ELSIE POTTER SAID THAT she would not go to visit Miss Fitch in the hospital. Not only that but: “I wouldn’t go if she got down on her hands and knees and begged,” Elsie told her mother and her sister, Mary.
“She’s in no condition to do that, the poor thing,” Mrs. Potter pointed out to her daughter. On her face was a look she was famous for. Concern for helpless souls, Mary called it. Elsie said, “Weak chin.”
“Well, if she could, I wouldn’t go. The old fraud. She’s probably faking this, too. She’s always putting on a big production.”
Elsie stood in the doorway to her room with her hands on her hips and her head held up stiff on her neck. It was her regal stance, the one that set her slight figure apart, more often than not these days, from others in a crowd; the one that so infuriated Mary. Elsie’s hair was short and curled around her head like a dark crown. Her nose turned daintily up at the end. Elsie wasn’t tall, not nearly so tall as Mary, but she had a way of looking down on people, a way of occupying higher ground which made height irrelevant.
“That’s a horrible thing to say about a person who’s lying half dead in the hospital!” cried Mary. “How can you say that? How?”
She was older than Elsie by a year, but softer. Mary would have gone in a flash. She would have gone on foot through freezing rain and blinding snow. She would have brought flowers and pretty notes telling Miss Fitch to get well soon. Mary had already imagined herself sitting on the hospital bed holding Miss Fitch’s hand, comforting her, while Miss Fitch said:
“Mary. You are too good to me. I have been thinking of you, and look! Here you are!” Miss Fitch could make Mary feel happy about doing anything. She could make anyone feel happy. She was French and spoke the English language with emotional lisps and inversions.
“Ah! How you make me feel gay!” Miss Fitch would say, and instantly, magically, the room was filled with gaiety. Not that she couldn’t be stern as well. Oh, yes, very stern, especially during lessons. But even that had its charm.
“For hard work there is no substitute!” she would cry, striding up and down her living room, skirts flying, hair toppled over her forehead. And then turning, suddenly, to face an ill-prepared student: “But for today, enough! You cannot play today. Tomorrow, yes perhaps. We humans are not perfect creatures. Come. Listen. I will tell you a story about …”
She told the most wonderful stories. Mary and Elsie had both been her students. Once a week for over two years they had gone to her small home four blocks from theirs. They had practiced fingering, and tone, and management of the bow. And they had listened, rapt, while Miss Fitch told about the miraculous violinist Paganini, whose incomparable playing caused women to faint in their seats, caused grown men to weep. She would tell about Stradivarius, the great violin maker, such a genius, it was said, that he could hear in his head how a new violin would sound before its parts were assembled.
She told tragic stories of musicians who died, penniless, in grim garrets, who went mad on city streets while their children starved. She described the loneliness, the scorn, the illness endured by fiddlers long dead, and her own eyes brimmed as she spoke, as if she had witnessed these events and mourned personally. Then—up and out! She sent a student away shiny-eyed and determined, and welcomed the next with a sudden burst of arpeggio on her own luminous instrument.
“Soon! Soon!” Miss Fitch would cry. “Soon you will play this too!” Her students were dazzled.
“She makes me believe in myself!” Mary had exclaimed. “It doesn’t matter whether I’m good or not. She makes me want to try for the moon!”
Only Elsie was unmoved.
“The moon is for astronauts,” she said. “No one else could live there.” She had not always felt this way about Miss Fitch. Elsie had been a believer too, and not so long ago. But now:
“She’s a fraud,” Elsie told Mary in the hall outside her room. “Always dressed up for the big performance and her makeup running in the cracks.”
“But why?” asked Mary, staring, scandalized at Elsie’s arrogant profile. “Why do you say things like that?”
Mary’s face was the gentle kind that showed hurt easily. She was going to be a big woman, gently plump like her mother. Now she was just “fifteen and big for her age.” In the hall, she stood beside her mother and their broad shoulders touched, and matched. Mary had her mother’s straight, light brown hair. She had the same wide, flat hands. They were good hands, warm hands, and wholly unsuited for the slender neck of a violin.
Twenty-five years ago, Mrs. Potter had found out about those hands for herself, on a borrowed violin in the front parlor of her own mother’s house. The heart was there but, after three years of lessons, the fingering was not. Mrs. Potter had forgotten her own frustration, or she had not looked at Mary’s hands. Or, seeing the notice in the newspaper: “Renee Fitch, Concert Violinist. Lessons,” she had simply jumped to replay history, to give it another chance.
Mrs. Potter enrolled Mary for lessons. Then, as an afterthought, she signed up Elsie, too. “So she won’t feel left out,” Mrs. Potter told Mr. Potter.
Elsie’s hands were thin and quick, perfect extensions of her thin, quick body. (“Beautiful hands!” cried Miss Fitch.) The violin was her instrument. (“Made for you!” Miss Fitch gloated.) Mary’s instrument might have been a trumpet, or a drum.
By the end of the first year of lessons, Elsie was mastering pieces by Mendelssohn and Mozart, while Miss Fitch stood beside her, swelled with pride. Mary, meanwhile, labored through a children’s song book.
“She loves you,” Mary had told Elsie at the end of the second year. “She can’t help it. She’s nice to me. She pretends she cares. But you’re the one she really loves.”
“I know,” Elsie had said.
“She thinks you have special talent,” said Mary, who was never stingy with compliments. “She thinks you’re going somewhere.”
“Maybe I am,” Elsie had said then.
But suddenly, and for no good reason that Mary could see, Elsie had quit. She had placed those perfect hands on her hips, shaken her head and refused to go to her lessons.
“Don’t ask me why,” she had snapped, leaving Mary high and dry, and mortified.
Mary had been ashamed, at first, to appear at her own lessons. She felt presumptuous to be going on alone. But Miss Fitch was wonderful. If she was hurt, she never showed it, never once asked a “Why?” of her own. She had shrugged and laughed instead.
“She’ll be back,” Miss Fitch said gaily. “She has a gift.”
But Elsie had not gone back. And now, four months later:
“You go see Miss Fitch,” Elsie was telling Mary, with a mean shrug in the hall. “Go ahead. I don’t care. She’s your violin teacher.”
Mary, however, was not the one who had been asked. Miss Fitch wanted Elsie, that was clear. She had sent a note to Mrs. Potter, who was holding it out to Elsie even now, as Mary stood aside in a fury.
“I called the hospital,” Mrs. Potter said. She knew how to call a hospital and get results. She did it all the time for her own charity cases.
“They think she will recover completely if there are no complications.”
“Was she … Well, you know,” ventured Mary, blushing.
“Nothing of that sort,” answered her mother. “Nothing carnal.” It was her own inappropriate word. Elsie snorted.
“She has a bad cut on her head, from when she hit the table falling down. And one arm is broken. It was the cut that almost killed her. At her age, she went into shock,” Mrs. Potter explained.
“Have they got who did it yet?” asked Mary with a shiver. “Who would do a thing like that to Miss Fitch, of all people?”
Mrs. Potter shook her head.
“Of all people, Miss Fitch is just the sort they would do it to,” sniffed Elsie. “And that,” she added, coming forward to peer at the note in her mother’s hand, “is not her writing.”
“Of course not. Someone wrote it for her. She couldn’t hold a pen in the condition she’s in,” said Mrs. Potter.
“Hah!”
“Why you mean thing!” cried Mary, close to tears. Elsie looked at her, unrelenting.
At fourteen, Elsie had acquired somehow, from somewhere, all the icy composure of the high-school seniors who frightened Mary in the halls between classes. She was as cool and indifferent as they were. Elsie never cried about anything. Elsie never complained. Elsie said she would do a thing, and then did it, whether or not people agreed.
“I’m going out tonight,” she’d tell her mother. And that was that. Out she went with barely a word of explanation.
“I think she has play practice,” Mary would say, to cover for her. Or: “She went to the library to study.” But did Elsie ever thank her? Certainly not.
“Say what you want, I don’t care,” she told Mary, as if loyalty, like charity, were a weakness, something a strong person could do without.
“But where were you?” Mary would ask. “There wasn’t any play practice last night. I looked at the schedule.”
“So, now you’re a snoop, too,” Elsie would answer, and Mary would turn away hurt.
This was not how other people’s sisters acted, she’d noticed.
“Want to see what dress I’m wearing tonight?” Mary asked Elsie once. After all, Mary was older. She had dates now, and went to parties. She could tell Elsie about things she might need to know, things that other younger sisters were dying to know.
“No, thank you,” Elsie replied. “What a waste of time,” she said, and Mary, appearing from an afternoon of hair washing and primping and staring insecurely into the mirror, felt suddenly ridiculous.
“Why is she like that?” Mary had asked her mother. “Does she hate me?”
“Perhaps she’s jealous.”
“No, she’s not. She really doesn’t like parties. She likes being alone in her room.”
“Yes,” Mrs. Potter had mused. “I think she does.”
In the hall, Mary watched as Elsie accepted at last the note offered by her mother, and bent to read it. She saw Elsie’s eyes flicking over the words.
“She wants you to bring your violin,” Mary couldn’t help saying, angrily.
“So I see.”
“That means she wants you to play for her.”
“So what?”
“How can you play?” said Mary, bringing her hurt face up to look at Elsie’s hard one. “You haven’t played for four months, ever since you quit! You don’t even have a violin anymore. You sold it, remember?”
Elsie’s head shot up.
“If I’m not going, it doesn’t matter what I did with my violin, does it?” she returned, cold as ice.
Elsie handed the note back to her mother. Then, pirouetting on her heel like an outraged fairy-tale queen, she swept back into her room and rudely shut the door behind her.
Mary clenched her fists.
“Do you know that Elsie has never, in two years, invited anyone into that royal palace of hers?” Mary asked her mother. Not even Heidi and Roo, her own little sisters. Not even Father. She makes him stand at the door to talk. Do you know that?”
But Mrs. Potter was plainly thinking of something else.
“Mary?” she said, as they walked together down the long hall, toward the stairs. “Mary? Why don’t you go after all? Miss Fitch needs cheering up by somebody. I’ll go too, if you like.”
“But, we couldn’t,” gasped Mary, thunderstruck. “Don’t you see? She asked Elsie specially. We couldn’t possibly go. What would Miss Fitch think when she saw me and my violin instead?”
Mrs. Potter sighed. “Well, then,” she said, folding up the note, “come downstairs and help me get Granny’s tea together. I know it’s Elsie’s day, but …” She cast a helpless look at the closed door behind them.