But the school violin, even with its new bridge, was a school violin. Its voice thinned and gave out exactly where the music started to ask real questions; and by April Arthur had begun to go quiet in lessons in a way she had not heard before β a listening past the instrument, to the player trapped inside its limitations, like a man hearing a singer through a wall.
The saxophone was Arthur's college instrument. He had played it in a dance band to pay for his tuition, four nights a week, in a jacket with satin lapels he had described exactly once and refused to describe again. When the band ended, the saxophone had gone into its case and survived thirty-some years of spring cleanings, because Rose understood, as she put it, that a man does not sell the sound of himself at twenty.
In the second week of April, 1986, Arthur took it to a music dealer across the river, and sold it, and came home with the money folded into an envelope in his inside pocket, and said nothing.
He said nothing for a week. But Arthur was a man whose honesty was so complete that an unshared fact showed in his shoulders, and Rose, who had been reading those shoulders since 1968, simply waited until Thursday, set two cups of tea on the kitchen table, and said, "Arthur. Tell me about the saxophone."
He told her. All of it: the dealer, the price, the envelope, the plan. A real violin β not a good-enough violin, but one sized and voiced for the girl, bought outright, hers in law and in fact, so that no cupboard and no budget meeting could ever take it back. He had the whole defense prepared. She could see him holding it, like sheet music.
Rose was angry for exactly one minute.
She was not angry about the violin. She was angry β she said this at full volume, standing, with the tea going cold β that he had gone alone, that he had carried it alone for a week like a stone in his shoe, that after eighteen years of marriage he still believed there was a single good deed in this world he was required to smuggle. "You don't get to be noble by yourself in this house, Arthur Delaney. That is not the arrangement. That has never been the arrangement."
And then the minute was over, the way weather passes over a ridge, and she sat down, and opened the envelope, and counted the money twice with a nurse's precision, and said, in her ordinary voice, "It's not quite enough for the one she deserves. It's enough for the one she deserves if the man selling it has a heart. Tomorrow you and I are going to find out which kind of man sells violins in this city. Together."
They went together: the two of them in the violin shop on a Saturday, Arthur in his good jacket, Rose with the envelope in her handbag and her other hand in the crook of his arm, and three violins laid out on the counter's green cloth. The dealer β who turned out to be the kind with a heart, or at least the kind who recognized Rose Delaney's expression and rose to it β brought a fourth from the back, unpriced, and said, "Have the child play them all. The right one will stop arguing."
She played them all, in the shop's back room with its smell of rosin and old wood, her heart going like a drumline, so frightened of choosing wrong that Arthur finally said, gently, "Gabrielle. It isn't an examination. You're listening for the one that sounds like the inside of your own head."
The fourth violin sounded like the inside of her own head.
It was not the prettiest. Its varnish was a deep, plain brown, unshowy as a sparrow. But when she drew the bow across the open strings the sound came up round and unhurried, with a warmth at the center of it that the school violin had only ever been able to point at from a distance, and she played the hymn tune, and the scale, and then β without deciding to β the first bars of the piece she was learning for the spring concert, and the room went quiet around her in a way she had only ever heard in churches.
Rose said, "That one," in the voice of a woman reading a thermometer. Arthur, who had sold the sound of himself at twenty to buy it, stood with his hands folded in front of him like a schoolboy and said nothing at all, and the dealer wrapped it in its case and then in brown paper, although it had a case, because some purchases require ceremony the way some medicines require food.