by Tamas Dobozy
I calmed myself by carefully squaring up the papers in my hand, returning them to the pile from which I’d taken them. I could only imagine what saintly endurance, what absolute patience, Frankenbauer drew upon during those endless hours with Tomlinson— even while dying, while time was running out, while there was still so much to do—sitting there day after day, and suffering the “instruction” of that lunatic. But before the thought could grow physically painful I blotted it out by asking a quick question: “Tomlinson, could I see these exercises you’ve made up for him?”
“Why?” he asked, sitting up, eyes narrowed.
“Well,” I said, “I saw one on his piano the other day, and I was really impressed. You’ve taken Frankenbauer’s style to whole new heights.”
He stared at me a second, and then laughed. “Well, you’ve just confirmed to me what I’ve always suspected.”
“What’s that?”
“You’re as bad as the rest. You couldn’t tell a piece of music from a rock ‘n’ roll song.” He tossed a folder of papers across.
Two days later Frankenbauer was dead of a massive brain hemorrhage. By then, of course, I hardly noticed, having become obsessed with my failure to verify Frankenbauer’s code against Tomlinson’s parodies. They just didn’t match up; though that didn’t stop me from trying to wring the answer from them.
As reporters stormed the door, and policemen and doctors marched up and down the hall; as the remaining staff tuned in to radio stations interrupting scheduled programming to play Frankenbauer’s music; as television cameras showed up outside the front doors and the notables cried and told and retold anecdotes to the reporters; as all this happened I fled into the riddle, sitting at the piano and poring over Frankenbauer’s scores, hitting keys at random to try and unlock that irreplaceable sound. In the meantime, while I was plinking in the key of G, the place was emptying itself out, many of the assistants and servants not willing to wait on instructions, packing up their things, accepting jobs elsewhere. And by the time the lawyers brought us together for the parcelling of the estate, there were only two of us left, myself and Bernard Coates, both so shocked and saddened by the composer’s death that we’d gone on with the work—filing, answering the phone, dusting, collecting royalty money (much increased due to commemorations of his death), responding to lawsuits—as if they were rituals against grief.
I had never before seen the lawyer who was present that day, but he obviously knew what he was doing: racing through the formalities, recalling how he’d managed to shoo away most of the “false claimants” to Frankenbauer’s legacy (those “mothers” and “sons” and composers he’d supported in those last, feeble-minded months) before putting on the videotape.
It showed Frankenbauer sitting up in bed, Tomlinson holding pillows to either side of his head. For a while the composer said nothing, staring fixedly into the camera as if he were the one doing the filming; then, finally, flicking his eyes in Tomlinson’s direction, he said quietly, “Frankenbauer leaves everything…” Here his voice either dropped out of range of the microphone, or his mouth moved in absence of sound (though I could swear, by the movement of his lips, that he was saying “Frankenbauer leaves everything to Frankenbauer”). Then, the sound level rising, the composer concluded, “He leaves everything to him.” And here he and Tomlinson exchanged glances, staring at one another as if they not only couldn’t understand what had been said, but as if they had no idea what they were doing in the presence of one another. And then Frankenbauer looked back at the camera and said, with emphasis, “He leaves everything to him! Him!”
I could only reflect sadly on these two mental defectives dispersing an inheritance worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.
“It is clear,” said the lawyer, turning off the video, “that Henry George Tomlinson is the sole beneficiary of Felix Frankenbauer’s estate.”
Coates and I looked at each other, but Tomlinson seemed even more alarmed by the news than we were. Even in his state of shock he managed to mutter something about “refusing” it, about not wanting to “live off the proceeds of mediocrity,” about how it was his role “to starve, as all true artists must starve” (it obviously hadn’t occurred to him that for the last twenty years he’d been doing just fine off Frankenbauer’s earnings). The lawyer, however, was certain, and said we had a given period in which to contact our own legal counsel, should we wish to contest the evidence of the videotape.
After that meeting—as I was standing in the hall watching Tomlinson argue with the attorney—Bernard Coates came up and led me down the hall. “Well, what do you think of that?” he asked. I looked at him, baffled, doing something with my hands. “It was me who took that videotape, you know, on Mr. Frankenbauer’s request.”
“Not Tomlinson’s?”
Coates went on, ignoring me, “There was no talking him out of it!” Coates seemed very bothered, and he kept pulling at his own shirt cuffs. “But that shyster’s got it all wrong, I tell you! Mr. Frankenbauer wasn’t right in the head!”
“Come on, Coates,” I replied, without much conviction, “he was weakened, and he couldn’t read music, but it only got bad at the end.”
Coates ranted on: “That shyster. He doesn’t know what we know, you as well as me: after the accident Mr. Frankenbauer only ever referred to himself as if he weren’t in the room. You remember. I think when he said he was leaving everything to ‘him’ he didn’t mean Tomlinson; he meant his own self!”
“Are you kidding, Coates? How’s a man to collect his own inheritance after he’s died….” I stopped in mid-reply, staring at Coates. He was right. After the accident Frankenbauer had always referred to himself in the third person. And it was at that moment that it became clear, and I turned away from Coates as he shouted after me, running down the hall to my room, where, in a single motion, I swept all of Tomlinson’s parodies off the piano and grabbed Frankenbauer’s cryptic sheets, hurrying over to my shelf to pull out the composer’s “Piano Works: The Collected Scores.” And there, with hands trembling so badly I could barely turn the pages, realized that the “he” Frankenbauer had referred to that night at the piano, the “he” whose music he was resisting, was not Tomlinson but himself. He had not, as I thought, been looking into the piano but at it, at his own reflection on the polished surface. That night, it was his own music he had been attempting to unlearn.
It took four weeks—during which I stayed locked in my room, only going out early in the morning, exiting my private entrance to grab a bite at an all-night diner four or five blocks off—before the rectangles and ellipses of Frankenbauer’s code resolved themselves into readable notes. It was another week before my delight at being able to play the pieces gave way to remembrances of Bernard Coates, Tomlinson, and Frankenbauer’s inheritance.
But by then it was over. Not that I could have done anything. The legal machinery, once set in motion, was too relentless. I exited my room to find the mansion completely deserted, all the staff and movable furniture gone, with only old Bernard Coates left to superintend the place prior to its sale. My presence must have gone unnoticed in the rush, the notes coming from my piano unheard amidst the reading of pink slips (mine was in the increasing heap of mail I’d been ignoring), the scrape of furniture, boxes, and feet.
Coates was the first person I met upon coming out of my room. He was so hurt by my absence he barely wanted to speak, though he finally did reveal that the majority of the estate had gone to Tomlinson, with a small portion left to the Frankenbauer Foundation, a trust fund intimated at in an earlier will, which Frankenbauer wanted set up to nurture young composers. Coates was certain this had been what Frankenbauer alluded to in the videotape. “Mr. Frankenbauer, he loved his music,” said Coates. “I’m sure that’s where he wanted his monies to go.”
But I wasn’t so sure. And when I looked around the place, wandering into the empty rooms, staring out of Frankenbauer’s vacant study at the large “for sale” sign on the front lawn, I wondered how I could ha
ve become so lost—to both myself and the world at large—as to be oblivious to the place being emptied. But I had only to go back to my suite and my piano and Frankenbauer’s pieces to understand how easily it had happened. The pieces were designed for such a loss: the self vanishing into the music, the logic of the score overpowering and erasing the intelligence of the musician. And while I have tasted such liberty before, performing the music of Bach and Chopin and others, there was to those performances the question ofhow I, the performer, chose to play, not to mention the style already embedded in the pieces, whereas Frankenbauer’s late music seemed to negate the signature of the person playing it, and, especially, that of the composer himself.
As for Tomlinson, I saw him one last time. For a while, after Frankenbauer’s death, his name was everywhere, speaking about Frankenbauer on the television or radio, with that condescension I am now sure was honestly felt, and which in no way interfered with or contradicted his affection for the old man, with the love he had put so visibly on display during his hospital vigil. And while there was no more talk of “living off the proceeds of mediocrity” (the lawyers had obviously sat Tomlinson down and pointed out the benefits—for all concerned—of him being in charge of the estate), there was even more about his own greatness.
For the short time that controversy raged around Frankenbauer’s genius—by which I mean the squabbles initiated by Grober and Fischer and their respective allies—Tomlinson was much in demand, though he refused to corroborate either side, until both grew exasperated with how he always turned their questions toward his own compositions, and decided to argue it out without him. Eventually this died down too, as Fischer couldn’t prove a thing without a witness, and Grober, in order to cement his argument, would have needed at least one recording, one performance, or one deciphered score of Frankenbauer’s final piano works to prove that the composer’s genius was so without precedent it obliterated any charge of plagiarism.
But I was not willing to provide. This is a great loss, I know, but in the end my loyalties to Frankenbauer outweigh any I might have to the public (whom, after all, I blame for his death). You see, to have played his late pieces then—to settle a personal grudge against Tomlinson and the critics—would have been to exploit Frankenbauer as badly as they had. Nor was I willing to see these pieces recorded or, worse, published, to provide royalties to an estate almost entirely in the hands of Tomlinson. For while I knew that Frankenbauer would have been happy to have his music bring rapture or relief to another, he would not have wanted it played under any circumstance where people might have heard his name in it. After all, they had been written not to increase his fame, but to ring through the mansion during those last, terrible months, distracting all of us from his slow death by enacting that death in the most consoling of music.
It was art as he had come to understand it: created not to exalt the artist, but to provide for another.
It wasn’t until the anniversary of Frankenbauer’s death that I came to this realization. Lost as I had been in deciphering the music, I missed the first, official funeral, at which considerable crowds were in attendance. But within a year Grober and Fischer had abandoned their argument, having so damaged Frankenbauer’s credibility that the composer’s stock sank below notice. (I am confident it will eventually return.) The world of contemporary classical music is fickle. In fact, the five or six people who showed up that rainy day in October were not there for Frankenbauer at all. Rather, they were there to see Tomlinson perform his “Dedications,” impressed as they (and the critics) were by a man who, having finally gotten his hands on a little money, managed to arrange large-scale performances of his compositions, inviting just the right people, and creating such spectacles, that most of the world was now convinced there was something to him after all.
I was standing beside Tomlinson as the priest spoke, the two of us folding our hands, bowing our heads, and waiting. And then, when the words had ended, when we’d placed our flowers on the memorial headstone, when the attention of the guests brave enough to face the rain turned toward the piano in the nearby gazebo, Tomlinson turned to me and said, “Maybe there’s something you’d like to play?”
I looked at him. He glowered back, so that I understood this was neither a dare nor a risk on his part—that he was so firmly convinced of his genius that nothing I played could in any way threaten him. And for a second I considered it: going up, stretching my fingers and wrists, and letting all the world know how great Frankenbauer had truly been. His reputation restored. Thanks to me.
And in a gesture that was at once an affirmation of Frankenbauer’s artistic beliefs, and their eclipse, I turned back to Tomlinson, saying, “No, no. Go ahead. He would have wanted you to play.”
Acknowledgments
Chris Tzotzos sat with me, sometimes for hours, going over all the possible variations of a sentence. His thoughtfulness, encouragement, and support were invaluable.
Bill New looked over early drafts of several of these stories. My gratitude to him for this, and for much else.
Mária Lelkes went through my Hungarian spelling. Thanks are hers; any remaining mistakes are mine.
“Tales of Hungarian Resistance” appeared in Northwest Review; “The Inert Landscapes of Gyôrgy Ferenc” in The Colorado Review; and “Into the Ring” in The McNeese Review. The editors of journals such as these are the people who keep writers alive. Eternal thanks.
Simultaneously blunt and subtle, Phyllis Bruce is the best editor I’ve ever worked with. In every way, she made this a better book.
Special thanks to David Bergen. This wouldn’t have happened without him.
Last, and most important, for Marcy and Benjamin, where home is.
