He wondered (not long) why the thought of another face, familiar and vigorously detested, should have crowded away the cherished ugly features of Mr. Brooks. This face was a handsomely carved block of chilly pink meat under white hair. High falcon nose, flexible lips that squeezed a manifest delight out of elaborately precise diction. Words did not simply pass through the lips of Judge Cleever: they were escorted out, by a pair of busy pale red snakes, the only organs of the man's face that ever knew emotion. The lips writhed, twisted, enjoyed, were sickly passionate: "that you be taken hence to the place from which you came, and thence, at the appointed time, to the place of execution, where—" but give the dreary old cannibal credit, the apparatus under that raptorial beak would squirm with the same enthusiasm when it was ordering a poached egg. The pallid blue eyes of this pillar of society were astonishingly dull. Cleever was an earnest prohibitionist: no drink, no smoking, no cussing, likely hadn't been laid in thirty years, yet you could observe similar eyes whenever the drunk tank yielded its human load to the courts and hospitals. To learn of an original thought behind those soggy irises would be nearly as incredible as to learn of a generous one. Cleever had been a judge since the days of the political machine preceding Timmy Flack's, into his present miasmic twilight of senility. Automatically, in a new trial, if Terence Mann were for any reason disqualified, he would sit in judgment on the life of Callista Blake.
Thanks, Judge, thanks to your obscene simulacrum for reminding me of several things I must not do. Terence Mann flexed his hands to relieve a tension; then he played the third Fugue, to completion this time, and well enough. Mr. Brooks would have rubbed his fleshy nose and said: "Mmm."
Then he was compulsively searching through a pile of long unused material, until he unearthed the beginner's book, the first-grade instruction prescribed by Michael Brooks. He remembered insisting, eight years old, that he must pick out the book personally, so off to Simms' Music Store in Winchester with the tickled, slightly bumbling Doctor, who knew everybody and took occasion to introduce him to the lantern jaw and slow-motion smile of Hubert Q. Simms; and embarrassed the toe-twisting bejesus out of the boy with some well-meant cockadoodle about "latest threat to Josef Hofmann." Then four blocks down Court Street to (Terence hadn't quite believed it) Judson's Piano Store. This same piano now standing here thirty-nine years later, rather old as such things go but good as new. The Doctor's way, taking such a plunge out of nothing but faith in a small boy's dream. Probably that year he'd been just barely able to afford it. He should have lived another forty.
But Dr. Carl Mann, in the early winter of 1930, not drunk for he never was, a blue ugliness of ink still visible in the long seam of scar tissue across his face, his financial affairs well in order—in fact very little hurt by the smash of 1929, for country people still got sick and still paid for it as well as they could—and the night cloudy, yes, but no rain or ice on the roads, happened somehow to drive his car into the concrete abutment of the railroad overpass at Pritchett. His only unkindness the matter of uncertainty. It could easily have been a syncope as the coroner decided, or a mechanical failure of the car concealed by the total smash. Or the Doctor might have been uncertain himself, up to the last blind instant of no return.
Here anyway was the instruction book, pages gone brown at the rims, and with the script of Michael Brooks. Eyes on the notes! Get rid of that shoulder-arm tension!!
Judge Mann carried it to the armchair, with a go-to-bed glass of brandy. Not all those careful fingerings had been written in by Mr. Brooks. The last half of the manual (he had forgotten) had quite a few figures in an eight-or nine-year-old hand (correct too!) placed there after he had got by the first few hurdles with his enthusiasm still afire. The book would be more or less out of date, Judge Mann reflected: modern pedagogy had new notions, some good, some not.
He wondered if he was examining this relic from a middle-aged need to get nearer somehow in time to the mind of Callista Blake. Partly, maybe. Certainly the dignified black notes before his eyes, the passages of the third Fugue remembered, The Express, the first discovery of Huck Finn, Moby Dick, Beethoven Opus 57, the embrace of a Filipino girl whose body was a little golden candle flame—certainly none of all that had the effect of shutting away Callista Blake. She was very present. ("Which is the Clerk?") But more than anything else, here at the frayed, tired, lonely end of the evening, he was wondering—practically too, and with the special fascination of such practical problems—how he would go about helping a child beginner to free the fourth finger, strengthen the fifth, accomplish the small-immense passage from the five-finger cage to the wide-open country of the octave. And he found that he meant just that: how he would do it, he, Terence Mann, age forty-seven, not merely Judge of the Court of General Sessions in and for the County of Winchester, but also a pianist of more than decent competence.
If in the habit of speaking aloud in loneliness, he supposed he could have said reasonably to the imagined presence of Callista beyond the bright amber of the brandy: Not now, not while your life is proposed for burning, Callista. But afterward, maybe. Afterward. Possibly a letter to the New Essex Bar Association, explaining how for me the law has been an interlude of a quarter-century, and interesting, but now I would rather attempt something that I find more important. Which would annoy the holy hell out of them, Callista, but all the same I may write it.
A curious thought which he took to bed; sleeping quite soon, to encounter the inner voices of sleep, with moments of tranquillity.