The Music School Read Free Page A

Yankee. His age and status are too peculiar. He is surely older than forty and younger than sixty—but
is
this sure? And, though he greets everyone by name with a light wave of his hand, the conversation never passes beyond a greeting, and even in the news store, when the political contention and convivial obscenity literally drive housewives away from the door, he does not attempt to participate. He witnesses, and he now and then offers in a gravelly voice a debated piece of town history, but he does not participate.
    It is caring that makes mysteries. As you grow indifferent, they lift. You live longer in the town, season follows season, the half-naked urban people arrive on the beach, multiply, and like leaves fall away again, and you have ceased to identify with them. The marshes turn green and withdraw through gold into brown, and their indolent, untouched, enduring existence penetrates your fibre. You find you must drive down toward the beach once a week or it is like a week without love. The ice cakes pile up along the banks of the tidal inlets like the rubble of ruined temples. You begin to meet, without seeking them out, the vestigial people: the unmarried daughters of the owners of closed mills, the retired high-school teachers, the senile deacons in their underheated seventeenth-century houses with attics full of old church records in spidery brown ink. You enter, by way of an elderly baby-sitter, a world where at least they speak of him as “the Indian.” An appalling snicker materializes in the darkness on the front seat beside you as you drive your babysitter, dear Mrs. Knowlton, hometo her shuttered house on a back road. “If you knew what they say, mister, if you knew what they say.”
    And at last, as when in a woods you break through miles of underbrush into a clearing, you stand up surprised, taking a deep breath of the obvious, agreeing with the trees that of course this is the case. Anybody who is anybody knew all along. The mystery lifts, with some impatience, here, in Miss Horne’s low-ceilinged front parlor, which smells of warm fireplace ashes and of peppermint balls kept ready in redtinted knobbed glass goblets for whatever open-mouthed children might dare to come visit such a very old lady, all bent double like a little gripping rose clump, Miss Horne, a fable in her lifetime. Her father had been the fifth minister before the present one (whom she does
not
care for) at the First Church, and
his
father the next but one before him. There had been a Horne among those first seventeen men. Well—where was she?—yes, the Indian. The Indian had been loitering in the center of town when she was a tiny girl in gingham. And he is no older now than he was then.

 
Giving Blood
    T HE M APLES had been married now nine years, which is almost too long. “Goddamn it, goddamn it,” Richard said to Joan, as they drove into Boston to give blood, “I drive this road five days a week and now I’m driving it again. It’s like a nightmare. I’m exhausted. I’m emotionally, mentally, physically exhausted, and she isn’t even an aunt of mine. She isn’t even an aunt of
yours
.”
    “She’s a sort of cousin,” Joan said.
    “Well, hell, every goddamn body in New England is some sort of cousin of yours; must I spend the rest of my life trying to save them
all
?”
    “Hush,” Joan said. “She might die. I’m ashamed of you. Really ashamed.”
    It cut. His voice for the moment took on an apologetic pallor. “Well, I’d be my usual goddamn saintly self if I’d had any sort of sleep last night. Five days a week I bump out of bed and stagger out the door past the milkman, and on the one day of the week when I don’t even have to truck the brats toSunday school you make an appointment to have me drained dry thirty miles away.”
    “Well, it wasn’t
me
,” Joan said, “who had to stay till two o’clock doing the Twist with Marlene Brossman.”
    “We weren’t doing the Twist. We were gliding around