Edgar Pangborn - A Mirror for Observers

I thought then: Namir has met him. Namir has dropped a whisper, to make him think I am not what I seem. Of course. Namir would know all the uses of scandal and innuendo and half-truth. Strange weapons, so easy to take up, the stain indelible on user and victim. I had tried to foresee other methods of attack, and stupidly overlooked this one, so natural to any creature who believes that the end can justify the means. Now I would have to find out somehow what the whisper had made of me — Asiatic spy, anarchist, escaped criminal. It could be anything: the whole field was open, and when I traced down one lie to kill it, another would replace it. I said: “Why, yes, sometimes it does. Not apt to be as damp as this, inland.”

“That so? You remember it pretty well?”

Angelo looked merely puzzled, Billy Kell blank. And Feuermann had parted with me in such a friendly way only a few hours before! “Not very long since I was in Canada.”

“No? Your mother in, Angelo?” Not waiting for an answer, he went around to the basement entrance. To avoid passing near me.

The money came from Toronto the following day.

I acquired a pretty fair one-lunged ’55 job with a cauliflower fender, and during the next two outwardly quiet weeks Angelo learned a little about the woods. Or perhaps a great deal, because there was no need to teach him how to listen. He met the living quiet of the woods with a wonderful receptive quiet of his own, and we didn’t trouble much with words. Under the trees his normal boy’s restlessness disappears: he can sit still, and wait, and watch, so rather than make any stuffy effort to teach him about what he saw, I kept quiet and let the earth speak for itself. We had four such expeditions, about thirty miles out of town into the piny foothills of the Berkshires — two full days and two afternoons. Since talk would have been intrusive, I can’t say that it advanced my knowledge of him, but that doesn’t matter: he was happy, and learning things with all five senses that Latimer could not show him. Rosa trusted me, and seemed glad to have him with me.

Not so Feuermann. On the evening of that rainy Sunday I visited his room. He was unwilling to face me, brusque to my small talk; he dreamed up an outside errand for himself to get rid of me. I didn’t comment on the change — humanly speaking, I didn’t know him well enough. But there was a false note in it. Reading this far unbiased, Drozma, you have probably seen the truth. I didn’t, then. I only thought that if he suspected something ugly about me the Feuermann I had known would have investigated, or put his suspicion in open words. Sulky withdrawal wasn’t properly in character.

It was nearly two weeks after that day when Rosa bared some of her worries to me. She was cleaning my room, on another muggy morning. Her color was poor, her breathing labored; when I urged her to rest, she took the armchair gratefully. “Aie! — if I can ever get up again…. Ben, when you were a boy, did you ever get into one of those, you know, kid gangs?”

I by-passed my own youth. “I don’t think Angelo will do that.”

“No?… You’ve been good for him. I appreciate it.” I remember thinking it strange that she was still friendly, if Namir was using the poison knives of whispers. “Well, I almost married again, just on account he needs a father so bad. Wouldn’t’ve worked, I can see now.” She mopped her kind face, round, sad, shining under the towel she used to guard her hair. “He sure enough told you he wouldn’t join up with Billy Kell’s gang?”

“Well, no. But maybe the gang isn’t so bad, Rosa.”

“It’s bad. They get into fights, I don’t know what all. And I never can figure out what’s best for him. All I can do to add up a grocery bill. How’d I ever come to have such a boy? Here I’m common as mud—”

“Far from it.”

“You know I am,” she said, and not coquettishly. “Well, Father Judd (he’s dead now) he christened him Francis, that was Silvio’s idea. For, you know, the blessed Francisco di Assisi, so that’s really his name, Francis Angelo, the Francis never stuck. When he wasn’t a year old yet he looked so — so — anyway I had to use the name I picked…. Ben, would you sort of talk to him, about not joining that gang? You could say things that I — that I—”

“Don’t worry. Sure, I’ll talk to him about it.”

“If he joins maybe I won’t even know.”

“He’d tell you.” Her face said bleakly that there was much he never told her. “By the way, Rosa, is Mr. Feuermann sore at me?”

“Sore?” She was astonished, then adding two and two in some private hurried way. “Oh, it’s the hot weather, Ben. He feels it bad. Hardly seen him myself all week.” She pushed herself upright and finished her work….

That afternoon I took out my car — Angelo and I had named it Andy after Andrew Jackson because it’s always quarrelsome with body squeaks — and drove past EL CAT SEN when I knew Sharon would be on her way to a practice hour at the empty school. She accepted the lift with gracious calm. “Seems to me you ought to have your own piano at home, Sharon.”

“Mom has Headaches,” she said politely. “And besides.. It’s a good piano at the school. Mrs. Wilks told ’em they hadta. Mrs. Wilks is terrific. I love her beyond comprehemption.”

“Like to meet her sometime.”

“She’s blind. Looks at your face with her fingers, all kind of feathery. I memorized the first piece in two tries, no mistakes.”

“That is terrific.”

“I get terrific sometimes,” said Sharon, preoccupied.

At the school we were admitted by the janitor, a dim-eyed ancient who took my word for it that I was a friend and shuffled off into his forest of cold steampipes: no protection there. The piano was in the assembly hall — too big a place, too empty, but in a yard under the windows teen-age basketball practice was going on, and I noticed two young women working in an office we passed. I shoved aside the worried parent in me, and paid attention to a half-expected miracle.

Not music, naturally: beginner’s stuff, the five-finger, the scale of C major, a kindergarten melody with plimp-plump of tonic and dominant in the left. That didn’t matter. Touch was there, and a hunger for discipline and self-discipline. Left hand and right were already partners, after a scant fortnight of lessons. Yes, touch. Call it impossible: I heard it.

I tiptoed down into the auditorium and slumped in a seat with my mouth open. A shaft of sunlight was making her brown hair luminous in a haze of gold. Certainly she was the Sharon of Amagoya, of the red rubber ball on a string, but I could see the woman too. I saw her as beautiful, even if she retained the pug nose — likely she wouldn’t. The gown for her debut ought to be white, I thought, and she would not be really tall, but would seem so, alone under the lights, a massive black Steinway obedient to her. It was real to me. For her, there should be that transitory dazzling of crowds they call fame; there should be the greater achievement to which contemporary fame is a thin echo. But even if the end was in black frustration, Sharon was a musician and could never escape it. I would have to meet blind Mrs. Wilks: we could talk.

I ought to have heard the soft opening of the door at the back of the hall, but I was intent on Sharon, and on shutting out the basketball squeals, until I caught faint motion at the edge of my field of vision. I was slouching in shadow; he must have been unaware of me until I jerked up to look around. Then he was retreating quickly, face averted, head low. Even with a glimpse of yellow hair I could not be certain it was Billy Kell. The door clipped shut gently. He was gone.

I could try to dismiss it. Some boy wandering in, not knowing the assembly hall was in use. Some harmless playmate of Sharon’s who became shy at seeing an adult. But the hurried retreat had been furtive, ratlike. I felt that coldness in the throat — the human equivalent is what they call goose flesh.