Also by the author:
In the Fall
Lost Nation
A Peculiar Grace
After You’ve Gone
Jeffrey Lent
Copyright © 2009 by Jeffrey Lent
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Published simultaneously in Canada
ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-9724-5 (e-book)
Grove Press
an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
841 Broadway
New York, NY 10003
Distributed by Publishers Group West
Marion, Esther, Clara
One
If love had a language, he’d realized it would be this, not words or gestures but the mellifluous richness he’d heard that summer evening, anchored between the pair of violins and the bass. The musician seated with his cello tucked between his knees, bent in concentration and intensity of focus that swept and fled, stroked and drew upon man, instrument and bow.
Henry recalled the warm room, an upper story of the Civic Club and how he’d sat next to Olivia, their moist hands clamped as if she knew his unease. During his years at Brown and then Yale he’d had opportunities to hear music performed and dismissed those out of hand. He was otherwise busy, and music was for him an unfathomable abstract for other people. So it was in Elmira the summer of 1891, soon after their marriage, that his introduction came. He remembered this string quartet, not gifted amateurs but dispatched from somewhere to here, by unknown hands and purse strings. The program a mystery, but for all the ample virtuosity of the two violin players, the settled heart-rhythm of the bass, what flowed out to him that evening was the lovely dulcet balance, as pure as the hand in his, of the cello.
The essence of life; those long drawn notes or swift arpeggios of that love both ardent and calm beside him. He was transported.
In the pale green evening—the day lengthening in a slowed leveling toward its inevitable night—he and Olivia had left the reception and strolled hand in hand along the height of land above the valley of the Chemung, the grand homes of her childhood, the summer shade of big elms and sycamores and shagbarks cooling them. Walking toward their own modest pleasant first home, only two streets down and a bit to the west, closer to the campus, he stumbled over a sudden realization. And was as quickly shy.
“Olivia.”
“Yes?”
“Your piano.” Referring to the handsome parlor upright that had been moved into the house following their wedding, along with other bequeathed furniture. He’d considered it somewhat like the array of paintings on the walls and potted plants to be only another fixture of this new life.
“Yes?” And heard her own shyness.
“You do play it, don’t you?”
“Of course.”
“I’ve never heard you.”
She was quiet a bit as they strolled and then said, “You never asked.”
“So when do you play?”
“During the day.” She paused again and said, “Not as often as I used to.”
He knew not to ask why. He said, “Would you play for me?”
“Would you like that?”
“Certainly. Very much.”
“I’d thought perhaps you didn’t care for it. Since you never mentioned it.”
And he had the great gift of young love, to entrust fully and so be trusted and was not wise but passionate when he responded, “I’ve never truly heard music until this afternoon. And I so do want to hear you.”
“Oh.” She was alarmed. “I’m very poor compared to those musicians.”
He stopped her and swiftly kissed her, careless of passersby. She was blushing when he stepped forth and offered his arm and said, “Everything about you is beyond compare.”
So he first sat and listened to her and then as both she and he became more confident and he understood better what she was doing he stood alongside her bench and although his ability to read music was limited to his early training for singing in church he soon was able to turn the pages for her as she worked her way through a much larger repertoire for piano than he’d expected. Not only the popular parlor songs, some few of which she sang in a strong rolling voice, but also not uncomplicated works of Beethoven, Chopin, and Schumann. And so music filled their house in evenings and her flush of pride met his own in this accomplishment and while she played he would rest one hand against the small of her back as he loomed gentle, her page-turner, her husband and lover.
Two
Under a pewter sky of clouds folded in tight waves, the wind at his back, Henry Dorn crossed Nieuwmarkt, near empty this late afternoon almost four years since the signing of the Armistice, some few bicycles steering gingerly around patches of ice passing him as he trudged onward, his greatcoat belted tight and brushed-wool fedora clamping his ears, the canvas case with leather strapping gripped by both hands as the wind caught and tugged it, the cello a kite, a bird captured that the wind would free. His nose and cheeks were bright with cold and his lungs seemed to lodge and trap the air to freeze him from within.
Henry Dorn was fifty-five years old. He’d outlived his father’s short span by nearly thirty years. He’d written his mother this past spring just before his departure for Holland but had not been back to Nova Scotia in fifteen years. He loved that gloomy spit of land between St. Mary’s Bay and the wild water of Fundy like no other place but some time since had decided he’d not return there. It was a love best kept at a distance.
And then abruptly eighteen months ago the devastating double tragedy which had brought him to this place, this strange city the other side of the world. Or had seemed to at the time. Did this account fully for the essential if unspoken exile? Certainly not but from the youngest age the unpredictability of life had been a constant companion—only for that span of now-lost years had he thought otherwise.
Then face into the wind past the Waag and right onto Recht Boomssloot, the canal frozen, the houseboats encased, the trees skeletal traces overhanging the railings and here the wind was cut a little and he was able to carry the burden by the handle, balanced so the case rode alongside him now, the neck forward and up. As if tamed. He snorted.
He hadn’t anticipated the cello when he’d signed the lease and so was faced, as he was each Tuesday afternoon, with the narrow steep steps up to the third story—a little effort was all. You