Improvisato Read online

  It was better than starving, which she had done. It was better than stealing, which she had done. It was better than prison, where she had spent three years. It was better than busking in subway stations, running from the consequences of one bad decision after another.

  A lot better.

  The notion that had—early in their renewed relationship—percolated to the surface from the depths of her subconscious and formed a kind of determination was that she wanted to be a useful appendage for Albert, not a tumor that sucked the life from him.

  Jeremy had been dubious. It hadn’t been his idea that she come live with them, even though he had been the one to extend the invitation. He had read Albert’s mind, even though Albert hadn’t known he’d been thinking it, and simply made it so.

  That’s what he did.

  The last few months, though, had convinced him that Angela was good for Albert. She did things for him that would never have occurred to Jeremy, because she was female. Of course, Mrs. Gibson was female, too, but she was more female in the “do as your grandmother tells you,” mold—not unlike the mother who, by this time, had probably been lowered into a six-foot hole in Maine.

  Angela, who seemed to be sleeping as Jeremy studied her from across the aisle, despite her sketchy background, had social skills that he lacked. She knew how to negotiate the minefield of upper-class mores and manners—where so much of what was said was unspoken—while he tended to plow through them in his wheelchair, leaving a lot of bruised feet in his wake. She knew how to dress Albert so he didn’t look like he’d walked through a laundromat, grabbed anything that came within reach and put it on wet. She could twist an uppity maître d’ in knots and spit him out in a wad. The same with bureaucrats and the denizens of officialdom.

  Jeremy had come to see what he hadn’t suspected of himself, that he, too, manipulated people through their sympathy for him. That’s okay. You work with what you’ve got—or don’t have—to get what you need.

  Angela had two other potent weapons he didn’t have. First, she was more than ordinarily pretty, and somehow unconscious of it, which made her disarming in a way that could be lethal. Novacaine and hot butter came to mind, for some reason.

  The second weapon was, from a psychological perspective, strange. While herself the child of middle-class parents of solid “know-your-place” British stock, she had at one time—and for a long time—impersonated her highborn classmate, Heather Antrim. And done so to such a degree of perfection, that she convinced herself—and everyone else—that she was Heather.

  How weird can you get?

  Angela wasn’t asleep. She could feel the eyes of Jeremy Ash upon her, though with what intent or to what purpose she couldn’t fathom. The boy—not so much a boy anymore—was an enigma to her. While she was not unused to being stared at sexually and, though she sometimes sensed him looking at her that way, he most often seemed to go out of his way to seem to be ignoring her.

  But she knew he wasn’t. And that made her uncomfortable, and she reacted to that discomfit by being more abrupt with him than she meant to be. More sarcastic. Despite the fact that, not so deep down, she had tremendous admiration for him, and a kinship in their mutual love for Albert.

  Therapy had helped her understand that the border between truth and illusion, fact and delusion, was marked by the mental equivalent of Hadrian’s wall—pocked with holes in some places, missing entirely in others—and that she had wandered that strange country for a long time. Sometimes she wondered if she had altogether found her way out of it.

  How much of a fellow-traveler in those precincts was Jeremy Ash? Kept locked in a wedge of closet under the stairs in the home of his drug-addled mother for the first seven years of his life—all but naked, fed indifferently, never loved, never held, never cared for, never even standing to his full height until he was finally released from that little dungeon, upon which it was discovered his legs were too diseased to support him and had, in stages, to be removed—mightn’t he be even more an inhabitant of that horrible landscape than she?

  The possibility that, of the three of them, Albert might be the most sane, was sobering. It also made her chuckle to herself.

  Jeremy, seeing this, withdrew his gaze. What was she thinking?

  Albert was looking at the coffee in his cup. Something in the mechanism of the aircraft was making the coffee vibrate, creating an irregular pattern of concentric rings. Three rings equally spaced, then a fourth a little out of sequence, then a rest, repeat.

  1-2-3-and-4-and-a-repeat

  An eighth note triplet, followed by a sixteenth rest, an eighth note, a dotted eighth rest, repeat.

  As the pattern established itself in his brain, it was joined by a melody. Then harmonies of 3rds and 5ths. No. Not 5ths, 4ths. As he listened, an underlying current of Gregorian plainsong bubbled toward the surface every now and then, subsiding almost to silence in between the pulses. Plainsong was voices. Music rarely came to him in voices. He tried to listen to what they were saying, but the words were Latin. He didn’t speak Latin.

  His mother had spoken Latin. She had attended the Latin School in Boston, so that was to be expected.

  She wasn’t speaking anything now.

  He mentally closed the casket on the last image he’d had of her to the accompaniment of the odd little requiem that the coffee had written. Would she approve of the piece? He didn’t know. Come to think of it, he didn’t know what kind of music she liked. She never listened to the radio or records. Come to think of it, she had never, as far as he could remember, attended his concerts.

  Come to think of it, he hadn’t known her; not at all.

  She must have been young once. He pictured Abigail Grace, a young version of her old mother. But is that what Mother had been? A young version of her older self? Or had she been different, changed by her experience of life into what she became—upright, strict, proper, demanding, unbending, hard, but somehow sad?

  She must have been in love once. She got married, after all. Had three children. The one before Albert had died. She never talked about it—Albert didn’t even know if it had been a brother or a sister. Nor had she ever spoken of her husband, their father. There were no pictures of him in the house. Of course, there were no pictures of Albert or Abigail Grace as children, either, not until that one taken of the little family after his first concert at Carnegie Hall—she had attended that—Albert in the middle, with his hands at his side, Mother on his right, with her hands crossed in front of her, a mirror image of Abigail Grace, on his left. None of their bodies touching. None of them smiling.

  Albert looked out the window. He’d never thought about his father, or(?) until now, that he had no mother. Was he an orphan? Cities and towns, marked by sprinklings of lights, passed slowly below. Was he down there somewhere, as unaware of Albert as Albert was of him?

  The speckling of lights became blurry. He wiped at his eyes and, feeling something moist on his fingers, looked at them.

  Tears.

  “I love you, Mother,” he whispered. He didn’t feel it, but he wanted to, and he thought saying it out loud might help. Maybe if he said it often enough . . . .

  There was a light touch on his shoulder. “May I take this?” said the stewardess, taking the saucer between her thumb and fingers. He nodded. She took it. “Is there anything else I can get you?”

  “No.”

  She hesitated. “I just wanted to . . . I’ve never done this before, and they’d skin me alive if they knew, but . . . would you mind?” She smoothed a napkin on his tray and handed him a pen. He picked it up, scrawled his name on the napkin and handed it back to her. “Thank you. Thank you so much, Mr. . . .”

  “That’s okay,” Albert said. “You know, I think I’d like you to leave the coffee.”

  “But, it’s cold,” said the stewardess. “Why don’t I get you some that’s(?) hot?”

  “No. I just want to watch it.”

  The stewardess didn’t seem to know whether to take him serio
usly. “I, you mean . . . “

  “Just leave it,” said Jeremy Ash from the seat behind Albert.

  The stewardess sputtered a little protest, but did as she was told and went away.

  “Why New Zealand?” said Angela, when she and Jeremy caught one another’s eyes.

  Jeremy shrugged. “I remember you mentioned it, when we were in London. Place I’d never thought of before, and it just came to mind when he asked where I wanted to go. Crazy, huh?”

  Angela nodded. “My sister’s there, somewhere.”

  “So you said. Haven’t seen her in a while?”

  “Not for a long time. I was just a kid. Wouldn’t even recognize her now, I shouldn't think.”

  “We should look her up.”

  “I wouldn’t know how.”

  “You know her married name?”

  Angela nodded. “McEvers.”

  “First name?”

  “Hester.”

  “Hester McEvers. All we need’s a phone book.”

  Jeremy drew an inference from the silence that followed. “You don’t want to see her?”

  It was Angela’s turn to shrug. She did. “I’m not sure she’d want to see me.”

  “She is real, though?” said Jeremy. “You haven’t made her up, the way you made up . . . .”

  “No! She’s real. She and her husband, Gilly. Gilbert. They’re real, and they’re really my sister and brother-in-law. More like parents, really. They all but raised me.” She became thoughtful for a moment or two, and Jeremy Ash let her. “If we find her, it will all come out, Heather, the accident, the impersonation. Prison. Everything.”

  Jeremy didn’t respond. The fact was self-evident.

  “It’ll be like living through it all again.” She looked out the window. “I don’t know if I want to put myself through it.”

  “Sometimes what we want to do don’t enter into what we need to do.”

  She turned toward him and, in response to the smile that crept to his eyes, laughed and tossed a balled up napkin at him. “I hate you.”

  To Albert, the exchange between Jeremy Ash and Angela—though he couldn’t hear all their words—was like music. A lullaby. Comfortable. Something he could curl up and go to sleep in. And he did.

  Chapter Two

  His first impression of New Zealand, as they stepped from the metallic cocoon into the bright glare of the late-morning sun, was that it was hot. “It’s hot,” he said.

  “It’s beautiful!” said Angela. “I love it already. Well done, J.” She patted Jeremy Ash on the shoulder as an assortment of attendants jostled one another to be helpful, carrying him down the ramp to his waiting wheelchair.

  Albert hadn’t really been listening—as was his custom—when the stewardess told the new arrivals that a warm Maori welcome awaited in the terminal and, therefore, was unprepared for the assault by a horde of pudgy, spear-wielding, heavily-tattooed and very unhappy-looking dark-skinned men in grass skirts.

  “Isn’t this amazing!” said Angela as two of the attackers, eyes-bulging like ping-pong balls, advanced within poking distance and, punctuating ominous grunts with stamps of their feet, wagged prodigious tongues at her as if intent on strangling her with them. “What a welcome!”

  Albert required a restroom, and a change of clothes.

  Some thirty minutes later—his material needs met—he settled back into the limousine. It had been a very long flight, and he was tired. He lit a cigarette, and a thought occurred to him. “Where are we going?”

  “It’s a little place called the Braemar Hotel. Downtown,” Angela replied. Proud of the arrangements she had made on short notice, she was eager to tell him all about it—how she had made good use of her time while he and Jeremy Ash were in the men’s room to ask the airport concierge where they could find the most comfortable, quaint place in town, and how he had suggested the Braemar without hesitation.

  After five minutes further discussion, she felt she knew the place. Within ten minutes its three guest rooms had been reserved exclusively and indefinitely for Albert, Jeremy Ash, and herself. And the concierge had enriched his personal coffers with both a ten percent commission and a gratuity gratefully received from the generous American.

  The rooms at the Braemar were, of course, occupied, or were already booked by others but, once the innkeeper discovered who he was to be hosting, and Angela had offered each guest, or would-be guest, a fistful of dollars and first-class accommodation at the hotel of their choice for their inconvenience, objections were quickly and quietly overcome.

  Albert didn’t know any of this, and it didn’t occur to him to ask.

  “I hope you like it.”

  “It will be fine,” said Albert. It was easy to please someone who didn’t really care.

  Jeremy Ash read Angela’s disappointment. “Tell me about it.”

  By the time they arrived at the hotel—more a guest house, really—a half-hour later, Jeremy felt he could negotiate the place blindfolded. Only one consideration seemed to have been overlooked. “No elevator, huh?”

  Angela hadn’t thought of that. “No. I . . . I didn’t think . . . I was so excited. I forgot.” Jeremy could almost hear the air squeak out of her little pillow of custodial pride. She seemed to deflate before his eyes. “You do these things much better than I.”

  “Don’t worry about it. If those guys in the hula hula skirts at the airport are anything to go by, it won’t be too hard to find one or two of ’em to toss me around.”

  And that is how, by day’s end, Albert’s entourage was—pound-for-pound—tripled by the addition of Wendell, a native in the mold of those who had assaulted them at the airport, only—in the refined spaces of the Braemar—much larger. He had been highly recommended by Mr. Sweetman, the proprietor, who called him a “man of all work.” “A wonder with the heavy liftin’ is Wendell,” said Mr. Sweetman, with a nod toward the monolith in question; a cross, it seemed to Albert, between Buddha and Stonehenge, who could crush Jeremy Ash with an eyelid.

  Concerns along those lines were soon dispelled, however. Wendell handled Jeremy Ash like a hothouse flower, and called him “Little Pakeha.” Albert had heard somewhere a story of a gentle giant. Goliath? No. He hadn’t been gentle. Big Ben? Anyway, but for the name, it might have been a story about Wendell.

  Jeremy Ash, for reasons of his own, called the giant, Otis, and that made the giant laugh in the depths of his eyes and the dimples on his cheeks. Everyone was happy.

  Albert was happy.

  Mr. Sweetman had a tendency, when he spoke, of leaning toward his principle hearer. He leaned at Albert over his soup at dinner that evening. “I’m afraid we don’t have a piano,” he said.

  “‘Perfect love casts out fear,’” said Albert.

  Sweetman seemed to be considering this. “Yes. To be sure.”

  Albert wasn’t really worried. There were at least four pianos in New Zealand; he’d played them on previous concert tours of the country: in Christchurch, Dunedin, Wellington, and Auckland. South to north. Somebody had probably planned it that way.

  “There’s one at the Rivens’, two doors down.” said Mr. Sweetman, whose Adam’s apple bobbed as he spoke, making his yellow-and-black polka-dot bowtie rock slightly back and forth in a mesmerizing way. He turned and leaned toward Angela. “Retired Colonel MacAulay Rivens,” he said. “Mac, we call him.” He leaned back at Albert. “Just Mac.”

  “Does he play piano?” said Albert. Not that he cared. He just wanted to watch Sweetman’s necktie twitch.

  “I shouldn’t think so,” said Sweetman, sitting suddenly back as if surprised by the suggestion. Then he leaned forward again. “His wife died not three months since.”

  Albert’s eyebrows interrogated one another. Was it not possible to play piano if your wife was dead? This was a new and troubling thought. It hadn’t applied to Melissa Bjork. She had died in his arms, but the fact hadn’t affected his playing, though his music had changed. Of course, they hadn’t been married, just . .
. well, not married.

  “I don’t think we’d wish to intrude on his grief,” said Angela.

  That’s why Albert liked having Angela around; she knew what to say, and when to say it, and how to say it in a way that made the person she was saying it to feel as if, at that moment, they were the only one in the world. That she cared.

  “Sometimes that’s all people want,” Albert thought aloud. He hadn’t meant to.

  All eyes turned toward him, except those of Wendell—who occupied the end of the table opposite Mr. Sweetman—and were intent upon his dinner which, with a broad grin at Sweetman he had earlier commended. “Mmm. Puha and pakeha!”

  “Pardon?” said Mr. Sweetman.

  “Nothing,” said Albert, bending his head toward his soup, and silencing his tongue with a spoonful.

  Instead of what he was thinking, their host said, “Unfortunately, grief’s not an exclusive commodity on Parliament Row these days.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” said Angela. “Troubles?”

  Sweetman inclined toward his lovely young guest. His spoon, from which his inverted reflection regarded him with interest, awaited his pleasure halfway between his mouth and his bowl. With his other hand he held up three fingers. “Suicide,” he whispered, bending one of the fingers. “Accident.” He bent the second finger. “And Mrs. Rivens . . . two doors that way.”

  “How horrible!”

  “What happened to her?” said Jeremy, who had been uncharacteristically quiet until now, no doubt contemplating the great mysteries of life, thought Albert. That would explain why he always had an answer when one of them sprang up.

  “Murdered.”

  The voice that spoke the dreaded word that had pursued Albert, Angela, and Jeremy Ash for the last four years, was not that of Mr. Sweetman. It was, therefore, toward Wendell that all heads but Albert’s swiveled.