by Paul Russell
Doug did not look at all convinced. He took a long sip of his coffee, then said grimly, “The health of our students is at issue. That rises above personal foibles, I would think, sir. And besides”—he played his trump card—“didn’t Middle Forge just recently pass an ordinance making it against the law to smoke in a public building?”
“Perhaps,” Louis said.
“No, sir,” Brill reminded him. “It did. Period. End of story.”
Louis sighed. He hated certain kinds of logic. “You’re right,” he said. “You’re absolutely right.”
He reminded himself that this was a man for whom winning was everything. Against great odds, Doug had taken the soccer team to the finals three times in the last four years, and since soccer had been one of Jack Emmerich’s great loves and Louis was committed to continuing the school’s excellence on that particular playing field, he’d made himself close to indispensable. Out for his own brisk constitutional, Louis saw him run past every morning—ten miles a day, Doug boasted. Perhaps he’d been the clumsy, overweight kid in school, the butt of jokes and playground bullying, and in response had made himself through sheer will into the capable athlete that he was. And was that not wholly admirable? Nevertheless, there was something self-satisfied in his fitness that made Louis uneasy. Perhaps the two of them were not as different as he might like to believe. There was, objectively, no reason in the world to dislike Doug Brill. He stood for all the right things. Even his militant stand on smoking was clearly, painfully, in the right, and Louis felt a sudden twinge of anger that Eleanor’s habit had, in a sense, held his office hostage. But of course that was his great weakness: loyalty to his friends had always come first, a loyalty that, truth be told, sometimes blinded him to larger issues. He was well aware of that. It had happened before.
“Doug,” he pleaded. “Please be reasonable with me here. We both know Eleanor. We know she’s set in her ways. I haven’t told anyone else, but this is almost certainly her last year with us. Chances are she’ll be retiring in June.”
He knew very well it probably wasn’t true, but he also knew it might placate Doug, who, having been wounded more than once by Eleanor’s tart tongue, would in all probability prefer the prospect of her leaving for good in six months to her indefinite reprieve as a reformed smoker.
“You’ll see to it that all this goes no further, okay?” he said sternly. He knew that people like Doug responded well to authority. “You’ll talk to your students, calm them down. Their concerns are legitimate, obviously. But it’s a complex world out there. I have many more important things on my mind than smoking. I am counting on you to defuse this for me. Do you understand? I have great faith in you.”
Doug sighed. For a moment it seemed he might be weighing the consequences of further dispute. Louis hated being heavy-handed like this.
“I’ll speak to the issue at Assembly next Wednesday,” he continued. “We’ll work things out. You just keep the simmer from becoming a boil, okay? I’ll appreciate that greatly.”
He would fashion a general statement about the school’s smoking policy. He would urge everyone to care for their health. Come September Eleanor would still be around, smoking like a steam engine, and the tiresomely unimpeachable Doug would be back to visit him, sitting in this very chair, angry and bitter—and rightfully so—at having been betrayed. Nothing would have been solved, only made worse. He could already see it, and yet he did not have the will, at the moment, to offer Doug anything more than he already had. This was how one made implacable enemies. He was simply not cut out for the steady work of fortitude, which had come so effortlessly to Jack Emmerich in crises great and small. How strange that he had spent most of his life doing something for which he was really not very well suited.
On those evenings when Claire taught her Introduction to Writing by Women, she would often relocate, after class was over, to the diner across the street from campus, where she would continue the conversation for another hour or so with some of her more committed students: harried working mothers, overweight and resentful secretaries, joyless lesbians. Louis thought he could imagine those sessions all too clearly, Claire drinking cups of decaffeinated coffee while the others indulged in slices of those poisonous pies that turned endlessly in the brightly lit display carousel. Likewise the endless rehearsal of the grievances of the misfortunate, which seemed to constitute so much of what passed these days for intellectual life at the college level, and which Claire seemed to find unaccountably exhilarating, even, in her words, “empowering.” The kin, perhaps, of Tracy’s “enabling.” Not that he begrudged for an instant Claire’s getting out into the world, her belated discovery of her considerable talents as a teacher and scholar.
What he did begrudge, just a little, was being left to knock about the empty house two evenings a week. Prey to all sorts of stupid anxieties and doubts, he forsook his usual books and music. He sipped more scotch than agreed with his stomach. Turning on the television, he sat in a stupor before its empty visions. The mullahs of Iran, he’d read with a great deal of sympathy, had outlawed satellite dishes in an attempt to withstand the inane tide of what passed for popular culture in the West.
It was with those dreary alternatives in mind that he had first broached his proposal to Tracy. The young man had been so kind, after that first evening at their house, as to signal his pleasure in having made the acquaintance of Daphne, that tale of a woman confused by desire, torn tragically between the terrible love of a mortal and the terrifying love of a god.
“I think I never really got into classical music because I never had anybody to explain it to me” was what he’d said—Louis remembered the sentence exactly—and since there was nothing Louis liked better than, as Tracy put it, explaining classical music, he’d decided to set about redressing that unfortunate omission in his junior colleague’s education. It was hardly the first time he’d taken on himself the role of musical guide. As an adolescent, on long summer evenings when other boys played stickball in the streets or chased after girls, he would call his parents into the living room after dinner and make them sit quietly, together on the sofa, while he positioned a stack of heavy seventy-eights on the Victrola. For two heavenly minutes the scratchy force of a Beethoven symphony filled the room’s dim air. “There’s the main theme in the violins,” he’d point out, resisting the undignified urge, occasionally yielded to in private, to actually conduct the music with expressive hands, wildly flailing arms. “And now the horns come in, and the cellos, and in a second it’s going to shift into minor.”
“Yes,” his father told him patiently. “I think we can hear all that.”
But did they hear it the glorious way he heard it? That was his fear: that without his intervention, these moments of great beauty might slip away unremarked by the world at large.
All too soon the music ended in a hissing of empty grooves.
“I think that’s enough for now,” his father would say, even as the next disk made ready to drop onto the turntable.
“There’s more,” Louis would say hopefully. “That’s just the beginning of the first movement.” He dreamed of one day ushering his parents—who, in the right mood, could enjoy music a great deal, especially the chamber concerts sponsored by the Germania Association before the war, unfortunately, canceled such opportunities—through the intricacies of an entire symphony. Then they would understand not only the music’s tumult and loveliness, but the tumult and loveliness that lay unexpressed in his own young soul.
If the memory made him wince these fifty years later, especially as he had proved so deaf, at the time, to the unruly noise of his parents’ marriage splintering all around him, he nonetheless recognized that the impulse that had first stirred in those evenings of erstwhile musical appreciation had never left him. His educational aims might remain more or less intact, but his methods, fortunately, had long ago ceased to be quite so crude.
This particular evening he had decided, after consideration that had filled the grea
ter part of the afternoon, on some songs by Schubert, a few selections from Die Winterreise. His intent was to play Tracy several different recordings of each song, so that he might begin to hear the interpretative gestures a singer can bring to a piece of music. Pulling the first record from its sleeve—the venerable Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, accompanied by Alfred Brendel—he positioned it carefully on the turntable. He had resisted investing in a CD player as long as possible, predicting, wrongly enough, that that technology would turn out to be a short-lived fad.
Tracy was late—already it was nearly fifteen minutes past the hour. Pacing restlessly around the den, Louis rearranged the pillows on the sofa, checked the audio equipment, double-checked to make sure the porch light was on, all the while feeling a sickening sense of panic and regret. He’d run into Tracy in the corridor after classes had finished and offhandedly reminded him, “See you at eight, right?” just to make sure. Tracy had smiled at him forbearingly, in a way that hinted, were one inclined toward anxiety, No need to remind me; I’m perfectly capable of keeping my appointments. Louis had rebuked himself for that parentlike slip—though now it perhaps turned out that such a reminder had, in fact, been in order.
Waiting, he thought, was the most miserable condition a man could find himself in. His whole life, he had been waiting for one thing or another.
For a second time the doorbell rang, though, as if by listening for something too intently one could miss it altogether, he had not registered the first ring until he had heard the second.
“I’m really sorry I’m late,” Tracy apologized. His face glowed healthily from the brisk evening air, and when he smiled, it seemed to Louis that all the unbounded, virile optimism of youth itself was present. In an instant, those fifteen minutes of worry were forgiven. “I was on the phone, and I completely lost track of time.”
But hard on the heels of that relief came an odd emptiness. Who had he been talking to? Louis realized, with a sense of longing, that he really knew nothing at all about Tracy’s life outside the routines of school and the occasional musical evening. Presumably he had friends—down in New York, no doubt. He had mentioned, once, having gone away for the weekend. Might there not even be a love interest somewhere in the background, a young woman, perhaps, a lively young professional in publishing, say, in magazines, an alum of William and Mary like Tracy himself, a girl he’d known practically forever? Louis tried to picture their life together, but failed utterly. This figure who stood before him seemed bravely independent, unattached, mercifully unsullied. Parsifal, he had once thought, and he smiled to himself at the memory of that early impression.
Over a subdued flannel shirt Tracy wore a handsome sports jacket. During the past month and a half, Louis had noted with approval the young man’s adoption, even on occasions like this evening when it wasn’t strictly necessary, of what could be considered adult attire. That he still looked a bit as if he were playing dress-up only added to the charm.
“Well,” Louis told him, “I hope you’re ready for a bit of music. Would you care for a cocktail?” He always asked, and his guest, disappointingly, always demurred.
“I’ll just have a glass of water,” Tracy said.
“As you wish,” Louis told him, while pouring himself a real drink. He could make a very small scotch last quite a long time when there was serious music to be listened to.
Once the lights were dimmed, they were ready to begin their journey. How much should he say by way of introduction? Reluctant to overburden Tracy with useless information, at the same time he knew how important it was to set the scene. Self-consciously he cleared his throat, then began his bit of narration.
“When he wrote Die Winterreise, Franz Schubert was in the final year of his brief life. He is said to have told his friends, ‘I have composed a cycle of dreadful songs for you.’ Schauerlich. Do you know that word? ‘Dreadful’ in the sense of exciting dread. I think you’ll hear that quality quite clearly. In this first song, listen to the music’s deliberate pacing, like footsteps. Listen to the way the voice darkens.” Handing Tracy a German/English lyric booklet, he lowered the needle into the groove and sat back. A woeful descending figure in the piano, the wanderer’s sorrowful tread. Then Fischer-Dieskau’s sonorous, lovesick baritone.
A look of serious concentration settled onto Tracy’s features; a bit of a frown perturbed his forehead, behind which an alert and agile brain would be processing the raw data of sounds into music. But what music did Tracy hear? Certainly it was not the same as what he, Louis, experienced, who had heard this song many times and under many circumstances. How he longed to convey the depth and darkness these notes had acquired over the years. But perhaps, already, a similar process had begun in Tracy. In the future, whenever he heard this music, he would perhaps think back to this first occasion on which he had encountered it. And what, exactly, would he think? Die Liebe liebt das Wandern, the singer lamented. Gott hat sie so gemacht. Yes, it was true. Love did love to wander; that was how God, in his cruel and infinitely jesting way, had made it. And as for Tracy, what loves had he known in his brief life?
Louis thought he could hear from Tracy an audible murmur. Likewise, he found himself rather more moved than he had perhaps intended, and decided, rather than risk disrupting the mood with some remarks on Fischer-Dieskau’s splendid vocal technique, to let the winter’s journey continue.
Through four more songs, then, they sat in silent communion—until Tracy, in the pause, stretching mightily, said with an embarrassed smile, “I hate to do this, but can we take a break? I need to go pee.”
Instantly their fragile pact was shattered. Tracy often interrupted their musical evenings like this; bladder control was not the young man’s forte. Through the bathroom door, Louis could hear the sound of his vigorous stream, so unlike his own fitful efforts. Then, without warning, an incongruous memory seized him, an image he thought he’d successfully laid to rest long ago: his mother, her eyes dark and wide, her hair disheveled, repeating over and over in a flat, measured voice, “I see clearly now, I see everything clearly now,” words that had excited in him, an adolescent of fourteen, such dread, words clairvoyant and absurd, for what had she seen so clearly that it had blinded her mind like an explosion of light?
“Now that’s better,” Tracy said cheerily, returning to his seat with a small dark spot, Louis couldn’t help but notice, just visible on the front of his khaki trousers. But if Tracy felt better, Louis suddenly felt far, far worse. It was as if his mother stood, incorporeal but icily intact, there in that room so many years after her trouble, like a raging torrent, had carried her helplessly away from them all. So, she seemed to say. You too. Your father’s son.
“These songs are really kind of amazing,” Tracy enthused. “I’ve never heard anything quite like them.”
“Yes, they are quite remarkable,” Louis agreed, wondering if the truly remarkable thing wasn’t Tracy’s ability to banish ghosts, mothers, the dread doubt that always hovered close. “But I think,” he went on, “we should listen again to ‘Der Lindenbaum.’” Though not, as he’d originally intended, in another performance. Fischer-Dieskau did a particularly fine job with that gem. When its final, innocent-sounding but not-so-innocent notes had ended, Louis lifted the needle and set it aside. Tracy looked up from the translation booklet he’d been following along in.
“I’m curious,” Louis said. “Tell me, what do you hear? Talk to me about this song.”
Taken off guard, Tracy looked a little alarmed.
“It’s not a test,” Louis hastily reassured his guest.
That made Tracy smile. “Well,” he said slowly, prolonging the word in his scramble to formulate something, “speaking as a proselyte”—and again he smiled—“I’d have to say that there’s something going on here. I mean, under the surface. Things aren’t what they seem to be. This linden tree that’s offering him rest—there’s something that scares him about that.”
“Yes,” Louis said, pleased with the direction of Tracy
’s groping sentences. “And do you hear how the music works with the words to accomplish that? How the shift into minor in the middle of the song leaves its traces even after we return to major at the end of the song? There’s a sinister tenderness to that word Ruhe. It’s not just rest and repose it offers—”
“No,” Tracy said simply. “It’s death.”
Earlier, in a moment of doubt, Louis had seen himself as he might appear to the young man: fussy, pompous, an aged pedant harping on obscure and even alarming obsessions. But now he told himself he needn’t have worried. Without having to be prompted, Tracy had understood. Was there anything more reassuring? That, after all, had been what drew him as a young man to Claire: her ability to intuit those moments he feared might be lost on others. That had been Jack Emmerich’s gift as well—it had been his genius. This small circle of the elect. Anchorites, guardian monks charged with preserving intact their precious hoard down through the long twilight. Wasn’t it Jack’s much-beloved poet who had said, “Marvels this day cannot grasp / Are rife with the fate of tomorrow?”
The room was quiet all around them. From the kitchen, Lux on his mattress heaved a loud, profound sigh, almost a groan. It might have been comic, but neither of them took it that way.
“When I was in Japan,” Tracy said, “I learned this word—hakkanai. It’s the cherry-blossom thing—beauty that only lasts for one brief moment. And the sadness that comes from that, but it’s a thrilling sadness. I don’t really know what I’m saying.”
And neither did Louis, exactly, but he felt very much the spirit of what Tracy was trying to say. The moment itself was everything. It had its own formidable eloquence. Lux sighed again from the kitchen, and this time the effect registered on Tracy as comic after all.
