Sitting in the front row with her arms around her sleeping child, watching the back of that familiar beloved head as George leaps and dances in front of her, whipping the air with his arms and stabbing his baton toward the strings, while with his left hand he beckons and gestures up, up to the wailing horns, bending the blue notes into new notes, Rebecca mourns her grandmother with a fresh and deep grief. Her grip tightens around the hot, trusting little body in her lap and she closes her eyes, inhaling the still intoxicatingly sweet aroma of her baby’s scalp. She drifts on the waves of music, and feels her arms around that other little body, that tiny still body in the bed between them on that September day, and she feels in her arms the spirit of her grandmother, as the music surrounds them and floats them and makes her feel loved and held, as she and George surrounded Esther on that last day, the last day, the day her grandmother finally allowed herself to die, as they rocked her and sang their music to her, and they held her and they let her go. Rebecca dozes to the gentle accompaniment of recorders and muted strings as the oratorio approaches the opening of the somber culminating funereal passage; as the streets of the bereaved city clog with thousands of mourners and the chorus keens in grief as the coffins are wheeled down the streets and the crowds following the coffins are silent in their sorrow, there is only the rattling sound on the cobblestones, the clattering, shattering sound of the wheels under the coffins as they roll through the city.

da capo

The wheels of the cart in the hallway make their sound and it rolls through the halls, and in the silence I am hearing in my bed the taxi horns far off in the street and the telephone ringing far off in the hall and now the wheels come nearer and here is the nurse and now comes the squeak squeak squeak of the bulb of the blood pressure cuff again it is on my arm so they can squeeze it to feel the blood is still moving and now the scratch scratch scratch of the nurse writing, and now again the sound of the wheels, the wheels take her out of the room, and I am tired and I am letting go, it is time, it is time, the blood they measure is slower and slower, I feel the pull of the days, thousands of days, the weight of the days is lifting off me on this day, that day, that day, on that day, I am working at my machine, always this is how my days go, that is how this day goes, working at my machine, with only a few minutes left before the end of another day, and I have only those two right sleeves remaining in my pile—my sister, she does the left sleeves and I do the right sleeves and between us we can finish sometimes twenty-four shirtwaists in an hour, three hundred shirtwaists on a good day. We have so many good days, but not enough days. My sister, she is a little faster than I am, always she is in a rush, and her finished pile is higher, because she does her sleeve first and then I take from her pile to do the right sleeve, but I have to say it one more time, my seams are the ones always perfectly straight.