"You never took care of them!"
Stop it, I won't think on those times, I won't, or of little Faye and Katrinka on that afternoon when I went away, Katrinka scarcely interested, but Faye smiling so brightly and throwing her kisses . . . no, don't. Can't. Won't.
Play your violin for me, all right, but I will now politely forget my own.
Just listen to him.
It's as if he were arguing with me! The bastard! On and on went the song, conceived in sorrow and meant to be played in sorrow and meant to make sorrow sweet or legendary or both.
The world of now receded. I was fourteen. Isaac Stern played on the stage. The great concerto of Beethoven rose and fell beneath the chandeliers of the auditorium.
How many other children sat there rapt? Oh, God, to be this! To be able to do this! ...
It seemed remote that I had ever grown up and lived a life, that I'd ever fallen in love with my first husband, Lev, known Karl, that he'd ever lived or died, or that Lev and I had ever lost a little girl named Lily, that I had held someone that small in my arms as she suffered, her head bald, her eyes closed-ah, no, there is a point surely where memory becomes dream.
There must be some medical legislation against it.
Nothing so terrible could have happened as that golden-haired child dying as a waif, or Karl crying out, Karl who never complained, or Mother on the path, begging not to be taken away that last day, and I, her self-centered fourteen-year-old daughter utterly unaware that I would never feel her warm arms again, could never kiss her, never say, Mother, whatever happened, I love you. I love you. I love you.
My father had sat straight up in the bed, rising against the morphine and saying, aghast: "Triana, I'm dying!"
Look how small Lily's white coffin in the California grave. Look at it. Way out there where we smoked our grass, and drank our beer and read our poetry aloud, beats, hippies, changers of the world, parents of a child so touched with grace that strangers stopped-even when the cancer had her-to say how beautiful was her small round white face. I watched again over time and space, and those men put the little white coffin inside a redwood box down in the hole, but they didn't nail shut the boards.
Lev's father, a hearty gentle Texan, had picked up a handful of earth and dropped it into the grave. Lev's mother had cried and cried.
Then others had done the same, a custom I'd never known, and my own father solemn, looking on. What had he thought: Punishment for your sins, that you left your sisters, that you married out of your church, that you let your mother die unloved!
Or did he think more trivial things? Lily was not a grandchild he had cherished.
Two thousand miles had separated them, and seldom had he seen her before the cancer took her long golden streams of hair and made her little cheeks soft and pufy, but there was no potion known to man that could ever dull her gaze or her courage.
He doesn't matter now, your father, whom he loved and did not love!
I turned over in the bed, grinding the pillow under me, marveling that even with my left ear buried in the down, I could still hear his violin.
Home, home, you are home, and they will all someday come home. What does that mean? It doesn't have to mean. You just have to whisper it... or sing, sing a wordless song with his violin.
And so the rain came.
My humble thanks.
The rain came.
Just as I might have wished it, and it falls on the old boards of the porch and on the rotting tin roof above this bedroom; it splashes on the wide windowsills and trickies through the cracks.
Yet on and on he played, he with his satin hair and his satin violin, playing as if uncoiling into the atmosphere a ribbon of gold so fine that it will thin to mist once it's been heard and known and loved, and bless the entire world with some tiny fraction of glimmering glory.
"How can you be so content," I asked myself, "to lie right between these worlds?
Life and death? Madness and sanity?
His music spoke; the notes flowed low and deep and hungering before they soared.
I closed my eyes.
He went into a ripping dance now, with zest and dissonance and utter seriousness.
He played so full and fierce, I thought surely someone would come. It's what people call the Devil's kind of music.
But the rain fell and fell and no one stopped him. No one would.
Like a shock it came to me! I was home and safe and the rain sur rounded this long octagonal room like a veil, but I wasn't alone:
I have you, now.
I whispered aloud to him, though of course he wasn't in the room.
I could have sworn that far away and near at hand, he laughed. He let me hear it.
The music didn't laugh. The music was bound to follow its hoarse, perfectly pitched, driving course as if to drive a band of meadow dancers weary mad. But he laughed.
I began to fall into sleep, not the deep black beginningless sleep of hospital drugs, but true, deep, sweet sleep, and the music rose and tightened and then gave forth a monumental flood as if he had forgiven me.
It seemed the rain and this music would kill me. I would die quiet without a protest.
But I only dreamed, sliding down down into a full-blown illusion as if it had been waiting for me.
Chapter 5
It was that sea again, that ocean clear and blue and frothing wild into the flopping prancing ghosts with every wave that hit the beach. It had the spell of the lucid dream. It said, Yes, you couldn't be dreaming, you are not, you're here! That's what the lucid dream always says. You turn around and around it and you can't wake up. It says, You cannot have imagined this.
But we had to leave now from the soothing breeze off the sea. The window was closed. The time has come.
I saw roses strewn across a gray carpet, roses with long stems and each tipped with a sealed vial of water to keep it fresh, roses with petals darkened and soft, and voices spoke in a foreign tongue, a tongue I ought to know but didn't know, a language made up, it seemed, just for this dream. For surely I was dreaming. I had to be. But I was here, imprisoned in this, as if transported body and soul into it, and something in me sang, Don't let it be a dream.
"That's right!" said the beautiful dark-skinned Mariana. She had short hair, and a white blouse that didn't cover her shoulders, a swan's neck, a purring voice.
She opened the doors of a vast place. I could not believe my eyes. I could not believe that solid things could be as lovely as the sea and sky, and this-this was a temple of polychrome marble.
It's not a dream, I thought. You couldn't dream this! You haven't the visions in you to ma ke such a dream. You're here, Triana!
Look at the walls inlaid with a creamy deep-veined Carrara marble, panels framed in gold and the skirting of darker brown stone, no less polished, no less variegated, no less wondrous. Look at the square pilasters with their golden scrolled capitals.
And now as we come to the front of the building, this marble moves to green, in long bands along the floor, the floor itself an ever changing and intricate mosaic. Look. I see the ancient Greek key design. I see the patterns dear to Rome and Greece for which I don't remember names, but I know them.
And now, turning, we stood before a staircase such as I have never seen anywhere.
It is not merely the scale and the loftiness, but again, the color: behold, 0 Lord, the radiance of the rose Carrara marble.
But attend first these figures, these bronze faces standing at attention, bodies of deeply carefully carved wood, curving into lion's legs and paws on their plinths of onyx.