Ensemble

bit as tall as Arthur, and he was not a short man. Her face, he noticed as if for the first time, was remarkably smooth and apple-cheeked for one so old—and she was old, indeed, though she did not seem any older than she had always been. “Thaddeus and George,” she said in a voice gone lower and huskier, “told me you would resist. You are the one who always got his way, they said. Did you know they both proposed to your wife, but you were the one she chose?” Her thick black eyebrows rose and then met across her Slavic nose. “Because she likes stubborn men, they said.”

  “Yes, she admitted they had before the wedding,” he began, then stopped himself, began again. “Thaddeus! George! But how did you know?”

  “No one ever really dies,” she answered. “Just as Christ walks the earth still. I am here because through me they can communicate to you. I have a notebook already, full of their automatic writing. It makes little sense to me; perhaps it will prove useful to you.”

  He was at a loss for words; he clutched at his celluloid collar and tore it off, breaking its snap, without thinking. Except for her heavy silver crucifix and amber-glass rosary

  (accoutrements he hadn’t remembered), she was a solid column of black before him, from her black boots through her long black skirt and blouse to her still jet-black hair, and she was immoveable. In the morning she would show him the book and they would visit his “player piano.”

  They settled into life between the farm and the mill together. The “automatic writing” proved a curiosity, full of arcane diagrams and indecipherable charts, marginalia scrawled in what might be Hebrew, and puzzling advice in broken English (“all stops be starts,” “blue apples at noon”); nevertheless, the notebooks she had kept inspired him, as did the puzzling books she brought with her to his offices, and the machine grew, and he felt he was coming, ever so slowly, nearer to his goal. Since Mrs. Karinskaya could play and he could not, he enlisted her to try out the keyboards while he scurried about, tuning the pitches and turning up the volume where necessary. Often, a tired merchant heading home after a long summer’s day would pause on the darkened street below the mill and listen to a lugubrious choir of simulated seraphim toying with “Wachet auf” or a young farmhand and his sweetheart, driving past the mill long after midnight, might overhear one of the entwined threads of a classical fugue. No one listening on the outside could have guessed that through such music the inventor and his psychic amanuensis were trying to tap at the gates of heaven and rouse its occupants into a duet for life and afterlife. This third and greatest of Cahill instruments was now to be known as the “Omniphonium.” After the Greek, Arthur explained. (“But can it play a simple barcarolle?” Mrs. Karinskaya had asked when she first saw it snoring like a sleeping leviathan within the bowels of the limestone mill.) All would seem well, but Arthur knew that something was not quite right. Mrs.

  Karinskaya seemed to have her own motivations for supporting his research and the expansion of the machine, which gradually was to occupy several floors of the mill building and threatened to break through the very walls and windows in its inexhaustible need for more rheotomes, larger generators, greater alternators, and an increasingly complex system of dynamos and switches that would amplify the music and be able to carry it through cables around the world. Already the old woman was transcribing a new concerto by Vivaldi (indeed, it did sound like several hundred of his other concertos) just for the Omniphonium. She had suggested that they could give public concerts and thus raise more money to shore up their rapidly dwindling funds. That, and she had met certain widows and spinsters in town who would desperately like to hear the voices of their departed husbands and friends. Arthur, who did not want to repeat any of the embarrassing episodes of the past, refused, and told her to stay home when she wasn’t needed at the mill. She would fly out of the house, amber beads rattling, umbrella in hand, after they argued and, she warned him before she left, she would send spiders and ravens to spy on him. As he watched her stomp off down the gravel path, the umbrella carrying her forward like a sail, he would be stricken again by another of his terrible headaches, which came as often and quickly now as spring thunderstorms over the cornfields but did not dissipate so soon.

  There was something about the Omniphonium which he would not tell even Mrs. Karinskaya, something which he had only lately discovered about it himself; seized by a headache, he had consulted the “transcriptions” of Thaddeus and George once again and now was convinced: the Omniphonium, if completed according to their instructions, would be capable not only of conversing with the dead, but also of communicating with the occupants of the future. The right scale, the right key, the right intonation, and they would answer him, these humans who were not yet born. At first it sounded even more preposterous than a machine that could make contact beyond the grave, but over many weeks he began to understand the enormous potential and practical uses of such a creation. Of course Mrs. Karinskaya suspected that he was holding back something from her, but in this matter he was resolute: his brothers would have wanted this last chance to one-up their conniving “auntie,” and he was not going to let her see the new notebook he was keeping. Let her storm and stew; this was their little secret, between the three of them. So despite his headaches, which were only getting worse, despite the many times he would wake exhausted at his desk after another long night adjusting dials and taking measurements, he carried on with his new mission in life: to greet the residents of the glorious future, who no doubt were eagerly trying to reach him by their own advanced methods, as well.

  “What is that I see you putting in your tea?” he asked Mrs. Karinskaya one day, as they ate another hasty breakfast in one of the few empty rooms left at the mill. As usual, they heard the cacophony of carpenters and engineers sawing wood and banging at metal below, helping the machine to grow—for it must continue to grow or die. The larger it became, the more seismographically sensitive it would become to vibrations both earthly and unearthly in origin. “It’s a wonder you haven’t noticed before,” Mrs. Karinskaya answered with a blush coursing through her already ruddy face. “And if you must know, it is arsenic.”

  “Arsenic! My God!”

  She chortled and waved her little tole-painted snuffbox under his nose. “Just a grain or two now and then,” she admitted. “In the old country, it is a habit of the moujik. The peddlers and the cimbalom players always have a little for you. My complexion, you see how healthy it is for a woman my age? That is its magic. You Americans, you would use it, too, if you packaged it like Ivory soap.”

  He turned away from her and back to his scribbled notes for the day. “I think it’s hideous.”

  She made a rude sound in the back of her throat and then slurped down the rest of her tea.

  Decline and Dénouement

  By the time Effie, Arthur Cahill’s former wife arrived, he was already confined to bed. The headaches had worsened, affecting his appetite and his ability to continue working such long hours, and then one evening on his way home from the mill he had stumbled and Mrs.

  Karinskaya had had to help him up the stairs and into his bedroom. Neither of them believed in small-town old-fashioned doctors; for that matter, despite her many complaints, neither Mrs. Karinskaya nor Arthur had ever been seriously ill. Though he had never converted, Arthur had once attended a very convincing Christian Science lecture. Effie suggested then if he did not mistrust the medical profession completely, he should try the sulfur baths in Arkansas or the mineral waters of Colorado; he protested that he felt too weak to board a train to anywhere. Most importantly, he did not want to leave the farm and the Omniphonium in her hands, especially since his startling breakthrough, all documented in his tall, narrow ledger books—the ones he kept locked in his bedroom safe.

  Effie herself, for all her own experience with nerves and psychosomatic ailments, seemed remarkably healthy. In the years since her breakdown and slow recovery she had lived as an undedicate nun, darning stockings with the mentally unfit
and playing piano at rallies for socialists and utopians. Such dedication and sacrifice had both hardened and dignified her. “You know what I am?” she liked to asked strangers on streetcars and suffragettes at chautauquas. “I am pamprodactylus; that is, I have all my feet pointing in the right direction!” She was still quite a handsome woman, quite thin, with aquiline features that betrayed Semitic blood and her piles of gray-streaked hair which she had refused to have bobbed. Mrs. Karinskaya had been right, in the end: she had been able to convince Effie to come back to her husband, though it was only because she had been told Arthur might be dying that she had come all the way from Battle Creek. She was fully homeopathic these days and believed that with just the right tinctures and elixirs she could bring her former husband back to good health. Effie believed that her good cheer and laughter alone would be arnica to his bruise, balm to his fever, though, a lover of ipecac and codeine herself, she had trouble staying on an even temper. “Arthur,” she told him the afternoon after she had arrived after her tedious journey, recouping her energy in a wicker armchair facing