The Music School: Short Stories Read online

  It is difficult to discover anything about him. He wears a plaid lumberjack shirt with a gray turtleneck sweater underneath, and chino pants olive rather than khaki in color, and remarkably white tennis sneakers. He smokes and drinks coffee, so he must have some income, but he does not, apparently, work. Inquiry reveals that now and then he is employed—during the last Christmas rush he was seen carrying baskets of Hong Kong shirts and Italian crèche elements through the aisles of the five-and-ten—but he soon is fired or quits, and the word “lazy,” given somehow more than its usual force of disapproval, sticks in the mind, as if this is the clue. Disconcertingly, he knows your name. Even though you are a young mutual-fund analyst newly bought into a neo-saltbox on the beach road and downtown on a Saturday morning to rent a wallpaper steamer, he smiles if he catches your eye, lifts his hand lightly, and says, “Good morning, Mr. ——,” supplying your name. Yet his own name is impossible to learn. The simplest fact about a person, identity’s very seed, is in his case utterly hidden. It can be determined, by matching consistencies of hearsay, that he lives in that tall, speckle-shingled, disreputable hotel overlooking the atrophied railroad tracks, just down from the Amvets, where shuffling Polish widowers and one-night-in-town salesmen hang out, and in whose bar, evidently, money can be wagered and women may be approached. But his name, whether it is given to you as Tugwell or Frisbee or Wigglesworth, even if it were always the same name, would be in its almost parodic Yankeeness incredible. “But he’s an Indian!”

  The face of your informant—say, the chunky Irish dictator of the School Building Needs Committee, a dentist—undergoes a faint rapt transformation. His voice assumes its dental-chair coziness, an antiseptic murmur while your mouth is full. “Don’t go around saying that. He doesn’t like it. He prides himself on being a typical run-down Yankee.”

  But he is an Indian. This is, alone, certain. Who but a savage would have such an immense capacity for repose? His cheekbones, his never-faded skin, the delicate little jut of his scowl, the drooping triangularity of his eye sockets, the way his vertically lined face takes the light, the lusteress black of his hair are all so profoundly Indian that the imagination, surprised by his silhouette as he sits on the hydrant gazing across at the changing face of the liquor store, effortlessly plants a feather at the back of his head. His air of waiting, of gazing; the softness of his motions; the proprietory ease and watchfulness with which he moves from spot to spot; the good humor that makes his vigil gently dreadful—all these are totally foreign to the shambling shy-eyes and moist lower lip of the failed Yankee. His age and status are too peculiar. He is surely older than forty and younger than sixty—but is this sure? And, though he greets everyone by name with a light wave of his hand, the conversation never passes beyond a greeting, and even in the news store, when the political contention and convivial obscenity literally drive housewives away from the door, he does not attempt to participate. He witnesses, and he now and then offers in a gravelly voice a debated piece of town history, but he does not participate.

  It is caring that makes mysteries. As you grow indifferent, they lift. You live longer in the town, season follows season, the half-naked urban people arrive on the beach, multiply, and like leaves fall away again, and you have ceased to identify with them. The marshes turn green and withdraw through gold into brown, and their indolent, untouched, enduring existence penetrates your fibre. You find you must drive down toward the beach once a week or it is like a week without love. The ice cakes pile up along the banks of the tidal inlets like the rubble of ruined temples. You begin to meet, without seeking them out, the vestigial people: the unmarried daughters of the owners of closed mills, the retired high-school teachers, the senile deacons in their underheated seventeenth-century houses with attics full of old church records in spidery brown ink. You enter, by way of an elderly baby-sitter, a world where at least they speak of him as “the Indian.” An appalling snicker materializes in the darkness on the front seat beside you as you drive your babysitter, dear Mrs. Knowlton, home to her shuttered house on a back road. “If you knew what they say, mister, if you knew what they say.”

  And at last, as when in a woods you break through miles of underbrush into a clearing, you stand up surprised, taking a deep breath of the obvious, agreeing with the trees that of course this is the case. Anybody who is anybody knew all along. The mystery lifts, with some impatience, here, in Miss Horne’s low-ceilinged front parlor, which smells of warm fireplace ashes and of peppermint balls kept ready in redtinted knobbed glass goblets for whatever open-mouthed children might dare to come visit such a very old lady, all bent double like a little gripping rose clump, Miss Horne, a fable in her lifetime. Her father had been the fifth minister before the present one (whom she does not care for) at the First Church, and his father the next but one before him. There had been a Horne among those first seventeen men. Well—where was she?—yes, the Indian. The Indian had been loitering in the center of town when she was a tiny girl in gingham. And he is no older now than he was then.

  Giving Blood

  THE MAPLES had been married now nine years, which is almost too long. “Goddamn it, goddamn it,” Richard said to Joan, as they drove into Boston to give blood, “I drive this road five days a week and now I’m driving it again. It’s like a nightmare. I’m exhausted. I’m emotionally, mentally, physically exhausted, and she isn’t even an aunt of mine. She isn’t even an aunt of yours.”

  “She’s a sort of cousin,” Joan said.

  “Well, hell, every goddamn body in New England is some sort of cousin of yours; must I spend the rest of my life trying to save them all?”

  “Hush,” Joan said. “She might die. I’m ashamed of you. Really ashamed.”

  It cut. His voice for the moment took on an apologetic pallor. “Well, I’d be my usual goddamn saintly self if I’d had any sort of sleep last night. Five days a week I bump out of bed and stagger out the door past the milkman, and on the one day of the week when I don’t even have to truck the brats to Sunday school you make an appointment to have me drained dry thirty miles away.”

  “Well, it wasn’t me,” Joan said, “who had to stay till two o’clock doing the Twist with Marlene Brossman.”

  “We weren’t doing the Twist. We were gliding around very chastely to Hits of the Forties. And don’t think I was so oblivious I didn’t see you snoogling behind the piano with Harry Saxon.”

  “We weren’t behind the piano, we were on the bench. And he was just talking to me because he felt sorry for me. Everybody there felt sorry for me; you could have at least let somebody else dance once with Marlene, if only for show.”

  “Show, show,” Richard said. “That’s your mentality exactly.”

  “Why, the poor Matthews or whatever they are looked absolutely horrified.”

  “Matthiessons,” he said. “And that’s another thing. Why are idiots like that being invited these days? If there’s anything I hate, it’s women who keep putting one hand on their pearls and taking a deep breath. I thought she had something stuck in her throat.”

  “They’re a perfectly pleasant, decent young couple. The thing you resent about their being there is that their relative innocence shows us what we’ve become.”

  “If you’re so attracted,” he said, “to little fat men like Harry Saxon, why didn’t you marry one?”

  “My,” Joan said calmly, and gazed out the window away from him, at the scudding gasoline stations. “You honestly are hateful. It’s not just a pose.”

  “Pose, show, my Lord, who are you performing for? If it isn’t Harry Saxon, it’s Freddie Vetter—all these dwarfs. Every time I looked over at you last night it was like some pale Queen of the Dew surrounded by a ring of mushrooms.”

  “You’re too absurd,” she said. Her hand, distinctly thirtyish, dry and green-veined and rasped by detergents, stubbed out her cigarette in the dashboard ashtray. “You’re not subtle. You think you can match me up with another man so you can swirl off with Marlene with a free
conscience.”

  Her reading his strategy so correctly made his face burn; he felt again the tingle of Mrs. Brossman’s hair as he pressed his cheek against hers and in this damp privacy inhaled the perfume behind her ear. “You’re right,” he said. “But I want to get you a man your own size; I’m very loyal that way.”

  “Let’s not talk,” she said.

  His hope, of turning the truth into a joke, was rebuked. Any implication of permission was blocked. “It’s that smugness,” he explained, speaking levelly, as if about a phenomenon of which they were both disinterested students. “It’s your smugness that is really intolerable. Your knee-jerk liberalism I don’t mind. Your sexlessness I’ve learned to live with. But that wonderfully smug, New England— I suppose we needed it to get the country founded, but in the Age of Anxiety it really does gall.”

  He had been looking over at her, and unexpectedly she turned and looked at him, with a startled but uncannily crystalline expression, as if her face had been in an instant rendered in tinted porcelain, even to the eyelashes.

  “I asked you not to talk,” Joan said. “Now you’ve said things that I’ll never forget.”

  Plunged fathoms deep into the wrong, feeling suffocated by his guilt, he concentrated on the highway and sullenly steered. Though they were moving at sixty in the sparse Saturday traffic, Richard had travelled this road so often its distances were all translated into time, so that the car seemed to him to be moving as slowly as a minute hand from one digit to the next. It would have been strategic and dignified of him to keep the silence; but he could not resist believing that just one more pinch of syllables would restore the marital balance that with each wordless mile slipped increasingly awry. He asked, “How did Bean seem to you?” Bean was their baby. They had left her last night, to go to the party, with a fever of 102°.

  Joan wrestled with her vow to say nothing, but maternal concern won out. She said, “Cooler. Her nose is a river.”

  “Sweetie,” Richard blurted, “will they hurt me?” The curious fact was that he had never given blood before. Asthmatic and underweight, he had been 4-F, and at college and now at the office he had, less through his own determination than through the diffidence of the solicitors, evaded pledging blood. It was one of those tests of courage so trivial that no one had ever thought to make him face up to it.

  Spring comes reluctantly to Boston. Speckled crusts of ice lingered around the parking meters, and the air, grayly stalemated between seasons, tinted the buildings along Longwood Avenue with a drab and homogeneous majesty. As they walked up the drive to the hospital entrance, Richard wondered aloud if they would see the King of Arabia.

  “He’s in a separate wing,” Joan said. “With four wives.”

  “Only four? What an ascetic.” And he made bold to tap his wife’s shoulder. It was not clear if, under the thickness of her winter coat, she felt it.

  At the desk, they were directed down a long corridor floored with cigar-colored linoleum. Up and down, right and left it went, in the secretive, disjointed way peculiar to hospitals that have been built annex by annex. Richard felt like Hansel orphaned with Gretel; birds ate the bread crumbs behind them, and at last they timidly knocked on the witch’s door, which said BLOOD DONATION CENTER. A young man in white opened the door a crack. Over his shoulder Richard glimpsed—horrors!—a pair of dismembered female legs stripped of their shoes and laid parallel on a bed. Glints of needles and bottles pricked his eyes. Without widening the crack, the young man passed out to them two long forms. In sitting side by side on the waiting bench, spelling out their middle names and recalling their childhood diseases, Mr. and Mrs. Maple were newly defined to themselves. He fought down that urge to giggle and clown and lie that threatened him whenever he was asked—like a lawyer appointed by the court to plead a hopeless case—to present, as it were, his statistics to eternity. It seemed to mitigate his case slightly that a few of these statistics (present address, date of marriage) were shared by the hurt soul scratching beside him. He looked over her shoulder. “I never knew you had whooping cough.”

  “My mother says. I don’t remember it.”

  A pan crashed to a distant floor. An elevator chuckled remotely. A woman, a middle-aged woman top-heavy with rouge and fur, stepped out of the blood door and wobbled a moment on legs that looked familiar. They had been restored to their shoes. The heels of these shoes clicked firmly as, having raked the Maples with a dazed, defiant glance, she turned and disappeared around a bend in the corridor. The young man appeared in the doorway holding a pair of surgical tongs. His noticeably recent haircut made him seem an apprentice barber. He clicked his tongs and smiled. “Shall I do you together?”

  “Sure.” It put Richard on his mettle that this callow fellow, to whom apparently they were to entrust their liquid essence, was so distinctly younger than they. But when Richard stood, his indignation melted and his legs felt diluted under him. And the extraction of the blood sample from his middle finger seemed about the nastiest and most needlessly prolonged physical involvement with another human being he had ever experienced. There is a touch that good dentists, mechanics, and barbers have, and this intern did not have it; he fumbled and in compensation was too rough. Again and again, an atrociously clumsy vampire, he tugged and twisted the purpling finger in vain. The tiny glass capillary tube remained transparent.

  “He doesn’t like to bleed, does he?” the intern asked Joan. As relaxed as a nurse, she sat in a chair next to a table of scintillating equipment.

  “I don’t think his blood moves much,” she said, “until after midnight.”

  This stab at a joke made Richard in his extremity of fright laugh loudly, and the laugh at last seemed to jar the panicked coagulant. Red seeped upward in the thirsty little tube, as in a sudden thermometer.

  The intern grunted in relief. As he smeared the samples on the analysis box, he explained idly, “What we ought to have down here is a pan of warm water. You just came in out of the cold. If you put your hand in hot water for a minute, the blood just pops out.”

  “A pretty thought,” Richard said.

  But the intern had already written him off as a clown and continued calmly to Joan, “All we’d need would be a baby hot plate for about six dollars, then we could make our own coffee, too. This way, when we get a donor who needs the coffee afterward, we have to send up for it while we keep her head between her knees. Do you think you’ll be needing coffee?”

  “No,” Richard interrupted, jealous of their rapport.

  The intern told Joan, “You’re O.”

  “I know,” she said.

  “And he’s A positive.”

  “Why, that’s very good, Dick!” she called to him.

  “Am I rare?” he asked.

  The boy turned and explained, “O positive and A positive are the most common types. Who wants to be first?”

  “Let me,” Joan said. “He’s never done it before.”

  “Her full name is Joan of Arc,” Richard explained, angered at this betrayal, so unimpeachably selfless and smug.

  The intern, threatened in his element, fixed his puzzled eyes on the floor between them and said, “Take off your shoes and each get on a bed.” He added, “Please,” and all three laughed, one after the other, the intern last.

  The beds were at right angles to one another along two walls. Joan lay down and from her husband’s angle of vision was novelly foreshortened. He had never before seen her quite this way, the combed crown of her hair so poignant, her bared arm so silver and long, her stocking feet toed in so childishly and helplessly. There were no pillows on the beds, and lying flat made him feel tipped head down; the illusion of floating encouraged his hope that this unreal adventure would soon dissolve, as dreams do. “You O.K.?”

  “Are you?” Her voice came softly from the tucked-under wealth of her hair. Her parting was so straight it seemed a mother had brushed it. He watched a long needle sink into the flat of her arm and a piece of moist cotton clumsily swab the spot.
He had imagined their blood would be drained into cans or bottles, but the intern, whose breathing was now the only sound within the room, brought to Joan’s side what looked like a miniature plastic knapsack, all coiled and tied. His body cloaked his actions. When he stepped away, a plastic cord had been grafted, a transparent vine, to the flattened crook of Joan’s extended arm, where the skin was translucent and the veins were faint blue tributaries shallowly buried. It was a tender, vulnerable place where in courting days she had liked being stroked. Now, without visible transition, the pale tendril planted here went dark red. Richard wanted to cry out.

  The instant readiness of her blood to leave her body pierced him like a physical pang. Though he had not so much as blinked, its initial leap had been too quick for his eye. He had expected some visible sign of flow, but from the mere appearance of it the tiny looped hose might be pouring blood into her body or might be a curved line added, like an impudent mustache, to a painting. The fixed position of his head gave what he saw a certain flatness.

  And now the intern turned to him, and there was the tiny felt prick of the Novocain needle, and then the coarse, half-felt intrusion of something resembling a medium-weight nail. Twice the boy mistakenly probed for the vein and the third time taped the successful graft fast with adhesive tape. All the while, Richard’s mind moved aloofly among the constellations of the stained, cracked ceiling. What was being done to him did not bear contemplating. When the intern moved away to hum and tinkle among his instruments, Joan craned her neck to show her husband her face and, upside down in his vision, grotesquely smiled, her mouth where her eyes should have been, her eyes a broken, blinking mouth.