Jewel Weed

by Barbara Fischer

They met when Margot was a secretary at the Cascade Philharmonic in upstate New York, over thirty years ago now. Staff members were required to attend every concert—it was why she’d taken the job. Margot always sat in Row P, seat 48; it belonged to an elderly patron who never attended. It was the best seat in the house. That seat just happened to be next to Mr. Peterov. Before the concert they exchanged pleasantries and commented on the program. During intermission they discussed the music they’d just heard. Soon, they were going for coffee afterward.

Margot was in her late thirties then, still numb from her recent divorce. Mr. Peterov, she guessed, was in his late sixties. He reminded her of a Roman Senator—short, robust, thin white hair combed back to front, the sparse white wisps making feathery bangs high on his forehead. She especially liked his face, so unapologetically homely it was almost handsome.

He had a barely noticeable accent. All she knew was that he was from “the other side.” Her grandmother had used the exact same phrase when she talked about the country she’d come from as a girl. Margot asked her, once, if she wanted to see it again, go back for a visit. “What for?” her grandmother had said. “There’s nothing there.” And so she’d never asked Mr. Peterov about his first country, his first language. Was he from Nazi Germany? Was that why he was so reluctant to talk about it? Why she was so reluctant to ask?

Mostly they talked about music. “I, too, preferred the Sturm and Drang, the bombast of the dramatic, the Bells of Kiev, when you,” he once told her. “But older, I find what pleases best is the subtle, unexpected harmony.” Like us, she thinks now. He was talking about us.

There was nothing subtle about the way he died. That had been worthy of Wagner. He fell from an icy cliff at the top of a waterfall onto the jagged rocks two hundred feet below. His death was ruled accidental. Margot suspected it wasn’t. Later, when she was sure, another suspicion was confirmed. Given the choice, we choose passion.

Several months into their friendship, the orchestra performed Brahms’ First Symphony. “He was quite the curmudgeon, Brahms,” Mr. Peterov said, as if he’d known him personally. “He made no secret of his impatience with musicians less gifted than himself. And yet he himself was plagued with self-doubt. It took him ten years to write his first symphony.”

“He was intimidated by Beethoven,” Margot said. “His hero. His rival.”

“Brahms quotes him, you know,” he said, “in the third movement of his first symphony, as homage.” Margot didn’t know. “Oh yes,” he said. “Critics accused him of plagiarism.” He wouldn’t tell her what passages Brahms quoted. And then she heard them—those measures so like Beethoven’s Ninth, his Ode to Joy, his lastsymphony. How had she not heard them before? And how different they were, filtered through Brahms. She reached for his hand when she recognized them, this wise, more careful joy.

She invited him to lunch the following Sunday, and then nearly every Sunday afterward he rode two buses to her house with a bakery box balanced on his knees. Margot’s daughters, Lara and Olivia, were sixteen and twelve at the time. They spent Saturday nights with their father and his fiancée, Eleanor (the other woman) and were dropped off Sunday evening long after Mr. Peterov had gone.

Eleanor was not exactly the reason for their divorce, though Margot’s daughters put the blame squarely on her. Margot hadn’t made any effort to set the record straight. Blaming the other woman was so much safer than blaming a parent. Still, Eleanor—so plain, so self-effacing, so nice—was hardly worthy of the label. None of Margot’s friends could understand what Richard saw in her. It was no mystery to Margot. Eleanor was a long dreamless nap on a dark winter afternoon. After the Sturm and Drang that was their marriage, Richard must have craved the rest. Given her and Richard’s screaming fights, the screaming lovemaking after the fights, the way they threw themselves into both with their entire beings, you’d think Margot would have made scenes in public places when she discovered his affair with Eleanor. Instead she was almost relieved. By then, she was ready for a rest, too.

She discussed none of this with Mr. Peterov. He knew only the facts. She was a secretary at the Cascade Philharmonic. She gave piano lessons to neighborhood children on Saturday afternoons. She accompanied the First Methodist Church choir on Sunday mornings. She had two adolescent daughters. She was divorced.

Lara and Olivia knew about Mr. Peterov, too. They weren’t at all curious about him, although when they came home every Sunday evening they headed straight to the kitchen to plunder the bakery box. Mr. Peterov always brought four little cakes, two of which were meant for them.

One Sunday, Richard dropped off the girls at three rather than six. Mr. Peterov was still there. Usually he left around two-thirty, but the time had just slipped away, as it often did. Lara, sixteen then, sparkled in the presence of men. She gave him her best smile, said warmly, “I’ve heard so much about you!” (she hadn’t, really) then vanished into her room, her duty done—sunshine spread, another man bedazzled with minimal effort. Olivia, twelve, briefly flicked her eyes in Mr. Peterov’s direction when Margot introduced them. Mr. Peterov had gotten to his feet and stood heavily on his cane.

“You know that stupid dance at school next Friday?” Olivia said. “Turns out I have to go. Miss Randolph says we’ll get extra credit in social studies if we go and I’m nine points away from an A. Dad says I should stand up for my principles and not go even if it means getting a B, but I told him oh no, a B would not be okay with you.” Could she get her nails tipped? Bianca was getting hers done. And could she at least wear eyeliner to her first dance ever seeing as how she didn’t even want to go in the first place?

“Ah, girls that age,” Mr. Peterov said after Olivia had finally gone to her room. “So full of themselves and their own secrets. How beautiful they are, how genuine. This they share with us without meaning to.”

“So full of themselves is right,” Margot said, embarrassed. “The older mothers in Bible Study tell me they grow out of it eventually. I’m not sure I believe them.”

“Their generous spirits will come,” Mr. Peterov said. “Now, their nearness is their best gift. Polite, they will not be so near. Polite, we will not know them so well. This is not my own original thought. My dear late wife said this to me after our daughter—our only child—stung me to the quick with her genuine, casual cruelty.”

“When did your daughter finally appreciate you for the treasure you are?” Her face reddened—she could feel it.

“I am still waiting,” he laughed. “So you see I am talking through my hat.” Then he said, “My daughter is…not well. A cruel illness. It came upon her when she was in her early twenties. It stole her beautiful spirit. Take joy in them as they are now.”

***

Once upon a time, he told her, he’d aspired to be a concert pianist. “Aspired,” he emphasized. They were having high tea during the Christmas season at an elegant hotel—his treat. He told her he’d performed several tepidly reviewed concerts when he was a young man on the other side. But when he was in his early twenties, his fingers grew increasingly painful. His other joints as well, but he was most concerned about his fingers. He consulted the finest doctors in Prague, where he was performing at the time. Rheumatoid arthritis, it was called now, he said. It would attack, retreat, but ultimately, progress. There was no cure, no treatment. He refused to believe. He practiced longer, harder. But the doctors were right. His career, such as it was, was over.

“Predictably, I cried to heaven,” he said. “Heaven seemed not to care. So. I am given an excuse. All was taken from me—such tragedy! I would never be one of those less gifted musicians with whom Brahms would have had the field day!” He looked down at his gnarled fingers. “But I romanticize. Such a temptation when telling one’s story to such a charming listener. In truth, the sad old man you see before you is nothing more than a piano tuner, a technician. Now retired.”

When it became clear that he could no longer perform, he apprenticed with a blind piano tuner on the other side. “A gifted man,” he said. “A gifted teacher. He taught me to feel sound. Of course he heard sound more acutely than I, but in addition, he felt it, and more, taught me to feel it.” Each tone, Mr. Peterov said, has its own unique feel. “No matter how keen your ear, you cannot be absolutely certain a tone is true until you feel it. There is nothing like it—that unique resonance of a string perfectly in tune under your touch.”

The dessert course had been served over an hour before. The teapot would not be refilled. She divided what remained—a swallow, at best.

“And so,” he said in a lighter tone, “That is how I found my rightful place on the world’s greatest stages. No doubt you have heard that old joke. How to get to Carnegie Hall?”

“Practice, practice, practice,” she said.

“Or tune pianos.”

***

Instead of waiting like a guest in the living room when he came to lunch, Mr. Peterov began keeping her company while she made tea and tuna salad and they ate at her kitchen table. He told her that in fact he had tuned the grand pianos at Carnegie Hall. He was also called to the hotel rooms of performers on world tours to service the grand pianos on which they practiced in their fabulous suites. “My fingers were not so clumsy then,” he said. “Too clumsy for a concert pianist’s, yes, but for many years, good enough to tune the pianos of the world’s finest performers. I was much in demand. I became quite the prima donna. I would tune their pianos to perfection and then I would tell them the story of Picasso and the architect.”

Picasso, he told her, hired a young architect he met in a bar to re-design his kitchen when he was living in Paris. To illustrate what he had in mind, Picasso made a rough sketch on a paper napkin. What will it take to accomplish this, Picasso asked. Sign the napkin, the architect said. He would take no other payment.

“Years later,” Mr. Peterov said, “I saw with my own eyes the framed, signed sketch on the wall of the architect’s modest pensionne. A Picasso original on a cocktail napkin! He was a dear friend of mine, this architect, much older by this time, though still working. Had he sold the sketch to a collector, he could have retired in the prime of his life, comfortably wealthy. Yet he considered himself rich beyond measure to possess such a treasure—a work of art created for him and him alone by a master. And then,” Mr. Peterov said, “at the end of my story, I would ask the pianist to play for me. And said that I, too, would accept no other payment.”

It was late September only four o’clock, but already the sun no longer lit the kitchen windows. The girls would not be home that night—they were at one of the many festivities leading to Richard and Eleanor’s wedding. Margot rose from the table to tidy up. He caught her hand. “Not yet,” he said. “I must go, I know. But first, allow me to tell you a most amazing story.” She sat down.

“Sergei Rachmoninoff,” he said, “yes, the Sergei Rachmoninoff, or rather his agent, contacted mine—I had an agent in those days—to tune his piano at his home in Zurich. I was flown there, all expenses paid. I did not expect to meet the Maestro, but as I was gathering up my instruments, the great Rachmoninoff himself came into his music room and sat at the piano to test my work. Such immense hands, yet so agile! He played several arpeggios and nodded. I did not go into my story of Picasso and the architect. I said that since I was a child, my greatest wish had been to hear him play his Prelude in C sharp major, his Bells of Kiev. I did not confess that I had once been a pianist, nor that Bells of Kiev had been my signature piece. I did not say that I knew its every note, its every nuance, and desired with all my being to hear it delivered from the hands of its maker, to compare the original to my own sad rendition. Imagine a scientist who thinks he has manufactured life in a test tube. And then image him in the presence of God. So many questions!

“The great god Rachmoninoff told me, rather gruffly, that there were many fine recordings of that piece and that his accountant would send me one. I said, ‘Is it true? You hate Bellis of Kiev?’ I knew he did. It was common knowledge. I but I wanted to know why. Short of hearing him play his Prelude in C sharp major, my second greatest wish was to know why, how, the great Rachmoninoff, or any god, could hate his own splendid creation.

“The most likely reason was that he was simply sick to death of it. He’d composed it when he was eighteen yet it remained the piece he was expected to play during encores. I had a more romantic theory. I thought his Bells of Kiev made him nostalgic for his homeland, to which he could never return. This, I could understand. I felt it myself, though my nostalgia was not for my homeland but for my days as a pianist. I wished to re-visit those days, to re-live them, if only for a moment, through him.

“I did not expect him to reply. But he answered. He said ‘I was a boy. I knew nothing.’

“We were in his comfortable home in Zurich, his career at its zenith, his lovely wife puttering in their garden, my own dear wife and I still almost newlyweds, our beautiful little daughter still full of promise. Of course I knew it could not last, this clean, simple world, but I did not know then who it would make of us.

“He played the beginning measurers of Bells of Kiev. But the way he played them. Insipidly, without expression, intentionally so, this piece that defines headstrong, youthful recklessness. I could not help but recall the first time I heard it when I was a boy myself, the wild thrill it called up in me, the great rising hope, one’s greatest adventures still to come. But what a ponderous, dismal piece it is when played without passion. That day, I felt the full weight of its heavy hopeless sadness. It is with me still.”

The kitchen was mostly dark by then. They were still holding hands. She leaned forward and kissed him, a long, lovely kiss. His hand gently held her face to his. They rose to embrace. His cane clattered to the floor. “Forgive me,” he said, pulling away and sinking heavily into his chair. “That was quite inappropriate of me. But you are so very lovely, my dear.”

At the time, she thought she knew why their kiss hadn’t progressed beyond their awkward embrace. He was beyond passion—hadn’t that been the point of his story? Now, approaching the age he’d been then, she sees that the spark was still there, that it never went out—does it ever?—and that he’d hope she could re-ignite it. But she hadn’t.

***

The next to the last time she saw him was at the Cornell Arboretum, a thirty-minute drive from her house. They sat on a bench beneath a red maple shedding its colorful leaves. It was mid-October, the day as crisp as an apple.

“Such a beautiful world, this upstate New York of yours,” he said. “The cliffs, the waterfalls. My dear wife was enchanted by this fairy-tale landscape. She was content here. As was I. And, a most miraculous thing, on occasion, we were…almost happy. You could not think such a thing could be possible with our daughter in the institution, with all we had been through before.”

He told her about the places he and his wife had visited back when he still drove. Small local towns with mysterious names, Horse Head—why plural? The deep, dark finger lakes carved by the glaciers of the last ice age. A spectacular waterfall hidden deep in the woods. He and his wife hiked miles along a winding stream in search of this fabulous waterfall, the cliffs rising high on either side. They worried that they’d gone off course. Each accused the other of misreading the map. And then a riotous cascade tumbling from an impossibly high cliff into a deep, calm pool.

“And everywhere,” he said, “the most amazing flowers. Like miniature orchids, yellow and orange. So exquisite, so delicate. Thousands bloomed by the pool. And their leaves! They glittered as if with silver jewels. Just droplets of water, one saw, but still, an amazing thing, how they shone like something precious.”

“Jewel Weed!” Margot said.

“You know these flowers? This is what they are called?”

“Yes! Jewel Weed. The water beads on their leaves. And when you dip the leaves in water, their undersides turn silver.” And did he know that the leaves had magical properties? That they took the itch out of mosquito bites and poison ivy, that they relieved the pain of bee stings? “You touch them to whatever hurts,” she said, “and the pain just goes away.” She told him about the amazing seedpods the Jewel Weed flowers gave way to every fall. You barely touched them, she said, and they explode like rockets to spray their seeds.

How wonderful, he said.

“Wouldn’t you like to see it again?” she said. “That waterfall? The Jewel Weed? Why don’t we look for it, right now?”

There were hundreds of waterfalls in upstate New York, but from his description, she was certain he was talking about Taughannock Falls. He couldn’t walk the lower trail now, but there was an overlook, and along the steep, twisting road there, rivulets tumbled down the rock walls, and in one of those pockets she was sure they’d find Jewel Weed, the flowers done now but the seed cases swelled to bursting.

He said, “The way to get to there is foggy in my mind.” Something had changed. He might have been her grandmother saying, “What for?” Yet this same grandmother had taken her into the woods every fall to gather the leaves and pop the seed cases, and laughed—her grandmother—every time they sent another spray flying. “We could find it,” Margot said. “Taughannock Falls. It’s not so far from here.” She could give him this.

“But that is exactly its magic,” he said. “That I will never find it again. That it will remain just as I remember.”

***

The next few Sundays he phoned with excuses. He was a little under the weather; he didn’t trust his cane on the icy sidewalks. “I could bring lunch to you,” she’d offered shyly. And then he didn’t call at all. It’s over, she thought. Whatever it was, it was over. She would not sit next to him at the November concert. But he didn’t attend that concert. Worry trumped pride. She called him.

“What a delight to hear from you,” he said, as if she’d been the one who’d withdrawn. No, he assured her, nothing was wrong, it was just this thing after that thing, the snow, the buses so unreliable. But he very much wanted to see her again. Might he drop by this Sunday, now that they were temporarily between storms?

A taxi delivered him to her house. He’d lost weight. There were plum-colored rings beneath his eyes. He trembled on his cane. “I arrive quite empty-handed,” he said at the door.

“What a relief,” she said. “I made a peach pie from scratch. The lopsided thing would be shamed to death next to those beautiful cakes of yours from Schneider’s.”

“Today let us have dessert first,” he said. “I insist.” He didn’t follow her into the kitchen. When she returned with the wobbling gelatinous wedges, she found him leaning on his cane by her Wurlitzer console.

“You have never played for me,” he said. “Will you, today? One of your own compositions?” She’d confessed that she made up (she did not say composed), little pieces of her own.

“I’d disappoint you,” she said. She did not say again.

“My dear, you will always fail to disappoint me.”

“Try the pie and say that.” He settled himself in his chair by the window, sawed off a piece with his fork, chewed and swallowed with great concentration. “Abysmal,” he pronounced. “A grave in justice to flour, an abuse of sugar, an insult to peaches everywhere. There! Have you survived?”

“Barely,” she laughed. “But I suppose life will go on.”

“Indeed. So play for me, please.” Still, she hesitated.

“Once upon a time,” he said, “when I was in Budapest” (Budapesht, he pronounced it), “I was called to the hotel room of Yitzhak Paderewski. Now doubt you have never heard of him—another world. But then, quite famous, a lonely old man far from home and thus very talkative. For the next four hours while I tuned his piano, Paderewski drank shot after shot of Vodka. I confess I joined him. A most generous man. A most pleasant afternoon. And then, as always, I asked Paderewski to play for me. By this time I had confessed my own story. We had the same first language, Paderewski and I—honey in the mouth! I told him not only the story of my own failed aspirations, but also how I shamefully employed the tale of Picasso and the architect to persuade virtuosos to perform for me, how almost all did then paid me anyway, as I knew they would. I revealed all my secrets that afternoon—again, the Vodka. With the imperiousness of the very drunk, Paderewski said, No, Peterov. Today you will play for me.

“I said that my fingers were no longer agile enough. Paderewski laughed. He said, ‘You are afraid of hitting a few wrong notes? The great Paderewski hits dozens during every performance. No one cares, I am forgiven. The interpretation is the soul of any performance—and what pays the bills. So play for me, Peterov. If you dare.’ Of course I longed to. What musician doesn’t long to perform?”

“And?”

“I played for him. A relatively undemanding piece. Brahms’ Intermezzo in A major.”

“The one Brahms composed for Clara Schumann,” Margot said.

“The world’s most exquisite love song.”

“Composed for the wife of his best friend. Did Brahms love her? I’ve always wondered.”

“You know the piece yet still you wonder?”

“Obviously he loved her in some way,” she said, a little defensively. “But what way was that, exactly?”

“Must we know? Is the enigma more compelling when explained? Another mystery: when I played for Paderewski, my clumsy fingers touched the very soul of the piece. My best, my bravest, my most imperfect performance.”

“And Paderewski? What did he say?”

“He said, yes, yes, we all know the piece is about unrequited love, no need to bludgeon the poor lovers to death. He said my phrasing was sentimental. Restraint is what is called for, he said, the better to make us grieve the cruel possibility of happiness during that soaring, lyrical passage when all that might have been…might have been.”

She knew the passage he meant—G sharp, A, F sharp. So full of sorrow and joy. Her favorite in all of music. She closed her eyes and sang it. He sang with her. They were perfectly in tune.

“You have perfect pitch,” he said. “And you made the same mistake I did the day I played for Paderewski. You held the first note in the phrase the smallest fraction of a beat too long, this phrase where everything seems possible. You must touch it gently, this flicker of light, then quickly let it go, because that is where the magic is—in the shadows. According to Paderewski.”

“It hurt you,” she said. “His criticism.”

He shrugged. “Not my first bad review. Yet he did not try to spare my feelings. He made no allowance for my infirmities. He critiqued me as one musician to another. It made what he said next that much more meaningful. He said, ‘And yet, Peterov, despite your appalling technique, you captured something I will not soon forget. What a pity I could not have been your teacher when greatness was still in the cards for you.’ He said this to me. Of course it was too late for me—we both knew that. So. A sad gift, but a gift nonetheless. I was glad he insisted I play for him, that I found the courage to do so. And now I insist that you find the courage to play for me.”

“You were drinking Vodka,” she teased. “That’s where your courage came from.”

“You have something in the house?”

“Sherry.”

“Bah.”

“I might have some gin.”

“Better. Bring the bottle.”

She had to go upstairs to get it. She hid the Tangurauy on the top shelf of her bedroom closet beneath her grandmother’s neatly folded quilts. She was (ha!) a closet drinker. No one knew that she drank, nor how much, when the girls were at Richard’s. What would the Methodist Mothers say? And what would happen after the girls were grown and gone? Would she become that pathetic cliché—the desperate, middle-aged divorcee with deep lip lines and a raspy whiskey voice? Not that she knew any divorced women at the time, but she was sure, then, that they were all sad and desperate and that soon she’d be one of them. But something else occurred to her as she walked down the stairs with the half-empty bottle and saw his intrigued, appraising look. She could be anyone she chose. She could still surprise.

They drank two shots, quickly. She sat at the piano, straightened her back and played one of her earliest pieces, the one she’d always considered her best. It was loud, complicated, full of dissonant chords, and mercifully, not too long. He sat quietly for several long seconds after it was over, then said, “You are trying to beat your poor piano to death? It has harmed you in some way?”

“Terrible, I know. I warned you.”

“Not completely terrible,” he said. “But, yes, mostly terrible.” And then, “I, too, preferred the Sturm and Drang, the bombast of the dramatic, the Bells of Kriev, when young. But older, I find what pleases best is the subtle, unexpected harmony. Play for me, please, a more mature work.”

She gently arranged her fingers on the keys and played a piece so new that she had to improvise in places. It had a thin thread of melody that didn’t try too hard. A little said, but not too sad. Resigned. No, reconciled. And at the same time, due to several rising notes—something she hadn’t noticed before—almost happy.

“Lovely,” Mr. Peterov whispered when she’d finished, his eyes closed, his head in his hand. She suspected that he’d been asleep.

***

She learned about his death from the newspaper. It was in Wednesday’s local/metro section three days after his visit. Local man falls to his death at Taughannock Falls, the small headline read. Foul play was not suspected. The article quoted Hannah Katzinski, a woman identified as his sister-in-law: “Abraham loved to walk in the woods, always, in all kinds of weather.” In another paraphrased quote the sister-in-law said that he must have lost his footing on the icy trail. He’d recently been diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease, she said, which affected his balanced.

She’s lying, Margot thought. Understandable. But why mention a recent diagnosis of a fatal disease if you wanted people to think fall was unintentional? Later still, Margot reminded herself that the sister-in-law—elderly, no doubt—was most likely in shock when the reporter interviewed her. Most likely, she was still trying to convince herself that his fall had simply been a tragic accident. It was possible.

Still, how had he gotten there? And how had he managed to walk even the short rail to the cliff that overlooked the falls? When she’d seen him just three days before, he could barely stand, and for the first time after his last visit—his last visit—he allowed her to drive him home. His boxy apartment building shared a parking lot with the blood plasma center. He did not invite her in.

But whether he jumped or fell or left it to slippery accidental chance, several things were clear. The way to get to Taughannock Falls was not foggy in his mind. And he did want to see it again—but not with her. Did he think of her at all the day he fell? Did he remember what’d told him, that the Jewel Weed, far below, had the power to take away pain?

His obituary was in the same day’s paper, thought it wasn’t until the early hours of the next morning that Margot thought to flip to that page. Just two lines. Abraham Peterov, 68. Service at Kaufman’s Funeral Home, Thursday, 11:00 a.m. It wasThursday. She’d spent Wednesday night at the kitchen table. She tossed her cold tea in the sink, showered, dressed, and carefully did her hair and makeup, as she always did before a date with Mr. Peterov.

At Kaufman’s, she was directed to one of its smaller rooms. Less than half the chairs were filled. The first row, always reserved for family, remained empty. Kaufman’s specialized in non-denominational services for the “unchurched.” Margot had been to several for her grandmother’s ancient lady friends. Typically, they were perfunctory, no-fuss affairs. Margot took a seat on the aisle near the back.

Most of the men at Mr. Peterov’s service wore Yamakas. She’d seen the box of disposable ones in the entranceway. Mr. Peterov had been Jewish. She’d assumed as much by then, but of course they’d never talked about it, how he’d survived, what he’d survived, on the other side. How much more could they have been to each other if they had?

But maybe he’d tried. I cried to Heaven. Heaven seemed not to care. She remembered his allusion to all he and his wife had been through “before.” Had these comments, always embedded as asides in his fabulous stories, been the real story she’d failed to hear?

A hush descended. Heads turned. Two women promenaded arm in arm down the narrow aisle between folding chairs. One woman was striking—tall, razor thin, with the posture of a queen. She wore a mink stole, black elbow gloves, a black velvet pill-box hat trimmed with sparkly netting, a tight, a knee-length skirt, fur-trimmed high-heeled ankle boots that accentuated her muscular calves. Margot guessed she was in her late forties or early fifties, though it was hard to tell since the veil was angled dramatically, strategically, across her face and neck. You barely noticed the doddering old woman hanging on her arm. She too wore a mink stole and a similar hat, but her mink stole sat askew on her stooped shoulders and her hat had slipped sideways so that its stiff veil protruded like a strange growth from her left ear. Her lower jaw slid about as if tasting words then silently spitting them out.

But the stooped woman was not elderly. When they hobbled past, Margot saw that she had to be at least a decade younger than the tall, striking woman. A deep, sweet dimple appeared, disappeared, appeared again in her cheek as she ground her jaws. The younger woman was wearing the elegant women’s clothes, Margot guessed, because of course she had nothing appropriate in the psychiatric hospital. Because of course the stooped woman was Mr. Peterov’s daughter. The two women took their seats in the first row. The chairs on either side remained empty.

A young funeral director came to stand behind the lectern. “Today we bid farewell to Abraham Peterov,” he read. He made no secret of the fact that he was reading from notes. There followed a litany of facts: born 1908 in Novgorod, the only surviving child of Jacob and Leah Peterovski, preceded in death by his wife, Anna, survived by his beloved daughter, Madeline, virtuoso pianist, beloved teacher, famous piano tuner to the stars, a great lover of nature. Margot recognized phrases from the newspaper: loved to walk in the woods, always, in all kinds of weather. Surely his sister-in-law, Hannah Katzinski, had written these notes.

Strange that she hadn’t been named as one of Mr. Peterov’s survivors.

The next Sunday afternoon there was a knock at Margot’s door. She’d been giving the living room a thorough cleaning. She’d moved furniture away from the walls and had cleared every surface. Knick-knacks, framed photos and a mountain of books littered the floor. She barely recognized the room.

“Marty Seigal,” said the man on her doorstep. He gripped a pleated leather bag like a doctor making house calls. He was about forty, balding. His watery eyes swam behind thick tortoise-shell glasses. She stared at him stupidly. “Mr. Peterov said you’d be expecting me. To tune your piano? A Wurlitzer console?” She pushed the door open. “Has Mr. Peterov arrived yet?” he said, politely ignoring the clutter.

“Mr. Peterov is…gone,” she said. “You didn’t know?”

“Gone?” He sank onto the piano bench, which sat at a silly angle in the center of the living room. “How? When?” Margot told him the newspaper’s version.

“But I spoke to him just this week. Just this Monday when he called to arrange this tuning. Might I…do you think I might have something to drink?”

In the kitchen she moved a chair to the cupboard above the sink for the vodka. Expensive, imported. She’d bought it on her way home from Mr. Peterov’s funeral. She never intended to open it, though she supposed her daughters would, someday, when they were cleaning out the kitchen after her funeral. The seal opened with a crack. She poured two inches into juice glasses and tossed a handful of ice into each.

She expected to find Marty Seigal still sitting on the marooned piano bench, but he’d already moved her piano away from the wall and had removed its lid. His bag lay open on the floor, his tools neatly arranged beside it. He’d draped his coat over the back of her sofa. His stiff white shirt had sharp creases down its arms. She suspected he’d starched and ironed it himself—he didn’t wear a ring. She handed him his drink. “Careful, it’s not water,” she warned, though she knew he didn’t expect it to be. He drank it down in one enormous gulp and set it next to his instruments.

He pounded a mallet into the back of her piano. The panel separated with an unmelodious chime to expose its spine, its strings, its secrets. He reached for a delicate silver hammer and tapped the A above middle C. He used a small silver wrench to tighten the bolt that anchored the string to the soundboard. He tapped and listened, again and again. After the seventh adjustment, he sank to his knees, squeezed his eyes shut, held the string between his thumb and index finger and tapped once more. His shoulders untightened; his face relaxed.

“The A string is the easiest to tune,” he told her. “The others are actually harder. Not only do they have to be tuned in relation to that perfect A, they must also be tuned in relation to each other. If you tuned every string besides A to its true, perfect tone,” he said, “you’d have chaos, anarchy! The overtones would be wrong!” And so every string besides that one perfect A, he said, must be slightly imperfect, each in its own unique way, in order for them to be perfect, together.

“You learned from Mr. Peterov,” she said.

“He taught me everything. He was my mentor, my piano teacher, my friend.”

“You play?”

“Not well enough. Not that he ever said so. Not in so many words.” He laughed. “He said so in volumes of words, story upon story, until finally, dense as I am, even I eventually got his drift.”

“That must have been hard to hear.”

He shrugged. “I’d probably have fooled myself for years if he hadn’t told me so in that circuitous way of his. Your piano is shit, by the way. Very poor quality. Forgive me. I’m sure Abe would have put that more delicately. I used to tell him life was too short for his kind of round-about honesty.” He removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “You say he fell? While walking in the woods? Abe?”

“You don’t think he…fell.”

“Do you?”

“I’m not, well, of course I wonder, but…”

“You know what else life is too short for? Waiting to be offered another drink.”

When she returned with is drink—mostly ice and water this time, he was again industriously at work. “What can you tell me about Hannah?” she said.

“His wife? I’ve met her.” He didn’t look up. “Not the biggest fan of classical music. A dancer back in the day. Broadway musicals. Quite a bit younger than him. Or maybe just extraordinarily well preserved. Or—my guess—had an extraordinary plastic surgeon.”

“His wife’s name was Anna,” said Margot.

“Anna. Hannah. Sharp dresser. Carried her head like it was some priceless artifact balanced on that perfect neck of hers. Rather haughty.” Haugh-tee, he said, in a stereotypical upper-crust English accent. Then, catching himself, “Poor woman. Must have been a terrible shock. She was devoted to him.”

“His wife’s name was Anna,” Margot repeated. “She died years ago. Hannah was his sister-in-law. It says so in the paper. I’ll show you.”

“As long as you’re getting up, could you put some alcohol in this?”

She made them both another drink.

“So who was she really? Hannah?” Margot held out the glass to him but wouldn’t let go until he answered.

“One of his mistresses, I guess,” he said.

“One of his mistresses?”

“How well did you know him?” he gave her a look that was just short of a leer.

“We were friends,” Margot said primly.

“Forgive me. Never in a million years did I think otherwise. We artistes do love our intrigue. Plus I’m an ass, in case you haven’t noticed.”

She smiled for the first time in days. “Never in a millions years would you have believe I was one of Mr. Peterov’s many mistresses? Actually, I am a little offended by that.”

“Again, forgive me. ‘Seigal,’ he used to tell me, ‘if you can’t learn even the most rudimentary of manners, at least learn to say forgive me before and after every sentence.’”

“I can almost hearing him saying that.”

“The quotable Abe. I try to stick to his script, because let’s face it, it’s pure gold. The man charmed the world’s greatest musicians—did you know that? They hung on his every word. But the words that come out of my mouth? Well, you’ve heard me. At least this damn sorry crate of yours will sing when I’m done with it. Yes, I too have a gift.” In an eerily convincing imitation of Mr. Peterov, he said, “Would the great Peterov have wasted his precious time on me otherwise? No! The great Peterov does not waste his precious time on the unexceptional! Which speaks quite well of you, my dear.” In his own voice he said, “Why else would he fly me here all expenses paid to tune this pile of sticks of yours unless he…thought well of you. Anything else you need to hear? No? Then please allow me to get back to fulfilling what it seems was his last wish.”

He turned his back to her. She’d been dismissed, obviously, rudely. In the kitchen she lay her head on the table and covered her ears with her hands, but she could still hear the cries of the strings as he tightened them. She startled awake. It was quiet. She pulled herself up and stumbled into the living room. Marty Seigal was easing his instruments into their velvet pouches.

“It’s done,” she said.

“As you see.”

“Mr. Peterov used to ask his clients to play for him after he’d tuned their pianos,” she said.

“You know that story? If I gave my clients the option of playing or paying, they’d pound out some garbage on their perfectly tuned instruments and consider the bill paid. Which is not to say I won’t use that old shtick when I have famous clients of my own someday. Forgive me. Abe did say that you play not altogether badly. Call me a taxi, will you, sweetheart? My next job is at that Methodist Church of yours. No rest for the wicked. You wouldn’t happen to have a breath mint, would you?”

“But that piano was tuned…,” she stopped to think, “just four or five months ago.”

“Not well enough, apparently.”

“But how did he know? How could he possibly have known what the piano at church sounds like?”

“I assumed that’s how you met. He was a sucker for free concerts, always traipsing off to hear this or that amateur, always looking to amazed by some fresh new talent to take under his wing, was our Abe. And always disappointed. I certainly obliged.”

She followed him outside to wait for the taxi. The cold wind pulled at her clothes. “I disappointed him, too,” she confessed.

“Everyone did. Welcome to the club, sister.”

“But not Hannah.” How regally she’d processed down the aisle at Mr. Peterov’s funeral. Margot could almost see her accompanying him to the precipice above the falls with the same dignified grace, proud and terrified as a bride. She said, “It was Hannah, wasn’t it, who walked him to the cliff?”

“Ask yourself. Who would you trust with that little errand? The brave, beautiful, passionate Hannah? Or some…silly little person with artistic pretensions and a school girl crush?”

“Are you talking about me? Or you?”

He caught her face between his hands, leaned in as if to kiss her, then bit her lower lip, hard. She tasted blood. She pushed him away the same moment he released her. She stumbled on the sidewalk and batted him away, though in fact he’d made no attempt to reach for her.

Safely inside with the door locked behind her, she rinsed her mouth with Listerine and lay on the sofa with a cold washcloth pressed against her lower lip. She thought about Mr. Peterov’s daughter, Madeline, what the girl had said to him that time she’d stung him with her genuine, casual cruelty. You only pretend to be the person I want you to be, she’d said. I would much prefer to hate you for who you really are.

When had Mr. Peterov told her that? You’d think she’d remember since she so clearly remembered wondering if he’d ever trust her enough to tell her what, exactly, she’d said to wound him so. And at some point he had. But when? It wasn’t he afternoon her girls came home early. That day he’d told her what she’d wanted to hear—that their generous spirits would come. That polite, we would not know them so well.

How kind, how careful, how polite they’d always been with each other, she and Mr. Peterov. Yet don’t we always love best those who are cruel to us?

Barbara Fischer’s work has been published in The Tampa Review, Nimrod International, Sycamore Review, The Louisville Review, and other journals. She lives and writes in Versailles, KY.