“You don’t look like you’re from around here.”
A slight emphasis on you. And he was smiling.
She didn’t seem to have heard, exactly. Poised yet childlike in her manner. The slightest flicker of attention directed upward at him as her red-lacquered nails took his ticket from him yet there came her blinding flash of a smile: “Sir, thank you!” As if he’d won a prize. As if for the late-afternoon half-price $2.50 he’d been granted entrance to a holy shrine and not the mildewy-smelling interior of the Bay Palace Theater where a rerun of West Side Story was showing.
Deftly she tore the green ticket in two and handed him back the stub already looking past his shoulder with that luminous smile at whoever was pushing close behind him: “Sir, thank you!”
New usherette at the Bay Palace Theater. Dove-gray trousers with flared legs, snug-fitting little bolero jacket with crimson piping. And, on the just-perceptibly padded shoulders, gold braid epaulettes. Prominent shiny bangs across her forehead, skimming her eyebrows. Dark brown, dark-red-brown hair. And the long-handled flashlight she took up with girlish zest, leading older patrons, or moms with young children, into the shadowy interior of the movie house where on the frayed carpet you might unknowingly kick a discarded box of popcorn or a part-eaten candy bar tangled in its wrapper: “This way, please!”
She might have been any age between nineteen and twenty-nine. He wasn’t a keen judge of ages as he wasn’t a keen judge of character: wishing to see the best in others as a way of wishing that others might see only the best, the crispy rind of surface charm and American decency, in him.
He couldn’t recall having taken notice of any usher/usherette at the local movie house before. It was rare for anyone to make an impression upon him. Nor was he a frequent patron of movies, in fact. American pop culture bored him to hell. The only twentieth-century music that engaged him was jazz. His was a jazz sensibility meaning at the margins. In a white man’s skin by accident of birth.
Here in Malin Head Bay at the northern edge of New York State in the off-season everyone was local. Few summer residents lingered beyond Labor Day. The usherette had to be local, but new to the area. Gallagher was himself a new local: one of those summer residents who’d lingered.
His family had had a summer place on Grindstone Island, a “camp” as such places were called, for decades. Grindstone Island was one of the larger of the Thousand Islands, a few miles west of Malin Head Bay in the St. Lawrence River. Gallagher had been coming to the island in the summer, for much of his life; since his divorce in 1959 he’d taken to spending more and more of the year in Malin Head Bay, alone. He’d bought a small house by the river. He played jazz piano at the Malin Head Inn two or three nights a week. He still owned property near Albany, in the suburban village of Ardmoor Park, where the Gallaghers lived; he remained a co-owner of the house in which his former wife lived, with her new husband and family. He did not think of himself in exile nor as estranged from the Gallaghers for that made his situation appear more romantic, more isolated and significant than it was.
What ever became of Chet Gallagher?
Moved away from Albany. Living up by the St. Lawrence.
Divorced? Estranged from the family?
Something like that.
He’d been seeing the new usherette in Malin Head Bay, he realized. Not gone looking for her but, yes he’d seen her. Maybe at the Lucky 13 over the summer. Maybe at the Malin Head Inn. Maybe on Main Street, Beach Street. In the IGA pushing a wobbly wire cart in the early evening when there were few customers for most residents of Malin Head Bay ate supper at 6 P.M. if not earlier. He seemed to recall that the girl had had a young child with her.
Hoped not.
They ever have children, Chet and his wife?
She does, now. But not his.
The usherette had smiled at him as if her life depended upon it but had tactfully ignored his inane remark. He was thinking now he might have alarmed her. He was thinking now he’d made her uneasy and he’d meant only to be friendly as an ordinary guy in Malin Head Bay might be friendly, maybe he should go back and apologize, yes but he wasn’t going to, he knew better. Leave this one alone was the wisest strategy as he groped for a seat in the darkened near-deserted smokers’ loge at the rear of the theater.
And a second time, a few weeks later at the Bay Palace Theater he saw her, he’d forgotten her in the interim and seeing her again felt a stab of excitement, recognition. A man might make the mistake in such a situation thinking the woman will know him, too.
This evening the usherette was selling tickets. In her pert little military-style costume, in the ticket booth in the brightly lighted lobby. He was struck as before by the young woman’s manner: her ardent smile. She was one whose face is transformed by smiling as by a sudden implosion of light.
Her hair was different: pulled back into a ponytail swinging between her shoulder blades, partway down her back. You could see that she liked feeling it there, took a childlike sensuous pleasure in shaking, shifting her head.
The mood came over Gallagher at once. Weak-jointed, swallowing hard as if he’d been drinking whiskey and was dehydrated. You ain’t been blue. No no no.
Yet, oddly he’d forgotten this young woman until now. Since the evening of West Side Story weeks ago. Now it was October, a new season. Though Gallagher was emotionally estranged from his father Thaddeus and had not been close to the family for much of his adult life, yet he was involved in some of the Gallagher Media Group properties: radio-TV stations in Malin Head Bay, Alexandria Bay, Watertown. He remained a consultant and sometime-columnist for the Watertown Standard and its half-dozen rural affiliates in the Adirondack region: the only liberal Democrat associated with Gallagher Media, tolerated as a renegade. And he had his jazz gigs which paid little except in pleasure and were coming to be the center of his unraveled life.
When he wasn’t actively drinking he had AA meetings in Watertown, forty miles south of Malin Head Bay. There, Chet Gallagher was something of a spiritual leader.
Which is why, Gallagher thought, waiting in the brief line to buy his ticket for The Miracle Worker, a man yearns to meet an attractive young woman who doesn’t know him. A woman is hope, a woman’s smile is hope. No more can you live without hope than you can live without oxygen.
“Hello! That’s two-fifty, sir.”
Gallagher pushed a crisp new five-dollar bill beneath the wicket. He’d vowed he would not make a fool of himself this time, yet heard his voice innocently inquire, “Do you recommend this movie? It’s supposed to be”�pausing not knowing what to say, not wanting to offend the dazzling smile�“pretty arduous.”
Regretting arduous. Really he’d meant tough going.
The smiling young woman took Gallagher’s money, deftly punched cash register keys with a flash of her red-lacquered nails, pushed change and green ticket toward him with a flourish. She was looking even more attractive than she’d looked back in September, her eyes were warmly dark-brown, alert. Her carefully applied red lipstick matched her nails and Gallagher saw, couldn’t prevent the rapid search of his gaze, she wore no rings on any of her fingers.
“Oh no, sir! It isn’t arduous it’s hopeful. It kind of breaks your heart, but then it makes you”�in her breathy downstate voice, almost vehement, as if Gallagher had challenged the deepest beliefs of her soul�“rejoice, you are alive.”
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.”
Zack saw with his shrewd child’s eye that Mr. Sarrantini was impressed by Hazel Jones. At least in Hazel Jones’s presence, he would behave in a more kindly manner with his pupil.
Scales, scales! Zack tried to be patient with the tedium of “fingering.” Except there was no end to scales. You learned the major keys, then came the minor keys. Didn’t your fingers know what to do, if you didn’t interfere? And why was timing so important? The formula was so prescribed Zack could hear every note before his finger depressed it. Even worse were the study pieces (“Ding Dong Bell,” “Jack and Jill Go Up the Hill,” “Three Blind Mice”) which provoked his fingers to swerve out of control in derision and mockery. Recalling the boogie-woogie piano pieces that made you smile and laugh and want to get up and jump around they were so playful, making-fun-of other kinds of music, he’d been so captivated by long ago hearing on the radio in the old farmhouse on the Poor Farm Road he wasn’t to think of for that would make Mommy unhappy, if Mommy knew.
If Mommy knew
. But Mommy could not always know his thoughts.
Here in Malin Head Bay, in their apartment above Hutt Pharmacy, there was a plastic portable radio Mommy kept on the kitchen table. Restlessly turning the dial seeking “classical music” but encountering mostly loud jokey talk and news broadcasts, jingly advertisements, pop songs where the women were breathy-voiced and the men were bawling, and static.
He would play pieces by Beethoven and Mozart one day, Mommy said. He would be a real pianist, on a stage. People would listen to him, people would applaud. Even if he didn’t become famous he would be respected. Music is beautiful, music is important. In Watertown, there was a “youth concert” every Easter. Maybe not next Easter�that would be too soon, she supposed�but the following Easter maybe he might play at this concert if he followed Mr. Sarrantini’s instructions, if he learned his assignments and was a good boy.
He would! He would try.
For nothing mattered more than making Mommy happy.
Arriving twenty minutes early for his lesson with Mr. Sarrantini so that he could listen to the pupil who preceded him, a ninth grader whose spirited playing Mr. Sarrantini sometimes praised. She was one who executed her scales dutifully, doggedly; kept to the metronome’s pitiless beat almost perfectly. A husky girl with bristly braids and damp fleshy lips whose book was the blue-covered My Third Year at the Piano; she sounded as if she were playing piano with more than ten fingers, and sometimes with her elbows: “Donkey Serenade,” “Bugle Boy March,” “Anvil Chorus.”
At home Zack had no piano upon which to practice. This shameful fact Hazel Jones didn’t want anyone to know.
“We can make our own keyboard. Why not!”
They made the practice-keyboard together, out of white and black construction paper. They laughed together, this was a game. Between the keys they drew lines in black ink to suggest cracks. Zack’s hands were still too small to reach octaves but they prepared the keyboard to scale. “You’re practicing not just for Mr. Sarrantini, but for all of your life.”