Carnal Innocence

one. She tuned and polished it herself, often to the amusement of whatever orchestra she was playing with.
    Luis had complained more than once that she spent more time stroking the violin than stroking him. That had made her feel guilty—until she’d discovered he’d been doing quite a bit of extracurricular stroking himself.
    She strode toward the parlor, the lecture already heating her tongue. Then she stopped. Jim was kneeling beside the violin case, and his thumb brushed carefully across the strings, as gently as if he were stroking the cheek of an infant. But it was his face that stopped Caroline from speaking the sharp words. He looked as though he’d just discovered some marvelous secret. His smile stretched across his face, not in glee but in profound joy. His eyes shone with it.
    “Jim,” she said quietly, and he jerked to his feet like a puppet on a string. His eyes widened until Caroline was all but sure they were going to swallow the rest of his face.
    “I—I—I was just looking. I beg pardon, Miz Caroline, I know I wasn’t supposed to. Don’t fire my daddy.”
    “It’s all right,” she said, and it was. Wouldn’t Luis be surprised, she thought, that it was all right with her if a young black boy handled her violin? She’d never allowed Luis to do more than breathe on it.
    “You don’t have to pay me for the work or nothing,” he barreled on. “I know I shouldn’ta done it.”
    “I said it’s all right, Jim.” When she touched a hand to his shoulder, the calm amusement in her voice finally reached his rattled brain.
    “You ain’t mad?”
    “No, but it would have been better if you’d asked to see it.”
    Of course, if he had, she would have said no. Then she would have missed that glimpse of sheer pleasure. The same pleasure she remembered feeling herself, once upon a time.
    “Yes, ma’am, I apologize. I sure do. Had no right coming into your parlor like this.” Hardly able to believe his good luck, he started backing out. “I was coming in to ask if you wanted that back porch braced, then I just …” It occurred to him he’d be smarter to leave well enough alone.
    “What made you want to see it?”
    Shoot, he thought, she was going to tell his daddy for sure. Then the shit would be in the fire. “It was just … hearing you play it yesterday. I ain’t never heard nothing like the way you made that fiddle sing. So I thought … well, I wondered if it was something special.”
    “It is to me.” Thoughtfully, she took the violin from its case, as she had too many times to count. The weight, the shape, the texture, all so familiar. How much she loved it. And how much she hated it. “Have you ever held one?”
    Jim swallowed hard. “Well, old Rupert—that’s Deputy Johnson’s grandpappy—he showed me a couple of tunes on his fiddle. It ain’t nearly as pretty as yours. Don’t make music the same neither.”
    She doubted old Rupert owned a Stradivarius. She had an impulse that surprised her. Then she reminded herself that blocking her impulses was what had landed her in that hospital in Toronto. Freeing them had brought her to Innocence, for better or worse.
    “Why don’t you show me what you can do?” She offered the violin, and Jim immediately put both hands behind his back.
    “No’m, I couldn’t. Wouldn’t be right.”
    “It’s right if I ask you, isn’t it?”
    She watched the boy’s eyes latch on to the violin, saw the war in his face between desire and what he considered propriety. His hands came out slowly to take it.
    “Holy crow,” he whispered. “It do shine, don’t it?”
    Silently, she took out the bow, rosined it. “I wasn’t very much older than you the first time I played this violin.” She thought back, so far back to the night her parents had given it to her. In her dressing room at the Academy of Music in Philadelphia, before her first major solo. She’d been sixteen, and had just finished retching—as quietly and discreetly as possible—in the adjoining bath.
    Then her parents had come in, her father so full of beaming pride, her mother so full of desperate ambition, that the sickness hadn’t had a chance against them.
    She’d never been sure if the violin had been a gift or a bribe or a threat. But she hadn’t been able to resist it.
    What had she played that first time, Caroline wondered, there in the dressing room heavy with the scent of flowers and greasepaint?
    Mozart, she remembered, and smiled a little.
    “Show