Page 22 of The Paradox Club

“He made his money in investments—I’m not sure if they called them hedge funds back in those days, but it was one of those make-billions-without-actually-doing-any-work sort of things. But he was a decent man in other respects. Good to his wife, loving to his children when they were home from boarding school.”

“What did you do for him?”

“I was a cataloger. There were three of us. One for the paintings and the sculpture, one for the books, and one for the manuscripts. Did I mention he was a collector? I was the manuscript cataloger. Letters from famous people, signatures of every president, literary manuscripts, scientific manuscripts. But my favorites were the musical manuscripts. In addition to the Park Avenue apartment, he had this huge house in the Hamptons and in the living room he had a piano that had once belonged to Maurice Ravel. From the bench, you could look out and see the ocean. He let me play it whenever I wanted. Did I ever tell you I played piano?”

“No, Vivian, I don’t believe you ever mentioned it.” There had been a battered old upright piano in the lake house, but Tess had never heard anyone play a single note—though Vivian had often sat on the bench during cocktail hour, when the adults drank gin and tonics and Tess nursed a Shirley Temple.

“Oh, yes. I once played Beethoven’s third piano concerto with the Radcliffe Symphony Orchestra, but that wasn’t the highlight of my musical career.”

“What was the highlight?”

“One day I was at the Hamptons house and a package arrived from Sotheby’s in London. I was the only one there, working on cataloging an archive of E. M. Forster letters, so I signed for the package and, since it was from Sotheby’s, I opened it. I knew what Mr. Deramus had bought at the most recent auction and I couldn’t wait to see it. Inside was a twenty-two page, previously unknown musical manuscript by Clara Schumann—my idol when it came to the piano. The manuscript had been described as an ‘unfinished work for keyboard, never performed or recorded.’ I didn’t need to know any more than that. I set the pages on Ravel’s Steinway and started to play.

“Oh my God, Tess, can you imagine? Hearing a piece of music that no one has heard except the composer who died a century ago? And having it come out of your fingers through Ravel’s piano and seeing the waves of the Atlantic whenever you glanced up? I wept. When the housekeeper came in with the FBI, they found me sitting there weeping.”

“I’m sorry, did you say the FBI?”

“Oh yes. FBI, SEC. Turns out Deramus was running a Ponzi scheme. Defrauded investors of something like two billion dollars. But, you know, easy come, easy go. It was the last time I ever went to the Hamptons. The government sold the Schumann manuscript along with everything else. I’ve no idea where it went. But I remember it—I can’t play it note for note, but I can hum the themes and I can remember how it made me feel. They can never take that away.”

“Could you play a little of it for me?”

“What do you mean?”

“The Schumann,” said Tess. “If we went someplace with a piano, could you play some of it?”

“Don’t be silly, Tess,” said Vivian. “I don’t know how to play the piano.”

This was how it always went with Vivian’s stories—she told them with total commitment as if they had been a real part of her life. Then as soon as the story ended, Vivian forgot all about it. Quizzed on the details she’d look nonplussed and ask where in the world you got such a silly idea. And yet the story soothed Tess, as Vivian’s tales so often did. And it quieted the voices. They’d be back, Tess knew that, and she wouldn’t always be able to count on a new story from Vivian, but as she slipped back into a dreamless sleep, the voices were silent.

TESS AND HARRY ON THE DOCK

“Why can’t we have a television here?” nine-year-old Tess had asked her father one night. “You said you watched the moon landing from the lake on a television.”

“That’s true, but it was my parents’ decision to bring a TV that summer, and it was the only year we ever did. And the reception was terrible. Besides, it’s not like we sat around watching game shows all summer. We watched the moon landing and that was it. It was a special occasion.”

“There are other special occasions,” said Tess sulkily.

“We have a radio.”

“It’s not the same. There are no cartoons on the radio.”

“Radio waves are the most beautiful things in the world, Tess. They can send us music and entertainment, and they can teach us about the stars and the origin of the universe.”

“And that’s what you do at your work, right? Listen to the radio?”

“Not exactly. I teach at the university, you know that. But I also work for SETI analyzing radio waves.”

“Listening for aliens, right?”

“Something like that,” said Harry.

“If you ever hear a message, what will you say back?”

“Think about this, Tess. We believe that the earth is near the edge of the Milky Way Galaxy. That galaxy is something on the order of fifty thousand light-years across.”

“And a light-year is really far, right?”

“If we sent a radio wave to a star one light-year away, it would take a year to get there.”