“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why’d women be ”welcome,“ if they aren’t? And Jews, and Ne-groes?” Hazel gave Ne-groes a special inflection.
Gallagher saw she was teasing now, and looked uncomfortable.
“Look, I’m not a dues-paying member. I’ve been there only a few times. I thought it might be a nice place to go for dinner on Sunday, to celebrate Zack’s good news.” Gallagher paused, rubbing his nose vigorously. “We can go somewhere else, Hazel. If you prefer.”
Hazel laughed, Gallagher was looking so abashed.
“Chet, no. I’m not one to ”prefer‘ anything.“)
Sometimes I’m so lonely. Oh Christ so lonely for the life you saved me from but he would have stared at her astonished and disbelieving.
Not you, Hazel! Never.
In Buffalo they lived at 83 Roscommon Circle, within a mile’s radius of the Delaware Conservatory of Music, the Buffalo Historic Society, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. They were invited out often, their names were on privileged mailing lists. Gallagher scorned the bourgeois life yet was bemused by it, he acknowledged. Overnight Hazel Jones had become Mrs. Chet Gallagher, Hazel Gallagher.
As, young, she’d been an able and uncomplaining chambermaid in an “historic” hotel, now in youthful middle age she was the caretaker of a partly restored Victorian house of five bedrooms, three storeys, steeply pitched slate roofs. Originally built in 1887, the house was made of shingle-board, eggshell with deep purple trim. Maintaining the house became crucial to Hazel, a kind of fetish. As her son would be a concert pianist, so Hazel would be the most exacting of housewives. Gallagher, away much of the day, seemed not to notice how Hazel was becoming overly scrupulous about the house for anything Hazel did was a delight to him; and of course Gallagher was hopeless about anything perceived as practical, domestic. By degrees, Hazel also took over the maintenance of their financial records for it was much easier than waiting for Gallagher to assume responsibility. He was yet more hopeless with money, indifferent as only the son of a wealthy man might be indifferent to money.
With the instinct of a pack rat, Hazel kept receipts for the smallest purchases and services. Hazel kept flawless records. Hazel sent by registered mail photocopied materials to Gallagher’s Buffalo accountant on a quarterly basis, for tax purposes. Gallagher whistled in admiration of his wife. “Hazel, you’re terrific. How’d you get so smart?”
“Runs in the family.”
“How so?”
“My father was a high school math teacher.”
Gallagher stared at her, quizzically. “Your father was a high school math teacher?”
Hazel laughed. “No. Just joking.”
“Do you know who your father was, Hazel? You’ve always said you didn’t.”
“I didn’t, and I don’t.” Hazel wiped at her eyes, couldn’t seem to stop laughing. For there was Gallagher, well into his fifties, staring at her gravely in that way of a man so beguiled by love he will believe anything told him by the beloved. Hazel felt she could reach into Gallagher’s rib cage and touch his living heart. “Just teasing, Chet.”
On tiptoes to kiss him. Oh, Gallagher was a tall man even with shoulders slouched. She saw that his new bifocals were smudged, removed them from his face and deftly polished them on her skirt.
Mrs. Chester Gallagher.
Each time she signed her new name it seemed to her that her handwriting was subtly altered.
They traveled a good deal. They saw many people. Some were associated with music, and some were associated with the media. Hazel was introduced to very friendly strangers as Hazel Gallagher: a name faintly comical to her, preposterous.
Yet no one laughed! Not within her hearing.
Gallagher, the most sentimental of men as he was the most scornful of men, would have liked a more formal wedding but saw the logic of a brief civil ceremony in one of the smaller courtrooms of the Erie County Courthouse. “Last thing we want is cameras, right? Attention. If my father found out…” The ten-minute ceremony was performed by a justice of the peace on a rainy Saturday morning in November 1972: the exact tenth anniversary of Gallagher and Hazel meeting in the Piano Bar of the Malin Head Inn. Zack was the sole witness, the bride’s teenaged son in a suit, necktie. Zack looking both embarrassed and pleased.
Gallagher would believe he’d been the one to talk Hazel Jones into marrying him, at last. Joking that Hazel had made an honest man of him.
Ten years!
“Someday, darling, you’ll have to tell me why.”
“Why what?”
“Why you refused to marry me for ten long years.”
“Ten very short years, they were.”
“Long for me! Every morning I expected you to have disappeared. Cleared out. Taken Zack, and left me heartbroken.”
Hazel was startled, at such a remark. Gallagher was only joking of course.
“Maybe I didn’t marry you because I didn’t believe that I was a good enough person to marry you. Maybe that was it.”
Her light enigmatic Hazel Jones laugh. She’d tuned to perfection, like one of Zack’s effortlessly executed cadenzas.
“Good enough to marry me! Hazel, really.”
As Gallagher had arranged to marry Hazel in the Erie County Courthouse, so Gallagher arranged to adopt Zack in the Erie County Courthouse. So proud! So happy! It was the consummation of Gallagher’s adult life.
The adoption was speedily arranged. A meeting with Gallagher’s attorney, and an appointment with a county judge. Legal documents to be drawn up and signed and Zack’s creased and waterstained birth certificate issued as a facsimile in Chemung County, New York, to be photocopied and filed in the Erie County Hall of Records.
Legally, Zack was now Zack Gallagher. But he would retain Zacharias Jones as his professional name.
Zack joked he was the oldest kid adopted in the history of Erie County: fifteen. But, at the signing, he’d turned abruptly away from Gallagher and Hazel not wanting them to see his face.
“Hey, kid. Jesus.”
Gallagher hugged Zack, hard. Kissed the boy wetly on the edge of his mouth. Gallagher, most sentimental of men, didn’t mind anyone seeing him cry.
Like guilty conspirators, mother and son. When they were alone together they burst into laughter, a wild nervous flaming-up laughter that would have shocked Gallagher.
So funny! Whatever it was, that sparked such laughter between them.
Zack had been fascinated by his birth certificate. He didn’t seem to recall ever having seen it before. Hidden away with Hazel Jones’s secret things, a small compact bundle she’d carried with her since the Poor Farm Road.
Zack asked if the birth certificate was legitimate, and Hazel said sharply Yes! It was.
“My name is ”Zacharias August Jones’ and my father’s name is “William Jones‘? Who the hell’s ”William Jones’?“
“”Was.“”
“”Was’ what?“
“”Was,“ not ”is.“ Mr. Jones is dead now.”
Secrets! In the tight little bundle inside her rib cage in the place where her heart had been. So many secrets, sometimes she couldn’t get her breath.
Thaddeus Gallagher, for instance. His gifts and impassioned love letters to Dearest Hazel Jones!
In fall 1970, soon after Hazel received the first of these, an individual wishing to be designated as an anonymous benefactor gave a sizable sum of money to the Delaware Conservatory of Music earmarked as a scholarship and travel fund for the young pianist Zacharias Jones. Money was required for the numerous international piano competitions in which young pianists performed in hope of winning prizes, public attention, concert bookings and recording deals, and the donation from the anonymous benefactor would allow Zacharias to travel anywhere he wished. Gallagher who intended to manage Zack’s career was keenly aware of these possibilities: “André Watts was seventeen when Leonard Bernstein conducted him in the Liszt E-flat concerto, on national television. A bombshell.” And of course there was the legendary 1958 Tchaikovsky Competition in which twenty-four-year-old Van Cliburn took away the first prize and returned from Soviet Russia an international celebrity. Gallagher knew! But he was damned suspicious of the anonymous benefactor. When administrators at the Conservatory refused to tell him the benefactor’s identity, Gallagher became suspicious and resentful. To Hazel he complained, “What if it’s him. God damn!”