The Piano Maker (8 page)

They were working long hours to fill the orders coming in now from all over, she told Mother. Business was good, and since there was a bit of money now she was speaking to an engineering firm about electrifying the system. Apparently it could be done by widening the millrace at the top and narrowing it at the end, and then by replacing the old wooden water wheel with some kind of in-stream system with several rows of blades for much more power. A dynamo would then be connected for stronger electricity than was available on the house current. This would speed up all the wood preparation, and it would eliminate the dangerous and antiquated transmission belts on the floor.

Mother listened. She closed her eyes and said, “Good, Hélène. You are strong and courageous, and your heart is set to the truth. You’ll do well. I know it absolutely.”

“Thank you, Maman. Juliette has offered to move into the house. She thinks she can help me better that way. Should I accept?”

“No. Juliette likes her independence, and if she moves out of that little apartment she’ll never get it back. Thank her, but say no.”

“All right. I will. She still comes every day, and when I’m late she and Claire eat dinner together and then Juliette reads to her and puts her to bed. I offered to hire someone
to help with Claire but Juliette won’t hear of it.”

“Of course not. Have a stranger in the house? Pay her a little more. Don’t ask, just put more in the envelope. Refuse to discuss it.”

There were sixteen beds in the cancer room. Visitors came and left, and doctors and nurses made their rounds in felt-soled hospital clogs. When a patient was close to death the nurses put screens around the bed, but the screens could not keep out the sounds. In a patient’s last hours Father Dubert appeared and he whispered in Latin behind the screens, and they could hear the clinking of the glass stopper and those nearby could smell the scent of holy oil. Then the bed was rolled out the door and away to the right, down the hallway to where there was a swinging door with a creaking hinge whose sound everyone in the cancer room came to know very well. Next day the bed came back empty with fresh sheets and a clean name slate on it.

Once in a while Claire came along to visit Mother, but whenever she did she sat terrified and silent in the chair, and on the way home in the taxi she cried, and all the next day she hardly spoke.

Patients with money died more easily because they could pay for morphine. Mother could; Molnar pianos had perhaps killed her, but if so they were now also providing the means to help her be calm and breathe.

They were paying for a kinder death,
une mort plus douce
, Dr. Menasse said.

On one of her last days, Mother gave her the most valuable gift she’d ever given her. It was after lunch on a cloudy day, with the light dim and gentle in the room. The food tray had been taken away, and Mother was sitting up against the pillow with her eyes closed. Hélène thought she was sleeping, but suddenly without opening her eyes Mother said softly, “I know you’re there. I always know it. Give Claire my love. Kiss her for me and tell her not to come any more. But there is something I want to say to you, Hélène. I remembered it last night … I know you’ll do your best with the business, but also never neglect your music. Businesses can disappear through no fault of our own, but your music is all yours. Look after it, and it will see you through.” Her mother opened her eyes and looked at Hélène. “Have I told you that before?”

“No, you haven’t, Maman. Not in that way.” She reached and held her mother’s hand on the blanket.

“Music did see
me
through, Hélène. Especially after your father died. In different ways, because I was never as good as you. But even so, our pianos gave me a wonderful purpose all my life. Your father and you and our fine pianos.”

“Yes, Maman.”

“I know your father was not home very much, but I also know that he was unhappy about that. He would have loved to spend more time with you. The Colonial Office pays them well, but it also works them like slaves … Things weren’t always easy between your father and me. Perhaps you know that, or perhaps you don’t. It doesn’t
matter. It’s much more important that you know I loved your father. I came to love him very much … For a while after he died it was very hard. I felt so lost, sweetheart, but eventually I learned things about myself that I would never have learned otherwise. Even so, nothing was ever the same. Am I repeating myself? Have I said that before?”

“No, you haven’t, Maman. And if you have, it doesn’t matter. I like to hear you talk about Papa.”

She was weeping by then. She wanted to wipe her eyes, but she would not let go of her mother’s hand for fear of losing her.

Two days later the screens were put around the bed, and when Father Dubert arrived in his vestments and with the holy oil, her mother’s face relaxed in the most beautiful way.

Pierre could not come in time for the funeral, but to her surprise Nathan was there. And so on a November afternoon they all stood at the graveside while Father Dubert waved his censer and prayed in Latin. When he said
Amen
, they all replied
Amen
and crossed themselves, and then she and Claire took turns with the silver cup, and they scooped up earth and let it fall on Mother’s coffin. She crouched beside Claire and held her close. Nathan stood not far away with his head bowed and his hat in his hands. She avoided looking at him, but she was always aware of him; in her state of grief he was a distraction, and she wished he hadn’t come.

“Help me fend him off,” she whispered to Juliette, and from behind her black veil Juliette said, “Don’t worry about him.”

He had a car waiting and he offered them a ride, but she thanked him and said they’d rather walk, it was not far. Juliette motioned him aside, and after a few paces when Hélène looked back she saw them standing on the grass by the walkway, Nathan tall in a trench coat with a black mourning band on the sleeve and Juliette frail but still so very straight in a long black coat and black hat with the veil folded up now, and Juliette’s hand was halfway up and moving sideways in some firm gesture of refusal.

“He invited us for dinner,” Juliette said later, “but I explained that none of us is up to socializing. Still, he will be calling in the morning to say his adieus. That is something we cannot deny him.”

In the morning she and Nathan took coffee in the library. Juliette served them on the good sterling tray and then hovered in the background like a chaperone. Nathan sat in his chair, confident and with the familiar spark in his eyes.

He was doing well, he said when she asked him. He was working for the Egypt Antiquities Service, learning a great deal about that new field. He talked about the Valley of the Kings and the tombs, all the amazing treasures being unearthed there.

He said, “It’s giving me ideas for a lucrative business of my own, Helen. In museum pieces.”

“Not pianos any more?”

He shook his head.

“And how did you know about Mother?”

“Oh. I just heard, I forget from whom. Someone in Amsterdam, I think. Molnar is becoming quite a name.”

When he stood up to leave, he said, “If there’s ever anything I can do to help – anything. For old times’ sake, and because I always thought highly of your mother.”

He waited. “Helen? I want you to know that I am very happy for you. Your marriage, your lovely daughter. You in charge at Molnar now. Congratulations. I am glad things turned out well for you. They did for me too.”

“Yes, it sounds like it. I’m glad, Nathan.”

She walked with him downstairs and smiled and shook his hand at the door. He leaned and kissed her cheek.

“An interesting man,” said Juliette afterward. “More so than most. We have to admit that. But an adventurer, to hear him speak. Men like that do not make good husbands, Hélène. Strong, steady men do. Like your Pierre. You made the right choice.”

The pair of shoes that David Chandler brought in the early evening felt better than any she’d ever had on her feet. She sat on the chair by the coal fire and slipped them on and off, and on again. She stood up and walked to the window and back.

“Is there good support where you need it, Mrs. Giroux?”

“Yes. It seems very good, Mr. Chandler. Loose on top, of course, without laces, but firm where it matters.”

“If you step this way, we’ll pinch it where the laces will be. Make it snug around the ankles. The foot changes shape as we put weight on it. And it needs to be able to move forward a bit, maybe an eighth of an inch.”

“It feels very good.”

“Did you want hooks and eyelets, or just eyelets?”

“Perhaps just eyelets. That seems to be the fashion now.”

“It is. Very well then.”

“Shall we have our tea now, Mr. Chandler?”

“I would like that, Mrs. Giroux.”

She made tea, and when she brought the tray from the kitchen he was standing by the window looking out. There were two windows in the living room, and this one faced southwest onto the ocean. The sky was deep red along the horizon and nearly purple above.

“Beautiful,” he said. “I imagine on a clear day you can see Maine, and some nights you might even see lights refracting up from below the earth’s curvature. That would be Eastport then, or Cutler. Grand Manan would be more that way. You wouldn’t see it for the trees.”

He took a few sips of tea and carried cup and saucer to the coffee table. They sat on the sofa and the chair in the light from the floor lamp.

“You notice I’m not asking any questions, Mrs. Giroux. I’m sure whatever it is, it’ll all get cleared up, but in the
meantime, like I said, I’d be glad to lend a hand. Just send someone to let me know.”

“Thank you, Mr. Chandler.”

For a moment all was quiet except for some seagulls in the distance.

“I’m from New York City myself,” he said then. “My parents used to come here with us for the summers so my sister and I could get the air, as they used to say. I always liked it, and when they died I moved here. My sister moved to California. We still write.”

“And you learned the business here?”

“The leatherwork, yes. In New York I studied engineering and pattern making, and then here I learned the leatherwork. It’s good to have a second arrow to one’s quiver. And it’s interesting. I’ve been lucky in many ways in my life, Mrs. Giroux. Not in all. I was married for sixteen years, and then my wife died with the Spanish flu. Early on in the epidemic. Quite a few people did, in these parts.”

“I’m sorry to hear that, Mr. Chandler. I was in London at the time, and we had it there too. I knew some who died from it. My daughter and I were lucky.”

“Your daughter,” he said and smiled. “Tell me about her.”

She rose from the chair and found her purse and took out the small leather folder with Claire’s photograph and handed it to him. “This was taken five or six years ago in Montreal. In the backyard of the house where we lived for many years. I too have been lucky in many ways, Mr. Chandler, but not in all. In one important event I was not lucky. But at least
my situation now does give me time to think. That is the silver lining. I don’t need to look over my shoulder all the time any more, and I can slow down and prepare myself for what is coming.”

“Yes,” he said. “I think I know what you mean.” He put the photo down on the table and waited a moment, and when she offered no more he said, “About the shoes now – the right one would be the more critical, and it’s fine, you say?”

“It’s more than fine. It’s very good. Thank you, Mr. Chandler. By the way, did you mean that, that you’d be prepared to lend a hand?”

“Yes, I do. I certainly do.”

“Good. Because there is something. We were speaking of Claire just now – well, you’ll be meeting her soon because she’s coming to visit, and I was wondering, Mr. Chandler: Can you drive a car?”

PIERRE HAD A TELEPHONE
installed at the Tonkin Hill house, and over a relay of Colonial Office exchanges they would talk at prearranged times. The Vietminh attacks had flared up again, and he had been put in charge of a company of Foreign Legionnaires to patrol the countryside and plantations. He was losing men to explosives buried in dirt roads, he said. Dynamite, triggered by someone stepping on a crude switch. Grenades tripped by wires on bush paths. His men were also falling into hidden pits spiked with sharpened bamboo sticks smeared with excrement. But the enemy was never seen. They moved by night; they blended in with the local population.