Beauty begins within the soul. Within every one is an inner light. This light cannot easily be extinguished. The light can get low. It can be muted and dimmed. The light flickers with the belief that one is born malevolent and doomed. If this belief falls into faith, the believer begins to become a beast. Light burns brighter and slower for longer with the conviction that the ego is sacred and life is worth living. And if this conviction becomes confidence, the knowing one becomes beautiful just in being—in being oneself.
The rising sun caught and streaked strands of Gerta’s auburn hair. As she tinkled the lighter keys, Gerta leaned more than she swayed, holding her posture upright yet relaxed as her fingers caressed the piano with slight pressure—like a feather stroking the ivory keys with the measured force of every muscle and nerve, gently pressing down before lifting up.
Gerta played in a practice room as plain as others in the university’s hall of music and fine arts. The gothic building had been there for over a century. Gerta, cloaked in her hooded cape, used the room every week at the same time, slipping in without permission, slipping out without notice. Only the custodian, an administrator and the dean knew she was there. They each had reasons to look away so Gerta could play. Music filled the room with joyful music few remembered and everyone enjoyed.
Every Wednesday before noon, Gerta began to loosen up in light of the sun high above the Fine Arts Building, shimmering off the lake, piercing through clouds or illuminating campus leaves, trees and lawns. On some days, the sun was heavily covered by dark clouds—visible through a single, wide, long window. Before the sun began to drop over the western plains, she’d have closed the piano and hooded herself, exiting the practice room and taking leave down a flight of stairs. Gerta arrived and played every Wednesday morning. She left by mid-afternoon. She alone knew the motive, reason and reward.
Gerta did not know the girl she’d look down through the window upon. Seated at the piano bench facing the large, gothic window, she could see that the child lived in a room which she supposed had been the servants’ quarters of a large house on campus set back far from the tree-lined avenue. Gerta could see the girl sitting on her bed wearing a skirt which came above her knees, swinging her legs, hands folded in her lap until the door opened and the mother appeared. Gerta could see everything from the bench: tension in the small face, chewing of her nails, wide, petrified, unblinking eyes as the girl’s body braced while the mother entered, advancing toward the child. The first time Gerta watched, she stopped playing and, when she did, the girl turned her face to bear the force of the mother’s willful blow. Gerta noticed the mother paused when the music stopped—and promptly struck the child again…but harder.
Gerta never stopped playing piano while watching the girl again. After a few weeks, it was as if Gerta was absorbing, assimilating and channeling the girl’s trepidation through her fingertips in dark, dramatic musical notes. The child’s routine varied. Gerta, seeing what happened below through the house bedroom’s large, wood-framed window, noticed each varied routine ended with the same result.
The mother adorned the girl as one would dress a doll. The woman sat on the bed, placing and opening a pink-dotted black case on a bedside vanity table. Reaching for the case, using various hand tools, she dabbed, smudged and painted the child’s face. The mother pushed, powdered, held still and stifled the girl, and she did so with effort, brushing and sculpting the child into a little adult—approximating a miniature woman—dressing her in clothes beyond her age, as if to accentuate a form which was not real. The girl, whom she randomly struck without fuss, was moistened, glistened and positioned. With her hair curled, Gerta saw that she was glamorized into a figurine for show. Taking measure as the girl was prepared for display, Gerta let herself watch as she played the piano.
Weeks passed, then months. Gerta began to select her repertoire as she developed a sense of the child, noticing, then, anticipating, the girl’s twitches and slightest movements and sudden, wincing turns of cheek. The furrow of her brow, a recoil—her small, thin frame shuddering and trembling, how she stood stiff and unmoving before the mother—how she lay while sleeping during a nap, whether twisting to a scream or smiling in slumber before the mother breached the space, often poking and pulling the girl out of the room.
Gerta leaned to the left of the piano bench to peer upon a portion of the front porch, watching mother and daughter descend the stairs and walk to the curb. There, she could see the girl corralled into a car, taken to what Gerta supposed were rehearsals for beauty contests. The child was decked in beaded, speckled costumes glued with shards of colored plastic and topped with hats matching shiny, tiny shoes.
The girl was being groomed, Gerta realized as she closed the fall board and the afternoon sun began to blind her eyes. One time, she looked down at the girl in the room, past the sheer curtain of the wide, wood-framed window, gazing upon a spent, deflated child peeling off her costume. Wiping makeup while seated on a stool before the mirrored vanity, Gerta saw the girl fall onto the bed, curling up to rest and be left alone—to read a book, to simply be. After she finished playing, Gerta rose from the bench, moved to the window and stood, observing as Gerta’s heart nearly beat out of her chest, bearing witness to a fellow prisoner in another cell—whom she could not reach, yet wanted to embrace, strengthen and liberate.
Disturbed to action, Gerta bolted from the practice room, taking three flights of stairs to make her way home with her coat buttoned up, chenille scarf tossed and tightly wrapped up and around her neck to her chin with the wide, curved brim of a custom-made hat pulled down over her hood, shielding her face. Carrying a loose bag stuffed with sheet music looped over her shoulder, Gerta’s weekly ritual of observance and swift departure repeated for months—then, for years.
When the housebound girl reached the age of 11, filling out her lithe body, Gerta added more abstract music to her repertoire. Gradually, as she played her instrument and observed the girl, Gerta watched the girl becoming woman. Her bed became larger. A new mattress was moved in. The room remained plain. The mother remained stern, though slower to strike, primp and stifle the child.
The house and music hall were soon covered in snow. Beyond the new season’s falling snowflakes, through the bedroom window’s curtain between Gerta and the girl below, Gerta witnessed the child in tears, pulling stockings down or leaving them bundled on the floor as Gerta began to notice the girl using her hands in a way she’d not previously seen. Observing an orange container dispensing white pills on a palm, the girl, now teenaged, threw back her head as if mocking the world, hating herself.
The teenaged girl’s new habit lasted for months until one frosty morning when Gerta arrived in the practice room, uncovering her hood and, taking her seat on the bench and lifting the fall board to play, she saw circling red lights from an ambulance at the curb. As the practice room flashed in crimson, Gerta noticed the door thrown open to the girl’s room and watched medics carry a slim, lifeless body on a stretcher past the mother’s shadow against a hallway wall.
Every week, Gerta continued to play piano—she didn’t notice each performance grow more intense—peering below only to see a dark space lined with a strip of light beneath a closed door until one rainy afternoon, as Gerta finished a long, arduous sonata movement, almost on cue the girl, now a young woman, opened the door, re-entering her bedchamber with a slow, tentative step.
Gerta knew not where the girl had came from, though she could pre-suppose, and she noticed something different, wiser, in the woman’s demeanor—as if in the pause, the young woman had accepted, integrated and owned that which had preceded her return. Gerta observed that she set a basket of books topped by a wrapped object upon the bed. The girl began to remove the items until the mother appeared at the room’s entrance, looming behind her. At that, the girl turned, rose from the basket and abruptly stepped forth to block the mother’s way. The mother shrank in retreat as the rain came falling down.
The girl resumed unpacking to unsheathe the wrapped object, which she held out to behold. Gerta could see her holding an etched glass reproduction of an ancient Greek statue of a nude woman, hands and arms reaching upward, face squarely looking up. The young woman held the statue with intent before setting it down, stepping back to contemplate, examine and admire it, turning her body as if posing in proximity to that which she now owned. Adjusting the statuette atop a pedestal opposite a full-length mirror, she proceeded to lift, unpack and examine the books in her basket, one by one, placing each volume either on a bookshelf beside a chair and floor lamp in the corner or stacked against the vanity mirror.
Many were thick, wide, hardbound books. Most editions featured pictures of sculptures on the covers. As Gerta watched the young woman re-emerge while listening to the patter of rain, she resumed playing piano, infusing her performance with deliberation. To Gerta’s amazement, if not shock, the woman who’d once been a girl suddenly stopped unpacking her box. Purposefully, like a ballerina in plié, the woman who’d reclaimed her own room stepped to the rain-soaked window, looking up—her eyes searching through the rain for the source of the music, her face at last plain, clear and beautiful.
Drawn by Gerta’s melody, she pushed the curtain aside, lifting the heavy, slightly open window higher and gazing upon the practice room, where she saw the pianist playing the music she heard—and, for the first time, that the player was a woman at a large picture window—performing while matching her gaze through the rain. They studied one another’s faces as their eyes met. The melody softly played, echoing between house and hall of arts, accompanied by the rain.
The woman who’d been a child contestant looked up in awe at the auburn-haired musician. Gerta could see her stricken face filling with curiosity, confusion and something which was not pity but a plea—a longing to learn. This is the moment a long, dark shadow came over the practice room wall behind Gerta, who heard footsteps behind her. Holding the young woman’s gaze from the house below, she dared not turn to look. Gerta heard the older female dean’s blank, lifeless voice say: “You sound…off…today.”
Gerta heard heels click as the dean retreated, departing the practice room. The young woman watched as the dean’s shadow shrank behind Gerta, who was aware that the dean had taken notice of her music, exiting without further comment. The young woman had witnessed the encounter and had kept watch—observing with her downturned mouth as her eyes looked up, studying the pianist—as if striving to grasp, to know and to help Gerta were she in distress.
Out of both their sights, hiding inside the practice room doorway, the dean listened. The next day, the same thing happened. Gerta played her solemn song as the woman heard the notes and looked up in puzzlement, curiosity and longing—while the dean lurked inside the doorway—and Gerta looked upon her young neighbor, playing as raindrops fell.
The downpour lasted five consecutive days, puddling the campus, casting the sky into alternately dark and light gray storm clouds as the temperature turned colder. The women kept their pact of performance and wonder as the young woman rearranged her bedroom, settling into space. The silent exchange became a ritual: young woman watching from a wood-framed window while silk-haired Gerta played music she wrote. Her audience could not have known that Gerta wrote the song when Gerta was a girl.
Gerta’s composition was born one Saturday, conceived after Gerta as a girl had resolved herself to inner rebellion. Young Gerta had decided to defy her mother. Like the neighbor girl, the child Gerta had been groomed, too, for the sake of attaining a certain status. One night, after her mother, enrolled in graduate school and accustomed to her daughter cooking and serving dinner, came home and took her usual seat at the dining table, Gerta smiled as she prepared dinner, cooking the stew to a boil. This is when Gerta, who’d chosen to wear her favorite fall dress, a loose garment in gun-metal gray, paused to announce from the kitchen that she was going out tonight with the one she loved. Stirring the low-boiling pot, pausing to listen for a reaction, Gerta heard her mother slowly push her chair back from the dining table.
The sound of her mother’s footsteps followed. Gerta’s mother entered the kitchen speaking in a low-voiced fury, chastising her daughter, by then a teenage piano prodigy, for acting on her love. Gerta turned from the stove, stepping forward to face her mother. Gerta spoke low when she gravely replied: “I’ll be out tonight with the one I love.”
The mother seethed, spewing words Gerta would never forget, blocking Gerta’s way, which the girl had anticipated. Stepping backward, she reached for the stove. Gripping the handle of the boiling pot—lifting and raising the pot as a kind of threat, she lowered her voice and said: “Get out of my way or this is on you.” These were the last words Gerta spoke to her mother, now fine arts dean of the university where Gerta played piano—the same dean tucking herself inside the doorway to listen to her daughter play.
This is when Gerta heard the flame crinkling up her sleeve, the edge of which had caught the blue of the stovefront flame, engulfing her arm and chest as she saw a look of horror on her mother’s face and, immersed in heat, realized her upper body was on fire. Gerta howled as she dropped down and rolled. The rest of what happened went blank in Gerta’s mind. She would regain consciousness on a Saturday when a melody came to her as a whole composition. Gerta’s was a song of passion, softness and peace conceived as she lay writhing in a helicopter on the way to a burn clinic before the grafting began.
Now, as Gerta played the tune to a climax of ascendant notes, easing into a slower progression, like a wedge gently being fitted into place—sharp edges lining with the mold, snapping into form, Gerta slightly turned. Sensing her mother the dean closing in, Gerta chose instead to focus on the woman looking up from the rain-soaked window below.
Amid the rhythm of rain, the woman looked into Gerta’s eyes in unspoken recognition as Gerta played her song, pausing before reaching for and pushing the curtain aside in a swift, strong, single stroke. Then, she clasped and pressed a control in her hand and, suddenly, bright light flooded and swept the bedroom.
Gerta watched transfixed and played her song’s gentle notes as the woman swapped the remote control for a wooden tool. Gerta could see that she stood before a wide pedestal topped by a mound of clay. Gerta’s eyes drifted to a corner of the bedroom while she played—and she at once noticed the naked feet and legs of a man stepping into the light. For the first time, Gerta saw that the woman, who’d turned her back and began sculpting the young male model, was wearing a smock.
Gerta gazed upon the nude model’s muscled physique, which flowed in sinuous lines and curves from his neck, chest and abdomen to his thighs, calves and feet—everything in proportion—as his arms lay loose at the sides, shoulders upright, alert yet at ease. Gerta could see that he was looking past the sculptress, catching sight of himself in the full-length mirror the woman had re-positioned behind her so the model could see himself posing as she cast his figure in clay while Gerta’s music echoed in the space between the stone hall and the house next door, amplified by steady rain. Only these three knew the sculptress could hear the pianist playing the song as she sculpted the naked man.
The dean continued to watch her daughter from the doorway. As Gerta’s melody played, rainfall dissipated. The air turned cold. Quiet befell the campus and the sky turned dark as the bright room glowed. Gerta’s melody played as snowfall began, as if snowflakes were tossed like slow-motion confetti to accentuate the want and longing of her anguished song. Gerta’s smoothly scarred, taut face, held between her silken, auburn-coated parenthetical haircut, was unseen, unknown, unborn—and she felt the warm wave of happiness which ought to have belonged to the girl whom Gerta once had been—visible only to the sculptress below who, in the moment, sculpted to Gerta’s music.
The small room in which she’d seen the girl beaten—where the child had returned to the mother’s domain, remaking herself on a day of deliverance to music Gerta had created and chosen to play—had been repainted in white, appearing as a block of pure, naked light. Gerta’s fingers, hands and wrists undulated across the keys to slow-falling snow, as homage to her audience, her dreams and herself.
The sculptress briefly paused sculpting, turning to look at Gerta. As if in a dare, she lifted her chin with a smile, looking into the eyes of the musician with the scarred face. Gerta’s eyelids fell and she was stung with tears which flooded down over smooth, thick, hard skin as she played. Against the darkness, Gerta screamed—or she thought she did. Gerta’s bellow was like a wail and she could not see that sculptress and model alike had stepped forth in unison and were standing at the window—because what they’d heard was a high-pitch hymn sung by a siren calling out to her lost and loved one.
Young sculptress and nude model stared up to the practice room from where the music came. They watched—the model and the creator recreating the beauty of man in art form—both held by the long note they did not want to come to an end. When it did, the mother the dean re-emerged in the practice room. Gerta had performed with perfection, playing beyond her skills as her music permeated the room, the building, the campus and the radiating room below, reducing her mother and the past to smallness, causing Gerta’s fingers and nerves to feel flush with the rush of her blood.
The sculptress witnessed Gerta’s joy and smiled with her eyes. Standing at the window beside her, the model, whose face conveyed a hint of mockery, began to turn, twist and move. Gerta continued to play, observing as the model began to dance within the wood-framed square of white light. Sculptress witnessed him move with rapt attention, which spurred her to grip the sculpting tool, plunge it into the clay and pull through with a sense of purpose, power and grace, like a laser pointed to cut through ice.
By the time she finished, Gerta’s tune faded to a whisper. The woman looked backward and up. Their eyes met. Through falling snow, musician and sculptress sealed their mutual bond in an expression which was pride. Having been paid for her performance, the pianist rose without enclosing the keyboard. Lifting her chin, Gerta strode past the dean, exiting the practice room, descending for the last time and, for the first time, uncovered by her hat and hood.
Just then, the sculptress drew the curtain to close. Watching the dancer in his dance, she finished shaping her first sculpture, which would not be her last, in three final strokes, before setting her tool down. Gerta exited campus, walking on—revived with love for living. From now on, she played music she wrote for pleasure or pay. Gerta became known throughout music halls and through technology she consented to repurpose her work. Gerta’s story, wealth and reputation earned respect and rewards and she went about her days wearing a cape without a hood.
The sculptress sculpted, eventually leaving her room for a private studio in a city on a mesa out West. Gerta and the girl greeted one another for the first time in mutual scars to the beautiful—remaking themselves in sculpture and song—years later at the model’s Carnegie Hall debut in dance. He danced to the music she’d made with a larger-than-life-sized reproduction of what the sculptress had made. The beautiful birthed a model who danced (and still dances) in a world too ugly to be ready for them. For an invited audience that packed the house, they reveled—and moved—in the beauty of what they’ve made.
