Gallagher would believe he’d been the one to talk Hazel Jones into marrying him, at last. Joking that Hazel had made an honest man of him.
Ten years!
“Someday, darling, you’ll have to tell me why.”
“Why what?”
“Why you refused to marry me for ten long years.”
“Ten very short years, they were.”
“Long for me! Every morning I expected you to have disappeared. Cleared out. Taken Zack, and left me heartbroken.”
Hazel was startled, at such a remark. Gallagher was only joking of course.
“Maybe I didn’t marry you because I didn’t believe that I was a good enough person to marry you. Maybe that was it.”
Her light enigmatic Hazel Jones laugh. She’d tuned to perfection, like one of Zack’s effortlessly executed cadenzas.
“Good enough to marry me! Hazel, really.”
As Gallagher had arranged to marry Hazel in the Erie County Courthouse, so Gallagher arranged to adopt Zack in the Erie County Courthouse. So proud! So happy! It was the consummation of Gallagher’s adult life.
The adoption was speedily arranged. A meeting with Gallagher’s attorney, and an appointment with a county judge. Legal documents to be drawn up and signed and Zack’s creased and waterstained birth certificate issued as a facsimile in Chemung County, New York, to be photocopied and filed in the Erie County Hall of Records.
Legally, Zack was now Zack Gallagher. But he would retain Zacharias Jones as his professional name.
Zack joked he was the oldest kid adopted in the history of Erie County: fifteen. But, at the signing, he’d turned abruptly away from Gallagher and Hazel not wanting them to see his face.
“Hey, kid. Jesus.”
Gallagher hugged Zack, hard. Kissed the boy wetly on the edge of his mouth. Gallagher, most sentimental of men, didn’t mind anyone seeing him cry.
Like guilty conspirators, mother and son. When they were alone together they burst into laughter, a wild nervous flaming-up laughter that would have shocked Gallagher.
So funny! Whatever it was, that sparked such laughter between them.
Zack had been fascinated by his birth certificate. He didn’t seem to recall ever having seen it before. Hidden away with Hazel Jones’s secret things, a small compact bundle she’d carried with her since the Poor Farm Road.
Zack asked if the birth certificate was legitimate, and Hazel said sharply Yes! It was.
“My name is ”Zacharias August Jones’ and my father’s name is “William Jones‘? Who the hell’s ”William Jones’?“
“”Was.“”
“”Was’ what?“
“”Was,“ not ”is.“ Mr. Jones is dead now.”
Secrets! In the tight little bundle inside her rib cage in the place where her heart had been. So many secrets, sometimes she couldn’t get her breath.
Thaddeus Gallagher, for instance. His gifts and impassioned love letters to Dearest Hazel Jones!
In fall 1970, soon after Hazel received the first of these, an individual wishing to be designated as an anonymous benefactor gave a sizable sum of money to the Delaware Conservatory of Music earmarked as a scholarship and travel fund for the young pianist Zacharias Jones. Money was required for the numerous international piano competitions in which young pianists performed in hope of winning prizes, public attention, concert bookings and recording deals, and the donation from the anonymous benefactor would allow Zacharias to travel anywhere he wished. Gallagher who intended to manage Zack’s career was keenly aware of these possibilities: “André Watts was seventeen when Leonard Bernstein conducted him in the Liszt E-flat concerto, on national television. A bombshell.” And of course there was the legendary 1958 Tchaikovsky Competition in which twenty-four-year-old Van Cliburn took away the first prize and returned from Soviet Russia an international celebrity. Gallagher knew! But he was damned suspicious of the anonymous benefactor. When administrators at the Conservatory refused to tell him the benefactor’s identity, Gallagher became suspicious and resentful. To Hazel he complained, “What if it’s him. God damn!”
Naively Hazel asked, “Who is him?”
“My God-damned father, who else! It’s three hundred thousand dollars the ”anonymous benefactor‘ has given the Conservatory, it has to be him. He must have heard Zack play in Vermont.“ Gallagher was looking fierce yet helpless, a man cut off at the knees. His voice pitched to a sudden pleading softness. ”Hazel, I can’t tolerate Thaddeus interfering in my life any more than he has.“
Hazel listened sympathetically. She did not point out to Gallagher It isn’t your life, it’s Zack’s life.
It was a mother’s predatory instinct. Seeing how her son’s skin glowed with sexual heat. His eyes that guiltily eluded her gaze, hot and yearning.
Restless! Too many hours at the piano. Trapped inside a cage of shimmering notes.
He went away from the house, and returned late. Midnight, and later. One night he didn’t return until 4 A.M. (Hazel lay awake, and waiting. Very still not wanting to disturb Gallagher.) Yet another night in September, with only three weeks before the San Francisco Competition, he stayed away until dawn returning at that time stumbling and disheveled, defiant, smelling of beer.
“Zack! Good morning.”
Hazel would not rebuke the boy. She would speak only lightly, without reproach. She knew, if she even touched him he would recoil from her. In sudden fury he might slap at her, strike her with his fists as he’d done as a little boy. Hate you Momma! God damn I hate hate hate you. She must not stare too hungrily at his young unshaven face. Must not accuse him of wishing to ruin their lives any more than she would plead with him or beg or weep for that was never Hazel Jones’s way smiling as she opened the back door for him to enter, allowing him to brush roughly past her beneath the still-burning light breathing harshly through his mouth as if he’d been running and his eyes that were beautiful to her now bloodshot and heavy-lidded and opaque to her gaze and that smell of sweat, a sex-smell, pungent beneath the acrid smell of beer, yet she allowed him to know I love you and my love is stronger than your hatred.
He would sleep through much of the day. Hazel would not disturb him. By late afternoon he would return to the piano renewed, and practice until late evening. And Gallagher, listening in the hallway would shake his head in wonder.
She knew!
(He had to wonder what she’d meant in her playful teasing way Mr. Jones is dead now. If she meant that his father was dead? His long-ago father who had shouted into his face and shaken him like a rag doll and beat him and threw him against the wall yet who had hugged him too, and kissed him wetly on the edge of his mouth leaving a spittle-taste of tobacco behind. Hey: love ya! As his fingers executed the rapidly and vividly descending treble notes in the final ecstatic bars of the Beethoven sonata he had to wonder.)
Strange: that Chet Gallagher was losing interest in his career. Had lost interest in his career. Following the abrupt and shameful ending of the Vietnam War the most protracted and shameful war in American history strange, ironic how bored he’d become almost overnight with public life, politics. Even as his career as Chet Gallagher soared. (The newspaper column, 350 words Gallagher boasted he could type out in his sleep with his left hand, was nationally reprinted and admired. The TV interview program he’d been asked to host in 1973 was steadily gaining an audience. Also in 1973 a collection of prose pieces he’d cobbled together whimsically titled Some Pieces of (My) Mind became an unexpected bestseller in paperback.)
Losing interest in Chet Gallagher in proportion as he was becoming obsessed with Zacharias Jones. For here was a gifted young pianist, a truly gifted young pianist Gallagher had personally discovered up in Malin Head Bay one memorable winter night…