House of Rougeaux(66)

Dishes washed and dried, Eleanor crept up the stairs thinking she would have one of the ginger cookies Melody had made for her. There were two or three dozen in the tin she had stashed in the wardrobe, and she meant to ration them out for herself. But then, in the hallway, the second set of stairs caught her eye. It must be an attic, she thought. She padded down the length of the hall and then slipped into the narrow passage. The stairs creaked mightily. She stopped at each one, checking for the sound of snoring, until she stood before a tiny brown door with a brass knob. Mrs. Delaney slept on.

It was indeed an attic, with dust-covered shapes just barely illuminated by the daylight that filtered in through the dirty glass of a miniature window, set in bare brick. The ceiling was so low Eleanor had to stoop even when standing directly in the center. There were a few trunks and crates tucked into the edges where the ceiling met the floor, and something larger covered in a tarpaulin at the farther end. The size and shape were familiar, but it couldn’t be. Her steps disturbed so much dust she had to cover her mouth and nose with her sleeve, and her eyes watered. She lifted a corner of the tarpaulin, catching the faintest gleam of polished wood, and then a bit of scrollwork encrusted with more dust, and then hinges of a fallboard.

A piano.

The tarpaulin hit the floor, sending up a thick cloud. Eleanor gingerly lifted the fallboard and ran her fingers over the keys. Two or three were missing or broken, and it was in poor tune, but a real piano nonetheless.

She heard a rustling, and the sudden sight of Mrs. Delaney at the attic door nearly caused her to jump out of her skin.

“Oh,” she said. “You’ve found Mr. Delaney’s piano.” She stepped into the attic. “A rare thing, isn’t it? He had to take it almost completely apart to bring it up here. He was in cabinetry, thank goodness.” She wrung her hands in a kind of friendly nervousness. “Do you play?”



* * *



The next morning Maxis left early to look after her invalid and Mrs. Delaney departed to where she cleaned the offices of a small law firm two mornings a week. Eleanor, having already eaten more than her ration of Melody’s cookies, returned to the attic. She had found a broom and dustpan in the kitchen and also brought up a bucket of suds and some rags. The attic was nearly as cold as outdoors, but her efforts at dust removal and rearranging, plus the natural added heat of pregnancy, quickly had her perspiring. The piano now stood ready; one of the trunks, with the tarpaulin clean and folded on top, made a decent bench.

Eleanor sat and ran through her scales. Quickly she learned which keys struck notes in or out of tune, and which few were missing their hammers, because they gave out no sound at all. Poor as the instrument was, touching it was an immense relief. As her hands moved, her imagination rushed in to replace the absent notes, and because she heard this internal music so clearly, the notes that were off bent to their proper form. The heaviness that weighed on her neck and shoulders lightened, and the old electricity shot through her fingers. Like a feral beast, the instrument became tame, charmed into producing a melody, and then another and another. She played the nocturne she learned at the Conservatory, and then the études. She even played the scherzo of Gerard Batiste, which became an ode to the twists of her own life, and to the unmapped horizon toward which her young vessel sailed, recklessly, cautiously, and with no other choice.

That night before bed she opened Mr. Hathaway’s package. A moment after tearing the paper four books of sheet music lay spread out on the blue and green plaid blanket. The Complete 32 Piano Sonatas of Ludwig van Beethoven, with an envelope of banknotes pressed between the pages of the first volume.

“My word,” she breathed. Whether or not she deserved it, there was hope after all.

All that winter she studied the sonatas, played Mr. Delaney’s feral piano in the frozen attic, and did her best to help the Delaney women with the running of their modest household. Her belly grew with the unknown baby inside, and she sometimes dreamt at night of a child laughing, playing a game of hide-and-seek where what was hidden was never found.



* * *



Her time came in early February. The labor came on quickly, beginning in the afternoon. The hours did not pass easily for Eleanor. As the waves of pain increased, so did her fear. Fear that she would die, that the baby would die, that either or both would be her punishment, but that first she would be crushed in the Devil’s grip. She lay, gasping between contractions, wondering how soon death would come, and then the pain came on again, obliterating any thought at all.

Just before midnight the baby’s head emerged, and then the rest of him, the fluid, and finally the afterbirth. The midwife wrapped the baby, saying he looked fine and that she wished all her births went as well. Eleanor lay in a daze as the midwife placed the baby in her arms and helped him to feed. She studied his tiny form with wonder and trepidation: the thin dark curls that clung to his damp head, the little flared nose, the dark eyes that gazed at her a moment and then shut again.

Eleanor asked Mrs. Delaney to write a note to her brother and sister-in-law for her. She wanted them to call the child Gerard, as it suddenly seemed urgent he have something of his father. Eleanor would not, could not, care for the baby herself. She felt acutely the lack of space in which to hold him, and yet at once she cared immensely for his welfare.

There was Gerard Batiste, and now there was a Gerard Rougeaux. He would be Ross’ son, and Mathilde’s, if he survived. Relief that she was free was at once overwhelmed by the shame that she should want that freedom, and that she should have it at all.