Collected Stories. Carol Shields

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       A Wood (with Anne Giardini)

      THE OTHER EVENING Ross AND STANLEY arrived at the rehearsal hall in time to see Elke go through her violin concert to be performed at the end of the month. It has taken all these years for recognition to come, though she began composing when she was sixteen. How serene she looked in the middle of the bare stage. But she was wearing that damned peasant skirt; Ross had begged her not to dress like that. It made her look like a twelve-tone type. It made her look less than serious.

      “Isn’t she magnificent!” Stanley said, breathless. “The coloring! The expression! Like little gold threads pouring out.”

      “She’ll never be ready,” Ross said. “She should have been working all summer.”

      “You’re hard on her. Don’t be hard on her. She’s human. She needed to get away.”

      “We’re all hard on each other, all the Woods are hard on each other. Papa used to say, ‘A Wood will only settle for standards of excellence. A Wood asks more of himself than he asks of others.’”

      Stanley hadn’t thought of poor Papa for some months, and now he joined in. ‘“A Wood knows that work is the least despised of human activities.”’

      “Shhhh,” Ross said. “She’s starting her Chanson des Fleurs.”

      “‘A Wood values accomplishment above all,’” said Stanley, who, now that he had started, couldn’t stop. “Shhhh.”

      The first searching notes of the song were spirited from the instrument. Elke heard each note as a reproach. She hadn’t yet seen her two brothers in the back row; the lights at the top of the stage were on, blinding her. The song was coarse and coppery, not as it sounded when she wrote it. Why did she write it? How could she expect substance to come out of nothing?

      The violin dug uncompromisingly into the soft flesh of her neck and chin. Today the bow seemed malicious and sharp. These benign forms—she had let them take her over and become something else. The song, mercifully, ended, and so did her dark thoughts.

      “Bravo! Encore!” Stanley’s voice rang out. Was he here then? If only they’d shut off the lights. Why would they need them on so long before the actual concert? Today wasn’t even a real rehearsal. How has Stanley tracked her down? If only it could be hoped that he hadn’t brought Ross.

      “Stanley?” Her wavery voice. It was a good thing she hadn’t been trained as an actress. “Was that you, love?”

      At the restaurant Elke was drinking red wine instead of white because Ross said it was more calming for her; she could scarcely afford to have one of her spells with the concert so near at hand. And only one glass, said Ross, then she must go home and get a good night’s sleep.

      Stanley watched her closely, thinking how regal she was. The long Wood nose. The Wood eyes. An almost-Wood chin, but less resolute than his or Ross’s, which was perhaps a good thing.

      “Well, of course I’m glad you came,” she was saying to Stanley. “But who told you where the rehearsal hall was? Ross, I suppose.”

      “When you played the Danse du Feu, I had tears in my eyes,” Stanley said. “Even now, two hours later, just thinking about it brings tears.”

      Ross said, “But you always cry at concerts.”

      “And at art galleries,” said Elke. “I remember taking you to the Picasso retrospective at the Art Gallery when you were fifteen, and you got weepy and had to go to the men’s room.”

      “Papa cried when he heard Callas,” Ross said. “You could hear him sniffling all over the balcony.”

      Elke turned to Stanley and touched the top of his wrist. “Promise me you won’t cry at the concert. I don’t know what I’d do if I heard someone blowing into a handkerchief from the third row. I’d lose my place. I’d lose my sense of balance.”

      “I can’t promise,” Stanley said, his eyes filling with tears.

      Elke found it hard to breathe. She was overwhelmed the way she had been with Papa before the accident. There was Ross, so brusque and demanding. And Stanley, too sweet, too sweet. The two were inseparable and, it seemed lately, inescapable. She would have to invent strategies to keep them out.

      “Do you believe,” she asked them, “do you believe that there is hidden meaning in what we dream?”

      “Oh, yes,” said Stanley at once.

      Ross poured himself another glass of his chilled, ivory-colored wine.

      “Well,” Elke began, “I’ll tell you my dream then, and you must interpret it for me.” The only question in her mind was which dream to describe. She chose the one they might be most likely to understand.

      “Papa gave me, in this dream, a set of heavy, leather-bound books. They were encyclopedias, very old and very valuable. They filled the long shelf above my desk. One day, as I sat looking through volume R to S, I noticed that the binding, under the leather, was made of old sheet music. I was certain that this was one of Schiffmann’s lost symphonies, although I don’t know why I was so sure of this. So, of course, I ripped apart every book and peeled away the pages of the symphony. And just as I became aware that I was mistaken, that the music was only a series of piano exercises, I also became aware that you and Papa had come into the room and were looking at me with expressions of enormous reproach.”

      “She made it up,” Ross said later, when he and Stanley had turned out the light and were about to go to sleep. “She made up the whole dream.”

      From the other side of the room Stanley’s voice was muffled. He liked to pull the blanket up so that it reached his lips. “How do you know it wasn’t a real dream?”