I had written ahead. In the morning, among the crowds of persons milling around the Grand Central Station, we found Churchill Weeks and his wife, Catherine. They were at the barrier to meet us, to arrange with the porters for our baggage, to take us to our hotel, which on that occasion was the Chelsea. Catherine, whom we knew only slightly, said nothing. It seemed to me she found our arrival a trial, as though she were not accustomed to such heavy responsibilities. She was a thin, neurasthenic, almost flat woman whose body seemed concave at the front. Her brown hair was pulled tightly back from her thin face and fastened at the nape of her neck in the style of those days. She had the look of someone waiting always for something unpleasant to happen, always expecting a repellent flavor as she looked at her food. When she spoke to her husband her voice was sharp and impatient as though his very presence were an annoyance to her. Try as I might for Churchill’s sake and Robert’s, I could not like her.
In our rooms at the hotel Churchill said, “We’ll leave you now. You must be tired from the long journey. Is there anything we can do to make you more comfortable before we go?”
“We are expected to lunch with the faculty at twelve sharp, Churchill,” said Catherine, in her rough, edgy mid-western voice.
“Nothing. Nothing at all, thank you,” said Robert. “You are very good.” He spoke as though he had not heard the asperity in Catherine’s voice, and perhaps he had not. His own voice was distant and weary. He smiled at Churchill his half-smile, his eyes lighting up as he looked at his friend. “We will rest and perhaps take a walk and wait for you to come.”
Churchill had looked at Catherine as though he were preparing to strike her, but when Robert spoke, he smiled at him. For one moment, I thought, the old ineffable love seemed to hover in the air between them. Neither sharp Catherine nor birdlike Caroline was present to them.
Catherine stared stonily at her husband. I thought, What a strange marriage this is, without even the pretense of civility before others. Or perhaps I was oversensitive to the import of the looks they exchanged and to the overtones of her words, because my own marriage had no resonances except for the echoes of wordlessness. It must have been that.
They left us. Robert lay down on the bed and slept almost at once. I lay beside him, careful not to disturb him by my motion, listening to his almost silent breathing and hearing beyond the hotel windows (we were on the second floor, we never stayed above the second floor, because Robert was afraid of fire and so feared to sleep in a room on a higher floor) the continuous roiling sound of traffic on the street below, and the shouting, and the clanging of wagons and motorcars. I felt exhilarated to be in a city.
At six o’clock the Weekses returned, but Robert had decided he would prefer not to venture out for the promised dinner. So Churchill arranged with the hotel to bring to our room a lavish set of covered dishes on a moving table, a service I had never before seen provided for guests in America. I enjoyed it all hugely, as did Churchill, who talked a great deal to Robert of the pleasures of living in New York, of teaching piano and harmony and composition in a university where an academic department devoted to the study of music had just been established. Robert smiled, nodded assent, but spoke very little. I listened. Catherine, as I recall, said nothing.
The morning of Commencement Day was beautiful, cool, and clear. We traveled by trolley car along Broadway to Morningside Heights and walked through the great gates to the new Seth Low Library to meet the president, Mr. Nicholas Murray Butler. Weeks was there with other faculty members from the department of music. I was given a ticket to the chairs set up at the foot of the library steps. When I found my place, there was Catherine Weeks. I sat beside her. She asked after Robert’s condition and seemed to wish to explore the subject of his apparent ill health (it is uncharitable of me, but I felt she was the kind of sour woman who enjoyed the spectacle of other people’s misfortunes). But before I was required to say very much, the music—trumpets and horns—started. We rose to our feet to attend the glittering procession of garbed professors and students. Walking near the head was Robert, looking pallid and gaunt in his black academic mortarboard with a gold tassel falling before his eyes. He wore a handsome blue robe decorated with the crowns of King’s College, for so this university had been named at its inception, I read in the engraved program handed to me when I entered. Robert’s forehead was wet with perspiration; I was sorry he had insisted on dressing in his old but still fine German suit. He was going to be very warm up there, I thought.
I sat through the opening of the ceremony feeling very hot, too, for the sun was beating down on us at that hour. I felt uneasy for Robert. Always before, as I had waited in audiences for him to perform or conduct, I was confident, knowing well his perfect control, his quiet command of all his powers. But after the night in the railway car my confidence was shaken. How would he do?
At last—it seemed to me a very long wait in that hot sun—President Butler rose to read the awards of honorary degrees. I was delighted that Robert’s was read first. The citation was glowing and effusive. “Robert Glencoe Maclaren is one of America’s great composers. He has turned his excellent European training to the service of American music, American themes and subject matter. America’s Orpheus, he has been called by one critic, and his future,” read President Butler from a parchment scroll, “promises to be as distinguished as have been the short years of his already eminent career. He is a man whose thirty-three years of life are studded with world-recognized accomplishments.”
I watched Robert, seated in the front row on the platform, as the president read. He was looking straight ahead into the audience, listening perhaps, but somehow I felt he did not hear what the president was reading. The president stopped, there was applause. Mr. Butler looked over at Robert, expecting him to rise and come forward. The audience applauded loudly, but Robert did not rise. I saw a professor seated behind him lean over to shake his arm and whisper something. Robert seemed to awaken, looked back at the red-gowned man behind him, nodded his head slightly, and stood up. Then, to my horror, he turned and walked away from where President Butler stood, making his way carefully toward the steps at the opposite end of the platform.
A murmur went through the audience. I could feel myself covered by a red flood of embarrassment and heat. What could I do? Nothing but sit on my camp chair and watch my poor confused husband wander in the wrong direction, away from his honor, in front of hundreds of graduates and parents, professors, and the president of the university.
President Butler was quick-witted. A vigorous man in his early forties, he had only recently taken over his eminent position. At that terrible moment he seemed capable of dealing efficiently with anything, even so eccentric a situation as this. He strode briskly the length of the platform, while everyone else sat, frozen. He reached Robert and took his arm just as he was about to descend the steps and leave the platform. He pulled him back, turned him around, and, with wonderful tact that made what he was doing seem normal ceremonial procedure, pushed him gently ahead, in the right direction, inching him toward the podium.
Robert then seemed to remember what it was he had to do. He reached into the inner pocket of his hot woolen suit and brought out the sheet of paper on which I had printed for him in large block letters the words of his speech. While the president discreetly sat down behind him, Robert began to read in his low, musical voice.
I relaxed a little, although by now my dress was suffused with perspiration and my handkerchief could no longer contain the moisture from my forehead and hands. No, I thought, it will be all right. Beside me, Catherine shifted in her seat. In my apprehensive state I took her movement to be a tart comment of some kind on what had just taken place on the platform.
Robert came to the last line. He read it slowly, distinctly. A low swell of applause began to grow on the platform and in the audience, but it died abruptly when Robert’s voice went on. Dear God! I realized he had begun at the opening sentence and was reading the whole first paragraph a
gain! I was overcome with horror, hearing the low murmur around me. I wanted to rush up to the platform and rescue him, stop the solemn proceedings and take Robert home to the Farm where he would be safe from the world’s knowledge.
But again the clever president assessed the situation quickly. He half rose from his seat as Robert once again came to his final sentence of gratitude, and when it was horrifyingly clear that he was about to begin a third reading, President Butler was at his elbow, taking his hand firmly in his two hands and shaking it, saying something to him very low that I could not hear. Robert stopped reading and turned to the president in confusion, seeming not to recognize him. But he was silent, at last. The audience was now enthusiastically applauding my poor oblivious husband, as the president led him back to his seat while appearing merely to be politely escorting him. How grateful I was, sitting below in a bath of fright and heat, for the president’s intelligence and his quick thinking.
The rest of the afternoon I remember quite clearly, for much of it I was now able to enjoy. Luncheon was served in wicker baskets to us and to the graduates and their parents and friends. Numbers of persons shook Robert’s hand and asked him if he remembered them. To each he nodded, said “Yes,” and smiled his weak, gentle half-smile. But I could tell he remembered none of them. He held my arm, or Churchill’s, during the hour that followed the luncheon, acknowledging the faculty members who spoke to him of their admiration for his music. He nodded, giving them each a wordless, childlike smile, sweet and vacant.
No mention was made by anyone of the debacle on the platform. It seemed to have been accepted and forgotten, reegarded as the eccentric, absentminded behavior of a genius. Only I knew better.
The Weekses had arranged tickets for us for a music-hall entertainment that evening. The variety show was a theatrical experience Robert had loved since a boy. Often he had spoken to Churchill when they were studying in Germany, and later to me, of a variety star he had seen in Boston, Della Fox, a wonderfully beautiful, plump, girlish singer, as he described her to me. By fortunate chance it happened that she had decided to return to the vaudeville stage, which was now very popular, during the weekend we were to be in New York. Churchill was kindness itself. He had obtained four tickets for Della Fox’s third appearance, on Sunday evening, the evening of the Columbia Commencement, after her scheduled opening on Friday.
Robert was excited, awakened from the trancelike state he had been in during the ceremony by the prospect of seeing and hearing Della Fox again. We sat in midafternoon under the great elms on the campus, cooler now, with Churchill and Catherine. Robert was better. He talked more than he had since we left the Farm.
“I simply cannot wait. I remember, it must have been when I came back on a visit almost twenty years ago—could it have been that long ago, Church?”
“I think so, Rob. The newspaper account said she had been retired for almost twenty years.”
“Twenty years! She was my idol, my dream, my ideal woman when I was, what was I? Fourteen? I must have been. She sang in a small but pure soprano. The Police Gazette called her ‘la petite Fox.’ Do you remember ever seeing her, Church?”
Catherine stared at her husband. He blushed, and then admitted gallantly, I thought, to Robert, that yes, he remembered hearing about Della Fox.
Robert went on: “I removed her picture from the Gazette. And my mother found it in my room and destroyed it. But I see Della Fox in my mind’s eye so clearly. She is small and blond, very blond, with small blond curls. She dressed differently from the other musical stars of those days. They wore spangles, and pinched-in stays and tights. But Della wore a white satin man’s suit—trousers and vest and jacket and cravat, even a white yachting cap with a small visor that sat jauntily on her curls. Her eyes were deep, sparkling blue, and she was delicate, very delicate, yet—yet full-bodied, do you know? Do you know what I’m trying to say, Church?”
Churchill smiled at him, ignoring what I took to be his wife’s evident displeasure at Robert’s nostalgic flights, for she was looking sternly, unsmiling, at her husband.
“She is magnificent, Rob, I’m sure. I cannot wait to see her.”
Robert continued: “And I remember, as clearly as if it were yesterday, the song she always sang as she lounged against a table, with her leg thrown over it so the audience could see her ankle. Something like … shady brook? Yes—‘Shady brook, babbling brook, and now serenely mellow,’” he sang in his fine, low tenor.
Churchill joined in. The two men sang the verses of the foolish little song to the end. People seated near us on the grass applauded and laughed, and the two men looked dismayed at having been so carried away. Churchill gracefully acknowledged the gentle applause by tipping his straw hat. Robert, flushed, looked away, but I could tell he was pleased. It had been so long since he had come out of himself, enjoyed himself in that way.
Then Churchill said, “One caution, Rob. I read in the Sun last evening that Della Fox’s first two performances had to be canceled because she was ill. I’m hoping that won’t be the case tonight, but we won’t know until we get downtown to the theater and see if the bills are posted out front. But there are six other acts if she doesn’t appear.”
Robert was still transported into his past and did not seem to hear Churchill’s warning. “She smoked, onstage! I can see her now, leaning back, reaching into her white jacket pocket for her little silver case, opening it, putting a cigarette into her mouth and lighting it. She breathed out a ring of smoke and looked at us all in the audience with those deep blue eyes, as though she dared us to disapprove. Never have I seen so—so seductive an act. She was charming, performing what was forbidden in full view.
“I see her still, standing there, her leg swung across the edge of the table—another charmingly illicit act—all that delicious femininity encased in that white suit, blowing smoke rings at the audience and singing. Della Fox …”
We all laughed at Robert—all but Catherine, who stared at the table during his elegiac reminiscence. In that moment he looked almost young and eager. I could imagine him reaching out with his hot boy’s hand toward a mythic goddess of incredible allure. It was so good to see him like this again. I was impatient for the evening’s entertainment.
We dined with the Weekses in their apartment on Fifty-seventh Street, a long, dull meal with too many hot rolls and heavy brown gravy for the beef. We finished with pie made, it seemed, of leaden apples. (How is one able to remember the details of unmemorable meals such as this one? It must have been the happenings of the evening that fastened these trivial matters forever in my mind.) At dinner Robert was quiet but pleasant. He watched Churchill carve the roast most capably and pour the Médoc, admiring, I could tell, his skill with the knife and the cork. At one point, I remember, he hummed “Shady Brook,” and we all listened, and then laughed.
There was much talk of the old days, in Paris and in Frankfurt. Only once was there a break in the pleasant tenor of the supper. When Churchill mentioned their beloved teacher Joachim Raff, rehearsing the details of his sudden death, Robert’s eyes filled with tears that ran down his cheeks. Catherine looked away while Robert searched his pockets for a handkerchief. When he could not find it, Churchill passed his. We all waited for Robert to regain control.
Churchill said it was time. We walked down Broadway to the Lyceum Theatre. For me it was exciting to see the city in the evening light, spread, unbelievably, upward, and glistening in the clear air. I held Robert’s arm and felt almost gay and young again, wishing we could preserve the exhilaration of that evening, wishing we could recapture the pleasures of the early days when we walked together on the Common, with Paderewski encircling us with his leash and drawing us together. …
The marquee that jutted out over the sidewalk was lighted. A small crowd of persons gathered under it. Churchill smiled with pleasure when he saw the bills posted on both sides of the door:
Under the corner of the bill on the right side of the entrance was a picture of Della Fox in
her famous white suit, looking much as Robert had described her: a small, plump, pink and white, full-breasted young woman, jaunty and fresh-faced.
Our seats were close to the front of the orchestra, in recognition, I guessed, of what Churchill had remembered of Robert’s boyish passion. I wondered if we were not too close. We seemed to be seated almost directly above three shabby-looking musicians in the orchestra pit, now trying out their instruments in a peculiar cacophony.
“No. We’ll see well here,” said Robert. He was in a state of high excitement. All his morning’s weariness and disorientation had vanished. Like a child, he seemed hardly able to wait for the curtain to rise. He applauded when the musicians, now somewhat more together, began the notes of “Shady Brook.” The rest of the audience was quiet. Unself-consciously, Robert clapped alone.
After a long introduction, which consisted of a medley, I assumed, of Della Fox’s “hits,” the theater was darkened and a spotlight opened upon the left side of the stage. The curtain went up on a set vaguely designed to resemble the interior of a dilapidated cabaret. The spotlight hovered uncertainly around the wings, the music repeated its themes, the pause, in which nothing happened, seemed to stretch interminably. And then she entered.
Chamber Music Page 9
