Reflection (43 page)

Rachel laughed. “If you say so, sweetie. You lost me somewhere around the fortissimo bit.”

“He must have been experimenting,” Chris said. “Maybe that's why this piece was special to him. This is my favorite part.” He played the theme from the first movement. It was lovely. “Awesome,” he said.

“It's beautiful,” she agreed.

“I want to put this into my computer. I have a really cool music program. Maybe I can adapt some of this to my band.”

She nearly vetoed the idea; she'd just told Gram she wouldn't let the music leave the house. But she wanted
Reflections
in Chris's computer. She wanted it someplace other than in that tan folder where it could be burned or lost or thrown away. “Put it in the computer,” she said. “But you'll need Gram's permission to use any of it publicly.”

“Right.” His voice told her that he would worry about that later. He jumped up from the piano bench and raced off to his room. Michael was right—Chris had a passion.

She spent the afternoon in the basement of the church with Celine and the same two women she'd worked with the last time. Members of the congregation had donated health kits and layettes, and Rachel packed them into boxes to be shipped to the Mennonite Central Committee in Ohio. From there, the supplies would go to the camps.

The women worked quietly, and Rachel figured that she was the damper on their conversation. They thanked her for her help, but she was certain they wished she hadn't joined them.

“Did you see the pictures from the camps in the New York
Times
this Sunday?” she ventured to ask when they'd been working for over an hour.

The women didn't answer her right away, and Rachel chewed the inside of her cheek in the silence.

“I didn't,” Celine said finally. “I don't get the paper.”

The other women shook their heads without looking up from their work, and Rachel waited a moment before speaking again. “Does the Mennonite Central Committee require a volunteer to be a Mennonite?” She told herself she wanted the answer to that question merely out of curiosity, nothing more.

“No, but they'd have to be a member of some church,” Celine said. “And they have to be screened.”

Would they take a Unitarian? she wondered.

SHE RETURNED HOME AT
six. There were two messages from Michael on the answering machine, the first telling her that he would be working with the youth group on the Reflection Day presentation that night and wouldn't get to see her again until the following day. The second message was for Gram, merely asking her to return his call.

She found her grandmother on her knees in the garden, pulling weeds from around the tomato plants. “Did you call Michael back?” she asked.

Gram looked up, shading her eyes from the sinking sun with her hand. “Does a cat go into a doghouse?” she replied.

Rachel felt a flash of impatience. She turned and walked back to the house before she could say anything she might regret.

She found Chris still in his room, sitting on the bed, bent over his laptop computer. “Pasta for dinner?” she asked.

“I'm not hungry.” He barely looked up from the computer screen. “Maybe later.”

She made pasta for herself and Gram, and they ate in silence. She didn't know what to say. Her grandmother's stubborn selfishness was starting to irritate the hell out of her.

“I'm tired,” the older woman said when they'd finished dinner. “I get tired too easily these days.”

“Well, you've had a very full day,” Rachel said. “A trip to town. All that work in the garden.”

Gram nodded. “I think I'll go to bed early. Read a little.”

Rachel felt helpless as she watched her grandmother leave the room. There was nothing she could do. She couldn't make her return Michael's call or force her to send the music to Karl Speicer. Gram had all the power in this situation.

She cleaned up the kitchen, wishing she could see Michael, wishing her son would come out from the cave of his room. She was fighting a pang of loneliness when she heard Chris's bedroom door open. In a moment he stood at the door of the kitchen. He looked ashen, ill, and she set the dish towel down on the counter.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

“You won't believe this, Mom. I…” He shook his head. “There's a code in the music. A cipher.”

She didn't understand what he meant. “A cipher?”

“Some composers put messages in their music—although not usually this elaborate. This is…” He shook his head again.

“You mean, Grandpa put a message in his music? He says something?”

“He says something unbelievable.”

“What?”

“Come here.”

She followed him into his room.

“Sit here.”

She sat next to him on his bed, and he put the computer on his knees.

“It's only in this one section,” he said. “You know, where it all sounded so weird?”

She nodded.

“He was trying to tell us something with that B-A-C-H theme. See, the Germans know B flat as B, and B as H. So where he has A—D-D-A-B-E-A-D, he's really saying ‘add ahead' and what he really means—and believe me it took me about a millennium to figure this out—is to keep adding more alphabet. He does it twice. He already had A through H. Then he tells us to add I through P by using the next higher octave, then Q through X by going even higher. So he's got nearly the whole alphabet to work with, but that's why the music sounds so bizarre here. He didn't really care about the music, although he pads it with a few things, but he was primarily interested in getting his message across.”

He had lost her again. “So what does he say?” she asked.

“Well, like I said, he padded it with some superfluous stuff, but when you take all that out and add some punctuation and some ‘y's in the right places”—he hit a few keys on the computer—”here's what you're left with.” He set the computer on her lap, and she read the message on the screen aloud.

“
My dear Karl, this is my finest work. Yet you may listen to it and wonder how I can say that. You must believe me, this is my finest creation. But it doesn't approach Helen's poorest.
“

Rachel looked at Chris. “What does that mean?”

“Keep reading.”

“
All the work passed off as mine was, in reality, Helen's.” Rachel read the line again, chilled. “Didn't you ever guess?” she continued. “Helen was good at protecting me, but I thought you, of all people, would one day figure it out. I believe the world should know the truth. When you receive this work, I will be dead, and I ask you to make this fact known—that Helen Huber is one of this country's finest composers, that her husband, though a man of integrity despite this one major transgression, was a fraud. I composed a great deal, dear friend, but none of my work ever reached the public ear. I was no competition for my wife. The piece you hold in your hands now is the only work of mine you have ever seen, and you will know as you listen to it that I'm telling the truth.
“

Rachel looked up from the computer. “This is ridiculous,” she said. She thought of the institution that was her grandfather. She thought of all the music the world knew as his. “For some reason he wanted Gram to have some fame after he was gone. Or maybe he felt sorry for her because she'd been a composition student, too, and she essentially gave it up to marry him.”

“Mom, he's telling the truth,” Chris argued. “I was confused by this piece. I thought maybe he was in a different creative phase or something, and that's why it was so stylistically different. But it makes sense now. He wrote this”—he held up the music from his desk—”and Gram wrote everything else.”

“How could he…why would she allow…?”

“I don't know,” Chris said, “but that statue down by the pond? That should be Gram standing there in bronze, not Peter Huber.”

Rachel still couldn't grasp the obvious truth. Was this why her grandmother didn't want Karl Speicer to see
Reflections
? Did she know or suspect a cipher in the music and want to protect her husband and his secret forever? Or did she simply know that this piece would not be as good as her own, that it would serve only to tarnish her husband's memory?

Suddenly she thought of the music in the box in the attic. “Come with me, Chris,” she said.

He followed her into the attic. They opened the box and pulled out the sheets of yellowed music. Quickly, the two different handwritings made sense.

“She'd create it,” Chris said, holding up one copy of a sonata. “And he'd copy it over in his own writing.” He held up a second manuscript of the same piece, the handwriting neat and clean. “Maybe he'd change it a little here and there, but basically it was hers. Look here in the margins. These are her notes to him.” He read one of them. “
Remember, you're moving toward the climax of the cadenza
,” she'd written.

They went through two more boxes, until there was no doubt left in Rachel's mind that her grandparents had engaged in a lifelong ruse. For what reason, she couldn't guess. But Helen Huber was indeed one of the country's finest composers.

RACHEL AWAKENED TO THE
sound of the piano in the morning. At first she thought Chris was playing again, but once she entered the living room, she discovered it was her grandmother. Rachel stood next to the piano until Gram finally looked up, her hands coming to rest on the keys.

“Gram.” Rachel folded her hands on the ebony lid of the piano. “Please play me something you wrote yourself. Play me one of your compositions.”

Gram looked perplexed. “What do you mean?” she asked.

Rachel flattened her palms on the lid. They were sticky with perspiration. “Chris made a discovery last night,” she began. “He found that Grandpa had put a coded message in the music of
Reflections
.” She spoke very slowly, deliberately.

A swatch of color formed on her grandmother's cheeks, and the older woman lowered her hands from the keys to her lap.

“Then Chris and I went upstairs in the attic, and—I know this was against your wishes and I'm sorry—we looked through the boxes of music. Please, Gram,” she pleaded, “play me something. Play me the piece you've written that you love the best.”

Gram looked at her a long time before finally lifting her hands to the keys once more. The opening notes of Patchwork filled the room, and Rachel sat down in the chair by the window to listen to her grandmother play her masterwork.

“YOU KNOW I STUDIED
composition with him,” Gram said.

“Yes.” They were sitting in the wing chairs in the library, and Rachel was relieved that Gram finally seemed ready to talk.

“But my ambitions were tempered by the times,” Gram continued. “I often felt torn between what I wanted as an artist and what I wanted as a woman, which was to be a supportive wife and mother. Also, there were precious few successful female composers.”

Rachel shook her head. “I'm still stunned, Gram.”

“I would submit work, and it would receive no recognition whatsoever. Then Peter decided to enter a competition. He tried to persuade me to enter it with him, but I was so discouraged by the poor reception of my work that I decided against it. Peter thought my compositions were excellent, and he was angry that they were being ignored on the basis of my gender. At any rate, the competition involved the submission of three separate works over the course of a year. Peter worked very hard on his first submission, but he couldn't get it to fall together properly by the first deadline. He was so distraught. On a whim, I suggested he submit one of my pieces, just to qualify for the contest. He did so—under his own name, of course, and with my blessing—and the judges thought it was extraordinary.” Gram smiled to herself. “It was not bad, and I had a good laugh when they said Peter was in first place after that initial round.

“He continued working on his own piece and turned it in as his second submission. The judges were anxiously waiting for it, and they were very disappointed. They advised him to return to the style of the first piece. This second, they said, lacked the warmth and heart and mystery of the first.” Gram shook her head. “I'm afraid they were right. Technically, Peter was a master at composition, but he couldn't seem to instill his work with much emotion. He worked on a third piece, but as the deadline for submission rolled around, he knew it was no good. He and I had a long talk one night. We stayed up the entire night, and we made a decision. We entered into a pact. I would give him another composition for the competition. We both knew that if it was well received, we would be starting a ruse that had no end. And the piece was indeed well received—well enough to cancel out the lackluster reception for his second submission and enough to propel him to a national standing.”

“But why didn't you claim what was rightfully yours?” Rachel asked. “Show the bastards who rejected you as a female what fools they were?”

“It would have ruined both of us at that point to admit to our…duplicity,” Gram said. “Neither of us would have had a chance for a successful career. And the ruse served us both very well. I loved composing. I had no desire for the travel and other responsibilities and supposed benefits that went along with fame, while Peter thrived on that end of things. While he was away, I'd write music. When he returned, he'd take what I had written and make minor adaptations to it. The thing that was hardest for him, though, were the accolades, because he knew they were not truly meant for him. That's why he always refused to appear publicly to receive them. But his fame and his reputation gave him the opportunity to have influence and power, and because I fully agreed with his political leanings, I felt I was doing something for the greater good, freeing him up that way. Plus, I had the personal satisfaction of hearing and seeing my work performed by the finest musicians in the world.” She shook her head again. “I didn't need public recognition, Rachel. It's always been enough for me to know in my heart that what I created touched people. I have no need for them to know that I did it.”