The Stone Loves the World

by BRIAN HALL

  Vernon was relieved. He’d thought he had Alzheimer’s. He would surrender his body before his brain any day. He didn’t know then that many Parkinson’s patients eventually develop something called Lewy body dementia. Well—he sure knows now. Sometimes he fades out. This intermittency is one of the things that distinguishes LBD from Alzheimer’s. He’ll fade out more as time goes by, until it will be more useful to speak of the times he fades in. His periods of clarity give him opportunities to stand back and really appreciate the inexorable ruin of his mind. Another co-incident condition of Parkinson’s, his doctor tells him, is depression. By that is meant an organic condition, over and above the depression anyone would feel at having a progressive, incurable, terminal disease.

  Imogen thinks his neurologist is an idiot. I can’t believe you’re still seeing that incompetent fool. Maybe that counts as caring for him. But it sounds like anger at his stubbornness. Maybe it’s an excuse to blame him for his disease. Get your fat, diseased self out of here.

  It’s true that he slept soundly when Susan, during her wild teenage years, was out late with the car. Talk about stubborn. She was so bullheaded, he couldn’t imagine anything as mundane as a car accident changing her trajectory.

  You called Susan a whore.

  Well, no, not technically. He remembers the evening perfectly well, probably a hell of a lot better than Imogen does. Susan was fourteen or fifteen, headed out with friends. She had only recently begun applying makeup, and like lots of inexperienced girls she had put on too much. He was only trying to shield her from embarrassment. He was her father. And since he knew she rarely listened to him, he wanted to say something that would catch her attention. A rhetorical ploy. He said, “With all that makeup, you know, you look like a streetwalker.”

  Yes of course, now he sees, he concedes, he surrenders, his hands are up, his throat is bared—he shouldn’t have used that word.

  It’s called a mistake.

  Gen twists things. She hated her mother. Maybe it’s a compliment to him, maybe it indicates his importance to her, that she’s furious with him most of the time.

  He hears the car in the driveway. The back door opening, the cats converging in the kitchen, the affectionate voice she reserves for them. She will linger downstairs. She’s hoping he’s asleep. He tells himself he wants to oblige her. But he’s waiting. He wants the tiniest bit of normal conversation between a man and his wife. How was your evening? Go to sleep, dear. To be honest, maybe he also wants to find out if she is too drunk to have driven safely, so he can score some points.

  He struggles to stay awake while she waits downstairs for him to fall asleep.

  As usual, she wins.

  * * *

  • • •

  There’s an episode of The Twilight Zone in which Burgess Meredith plays a myopic milquetoast with an awful wife. He loves to read and she mocks him for it, tearing up his books in front of him. Each lunch hour at the bank where he works, he closes himself in the vault, so that he can read in peace. One day, while he’s in there, a nuclear war occurs. He emerges to find himself alone. He wanders the city ruins, disconsolate, until he happens upon the grand stone steps of the library. (Vernon suspects that Rod Serling also saw the 1945 Life magazine sketch of the New York Public Library set amid Hiroshima-style desolation.) Books are spilled everywhere. Now our hero is happy. Maybe the world has been destroyed, but he can read all the Dickens, Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Shakespeare he wants. Plus, his wife has been vaporized. In his excitement, he drops his glasses on the stone steps and they shatter. Now he’s blind. End of story.

  Vernon sits looking at his Beethoven quartets.

  The Pascal kept him satisfied for seven years, the Budapest for five. He doesn’t have to remember the dates, he has a note inserted in every record stating when he acquired it. In 1967 he bought another box of the lates performed by the Hungarian Quartet, on Seraphim. They played squarer and sparer than the Budapest. Another step away from Pascal-style lyricism to something more “classical.” The cellist, Gábor Magyar, tended to play too quietly. Vernon missed Budapest’s Schneider. And the paper sleeves had no cutouts for the labels, which was intensely annoying. Like every other customer on Earth, Vernon had to write on the outside of each sleeve which quartet it contained.

  For the Beethoven Bicentennial in 1970 new recordings sprang up like mushrooms. Vernon bought the Yale Quartet on Vanguard in 1971. Again, no label cutouts! What could they be thinking? (The trouble is, they don’t think.) The acoustics were a tad cavernous, but Yale was technically the most proficient Vernon had heard. They were the first to get the crazily fast Presto in Opus 131 to hang together, and their piano-forte contrasts throughout were more pronounced. Vernon finds the correct Yale disk, slides it out against his palm—the A minor Opus 132. Runs his damp cloth over it. You can feel how, by 1971, the vinyl is getting thinner. By the mid-seventies, LPs were almost floppy. He places it on the turntable. Padded chair, headphones, score. God’s in his heaven.

  He’s struck again by how similar the opening measures sound to the Grosse Fuge theme. Those rising and falling half-steps haunted Beethoven throughout the late quartets. Why? Does the chromaticism uncenter the key? Vernon should ask Mark.

  He remembers years ago, looking out through the screen door at Mark playing in the basement. Mark used to sit at the wooden table—now holding laundry supplies—building model cars, planes, spaceships. Cheap plastic parts with translucent flash, which Vernon showed Mark how to shave off with a penknife. Sensitive, shy kid. Worrisomely girly when young, like his uncle Julian. Hopeless at touch football or catch. Susan was the talented one there. Vernon would engage the three of them in a ball game out in the yard, to get Mark out of the house and let Susan work off nervous energy. This was before Susan turned into a juvenile delinquent, so she’d have been thirteen or so. Since Mark was five years younger, and not naturally gifted, he’d usually end up crying. He had this way of collapsing into a damp heap. Vernon knew his son would get into endless trouble at school, so he urged him to butch it up a little. Later, in his twenties, he seems to have had a girlfriend or two. But he never married, so you have to wonder.

  An image sticks in Vernon’s mind. He was sitting right here, with his headphones on, listening to the Trout Quintet, looking through the doorway. The screen door was open. Mark was hunched over a model piece sitting on the spread-out newspaper, applying red enamel paint from one of those cubic jars the toy stores sell. For some reason, Susan was standing behind him, looking on. Maybe Vernon remembers this because it was rare for her to take an interest. He couldn’t hear anything, but he could see that she asked Mark something, and Mark turned his head to answer. She leaned closer and gestured toward the plastic part. Then she said something that made Mark laugh and he turned away, as though abashed by his own delight, and the tacky tip of the brush he was holding snagged against the newspaper and started to pull it off the table. Susan put a hand down to hold it in place.

  That’s the whole memory. In the last year or two it has come to his mind with increasing frequency. It feels to Vernon like it represents everything he’s lost—his wife, his children. Of course Susan is gone, something he thinks about as rarely as possible. In a more subtle but no less real way, Mark is also gone—that Mark. You have your children and you love them, and where do they go?

  He wishes he knew what they’d been saying.

  Some years ago he read in an essay a whimsical idea about a Museum of Lost Gestures. The writer was talking about habitual motions people used to make that have disappeared because of changing technology. An example he gave was shielding a candle flame with your hand as you walked down a dark hallway. The lost gesture that Vernon often thinks of is the position you take when a child is standing in front of you—watching a parade, a ball game—and you put your hands on his shoulders. He misses that like hell. It’s probably this trio section of the Opus 132 that’s carrying him out on a tid
e of wistfulness. It’s a musette, meant to imitate a bagpipe, with a bass-line drone and a simple melody. Something about the static harmony—whatever the reason, it sounds like nostalgia to him, like stopped time.

  End of side. Vernon rotates the disk between palms to the opposite side, holds the edge against his shirt-front, cleans the surface with his cloth. With CDs taking over the world, these will soon be lost gestures. On to the third movement.

  Beethoven had recently recovered from a serious illness, and he labeled this movement “Holy Song of Thanksgiving of a Convalescent to the Deity, in the Lydian Mode.” (He would be dead within the year.) According to The Beethoven Companion, Beethoven’s recent study of Palestrina had piqued his interest in the old church modes. Vernon had no idea what those were, so he read up about them. Apparently, if he plays from C to C on Gen’s old piano using only the white keys, he’s playing the Ionian mode. If he begins at A, he’s playing the Aeolian. A lot of English border ballads, as it turns out, are in the Dorian mode (D to D), which—if you stare stupidly at the piano keyboard long enough, you can figure out—is like a standard minor key with a raised sixth. The Locrian mode (B to B) has a diminished chord for a root triad, which means—for some reason that Vernon can’t fathom—composers almost never use it. (He so wishes he had a natural aptitude for music. This room would not be his study, but his studio. He’d have widened the door to get his piano in. He would nod his head knowingly to Locrian impossibility, or he’d convert the heathen with his melting Locrian études. He would understand his own emotions.)

  As for this movement’s Lydian mode—here’s the theory that Vernon has read: Lydian is like a major key with a raised fourth, which means it doesn’t use the subdominant chord, since the raised fourth is a tritone, which is too remote from the tonic to sound right. So instead of the usual I-IV-V harmonies you get a lot of I-V alone, which in this case is F and C. Since F Lydian has the same key signature as C major, the melody seems to float between the two, making it sound ethereal. Additionally, whenever it sounds like C major, the F and C harmonies seem no longer to be I-V, but IV-I, which is the “amen” cadence at the end of Protestant hymns. Which is obviously appropriate to a song of thanksgiving.

  Got that? If so, please explain it to Vernon.

  Vernon sets the needle down.

  Yale plays it extremely slowly. He approves. May this movement truly never end. It begins, indeed, sounding like a hymn. But even with the score in his lap, even after having laboriously picked out the chords on the piano, he can’t convince himself that it sounds like anything other than C major. For example, the end of the second strain, a C major chord, sounds like home. The fourth strain, which in many hymns would be the final one, does end on an F triad, but it doesn’t sound, to Vernon, like the final cadence, and in fact Beethoven continues into a fifth strain, which on the last chord modulates to A major and then leads in the next measure to a new melody—marked “Feeling New Strength”—which is in D major.

  Well—who cares. It’s one of the most beautiful passages in the world, and F Lydian to A major to D major doesn’t explain a damn thing. Some musicians say C major sounds joyful, E-flat major heroic, F major pastoral. Vernon can’t hear any of that. He feels like a purblind man who can glimpse just enough of outlines and shadows to wonder agonizingly what forms and colors are.

  He listens. He has thought for years that he would like to hear this movement on his deathbed. Note to self: leave a note.

  His father used to say, whenever you make a to-do list, begin it with #1: Make a List. That way, when you finish writing the list, you can cross off the first item.

  God, he misses his father.

  He closes the score, closes his eyes, keeps listening. The delicate dance of new strength—he sees Beethoven tottering on his pins around his squalid room—is followed by the hymn again, the voices weaving around each other in a more complicated way. Then another dance, and then the hymn again, with even more complication, but still so open, so guileless, so grateful. It gets to the long crescendo, where the first violin edges higher and higher, and the chords get more insistent, like hands reaching up, fingers stretched as far as they will go, and the chords repeat themselves, the fingers will stretch no farther, no matter how they try. And this always happens, right here—he is weeping. So fragile, so yearning, so mortal.

  * * *

  • • •

  A story Vernon’s dad used to tell:

  A man is out on a bird hunt. Nothing is going his way. The waterfowl near his stand have disappeared. The field birds flush before he creeps close enough. Now it’s evening, and he’s walking home through the woods, tired and discouraged. His path takes him across a log bridging a stream. When he reaches the midpoint he sees a catfish below him, just under the surface. The man doesn’t have a fishing pole with him, but he has his bird gun. He raises the gun to his shoulder. Now, he likes to think he’s a clever man, and it occurs to him that if he fires the gun, the recoil will knock him off the log. After pondering the problem, he realizes he can lean forward until he’s off-balance, then shoot, and the recoil will push him back upright. He knows his gun; he’s confident he’ll be able to sense the right moment to fire. So, sighting on the fish, he leans forward and begins to fall. He pulls the trigger. The gun misfires and he topples into the stream.

  One of the last things Vernon did at RAND, when he had more or less stopped work on his real project involving the aerodynamics of ICBMs, was to double-check the data from a civil defense study headed up by Herman Kahn. Vernon was drawn to Kahn’s work because it seemed the epitome of what he had come to loathe about RAND. When engineers express contempt for aspects of a proposal, they talk about “hand-waving”—the moment when the idea guys get vague on the details of how one might actually bring into working existence that winged pig they’re dreaming of. Kahn, RAND’s jovial clown peddling patter and pixie-dust magic at the generals’ parties, was a hand-waver par excellence.

  This must have been the spring of 1958, and the idea was that any American threat of escalation during a crisis would be more credible if the United States had in place a robust civil defense program—i.e., go ahead and nuke us, you Soviet savages, we’ll ride it out in our shelters and then turn everything east of the Urals into a glass plain of trinitite. For rural areas, small towns, and suburbs, fallout shelters like the one Vernon is sitting in right now would be sufficient, but cities would need blast shelters. Kahn actually envisioned a future in which much of the US population would have to descend into shelters two or three times a decade. He talked about the strategic danger of a “mine gap”—whether the Soviets had more and deeper mines than we did, to hide their people in. So he hired an outside engineering firm to evaluate the feasibility of excavating shelter space for four million people in the bedrock under Manhattan. The plan called for a network of chambers 800 feet below the surface, providing 20 square feet per person, a 90-day supply of food and water, power generators, etc. There would be 91 entrances spaced regularly around the island, so that no residents would be farther than a ten-minute walk from the nearest entrance.

  Since one aim of the study was to evaluate cost, Kahn postulated that humankind might find new uses for the crushed rock produced by the excavation. And since RAND really did let its employees pursue their private passions, Vernon spent a grimly hilarious two days calculating the volumes of Manhattan mica schist, Fordham gneiss, and Inwood marble likely to be brought to the surface, and then investigating what firms might be interested in buying it. It turns out that crushed mica schist—by far the bulk of the product, somewhere in the neighborhood of one billion cubic feet—is lousy for road construction, foundation work, landscaping, etc, because it cleaves in planes. For the same reason, it’s rarely used as dimension stone in construction. On the other hand, it can be converted to vermiculite, which is that tuff-like stuff they mix into potting soil for water retention. So maybe the Great Manhattan Shelter could pay
for itself by supplementing victory gardens across the country, after the Soviets bombed US agriculture back to the Stone Age.

  The hand-waving here didn’t involve technical details of construction, which were well known and trivial, but pie-in-the-sky political and social expectations. The same realpolitikniks who had rightly scoffed at calls for World Government somehow expected US politicians and the American public to act with long-range foresight, accepting immense expenditure, to defend against an emergency no one had ever experienced nor could imagine. Part of Kahn’s Manhattan study calculated how quickly residents in high-rises could descend using preexisting elevators—but it assumed that people would wait their turns. Evacuation plans to outlying areas proposed that families with even-numbered license plates wait until all the odd-numbered people went first. They proposed that all drivers have printed on their car registration their designated shelter, which assumed that people would be willing to drive past a nearby shelter in the hopes of reaching a farther one before the x-rays charred them and their children. Someone working on Kahn’s study worried that Manhattanites might saunter to shelters too slowly and proposed that the US detonate an atom bomb high over the city to get them moving.

  Vernon knows all too well that logical people are prone to fantasies of control. Don’t worry, dummies! I’ve got it all figured out! Only experience can show us what our logic has failed to anticipate. The gun misfires and we fall into the stream. Conan Doyle didn’t understand this. He had Holmes say to Watson, “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” Bullshit, Sherlock. It’s more likely there’s a possibility that hasn’t occurred to you. Charles Schultz knows better. Lucy spots a butterfly on the sidewalk and enthuses to Linus about its long migration from Brazil. Linus looks more closely and discovers it’s a potato chip. Lucy responds like any scientist wedded to her paradigm: “Well, I’ll be! I wonder how a potato chip got all the way up here from Brazil.”