Apprehensions and Other Delusions Read online

  “All right. I’ll just sit down for a bit, get some water.” She resumed walking.

  “Why did you stop where you did?” Warren called after her.

  Vanessa halted. “Did I stop?” She seemed confused. “I guess it was the pitch going. It felt like I was finished.” Her frown became a glower. “I don’t leave music unfinished.”

  “Well, if the pitch wasn’t right,” said Warren as he cut through a row of seats toward the side door that led to the offices of the hall, “I can see how you’d stop.”

  Vanessa nodded, but went back to the forte-piano, and, after a long moment, sat down and began the Sixth fugue again, concentrating on the music, doing her best to ignore the slight shift in pitch in the strings. “That’s the trouble,” she said. “It needs tuning.” She continued on through the fugue, paying close attention to its tone and the pacing of the work. As she reached the extended passage for the left hand, she faltered. “Damn,” she said aloud, and began the left-hand passage again, a bit more slowly and deliberately. This time it worked, and she thundered on into the end, careening through the dizzying pyrotechnics with the verve of a race-car driver. “There,” she said as if to confirm her final repeated chords. When she was finished, she was a bit shaky; the beginnings of a headache buzzed behind her eyes and she pinched the bridge of her nose to stop it.

  “Brava!” called Warren from the side-door. “That was spectacular.”

  “Yeah. But the pitch is off,” said the tuner, who stood beside him. “Still, the playing’s first rate.”

  “Thanks,” said Vanessa, moving away from the fortepiano. “The low E is really off.”

  “I’ll take care of it,” said the tuner, and brought his small case of tuning forks onto the stage. “Have to do this the old-fashioned way,” he said.

  “Good,” said Vanessa, and sought out the soothing darkness of the backstage area. She leaned against the wall and willed herself to relax, which left her jittery. What on earth had happened to her? she asked herself.

  “Ms. Hylas, are you okay?” Warren asked her as he rolled a strange-looking, metal box on wheels, ornamented with dials and gauges up next to the stage-manager’s podium.

  She made herself straighten up. “Just a bit tired.”

  “There’s coffee in the house-manager’s office.” He studied her for a moment, then began setting up his equipment.

  “And it’s terrible,” she said, attempting levity. “But it’s hot.” She started toward the door that would lead to the hall to the offices.

  “You sure you’re all right?” Warren called after her, his question underscored by the tuner as he started his work.

  “Yes, thanks,” she said automatically, and wondered if she dared to eat anything. It might help her feel better, but it could make her feel worse. She was still debating this as she reached the house-manager’s office, where the odor of scorched coffee told her not to have any of it. She went to the drinking fountain and gulped down several mouthfuls, then wandered back toward the stage where the tuner was making progress on the forte-piano and Christopher Warren was busily setting up his display of machines.

  “Feeling better?” Warren called out cheerfully. “You look a bit less pasty.”

  “Thanks,” she said drily. “Rehearsing can take a lot out of me.”

  “If it was just the rehearsing,” he said almost jauntily.

  “How do you mean?” Vanessa asked.

  “I’ll tell you after I’ve finished monitoring the rest of your rehearsal,” he said, merrily adjusting what appeared to be an oscilloscope.

  “All right,” she said, trying not to be too curt with him even though she resented his intrusion on her rehearsal time.

  “Just carry on as if I weren’t here,” he encouraged her. “You know how to do it.”

  “What makes you think so?” she could not stop herself from challenging.

  “Well, you certainly weren’t aware of me when I arrived,” he said blandly, his pleasant face showing no signs of sarcastic intent.

  “No, I wasn’t,” she allowed, and listened while the tuner finished his work.

  The Nursery Songs went well enough, their fancy ornaments and flourishes sounding impressive, as they were intended to be. When she was finished, she had the tuner come back again, before she started the Grand Toccata and Fugue on a Polish Folk Song. “If it isn’t slipping now, it will be before the piece is done,” she said with a wry smile. She turned to Warren. “Anything so far?”

  “I’m not certain,” he said from his place in the first row of the audience where he was staring at the screen of his laptop.

  Vanessa paced the apron, reviewing the piece she was about to rehearse in her mind. She paid little attention to her slight light-headedness, attributing it to her skipped lunch. As soon as the tuner relinquished the forte-piano to her, she sat down, ready to begin.

  “This is the piece he played when he—?” Warren asked, breaking her concentration.

  “Yes. He shot himself three-quarters of the way through the piece,” she said testily. “Anything else, or can I ...” She gestured to the keyboard.

  “Go on,” he told her, his whole attention on the screen.

  The opening bars of the toccata went well, the pace a confident andante con moto. Vanessa let the steady four/four beat carry her along through the modulation from E-flat to G-flat, and back to E-flat again. She was part of the music now, like a raft on a river, riding the current. Gradually all sense of the hall and the strange monitors around her faded away and she seemed to be in the eerie splendor of Lowenhoff, lit by candles in chandeliers and sconces, with a select group gathered to listen to him play this newest piece he had composed, the piece that was dedicated to Maria-Antonia, Graffin von Firstengipfel, the woman to whom he was utterly devoted, and who could not express her love to him. The stage lights vanished, and the darkened concert hall was gone, and in its place was the ballroom of Lowenhoff, golden and glistening.

  The Graf sat bolt upright, listening in growing fury at the scandal this man had brought upon him and his family; Dziwny could see his disapproval in every line of his body. He knew this was the last concert he would ever give under von Firstengipfel’s patronage, but he would not accept the callous dismissal he had been given—that way lay ruin for him and a tarnished reputation for the Graffin. No, he would show the Graf what he thought of his arrogant termination with one far more damaging than anything the Graf had promised. The fugue began simply enough, and he played the octaves with deceptive ease, thinking of the song he had heard so many times in his childhood: Endless Love. The melody, plaintive and sweet, echoed from hand to hand, growing and enlarging in long cantabile passages that led to the astonishing fermata. He laid his left hand on the keys and began to play the long restatement of the fugue’s theme, while he reached for the pocket in his swallow-tail coat.

  Fumbling with her skirt on the piano bench, Vanessa was transfixed by Dziwny’s composition. Her face was without expression, and everything but her hands moved like a doll, stiffly and automatically. With a sudden cry of frustration, she rose from the bench, slapped the side of her head and collapsed, falling between the bench and the forte-piano as Warren sat all but mesmerized by what he saw on his screen.

  * * *

  Faster was on one side of her and Warren on the other when Vanessa finally walked out of Cummings Hall some three hours later. “I still want you to see the doctor tomorrow,” Faster was scolding her. “I can’t have you fainting during a performance.”

  “Not to worry,” said Vanessa. She was feeling a bit embarrassed for putting these two men—and the tuner—through an hour of anxiety. “I’ll be fine.”

  “I want to be sure of that,” Faster said, then rounded on Warren as they reached the edge of the street. “What were you thinking, putting all that equipment around her? Didn’t it occur to y
ou it might hurt her?”

  “How could it?” Warren asked as calmly as he was able.

  “I don’t know. It’s your equipment. You should know better than anyone what it’s apt to do.” Faster signaled for his town-car, and kept his hand protectively on Vanessa’s arm.

  “I don’t think it was his equipment,” said Vanessa, startling both men. “I think it was the forte-piano.”

  The two men stared at her with varying expressions of disbelief. Finally Faster spoke. “You sure you’re okay? That sounds a bit ... nuts.”

  “To me, too,” she said, watching as his Lincoln pulled up to the curb. “But it happened before Professor Warren set up his monitors, only not so intensely.”

  “What happened?” Faster demanded, his patience finally failing him. “What are you talking about?”

  “About the fugues,” she said, and laughed sadly. “It set ... I don’t know ... something off. Something that the forte-piano is part of.” Although Faster opened the door for her, she didn’t get in immediately. “It’s still there, you know. It’s still at Lowenhoff, and it always will be.”

  “You mean the instrument?” Warren asked.

  “If that’s what it is,” said Vanessa as she allowed Faster to assist her into the town car. She stared straight ahead as Faster got in and they sped away, leaving Warren alone on the sidewalk.

  About Fugues

  This title refers both to the musical and the psychological form of a fugue, both of which are present in the story.

  Forty years ago, I was allowed to play a forte-piano—the immediate ancestor to the modern pianoforte—for the greater part of a month. The experience made the music of Mozart and his contemporaries much more understandable to me, including the on-going effort to keep the strings in tune.

  There are many legends and stories about possessed musical instruments, and the belief that musical instruments possess magical powers is nothing new. In the 13th century, a Papal commission was appointed to determine which instruments were holy and which were damnable: those clerics decided that the rebec (ancestor of the violin) was played by the Devil, and the crumhorn (ancestor of the trombone) was holy. Assigning such virtue, or lack of it, to a musical instrument strikes me as chancy, although this forte-piano undoubtedly has an odd kick in its gallop—or perhaps Vanessa has one in hers.

  RATS didn’t taste nearly as good as he hoped they would—even spiders were tastier. He managed to choke the third one down, pulling the tail out of his mouth as if it were an unpalatable length of spaghetti. He put this in the little plastic bag where he had already stowed the heads and skins and guts and paws of his other rodent-prey, then closed the bag with a knot. That done, he sat down and waited for the energy to rev through him as he knew it must. This time it hit him hard, making his veins fizz with the force of it. This was so much better than anything he’d gotten from bugs and lizards. He got up and paced around the basement, suddenly too full of vitality to be able to remain still. It was everything that he had hoped, and that thrilled him.

  When the call came for dinner, he made his way up the stairs, the bag of innards and skin at his side. After his feast he was almost convinced he could levitate, so full of life was he. Everything in him was alive, from his hair to his toes. He felt like a hero in a comic book, or maybe an action hero. His step was light and he was smiling as he emerged from his haven. In the kitchen he looked about, smelling all the odors with an intensity that made him feel dizzy. The salty aroma of Hamburger Helper seemed overwhelming and yet unsatisfying—the beef was dead, robbing it of its savor. Since eating the rats he knew it was only living meat that would satisfy him.

  “Henry! Wash your hands!” His mother’s voice—along with her choice of words, since she only called him Henry when she was stressed out—warned him that she had had a rough day at the clinic.

  “Okay!” He stopped at the sink and rubbed his hands on the cake of glycerin soap in the dish over the faucet. It reeked of artificial flowers and he wrinkled his nose in disgust.

  “And turn the heat down under the string beans!”

  “Okay!” he answered; he rinsed his hands and dried them on a paper towel. He went to the stove and adjusted the gas flame under the saucepan.

  “The table’s set,” his mother called as a kind of encouragement. “Your sister will be down in a minute. She’s changing.”

  Henry made a face; just the idea of his sister made him want to puke, but he would not let any of it show. He licked his teeth, hoping no scraps of his meal would remain; he was not in the mood to answer questions about his basement activities. Let them think he was playing or studying or whatever they assumed he did down there.

  “I could use some help with the salad.”

  Salad! he thought contemptuously, but spoke meekly enough, “Sure, Mom.”

  “There’s lettuce in the fridge. I’ll slice a couple tomatoes and if you’ll wash and tear up the lettuce, we can use the last of the buttermilk ranch, or the creamy Italian. You can choose the one you like best.” She had gone to the cupboard and taken down the bottle of vodka and was now pouring herself about three ounces into a small water-glass. “I need to relax tonight,” she said, by way of explanation. She drank about a third of the vodka without ice, which wasn’t like her.

  “Something bad happen today, Mom?” Henry asked, knowing she wanted to talk. He retrieved the lettuce from the refrigerator and made sure it wasn’t too brown.

  “Things are always happening at the clinic,” she said, and Henry realized whatever has taken place, it had been very bad. When she sounded like that, it meant something pretty awful.

  “What about getting another job?” he suggested, knowing the answer.

  “The only other jobs I could get pay less. Working with those patients—the mental ones, in the locked ward—I earn more, and we need the money.” She bit her lower lip then made herself smile. “I guess I’ll just have to make the best of it.”

  “Well, it’s not fair,” he said as he thrust the lettuce under the faucet and turned on the cold water, pulling the head apart. Why, he wondered, was this called butter lettuce? It wasn’t anything like butter. He made a pile of the leaves and waited for his mother to say more. He began to pull the lettuce-leaves apart, remembering how sweet it had been to pull the rats to bits. He tried to imagine the soft green leaves were muscle and sinew and bone, but it didn’t work and he was left to try to remember how good it had felt to kill the rats.

  “Did you have a good day at school?” His mother sounded slightly distracted, but he answered her anyway.

  “I guess so. I got a ninety percent in geometry and Mister Dasher said my English paper was better than the last one.” He told her the good parts and left out the things Jack Parsons had called him in gym, and the bad grade he’d got in the American History quiz. There’d be time for that later. He looked around for the salad bowl and began to put the torn lettuce into it. In spite of the lowered heat, he could smell the green beans charring in the saucepan.

  “Good for you,” she said, going to work on the tomatoes, taking the time to make the wedges all about the same size.

  “So how was the clinic?” Henry asked, trying not to be too obvious about it.

  “Trouble, a lot of trouble. Old Missus Chuiso got out of the day room and into the pharmacy and started taking everything she could get her hands on. They had to pump her stomach, and there were a lot of upset people on the locked ward. The violent ones needed extra medication.” She sighed. “Half of them aren’t really crazy, they’re senile, or they have brain damage, like Brian Bachman, who went over the handlebars of his motorcycle into a tree. He has seizures, bad ones, and he can’t stand up straight.” She had another drink, this one longer and deeper than the previous one. Henry knew it had been bad—she always mentioned Brian Bachman when it was bad. “I told Doctor Salazar that we ought to se
parate the crazy ones from the senile and damaged ones, but he says we don’t have the budget for it. It would be better if we did something to make the place better for them.”

  “But it’s county, Mom, and you say that’s like charity.” He scowled, thinking that it was stupid to argue with her when she was like this, but unable to stop. “The Thomas J. Doer Memorial Clinic is for people who can’t afford—”

  “I know, I know,” said his mother, refilling her vodka glass. “But it’s not doing any good, and in some cases, like poor Missus Chuiso, we’re probably making things worse. Not that there is anything we can do for her.” She sighed as she drank again. “It’s so disheartening to try to deal with her. You should have seen her—well, maybe you shouldn’t—they had to put her in restraints because she kept fighting them, even though they were trying to save her. She’s miserable, and she’s all alone. She needs someone with her all the time, but we don’t have enough personnel to do that.”

  “You do a great job, Mom; the best anyone could,” Henry told her as he took the buttermilk ranch dressing and held it out to her. “Do you want to toss it?”

  “No; you do it.” She tossed the tomato wedges into the torn lettuce and went to wash her hands. “The Hamburger Helper is almost ready.”

  “Great,” Henry said, though the thought of something so dead left him feeling queasy. He needed something with life in it.

  “Just put it on the table. We can toss it before we serve it.” She was beginning to sound a little mellower, but not so much that Henry could refuse dinner with impunity. “I’ll find a bowl for the string beans.”

  “Okay.” He took the salad into the small dining room—it was really more of an alcove off the living room—and put it on the small round table. He thought it was disgusting, and his feeling showed.

  “Why are you making such a face?” his sister asked as she came in from her room. She was extravagantly made up, with two bright colors of eyeshadow above her black-lined eyes. Her cheeks, although they had no need of augmentation, glowed with blusher and her lips were painted a brilliant crimson.