Ensemble

by S. P. Elledge

explained to the others, sending musical signals through the wires the way we now send our voices—but more distinctly, for the music would originate within the mothermachine and the wires itself. “We could ring up a hotel salon in Boston or a private home in Wellesley Hills and deliver music like they’ve never heard right into their chambers.” There was the problem of amplification, for telephone signals were weak, but they could enhance the receivers’ sound with megaphones such as were used on the new wax-cylinder players. The more the Brothers Cahill worked on their problems the less the instrument became of the spirit world; instead it was taking shape as a very physical object indeed, weighing several tons already, and their boyish interest in devising the means to listen in to conversations among musically inclined angels, however fascinating, began to appear as quaint as the late nineteenth century was already beginning to seem.

  By 1906 the Telharmonium (or “Teleharmonium”), as the instrument was rechristened to reflect its creators’ revolutionary new ideas in the mass distribution of live music, had been patented and was ready for public demonstration. Through connections at the court house and in the city streets they had attracted a number of bankers, merchants, and fellow lawyers who gathered in the warehouse one evening for a most curious concert. The lights were kept low, partly to disguise the machine’s mammoth size, and partly to allow the use of candles placed about the operating room to lend it a somewhat churchlike, if not dungeon-like, atmosphere. The audience was dressed for a concert, in frock coats and top-hats. Though several doubters searched in vain for organ pipes or bellows, they found instead a phalanx of modified dynamos (145 if they had cared to count) attached to specially geared shafts and inductors; these were controlled by seven octaves of polyphonic velocity-sensitive keyboards, 36 notes per octave. Thaddeus had made a great study of just intonation and equal temperament. Two very serious female conservatory students from Boston, who had been training on the difficult control-banks for months, were attired in suitably solemn academic robes and stood before the machine somewhat as Andromeda might have confronted her future, chained as she was to a rock. Although the businessmen might have been content to seat themselves behind the women and attend to their technique, the brothers led them to a series of velvet-lined booths set along the walls on either side. Inside each booth was a modified telephone, and the men were instructed to lift their ear-pieces, fitted with small celluloid trumpets, when George gave the signal. Thaddeus switched on the Telharmonium, which seemed to waken with a monstrous shudder and then hum like a thousand beehives, sending an electric shiver right through the men’s spines. At George’s command the gentlemen picked up their ear-phones as if they were answering their wives in a distant county, and the ladies began to play Bach’s “Jesu, Joy Of Man’s Desiring” (Thaddeus had determined that the clean contrapuntal lines of baroque church or chamber music best illustrated the beast). The music that the men heard seemed not to come from any organ or manmade mechanism but from out of earthly realms, so pure and plaintive was its sound—not like pipes and not like woodwinds or brass, but like all blended together in shifting, shimmering, always mellifluous timbres. At first a few of the men doubted that the sound could really be coming from such a uncomely amalgamation of switchboards, electrical cables, toggles, buttons, keys, and revolving rotors—but once the recitalists began to take requests (repertory works only, please), they were convinced and willingly sat through George’s prepared lecture (being the most pragmatic of his brothers, he was also the best at answering the public at large). In the future, George told them, we would not come to the concert-hall, but the concert-hall would come to us. We would not be content with shellac records that were forever breaking and forever, monotonously the same but would demand actual performances by virtuosos on either side of the continent. Music would be there to soothe or enliven us at all hours, at work and at play, more easily accessible than a trunk-call was today. Indeed, the same telephone that keeps us in touch with faraway relations and associates would enable us to hear great masterpieces from the greatest of composers with very little fuss—and for a nominal fee. The audience was impressed, and soon money was flowing into the brothers’ research and development accounts as freely as Bach had through the wires. There remained only the simple matter of relocating to Manhattan, acquiring larger accommodations, and advertising the revolutionary services of the Electric Music Company up and down the grand avenues.

  Dubious Enterprises

  Christ, explained Mrs. Karinskaya, never died; he wanders upon the earth in myriad forms—a beggar, a Pullman porter, a starving mongrel, a barn owl—yes, like that one. Just the same, none of us ever really dies, either, she told Arthur that same evening she had reappeared, resurrected whole, pounding a monstrous Malacca umbrella handle against the front porch floor. She had never seemed so tall, so mannish, so threatening. “You think your little darling mother ever left you?” she asked as they stood together soon after in the bedroom she had quickly appropriated for herself. The lecture had been instigated when Arthur admitted that he didn’t know in which town cemetery his mother had been buried and didn’t care really because he did not believe in the commonly accepted Christian principles. “Then we are alike,” she said. Swiftly, she unsnapped a carpetbag and withdrew a pile of tattered envelopes tied with a girlish velveteen ribbon. “Your mother was burned horribly, it is true—but she writes to me still from the other side.” She shook the bundle in his face. “You think I am deluded?” she added, unknotting the ribbon. “The handwriting, it is hers—look!” And she threw the letters onto the bed. The brown ink had faded into the tissues, too faint to prove or disprove anything. He stood before her, as baffled as the boy she had left behind four decades ago.

  Mrs. Karinskaya had come across an article about the inauguration of the Telharmonium in an old New York Evening Sun lost between the leather cushions of a trolley in Saratoga Springs, where she just happened to be “passing through.” The fact that she had found the article there and then was proof that this was Destiny. She was to go to him, to help him. The cards had told her he would be back in Iowa—the cards and a helpful librarian in Poughkeepsie.

  What had she been doing all these years? Cook’s Tours, she said, and rest homes, sanatoria and hot-springs. No quack doctors, thank you! Rheumatism, dropsy, the gout—people from her corner of the world were prey to such maladies, but now she felt as strong as a youth of five and twenty. You met a lot of interesting people out in the world, she told him—interesting, delightful, well-off people. At that, she giggled almost girlishly and tapped him on the wrist with an imaginary fan. Arthur had mostly forgotten that theatrical life on the road with her when he and his brothers were young, and did not like the way she sounded so conspiratorial. After all, they had been but boys then, and bound to do her bidding, however much fun they might have had. He was a grown man well into his middle years now, a married—that is, divorced man, a lawyer and an inventor and not one to flout the law.

  They were now back in the “sitting room” having chamomile tea to ensure wholesome dreams. Mrs. Karinskaya took hers in a glass and let the honey drip for a long while. “I can read minds still,” she said, stirring. “But I can get her back, you know.”

  Arthur paused, his tea-cup frozen in midair. “Who?” he asked, feigning ignorance.

  She took a long noisy slurp of tea. (How vividly he recalled that sound!) “Her photograph in the newspaper was lovely,” she said. “You would not have wanted to give her up lightly.”

  “My wife… she became unwell. It was the strain of living with a scientific man. We hardly knew one another, actually.”

  “Still, you, a respected man, would like her back. That, I can do.”

  He drained his tea and set the cup down forcefully on the table—or as forcefully as one can set down a fragile bit of porcelain—and, face to face to his old guardian, said, “You are welcome to stay as long as you like; I can use someone to help me out around h
ere, since my last girl ran off to get married. But promise me no chicanery. Promise me you’ll not interfere in my work. Do that, and I will not bother you.”

  She smiled—like the Giaconda, he thought, just as inscrutably, just as infuriatingly, and finished her own tea. “The Turks,” she said at last, folding her broad hands as if in prayer, “they burned our dachas, and they drove us from the steppes into Walachia. Later we fought the Bessarabian separatists. Even now, the Bolsheviks are persecuting my people. I live by my, as you say, wits. So I am afraid of nothing. I came here to help you, and I shall. You want your player-piano to play the songs they sing on the other side. This, I know much about. Good, you have your American tools and your American technology, but I can reach realms where all your university know-how cannot.”

  Arthur had been circling the round kitchen table like a locomotive on its tracks as she spoke, and now he halted, hands in pockets, bent toward her sitting figure. “I can do it on my own,” he stated.

  She rose before him, elongated as an El Greco, every