Body & Soul (16 page)

"What?" This was a new Weisfeld. The implicit threat was a brand-new way of talking. "What do you mean?"

"We all need strength." He nodded, as if agreeing with himself. " Life is full of surprises."

Claude sensed this was a retreat, so he pushed. "I think I'm strong enough," he lied. "I'm not afraid of surprises."

"You should be," Weisfeld said. And then abruptly he shifted in his seat and looked out over the room. "It is surprising to me—I mean, if I take the long view—it is very surprising to me that I'm sitting here getting drunk in a German restaurant." He gave a short bark of laughter. "Drinking German beer."

"You're not drunk. I've seen my mother."

"Yes, you're right. Not quite." He pushed the various glasses on the table away. "Time to stop."

"Y
OU MUST WEAR
a jacket and a tie," Weisfeld had said. "Be polite, but volunteer nothing. They're hiring you to play the piano parts, just the way they hire people to drive their cars or serve the caviar."

"What's caviar?"

"Fish eggs. Roe. Considered a great delicacy. You won't be getting any."

"That's okay with me."

And so, at the age of fifteen, height five foot five inches, weight one hundred and sixteen pounds, dressed in a wool jacket, gray trousers, white shirt, and a blue tie from Bloomingdale's basement, Claude Rawlings stood at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Eighty-eighth Street at four o'clock in the afternoon and regarded the Fisk mansion.

Surrounded by tall apartment buildings, it was an architectural anomaly—a three-story building of gray stone set back from the street, with a slate roof, mullioned windows, and Doric columns framing the entranceway. There was a short curved driveway, arcing from the avenue to Eighty-eighth Street. He walked across its cobbled surface, past an empty black limousine whose license plate caught his eye. Number 57, with various official-looking badges and emblems of thick metal attached to its upper rim. Weisfeld had explained that Dewman Fisk was high up in city government, and that among his posts was that of deputy mayor. Claude climbed two steps to the door and rang the bell.

A uniformed maid opened the door. "Yes?" She was quite young. Puerto Rican, maybe, the boy thought.

"I'm supposed to be here at four."

"Yes, yes. Come in." She turned away.

She had a white bow tied at the small of her back, and the two ribbons that hung from it moved with her narrow hips as she walked through the foyer into a large, high-ceilinged room in which clusters of delicate-looking antique furniture stood in different areas around low, highly polished tables. There were flowers everywhere—vases of them, small and large, different shades of color for each bunch. Red, pink, salmon, white, and then, at one end of the room, near the fireplace, a profusion of various blues held in crystal and porcelain. Flowers of different shapes, bursting, drooping, fountaining up out of green ferns. "I change them every other morning," the maid said. "It takes two hours."

She walked to the end of the room opposite the fireplace and climbed three wooden steps onto a shallow curved platform. She went behind curtains that covered the entire wall. After a moment the curtains began to part, and he realized he was looking at a stage, complete, as he took the steps to the apron, with footlights. When the curtains were fully opened he saw a grand piano and some chairs and music stands at stage left. The maid emerged from the wings and indicated the piano bench. "Wait here. They'll come."

He sat in the shadows and watched her descend, weave her way through the flower-drenched room, and disappear through one of its many doors. From behind the piano he could see partway into another large room, opening off the first. Bookshelves. A long table covered with magazines. Two black leather chairs. Standing brass lamps with green shades made of glass. He could hear voices, although he saw no one.

He glanced through the music on the piano. A mélange of excerpts, transcriptions, reductions, and selections, mainly Mozart but also some Mendelssohn and Schubert. He could not find a full piece of music anywhere. He took care to leave everything in the order he had found it. Bending his head, tilting his right ear to the keyboard, he tried a quiet chord. The action was so stiff he barely got a sound. With the damper pedal down he played a few soft scales, put his hands in his lap, and waited.

He waited a long time. Snatches of high-pitched conversation, bits of
laughter, and murmurs floated in from the other room. He began to wonder if the maid had told anyone he'd arrived. But then Mrs. Fisk emerged, followed by a strange-looking boy of seven or eight years. His head, covered with blond curls, was much too large for his body, and it bobbled as he moved, as if the weight were too much for the slender neck. His eyes were magnified behind thick glasses and moved lazily like great blue tropical fish. His arms were short and his waist very high. He was dressed in a brown velvet suit with a white lace collar, and he carried a small violin case.

"Good afternoon, Rawlings," Mrs. Fisk said, climbing slowly onto the stage. "I see you've found the piano." She flicked a wall switch and the air exploded into brightness. "This is my son, Peter Fisk."

The boy walked over to Claude and extended his hand. Claude grasped it—cool, limp, jelly-boned. The boy withdrew, his body moving stiffly. He went to the music stand, took out his three-quarter-sized violin, and slipped it under his chin. "Give me an A," he said, his voice unexpectedly full, like a mezzo-soprano's.

Claude played an A.

Mrs. Fisk sat down on one of the folding chairs. "Peter has been playing since he was four." Peter tuned his instrument rapidly, skimming the bow over the strings. Claude had very much hoped he'd be playing with Catherine, but his disappointment was muted by curiosity about this exotic creature who now looked up.

"The B-flat Mozart?" Peter asked.

"Yes. It's here on top."

Peter opened his music. "All right. Four-four. Ready. One, two, three, four."

Claude's hands went to the keys like lightning, caught the opening chord, and they were launched. It was a simple piece, a transcription from the Viennese Sonatinas, and Claude played easily, almost automatically as he shifted his attention to the violin, first in order to figure out why it sounded so odd. The boy could play—he was certainly playing the notes, with a thin tone and practically no vibrato—and yet it sounded completely mechanical. The time values were correct, but the notes did not flow into one another. It was one note at a time, laid out flat.

"Lovely," Mrs. Fisk said when they finished.

Claude was bewildered. The child hadn't made a single mistake, and he had even followed the dynamic notations, albeit crudely, and had
obviously put in hundreds of hours on the instrument. But why and how could he have done all that work without the slightest musical feeling? Claude stared at the motionless boy, standing there like a machine waiting to be switched on, heard the few delicate claps from Mrs. Fisk, and in a quick, chilling flash understood. The boy was playing simply because he'd been told to play. His accomplishment was only slightly less amazing than that of a deaf person who had somehow, against all odds, learned to play by the senses of sight and touch.

It was pitiful. He felt a mixture of revulsion, respect, and, surprisingly to himself, protectiveness toward this robot child in the velvet suit, as pale as an orchid. Claude wondered if Peter ever went outside. People would certainly stare at him.

"What's next?" asked Mrs. Fisk.

And so they went through the pieces, one after another, Claude adjusting his playing to give the child the most support possible. Now and then, when he saw an opportunity—a few bars of solo piano—he would play with a bit of feeling, trying to nudge Peter toward flexibility, but the child gave no sign that he had heard anything. During the last piece of heavily edited Schubert there was a unison section, and Claude played with rubato to bring out the shape of the line.

Frowning, the child lifted his bow from the strings in mid-course. "What's that? I don't see anything," he said, peering at his music. "Aren't we supposed to be together in here?"

They both looked at Claude—Peter genuinely perplexed, Mrs. Fisk alert, expressionless. For a moment Claude was tempted to tell the truth, but even as he drew his breath he knew that the child wouldn't understand, and that the mother would doubtless hire somebody else to play accompaniment. "Sorry," Claude said, "my fault. Let's start again at the top of the page."

As they were playing, Claude heard the sounds of voices and of the front door slamming. Then, from the corner of his eye, he saw Catherine come into the room, glance at the stage, and continue on into the library. A very tall man entered a minute later, stopped, sat down on a chair, crossed his legs, and gave a little wave to Mrs. Fisk. As the piece ended, he joined her in brief applause.

"Well done, Peter," he called from his chair. Dewman Fisk had a rosy face, thin dark hair graying at the temples, pendulous earlobes, and quick pale eyes. His hands, now folded over his knee, were large.

"Thank you," said Peter, loosening his bow.

Mrs. Fisk got up and, moving carefully, stepped down from the stage to join her husband.

"How was the rehearsal?" she asked.

"Splendid." He stood up. "Balanchine says they're ready."

They moved together into the library.

Peter placed his instrument in its case.

"Did your teacher...," Claude began. "Did you have trouble learning to sight-read?"

The child looked up. "No. Did I play wrong notes?"

"I didn't hear any."

"That's because they were correct," the child said, closing the case. "After I play a piece two or three times, I don't make mistakes."

"You play very well."

"Thank you."

There was an awkward silence, and then they climbed down from the stage. Peter moved to the library, and Claude, not knowing what to do, followed. He stepped into the room cautiously. The maid was serving tea. Mrs. Fisk sat in a wing chair, Mr. Fisk and Catherine sat on the couch, and Peter knelt on a small striped pillow at the low table.

"He said I could come to the studio and watch them run through the new thing," Catherine was saying eagerly. "The duet where she has to run away, and he wants to go with her."

"That's nice of him." Mrs. Fisk picked up her teacup with both hands.

Suddenly Catherine looked up and saw Claude standing motionless just inside the doorway. After a moment she gave a little laugh. "Look at his tie."

Mrs. Fisk whispered something Claude could not hear, and the girl turned her attention to a plate of small sandwiches, held her hand over them for a moment, and picked one. Her teeth were very white as she bit off a corner and gave a small toss of her head. Dewman Fisk appeared to be reading the afternoon paper, his smooth face expressionless. Mrs. Fisk lowered her cup and half turned in her chair. Without actually looking at Claude, her faintly trembling body in three-quarter profile, she said, "That was fine. Will the same time next week be convenient?"

"Yes." Claude was blushing because of Catherine's remark. He wanted to say something sharp to her, something to break her composure, but his anger was no more than a surface reflex. Deep down, he felt she was so beautiful she obviously had the right to say anything she wanted. Deep down, he felt gratified that she had noticed anything at all about him. It was a peculiar sensation.

"Very good, then," Mrs. Fisk said. "Peter, will you show Rawlings to the door, please?"

The child got up immediately.

In the hall Claude paused. "What's wrong with it?"

"What?"

"Your sister doesn't like this tie."

"Oh, she says things like that all the time. She's always trying to be so grown up. Anyway, she's only my half-sister. Her father died a long time ago."

Claude pondered this information. He resisted the urge to ask more about her, aware that Peter, dulled by familiarity, probably took her for granted. Also, he didn't want to give away the fact that she fascinated him. She would doubtless amuse herself by using it against him somehow.

At the door, just before Claude stepped out, Peter glanced at the tie in question. The blue eyes drifted upward.

"It may be too shiny," he said. "My father's ties aren't that shiny."

Claude understood that the movies were not real. They were fabrications, delightful concoctions, shaped and formed to achieve an effect. Life, on the other hand, simply happened. Movies were metaphors in various realities beyond his ken, and gave him the exhilarating sense of being lifted out of his own petty and narrow surroundings. He did not go to learn, but inevitably lessons from Hollywood seeped into his bones.

Westerns.
Do not approach a campfire without first announcing yourself from a distance. Do not brag, bully, or lie. Do not draw on an unarmed man, shoot anyone in the back, or steal a horse. Be respectful to women, regardless of their situation in life.

War movies.
Democracy is worth dying for. Germans are intelligent, arrogant, ruthless, and sadistic. Japanese are treacherous, cowardly, fanatical, and devoid of individuality. Russians are brave, emotional, and crude. Chinese are simple, domestic, gentle, and the keepers of ancient wisdom. Italians are childlike, the French weak, the British brave and noble. War could be conducted in a civilized manner. American soldiers are the best because of obedience to authority, without any concomitant sacrifice of individual initiative and courage.

Gangster movies.
Crime does not pay. Low criminals are stupid and brutal. High criminals are greedy, reckless rebels against the beneficent forces of organized society. The police are good, unless corrupted from below by money or from above by political power. Women are weak, venal, decorative, and irrelevant. Guns, large automobiles, conspicuous consumption in public places, and familiarity with the uses of terror are potent symbols of real power.

Horror movies.
Death is obscene. The unknown is dangerous. Destructive forces surround the visible world, and protection is afforded by religion, moral purity, light, and banding together in groups. Luck is an important factor. Courage is foolhardy.