My mother's brother Uncle Mike got a violin from his father. His father got it from his grandfather and so on, back to the day when an earlier Mike had brought the violin from Italy to Cork. It lay in its bed of rich, shining green cloth within a worn black case. The violin was with a faded label： Antonius Stradivarius Cremonensis Facibat—Anno 17. It was in its accustomed shrine on the top of the china closet in the dining room.
Once my father took a risk to open his own shop when he needed a mortgage, but my mother didn't not agree with him.
She cried, "They could turn us into the street. We'd be beggars, Carl."
"I tell you, Mary, there's no risk whatever," said my father. "It's only a matter of your signature on this loan application. I can pay three thousand dollars back in two years without any trouble."
A quarrel broke out between my father and mother when Uncle Mike offered the violin to my father.
"I've read where a Stradivarius violin has sold for as much as five thousand dollars. Take it out and sell it,Carl." His hands trembled a little, but his voice was perfectly calm.
So my father went out to sell it, yet he came back later with the violin, saying "Up there where it is, it's just as if we had a strong box with fifty new one-hundred-dollar bills. And if we have that, a three—thousand—dollar loan needn't worry us."
Uncle Mike left the violin to buy me a college education after his death. I went to sell it again the day before I left for my college where the old shop owner recognized it and told me something quite unexpected.
"It's got a Strad label in it," he said gently. "Lots of violins have that. Not genuine. Never was genuine. This violin is maybe a hundred years old, but it is not, excuse me, a first—class violin." He peered at me curiously. "I have seen this instrument before. Aren't you Carl's girl?
Returning home, I decided to take the violin to the college and keep my father's white lie a secret, speaking to my mother,
"You won't have to worry about me,if anything happens and I need money. It will be just as if I had a violin case filled with bank notes. Won't it, Papa?
"It will, Marie, it will,'' my father said, avoiding my eye.
