The Widow's Opera

The widow gazed down the wide prospect of Canal Street at a twilight, eastern sky.  She was on the lookout for Morpheus but thinking of this corner almost six years before when the music of Ferdinand Piro haunted it, drifting out from the overcrowded building behind her. He had come a long way past that first evening of despair and charity food from the woman neighbor who worked for a large butcher shop chain, whose thick accent necessitated repeating her name several times before he understood that it was simply Ursa; he had endured, so had she, and they had helped each other. Through cool April evenings, the breezy nights of May, they dined on every cut of lamb, beef, pork, poultry, to the tintinnabulation of Ursa’s bell-clock.  That foreign, antique contraption, with its glass bells, silver clappers, entranced Ferdinand. He sought high and low for praiseworthy similes. He rhapsodized. Its sound was likened to that, in microcosm, of the music of the spheres.  Ah, the bell-clock!  It chimed hourly. There were other sounds; the musician’s quick ear delighted in Ursa’s accent, discovered usable melodies in her  homely Polish tunes. He grew accustomed to her sympathy, her lonely ways, to a new and soon indispensable meal-time security. That dinner season passed as flutteringly as Ursa’s white tablecloth, shaken at first, might float and then settle down on the nocturnal table; just so habit smoothed into accord the young man’s uneasy pride and the refugee’s timidity in the presence of an artist.

In his gratitude, Ferdinand got her a job as a cook and, unbeknownst to her, amazed and awed her new employer with the tale of her sufferings.  Such courage and endurance, Stanley Belden felt sure, could only prosper in the land of opportunity. He was devising ways to give her a better start, when his wife fired her, with the remark that the cook begrudged doubling as a part-time domestic.  The easy-going days of leaning back against a window frame, a finger contemplatively pressed to his chin, of musing over projects for the heroic, white-garbed woman who lit like a great, pale butterfly from task to task in the enormous, high-ceilinged house -- those days were over. The financier moved to help at once. His loans led to Ursa’s new apartment, to the start of her butcher shop. He had confidence in her. But she dreamt of a doubt in his eyes, a mote of suspicion about the chances for a woman who spoke barely intelligible English. She persevered.  She astonished her new neighbors, the Morphy’s, for despite long work hours, she had time enough to flatten the Slavic lilt out of her syntax, eradicate the accent and master some American slang. But she stopped there. She had no ambitions beyond one day repaying her  benefactor.

The diners continued as before, with the ancient, ever-spotless tablecloth and the harvest moon aglow in the window, regardless of  Mrs. Morphy’s disapproval that Ferdinand’s example would soon bring the whole neighborhood begging to the butcher shop. But after the musician obtained the opera company job, he insisted on financing the meals.  (And, needless to say, since the lurid, local uprising for alms never came to pass, Nina then  had no competitors for her neighbor’s bounty.)  Ursa Smirny had become Ferdinand’s audience.  She alone heard his music and knew that the careerist pose masked as much composition as ever.  She smiled on his youthful plan to reemerge and take the musical world by storm. His hopes were the joy of her life; above all, his romantic hopes.

How crazy he went over that Belden girl!  Ursa had never seen anything like it.  As she swept, dusted away her afternoons from room to magnificent room, she heard always the nearby piano sonata, allegro, andante, presto, as the girlish  fingers trilled over the ivory keys.  After each weekly lesson, on their way home down the wide streets of the rich, along treeless commercial avenues in the bus, finally to their own cramped, hilly end of town, the widow heard it all and intermingled with Ferdinand’s voice, she thought she heard time, glassily, melodiously measured by the bell clock, its melancholy chime that all is passing and leaves no trace.  The young man was lost. He had given himself up to  a mere child, who, by some miracle, understood it. Ursa, the sole witness, could help in no way besides listening, and of course Ferdinand, with the generous egoism of the lover, assumed that she was eager to hear about his every slightest emotional palpitation, his every fragment of a thought about Mae. He disarmed all criticism or advice. He was so natural, artless, direct, a true child of light.

She paced to and from the curb, annoyed at Morphy for keeping her waiting. It was uncharacteristic for him to be late and especially on this, the night of her dinner party. It seemed to her that he had recently been acting strangely, as though he had lost his good sense. He prowled around at all hours, if not alone, then with the most unsavory, even criminal types, and when they met, he plagued poor Ursa with questions.

“And he’s probably ruining his health,”  she reflected, smoothing down her breeze-ruffled pastel skirt. As she thought of his pale, intent eyes, and how they fairly burned from within, it occurred to her that Morphy was in love.  “But with who?”  She asked aloud.  “If not Nina?”  The image of a detective building a case came to mind, but it was not merely a detective, nor merely a case, but a man, putting together the pieces of a woman’s character and then, perhaps, confusing her with another.  “He himself may not even know who it is,”  she thought, but was certain that the answer would come anon.

Ursa moved uneasily down the block. Ambiguous motions flickered gloomily by in her mind, like night-birds through the surrounding twilight. She passed the jangling carts of peddlers, their vermiculated trays of half-priced goods, and let her thoughts whir indistinctly on. She paused at a late-hours Chinese grocery stor