The Silver Swan (26 page)

Stricken, Mariana dropped the letter, and into the late afternoon silence she screamed, “God damn you, god damn you, Alexander Feldmann,” into the empty room. She stood up abruptly and pulled a large photo of Alexander from the wall, held it over her head, and dashed it to the floor. Glass fractured and splintered, the frame shattered against the wall.

As a result of his unfathomable selfishness, she had fallen in love — she was having an affair — with her own half brother. How callously evil it was for her father to bring them together after his death, with no thought of the consequences, no impulse to warn them, to be honest, to come clean. Claude was Alexander’s son, Mariana his daughter. Their father had known this but had refused to acknowledge the truth of it. Even in death, he had kept his silence and deprived her of the chance for happiness.

Claude would have to know the truth. She would not bear this secret alone, nor would she spare his mother the confrontation that would surely ensue.

For several days, Mariana could not bring herself to eat, to practice, to leave the house or resume her grim task. She moved from room to room, from bed to couch to bed, suffering, trying to sleep, waiting for the phone to ring, to hear Claude’s voice. He didn’t call. Finally she drove into Stockbridge and FedExed a copy of Francine’s letter to him in Lugano.

She had no one. Her mother and father were dead. Anton had returned to his family. Claude would marry Sophie. Her friendships had suffered neglect in the years since she’d left New York to tend to Alexander. She could not confide in her few acquaintances in Stockbridge and Tanglewood. They were hardly friends.

Finally, when Claude did not call, she went back to work, but this time with a different purpose. Plugging in the paper shredder Alexander had kept under his desk and never used, she began to feed paper into its grinding teeth. Each time the
shredder bin grew full, she emptied it into a large green garbage bag. She drank coffee to stay awake. In her nightgown, her long, aching legs stretched in front of her, she flung the empty boxes into the foyer where they piled up, strewn like giant building blocks. The dark green bags formed a separate, growing mound.

When she had stripped Alexander’s studio, she carried the trash bags to the kitchen porch. She moved the empty boxes there as well. After her orgy of shredding, Alexander’s legacy was reduced to his recordings and his collection of music manuscripts, marked with his fingerings and bowings and commentary that might interest future cellists. These she would give to the Juilliard library.

One early morning, when the shelves and closets and walls were at last empty, she turned off the security alarm and strode out into the garden behind the house. Faint light on the eastern horizon lit her way. She approached the unused swimming pool at the back of the garden and, with effort, turned the rusty crank that rolled up its ancient canvas cover. The empty pool, its pale green paint cracked and strewn with leaves, glowed eerily in the half-light.

Crossing back and forth from kitchen porch to pool, Mariana tossed box after box into the waterless hole. In the silent dawn, the dull thud of the falling boxes reverberated like blows. Then she emptied the garbage bags, flapping them over the boxes, a snowstorm of fluttery strips. A slight breeze blew from the west.

She carried the empty garbage bags back to the kitchen. On the counter, her cell phone blinked. She had a message. She put the phone in the pocket of the old sweater she’d thrown over her nightgown. Picking up the box of long
matches by the fireplace and a piece of newspaper, she headed back into the garden. At the pool’s edge she rolled up the newspaper, struck a match, and set it alight. She tossed it onto the shredded paper pile.

Flames flew up instantly, brilliantly, into the sky. Mariana, retreating, walked backward toward the kitchen, watching the growing fire. Burning wisps of Alexander’s legacy floated up like fireflies, then fireworks. They drifted over the garden and toward the house, rising and falling in the light breeze.

She stepped inside and watched the conflagration through the kitchen windows. Minutes passed as she stared, transfixed. Oh, Alexander — all that self-love, all that history she’d set aflame, was burning and turning to ash.

Pressing her face against the window, she suddenly noticed that the fire was spreading beyond the pool, leaping toward the house, carried by wisps of burning paper. Pilar’s large baskets of pinecones erupted in flame. Fire licked at the white posts of the porch. Smoke curled toward the windows and through the open kitchen door. Horrified, she pulled her cell phone from her pocket and called 911. Flames inched, then jumped, then raced along the porch. The noise was loud, the kitchen too was beginning to burn.

Running down the hall to Alexander’s studio, she felt the heat advancing at her back. Her hands shook as she removed the paintings, pushed aside the false wall, and tried to open the safe. Several times, in the dim light, she failed to enter the right combination. When at last she succeeded, she pulled open the heavy door and reached for the Swan, grateful she’d hung it on the last hook, easily found. She pulled it off the loop and pushed the door closed. Fleeing the studio, she crossed the foyer to the front door and wrenched it open.

At the end of the corridor behind her, she saw fire. Mariana turned and, clutching the instrument, ran toward the front door. In her terrified haste — trying to remember what they said to do in fire, to stay low and not breathe deeply — she bumped the cello hard against the doorframe. There was a loud popping sound.

Mariana staggered down the front steps, clutching the Swan, and bolted from the house. Safely away, she ran her hands over the Swan and felt an opened seam down the middle of its back. Weeping with remorse, she awaited the fire trucks. There were sirens in the distance. She could hear them first, and then trucks rumbling up the driveway. Through the trees, Mariana saw the flashing strobes of light.

The kitchen addition had burned to the ground, but the main house suffered only smoke damage. In that regard, she was lucky. The cellos left in the vault had fared better than the Stradivarius she’d tried to save. The Swan now had a crack along its back, where it had hit the doorframe as she rushed from the house.

Mariana, staying at the Red Lion Inn, was finally able to check her cell phone for messages. She had dropped it in the grass as she fled the house three days earlier, and the insurance inspector found and returned it. There was only one message. Claude had left it on the day of the fire.

“Mariana, dear Mariana, won’t you pick up the phone? Won’t you call me, please? I must speak with you; there has been a terrible misunderstanding. If you’ll agree to meet me, I’ll come back to America immediately. My mother told you that I planned to marry Sophie, and I can imagine how much this hurt. But darling, it’s not true. How could you have believed her? It was a misunderstanding on her part. She only hoped I
would
marry Sophie, for reasons I’ll explain when we meet. I beg you to call me.”

Mariana suspected he had not yet received her second FedEx when he left this message. By now he would have it. She dialed his number.

“It’s Mariana,” she said when he answered the phone.

“Where are you?”

“At the Red Lion Inn in Stockbridge. I set the house on fire. I didn’t mean to. It was an accident.”

“Are you hurt?”

“No.”

“Thank God.”

“But the Swan suffered some damage.”

He froze. After a moment, he said, “So have we all, so have we all.”

Mariana did not answer.

“I’ve read the letter you found in your father’s papers. I haven’t spoken with my mother since then, but she sent me a letter as well. I’d like to read it to you.”

“I’m not sure I want to hear it, Claude.”

“Mariana. We have no more secrets. Please listen.” He read:

Two weeks later, after Claude had played his last concert of the summer season, he and Mariana met in New York. At seven thirty on a Tuesday night, Claude sat at Cafe Luxembourg awaiting her. He’d asked the maître d’ for the table they had dined at in April. Leaning back and drumming his fingers nervously on his leg, he drank a double Macallan, neat. Ten minutes passed. He practiced phrases while he watched the entrance for Mariana’s arrival. On his flight to Kennedy, he had tried to imagine this moment, so much hanging in the balance.

It would not be simple. She too would need a drink. He wondered if he should order for her or choose a fine bottle of wine. On the plane he had sat beside the J.-B. Vuillaume in its bright blue case. Claude had not touched it for all the weeks it stood in his hall closet. It belonged to Mariana. But he had resolved to his personal satisfaction his own conflict about the Stradivarius. Since he was Alexander’s son, he was, one could say, as much an heir to the great instrument as Mariana. He was almost certain they could come to an agreement.

The restaurant was filling up. He felt conspicuously alone. He wanted another scotch but decided to wait till she joined him. One thing he’d begun to understand about her — she had an elastic sense of time. She well might be an hour too early
or late. “Punctuality,” his father liked to say, “is the politeness of kings.” But not necessarily of queens! Claude thought.

As if on cue, however, she appeared in the restaurant’s entrance. The maître d’ led her to his table. Mariana hurried toward him. Sharply, he drew in his breath; she was astonishing — tan, tall, and slender, long arms and legs bare despite the evening’s chill. She wore a short black sheath, anchored on one shoulder. Her thick, dark hair fell in wild curls and her eyes were lined in black pencil. She had lost weight, perhaps a bit too much. How, he wondered, should he greet her? Would they kiss on the lips?

In the European manner, she leaned forward to brush both his cheeks. “I thought this moment would never arrive.” She was breathless. Dropping her shawl on the table, she sat. Her eyes filled with tears as she searched his face. “I’ve missed you.”

He reached out his hand. She did not take it. “I’ve been wretched. And a wretch as well. I don’t know what possessed me to take the Swan from you.”

The waiter approached. Claude ordered a second Macallan — a single, this time — and she requested a kir.

“You were very angry when you thought I’d marry Sophie.”

Mariana half smiled, rueful. “Yes, I was. Such a history of anger. First, I was angry at my father for his affair with your mother. Then I was angry at him for giving you the Swan, then angry at you for accepting the gift, and then enraged that you were to marry Sophie. And then the shattering discovery that we share a father …”

He started to tell her that he understood, but she put up her hand to stop him.

“Please, Claude. I’m trying to apologize. I need to set this whole business straight. You must have been furious, outraged when you opened the cello case in Barcelona.”

He didn’t answer. She was silent as their drinks arrived.

“I’ve been unable,” Mariana continued, “to eat or sleep. I’ve been scared you would never forgive me for what’s happened to the Swan. I had almost made peace with my father’s decision to give it to you. You and the cello together were part of my future, my life. I felt almost fortunate, Claude, that it worked out this way, that you would own the instrument” — she paused and looked into his eyes — “because when I met you I fell in love with you.”