by Mark Dunn
“If it is a curse that must be borne alongside your incredible gifts for music and whimsy—gifts that are making possible the world’s first concerto for ukulele and orchestra, dear chum—then you must learn to bear your cross with dignity, and yes, even with some measure of gratitude.”
Aaron nodded. Then he said soberly, “But you haven’t met ‘Myself.’ And I would never wish it, most especially upon my best friend.”
When the stay at Crater Lake had concluded, Percy Llewellyn returned to his piano lessons, and to his instrumental participation in various local concert and dance bands, and to playing the organ for Douglas Fairbanks adventures and Fatty Arbuckle comedies. And he returned to his lonely bachelor suppers at the Rex Café, and to falling in love (vicariously speaking) with every pretty new piano student above the age of sixteen and every beautiful woman who would catch his eye from across the dance floor. And the cloud of depression would periodically roll in and Percy would take to his bed for a brief season. Life went on thusly with little variance.
Several miles west of Medford, in Jacksonville, it was a different matter for the great American composer Aaron Francis, who dared with a smirk of mischief to give the world its first concerto for that Hawaiian instrument presently finding its way into hundreds of new works of popular music. A month after Aaron’s trip to Crater Lake National Park, he was visited by the maestro himself, Carl Denton, who had come to check on the progress of the concerto, to see how things were going with his sometimes beleaguered overseers, and even (an organist virtuoso, he) to play, on a whim, the “Mighty Wurlitzer” in accompaniment for The Sheik, starring Rudolph Valentino, at a local movie house.
Denton was especially taken with Aaron’s mother Mamie, a woman of noticeably good breeding, a fine cook, and one who loved her talented son even through the frequent fogs of her own cyclothymic cycles.
During his last night in Jacksonville, over dinner, the permanent conductor of the Oregon Symphony apologized to Aaron. “Now you must forgive me for treating you so criminally, Francis. This commission is very important for raising the profile of our new symphony orchestra. The fact that one of the best Vaudevillian musicians and arguably the best ukulele player in the country has been engaged to play an Aaron Francis premiere necessitated my taking great care to prevent any sort of setback. Your history of destroying concert scores in which you’ve lost faith is legendary. And it’s not the kind of legend I’m happy to bruit about. You understand, don’t you?”
“So when I return with you to Portland tomorrow to meet the members of your organization, into whose custody will we place the score?”
Denton thought about this. “Since you’ve refused my offer to have either a hand or photostatic copy made of the work in progress, we shall have to find someone to whom to entrust it.”
“I’d be happy to keep an eye on it,” volunteered Mrs. Francis. “Or am I not to be trusted?”
“I have no reason not to put my confidence in you, dear woman,” said the conductor. “Mr. Francis, do you agree?”
“Since I do not wish to share the work with members of your orchestra prematurely, and because Rafferty and Miss Julie and the perpetually drowsy Mr. Snopes would all be happy to have a two-day holiday from staring at me like a watched pot for ten or eleven hours a day, I can devise no better solution.”
It was decided, then, that the manuscript should remain behind in the care of Mrs. Francis.
That night, as Aaron was packing his smallest suitcase for the brief trip, his mother came into his dressing room and said, “When you played some of the piece for Mr. Denton and me on the piano this afternoon, I was thinking that it should be livelier, much happier in its tone. Ukulele music, by its nature—why, it’s supposed to have some pep to it, isn’t it? Since when has music from the islands ever moved a listener to uncontrollable melancholia?”
“What I played for you—it moved you to melancholia?”
“It did, Aaron. Should I iron these trousers for you?”
“They’re fine. Who would have thought it?”
“Thought what?”
“My concerto to be anything but exultant. Mother, I believe that you are the exceptional case.”
“I’m quite certain that I am not. Don’t forget your razor strop.”
“Well, what do you want me to do about it? You don’t have to come to the performance in March. In fact, I’d rather you not be there if the music is only going to depress you.”
“I won’t be singular in my view. You’ll see. There will be people who will hear it and imagine that the Hawaiians have become just as morose as the Scandinavians.”
“I’ve never heard such flummery in all my life. Is this why you agreed to come and live here, Mother? To spout nettling inanities about my work whenever you take the notion?”
“You’ll see.”
“Stop saying that.” Aaron closed his suitcase and cinched the straps around it. “I’ve asked my cook and housekeeper, Mrs. Cutberth, to stay with you while I’m gone. For your own safety.”
“Like mother, like son.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“But you do, Aaron. I know that you do.”
Mrs. Cutberth had very little to do. Mrs. Francis was offended each time the cook got herself anywhere near the new Hughes Electric Range Oven, though Aaron’s description of his mother’s psychological infirmity gave the older woman to imagine Mrs. Francis putting her head into the oven—not necessarily to asphyxiate herself (it not being a gas appliance) but to burn herself up like an over-crisped roast chicken.
The cook/housekeeper, having kept Mrs. Francis under an eagle eye, finally submitted to the importunity of sleep and laid herself down for a nap as Mrs. Francis was preparing their dinner—a baked ham with pumpkin and cheese. As the house grew quiet (Mrs. Cutberth had been listening to phonograph records—all songs that Mrs. Francis didn’t particularly favor), Aaron’s mother wiped her hands upon her apron and went to her son’s work alcove, which was dominated by his grand piano, its lid closed and supporting a clutter of music notation paper, each page filled with the musical calligraphy of his profession. “Leave it to my boy Aaron to make a ukulele sound gloomy,” she muttered between tuts of parental judgment. The full in-progress score of Concerto for Ukulele and Orchestra, a commission for the Oregon Symphony under the direction of Mr. Carl Denton, by Aaron Francis, Esq. was tidily stacked an inch and a half thick within a box on the piano bench.
Mrs. Francis picked up the box and carried it into the kitchen.
She stared at the oven, wishing in vain that it had an open flame. She went into her son’s library and gazed upon the cold and empty fireplace, not yet engaged for the season. Finally, she went out into the backyard, found a shovel, and buried the concerto in the ground.
When Aaron returned two days later and couldn’t find the manuscript, Mrs. Francis admitted without guilt that she had gotten rid of it, but she wouldn’t say how she did it. “You would have come to your senses eventually and done the deed yourself, dear,” she said. “Just as you destroyed those other manuscripts, each penned by the dark hand that your melancholic mother has passed along to you through the curse of inheritance. For we are so very much alike, you and I. We kill the things we love. We just can’t help ourselves.”
Within hours, Mrs. Francis was gone. Aaron never saw her again.
Upon their trip to Crater Lake the next year, Aaron Francis related to his friend Percy Llewellyn in great detail all of the particulars regarding the loss of the concerto (except how it was that his mother had disposed of it, for she would never tell), and how the loss had brought him to the important decision of ending his career as a composer of serious music—or any music, for that matter. “I therefore pass the baton, willingly, to you, chum.”
“And I take it and will cherish it in my dilettantish hands, but forever will I mourn the end of your famed musical life, doomed as it always seemed.”
“Please don’t weep for me
, comrade,” said Aaron, who smiled along with his friend, both men remembering that the word “comrade” was used by German soldiers in the Great War to signal a desire to surrender. Aaron Francis was surrendering to the inevitable. Talent alone cannot assure one of professional success. There are other factors at play—some of which are beyond one’s control. Once Aaron realized this important fact, he was able to accept his fate with equanimity.
And this is the story of Aaron Francis, the most brilliant composer you’ve probably never heard of.
CODA
The above is the rough first draft of a story that I wrote in early 1970. Both Aaron and his friend Percy had been long dead by then, but both men’s diaries were available for me to draw from. I was inspired to tell the tale by a discovery my son made out in our backyard one day. We hadn’t had the Francis house for very long, and Robin, my wife, hadn’t had time to restore the flowerbed, which had reverted to grass and weed after being neglected by its two previous owners. My nine-year-old Stevie had created a moonscape there for Major Matt Mason (Mattel’s NASAish astronaut) and his miniature lunar rover, and in the process of digging out a crater, he’d struck the long-buried box with his trowel, its contents fairly well preserved during all those years of undisturbed entombment.
I took the unfinished music score to the Oregon Symphony. There was little interest in finding someone to complete it so that the concerto might someday be performed. Ukulele Ike, otherwise known as Cliff Edwards (and more familiarly known to me as the voice of Pinocchio’s Jiminy Cricket), having passed away, I tried to contact the only other ukulele player I knew of—Tiny Tim—to see if he might be interested in doing anything with it, but he was preparing for his televised wedding to Miss Vicki on The Tonight Show and didn’t have time (although the idea intrigued him).
It saddened me to think that the work might never be finished, might never be performed—this potential masterpiece by a now largely forgotten American composer. Over the succeeding years, Robin would sometimes catch me staring at the box on the shelf, wondering if there was anything that could be done to honor the memory of the talented Mr. Francis.
“You could do him the biggest favor of all, Steve, by returning the poor thing to its grave. Let it rest in peace. Let him rest in peace.”
This I resolved reluctantly to do.
We had a funeral of sorts—Robin and Stevie and me. Stevie played a plucky dirge on the little Mickey Mouse ukulele we’d given him when he was in kindergarten. Then I put the box back into the ground. As I was about to cover it with dirt, Robin stayed my hand. “I’ve changed my mind, honey,” she said. “I’d like to put a rose bush here. Let’s bury the concerto someplace else.”
It didn’t matter to me. And then, several minutes later, it came to matter quite a bit. Because the place in the backyard that my wife had selected was already occupied. Aaron’s mother was there. She had apparently been buried in the spot by Aaron himself. I pictured Aaron, spade in hand, a smile upon his once melancholic face, making this valediction by the light of the Oregon moon: “You’re right, Mother. We are alike. We do kill the things we love. I’ll leave you now, Mother. I suspect that you’d like some privacy while you decompose.”
1922
CINEASTIC IN ARKANSAS
Abel Adamson never regretted his father’s sense of humor or the fact that his mother hadn’t a veto over the name his father had chosen for him. There was undeniable clerical whimsy in a Methodist minister bestowing upon his second-born the name of Adam’s own, with a convenient reference to Adam himself in the surname. The name was an especially appropriate choice given the fact that the son decided to follow in his father’s ministerial footsteps. At many an annual conference did Abel’s fellow pastors and the district superintendents and even the bishop himself josh him about his name or, more affectionately, draw the obvious respectful comparison between Abel, the Old Testament shepherd, and the Reverend Abel Adamson, shepherd of his own two-legged flock.
Abel took great pleasure in his chosen profession. He enjoyed serving as spiritual leader of the Second Methodist Episcopal Church of Blytheville, Arkansas, a medium-sized church in a medium-sized town. He never worked too hard, nor, contrariwise, did he consider himself slothful in any way. And there was much for a Methodist minister of a medium-sized church to do: deliver sermons on Sunday morning and Sunday night, lead a more informal “prayer meeting” service on Wednesday night, make appearances at meetings of the Epworth League, the Junior Epworth League, and the Ladies Aid Society (each visit pointedly brief so as to not get himself too much in the way). There was the occasional wedding and funeral to officiate, and pastoral calls to make.
Abel Adamson prayed frequently. His were largely prayers of supplication on behalf of members of his congregation and thanksgiving on his own behalf. Because Abel had much to be thankful for—satisfaction in his job, good health, and a fine family comprised of Julianne, who was wife, lover, companion, and partner in the salvation of Blythevillian souls; and Matthew, his much-beloved son, who, in the summer and fall of 1922, was thirteen.
A quiet boy who kept largely to himself, Matthew liked nothing better than the chance to go off fishing alone on warm summer mornings and brisk Saturday afternoons in autumn, almost always returning home with an empty creel due either to poor luck or to the bequeathing of his piscatorial gain to a poverty-stricken widow and her hungry children who just happened to live along Matthew’s path to and from his favorite fishing hole.
At least this is what Matthew told his father, and because Matthew was a boy who had never before been caught in even the whitest of lies, Abel Adamson had no reason not to believe that what his son said was true.
Of course, Abel Adamson could not have been more wrong about his son.
The truth came to him one Saturday afternoon in September. This was the Saturday Abel was scheduled to drive to Jonesboro and meet with the district superintendent and others whose charge it was to plan a choir festival that would enlist all the district’s M.E. church choirs and would be, in the words of the superintendent, “so joyous a lifting of voices as to put the Welsh to shame!”
The location of the meeting was an hour’s drive away, and though Abel could easily have made the trip on the train connecting the two towns, he enjoyed the sweet solitude of driving his second-hand flivver along tranquil country roads. The trip offered Abel the opportunity to collect his thoughts in the midst of a beautiful cottony-white landscape, evidential of the hand of both God and man at his most agrological, while commanding a machine that rarely questioned his authority (except upon those rare occasions when it overheated) or argued for a different path than the one that Abel, in all his directional wisdom, had chosen for the two of them.
The meeting lasted two hours. Perhaps because Abel had a good voice and often sang with the tenors in his own church’s choir, he was made co-chairman of the committee, and, exercising his endowed leadership, was successful in convincing the committee to program a nice mixture of both the hymns of old and those newer songs of praise that had of late gained popularity among the more urban churches—hymns that injected a little pomp and collegiate muscularity into the songful portion of the worship service.
Abel had been forced by a busy market day to park his Model T several blocks from the large church in which the meeting was held, a spot not too far from the majestic Empire Theater, which added an element of architectural sophistication to this somewhat unsophisticated block of downtown Jonesboro. Abel had parked so close to the theatre, in fact, that upon returning to his car he found himself within easy sight of the bill for that weekend’s fare; the picture was Grandma’s Boy, starring Harold Lloyd. It looked to Abel like a fun picture and he wished he could disregard his own pulpit repudiations of Hollywood decadence—repudiations that took the form of exhortations against the attending of any cinematic performance—and slip inside. This movie, in particular, seemed far from decadent and was perhaps even morally instructive. Was that not the warmest and most
chaste of familial embraces depicted upon the poster? Was not the bespectacled Mr. Lloyd both affectionate and properly deferential toward his aged, loving grandmother (who resembled several of the septuagenarian members of Abel’s own congregation)? “But I’ll resist the temptation,” said Abel to himself as he slid behind the wheel of his Tin Lizzie. “For that which is not inherently evil may in giving the appearance of evil divert the mind nevertheless from thoughts both spiritual and pure.”
On the other hand, the motion picture did look to be quite funny. In fact, were not those patrons presently emerging from the darkened theatre, squinting in the bright afternoon sun—were they not smiling and laughing and elbowing one another in fresh recollection of some of the photoplay’s more amusing scenes? And look at that boy there! marveled Abel. He hasn’t even a companion, and still he laughs heartily to himself in private merriment.
That boy who bears a remarkable resemblance to my own son Matthew.
That boy who is, in fact, my own son Matthew!
Father and son sat upon stools at the pharmacy fountain counter across the street and sipped and slurped from their tall glasses of orange phosphate. “And what is it you usually do with the fishing pole?”
“Oh, I ditch it behind the train depot.”
Slurp.
“I see.” Abel nodded his head in the manner of the contemplative pastor, assaying all the facts before pronouncing an ecclesiastic verdict. “Please make note, son, that our sitting here partaking of refreshment with one another shouldn’t be construed as a reward for your misbehavior.”
“I know that, Dad.”
“I’m actually quite displeased with you for going to the pictures without seeking my consent first.”
Matthew wiped his mouth with his napkin. “But if I’d asked your consent, Dad, you would have said no.”
