Ensemble

by S. P. Elledge

the households of Newport or Nob Hill. The Cahill boys, being in essence a useful triplicate in such matters, helped in the creation of spectral sensations and the manufacture and distribution of ectoplasmic secretions (a little corn starch, wood putty, and extract of eucalyptus as base); now more than ten years old, they felt no moral compunctions, for their governess assured them that these were just minor “demonstrations” to help the spiritually adrift secure an anchor. It was no better or worse than the way others might be comforted by a weeping icon or the synthetic blood of a martyr. One might say Thaddeus, George, and Arthur learned to count by table-tap and that they developed good pitching arms by impersonating crockery-hurling poltergeists. Mrs. Karinskaya, working on yet another extra-sensory opera in yet another parlor, taught the boys how one treats a Bechstein and how to become sensitive to metaphysical improvisations, as it were. But they were not much interested then in either music or manifestations from the great beyond; instead, any free time Mrs. Karinskaya allowed them they spent playing ball-games and taking apart broken typewriters and ticker-tape machines. They seemed to have no memories of either Mr. or Mrs. Cahill. Their “auntie” usually kept the three gravely taciturn children in a nearby hotel with a hired girl while she sized up the locals at casinos and health farms. If it helped matters, she would present them singly, never together, as her poor mute great-nephew (thus in a way abetting their penchant for thinking of themselves as three-in-one). As psychically acute as she was, Mrs. Karinskaya sometimes had to wonder, when picking up platens and detached alphanumerical keys around the suite, if it had been the anarchist clockmaker and not the gouty marquess who had once stolen their mother’s heart. As they approached adolescence, the boys became more unruly and could not always be trusted to be in their proper places at a séance; embarrassments ensued and their guardian saw that they might be better off at Groton, after all. Besides, the trust fund would pay for it. In effect, she was firing her assistants, though in years to come they would feel it was she they had let go.

  Once at school the boys became more of an impregnable kingdom than ever before; unlike their schoolmates they were not interested in the debutantes down in Concord or Boston, they would only play a sort of baseball with rules they themselves had invented, and they seemed to communicate more with glances and gestures than words. Older boys regarded them as queer fish indeed and younger boys were genuinely frightened, especially when it was said they were the nephews of a witch. Despite their awkward social graces they excelled at their studies, especially the sciences. Thaddeus was the first to take up the piano again and discover music which was not paranormal in origin, though it was mostly through a scientific fascination with sound-waves and Pythagorean theorems. Not only did he love the new art of telegraphy like his brothers, but he also would lie for hours under the telegraph poles on a spring day, listening to the hum and whistle of the wires. Later in life he would call it the most ethereal, the most celestial of singing, and admitted that sometimes, somehow it seemed to be their very own mother’s heavenly, half-forgotten voice he heard high in the air over his head, while sunning in that hay-meadow.

  Their legal guardian would send them cryptic messages on occasion, written on letterhead borrowed from country estates and expensive hotels, warning them that she had “eyes everywhere” and asking more and more frequently for the “loan of a few banknotes.” Soon, assured of enough funding, there would be a cantata at the Metropolitan or perhaps just a recital at Symphony Hall, for surely the world hadn’t heard the last of Meyerbeer or Mendelssohn—and hadn’t she done so much for them over the years? Eventually they stopped answering her and half-consciously came to assume she had died after the last of her telegrams, likely as not penniless after one last failed scam, for certainly she had been ancient since their births and now they were old enough to enter Antioch, following in their father’s footsteps.

  At college Thaddeus first revealed his plans for the as-yet-unnamed Telharmonium to the other two: hardly daring to call it a musical instrument, he instead described it as a machine so sensitive to magnetic fields and so precisely calibrated it would be able to translate the electrical impulses left by dying and deceased entities into audible frequencies. It would have a keyboard, yes, like a piano or typewriter (ravished portions of both lay around their dormitory room), but the machine would play you, in a sense, as it tapped into the flow of energy within your body and guided your fingers by occult powers; the rest he need not attempt to put into words, for of course his brothers understood. Mrs. Karinskaya had, after all, shepherded them across the continent for years; she’d taught them to whisper down an ear-trumpet, disappear behind false wainscoting, play a mandolin hanging from a concealed wire; she’d wrapped them in gauze and attached swan’s-down wings to their backs so that even flash-cameras in a dark sitting-room could record their angelic presence, much as others were photographing fairies and portrait gallery hauntings. Even though well-versed in her chicanery, they may very well have had a genuine desire, like her, to reach beyond this world into the next—perhaps to touch their long-dead mother or father, perhaps not. At school they might have returned to their father’s Methodist assurances, but something of the long-lost marquess’s profligate ways (or was it the clockmaker’s wicked iconoclasm?) lingered in their atoms, not in the manner of worldly extravagance or bomb-throwing, but in an extravagant delight in deflowering baby grands and disemboweling Royals. Thaddeus showed Arthur and George some tentative sketches and helped them set about reassembling telegraphic equipment into primitive sound-generators that might be able to tune into the legendary music of the spheres. Already Elisha Gray—by all rights the true father of the telephone, the brothers agreed—had invented the Musical Telegraph, ingeniously constructed from telegraph parts and capable of transmitting a full chromatic scale across wires (this ability inspired fresh ideas). Alexander Graham Bell, as usual, was just slightly behind with his Electric Harp. These devices were much discussed in journals of the day, but the brothers felt no sense of urgent competition. Neither inventor, obviously, was willing to go far enough.

  It might seem a surprise that after all this quasi-scientific experimentation the Cahill brothers chose to study law after graduating with a triple cum laude from Antioch College, but by this time the brothers had come of age and discovered that even though the legacy left by their father was handsome, it might not be enough, even used most frugally, to last them through the long years it might take to perfect and then market what they first called the Dynamaphone. As peculiar as they were, they wanted to become steadfast and economically comfortable— unremarkable—citizens, if that was what it might take to stay together as three brothers in one house. Giving one’s life outright to science or any of the arts was risky. Attorneys, however, seemed to be the most richly compensated professionals besides surgeons (and they had no love of the flesh), so they pragmatically entered Harvard Law School, taking a modest room in the square and settling down for several uneventful but studious years with their books. Now and then in the evening Thaddeus might serenade them on the player-piano in their rooming-house’s dining hall, but music of this world or the next seemed an almost dangerous diversion while they worked on their graduate degree. Especially when Arthur and George feared Thaddeus’s variations were becoming a mite too unrestrained and “intuitive,” they were glad when he finally banged the keyboard cover shut and stood up, shaking but eager to return with them to their room and their three parallel cots.

  Not long after graduation they learned of available offices in Holyoke, Massachusetts, hung out their tri-part shingle, and spent the next several years building up a lucrative general law practice there. They acquired a quarter-block of brick row houses—four units, one for each of them plus one for the servants—generous accommodations but nothing extravagant, though they could have afforded much more. Their real interest (and what necessitated a constant flow of cash) lay in the warehouse they kept at the edge of town. This was the rea
son they said they could not afford to marry, join gentlemen’s clubs, or pursue any kind of social life. It… the already ungainly Dynamaphone… was growing and growing, almost as if it were a beast kept in the stall to fatten, and consuming as well more and more of their time. Luckily there were three of them, for the complexities of the instrument demanded constant attention from electricians and machine-builders, men who may have seemed bewildered by the behemoth before them but who enjoyed the challenge of helping to create something mighty as a cathedral organ and complex and ungainly as a locomotive. By this time Thaddeus’s conception of the instrument had been altered by the suggestions and modifications of his siblings: they helped him to envision a way to harness the Dynamaphone to the telephone company’s readily available cables; in such a way, they might feed into the power of a “national communications grid” (as George put it) and deliver its other-worldly music to anyone capable of making the connection. Imagine, George