Orfeo

by Richard Powers

  But Mister In-Between is everywhere, messing with them. The men wade into current events. They determine what went wrong in Korea. Peter’s father—self-made insurance sales force manager with a captured Nazi flag hanging in his subterranean rec room—declares that America should have bombed its way up both banks of the Yalu until the Chinese saw reason. Elses of all stripes parry him with snub beer-bottle lances. Get a load of this guy! He’s off his nut!

  A squeal from lissom Kate dispels all politics. She launches off the raft, arcing into the air with a C# of delight, a missile aimed to land with deadly precision inside a ring of Pittsburgh male cousins.

  When Peter turns his ears back shoreward, the adults have crossed the bloodstained map to Hungary. Uncles decree that going up against the Russians for nothing would have been suicide. For nothing? Peter’s father shouts. We egged those people on; we then left them for dead. But he’s outgunned, scoffed at even by the chorus line of sunbathing aunts.

  The uncles jump from Hungary back home, drawn along by the family need to fight. They squabble over the buses down South, the black and white chess game for the nation’s soul. Karl Els pokes a bottle in his brother Hank’s chest and says that blacks have more right to North America than whites. Uncles swat the air, dismissing him and his whole blighted branch. Aw, go raise your rabble in the Congo.

  Awful names ring out onshore, words from the forbidden list. Peter’s mother starts to cry. Her husband tells her to grow up. The Elsfest threatens to go the way of world affairs. Peter searches the lake for help. His hundred cousins are hammering out the rules for a game of tackle water polo. His mother sits wrapped in her French towel, sobbing. His father sucks a cigarette through the cup of his hand. Peter glances at brother Paul, who glares back a warning shot. Paul has never been so popular as he is today, and he will not let this party end. On the far side of the raft, little sister Susan, already addicted to giddiness, spins herself silly in her inner tube.

  The music dies. His mother combs the beach, gathering up her things and crushing them into her beach bag. Peter slips from his seat on the slime-slick ladder and starts to breaststroke back to the beach. But a voice from behind hooks him.

  Hey, licorice stick. C’mere a sec.

  Cousin Kate, sleek and shiny as any marine mammal, splits him with a smile. Her challenge unfolds as it has a hundred times already in Peter’s private theater. But she doesn’t wait for a response, just paddles around to the hidden cove on the raft’s deep side. Peter follows, helpless in her wake. The great adventure of his life is beginning at last, and the tune unfolds just as he has practiced it.

  He draws near to where she floats, her hand on the raft.

  Licorice stick. You like me?

  He nods, and she plunges through the water onto him. Her legs wrap around his chest, pulling him down. Her clasping weight swamps him, and they go under. In the green cloud, her coiled body inches over his. Her tongue probes his mouth, filling him with the taste of lake. A thigh whacks his groin. Pain shoots up his whole length, and with it, a filament of sharpest pleasure. He paws her slippery skin and snags a fallen strap. She pushes away, back toward air. A foot catches his face on their scramble upward, and his nose fills up with water. He tastes the murk of whatever comes after life. Liquid goes down his windpipe, and he starts to drown.

  Rising, he rams a slimy mass. He comes up underneath the raft. The green-smeared oil cans bang him. His head pounds with the need to breathe. He jerks sideways, frantic for an opening, but tangles on the seaweed-coated anchor chain.

  At last he snaps free. He surfaces, coughing up algae, grappling on the raft’s edge and sucking air. Nearby, a pair of California cousins laugh at this, the most hilarious thing they’ve seen all day.

  His vision clears. He looks around for Cousin Kate. She’s leagues away, bobbing in the waves and singing at full voice for an admiring crowd. Come smoke a Coca-Cola, drink ketchup cigarettes. See Lillian Russell wrestle with a box of Oysterettes!

  His mother stands calling at the water’s edge. Petey! Are you okay?

  A California cousin shouts, Only his hairdresser knows for sure.

  Peter waves; he’s fine. More green water issues from his lungs. The air fills with shrieks that pass for laughter. He thinks he might be dead, still thumping against the underside of the raft. His father looms up onshore and blasts his metal lifeguard whistle. Everybody out for a head count. Chop-chop.

  Sister Susan doesn’t hear. She’s trying to force every part of her inner tube underwater at the same time. Brother Paul, enjoying a brief reign as king of the raft, yells back, Five more minutes!

  Not five minutes. Now! You don’t bargain with your father.

  In fact, every exchange with the man since their infancy has been a haggle. A couple of nervous aunts rise from their beach blankets and count their kids. Another calls her daughters from the lake. There’s a general summoning, and the whole surly group, crushed again by adult whim, readies to swim in.

  Then, on some invisible cue—a shift in the wind, a cloud across the sun—the group will changes to won’t. The ringleaders detect a fatal softness in the adult demand. Coming! they call falsetto, half compromise, half jeer. They swim back to the raft, across a moat too wide for any beer-addled old man to ford. Karl Els blows the whistle again—two violent blasts for no one.

  One of the Pittsburgh lieutenants snarls, He’s gonna swim out and drag us all back one-handed?

  Kate’s mountainous brother Doug sniggers from his roost on the edge of the float. A line of dark hair runs from the dimple of his sternum all the way to his navel. The fur gives him dominion over the whole raft. Let him try. His grin declares the whole great span of human events to be Howdy Doody time.

  Karl Els calls his sons by name. Paul studies the landlocked man, and Peter studies Paul. Too many seconds click off for life ever to come right again. Even if they submit now, the weakest imaginable punishment will be terrible.

  His father’s shame reddens Peter. A bankrupt government of one, mocked by a lake full of children . . . One short swim to shore and Peter might still rescue the man, help him pretend that nothing has changed in the order of things.

  A sneer from Paul freezes him. Kate, too, holds Peter with a look, threatening bottomless contempt if he surrenders and promising prizes if he stays true. Everything alive wants his loyalty.

  Treading water, Peter eyes his father. He wants to tell the man: It’s nothing. A summer game. Patterns on the air—over before you know it. Queasiness engulfs him. How easy it would be, to kick out into the center of the lake until he can’t kick anymore. But Peter can only bob, weightless, between this rebel raft and the imperial shore. The music in his head, that Shaker tune of his green practicing, scatters into noise. He will dog-paddle in place, a lone child, waving his stick arms and kicking his feeble legs until strength fails him and he goes down.

  The day fragments into frozen shards. His father, beet-red, staggers, sheds the cigarette and beer. He plunges into the lake. But he doesn’t swim. There’s rushing, shouting, confusion. Uncles in the water, dragging the thrashing bulk back onto land. His crushed father, clutching his chest, propped against a cabin, ashen and sneering at the wisdom of crowds. That crowd, on the beach, like statues, heads bowed. Too late, Peter swims in, as hard as he can. But he hangs back from the pallid man, terrified, and soon they have his father in a car and heading to a doctor.

  Music forecasts the past, recalls the future. Now and then the difference falls away, and in one simple gift of circling sound, the ear solves the scrambled cryptogram. One abiding rhythm, present and always, and you’re free. But a few measures more, and the cloak of time closes back around you.

  The fatal heart attack followed an hour later, in a rural clinic where the lone GP with his shelves full of gauze bandages, tongue depressors, and rubbing alcohol was helpless to do anything but put Karl Els in an ambulance for Potsdam. He died in transit, miles from anywhere, still blowing his lifeguard’s whistle, leaving behi
nd a son convinced he’d helped to kill him.

  In middle age, Peter Els would spend years writing an opera, the story of an ecstatic rebellion gone wrong. For years, the piece seemed to him like a prophecy of End Time. Not until the age of seventy, an old man burying his dog, did he recognize it, at last, as childhood memory.

  Crumb: “Music is a system of proportions in the service of a spiritual impulse.” My spirit’s impulse just happened to be criminal.

  Els brushes off the dirt, goes inside, and looks for something to play for his dog’s funeral. He lands on Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder: five songs lasting twenty-five minutes. Fidelio used to go nuts with the cycle, back in her puppyhood. At the very first measures of the first song she’d start crooning, the way she did when Els took her to the park on a fall night under the full moon.

  The choice feels a little maudlin. It’s not as though a human has died. Not Sara, the three a.m. call he can’t even imagine well enough to dread. Not Paul or Maddy or a former student. Not Richard. Only a pet, who had no clue what was happening. Only an old dog, who gave him unconditional joy and loyalty for no good reason.

  He and Fidelio often attended imaginary musical funerals—preemptive memorials of pure sound. Nothing was more invigorating than dark music, the pleasure of a practice run, the chance to make imagination the equal of death. But tonight is no rehearsal. He has lost the one listening partner who could return to the same old pieces and hear them afresh each night, for the first time. A little lamp has gone out in my tent. Hail to the joyous light of the world.

  The recording sits on his shelf, a prophecy from a hundred years ago. These five songs first taught Els how music might work. In the half century since, he has gone back to them through every sonic revolution. No music would ever again be as mysterious as this music was, the day he discovered it. But tonight he can listen one more time, take in their wild noise the way an animal might.

  He fumbles the disc out of its jewel box while doing the math: an eight-year-old who heard Schumann’s Scenes of Childhood in the year it was published could, at seventy-five, have attended the premiere of Mahler’s Songs on the Death of Children. From the spring of Romanticism to Modernist winter in one life. That was the curse of literacy: Once you started writing music down, the game was half over. Notation touched off a rush to uncover every trick hiding out in the rules of harmony. Ten short centuries had burned through all available innovations, each more fleeting than the last. The accelerating vehicle would one day have to hit the wall, and it was Els’s luck to be alive at the moment of smash-up.

  By the time Peter first heard Mahler’s songs, his own childhood had long since died. It ended with his father’s heart attack, the raft uprising. For a long time, nothing softened Peter’s guilt about that day more than listening to the best of his father’s records: the Jupiter, the Eroica, the Unfinished. Once or twice, the music reopened that purer world, just alongside his own. Then his mother got rid of all his father’s records, all his clothes, every possession that gave memory any power over the present. Without even asking her children, she donated the music to Goodwill.

  Way too fast, Carrie Els got remarried, to a casualty actuary who’d worked with Peter’s father. Ronnie Halverson, a big, friendly man whose Bennett Cerf puns and quid pro quo morality were as inexorable as death, took gentle possession of the Els home. He filled the house with big bands on Saturday mornings while he fried up hash browns and omelets for all, and he never understood why his gifted stepson refused to hear, in the sweet, swinging liberty of Woody Herman and Artie Shaw, how the clarinet ought in fact to be handled. Peter made peace with the intruder, did his homework, delivered his newspapers, practiced, played in the local youth symphony, smiled at adults whenever they smiled at him, and scribbled down furious, revengeful tutti passages for enraged full orchestra, which he hid in a spiral-bound music notebook between his mattress and bed slats.

  At fifteen, he fell in love with chemistry. The pattern language of atoms and orbitals made sense in a way that little else but music did. Balancing chemical equations felt like solving a Chinese puzzle box. The symmetries hidden in the columns of the periodic table had something of the Jupiter’s grandeur. And a person might even make a living with the stuff.

  Then, on the first day of senior year, from across a packed homeroom, Els spotted Clara Reston and recognized her as coming from a planet even more remote than his. He’d watched her with pained lust across the bowl of the high school orchestra the year before, primped up behind her cello in muslin skirts and thin-ribbed pullovers that the school should have banned, drawing her bow across her instrument with an all-denying smile. Slim-framed, her posture like a bookend, and with four feet of hair that fell below her knees, she looked like a Tolkien elf. And she could play the silliest arrangement of the state song as if it were the first tune ever to spring from Apollo’s lyre.

  He gazed on Clara across the classroom in a stupor of admiration. As if he willed it, she lifted her eyes to intercept his and tilted her fine head, knowing everything. Her look said: Took you long enough. And in that glance, the morning of his life changed into blustery noon.

  Two days later she came up to Peter in the hall and stepped on his right foot with the tip of hers. Hey, she said. What do you think of the Zemlinsky Clarinet Trio?

  He’d never heard of Zemlinsky. She appraised him with a smile that hinted at a very long list of things he’d never heard of.

  The next week, she had parts for them to sight-read. They spent two hours working through the Andante. Just the pair of them: the school had no pianist who could handle the piece. The movement started with an extended solo piano passage that Peter figured they’d skip. But Clara insisted they sit and count their measures of shared tacet. She could hear the ghostly keyboard as clearly as if it were there, playing alongside them. And soon enough, so could he.

  They read through a dozen pieces that way—trios, quartets, quintets—their two lines sailing out over the hush of the missing instruments. Once they read a piece, they followed up by listening to a recording.

  Listening alongside her, he began to make out the muted message that he’d always suspected lay underneath the surface of sounds. And watching Clara listen, he saw that she possessed a key that he did not.

  Sometimes, she told him, when I listen? I’m everywhere.

  Soon they were listening together two or three evenings a week. And before long, listening turned to another kind of playing.

  In November, when Clara decided he was ready, she gave him the Kindertotenlieder. Els knew Mahler’s name, but had shunned the music. He’d accepted the prevailing opinion about the man: too long-winded, too banal, too neurotic, too twisted up in marches and ländlers and pub songs. How teenaged Clara came to love the still-little-heard composer, Peter never knew. Truth was, once she dropped the needle down on the first track of those five blighted songs, he had more urgent questions.

  They listened in Clara’s room, with the door cracked open wide enough for propriety, while her parents prepared dinner a floor below. A night in November 1959: Earth’s first artificial moons threaded the black sky above them. The phonograph spun, the song began its chromatic wanderings, and Peter Els never heard music the same way again.

  As the songs played, Clara hovered over him. Her four feet of hair, which hadn’t been touched by a scissors since she was six because of the pain she claimed to feel, draped him like a tent in the wilderness. Flushed and confused, her face a little cloudy, she undid the buttons of her pink seersucker blouse and placed his hand inside. And they sat stock-still, blood pounding, tangled in each other, listening to the muted reds and russets of dying children.

  The story would stay with Peter better than the details of his own childhood: How in the first year of the new century, Mahler the wanderer, three times homeless—a Bohemian in Austria, an Austrian among Germans, and a Jew throughout the world—collapsed from a massive hemorrhage brought on by overwork. Only hasty surgery saved his life. During
his forced convalescence, he fixed on a collection by Friedrich Rückert of more than four hundred poems to his two young children, who died of scarlet fever within two weeks of each other.

  The poems had poured out of Rückert, two or three a day—thousands of raw and compulsive stanzas. Some of them were stillborn. Some were filled with a sick calm. Some sank into the hackneyed, while others talked to themselves in an airless crypt. Rückert hid them away for private use. None were published in his lifetime.

  Fresh from his own near-death, Mahler read the poems like a lost diary. Seven of his thirteen siblings were dead by the age of two. His beloved younger brother died on the threshold of puberty. And here was the field guide to those deaths. The forty-one-year-old bachelor consumed the hundreds of lyrics like a parent come loose with grief.

  The songs took shape, an exercise in convalescence. Then came Mahler’s whirlwind marriage to the child bride, Alma Schindler. In quick succession, they had two healthy children. When, in the summer of 1904, Mahler returned to work on the songs, his wife was horrified. Incomprehensible, setting the death of children to music, when the man had kissed his own daughters good night moments before. For God’s sake, don’t tempt fate! But tempting fate was music’s job description.

  Els goes to the kitchen, pours single-malt scotch into a jelly glass, and takes it into the front room. He sits in the Eames chair and pushes away the footstool, making space at his feet for the dog. He goes limp, closes his eyes, and hears Clara whisper to him. These songs are the death knell of tonality. Where did a self-taught, eighteen-year-old virgin get such grandiosity? Els, an ignorant hick with a gift, had believed her. He’d loved her for her eager, bright pretension. And hers were the first girl’s breasts he’d ever touched.