Gallagher laughed. Those intense dark-brown eyes, how could he resist. His heart, a wizened raisin, stirred with feeling.

“Thanks! I will certainly try to ”rejoice.“”

Without glancing back Gallagher walked away with his ticket. Already the young woman was smiling up into the face of the next customer, just as she’d smiled at him.

Beautiful but not very bright. Transparent (breakable?) as glass.

Her soul. Can see into. Shallow, vulnerable.

In the smokers’ loge in a rear seat. Ten minutes into the movie he became restless, distracted. He very much disliked the music score: obtrusive, heavy-handed. The stalwart melodrama of The Miracle Worker failed to engage him, who had come to see that failure is the human condition, not victory over odds; for each Helen Keller who triumphs, there are tens of millions who fail, mute and deaf and insensate as vegetables tossed upon a vast garbage pile to rot. In such moods the shimmering film-images, mere lights projected onto a tacky screen, could not work their magic.

Yet we yearn for the miracle worker, to redeem us.

Gallagher’s bladder ached. He’d had a few beers that day. He rose from his seat, went to use the men’s lavatory. This tacky tawdry smelly place. In fact he knew the owner, and he knew the manager. The Bay Palace Theater had been built before the war in a long-ago era. Art deco ornamentation, a slickly Egyptian motif popular in the 1920s. His father’s boyhood, adolescence. When the world had been glamorous.

Wanting to look for the ponytailed young woman. But he would not. He was too old: forty-one. She was possibly half his age. And so naive, trusting.

The way she’d lifted her beautiful eyes to his. As if no one had ever rebuffed her, hurt her.

She had to be very young. To be so naive.

He hadn’t wanted to stare at her left breast where a name had been stitched in crimson thread. He wasn’t that kind of man, to stare at a girl’s breasts. But he could call the manager, whom he knew from the Malin Head bar, and inquire.

That new girl? Selling tickets last night?

Too young for you, Gallagher.

He wanted to protest, he felt young. In his soul he felt young. Even his face still looked boyish, despite the lines in his forehead, and his receding hair. When he smiled, his pointed devil’s-teeth flashed.

In some quarters of Malin Head Bay he was known and respected as a Gallagher: a rich man’s son. Deliberately he wore old clothes, took little care with his appearance. Hair straggling past his collar and often didn’t shave for days. He ate in taverns and diners. He was one to leave inappropriately large tips. He had an absentminded air like one who has been drinking even when he has not been drinking only just thinking and taxing his brain. Finding his way back to his seat without drifting out into the lobby looking for the usherette. He felt a stab of shame for the way he’d spoken to her, as a pretext for provoking her into reacting; he hadn’t been sincere but she had answered him sincerely, from the heart.

When The Miracle Worker ended in a swirl of triumphant movie-music at 10:58 P.M., and the small audience filed out, Gallagher saw that the ticket seller’s booth was darkened, the young ponytailed woman in the usherette’s costume was gone.

7

“Hide most things you know. Like you would hide any weakness. Because it is a weakness to know too much among others who know too little.”

He was Zacharias Jones, six years old and enrolled in first grade at Bay Street Elementary. He lived with his mother for his father was no longer living.

“That’s all you need to tell anyone. If they ask more, tell them to ask your mother.”

He was a sly fox-faced child with dark luminous shifting eyes and a mouth that worked silently when other children spoke as if he wished to hurry their silly speech. And he had a habit, disconcerting to his teacher, of drumming his fingers-all his fingers-on a desk or tabletop as if to hurry time.

“If they ask where we’re from say ”downstate.“ That’s all they need to know.”

He didn’t have to ask who they were, it was they, them who surrounded. By instinct, he knew Mommy was right.

They lived in two furnished rooms upstairs over Hutt Pharmacy. The outdoors stairs ascended the churchy dark-shingled building at the rear. A sharp medicinal smell lifted through the plank floorboards of the apartment, Mommy said was a good healthy smell-“No germs.” There were three windows in the apartment and all three overlooked an alley bordered by the rears of garages, trash cans and scattered debris. Always a smudged look through the windowpanes which Mommy could wash only from inside. A mile and a half away was the St. Lawrence River, visible as a dull-blue glow at dusk that seemed to shimmer above the intervening rooftops. There were other tenants living above Hutt Pharmacy but no children. “Your little boy will be lonely here, no one for him to play with,” the woman next door said with an insincere twist of her mouth, but Hazel Jones protested in her liquidy movie-voice, “Oh no, Mrs. Ogden! Zack is fine. Zack is never lonely, he has his music.”

His music was a strange way of speaking. For never did he feel that any music was his.

Friday afternoons at 4:30 P.M. he had his piano lesson. Stayed at Bay Street Elementary (with his teacher’s permission, in the makeshift library where by November first he’d read half the books on the shelves including those for fifth and sixth graders) until it was time then hurried over tense with anticipation to the adjoining Bay Street Junior High where, in a corner of the school auditorium backstage, Mr. Sarrantini gave piano lessons in half-hour sessions of sharply varying degrees of concentration, enthusiasm. Mr. Sarrantini was music director for all public schools in the township, also organist at Holy Redeemer Roman Catholic Church. He was a wheezing big-bellied man with a flushed face and wavering eyes, of no age a six-year-old might guess except old. Listening to his pupils’ lessons, Mr. Sarrantini allowed his eyes to shut. Close up, he smelled of something very sweet like red wine and something very harsh and acrid like tobacco. By late afternoon of a Friday when Zacharias Jones arrived for his lesson, Mr. Sarrantini was likely to be very tired, and irascible. Sometimes when Zack began his scales Mr. Sarrantini interrupted, “Enough! No need to beat a dead horse.” At other times, Mr. Sarrantini seemed displeased with Zack. He discerned in his youngest pupil a deficient “piano attitude.” He’d told Hazel Jones that her son was gifted, to a degree; he could play “by ear” and would one day be able to “sight read” any piece of music. But the steps to playing piano well were arduous, and specific, “piano discipline” was crucial, Zacharias must learn his scales and study pieces in the exact order prescribed for beginning students before plunging on to more complicated compositions. When Zack played beyond his assignment in My First Year at the Piano, Mr. Sarrantini frowned and told him to stop. Once, Mr. Sarrantini slapped at his hands. Another time, he brought the keyboard lid halfway down over Zack’s fingers as if to smash them. Zack yanked his hands away just in time.

“One thing all piano teachers despise is a so-called ”prodigy‘ getting ahead of himself.“

Or, with a wet-wheezing laugh, “Here’s little Wolfgang. Eh!”

Hazel Jones had offended Mr. Sarrantini, Zack knew, by telling him that her son was meant to be a pianist. He’d cringed, hearing such a flamboyant statement put to the music director of the township.

“”Meant to be,“ Mrs. Jones? By whom?”

Another parent, addressed with such sarcasm by Mr. Sarrantini, would have said nothing further; but there was Hazel Jones speaking in her earnest, liquidy voice, “By what we all have inside us, Mr. Sarrantini, we can’t know until we bring it out.”