“He’s right,” she said. “I don’t want Mother Sophia trying to get supper for herself….”
This time we ventured with the car into the maze of Brooklyn, Sharon acting as guide and pretending there was nothing to it. I observed a different Abraham there at Sharon’s apartment, one I had known about but never truly seen. It was manifest in his behavior toward Sophia Wilks, a tenderness and consideration without any of the condescension of extreme youth. He liked her, and found easy ways of making it plain. She looked at his face with her fingers, prolonging that inquiry probably because of the singing note in Sharon’s voice, and she smiled at whatever she found there — she who seldom smiled even when she was amused. After supper, when Sharon and Abraham went into the studio, I sat and talked with Sophia about Abraham. Most of her questions had unspoken ones behind them: she was more interested in his temperament than in any practical circumstances, and I told her only those things Sharon might have told me of the boy who used to live in Latimer. In Latimer Sophia had never known him, except after his disappearance, and then only through the halting and grief-confused words of a ten-year-old girl. I was careful with my voice, but there was scant danger that Sophia could ever connect Meisel with the funny old quasi-Polish gentleman who had wanted a monument: her mind was elsewhere, and her own quiet memory of Benedict Miles another monument. “Should an artist marry, Mr. Meisel? I did, but only after I had learned that the heights were not for me — in any case my husband was also a teacher. Sharon is all fire and devotion.
Do you know that for seven years now she has never practiced less than six hours a day, often ten or twelve?”
I said something comfortably useless, about how it had to be a separate problem for every artist, one that only the artist could answer. Unfortunately that was true as well as useless, but Sophia already knew it as well as I. “We never drove her, my sister and I. There was a year, Mr. Meisel, when she was fifteen, after she had come to live with us — she would get up from the piano not knowing where she was. Once my sister saw her blunder into the doorframe on the way to her bedroom because, you understand, she was not in the room at all, she was in some place — I think you understand — some place where nobody else could be with her. We were so frightened that year, my sister and I. It was too much, we thought — we never drove her, and sometimes tried to hold her back, but that we couldn’t do either. The fears were foolish, you see. Such a flame does not ever burn out. It is only the little flames that — ah there!” The piano in the studio had spoken. “No — no, that isn’t Sharon. Why, does he—”
I said quickly: “He’s a beginner. Something pulled him toward music, I don’t know what. He’ll probably find out his talent is elsewhere, before too long.”
“I see.” I am not sure she did, and she was not pleased. Abraham was playing the somber Fourth Prelude of Chopin almost correctly, with a fair touch and some insight. I muttered to Sophia that I would be back in a moment, and I strolled into the studio as Abraham was finishing it. I saw his upward glance of inquiry — why, there was amusement in it too, how genuine I don’t know, defensive perhaps. I also saw Sharon shake her head a little, involuntarily, I believe.
She softened it at once by saying: “Not yet.” And stepped behind the piano chair to put her arms around him, bring her mouth close to his ear. “Do you really want it, Abe?”
“I don’t quite know.”
“It’s rougher’n hell — well, you know that. Point is I don’t think you’d want it just for your own pleasure — if you did it would be good, but if I know you, Abe, you’d want to give, with it. That takes eight hours a day, for years, and it might not be there.” She glanced up at me over his head, and she was very frightened. “And it might take away from — oh, other things, things worth more, things you could do better.” Yes, she was horribly frightened, and I couldn’t help.
But Abraham said: “I think it was a fever, Sharon. I think I notice some nice cool sweat on the brow.” His mouth was unsteady, but he was smiling with it. “Do something for me?”
“Anything,” she said, nearly crying. “Anything, now or any time.”
“Just play it the way it ought to be.”
“Well, there’s no one way it ought to be,” said Sharon Brand. “But I’ll play it as well as I can.” She did of course. It would have been a cruelty to play at anything less than her best, since he would have known it; but I wonder how many others would have sensed that at such a moment? I’ve known a lot of pianists, human and Martian. They fall readily into two classes: Sharon and then all the rest of ’em. I never could quite bear that prelude anyhow. She blinked at me rather desperately, and followed the prelude immediately with the tiny, half-humorous one in A Major, the Seventh, simply because something had to follow it, it couldn’t hang in the air.
“I have a special corner in the temple,” said Abraham, and put a cigarette between her lips and lit it for her and kissed her forehead. “The corner where you can hear best. Remind me to tell you sometime that you’re slightly snub-nosed.”
“Are you p-partial to pug noses?”
I went back to Sophia….
Abraham needed to talk to me, a little, as we started home. Fortunately the automobile is one human gimmick that doesn’t overawe me. I feel almost at home with it so long as it stays on the ground. Don’t think I’ll ever try the plane-car they’re experimenting with nowadays. The damn thing has wings folded over its back like a beetle’s; it’s supposed to snap them out at a comfortable seventy miles per hour and take off. Retractile propeller. Slow stuff, not intended to do anything over three hundred when it’s airborne, but all the same I think they can keep that one. Nice, of course, for kids anxious to find some new way of breaking their necks. Poking through those quiet and sober streets that had grown empty toward midnight, I was able to listen to Abraham without thinking much about my driving. He wanted to talk about the reform school. Not, I think, on his own account, but to satisfy possible questions that I had not spoken.
He had grown a shell in that environment, except for a few friendships. And those, he said, were all shadowed by the sense that nothing could ever last very long. I said something commonplace to suggest that human growth had much in common with the growth of insects: old chrysalids tossed on the rubhish heap and new ones grown. “Still,” he said, “as a larger bug I probably have a better memory of earlier states of bugginess than, say, a weevil.” He went on to make a rather horrible and intricate pun deriving pupil from pupa which, out of respect for our Martian community, I decline to record. He told me more about how the lost boys came and went. It had been a large school with, I guess, a fairly sensitive conscience somewhere at the top. The boys were of all sorts — the sickly, the morons, the majority called normal, the few bright ones; making a fenced-in, neurotic community, it seemed to Abraham that they had had little in common except bewilderment. Even bitterness was curiously absent in some of them. They were abused more by each other than by authority. Such violence as he saw was mostly furtive. Discipline was rigid enough, and the school had made a serious effort to weed out bullies or clip their claws. “I carried a knife,” Abraham told me. “Never could have used it, but it was the thing to do. Like a fraternity pin, I guess. A new boy would get beat up a few times, then someone would befriend him, see that he learned to carry a knife, talk the accepted language, and he’d be let alone. I was able to get some books. Last two years I had a sort of trusty job, in the so-called library. Except for the physical thrills, even beating up a new candidate was a sort of — oh, dutiful routine…. Well, they did have one thing in common besides bewilderment. The nobody-loves-me feeling. Those who had parents coming to see them had it worst. But we all felt or imagined or tried to imagine that no one had ever cared much about us. I knew better, Will, so did a lot of the others, but you couldn’t say so. Saying so would have been admitting that you might be partly to blame yourself, but it was more than that. You had to believe you were unwanted, or you’d be a social outcast. The school of paradox. Maybe not such a bad preparation for what’s outside. You know, Will — the old school tie. Alumnus Brown recalls the golden age.” But there was no overtone of bitterness. “Will, I wonder — can anything turn around and kick itself in the teeth like the human mind?”