Free Violin by Anne Rice Page A

if he were arguing with me! The bastard! On and on went the song, conceived in sorrow and meant to be played in sorrow and meant to make sorrow sweet or legendary or both.
    The world of now receded. I was fourteen. Isaac Stern played on the stage. The great concerto of Beethoven rose and fell beneath the chandeliers of the auditorium. How many other children sat there rapt? Oh, God, to be this! To be able to do this! …
    It seemed remote that I had ever grown up and lived a life, that I’d ever fallen in love with my first husband, Lev, known Karl, that he’d ever lived or died, or that Lev and I had ever lost a little girl named Lily, that I had heldsomeone that small in my arms as she suffered, her head bald, her eyes closed—ah, no, there is a point surely where memory becomes dream.
    There must be some medical legislation against it.
    Nothing so terrible could have happened as that golden-haired child dying as a waif, or Karl crying out, Karl who never complained, or Mother on the path, begging not to be taken away that last day, and I, her self-centered fourteen-year-old daughter utterly unaware that I would never feel her warm arms again, could never kiss her, never say, Mother, whatever happened, I love you. I love you. I love you.
    My father had sat straight up in the bed, rising against the morphine and saying, aghast: “Triana, I’m dying!”
    Look how small Lily’s white coffin in the California grave. Look at it. Way out there where we smoked our grass, and drank our beer and read our poetry aloud, beats, hippies, changers of the world, parents of a child so touched with grace that strangers stopped—even when the cancer had her—to say how beautiful was her small round white face. I watched again over time and space, and those men put the little white coffin inside a redwood box down in the hole, but they didn’t nail shut the boards.
    Lev’s father, a hearty gentle Texan, had picked up a handful of earth and dropped it into the grave. Lev’s mother had cried and cried. Then others had done the same, a custom I’d never known, and my own father solemn, looking on. What had he thought: Punishment for your sins, that you left your sisters, that you married out of your church, that you let your mother die unloved!
    Or did he think more trivial things? Lily was not a grandchild he had cherished. Two thousand miles had separated them, and seldom had he seen her before the cancer took her long golden streams of hair and made herlittle cheeks soft and puffy, but there was no potion known to man that could ever dull her gaze or her courage.
    He doesn’t matter now, your father, whom he loved and did not love!
    I turned over in the bed, grinding the pillow under me, marveling that even with my left ear buried in the down, I could still hear his violin.
    Home, home, you are home, and they will all someday come home. What does that mean? It doesn’t have to mean. You just have to whisper it … or sing, sing a wordless song with his violin.
    And so the rain came.
    My humble thanks.
    The rain came.
    Just as I might have wished it, and it falls on the old boards of the porch and on the rotting tin roof above this bedroom; it splashes on the wide windowsills and trickles through the cracks.
    Yet on and on he played, he with his satin hair and his satin violin, playing as if uncoiling into the atmosphere a ribbon of gold so fine that it will thin to mist once it’s been heard and known and loved, and bless the entire world with some tiny fraction of glimmering glory.
    “How can you be so content,” I asked myself, “to lie right between these worlds? Life and death? Madness and sanity?”
    His music spoke; the notes flowed low and deep and hungering before they soared. I closed my eyes.
    He went into a ripping dance now, with zest and dissonance and utter seriousness. He played so full and fierce, I thought surely someone would come. It’s what people call the Devil’s kind of music.
    But the rain fell