They were stunned, disbelieving. They were immensely proud.

We always had faith in you Rebecca.

No. You didn’t.

We always loved you Rebecca.

No. I don’t think so.

It was hard for us to speak. I did not trust this new language. And your father, you know what Pa was like…

Do I!

Pa loved you Rebecca. Used to say he loved you most, you were most like him.

Hazel’s face was a brittle doll-face, covered in cracks. She was desperate to hide it, that no one would see. Tears gushing from her eyes. She managed to cover part of her face, with one hand. Seeing the neglected and overgrown cemetery. Always the cemetery was close behind her eyelids, she had only to shut her eyes to see it. There, grave markers were toppled over in the grass, cracked and broken. Some of the graves had been vandalized. The names of the dead had been worn away. No matter how carefully engraved into the stone the names of the dead had vanished. Hazel smiled to see it: the earth was a place of anonymous graves, every grave was unknown.

She opened her eyes that were flooded with tears. On the stage, the pianist was completing the final, turbulent movement of the Beethoven sonata. All of his young life was being channeled into this moment. He was playing his heart out, that was clear. Hazel’s face must have shone with happiness, that had been strained and hard for so long. There came the final chord, and the pedal holding. And the pedal released. At once, the audience erupted into applause.

With childlike eagerness the pianist bounded from his seat to bow to the audience. His young, vulnerable face gleamed with perspiration. There was something glaring and fanatic in his eyes. Yet he was smiling, a somewhat dazed smile, he bowed as if stricken with humility like sudden pain. By this time Gallagher was on his feet, lifting his hands to applaud with the rest.

“Hazel, he did it! Our son.”

There should be some reason why she survived.

She knew. She knew this fact. Yet she did not know what the reason was, even now.

So restless!

It was 2:46 A.M. Though exhausted she could not sleep. Though spent with emotion she could not sleep. Her eyes burned as if she’d rubbed them in sand.

Beside her Gallagher slept, heavily. In sleep he was childlike, strangely docile. Leaning his hot, humid body against her, nudging her like a blind creature ravenous for affection. Yet his breathing was so loud, labored. Sounds in his throat like wet gravel being shoveled, scraped. In such breathing she foresaw his death: then, she would know how deeply she loved this man, she who could not articulate that love now.

She was one whose childhood language has been taken from her, no other language can speak the heart.

Must get out! Slipped from the bed, left the darkened bedroom and the sleeping man. Insomnia drove her like red ants swarming over her naked body.

In fact, she wasn’t naked: she was wearing a nightgown. Sexy-silky champagne-colored nightgown with a lace bodice, a gift from Gallagher.

In the parlor she switched on a lamp. Now it was 2:48 A.M. By such slow degrees a life might be lived. It was five hours since Zack had played the “Appassionata.” At the reception afterward the girl with the blunt beautiful face had embraced Hazel as if they were old friends, or kin. Hazel had held herself stiff not daring to embrace the girl back.

Zack had gone away with her. Her, and others. He’d asked Gallagher and his mother please not to wait up for him, they’d promised they would not.

Rain was pelting against the windows. In the morning again there would be fog. The nighttime city was beautiful to Hazel but not very real. At this height of twenty floors, nothing seemed very real. In the near distance there was a tall narrow building that might have been a tower. A red light blurred by rain rotated at its pinnacle.

“The eye of God.”

It was a curious thing to say. The words seemed to have spoken themselves.

She wouldn’t take time to dress, she was in too great a hurry. Her trench coat would do. It was a stylish olive-green coat with a flared skirt and a sash-belt to be tied at the waist. The coat was still damp from that evening’s rain. Yet she would wear it like a robe over the nightgown. And shoes: she could not leave the room barefoot.

Looking for her flat-heeled shoes she found a single shiny black dress shoe of Gallagher’s lying on the carpet where he’d kicked it. She picked it up and placed it in a closet beside its mate.

They had returned to the hotel suite to celebrate, together. Gallagher had called room service to order champagne. On the marble-topped coffee table was a silver tray and on the tray a spillage of wrappers, bottles, glasses. Remains of Brie cheese, rye crackers, kiwi fruit and luscious black Concord grape seeds. And almonds, Brazil nuts. After the emotional strain of that evening’s program Gallagher had been famished but too excited to sit still, he’d paced about the parlor as he ate, and talked.

He had not expected Zack to play so well, perhaps. He, too, had expected some sort of catastrophe.

In May, the elder Gallaghers had had a medical scare. Gallagher’s gastric pains continued, something cloudy had showed up on an X-ray but was not malignant. An ulcerous condition, treatable. They’d decided not to tell Zack, this would be their secret.

Zack had gone off with friends from the Conservatory and other young musicians they’d met in San Francisco. After his controversial performance Zack would be something of a hero, among pianists of his own generation at least.

Hazel would not approach the door to Zack’s adjoining room. She would not turn the knob, gently: she knew it would be locked.

Yet surely the girl would not be in that room with Zack. In that bed. In such proximity to the Gallaghers. She had a room elsewhere in the hotel and she’d come alone to San Francisco and if she and Zack were alone together in any bed, exhausted now in the aftermath of lovemaking, they would be in her room. Probably.

She would not think of it. She was no one’s daughter now, and she would be no one’s mother. All that was over.

She would say, You can live your own life now. Your life is your own, to live.

She’d brought with her, to San Francisco, the most recent of Thaddeus’s letters. Love letters they were, of increasing passion, or dementia. Opening the stiff, much-folded sheet of stationery, to read by lamplight as her husband slept oblivious in the adjoining room. The letter was clumsily typed as if in lunges, in the dark; or by one whose eyesight is dimming.

Dearest Hazel Jones,

You wld tickel an old mans vanity if youd replied to my appeals but I see now, you are Hazel Jones and a good wife and you are a worthy Mother to your son. So you wld not reply, I rever you for it. I think that I will not write to you agin this side the grave. You & the boy will recieve a consumat Reward for your fathfulness & goodness. Your shallow husband the Mouth of Liberal Consience does not have a clue! He is a fool unworthy of you & the boy, that is our secret Hazel Jones isnt it. In my will you will all see. The scales will fall from the eyes of some. God bless you Hazel Jones & the boy whose music of beauttu is to outlive us all.

Hazel smiled, and folded up the letter again, and put it away in her handbag. A voice echoed faintly as if in rain beating against the windowpanes You-you are born here. They will not hurt you.

Pushed her arms into the sleeves of the still damp trench coat, and tied the belt tight around her waist. No need to glance at herself in the mirror: she knew her hair was disheveled, the pupils of her eyes dilated. Her skin smarted with a kind of erotic heat. She was excited, jubilant. She would take money with her, several twenties from her purse. She would take several items from the mini bar: miniature bottles of whiskey, gin, vodka. She would take the playing cards, dropping them loose in a pocket of her coat. And she must not forget the key to room 2006.