Peter never learned why no one asked about the violin or told him he needed to return it to Standish Middle School. Only later he realized it was probably because it was worth so little to begin with that no one would miss it or care, and anyway, how would anyone have known where to reach him once he’d gone and switched and then re-switched schools. All the same, it assumed a kind of talismanic presence in his life—the gray case with the faded magic marker writing on it and the worn and chipped face of the instrument inside with its peeling brown fingerboard and the fake promise of something more luxuriant or grand in the decorative bull’s-eye gold rings on its pegs and tailpiece. There was just enough room in the case for his shoulder rest, some polish, and a broken cake of rosin that, judging from the graphics on the box, seemed to have been made in a previous century. He slept with it under his bed, first in the room he shared with three other boys all much younger than he was, and later in the basement room that he had to himself in the house of an older couple where the smells of cigarette smoke and burned meat seeped through the floorboards to corrode the lining of his throat and sinuses at all hours of the day, even after they’d gone to sleep and could be heard snoring above, the booming racket of their TV shows having been replaced with the hiss and chatter of the heat vent in the ceiling above his bed. Somewhere toward dawn he’d wake and realize that the stink was gone and that just behind it in the chillier air were the house’s truer smells of sour old timber and paint and plaster, smells to put him in mind of his aunt’s house and make him realize all over again how badly displaced he was. How much he missed her and his old way of life. And every day, with the case bumping his knee to and from school, once he’d found out how to enroll with the orchestra there, it was the one constant beyond which other aspects of his existence tended to fade in and out of focus. The one lucky charm, gift, that no one seemed to have noticed or to want back from him.
His dedication to polishing it at the close of each day’s home practice session, using the square of cloth and little bottle of orange-smelling furniture polish he’d taken from his aunt’s thing-drawer the last day at her house, was not so much a matter of repaying the universe and showing gratitude—though it was that, too—but more like a way of winding back time. A way of stalling or resisting the passage of time anyway. He’d pour a daub of the polish on the bare wood and then lean in close enough to smell it, really working the cloth to make sure polish went evenly across the yellow-brown face of the top plate so it smoothed away chips temporarily and gave the wood a greasy, glossy shine. Then he’d flip it and work the same magic on the back, scrubbing until the cattail stripes in the wood came closer to the wood’s surface and appeared more three-dimensional, alive almost or holographic under the surface.
He supposed he knew before Ms. Newsome told him that she would not be following through with her plans to adopt and have him live with her. Or maybe he was sufficiently numb and accustomed to expecting worst outcomes that nothing really shocked or surprised him anymore, so it was almost like he’d already known. Certainly, there were signs. Missed phone calls. Long, silent stares when they were supposed to be out doing something together or talking about plans. There was the day she somehow forgot about getting him from school and going to the appointments she’d lined up in advance for things that needed to be done together—furniture shopping, meeting with someone in a legal office somewhere, filling out more forms, looking through his aunt’s letters and pictures if he was up to it. Instead, he’d ended up embarrassingly adrift in the school parking lot and then on the swings in the playground area waiting for her, then back beside the parking lot again and inside the glass double doors for a while looking out, still waiting, waiting for her stupid car to show up around the corner, and finally outside again, watching as teachers and secretaries and administrators wound their way out, all waving good night at him, looking quizzically and moving on until one of them seemed to register how late it was, the strangeness of the situation, and asked him with a little more alarm than the others had what he was doing and what had happened to his ride home. No, no, she’s just late. She’s kind of a crazy driver, but she’s always late. Not my mom, no, she’s a … you know. Family friend, he’d said the first few times anyone asked. Former orchestra coach … lady who says she wants to adopt me, was more than he could expect anyone to understand. But when this last one asked, Molly, the blond lady from the front office, in a white lambswool outfit that looked vaguely ceremonial or celebratory in a way he’d noticed earlier the same day, he had no words. Just a lot of juddering tears and blubbering, embarrassed sobbing like he was a much younger kid. “I don’t know,” he said finally, and they went inside together, flipping on lights as they headed for the central office to make a few phone calls and figure out how he’d get to the house where he was then staying.
That time he’d mostly believed all her apologies and remonstrations. They had takeout dinner at her house three days in a row from a Chinese place she loved, and she didn’t once insist on running through his pieces with him, bearing down with her usual furious attention to every little detail and nuance until he felt like no matter how much better he got, he would never understand the first thing about music. Each of those final visits began or ended with her pressing his hands between hers and tugging on them as she said again how sorry she was. “Every kid’s worst nightmare! Jesus. My own for sure. But I was all the way on the other side of town before I remembered. You have to forgive me! You’ll never forgive me, will you?” And each time he’d known that the correct response to this was to say that of course he would. What other choice was there? He felt pulled back from some interior abyss, into a temporary lull, half-convinced again of that little room at the side of her apartment and his future with her there, his new clothes hung in the closet, his own beanbag chair to read in, a routine for them together. But meanwhile, he knew somehow without knowing. It would never happen.
The day she told him, he spent some extra time afterward with the last of his polish from the bottle shining the violin’s back and wishing somehow that the blurred and buried flames in the wood might subsume him in their marbleized-looking stripes. Pull him right down and through to some other way of being and keep him barred in there forever with Mozart and Vivaldi and Beethoven and all the finished stories of their lives. And then he noticed how the scroll of the violin was a dry gray-brown with ugly chips in the varnish that he’d never fed or cared for as he’d done with the face and back and sides daily, so he spent some time with those too, working the cloth in and around the eyes and the fluting in the wood, all to no avail. That part of the instrument was so poorly made or worn out or both there was no shining it up. But you’ll be better off, I’m sure. It’s just not something I’m able to do right now, I’m afraid, she’d said. One day you’ll understand. And I’m not going to be out of touch with you. Not for a second! Ever! I just … there are too many reasons to go into. Please promise you’ll try to understand. He did understand. He told her he did. And then he got out of the car and walked up the street to the house where he was staying. The key under the flowerpot. The stink of burned meat and cigarettes. No one home for a few minutes at least. He slid the violin out from under the bed and flipped it around in his hands wondering how it could possibly be his still or how it might matter that it was, why no one cared, put it back in its case, and then got it out again. Played for a while. The minuet for his lesson. The clock piece for orchestra. It all sounded terrible, every note. Why bother? The worst part, he decided, and the part that would hurt the longest was that she’d been lying to him or lying to herself the whole time. Or she’d been very confused. But in that case, she should have said so. She wasn’t a bad person; she just should have known enough to tell him the truth because … He didn’t know how to complete this thought.
That violin was also probably the way she identified him on his way up Cumberland Avenue more than a year later, headed home from counseling on foot because he’d forgotten his bus fare again. The case bonked his leg as he went, as always, a new rattle and squeak in its handle lately from all the days he’d spent swinging it alongside himself wherever he went. He heard her honking and caught a glimpse of her through the passenger’s side window hunched toward him and waving as she sped past before he could fully identify her—the peeling bumper stickers, a newer purple one he didn’t recognize and couldn’t see well enough to read. She veered jerkingly out of traffic, turn signal flashing after the fact and staining the snowbank red as she bumped over it and slid to a stop, door flung open. “Hey!” she yelled. “Peter Maguire! How the heck are you?”
How long since the first day he rode away with her in that car? How were they even the same two people … or were they? He was settled now, or settled enough anyway, in a house that stayed warm most of the time and didn’t threaten to asphyxiate him, his own tiny room and a bathroom he shared with a pair of quiet older kids, siblings; a childless couple who seemingly weren’t in the foster care racket to save on heat and grocery bills and taxes. As far as he could tell, they weren’t church people, though in many ways they acted like it, adhering to strict codes and ideals of generosity and selflessness that seemed based in principles that were probably good enough but remained largely unknowable to him. They had a vision. As near as he could tell, it was about holey tie-dyed shirts, softish hippy rock, and very profitable real estate management. As parents they tended to say yes to pretty much whatever any of the kids wanted permission for, though only after a good, contemplative discussion about it, peppered with questions like, And how do you feel that meets your long-term goals? … How do you feel we should respond? … Why?
“Ms. Newsome,” he said. Out of nowhere he remembered a moment from one of the few times he’d stayed at her house during that muddled period of living nowhere and not knowing his future: the oddness of watching her jab color onto her cheeks in the front hall mirror and then go more judiciously around her mouth with lipstick, batting her eyes at her own reflection and beaming in a way that made her look like a doll—and then the strangeness of realizing she’d been looking at him as he watched her do all of this. Ready? she’d asked then. Away we go. It was like they’d momentarily become their reflections and entered some alternate reality wherein he was more like a peer or friend, and then just as quickly that reality was gone.
“Hey,” she said again, still waving as she approached. “I saw you up the road, and I thought, no way! What are the odds? Couldn’t be you … because I was just this very instant thinking about you and wondering how to get ahold of you. You’re out at South High now, right? Isn’t that where you landed?” As she spoke, she’d closed the distance between them so they were face to face on the sidewalk, breath misting in the air between them and cars rushing by, a chilly drizzle brushing his face and sticking in the hair that spilled from under her hat. “And I was thinking I needed to track you down because I wanted to tell you that I’ve just now learned, like the other day, that I’m going to be taking over out there for a while coaching the strings! Your Mrs. W is pregnant, as you probably noticed—or maybe you didn’t notice, I don’t know—so … well, you know.” She did her wrist winding thing. “Maternity leave, blah blah. And that’s where I come into the picture. So we’ll be working together again! And, and, I had some ideas for afterward, once she’s back, which they really liked—surprise, surprise—doing a straight strings-only ensemble out there, like a Wednesday/Friday deal. And I wanted to get you involved! If you want. If you … you’re still playing obviously.” Here she gestured at his case. “My god, you haven’t changed a lick,” she said before he could answer, though he knew this could not be true, and that without the case, she might well have driven right by him. He’d grown several inches, gained enough weight so most of his clothes no longer fit, needed to shave every third or fourth day, and his cheeks lately were mottled with razor-burned zits. She was being kind, or maybe this was an indirect way of commenting on or forestalling any comment from him regarding how much she’d changed, though the changes in her were harder to quantify. Leaner. More wrinkles through her cheeks. Hair a little lighter and shorter, puffier anyway, what he could see of it, though that could be the mist. Everything about her seemed to have faded, except for her eyes. The same intensity and querulous attentiveness there as always. And a much stronger smell of cigarettes around her. Wafting through her clothes like an elemental part of who she was. “Let me give you a lift, and we can talk about it. Man, oh man, but it is so good to see you. Come on!”
So he slip-slopped after her over the snowbank to her car.
Getting in, it occurred to him he’d hardly said a word in reply to any of her questions or comments. Only nodded his head. Said sure once or twice, and smiled until he felt his temples aching. What did counselor Jan always say about this kind of reactive response to situations? Advocate for yourself. Self-advocacy. That was the word. One of them anyway. But how? And what more was he supposed to say or advocate for? The ashtray in her car was stuck open and jammed with cigarette butts—no surprise—and the upholstery reeked of stale smoke, which she mitigated by cracking open all the windows as she signaled and swung back out into traffic. So she was done pretending to herself or to anyone else that she didn’t smoke. But she leaned beside the steering wheel exactly as he remembered, alternating between watching him and looking ahead at the traffic, following traffic signals, veering suddenly one way and another out of danger.
“Where are we headed anyway?” he asked.
“Your house! But you haven’t told me—where do you live now?”
He gave her the address and watched as she nodded to herself, calculating a route.
“And so how’s life? How’s the playing going?” Her eyes were on him for a beat, then back on the road. “You’re doing all right with it? Lessons, orchestra, driving the girls crazy, moving through the Suzuki books or whatever it is you’re working on?”
He could lie to her like she’d lied to him all that time he supposed. But what would be the point? “I’m doing all right,” he said. What could he say? How to describe it exactly? “Honestly, I’d say I probably sound about as terrible as the last time you heard me.” He remembered the stuffy music room at his old school, sitting there with her and the black marks on the page, the bow slipping in his hand and making his thumb ache, his forefinger going numb, his wrist always too stiff, too locked up like an extension of something frozen and deficient in his soul. Her tapping and clapping out and singing rhythms for him over and over. The unsparing brilliance of the overhead light exerting some alchemical force on his brain to squeeze all thought into the pressure of his fingertips on the fingerboard and the ache through the backs of his knuckles; and still the same old agonizing inaccuracies of sound and pitch, the graininess of the sound so close and awful and shrieky under his ear. Had he gotten any better since then? Probably a little. Not much. “I think it probably isn’t really my bag so much after all, music, but … but,” here he shrugged, “I enjoy it. A lot. It’s a good thing in my life. A force for good.”
This was the voice of his “stepdad,” he supposed, Mark; the laissez-faire I’m-cool-you’re-cool tone Mark tended to take with just about anything, no matter how he actually felt. His sandals and ragged T-shirts all seasons of the year—his been-to-Nam-and-survived-it stare and smile. You can’t touch me. Peter was trying, anyway, to cop a little of that attitude in his tone and delivery, though he knew too how ridiculous it sounded on him and how short he was falling.
“Anyway,” he said, “no one wants to say how much you suck in a school orchestra, Ms. Newsome, right? As you well know.”
“Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,” she said in a lowered fake-husky tone to mock the way he was mimicking his stepdad. Shifted gears and waved a hand like dispelling a bad odor. “Whatever. It’s that piece-of-shit violin you’re playing, if you want to know. Probably. If I had to guess. That thing … I can’t believe you still have it!” She shook her head. Glanced at where it sat between his knees. “Might as well be trying to make fondue out of horseshit.”
“It’s not that bad.”
“Not that bad.”
“So get me a better one,” he said.
She laughed. “I might just do that. You know, who’s to say. I came into a little money recently.” She nodded. There was more to this, and she would eventually share, otherwise she wouldn’t have mentioned it. But he wasn’t going to pry. Again, she nodded, and for a moment, he worried she’d go into it right then—spill whatever had happened and whatever ways she still felt bad or guilty for having gotten too caught up with him too fast and for letting him down. If that happened … oh boy. “Maybe I’ll do just that,” she said. “But you gotta promise me first you’ll be in my string quartet. Deal?”
“I would do that anyway. But sure. Deal.”
***
That Peter should find direction in his life and a new pathway forward at the violin shop in downtown Portland, just over a week after she saw him on the street and offered him a ride home, was never Dara Newsome’s plan. The shop owner was a guy she knew only since moving back to Portland—a Boston-area transplant too—so he was unencumbered of any family associations or connections going back to her childhood. He was heavyset, mid-forties, with a mustache and wire-rimmed glasses, and had thickly calloused thumbs that flexed backward far enough to appear bent in the wrong direction, a detail she always seemed to forget about until she saw him again and watched him handling instruments, at which point she also recalled more generally how much she liked him and liked being in his shop, in his company, watching him work. He had a tendency to pause or stutter over his words beginning and ending sentences in such a way to draw you in and make you feel more inclined to listen and to trust what he said next. Too, she liked how she imagined herself to appear in his eyes, busy, industrious, full of stories about her wacky students and showing up semiannually with bundles of garbage bows, all sizes and types, rented out by the district for abuse and neglect from the kids who played on them: rehair and repair—the ones that were worth the cost of parts and labor anyway. The usual, she’d say. And then the exchange of snark and commentary that would follow, leaning with him over the leather-topped counter as they continued talking shop—music, instruments, teaching, people they knew in common—the light fading in the windows behind her and the various stringed instruments he had for sale on display glowing on their shelves as if from some internal source of illumination. Always it felt to her there was an invitation to linger. Hang. Talk a while.
“So he needs a better-quality instrument than this thing,” she said the day she brought Peter. She gestured at the violin in Peter’s case with its worn-out strips of colored tape and dots painted on the fingerboard to help him find pitches. Poor old thing, she thought, feeling momentarily nostalgic or regretful on its behalf. What would come of it next? How many days had it endured being slung alongside him everywhere through heat and rain and snow? To what end? “Shouldn’t be too hard,” she concluded. “Right?”
The look of wonderstruck reverence on Peter’s face entering and climbing the stairs together and seeing all those instruments arrayed around the high, triangular room should have been her first clue. His mouth had slid open as his eyes raced to take in the whole picture—all the violins hanging shoulder-out on racks, the posters featuring musical events, the smells of old wood and violin varnish, the rich quiet of all that withheld sound. Now, still standing beside her waiting for whatever was next, he seemed focused in a way she was unused to seeing him—not twitching or scratching or biting at the ends of his fingers. If he was experiencing any twinges of the sentimental nostalgia she felt at seeing his old violin as part of a horse-trading deal and about to vanish from his life, it didn’t show.
“Not too hard at all, no,” the shop owner agreed. He shook his head. “No offense but …”
“And I’m paying,” Dara added.
The owner’s eyebrows went up. Light flashed over his glasses, erasing his eyes momentarily. He grinned. “Ah. S-s-s-so, the sky’s the limit?”
“No. More like, I expect a totally killer deal, or I won’t be back again.”
“To be sure. But that’s a given. Who do you think I am?”
She’d had one goal in mind: making good on her failure to have provided for Peter. Putting something a little more pleasing under his chin and thereby making it more likely that he might keep playing, at least for a while, or that he’d find more enjoyment in it for as long as he wanted to keep playing. She didn’t want to agree with his self-assessment of having made no progress musically since their time together, but it was clear too that day, as he tried one violin and another and another, that his tendency to play everything in the same monotone, full-bore manner, to grab onto the violin and bear down on it with this odd unmusical intensity—like he meant to break the instrument open or force his way through it to some solution beyond music—was pretty much unchanged. He had a little more dexterity and grace. A little more ease. He knew enough to pretend to lighten his attack and add some dynamics, but only temporarily as a kind of grudging reprieve from his default setting of wide, hard, full-volume bowing. It was going to be tough having him in an ensemble. Whatever, though. It was the least she could do for him.
What she hadn’t expected any more than his seeming awe of the shop in general was his interest in what made one violin different or better constructed or more expensive than another, and with that, his persistent line of questioning about the history of each instrument and about the violin in general. Until she remembered his obsessive fascination with the past. With music history. How had she forgotten? All his recitations of those told and retold half-true factoids and stories about the dead composers, stories that had been burnished into representative “truth” long ago and that could be excavated only and never extended. Of course, he’d want the history of a violin. The history of violins more generally.
“I’ve changed my mind,” she said after a while of watching this—Greg bringing out instrument after instrument and indulging Peter with stories, some probably true, some made up or embellished. This one came from an old guy whose wife played it, like, in high school—sometime in the 1930s, I want to say?—and then he kept it under the bed for decades after she died, getting eaten up by bugs and mice—the fiddle, not the wife—until he died and one of his kids brought it in. She’s actually a voice actor on The Simpsons, the daughter who brought it in. I forget which character. Anyway. I had it around until just a few months ago when I decided to dust it off. String it up. New post and bar. I don’t know if you believe it or not, but word is she—the old lady—she was the original concert master for one of the local orchestras here or around Augusta, and I think, gotta check my facts though, one of the first women to sit on the Maine Supreme Court. Sounds quite decent for having been out of commission all those years … Or, This one’s from an old church attic. Whole thing—well, most of the church—burned down, but this came out unscathed. No idea why or what the deal was. If it was fate or if someone left it there after the fact. Who knows …
Dara was leaning at the counter. The light had gone from the windows, and she was uncomfortably warm in her red fur-collared coat and also anxious for a cigarette. But as always there was seemingly nowhere to hang her coat and no real indication yet that they’d stay long enough that taking it off was warranted. She slid one arm free with a jangle of bracelets anyway and then pulled the whole thing off and hung it over the chair beside her, aware of the static in her hair and the smell of cigarettes intensifying around her. Pushed up the sleeves on her sweater and straightened her hair. And when she was sure she had their full attention, she nodded.
“I changed my mind,” she said. “I’m not paying.”
She watched Peter’s face as she said this. The sudden flush, eyes popping and going glassy. The blankness and humility overlying fury in such a way that the word aghast came to mind. The only way to describe him. That or indignation. Righteous indignation. How many times had she surprised him, changed up on him, promised him one thing and given him another? And then the beginnings of his signature resignation. More bad news. “The fuck,” he began.
She shook her head and held up a finger. “I’m paying half. Up to five hundred dollars only. Peter will pay off the other half by working for you.” She pointed at Greg. “You put him to work a few hours a day after school doing whatever. Make him sweep and schlep the garbage. Teach him how to rehair bows and do setup. Whatever. Ring up the customers. You do one-fifty on his trade-in, like we said, I cover the five hundred, and the rest is to be worked off.” She looked back and forth between the two of them. “I think it’s a pretty sweet deal really.” She knew from previous conversations that the shop owner had left a difficult family situation and was mostly estranged from his high school–aged children still living near Boston. He had no help in the shop and was purposely keeping his life as emotionally uncomplicated as possible. “This kid will work his butt off for you. Am I right about that, Peter?”
Peter quirked his eyebrows together and tilted his head and seemed to be considering his options. “Well,” he said. “Sure, but ...” But of course, as always, there were no other options.
It became part of her routine thereafter—driving by after work and pausing in the intersection outside the flatiron building long enough to look up and see if he was in. See if she could make out his shadow among the other shadows cast to the wall or the ceiling in one of the back rooms, working away, or in front talking with people, being part of that world. Finally belonging somewhere at least a few hours a day. And just as often, whether she saw evidence of him inside or not, she’d circle the block and circle again until she found parking, and then she’d head upstairs with a bag of donuts from downstairs and coffees for everyone. ◆
Homepage Image: Edward Hicks, The Peaceable Kingdom, c. 1830–32, The Metropolitan Museum of Art; gift of Edgar William, and Bernice Chrysler Garbisch, 1970, from Gulf Coast Winter/Spring 2021, Issue 33.1
