Ensemble

by S. P. Elledge

where that odd Cahill boy, who had left so long ago with his brothers, was working on something which even the Bible could not have predicted or described.

  Deep within the stone walls of the mill, Arthur Cahill would sit dreaming at his drafting board, long after the workmen had gone home to their wives and children for the evening. It was only at times like these, far into the still and solitude of an Iowa night, that he felt he could once more think with that larger mind he had once shared with his brothers. Often as not he would forget they had ever died, but seemed to feel them yet at his side, urging him on with fraternal rivalry. “Thad,” Arthur might say aloud to the empty laboratory, as if expecting his brother to hand him a compass or tuning-fork; or “Yes, George,” he sometimes said to the wind from an open window when it sent a sheaf of music paper scurrying across the floor. He would not have been surprised if either man had answered, he felt so close to finding the key that would unlock the door to the other side. Nevertheless, by dawn’s light he would repeatedly find himself as far from the solution to his puzzle as he had been the previous morning, and he would tear up a notebook’s pages with weary hands or throw the whole thing into the coal furnace. Summer faded to autumn and autumn to winter and it seemed the thirteen boxcars had been in vain, for still no music was heard from the banks of the dried-up creek, and communication with the spirit world remained a decidedly one-way conversation. Then, in the spring of 1920, Mrs. Karinskaya, his mother’s former aide-de-camp and once-renowned “psychic materialist” appeared at the Cahill farmhouse laden with many bags and a library of arcane literature which she said might possibly be of some small help to him. Arthur thought she had died twenty years before.

  History Lesson

  Few people still alive in the early twentieth century, and fewer still in America, remembered La Cygnetta, as she had been called on the Continent, mother to the Cahill triplets and once, long ago and far away, the Baltic States’ answer to Jenny Lind. It was she of the lyrelike voice and swanlike purity who, recently pregnant by a carefree and careless marquess torn from the pages of Byron’s Don Juan, had fled to the States with her faithful astrologist, sometime accompanist, and costume mistress—the redoubtable Mrs. Karinskaya (faith in the Lord advertised about her neck and militant umbrella always at her side), or Madame Karinskaya, as she had been known elsewhere. Their passage had been paid by an admirer in Riga, a Gogolian entrepreneur who had a weakness for bel canto made flesh and who owed the Madame an embarrassing favor. In Boston for an academic conference, botanist Artemis T. Cahill, who had despaired of ever marrying because of a hereditary anemia, met and wed almost overnight the towering soprano and optimistically took her and her sullen Russian mystic aboard the train back to Iowa. It was the end of the Civil War. Artemis was a skilled scientist and lecturer but at a trembling loss with coeds and other women, even ones with mustaches as pronounced as Mrs. Karinskaya’s. His prodigal wife did not fit into Mt. Vernon society, perhaps because she reminded too many too much of their own not-so-distant east-European past—though she was perhaps more ignored than she was hated. La Cygnetta spoke English no better than French or Italian, no matter how fluent she was in the language of opera. Throwing things like vases or books, anyway, was more effective than cursing in any tongue. She did not like Iowa or Iowans. She especially did not like people who thought a dubiously pregnant woman should be cloistered in some sort of Protestant harem. Nevertheless her husband adored her, studied vulgar Estonian when instead it was only a rare dialect she understood, and fanned the smoldering fires of her musical career. True, Mt. Vernon, like many sizable Midwestern towns of that period, had an opera house, though it was the sort of place where dramatic enactments of Uncle Tom’s Cabin or Stephen Foster minstrel revues were more common than Rossini or Cimarosa. Nevertheless, soon after the birth of her triplets (not seven months since the marriage, though he did not seem to notice), Prof. Cahill hired a voice-teacher from the college and the farmhouse came alive with song. Mrs. Karinskaya wielded her big umbrella like a riding crop, and tapped out rhythms on the floor with its Malacca-cane handle.

  Cici, as Artemis called her, for her real name was as unpronounceable as it was unwriteable, no longer cared for Rossini or Cimarosa, but would do whatever Mrs. Karinskaya bid her to do, and Mrs. Karinskaya had her own rather Chaldean plans. She gladly took on the autocratic role of nurse and then nanny and then governess, as capable with three as she would have been with one, as happy to hear her mistress practicing her scales and elocution as her mistress was happy to subvert any maternal instincts. Busy as she was with the infants, Mrs. Karinskaya was still in touch with the supernatural and had commenced transcribing a new opera by Gaetano Donizetti, deceased for nearly twenty years. Though a botanist might be considered among the earthiest of men, Prof. Cahill was convinced of the worthiness of the endeavor and eagerly increased Mrs. Karinskaya’s salary (for it seemed even the dead did not come cheap). After all, the celibate lesbian who had long nurtured darling Cici was her only real friend. Had the vocal teacher from Cornell heard the first aria from the late Donizetti’s new tragedy, La Donna Della Stella, he might have remarked upon its uncanny similarity to any of the composer’s many other hundreds of arias, but then all the later ones were very much cut of the same cloth, were they not?

  Mrs. Karinskaya could read music and play more than a little piano; she could go into a trance at the drop of a derby, and she knew where her bread was buttered. She invited an old acquaintance then visiting America, a Ruthenian conductor (defrocked) and erstwhile dealer in diamonds, to come to Iowa and attest to the genius of her telepathically arrived opera. A selection of excerpts from La Donna Della Stella was performed by La Cygnetta at the tiny Cornell College recital hall, and Duke Vuytautus delivered an incomprehensible and interminable talk about the relationship between what would become known later as Theosophy and what he termed “electro-somatic harmonics.” It did not matter that almost no one attended; Artemis Cahill was caught up in the higher spiritual aspirations of the evening and gladly paid a handsome sum to have the duke and his old friend arrange for an orchestra and a date at the Mt. Vernon Opera Hall. An out-of-work troupe was hired from Chicago (all of them Moldavian, but that did not matter) and sundry other musicians assembled from the college and local dance bands. The opera dealt with a Druidess spurned unfairly by her chieftain husband; she turns to a high priest for guidance and winds up transformed into a live oak—or something like that, for the schoolbook Italian of the libretto was faint and malnourished, to say the least. Who “The Lady Of The Stars” might be was never made quite clear; be that as it may, Cici Cahill looked imperial in her many elaborate garments and one daring, spangled body-stocking, and Mt. Vernon was just curious enough to fill all the seats on opening night. Though offered other babysitters, Mrs. Karinskaya oddly enough decided to stay home with her charges on opening night—in retrospect, she often said, because she’d had a terrible foreboding.

  It was said in the local papers and even as far as The Chicago Daily News that the tall, slender, swanlike diva had just stepped under the proscenium when the impossibly long train (historically inaccurate, they also noted) of her Druidic vestments toppled and then became entangled in a lit torchiere onstage, which ignited the highly flammable gold-embroidered costume and almost instantly enveloped her in flames before setting the hall itself on fire. Gaslit, wood-framed theaters burn quickly, but the other players and audience escaped alive and only a little scorched; however, by the time Mrs. Cahill was carried onto the forecourt she had already succumbed to burns and smoke. The world would never hear Donizetti’s posthumous work (the only existent scores were also burned) and Artemis Cahill’s songbird was silenced forever. They had been married less than six years and Mrs. Karinskaya swore between her tears that she had been but a nineteen-year-old virgin when they had married. Her benefactor felt the large and airy farmhouse closing in upon him; while any other house might seem empty after such a death, this house seemed t
o shrink smaller and smaller, for her voice was in every room and in every cabinet, cubbyhole, and closet. Mrs. Karinskaya was of the opinion that the souls of those who died too young were earthbound to their last dwelling-place. This did not help the already greatly bereaved Mr. Cahill; the botanist hung himself in an oak tree a year to the day after his wife’s immolation. Mrs. Karinskaya was disturbed to find that most of his remaining funds had thoughtfully been put into trust for his sons, the rest to be inherited when they came of age; meanwhile she would have to revert to her previous means of existence. And of course stay in ready touch with the ghosts of celebrated artistes.

  By the late 1870s spiritualism was sweeping the country, and if America was one immense Ouija board, Mrs. Karinskaya was its peripatetic planchette, much in demand from coast to coast as medium, mystic, and if need be, magician—for if the money was right she wasn’t adverse to materializing a Sioux princess or a Dearly Departed bank president to secure her position in