by BRIAN HALL
No, no, the real world—human society, this moment, the cosmos—will always be surprising to the human mind, our theories one step behind. Our lifelong job is to find that one tiny island on whose beach we can spell out with driftwood This is true, and never turn our back on the unsoundable sea.
He contemplates his Beethovens. The opus numbers of the late quartets don’t match chronology. Beethoven finished Opus 127 first, then 132. After that came 130, which ended with the Grosse Fuge, then 131 and 135. Friends advised Beethoven to detach from 130 the Grosse Fuge—too long, too strange, too unplayable—and he acceded. The Fuge was published separately as Opus 133, and Beethoven wrote a shorter, cheerier final movement for 130. Friends applauded. Beethoven died. Vernon will save 130 and the Grosse Fuge for last, which means it’s time for Opus 131, the C-sharp minor. It’s said that this was Beethoven’s favorite, which shows once more what a dunderhead Vernon is. Yes, it’s great, but he’s always thought 132 and 130 were greater.
He bought the Végh Quartet recordings in 1973, on Telefunken, and their renditions are among his favorites. They play with a stolidity that at first seems somnolent, all their tempi slower than other quartets. But they win you over. Nothing is showy, but everything is there. He takes the box down from the shelf, looks at the photo on the cover. Four old men, padded asses in chairs, leading worthwhile lives. He slips side five out, handles it immaculately, cleans it meticulously, places it on the turntable.
After Beethoven received the sacraments, he uttered what he thought would be his last words to the admirers crowding the bed: “Plaudite, amici, comedia finita est.” Pretty corny. He’d probably thought it up weeks before. But life is surprising. He didn’t die that night, and the following morning a gift of wine arrived from his publisher. Gazing on all that delicious booze, delirious, he uttered his actual last words: “Pity! Too late!”
Vernon’s father woke up in his own bed on an everyday morning and uttered his final words: “I feel funny.”
According to Mark, Susan’s last word was “Figures.”
That sounds so much like her.
Vernon’s? He hopes it will be, “Play that Holy Song of Thanksgiving again, Sam.”
He sets the needle down, leans back in his chair. Glances warily around for Vargas, but the cat is nowhere to be seen. The first violin begins alone, playing yet another motif featuring a lingering leading tone. This time it’s B-sharp, wanting more than anything to be C-sharp.
There’s a poem he memorized years ago and now fervently wishes he could get out of his head:
Jenny kiss’d me when we met,
Jumping from the chair she sat in;
Time, you thief, who love to get
Sweets into your list, put that in!
Say I’m weary, say I’m sad,
Say that health and wealth have missed me,
Say I’m growing old, but add
Jenny kiss’d me.
* * *
• • •
When the piece is over, he throws Vargas off (goddamnit) and climbs the stairs, concentrating on his feet. Gen is at the kitchen table, smoking a cigarette, reading a mystery. “There you are,” she says, cheerfully enough. “What have you been doing?”
“Paying bills.”
“Should I make you something for lunch?”
“I can fend for myself.”
“I’m about to go to the Stop and Shop, I’m almost out of cigarettes. If you want anything, put it on the list. I’ll get milk for your cereal. Did you take your pills this morning?”
“Yes.”
“Isn’t it time to take them again?”
“I suppose it is.”
“I’ll get them.” She springs up, darts into the dining room, returns with the pillbox. So spry. And as slender as when he met her. “You’re going to fall down those basement steps one day.”
“I hold on to the handrail.”
“You should move your stereo and records up into the dining room. I’ll help you.”
“I like it down there.”
“Suit yourself. But if you fall down those stairs, I’ll be the one who has to take care of you.” Get your fat, injured self out of my sight.
“I won’t fall down the stairs.”
“You’re the one who’s always said it’s illogical to say an accident won’t happen.”
“I said that to children. I’m not a child.”
“You certainly act like one sometimes.”
And not a gray hair on her head. Truly, not one. Her mother always proudly claimed there was Cherokee blood in the family. The stupid old biddy’s head would have exploded at the suggestion there might be black blood.
“Anyway, I’m off to do the shopping.”
And she’s gone.
She runs on cigarettes. And high-octane dudgeon. She’s much smarter than her mother was, but otherwise a chip off the block.
Vernon gets out crackers and cheese, a bottle of beer. He finds a ball game on the portable on the kitchen table, watches a couple of innings, eats too much. Some writer said once about some woman, “She had a whim of iron.” His and Gen’s parents are all dead now. His sister Patty died of cancer nearly twenty years ago. Julian’s still alive, living with his boyfriend somewhere in California, but he and Vernon haven’t communicated in years. Long ago, Vernon was giving his brother a monthly check to help with his support while he attended a school for interior design. Then Julian dropped out, but didn’t tell Vernon and kept taking the money. Vernon had to learn the truth from Patty. When confronted, Julian didn’t seem to think he’d done anything wrong. The amount of money hadn’t changed, so what did it matter to Vernon?
Patty, when she had cancer, wrote to Vernon, “I wish you and Julian could reconcile your differences. When I am gone, I’m afraid he’ll end up all alone.”
Yes, well, some people deserve to be alone.
He contemplates calling Mark, but doesn’t have a good reason.
This surprising world. His old vacuum-tube radio upstairs has the CONELRAD logo stamped on the dial at 640 and 1240 kHz. If the Soviets had attacked, all broadcasting would have shut down except at those two frequencies, and the stations using them would have operated round-robin, so that enemy bombers wouldn’t be able to home in on any one signal and target its host city. A smart plan, thought up by a team of smarties. The broadcasting stations would direct populations to shelters, engineered and constructed by more smarties. People would wait their turn, drive sensibly in their millions, written directions in hand, with a full tank of gas they’d stored in their garage ahead of time. In the back seat, Sally, Dick, and Jane would be troopers, despite the fact that Spot had been left behind. Civil defense volunteers in their thousands would be distributed sensibly all over the road network, to help the lame, hurry the halt, inform the lost. They would not spend one distracting second thinking about seeking shelter themselves.
Except the shelters were never built. All those blueprints, studies, salaries. How far did we get? At the top of basement stairs in public buildings, we put up signs and printed stencils—three triangles, Trinity squared, pointing down to the underworld. Nearly every school had a stencil, because our children are important. And like the civil defense logo on Vernon’s radio, many of those stencils and metal signs are still there, faded or rusting, because who wants to spend money to get rid of them? They don’t lead down to food or water, or dosimeters or Geiger counters, or baffle walls for keeping out Chinese demons. They never did. All that’s ever been down there is basement.
And now idiots think Reagan’s anti-missile system will work, when all it does is relocate that chimerical shelter in the sky. After thirty years of designing balloon and rocket flights with instrumentation that must remain directed toward the Sun, Vernon knows something about pointer systems. And after RAND, he knows something about the flight of ICBMs. In fact
, these are pretty much his only two islets in the vast, mysterious sea. And he’ll signal with driftwood to anyone who will pay attention, which includes precisely no one who matters: dependable in-flight interception of an ICBM is impossible.
“But, you know,” idiots have said to him, “we thought it was impossible to put someone on the Moon.”
“That was acknowledged to be difficult, not impossible.”
“But surely, if we don’t try, how can we—”
“Do you know anything about the flight characteristics of an ICBM?”
“No, but—”
“You’re right. You don’t know. So your opinion is worthless.”
Yet here we go, obeying that doddering fool’s whim of iron: more studies, more salaries. Because our children are still important to us. Almost as important as our illusions.
Vernon puts his plate in the dishwasher, his bottle in the recycling tub. Redescends the basement stairs, holding on to the handrail for dear life.
Patty got the news about her bone marrow cancer when she was forty-seven. Two boys still in school. “Pray for me,” she wrote to Vernon. She’d always liked him more than he’d liked her. Life could be sad that way. Of course he would have prayed for her, if he’d believed in any of that nonsense. He hoped her religion comforted her. As for him, he’ll have to lose a lot more of his marbles for any consolation to come to him from that quarter.
In 1953 and 1955, the Federal Civil Defense Agency ran Operations Doorstep and Cue, in conjunction with atomic bomb tests run by the AEC. In the first, they built two wood-frame houses at 3500 and 7500 feet respectively from the shot tower, placed mannequins in them and filmed what happened when the bomb went off. The nearer house collapsed, which was expected, and in fact desired, because the FCDA was testing whether people in a lean-to shelter in the basement might survive the destruction of the house above them. (They concluded there was a good chance.) In the more ambitious Operation Cue, the FCDA built a wood-frame house, a brick house, and a concrete-block house—why the test wasn’t called Operation Big Bad Wolf, Vernon will never understand—plus power lines, a working electrical substation, a propane storage site, and two radio towers. They spread a few dozen cars around, put mannequins in the cars and in the houses, this time with canned food to test afterward for radioactivity, and lined up more mannequins outside, facing toward the blast wearing different types and colors of clothing. They called this bigger settlement Survival Town, and the newsreels featured can-do narration detailing the relatively modest preparations citizens could make to help them get through a holocaust in one piece.
But all anyone remembers from those films is two clips. The first is of the nearer wood-frame house in Operation Doorstep. It might be any suburban home of the northeast US, built in colonial style of white clapboard. It stands two-thirds of a mile away from a 16-kiloton explosion. At the instant of detonation, the house is bathed in a weirdly stark light that makes it look, frighteningly and appropriately, like a toy model. An instant later, the paint all across the front lifts off, burning blackly from the x-ray flash. Two seconds after that, the blast wave hits and the house dissolves, leaving nothing behind other than—well, its doorstep.
The second clip is filmed from inside one of the houses in Operation Cue. A mannequin of a boy maybe ten years old has been placed near a window. He’s wearing what might be a dosimeter on a long chain around his neck. Farther from the window and partly out of the frame sits his mother, who is opening one hand toward him. The Venetian blinds have been closed to test whether they will effectively shield the boy from the x-ray flash. When the flash comes, the blinds start to smoke, and vaporized plastic billows into the room as the light darkens from the approaching dust cloud. But the boy appears to be unhurt. That is, his face isn’t smoking. Then the blast wave hits and in an instant everything in the room—boy, mother, sofa, recording camera—is annihilated.
The films were propaganda designed to inspire in viewers the confidence and determination to protect themselves. Instead, they shocked everyone into hopelessness and inaction. No one, in the years afterward, has ever called that eerie settlement Survival Town. It’s always referred to as Doom Town. See, Sherlock? Surprise.
In 1954, Susan was born with strontium-90 in her skeleton. Mark, in 1959, was born with more. Half-life, 29 years. Effect, increased incidence of bone cancer and leukemia. By 1963, children in the United States were being born with 50 times the level of strontium-90 in their bodies compared with those born before 1950. By 1960, the pasteurized milk in sterilized glass bottles delivered to the back door every third day by the immaculate dairyman dressed in white contained iodine-131. Half-life, eight days. Effect, increased incidence of thyroid cancer. This is to say nothing of the army troops deliberately and openly exposed, or the downwind civilian populations deliberately and secretly exposed. Not one becquerel of this was thanks to the Soviets. No, it was thanks to our own military, thanks to Buster-Jangle, Tumbler-Snapper, Upshot-Knothole, Teapot, Plumbbob, Hardtack. Scrappy names for our team of streetfighting little rascals.
In the fifties, newspaper ads for suburban housing developments touted the fact that they were outside the radiation zone. While the pasty and sedentary Herman Kahn indulged fantasies of the entire population living underground, others proposed redesigning our cities as donuts, with industry and residential areas in a ring around a hollow core, so that Soviets would either obliterate the worthless center or have to waste megatonnage dropping bombs ring-around-the-rosy style. As with all other theories of civil defense, no one except paid consultants gave this plan a second thought. Then white people in the sixties accomplished it magnificently, not in order to escape the bomb, but to escape the blacks. Maybe some cultural memory lingered, since suburbanites began referring to inner-city ghettos as “bombed-out areas.” Surprise.
Now smarty-pants Vernon can’t count his own pills. At night, instead of dreaming he can fly, he dreams of a new impossible thing: that he can run. He examines his Beethovens in the catacomb they built him for free.
After Végh, he bought a set by the Bartók Quartet, on Hungaroton. By then, Mark was in high school getting straight As and Susan was God knows where. She’d dropped out of Tufts after one semester, lived for a while in Somerville, maybe waitressing—she’d more or less stopped talking to either Vernon or Imogen—then hopped on a plane at twenty and flew to Sri Lanka. She called from the airport to say nothing beyond the fact that she was going. Mark probably knew more, but both Imogen and Vernon saw that the one mistake they could perhaps not make was to try to leverage Susan’s lingering feelings for her brother. She would no doubt have sworn him to secrecy.
The Bartók Quartet was a return to old-school dominance by the first violin. Vernon went back to listening to the Végh and the Yale, and in 1977 bought a reissue on the Columbia label of historic EMI recordings done by the Budapest in the 1930s. By this point Vernon owned seven complete sets, and he was about to pay for Mark’s college, so with a mixture of embarrassment and regret he decided he’d indulged himself enough. But then Mark graduated in 1981, so in 1983 Vernon bought the complete set by the Cleveland Quartet on RCA Red Seal.
He pulls it down, slips out Opus 135.
Where was Susan in 1983? In Copenhagen, in that squatters’ settlement? Or that nutty organic Belgian farm run by that manipulative deviant? She’d been back in the US for a couple of years around 1980, mainly on the West Coast, but she did come home for one of the Christmases. She and her mother smoked and argued politics—Imogen left-wing, Susan left-fringe—and Susan radiated more than a tinge of superiority regarding her wide experience of the world, compared with the parochial shut-ins she called her parents. But she hugged them both when she left and from then on she sent a couple of letters a year. Maybe she was finally growing up, learning not to blame every last thing on her upbringing. Toward the end she even went back to college. She was in so many ways a stranger. And in other ways
, the same stubbornly independent child and turbulent teenager he’d been so angry at so often, and now unaccountably missed.
Vernon cradles the disk, wipes it clean, places it gently on the turntable.
Her letters were terse, mostly information about where she was and the bald assertion that she was fine, but in one of the last ones she added a postscript, hey dad, I’m often reminded here of that thing you always used to say, that not all the crazy people are locked up; this place would drive you up the wall. Vernon was surprised how moved he was that she’d remembered anything he’d ever said. Or that she thought of him at all in her daily life.
He lowers the needle. Technically speaking, this set just might be his favorite. And artistically it’s right up there. Cleveland plays gorgeous fortes, even when the first violin is sky-high. And they aren’t slaves to virtuosity, i.e., they don’t play the fast movements too fucking fast. The last of the lates, and almost the last thing Beethoven composed, Opus 135 is quieter than the others. To Vernon’s ears it has always sounded like the start of a new cycle that was cut short, rather than the end of this one. The calm before a new and unimaginable storm. Christ, what the world lost when he died. Or maybe that’s not the right way to think of it. Someone wrote somewhere—was it E. M. Forster?—“Great art doesn’t fill a need, it creates one. No one needed Beethoven’s Fifth until he wrote it. But once he wrote it, we couldn’t live without it.”
He listens. The insouciant Allegretto, built out of scraps. The playful Vivace, which is surely meant to sound like country fiddlers that never can quite get on the same beat. The Lento, simplest and most peaceful of all his slow movements. All this written by a tortured, dying man. Astonishing. And now the final movement, at the head of which Beethoven wrote what seemed to be a programmatic explanation: The Difficult Decision. Above the opening three-note phrase of the Grave, which rises anxiously, he wrote Must it be? And above the emphatic Allegro motif, which is the same phrase turned upside down, he wrote It must be! For years and years, Vernon took this as Beethoven’s anguished questioning of his mortality, followed by a profound acceptance, leading—so touchingly, so heroically—to joy. Then he read in The Beethoven Companion that it was all a joke, that some rich dumbass named Dembscher wanted to have the Opus 130 played at his house, but hadn’t subscribed to the piece’s premiere, so Beethoven refused to loan him the parts. When he asked through a friend what he might do to be forgiven, Beethoven responded that he could start by paying the goddamn subscription fee, which was fifty florins. Dembscher replied with such a miserable and weaselly “Must it be?” that Beethoven gleefully wrote a canon to the words, “It must be! Yes, yes, yes! Fork over the bucks! It must be!”
