The Gravedigger’s Daughter

Naively Hazel asked, “Who is him?”

“My God-damned father, who else! It’s three hundred thousand dollars the ”anonymous benefactor‘ has given the Conservatory, it has to be him. He must have heard Zack play in Vermont.“ Gallagher was looking fierce yet helpless, a man cut off at the knees. His voice pitched to a sudden pleading softness. ”Hazel, I can’t tolerate Thaddeus interfering in my life any more than he has.“

Hazel listened sympathetically. She did not point out to Gallagher It isn’t your life, it’s Zack’s life.

It was a mother’s predatory instinct. Seeing how her son’s skin glowed with sexual heat. His eyes that guiltily eluded her gaze, hot and yearning.

Restless! Too many hours at the piano. Trapped inside a cage of shimmering notes.

He went away from the house, and returned late. Midnight, and later. One night he didn’t return until 4 A.M. (Hazel lay awake, and waiting. Very still not wanting to disturb Gallagher.) Yet another night in September, with only three weeks before the San Francisco Competition, he stayed away until dawn returning at that time stumbling and disheveled, defiant, smelling of beer.

“Zack! Good morning.”

Hazel would not rebuke the boy. She would speak only lightly, without reproach. She knew, if she even touched him he would recoil from her. In sudden fury he might slap at her, strike her with his fists as he’d done as a little boy. Hate you Momma! God damn I hate hate hate you. She must not stare too hungrily at his young unshaven face. Must not accuse him of wishing to ruin their lives any more than she would plead with him or beg or weep for that was never Hazel Jones’s way smiling as she opened the back door for him to enter, allowing him to brush roughly past her beneath the still-burning light breathing harshly through his mouth as if he’d been ru

He would sleep through much of the day. Hazel would not disturb him. By late afternoon he would return to the piano renewed, and practice until late evening. And Gallagher, listening in the hallway would shake his head in wonder.

She knew!

(He had to wonder what she’d meant in her playful teasing way Mr. Jones is dead now. If she meant that his father was dead? His long-ago father who had shouted into his face and shaken him like a rag doll and beat him and threw him against the wall yet who had hugged him too, and kissed him wetly on the edge of his mouth leaving a spittle-taste of tobacco behind. Hey: love ya! As his fingers executed the rapidly and vividly descending treble notes in the final ecstatic bars of the Beethoven sonata he had to wonder.)

Strange: that Chet Gallagher was losing interest in his career. Had lost interest in his career. Following the abrupt and shameful ending of the Vietnam War the most protracted and shameful war in American history strange, ironic how bored he’d become almost overnight with public life, politics. Even as his career as Chet Gallagher soared. (The newspaper column, 350 words Gallagher boasted he could type out in his sleep with his left hand, was nationally reprinted and admired. The TV interview program he’d been asked to host in 1973 was steadily gaining an audience. Also in 1973 a collection of prose pieces he’d cobbled together whimsically titled Some Pieces of (My) Mind became an unexpected bestseller in paperback.)

Losing interest in Chet Gallagher in proportion as he was becoming obsessed with Zacharias Jones. For here was a gifted young pianist, a truly gifted young pianist Gallagher had personally discovered up in Malin Head Bay one memorable winter night…

“It happens, he’s my adopted son. My son.”

Gallagher had to concede this was a phenomenon his own father had been denied. For he’d let his father down. He had failed as a classical pianist. Maybe to spite his father he’d failed but in any case he had failed, all that was finished. He played jazz piano only occasionally now, local gigs, fund-raisers and benefits and sometimes on TV, but not serious jazz any longer, Gallagher had become so Caucasian bourgeois, damned boring middle-aged husband and father, and happy. There’s no edge to happy. There’s no jazz-cool to happy. So devoted to his little family he’d even given up smoking.

How strange life was! He would manage the boy’s career for the responsibility lay with Chet Gallagher.

Not to push the boy of course. From the first he’d cautioned the boy’s mother.

“We’ll take it slow. One thing at a time. Must be realistic. Even André Watts, after his early fantastic success, burned out. And so did Van Cliburn. Temporarily.” Gallagher was not seriously expecting Zack to win a top prize at the San Francisco Competition: for one so young and relatively inexperienced, it was a remarkable honor simply to have qualified. The judges were of various ethnic backgrounds and would not favor a young Caucasian-American male. (Or would they? Zack was playing the “Appassionata.”) Zack would be competing with prize-wi

Her name was Frieda Bruegger.

She was a student at the Conservatory, a cellist. Beautiful blunt-featured girl with almond-shaped eyes, thick dark bristling hair exploding about her head, a young animated very shapely body. Her voice was a penetrating soprano: “Mrs. Gallagher! Hello.”

Hazel was smiling and fully in control but staring rather vacantly at the girl Zack had brought home, whom he had introduced to her as a friend he was preparing a sonata with, for an upcoming recital at the Conservatory. Hazel was admiring the beautiful gleaming cello in the girl’s hands, she would ask questions about the instrument, but something was wrong, why were the young people looking at her so oddly? She realized she hadn’t replied. Numbly her lips moved, “Hello, Frieda.”

Frieda! The name was so strangely resonant to her, she felt almost faint.

Realizing that she’d seen this girl before, at the music school. She had even seen the girl with Zack though the two had not been alone together. Following a recital, among a group of young musicians.

It’s her. She’s the one. He is sleeping with her. Is he?

So without warning Zack had brought the girl home with him, Hazel wasn’t prepared. She’d expected him to be secretive, circumspect. Yet here the girl stood before Hazel calling her “Mrs. Gallagher.” Really she was a young woman, twenty years old. Beside her Zack was still a boy, though taller than she was by several inches. And awkward in his body, uncertain. In personal relations Zack had not the zestful agility and grace he had at the piano. He was swiping at his nose now, nervously. He would not look at Hazel, not fully. He was excited, defiant. Gallagher had told Hazel it was the most natural thing in the world for a boy Zack’s age to have a girlfriend, in fact girlfriends, you had to assume that kids were sexually active today as they generally had not been in Hazel’s generation, hell it was fine as long as they took precautions and he’d had a talk (how awkward, Hazel could only imagine) with Zack so there was nothing to worry about.

And so Zack had brought home this bluntly beautiful girl with almond-shaped eyes and rather heavy dark unplucked eyebrows and the most astonishing explosive hair: Frieda Bruegger.

Informing Hazel that they would be performing a Fauré sonata for cello and piano at a Conservatory recital in mid-December. This was the first Hazel had heard of it and did not know how to respond. (What about the “Appassionata”? What about San Francisco, in eight days?) But Hazel’s opinion was not being sought. The matter had been decided.