The Love of a Good Woman

family had no real interest in music. They didn’t quite know this. They thought that the intolerance or even hostility they felt towards a certain type of music (this showed even in the way they pronounced the word “classical”) was based on a simple strength of character, an integrity and a determination not to be fooled. As if music that departed from a simple tune was trying to put something over on you, and everybody knew this, deep down, but some people—out of pretentiousness,from want of simplicity and honesty—would never admit that it was so. And out of this artificiality and spineless tolerance came the whole world of symphony orchestras, opera, and ballet, concerts that put people to sleep.
    Most of the people in this town felt the same way. But because she hadn’t grown up here Jill did not understand the depth of this feeling, the taken-for-granted extent of it. My father had never made a parade of it, or a virtue of it, because he didn’t go in for virtues. He had liked the idea of Jill’s being a musician—not because of the music but because it made her an odd choice, as did her clothes and her way of living and her wild hair. Choosing her, he showed people what he thought of them. Showed those girls who had hoped to get their hooks in him. Showed Ailsa.
    Jill had closed the curtained glass doors of the living room and she tuned up quite softly. Perhaps no sound escaped. Or if Ailsa heard something in the kitchen, she might have thought it was a sound from outdoors, a radio in the neighborhood.
    Now Jill began to play her scales. It was true that her fingers were no longer puffy, but they felt stiff. Her whole body felt stiff, her stance was not quite natural, she felt the instrument clamped onto her in a distrustful way. But no matter, she would get into her scales. She was sure that she had felt this way before, after she’d had flu, or when she was very tired, having overstrained herself practicing, or even for no reason at all.
    I woke without a whimper of discontent. No warning, no buildup. Just a shriek, a waterfall of shrieks descended on the house, a cry unlike any cry I’d managed before. The letting loose of a new flood of unsuspected anguish, a grief that punished the world with its waves full of stones, the volley of woe sent down from the windows of the torture chamber.
    Iona was up at once, alarmed for the first time at any noise made by me, crying, “What is it, what is it?”
    And Ailsa, rushing around to shut the windows, was calling out, “It’s the fiddle, it’s the fiddle.” She threw open the doors of the living room.
    “Jill. Jill. This is awful. This is just awful. Don’t you hear your baby?”
    She had to wrench out the screen under the living-room window, so that she could get it down. She had been sitting in her kimono to do her nails, and now a boy going by on a bicycle looked in and saw her kimono open over her slip.
    “My God,” she said. She hardly ever lost control of herself to this extent. “Will you put that thing away.”
    Jill set her violin down.
    Ailsa ran out into the hall and called up to Iona.
    “It’s Sunday. Can’t you get it to stop?”
    Jill walked speechlessly and deliberately out to the kitchen, and there was Mrs. Kirkham in her stocking feet, clinging to the counter.
    “What’s the matter with Ailsa?” she said. “What did Iona do?”
    Jill went out and sat down on the back step. She looked across at the glaring, sunlit back wall of the Shantzes’ white house. All around were other hot backyards and hot walls of other houses. Inside them people well known to each other by sight and by name and by history. And if you walked three blocks east from here or five blocks west, six blocks south or ten blocks north, you would come to walls of summer crops already sprung high out of the earth, fenced fields of hay and wheat and corn. The fullness of the country. Nowhere to breathe for the reek of thrusting crops and barnyards and jostling munching animals. Woodlots at a distance beckoning like pools of shade, of peace and shelter, but in reality they were boiling up with bugs.
    How can I describe what music is to Jill? Forget about landscapes and visions and dialogues. It is more of a problem, I wouldsay, that she has to work out strictly and daringly, and that she has taken on as her responsibility in life. Suppose then that the tools that serve her for working on this problem are taken away. The problem is still there in its