Father abandoned the piano for several weeks after Sterling left. It sat empty for a string of evenings until one night after dinner, I took up again with my method. I was determined to will some part of Sterling’s freedom back into our lives before it abandoned us entirely.
Thus, I first came to notice Otto Houser during a period of great mourning. Our introduction came as I got up to open the window one evening after practice. The heat that night was thick. It was as though the radiator had been bled for the first time that season and a hot steam had descended over our little road. Under the lamp, my face was slick with sweat. My body was dank and my bathing suit clung to my crotch. I stood at the window hoping to catch some movement in the air.
Otto was sitting on his porch, not unusual given the hour. In my experience, the heat often drove people outdoors. Being that I was young, I was still under the guise that I was shielded by darkness. I could barely make out the outline of the old man’s figure in the gathering darkness of the veranda. I stared at him for a moment while picking at my swimsuit and wiping the sweat from my brow.
This particular bathing suit had allure. The allure was the reason I had chosen it, had barely taken it off my body since I had picked it off the rack. It was white with three holes on each side, which were fastened together with pink plastic buttons. When I lifted my arms toward the piano, you could see three patches of flesh running up the side of my body. This, I imagined, was what people meant by “untouchable combinations.” I’d heard a neighbor use those words once when telling Father an anecdote about breeding. He’d recently sired a Doberman with a Golden Retriever. “In the end,” he said, “You’re looking at a good, kind dog with a strong snout. The snout gives the Doberman away, but it’s the combination that’s untouchable.” This was also how I imagined Sterling’s actress friend would have dressed for him.
When I played, Otto Houser said he had the feeling that he was glimpsing some rare, unidentified talent. He observed me from across the road. The details of the piece, he said, he could not discern at his precise distance. From his place on the porch, unable to hear the sounds I made, he watched instead for some forward thrust in my body to suggest the recurrence of a chord or the emergence of melody. He particularly admired those passages where the thin waft of one of my arms eagled-out as it ran up and down an octave. Otto enjoyed those segments of the old television variety hours that featured some new emerging talent, often a corn-fed, blond-haired youth with his or her sights set on the big city lights. These displays of talent produced a rising in Otto’s chest, he said. Their fame nearly embraced him.
On the warmer days, I played in the mornings before the sun was already on us. One noon after practice I went out into the yard to get the mail. Otto Houser was sitting in a rusty beach chair he’d brought onto his porch. Later, once I’d come to know him, he said when the sun was overhead and the shade was right, he liked to sit under the cover of the veranda and eat peanuts while he watched me play. He liked to suck the salt off the shells.
“Hey, Hotshot,” Otto called across the road to me the first afternoon we spoke. I turned to look at him. It was the first time I had known a man to notice me. I could see my reflection in the window at his back. There wasn’t much curve to me. Twelve going on thirteen, I’d grown four inches that year. My chest was still flat. I hadn’t yet embodied the weight of the world, as Mother said. I fumbled with the mail. One of the envelopes slipped off the top of the stack.
“You missed a note,” Otto said.
3.
Early that summer, Mother took a vision of England under her wing. She fell in with Margaret Nydam, the elderly British widow who lived in the studio apartment above the Agway in the center of town. Margaret was Fay Mountain’s only living European transplant. Along with her accent and her collection of Yeats, Margaret boasted purebred old world blood. The Women’s Voting League congregated in her parlor every Sunday where Margaret served scones and cream. Father often called Margaret cultural driftwood. Her influence, he said, floated wherever it was least needed. She was also the town librarian.
Most mornings that summer I awoke to Margaret sitting on the wooden stool next to our kitchen counter where Mother sat when she sorted the bills. Margaret sipped a black coffee. Mother would put out a spread until Margaret chided her enough that she’d finally retire to the table with her cigarette and tea. Mother was constantly extending the life of her teabag with fresh water until the brew was so weak it tasted like a river of stirred up silt. “One of anything goes a long way,” she said.
Margaret arrived in the early hours cloaked in layers of felt and flannel and an old safety pin where she’d thrown up her bangs. Layers, Margaret said, trapped the breeze. A husky body odor emanated from the places where Margaret exposed her pallor to the light. Due to her age and thickness of her hair, the oils made her face glow and gave her hair body. Her long unkempt grays were braided to one side her face. Margaret was not in the habit of wearing undergarments. I had glimpsed her breasts once where they hung away from her skin as she bent over to adjust her stool and pour herself another trifle from her flask. The immodesty of my gaze seemed to impress her.
That morning, the two women were hanging a painting in the kitchen above Old Eagle Back. Margaret sat on the stool observing Mother work.
“What about here,” Mother said, holding the painting at shoulder level against the far wall of the kitchen. “How’s that for height?”
“That’s fine,” Margaret said. “That’s just fine. Mark it off. I’ve got a level in back of the car. I’ll make a dash for it after we finish our tea.”
Mother took the pencil from behind her ear and drew a faint line on the wall over the center of the frame.
The wall had been a focal point of Mother’s recent discomfort. It sat at the far end of the house onto which both the living room and the portico overlooked. The previous owners of the house had been an elderly couple with a fondness for stenciling pastoral scenes onto any stretch of wall that enjoyed some open expanse. To Mother’s mind, the kitchen offered a particularly unforgivable example. The laymen’s handiwork, she felt, was evidence of the house’s age and limited possibility.
“Like Didion said,” Margaret said. “Style is character.”
“Truly,” Mother said. She leaned the print against the wall and stood back to regard it as she smoked.
In truth, I could tell Mother wasn’t entirely sure about the choice of the work. The print had been a gift from Margaret, an old replica from her wall, which Margaret said she’d stared at too long.
“It needs fresh eyes,” Margaret had said, putting the frame into the back of her Volvo one night after the two women had gotten into the sherry.
Mother looked disappointed now with her choice. She’d hoped for something more modern. In the wake of their enthusiasm, she’d ended up with Georgia O’Keeffe’s “Red Hills.”
“There’s a hardness about it,” Margaret said. “It radiates a certain intelligence.”
Mother searched the soft red expanse of the print for the intelligence of which Margaret spoke. In her worst imaginings, I thought, the earthen mass looked not unlike one of the watercolors Birdie would bring home from school. At best, it radiated a kind of optimism.
“It’s a horizon,” Mother said.