SPRING WAS WELL UNDERWAY BEFORE Jimmy Dee heard the music again. The daffodils beneath the tree in Miss Fitch’s front yard bloomed and faded. The tree itself—a crab apple—produced a cloud of pink flowers, shed them, then thickened with leaves. The air turned warm. Birds sang feverishly from the bushes in the long evenings.
In back of Miss Fitch’s house, Jimmy Dee’s own laurel grove grew rich with blossom. On the branches, thousands of white florets opened out like tiny parasols, each printed inside with a miniature design. He was fascinated, and flattered, by such beauty from a place that had provided only shelter before. The bushes bloomed for him, he thought. He was a little shy before them as if they offered too much, and dared pick only one floret each visit. This he mounted, stirred by some memory of elegance, in the top buttonhole of his ragged coat.
Meanwhile, he waited for Miss Fitch to play again, all patience, during many nights. He saw her make supper and wash up. He saw her move about her living room, sometimes quiet and thoughtful, sometimes rushed with energy. He sniffed the flowers. They had an earthy odor, not like some he’d smelled. In the dark, they glowed. He felt himself glowing, too, but dimly, full of patience.
In the beginning, when he first discovered that Miss Fitch was home again, Jimmy Dee had felt afraid. Not afraid that anyone would catch him there. No. With Miss Fitch came the return of his old sense of safety, of having found at last a place unassailable by the outside world. He was afraid of himself, afraid that he would feel again the twisty thing in his chest that before had sent him loping across the yard, galloping insanely toward her back door.
“Play! Play!” he had screamed, and put his frozen hands on her shoulders to shake her.
Now that she was back, he remembered everything. He forced himself to remember, and went over the details in his head. The trouble was, his head was not always clear. Out of fright, he drank less, guarded himself in the laurel bushes. It wasn’t so hard. He talked himself into patience and picked a single floret for his buttonhole. He could wait for years, he thought, but saw as well that it wouldn’t be that long.
She was as eager as he to start her music again. Her students had already reappeared. She taught them majestically in the afternoons. Her old floating movements had returned. In the evenings, she opened the case that held her violin and brought it out to polish. She kept books of music open on the music stand, and read them, brow furrowed, like a minister at the pulpit.
Jimmy Dee knew what a cast was. He’d had some of his own in his time. He put his left hand on his right sleeve and imagined the texture of plaster there, hard and stiff. He recalled the supple lines of her arms when she played. He understood. And waited, ringed by flowers.
One evening, Jimmy Dee arrived late, long after dark. He had spent the afternoon on a bench in the weedy park across from the library. He had sat in the sun, and later, because the day was warm he had pulled his long legs off the ground, laid his head on his arm and gone to sleep. He made a hopeless picture lying there, a dirty hump of a man, with one boot falling off for lack of laces. Passersby went around him with space to spare. Mothers called their staring children back closer to the swings.
He slept all afternoon undisturbed, which was unusual. Perhaps the police officer who patrolled the area from a car had been called to another part of town. He slept into the evening. Waking finally at about nine o’clock, he was fortunate to find an almost untouched peanut butter sandwich in a trash can by the park gates going out. He rewrapped it gingerly in its wax paper and shoved it in his pocket. Then he began, in the dark, the slow journey up the hill toward Miss Fitch’s house.
Jimmy Dee did not hear the music until he rounded the side of the house into the back yard. Certainly, it would have been better if he had sensed it first as a strain in the wind, and then, coming closer, had heard a distant melody. He should have been allowed, after waiting so long, to creep up to it slowly, to control its force by his own approach.
As it was, the music hit Jimmy Dee square on the head when he rounded, in his usual hunch, the corner of Miss Fitch’s house. A window had been left open back there. The sound of the violin rushed through, driving straight into Jimmy Dee, knocking him backward as if it had substance.
He keeled over heavily on the grass and put his hands on his ears. He pounded his ears with his fists. He staggered to his feet, glanced instinctively over his shoulder, and ran, crouched low, to his laurels.
From there, he hardly dared to look. The music surrounded him. It came from all sides at once, louder than he had ever heard it, buzzing and boiling. He tore at his ears and peeped timidly toward the house.
She was there, playing, just inside the windows. She played furiously, her whole body stretching, dipping, as if the violin had hold of her rather than she of it. Her fingers ran crazily along the neck, faster and faster. Her bow arm plunged and soared, plunged and bucked, but at the center her face—he saw it in profile—was still, perfectly concentrated.
Miss Fitch reached the climax of her piece, and slowed. Her fingers tread more gently on the strings. Her bow gave out a fine ribbon of sound that curled and rolled over itself, repeated a phrase and then stopped. Her forehead glistened. She mopped it on a sleeve of her blouse, still grasping the bow.
The next thing that Jimmy Dee heard was clapping. This noise came from inside the house, also, but from farther back, beyond Miss Fitch. From the shadow at the side of the room it came, light, steady clapping. Jimmy Dee leaned forward in surprise, and as he did, a small figure stood up from behind a chair. It was a girl, he saw, dark-haired and thin. She walked toward Miss Fitch, still clapping, and the older woman laughed at this and raised her arm with a flourish to brush some loose strands of hair from her eyes.
Jimmy Dee had never thought to clap before. Now, amazed, he saw it was the right thing to do. He brought his palms together softly at first, then louder and louder, until the laurels shook around him and the air was full of clapping. Inside the house, Miss Fitch bowed grandly, a sweeping, crowd-pleasing curtsy. Jimmy Dee knew it was for him, and for a moment, yes, he was tempted. His foot even moved a fraction of an inch toward the house. But, at the last minute, he drew back into the bushes again.
Jimmy Dee knew magic when he saw it. One touch and poof! She might vanish again. He wasn’t about to risk that. Jimmy Dee leaned back on his bush and when Elsie stopped clapping, he did, too. He was already waiting for the next piece of music to begin.