At once, Amy popped in the door. I didn't ask if she'd been eavesdropping. Of course she had. I handed the fiddle over to her, and she examined it carefully before beginning to take the broken string off. "Might as well put a whole new set on," I suggested, and she nodded. I went on daydreaming while she opened a fresh packet. Crazy old Peter Ilyich, I thought again—only what it turned into was, "Crazy Nyla Bowquist, what are you doing with your life?"
I sucked on my fingertips, thinking. They were sore. They weren't bloody—you can't cut my left hand's fingertips with anything much less than a chisel any more—but they hurt. I was hurting in a lot of places.
I said, "Amy, where do you suppose my husband is now?"
She looked at her watch. "It's pushing five here-going on four back home-I suppose he's still in his office. Do you want me to get him for you?"
"Please." Even when somebody else was paying for it, Ferdie didn't like me running up huge long-distance bills, so we had this special line to use-only Amy was better at remembering all the numbers you had to dial than I was. It took her a minute or two.
"He was on his way to his club," she explained, handing me the phone. "I got him on the car phone for you."
I looked at her in a way that she immediately interpreted correctly. "I'll finish this outside," she said, taking the Guarnerius and the strings and the polishing material, and I said into the phone:
"Honey? It's Nyla."
"Thanks for calling, dear," came the warm, soft old voice. "I've been worried about you, with all that's going on—"
"Oh, I'm fine," I said, lying. "Ferdie?"
"Yes, dear?"
"I—uh—it's pretty wild around here today."
"I know it. I've been thinking you might have trouble getting a flight to Rochester. I suppose the airlines are all messed up. Do you want me to send the company jet?"
"Oh, no," I said quickly. What I wanted was not very clear to me, but I knew that wasn't it. "No, Amy's got all that sort of thing under control. The thing is, Ferdie dear, there's something I want to tell you." I took a deep breath, getting ready for the next words.
They wouldn't come out.
"Yes, dear?" said Ferdie politely.
I took another deep breath and tried a different way. "Ferdie, you remember Dom DeSota?"
"Of course, dear." He sounded almost amused. Well, that was a dumb question! There wasn't anybody in the country who didn't know who Dom DeSota was this day, besides which Ferdie had always made it his business to know everybody with any kind of power in Illinois. "It's awful about him," he offered. "I know it must upset you to think about what he's involved in."
I swallowed. Of course he hadn't intended anything—when you've got a bad conscience, even "hello" is a double entendre. I tried to imagine what Ferdie was hearing, from what I was saying. It seemed to me that I was giving an excellent performance of the wife who has something to confess but can't quite get the words out of her mouth, and maybe down inside my head somewhere that was what I was trying to do-to make Ferdie at last so suspicious that he would come right out and ask the questions that I would have to answer.
Only Ferdie wasn't getting suspicious. He was, if anything, getting tenderly, forgivingly amused at his flutter-brained wife who couldn't seem to remember what it was she was talking about. "Ferdie," I said, "there's something I wanted to talk to you about.
You see, I've been—oh, what is it, Amy?" I asked, irritated, as she appeared in the doorway.
"Mrs. Kennedy is here to see you," she said.
"Oh, hell," I said. On the phone I could hear Ferdie's fond chuckle.
"I heard that," he said. "You've got company. Well, dear, at the moment we're double-parked in front of the club, and maybe you can hear the horns blowing. Let's talk later, all right?"
"That will be fine, darling," I said, frustrated, scared . . . and mostly relieved. Some day I would have to say it all to him, every word, every truth . . . but, praise God, that day was not yet. And when Jackie came in to tell me that she was going to carry me off to dinner—"Just family, really, but we want you to join us"—I accepted with gratitude.
It wasn't really a family dinner—none of the children were there-not even in the sense of political family, although Jack Kennedy's principal aide and his wife were at the table, because the only other guest was our old friend Lavrenti Djugashvili. Good host and gracious guest, sure, but I was surprised to see him, all the same. That made my presence a little easier to understand, because Lavi was a single man that evening and Jackie didn't like an unbalanced table. "No, dear Nyla," he said, kissing my hand, "tonight I am bachelor, because Xenia has gone back to Moscow to make sure our daughter is taking proper vitamin pills at boarding school."
"So what we are going to have," the senator said, "is just a normal informal dinner, because we've all had all the excitement we need today. Albert! See what Mrs. Bowquist would like to drink."
It isn't just wealth. Ferdie is just about as rich as Jack Kennedy, but when we have a normal, informal family dinner we don't usually have it in the dining room with a butler handing the dishes around. We have it in the breakfast room, and Hannah the cook usually puts the dishes on the table in front of us. The Kennedys were never that informal. We had our cocktails in the drawing room, with the portraits of the senator's three deceased brothers looking down at us, and when we went into the dining hall there were old Joe and Rose looking down at us in oil from that wall. The wines were all estatebottled, and the silver wasn't silver. It was gold.
And, actually, the whole thing did just what Jack Kennedy said he wanted it to do. It made the world real again. It was exactly the kind of small dinner party that marked a hundred nights of every year for me, even to the talk about the weather (hurricane on its way, rain expected to get worse) and Lavi's daughter's school grades, and how truly beautifully (Jackie told me again) I had played the Gershwin, and what a pity it was that the audience had been distracted.
The ambassador took me in, handsome blocky Russian face cheerful and admiring of my dress, the flowers on the table, the wine, the food. I'd always liked Lavrenti, partly because he really enjoyed music. It wasn't always the kind of music I understood. I'd gone once with him to hear some traveling troupe from Soviet Georgia, fifty squat, dark, handsome men bellowing out a-capella songs that seemed to be made up mostly of roaring, with interjecdons of Hai! and Hey! every few seconds. They were not my cup of tea, but Lavi's eyes were misting when we left; and I'd seen him affected just as much from the stage, while I was doing the Prokofiev Second. Which says something; because there's marvelous musicianship in that concerto, but the fraction of any audience that finds it touching its heart is minute.
And for nearly an hour we stayed off the subject of the other United States of America's invasion, and especially the subject of my Dom.
Jackie kept it going. She and Mrs. Hart were helping with a fund raiser for Constitution Hall, and the two of them had amusing stories about how Pat Nixon wanted to bring in a country-and-western group, and Mrs. Helms had a pet tenor from Southern Methodist University she wanted to give exposure to. As we were starting on the guinea hen and wild rice Jackie looked over at me and said, "Shall we really rock them, Nyla? Would you like to come and do something like the Berg?"
The senator shifted position uncomfortably—his back was obviously bothering him again—and complained, "The Berg? That's that squeaky-squawky one, isn't it? Do you really like that, Nyla?"
Well, nobody really "likes" the Berg concerto-I mean, it's like "liking" a rogue elephant. You have to pay attention to it, whether you like it or not. But it's a show-off piece, so I need to do it once in a while to keep the other guys impressed. And I can't do it very well at home, because Chicago's Orchestra Hall isn't up to it. It's fine for, say, the Beethoven or one of the Bruchs, which are so melodic and rhythmic that the orchestra doesn't really have to hear itself. But they need to for something like the Berg, and Orchestra Hall's acoustics aren't good that way.