Hazel went away from the music room feeling as if her soul had been annihilated, extinguished.

So lonely!

She could not cry, there was only futility in crying. With no one to witness, a waste of tears.

Made your bed now lie in it.

Made your bed your bed. Now lie in it, you!

The coarse, crude voices of her childhood. The old voices of wisdom.

On the third floor of the house in the sparely furnished attic space that had become Hazel’s private space she hid away like a wounded animal. At this distance she could not hear if the young couple resumed their practice. She could not hear when the girl left. She could not hear if Zack left with her. If he’d called out to her on his way out of the house, she had not heard. If the girl called out to her in that warm penetrating voice Goodbye Mrs. Gallagher! she had not heard.

Never what you’ve told yourself. Never escaped from him. Pa was too smart, and too quick. Pa was too damned strong. Aimed the shotgun at your scrawny girl-chest and pulled the trigger. And that was it. And afterward turning from what lay bleeding and mangled on the bedroom floor like a hunk of butchered meat triumphant his enemies would not subdue and humiliate him another time he reloaded the shotgun that like the console model Motorola radio was one of the astonishing purchases of his American experience awkwardly he turned both barrels on himself and fired and in the aftermath of that terrible blast there was only silence for no witness remained.

Laugh at death. Why not and yet he could not bring himself to laugh.

The earth’s soil was steeped in blood. He knew, before he’d met Frieda Bruegger. He knew of the Nazi death camps, the Final Solution. Seemed already to know what he might spend years learning. Laugh at death was not possible this side of death.

How airy, how ephemeral and trivial music seemed, of all human efforts! Fading into silence even as it’s performed. And you had to work so very hard to perform it, and very likely you would fail in any case.

Revolted by his own vanity. His ridiculous ambition. He would be exposed, on a brightly lighted stage. Like a trained monkey he would perform. Before a panel of “international judges.” He would desecrate music, in the display of his own vanity. As if pianists were racehorses to be pitted against one another, that others might wager on them. There would be a “cash prize” of course.

Six days before they were scheduled to fly to San Francisco he informed the adults who surrounded Zacharias Jones: he wasn’t going.

What a commotion! Through the day the telephone rang, Gallagher was the one to answer.

The young pianist refused to listen to his piano teacher. Refused to listen to other musicians at the Conservatory. Refused to listen even to his stepfather whom he adored who pleaded with him, begged and cajoled and bartered: “This can be your last competition, Zack. If you feel so strongly.”

The young pianist’s mother did not plead with him, however. She knew to keep her distance. Perhaps she was too upset, she avoided speaking with anyone. Oh, the boy knew how to wound his mother! If Hazel had tried to plead with him as Gallagher did, he’d have laughed in her face.

Fuck you. Go play yourself. Think I’m your fucking trained monkey, well I am not.

In this way three days passed. Zack hid away, he was beginning to be ashamed. His decision was coming to seem to him like mere cowardice. The moral revulsion in his soul was coming to seem like mere nerves, stage fright. His face was inflamed. His bowels now spat liquid shit in a scalding cascade. He could not bear his exhausted reflection in any mirror. He could not even speak with Frieda, who had begun by being sympathetic with him but was now not so certain. He had not meant to draw attention to himself. He had meant to remove himself from attention. He had been reading the Hebrew Bible: All is vanity. He had been reading Schopenhauer: Death is a sleep in which individuality is forgotten. He had meant to withdraw himself from the possibility of acclaim and “success” as much as from the possibility of public failure. Now, he was beginning to reconsider his decision. He had tossed something very precious into the dirt, now he must pick it up and wash it off. Maybe it would be better to kill himself after all…

Or he might run away, disappear across the border into Canada.

The Conservatory had not yet notified the organizers of the competition, that Zacharias Jones had decided to drop out. And now he was reconsidering his decision. And there was Gallagher to speak reasonably saying that nobody expected him to win, the honor was in qualifying. “Look, you’ve been playing the Beethoven sonata here for months, so play it out there. What’s the difference, essentially? There is no difference. Except Beethoven composed his music to be heard, right? He kept the ”Appassionata‘ from being published prematurely because he didn’t believe that the world was ready for it yet, but we’re ready for it, kid. So play your heart out. And for Christ’s sake stop moping.“

Taken by surprise, Zack laughed. As usual, Dad was right.

2

In San Francisco the streets shone wetly. So steep, as in an ancient cataclysm. The air was harshly pure, blown inland from the fog-obscured ocean.

And the fog! Outside the windows of their twentieth-floor suite in the San Francisco Pacific Hotel the world had collapsed to a few feet.

The world had collapsed to a gleaming piano keyboard.

“The breath of God.”

It was so. There could be no other explanation. That he’d become at the age of seventeen a young pianist named Zacharias Jones, his thumbnail-sized photograph in the glossy program of the 1974 San Francisco International Piano Competition. And she’d become Hazel Gallagher.

In their hotel suite, a dozen red roses awaited. A cellophane-wrapped wicker basket stuffed with gourmet foods, bottles of white and red wine. They would have laughed wildly together like conspirators except they’d grown wary of each other in recent months. The son had aimed at the mother’s heart, he’d struck a deep stunning blow.

Unknowing, Gallagher had become the mediator between them. He had not the slightest awareness of the tension between mother and son. Nudging Hazel, when they heard Zack whistling in his adjoining hotel room, “Listen! That’s a good sign.”

Hazel did not know if it was a good sign. She, too, had become strangely happy in San Francisco, in the fog. It was a city of wetly gleaming near-vertical streets and quaintly clamorous “trams.” It was a city utterly new to her and Zack. It had a posthumous feel to it, a sense of calm. The breath of God had blown them here, as whimsically as elsewhere.

Downstairs in the hotel gift shop, Hazel bought a deck of cards.

Alone in the suite she tore the cellophane from the deck and rapidly shuffled the cards and slapped them out onto a glass-topped table facing a window, for a game of solitaire.

So happy, to be alone! Gallagher had badly wanted her to come with him and Zack, to the luncheon honoring the pianists. But Hazel remained behind. On the plane, she’d seen two teenaged girls, sisters, playing double solitaire.

So happy. Not to be Hazel Jones.

“Hazel? Why the hell are you wearing black?”

It was a new dress of softly clinging jersey, graceful folds of cloth at the bodice. Long-sleeved, long-waisted. The skirt fell to mid-calf. She would wear black satin pumps with it. The October night was cool, she would wrap herself in an elegant black wool shawl.

“Shouldn’t I? I thought…”

“No, Hazel. It’s a gorgeous dress but too damned funereal for the occasion. You know how Zack interprets things. Especially coming from you. A little more color, Hazel. Please!”