Nothing That Meets the Eye (21 page)

Only two or three chords had sounded, but each sent a thrill over her. How strange and personal it felt to know that other hands were on her piano!

“You have the most beautiful touch!” she whispered into the mirror. She drew the very soft ivory-backed brush across her black hair once more, letting some of it lie over her shoulders.

She tiptoed down the hall, down the stairs, bending a little so she might sooner see the lighted corner of the room where the pianos were. Middle C sounded, firmly held down.

“Oh!”

“Come on down, Agnie!” Margaret called from where she stood at Agnes's piano. “Klett's upstairs washing for supper.”

“Oh.” Suddenly she felt she almost hated Margaret.

“You're looking so much better than I'd expected, Agnes. Really, I'm delighted. Mummy's last letter said you'd had more of those pains in the back and had already been in bed a week.”

“I've just spent five days in bed,” Agnes explained.

“Did you write that lumbar specialist I told you about in Chicago?”

“Oh, yes,” Agnes replied wearily. “I don't know, I just don't know. There've been so many specialists. Sometimes I think all they do is take one's money and go off. And who knows? Who knows? Pain is just my cross, darling!”

“How's your sleeping?”

“I sleep when I can,” she said with a cheerful laugh.

Seated on the end of the bench, Margaret ran her fingers again over a few notes, sounded them together, but Agnes took no pleasure in them now. “The trouble is, I suppose, if one's in bed all day one simply isn't tired at night. You have gained weight, though, haven't you?”

“Perhaps. So have you!” Agnes made herself smile. Margaret had put on tons. It was really disgusting.

“I suppose I have.” Margaret smiled. “Bad as the year I was married. But I must say I feel better for it.”

Agnes remembered how she had gained pounds when she married, being so happy, happy like a pig with her Austrian musicologist, Dr. Hermann von Haffner. But then of course the divorce had come only two years later. Agnes pressed her palms together, twisted them. “Do ask Klett to come down and play something before supper, Margaret. I think he's perfectly charming!”

“All right. I did want to warn you, Agnie, not to make too much over Klett. He's a very conceited young man and it goes right to his head.”

“Oh—did I?” She found a mischievous amusement in the fact she might have.

“Not seriously.” Margaret frowned with a look of humor in her eyes, in an old habit Agnes remembered. “He's from a small school where he's had too much praising already. He could develop into a good or a mediocre musician, but at this stage a swelled head won't help.”

“Oh! Well—” Agnes laughed a little. “I'll ask him to come down.”

She went upstairs to the door at the end of the hall. She heard the snap of a suitcase closing. How exciting it was to have a guest!

“Come in?” he responded to her knock.

She opened the door slowly, smiling. He wore the same Tyrolean jacket, but with a dark blue and red silk scarf knotted at his throat instead of the muffler. His light brown hair was damp from his washing, and the wavy rise of hair over his forehead was higher and bore fresh marks of his comb. What a handsome figure he makes in this room that has been silent so long, she thought. She loved his clothes. They reminded her of a conception she had long entertained of Frédéric Chopin. She loved, too, his air of aloofness and nervous impatience that could alternate so quickly with boyish uncertainty. The only thing he was yet certain of, she supposed, was his genius. He gazed back at her now, however, with perfect composure in his gentle, intense face. His slightly parted lips held the merest beginning of an involuntary smile. Surely he understood that she understood him, she thought, and felt a tingling shock pass over her.

“Won't you come down and play something for us?” she asked finally.

He bowed a little. “It would be a pleasure, Miss Steinach.” He moved to the mirror, touched the side of his head with his palm, then followed her out of the room.

To Agnes's annoyance, Margaret was still at the piano, but she got up as they crossed the room.

“This one's the best. The other's way out of tune,” Margaret said, for Klett had stopped near her father's darker piano. “Well, I'll leave you two. I'm in need of a quick nap.”

The better piano, thought Agnes, but Margaret's very utterance had offended her most. How could she talk so callously about the piano their father had cherished?

“Beautiful instruments,” Klett remarked, feeling the surface of her father's piano with the backs of his fingers.

Agnes's Baldwin and her father's Steinway, except for their want of tuning due to Agnes's basic unmusicalness and consequent neglect, were monuments of judicious care and handling, like the Pierce Arrow Otto Steinach had bought in 1927. Their wax and polish lusters were unbroken by a single scratch, the almost black one of the father, Agnes's of lighter brown mahogany streaked with dark, much like the coat of a tiger-striped cat. Even from some distance in the closed room they gave off the bouquet that pianos, of all musical instruments, seem to possess so richly, of aromatic polish, of felt and steel and a certain dusky sweetness like the piano's versatile music itself. A taffeta-shaded lamp stood on either piano atop a swirled scarf. The scarf over Agnes's was a gloomily colored Persian print, over her father's a heavy and ancient-looking rep of beige fringed with stiffened gilt that looked rather military. Their tops suggested half-conjoined wheels of chance in motion, the black and white keyboards parts of their numbered rims, or so Agnes had often thought when she and her father seated themselves facing each other to play their duets, their Bach and Haydn double concertos, their Chopin “treble and basses.” She had seemed to be caught in the centrifugal force of their repertory even before they touched the keys, she remembered. But now as Klett sat down at her piano, she felt only a simple joy that his young genius was about to be expressed on the piano she knew so well.

She looked down at her hands, which she had arranged carefully in her lap, one with palm up, the other lightly at rest upon it, its smooth knuckleless fingers flowing down to oval pale lavenderish nails. Klett was quickly spanning off keys without pressing them, like a musician before a concert, but a tremulous excitement prompted Agnes to interrupt.

“I'm so fortunate in having long fingers. I suppose I should play much better than I do.”

Klett looked at her hands. “It doesn't really matter about the length, you know. Yours might be too flexible.”

Agnes's face fell. “I can play two notes beyond an octave.”

He shrugged. “I can just reach an octave.” He held up his right hand, turned it front and back objectively. “My hands are supposed to be the best type.”

Agnes watched his hands come together on the keys, the fingers striking with precision, like arched hammers. He had rather unattractive hands, she thought, not at all what she considered a pianist's hands should be. They were short and squarish and their backs round with muscle. Then, aware that he was playing something, she forced herself to listen. “Bach!” she said.

“First prelude from
The
Well-Tempered Clavier.”

“Yes!” Didn't he think she knew that much? When he had finished she asked, “Do you know any Chopin? I adore him.”

“Oh, yes,” he said casually, and began a Chopin nocturne—the very one she had been practicing!

“Exquisite!”

“It'd sound better if the piano didn't ring so. The felt's worn down apart from the tuning, you know.”

Agnes hardly heard. She had never listened to the nocturne played with such thrilling clarity, such surety of rhythm. She felt herself grow taut from head to foot. “Oh, now you look right!” she whispered.

Klett smiled suddenly at her. It was the first time she had seen him smile like that, his face lighted with his own music, with a ­half-preoccupied tenderness in his eyes. In the close-fitting jacket his arched back, which bent with his playing, his head, round in back and balanced with the crest of hair in front, made a study in reposeful concentration.

“You belong at a piano! You are like a bird that has left off beating its wings—to glide in air!”

He laughed appreciatively. Smiling, lifting his hands high, he played the Chopin Mazurka in A. The tassels danced on the pink lamp. He held the pedal down until Agnes felt swept away on melodious clouds of ringing, echoing, ear-dazzling sound. She wondered what the neighbors, the Carstairses and the Hollinses on the other side, thought of the burst of music coming suddenly at dusk from the Steinach home.

“Klett!—Excuse me.” Margaret's voice was drab and ugly, from another world. She stood halfway down the stairs. “Klett, you know that's the very thing I don't want you to play yet.”

“All right,” Klett said, looking down at the keys he still lightly touched. But he had stopped the melody abruptly.

“Awfully sorry, Agnes.” Margaret gave an apologetic laugh. “You don't know it yet and you're just hammering in those mistakes for all you're worth. Play anything else, Klett.” She went back upstairs.

Agnes smiled and wrung her hands. “Isn't that annoying!”

Undaunted, Klett had begun a quiet Bach praeludium. He continued with something Agnes thought was Scarlatti, though it might also have been Bach.

“Lovely!” she said once or twice, but Klett did not look up or smile again. Agnes was content to watch him, absorbed in his own easy continuous playing, though she kept wishing he would pay some attention to her.

“Anyway, last year at the fall concerts I found one Scarlatti on the program gave more headaches than all moderns put together,” Margaret was saying, adding another pat of butter to her baked potato. “Mummy, I didn't tell you what happened to Schindler this summer. You know, the assistant professor of violin with the horrible temper?” She burst out laughing.

Agnes laid down her fork and looked at her sister almost tearfully. She might have allowed their guest to talk, but there she was babbling on and on, so busy stuffing herself she would never notice a look. Agnes ­didn't like her new housecoat so much after all, she decided. It was too tailored, not the least in her style, as certainly a sister should have known. Margaret had brought it from San Francisco and, suddenly remembering it, had insisted that Agnes try it on and wear it to supper. Upstairs the maroon flannel and white piping had looked deceptively trim and attractive. Now, looking down at the broad cuffs above her slender hands, she felt it had been part of a deliberate scheme to make her hideous. Small wonder that Klett had not troubled to talk with her! She wished she were in bed in her old satin dressing gown, even if its lace was torn. Who appreciated anyway what it cost her to come down to supper, when almost every day of the world Alantha served three meals to her in bed?

“Oh!” Agnes gasped in a tone of surprise and outrage.

“Darling!”

“Oh, dear,” said Mrs. Steinach.

Agnes had bent her head low over her plate. The searing vertical pain along her spine spread into both hips. It was hot, unreasonably cruel, yet tingling like something not quite there. It made a familiar pattern, like an inverted T with a fuzzy crossbar. “It's—all right.”

“Can I do anything, Miss Steinach?” Klett asked, half standing.

She shook her head. And indeed the pain had already gone, so suddenly she could almost doubt it had been. It always departed suddenly, but left her so weak, so stricken. “Upstairs,” she whispered.

“I'll help you, Agnie,” Margaret said.

Agnes teetered to the right, however, and took the arm Klett proffered. She left the dining room with bowed head, the new housecoat trailing the ground, like one on the way to an executioner. She might almost have been willing to go to an executioner on Klett's arm, she thought, he carried himself so beautifully, with such pride and court­liness.

In answer to Mrs. Steinach's summons, Dr. Reese arrived at eight-thirty. He was the family doctor, had officiated at both Margaret's and Agnes's births, and since Agnes's semi-invalidism seventeen years before had called twice or thrice weekly at the house.

“Caught me right in the middle of dinner, Mrs. Steinach,” Agnes heard his voice from her bed upstairs. “Hello, Margaret! Saints alive! I haven't seen you—” Now he kissed her, Agnes supposed. “How's my girl?”

Their happy pain-free voices blended to Agnes's ears until she could no longer tell what they said. She closed her eyes and made her body rigid as Dr. Reese entered, with Margaret behind him.

“Well! How's my patient?”

His face was unusually radiant, and suddenly Agnes felt strong dislike for him. Ordinarily he was calm, serious, and rather formal. Now he seemed positively silly. His knees jutted awkwardly above the incongruous little potbelly as he walked. His gray head shook more than ever as though he did some foolish dance. Agnes did not reply to his question.