The Piano Maker (7 page)

NATHAN HOMEWOOD
always kept in touch. Along the way he even sent two sales leads from Paris, and those deals did in fact close. He wrote that he did not want any commission, but Mother mailed him a cheque anyway, for the five per cent customary in the trade. He cashed it.

Letters from him kept arriving: from Canada, from England, from Egypt, from America. Sometimes a letter was addressed to her, sometimes to her mother. Her mother usually opened her mail at the breakfast table and then, often not wanting to bother with her glasses, handed the letters across the table for Hélène to read.

“He’s in London now,” she said one morning early in 1909. “Doing some kind of logistics work. He says it’s about shipments from Canada to Britain. Listen to this: ‘ships full of lumber and copper and gold and whatever else they can steal.’ ”

“
Steal
,” said Mother. “Is that what he says? The Americans may have shaken them off, but whether he likes
it or not, English Canada is a British colony by whatever name. They took it and now it’s theirs.”

“I wish he’d stop writing.”

“Does it really matter? He is not an unpleasant person, and he was very good for our business. We must always remember that.”

“I think that the only reason he came to us with that deal was because he’d done his research, as he kept saying. He knew Molnar was in trouble and with us he could get the highest commission. Bösendorfer or Bechstein would have shown him the door.”

“Maybe,” said Mother. “But that is business. He is clever and he was right.”

Ever since she’d told Dr. Menasse that she’d try to help, Juliette had been coming to the house in the mornings. She’d put on the white bib apron and lift the household keys from the hook in the kitchen and take charge. And because Juliette also helped out with Claire, both Hélène and her mother were able to concentrate fully on the factory. Mother offered to pay Juliette something to supplement her pension, and Juliette accepted.

When Claire was nearly two, they prepared to travel to Indochina in order to spend time with Pierre and to promote Molnar in the colony. Travel outfits were bought, and Mother had a baby grand crated for her to take along. Mother also designed a collapsible child carrier with an
upright seat for quick transportation. She called it an
enfantmobile
, and the men on the shop floor made it from canvas and poplar and the wheels of an Oxford tea trolley. Before long Hélène kissed her mother and Juliette goodbye, and then she and Claire travelled by train to Marseilles and from there on the steamer
Patrie
south and through the Suez Canal into the Indian Ocean.

Weeks later, in Haiphong harbour, Pierre came out on the launch to meet them, and when she first saw him again, in his tropical uniform with his suntanned face and his eyes so happy, all she could do was laugh and weep at the same time. She stood at the portside rail holding up Claire, and Pierre’s smiling face was all she could see, and Claire’s hair, pure black like her own and freshly washed that morning, blew into her face and it was all she could feel and smell.

“
Ch
é
rie
,” said Pierre, and he stroked her wet cheek and kissed her lips. He eased Claire from her arms and carried her on his shoulders as they walked down the gangway to the launch.

Haiphong was the main naval base for the French in Indochina. It was an old city of crowded streets and of some good restaurants and shops, of fine evening views of the Gulf of Tonkin to the east and of plantations all the way to the western horizon. Pierre was renting a small house on Tonkin Hill, and from its terrace one could see the sunrise over Hainan. Some mornings when Claire and Pierre were still asleep she would tiptoe out the sliding door in her nightgown and stand in the astonishing light
of five a.m., when the ships in the harbour still lay in darkness, while above them the sun pushed forth like some molten thing breaching the earth’s crust and up into the sky over the island, and instantly the day was hot.

On most Saturday evenings, she and two string players from the symphony orchestra gave recitals in the main concert hall. The baby grand had survived the journey well, but because of the high humidity it had to be tuned frequently, at times even during intermissions with the curtain drawn. The pin block was still a single piece of hardwood then, and it was during one of those tunings in Haiphong that she studied the anchoring of the block and then wrote to her mother suggesting that the block be made in segments as tight inserts into openings at the very base of the harp, and that metal should replace as much wood as possible. She sketched her idea on a separate page in the letter.

The cellist at her recitals was Madame Tran. She had studied at the Sorbonne and was not much older than Hélène. They became friends, and Madame Tran gave her lessons in Vietnamese. Claire always came along and afterward would amaze her parents with the Vietnamese words and phrases she remembered.

One day on their way home from a lesson, they discovered a park not far from the hill, and from then on the three of them would often go strolling there in the evenings, Pierre in his uniform and she and Claire in linen dresses and ribbon hats and white shoes. They walked past bushes pruned into the shapes of animals, and they would
identify the animal and then ask someone the name in Vietnamese, and that person would stop and say the word and listen to them repeating it.

In that same park there was a wilderness area near a pond, and in that soil grew small magical wildflowers that kept their blossoms tightly closed during the day. So tight that barely a thickening showed at the end of the stem, but at night, in full darkness, the flowers opened to a deep red and purple, and they spread an aroma sweet and unusual like rare perfume. Tiny, colourful birds came to feed there in the dark, much smaller than a hummingbird, smaller than Claire’s thumb. Twice she and Pierre and Claire brought a blanket and mosquito netting and a flashlight, and they lay on that blanket like children and watched the spectacle of the midnight flowers and the tiny birds.

When Pierre was not on field duty he could come home in the evenings, and there were stretches when for two weeks in a row they could spend every night together. She would always remember that: the lovely times in Haiphong when they could have dinners on their own terrace, and when she and Pierre could sleep in the same bed night after night, and lie in each other’s arms and wake up together in the morning. They became a true family then, living together under the same roof, something they had rarely been able to do in France because of his postings and her obligations at the piano works.

But one morning she was summoned to the consulate and handed a radio telegram from Dr. Menasse. In it the
doctor said that her mother had fallen ill and was asking her to come home.

She telephoned and spoke to Juliette and then to her mother, but Mother’s voice was too weak for her to understand.

And so from one day to the next everything was different, and their magical time in the little house on Tonkin Hill was over.

In her year in Indochina she had sent home orders and down payments for seven pianos, among them two concert grands for the symphony orchestras in Haiphong and Hanoi. Now she sold the baby grand to the baker’s wife and said goodbye to Madame Tran. They sat over orange tea, and when she left, Madame Tran embraced her the French way, and then she reached out and with one fine finger made a circle on Hélène’s forehead.

Back at the house she packed her own and Claire’s trunks. Pierre came along on the launch, and he held Claire’s hand all the way across the harbour. When the launch slowed, he knelt on the deck and embraced Claire.

That single piercing image of Pierre kneeling and his face so sad would remain locked in her mind for years afterward, and at first whenever the image came to her it created terror and the fear of more loss, but after some time it brought only gratitude for what had been and was now hers in memory forever.

IN THE MORNING SHE
sat on the chair by the telephone in the freezing church office and spoke to Claire in London.

“Oh, Mom,” said Claire. “Give me the details. What the policeman said.”

She told her. There was not much.

“New evidence. What new thing could they have dug up?”

“I have no idea. I was hoping you could come and visit, Claire. Are you finished with the exam?”

“I’ve done the practical. The written is tomorrow.”

“Can you come then? Use the money in the special account. It’s there for emergencies, and that’s what this is now.”

“I’ll see what I can do. I’ll talk to the head nurse.”

She told Claire she loved her, and Claire said she loved her too. Claire said, “Don’t worry, Mom. They dismissed it once, they’ll dismiss it again.”

After she’d hung up she dialled the operator again and
asked for the charges.

On her way through the church she saw David Chandler up in the organ loft, and she opened the door and climbed the stairs. He had wooden machine parts laid out on the floor, and he was down on both knees measuring them and making drawings.

“Mrs. Giroux,” he said and stood up. “I heard from Morris. Father William had to tell him because of the arrest situation.”

“I see. So it’s out.”

“Well, yes. Do let me know if there’s any way I can help. I mean, you not being able to get about. It must be some kind of mistake.”

“It’s not a mistake, Mr. Chandler. It’s a long story and I thought it was over.”

She stood looking down at the wooden parts on the floor. Drive shafts, universal joints, pedal links. There were two she did not recognize, and she used them to change the topic.

“What are those, Mr. Chandler?”

“The bellows levers. Pump levers, I should say. I’m thinking we could make them with a brass sleeve right there in the pivot where this one’s cracked. There’s friction, and any grease or graphite just gets squeezed out. I’ve done it before, using soft brass bearings instead of lubrication. When they fail you can replace just the sleeves. By the way, Mrs. Giroux, I have the first pair of shoes ready for you to try on. I can come by this afternoon, like you said.
Would four o’clock be convenient?”

“Yes, it would.” She waved a hand at the machine parts on the floor. “When I was young we made some of those for an organ company in Bordeaux. We used winter oak cut during the last few days of the new moon of January. There were a few people in our town who still knew about that sort of thing, and they had stories of wooden eavestroughs lasting two generations, and wooden shingles holding up longer than clay tiles. In the end we lost the contract to a Belgian company. They had cheaper wood from the Congo. A black, very hard wood.
Bois de fer
, we called it.”

“I think in English it’s also called ironwood, Mrs. Giroux. There’s a version of it in North America. I don’t know if it’s black, but from what I hear it’s hard enough on tools. And I’ve read about winter wood cut by the moon.”

“Yes,” she said. She hesitated a moment and then nodded at him and said she did not want to keep him. She walked away down the stairs, holding on to the wooden rail.

Back in Montmagny after the interminable return journey, she and Juliette took turns at Mother’s bedside. Mother had become pale and thin, and she lay with her eyes closed much of the time. She had difficulty breathing; at times her breath stopped altogether and then restarted with a convulsive effort.

“A grave illness,” Dr. Menasse said to Hélène after one
of his visits. “I am quite certain now what it is.”

“You are? What, doctor?”

“It’s a form of cancer, Madame. In the lungs, mostly. But perhaps also the liver and the spleen.”

He said he’d sent slides of blood and saliva to a laboratory and had viewed some slides himself under a microscope.

“Perhaps the fumes in the factory,” he said. “The shellac and the glue. We know that solvents can change the chemistry of blood, which would then affect vital organs. And all that wood dust, fine cellulose clogging the lungs.”

He looked down into the black crown of his hat and said, “The hospital might be a better place for her now, Madame.”

And so Mother was moved to the Misericordia, and Hélène rode there twice a day on her bicycle. Juliette would take a taxi and spend hours at Mother’s bedside and help the nurses look after her.

Hélène ordered cartons of surgical masks and made it a rule that they be worn by everyone on the factory floor. Claire had to put one on when she walked through the door, and Hélène wore one as well. When she saw men not wearing a mask, she called them into her mother’s office one by one and sat them down and spoke to them. In the finishing room she had a second exhaust fan put into the exterior wall and more filtered air intakes in the wall opposite.

Mother, who had always been so relentlessly clear-minded and strong-willed, who had been able to wrestle the cast-iron harp for a baby grand onto a dolly and drag it across the floor to the place of assembly, could now
hardly lift a cup to her lips.

Hélène rinsed her mother’s face and did her hair and put lipstick on her lips, and her mother was so thankful for each small kindness it made Hélène want to weep.