Free The Piano Maker by Kurt Palka Page B

exhaustion. They slept in each other’s arms as they had done in the house on Tonkin Hill, except that in Oostende in the morning a maid knocked and brought them breakfast in bed. Soon after that Claire would come bouncing in from the adjoining room, wide awake and impatient for the new day’s adventure.
    On August 30 of that year, the military sent Pierre to take command of a company in the east, and just five weekslater he was dead. A hero, his colonel’s letter said; one who’d given his life for France during a dawn attack on enemy lines. They sent his medals and his wallet, and a wedding ring that was not his. In the wallet, she found among other bits of paper a small print of the picture that the magazine had taken of her, and another picture of Claire looking scrubbed and uncommonly serene in her sailor suit, also taken by the magazine photographer.
    The day after the letter, she and Claire took out the black clothes they’d bought for her mother’s funeral. Claire had started school that year; she’d outgrown the dress and Hélène bought a new one.
    Juliette came along as they walked to her mother’s grave, and then they stood there for a while because they needed to stand at a grave that day.
    It was another golden October day, much like the one ten years ago when she’d sat with Pierre eating ice cream and watching his face and promising herself that this would never change. Shiny chestnuts lay on the ground again, and from somewhere beyond the cemetery wall came the sounds of boys shouting and the thump of a ball. Eventually they turned and walked away along the gravel path.
    “We are not alone, sweetheart,” she said thickly to Claire. “We are still a family.” And Claire looked up to search her face behind the veil and held her hand more tightly.

Eleven
    THERE HAD BEEN A TIME when she disliked having to play the piano, playing for prospective buyers, always having to dress up as she had for the man from Boston, her hair always up because her mother insisted that there was a sweet vulnerability to a young woman’s neck.
    “They’re not buying
me
, Maman,” she’d objected at first. And her mother had said, “No, they’re not, sweetheart. But something lovely attaches to the piano, and they like that. They’ll remember it. A moment of our exceptional culture, in their all-too-familiar English or American drawing-rooms back home. That is what they’re buying, Hélène: memories and dreams, and our wonderful pianos.”
    But if she’d hated playing the piano then, it was saving her life now, had been doing so for years.
    She was at the keyboard, working from memory on “Morning Has Broken,” when she saw Father William entering by the side door. He looked at her across the sanctuary and then came her way. She stopped playing.
    “It’s a new hymn,” she said. “Do you know it?”
    “I don’t think so.”
    “The words are by an Englishwoman called Eleanor Farjeon, and they are set to a Gaelic tune. It’s lovely. Listen.”
    She played and sang it for him softly:
    Morning has broken like the first morning;
    Blackbird has spoken like the first bird;
    Praise for the singing, praise for the morning;
    Praise for them springing fresh from the Word …
    “Yes, lovely,” he said. “Lovely.”
    “I’d like to find the sheet music so I can work on it with the choir.”
    “We can probably get it in the city. There’s a good music store on Barrington Street. I’ll telephone them.”
    He looked up and around. There were perhaps a dozen people sitting in pews in the dim light near the door.
    “You have an audience.”
    “Yes. They started coming the day after I put up the notice.”
    “I’m glad to see you are able to think about music. How are you coming along with the choir?”
    “Quite well. We’ve met six or seven times now. The new situation is not helping, but I’ve spoken to them and asked them to put all that aside until the court case, and most are quite good about it. One