The Ground

The ground was the first thing applied and the last thing removed — a thin layer of hard wax spread across the polished copper plate with a felt-covered roller, heated gently over a spirit lamp until it flowed evenly and then allowed to cool to a matte finish that accepted the graver's cut without chipping or crumbling. The ground served two purposes: it protected the unworked areas of the plate from accidental scratches, and it provided a visual contrast that made the engraved lines visible against the copper's reflective surface, the cut lines appearing as bright threads against the dark wax, a reversal of the final printed result, where the lines would appear as dark ink on white paper. Everything in engraving was reversed. The engraver worked in mirror, cutting the music backward so that it would print forward, and this reversal was so deeply embedded in Abigail's practice that she no longer thought about it, her hands automatically transposing left and right as they moved across the plate, her mind reading the backward notation as fluently as she read the forward notation on a printed page.

She had once tried to explain this to Eliot, when he was fourteen and had come to the workshop on a Saturday to watch her work. He had stood beside her bench and looked at the plate and said, "It's all backward," and she had said, "It's not backward to me," and he had looked at her with an expression she still remembered — not surprise, exactly, but recognition, as if he had understood something about her that he had not understood before, something about the particular way her mind worked, the way it could inhabit a reversed world and call it home.

That was seventeen years ago. Eliot had been a boy with dark hair and his father's jawline and a way of standing that was simultaneously present and elsewhere, his body in the room but his attention somewhere above it, listening to something no one else could hear. His father, Daniel Voss, had been a cellist in the Philadelphia Orchestra, a reliable section player who had occupied the third stand of the cello section for twelve years before a tendon injury in his left hand ended his playing career and, in the slow cascade that followed, ended his marriage to Abigail and his daily presence in Eliot's life. Daniel lived in Baltimore now. He taught at the Peabody Conservatory. He and Abigail exchanged emails on Eliot's birthday and at Christmas, brief messages of such careful neutrality that they could have been written by a diplomatic service.

Daniel knew about Eliot's silence. He did not know, because Abigail had not told him, about the Barlow manuscript. She was not sure why she had not told him. It was not protectiveness, or not only protectiveness — it was something more like superstition, a feeling that the manuscript's meaning, whatever it turned out to be, belonged to the space between herself and Eliot, and that to introduce a third party, even Eliot's father, would change the shape of that space in ways she could not predict and did not want to risk.

On Saturday morning Abigail drove to Fishtown.

Eliot's building was a converted textile mill on a side street off Frankford Avenue, four stories of red brick with tall windows that had once illuminated rows of looms and now illuminated apartments whose rents had tripled in the fifteen years since the neighborhood's transformation from working-class to whatever it was now. Eliot's apartment was on the third floor, a one-bedroom unit with high ceilings and original hardwood floors and a view of the elevated train tracks that carried the Market-Frankford line past his windows every eight minutes during the day and every twelve minutes at night, a rhythm that Eliot had once told her he found comforting, the regular passage of the trains a kind of metronome that structured the hours without requiring anything of him.

She pressed the buzzer and waited. The intercom crackled. "Yes," Eliot said.

"It's me."

A pause. The door buzzed open. Abigail climbed the stairs — the elevator had been broken since December and the building's management company had been promising to repair it for three months — and arrived at the third floor slightly winded, a fact she attributed to the stairs and not to the apprehension that had been building in her since she left Mount Airy, a tightness in her chest that was not physical but that expressed itself physically, as these things always did.

Eliot's door was open. He was standing in the kitchen, filling a kettle. He was wearing a gray sweatshirt and jeans and his feet were bare on the wooden floor, and he looked, Abigail thought, the way he always looked now — thinner than he should be, his dark hair longer than he used to keep it, his face carrying the particular pallor of someone who spent most of his time indoors. But his eyes were clear and he was standing upright and the apartment, while cluttered, was not dirty, and these were the things she checked, the small diagnostic observations she performed each time she saw him, the vital signs of a life she could monitor but not treat.

"I brought muffins," she said, setting a paper bag on the kitchen counter. "From the place on Chelten."

"Thank you."

He made tea. She sat on the couch, which was a large, sagging corduroy affair that Eliot had found at a thrift store in Kensington and that was, despite its appearance, extraordinarily comfortable, the kind of furniture that received the body rather than resisting it. The apartment around her was as she remembered it: books in piles, a laptop on the kitchen table with its screen dark, a small television on a stand against the wall, the Bechstein piano in the corner with its lid closed, the stack of mail on top of it higher than it had been eleven days ago.

She did not look at the piano. She looked at the books. The pile beside the couch had grown — a novel with a blue cover, another with a red cover, a nonfiction book about the history of the Erie Canal that she found incongruous but did not comment on because she did not comment on Eliot's reading habits any more than she commented on his eating habits or his sleeping habits or any other aspect of his life that was, she had decided long ago, his to manage.

Eliot brought two mugs of tea and sat in the armchair across from her. The armchair was positioned so that he could see the window, and beyond the window the elevated tracks, and Abigail noticed that the chair had been moved since her last visit — it had been angled toward the television and was now angled toward the window, a small rearrangement that might have meant anything or nothing but that she noted and stored in the accumulating file of observations that constituted her understanding of her son's interior life.

"How's the workshop," Eliot said.

"Busy. We have a large commission."

"What is it?"

"A violin concerto. Posthumous. The composer died in January."

She said this without inflection, without emphasis, without any of the verbal cues that would have signaled to Eliot that the information was significant. She said it the way she would have said it about any commission, because she had decided, in the car on the way over, that she would not tell him about the dedication. Not yet. Not until she understood more about the piece, about Barlow's intentions, about the nature of the connection between the dead composer and her living son. To tell him now, with no context, no preparation, no understanding of what the dedication meant, would be to drop a weight on him without knowing whether he could bear it, and Abigail, who had spent three years watching her son carefully, measuring his capacity, calibrating her words and her silences to the fluctuations of his state, was not going to drop anything on him that she had not first weighed herself.

"Who was the composer," Eliot said.

And here was the moment she had anticipated, the question she had known he would ask, and she answered it because to deflect it would be more conspicuous than to answer it, and because she did not lie to Eliot, had never lied to him, had built their entire relationship on a foundation of honesty that she was now, she recognized with a discomfort she did not allow to show on her face, undermining by omission.

"Peter Barlow," she said.

Eliot's hand, which had been raising the mug of tea to his mouth, stopped. Not dramatically — not a flinch or a freeze, nothing that would have been visible to anyone who was not watching as closely as Abigail was watching — but a pause, a momentary suspension of the hand's trajectory, as if the name had introduced a small obstacle in the air between the mug and his lips and the hand needed a fraction of a second to navigate around it.

"Peter Barlow," he said.

"Yes. The estate sent us the manuscript. It's a violin concerto."

"His second."

"You knew about it."

"He mentioned it. Years ago. He said he was working on something for violin." Eliot brought the mug to his lips and drank. "He died in January. I read about it."

"Were you in touch with him? Recently, I mean."

"No."

The word was flat, unadorned, and it closed the subject the way a barline closes a measure — not permanently, because the music continues in the next measure, but with a definiteness that said: this measure is complete, whatever it contained is contained, and we are moving on. Abigail recognized the barline. She moved on.

They talked about other things. The weather, which had been unusually cold for March. A restaurant that had opened on Girard Avenue, a ramen place that Eliot said he had been to once and that was, he said, acceptable, a word that in Eliot's vocabulary occupied the exact midpoint between enthusiasm and indifference. The Erie Canal book, which Eliot said was interesting because it described the process of building the locks, the engineering of water control, the precise calculations of elevation and flow rate that allowed boats to be raised and lowered through a vertical distance that would otherwise have been impassable.

"The locks are beautiful," Eliot said. "They're simple machines. They just hold the water at different levels and let it equalize. Nothing moves except the water."

Abigail listened. She listened the way she listened to music — not to the words themselves but to their arrangement, their rhythm, their dynamic contour, the way Eliot's voice rose slightly when he talked about the locks and fell when he talked about the restaurant, the way he leaned forward in the armchair when he was engaged and settled back when he was merely filling the silence. She had been listening to Eliot for thirty-one years and she could read him the way she could read a manuscript — not fluently, not without ambiguity, but with an expertise that was born of sustained attention and that no one else in the world possessed, because no one else had spent as many hours studying this particular text.

He was not well. This was not a diagnosis — Abigail was not a doctor, and the doctors Eliot had seen in the first year after the breakdown had offered their own diagnoses, their own prescriptions, their own carefully calibrated programs of treatment that Eliot had followed for a time and then abandoned with a quietness that was itself a symptom of whatever was wrong, because a person who was fighting would have abandoned treatment loudly, angrily, with the energy of rebellion, and Eliot had abandoned it the way a leaf detaches from a branch, without force, without decision, simply letting go. He was not well, but he was not in crisis. He was in the middle place, the plateau between falling and climbing, and Abigail did not know whether the plateau was a rest stop or a destination, whether he was gathering strength for an ascent or simply settling into a permanent altitude that was lower than the one he had once inhabited.

She stayed for an hour. She did not mention the dedication. She did not mention the solo violin's entrance on the second ledger line, the leap of a minor ninth, the music reaching beyond the staff. She drank her tea and ate a muffin and talked about the weather and the Erie Canal and she watched her son's face for the signs she always watched for — the flicker of interest, the brief animation that meant something in the conversation had reached him, the equally brief withdrawal that meant something had struck too close — and she cataloged what she saw and carried it with her when she left.

In the car, driving back to Mount Airy, she thought about the ground — the wax layer on the copper plate, the dark coating that protected the surface and made the work visible. The ground was temporary. It would be removed after the engraving was complete, dissolved with turpentine, the plate cleaned and polished until only the engraved lines remained, permanent and unprotected, ready for the ink. The ground was a shelter for the work while the work was being done, and once the work was done the shelter was no longer needed, and the work stood alone.

She thought about this. She thought about what it meant to be a ground — a temporary protection, a dark surface against which the bright cuts of the work could be seen. She thought about whether she had been a ground for Eliot, a shelter for the work that was growing in him during the years when it was growing, and whether the shelter had served its purpose or had become, over time, something else — not a protection but an obstruction, a dark layer that did not make the work visible but obscured it, that did not enable the bright cuts but prevented them.

She did not know. She could not know. This was the fundamental limitation of her position — she was the engraver, not the composer, the one who made the music visible on the page but who did not write the music, who could read the notation but not hear the sounds, who could cut the lines but not determine their direction. She could see the pattern of Eliot's life the way she could see the pattern of notes on a manuscript page, but she could not interpret it, could not say with certainty what any given passage meant, could only engrave what she saw and hope that the printing — the final result, the life that Eliot would eventually live — would reveal a coherence that was not yet visible in the manuscript.

At home she sat at the kitchen table and opened the Barlow manuscript to the place where she had left off the night before — the beginning of the second movement, where the handwriting began to deteriorate and the notation became harder to read. The second movement was marked Andante con moto — walking pace, with motion — and it began with a long solo for the violin over a sustained string chord, the solo line moving in a narrow range, stepwise, almost like a recitative, like someone speaking rather than singing, the notes closely spaced and rhythmically free, with the kind of expressive flexibility that the Italian word rubato — literally "stolen" — described, time being taken from one beat and given to another in a way that notation could suggest but never fully capture.

Abigail read the solo line slowly, measure by measure, using the magnifying glass to distinguish the noteheads from the blots and smudges that surrounded them. The line was in D minor, the relative minor of the first movement's F major, and it had a quality that she recognized from Barlow's other works — a searching quality, a sense of the melody trying to find its way through the harmony, testing one path and then another, never quite arriving at the destination the ear expected, always deflecting at the last moment into an unexpected interval, a chromatic turn, a leap that changed the direction of the phrase.

On the fourth page of the second movement she found the first annotation.

It was written in pencil, in handwriting that was different from the main text — smaller, neater, more deliberate, as if the writer had set down the pen with which he was composing and picked up a pencil to leave a note to himself, or to someone else, in the margin. The annotation read:

E — this is where the memory starts. Can you hear it? The Schubert. Third bar of the development. You played it for me in the studio, that afternoon. Do you remember.

Abigail read it twice. She read it a third time. She set down the magnifying glass and looked at the manuscript page, at the penciled words in the margin beside the notation, at the careful handwriting that did not match the increasingly desperate notation hand, and she understood that Peter Barlow had not simply composed this concerto for Eliot Voss. He had composed it to Eliot Voss. The music was a letter, and the annotations were its footnotes, and the dedication on the title page was not a courtesy but a declaration, and the work she had been asked to do — the engraving of this score — was not a technical task but a translation, a rendering into permanent form of a dead man's last attempt to reach a living one.

She looked at the notation surrounding the annotation. The solo violin line at that point was playing a descending phrase in eighth notes — D, C-sharp, B-flat, A, G, F-sharp — and Abigail, who had studied oboe at Curtis and who still possessed, despite decades of silence on the instrument, the musician's ear for reference and allusion, heard in the descending line the echo of something familiar. Schubert. The annotation said Schubert. Third bar of the development. She could not place it immediately — she did not have the comprehensive knowledge of the repertoire that a working musician or a scholar would have — but she recognized the shape of the melody, the particular contour of the descent, and she knew that Peter Barlow had embedded in his concerto a quotation, a fragment of another composer's music, and that the quotation was not decorative but referential, pointing to a specific moment, a specific memory, a specific afternoon in a studio at Juilliard when Eliot had played something for his teacher and the teacher had remembered it and woven it into the last thing he wrote.

Abigail closed the manuscript. She sat at the kitchen table and she thought about what she had found, and what she had not yet found, and what the remaining pages might contain, and she thought about Eliot in his apartment in Fishtown with his closed piano and his bare feet on the hardwood floor, and she thought about whether to tell him.

Not yet.

She was not ready. The manuscript was not ready. The deciphering was not complete, the annotations not fully cataloged, the music not fully understood. She would finish the recon — the word came to her from some other context, some other discipline, the military or the surveying of land — before she made any decisions about what to share and when to share it and how.

She washed her mug. She turned off the kitchen light. She went upstairs and lay in the dark and she did not think about the Schubert quotation or the penciled annotation or the dedication on the title page. She thought about Eliot at fourteen, standing beside her bench in the workshop, looking at the reversed notation on the copper plate and saying, "It's all backward," and she thought about what she had said in return — "It's not backward to me" — and she wondered whether this was still true, whether the reversal she had mastered in her work had somehow infected the rest of her life, so that what she saw as forward was in fact backward, and what she offered as closeness was in fact distance, and what she intended as love arrived, in the printing, as something else entirely.

The house settled. The radiator ticked. Outside, the last light of the March evening faded from the windows, and Abigail lay in the dark with her eyes open, and the manuscript sat on the kitchen table below her, and the music in it waited, uncut, unprinted, unheard.