The Time of Her Life (23 page)

She finally lifted the violin with great care and fitted it beneath her chin, but she did not pick up the bow yet. She stood
with her bow arm hanging lax as she adjusted her head and looked down the strings. At last she raised her hand just to pluck
the strings to see if they were in tune, and in spite of herself, the real tension of them—not the reluctant elastic feeling
of her rented instrument—the pleasant resistance of those strings as she plucked across the bridge filled her with excitement.
And then she did pick up the bow and began tentatively to play the “Air for the G String.” As
soon as she first drew the bow across the strings, she was aware that she had left herself and was speculatively observing
her own playing. She was aware that no conscious part of her was controlling her own actions, that she was floating away from
herself as she played the lovely, light, graceful violin and produced a sound of real brilliance. It was to be one of the
rare moments in her life, as she stood there in the middle of the lightening room among the many little pinpoints of candlelight,
when all the lines of coincidence and fate and circumstance intersect and a small miracle of luck occurs.

Toward the evening of the twenty-third of December there was a general stirring in all the houses where there lived a student
in the Lunsbury Central Schools who played an instrument, orchestral or band, or who sang in the chorus. Some children did
all three, and in those houses there was a buttoned-down tension more concentrated than in other houses. Even so, each music
student basked in the attention of his or her family members, enjoyed the meal served early on his or her account, and dealt
one way or another with the combined excitement of the music concert and the upcoming holidays. They were pleasantly burdened
with the heavy and titillating anticipation that hangs over children as festivities mount toward what is always a disappointingly
benign celebration.

Jane arrived in the auditorium faintly dazed from the long day and also from her sudden reimmersion into her particular society
and the bedlam of backstage activity after the sweet, quiet time of seclusion she had taken for herself. In fact, she was
intimidated and alarmed by all the stirring about, by the jargon of the
day being thrown from child to child to impress whoever might be listening.

“Oh, my God, Jane! You look really good! I saw that dress at Halls in the designer collection, but my mother won’t let me
shop there. You look really fantastic!” Linda had been dashing by but had stopped still to give Jane that quick compliment.
Jane was out of practice, though, and just looked back mutely and moved out of the way.

Jane was the object of a good bit of ostentatious solicitude. All the girls in the group—genuinely kind-hearted girls for
the most part—took care to adopt a somber attitude of sympathetic inquiry when they approached Jane. They surreptitiously
vied with one another to be the one most thoroughly concerned about her. And their concern was not at all feigned, but it
became more and more intense. Their scrutiny of each other was so close that each consoling gesture any one of them made in
Jane’s direction affected in the others real emotion and an almost frenzied need to prove their magnanimity toward Jane and
her plight. Jane’s friends were flying around, doing errands for the chorus director or instructing the younger children in
this or that—they were gleefully self-important as sixth graders. But they would spot Jane and come to a halt, and Heather
or Stephanie or Linda would move gravely toward her, touch her arm, and speak to her softly. Then they would dash off to be
seen at some other important job. Only Diana stood apart from her and was quiet and withdrawn. Jane had hurt her feelings
very much over the past few weeks, which was a fairly long time in the social lives of those girls. Diana stood at the far
end of the corridor from Jane, dispiritedly holding her flute and waiting for the orchestra to take its seats.

Jane didn’t notice that Diana was ignoring her, and even the benevolent attention aimed her way roused in her a longing to
be away from all the people and the noise, but at the same time she was in the grip of a keenness for a certain kind of power.
She was eager to perform and test herself with the new violin, while she was also terrified that she had tricked herself into
believing she sounded better than she did.

She stood backstage against a wall to be out of the way and leave the passage behind the curtain free while her friends passed
back and forth. The other girls all had a self-conscious look of sly pleasure, and they drifted here and there, in everyone’s
way, much taken with themselves in the long-skirted Laura Ashley dresses they had bought at the Honeybee. They were eager
to be observed, but they pretended a kind of cavalier boredom with it all. And the boys were equally and less subtly impressed
with themselves in their gray flannel slacks and brass-buttoned blazers.

Jane was fairly oblivious to everything going on around her and especially to the clothes she had on. She was so tired from
the short night and long day preceding this evening that she was queasy with a surge of adrenaline through all her body. Her
hands trembled slightly, and her legs felt wooden and locked at the knees. She was also concentrating to some degree on keeping
her violin out of sight so Miss Jessup wouldn’t notice it and insist she play the other one for this performance. She did
not want her mother and her teacher to be at odds with each other. She stood where she was, worrying about the pieces she
would play and staying out of the way.

But any of the adults who came backstage for some
reason or another and even some of the other performers—when their attention momentarily slewed away from themselves—could
not help noticing Jane. She was not dressed in one of the sweet Laura Ashley dresses. It would never have occurred to Claudia
to check with any other parent and find out what might be the order of the day. She had not even thought to shop in the Girls’
Department of Halls; she had selected Jane’s dress from the same collection from which she chose her own clothes, whenever
she remembered to do that. Clothes weren’t important to Claudia, and she always bought what appealed to her at the moment.
Jane stood against the wall dressed in a plain knee-length white wool dress and matching waist-length jacket that had no ornamentation
whatsoever except that the squared neckline of the jacket was gently scalloped and framed Jane’s collarbone and long, arched
neck. It was a dress of very restrained femininity, and Claudia had bought it that afternoon as soon as she saw it; it was
a dress she would have liked to wear herself, although she had the wrong figure for it. She didn’t think about the fact that
Jane was only eleven years old, even if she was tall, and that this dress was sophisticated for a child to wear successfully.
The dress had fitted Jane perfectly.

Claudia hadn’t known what to do with Jane’s hair, and Jane hadn’t cared one way or another. But just before they left the
house, Claudia had brushed Jane’s dark blond hair straight back and wound it as best she could into a French twist. This left
Jane’s smooth, wide brow clear, and her eyes were large and serious in her oval face. Without her hair hanging down on either
side, the planes of her face were apparent, and the firmly rounded chin and the strong, distinct line of her jaw.

The dress Claudia had chosen was exactly right for Jane, as it turned out, because she didn’t have the face of a child, and
people turned to look at her. She had the heart-stopping look of wisdom that one observes in the faces of young ballet dancers.
She had such an expression of assured devotion that Mr. Walters, the band director, noticed her, and it went fleetingly through
his mind that she looked like a young nun. But then he moved on in his thoughts to worry about whether to reposition the drums
so they wouldn’t be too dominant. There was a plethora of drummers this year.

Claudia had dropped Jane at school early and gone to Burger Chef to get some dinner for herself. When she returned, the parking
lot was full, and she had to leave the car two streets away and make her way toward the school on foot. All around them, as
the parents of Lunsbury negotiated a path along the shoveled, icy sidewalks beneath the streetlights, was a fine, black, misty
night. A vaporous condensation rose from the ground, and the air seemed rich and loamy in contrast with the white, crusted
yards and brittle banks of snow along the plowed roads. Only long feathers of clouds moved through the upper distance to break
the dark, and snowflakes fell sparely and in such cold that they landed on a dark coat sleeve or shoulder in tiny but perfectly
delineated crystalline formations, and then they were gone again in an instant.

Claudia moved with the throng in her long wool cape and was pleased to listen to various parents greeting each other. She
was in a state of such optimism and excitement that the communal calling back and forth and laughing and polite joke making
seemed to her an almost unbearably poignant reminder of the possibilities
of civilization and goodwill. Her perceptions were on a hair trigger this evening, and she was so convinced, in this crowd,
of the occasional benevolence of human-kind that she was near tears.

When she entered the auditorium, she had no idea that her face took on an expression of gratitude that cast a vulnerability
over her features. She attracted attention in the same way her daughter had backstage. The two of them looked, tonight, like
people around whom something is bound to happen. Everything about them bespoke an intrinsic drama. Claudia was startling to
see with all her hopes upon her delicate triangular face, and she was tall in the crowd in her black cloak. And although she
was somberly dressed among all the bright goose down jackets, she was also jarringly glittery with refracted regard, because
Claudia was indifferent to the opinion of strangers. She did not absorb their consideration, and it bounced back at the observers,
any one of whom felt oddly slighted.

It was not until she caught sight of Avery smiling at her from the third row that she became self-reflective and put a hand
up to brush back her hood and settle her hair. She made her way down an aisle and smiled at him and then sat down beside him,
and he leaned over and gave her a polite little kiss in greeting. She was sitting forward a bit, and she stayed perfectly
still for a moment. Such a clear-cut friendliness from her own husband unnerved her, but she settled back in her seat and
shrugged off her cape and crossed her legs.

“Wait till you see Janie tonight,” she said to him. “She looks so… grown-up, I guess. I’m not sure how to describe her. She
looks very elegant, and, oh, ‘serene’ is as close as I can come. ‘Grown-up’ isn’t quite what I
mean. It’s very surprising when you first notice the difference. Avery, it almost broke my heart.” Claudia had turned to hold
his gaze directly. To Avery she generally said exactly what she meant, which caused her, quite often, to sound overwrought,
even though her voice was perfectly calm.

“That’s probably what was bound to happen,” Avery said. “Even when she was little, she never really looked
young
. She’ll go from being an ordinary little girl to someone you have to take seriously.”

Claudia looked at him more closely. That terrible note of self-indulgent nostalgia was infusing his voice again, although
he was absolutely sober. Claudia didn’t think he had had even one drink. She knew him so well that she could gauge his sobriety
just by the small degree of muscular tension in his face.

Avery was pondering and sorting his ideas as he spoke, and he went on. “She could end up being one of those women who are
frightening. Admirable but alarming. Do you know what I mean? She’s always had that quality around the eyes…. Well, I know
what it is.” And he sketched vaguely with his hands to try to describe his daughter. “She’s watchful. It’s judgment. She’ll
always have a slightly secretive look. Remember, even when she was a baby, she always looked as though she were weighing everything
in the balance. You used to pick her up to feed her and say, ‘Oh, come on, give me a break!’ Remember?” And he laughed. “She’s
always been able to make up her mind and look out for herself.” And he meant this. He thought he loved his daughter. He and
Claudia had no idea; they had no idea at all how mysterious parents are to their children. Claudia and Avery both thought
privately that Jane was
a rather strange child who didn’t altogether approve of them.