The Organist
When I was a girl, I had blond curls, and I played in a magnificent garden. There were all kinds of roses, and dahlias, and maybe in orchid or two, because it *was* Florida. When I was young, my mother lived by sewing, and my father did odd jobs. I was an only child. The house was clean, I suppose. We had nothing to clutter it. There was no dust on the floor, and very little food on the table. It was hot. We were stuporous fools. We organized ourselves in little tableaus that could all be generalized under the title of “the working poor”. It was my understanding that we lived in some way connected to the beneficence of the rich man whose property adjoined our own.
When I got older, and filled out, I got bolder. The door to the house was always open, because it was so hot, and I got into the habit of going out, like a cat, and, like a cat, nobody seemed to think it unusual.
Our front lawn was a little patch of green, clipped close, and beyond there was a tangle of underbrush and mangrove trees. There were many flies, and little rivulets, clogged with mud, sticks…the odd tadpole, lazily flourishing in some sort of grotesque state. Yet you could hear the music, so you kept going. At least I did.
The rich man had a sort of castle, made of stone and seashells. He had a tower, and he employed a musician, an organist. Growing up, I heard the constant swell on music wafting through the trees. My mother told me the rich man was old, and that he employed this organist to keep him company. I wanted to see the prince, and the fairy tale castle. I kept going until I managed my way through the dense brush until I came back out of the woods, and the light got brighter, and brighter, until I got back to another close clipped lawn, and the music was so, so loud.
Suddenly I was exposed. I never meant to come this far. I turned back, but I heard the music again. It was stronger than ever, clashing…almost violent. It seemed to me that the hidden organist had sensed my presence, and was taunting me. I smoothed my skirts, and my hair. There was a large stone house, and this was the first time I had seen the rich man’s house. There were many windows, and some of them seemed almost black, but I sensed a hidden, shuffling presence…the rich man. I imagined he saw me, and that there was no angle of my presence that was not exposed to him, there on the lawn, the wide, wide lawn. I began to run, and because there was nowhere else to run, I ran towards the music.
I found the tower. It was a slender, baroque sort of thing, in crusted gold. The shutters were painted red. It stood apart from the house. There was an arched, ancient door, and the door itself seemed kindly, and worn, like a friar’s shoes. I ran to it. I pounded on it. The music stopped.
It could not have happened like that, and yet I have no memory of anything else. The simplest moments seem like the biggest lies, in retrospect, the way the mind tries to shove things into boxes that will not hold him. Beneath all that crashing music, there must have been no way that the organist could have heard the pounding at the door. Yet, the music stopped, the door opened…and…love…I suppose. A thin figure, frightened, as I was frightened…pale…handsome…young…not more than twenty. These things he was. He must have thought it was the old man, because he told me that he walked often with his benefactor, in the evenings, over the grass, talking of music, art, history. The old man would sometimes fall silent, and look confused, especially when the moon rose over the crenellations of the antique residence. A long time ago, and for no particular reason, the old man had fought in a war in Columbia, and the musician suspected, under the stars, within view of the trees, and walking next to a dark eyed companion, that the old man was transported back to other times, other forests, other bullets he could no longer dodge, on his old feet, his cracked legs.
You might think, in this story, the old man died. Or someone else with age and nothing particular to argue with, push for, push against. But the only person who dies in this story was me. I died because I fell in love with the organist, in a silly, helpless, fated sort of way. Because I had nothing else to do, nothing else to imagine, I died, and I had to give him up. The dead give up many things. It’s a special talent of theirs.
My mother decided I must marry, alarmed, I suppose, at my wanderings. I agreed, because I was sure than there was nobody who could threaten my perfect isolation. Yet they produced a candidate. He lived fifty miles away, owned an orange grove and a fattened calf, and said he liked my looks in an old miniature I had made when I was sixteen in New York City. I had forgotten about it. I hadn’t seen it in years. My mother found it, brushed it off, and mailed it, in a brown paper envelope. Before I could quite get over my shock, the man arrived. He was an inch shorter than me. He held my hand in the parlor. His fingers were fat, calloused, and warm.
My father developed a cough. My mother couldn’t do piecework anymore, not the fine stuff, the one all the customers liked, such as the elegant tablecloths and napkins the old man bought for his house. I decided that I must go away. I wanted to tell the organist.
By this time it had been a year, but the music still came through the trees as regularly, as confidently as ever. I waited until dusk, because I knew the organist must leave the tower. I almost ran. I was terrified to miss him, because this might be my only chance. By the time I met him, he was on the lawn, walking in moonlight, and I was there, running at him, reaching for his pale, artistic hands, jabbering a bunch of nonsense. He held me, and he kissed me, first slowly, and then faster, and sobbed and through a blurred veil of tears saw the old house rear up, like a dragon, all teeth, and the black windows were black eyes, and the great spires were claws, ready to snatch us up and deposit us in his ancestral cave, like spotted eggs, or jewels that were out of fashion…something for the nest.
I am not sure what happened next. I am not sure if I ever managed to say goodbye to the organist. I spent six weeks in an insane asylum. I was too precarious to be moved, I was told. I was told this as I lay, in a white bed, wrapped in a white sheet that, according to the policy, must be so snug, because I was so cold, and not because I must continue living at every moment, and in every way, insinuated with cloth and looks and needles and manners into a winding sheath…a shroud.
And that is how I died, I suppose, because at the end of it all, having been convinced I was dead, having done nothing else but die, having practiced it like a flickering Madonna in a peeling fresco, in a final act of cowardice…I lived, and stuck the knife in with such gusto, you would never have known me.
I married the good man, because really he was good, but I never loved him, and I was never living after that night on the lawn. The movies came, the talkies, and all of them ad organists…sitting in the shadows…tall, short, fat, thin, young old…year after year…walking out the back door, sometimes skipping a little, sometimes smoking, sometimes not…mostly with their eyes lifted to the moon, sniffing the air. And as they walked out the back door of the movie house, I knew that they walked with the movie stars swimming in the backs of their heads, like the old Italian caves along the coast, when the water sweeps in, and inside those old gusty caverns, all the sea treasures…the crabs, the shells, the snails and sharks, and, just where the water lips at the rock…all the stars, captured there, jangling like ready cash in the pocket. And I know it, because I was there too, watching, waiting…disappointed, I suppose, old, by then..but hearing music still, even if just in my memory.
