Don Juan Triumphant

The gardener has brought in an armload of cut chrysanthemums, September-yellow in the late afternoon sun. You aren't supposed to cut flowers at the end of the day, I wanted to tell him, but held my tongue. He's an Arab, a man in his forties with two young sons who help him with his work. My young Flemish man left to go back to his country village and marry. The fountain keeps cleared of its sludge now; the leaves are raked, the beds turned for the winter's sleep, to awake refreshed for the spring planting.

Mahmoud and the boys talk softly in their language as he shows them plants, runs their hands through the earth to feel its fertility, helps them fill the watering cans. Somewhere in one of the faubourgs he probably has a silent wife. Erik could understand them, I think. He could follow their soft melodic tones, and what he heard would probably make him smile.

Philippe came this morning to retrieve his cello, the old one from his student days. The one he plays at home has already been shipped to London, but he misses the strings under his fingers like he must have missed Anki in their months of separate beds. So he telegraphed, and I knew he wanted to see me, because otherwise he would simply have had it shipped to Grobbendonk by train.

I went to the station to meet him, as if he were still a student coming home for the holiday. He wasn't hard to spot, tall and black-hatted above the crowd, with a pinched, worried expression. He used to have that tight face as a child, when someone had called him "longshanks" at school, or if he couldn't complete a drawing of the little tubes inside some plant or little creature to his satisfaction. I had not seen him since that time in Paris, when Jacques and I lay in Jacques' hotel, my own pristine bed in the ladies' hostel prim and smoothly unoccupied. So here Philippe was, wanting to talk. Very well. So did I.

When we got to the house, he almost twisted his head to look around at the garden. The trimmed boxwoods made a neat frame around the fountain's little stone plaza, where tiny liquid mirrors of water sparkled down the sides.

"I always wanted a Triton there," he said at last. "So did Father, but you insisted on the Venus with the seashell."

"You hated it and said, 'Who wants to look at a girl with no clothes on?'"

He laughed then, and some of the dragging stiffness in our conversation since the railway station lifted. "Triton would have had a spear. I imagined climbing up at night to steal it. But a twelve year old boy doesn't want a seashell." He turned to me, face sober. "You've done wonders with it, Mother."

"Not I," I said. "Mahmoud, it's his doing, he and the boys."

"They don't live here," he said, although it was a question.

"No, they're over in the Arab quarter. He takes the tram. Jacques helped me find him."

He stiffened at Jacques' mention, but said nothing. I clenched a little inside too, expecting an outburst or remonstrance. "I won't have him disgracing you in any way," he finally said.

This was the boy who with nervous resolution had asked Raoul for permission to marry the glassmaker's daughter when she was in the family way. "He's a good man, Philippe. He won't disgrace me. We are discreet and know how to behave in public. But I won't mince words with you. He is my friend, and will continue to be." More softly, I said, "I miss your father too, Philippe."

"I come here and look at all this, and it's almost cruel to say, but in some respect I preferred it all weeded and overgrown. When it's all cared for like this, it's as if Father's still here, and its beauty mocks me with his absence. He picked one of the bright yellow flowers and twirled it around a few times. "Isn't it a bit morbid, Mother, to plant so many of a flower that one normally reserves for graves?"

"I don't think so."

"But then again," he went on, "you never did do things much like other people."

I looked at him, my tall son, soon to go abroad, and a small pain of missing him went through me. "No, Philippe, not much of my life has been like other people's." He shrugged, still uncomfortable, and I put my hand on his sleeve. "Look. let's go stir up some dust in the attic and fetch that cello."

But it wasn't in the attic – very little was, really. No generations of de Chagnys had lived in this house, to fill the attic with old relics. Louvel's old Minerva bicycle hadn't gone with him to America, so it stood covered with a tarpaulin in a corner, and next to it sat my battered trunk from theater days in Paris. Alongside it sat the small wooden trunk that I had brought from Sweden so long ago, resting half-open. Some little girls had put several dolls to bed in it, then left them lying forgotten.

In that trunk had rattled my other wool dress and a few books when the Valeriuses and Papa and I came to Paris and saw the Seine for the first time. A ragged one-armed soldier, recently paroled from the Prussians, wanted us to pay him to carry it. Professor Valerius said no at first, but then gave him a franc anyway. So the soldier went and sat in the sun outside the train station, lighting his cigarette with only one hand, and I carried the little wooden trunk myself.

"Let's try the east guest room," I suggested to Philippe. There it was, propped in its cracked black case, set behind a Japanese screen.

He carried it to the parlor and unpacked it lovingly, running his hand around its glossy maple waist. Rosined and tuned, the low tones flew from the instrument lying docile beneath his fingers, and I left him occupied with his music. I had walked up the stairs of our home thousands of times, but that climb to my room was the longest I'd ever made, because I bore the full weight of what I had to do.

He was still playing when I came back. I carried the leather portfolio and a few loose sheets on top. Erik had inserted individual pages in between the bound ones, as new ideas had come to him, and I had to grip the whole notebook carefully to keep them from falling out, but it was difficult to do for the trembling of my hands. From the middle of the volume I had pulled out some of the second act, a passage that Erik had labeled adagio con amore. Its strong and plaintive cello line suggested the longing of Don Juan and his love for each other, as she languished imprisoned in her father's castle tower. It was such an afterthought that Erik had added. Philippe was entirely wrapped in his playing now, and noticed nothing – not my return to the parlor, not my sigh of fear and resignation, not when I rested his father's book on a side table.

After an hour or so he stopped, and looked up in surprise. "You're still here, Mother? You haven't sat and actually listened for years."

"I always listened. My hands were just busy elsewhere. Despite those old strings and an old bow, you make it sing. I could almost hear a voice beneath it."

He smiled, pleased, and in the man I saw the fresh-faced boy flushed from running home from school, hastening to unpack his cello so he could practice before his lesson. During the school day his fingers would twitch in the fingering pattern he was trying to master, and the schoolmaster would smack his hand with a stick. At that memory the anger came up red and hot that my son's hand, so nimble in fretting, so skilled as he moved inside and through living human flesh, could have been hurt in that way. And now, would I treat him any better?

"I have some music I'd like you to look at," I said as he applied a bit more rosin to his bow. "It's very old, and I think you'll find it a challenge."

He looked up, interested. "You haven't haunted the music shops looking for challenges for me in many years now."

"This didn't come from a shop."

"An original composition, then? Whose?"

"My old music teacher in Paris, from long ago." I picked up the loose sheets, and hoped Philippe could read the scrawled red notes which danced like fleas across the page.

"You've never spoken of him. In fact, you've said very little of those days at all."

"Hard to imagine your mother as a singer in the Paris Opera?" My hand started to shake again. So little of this part of my life had I shared with my children.

"I always wondered why you had no keepsakes, no programs, no posters."

"I lived in a small apartment … there wasn't much room," I stammered, but he didn't seem to be listening. Looming over me, he held out his hand for the music, and I gave it over mutely.

"What did he teach you, singing? I thought you said you went to the National Conservatory."

"We were expected to keep up private lessons."

"Ah, I see. So he composed, too?"

"He did."

Philippe looked at me with those strange eyes, alternately black in the shadows, then flashing gold when caught by the late afternoon sun. When he took the pages I saw that his hands were shaking as well. "You've kept it all these years?" Then he seemed to forget his question as he scanned the sheet, sinking beside me on the sofa. "All these notes in the margins, what do they mean?"

"I don't know. I thought they were fragments of poems."

"Love poems, by the look of them." He grew a little red, and I wondered what he'd read. I hadn't been able to make out all of Erik's fragmentary bits. "Did he write this for you?"

Had he? It was one of the inserted pages, not originally bound in the book. "Perhaps," I answered, afraid to look at Philippe's face. "Is there a date on the page?"

He turned it over, looked at the second page. "None that I can see. But the composition looks very interesting. I should like to try it."

"Philippe," I started, then put my hand on the page. "He had begun it long before I … studied with him. Then, he finished it after he and I began working together."

"Tell me more about him," he said, and I shook a little at the tone of command beneath his soft words. "Would I recognize his music?"

"No," I answered. "He never published it. It was never performed anywhere."

"A strange choice for a teacher," he remarked, still holding the sheets but studying me more closely than them.

"He was a friend," I whispered with a dry, choked throat. "He was the Moses that struck the dry rock with his staff, and my voice poured out like water. It didn't matter if he were famous or not."

"A friend …" he mused. "Monsieur Peillard is also 'a friend,' is he not?" He set the music down and began to pace, distracted from the conversation and the thrill of a new piece of music to master. "Mother, what are his intentions towards you? I will tell you forthrightly, this would disturb me far less if I knew he intended to marry you, even with the unseemly matter of the timing, so close to Father's death."

"Perfect timing isn't always possible in love."

"Now it's love?" he said, stopping by the piano, stiff and angry.

"Certainly you know that from your own experience," I said, the anger creeping up from under my collar and flushing my own face.

"What do you mean by that?" he sputtered.

"Johannes wasn't a six-months' child, even though he was small."

"You're trying to distract me."

"Not at all. You brought up my friendship with Monsieur Peillard, not I. Although if you wish to discuss it, I'm more than amenable."

"Are you indeed?"

"No need for sarcasm, Philippe. I will tell you outright. Monsieur Peillard has indeed asked me to marry him."

"There, you are thinking of marrying!"

"I didn't say no, but I didn't say yes either."

"Oh, so you play with him, then?" He was red now, really angry.

"I play with no one, neither him nor you! He understands that I am not ready to marry again." At least, I hoped this was true. "But I like him, and I will spend time with him, be it proper or not. Whether you approve or not. Not that your permission is required anyway."

"What makes you cast aside all restraint and act with such abandon? What has come over you?"

I stood, and we circled each other like cats in the alley, ready to spring on each other at any second. "Go ahead, ask me more questions. Perhaps you will find that this 'abandon,' as you call it, is nothing new."

His face collapsed, suddenly paling. "Mother," he said softly. "Please."

"You know Raoul's and my anniversary, and the date of your own birth. You weren't a six- or seven-months' child either. So don't you dare to condemn me."

"No," he said, hushed now. "I don't mean to."

The anger fell away from me, and I suddenly had the deep and cutting urge to weep. "Jacques is a good man, Philippe. He loves me. I am the one who refuses to rush headlong into marriage."

"Do you love him, Mother?"

The thought of Jacques covering me came unbidden in a rush of a hot whiskered face, soft full mouth, pliant softness over hard muscle, and then in the coolness of afterward, his sharp intelligent eyes behind their twinkling spectacles. He had made no charge for me, no fierce and fatal last stand, no mad rush into oblivion. But then again he wasn't a young man, as Raoul had been. Would Jacques have fought Erik for me? It was a question that shook me to the core, and so I said, "I don't know."

Philippe had pulled himself together. He smoothed his black hair back. "And your music teacher, Mother. What was his name, by the way?"

"Erik."

"Just Erik?"

Once Raoul had encouraged me to try skiing, on a holiday in Switzerland. The feeling of rushing down the slope was terrifying, and for a few seconds it seemed as if I would fly off the face of the earth. Then I collided with the snow, and fell tangled up in a web of skirt and scarf and ski, snow filling my eyes and mouth. Never again, because I could not bear the sensation of spinning out of control. Now it seemed as though I were on that steep long run again, speeding without limit into some unknown collision.

"Yes. Just Erik. He was old when I knew him. He said he was fifty or thereabouts, but he may have been older. Not that that seems so ancient anymore," but the joke was lost on Philippe.

"No surname, or you don't wish to tell me?" He continued to pace again while I sat. Anything could happen now, and I didn't want to faint.

The shame of not knowing Erik's last name went through me like a shot. "Why, are you thinking of searching him out? He's dead. He died before you were born."

Philippe frowned, in him not a sign of displeasure but rather one of analysis. "You said you'd known Father since late childhood, from when you first came to France, but then you'd lost track of each other when Father went to sea, and after Grandfather Daaé died. Then you found each other again at the Opera, when Father happened to hear you singing that one night. But if this man, this Erik was your teacher, then you must have been studying under him at this time, or somewhere near to it."

I swallowed. It wasn't necessary to say anything. It was all written on my face.

"Let me guess," he said slowly, as if thinking out loud, although from his eyes it was clear that he'd already come to a conclusion. "He was tall, and thin, and his hair was dark."

"What was left of it, that wasn't greyed," I answered.

"Did Father know about him? About this?"

The lie bubbled up and sat on my tongue, waiting to be spit out. Raoul had left no journals, no letters mentioning Erik of which I knew. I had pored over Erik's manuscript, and while whole passages were impervious to me, I didn't think they made any reference to Raoul. To admit even this partial truth invited the unveiling of all of it – the whole mad, sad tale. What did I fear worse, Philippe's pity or his condemnation? I watched Philippe pace back and forth. The tiny vibrations from his steps made sparkles of dust fly up from the piano cloth.

Pity. It would be worse to have his pity, and anyway, Erik deserved it, not I. Then this book came to mind, sitting on my writing desk upstairs in full view. If I lie, I thought, my next act should be to throw this book into the fire, because Philippe or Martine will find it otherwise. I will have died with a lie on my tongue, and a lie will be graven into Philippe's heart. And if I burn this book, then some part of me will have died, even though my own heart would still continue to beat. "Yes," I answered. "I carried you under my heart when your father and I married. I told him that he didn't have to, but he took me anyway."

"My father was a good man," he said after a long moment.

"My teacher was your father."

"On the contrary," he said, slamming the sheet music down atop the piano. His eyes were like gold ice. "My father was Raoul de Chagny. A father is more than the body that begets. Any race horse set out to stud can do that. Many girls fall, and you were young, in a city with more cliffs over which to topple than the English coast of Dover. I see it in my own practice, and have gone to childbeds that come a few months after the marriage, or where there is no marriage at all."

"Your father always treated you as his own."

He picked the sheets of music up, and I feared he would tear them to shreds. "This man had a wife, no doubt, and abandoned you. How could you keep this, as memory of your shame?"

"No," I said, taking the music from his hand, afraid that he would destroy it. "It wasn't like that at all. He wasn't married, never had been. He loved me and wanted to marry me. I didn't love him in the same way. Then he became sick, and died."

At the word "sick," Philippe looked over at me intently, and a wave of despair went through me. I had worried so much about Philippe's scorn, or pity, or anger. I should have known that more powerful than any of those, rivaled only by his love for Anki, was his scientific curiosity. Now it was alert as a hound on the scent.

"How did he die?" He sat across from me, elbows on his knees, the way I imagined he sat in his study interviewing a patient.

"He had a wound in his thigh, and it corrupted." Philippe said nothing, just sat there with an expression that said, Go on, I can wait all evening and into the next morning if necessary. There was no way out of this but through. "It was a gunshot wound. Your father shot him."

Astonished, Philippe jerked backwards, and then raggedly laughed. "Father was the dueling type? Now that I would have never in an age expected." He leaned over, fierce and intent. "I hope it was to salvage your honor. But from your expression, I'd say that wasn't the case."

"He had come into your father's rooms late at night. I didn't know about it until your father told me shortly before he died. He never knew whom he had shot, but I knew."

"That man broke into Father's home? Whatever for?"

"I don't know. Your father had offered to send me to a convent on the Dordogne, to take me out of Paris, and he overheard. I don't think Erik went that night to do mischief. I think he was bitter, and sad."

"What man goes into another man's chamber unbidden at night, except to do mischief? Your heart is too kind, and I do not believe you know men. He's lucky he didn't live," Philippe said, his hands clenched in fists now, "or I should kill him myself. I would have killed him that night, had I the chance."

"You don't know. You weren't there. Or rather, you were, but," and I stopped, confused and heavy of heart, deeply regretting prying the lid off the coffin of my history. "There is ugliness in the world, and sorrow, and loss. By the time I was twenty I had known virtually every kind, or so I thought. You've known loss too," and I was thinking of Isabeau when I said this. "However, you knew very little ugliness. Your father and I saw to that. But mine didn't, and I saw the world clear and close up at the most tender of ages. So yes, as a maiden I encountered it – and I don't mean malformation of the face, don't think for a moment I speak of that, but the rawness of circumstances which drive a man in love to desperation."

"You make excuses for him?"

"I make no excuses. All I know is that if you take a dog, even the gentlest of breeds, and beat him and poke him with sticks, he will bite. So much more for a man. The world for Erik was a sharp stick, and he bit."

"When a dog is mad, we put him down, and then examine the brain to find out why."

I sprang to my feet. The image rose too strong to bear, of Erik holding my skirt, wiping his tears with the hem, and saying, If you only loved me, I would be as a dog for you. I would follow you everywhere, and do anything you wished. I picked up the portfolio and thrust it at Philippe, who took it almost by reflex, as something his mother handed him, that he must keep from falling to the floor. "This was Erik!" I said. "Behold the man! Yes, he saw your father as a rival. Yes, they fought. But these calamities were not the sum of the man, and if you judge him by his disasters only, the failure is mine and not his."

He rested the big leather book on his knees but didn't open it, just looked up at me as if seeing me for the first time.

"I wasn't always your mother," I went on. "I wanted you to see … I wanted you to know. Perhaps it was wrong of me. Perhaps I should have said nothing, and destroyed what you hold." I knew at once that this book in which I write and the quarto volume in Philippe's hand were linked like Chang and Eng. As those two men from Siam were joined at birth to share one body, so were these two volumes joined in spirit. Both deserved to live. "But I don't think I was wrong. Because nothing beautiful should be destroyed, even if its origin is base."

"What is this?" he asked, almost as if afraid to open it.

"It's an opera, composed by Erik."

He stroked the gold leaf embellishment almost faded and gone. "I always thought he'd been a student from the Sorbonne, I don't know why. Perhaps I'd read too much Victor Hugo. Someone young, intent, perhaps a theologian even." He laughed, but his eyes were sad. "Someone perhaps in the back of my mind I could excuse for a temporary lapse, but still admire."

I sat silently and thought of Philippe's uncle of the same name lying dead on a cold slab of stone by the shores of the underground lake. We had told the children that he had drowned long ago, before their birth. I looked around the parlor, at the brass and crystal chandelier, the little blue figures dancing on the Delft tile of the fireplace, and a thick nausea of the soul came over me.

Raoul had read the autopsy reports, but I couldn't bear to, not after Raoul told me that one of his hands had dangled in the water, and even in the short time between his death and discovery, the little fish of the lake had nibbled away a few of them. I grew as white then as I felt myself growing now. Raoul had gone on to say that there was no strangling, no sign of a garotte, no damage to the windpipe. His brother's lungs were full of water, yet he was not found in the lake, but on the lakeside.

Erik had struggled with the elder Philippe, that I knew. But if Erik had held Raoul's poor brother's head underwater until he died, why not leave him in the lake? Why pull him up onto the stone shore? Why fight with him in the first place? After all, Philippe and Erik had the same aims, to rid Raoul of me.

The dead deafen us with their relentless silence, however, and their stories rot in their breast. My head throbbed and swam. Philippe said something in a concerned voice, but I ignored him. Everything around me in this room all felt stolen from old Philippe, dead Philippe. None of it was mine, not really, and then I knew as if told that when I left this house to go to Perros-Guirec I would never return. Let Martine and Jannecke have it; it's what they've always wanted. The furniture, everything. I'll sign the deed at once. It's built upon the bones of dead men; their blood fills the foundation. It's time to leave.

"Don't admire his life," I said after a time. "Admire the work of his hands. That's what I wanted to give you, not all his failures and mine."

"The truth we uncover is never what we expect, is it?"

The walls and thick blue velvet drapes seemed insubstantial, as if the afternoon breezes could blow right through them, or right through my own substance. "No, it's not."

"You're not coming to England with us, are you?"

"You'll manage well enough without me."

"I suppose," he sighed. "The children will have their tutors, and the house servants we've engaged speak both English and French, even though I've ordered that they avoid French save for necessity. But now, I suppose you don't want to leave Brussels. Or Paris." He said it without rancor, and I hoped he was resigned.

"I'll visit, you know that. And the children can come to Bretagne for the summer holidays, just as you used to do." I paused. "I'm thinking of buying summer property there, a house with a garden, away from the resorts and crowds."

"The children might like to play with others from the hotels."

"Part of the pleasure is walking up the beach to where the hotels are. They'll find other children. The young ones always know how to find each other," and Raoul came unbidden to my mind, young and beardless, running barefoot on the strand. Philippe still looked sad, abstracted. "Will you tell Anki?" I asked. "She already knows about England, I mean, but will you tell her about our talk?"

"Of course," he said quietly. "I keep no secrets from Anki." He hesitated and then said, "She is more forgiving than I."

I bristled a little inside. "What's to forgive? Do you think I told you this to ask your forgiveness?"

"See it through my eyes, as a father. I think of Genna and Larissa, tiny girls now, and imagine some older man attempting to seduce them. I never thought I could kill someone, Mother, but that thought spurs me to it, twice in one evening. Further, it would give me immense pleasure."

"I know you could. But I wasn't a seven year old girl. I was a woman of twenty. Your girls will be women too someday, and will have hearts of their own, as will your sons," and I thought once more of Johannes's almost preternatural love for Lilli.

"You had no father to look after your interests."

"That's true," and I thought to myself, I neither need one now, nor see you in that role, but kept that unvoiced. "But consider – had I a father then, and a mother as well, I would never have come to Paris, and we wouldn't be having this conversation. Who knows, had my parents lived, we might have even emigrated to America."

He said drily, "I always wanted to ride a horse and fire a six-shooter. Or ride a bull in the rodeo."

"Your brother's never done that."

"He moved there when he was too old. All he did when he first arrived in St. Louis was get a job at that automobile factory, working for the Germans."

"Not the same as in the magazines, is it?" The tautness in my chest relaxed as Philippe laughed a little, then picked up Erik's sheet music from the piano and placed it on his own music stand near where the cello sat.

He turned to me, suddenly serious again. "I don't judge you harshly. As I said, you were without a father, and living an irregular life in the theater. My girls won't have that, because I won't allow it. They'll have a well-ordered life. Every day I see the chaos of bodies breaking down, or broken and beyond repair. It's part of the natural process, but it does not have to be the fabric of our moral lives."

"I understand you wanting to keep your girls out of the evil glare of the footlights, but there's only so much one man can hold in his hand at any one time. When I was Genna's age, my world fell apart. Nothing could have prevented it. We pick up the pieces, and we go on."

As if he didn't hear, he sat down in front of the music stand and took up his instrument. I saw that in his mind he had moved away from the room, from me, from our conversation, and all his focus was now centered on those scrawled red notes. He drew the bow across the E-flat, went down to A, up to B-flat, and after a few more measures he was drawn in. He played for awhile, and the tenderness of memory lapped over me like a bath.

Presently Philippe said, "There was this young Frenchman, a composer. I heard him at an exhibition in Montmartre a few months ago in Paris. This hearkens him …"

"You were in Montmartre?" I interrupted. "You lecture me about a life in the theater. What brought you to Montmartre? And you say you have no secrets from Anki?" My tone laughed but my face was set in seriousness.

"The music," he said. "What else? When did you say this was written?"

"I don't know. Certainly no later than 1882, at the earliest the 1860s. So I don't think he stole it from your French musician. It was for the woman he loved when he was a young man. She died."

"It just reminded me of something, with its haunting quality. It also brings to mind the music of those Russians, 'The Five' they're calling them now. Was he Russian, perhaps?"

"No, thoroughly French, from Rouen. But he had lived in Russia and Central Asia for a time. The woman he loved was Persian, like the leading lady in this opera."

"Do you mind if I finish the piece?" and he tapped his foot, impatient to get back.

"It's yours. The portfolio too. I have no pictures, no lock of hair woven into a ring, no mementos but this. It's for you to take and do with as you wish."

"Don Juan Triumphant," he said. "What a strange name. What is his triumph, pray tell?"

"You," I said. "You were his triumph." Then I leaned over his amazed face and kissed him gently on the forehead. "I'll leave you now. Play as long as you like."

Without looking up, he picked up his bow, and once again a young girl looked out over the gentle forest hills as she waited for a man to elude the guards in the moonlight and come to her window.

Up the stairs I went, thinking, not too many more times now. My room was dim in the twilight. There on my desk sat this book begun so many months before. I thought of the trunks in the attic, but especially the old wooden one with the twirling rosemaling all over its cover and sides.

That would be a good place for it, I thought. No one will look there. Martine hates anything old, anything that would remind her of the peasants. She'll never go up there anyway; she'll send the servants instead. And if she does throw my trunk into the fire without even opening it, and these words fly up in hot sparks to join Erik in his life further up and further in, then it will be by her hand, not mine.

Down below, in the parlor, I thought I heard the Persian girl in her lonely tower sing along with the silver echoes of the stars.

(The End)