This is where Berndt thought he could maneuver her into marriage, but she proved too cunning for him. It was early in the evening and the yard was pleasant with the sound of grasshoppers. They sat on the porch drinking a glass of sugared lemon water. Every so often, in the ancient six-foot grasses that survived at the margin of the yard, a firefly signaled or a dove cried out its five hollow notes.
“Why do so many birds’ songs consist of five?” she asked idly.
“Five what?” said Berndt.
They drank slowly, she in the sprigged berry dress that skimmed her waist. He noted with disappointment that she wore a normal woman’s underclothing now, had stopped binding her breasts. Perhaps, he thought, he could persuade her to resume her old ways, at least occasionally, just for him. It was a wan hope. She looked so comfortable, so free. She’d taken on a hardiness. Though still thin she had lost her anemic pallor. She had a square boy’s chin and a sturdy, graceful neck. Her arms were brown, muscular. In the sun, her fine hair, growing out in curls, glinted with green-gold sparks of light and her eyes were deceptively clear.
“I can teach music,” she told him. “Piano.” She had decided that her suggestion must sound merely practical, a moneymaking ploy. She did not say how well she could actually play nor did she express any pleasure or zeal, though at the very thought each separate tiny muscle in her hands ached.
“It would be a way of bringing in some money.”
He was left to absorb this. He might have believed her casual proposition, except that Miss DeWitt’s restless fingers gave her away and he noted their insistent motions. She was playing the Adagio of the Pathetique on the arms of her chair, the childhood piece that nervously possessed her from time to time.
“You would need a piano,” he told her. She nodded and held his gaze in that aloof and unbearably sexual way that had first skewered him.
“It’s the sort of thing a husband gives his wife,” he dared.
Her fingers stopped moving. She cast down her eyes in contempt.
“I can walk to town and use the school instrument. I’ve spoken to the school principal already.”
Berndt looked at the three-quarters-moon bone of her ankle, at her foot in the brown, thick-heeled shoe she’d bought. He ached to hold her foot in his lap, untie her oxford shoe with his teeth, move his hands up her leg covering her calf with kisses, breathe against the delicate folds of leafy cloth.
He offered marriage once again. His heart. His troth. His farm. She spurned the lot. The piano. She would simply walk into town. He let her know that he would like to buy the piano, it wasn’t that, but there was not a store for many miles where it could be purchased. She knew better and with exasperated heat described the way that she would, if assisted with his money, go about locating and then acquiring the best piano for the best price. She vowed that she would not purchase the instrument in Fargo, but in Minneapolis. From there, she could get it hauled cheaper than the freight markup. She would take the train to Minneapolis and make her arrangements in one day and return by night in order not to spend one extra dime on either food she couldn’t carry or on a hotel room. When he resisted to the last, she told him that she was leaving. She would find a small room in town and there she would acquire students, give lessons.
She betrayed her desperation. Some clench of her fingers gave her away. It was as much Berndt’s unconfused love of her and wish that she might be happy as any worry she might leave him that finally caused him to agree. In the months he’d known Agnes DeWitt, she had become someone to reckon with. Even he, who understood desperation and self-denial, was finding her proximity most difficult. He worked himself into exhaustion, and his farm prospered. Sleeping in the barn was difficult, but he had set into one wall a bunk room for himself and his hired man. He installed a stove that burned low on unseasonably chilly nights. Only, sometimes, as he looked sleepily into the glowering flanks of iron, he could not help his own fingers moving along the rough mattress in faint imitation of the way he would, if he could ever, touch her hips. He, too, was practicing.
THE CARAMACCHIONE
The last grand piano made by Caramacchione had been shipped to Minneapolis, and remained unsold until Agnes entered the store with her bean-sock of money. She made friends with a hauler out of Morris and he gave her a slow-wagon price. The two accompanied the instrument back to the farm during the dog days. Humid, hot weather was beloved by this particular piano. It tuned itself on muggy days. As the piano moved across the table fields of drought-sucked wheat like a shield, an upended black thing, an ebony locust, Miss Agnes DeWitt mounted the back of the wagon and played to the clouds.
They had to remove one side of the house to get the piano into the front room, and it took four strong men the next day to do the job. By the time the instrument was settled into place by the window, Berndt was persuaded of its necessary presence, and proud. He sent the men away, although the side of the house was still open to the swirling light of stars. Dark breezes moved the curtains; he asked her to play for him. She did. The music gripped her and she did not, could not, stop.
Late that night she turned from the last chord of the simple Nocturne in C Minor into the silence of Berndt’s listening presence. Three slow claps from his large hands died into the waiting quiet. His eyes rested upon her and she returned his gaze with a long and mysterious stare of gentle regard. The side of the house admitted a great swatch of moonlight. Spiders built their webs of phosphorescence across black space. Berndt ticked through what he knew — she would not marry him because she had been married and unfaithful, in her mind at least. He was desperate not to throw her off, repel her, damage the mood set by the boom of nighthawks flying in, swooping out, by the rustle of black oak and willow, by the scent of the blasted petals of summer’s last wild roses. His courage was at its lowest ebb. Fraught with sheer need and emotion he stood before Agnes, finally, and he asked in a low voice, “Schlaf mit mir. Bitte. Schlaf mit mir.”
Agnes looked into his face, openly at last, showing him the great weight of feeling she carried, though not for him. As she had for her Mother Superior, she removed her clothing carefully and folded it, only she did not stop undressing at her shift but continued until she slipped off her large tissue-thin bloomers and seated herself naked at the piano. Her body was a pale blush of silver, and her hands, when they began to move, rose and fell with the simplicity of water.
It became clear to Berndt Vogel, as the music slowly wrapped around him, that he was engaged in something for which he would have had to pay a whore in Fargo, if there really were any whores in Fargo, a great sum to perform. A snake of dark motion flexed down her spine. Her pale buttocks seemed to float off the invisible bench. Her legs moved like a swimmer’s, and he thought he heard her moan. He watched her fingers spin like white shadows across the keys, and found that his body was responding as though he lay fully twined with her underneath a quilt of music and stars. His breath came short, shorter, rasping and ragged. Beyond control, he gasped painfully and gave himself into some furtive cleft of halftones and anger that opened beneath the ice of high keys.