Violin Read Online Free Page A

moment. I thought she was pretty in her dressing gown; it was white with pale flowers and pleated at the waist, and she had satin slippers too, such as a Garden District lady might, and she was very rich, they always said. Her gray hair was neatly trimmed in small curls around her face.
    I looked back out at the Avenue. The tall lanky manwas gone from view. I heard those words again.
You’re the one who never goes mad!
I couldn’t remember the expression on his face. Had he smiled? Had he moved his lips? And the music, just thinking of it made the tears flow.
    It was the most shamefully emotional music, so like Tchaikovsky just saying, Hell with the world, and letting the sweetest, saddest pain gush, in a way that my Mozart and my Beethoven never did.
    I looked at the empty block, the far houses. A streetcar came slowly rocking towards the corner. By God, he was there! The violinist. He had crossed to the median and he stood on the car stop, but he didn’t get on the car. He was too far away for me to see his expression or know even that he could still see me, and now he turned and drifted off.
    The night was the same. The stench was the same.
    Miss Hardy stood in frightening motionlessness.
    She looked so sad. She thought I was crazy. Or she just hated it, perhaps, to be the one to find me this way, the one to have to do something perhaps. I don’t know.
    She went away, to find the phone, I thought. She didn’t have more words for me. She thought I was out of my mind and not worth another word of sense, and who could blame her?
    At least it was true about the baby born in London. But I would have let his body lie there even if they’d all been home and here. It just would have been harder.
    I turned around and hurried out of the parlor, and across the dining room. I went through the small breakfast room and ran up the steps. They are small, these steps—not a grand staircase as in a two-story antebellum house, but small delicate curved steps to go to the attic of a Greek Revival cottage.
    I slammed his door and turned the brass key. He was always one for every door having its proper key, and for the first time ever I was glad of it.
    Now she couldn’t get in. No one could.
    The room was icy cold because the windows were wide open, and it was full of the smell, but I took deep gulping breath after breath and then crawled under the blankets and beside him for the last time, just one more time, just one more few minutes before they burn each and every finger and toe, his lips, his eyes. Just let me be with him.
    Let me be with all of them.
    From far off there came the clamor of her voice, but something else from a distance. It was the dim respectful pavane of a violin.
You out there, playing.
    For you, Triana.
    I snuggled up against Karl’s shoulder. He was so very dead, so much deader than yesterday. I shut my eyes and pulled the big gold comforter over us—he had such money, he loved such pretty things—in this our four-poster bed, our Prince of Wales-style bed which he had let me have, and now I dreamed for the last time of him: the grave dream.
    The music was in it. It was so faint I couldn’t tell if I was only remembering it now from downstairs, but it was there. The music.
    Karl. I laid my hand on his bony cheeks, all sweetness melted away.
    One last time, let me wallow in death and this time with my new friend’s music coming to me as if the Devil had sent him up from Hell, this violinist, just for those of us who are so “half in love with easeful Death.”
    Father, Mother, Lily, give me your bones. Give me the grave. Let’s take Karl down into it with us. What matterto us, those of us who are dead, that he died of some virulent disease; we are all here in the moist earth together; we are dead together.

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    D IG DEEP , deep, my soul, to find the heart—the blood, the heat, the shrine and resting place. Dig deep, deep into the moist soil all the way to where they lie, those I love—she, Mother, with her