Anne Rice - Violin

Grady warned against our spendthrift ways. But he had to admit that the sales of the records had already exceeded Karl's trust fund. And the fund was doubling. And the sales of the records might go on forever.

We couldn't stint. We didn't care. Katrinka felt safe! Jackie and Julie went to the finest school back home, then dreamed about Switzerland.

We went down into Nashville.

I wanted to hear and play for the bluegrass fiddlers. I sought out the young bluegrass genius Alison Krauss, whose music I so loved. I wanted to lay roses at her door. Maybe she would recoguize the name Triana Becker.

My sound, however, was not bluegrass anymore than it was Gaelic. It was the European sound, the Viennese and the Russian sound, the heroic sound, the Baroque sound-all that melded together-the soaring flights of the longhairs, as they had once been called before that tag line was co-opted by hippies who looked like Jesus Christ.

Nevertheless, I was one of them.

I was a musician.

I was a virtuoso.

I played the violin. It belonged in my hands. I loved it. Loved it. Loved it.

I did not need to meet the brilliant Leila Josefowicz, Vanessa Mae, or my dearest Alison Krauss. Or the great Isaac Stern. I had no nerve for such things. I needed only to think, I can play.

I can play. Maybe someday they will hear Triana Becker.

Laughter.

It rang in the hotel rooms where we gathered to drink the champagne, and we ate desserts full of chocolate and cream, and I lay on the floor at night, looking up into the chandelier the way I liked to do at home, and every morning and night...

Every morning or night, we called home to see if there had been any word of Faye, our lost sister, our beloved lost sister. We talked of her in interviews on the steps of theaters in Chicago, Detroit, San Francisco.

“…our sister Faye, we haven't seen her in two years."

Grady's office in New Orleans fielded phone calls from people who were not Faye, and had not seen her. They could not accurately describe her small beautifully proportioned body, her effervescent smile, her loving eyes, her tiny hands, so strong, and so cruelly marked with small thumbs by the alcohol that had poisoned the dark water in which she had fought to live, so tiny, so sickly.

Sometimes I played for Faye. I was with tiny Faye on the back flag-stones at the house on St. Charles, with the cat in her arms, smiling, oblivious, an invincible elf, oblivious to the drunken woman inside, or the screaming fights, the sound of a woman vomiting behind a bathroom door. It was for Faye who lay on the patio, and loved to feel the rain dry up on the flagstones in the sun. Faye who knew secrets like that, while other people quarreled and accused.

There were times on the road that were hard for others. Because I couldn't stop myself from playing the long Strad. I went nuts, said Glenn. Dr. Guidry came. In one place, my brother-in-law Martin suggested I be tested for drugs, and Katrinka screamed at him.

There were no drugs. There was no wine. There was music.

It was like a fiddler's replay of The Red Shoes. I played and played and played until everyone else in the suite had fallen asleep.

Once I was even taken from the stage. A rescue operation, I think, because it had gone on and on, and people were clamoring for encores. I collapsed but soon came to my senses.

I discovered the masterly film Immortal Beloved in which the great actor Gary Oldman seemed to capture the Beethoven I had all my life worshiped and perhaps in my madness even glimpsed. I looked into the eyes of the great actor Gary Oldman. He caught the transcendence. He caught the heroic of which I dreamed, and the isolation which I knew, and the perseverance which I made my daily office.

"We'll find Faye!" Rosalind said. In hotel dining rooms we replayed together all the good things that had happened. "You've made so much noise that Faye is bound to hear it and she'll come back! She'll want to be with us now....

Katrinka broke into joke telling and rampant wit. Nothing could chill her now-not the taxes, not the mortgage, not old age, or death, or where the girls would go to college, or whether her husband was spending too much of our money-nothing troubled her.

Because everything in this bounty and success could be solved or resolved.

This was Success Moderne. A success that can only be known in our time, I would guess, when people round the world can record, watch and listen-all at the same time-to the improvisations of one violinist.

We convinced ourselves that Faye had to share this with us, that somewhere somehow she already did, because we reached out for her. Faye, come home. Faye, don't be dead. Faye, where are you? Faye, it is fun in the limousines, and the beautiful rooms; it is fun to push through the crush at the stage door, it is fun.

Faye, the audience gives us love! Faye, it is warm now forever.

One night in New York, I stood behind a stone griffin, I think it was near the top of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel. I looked out over Central Park. The wind blew cold like it had in Vienna. I thought of Mother. I thought of a time when she had asked me to say the Rosary with her, and she had spoken of her drinking to me-which she had never mentioned to any of the others-when she had said it was a craving in the blood, and that her father had it, and his father. Say the Rosary. I closed my eyes and I kissed her. The Agony in the Garden.

That night on the street, I played for her.

And soon my fifry-fifth year would be complete. October would come and I would be fifly-five.

Then finally-as I knew it would-the inevitable moment came.

How kind of Stefan and how perfectly impulsive and unwise to have written it himself with his very own ghostly hand, or had he gone into the body of a human being to inscribe these letters?

Nobody in this day and age had a script so perfect as this, in long sharp strokes of a dipped pen, and grand purple ink-on parchment no less, new, of course, but as firm as any he might have chosen in his time.

He didn't keep any secrets.

"Stefan Stefanovsky, your old friend, cordially invites you to come for a benefit concert in Rio de Janeiro, and looks forward to seeing you there. All expenses to be paid for you and your family at the Copacabana Hotel, Rio. Further arrangements and details at your pleasure. Please call the following numbers collect when it is convenient for you to do so."

Katrinka handled the details on the phone. "At what theater? The Teatro Municipale?"

Sounds modern, sterile, I thought.

I would give you Lily if I could.

"You don't want to go down there, do you?" asked Roz. She had had her fourth beer and was mellow and soft, her arm around me. I was dozing against her and looking out the window. This was Houston, a tropical city, really, with a great ballet and an opera, and audiences which had been so warm to and unquestioning of us.

"I wouldn't go there," said Katrinka.

"Rio de Janeiro?" I said. "But it's a beautiful place. Karl wanted to go. He wanted to complete his work on the book. St. Sebastian, his saint, his . .

"Academic field," said Roz.

Katrinka laughed.

"Well, that's all done, his book," said Glenn, Roz's husband. "It's being shipped now. Grady says everything is going splendidly." Glenn pushed his glasses up on his nose.

He sat down and folded his arms.

I looked at the note. Come to Rio.

"I can see it in your face; don't go!"

I simply stared at the note; my hands were wet and shaking. His handwriting, his very name.

"What in the name of God," I asked, "are you all talking about?"

Exchange of looks. "If she doesn't remember now, she will," said Katrinka.

"That woman who wrote to you, your old friend from Berkeley, who told you...