She could not bear it, that her gifted son might yet fail. It would be death to her, if he failed after having come so far.
“The breath of God.”
That roadside café in Apalachin, New York! The hot-skinned child on her lap snug in Mommy’s arms reaching up eagerly to play the broken keyboard of a battered old upright piano. Smoke haze, the pungent smell of beer, drunken shouts and laughter of strangers.
Jesus how’s he do it, kid so little?
She smiled, they’d been happy then.
He was an affably drunken older man acquainted with Chet Gallagher eager to meet Gallagher’s little family.
Introduced himself as “Zack Zacharias.” He’d heard that Gallagher’s stepson was a pianist named “Zacharias,” too.
This was at the Grand Island Yacht Club to which Gallagher took his little family to celebrate, when Zack was informed he’d been selected as one of thirteen finalists in the San Francisco competition.
Gallagher’s philosophy was: “Celebrate when you can, you might never have another chance.”
Weaving in the direction of their riverside table was the affably drunken man with stained white hair in a crew cut, lumpy potato face and merry eyes reddened as if he’d been rubbing them with his knuckles.
He’d come to shake Gallagher’s hand, meet the missus but mostly to address the young Zacharias.
“Coincidence, eh? I like to think coincidences mean something even when likely they don’t. But you’re the real thing, son: a musician. Read about you in the paper. Me, I’m a broke-down ol‘ d.j. Twenty-six friggin’ yeas on WBEN Radio Wonderful broadcasting the best in jazz through the wee night hours”-his voice pitched low into a beautifully modulated if slightly mocking Negro radio voice-“and the lousy sonsabitches are dropping me from the station. No offense, Chet: I know you ain’t to blame, you ain’t your old man friggin‘ Thaddeus. My actual name, son”-stooping over the table now to shake the hand of the cringing boy-“is Alvin Block, Jr. Ain’t got that swing, eh?”
Shaking his hips, wheezing with laughter as the white-jacketed maître d‘ hurried in his direction to lead him away.
(The Grand Island Yacht Club! Gallagher was apologetic, also a bit defensive, on the subject.
As a local celebrity Chet Gallagher had been given an honorary membership to the Grand Island Yacht Club. The damned club had a history-invariably, Gallagher called it a “spotty history”-of discrimination against Jews, Negroes, “ethnic minorities,” and of course women, an all-male all-Caucasian Protestant private club on the Niagara River. Certainly Gallagher scorned such organizations as undemocratic and un-American yet in this case there were good friends of his who belonged, the Yacht Club was an “old venerable tradition” in the Buffalo area dating back to the 1870s, why not accept their hospitality that was so graciously offered, so long as Chet Gallagher wasn’t a dues-paying member.
“And the view of the Niagara River is terrific, especially at sunset. You’ll love it, Hazel.”
Hazel asked if she would be allowed into the Yacht Club dining room.
Gallagher said, “Hazel, of course! You and Zack both, as my guests.”
“Even if I’m a woman? Wouldn’t the members object?”
“Certainly women are welcome at the Yacht Club. Wives, relatives, guests of members. It’s the same as at the Buffalo Athletic Club, you’ve been there.”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why’d women be ”welcome,“ if they aren’t? And Jews, and Ne-groes?” Hazel gave Ne-groes a special inflection.
Gallagher saw she was teasing now, and looked uncomfortable.
“Look, I’m not a dues-paying member. I’ve been there only a few times. I thought it might be a nice place to go for dinner on Sunday, to celebrate Zack’s good news.” Gallagher paused, rubbing his nose vigorously. “We can go somewhere else, Hazel. If you prefer.”
Hazel laughed, Gallagher was looking so abashed.
“Chet, no. I’m not one to ”prefer‘ anything.“)
Sometimes I’m so lonely. Oh Christ so lonely for the life you saved me from but he would have stared at her astonished and disbelieving.
Not you, Hazel! Never.
In Buffalo they lived at 83 Roscommon Circle, within a mile’s radius of the Delaware Conservatory of Music, the Buffalo Historic Society, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. They were invited out often, their names were on privileged mailing lists. Gallagher scorned the bourgeois life yet was bemused by it, he acknowledged. Overnight Hazel Jones had become Mrs. Chet Gallagher, Hazel Gallagher.
As, young, she’d been an able and uncomplaining chambermaid in an “historic” hotel, now in youthful middle age she was the caretaker of a partly restored Victorian house of five bedrooms, three storeys, steeply pitched slate roofs. Originally built in 1887, the house was made of shingle-board, eggshell with deep purple trim. Maintaining the house became crucial to Hazel, a kind of fetish. As her son would be a concert pianist, so Hazel would be the most exacting of housewives. Gallagher, away much of the day, seemed not to notice how Hazel was becoming overly scrupulous about the house for anything Hazel did was a delight to him; and of course Gallagher was hopeless about anything perceived as practical, domestic. By degrees, Hazel also took over the maintenance of their financial records for it was much easier than waiting for Gallagher to assume responsibility. He was yet more hopeless with money, indifferent as only the son of a wealthy man might be indifferent to money.
With the instinct of a pack rat, Hazel kept receipts for the smallest purchases and services. Hazel kept flawless records. Hazel sent by registered mail photocopied materials to Gallagher’s Buffalo accountant on a quarterly basis, for tax purposes. Gallagher whistled in admiration of his wife. “Hazel, you’re terrific. How’d you get so smart?”
“Runs in the family.”
“How so?”
“My father was a high school math teacher.”
Gallagher stared at her, quizzically. “Your father was a high school math teacher?”
Hazel laughed. “No. Just joking.”
“Do you know who your father was, Hazel? You’ve always said you didn’t.”
“I didn’t, and I don’t.” Hazel wiped at her eyes, couldn’t seem to stop laughing. For there was Gallagher, well into his fifties, staring at her gravely in that way of a man so beguiled by love he will believe anything told him by the beloved. Hazel felt she could reach into Gallagher’s rib cage and touch his living heart. “Just teasing, Chet.”
On tiptoes to kiss him. Oh, Gallagher was a tall man even with shoulders slouched. She saw that his new bifocals were smudged, removed them from his face and deftly polished them on her skirt.
Mrs. Chester Gallagher.
Each time she signed her new name it seemed to her that her handwriting was subtly altered.
They traveled a good deal. They saw many people. Some were associated with music, and some were associated with the media. Hazel was introduced to very friendly strangers as Hazel Gallagher: a name faintly comical to her, preposterous.
Yet no one laughed! Not within her hearing.
Gallagher, the most sentimental of men as he was the most scornful of men, would have liked a more formal wedding but saw the logic of a brief civil ceremony in one of the smaller courtrooms of the Erie County Courthouse. “Last thing we want is cameras, right? Attention. If my father found out…” The ten-minute ceremony was performed by a justice of the peace on a rainy Saturday morning in November 1972: the exact tenth anniversary of Gallagher and Hazel meeting in the Piano Bar of the Malin Head Inn. Zack was the sole witness, the bride’s teenaged son in a suit, necktie. Zack looking both embarrassed and pleased.