Various Miracles (15 page)

Elke was too tired to read yet another of Stanley’s little notes. She accepted it with a small smile, then slipped it between the sheets of music on her stand. She never saw it again and assumed that it had fallen during the night and been swept
up and thrown away—which was what she would have done with it herself.

In any case, the note wouldn’t have comforted her. She worried less about the actual cause of Papa’s death than everyone thought. It was what he’d meant to her that she fretted about, and his expectations. Her psychiatrist had assured her that the death would release her, but she knew she was going through with the concert for Papa’s sake. For Papa, everything must be flawless.

Stanley told her her playing was perfect. It was impossible for her to improve. “Don’t change a thing,” he begged.

Ross told her he would select her clothes for the concert. He had examined her wardrobe. Only the red blouse would, perhaps, do. she needed a skirt, shoes, a scarf—everything. She was not to worry about it. He would look for the clothes and would buy her what she needed.

Elke found herself thanking him.

Ross was happy. Stanley had not seen him so happy since before Papa died. He smiled; he pranced; he showed Stanley the new clothes which he’d spread out on his bed. (Once this had been Papa’s bed.)

There was a long black skirt made of some silky material, a pair of black shoes which consisted of thin little straps, and a printed scarf with red fleurs-de-lis on a black background.

That night, however, Stanley dreamed that the scarf became wound around Elke’s neck during the performance and strangled her. He said to Ross in the morning, “I like everything but the scarf. Elke should wear the gold necklace instead of a scarf.”

“It’s too heavy for Elke,” Ross said.

“It might bring her luck,” said Stanley.

Many generations of Woods had worn the gold necklace. Three Woods had been married in it. A Wood had worn it to a funeral mass for Czar Nicholas. A Wood had shaken the hand of the great Schiffmann while wearing it. A Wood had hidden it behind a plaster wall in the city of Berlin. Another Wood had carried it out of Spain in 1936 sewn into the hem of a blanket.

“Gold can be vulgar,” said Ross. “A scarf has more
esprit.”

“Papa would have insisted she wear the necklace,” said Stanley. He was tired. He’d worked later than usual.

“All right,” Ross said. “Tomorrow I’ll go to the bank and get it out of the vault. But don’t tell Elke. I want to surprise her.”

On the day of the concert, Elke woke refreshed and alert after what seemed to her to have been a dream-free night. She lay for a few minutes in her bed and tried to remember when she’d last felt so almost happy. Her bedroom was filled with sunny shades of yellow and red—colors she’d chosen herself. The room was quiet. She could lie here as long as she wanted, and no one would come to tell her to get up.

She was at the hall by noon, before the technicians, before her brothers, before the audience and critics. Today the stage felt friendly; it welcomed the sound of her steps and her soft humming of the music she would play tonight. There was no terror in this.

“How do you feel?” Ross’s voice sounded sharply at her feet. He was standing, suddenly, at the stairs leading from the front row to the stage. “Did you sleep well?”

“Woods always sleep well.” Her rare teasing voice.

“But
did
you?” He paused, then walked up the stairs to where she was standing. His arms stretched toward her
in a curious, beseeching gesture. “I’ve brought you the necklace. I got it from the bank yesterday, just before it closed for the weekend. I was so worried, I hid it underneath my pillow all night.”

“Are you sure—?” Elke asked.

“Papa would have wanted you to wear it.”

“Then I must, of course.”

“Hurry,” Ross said to Stanley. “We want to be there at least twenty minutes before the program begins.”

“I should polish my shoes one more time,” said Stanley. The two brothers stood by the door, dressed alike in their black suits and dark ties, the coarse Wood hair brushed back from their foreheads.

“Your shoes are fine as they are,” Ross said, but he did not want to start a quarrel. He had quarreled with Papa the night he died, a circuitous quarrel about bonds and about the little Monet drawing—what should be done with it. It was just after the quarrel, in fact, that Papa had rushed out into the street and fallen in the path of the motorcyclist.

“I’ll only be a minute,” Stanley said. He found a soft cloth and rubbed at the toes of his black shoes. Then he pulled at his shirt cuffs and examined them. Elke must be proud of them tonight.

The air outside was spicy and cold, and the chilly white light of the moon coated the pavement and the tops of parked cars. Ross and Stanley fell into step, left-right, left-right. They were silent, guarding their thoughts and guarding at the same time, it seemed, Elke’s good luck. Stanley wondered if she were anxious, if the little nerves were jumping under the skin of her playing arm, if she were finding it painful to breathe, if her vision were blurred or her thoughts scattered.

Walking along dark streets always made Stanley think of how piteously men and women struggle to make themselves known to one another, how lonely they can be.

At least he wasn’t alone. He would never be alone. Thinking this, he stumbled slightly with happiness and bumped up against Ross. The two of them bounced lightly off each other as two eggs will do when boiled in a little pan.

Elke had persuaded Ross and Stanley to let her eat supper alone. She ate two peeled peaches and a bowl of corn flakes, and had drunk a small glass of Scotch. Now she was wandering the corridor beneath the stage.

There seemed an endless number of rooms: dressing rooms like her own, larger rooms filled with props and costumes, one tiny room with row after row of wigs, several rooms of mops and rags and buckets, then a little library whose shelves were weighted down with scripts and scores, next a delightful room full of instruments in need of repair, and still another room full of instruments beyond repair. This labyrinth of rooms had the surprising and inevitable logic of a dream.

She glanced at the watch given to her by Papa for her last birthday; the slim gold pointers had moved alarmingly fast. She had only a few minutes to get dressed. Before turning back to her room where Ross’s clothes lay spread out on a divan waiting for her, Elke opened one last door.

Costumes, costumes. These must be the costumes for the Saturday matinee performances of fairy tales given to busloads of children; Rapunzel’s gown, Goldilocks’s frilled pinafore, Sleeping Beauty’s nightdress, Cinderella’s slippers, Red Riding Hood’s cape. The costumes were made to last for years of performances, and were lovely enough to enchant the most disenchanted of children. Rapunzel’s gold-green gown,
with its square neck and high empire waist, was by far the most beautiful and, as it happened, fit Elke perfectly.

The gold necklace, retrieved from a hiding place in her dressing room, sat solidly on her throat, framed by the square of satin and velvet. Elke caught up her violin and bow and walked lightly up to the wings.

    “Four more minutes.”

“Five. Shhhh.”

“A worthy audience. A very fine audience. Wouldn’t you say so, Ross? A fine audience?”

“Well, of course. A Wood always—”

“Ross?”

“What?”

“Papa.”

“What about Papa?”

“Do you think he—? Do you ever believe that… after people die, that they—”

“Yes.”

“Yes, what? You mean you think—”

“Yes, I’m sure of it. Papa is here. With us. Tonight.”

“I don’t.”

“What do you mean, you don’t?”

“I don’t think he’s here.”

“Of course he’s here.”

“I think he’s gone. I’m sure of it. He’s left us.”

“He’ll never leave us.”

“Isn’t that—?”

“Yes. Shhhh. She’s coming.”

Elke had just arrived in the wings when the lights were dimmed and the noise from the audience thinned to a softer
sound. She stood, bent slightly forward, with one arm crooked around the violin and the bow held lightly in the opposite hand. Under the surprising folds of the costume, which she now realized smelled strongly of mothballs and dust, her body felt cool and determined.

It seemed suddenly as though Papa were near—in the chamber of the violin or wrapped around the resined strings of her bow. But she knew this was only an illusion stirred by the hard lights and the rising excitement.

“He’s gone,” she told herself, looking down at the backs of her hands. “I’m sure of that, at least.”

It was time to begin. It was past time to begin. A hand pressed on her spine between her neck and her waist, between her shoulder blades, an encouraging, insistent pressure. “Go, go, they are waiting.”

Elke bent her neck to show she was ready, then followed the angle of her head out onto the stage. A few minutes of surging noise—was someone shouting something to her?—then she laid her chin and her cheek on the violin, positioned her arm and bow. She closed her eyes and clearly saw the notes of her
Chanson des Fleurs
lined up before her. With a slight nod to the notes, to the audience, to herself, to whomever might be watching, she began to play.

Stanley was on his feet. “Bravo! Bravissimo!”

The two, bright, flag-shaped words were out of his mouth before he realized it and before Elke had played a single note. The shame, the shame. He felt the blood go out of his clapping hands and then their unbearable weight at his sides. The disgrace! For Elke, for Ross, for Papa whose wide pale disappointed face came sliding before his eyes.

To himself he said: “I’m going to faint.”

But he didn’t. All around him people were rising to their feet and applauding. For Elke, darling Elke. Even Ross, looking stunned, rose and opened his mouth and whispered, “Bravo.”

She began. Her
Chanson
first, each note rounded like the bowl of a spoon. Stanley held his breath in the final bars where the notes seemed to heap themselves one on top of the other. Then, her
August Suite
and, after that, her
Flueve Noir
, so slow, so stately that Stanley would have cried if he hadn’t felt carried to a calm rivery place beyond tears. Last, Elke played her silky little
Lament
in memory of Papa.

She bowed deeply. It was intermission already. The gold necklace burned at her throat and the great golden-green dress swept the floor—where had she found such a dress? Stanley turned to ask Ross, who was staring straight ahead, “Where has she found such a dress?”

“We picked it out together,” Ross was saying. “It seemed to set off the necklace.”

It was over. She was back in the dressing room, exhausted, happy, her fingers aching for the resistance of the strings, her heart rocking. All those people; all those eyes scraping against the skin of her face.

She hesitated only a moment before opening the door to Ross’s knock. One, two, three, she counted, then opened it.

Stanley followed Ross into the room carrying—by the stems, heads downward—an enormous bouquet of flowers, an absurd bouquet of flowers. “Ecstasies! Ecstasies!” His eyes rolled, his arms swung, and the flowers fell to the floor, their sharp fragrance mingling with the odor of mothballs.

Ross blinked, then smiled, then bent down and picked up the strewn flowers. “For you,” he said, presenting them and
kissing Elke in the Wood way, first on one cheek, then on the other, finally on the forehead. “You are a true Wood,” he said into her ear. He did not look into her eyes.

“The truest Wood,” added Stanley, who liked the last word, and who was always permitted to have it.

WENDY
IS BACK
! the sign said. It caught his eye.

It was a handprinted sign and fairly crude—not that he was a man who objected to crudeness; crayon lettering on a piece of cardboard: WENDY IS BACK! it said.

The sign was in the window of an orthopedic shoe store on a dim back street in downtown Winnipeg. He passed it one morning on his way to the office, and the image of the sign, and all the questions it raised, stayed with him, printed as it were on the back wall of his eye.

Who is Wendy?

Where has she been?

Why is she back?

And why is her return the cause of joy?

Joy, there was no other word for it. The sign taped flat against the plate-glass window was a joyful announcement, a public proclamation, reinforced, too, by its light, high floater of an exclamation point (that fond crayoned slash of
exuberance) testifying to the fact that Wendy’s return, whether from visiting her grandmother in Portage or from vacationing with a girlfriend in Hawaii, was an event worthy of celebration. The question was, why?

She would be about his own age, he reasoned—which was thirty. Nobody over thirty was named Wendy, at least nobody he’d ever met. But where had she been? Perhaps she’d been sick; flu was going the rounds, a persistent strain. (He himself had missed three days at work only the week before, and now his wife had come down with it.) Or an operation. Impossible.