One person who had no reservations over Uncle Ed’s promotion was his sixteen-year-old niece. I was already a devoted opera fan, with a picture by my bedside of Melba, whose London debut as Lucia had been the great moment of my life. I attended the Brearley School, but books, and even, in holiday parties, boys, hardly existed for me. I lived for the afternoons and my singing teacher, Miss Angela Frith. Uncle Ed, whose courteous demeanor to the young raised them briefly to the paradise of adults, was already my favorite relative. Now he became a god.
Mother, who considered herself vastly more liberal than the Stillmans, was as one with them when it came to any serious extension of the arts beyond the parlor. She laughed at my musical pretensions, when she was not irritated by them.
“Why don’t you take Amy to one of your rehearsals, Ed?” she asked my uncle one night. “I wonder if seeing the opera house in its shirtsleeves wouldn’t cure some of her fancies?”
Poor Mother! If she only had known what oil she was pouring on my fire! I waited breathless for Uncle Ed’s answer, afraid to ruin my chances by showing my enthusiasm, but his smile recognized my palpitations. He knew that waiting was torture to the young.
“Why, certainly, any rehearsal she wants. We’re running through the second act of Tristan tomorrow afternoon. How will that do?”
And so, after a sleepless night and a morning at school in which I took in nothing, my dream came true. There was I, Amy Stillman, seated with my uncle in the center of the second row of the orchestra pit in the great dark, empty opera house before a stage covered with cartons and dirty canvases, watching two stout middle-aged persons, a man and a woman in modern dress, sitting side by side on a small wicker divan. And when the conductor raised his baton, and we started right off in the middle of the love duet, I thought it the most romantic setting that I had ever seen. So much for Mother’s precautions!
I was familiar with Lohengrin and Die Walküre, but I had never heard a note of Tristan. Its effect on me was ambivalent. I was intrigued and excited by the violence and surge of the music, but at the same time it made me restless, apprehensive, almost afraid. Of what? Of love, of physical love? I have often asked myself since. But I do not think so. It was difficult for a girl in my time to associate love with the pordy middle age represented by the two performers. No, there was something else in that churning, seething music, something like being caught in the backwash of a big breaker when surf bathing in Southampton on a visit to Granny, tossed and pulled by the hissing water and borne out ineluctably to sea, to be smothered, perhaps to be drowned in a terrible peace beneath that tormented surface. I had no idea that this was a common reaction to Tristan, and I became at length so agitated that I was relieved when the music director called to the conductor through a little megaphone to stop the music.
The woman who was singing Brangäne had been delivering the offstage warning in a voice that was almost inaudible. She complained that the strain on her vocal cords was so great that she could not sing in full voice until the performance. It could be then or now, she concluded defiantly. The Herr Direktor could choose. The latter turned to Uncle Ed.
“Which shall it be, Mr. Stillman?”
“Tell her to sing today,” Uncle Ed snapped, and the rehearsal went on. Inexperienced as I was, I could sense that he had already taken hold of his company.
In a break, after the duet, Uncle Ed suggested a turn around the block. I was very proud to be on the arm of my handsome and distinguished uncle, and I admired the easy courtesy with which he raised his hat to any members of the company whom we passed, without interrupting the flow of our discussion. He asked me which I preferred, Tristan or Lucia, already knowing that Lucia was my favorite opera.
“Oh, Lucia,” I said promptly. “But Tristan is more interesting,” I added politely, suspecting his own preference.
“Interesting,” he repeated thoughtfully. “Perhaps that’s just what it is. Look down Broadway, Amy.” We paused at the corner and gazed south at the great thoroughfare. “Look at all that gray dirtiness and listen to all that strident clamor and tell me if you really think our modern life corresponds to the tinkling tunefulness of Donizetti.”
“You believe it should?”
“Well, don’t you think there should be some relation between daily life and music? Or do we go to the opera just to dress up and see our friends?”
“But Uncle Ed,” I protested earnestly, “shouldn’t opera help us to forget all that dirt and clamor?”
“Spoken like a true boxholder! You’ll be like the other dreamers in Number Seven, Amy. Your grandmother sighs for Edgar of Ravenswood, and even your Great-Aunt Rosalie wants to immolate herself with Rhadames in a living tomb!”
“And I can be Carmen!” I exclaimed, feeling very adult to be joking about such things (particularly Granny!) with the older generation.
“I’m sure a very proper Carmen,” Uncle Ed added with a chuckle. “Maybe even a rather severe one, like dear Lili Lehmann. She sings the ‘Habanera’ as if it had been written by Haydn. I suppose, Amy, I sometimes feel that our life is such a continual fancy dress ball that I want—just for a minute, mind you, just every now and then—to slip into plain old clothes and be myself.”
As I took in with a quick glance my uncle’s rich brown tweeds, the maroon polish of his shoes gleaming beneath his spats, the red carnation in his buttonhole, the walking stick with the silver knob, I could not but wonder if these were his plain old clothes. “Does your Tristan ‘correspond’ to modern life?” I asked timidly.
Uncle Ed became immediately serious at this, more so than I could ever remember having seen him. “That’s a good question, Amy. No, Wagner’s operas don’t correspond to modern life because Wagner didn’t believe in modern life. Not in ours, anyway. He thought that it didn’t exist, or if it did, that it was too trivial, too unheroic, too sordid, to be worth commenting on in musical terms. If a man was to write opera, it should be about valiant mythological figures, gods and goddesses, and if there weren’t any gods and goddesses, he ought to create them. Think of it, Amy!” Here Uncle Ed’s eyes really sparkled. We stopped walking, and he spread one arm in a broad gesture. “Ever since Shakespeare we have taken for granted that the artist must deal with mortal men, that his province must lie in love and compassion. You remember what Pope said: the proper study of mankind is man. But Wagner did what nobody has done in the whole history of art, except perhaps the ancients. If he was compelled to comment, he would create a world worthy to comment upon. He despised mankind, but did that stop him? He saw that the only beautiful thing in the world was death, and he made love to it in Tristan. Oh, Amy, when once you feel Wagner, there is nobody else. There is nothing else.”
How vivid that moment is to me this day, more than sixty years after! For I saw things then that were beyond the comprehension of my years in a terrible flash of divination. It was not that I agreed with Uncle Ed. I didn’t then, and, thank God, I do not now. But I saw, and the vision scared me. I saw into the awful emptiness of his soul, and I felt the well of pity bubbling up in my own. Because, you see, Mr. Styles, I felt that I had seen into something essential in the nature of my family, or at least of the Stillman side of it, something that Granny had all along suspected and that she fought blindly, without understanding. And this was it: Uncle Ed’s elegance, his smartness, his whole air of exquisite maintenance, was the same gallant but essentially futile effort to decorate the void of God’s or non-God’s neglect that he fancied he could detect in the tumultuous creations of Wagner. It all had to end, as it ended in Tristan, in a death that one could only pretend was a love death.
My shudder was barely perceptible, but Uncle Ed perceived it. He shook his head, apologized for his theorizing (always, in his opinion, “bad form”) and led me back to the opera house. “If Granny Stillman hears I’ve been trying to convert you to Wagner, there’ll be the devil to pay,” he said with a wink, as we took our seats. “If she asks you what was being rehearsed today, tell her it was Les Hug
uenots.”
***
Granny, of course, had not been born a Stillman, and she had none of their characteristics. She was a good deal tougher and less imaginative, and she was much more innately conservative. Where Father and Uncle Ed were by temperament aristocratic, she was bourgeois to the marrow of her bones. She had been widowed early in life and had managed her small inheritance so well that she was now able to maintain a house on Sixty-fifth Street and a shingle cottage in Southampton and to keep a butler and four maids. But always frugal, she depended on her richer sister for the luxuries of a carriage and opera box.
I look at Granny’s photograph as I write, with the pale oval face, the high-piled, elaborately waved gray hair and the large, watery, apprehensive eyes, and I think how she would stare at the liberties I am taking with her! Yet I have started this thing, and I have to make her understandable. Granny believed in the present, the present instant, the concrete thing before her eyes. Having said she was bourgeois, I will now say that she had a bit of the peasant in her. She accepted the mores of her New York as if established by divine decree. When her favorite niece lay dying, we were all surprised that she seemed wholly concerned with whether or not to call off a dinner party. But this was not from lack of feeling. It was from a deep-seated belief that doing the “right thing” was paramount to personal grief, and it gave an oddly impersonal quality to her snobbishness. She never scorned outcasts, any more than, conventionally anti-Semitic and anti-Roman, she in the least disliked or disapproved of Jews and Catholics. She simply would not pick her friends among them.
I believe that Granny loved Uncle Ed more than she had ever loved another human being (unless it was the rather shadowy figure of my long-dead grandfather), but when rumors began to circulate that he had “gone over to the Germans” and even that he had “betrayed his trust,” she found herself in an acutely painful position. She and her sister, Aunt Rosalie Belknap, were close with the peculiar closeness of their generation of siblings: they lived on the same street in Manhattan and on the same sand dune in Southampton and saw each other every day of the year. Aunt Rosalie, being older and cleverer and a great deal richer, dominated Granny, while Uncle Harry, who took care of her business interests, represented “men” in her respectful widow’s heart. If the Belknaps were against the “new music,” how could a Stillman be for it? How much less could a Stillman be for it who owed his very job to Uncle Harry?
Matters came to a head on the Sunday after that rehearsal, at Granny’s family lunch. As in other brownstones of that period, the dining room was the one handsome chamber, always on the first floor back, shrouded in kindly darkness, high-ceilinged, with perfectly polished silver gleaming in crowded density on the sideboard and with high, carved Jacobean chairs looking like antiques under the crystal chandelier. When I inherited Granny’s and put them in a good light, they showed up as bad fakes.
Aunt Rosalie, as was to be expected, led off the discussion. To tell the truth, I always found Aunt Rosalie, who dyed her hair a jet black and wore too many rings and bracelets, the least bit common, whereas Granny, even at her most worldly, was always totally a lady. Money sometimes had that effect on old New York. Granny may have owed her relative refinement to her relative poverty.
“They tell me young Damrosch is twisting you around his little finger, Ed,” Aunt Rosalie began. “They say we’re going to have nothing but darkened stages with earth goddesses moaning about time and fate.”
“Oh, I think I can promise you a Rhine maiden here and there, Aunt Rosalie,” Uncle Ed drawled in his easiest tone. “And we’ve installed some very curious machinery to make them appear to be swimming about under water. I think it might interest you to see it. Would you care to come down to the house one morning next week and let me show you?”
Uncle Ed could have his way with most women, even with Aunt Rosalie, but not when she was on the track of something. “It’ll have to wait, I’m afraid, for I’m tied up all next week. But Harry and I would like very much to know what you’re planning to tell your board when they find that all their lovely Traviatas and Aidas have been traded in for a parcel of shrieking Valkyries. Wouldn’t we, Harry?”
“Very much, my dear.”
“Ah, but I’m all ready for the board, Uncle Harry, I assure you,” Uncle Ed exclaimed, turning deferentially to the old white-whiskered gentleman. “I have ordered a new dragon for Siegfried, and you can’t even object to the expense, as I’ve raised the money myself. It is guaranteed to send shivers down the hardiest spine. Fire and smoke come out of its jaws, and its eyes goggle hideously. I predict that even you, Uncle Harry, won’t sleep through that scene!”
Uncle Harry grunted, and I giggled and Mother smiled, but there was a distinct feeling at the table that Uncle Ed was going rather far. Granny did not attempt to conceal her apprehension.
“I don’t think that’s very polite to your uncle, Edmund,” she intervened, as if he were five and not forty-five. “After all, it was he who suggested your name originally to the board. He is going to bear the responsibility for what you do. He is going to be the one to face the boxholders!”
“I know that, Ma! I couldn’t be more aware of it. But the day is also coming when Uncle Harry will be proud to have made me the manager. He will be known in musical history as the man responsible for the first all-star Wagner performances in this country!”
Uncle Harry looked so uncomfortable at this that even Aunt Rosalie saw that the conversation had better be changed, and we turned to the happier topic of who could be dropped that year from her ever-expanding Christmas party.
***
The struggle between Uncle Ed and the boxholders came to its crisis during a Monday night performance of Tristan und Isolde with the same cast that I had seen rehearsing it. I sat as usual on family parties in the front row of the Belknap box between Aunt Rosalie, who always occupied her special armchair on the left, and Granny. It was a trying seat, for I had to sit up as straight as they did. Aunt Rosalie even had a little cushion, as hard as a board, which hung down over the back rest to keep her from tilting. But what was far worse than the strain of the posture, at least to a music lover like myself, was the way, with a license as broad as their physical freedom was narrow, they exchanged comments about the opera across me in perfectly normal speaking tones.
In the second row were my parents and Miss Behn, one of those soft, chattering, semi-indigent old maids, always smiling, always looking to the “bright side” of their faintly illuminated existences, who attached themselves to the Aunt Rosalies of that era as pilot fish to sharks. And alone in a comer at the back of the box, a nodding Jupiter, Uncle Harry slept the sleep of the just fiduciary.
Why did they go to the opera? What took them, every Monday night, year in and year out? Could it have been only snobbery, as people believe today? I would be the last to deny that snobbery played its part, but it seems to me that there had to be something else, something deeper in the folkways of human communities. Monday night at the opera was like a village fair or a saint’s festival. Society was still small enough so that one knew, if not everybody, at least who everybody was, and who were their guests and why. Many young people today do not know what this pleasure is. The impersonality of the modern city has destroyed it. But in New York you can still see a strange atavistic yearning for something not unlike it in the Easter Parade. What used to be a leisurely stroll of familiar figures in new finery down Fifth Avenue after church has become a turgid human river, overflowing the sidewalks and filling the thoroughfare to the elimination of all vehicles, a dense, slowly moving mass without origin or destination, drawn from the desolate suburbs, thousands upon thousands of women in silly hats, staring and being stared at, recognizing nobody and ignorant of why they are there, zombies seeking a lost ritual of community living that they will never find. Thank God my life has been largely lived in another day.
We arrived very late that night, to my distress but hardly to my surprise. Tristan and Isolde were already d
rinking the potion, and Granny and Aunt Rosalie were sufficiently diverted by the shouts of the sailor chorus so that no real ennui had settled in before the long entr’acte. In the second act, the love duet held everyone’s attention, but trouble came, after the interruption of the lovers, with King Mark’s long aria. The ripple of conversation through the boxes swelled to a gurgling stream.
I had done my homework on Tristan since the rehearsal, and I remember thinking that it was ironical that Granny and Aunt Rosalie’s world should be most bored when Wagner was speaking most directly to them. For Mark sings of the day, which in Tristan is always compared unfavorably to the night. The day is reality: it is harsh and bright and garish. It is full of things that boxholders like to talk about: honor, loyalty, ties of blood. But the night, which to the lovers has become the only truth, is dark and lush and sleep-inducing. The night is death and love.
The chatter in the boxes reached a pitch that I had not heard before. It was actually difficult to catch some of Mark’s notes. Suddenly, appallingly, silence fell with the unexpected downward swoop of the great curtains, the music stopped, and the lights went up. A tall bearded gentleman in white tie and tail coat strode quickly across the proscenium and faced the audience across the prompter’s box. It was Uncle Ed. His high tense voice rang out in the auditorium.
The Collected Stories of Louis Auchincloss Page 23
