The Time of Her Life Read online

  She finally lifted the violin with great care and fitted it beneath her chin, but she did not pick up the bow yet. She stood with her bow arm hanging lax as she adjusted her head and looked down the strings. At last she raised her hand just to pluck the strings to see if they were in tune, and in spite of herself, the real tension of them—not the reluctant elastic feeling of her rented instrument—the pleasant resistance of those strings as she plucked across the bridge filled her with excitement. And then she did pick up the bow and began tentatively to play the “Air for the G String.” As soon as she first drew the bow across the strings, she was aware that she had left herself and was speculatively observing her own playing. She was aware that no conscious part of her was controlling her own actions, that she was floating away from herself as she played the lovely, light, graceful violin and produced a sound of real brilliance. It was to be one of the rare moments in her life, as she stood there in the middle of the lightening room among the many little pinpoints of candlelight, when all the lines of coincidence and fate and circumstance intersect and a small miracle of luck occurs.

  9

  Toward the evening of the twenty-third of December there was a general stirring in all the houses where there lived a student in the Lunsbury Central Schools who played an instrument, orchestral or band, or who sang in the chorus. Some children did all three, and in those houses there was a buttoned-down tension more concentrated than in other houses. Even so, each music student basked in the attention of his or her family members, enjoyed the meal served early on his or her account, and dealt one way or another with the combined excitement of the music concert and the upcoming holidays. They were pleasantly burdened with the heavy and titillating anticipation that hangs over children as festivities mount toward what is always a disappointingly benign celebration.

  Jane arrived in the auditorium faintly dazed from the long day and also from her sudden reimmersion into her particular society and the bedlam of backstage activity after the sweet, quiet time of seclusion she had taken for herself. In fact, she was intimidated and alarmed by all the stirring about, by the jargon of the day being thrown from child to child to impress whoever might be listening.

  “Oh, my God, Jane! You look really good! I saw that dress at Halls in the designer collection, but my mother won’t let me shop there. You look really fantastic!” Linda had been dashing by but had stopped still to give Jane that quick compliment. Jane was out of practice, though, and just looked back mutely and moved out of the way.

  Jane was the object of a good bit of ostentatious solicitude. All the girls in the group—genuinely kind-hearted girls for the most part—took care to adopt a somber attitude of sympathetic inquiry when they approached Jane. They surreptitiously vied with one another to be the one most thoroughly concerned about her. And their concern was not at all feigned, but it became more and more intense. Their scrutiny of each other was so close that each consoling gesture any one of them made in Jane’s direction affected in the others real emotion and an almost frenzied need to prove their magnanimity toward Jane and her plight. Jane’s friends were flying around, doing errands for the chorus director or instructing the younger children in this or that—they were gleefully self-important as sixth graders. But they would spot Jane and come to a halt, and Heather or Stephanie or Linda would move gravely toward her, touch her arm, and speak to her softly. Then they would dash off to be seen at some other important job. Only Diana stood apart from her and was quiet and withdrawn. Jane had hurt her feelings very much over the past few weeks, which was a fairly long time in the social lives of those girls. Diana stood at the far end of the corridor from Jane, dispiritedly holding her flute and waiting for the orchestra to take its seats.

  Jane didn’t notice that Diana was ignoring her, and even the benevolent attention aimed her way roused in her a longing to be away from all the people and the noise, but at the same time she was in the grip of a keenness for a certain kind of power. She was eager to perform and test herself with the new violin, while she was also terrified that she had tricked herself into believing she sounded better than she did.

  She stood backstage against a wall to be out of the way and leave the passage behind the curtain free while her friends passed back and forth. The other girls all had a self-conscious look of sly pleasure, and they drifted here and there, in everyone’s way, much taken with themselves in the long-skirted Laura Ashley dresses they had bought at the Honeybee. They were eager to be observed, but they pretended a kind of cavalier boredom with it all. And the boys were equally and less subtly impressed with themselves in their gray flannel slacks and brass-buttoned blazers.

  Jane was fairly oblivious to everything going on around her and especially to the clothes she had on. She was so tired from the short night and long day preceding this evening that she was queasy with a surge of adrenaline through all her body. Her hands trembled slightly, and her legs felt wooden and locked at the knees. She was also concentrating to some degree on keeping her violin out of sight so Miss Jessup wouldn’t notice it and insist she play the other one for this performance. She did not want her mother and her teacher to be at odds with each other. She stood where she was, worrying about the pieces she would play and staying out of the way.

  But any of the adults who came backstage for some reason or another and even some of the other performers—when their attention momentarily slewed away from themselves—could not help noticing Jane. She was not dressed in one of the sweet Laura Ashley dresses. It would never have occurred to Claudia to check with any other parent and find out what might be the order of the day. She had not even thought to shop in the Girls’ Department of Halls; she had selected Jane’s dress from the same collection from which she chose her own clothes, whenever she remembered to do that. Clothes weren’t important to Claudia, and she always bought what appealed to her at the moment. Jane stood against the wall dressed in a plain knee-length white wool dress and matching waist-length jacket that had no ornamentation whatsoever except that the squared neckline of the jacket was gently scalloped and framed Jane’s collarbone and long, arched neck. It was a dress of very restrained femininity, and Claudia had bought it that afternoon as soon as she saw it; it was a dress she would have liked to wear herself, although she had the wrong figure for it. She didn’t think about the fact that Jane was only eleven years old, even if she was tall, and that this dress was sophisticated for a child to wear successfully. The dress had fitted Jane perfectly.

  Claudia hadn’t known what to do with Jane’s hair, and Jane hadn’t cared one way or another. But just before they left the house, Claudia had brushed Jane’s dark blond hair straight back and wound it as best she could into a French twist. This left Jane’s smooth, wide brow clear, and her eyes were large and serious in her oval face. Without her hair hanging down on either side, the planes of her face were apparent, and the firmly rounded chin and the strong, distinct line of her jaw.

  The dress Claudia had chosen was exactly right for Jane, as it turned out, because she didn’t have the face of a child, and people turned to look at her. She had the heart-stopping look of wisdom that one observes in the faces of young ballet dancers. She had such an expression of assured devotion that Mr. Walters, the band director, noticed her, and it went fleetingly through his mind that she looked like a young nun. But then he moved on in his thoughts to worry about whether to reposition the drums so they wouldn’t be too dominant. There was a plethora of drummers this year.

  Claudia had dropped Jane at school early and gone to Burger Chef to get some dinner for herself. When she returned, the parking lot was full, and she had to leave the car two streets away and make her way toward the school on foot. All around them, as the parents of Lunsbury negotiated a path along the shoveled, icy sidewalks beneath the streetlights, was a fine, black, misty night. A vaporous condensation rose from the ground, and the air seemed rich and loamy in contrast with the white, crusted yards and brittle banks of snow along the plowed roads. Only long fea
thers of clouds moved through the upper distance to break the dark, and snowflakes fell sparely and in such cold that they landed on a dark coat sleeve or shoulder in tiny but perfectly delineated crystalline formations, and then they were gone again in an instant.

  Claudia moved with the throng in her long wool cape and was pleased to listen to various parents greeting each other. She was in a state of such optimism and excitement that the communal calling back and forth and laughing and polite joke making seemed to her an almost unbearably poignant reminder of the possibilities of civilization and goodwill. Her perceptions were on a hair trigger this evening, and she was so convinced, in this crowd, of the occasional benevolence of human-kind that she was near tears.

  When she entered the auditorium, she had no idea that her face took on an expression of gratitude that cast a vulnerability over her features. She attracted attention in the same way her daughter had backstage. The two of them looked, tonight, like people around whom something is bound to happen. Everything about them bespoke an intrinsic drama. Claudia was startling to see with all her hopes upon her delicate triangular face, and she was tall in the crowd in her black cloak. And although she was somberly dressed among all the bright goose down jackets, she was also jarringly glittery with refracted regard, because Claudia was indifferent to the opinion of strangers. She did not absorb their consideration, and it bounced back at the observers, any one of whom felt oddly slighted.

  It was not until she caught sight of Avery smiling at her from the third row that she became self-reflective and put a hand up to brush back her hood and settle her hair. She made her way down an aisle and smiled at him and then sat down beside him, and he leaned over and gave her a polite little kiss in greeting. She was sitting forward a bit, and she stayed perfectly still for a moment. Such a clear-cut friendliness from her own husband unnerved her, but she settled back in her seat and shrugged off her cape and crossed her legs.

  “Wait till you see Janie tonight,” she said to him. “She looks so… grown-up, I guess. I’m not sure how to describe her. She looks very elegant, and, oh, ‘serene’ is as close as I can come. ‘Grown-up’ isn’t quite what I mean. It’s very surprising when you first notice the difference. Avery, it almost broke my heart.” Claudia had turned to hold his gaze directly. To Avery she generally said exactly what she meant, which caused her, quite often, to sound overwrought, even though her voice was perfectly calm.

  “That’s probably what was bound to happen,” Avery said. “Even when she was little, she never really looked young. She’ll go from being an ordinary little girl to someone you have to take seriously.”

  Claudia looked at him more closely. That terrible note of self-indulgent nostalgia was infusing his voice again, although he was absolutely sober. Claudia didn’t think he had had even one drink. She knew him so well that she could gauge his sobriety just by the small degree of muscular tension in his face.

  Avery was pondering and sorting his ideas as he spoke, and he went on. “She could end up being one of those women who are frightening. Admirable but alarming. Do you know what I mean? She’s always had that quality around the eyes…. Well, I know what it is.” And he sketched vaguely with his hands to try to describe his daughter. “She’s watchful. It’s judgment. She’ll always have a slightly secretive look. Remember, even when she was a baby, she always looked as though she were weighing everything in the balance. You used to pick her up to feed her and say, ‘Oh, come on, give me a break!’ Remember?” And he laughed. “She’s always been able to make up her mind and look out for herself.” And he meant this. He thought he loved his daughter. He and Claudia had no idea; they had no idea at all how mysterious parents are to their children. Claudia and Avery both thought privately that Jane was a rather strange child who didn’t altogether approve of them.

  Claudia glanced away. She looked around the room, where people were still greeting each other and chatting in the aisles, and she looked at the stage, where the chorus was falling raggedly into place. She thought Avery spoke as if he were no longer related to his daughter, as if he were relegating her to memory.

  “My God, Avery,” she said, “she’s your own daughter.” But she said it so softly; she spoke out toward the stage without any particular inflection or urgency, and Avery only picked it up with the corner of his attention and didn’t comment one way or another.

  The room was filling rapidly, and Claudia turned in her seat to look for Maggie and Vince. Beyond the wide double doors of the auditorium the heavy, cold air and the dark clung so closely to the earth that as the people entered, it was as though the icy gloom had adhered to them and then evaporated upward in the warmth to chill and shadow the remote corners at the rear of the large room. The colors of the sweaters and blouses and shirts were vibrant, and the company took on an extra degree of animation. The scent of the snow and the night were exciting in this safe enclosure. The frigid dark was something substantial to have come in from. It was an evening that enhanced humanity and made all the people glad to be with their acquaintances.

  The seats were filled now, although parents and grandparents and aunts and siblings continued to stream into the lighted room, and so the men in the audience began to get up, many of them, and move out of the rows of seats to stand against the walls, vacating their places for their wives and mothers and children, or for the wives and mothers and children of other men. Avery made his way to the aisle and joined Vince and Mark, and Maggie and Celeste came to take places next to Claudia. Maggie and Claudia exchanged a customary light embrace and a pleasant greeting, and Maggie turned to chat with a woman she knew who was sitting in the row behind them.

  Avery and Vince leaned their shoulders against the long black-paned windows, and Avery stretched his arm out loosely across the high sill while he leaned toward Vince to tell him something. Claudia was watching them, and she absently raised her hand to her lips and passed her fingertips softly across her mouth as though she were stopping some words she might say. She looked at the two men and all the other fathers in their crew-necked sweaters and tweed jackets and then, in the audience, at all the women leaning together to speak to each other, or bending forward to rein in a small child who was heading off on some adventure. Claudia had a sudden inclination to double over and bury her head in her lap, to hide away from the evidence of such kindly sexuality. One father caught an escaped child and lifted him to sit high on the windowsill; another raised his daughter up over his head so she could straddle his shoulders and hold on around his neck. Their wives, sitting down at last, were weary from the effort of organizing the children, rushing them through the early dinner, worrying over and reassuring that child who would be performing.

  Claudia looked around and knew that later a husband in his nice blue sweater would collect his family after the concert, would move them along toward the car, would, perhaps, put his hand at his wife’s waist to guide her through the crowd and through the snow while she glanced back to be sure the children were coming after them. And she would not take special notice of that hand at her waist; that wife would be accustomed to that touch, and her husband would be accustomed to the touching. Claudia looked once more at Avery and Vince, who appeared to be unmoved by the implication all around them of such intimate involvement. It seemed to her all good, those intricacies of domestic life. It seemed to her to be a condition full of ease and grace, and she even imagined that the orderly sensuality she attributed to these people was something she had once had. Then she did have to look down at the floor, and she put her hands up to her face, because she was wounded by what was lacking in her life, she was overcome by lust and longing.

  The houselights came down, and the audience began to grow quiet as the musicians took their places. The string section was seated, and Jane was the last to take her seat in her position of first violin. Alice Jessup stood calmly waiting for her students to settle into their chairs, and Claudia watched her and was moved by a wave of sympathy and goodwill as she studied that serious littl
e figure at the front of the brilliantly lit stage. In fact, as Alice raised her arms and the strings began to play their first piece, a selection from the Messiah, Claudia could not turn her eyes away from Alice Jessup to look at Jane. Her attention was riveted to Alice’s slightly undulating figure as she coaxed forth the right notes at the right moments. She was so very small and straight with her long, long hair to her waist, and she was wearing her black-strapped Chinese shoes and, strangely enough for December, a mid-calf gauzy beige skirt with an India-inspired design around its hem. Against the light the skirt was completely transparent, and Claudia could not look away from Alice’s thin, slightly bowed legs beneath the skirt and her bright turquoise blue bikini underpants with elastic that was sprung so that they slipped fractionally with each upreach of her arms.

  Claudia didn’t dare glance around to see if anyone else had noticed this; instead she directed toward the stage the intense wish, on Alice’s behalf, that the wispy little pair of underpants would not fall down around her ankles with her next exhortation to her students. And she forgave Alice everything. She forgave her for her superior knowledge of music; she forgave her for the absolute possession of her own life; she even forgave her for the slight and mysterious disdain with which she suspected Alice viewed her. Alice had endeared herself utterly to Claudia by such an amazing lack of vanity and foresight.