Knowing When to Stop

by Ned Rorem

  During soccer, when Bruce Phemister and I were goalies, we’d discuss Nijinsky or Mae West until the enemy ball came our way; with a desultory kick we’d send it off, resuming the discussion. In the locker room where the pubic hair of upperclassmen was a thing of awe for all, I was treated like a sissy by the class jocks. Once at the entrance to the gym I was briefly surrounded by menacing bullies, who quickly lost interest. I quivered as much from embarrassment as from fear; I also watched myself quivering. I examined the world in a grain of sand, the civilizations in the furrows of that porous brick an inch from the eye, and wept at the limitless melancholy latent in this new perspective. From the brick’s rusty rivulet flowed dangerous tribes from She. Or did Marlene Dietrich emerge, as an ally against the opposing team, murmuring phrases from The Garden of Allah? Why did these boys care so much that I was not like them? That they were not like me was sexy.

  Later that day I and two others tormented Theodore until he dissolved into tears, tripping him from behind and telling him he resembled a baboon. What elation! But when I went home to supper, nervousness set in. The knack of hurting as one has been hurt is a heady dose. Give an iota of unearned power to a weakling and he joins the Gestapo. Did I apologize to Theodore? I was afraid to apologize.

  Bruce Phemister became my new leader. Since nursery school he was more organized and a harder studier than I, getting always straight A’s to my C average. But he was never much of an influence until after Jean Edwards left. Bruce’s parents were more straitlaced than Jean’s, and better off. His father was Chicago’s most eminent surgeon and an aloof presence; his mother an ample matron in the style of Lucille Watson. They lived on the top floor at 5620 Dorchester, just across the street.

  I have known Bruce virtually all my life, from age six months to the present day, but we only became “best friends” (and remained so through high school) in the fifth grade when we sat next to each other in the classes of Mrs. DePencier, with whom we both fell in love.

  At the start our antics were as dumb as the ones with Jean. In our unchanged voices, imitating upper-crust ladies, we ordered elaborate menus by phone with expensive restaurants where we—the “ladies”—planned to throw a party. From a local florist, also by phone, we ordered an orchid ship to be sent to young Billy Balaban, a brat we scorned. We listened to music in the booths of Lyon & Healy’s, then shattered the records with the excuse that we were emotionally upset. In the margins of our notebooks we drew inexpert pictures of Claudette Colbert naked with spit curls, as she looked in the role of Poppea, and mutely displayed them to Mrs. DePencier. We appeared in the French Christmas play together in which I, as a shepherd, memorized my first réplique in a foreign tongue: “Certainment il y aura une messe de minuit. Il faudra chercher un autre agneau, c’est tout.” We spent a weekend at The Dunes in Indiana with Jimmy Sutherland. When, during an outing, Jimmy had to do “number two” in the wilds, I inadvertently gave him poison ivy leaves to wipe himself with.

  We also saw our first dead person together. We were at Jay Wimple’s at the Windemere apartments on Saturday afternoon with Jimmy Sutherland and other boys playing Monopoly, when someone came in and said, “A man fell out of a window at the Saranac. He’s just lying there.” We rushed over to the stone court at the neighboring building and there beheld—surrounded by cops and the curious—”The man who jumped off the Saranac,” as we came to call him ever afterward. What did he look like? Well, he looked like a man, not a woman. His wrists were cut. He’d leapt from the seventh floor (the cops said) and landed in a pose almost coyly mangled. His eyes were open. Open! Bruce and I were traumatized, we wanted to leave. Jay and the others forced us to return to the Monopoly game. They even told jokes. (Irvin Cobb, overhearing someone say about his belly, “If that were on a woman I’d say she was pregnant,” answered: “It was and she is.”) We didn’t get home until after dark, in a state of morbid excitement which didn’t abate for days.

  These are souvenirs off the top of my head. Some years later, when the Phemisters had moved to the spacious house on University Avenue, Bruce and I hosted a party together. We asked the entire class (a departure—only girls gave parties) and everyone came, except maybe the most popular kids. “Informal,” read the formal invitation. Hors d’oeuvres, cakes, soft drinks, dancing to Raymond Scott records. Mrs. Phemister and Mrs. Rorem were chaperones. Was it a success? We played Josephine Baker songs in French, and nobody reacted. It was all rather stiff. But Mother, who had always found Mrs. Phemister forbidding, later told me she was moved when Mrs. Phemister confided that Bruce had once said, “Why can’t we do interesting things like the Rorems do?” Bruce was referring to the fact that we often had Negro guests, and that I was by then taking piano with black Margaret Bonds.

  Meanwhile I had another piano teacher. None of the previous instructresses had provided much sense of need; I may have been learning piano but I was not learning music. Now, Nuta Rothschild was the Russian spouse of art historian Edward Rothschild, and like many a sensitive university wife she had time on her hands. Bruce and I went to see her together. That first meeting opened a wild door. This was no lesson but a recital. She played Debussy’s L’île joyense and Golliwog’s Cake Walk and during those minutes I realized for the first time that here was what music was supposed to be. I didn’t realize that this “modern stuff” repelled your average Music Lover, for it was an awakening sound which immediately, as we Quakers say, spoke to my condition, a condition nurtured by Mrs. Rothschild, who began to immerse me in Impressionism. If Bruce showed less knack than I for the keyboard, I showed less knack than Perry O’Neil, our grammar school’s official genius (he had a scholarship and was elsewhere a student of Rudolph Ganz’s). The three of us would go Saturdays to the booths of Lyon & Healy’s, where our credibility was reinstated, and listen and listen and listen. Debussy led us forward to Ravel and Stravinsky, not backward to Brahms and Verdi, and I was unquestioningly at home with the garish roulades of Scarbo and the so-called percussion pianos of Les noces before I’d ever heard a Chopin nocturne.

  Bruce, who did not aspire to a musical career, still had a more investigative nose (ear) than I. Eventually he would introduce me to, on the one hand, discs of the Australian Marjorie Lawrence singing Richard Strauss in French and, on the other hand, to the German Greta Keller singing Dietrich’s repertory in English—so vocally superior to Marlene, so charismatically inferior. (The point of the one-of-a-kind Dietrich is that she sang off pitch in her gasping baritone, while we sighed with satisfaction. She was the tragic Florence Foster Jenkins.)

  Such scores and discs as we could not afford with our allowances, we stole. I devoured Romola Nijinsky’s dubious portrait of her husband, and Lockspeiser’s biography of Debussy, which remains, alas, with its mean, inexpert biases, astonishingly the only extant book on the subject. I had half learned all of Debussy’s piano repertory when the dilettantish Mrs. Rothschild, upon the death of her young husband, left Chicago forever.

  “How do you plan to make a living?” asked Father, on learning that I wanted to be a composer when I grew up. Apparently I replied, “What difference does it make, if I can’t be a composer?” That answer was so un-American as to impress Father, who, although a breadwinner, took seriously his not-so-sublimated baritone. To his eternal credit he agreed then and there to be supportive of the family freak. He has never been a Stage Mother, but Father nonetheless believed in work. It was time for a real teacher.

  The former Julius Rosenwald mansion, located on Ellis and Fifty-first, was now the site of the Julius Rosenwald Fund. It had a richly antique ambiance, with its arched entrance for automobiles and a garden with more arches in granite and brick. I remember seeing, maybe even meeting, old man Rosenwald once or twice: he seemed mummified, like John D. Rockefeller, rather than handsome and easygoing like rich people in the movies. The Fund was not only the backbone of the Committee on the Cost of Medical Care, of which Father was coordinator, but sponsor for Negro fellowships in the Arts & Sciences. The c
omparative radicalism of this, coupled with our pacifist leanings, lent the Rorems a reputation for being benignly odd. We were no threat when we invited Negro guests to dine. Such guests invariably arrived late, or so it seemed, earning them the slogan CPT, or Colored People’s Time. The lateness, Father explained, stemmed not from rudeness but from insecurity about the rare practice of interracial socializing. Among beneficiaries of the fellowships were Katherine Dunham, Marian Anderson, Howard Swanson, and Margaret Bonds.

  The last-named at twenty-one was already a middle-western “personality,” having played John Alden Carpenter’s Concertino with the Chicago Symphony under the composer’s direction, and being herself a composer of mainly spiritual arrangements and of original songs in collaboration with Langston Hughes. It was Margaret Bonds—Miss Bonds—who was to be my next piano teacher. Every Saturday morning I boarded the streetcar for her house in the ghetto of South Wabash. At our first lesson she played me some ear-openers: The White Peacock by Griffes, and Carpenter’s An American Tango. Had I ever heard American music before, beyond “To a Wild Rose,” which Mother used to thump out? Fired by my enthusiasm, she assigned these pieces on the spot, with no talk of scale-and-trill practice. In this day or any other it’s scarcely revolutionary for a male pupil to have a woman tutor. But for a white child to have a black teacher was not standard practice in Chicago during the 1930s, and is there a reason not to be proud of it?

  Margaret, ten years older than I, played with the authority of a professional, an authority I’d never heard in a living room, an authority stemming from the fact that she too was a composer and thus approached all music from the inside, an authority that was contagious. She dusted off the notion that music was solely for home use. She also showed me how to notate my ramblings—“Just look at how other composers put it down”—hoisting the ephemeral into the concrete: once his piece is on paper a composer is responsible for it, for it can now be reinterpreted by others, elating or shaming its maker.

  Rosemary was piqued at what she thought to be my preferential treatment. Mother responded to this pique till the end of her life; she was proud of my accomplishments (horrified at my “defective” behavior) but may have felt sentimentally nearer to my sister as a fellow childbearer. Why should an artist be more pampered than other people? Wasn’t Rosemary just as talented as Ned? Rosemary nevertheless, as elder sibling, remained wistful long after she married and had six children. Father identified with me and tolerated, albeit uneasily, my spoiled-brat stance. In a subtle shift, my role as Mother’s boy was switched to Father, Rosemary’s role as Father’s girl switched to Mother.

  4. Mother’s Diary

  After Mother died I came across—in her very small cache of intimate keepsakes—two journals, one from 1934, the other from our European trip in 1936, both written in her bold, byzantine script alternating between lead pencil and green ink. The first notebook is half filled, with fourteen entries between 10 October and 10 December, and covering twenty ruled pages. After this she must have lost interest.

  Chicago, October 10, 1934

  Our neighbors to the right (or is it to the left)—depends upon the way one is standing—have a lovely little flower garden. It is a nosegay in the heart of the city. Every day I glance at it as I sweep our back veranda. I do not know the names of our neighbors. They are a pleasant appearing man and woman. Not young in years—not old either—just people who love flowers. Some day I mean to speak to them and tell them what a joy they have created for the sixteen families living in our apartment building. Some days I contemplate the garden even when not sweeping the veranda. In the late afternoon I sometimes relax in an easy chair with a collection of Great Poems of the English Language. I like combining the poems with the flowers. Then again I go to attend to the two Zebra finches and the two canaries (which belong to my son and which he should be attending) as they make their residence on the porch. There is also a gold fish there but poor fellow he doesn’t count. We try to give him away, now since Ned has the birds, but nobody wants him. Why is it people almost never want gold fish? It seems that their home is either too hot or too cold for fish, or they have a pet cat and you know what pet cats do to gold fish. (They tell you.) Then often there is a baby who would be sure to put his fingers in the bowl and would probably pick out the fish and swallow it raw. Then there are people who have owned gold fish who have actually had days ruined because of a guilty feeling which will not leave them, when they neglect the fish by not feeding them and changing their water. So you see! We continue to keep the gold fish but it offers me the chance to view our neighbors garden when I go out to feed it its holy wafer.

  These words belie her contention—or my recollection—of her negative attitude about flowers. Still, I don’t remember cut flowers, bouquets, chez nous.

  October 11. Every evening I plan to put down some thoughts before retiring. I am writing in bed. (I like to read in bed too.) Rufus (my husband, good and kind) just turned out the electric lamp on the high boy beside me and replaced it with a candle. He thought the muses would adapt themselves better to candle light. Autumn is here and tonight I can hear the wind playing with the falling leaves. The vines on our neighbors’ windows to the rear of us, have turned red. These neighbors live across the court and I do not know their names either. They appear youngish through the windows. I should say they are a newly married couple. This evening I read two chapters of “Water Babies” aloud to Rosemary (my daughter—12 and Ned my son—10). Rufe sat in my room with us. He was trying to read a French book to himself. He listened some to us. We all like Tom, the Water Baby. Rufe and I are reading “Seven Gothic Tales” by Isak Dinesen aloud to each other. They are fantastic and sort of Arabian Nightish. Margery my niece, who is spending the winter with us, made grape jelly today. She comes from South Dakota and is 19.

  October 12. Ned and I went bicycle riding after school. We stopped in at Laredo Taft’s studio where we gazed at some lovely objects. I was glad to be taken for Ned’s sister by one of the artists (woman) who lives there in the colony—sort of a joy in one’s maturity. The sewing machine man took us for a ride in his ratty Ford to see a little old woman who had a canary to sell. When we arrived the dame had flown with the canary. I am sorry to keep birds in cages yet children are more important to me than birds and Ned loves pets so much and birds seem to be the best mannered creatures to keep in apartments. Tomorrow evening I must write a theme and not ramble as I have done for two writings.

  Earlier that year—was it at a Friends Meeting?—I met a young ornithology professor from the biology department named Ralph H. Mazure who introduced me to his living collection of multicolored finches, kept in a glass aviary filled with ferns. A rainbow explosion! Vitality glittering in a chirpy tongue which I immediately understood. I persuaded the family to let me order a pair of zebra finches from a farm called Bird Haven in California. Awaiting their arrival, Mazure helped me put together my own glass cage, which I furnished with miniature branches imbedded in plasticene plinths made in Miss Todd’s art class. The arrival of the birds, in their tiny wooden cage, “express collect” (a phrase I grew to cherish), was a thrill. Rosemary named them Cosette and Marius. The male zebra finch, half the size of a canary, is garbed in speckled gray-black feathers, tight and neat, with a zebrine face dominated by a beak of Chinese red. The female wears a uniform gray with the same bright beak. Their continual song is a monochrome fluty cheep switching in spurts between two pitches a minor third apart. I can still imitate the effect by flipping my tongue against the palette. We placed their transparent home on the platform window in our living room. Their diet was a commercial mix of millet, hemp, and rape seed. Days on end I spent transfixed by their darting avian play when not reading about related breeds, all from Australia, in Aviculture magazine. Once, while I was cleaning the cage, they escaped and flew behind a bust of Shakespeare atop the six-foot bookshelf. From then on we allowed them the freedom of the house, leaving open the door of the cage, where they returned for meals. So
on they were carrying bits of lint or string from the rug up to their Shakespearean aerie—building a nest. We gave them swatches of old linen and cotton, and they wove a cozy home. Cosette lay one egg which she incubated for weeks, but it never hatched. I kept it like a pearl in a little box hidden in the grandfather clock. In April, Cosette and Marius were moved to the screened-in back porch where they built another nest. Cosette died in childbirth—she was “egg-bound,” according to Aviculture. Marius grieved. We bought him a new mate, Esmeralda, but they fought viciously and killed each other.

  The brush with death was a tearful occasion which I dramatized out of proportion, as I had dramatized the death of Mama Miller the previous summer. (We had taken a cabin for a month at a resort in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. I picture Mother still, removing her wet bathing suit, when the telegram from Grandaddy arrived. She began to cry, and out of sympathy so did I, though I felt no special sorrow for Mama Miller, only anxiety that Mother seemed far away. She bade me shut up—I was usurping her voluptuous emptiness, the letting go in the face of loss.) During the next months other shipments from Bird Haven arrived. First a pair of strawberry finches, smaller even than the zebras—indeed, like giant strawberries—named Zeus and Hera. Then a pair of society finches, rather larger, clad in terse squares of brown and white. A pair of expensive (ten dollars) Lady Gould finches, of which the male’s plumage, in its neatly delineated radiance, mirrored Fra Angelico’s Angel Musicians. This creature, the size of a sparrow, is of stained glass tinted by beverages or fruits: a lemonade head, burgundy wings, pomegranate breast, thick orange rump. Then there were the Java ricebirds, who needed a cage to themselves (they bite off the legs of other species), and the three pair of parakeets—cobalt, emerald, and azure. All were given free reign of the apartment by day, returning to their covered cages by night. In the morning before school I would remove the covers, like opening a jewel box. To pals after school, or Mother’s friends, there was always the risk that a feathered friend would swoop past to let loose a dropping in their teacup.