Doc - Mary Doria Russell [5]
“This terrible old cough,” she complained smilingly. “I just don’t know why I can’t shake it!”
For the first time, the boy saw how small his mother was, how thin. The relief at finding her was shattering and he was shamed by the single sob that escaped him, but his pride was saved when Alice Jane let them both pretend it was the emotion of the music that had unmanned him.
“Oh, John Henry, I just knew that you would love it,” she cried, gray eyes shining at him from a pale oval face. “The Emperor is pure virile beauty! It is everything I want you to be, sugar. Elegant, and strong, and full of fire!”
They ordered sheet music for a solo piano transcription the next day and began work on the piece as soon as it arrived in the mail. Alice had taught many children to play and she was realistic about her son’s talent. John Henry was good, but not a prodigy. What made him unusual as a student was his capacity for obstinate labor, and she was confident that he would make this music yield to his persistence.
In the beginning, he was still so small that some stretches were impossible. As his reach lengthened, Alice made him play with pennies on the backs of his hands to level them and train his fingers to strike the keys more cleanly. At twelve, he’d have practiced trills and turns for hours if she hadn’t cautioned that too much repetition could injure him and stop his progress. By his thirteenth birthday, he was shooting up like a sunflower, already taller than many full-grown men, his wrists and forearms as flexible and strong as steel springs, his hands easily spanning tenths. His attack improved noticeably from week to week. He began to understand when to linger between the notes to expand the elegance and grace of a phrase.
Never in all that time did he or his mother speak of her illness directly.
He continued to study other compositions, but the Emperor was their common cause and their great shared passion. It was serene assurance within gnawing anxiety, splendor in defiance of deprivation and creeping poverty; as the drumbeat of incomprehensible Yankee victories grew louder, it became a bulwark against raw fear. By the spring of 1865, he could play the entire concerto without pause, executing the tense flying arpeggios with accuracy and authority, making low chords thunder and high chords chime like silver bells. Alice herself gave less and less instruction as the months passed but never tired of listening to him play, even as her own fate, and the Confederacy’s, came closer.
The war that was to have finished by Christmas of ’61 lasted four catastrophic years. More than 625,000 combatants were dead of wounds, starvation, or disease, with a million more bodies and spirits damaged beyond fixing. Nearly everyone in the South was bankrupted by the collapse of the Confederate currency and the postwar inflation. In this, the Hollidays were no exception, though the clan was more fortunate than most. Its menfolk bore their share of danger and hardship, but they all came back alive and relatively whole.
In the end, it was not Confederate veterans but his mother who taught John Henry Holliday that there are wars that cannot be won, no matter how valiantly they are fought. Consumed by fever, weakened by privation and by the terrible hunger that followed Sherman’s march to the sea, exhausted by the violent cough that all but shook her to pieces, Alice McKey Holliday died, day by day, before her child’s eyes.
He was barely fifteen when the great blow fell. Until her coffin closed, they had never been separated longer than a school day.
More mature members of the family were not surprised when John Henry’s father remarried a scant three months after his first wife was laid in her grave. In the view of Henry Holliday’s many brothers, he had shown admirable restraint during the long years when Alice was no true wife to him, for it was not only the war and her illness that had come between them. No one would have said as much, but everybody knew. On the day his little boy was born, Henry Holliday became superfluous in