The Silver Swan (2 page)

On one side of the mirroring paired images, Alexander’s own initials form part of the design, added to the filigree, an etched
AF
on the feathers of a wing. Her father has told Mariana that only three people in the world — he, she, and her mother — are aware of the existence of these additional marks. And the man who did the markings (here Alexander drops his voice) took his knowledge to the grave. So it is
our
family secret,
our
hidden sign, and the way you, Mariana Alexandra Feldmann, will always be able to recognize the authentic cello. There are lots of ugly ducklings, Alexander says, but only one true Swan. He tunes the instrument.

She watches her father’s long strong fingers, as he turns the wooden pegs. When he has finished tuning, he puts the gleaming Swan between her knees and kneels beside her on the carpet. He strokes her cheek. She is transfixed.

“All right, my angel, play beautifully for your papa.” He stands again. “One day, we’ll rent Carnegie Hall and we’ll choose the same date as my debut there in 1945. That happens to have been your birthday,” he reminds her. “Twenty-seven years later, you arrived on that exact date. It’s our magic number.” Mariana wonders if she would like to work so hard on her birthday but does not interrupt. She knows this story well, too. “A day I could never forget,” he says. “My debut. This is how I remember your birthday.”

“You’ll be away again this year,” she murmurs, but Alexander is lost in his fantasy.

“We’ll go to Bergdorf Goodman to buy you a glamorous dress and you’ll choose the color. I’ll be very proud of you, won’t I?” He holds her chin gently, his face close to hers. She doesn’t answer.

“Remember, best of all,” he repeats. “On that day, you’ll play the Swan.”

The winter had been hard and long: snow, rain, a sudden thaw, then snow again. By mid-April, finally, the ground had cleared. Mariana was on her way to Boston to meet her father’s lawyer. As the plane landed at Logan, she pulled on her knee-high leather boots, fastened her hair with a tortoise clip, and returned her book to the Hermès bag between her feet. She was coming from New York for the day and carried no luggage. The man across the aisle, with whom she’d briefly spoken as they boarded, watched her unabashedly. At almost six feet, a dark and angular beauty, she was used to such attention; men had been staring at her for years. Crossing her legs and pressing them against the tray in front of her, she leaned back in her own cramped seat. Wind gusts, the pilot warned them, might be strong. Turbulence did not bother her.

Once at the gate, she unbuckled her belt and reached into the overhead bin for the rain cape it seemed she was going to need. Draping it around her shoulders, Mariana hoisted her bag and waited to deplane. Now her high-heeled boots felt tight, and she regretted having removed them for the flight.

Her father had died suddenly in his house in the Berkshires on January 10, ten days after his ninetieth birthday party. Because he and Mariana were just about to share their ritual cocktail at five thirty, she was able to give the coroner an almost exact accounting of the timing of his fall: five twenty-eight. Waiting impatiently, on the second-floor landing, shouting for his nurse-attendant, he had raised himself from his wheelchair, become entangled in his oxygen tubing, and clattered down the long flight of stairs. Mariana, in the kitchen, ran to him, but he was unconscious. The nurse dialed 911. Mariana blamed herself. Had she been standing near her father — not staring out the kitchen window at the snowdrifts and the blowing snow — she might have caught him as he tumbled from the wheelchair, or might have broken his fall. She blamed the nurse as well.

Feldmann had survived his wife — who was fifteen years younger — by seven years. When her mother passed away on a clear, March morning, Mariana had been at her side. She and the hospice nurse had just finished changing their charge’s nightgown and brushing back her silver hair. Pilar lay silent as the nurse gathered up the soiled clothes and sheets and took them to the laundry. Mariana held her mother’s hand and studied her face, its sweet, peaceful expression. She spoke to her mother with the tenderness Pilar had so long rejected. These moments would have to satisfy her. They were what she would retain: a faint pressure on her hand, a sigh. She leaned down to whisper, “I love you, Mama.” Mariana felt no breath. She cried out for the nurse.

At the moment his wife died, Alexander was in Poland, judging a competition. He hurried back, bemoaning his loss, proclaiming devotion to Pilar’s memory and telling his
consolers he could not go on without her. Feldmann performed his sadness, an oratorio of grief.

In late May 2003, he sold the apartment on Central Park West and moved to Stockbridge, in the Berkshires. He told Mariana he was tired of the city and ready to live “in nature.” The family had long owned a summer place near Tanglewood that Alexander named “Swann’s Way” although he’d never read a word of Proust. Mariana had packed up Alexander’s apartment, closed up her own — a brownstone walk-up a few blocks away — and moved to Stockbridge with her father to care for him through the summer. The chamber music group she had played with since giving up her solo career, the New York Chamber Ensemble, did not perform in the summer months. When autumn came, she took a leave of absence to stay with Alexander. He said he could not survive without her, although he criticized her daily for forsaking her career.

Alexander required constant attention, and toward the end, Mariana was the only one left to provide it. She rarely left his side. One evening, shortly before his death, they sat together.

“Have I finished my martini, sweetheart?” Alexander’s fingers, trembling on the surface of the marble table, felt for the stem of the glass he could not see.

“There’s one more sip, Papa, and the olive’s at the bottom,” Mariana answered, edging the glass toward his hand. “And because it’s almost Christmas, we’ll celebrate. I’ll make you another. A small one, a mini. But you mustn’t get too sleepy before dinner. We have a lovely one tonight.”

He lifted his glass to capture the last drops. “You take such good care of me, darling. You must be very dull in the country with only an old man and his old friends for company.”

Mariana smiled at him. He had always confused the words “dull” and “bored,” as did his parents, who were Viennese and spoke tentative English all their lives. She took pleasure in this residue of foreign speech and did not correct him. “I am not at all dull here. I have a great deal to do taking care of you. I’ve come to love our life in Stockbridge, and, besides, I can always return to New York for a few days if I get restless.”

The old man was anxious. “You’re not planning to go again soon, are you? I get very lonely when you leave me here with nurses who never have anything interesting to say and can’t make a decent martini!” She laughed and stood up, reaching across the table to remove his glass. A small fire glowed across the room in the immense fireplace.

“No, I’m not leaving you. I haven’t found one good reason to go to New York in months, except to check on my apartment. I’m staying here, Papa.”

Outside, it was dark, and the holiday lights Mariana had strung on the evergreens in front of the house illumined the fresh snow. They had had no such lights when she was a child and they came to this house in the Berkshires for the holiday season. Her parents opposed them. “We are Jewish, after all,” her mother said. But now her mother was dead, and her father took pleasure in the sparkling display. A large Christmas tree, cut on the property, stood in the entrance hall. Under it, Mariana had placed the presents for Alexander that arrived each day from friends and students and fans. There were many. He was impatient for Christmas morning and asked her often to tell him how many days he would have to wait.

“I’m going to the kitchen to fix your drink and tend to dinner,” she announced, leaning down to kiss the top of his head.
“Why don’t you play for a little while? This would be a good time.” She positioned his wheelchair, turning it away from the table, and put on the brakes. The Silver Swan rested on the paisley shawl covering the grand piano. Mariana brought it to him. Then she applied resin to his bow. With the fire at his back, he began to play as she took up his empty glass and left the room.

Standing at the bar in the butler’s pantry, Mariana opened the glass cabinet doors and removed the gin and vermouth. She filled the silver shaker with ice and carefully measured Alexander’s martini, then poured herself a glass of white wine. Since her mother’s death, they had spent so many evenings this way, alone or with company, winter and summer. Mariana had managed the beautiful old house, giving dinners and parties for the musicians who played at Tanglewood, inviting Alexander’s friends, students, and former colleagues, and a few of her own, to visit. She had flown with him to dozens of “farewell” concerts, to master classes and competitions and festivals in Puerto Rico, Germany, Spain, France, Korea, China, Japan, and Argentina. But in the past year, he had grown frail, tired, and forgetful. His eyesight had failed. He wanted less company but kept her at his side.

The great irony for Mariana was that this life she now shared with Alexander was all her mother ever wanted. More and more despondent, her mother had waited for him to grow tired of traveling and concertizing, to come home, to take up a life with her — a life like this, shared evenings by the fire, idle conversation, hands touching as they watched the stars above the mountains. She felt deeply sad that her mother had missed Alexander’s new sweetness, the gentle humor and tenderness he expressed in these last years. Gone were the
fearsome outbursts of temper, the anger and egotism that terrorized her and suffocated Pilar. Here was this loving old man who needed her. Her mother had died too soon.

Alexander’s night nurse was eating her dinner at the kitchen table. She smiled at Mariana, arching her eyebrow at the extra martini on the tray, but said nothing. The old man must have his small pleasures, they had all agreed. Returning to the living room, Mariana set the drinks on the table and sat down. Alexander was playing the G-Major Bach Suite, the one he best remembered. His eyes were closed. The Silver Swan, its sound a resonant liquid gold, filled the room and vibrated in her chest. As she listened and sipped her wine, she imagined the Swan in the eighteenth-century Cremonese atelier where it was created; she saw another old man, brush in hand, applying his expert strokes of varnish as the instrument itself became a glistening source of light. This treasure, passed down through centuries and now possessed by Alexander Feldmann, would soon enough be hers.

The best violoncelli had names. She remembered some of them: the Bass of Spain, the Gore-Booth, and the Piatti. They were often named after the people who owned or performed on them: the Batta, the Countess of Stanlein, the Paganini, the Servais, the Duport, the Davidoff. “Perhaps,” Alexander often said, “this will become the Feldmann. It may someday be named for me.”

He came to the end of the suite and, exhausted, let his bow arm fall to his side. Mariana took the instrument from him. On the piano she saw the soft cloth he used to wipe the residue
of resin off the varnish. She retrieved it and, by the light of the lamp, cleaned the wood under the bridge.

“Don’t put it away just yet, darling,” Alexander murmured. “I would like to hear you play the Swan for me with the strength of your youth. I find I no longer can make it sing.”

“I can’t say I agree,” she answered. “You’ve lost very little.” This was not exactly true, but it was what her father wanted to hear. With her free hand, she moved a chair in front of him and placed the Swan between her legs. “What do you want me to play?”

“The D Major,” he said. She paused a moment and then plunged into the suite with force. He sat — eyes closed, smiling — and with his right hand beat time.

Mariana returned the Swan to the safe in Alexander’s studio and wheeled him to the dining room for dinner, drawing his chair up to the head of the long, polished table. She lit candles on the sideboard, tucked his napkin under his chin, and went to the kitchen. Returning with two bowls of onion soup, she joined him.

“I wonder how I shall be remembered,” Alexander began. Mariana sighed, anticipating another dinner spent discussing her father’s legacy, but she humored him as usual. “Really, Papa, your recordings will be played forever. No one will surpass your performance of the Dvořák concerto.”

“How sad,” he continued, “that I never recorded the Bach suites. I waited too long, it appears. That is a great loss for the world.” Feldmann paused. “I wonder if it’s too late.” Mariana didn’t answer. She too wished he had recorded them, but it was certainly too late. As they finished dinner, he grew troubled. “My sweetheart,” he said, patting Mariana’s hand, “you
are so good to me. But what will you do when I’m gone?” He paused again. “You know I have been ready to die for a long time now, but I cannot — because I know how much you need me and depend on me.”

Mariana suppressed exasperation as he looked at her wistfully.