Winter 2004
New Series · Volume XXVI Number 1

ROBERT McKEAN

RALPHIE'S CLARINET

Mrs. Gleason she noticed. Dolores Gleason was hard not to notice. The blue bouffant through which shone the bony hemisphere of her scalp, the three-pronged aluminum cane she pumped with the precision of a drum major, the little bronchial explosions the woman periodically issued. But Audrey was so deeply embroiled with Mr. Del Greco, who had jumbled the figures in his checkbook, that she didn’t notice the other woman until she stepped out of Mrs. Gleason’s shadow, appeared in front of the counter, and passed the note over.

An altogether pathetic sort of person, the woman was short, swarthy, furtive. Her face was crabbed and puckered as a wild apple. One eye, haloed in raw pink, roved sightlessly. She was wearing a long coat, sun-bleached purple beneath the dirt, even though it was too early in the season for a winter coat. From the folds of the fabric seeped a piercing odor––perfume, sweat—no, no, something more astringent than that, something Audrey wasn’t sure of and didn’t want to identify.

But of this she was sure: The woman was funny.

Audrey, although new to her job, had had basic teller training, plus another half day of in-service when they threw that tennis ball around and talked about their families. And if Mazi––steady, imperturbable Mazi Claprood, the flesh of her arms quaking like Jell-O but her fingers amazingly deft with the stacks of bills, a teller and nothing but a teller for thirty-one years––had been there, instead of picking up her car, there was no question Audrey would have done the right thing. Definitely, if Mr. Hamm had been in his office (and it had been he who broke the first rule, leaving her here alone), she would have followed the instructions drilled into her. If there was an incident, she was to comply with the perpetrator’s demands.

She knew that. She just didn’t do it. “No,” she said, pushing the nearly illegible note back across the counter. “We can’t accept that kind of thing here.”

The woman pointed at the note peevishly and pushed it forward again. The note was scrawled on a page torn from a tablet. Audrey had read it. She didn’t need to read it again. Having gotten this far beyond the script, the vessels that fed her heart constricting, she looked the disturbed woman in her one sound eye and sent the note back a final time.

“No,” she repeated, “I just told you––that won’t do.” She forced herself to look over at Mrs. Gleason, rolling her shoulders under her coat like a prizefighter, and announced as authoritatively as she could, “Next!”

The perpetrator, caught between Audrey’s implacability and the formidable presence of Mrs. Gleason, sidled up the counter, clutching her rejected note. Even then, with the bones in her hands giving forth strange little pangs and her skin dampening to such a degree that Mrs. Gleason’s check adhered to her palm, Audrey did not push the alarm. She recorded Mrs. Gleason’s deposit and made direct eye contact with her next customer. The woman, at some point, drifted away––what else was she going to do? But even when Mr. Hamm returned from the mall, Audrey waited. It wasn’t until Mazi settled in, mooshing her hemorrhoid pillow beneath her, that Audrey closed her window and walked back to Mr. Hamm’s office to report that there had been an attempted robbery at his bank.

Mr. Hamm, recently promoted branch manager, was, as expected, aghast. “You pushed the note back? Audrey, she could have been carrying a weapon!”

It was Friday afternoon. Mr. and Mrs. Hamm’s romantic sea cruise vacation started in forty-five minutes, plus or minus depending whether Audrey and Mazi balanced, and, by God, they had known for a month they had better well balance this particular Friday. Audrey recalled the nauseating odor lifting off the woman, and, for the first time, she permitted the icy fear that had been circling her heart to invade that organ.

What if she did have a gun?

“Oh, Audrey, look at the position you’ve put us in!” Mr. Hamm rubbed his bald spot inquisitively, tenderly. “What’re we supposed to do? Call the police, get the main office involved, draw up an incident report, put you on unpaid leave, draw up that report, and cancel my vacation––or, pretend this didn’t happen and endanger both our careers? And that’s our choice, you understand, that’s it!”

What Mr. Hamm neglected to add, but hung unspoken between them, was that every one of those reports would have to include the fact that he had left her alone. No one ever was to be left alone in the bank. “There wasn’t a robbery,” Audrey reminded him. “Just a very feeble attempt.”

“It makes no difference,” he snapped, “and you know that. That’s why we have policies, rules, drills.” Mr. Hamm warmed to his anger. “So when an emergency arises, we know what to do automatically. Do you think we do all that for fun? To entertain ourselves? Tell me, Audrey, is this job something you really need?”

Audrey detested this tone, the sarcastic voice ignorant parents inflict on their children. It had always struck her as significant that, despite Mr. Hamm’s protestations when they threw the tennis ball of how he cherished his family, the photographs of his wife and twin girls faced out, toward the customer’s chair. She wouldn’t have said anything, knowing his excitable temperament, but, by that same training, she felt duty-bound to report the incident. Whether that was a mistake she didn’t know, but she did know enough to let Mr. Hamm have his rant.

“Maybe you don’t need to work,” he continued. “You’re independently wealthy?”

They were not independently wealthy. In fact, ever since Ted had been furloughed from the steelworks, Audrey had become the family’s sole breadwinner. Recently, he had taken up with a fellow to sell potatoes by the side of the road. The enterprise couldn’t have been more humiliating. When her parents found out, they were scandalized. What’s come over him? her mother wanted to know. Has he lost his senses? her father weighed in.

It had been a difficult year. And Audrey took pride in the initiative she had shown by getting a job, her first real job. At thirty-seven, that had not been easy. But no one had warned her the work world would be full of children parading around dressed as adults. “I do need this job, Mr. Hamm,” she said when her boss’s tantrum seemed to have run its course. “I’m sorry, I am.”

Satisfied presumably, Mr. Hamm got up to close his door. “Does Mazi know?”

Audrey shook her head. “I didn’t say anything.”

“And no one else was in the bank?”

“Mrs. Gleason was here, and so was Mr. Del Greco.”

Mr. Hamm threw up his hands. “Audrey, she could have done them harm! The Gleasons have been with the bank for decades! Dolores’ father fitted me for my first pair of shoes! I didn’t know there were other customers here! You didn’t say that! Oh, this is just a mess!”

“They didn’t notice,” Audrey hastened to reassure him. “Mrs. Gleason would have been quacking like a duck if she’d realized what was going on, you know her, and Mr. Del Greco, he’s lucky to find his way to the counter. They didn’t see anything.”

Mr. Hamm smoothed his bald spot again. “You’re absolutely positive? How could you not notice an attempted bank robbery? It defies reason.”

“She was . . .” Audrey searched for words, “. . . like a street person, kind of strange and foggy. I’m sure she looked like someone trying to cash a check without ID. I said, no, we can’t accept that, and went on to the next customer, like you would, you know?”

Through the manager’s office of the Crocker Farm branch of the Ganaego Savings & Loan, the heartache of Mr. Hamm’s sigh fell softly. “All right,” he croaked, “we’ll overlook this breach––this time. But I’m going to say this once, once and once only: If there’s one more slip, the tiniest deviation from policy, you are going to be without a position, you hear me?”

Along with her new job, Audrey had inherited the task of doing the family’s bills. If Mr. Hamm wanted, he could dismiss her on the spot. “I understand,” she said.

If you were going to rob a bank, Audrey was thinking as she turned into the Oak Grove Music School, why would you wear a purple coat?

This past week the weather had turned, and now, all day, a drizzle as sharp as needles had been falling. Rivulets sluiced unchecked down her windshield, beneath the wipers of the foreign car that earned her, in Ganaego, hard stares. Clearly, the woman last Friday had had emotional problems. She was to be pitied, not taken seriously. But she had nearly cost Audrey her job, and that you had to take seriously. Landing the teller position had been a stroke of luck. She––if not Ted––had realized this past year, as inconceivable as it once would have seemed, the steel mill was on the verge of collapse. Shutdown was in the air. You could feel it. Ted’s layoff was permanent. He was never going to be called back. Why wouldn’t he face up to that? Night after night, Audrey lay awake, gripped by foreboding and despair. You could lose your house, your place in the community. She read about the foreclosures in the paper. People at food pantries going through the dented cans of soup. You could be flung out in the snow on your hands and knees, and no one would care!

Bronze oak leaves were strewn across the music school porch; one or two clung to the screen door, as though craving admittance. Audrey was apprehensive about the conversation that awaited her and, once inside, paused before the staircase to organize her thoughts. Upstairs, from the honeycomb of practice rooms came the now-familiar medley of squeaks, squawks, and aimless plinks. How atrocious it sounded, she thought fondly, but from all this off-key tootling and sour wheezing eventually came real music. And the thought that Ralphie, their youngest, might someday be a musician stirred her, in an otherwise bleak time, with an unaccountable passion.

Where had the notion to take up the clarinet come from? Not from them. Neither she nor Ted was musical. Ted claimed he got the idea from television. She thought it was something his big brother said. Wherever he got it, he deserved credit for trying. How many nine-year-olds could you name who had demonstrated even this much ambition? Music was hard, a lot harder than it looked. Perplexed but delighted, they bought him a clarinet with money they couldn’t spare and enrolled him in this private music school because the public schools did not accept children into the music program until they were in the fourth grade. They fashioned a special place for him in the rec room and sighed with parental pride (these moments, if Audrey was at home, they shared) when, from the basement, began rising––such tender, brave sounds!––tentative chirps, snorks, bleats.

And then, as suddenly as those precious notes began, they ceased. He was only a child, Audrey chided herself. His interests bloomed and faded overnight. One minute he announced he was going to be a doctor, the next a space ranger. Before he hit on what he wanted to do with himself in life, he’d have scores of enthusiasms. Nonetheless, it wounded her deeply. Both she and Ted admitted they had made mistakes with Teddy. Fifteen, not even sixteen, last spring he had run off with the irresponsible Gromeka girl. For two weeks the house was plunged in crisis, then, dear God, he called. Ted brought the boy home, no more than skin and bones, lice in his hair, full of shame and misery for having been jilted and abandoned by his girl. With Ralphie, they were determined to do better.

Stealing herself for the inevitable, she stood outside Mr. Weiner’s room until Ralphie opened the door and slipped out, eyes lowered, lips quivering. In that moment, Audrey felt her son’s failure as poignantly as if it were her own. Impulsively, she hugged her child, her baby, embarrassing him only further. Had their intense family focus made it even more difficult? Maybe they shouldn’t have fixed the special place in the rec room?

“Why don’t you go sit in the car,” Audrey told him. Her eyes lingered on his strong little fingers clutching his clarinet case. “Mommy will be along in a few minutes.”

She glanced up to see Mr. Weiner gazing down. Having seen his fill, apparently, the old man teetered back into his studio. Rocking on his thick-soled shoes, he lunged for the bookcase, then a chair. He rounded the piano and settled his weight on the bench, looking as if he were profoundly sorry he’d ever left that spot in the first place.

Holding her pocketbook before her, Audrey followed him. This rumpled old man, she thought, is a saint. His whole life he’s devoted to teaching others, mostly children, to make music. She had sat in on Ralphie’s first two lessons. She marveled at how the old man’s gnarled and spotted hands moved so sinuously over the ebony shaft of his clarinet, producing such exquisite sounds. Humbled, she was more than humbled by his resolution, by the vast reach of a long life given over to a single pursuit. At the same time, though, she knew Mr. Weiner unnecessarily frightened Ralphie with his stern rebukes.

“It’s too soon for the boy,” Mr. Weiner declared. “He wants maturity.”

Audrey was afraid the conversation would go this way. “Maybe,” she ventured, “if we helped him a little more? There’re kids here even younger than him.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Mr. Weiner dismissed her suggestion. “Bring him back in a year.”

“Do you think . . .” Audrey struggled to find a diplomatic way to phrase this “ . . . he might do better with another teacher?”

“He wants maturity!” Mr. Weiner thundered. “He doesn’t practice!” The old man thumped the piano with the flat of his hand. “You cannot learn to play unless you practice!”

“I’m sorry,” Audrey said. “I didn’t mean—”

“Sometimes,” Mr. Weiner said, breaking in, “the gift takes a while to manifest itself.” Like a magician pulling an endless scarf from his sleeve, he tugged a long handkerchief from his pocket and blew his nose. “Be patient. People nowadays have no patience. Maybe the school will refund your unused tuition. About that, you will have to talk with the people in the office. That’s what I have no patience for,” he harrumphed, “people in offices!”

On her way downstairs, Audrey saw the woman. Lurid coat, face contorted, hair sticking out from beneath a pillbox hat that had revolved off-center, she was tussling with a boy about Ralphie’s age. The boy, straining to free himself, swore at her. She yanked on his arm, hissed something unintelligible, and, that moment, looked up. Before Audrey could avert her head, their eyes met, and there leaped between them a mutual recognition. Taking advantage of the woman’s inattention, the boy pried himself free. He clattered past Audrey, escaping into a practice room. The woman, furious as an animal, dashed after him. Audrey could no longer see them, but she heard somebody being hit. Forcing herself to step up to the door, she peered in. The boy was holding his arms over his head, while the woman struck at him with a large book.

“Stop it!” Audrey ordered her. “What’s the matter with you?”

The woman turned on her. “This is none of your business!”

“This is a public place,” Audrey said. Blood drained from her face. “If you want to discipline him, do it at home.”

For the second time now, she understood she had overstepped the bounds. She stared at the woman’s sightless eye, wallowing in its radiant pink socket, then at the infuriated seeing one. “I don’t know what the problem is,” she continued. “If he’s done something wrong, he should be punished. But not by hitting him. And,” she reemphasized, having no idea why she felt so righteous about this, “not in a public place.”

“He stole money,” the woman said.

The irony was almost too great to resist. “Well, he shouldn’t be doing that,” Audrey said, suppressing the compulsion to laugh. “That’s wrong.”

The woman seized the cuff of Audrey’s jacket, startling her. “Don’t think I don’t know who you are. I can see right through this disguise, Eleanor. You’re losing your touch.”

The woman tossed the book on a harpsichord, producing within a small murmurous complaint. She shoved the boy past Audrey––that revolting smell!––and out of the room. Audrey, once she was alone, her terrors given license, reached for the book, for no other reason than to give herself a task, to return it to the shelves, then began flipping through it. Her hands were cool and trembly; the bones issued those strange little pangs. The book, for children, was a biography of Mozart, lots of pastel drawings of a little boy sitting primly at a clavichord, poring over music scores. What would anyone living now, she thought, know about Mozart the boy? Wasn’t he the one with the horrid father? Who could know––even their neighbors!––what went on inside the Mozart household? What preposterous things people wrote! Audrey jammed the book on a shelf, shook herself, and crossed the hall and went into the school office. Behind the counter, extracting staples from a stack of handouts, was Sara Kennedy.

“Did you hear that?”

“I hear a lot that I don’t hear,” Sara said, “if that’s what you mean.”

“Who is that? She was hitting her boy with a book.”

Sara considered Audrey’s question. “You don’t mean the lovely Mrs. Zurlo? All I can say is good-bye and good riddance. We can only let them get so far behind before we have to put our foot down.” She nodded at a battered clarinet case on the counter. “That, they haven’t paid any rental fees on since last year, not a penny.”

“She called me Eleanor.”

Sara glanced at Audrey quizzically. “You OK?”

Audrey forced herself to smile. “I feel so sorry for the boy.”

“Well, that part is a shame,” Sara agreed. “Mr. Weiner refuses to have anything to do with her, but he likes the boy, and he’s pretty stingy with his praise.”

Audrey remembered Ralphie alone outside. “I think I know the answer to my question,” she said, trying to hurry the conversation, “but is there any refund for unused lessons?”

“Only up until four weeks into the semester.”

“But Mr. Weiner says Ralphie’s not ready. He said I should ask for a refund.”

Sara compressed her lips. “God bless Jacob,” she muttered. “There is no refund, and he knows that, but we can move Ralphie, if you like. No one else teaches clarinet, but I know that Betty has a few holes in her schedule. She’s piano.”

Audrey shook her head. “I don’t think so. Mr. Weiner’s probably right about that––he’s not ready.” She considered her next words, rejected the impulse, then voiced them anyway. “Could we transfer Ralphie’s unused lessons to another boy?”

Sara set down, rather crossly, the clamp she was using. “Why is it,” she complained, “that people can’t do even the simplest things you ask? I specifically told Bunny not to staple these!” She adopted an official tone. “School policy,” she repeated, “is to refund tuitions up until four weeks into the semester, less a nonrefundable administrative fee, and, no, of course, they can’t be transferred. If we started doing that, we’d be out of business in a week.”

“I know it’s unusual,” Audrey pressed, “but these are unusual times. And why would that hurt the school?”

Sara reached for the ringing phone. “If your boy’s thinking of dropping out,” she said acidly, “you’re welcome to advertise his clarinet on the bulletin board. That’s why we always recommend that parents rent their children’s first instruments.”

The following week Ralphie announced for his school project he intended to construct a Van de Graaff generator. Neither Audrey nor Ted had ever heard of such a thing. When they discovered a Van de Graaff generator was a metal sphere as wide as a refrigerator that produced two-feet arcs of electricity, they put an immediate stop to those plans. Ted, recalling something from a science class, suggested they use a lemon to generate a weak electrical current. Audrey, filled with visions of her son electrocuting himself, was still dubious, but Ted assured her it was perfectly safe, and he and Ralphie went shopping for a suitable lemon.

The Hamms were home. Except for a bumpy return flight that upset the maternal Hamm tummy, the cruise had been a spectacular success. By way of several sly remarks and what appeared to be an unlikely Caribbean swagger in Mr. Hamm’s step across their tiny lobby, Audrey and Mazi were led to understand that aboard ship a certain marital rejuvenation had taken place. And for that, the two coworkers, exchanging glances, were grateful. Bank life would be easier, because of the Hamms’ restored felicity.

Later that morning, Mr. Hamm leaned over Audrey’s shoulder. “Any problems with that nutcake while I was away?”

“I haven’t seen her,” Audrey lied.

The place was a pigsty, and Audrey was on a tear.

Bad enough that even with a full-time job she still had to shop and cook, was she expected to do the cleaning, too? Was this a hotel people checked in and out of? Were they waiting for the maid to show up? Was there no one besides her who grasped the basic concepts of putting things on hangers, washing and drying dishes, running the vacuum, dusting?

Dusting? Had anyone here even heard of dusting?

Ted, Jr., uncharacteristically out of bed before noon on a Saturday and sorry for it, was the first to catch her ire. “I want,” Audrey demanded, “all the summer stuff, the lawn chairs, the table, the umbrella, everything, put away. Next, the windows need washed and the storm windows slid down. When you’re done with that, broom down the cobwebs in the basement. While you’re at it, you might as well empty the dehumidifier and push it under the stairs.”

The boy sulked. “Mom, I had plans.”

“If you apply yourself,” Audrey reassured him (why, she pondered, do young men always play with their navels?), “you can get everything done by noon. What are the chances that any of your buddies will be up before noon? And you’re not going anywhere anyway, young man, and you know this, until we’ve talked about your homework. If you’re thinking of resting on your laurels, straight Cs aren’t going to cut it.”

Ted, sleeping late––sleeping off too much wine, Audrey feared, noticing with alarm the empty bottle beside the garbage—caught it next. Heaven knows, she was trying to be sympathetic. She understood that her husband’s confidence, despite his usual bluster, was fragile and, this year, had been all but shattered. Twenty-three years of seniority, a responsible salaried job, technician in a metallurgical laboratory––gone in a flash. Son of a hopeless dipsomaniac, Ted had always taken pride in not following in his father’s footsteps. Now, on top of everything else, he had begun to drink. Not like his father, not week-long binges, but still, any amount of Ted’s drinking made Audrey anxious.

This morning, however, she was without pity. “Either you rake the leaves,” she threatened, “or I’m calling a service.”

Irritable before he’d had his coffee, Ted cupped his forehead in his hand to ease his headache. He was a lean, intense man with dark hair that came to a sharp widow’s peak. In that regard, he took after his mother, who was French, rather than his German father. Unlike his mother, though, who was sunny, a tad daffy, Ted usually wore a slightly belligerent expression. “I was waiting until they were all down,” he grumbled.

“Well, don’t I have good news for you,” Audrey informed him. “The last leaf just fell ten minutes ago.”

Hair tied in a bandanna, Audrey started on the second floor with her dust rags and her Pledge. From time to time, she glanced out to watch both the Teds in her life working below her in the yard. Especially, she fretted over the younger one. She remembered clutching Teddy on the doorstep when Ted brought him home, weeping so uncontrollably she started to cough, whooping for air. She was convinced that she had lost him, that he had been murdered, his body thrown in a ditch. Those two weeks he was away, she didn’t believe the separation from your own flesh and blood could grieve you so much.

The boy was taller, more manly, more handsome. Was that a good thing? Don’t be silly––of course, it was! But Teddy had a propensity to skim the surface, and that concerned Audrey. He appeared to be taking reasonably well to the special educational program at Our Lady of the Sacred Heart she had bitterly fought Ted over, but, even so, she suffered because she despaired that they had lost some essential portion of Teddy’s trust. He was sullen and resentful, excessively so. He seemed to have gone underground. Anguished, she stole glances at her son, showered this morning by a luxuriant autumnal sunlight, fighting the umbrella, wrestling the chaise lounge into the garage, taking no pleasure in the tasks, no pleasure in the day. Inside, he went at the windows just as bellicosely, yanking down the storm panes, ramming up the screens. She heard him swearing under his breath, swearing steadily, savagely, the way a disgruntled middle-aged man swears.

On the windows he left great brown smears.

During one of her trips to the basement, Audrey spotted Ralphie’s clarinet on the floor and carried it upstairs. Ralphie’s assignments had been to redd up his room, collect the scattered pieces of the new space station model he was building, hang up his clothes, and clean the hamster’s cage. When she checked in on him, he had done almost nothing, but was paging through an old Montgomery Ward catalog. Ralphie liked to cut out pictures of toys, sometimes even tools and appliances––chrome machines that polished shoes, jigsaws, gooseneck lamps––that he felt he positively had to have. Beside him already lay a sizable pile of clippings.

“We should make a decision on your clarinet,” she said. He absolutely would need to clean the hamster’s cage. “It shouldn’t just be left lying around.”

About his failed endeavor, Ralphie was still sensitive. It was the most public thing he had ever attempted. Moisture collected along the bottom rims of his eyes, and he turned away. Audrey reached out to him, drawing her boy in. “It’s OK, darling,” she murmured. “You gave it your level best. We can just put it up. Maybe you’ll want to try it again next year?”

“Don’t want it,” he said.

“Do you want me to take it back?”

He nodded, his hair against her cheek.

When Ted, later that evening, fumbled with the lamp, Audrey, pretending to be asleep, pretended to wake. Into the bedroom he brought the smell of beer. His hands, even his wrists, were brown with dirt from the potatoes. “We need,” she said, “to keep sending out your resumé.” Her father had been a machinist in the Welded Tube. Her grandparents were from Lithuania. They were peasants. People who sank their hands in dirt. She wasn’t embarrassed by a workman’s hands. But to see her husband’s darkened skin tonight provoked her. “We’ll go through the paper tomorrow. I’ll type the letters.”

“I don’t need your help going through the want ads,” Ted said. “I’ll tell you right now what’ll be there. Three lab techs––all in hospitals, two more in clinics, two more after that in medical offices. I can show them how to test their steel for purity.”

“What about the job-retraining program at the community college?”

“I––will––go—through––the––ads,” Ted said, “don’t worry.”

There were deceits in all marriages, places that had hardened over. Don’t tell her there weren’t. And this––her husband’s depression, no, his unwillingness to do anything about it––was one of those places. “I put the clarinet up,” she said, changing the subject. “He’s not using it.”

“That’s not my fault,” Ted said.

“I didn’t say it was, Ted.”

“He lost interest in it––little kids’ll do that.”

“But you were home, here,” Audrey cried, unable to stop herself. “You could have encouraged him more! Kept him practicing, helped him! He is a little boy––he needs direction, encouragement! You let him down!”

His foot snagged in his pajamas, Ted did a slow reel about the room. “What the hell do I know about music?”

The day that had started so promising, the busy cleaning, the crisp sheets and fragrant towels, had turned to ashes. Ted thrashed in the covers for a few minutes, his back to her, then fell asleep. Sometimes, when Audrey couldn’t sleep, she would go downstairs and work the crossword puzzle. Sometimes, a little warm milk would help. Tonight, she went to the hall closet and lifted down the clarinet case. In the darkness of her home, she held it against her breast.

Then she put it out on the kitchen counter to take back to the store Monday.

For two weeks now, the clarinet had been riding around in the backseat of her car like a small, mute passenger she didn’t know what to do with. The instrument was worth half of what they paid for it. The manager at Shea’s had made that clear when they bought it. Even so, the money was far from insignificant. But what haunted Audrey and kept her from returning the clarinet was the memory of the boy, arms arched over his head, while his mother rained down on him blow after blow. He was a short, sinewy little boy with pointy elbows. His hair was cut short on his perfectly round skull so that his head resembled a spherical bristly brush. He wore shorts and an ill-fitting sports jacket, although the jacket seemed wrong. Something an older boy would wear. Was it a sports jacket? No matter, what the scene represented was abuse, not discipline, and, worse, it signified more terrible things going on behind closed doors.

But every time she tried to concoct some indirect scheme of getting the clarinet in the boy’s hands, she shrank before the idea’s peculiarity. Some days she actually talked to the clarinet back there. What, she asked it, am I going to do with you? I mean, what would I think––let alone an unbalanced person––if a stranger knocked on my door and offered me a clarinet? And if they can’t afford lessons, what use is a clarinet anyway?

What brought the decision to a head had nothing to do with the clarinet or the boy. At lunch today, Audrey accidentally drove down a patch of Sutton Post Road she had been avoiding. Late afternoons, to her intense displeasure, after folding up their cart, Ted and his partner had taken to sitting in a bar, through dinner into evening. And now, coming past the potato stand suddenly and seeing Ted standing behind the makeshift cart of rotting potatoes––like a common tramp!––filled Audrey with a violent rage. When she got back to the bank, she slammed through Mr. Hamm’s desk searching for the telephone directory. Even for Ganaego, Zurlo was an unusual name, and she had no trouble finding what she wanted. On Chestnut Lane in Rose Township resided the single Zurlo in the entire Ganaego Valley, George B. Zurlo.

The drive, as it turned out, was longer than she expected. Chestnut Lane, not as bucolic as its name implied, wound past the public dump, then crossed by a basin where a swamp had risen and killed a stand of trees. The trunks, clothed in withered vines and shaggy with flaking bark, stood rotting in the slimy water, weighing on Audrey’s spirits. Long ago, her father would take the family on meandering Sunday drives. Audrey and her mother would dare him to turn down the smallest, least promising roads, trying to get him to a place where he’d have to admit to being lost. Those plots nearly always failed, since Jonas Zobarskas possessed an unerring sense of direction. Occasionally, though, they would tumble down through a country hollow where the road took a sudden swerve and they would see, spread before them, an entire flank of a hill littered with disemboweled cars, old school buses up to their doors in brambles, upside down iceboxes, moldering sofas. Not a junkyard, not a business, as bad as that might be, but somebody’s personal, lifelong blight on the landscape. Sometimes, amid these hodgepodges of scrap would stand unfinished houses, weathered shells sheathed in peeling tarpaper.

Such places threw Audrey into a deep despondency: the weedy yards, the toddlers in undershirts and no diapers, the sense of hardscrabble lives lived out in unrelenting anxiety. She understood that happiness was not the God-given possession of the middle class, no more than despair the inescapable burden of the poor. Nevertheless, she felt that. And the deeper she drove into the country tonight, straining to read the names on the mailboxes, the smaller and meaner the houses became and the more her fortitude, like a rope under increasing pressure, threatened to snap. Then, to her dismay, what she immediately guessed, as she noodled around a bend and saw a hillside given over to rusty automotive debris, was that this would turn out to be––and indeed was––the home of George B. Zurlo and family.

At that moment, Audrey’s courage did, in fact, waver.

What had seemed an improvident but praiseworthy undertaking now seemed inexplicable, even bizarre, a well-intentioned but dreadful mistake. But nobody ever promised that doing good would be easy. Her mother, a devout Catholic, would vouch for that, and Audrey—deciding that this clarinet was all she had to offer the boy, and, as such, she had no right not to offer it––squeezed the steering wheel with both hands and navigated her car into the rutted drive. If the child’s father pawned the instrument and drank up the money, she resolved, so be it.

The next debate was whether to walk down to the garage and deal with Mr. Zurlo or knock on the door and deal with the woman. Audrey chose the former and made her way down the slope. The building, even from a distance, smelled of grease and corrosion. Within, she could hear a radio, the banging of metal on metal, then voices, the voices of men in a garage, bellowing like steers. In her business suit and heels she felt very vulnerable. The frilly blouse made it all the worse. She had also brought her purse––rather than make a show of locking her car––and with that and the clarinet case she felt even more uncomfortable.

“Hello!” she shouted. “Hello there!”

The voices paused, then resumed, as though their owners collectively decided it had been only their imaginations. Should she shout again? She did not want to go in there! Besides the grease and dirt, she just did not want to go inside. Granted, what she had in mind was unusual, but it could be explained quite well outside in a moment or two. She had her speech worked out. She had been––very nearly constantly the whole drive out––practicing it.

“Is anybody home?”

This time the voices ceased definitively, and a boy about Ted, Jr.’s age emerged, wiping his hands on a red rag no less greasy than his hands. He wore a T-shirt with the cuffs rolled up to show his muscles. On his arm he had a tattoo. Audrey was outraged. What was a boy his age doing with a tattoo? He squinted at her as if he were nearsighted. “What you got in there, lady––a gun?”

“It’s a clarinet,” Audrey said, thrown off balance by the drift of the boy’s imagination. “Doesn’t one of your brothers play a clarinet?”

And now, suddenly, when the boy looked baffled, on the verge of hostility, it came to her that maybe she had misheard Sara––it never occurred to her to question that! Involuntarily, she took a step back. “Perhaps I’ve made a mistake,” she said. “I was looking for a little boy whose mother is named Mrs. Zurlo, I think. He plays the clarinet. He goes—or used to go––to the music school in Oak Grove.”

“You from that school? Whadda you want with us?”

From behind a truck out stepped a man dressed in pin-striped overalls long browned by oil and grease. He too was wiping his hands on a red rag. Not a big man, he had dark, sparse hair that fell across his forehead and failed to cover an ugly scab along his temple. Like the boy, he squinted when he spoke. “We paid you what we owed. We don’t owe nothing more on that boy.”

“I’m not from the school,” Audrey said. “My son was a student there, too, but then he dropped out. He wasn’t ready, you see? Mr. Weiner wants me to bring him back in a year, but, knowing Ralphie, I don’t think he’s ever going to go back to it.” This had nothing to do with her speech! What could these people possibly care about Ralphie’s commitment to the clarinet? She struggled to find her way back to her prepared speech. “Here,” she said, at last, holding out the clarinet and feeling very stupid, “I don’t care if you sell it or not––it’s worth a hundred dollars at Shea’s.” She was not to tell them that! She had made a strict agreement with herself to keep the price of the instrument out of the conversation. “I can’t help with his lessons, but I can help with his instrument, see?”

Mr. Zurlo did not take the case. “We didn’t ask for no clarinet.”

“I know you didn’t ask for it, Mr. Zurlo,” Audrey said. “It’s just something your boy might use and our boy doesn’t want to use.”

That sentence happened to be from her speech. Why it had picked this particular moment to come sailing back into her mind, Audrey had no idea.

“We don’t need nobody’s charity,” Mr. Zurlo said.

“It isn’t charity,” Audrey insisted.

“I think it’s stolen, Pop,” the boy said.

“Shaddup,” he snapped. He turned on his son. “What’re you standing around here for anyway? If I need your help, I’ll holler.” After the boy left––his shoulders, precisely as Teddy’s would, expressing his towering disdain––Mr. Zurlo stared at Audrey, deliberating. “You come in the house, explain this,” he said. “I ain’t saying no, and I ain’t saying yes. Come inside and we’ll talk.”

Anything but that! Audrey held out the clarinet case again. “Can’t I just give this to you?”

“Look,” Mr. Zurlo said, provoked, “you want to get back in your car and drive the hell off my property, that’s fine with me!” He reached out very swiftly, before Audrey could react, not taking the clarinet case but grabbing her wrist, not hard but firm. “You haven’t even tol’ me your name. You seem to know mine.”

“Audrey,” she said, frightened by his grasp. “Audrey Bachelor.”

“Well, you come inside, Audrey,” Mr. Zurlo said, releasing her. “We’ll ask Buster and his mother. I still don’t understand why you want to give us something that belongs to you.”

The house was two-story, not blackened planks covered in tarpaper, but certainly a long time had elapsed since the clapboards had seen a coat of paint. Mr. Zurlo went up a few steps, Audrey reluctantly trailing, then in a side door. Once inside, Audrey heard cats mewing, smelled the pungent odor, and recognized its source: cat urine. She wasn’t allergic to cats, but she was skittish around them. Mr. Zurlo led her down a short hallway, and they emerged into one vast room, the entire first floor. Never had Audrey seen such a remarkable thing––a house without rooms! Down two sides stretched long clothing racks, like in a store, with everybody’s clothes hanging in plain sight. Scattered about were card tables heaped with boxes of donuts and cupcakes and cookies, while other, more substantial, tables held those enormous cans of green beans and jars of mayonnaise you saw in the back shelves of grocery stores. In a corner she saw three colossal crates of toilet paper, and lying over the few pieces of living room furniture in the center were sheets, blankets, quilts, and pillows, everything furry with cat hair.

Surely, Audrey thought, they don’t all sleep down here, with the cats?

Appalled by the sprawling disorder throughout the large room, Audrey turned, and close by her elbow suddenly was the woman’s face, shriveled and brown as a berry.

“Coca-Cola,” she said. “I was thinking of Coca-Cola just as you drove up. You can put ice cream in Coca-Cola, did you know that?”

“Audrey here,” Mr. Zurlo said, “wants to give Buster a clarinet worth a hundret dollars, no strings attached. That’s right, ain’t it?” He turned to Audrey. “No strings?”

Audrey nodded. “It’s something we can’t use,” she said, finding this indeed the only line her brain preserved from her speech, “and maybe your son can.”

Mr. Zurlo gathered up an armload of blankets from an overstuffed chair, disturbing a cat nestled within, then indicated Audrey was to sit there. He left the room without a word. Audrey held both her purse and the clarinet on her lap. She had been too self-conscious to examine the chair before she sat. This was her only good business suit. If anything happened to it, she’d die. It was white linen. It cost one hundred and eighteen dollars at Kaufmann’s. And where had Mr. Zurlo gone? Mrs. Zurlo, not bothering to take up the blankets on the sofa across from Audrey, simply plopped down.

“You ever have Coca-Cola with ice cream?”

“No,” Audrey said.

“Eleanor used to like it. You can use a spoon or wait until it melts. You want some? I’ll never send him back to that school, never! They were mean to him!”

Mr. Zurlo reappeared, the little boy walking before him. The child had a terribly anxious expression, as if he was convinced he was about to be charged with some wrongdoing.

“Eleanor,” Mr. Zurlo said, “you’re thinking of a root beer float, not Coca-Cola.”

Audrey, feeling the ground go out from under her, gaped at the woman.

“Coca-Cola,” Mrs. Zurlo insisted.

“Well, then I don’t want it,” Mr. Zurlo laughed. “And I’m sure Audrey doesn’t either.”

“Motors,” the woman spat out, “that’s all you care about.” She turned her head and, with her one functioning eye, stared at Audrey. “Ask him how many motors he owns. Go ahead, ask him! Trucks, cars, lawn mowers, motorcycles––if it don’t have a motor, he’s not interested!”

Mr. Zurlo snorted good-naturedly. Despite her distress, Audrey couldn’t help but notice that ever since he had come inside Mr. Zurlo seemed more sociable. He urged forward the little boy. “You talk to Audrey about what she’s fixing to do,” he said. “As long as there’s no strings, I don’t care one way or the other.”

The boy was wearing shorts and the herringbone sports jacket Audrey remembered. The jacket, nearly as dimmed with age as his father’s overalls, was way too long for him. His hair was trimmed exactly as she remembered. With his somewhat old-fashioned clothes, his sharp nose, his dark suspicious eyes, and the deep furrows across his forehead you would expect in a much older person, he seemed an unusual sort of boy. Audrey held the clarinet case out to him, begging him to take it so she could go.

The boy accepted the instrument. His father slid a straight-back chair behind him, and he sat without looking, so preoccupied was he with opening the case. “Does it have a reed?”

Audrey nodded. “Everything should be there.”

The boy lifted the clarinet free of its bed of crimson plush. “Is it a good reed?”

“I wouldn’t know,” Audrey said. “I don’t know much about them.”

“It’s not broken in good,” the boy said. It was unclear whether he meant the reed or the instrument itself. “That’s obvious.”

“I’m sorry.”

Once he had the clarinet assembled, the boy brought the instrument to his lips, moistened the mouthpiece, and began to play. What piece he had chosen, Audrey couldn’t tell you. And, to be honest, the music wasn’t ravishing, not like the gorgeous, self-assured sounds Mr. Weiner drew from his clarinet. But it was real music the boy was making, not bleats, not squawks. Even if she knew nothing about music, Audrey knew that much. Notes took shape, tumbling over one another, filling the huge open space of the disorderly room. More than the music, however, it was the little boy himself who captured her attention. How dirty he was! You’d need to soak him in a hot tub for three hours, Audrey thought, and even then you might not get all the grime off him. But little boys were like that. Ralphie was no different. What was different about this boy was the depth of his self-absorption. Eyes closed, face scrunched, he bent his bristly head over the clarinet, while his miniature fingers went determinedly at the keys. His thin bare legs bounced, the toes of his heavy shoes absently scuffed the floor, and one of his socks, the elastic given out, slipped down his fleshless calf, loosely rimming his ankle. Watching him, his single-minded involvement in his playing, Audrey knew, even if she was murdered right here on the spot, she had done the right thing.

When he finished, she asked him, “What was that?”

“Just a sonatina,” the boy said.

Audrey pulled into the T&V Supermarket parking lot. She had decided to buy the family a treat, some Neapolitan ice cream. But what she really wanted was an excuse to sit in the dark for a moment with the doors locked. As she had stepped out of the Zurlos’ house into the fresh air, Mrs. Zurlo, clapping her hands at a private joke, craned herself over the porch railing like a schoolgirl to whisper in Audrey’s ear.

“With a hundred dollars you could buy yourself a pretty good gun, wouldn’t you say?”

So spooked was Audrey she took a wrong turn and drove back around the swamp, this time on the far side. The boles of the drowned trees, black and ghastly, glimmered in the moonlight. She heard strange ululating sounds, shrieks, howls. She was terrified she’d end up back at the Zurlos. It was all too reminiscent of nightmares she’d had as a child. But the road unexpectedly intersected the state route, and she pressed the accelerator, skidded on the crumbling macadam, gained the highway, and fled toward Ganaego.

She could still feel Mr. Zurlo’s grip on her wrist. Tomorrow, she vowed, either Ted got himself cleaned up and enrolled in that job-retraining program, or he was going to move out.

Winner of a Massachusetts artist’s grant, ROBERT McKEAN has published two stories from his collection in the Chicago Review. His novel-in-progress was a finalist in the Heekin Group James Fellowship competition.

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