could see him summoning the precise words he wished to speak, to impress upon her.
“Hazel. I hope you will comfortable here.”
It was a remark that carried with it a deeper meaning. At that moment Gallagher could not bring himself to look at Hazel.
If Zack had not been with them, investigating his room (a boys’ room, with bunk beds, Zack would sleep in the upper bunk), Hazel knew that Gallagher would have touched her. He would have kissed her. He would have framed her face in his large hands, and kissed her. And Hazel would have kissed him in return, not stiffening in his embrace as sometimes she did involuntarily but standing very still.
Pleading Don’t love me! Please.
As Gallagher would relent with his hurt, hopeful smile All right Hazel! I can wait.
Zack nudged against Hazel’s thigh: “Momma! Are we going to marry Mr. Gallagher?”
Rudely she was wakened from her trance. She’d been brushing her hair in long swift strokes in front of the crook-backed mirror.
Overnight Zack had begun to call her “Momma”-no longer “Mommy.” Sometimes the word was a grudging syllable: “Mom” pronounced “M’m.”
By instinct the child knew that speech is music, to the ear. And speech can be a music to hurt the ear.
He’d been awake and out of bed for more than forty minutes, and was restless. Maybe he was feeling uncomfortable in this new place. Pushing against Hazel’s thigh, nudging her hard enough to bruise if she didn’t prevent him. With the back of the hairbrush she swiped playfully at him but he persisted, “I said are we, Momma? Are we going to marry Mr. Gallagher?”
“Zack, not so loud.”
“Momma I said-”
“No.”
Hazel gripped his shoulders, not to shake him but to hold him still. His small body quivered in indignation. His eyes that were dark, moist and glittering, were fixed on hers in a defiant look that roused her to anger, except Hazel was never angry. She was not a mother who raised her hand to her child, nor even her voice. If Gallagher should overhear this exchange! She would be mortified, she could not bear it.
Her face wasn’t yet Hazel Jones’s face, but darker-skinned, a rich oily-olive skin she would disguise with lighter makeup, liquid and then powder. This makeup she would take care to extend onto her throat, gradually tapering off, always subtly, meticulously. And she would take care to disguise the fine pale scars at her hairline, that Gallagher had never seen. But her hair had been brushed vigorously and bristled now with static electricity, it was a warm chestnut hue streaked with dark red, it was a hue that seemed altogether natural to her, as Hazel Jones. She wore neatly pressed gray woollen slacks and a rose-colored woollen sweater with a detachable lace collar. For this weekend visit to Grindstone Island Hazel had brought two pairs of neatly pressed woollen slacks and a beige cable-knit sweater and the sweater with the lace collar and two cotton blouses. Hazel Jones was a young woman of the utmost propriety in her dress as in her manner. Gallagher laughed at her Hazel Jones ways, she was so proper. Yet Hazel understood that Gallagher adored her for those Hazel Jones ways and would not wish her otherwise. (Gallagher continued to see other women. Meaning, Gallagher slept with other women. When he could, when it was convenient. Hazel knew, and was not jealous. Never would she have inquired after Gallagher’s private, sexual life apart from her.) As, at Zimmerman Brothers Pianos & Music Supplies, the salesclerk Hazel Jones had established for herself a personality distinct as a comic strip character: Olive Oyl, Jiggs-and-Maggie, Dick Tracy, Brenda Starr Girl Reporter. The deepest truth of the American soul is that it is shallow as a comic strip is shallow and behind her shiny glass-topped counter in Zimmermans’ there was Hazel Jones prettily composed, smiling in expectation. Like Gallagher, Edgar Zimmerman adored Hazel Jones. Could not stop touching her with his fluttery little-man’s hands that were dry and hot with yearning. Bastard. Nazi. Hazel Jones’s smile wavered only when Edgar too emphatically touched her arm as he spoke with her in a lull between customers, otherwise her hands rested slender and serene on the shiny glass-topped counter. And Zimmerman’s customers had grown to know Hazel, and stood by patiently, ignoring the other salesclerks until Hazel was free to wait on them.
“Momma are we! Are we going to marry Mr. Gallagher!”
“Zack, I’ve told you-”
“No no no no no. No Momma.”
Hazel resented it, Zack pretending to be a child. Childish. She knew, in his heart he was an adult like Hazel Jones.
“Zack, what is this ”we‘? There is no “we.” Only a man and a woman get married, nobody else. Don’t be silly.“
“I’m not silly. You’re silly.”
Zack was becoming wild, uncontrollable. Back home he would never have dared ask such questions. He was forbidden to speak familiarly about “Mr. Gallagher” who had come into their lives to change their lives as he was forbidden to speak familiarly about “Hazel Jones.”
As, in Malin Head Bay, a very long time ago now it seemed, he had been forbidden to ask about the pebbles vanishing one by one from the windowsill.
This snowy-glaring island called Grindstone in the choppy St. Lawrence River seemed to have unleashed, in Zack, a mutinous spirit. Already this morning he’d left their rooms and had been running on the stairs and skidding on carpets in the hallway and when Hazel had called him back he’d come reluctant as a bad-behaving dog. Now, restless, he was prowling about her room: poking in a step-in cedar closet, bouncing on the brass four-poster bed which Hazel had neatly made up as soon as she’d slipped from between the bedclothes. (No unmade or rumpled beds in any household in which Hazel Jones lived! It was the one thing that roused Hazel to something like moral indignation.) On the bureau was a carved antique clock with a glass face that opened: Zack was moving the black metallic hands around, and Hazel worried he might break them.
“You’re hungry, honey. I’ll make breakfast.”
She snatched his hands in hers. For a moment it seemed he might fight her, then he relented.
Unfamiliar surroundings made Zack nervous, antic. He’d badly wanted to come to Grindstone Island for the weekend, yet he was anxious about changes in the routine of his life. Hans Zimmerman had told Hazel that for the young pianist as gifted as her son, his life must revolve around the piano. Always Zack woke at the same time each morning, early. Always he practiced a half-hour at the piano before leaving for school. After school, he practiced no less than two hours and sometimes more, depending upon the difficulty of the lesson. If he struck a wrong note he made himself start a piece from the beginning: there could be no deviating from this ritual. Hazel could not interfere. If she tried to make him stop, to go to bed, he might lapse into a temper tantrum; his nerves were strung tight. Hazel had seen him seated at the piano with his small shoulders raised as if he were about to plunge into battle. She was proud of him, and anxious for him. She took comfort in hearing him practice piano for at such times she understood that both Hazel Jones and her son Zacharias were in the right place, they had been spared death on the Poor Farm Road for this.
“And you can play piano, honey. All you want.”
As Gallagher had promised, there was a piano downstairs in the lodge. The previous evening, Gallagher had played before supper, boisterous American popular songs and show tunes, and Zack had sat beside him on the piano bench. At first Zack had been shy, but Gallagher had drawn him into playing with him, jazzy companionable four-hand renditions of popular songs. And they’d played one of Zack’s Kabalevsky studies from the Pianoforte lesson book, boogie-woogie style that made Zack laugh wildly.
The piano was a matte-black baby grand, not in prime condition. It had not been tuned for years, and some of the keys stuck.
Gallagher said, “Music can be fun, kid. Not always serious. In the end, a piano is only a piano.”
Zack had looked mystified by the remark.
In the kitchen, Gallagher had helped Hazel prepare supper. They’d bought groceries together in Watertown, for the weekend. Hazel had asked him, “Is a piano only a piano?” and Gallagher had said, snorting, “Only a piano, darling! Sure as hell not a coffin.” Hazel had not liked this remark which was typical of Gallagher when he’d had a drink or two and was in his swaggering boisterous mood out of which his eyes, plaintive and accusing, adoring and resentful, swung onto her too emphatically. At such time Hazel stiffened and looked away, as if she had not seen.
I don’t know what your words mean. I am shocked by you, I will not hear you. Don’t touch me!
She could guess what it had been like, living with Gallagher as his former wife had done for eight years. He was the kindest of men and yet even his kindness could be engulfing, overbearing.
With some comical mishaps, and a good deal of eye-watering smoke, Gallagher started a birch-log fire in an immense cobblestone fireplace in the living room, and they ate on a small plank table in front of the fire; Zack had been very hungry, and had eaten too quickly, and nearly made himself sick. In the kitchen, he’d been upset by the tile floor: a black-and-white diamond pattern that made him dizzy, it seemed to be moving, writhing. In the living room, he’d been concerned that sparks from the fire would fly out onto the hook rug, and he’d been fascinated and appalled by the several mounted animal heads-black bear, lynx, buck with twelve-point antlers-on the lodge walls. Gallagher had told Zack to ignore the “trophies,” they were disgusting, but Zack had stared, silent. Especially, the buck’s head and antlers had drawn his attention for it was positioned over the fireplace and its marble eyes seemed unnaturally large, glassily ironic. The animal’s fur was a burnished brown, but appeared slightly matted, marred. A frail cobweb hung from the highest point of the antlers.
Hazel had taken the boy upstairs to bed shortly after nine o’clock though she doubted he would sleep, he was over-stimulated and hot-skinned, and had never before slept in a bunk bed.
Still, he’d insisted upon climbing the little ladder, to sleep in the top bunk. The thought of sleeping in the lower bunk seemed to frighten him.
Hazel had allowed him to keep a lamp burning beside the bed, and she’d promised not to shut the door between their rooms. If he woke agitated in the night, he would need to know where he was.
“Please be good, Zack! It’s a beautiful morning, and this is a beautiful place. We’ve never been in such a beautiful place, have we? It’s an island. It’s special. If you want to ”marry‘ Mr. Gallagher you would have to live with him in a house, wouldn’t you? This is like living with him, this weekend. This is his house, one of his family’s houses. He will be hurt if you aren’t good.“
She spoke as if to a very young child. There was the pretense between them, that Zack was a child.
Hazel rebuttoned his flannel shirt, he’d buttoned crookedly. She pulled a sweater over his head, and combed his hair. She kissed his warm forehead. So excited! Feeling the child’s pulses beat quick as her own.
Neither of them belonged here. But they had been invited, and they were here.
Hazel led Zack out of the room. The air in the hallway was rather drafty, with an acrid smoke-smell from the previous night.
Except for the wind, and a sound of ice melting, dripping from the eaves, and the harsh, intermittent cries of crows, the house was very still. The sky was scribbled in fine, faint clouds through which the sun shone powerfully. It would be one of those balmy-wintry days. Hazel gripped Zack’s hand to keep him from running along the corridor and a wild thought came to her that she and the child might enter Gallagher’s bedroom, which was close by: tease the sleep-dazed man awake, laugh at him. Gallagher was a man who loved to be teased and laughed at, to a degree. She and Zack could climb onto the bed in which Gallagher slept…
Instead they paused outside the door of his bedroom, to hear him snoring inside: a wet, gurgling sound labored as if the man were struggling uphill with an awkwardly shaped weight. It was somehow very funny that the snoring-snorting noises were not at all rhythmic, but uneven; there were pauses of several seconds, pure silence. Zack began laughing, and Hazel pressed her fingers over his mouth to muffle the sound. Then Hazel too began laughing, they had to hurry away.
The flame of madness leapt between them. Hazel feared that the child would catch it from her, he would be uncontrollable for hours. Zack slipped from Hazel’s grasp, to prowl about the downstairs of the lodge. There was so much to see, with Gallagher not present. Hazel was most interested in a wall of framed photographs of which Gallagher had spoken slightingly, the day before. Clearly, the Gallagher family thought highly of themselves. Hazel supposed it was a sign of wealth: naturally you would think highly of yourself, and wish to display that thought to others.
Amid the faces of strangers she sought Gallagher’s familiar face. Suddenly, she was eager to see him as a Gallagher, a younger son. There: a photograph of Chet Gallagher with his family, taken when Gallagher was in his mid-twenties, with a startlingly full head of dark hair, a squinting, somewhat abashed smile. There was Gallagher a skinny boy of about twelve, in white T-shirt and swim trunks, squatting awkwardly on the deck of a sailboat; there was Gallagher a few years older, muscled in shoulders and upper arms, gripping a tennis racquet. And Gallagher in his mid-twenties in a light-colored sport coat, surprised in the midst of laughter, both arms flung around the bare shoulders of two young women in summer dresses and high-heeled sandals. This photograph had been taken on the lawn outside the lodge, in summer.
Beautiful women! Far more beautiful than Hazel Jones could ever make herself.
Hazel wondered: was one of the women Gallagher’s former wife? Veronica, her name was. Gallagher rarely spoke of his former wife except to remark it was damned good luck they hadn’t had children.
Hazel knew, Gallagher had to believe this. He was a man who told himself things to believe, in the presence of witnesses.
In many of the Gallagher photographs there was a broad-chested man with a large, solid head, a blunt handsome face like something hacked out of stone. This man was stocky, self-confident. Always in the photographs he was seated at the center, hands on his knees. In photographs taken when he appeared older, he was gripping a cane in a rakish gesture. His face resembled Gallagher’s only around the eyes, that were heavy-lidded, jovial and malicious. He was of moderate height with legs that appeared foreshortened. There was something stubby about him as if a part of his body were missing but you could not see what.
This had to be the father, Thaddeus.
In a cluster of photographs, Thaddeus was seated with a mannequin figure that looked familiar to Hazel: ex-Governor Dewey? A short man with sleekly black hair, prim little mustache like something pasted on his upper lip, shiny protuberant black eyes. In those photographs in which others appeared, Thaddeus Gallagher and Dewey were seated together at the very center, glancing toward the camera as if interrupted in conversation.
These were summer photos of years ago, judging from the men’s attire. Thomas E. Dewey a dapper little mannequin in sports clothes, very stiff in his posture, purposeful.
Those others. Who surround us. Our enemies.
The flat of his hand striking the newspaper’s front page, on the oilcloth covering of the kitchen table. His rage spilled out suddenly, you could not predict.
Except she’d come to know: all politicians, public figures were objects of his hatred. All figures of wealth. Enemies.
“It’s another time now, Pa. History has changed, now.”
Strange, Hazel had spoken aloud. She was not one to speak aloud even when safely alone.
Seeing then another photo of Gallagher as a boy: looking about sixteen, long-faced, somber, with a mildly blemished skin, posed in a suit and tie in front of a small grand piano, on what appeared to be a stage. Beside him stood an older man in formal clothes, regarding the camera sternly: Hans Zimmerman.
“Zack! Come look.”
Hazel smiled, Gallagher was so young. Yet unmistakably himself as Zimmerman, though much younger, in his early forties perhaps, was unmistakably himself. You could see that the piano instructor took a certain pride in his pupil. Hazel felt a curious sensation, almost of pain, dismay.
“I don’t love him. Do I?”
It came over her then, she would never fully know him. The previous night in bed in these unfamiliar surroundings she had thought of Gallagher close by, she’d known he was thinking of her, hoping that she would come to him; she had felt a stab of panic, in her dread of knowing him. Since Tignor, she had not wanted to make love with any man. She did not trust any man, not to enter her body in that way.
Yet now it seemed obvious, she could not know Chet Gallagher even if she became his lover. Even if she lived with him. Even if he became a father to Zack, as he wished. So much of the man’s soul had been squandered, lost.
“Zack? Honey? Come see what I found.”
But Zack was preoccupied, elsewhere. Hazel went to find him, hoping he wasn’t being destructive.
There he was standing on one of the leather sofas, peering at the “trophy” mounted over the fireplace mantel. The air here smelled of woodsmoke. How like her son, drawn to morbid things!
“Oh, honey. Come down from there.”
In daylight the buck was more visible, exposed. A large, handsome head. And the antlers remarkable. You knew this was merely an object, lifeless, stuffed and mounted, eyes shining with ironic knowledge but in fact mere glass. The heraldic antlers were foolish, comical. The deer’s silvery brown hair was matted and marred and Hazel saw numerous wisps of cobwebs on them. Yet the trophy was strangely imposing, unnerving. Somehow, you believed it might still be alive. Hazel understood why her son was drawn to stare at it in fascination and revulsion.
Hazel came up quietly behind him, to nudge him in the ribs.
Saying, in her playful Hazel Jones voice, “Somebody ”married‘ him.“
By the time Gallagher came downstairs, in the late morning, Hazel and Zack had had breakfast. Hazel had cleaned the kitchen: the stove top, and oven; the counters, that were mysteriously sticky; the cupboards that required fresh paper liners, and which Hazel neatly arranged, turning the labels of cans to face out. She’d opened windows to air out the woodsmoke and musty odors. She’d straightened stacks of back issues of Life, Collier’s, Time, Fortune, Reader’s Digest. Dragging a chair to stand on, she’d dusted each of the “trophies,” taking most care with the buck’s antlers. When Gallagher saw her Hazel was sitting in a patch of sunshine leafing through My Thousand Islands: From the Time of Revolution to Now. Close by, Zack was practicing one of his Kabalevsky studies.
“My little family! Good morning.”
Gallagher meant to be jokey, jocular, waking so much later than his guests, but his quivering red-rimmed eyes swam with tears, Hazel glanced up involuntarily to see.
He was saying, reasoning, “Why should it matter so much, Hazel? If people are married, or not? McAlster is only a caretaker. He doesn’t know you, or anyone who knows you.”
But Hazel Jones did not want to meet the caretaker.
“But why not, Hazel? You are here, and he knows I have guests. It’s perfectly natural. He opened the house for us, he’ll want to know if there is anything he can do for you or Zack.”
But Hazel did not want to meet the caretaker.
Running away upstairs when McAlster’s pickup approached the house.
Gallagher was amused. Gallagher was trying not to be annoyed.
He loved Hazel Jones! He did respect her. Except her quick bright laughter grated against his nerves, sometimes. When her eyes were frightened, and her mouth persisted in smiling. Her way of speaking airily and lightly and yet evasively like an actress reciting lines in which she can’t believe.
Gallagher understood: she’d been wounded in some way. Whoever was the father of the child had wounded her, surely. She was uneasy in situations that threatened to expose her. It was a wonder she hadn’t worn white gloves, pillbox hat, high-heeled shoes to Grindstone Island. Gallagher vowed to win her trust, that he might set about correcting her: for Hazel Jones’s imagination was primitive.
His Albany relatives would see through her awkward poise, at once. Gallagher dreaded the prospect.
His father! But Gallagher would not think of his father, in terms of Hazel Jones. He was determined that they would never meet.
Yet it was ironic, that he should fall in love with a woman who, in her soul, was more a Gallagher than he was. More conventional in her beliefs, her “morality.” What is good, what is bad. What is proper, what is not-proper. Hazel hid from the caretaker because she could not bear it, that a stranger might suppose she was Gallagher’s mistress, spending Easter weekend with him.
Other women whom Gallagher had brought to stay with him on Grindstone Island hadn’t been so self-conscious. These were women of a certain degree of education, experience. An employee like McAlster had no existence for them. Nor would they have cared what he thought of them, not for a moment.
Not that McAlster wasn’t the most tactful of men. All Gallagher employees, on Grindstone Island or on the mainland, were tactful. They were hardly likely to ask their employers awkward questions, or in fact any questions at all. McAlster had known Chet Gallagher’s wife Veronica for six or seven years always politely calling her “Mrs. Gallagher” and several summers ago when there apparently ceased to be a “Mrs. Chet Gallagher,” McAlster had certainly known not to inquire after her.
When McAlster drove away in his pickup truck, Gallagher called teasingly up the stairs:
“Haz-el! Hazel Jones! Coast’s clear.”
They went outside. They hiked down to the river, to the Gallaghers’ dock.
In the bright sunshine the river was starkly beautiful, a deep cobalt-blue, not so rough as usual. The wind had dropped, the temperature was 43° F. Everywhere snow was melting, there was a frenzy of melting, dripping. Gallagher wore dark glasses to shield his eyes against the sun clattering like castanets inside his skull.
Am I hungover? I am not.
A manic little tune, of castanets. Fortunately, Hazel could not hear it.
How striking the view of the St. Lawrence, from the Gallaghers’ thirty-foot dock! Gallagher, who had not been out on the dock since the previous summer, and certainly would not be there now except for his guest, pointed out the lighthouse at Malin Head Bay, several miles to the east; in the other direction, a smaller lighthouse at Gananoque, in Ontario.
Hearing himself say, who had not sailed in twelve years, “In the summer, maybe we can sail here. You and I and Zack. Would you like that, Hazel?”
Hazel said yes she would like that.
It was like Hazel to revert to her usual mood. As soon as she’d come downstairs, the issue of the caretaker was forgotten. There could be no protracted hardness or opposition in Hazel, always her moods were melting, quicksilver. Gallagher had never met so intensely feminine a woman, she was fascinating to him. Yet she would not make love with him, she held herself at a little distance from him, uneasy.
He couldn’t resist teasing her. She was shielding her eyes against the sun-glare, looking out. “He did ask after my guests. The caretaker. Asking if your rooms were all right and I told him yes, I thought so.”
Quickly Hazel said yes their rooms were fine. She was not to be baited by Gallagher. She asked if Mr. McEnnis would be coming back the next day.
Gallagher corrected her: “”McAlster.“ His name is ”McAlster.“ His people emigrated from Glasgow when he was two years old, he’s lived on Grindstone Island for more than sixty years. No, he won’t be coming back tomorrow.”
They were hiking along the river’s edge. Hazel would have descended a treacherous rocky path to the beach, where broken slabs of ice glittered in the sun like enormous teeth, and where storm debris lay in tangled heaps amid sand hardened like concrete, but Gallagher restrained her, alarmed. “Hazel, no. You’ll turn an ankle.”
They’d hiked more than a half-mile along the river and had some distance to retrace, uphill. From this perspective the Gallagher property appeared immense.
Zack had preferred to remain indoors practicing piano. Because of Easter weekend his Saturday lesson had been postponed until Tuesday after school. Hazel had told Gallagher that Zack had been outdoors for a while, earlier that morning; she spoke apologetically, as if the child’s lack of interest in the outdoors would annoy Gallagher.
Not at all! Gallagher was on the boy’s side. He intended always to be on the boy’s side. His own father had not much interest in his youngest son except to be “disappointed” at crucial times, and Gallagher did not intend to model himself after that father. I will make both of you need me and then you will love me.
Gallagher was surprised, Hazel Jones turned out to be so much more robust than he’d expected. She was hiking uphill with less effort than he, scarcely short of breath. She was sure-footed, eager. She exuded an air of happiness, well-being. The mid-April thaw was exhilarating to her, the great flaring sun did not overwhelm her but seemed to draw her forward.
Gallagher had wanted to talk with her. He must talk with her, alone. But she eased away from him, as if impatient. Slipping and sliding in the melting snow, that didn’t vex her but made her laugh. Nor did she seem to mind that evergreen boughs were dripping onto her head. She was sure-footed and exuberant as a young animal that has been penned up. Gallagher sweated inside his clothes, began to fall behind. Damned if he would call out to the woman, to wait for him. His heart beat hard in his chest.
You love me. You must love me.
Why don’t you love me!
Hazel was charmingly dressed for their hike. She wore a windbreaker and a girl’s rubber boots and on her head was a fawn-colored fedora she’d found in a closet at the lodge. Gallagher was forced to recall how when he touched Hazel, in their tender, intimate moments, when he kissed her, she went very still; like a captive animal that does not resist, yet remains slightly stiff, vigilant. You would not guess that the woman’s body was so young, supple and tremulous with life. Behind her clothes the female body, hot-skinned.
Overhead, hawks were circling. Always there were wide-winged sparrow hawks on Grindstone Island, along the river’s edge. They swooped to their prey in open areas, it was rare for a hawk to penetrate the pine woods. Now their swift shadows passed over the snow-stubbled grass and over Hazel’s figure, several hawks cruising so low that Gallagher could see the sharp outlines of their beaks.
Hazel, too, noticed the hawks, glancing up uneasily. She began to walk faster as if to elude them.
Damn! Gallagher saw that she was ascending a trail, the rutty remains of a trail, leading farther uphill; Gallagher had intended that they take another fork and return to the lodge, he’d had enough of hiking for one day. But Hazel hiked on, oblivious of her companion. The hill they were climbing was a small mountain, densely wooded, with a jagged, uneven surface, sharp diagonal outcroppings of shale ridged with ice; for sunshine came only in sporadic patches here, the interior of the pine woods was shaded, chill. The summit of the hill was impassable, Gallagher recalled. He had not hiked this damned trail in twenty-five years.
“Hazel! Let’s turn back.”
But Hazel plunged ahead, unheeding. Gallagher had no choice but to follow.
He’d bought a house for her and the child in Watertown. A handsome red-brick colonial with two separate entrances, overlooking a Watertown park. But Hazel would not step inside.
In her soul, a shopgirl. An usherette. Shrinking in shame from the judgment of a hired caretaker.
A mistake, loving Hazel Jones. It would be a terrible mistake to marry her.
Gallagher wasn’t accustomed to such physical stamina in any female. On Grindstone Island, it was rare for females to hike this mountain. His former wife would have laughed at him if he’d suggested such a hike in the melting snow. Gallagher had come to associate females with smoky bars, cocktail lounges, dimly lighted expensive restaurants. At least, females he found sexually desirable. And there was Hazel in her windbreaker and man’s hat, hiking a steep hill without a backward glance. Other female guests at Grindstone Island, strolling with Gallagher on his family property, had stayed close beside him, attentive to his conversation.
Another peculiar thing: Hazel was the only visitor to the lodge in Gallagher’s memory, female or male, who had not commented on the display of photographs. Guests were always exclaiming at the “known” faces amid the Gallaghers and their friends, looking so thoroughly at home. Some of the individuals pictured with the Gallaghers were wealthy, influential men whose faces Hazel would not have recognized, but there were numerous public figures: Wendell Wilkie, Thomas E. Dewey, Robert Taft, Harold Stassen, John Bricker and Earl Warren, Dewey’s vice-presidential running mates in 1944 and 1948. And there were Republican state congressmen, senators. It was Gallagher’s habit to speak disdainfully of his father’s political friends, but Hazel had not given him the opportunity for she’d said nothing.
She was ignorant of politics, Gallagher supposed. She had not been educated, hadn’t graduated from high school. She knew little of the world of men, action, history. Though she read the occasional newspaper columns Gallagher wrote, she did not offer any criticism or commentary. She knows so little. She will protect me.
At last, Hazel had stopped hiking. She was waiting for Gallagher where the trail ended in a snarl of underbrush, in the pine woods. When he joined her, out of breath, sweating, she pointed at a scattering of feathers on the ground, amid pine needles and glistening ice-rivulets. The feathers were no more than two or three inches long, powdery-gray, very soft and fine. There were small bones, particles of flesh still attached. Gallagher identified the remains of an owl’s prey. “There are owls everywhere in these woods. We heard them last night. Screech owls.”
“And owls kill other birds? Smaller birds?” The question was naive, wondering. Hazel spoke with a pained expression, almost a grimace.
“Well, owls are predators, darling. They must kill something.”
“Predators have no choice, have they?”
“Not unless they want to starve. And eventually, as they age, they do starve, and other predators eat them.”
Gallagher spoke lightly, to deflect Hazel’s somber tone. Like most women she wished to exaggerate the significance of small deaths.
Hazel’s cheeks were flushed from the climb, her eyes were widened and alert, glistening with moisture. She appeared feverish, still excited. There was something heated and sexual about her. Almost, Gallagher shrank from her.
He was taller than Hazel Jones by several inches. He might have gripped her shoulders, and kissed her, hard. Yet he shrank from her, his eyes behind the dark glasses tremulous.
Damn: he was sweating, yet shivering. At this height the air was cold enough, thin gusts of wind from the river struck his exposed face like knife blades. Gallagher felt a stab of childish resentment, here was a woman failing to protect a man from getting sick.
He pulled at her arm, and led her back down the trail. She came at once, docile.
“”The owl of Minerva soars only at dusk.“”
Hazel spoke in her strange, vague, wondering voice as if another spoke through her. Gallagher glanced at her, surprised.
“Why do you say that, Hazel? Those words?”
But Hazel seemed not to know, why.
Gallagher said, “It’s a melancholy observation. It’s the German philosopher Hegel’s remark and it seems to mean that wisdom comes to us only too late.”
“”The owl of Minerva.“ But who is Minerva?”
“The Roman goddess of wisdom.”
“Some long-ago time, we’re talking of?”
“A very long time ago, Hazel.”
Afterward Gallagher would recall this curious exchange. He would have liked to ask Hazel whom she was echoing, who’d made this remark in her hearing, except he knew that she would become evasive and manage not to answer his question. Her manner was naive and girlish and somehow he did not trust it, not completely.
“Why is it, do you think, ”the owl of Minerva soars only at dusk‘? Must it always be so?“
“Hazel, I have no idea. It’s really just a remark.”
She was so damned literal-minded! Gallagher would have to be careful what he told Hazel, especially if she became his wife. She would believe him without question.
They left the densely wooded area and were descending the hill in the direction of the lodge. Here in the open sunshine Gallagher would have been blinded without his dark glasses. A smell of skunk lifted teasingly to their nostrils, faint at first and then stronger. It might have been emanating from a stand of birch trees, or from one of the guest cabins. At a distance the smell of skunk can be half-pleasurable but it is not so pleasurable at close range. That inky-cobwebby odor that can turn nauseating if you blunder too close.
Families of skunks sometimes hibernated beneath the outbuildings. The warm weather would have roused them.
“Skunks have to live somewhere. Just like us.”
Hazel spoke playfully. Gallagher laughed. He was liking Hazel Jones again now that she wasn’t leading him up the damned mountain to a heart attack.
Gallagher tried the doors of several cabins until he found one that wasn’t locked. Inside, the air was cold and very still. Like an indrawn breath it seemed to Gallagher who was feeling unaccountably excited.
The cabin was made of weatherized logs, built above a small glittering stream. Nearby were birch trees whose trunks were blindingly white in the sunshine. The interior of the cabin was partly shaded and partly blinding. There was a faint but pungent odor here of skunk. There were twin beds, new-looking mattresses loosely covered with sheets, and pillows without pillowcases. On the floor was a hook rug. Standing inside the cabin, with Hazel Jones, Gallagher felt a rush of emotion so powerful it left him weak. He had an urgent impulse to talk to her, to explain himself. He had not talked very seriously with her since coming to the island and their time together was rapidly running out. Tomorrow he would have to drive his little family back to Watertown, their individual lives would resume. He had bought a beautiful house for Hazel and the child but they had not yet come to live with him.
No child. He had no child. If you have lost your way it is best to have no child.
It was then that Gallagher began to speak haphazardly. He heard himself tell Hazel Jones how as a boy he’d camped in the woods on summer nights, alone. Not with his brothers but alone. He had a “pup” tent with mosquito netting. The guest cabins hadn’t been built yet. Noises in the woods had frightened him, he’d hardly slept at all, but the experiences had been profound, somehow. He wondered if all profound experiences occur when you’re alone, and frightened.
It was like wartime in a way, sleeping outdoors, in tents. Except in wartime you are so exhausted you have no trouble sleeping.
He told Hazel that his father had built most of the cabins after the war. Thaddeus had expanded the lodge, bought more land along the river. In fact, the Gallaghers owned property elsewhere in the Thousand Islands which was being developed, very profitably. Thaddeus Gallagher had made money during wartime and he’d made a lot more money, after: tax laws highly favorable to the Gallagher Media Group had been passed by the Republican-dominated New York State Legislature in the early 1950s.
(Why was Gallagher telling this to Hazel Jones? Did he want to impress her? Did he want her to know that he was a rich man’s son, yet innocent of acquiring riches, himself? Hazel could have no way of knowing if Gallagher shared in any of his family money or if-just maybe!-he’d been disinherited.)
Hazel had never asked Gallagher about his family, no more than she would have asked him about his former marriage. Hazel Jones was not one to ask personal questions. Yet now she asked him, with a startling bluntness, if he’d been in the war?
“The war? Oh, Hazel.”
Gallagher’s wartime experience was not a subject he spoke of easily. His brash swaggering jocular manner could not accommodate it. His eyes snatched at Hazel Jones’s eyes, that were so glistening, intense. Just inside the cabin door they stood close together yet not touching. They were very aware of each other. In this small space their intimacy was unnerving to Gallagher.
“Did you see the death camps?”
“No.”
“You didn’t see the death camps?”
“I was in northern Italy. I was hospitalized there.”
“There were no death camps in Italy?”
It seemed to be a question. Gallagher was uncertain how to answer. While he’d been overseas, at first in France and then in the Italian countryside north of Brescia, he had known nothing about the infamous Nazi death camps. He had not really known much about his own experience. Twenty-three days after landing in Europe he’d been struck by shrapnel in his back, knees. Around his neck he’d worn a collar thick as a horse collar and he’d gotten very sick with infections, and later with morphine. He understood that he’d witnessed ugly things but he had no access to them, directly. It was as if a scrim had grown across his vision, like a membrane.
Now Hazel Jones was regarding him with a curious avid hunger. Gallagher could smell the fever-heat of the woman’s body, that was new to him, very arousing.
“Why did the Nazis want to kill so many people? What does it mean, some people are ”unclean‘-“impure’-”life unworthy life‘?“
“Hazel, the Nazis were madmen. It doesn’t matter what they meant.”
“The Nazis were madmen?”
Again it seemed to be a question. Hazel spoke with a peculiar vehemence, as if Gallagher had said something meant to be funny.
“Certainly. They were madmen, and murderers.”
“But when Jews came to the United States, the ships carrying them were turned away. The Americans didn’t want them, no more than the Nazis wanted them.”
“Hazel, no. I don’t think so.”
“You don’t think so?”
“No. I don’t.”
Gallagher had removed his dark glasses. He fumbled to slip them into his jacket pocket, but they slipped from his fingers to the floor. He was startled and somewhat repelled by Hazel’s intensity, her voice that was strident, uncanny. This was not Hazel Jones’s melodic female voice but another’s, Gallagher had never heard before.
“No, Hazel. I’m sure that wasn’t the case, what you’re saying.”
“It wasn’t?”
“It was a diplomatic issue. If we’re talking about the same thing.”
Gallagher spoke uncertainly. He wasn’t sure of his information, the subject was vague to him, distasteful. He was trying to remember but could not. His breathing was coming quickly as if he were still hiking uphill.
“The ships docked in New York harbor but immigration officials wouldn’t let the refugees in. There were children, babies. There were hundreds of people. They were sent back to Europe, to die.”
“But why did they return to Europe?” Gallagher asked. He had a flash of insight: he could debate this. “Why, if they might have gone elsewhere? Anywhere?”
“They couldn’t go anywhere else. They had to return to Europe, to die.”
“There were refugees who went to Haiti, I think. South America. Some refugees went as far away as Singapore.”
Gallagher spoke uncertainly. He really didn’t know. Vaguely he recalled the editorials in the Gallagher newspapers, as in many American newspapers, in the years before Pearl Harbor, arguing against American intervention in Europe. The Gallagher newspapers were very much opposed to F.D.R., in editorials F.D.R. was charged with being susceptible to Jewish influences, bribery. In the columns of certain commentators F.D.R. was identified as a Jew, like his Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, Jr. For a confused moment the scrim shifted in Gallagher’s memory and he saw with a child’s curious eyes, a sign in the lobby of a dazzling Miami Beach hotel jewish persons are asked not to frequent these premises. When had that been, in the early 1930s? Before the Gallaghers acquired their private Palm Beach residence on the ocean.
Gallagher said, faltering, “Much of this has been exaggerated, Hazel. And it wasn’t only Jews who died, it was all sorts of people including Germans. Many millions. And more millions would die under Stalin. Children, yes. Babies. Upheavals of madness like volcanos spewing lava…You understood, if you were a soldier, how impersonal it is. ”History.“”
“You’re defending them, then. ”Much has been exaggerated.“”
Gallagher stared at Hazel, perplexed. He felt an undercurrent of revulsion for the woman, almost a fear of her, she seemed so different to him, suddenly. He touched her shoulders. “Hazel? What is it?”
“”Much has been exaggerated.“ You said.”
Hazel laughed. She was blinking rapidly, not looking at him.
“Hazel, I’m so sorry. I’ve been saying stupid things. You lost someone in the war?”
“No. I lost no one in the war.”
Hazel spoke harshly, half-jeering. Gallagher made a move to embrace her. For a moment she held herself rigid against him, then seemed to melt, to press herself against him, with a shudder. A wave of sexual desire struck Gallagher like a fist.
“Hazel! Dear, darling Hazel…”
Gallagher framed the woman’s face in his hands and kissed her, and she startled him with the vehemence of her response. They stood in a patch of blinding sunshine. Beyond the cabin, air shimmered with sunshine, there was a glare like fire. Hazel Jones’s mouth was cold, yet seemed to suck at Gallagher’s mouth. Awkwardly, like one unaccustomed to intimacy, with a kind of desperation she pressed against him, her arms around him tightening. There was something fierce and terrible in the woman’s sudden need. Gallagher murmured, “Hazel, dear Hazel. My dear one,” in a rapt, crooning voice, a voice distinct from his own. He drew her into the cabin, stumbling with her, their breaths steamed, nervously they laughed together, kissing, trying to kiss, fumbling to embrace in their heavy outdoor clothing. Gallagher drew Hazel to one of the twin beds. Beneath the loose, discolored sheet the mattress was bare. A smell of skunk, bestial, intimate, lifted through the floorboards. It was a strangely attractive odor, not so very strong. Fumbling, laughing, yet without mirth, for she seemed very frightened, Hazel was pulling at Gallagher’s jacket, and at the belt of his trousers. Her fingers were clumsy, deliberate. Gallagher thought As she has undressed the child, the mother undressing the child. He was astonished by her. He was utterly captivated by her. So long had Hazel Jones resisted him, and now! In a swath of blinding sunshine they lay on the mattress, kissing, straining to kiss, continuing to fumble with their clothing. Gallagher had long advised himself She is not a virgin, Hazel Jones is not a virgin, I will not be forcing myself upon a virgin, Hazel Jones has a child and has been with a man but now, this Hazel Jones was astonishing to him, gripping him tightly, drawing him to her, deeply into her. In a frenzy the woman’s mouth sucked at his, he was losing consciousness of himself, in a delirium of animal urgency and submission. In the woman’s arms he would be obliterated, this was not natural to Gallagher, had not been his experience, not for many years. Not since late adolescence, when Gallagher’s sexual life had begun. Now, he was not the stronger of the two. His will was not stronger than Hazel Jones’s will. He would succumb to the woman, not once but many times for this was the first of many times, Gallagher understood.
Her hair that was damp with perspiration stuck to his face, his mouth. Her breasts were much larger, heavier than he’d imagined, milky-pale, with nipples large as berries. He was not prepared for the lavish dark hair of her body, spiky-black at her groin, lifting into her navel. He was not prepared for the muscular strength of her legs, her knees gripping him. I love love love you choked in his throat as helpless he pumped his life into her.
By quick degrees the sun expanded to fill the sky.
“The breath of God.”
A wayward breeze that would drive her in a sudden, unexpected direction that was yet determined, purposeful. She, and the child who was her own purpose.
A man wants to know. A lover wants to know. Wants to suck the very marrow of your bones wants to know.
A man has a right. A lover has a right. Once your body is entered in that way, he will have the right.
Telling him of what can’t be told. A lover wants to know what can’t be told. For some secret must be offered. It was time, and more than time. She knew, though she was not his wife and would not be. This girl at my high school in Milburn, d’you know where Milburn is, and he said No I don’t think so and she said When we were thirteen her father killed her mother, her older brother and her, and then himself, with a double-barreled shotgun in a back bedroom of their house they lived in a funny old stone house like a storybook cottage except it was old, it was sinking into the earth. And he said Jesus! what a terrible thing shifting uneasily was she a close friend of yours and quickly Hazel said No then Yes but not a close friend then, when we were in grade school she’d been and Gallagher asked Why did the father do such a terrible thing, was he insane? desperate? poor? with surprising naiveté for one who’d been in the war and had been wounded in the war Gallagher asked and Hazel smiled in the darkness, not Hazel Jones’s bright yearning smile but a smile of rage Are those reasons for killing your family and yourself, are those the recognized reasons but Gallagher mistook Hazel’s trembling for emotion holding her tightly in his arms to protect her as always he would protect her Poor darling Hazel! It must have been horrible for you, and for everyone who knew them and Hazel smiled Was it? for the thought had never occurred to her. SayingHe was the town gravedigger. As if that was the explanation. Gallagher would accept this explanation.
Hazel knew it was not true of course. No one in Milburn would have thought it was horrible. It was the gravedigger murdering his family, and himself.
Because he’d murdered them all. No one remained to grieve.
Why? Because it was time.
Hazel Jones would come to live with Gallagher in the red-brick house he’d bought for her in Watertown and of course she would bring her son. For the child’s sake she had consented, they would remain as long as seemed expedient as long as the man believed he loved her for the gravedigger’s daughter had not the right to bypass such an opportunity and when two years later the child was offered a piano scholarship at the Portman Academy of Music Gallagher would buy a house in Syracuse and they would move there.
My little family they were to him. Never in his adult life had Chet Gallagher been so happy.
It was meant to be. It was the breath of God. That my son would be a pianist, he would play before large audiences and they would applaud him.
“But why do you care so much, Hazel?”
Gallagher put the question to her gently. He was smiling, and stroking her hand. Always he was touching her, caressing her. He adored her! But the stubbornness in her, the curious adamant unyielding will, concerned him. Her primitive soul he thought it, then was ashamed of himself for such a thought. For he did adore her, he believed he would die for her. And the child he loved too, though not as he loved the mother.
“Because”-Hazel paused, wetting her lips, confused or seeming-so as at such times she seemed shy, uncertain, her eyes avoiding his so that Gallagher could not confound her with his equanimity-“music is beautiful. Music is-” It was here that Hazel’s voice dipped in that way Gallagher found both charming and maddening, you had to lean your head close to hers, to hear. And if you didn’t hear, and asked Hazel to repeat what she’d said, she would shrink away in shyness, self-conscious as a young girl: “Oh, nothing! It’s too silly.”
Afterward hearing the solemn muttered words he had not quite heard at the time Music is the one thing.
“” Why do fools fall in love‘…“
Why the hell not? He was forty-two years old and not getting any younger, smarter, or better-looking.
Laughed at himself in the bathroom mirror, shaving. This was the face he’d used to shield his eyes against-literally!-seeing at any hour and especially in the clinical unsparing light of a bathroom mirror. No thanks! But now, Hazel Jones downstairs in the kitchen preparing breakfast for him and Zack, a woman who actually liked to prepare breakfast and wore a floral-print apron while preparing it, Gallagher was in a mood to confront his own face without that old urge to slam a fist into the mirror, or puke up his guts into the sink.
And he loved, the boy, too.
My boy. Occasionally even My son he would hear himself say, in casual conversation.
My little family he kept to himself and Hazel. My new life he kept strictly to himself.
“Music isn’t ”the one thing,“ darling. There are plenty of other ”one things.“”
Was it so? Gallagher, a former child piano-prodigy, burnt out and for a time suicidal at the age of seventeen, certainly thought so.
He wouldn’t tell Hazel this, however. Of the many things Gallagher rehearsed to tell Hazel, this was one he would not tell her out of a fear of upsetting her, wounding her.
Out of a fear of telling the truth.
No longer was Chet Gallagher playing jazz piano at the Malin Head Inn, he’d moved one hundred miles south to Syracuse to a house within three blocks of the music school where Zack now took intensive lessons with a pianist who’d been one of Hans Zimmerman’s favored protégés. Zimmerman had arranged for the scholarship, there would be other costs and some of them considerable if Zack was to embark upon a serious professional career. Gallagher had not needed to tell Hazel that he would pay for this embarkment, happily he would pay what was required. No longer did Gallagher play much jazz piano, wanting to avoid smoky bars, occasions for drinking too much, occasions for meeting lonely seductive women, oh Christ he so much preferred staying at home evenings with his little family he adored.
Out of a fear of telling the truth.
Yet Hazel was reluctant to marry Gallagher! It was the great mystery of his life.
A mystery, and a deep hurt.
“But Hazel, why not? Don’t you love me?”
As always Hazel’s reasons were vague, evasive. She spoke hesitantly. You would almost think that words were thistles, or pebbles, scraping her throat. The Gallaghers would not approve of her, an unwed mother. They would despise her, they would never forgive her.
“Hazel! For Christ‘ sake.”
He held her in his arms, she was so distressed. Gallagher didn’t want to upset her further. Now that they were living together he was more able to gauge her moods. Like an upright flame Hazel Jones appeared, the eye was drawn to her, dazzled by her, yet a flame is after all a delicate thing, a flame can be suddenly threatened, extinguished.
Unwed mother, despise. Forgive! Gallagher winced at such clichés. What the hell did he care, if the Gallaghers disapproved of his liaison with Hazel Jones? They knew nothing of her, really. The most absurd, malicious things were said of her, in Albany. And now that Gallagher was openly living with her…They would never meet Hazel, if he could avoid it. By now, Gallagher was very likely disinherited. Thaddeus would have written him out of his will years ago.
“Is it money you’re worried about? I don’t need their money, Hazel. I can make my own way.”
It wasn’t exactly true: Gallagher received money from a trust established by his maternal grandparents. But he’d returned to newspaper work, he was producing radio programs. If Hazel was anxious about money, he would make more money!
He would protect Hazel Jones, that was a principle of his character. He wanted to think this was so: he was a man of principle. Even his father, supremely indifferent to the sufferings of masses of human beings like most “conservatives,” was nonetheless loyal, at times fiercely and irrationally loyal, to individuals close to him.
Thaddeus, too, had women; or had had women when he’d been younger, fitter. A primitive and seemingly insatiable sexual itch the man had satisfied with whoever was available. Yet, Thaddeus had remained a “faithful” husband in society’s eyes. He had not betrayed his wife publicly and perhaps in her naiveté (Gallagher wanted to think) his mother had never known that Thaddeus had betrayed her at all.
Gallagher heard himself ask, plaintively, “But don’t you love me, Hazel? I certainly love you.”
His voice broke. He was making a fool of himself. He seemed to be accusing her.
Hazel moved into Gallagher’s arms, as if too stricken to speak. This was proof that she loved him: wasn’t it? Pressing herself against him as, in their bed, she pressed against him, never resisting now, warmly affectionate, her arms around his neck, her mouth opened to his. He felt her heartbeat, now. He felt the quickened heat of her body. It came to him She is remembering another man, the man who hurt her. Gallagher felt an impulse to break her in his arms, as the other had done. To break her very bones, gripping her tight, burying his hot furious face in her neck, in a coil of her red-glinting hair.
He hid his contorted face, he wept. Tears no one need acknowledge.
Not in Watertown, and not in Syracuse had she had a glimpse of any man who resembled the man who’d masqueraded as her husband yet it came to her in a swoon of bitter certitude If I marry this man, if I love this man the other will hunt us down and kill us.
He could make money for his little family, certainly Chet Gallagher could. “Hazel Jones, you have the gift of happiness! You have brought such happiness into my life.” It was so: Gallagher was a young man again. An ardent lover, a fool for love! A man who’d once joked that his heart had shrunken to the size of a raisin, and was of the wizened texture of a raisin, now Gallagher’s heart was the good healthy size of a man’s fist, suffused with hope as with blood. His face appeared younger. Always he was smiling, whistling. (Zack had to ask Gallagher please not to whistle so loud, the tunes Gallagher whistled got into Zack’s head and interfered with the music Zack was playing in his head.) He drank red wine at dinner, that was all. He ate less compulsively, he’d lost twenty pounds in his gut and torso. His hair was still falling out but what the hell, Hazel stroked his bumpy bald head, twirled her fingers in the wiry fringe that remained, and pronounced him the most handsome man she’d ever met.
His ex-wife had wounded Gallagher sexually, other women had disappointed him. But Hazel Jones obliterated such memories.
Virtually overnight, Gallagher had gone from being a man who went to bed at 4 A.M. and staggered awake next day at noon, to being a man who went to bed at 11 P.M. most weekday nights and woke at 7 A.M. He produced a series of radio programs (“Jazz America,” “American Classics”) that originated in Syracuse, at a local station, and was broadcast eventually through New York State, Ohio, Pennsylvania. He’d been befriended by the editor in chief of the Syracuse Post-Dispatch, a Gallagher-owned paper, yet one of the more independent of the chain, and had begun writing newspaper columns for the editorial page on ethical/political issues. Civil rights, school desegregation, Martin Luther King, Junior. Racial discrimination in labor unions. The need for “radical reform” in New York State divorce law. The “morally suspect” war in Vietnam. These were impassioned columns, leavened with humor, that soon drew notice. Chet Gallagher was the sole liberal voice published in the Gallagher newspapers, a controversial presence. When the editors endorsed, as invariably they did, Republican candidates for office, Gallagher flamboyantly criticized, dissected, exposed. That he could be as critical of Democratic candidates was a measure of his integrity. Angry letters were published condemning his views. The more controversy, the more papers sold. Gallagher loved the attention! (His columns were never censored in the Syracuse paper, but other papers in the Gallagher chain sometimes declined to print them. These decisions had nothing to do with Thaddeus Gallagher, who rarely interfered with the operations of any of his papers if they were making profits. Very likely, Thaddeus read every column of Gallagher’s, for he was a man who kept a close scrutiny on all aspects of Gallagher Media, but he never made any comment on his youngest son’s columns, so far as Gallagher knew, and he’d never exercised his power to censor a column. It had long been a principle of the old man to detach himself from his youngest son’s career as a way of establishing his own moral superiority to him.)
And so, Gallagher was happy. To a degree.
Is she married? Is that it? And not divorced? She has lied to me, is that it?
Unbidden the thought came to him, even when they were making love. Even when they were sitting side by side, clasping hands, listening to the child Zacharias play piano. (His first public recital, at the Portman Academy. Aged nine, Zack was the youngest performer of the evening and drew the most enthusiastic applause.) Sometimes he was stricken by jealousy, a misery like tight-coiled snakes in his gut.
Hazel had told him she had never been married. She spoke with such pained sincerity, Gallagher could not doubt her word.
More and more, Gallagher wanted to adopt the child. Before it was too late. But to adopt the child, he must be the mother’s husband.
In his soul, Gallagher loathed the very idea of marriage. He loathed the intrusion of the state into the private lives of individuals. He quite agreed with Marx, he’d used to quote Marx to inflame Thaddeus, for Marx had got it right, mostly: the masses of humankind sell themselves for wages, capitalists are sons of bitches who’d slit your throat and collect your blood in vials and sell it to the highest bidder, religion is the opium of the masses and the churches are capitalist ventures organized to make money, secure power, influence. Of course, laws favor the rich and powerful, power wishes only to engender more power as capital wishes only to engender more capital. Of course the industrial world is pitched to madness, World War I, World War II, always the specter of World War, the ceaseless strife of nations. Marx had got most of it right and Freud had got the rest of it right: civilization was the price you paid for not getting your throat slashed, but it was too damned high a price to pay.
Getting a divorce in New York State in the mid-1950s! Gallagher was one of the walking wounded, almost a decade later.
“Asshole. Whose fault but my own!”
The irony was, he’d married to placate others. His mother had been very ill at the time, she would die shortly after the wedding. The tyranny of the dying mother’s role in civilization cannot be overestimated! Gallagher had returned from overseas wishing not to succumb to despair, depression, alcoholism like other veterans of his acquaintance, for an entire generation the only salvation had been marriage.
Gallagher had been young: twenty-seven. Grateful not to have been killed and not (visibly) crippled. As a way of showing his gratitude for being alive he had hoped to placate others, above all his parents. A mistake he would not make again.
Living in Albany, capital of New York state, Gallagher had been aware of the intrusion of the state into individuals’ lives, even as a boy. Impossible not to be aware of politics if you live in Albany! Not the politics of idealism but grub-politics, the politics of “deals.” There was no goal higher than “deals” and no motive higher than “self-interest.” Gallagher’s disgust reached its peak in 1948 with the sordid politicking that accompanied the Taft-Hartley law which the Republican-dominated U.S. Congress passed over Truman’s veto. And Dewey’s sneering campaign against Truman, to which Thaddeus contributed a good deal of money, not all of it a matter of public record.
He’d quarreled with Thaddeus, and moved away from Ardmoor Park. He would never be on comfortable terms with the old man again.
That Hazel Jones should consider herself unworthy of the Gallaghers, and of him! Preposterous.
To his shame he heard himself begging.
“Hazel, I could adopt Zack as my son, if we were married. Don’t you think that’s a good idea?”
Quickly Hazel kissed Gallagher saying yes, she supposed so.
Someday.
“Someday? Zack is growing up, the time is now. Not when he’s an adolescent who won’t give a damn about any father.”
Wanting to say won’t give a shit about any father. The anger in him was mounting, to desperation.
In the music room at the rear of the house Zack was playing piano. Must have struck a wrong note, the music broke off abruptly and after a brief pause began again.
Seeing that he was upset, Hazel took Gallagher’s hand that was so much larger and heavier than her own, lifted and pressed it against her cheek in one of Hazel Jones’s impulsive gestures that pierced her lover’s heart.
“Someday.”
For the Young Pianists’ Competition in Rochester, in May 1967, the boy was preparing Schubert’s “Impromptu No. 3.” At ten and a half, he would be the youngest performer on the program, which included pianists to the age of eighteen.
The next-youngest was a Chinese-American boy of twelve who was being trained at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto, and who had recently placed second in an international competition for young pianists in that city.
Day following day and often into the late evening the child practiced. Such precise, cleanly struck notes, such rapidity of execution, you would not have thought the pianist was so young a child and if, like Gallagher, you were drawn to the doorway of the music room, the child’s intense unblinking eyes would remain fixed upon the keyboard (the piano was no longer the Baldwin upright but a Steinway baby grand Gallagher had bought from Zimmerman Brothers) and his small fingers striking the keys as if of their own volition for the piece must be memorized, not a note, not a pause, not a depression of the pedal left to chance.
Gallagher listened, entranced. No doubt about it, the boy played more beautifully than Gallagher had done at his age, and older. Gallagher would boast He’s inherited all I had to give him. Quite a talent, isn’t he!
By degrees Gallagher was becoming the child’s father. Strange that he did not much wonder who the child’s true father was.
In the doorway of the music room Gallagher lingered, uncertain. Waiting for the boy to break off practice at which point Gallagher would clap enthusiastically-“Bravo, Zack! Sounds terrific”-and the boy would blush with pleasure. But the practice continued, and continued, for if Zack made the smallest error he must return to the beginning and start again, until Gallagher at last lost patience and slipped away, unseen.
Didn’t I promise you, Ma? You would be proud.
“Zack” is his name. A name out of the Bible. For he is blessed of God, Ma. None of us would have guessed!
My son. Your grandson. His face will be known to you, when you see him. It’s a face you will recognize, Ma. The father is not in him, much.
His eyes, Ma! His eyes are beautiful, like yours.
Maybe they are Pa’s eyes, too. A little.
At the piano, I hear him and I know where he is. In all the world he is here, Ma. With us.
He is safe in this house.
I should not have left you, Ma. I stayed away so long.
Sometimes I think my soul was lost in those fields. Along the canal. I stayed away from you so long, Ma.
I am paying for that, Ma.
If you hear him, Ma, you will know. Why I had to live. I love you, Ma.
This is for you, Ma.
It is called “Impromptu No. Three” by Schubert.
So quickly it happened, he would replay it many times in his memory. Always he was invisible, helpless to intervene. If something had happened to his mother, helpless.
Thinking I didn’t warn her. It was like I wasn’t there, no one saw me.
Out of nowhere the man appeared.
Out of nowhere staring at Hazel Jones as if he knew her.
Though in fact Zack had been seeing the man for perhaps ten, twenty seconds. Zack who never took notice of anyone had been seeing this man watching his mother from a distance of about thirty feet, as Hazel walked on the graveled path through the park, oblivious.
There was a repair truck parked in the roadway nearby. The man must have been a repairman of some sort, in soiled work clothes, work shoes. In cities (they lived always in cities now, and traveled only to cities) you learn not to see such individuals who are not likely to be individuals whom you know, or who know you.
Except this man was watching Hazel Jones, very intently.
This day! “Free time” for Zack. The day following a piano recital. For perhaps seventy-two hours his senses would be alert, aroused. He continued to hear music in his head yet the intensity of the music abated, and the need of his fingers to create it. His eyes felt new to him at such times, raw, exposed to hurt. They filled with moisture easily. His ears craved to hear, with a strange hunger: not music but ordinary sounds. Voices! Noises!
He felt like a creature that has pushed its way out of a smothering cocoon, unaware of the cocoon until now.
The man in work clothes was no age Zack could judge, maybe Gallagher’s age, or younger. He looked like one whom life has chewed up. He was perhaps six feet tall, yet there was a broken, caved-in look to his chest. His lower jaw jutted, his skin was coarse and mottled and flamey as if with burst boils. His head appeared subtly deformed like partly melted wax and strands of colorless hair lay like seaweed across his scalp. A ravaged-angry face like something scraped along pavement yet out of this face eyes shone strangely with yearning, wonderment.
It’s him.
Is it-him?
An afternoon in September 1968. They were spending the weekend in Buffalo, New York. They were guests of the Delaware Conservatory of Music. A party of six or seven persons, all adults with the exception of Zack, were walking in the direction of the Park Lane Hotel where the Joneses and Gallagher were staying. They had had lunch together at the Conservatory where, the previous evening, the young pianist had performed; he would not be twelve until November, but had been accepted as a scholarship student at the prestigious music school, and would play with the Conservatory Chamber Orchestra the following spring.
Hazel and Zack were walking more slowly than the others. By instinct wanting to be alone together. Ahead, Gallagher was talking animatedly with his new acquaintances. He had established himself as Zacharias Jones’s protector, manager. Vaguely it was implied that Gallagher was the boy’s stepfather and when Hazel Jones was called “Mrs. Gallagher” the misassumption was accepted in silence.
The remarkable young pianist Zacharias Jones was the subject of the adults’ conversation as he had been the subject of the luncheon but the young pianist himself was not much engaged. He, him, the boy he overheard, at a distance. Long he’d been adept at detaching himself from the attentions of others. In the roadside cafés where his hands had first discovered the piano keyboard he had begun knowing that it made little difference what others said, what others thought, there was only the music, finally. From Hazel Jones he’d learned to be both here and not-here simultaneously; how to smile even as your mind has retreated elsewhere. Zack behaved rudely and impatiently, at times. He would be forgiven, for he was a gifted young pianist: you had to assume he was playing music in his head. Hazel too played a continuous music in her head, but no one could guess what that music was.
During the lunch in the Conservatory dining room Zack had glanced up at Hazel Jones, to see her watching him. She’d smiled, and winked so that no one else could see, and Zack had blushed, looking quickly away.
They had no need to speak. What was between them could not be uttered in words.
Make his debut. Zacharias Jones would make his debut in February 1969 with the Delaware Chamber Orchestra among whom there were few musicians younger than eighteen.
February 1969! At the luncheon, Hazel had laughed uneasily saying it seemed so far off, what if something happened to…
Others looked at Hazel so quizzically, Zack knew that his mother had misspoken.
Gallagher intervened. Showing his devil’s-point teeth in a smile remarking that February 1969 would be here quickly enough.
Zack would play a concerto, yet to be chosen. The orchestra conductor would be working closely with him of course.
Feeling at that moment a sensation of alarm, the cold taste of panic. If he failed…
Afterward, Hazel Jones had touched his arm, lightly. They would allow the others to walk ahead through the park. It was a wan warm sepia-tinted autumn afternoon. Hazel paused to admire swans, both dazzling white and black, with red bills, paddling in the lagoon in surges of languid energy.
How the company of those others oppressed them! Almost, they could not breathe.
After the previous evening’s recital, Gallagher had hugged Zack and kissed the top of his head playfully saying he should be damned proud of himself. Zack had been pleased, but embarrassed. He was deeply in love with Gallagher yet shy and self-conscious in the man’s presence.
Pride puzzled Zack Jones! He had never understood what pride was.
Nor did Hazel seem to know. When she’d been a Christian girl she’d been taught that pride is a sin, pride goeth before a fall. Pride is dangerous, isn’t it?
“Pride is for other people, Zack. Not us.”
Zack was thinking of this when he saw the man in work clothes, at the edge of the roadway. The park was not very populated, traffic moved on the road slowly, intermittently. No one in view was dressed in work clothes except this individual who was staring at Hazel as if trying to decide if he knew her.
It was not unusual for strangers to stare at Hazel Jones in public but there was something different about this individual, Zack felt the danger.
Yet he said nothing to his mother.
Now the man had decided to approach Hazel, and was walking toward her with surprising swiftness. Suddenly you could see that he was a man who acts with his body. Though he looked unhealthy with his caved-in chest and boiled face yet he was not weak, and he was not indecisive. Like a wolf coming up swiftly and noiselessly behind a deer, that has not yet sensed its presence. The man made his way slantwise across a patch of grass in which please! do not walk on the grass was prominently displayed, and along the graveled path. Massive plane trees bordered the path and sun fell in coin-sized splotches on pedestrians as they passed beneath.
There was something of the deer to Hazel Jones in her high-heeled shoes and stylish straw hat, and there was something of the wolf, coarse-haired, ungainly, to the man in work clothes. Fascinating to Zack to see his mother through this stranger’s eyes: the scintillant chestnut-red hair, lacquered flash of red nails and red mouth. The perfect posture, high-held head. For luncheon in the elegant Conservatory dining room Hazel had worn a very pale beige linen suit with several strands of pearls and a wide-brimmed straw hat with a green velvet ribbon. Zack had noticed people looking at her, in admiration; but no one had stared rudely. After the Rochester Young Pianists’ Competition when Zack, the youngest performer, had received a special citation from the judges, photographs of the honored pianists and their parents were taken and one of the photographers had told Hazel, “You’re so beautiful with your hair and skin tone, you should certainly wear black.” And Hazel had laughed, disdainfully, “Black! Black is for mourning, and I’m not in mourning.”
Now the man in work clothes had caught up to Hazel and was speaking with her. Zack saw his mother turn to stare at him, startled.
“Ma’am? Excuse me?”
Blindly Hazel groped for Zack, who stood out of reach.
He saw the panic in her face. He saw her frightened eyes inside the Hazel Jones mask.
“Just I’m wondering if-if you know me? Like do I look like anybody you know, ma’am? My name is Gus Schwart.”
Quickly Hazel shook her head no. She would regain her composure, smiling her polite, wary smile.
Ahead, Gallagher and the others had not noticed. They continued on, in the direction of the hotel.
“Ma’am, I’m real sorry to bother you. But you look familiar to me. Used to live in Milburn? It’s a small town maybe a few hundred miles east of here, on the Erie Canal? I went to school there…”
Hazel stared at him so blankly, the man began to falter. His scabby face flushed red. He tried to smile, as an animal might smile showing yellowed, raggedy teeth.
Zack stood close by to protect his mother but the man took not the slightest interest in him.
Hazel was saying apologetically no she didn’t know him, she didn’t know Milburn.
“I been sick, ma’am. I ain’t been well. But now I’m over it, and I…”
Hazel was tugging at Zack’s arm, they would make their escape. The man in work clothes swiped at his mouth, embarrassed. Yet he could not let them go, he followed them for a few yards, clumsy, stammering, “Just you look kind of-familiar, ma’am? Like somebody I used to know? My brother Herschel and me, and my sister Rebecca, we used to live in Milburn…I left in 1949.”
Tersely Hazel said over her shoulder, “Mister, I don’t think so. No.”
Mister was not a word Hazel Jones ordinarily used, not in this tone. There was something crude and dismissive in her speech, that was unlike Hazel Jones.
“Zack! Come on.”
Zack allowed himself to be pulled with Hazel, like a small child. He was stunned, unable to comprehend the encounter.
Not my father. Not that man.
His heart beat heavily, in disappointment.
Hazel pulled at Zack’s arm and he jerked it from her. She had no right to treat him as if he was five years old!
“Who was that man, Mom? He knew you.”
“No. He didn’t.”
“And you knew him. I saw that.”
“No.”
“You used to live in Milburn, Mom. You said so.”
Hazel spoke tight-lipped, not looking at him. “No. Chautauqua Falls. You were born in Chautauqua Falls.” She paused, panting. She seemed about to say more, but could not speak.
Zack would taunt his mother now. In the aftermath of the encounter in the park he felt strangely aroused, unsettled.
In the aftermath of the recital he was free to say, to do anything he wished.
He was furious at Hazel in her linen suit, pearls and wide-brimmed straw hat.
“You did know that man. Damn liar you did.”
He nudged Hazel. He wanted to hurt her. Why did she never raise her voice, why did she never shout at him? Why did she never cry?
“He was looking at you so hard. I saw that.”
Hazel maintained her dignity, gripping the rim of her straw hat as she crossed a roadway, hurriedly. Zack wanted to rush after her and pound her with his fists. He wanted to use his fists to hit, hit! Halfway he wanted to break his hands, that were so precious to the adults.
Gallagher and the others were waiting for Hazel and Zack, beneath the hotel portico. Gallagher stood with crossed arms, smiling. The visit to Buffalo had gone as well as he’d hoped. Gallagher would look for a new house, in the Delaware Park area which was the most exclusive residential area in the city; in Syracuse, he would put their present house on the market. If he hadn’t quite enough money for a spacious old house in Delaware Park, possibly he’d borrow from a Gallagher relative.
The look in Gallagher’s face when Hazel came to him: like a light switched on.
Zack was trailing behind Hazel hot-faced, sullen. He must say goodbye to the adults, shake their hands and behave sensibly. The attention of strangers was blinding, like stage lights. Except onstage you have no need to stare into the lights, you turn your attention onto the beautiful white-and-black keyboard stretching in front of you.
Zack would be returning to Buffalo, in less than a month. He would take piano instructions with the most revered member of the Delaware Conservatory, who had studied with the great German pianist Egon Petri when Petri had taught in California.
If he failed…
He had not failed, the previous evening. He’d played the Schubert “Impromptu” which Hazel so loved, and a newer piece with which he’d been less satisfied, a Chopin nocturne. The tempo of the nocturne seemed to him maddeningly slow, the pianist had felt exposed as if naked. Not music to hide inside!
Still, the audience had seemed to like him. The Conservatory faculty, including his new teacher, had seemed to like him. Waves of applause, a waterfall drowning out the hot beat of blood in his ears. Why! why! why! why! He was dazed at such times, scarcely knowing where he was. Like a swimmer who has nearly drowned, struggling desperately to save himself and in this way drawing the attention of admiring strangers who applaud. Gallagher had told him to be proud of himself, and Hazel who was less demonstrative than Gallagher in public had squeezed his hand, allowing him to know that she was very happy, he’d played so well.
“You see? I told you!”
And so, Zack had not been defeated. He had not failed, yet. And he would practice harder, ever harder. Predictions had been made of him, lavish predictions he must live out. He felt the bitter weight of such responsibility, he resented it. Overhearing Hans Zimmerman remarking to his brother Edgar My youngest pupil has the oldest eyes. Yet he was giddy with relief, he had been spared. This time.
He would go upstairs to their suite in the Park Lane Hotel and fall onto his bed and sink into a deep dreamless sleep.
Mother and son went upstairs to the ninth floor, Gallagher remained behind to have a drink in the hotel lounge, with the conductor of the chamber orchestra. How tireless Gallagher was, plotting the future! His life was his little family, he adored without question. Upstairs Hazel removed her stylish straw hat and tossed it in the direction of the bed. Before she could see where it might land, she’d already turned away. Neither she nor Zack had spoken since Zack had shouted at her. In the elevator ascending to the ninth floor they had not looked at each other, nor touched. Zack was very tired now, fatigue was overtaking him like an eclipse of the sun. He saw his mother standing quietly at one of the tall windows, gazing down toward the park. He went to use the bathroom, making as much noise as he could, and when he returned Hazel was still standing there, leaning her forehead against the windowpane. Always when they checked into hotels Hazel would examine their rooms for cleanliness and she would not neglect the windows, frowning to see if they were polished clean or if they had been sullied by a stranger’s forehead. Zack observed her in silence. He was thinking of the man in work clothes, who had not been his father. Who the man was, Zack would not know. If he went to Hazel, to peer at her face, he would see that it was a vacant face, no longer young and not very beautiful. The eyes would be without luster, the light drained from them. The shoulders were beginning to slump, the breasts were becoming heavy, graceless. He was furious with her. He was frightened of her. He would not speak to her, however. Certainly Hazel was aware of him, her son’s hot accusing eyes, but she would not speak. Alone together, mother and son often did not speak. What was between them, knotted together like a tangle of guts, they had no need to utter.
Zack turned away. Went into his room adjoining the adults’ suite, shut the door but did not lock it. Fell onto the bed not removing any of his clothing nor even kicking off his shoes that were dusty from the park. Woke with a start later that afternoon to discover that the room was partially darkened, for Hazel had drawn the venetian blinds, and there was Hazel Jones lying beside Zack on top of the bed, fully clothed as well but with her high-heeled shoes kicked off, sunk into a sleep deep and exhausted as his own had been.
Dragging the stunned boy by his arm. As if wanting to tear his arm out of its socket. Yelling at him, punching and kicking. On the ground the boy tries to escape, crawling on hands and knees and then dragging himself as his father catches him, brings his booted foot down on the boy’s hands: first the right, then the left. Hearing the small bones crack. Hearing the boy screaming Daddy don’t hurt me! Daddy don’t kill me! and where is the mother, why isn’t the mother intervening, for the assault isn’t over, will not be over until the boy lies unconscious and bleeding and still the wrathful father will cry You’re my son! My fucking son! My son. Mine.
Yet it took her weeks to make the call. In fact it had taken her years.
And then, dialing the number that was suddenly familiar again to her, steeling herself hearing the phone ring at the other end of the line, she was struck by a sudden vision of the Meltzers’ house she had neither contemplated nor envisioned in years and in that instant from the side door of the Meltzers’ house she was seeing the farmhouse next door which was the house in which she’d lived and nursed her baby in a delirium of unspeakable happiness she knew now to be the only purely happy time of her life, and she began to tremble, and could not speak with the ease and clarity Hazel Jones had wished.
“Mrs.-Mrs. Meltzer? You won’t remember me-I lived next door to you eight years ago. In that old farmhouse. I lived with a man named Niles Tignor. You took care of my little boy when I worked in town, in a factory. You-”
Hazel’s voice broke. She could hear, at the other end of the line, an in-take of breath.
“Is this Rebecca? Rebecca Tignor?”
The voice was Mrs. Meltzer’s, unmistakable. Yet it was an altered voice, older and oddly frail.
“Hello? Hello? Is this Rebecca?”
Hazel tried to speak. She managed to speak, in choked monosyllables. Her heart was beating dangerously hard in her chest. The damned ringing in her ear, to which she’d grown so accustomed she rarely heard it during the day, was confused now with the pulsing of her blood.
“Rebecca? My God, I thought you were dead! You and Niley both. We thought he’d killed you, all those years ago.”
Mrs. Meltzer sounded as if she was about to cry. Hazel silently begged her no.
Edna Meltzer had not been her mother. It was ridiculous to confuse the two women. It was ridiculous to be trembling like this gripping the phone receiver so her hand shook.
At least, she was making the call in an empty house. Both Gallagher and Zack were out.
“Where is he, Mrs. Meltzer?”
“He’s dead, Rebecca.”
“Dead…”
“Tignor died in Attica, Rebecca, two-three years ago. That’s what Howie heard. He was sent away on assault, ”extortion‘-I’m not sure what “extortion’ is, some kind of blackmail I guess. None of it had anything to do with Four Corners or with what he’d done to you, Rebecca. We never saw him after that time he came to our house crazy-like wanting to know where you were, and we said we did not know! He was set to kill you, or anybody stood in his way, we could see. Saying you stole his son, and you stole his car. Saying no woman had ever insulted him like that and you would pay for it. He was like a wild man, saying he would murder you with his bare hands for betraying him, and he’d murder us if he found out we were hiding you. Howie has a shotgun, Howie ain’t one to back down, I told Howie just let it be, don’t rile the man up any worse than he is. Well, Tignor went off! Left the house like it was, mostly.” Mrs. Meltzer paused to catch her breath. Hazel saw the older woman warming to her subject, thrilled, smiling. Her voice had gained strength. It was no longer the voice of an old woman. “Such a time it was, then! But now it’s real quiet here. People moved in next-door, nice family and kids and they fixed up the house some. Oh, there never was anyone like Tignor in Four Corners before or since, I have to say.”
Hazel was sitting down. In an acid-bright patch of sunlight Hazel Jones was sitting down.
Mrs. Meltzer was asking how Niley was, such a sweet little boy, and Hazel managed to say that Niley was fine, healthy, he was eleven years old and played piano, and Mrs. Meltzer said this sounded wonderful she was so happy to hear this, her and Howie and other neighbors in Four Corners had the bad thought for years that Tignor had murdered them both and hid their bodies in the canal maybe where nobody would ever find them, and now Tignor himself was dead, probably killed by somebody like himself, they was killing one another all the time in Attica and the guards were almost bad as the prisoners, thank God the prison wasn’t any closer than it was, but how was Rebecca? where was Rebecca living now? was she married again, did she have a family?
“Rebecca? Rebecca?”
She had to lie down. She was dazed, dizzy as if he’d slapped the side of her head only just a few minutes ago, the ringing in her ear was high-pitched as a deranged cicada.
She would call Mrs. Meltzer back, another time. Only just not now.
“”Hazel Jones.“ A mysterious name out of the past.”
The elderly invalid leaned forward in his wheelchair to grip both Hazel’s hands in his, rather hard. She had no idea what he meant: mysterious? The man’s large glassy veined eyes of the hue of pewter gazed up at Hazel with such intensity, she was unnerved not knowing if Thaddeus Gallagher meant to be naively adoring, or was mocking such adoration of a young woman visitor. His hands gripping hers were doughy, warmly moist, seemingly boneless. Yet the man was strong. You understood that Thaddeus Gallagher was strong in his heavy upper body if not in his lower body and that he exulted in this strength, all the while continuing to smile at his startled visitor with the smiling air of a benevolent host. Hazel felt a shiver of dread that he would not release her, Gallagher would have to intervene and there would be an unpleasant scene.
Don’t let my father manipulate you, Hazel! Immediately we step into his presence, he will exert his will upon us like a fat spider at the center of its web.
The shock of meeting Gallagher’s father! Not only was the old man confined to a wheelchair but his body appeared deformed, a shapeless mass of mollusc-flesh inside weirdly jaunty tartan plaid bathing trunks and a white cotton T-shirt strained to bursting. Massive thighs and buttocks were squeezed against the unyielding sides of the wheelchair. Thaddeus’s arms were muscled while his legs hung useless, pale and atrophied. Yet his feet were large and wedge-like, resting bare against the wheelchair’s padded footrest. The big bare toes twitched in obscene delight.
An invalid! Thaddeus Gallagher! Hazel cast her companion Gallagher a look of dismay. How like Gallagher to complain of his father to her for years while neglecting to mention that the man was an invalid in a wheelchair.
Thaddeus winked at Hazel as if they shared an intimate joke, too subtle for Gallagher to grasp. “You seem surprised, dear? I apologize for greeting you so casually dressed but I swim, or try to swim, every day at this time. I confess that I also feel less constrained by decorum and fashion in my seventies than I did at your young age. My son ”Chet Gallagher,“ the prize-winning journalist and public seer, might have warned you what to expect.” Thaddeus laughed, sucking at his fleshy lips. He was reluctant to release Hazel’s hands that were damp and numbed from his grasp.
All the while, Gallagher stood awkwardly beside Hazel, staring at his father in vague unease. He had said very little. He seemed as confused as Hazel. The sight of his father whom he had not seen in several years must have alarmed him. That the elderly man was in a wheelchair and they were on their feet seemed to put the couple at a disadvantage.
Thaddeus said fussily, “Please do sit, both of you! Pull those chairs a little closer. We’ll have drinks now. After, I hope you will both join me for a swim in the pool. It’s a very warm day, and both of you are overdressed, and are looking uncomfortable.”
Thaddeus had been awaiting his visitors outside, by the pool. An Olympic-sized pool it was, exquisitely tiled in a deep rich aqua intended to suggest, as Gallagher had explained to Hazel, the Mediterranean. Yet the water exuded a warm sulphurous odor as of stale bathwater. Hazel’s nostrils pinched. She could not imagine herself in that water, she felt a wave of faintness at the prospect.
Gallagher was saying, quickly, “I don’t think so, Father. We don’t have time for that. We-”
“You’ve said. You must get back to the ”music festival‘ in Vermont. Of course.“ Thaddeus spoke with dignity, though looking rebuffed. He pressed a button on the arm of the wheelchair and the motorized chair moved forward. Sunlight illuminated oily beads of perspiration on his wide sallow face. ”But sit with me a while, at least. As if,“ smiling up at Gallagher, ”we had something in common beyond a name.“
It was late August 1970. At last, Gallagher had brought Hazel to Ardmoor Park to visit his aging father. In the past year Thaddeus had several times invited them, with a hint that his health was “worsening”; he had learned that Hazel’s son Zacharias Jones was one of the young musicians in residence at the Vermont Music Festival in Manchester, Vermont, less than an hour’s drive from Ardmoor Park. Reluctantly, Gallagher had given in. “Maybe my father is really ill. Maybe he’s repentant. Maybe I’m crazy.” Gallagher joked in his usual mordant way but Hazel understood that he was genuinely fearful of the visit.
Through the 1960s, the Gallagher newspapers had remained staunchly in favor of the Vietnam War. Yet, most of the papers continued to run Chet Gallagher’s column, that had won national awards and appeared now in more than fifty newspapers. Gallagher also published opinion pieces in popular magazines and occasionally appeared on television panels discussing politics, ethics, American culture. Hazel had become his assistant; she liked best doing research for him at the University of Buffalo library. It was becoming more difficult for Gallagher to maintain his distance from Gallagher Media, and from Thaddeus. Through intermediaries he heard that his father was “proud” of him-“damned proud”-though he would never agree with his youngest son’s “rabid radical politics.” Gallagher had been told, too, that Thaddeus was eager to meet his “second family.”
Gallagher would introduce Hazel to Thaddeus as his friend and companion, he would not even call her his fiancée. He would not be bringing Zack to Ardmoor Park at all.
He had warned Hazel not to be drawn into personal conversation with his father, still less into answering questions she didn’t want to answer. “I know he’s curious about you. He will interrogate you. He’s an old newspaper man, that’s what he knows. Poking and prodding and stabbing until the blade finds a soft spot, then he shoves it in.”
Hazel laughed nervously. Gallagher had to be exaggerating!
“No. It’s impossible to exaggerate Thaddeus Gallagher.”
Gallagher’s newspaper column was accompanied by a line-drawing caricature: a comically quizzical horsey face with a high forehead, deep-pouched eyes, lopsided smile, jutting chin and prominent ears. Around the near-bald dome of a head a fringe of kinky curls like a wreath. “Caricature is the art of exaggeration,” Gallagher told Hazel, “yet it can tell the truth. In times like ours, caricature may be the only truth.”
Yet on the drive from Manchester to Ardmoor Park, Gallagher’s composure leaked from him like air from a deflating balloon. He was chain-smoking, distracted. He avoided the subject of Thaddeus Gallagher and spoke only of Zack whom they’d heard perform the previous evening at the music festival. Zack was now thirteen, no longer a child. He was becoming lanky, loose-jointed. His skin had an olive-dark pallor. His nose, eyebrows, eyes were striking, prominent. In the company of adults he was withdrawn, rather reserved, yet his piano performances were praised as “warm”-“reflective”-“startlingly mature.” Where many child prodigies perform with mechanical precision and a deficiency of feeling, Zacharias Jones brought to his playing an air of emotional subtlety that was beautifully reflected in such pieces as the Grieg sonata he’d played at the festival. Gallagher could not stop marveling over the performance.
“He isn’t a child, Hazel, in his music. It’s uncanny.”
Hazel thought Of course he isn’t a child! There wasn’t time.
“But we’re not going to discuss Zack with my father, Hazel. He will want to know about your ”talented‘ son, he will hint that Gallagher Media could “put him on the map.” He will interrogate you, he will stick and stab if you let him. Don’t fall into the trap of answering Thaddeus’s questions. The one thing he wants to know-to put it bluntly-is whether Zack might be his grandson. Because of all the things he has, he doesn’t have grandchildren. And so-“
Hazel saw that her lover’s face was creased, contorted. He looked both angry and aggrieved, like a gargoyle. He was driving too fast for the narrow road curving through hilly countryside.
Hazel said, “But you and I didn’t even meet, until Zack was in school, in Malin Head Bay. How can your father-”
“He can. He can imagine anything. And it’s a fact he can’t know, even if he has hired private investigators to look into our relationship, when we first met. That, he can’t know. So I will field his questions, Hazel. We will stay for an hour, maybe an hour and a half. All this I’ve explained, but he will try to dissuade us of course. He will try to dissuade you.”
They were passing large estates set back from the road like storybook houses. Vast green lawns in which fugitive rainbows leapt and gleamed among sprinklers. Enormous elms, oaks. Juniper pine. There were ponds, lagoons. Picturesque brooks. The estates were bordered by primitive stone walls.
Gallagher said, “And please don’t exclaim that the house is ”beautiful,“ Hazel. You aren’t obliged. Sure, it’s beautiful. Every damn property in Ardmoor Park is beautiful. You bet, anything can be beautiful if you spend millions of bucks on it.”
By the time they arrived at his father’s house, the house of his boyhood, Gallagher was visibly nervous. It was a French Normandy mansion originally built in the 1880s but restored, refurbished and modernized in the 1920s. Hazel did not tell Gallagher that it was beautiful. Its enormous dull-gleaming slate roofs and hand-hewn stone facade reminded her of the elaborate mausoleums in Buffalo’s vast Forest Lawn Cemetery.
Gallagher parked beyond the curve of the horseshoe drive, like an adolescent preparing for a quick departure. He tossed his cigarette onto the gravel. With the bravado of an afflicted man mimicking his own discomfort, he thumped his midriff with his fist: he’d been having gastric attacks lately, dismissed as “nerves.”
“Remember, Hazel: we are not staying for dinner. We have ”other plans’ back in Vermont.“
Thaddeus Gallagher turned out not to be eagerly awaiting his visitors inside the massive house, but at the rear, by the pool. A female servant unknown to Gallagher answered the door, and insisted upon leading them to the pool area though Gallagher certainly knew the way. “I used to live here, ma’am. I’m your employer’s son.”
Along a flagstone path, beneath a wisteria archway, through a garden whose roses were mostly spent, fallen. Hazel glanced into tall windows bordered by leaded-glass panes. She saw only her own faint and insubstantial reflection.
And there, in his motorized wheelchair, in white T-shirt and tartan plaid trunks: Thaddeus Gallagher.
An invalid! Elderly, and obese! Yet the man’s eyes snatched at Hazel Jones, hungrily.
Close beside the pool they sat. A festive gathering! A male servant in a white jacket brought drinks. Thaddeus talked, talked. Thaddeus had much to say. Hazel knew, from Gallagher, that Thaddeus continued to oversee Gallagher Media, though he’d officially retired. Thaddeus woke at dawn, was on the phone much of the day. Yet he talked now with the air of one who has not spoken to another human being in a long time.
For this visit to Ardmoor Park, Hazel was wearing a summer dress of pale yellow organdy with a sash that tied at the back, a favorite of Gallagher’s. On her head, a wide-brimmed straw hat of an earlier era. On her slender feet, high-heeled straw sandals, with open toes. In a playful mood to celebrate Zack’s three-week residence at the Vermont Music Festival, she had painted both her fingernails and toenails coral pink to match her lipstick.
On the wheelchair footrest Thaddeus Gallagher’s toes twitched and writhed. The abnormally thick nails were discolored as old ivory. Like embryonic hooves they seemed to Hazel who could not help staring, revulsed.
This old man, Thaddeus Gallagher! A multi-millionaire. A much-revered philanthropist. Hazel recalled the wall of photographs in the lodge at Grindstone Island: a younger, less monstrous Thaddeus with his politician friends.
The shadow of death is upon him Hazel thought. She saw it, the fleeting shadow. Like the hawk-shadows passing over her and Gallagher as they’d climbed the steep hill on Grindstone Island.
Yet the older man confronted and confounded the younger. By quick degrees Gallagher lapsed into muttered monosyllables even as Thaddeus talked with zestful animation. Gallagher shifted uneasily in his chair, he seemed unable to catch his breath. Ordinarily, Gallagher did not drink alcohol at this hour of the day but he was drinking it now, very likely to show his father that he could. Hazel saw how he was refusing to glance at her. He was refusing to acknowledge her. Nor did he look Thaddeus Gallagher fully in the face. Gallagher looked like a man whose vision had gone blank: his eyes were open but he did not seem to be seeing. Hazel understood that she, the female, was meant to observe father and son: son and father: the elder Gallagher and the younger: meant to appreciate how the elder was the stronger of the two, in this matter of masculine will. This scene, Thaddeus had arranged.
At first, Hazel felt sympathy for Gallagher. As she’d felt a maternal protectiveness for Zack when he’d been a younger boy, at the mercy of older boys. But also impatience: why didn’t Gallagher confront his bully-father, why didn’t he speak with his usual authority? Where was Chet Gallagher’s corrosive sense of humor, irony? Gallagher had a superbly modulated “radio” voice he could turn on and off at will, playfully. He made his little family laugh, he could be devastatingly funny. Yet now at his father’s house the man who never stopped talking from morning to night was speaking vaguely, hesitantly, like a child trying not to stammer. This was the first Gallagher had returned to his childhood home since his mother’s death years before. It was the first Gallagher had seen his father in such intimate quarters since that time. He is remembering what hurt him. He is helpless as a child, remembering. Hazel felt a wave of contempt for her lover, unmanned by this overbearing invalid.
Hazel would have wished not to be a witness to Gallagher’s humiliation. But she knew herself, by Thaddeus’s design, the crucial witness.
Beyond the flagstone terrace and the swimming pool with its rich aqua tiles was a stretch of gently sloping lawn. Not all of the lawn was mowed, there were patches of taller grasses, rushes and cattails. On a hill above a glittering pond, a stand of birch trees looking in the sun like vertical stripes of very white paint. Hazel remembered how in the drought of late summer, birches are the most brittle and vulnerable of trees. As in a waking dream she saw the trees broken, fallen. Once beauty is smashed it can’t ever be made whole.
Seeing where Hazel was looking, Thaddeus spoke with childlike vanity of having designed the landscaping himself. He’d worked with a famous architect, and he’d had to fire the architect, finally. In the end, you are left with your own “genius”-such as it is.
Adding, in a pettish tone, “Not that anyone much gives a damn, among the Gallaghers. My family: they’ve all but abandoned me. Nobody comes to visit me, hardly.”
“Really! I’m sorry to hear that, Mr. Gallagher.”
Hazel doubted it was true. There were many Gallagher relatives and in-laws in the Albany area, and she had not heard that Thaddeus’s other adult children, a brother and a sister, were estranged from him as Gallagher was.
“You have no family, Hazel Jones?”
There was a subtle emphasis on you. Hazel felt the danger, Thaddeus would try to interrogate her now.
“I have my son. And I have…”
Hazel’s voice trailed off. She was stricken by a sudden shyness, reluctant to speak Chet Gallagher’s name in his father’s presence.
“But you and Chester are not married, eh?”
The question came blunt and guileless. Hazel felt her face heat with discomfort. Beside her, withdrawn and seemingly indifferent, Gallagher lifted his glass to his mouth and drank.
Hazel said, “No, Mr. Gallagher. We are not married.”
“Though you’ve been together for six years? Seven? Such free-thinking young people! It’s admirable, I suppose. ”Bohemian.“ Now in the 1970s, when ”anything goes.“” Thaddeus paused, shifting his bulk eagerly in the wheelchair. His groin appeared swollen as a goiter in the snug-fitting plaid trunks. His flushed scalp was damp beneath thin floating wisps of silvery hair. “Though my son is not so young, is he? Not any longer.”
Gallagher let this remark pass, as if unhearing. Hazel could think of no reply that was not fatuous even for Hazel Jones.
Thaddeus persisted, gaily: “It is admirable. Throwing off the shackles of the past. Only we, the elderly, wish to retain the past out of a terror of being thrust into the future where we will perish. One generation must make way for another, of course! I seem to have offended my own children, somehow.” He paused, preparing to say something witty. “There’s a distinction naturally between children and heirs. I no longer have ”children,“ I have exclusively ”heirs.“”
Thaddeus laughed. Gallagher made no response. Hazel smiled, as one might smile at a sick child.
The old man must have his melancholy jokes. They were this afternoon’s audience for his jokes. Gallagher had estimated, Thaddeus would leave an estate valued somewhere beyond $100 million. He had a right to expect to be courted, visited. The fat dimpled spider at the center of his quivering web. He wished now to persecute his youngest son whom he loved, who did not love him. He would poke, prod, stab at his son, he would demoralize his son, try to rouse him to fury. He hoped to make Gallagher squirm with guilt as with the most severe of gastric pains. Long he’d planned this passionate love-encounter, that was also revenge.
Winking at Hazel You and I understand each other, eh? My fool son hasn’t a clue.
The suggestion of complicity between them left Hazel shaken, uncertain. Her face was very warm. Here was an old man long assured of his appeal to women. He was suffused with a thrumming life that seemed to have drained from his son.
“Of course, none of us are. Is. Any longer. Young.”
Now Thaddeus began to complain more generally of the United States federal government, saboteurs in the Republican party and outright traitors among the Democrats, America’s cowardly failure to “pull out all stops” in Vietnam. And what of the “media manipulation” of leftist intellectuals in the country, that Senator Joe McCarthy had been onto but got sidetracked, and his enemies bludgeoned the poor bastard to death. Why, Thaddeus wondered, were Jews invariably the ones most opposed to the war in Vietnam? Why were most Jews, when you came down to it, Communists, or Commie-sympathizers! Even Jew-capitalists, in their hearts they’re Communists! Why the hell was this, when Stalin had loathed Jews, the Russian people loathed Jews, there had been more pogroms in Russia than in Germany, Poland, Hungary combined? “Yet in New York City and Los Angeles, that’s all you will find. In broadcast journalism, newspapers. The ”paper of record‘-the Jew York Times. Who was it founded the NAACP-not the “colored people,” you can bet, but the “chosen people.” And why? I ask you, Hazel Jones, why?“
Hazel heard these sputtered and increasingly incoherent words through a steadily mounting ringing in her ears. Mixed with the mad cries of cicadas.
He knows. Knows who I am.
But-how can he?
At last Gallagher roused himself from his stupor.
“Is that so, Thaddeus? All Jews? They don’t disagree with one another, about anything? Ever?”
“To their enemies, Jews present a unified front. The ”chosen people‘-“
“Enemies? Who are the enemies of Jews? Nazis? Anti-Semites? You?”
With a look of indignation Thaddeus drew back in his wheelchair. The subtlety of his argument was being misunderstood! His disinterested philosophical position was being crudely personalized!
“I meant to say, non-Jews. They call us goyim, son. Not enemies per se except as Jews perceive us. You know perfectly well what I mean, son, it’s a matter of historic fact.”
Thaddeus was speaking solemnly now. As if his earlier baiting had been a pose.
But Gallagher rose abruptly to his feet. Mumbling he had to go inside for a few minutes.
Gallagher stumbled away. Hazel worried he was having one of his gastric attacks, that sometimes led to spasms of vomiting. His face had gone sickly white. Gallagher had begun to experience these attacks when he’d first been heckled at anti-war rallies several years ago, in Buffalo. Sometimes he suffered milder attacks before one of Zack’s public performances.
Damn him: Hazel couldn’t help resenting it, being left behind with Gallagher’s father. This grotesque old man in his wheelchair glaring at her.
Saying, in Hazel Jones’s way that was both breathless and apologetic, and her widened eyes fixed upon the glaring eyes in a look of utter distress, “Chet doesn’t mean to be rude, Mr. Gallagher. This is an emotional-”
“Oh yes, is it, for ”Chet‘? And for me, too.“
“He hasn’t been in this house, he said, since-”
“I know exactly how long, Miss Jones. You needn’t inform me of facts regarding my own God-damned family.”
Hazel, shocked, knew herself rebuffed. As if Thaddeus had leaned over and spat on her yellow organdy dress.
God damn your soul to hell, you bastard.
Sick dying old bastard I will have your heart.
The gravedigger’s daughter, Hazel Jones was. There was never a time when Hazel Jones was not. Saying, in an embarrassed murmur to placate the enemy, “Mr. Gallagher, I’m sorry. Oh.”
The white-jacketed servant hovered at the edge of the terrace, perhaps overhearing. Thaddeus noisily finished his drink, a vile-looking scarlet concoction laced with vodka. He too might have been embarrassed, speaking so sharply to a guest. And to so clearly innocent and guileless a guest. His glassy eyes brooded upon the swimming pool, its lurid artificial aqua. In the ripply surface, filaments of cloud were reflected like strands of gut. Thaddeus panted, grunted, scratched viciously at his crotch. He then rubbed his hefty bosom up inside the T-shirt, with a sensuous abandon. Hazel lowered her eyes, the gesture was so intimate.
The photographs she’d seen of Thaddeus Gallagher in the lodge at Grindstone Island were of a stout man, heavy but not obese, with a large head and a self-possessed manner. Now his body appeared swollen, bloated. His jaws had the look of jaws accustomed to ferocious grinding. Hazel wondered what cruel whimsy had inspired him to dress that day in such clothes, exposing and parodying his bulk.
“Bullshit he’s ”emotional.“ He’s a cold-hearted’s.o.b. You will learn, Hazel Jones. Chester Gallagher is not a man to be trusted. I am the one to apologize, Miss Jones, for him. His idiotic ”politics‘! His Ne-gro jazz! Failed at serious piano, so he takes up Ne-gro jazz! Mongrel music. Failed at his marriage so he takes up women he can feel sorry for. He’s shameless. He’s a mythomaniac. He told me, bratty kid of fifteen, “Capitalism is doomed.” The little pisspot! These newspaper columns of his, he invents, he distorts, he exaggerates in the name of “moral truth.” As if there could be a “moral truth’ that refutes historical truth. When he was a drunk-and Chester was a drunk, Miss Jones, for many more years than you’ve known him-he inhabited a kind of bathosphere of mythomania. He has invented such tales of me, my ”business ethics,“ I’ve given up hoping to set them straight. I’m an old newspaper man, I believe in facts. Facts, and more facts! There’s never been an editorial in any Gallagher newspaper not based upon facts! Not liberal crap, sentimental bullshit about ”world peace‘-the “United Nations’-”global disarmament‘-but facts. The bedrock of journalism. Chester Gallagher never respected facts sufficiently. Trying to make himself out some kind of white Ne-gro, playing their music and taking up their causes.“
Hazel was gripping a sweating glass in her hand. She spoke evenly, just slightly coquettishly. “Your son is a mythomaniac, Mr. Gallagher, and you are not?”
Thaddeus squinted at her. His chins jiggled. As if Hazel had reached over to touch his knee, he brightened.
“You must call me ”Thaddeus,“ Hazel Jones. Better yet, ”Thad.“ ”Mr. Gallagher‘ is for servants and other hirelings.“
When Hazel made no reply, Thaddeus leaned toward her, suggestively. “Will you call me ”Thad‘? It’s very like “Chet’-eh? Almost no one calls me ”Thad‘ any longer, my old friends are falling away-every season, like dying leaves.“
Hazel’s lips moved numbly. “”Thad.“”
“Very good! I certainly intend to call you ”Hazel.“ Now and forever.”
Thaddeus moved the wheelchair closer to Hazel. She smelled his old-man odor, the airless interior of the old stone cottage. Yet there was something sweetly sharp beneath, Thaddeus Gallagher’s cologne. A monster-man, crammed into a wheelchair, yet he’d shaved carefully that morning, he’d dabbed on cologne.
Unnerving how, close up, you could see the younger Thaddeus inside the elder’s face, exultant.
“”Hazel Jones.“ A lovely name with something nostalgic about it. Who gave you that name, my dear?”
“I-don’t know.”
“Don’t know? How is that possible, Hazel?”
“I never knew my parents. They died when I was a little girl.”
“Did they! And where was this, Hazel?”
Gallagher had warned, his father would interrogate her. Yet Hazel could not seem to prevent it.
“I don’t know, Mr. Gallagher. It happened so long ago…”
“Not that long ago, surely? You’re a young woman.”
Hazel shook her head slowly. Young?
“”Hazel Jones’ The name is known to me, but not why. Can you explain why, my dear?“
Hazel said lightly, “There are probably ”Hazel Joneses‘-Mr. Gallagher. More than one.“
“Well! Don’t let me upset you, my dear. I’m feeling guilty, I suppose. I seem to have upset my overly sensitive radical son, who has run off and left us.”
Briskly then Thaddeus pressed one of the buttons on the wheelchair. Hazel heard no sound but within seconds a male attendant appeared, in T-shirt, swim trunks, carrying terry cloth robes and towels. This young man called Thaddeus “Mr. G.” and was called by the older man what sounded like “Peppy.” He was about twenty-five, darkly tanned, with a blandly affable boy’s face; he had a swimmer’s physique, long-waisted, with broad wing-like shoulders. Hazel saw his eyes slide onto her, swiftly assessing yet vacant. He was one who knew his place: a wealthy invalid’s physical therapist.
“Will you join me, Hazel? They say I must swim every day, to keep my condition from ”progressing.“ Of course, my condition ”progresses’ in any case. Such is life!“
Hazel declined the invitation. She came to assist Peppy as he helped Thaddeus into the pool, at the shallow end: this was a Hazel Jones gesture, spontaneous and friendly.
“My dear, thank you! I hate the water, until I get into it.”
Peppy fastened red plastic water wings onto the obese man, over his fatty shoulders and across his immense drooping bosom. Slowly then he helped Thaddeus into the water with the frowning attentiveness of a mother helping her clumsy, somewhat fearful child into the water, that shimmered and quaked about him. Hazel offered her hand. And how grateful Thaddeus was, gripping her hand. As his weight slipped into the water like a bag of concrete Thaddeus squeezed Hazel’s slender fingers in a sudden helpless panic. Then, as if miraculously, Thaddeus was in the pool, wheezing, paddling with childlike abandon. Peppy walked and then swam beside him slowly. Thaddeus was laughing, winking up at Hazel who followed his slow progress through the now choppy water, walking at the edge of the pool.
“Hazel! You must join us. The water is perfect, isn’t it, Peppy?”
“Sure is, Mr. G.”
Hazel laughed. Her pretty dress had been splashed, and would stink of chlorine.
“Really, Hazel,” Thaddeus said, holding his head erect out of the water, with an absurd dignity, “you must join us. You’ve come so far.” The motions of his hefty arms were energetic, those of his atrophied legs feeble.
“I don’t have a bathing suit, Mr. Gallagher.”
“”Thad‘! You promised.“
“”Thad.“”
Thaddeus was enlivened again, with a frantic gaiety.
“There are women’s bathing suits in the changing rooms, over there. Please, go look.”
Hazel stood irresolute. Almost, to spite her lover she was tempted.
As if reading her thoughts Thaddeus said slyly, “You must, dear! To show up my cowardly son. He fled, he’s afraid of his old crippled father who has prostate cancer, and a touch of colon cancer to boot. But do you see Thaddeus slinking away in cowardly defeat? You do not.”
Hazel knew not to react to this disclosure. Never must she make any reference to Thaddeus Gallagher’s health. She would pretend she had not heard. Carefully she removed her high-heeled sandals, to walk barefoot at the edge of the pool. Her legs were long, supple with muscle. Her legs were smooth, shaven. It was a fetish with Hazel Jones to shave her legs, thighs and armpits and other areas of her body that might betray her by sprouting dark, rather curly coarse hairs. As Hazel Jones ate sparingly, to remain Hazel Jones who was slender, very feminine and very pretty. In the smelly aqua water, Thaddeus Gallagher strained to watch her.
He could not speak very clearly, paddling and splashing with his absurd water wings. Yet he kept calling to Hazel as one might call to a perverse child. “Surely you can swim, dear? Nothing would happen to you, with Peppy and me at hand.”
Hazel laughed. “I don’t think so, Thad. Thank you.”
“And if I gave you a gift, dear? A thousand dollars.”
Thaddeus meant to speak in such a way that Hazel could interpret the remark as a joke, and not be offended. But the words came out awkwardly, his glassy blinking eyes stared and strained at her.
Hazel shook her head, no.
“Five thousand!” Thaddeus cried gaily.
An old man’s harmless teasing. He was falling in love with Hazel Jones. Cavorting in the water, making even Peppy laugh. Paddling and splashing and kicking and wheezing like a baby elephant. His behavior was so ludicrous, so strangely touching, Hazel had to laugh.
“My dear, don’t abandon me! Please.”
He’d thought that Hazel was walking away. She’d gone only to examine a lattice of crimson climber roses, against a cream-colored stucco wall.
After a few more minutes, Thaddeus abruptly ordered Peppy to haul him out of the pool. Again, Hazel Jones came to help: took the old man’s big fleshy hand, that gripped hers tightly. Hazel also brought towels, terry cloth robes for both men. Thaddeus wrapped the enormous towels about his body, rubbing himself briskly. His thinning hair that lay now flat against the big dome of his head, he dried as energetically as he might have done in his youth when his hair was thick. It was exactly Gallagher’s practice. Hazel saw this, and felt some tenderness for Thaddeus.
In his wheelchair, wrapped in towels large as blankets, Thaddeus puffed and panted and smiled, exhilarated. The white-jacketed servant had brought him another scarlet drink as well as a silver bowl of mixed nuts which he ate noisily.
“Hazel Jones! I must confess I’d heard certain things about you. Now I see, none of them were true.”
Thaddeus spoke in a lowered voice. He kept glancing back at the house, concerned that his son would reappear.
He reached out to take Hazel’s hand. She shivered but did not pull away.
“My son is a man of integrity, I know. I have quarrels with him but in his own way, yes of course he is ”moral.“ I wish that I knew how to love him, Hazel! He has never forgiven me, you see, for things that happened long ago. He has told you, I suppose?” Thaddeus squinted wistfully at Hazel.
“No. He has not.”
“He has not?”
“Never.”
“He complains about my politics, surely? My convictions that are so very different from his?”
“Chet only speaks of you with respect. He loves you, Mr. Gallagher. But he’s afraid of you.”
“Afraid of me! Why?”
There was something furtive and sick in Thaddeus’s face. Yet a glimmering of hope.
“You should ask Chet, Mr. Gallagher. I can’t speak for him.”
“Yes, yes: you can speak for him. Far better you can speak for him, Hazel Jones, than he can speak for himself.” The old man’s pose of drollery had quite fallen away, now he was fully earnest. Almost, he was pleading with Hazel. “He loves me? He respects me?”
“He thinks that your political beliefs are mistaken. That’s all.”
“He has never said anything about-his mother?”
“Only that he loved her. And misses her.”
“Does he! I do, too.”
Thaddeus and Hazel were alone on the terrace. Both Peppy and the servant in the white jacket had departed. Thaddeus sat swathed in white terry cloth, sighing. Still he continued to glance back at the house nervously. “You have no family, Hazel? No one living?”
“No one.”
“Only just your son?”
“Only just my son.”
“Are you and Chet secretly married, dear?”
“No.”
“But why? Why aren’t you married?”
Hazel smiled evasively. No, no! She would not say.
Wistfully Thaddeus asked, “Don’t you love my son? Why would you live with him, if you don’t love him?”
“He loves me. He loves our son.”
The words escaped from Hazel Jones as in a dream. For all her shrewdness she had not known she would utter them until that moment.
She saw in the old man’s face an expression of shock, triumph.
“I knew! I knew that was it!”
Worriedly Hazel said, with the air of one who has confided too much, “He can’t know that I’ve told you, Mr. Gallagher. He can’t bear the thought of being talked about.”
Thaddeus said, panting, “I knew. Somehow, seeing you. I did know. Hazel Jones: this will be our secret.”
A blind, dazed expression came over the old man’s face. For some seconds he sat silent, breathing hard. Hazel felt the terrible pounding of his heart in that massive body. Thaddeus was deeply gratified yet suddenly very tired. Cavorting in the pool had exhausted him. This long scene had exhausted him. Hazel would summon one of the servants to help him but Thaddeus continued to grip her hand, hard. Pleading, “You won’t stay for dinner, Hazel? You don’t think that Chet could be talked into changing his mind?”
Gently Hazel said no. She didn’t think so.
“I will miss you, then. I will think of you, Hazel. And of-”Zacharias Jones.“ I will hear the boy play piano, when I can. I will not push myself upon you, I understand that that would be a tactical error. My son is a sensitive man, Hazel. He’s also a jealous man. If-if Chester ever disappoints you, dear, you must come to me. Will you promise, Hazel?”
Gently Hazel said yes. She promised.
In a sudden clumsy gesture Thaddeus lifted her hand to his lips, to kiss. Long Hazel would feel the imprint of that kiss on her skin, the fleshy, unexpectedly chill sensation.
The fat dimpled spider, the gravedigger’s daughter. Who might have predicted!
The wound was such, Gallagher would not speak of it initially.
In silence they drove back to Vermont. Gallagher’s face was still unnaturally pale, drawn. Hazel surmised he’d been sick to his stomach vomiting in one of the bathrooms of his father’s house and he was deeply ashamed.
She did love him, she supposed. In the man’s very weakness that filled her with a wild flailing contempt like a maddened winged creature trapped against a screen she loved him.
The remainder of the day passed in a kind of dream. They were uneasily aware of each other without speaking, nor even touching. They had dinner with Zack and some others. By quick degrees, Gallagher recovered from the visit at Ardmoor Park. He was very much his usual self at dinner, and at a reception following that evening’s symphony concert. Only when he and Hazel were alone together in their hotel room did Gallagher say at last, in a genial tone to allow Hazel to know he was bemused and not angry: “You and my father got along very well, didn’t you! I heard you laughing together. From the window of my old room I saw him wheezing and splashing in the pool like a deranged elephant. Something of a couple: Beauty and the Beast.”
Gallagher was brushing his teeth in the bathroom, the door ajar. Spitting into the sink, harshly. Hazel knew without seeing that he was grimacing into the mirror.
She said, “He seems sad, Chet. A lonely old man fearful of dying.”
“Is he!” Gallagher spoke flatly, yet wanting to be appeased.
“He seems hurt by life.”
“By me, you mean.”
“Are you all of ”life‘ to your father, Chet?“
It was an unexpected response. When Hazel Jones said such things, Gallagher seemed often not to hear.
Later she slipped her arms around his chest. She held him tight, gravely she intoned, “”My son is a man of integrity, I wish that he would let me love him.“”
Gallagher’s laughter was startled, uneasy.
“Don’t try to tell me my father said that, Hazel.”
“He did.”
“Bullshit, Hazel. Don’t tell me.”
“He has prostate cancer, Chet. He has colon cancer.”
“Since when?”
“He doesn’t want you to know, I think. He made a joke of it.”
“I wouldn’t believe anything he says, Hazel. He’s quite the joker.” Clumsily Gallagher moved about the room, not-seeing. The staring vacant look had come into his face. “That crap about the ”Jew York Times‘-he’s got a feud going, the Times wins Pulitzer Prizes every year and the Gallagher chain wins a Pulitzer every five years if they get lucky. That’s what’s behind that.“ Gallagher was incensed, close to tears.
“He loves you, though. Somehow, he feels ashamed before you.”
“Bullshit, Hazel.”
“It may be bullshit, but it happens to be true.”
In bed, in Gallagher’s ropey-muscled arms, Hazel felt at last that she might tease him. She felt the heat of her lover’s skin, she lay very still against him. He would forgive her now. He adored Hazel Jones, always he was looking for plausible ways to forgive her.
Hazel whispered in his ear how shocked she’d been, to discover that Thaddeus Gallagher was an invalid in a wheelchair!
“He is? An invalid?” Gallagher squirmed and twitched beneath the bedclothes, staring toward the ceiling. “Christ. I guess he is.”
Hazel Jones: this will be our secret.
For the remainder of his life he would send her small gifts. Flowers. Every four or five weeks, and often following a public performance of Zack’s. Somehow he knew, he made it his business to know, when Gallagher would be gone from the house, and timed deliveries for those mornings.
The first came soon after Hazel returned to Delaware Park, Buffalo, to the house Gallagher had bought for them near the music school. Numerous red climber roses, small-petalled roses, in a thorny cluster that was awkward to fit into even a tall vase. The accompanying note was handwritten, as if in haste.
August 22, 1970
Dearest Hazel Jones,
I have not stopped thinking of you for a single momment since last week. I had a (secret!!!) tape made of Zachiaras playing at the music festival, truly your son is a suberb musician! So hard to believe he is only 13. I have photographs of him, he is so young. Of course in his heart he is no child is he! As I at 13 was no longer a child. For my heart was hardened young, I knew the “way of the world” from boyhood on & had no illusions of the “natural good” of mankind etcetera. Dear Hazel, I hope I am not offending you! Your husband must not know. We will keep our secret will we! Tho‘ I think always of you, your beautiful dark kind eyes that forgive & do not judge. If you would be so kind Hazel you might call me sometime, my number is below. This is my privvate line Hazel, no one will pick up.
Your Loving “InLaw” Thad
Hazel read this letter in astonishment, distracted by the numerous spelling errors. “He’s crazy! He’s in love with her.” She had not expected such a response. She felt a pang of guilt, if Gallagher should know.
She threw the letter away, she would not reply to it. Never would Hazel Jones reply to Thaddeus Gallagher’s impassioned letters, which became more incoherent with time, nor would she thank him for the numerous gifts. Hazel Jones was a woman of dignity, integrity. Hazel Jones would not encourage the old man, yet she would not discourage him. She supposed that he would be true to his word, he would not confront her or Zack. He would admire them from a discreet distance. Gallagher seemed never to notice the gifts in the household: vases of flowers, a heart-shaped crystal paperweight, a brass frame for a photograph, a silk scarf printed with rosebuds. The old man was discreet enough to send Hazel only small, relatively inexpensive and inconspicuous gifts. And never money.
In March 1971 there came by special delivery a packet for Hazel Jones that was not a gift, but a manila envelope with the return address GALLAGHER MEDIA INC. Inside the envelope were photocopies of newspaper articles and one of Thaddeus Gallagher’s hastily scrawled letters.
At last my assistant gathered these matrials, Hazel. Why it has takken so long I frankly DO NOT KNOW. Thought you would be intriguing, Hazel Jones. “Only a Conincidence” I know. [THANK GOD THANK GOD this poor Hazel Jones was not you.]
There were several pages more, but Hazel tossed them away without reading them.
In an upstairs room of the Delaware Park house where no one was likely to disturb her, Hazel removed the photocopied material from the manila envelope and spread it out on a table. Her movements were deliberate and unhurried and yet her hands shook slightly, she seemed to know beforehand that the revelation Thaddeus Gallagher had sent her would not be a happy one.
The newspaper articles had already been arranged in chronological order. Hazel tried to keep from glancing ahead to learn the outcome.
Yet, there it was:
GRISLY DISCOVERY IN NEW FALLS
FOLLOWS DOCTOR DEATH
Female Skeletons Unearthed
And,
DECEASED NEW FALLS M.D.
SUSPECT IN UNSOLVED 1950S ABDUCTIONS
Property Searched by Police, Skeletons Found
Both clippings included an accompanying photograph, the same likeness of a genially smiling man of middle age: Byron Hendricks, M. D.
“Him! The man in the panama hat.”
Both articles, from the Port Oriskany Journal, were dated September 1964. New Falls was a small, relatively affluent suburb north of Port Oriskany, on Lake Erie. Hazel told herself sternly It is over now. Whatever it was, is over now. It has nothing to do with me now.
It was so. It had to be so. She had not given a thought to Byron Hendricks, M.D., for eleven years. Virtually all memory of the man had faded from her consciousness.
Hazel turned to the first of the articles, also from the Journal, and dated June 1956.
NEW FALLS GIRL REPORTED MISSING
POLICE, VOLUNTEERS EXPAND SEARCH
Hazel Jones, 18, “Vanished”
This Hazel Jones had attended New Falls High School but had dropped out at the age of sixteen. She had lived with her family in the country outside New Falls and had supported herself by “babysitting, waitressing, housecleaning” locally. At the time of her disappearance, she had just begun summer work at a Dairy Queen. Numerous parties had seen Hazel Jones at the Dairy Queen on the day of her disappearance; at dusk she had left to ride her bicycle home, a distance of three miles; but she had never arrived home. Her bicycle was subsequently found in a drainage ditch beside a highway, about two miles from her home.
Apparently it was not a kidnapping, there was no ransom demanded. There were no witnesses to any abduction. No one could think of any person who might have wanted to harm Hazel Jones nor did Hazel Jones have a boyfriend who might have threatened her. For days, weeks, eventually years Hazel Jones was the object of a search but she, or the body she had become, was never found.
Hazel stared at the girl in the photograph. For here was a familiar face.
Aged seventeen at the time of the photograph, Hazel Jones had thick wavy dark hair that fell to her shoulders and across her forehead. Her eyebrows were rather heavy, she had a long nose rather broad at the tip. She was not pretty but “striking”-almost, you might say “exotic.” Her mouth was fleshy, sensuous. Yet there was something prim and even sullen about her. Her eyes were large, very dark, untrusting. For the camera she tried to smile, not very convincingly.
How like Rebecca Schwart at that age, this Hazel Jones! It was unnerving. It was painful to see.
Former New Falls classmates said of Hazel Jones that she was “quiet”-“kept to herself”-“hard to get to know.”
Hazel Jones’s parents said she would “never have gotten into any car with anybody she didn’t know, Hazel wasn’t that kind of girl.”
A subsequent article depicted Mr. and Mrs. Jones posed in front of their “modest bungalow-style” home on the outskirts of New Falls. They were a middle-aged couple, heavy-browed and dark-complected like their daughter, staring grimly at the camera like gamblers willing to take a risk though expecting to lose.
The fake-brick siding on the Joneses’ house was water stained. In the Joneses’ grassless front yard, debris had been raked into a mound.
The next several articles were dated 1957, from upstate newspapers in Port Oriskany, Buffalo, Rochester and Albany. (The Rochester and Albany papers belonged to the Gallagher chain, coincidentally.) In June 1957 another girl was reported missing, this time from Gowanda, a small city thirty miles south and east of Port Oriskany; in October, yet another girl was reported missing from Cableport, a village on the Erie Barge Canal near Albany, hundreds of miles east. The girl from Gowanda was Dorianne Klinski, aged twenty; the girl from Cableport was Gloria Loving, aged nineteen. Dorianne was married, Gloria engaged. Dorianne had “vanished into thin air” walking home from her salesclerk job in Gowanda. Gloria had similarly vanished walking home from Cableport on the Erie Canal towpath, a distance of no more than a mile.
How like Hazel Jones of New Falls these girls looked! Dark-haired, not-pretty.
In the several articles about Dorianne and Gloria there were no references to Hazel Jones of New Falls. But in articles about Gloria Loving, there were references to Dorianne Klinski. Only in later articles, about girls missing in 1959, 1962, and 1963, were there references to the “original” missing girl Hazel Jones. It had taken law enforcement officers, spread across numerous rural counties and townships through New York State, a long time to connect the abductions.
Hazel was reading with mounting difficulty. Her eyes flooded with tears of hurt, rage.
“The bastard! So that’s what he wanted with me: to murder me.”
It was a supreme joke. It was the most fantastical revelation of her life. “Hazel Jones”: all along, from the first, a dead girl. A murdered girl. A naive trusting girl who, when Byron Hendricks had approached Rebecca Schwart on the towpath outside Chautauqua Falls, had been dead for three years. Dead, decomposed! One of the female skeletons to be one day unearthed on Byron Hendricks’s property.
Hazel forced herself to continue reading. She must know the full story even if she would not wish to recall it. The final articles focused on Byron Hendricks, for now in September 1964 the man had been exposed. The most lavish article was a full-page feature from the Port Oriskany Journal in which “Dr. Hendricks’s” benignly smiling face was positioned in an oval surrounded by oval likenesses of his six “known” victims.
At least, Hendricks was dead. The bastard wasn’t locked away somewhere in a mental hospital. There was that satisfaction, at least.
Hendricks had been fifty-two at the time of his death. He had lived alone for years in a “spacious” brick home in New Falls. His medical degree was from the University of Buffalo Medical School but he had never practiced medicine, as his deceased father had done for nearly fifty years; he identified himself as a “medical researcher.” New Falls neighbors spoke of Hendricks as “friendly-seeming but kept to himself”-“always a kind word, cheerful”-“a gentleman”-“always well dressed.”
Hendricks’s only previous contact with any of his victims, so far as police could determine, had been with eighteen-year-old Hazel Jones who’d done “occasional housecleaning” for him.
Hendricks had been found dead in an upstairs room of his home, his body badly decomposed after ten or more days. Initially it was believed that he’d died of natural causes, but an autopsy had turned up evidence of a morphine overdose. Police discovered scrapbooks of news clippings pertaining to the missing girls as well as “incriminating memorabilia.” A search of the house and overgrown two-acre lot led to the eventual discovery of an “estimated” six female skeletons.
Six. He’d led away six Hazel Joneses.
How eagerly, with what naive hope had they gone with him, you could only imagine.
Hazel had not been seated at the table, which was a long, narrow worktable to which she often retreated (here, on the airy third floor of the house Gallagher had bought for her, Hazel felt most comfortable: she was taking night school courses at nearby Canisius College, and spread out her work on the table), but leaning over it, resting her weight on the palms of her hands. By degrees she’d become dizzy, light-headed. Pulses beat in her brain close to bursting. She would not faint! She would not succumb to fear, panic. Instead, she heard herself laughing. It was not Hazel Jones’s delicate feminine laughter but a harsh mirthless hacking laughter.
“A joke! ”Hazel Jones’ is a joke.“
There came a rebuking wave of nausea. A taste of something black and cold at the back of her mouth. Then the worktable’s nearest corner flew up at her. Struck her forehead against something sharp as the edge of an ax blade, abruptly she was on the floor and when she managed to rouse herself from her faint some minutes later, might’ve been five minutes, might’ve been twenty, there she was dripping blood not knowing where the hell she was or what had happened, she was still laughing at the joke she couldn’t exactly remember, or trying to laugh.
That night, beside Gallagher. Thinking I will wake him. I will tell him who I am. I will tell him my life has been a lie, a bad joke. There is no Hazel Jones. Where I am, there is no one. But Gallagher slept as always Gallagher did, a man oblivious in sleep, hot-skinned, prone to snoring, twitching and kicking at bedclothes and if he woke partially he would moan like a forlorn child and reach out for Hazel Jones in the night to touch, to nudge, to caress, to hold, he adored Hazel Jones and so finally she did not wake him and eventually, toward dawn, Hazel Jones slept, too.