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.
15
“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?”