Mirelle was suddenly startled out of her reverie by the applause for Madame Nealy.
Somewhat bitterly, Mirelle wondered if there was any way Jamie could have known how much the woman sounded like Mary LeBoyne. But how could he? There were only a few recordings of her mother's voice, and they were on ancient 78 rpm discs. Jamie's contained face, dramatically highlighted in the spill of the spotlight, was intent on the soprano for her cue to begin the next song. Jamie wouldn't be so deliberately cruel, Mirelle told herself. She sat up in the seat, determined to put aside these painful memories and really listen to the performance.
Fortunately, the Gluck aria which was next held no painful connotations for Mirelle. She could appreciate the delicate balance between singer and accompanist, and she found herself unaccountably jealous of the hours of rehearsal necessary to achieve such rapport. Madame Nealy was an undeniably handsome woman but Mirelle could not picture Jamie as her lover. Now why on earth would I think about that, Mirelle wondered, as if it made any difference to me at all whom James Howell had affairs with. Listen! Mirelle, you're here to listen!
There was a brief intermission before the lieder section. Mirelle waited patiently, determined to hold her mind to the concert without further ruminations. Her knowledge and appreciation of lieder was good. She'd learned German as a small girl because her mother had been well received as a lieder singer in Germany. Mirelle's happiest childhood memories were the four tours on which she had accompanied her mother when Mary Margaret had been singing all over the Third Reich. That had been before Mary Margaret had become aware of the military build-up and the penetration of Das Kultur in all areas of German life.
It was impossible to stem the flow of memories: dust motes dancing on the beams of sunlight flooding a music room, her mother's patient repetition of "Die Ring an Meinem Finger", beyond the windows so bright from the attentions of the parlor maid that morning, the glittering sweep of the Neckar River.
Surrendering for the first time to the pull of associations, Mirelle leapt from one reminiscence to another: all of them centering around her mother and those four tours, though Mirelle hadn't been more than six on the first one. She remembered the starchy feel of her linen 'good' dress, the way her shoes had pinched her toes because Nanny would not tell Mother that the shoes were outgrown: the scent of her mother's cologne, the yeasty smell of buttered rolls, and the taste of well-milked coffee, a special treat in the mornings when she and her mother had breakfasted together in bed.
And never once, not even in that last painful interview, had her mother ever mentioned Lajos Neagu.
Once freed of her guilty hatred for the man she'd considered to be her father, Mirelle had nothing but contempt for Edward Barthan-More. Her hatred she had transferred to the father who had ignored her existence, and left her mother to endure the vindictive intolerance of her stepfather.
Tonight in the darkened auditorium, familiar lieder melodies and words reinforcing associative memories, Mirelle could begin to appreciate her mother's silence; her father's apparent neglect. The long-held hatred dissipated and the bitter regret was absolved. Mirelle was limp with emotional strain by intermission and stumbled over feet with inordinate haste for the refuge of the sidewalk, chilly or not, and fresh air.
She could be relieved now that Sylvia had reneged. There would have been bright remarks and curious questions. Or perhaps, Mirelle pondered, she would not have switched to that train of thought in Sylvia's company. But where was Sylvia? The notion that Sylvia had arranged their meeting at the concert for someone else's benefit… as an alibi… reasserted itself. But surely if Sylvia had had no intention of keeping the appointment, why hadn't she had the decency to phone and warn Mirelle? It was only fair. Then Mirelle remembered leaving the phone off the hook all morning. She was partly to blame for her present situation, and she grimaced. The theatre lights blinked a warning.
Before the concert resumed, Mirelle had time to look at her program. Madame Nealy might have taken the selections from one of Mary LeBoyne's concerts. Even the arias had been in her mother's repertoire, and they were not the usual sopranic standbys, except "Pace! Pace!", the lovely old war-horse from Forza del Destino!
Peace, peace, Mirelle muttered under her breath. She could do with some of that, but if she immured herself in a hermit's cell, would she get as much done as she did now?
The lovely paean, "Il est doux" from Herodiade was next and, as the melody lifted, Mirelle found her eyes returning to Jamie. 'He is gentle, he is kind,' the aria said and Mirelle applied the adjectives to Jamie and found them suitable. 'I was suffering and alone, and my heart was calmed when I heard his voice. Oh, Prophet, so beloved, can I live without thee!'
That's enough of that, Mirelle told herself sternly. This concert is an unqualified disaster. I should have stayed home with the children, where I belong.
Nonsense, said the sane observer in her mind. Tragedy is the catharsis of the soul. You've been denying your past and until you face up to it, it will distort the future.
She had tried to submerge her background, wanting to eradicate anything that she owed to Barthan-More, and those English years, in her allegiance to her new country, and her love for Mary Murphy. And then, when her father's totally unexpected bequest had alienated the Martins, she had doubled her energies to camouflage her identity, to deny her parentage, and the talents that were her genetic legacy. But moulding herself on the pattern which she thought would please the Martins had not been successful. She'd become a shadow of a woman, and a shadow wife to Steve. Had she chosen Steve as a.husband because he represented all she felt she'd missed? A happy home-coming father and a loving husband? Candidly Mirelle doubted that: hoped she had reason to doubt it or the last fifteen years had been a complete lie and she was crippling her children as subtly as she had been crippled in her childhood in the Barthan-More nursery.
Lucy, hand to her wayward hair, feet flying in an effort to stay in the same place, Lucy of the statue was superimposed on the other distressing images. Lucy who didn't apologize for her poetry or her housekeeping or her mistakes but kept on running, somewhere, anywhere so long as it was ahead. Lucy who had tried to pry open Mirelle's clamshell, mend the hurt and encourage her talent.
And Mirelle thought of Sylvia, bitter because she didn't have Mirelle's ability to sculpt. Sculpting, Mirelle thought sardonically, was a ready-made out, for sculpture is never very popular so that if she had filled a studio with her industry, she wouldn't sell very much anyhow. Only she sold as many of the creche figures and the Dirty Dicks as she could produce.
The applause snapped her out of those reflections and she found herself clapping violently just as her neighbors ceased. She slid down in her seat, so intensely embarrassed that she was separated completely from reflections.
Fortunately the final portion of the program was made up of totally unfamiliar contemporary American art songs, devoid of any connotations with the past.