Asimov's Science Fiction: October/November 2013 (12 page)

The first time he'd ever heard music on wax cylinders was back in February, one unseasonably warm afternoon when his mother had met him at the end of a school day. Back then she'd been studying at the YMCA to learn to be a stenographer and typist, and some days she finished early enough to accompany Eustace home. Now that she was employed, those times together happened rarely. But on that afternoon, they had strolled up West Ohio Street and come upon a shop that had its doors open. Just inside, on a table, was a big box with a funnel sticking out the front. Half a dozen people stood on the sidewalk, as posed as mannequins. Even as he peered between them at the source of the music, they remained still. A polished wooden box sat on a table a few feet inside. One small piece of it—a shiny, yellowish cylinder—spun in place, but what drew his attention more was the huge cyclopean eye of the horn out of which the sound poured. It was glossy indigo, decorated with red radiating lines, and so large that a supporting stick propped it up. There for a moment he fell under the same spell that had captured the adults. Those red lines seemed to pull him out of his body and into the dark empty hole at the center, into the tune.

Then Mother broke the spell, identifying it to herself. " 'By the Light of the Silvery Moon,' " she muttered, and suddenly there was movement. Heads swiveled to look at her. Someone else concurred. "Yes," they said. Then they all listened again.

After a minute the tune ended, and a man who had been standing beside the box all along stepped forward and pushed a knob on its side. The cylinder stopped rotating. "Next performance in half an hour," he announced. "We have a wide assortment of songs in here, enough to entertain for hours and hours."

A few people stepped through the doorway. The rest walked off or peered into the shop window, where another of the devices was displayed on a stand, flanked by a trumpet and a viola.

As Mother took his hand again, Eustace heard the man explain, "Why, you can play a cylinder up to a hundred times. And buy the shaver and recording accessory and you can make your own recordings again and again. Imagine it!"

After that, Eustace meandered to the music store frequently. For a time, he just remained in the crowd—there was always a cluster of listeners on the sidewalk. Then one day he entered the store and discovered that the beautiful young woman who lived across the hall, Miss Comuzzi, worked there. She played piano in between performances of the "amazing Edison phonograph," and also gave lessons, which were often sold with a piano purchase. Miss Comuzzi recognized Eustace. She let him sit beside her while she played sonatas and nocturnes—never the contemporary pieces that might have put her in competition with the phonograph. Unlike Mr. Righter (another tenant of the boarding house, who smelled overly of Bay Rum), she smelled wonderful, like roses.

Occasionally, when the store was deserted, she would teach him keys and chords, or even a simple tune that he could practice. The salesman encouraged it. "The picture of domestic bliss," he said. Sometimes she brought home sheet music and presented it to Eustace after dinner, and though he couldn't yet read it, he would sit and stare at the arcane lines and shapes while he invented a tune to match. She bought him chocolates and penny candies, including candy corn, which he'd never seen before. Mother liked her, too. Despite their age difference, he decided that one day they would be married and she would play for him whatever she liked.

When one afternoon his worshipful presence beside Miss Comuzzi convinced a customer to buy a piano for his daughter, the owner, a round-faced little man, declared that he wanted Eustace there every day.

He taught him to stand on a box beside the phonograph and load a cylinder on the player. Eustace learned to balance the yellowish wax along two fingers and, pushing only against the end of it, slide it onto the mandrel, after which he locked it into place. He pulled the lever that started the cylinder turning, and carefully lowered the arm of the reproducer. While he diligently performed this task, a salesman exhorted the crowd on the ease of using the Edison machine. Why, look, even a
child
could enjoy the pleasures of this musical wonder.

Late in April, an Edison machine was set up beside the piano, and Eustace was allowed to direct the recording horn to capture Miss Comuzzi's performance of a Chopin Prelude, which she played faster than she had previously to make it fit onto the two-minute cylinder. Some in the crowd actually gasped when it was played back. The small spectacle generated a buzz, and soon Eustace was daily shaving cylinders and recording Miss Comuzzi, or her accompaniment of someone in the crowd who sang.

Sales of the twenty-dollar machines jumped. The happy store owner gave Miss Comuzzi a raise, and even paid Eustace a small consideration for his assistance, by arrangement with her. At first he spent all the money, but then he began saving it with the intention of buying something nice for Mother. For two years, since the day his father had been killed in a rail yard accident, Mother had worked tirelessly to take care of them both.

In the end Miss Comuzzi helped him pick out a necklace with a teardrop moonstone cabochon, and Mother loved it so much she wore it all the time, which made Eustace feel warm and grown up and wonderful.

A few times in those last weeks, the owner had handed Miss Comuzzi small notes, which she opened only after he went away; and then she made a small laugh and hugged Eustace as if
he
had done something clever, which made him wish he had. Those days she finished her shift, but did not walk home with him. Instead she hurried off down Desplaines Street, and did not appear at the boarding house until late in the evening.

Then, abruptly and unexpectedly, it all ended and the whispering among the adults began.

One day Miss Comuzzi did not show up at the music store. That morning before leaving the boarding house, she'd promised him a big surprise when he got to the store after school. She was so elated that he'd thought maybe... well, it was silly, but he'd thought it.

When he got there, the owner was furious. Miss Comuzzi had appointed lessons to give. The little man glared at Eustace as if he must know where she'd gone, and he ran home to the boarding house and rapped hard on her door. She wasn't there. It seemed she wasn't anywhere at all.

Two days later, when he came home from school, he saw that her room was open. He looked in to find that her belongings had been removed. A policeman had come, Mrs. Claymore told Mother. The news was... but she had seen him watching and instead of speaking only shook her head. A dark fog of silence clogged the boarding house that night.

Yet by the time they'd all been seated for supper the following day, the room was rented out to a new boarder, a Mr. Schulde. Mrs. Claymore announced it with delight as she set down the bowl of whipped potatoes. "Why, I hadn't even hung the sign out," she said. "It's kismet is what it is."

Eustace didn't know that word, but he decided it meant
unfair.

He took an immediate dislike to the new tenant, the interloper in Miss Comuzzi's room. Mr. Schulde was tall and slim, and his hair was black, oiled until it was as smooth as glass. He sported a waxed mustache that looked to Eustace like two scorpions. Behind the mustache, his face was smooth; Mother remarked upon how young he appeared for someone with such a palpable presence.

The first night that he sat at dinner with everyone, Mr. Schulde asked their permission to indulge in his particular musical vice. Mr. Vanderhoff was there that night, home from the road. His appearance at the dinner table was inconstant, but Eustace liked him a lot, and he seemed fond of Mother. After one of his long absences he'd brought her a box of Whitman's chocolates "all the way from Philadelphia." Eustace and Mr. Vanderhoff shared a secret that he swore never to tell Mother—that Mr. Vanderhoff carried a gun in his valise when he traveled. He'd even let Eustace hold it once on the back porch when no one was about.

Vanderhoff asked, "You have one of those contraptions in your room, do you?"

Mr. Schulde looked up from his plate. "I do. And I would be
pleased
to demonstrate it for you." Mr. Schulde smiled at Mother as he made the offer.

Mrs. Claymore clasped her hands upon the promontory of her bosom. "Oh," she said, "I love that someone
cultured
is among us."

Mr. Righter spluttered at her insult. Mr. Righter spent much of his time pontificating on virtually any subject from automobile manufacture to glider flight (all advancements happening in Germany instead of here in our great nation, according to him). He had what Mother called a
goiter.
Eustace thought he looked like a frog.

Mrs. Claymore remained oblivious of her gaffe, all her attention focused on Mr. Schulde. "Oh, come, sir. Show us, please."

With a magnanimous air, Mr. Schulde led them all up to the second floor, where they crowded into his doorway. Eustace wriggled between them to stand at the front. Mother politely eased in beside him.

It was still Miss Comuzzi's room, Eustace saw. Hardly anything looked different. Even the bed quilt was the same, the one he'd sat on any number of times. The room bore the hint of rose petals still, as if she had departed only hours before they'd entered. It was more spacious than his and Mother's room, too, and Eustace added to his list of objections that they had not been allowed an opportunity to move in here before this man intruded.

For a moment Eustace didn't realize that Mr. Schulde was standing beside the player—it looked so different from those the music store had sold—but when he unlatched and lifted away the wood cover, revealing the mechanism, Eustace quickly identified the mandrel, the circular reproducer, and the knob that set the cylinder in motion or stopped it. But these features were part of a larger apparatus than any he'd encountered. They sat atop a cabinet more than half the height of Mr. Schulde, resting upon four knurled feet. The cabinet face bore an odd rectangular opening, something like a baffle fronted by numerous uprights. It made the cabinet appear to be grinning.

He expected the horn to appear. Instead Mr. Schulde opened a door in the lower part of the cabinet and removed a pale cylinder, lifting it upon two extended fingers as Eustace knew was the proper procedure; then slid it onto the mandrel, locked it into place, and pushed the release. Delicately, he lowered the reproducer.

The song emerged from the rectangular mouth of the cabinet—"Alexander's Ragtime Band."

"Oh, my," said Mrs. Claymore, and she touched one hand just below her throat.

Everyone else stood silent until it was over, very like the crowd at the music store.

When it ended, they clapped, as though Mr. Schulde had performed some magic trick. Eustace crossed his arms and pushed out his lip.
He
had done more than that just helping to sell phonographs.

Mr. Schulde put the cylinder away and lowered the cover over the mechanism again.

"Can you record on it?" Eustace asked, and sensed everyone looking at him, including Mr. Schulde, who seemed surprised that he could speak.

"As a matter of fact, dear boy, I can... though I shan't demonstrate
that
for you now." He bowed to Mother, standing beside Eustace. "I assure you, I'll be discreet in playing my cylinders, and not at all late at night, as I know that some of us"—and now he speared Eustace with a look—"need to go to bed earlier than others."

Mrs. Claymore answered, "Oh, we're all great lovers of music here, sir, and poor Miss Comuzzi, who occupied this very room—I was just saying—was the music performer among us, and I'm sure she would delight that it's in her room." She sought approval from her tenants. Mr. Righter nodded with enthusiasm. Mr. Vanderhoff looked troubled, as if unhappy to be in Miss Comuzzi's room.

Then Mr. Righter began one of his speeches about progress and invention, and everyone dispersed. As they were turning away, Mr. Schulde came up to Mother. "You are my direct neighbor, Mrs. Lutts, so you will tell me if ever I am an annoyance, won't you?"

Eustace wanted to tell him he was
that
already.

Mother smiled demurely and dropped her gaze. "I surely will, Mr. Schulde."

He stepped nearer. "Please. We're going to be close neighbors. You must call me Franklin."

The look on Mr. Vanderhoff 's face expressed Eustace's own animus. He dove around Mrs. Claymore and fled down the stairs. Mother called after him but he pretended he didn't hear, and did not stop until he was outside in the twilight.

It was too awful: Miss Comuzzi was lost to him in some way only the adults knew, this hideous man had taken her place across the hall, and no one else saw how repulsive he was.

He could not explain to Mother his need to enter Miss Comuzzi's room (he refused to think of it as anything else). No one else knew about her promise of a surprise for him. Whether she had left something behind—a final sheet of music, a farewell letter, a valentine—or not, it didn't matter, though he truly believed the two of them had been too close for there to be nothing. She had promised.

Plus, that man,
Franklin,
was now clearly courting Mother. He was thus the enemy of
everything.

Schulde went off each morning at seven to his job—which was to do with what he called
phosphorescent lighting,
at the Columbian Exhibition that had just opened in Jackson Park. He returned each afternoon after three. His routine was established.

Eustace awoke the next day and pretended to be sick—not so sick that Mother needed to remain with him, but just sick enough to warrant a day at home in bed. A prepared hot water bottle provided his "fever." In secret he laid it across his forehead so that when Mother placed her hand there, she agreed that he felt warm.

The door to Miss Comuzzi's room was of course locked, but Eustace had prepared for that. One of the curious benefits of being a child was that adults often disregarded your presence while they performed some private act, which was how he knew where Mrs. Claymore hung the spare keys, and by pretending to mope about the house, he had already secured the one he needed.