chandelier, swathed in netting, blooms downward from the high, coved ceiling like a monstrous wasps’ nest. The pale Aubusson carpet, however, still covers the floor, and deadens his footsteps as he crosses to the grand piano between the windows, dropping his hat on a table as he goes. He seats himself at the instrument, raises the cover of the keyboard, and plays a few exploratory chords. The piano’s keys are stiff, at first, and the sound tentative, as a voice would be that had not been used in a great while, but it mellows and grows full and sonorous as he continues to play.
After a few minutes, he begins to sing. “Una furtiva lagrima negl’occhi suoi spuntò …” Sweet and beautiful: Donizetti’s Nemorino, telling of his beloved, and the secret tear that spills from her eye …
Downstairs, at the back of the house, Upton stands by the generator, listening to the distant music, and he gapes, just a little. He is a house agent, not a poet, and not particularly gifted with words. He would not be able to describe the sound of the voice he is hearing if someone were to ask him. But others have described it for him.
It is honey, and cream, and gold. It is dark velvet and sunlight. It is incomparable. For as long as it lasts, Upton stands immobile, forgetting time, forgetting his work, forgetting everything but the sound of that voice. When it stops, finally, he stands dazed, and sighs as the everyday world settles around him once more; and as he bends to help the footman, there are tears in his eyes.
ALFIERI KNOWS NOTHING of Upton’s tears, nor would he care greatly if he did. Twenty years of singing before audiences all across Europe have accustomed him to that phenomenon, and left him largely indifferent to the power he has to make men weep. Audiences themselves are of negligible importance; they provide an excuse for him to sing, and enable him to spend his life doing what he desires by rewarding him prodigiously well for it, but they are not the reason he sings.
They are, however, the reason he is here. Paris has named him “Le Rossignol,” the nightingale; London knows him as “the Lord of Song”; to all of Italy he is “Maestro Orfeo.” His fame has become such that walking unmolested in the street—any street, in any city in Europe which boasts an opera house, and in many which do not—has become a near impossibility for him. He has left Europe to regain, for a while at least, his own soul; and Upton’s tears, did he but know of them, would be of infinitely less moment to him than what he will have for dinner.
Rising at last from the piano, more satisfied with the sound of his voice than he has been in months, he flings the curtains wide, noting with approval that the room faces onto Gramercy Park itself. The trees dance in the May wind, beckoning and abundantly green, and he unfastens the latch on one of the tall French windows and pushes the double panes outward. The fresh air, rushing into the long shut-up room, smells the color of the leaves, and all but sparkles in its clarity.
He breathes it in deeply, hands resting on either side of the window, idly watching a couple walk arm in arm in the park while two small girls chase each other in and out of the trees, and he suddenly realizes that he is happy—truly happy—with the sheer, effervescent happiness of youth; happier, in this house, than he has been in years. The very walls seem to greet him kindly, and to embrace him, as if they have been waiting for him for a long, long time.
No one lies in wait for him here, just outside the door. No one clamors for him, clutches at him, prays to him, leaves gifts for him, or flowers, or notes. If he must be lonely—God!—then let him be alone. He has not known such relief as this, such lightness of heart, for twenty years. He can be solitary in this house, and happy, the vast walls around him forming an impenetrable shell. Until he returns to Europe, he will revel in this solitude, wallow in it, free of hangers-on, of the endless crush of people that surrounds him always: smiling, weeping, fawning; ready to sell themselves at a moment’s notice, to trade their husbands or wives, sons or daughters for the slightest hint of stature, power, influence, fame … eager to suck the very breath from his lungs, or the soul from his body if he will only let them …
The breeze blows, cooling his face again, carrying music with it from the other side of the park … the raucous, lighthearted sound of a hurdy-gurdy, drifting on the air. He listens … “Libiam’,” it pulses, “ne’ dolci fremiti, che suscita l’amore …” the brilliant brindisi in waltz time from La Traviata. “Let’s drink to love’s sweet tremors,” it says, “to those eyes that pierce the heart …”
Verdi, wafting in from a New York street … the melody a reply to his own music at the piano. He is not one to ignore omens: the welcoming house and its grateful solitude, the sense of remembering what he cannot possibly know, his discovery of the music room, the arias, statement and answer: it all means a successful stay in America. He needs to see no more … he and the house have clearly chosen each other, and his possession of it will begin, appropriately, here. With both hands he seizes the sheet which drapes the piano, snatches it off and tosses it to the floor, then moves on, stripping the cover from each chair and table in his progress around the room.
The open window does not illumine the farthest corners, which remain lost in shadow, but Alfieri does not even notice; his mind is too full of his newfound elation, and his own momentum carries him along with no slackening of pace until, turning to wrest the cover from an armchair backed against a distant wall, he stops with a quick intake of breath.
Something—someone—is curled within it.
Except for Upton, somewhere in the bowels of the house, he should be completely alone, and so for several heartbeats he only stares in disbelieving silence. The figure does not vanish from beneath his gaze; it merely huddles deeper into the cushions, moving Alfieri to confirm the evidence of his eyes. As he stretches out his hand to touch what he knows cannot be there, the figure puts its hand out to ward off his, and Alfieri finds himself grasping the fingers of …
A child. A little, pale, sad-eyed child clothed in black, more like the ghost of a child than a living one … except that its fingers are real, small and very cold, and the nails are ragged and bitten. The child raises its head—her head—and meets his eyes for one moment only, then looks away.
It is long enough.
Her face glimmers white in the gloom, and he can see the marks of illness plain upon it. A hint of freckles once dusted her cheeks; they have faded now, with the rest of her, and the blue hollows beneath her eyes look like old, old bruises. The eyes themselves, gray-green and very clear, are even older: windows onto some ancient, bottomless grief; haunting, in the face of a child.
His own joy of a moment ago is dwarfed by the magnitude of this pain. He covers her hand with his own, speechless in the presence of such sorrow, and raises it to his lips.
The shadowy room, the silent house, the young girl with her old eyes: there is a dreamlike quality to them all, as if Alfieri has stepped out of the stream of time into a moment which has been there always, waiting for him, and which he has always known would come. He will never entirely leave it again; for the rest of his life a part of him will be there still, in the dusky room, at the instant she raises her eyes, with his lips against her hand.
The moment passes; the child lowers her eyes, her hand slips from his; the spell is broken. Time takes up where it had left off: the wind stirs the curtains, the sound of a passing carriage rises from the street below. Nothing has happened at all, except that Alfieri’s life has changed forever, and that he knows it.
“Who are you?” he says, when he can speak again. “How did you come here?”
“I live here.” She speaks with her head down, and directs her words to the fingers clenched in her lap.
“Here? But this is an empty house.”
“It’s not empty. I live here.”
“With the furniture all covered over and no light? How do you live in this place? Are you alone?”
“Two of the servants have stayed on. There are candles for