She told me he was much nicer "after."
She was one of his only friends.
She and M. used to go to the drawing room and sit together on the settee;
he was allowed to have a gramophone, and he played her his favorite composers.
From him she learned to pick out the different styles of Schumann, Danhauser, Mendelsohn.
He went beyond all that - he could identify from the first phrase which conductor and orchestra had been recorded on the spinning, hissing disc.
The gramophone, the conductors, the music - all of it came "before."
Once, when she sat in the drawing room waiting for him to fetch the next recording from his room,
M's mother, Mrs. M., came in and sat next to her.
Mrs. M. was famous for her temper, and she waited for the smoke to emerge from the old lady's nostrils;
instead, Mrs. M. wept in her lap
perhaps because of something M. had done - a plate destroyed, another maid gone.
Mrs. M. admitted she couldn't go on.
It was 1940, and there were methods, quite commonplace at the time. First came leucotomes and cannula,
later the psychosurgeons used orbitoclasts and icepicks.
In the US, forty thousand.
In Britain, seventeen thousand.
M., of course, was one of seventeen thousand.
Suddenly, "before" was gone, and they all lived in the "after."
M. was much nicer.
The plates stayed whole; the maids no longer handed in their notice.
"After" is very different from "before."
She sat, alone, in the drawing room, and when she touched the gramophone,
behold: her finger left a curlicue,
a mark in the gathering dust
