Body & Soul

by Frank Conroy

  Once, while Claude was doing an exercise on the Bechstein in the basement of the music store, Weisfeld had come down on some errand and stopped. "What is that?"

  "You have to hold five notes down," Claude explained, "and keep them down while you play one after the other without moving your hand." He demonstrated, playing C D E F G, C# D# E# F# G#, and then D E F# G A. "It's hard."

  "Particularly the fourth finger, hmm?" Weisfeld had gone back upstairs without further comment.

  It was quite a while before Claude was allowed to spend much time on any actual music. Professor Menti was aware that the boy was able to play more advanced pieces than he was assigned, and the boy was aware that Menti kept the music simple so that he shouldn't slip back into using his wrists and his arms. Menti said little about interpretation, and it was understood that technique was paramount. In a sense, it was as if the music were only an opportunity to test the skills developed through hundreds of hours of scales and exercises.

  Claude played easy pieces by Bach, Couperin, and Mozart. Toward the end he committed to memory Clementi's Sonata, op. z, and Mozart's Sonata in D Major, no. 8. Playing for Menti, he learned to mask any emotion in his face, to sit still, and to concentrate on clean execution. But in the basement of the music store he would play another way, closing his eyes the better to feel the wash of colors, forgetting his hands, himself, listening to the structures and interweaving lines. He played right through mistakes, eager to feel the kind of exaltation that could rise in him when he sensed the music taking over—an emotion so intense he would sometimes feel tears in his eyes.

  He was relieved when Weisfeld decided it was time for him to leave Menti. The incessant drills, the dark apartment which had seemed to grow darker with the passage of time, the bitter-almond scent of Menti in his dressing gown—all this he was glad to leave behind.

  "I think it's time for The Well-Tempered Clavier," Weisfeld had said. "For that, you'll see Herr Sturm. He lives in the neighborhood."

  Herr Sturm was a short man with a large, square head, a fierce expression Claude found unsettling (as if the man were forever threatening to break into a rage), and the habit of pacing as he talked, making violent gestures with his arms, bobbing and weaving.

  "Do you know what this is?" he asked, pressing Book One of The Well-Tempered to the boy's chest.

  "Well, I've played a, I've looked at some of the..." Claude covered the score with his hands.

  "Preludes and fugues in all keys!" Herr Sturm cried. "All keys! Can you play in all keys?"

  "I guess, well maybe I don't know, but I—"

  "Sit! Sit! Play me something. Play anything."

  Claude, aged ten at the time, had been more than a little nervous in the presence of this electric man, although Weisfeld had warned him ("He shouts, he tears his hair, he jumps up and down, but it doesn't mean anything, he can't help it"), but Claude instantly decided to play Bach's Invention VII to show off the various trills and mordants he loved to execute.

  Herr Sturm wandered around the room, grasping his hands in front of his belly, throwing them up on the beat, bending his knees, cocking his head, turning back and forth in constant motion.

  "Good, good," he said when it was over. He shuffled through a mass of music stuffed into a bookshelf and pulled out a folio. He turned the pages so violently Claude thought they would surely rip. "Maybe dry a little bit, yes? Not cold, but maybe chilly a little bit, yes?" He came to Claude's shoulder and pointed his thick, hairy finger at the music. "Here. At bar eleven and twelve, where this business starts—da-da da-da da-da da-da da-dum, dah—you didn't sound confident. You just played it to get through it."

  Even though the notes had been played correctly, Herr Sturm had somehow heard that Claude hadn't really felt the figure, and the boy was thrilled at this magic. Menti could never have done it. "It's the sixteenth note before the bar line, I think," the boy said.

  "No. It's the trill before that. Don't think about the trill. Make the sixteenth note fit the one in your left hand. Think about that. Now try it."

  Claude did.

  "Good. Practice that at home. And then here—this B pedal point down here, tied through these measures. Press it hard. I don't mean play it loud, I mean press it hard after you've played it. Make it sustain. Squeeze it. Keep your fingers on the keys and use your wrists for the phrasing. Supple wrists!" He swung his arm and gave the side of the piano a tremendous slap, a cracking, open-handed blow. "This is a piano, not a harpsichord! Dig into it! Make it sing!"

  Over the next few months Claude felt his memories of Menti fade away as he dealt with Sturm, who was sometimes scary but a great deal more fun. Walking into a lesson was sometimes like walking into a hurricane, but the boy began to realize he was being encouraged to play the way he most enjoyed it—with feeling. Scale work continued, and C. P. E. Bach and Cramer exercises, but no more than an hour a day. Sturm wanted him to spend most of his time on substantial pieces of great music.

  "Work, work on this part here," he would say, and then turn the pages, "this section here, and the development here," turning more pages, "and then all of this which sounds like mud the way you play it. By Thursday, you hear?"

  He would grab the J. S. Bach folio and hold it aloft. "Work, work! It's all in here. Everything is in here." He brought his big head down into the boy's face. "It's how I learned to play, and you must work even harder than I did."

  "How come?"

  "Well, for one reason, you're not as strong. I was strong. It helped."

  Sometimes, at the end of a lesson, Herr Sturm would come up with a surprise. "Play these five notes in the bass," he said, leaning over to play a simple figure with his thick hand, "and improvise with your right hand."

  "Improvise?"

  "Yes. This is an instrument. Play the instrument. Make something up."

  "But what's the theme?"

  "There isn't any theme."

  "But then how do I, where should the—"

  "All right, all right," Sturm said impatiently. "The notes in the bass suggest perhaps a scale. More than one scale. Pick any of the scales. The theme, if you must cling to that idea, the theme is the notes of that scale in any order."

  Claude stared down at the keyboard. "You're kidding." The idea felt exhilarating. He caught on rapidly, laughing at the surprising patterns his fingers seemed to find on their own.

  "Fifteen or twenty minutes a day," Sturm instructed. "Real players know how to improvise."

  But mostly Claude worked on The Well-Tempered Clavier. It took more than a year to get through Book One. He was two thirds of the way through Book Two when Herr Sturm went away to South America for an extensive tour.

  "Finish" was all he said at the last lesson. "You can finish by yourself."

  By this time the stiff wrists, motionless hands, and rigid forearms as dictated by Menti were completely out the window. All he retained from the Italian was finger strength, and what he had learned from Herr Sturm was how to use it to get inside Bach.

  It had taken them six months to get everything they wanted from Emma Rawlings. She had signed affidavits, submitted to long and often mysterious interviews, revealed the names of every person she had ever met (that she could remember) at political gatherings and reading clubs, repeated every scrap of conversation she had overheard in the presence of Gerhardt Eisler, and consistently denied that she had ever been a member of the Communist Party. During this period she received one hundred dollars a week, in the mail, from the Committee for American Values—no member of which to her knowledge she had ever met—and was constantly threatened, by all her interrogators, with the possibility of being forced to testify in public proceedings. As it turned out, she was never used as a witness in a court of law or in congressional hearings. The money stopped coming, the requests for her presence ceased, and the whole matter appeared to be closed. The last person she saw was Burdick, who said, "It's over. Forget about it. You were lucky."

  Claude, who was practicing five hours a day
at the time, thought of little other than music and stayed in his room when he was home. Eventually he realized she was back to her old schedule, driving the cab, drinking at night, and littering the main room with newspapers and magazines. He also realized that she had reached a level of continuous, generalized anger deeper than anything he'd seen in her before.

  "Look at this man," she said, holding a newspaper under his nose. "This creep. This corrupt, money-grubbing mackerel snapper."

  Claude saw a man on a platform, head thrown back, one hand in the air, apparently giving a speech. "Who is he?"

  "The mayor! The mayor! He gets his money from the gangsters, and the man is the mayor of New York City."

  "La Guardia?" He snatched the name from memory.

  "No, no," she said. "He was good, but he's long gone. Now we've got this piece of garbage." She threw down the paper. "La Guardia was honest, but he didn't leave anything. No party, no organization. Nothing but that Park Avenue fathead Newbold Morris. So the sharks took over again."

  Claude watched her, her big face redder than usual as she stared up at the fan-shaped window, her eyes popping slightly, her mouth set in a hard line. As if sensing something, she turned. "What?"

  "Nothing," he said.

  But in fact strange thoughts had been going through his mind. Perhaps because he had paid so little attention for quite some time, it was a shock to look at her now, not as part of the general background of life in the basement apartment, but as a large, angry woman caught up in an ongoing harangue that seemed to feed on itself. What did all those names from the newspapers have to do with her? It occurred to him that she would always find things to be angry about, so what difference did it make what she said? He felt sorry for her, and it scared him.

  At night she would sit on the floor with a large, bright pair of scissors and clip articles, scribble notes on loose-leaf paper, and slip it all into any one of half a dozen cardboard file boxes spread around her. She worked very fast, muttering to herself or sometimes speaking to an invisible companion. "See that? What did I tell you?" she would say, clipping furiously. In the morning there would be paper everywhere.

  She bought a used typewriter at a pawn shop. "Everything has to be typed or they won't read it," she said. "Handwritten, they think you're just a nut."

  "Who?"

  "Everybody," she said. "All of them."

  In a matter of weeks she had learned to type. At night, he would play the white piano in his room, and between pieces he could hear the staccato rattle of her machine through the closed door, the syncopated pings of the warning bell, the crash of the returning carriage.

  Shortly after his thirteenth birthday, Claude had begun study with Mr. Fredericks. Awakened at five-thirty in the morning by the new Big Ben alarm clock Weisfeld had given him, the boy ate breakfast in the kitchenette, walked the still-dark streets to the subway, and took the downtown express to Grand Central. There he boarded a northbound train at six forty-five, read stories from the latest issue of Astounding Tales, "A Magazine of Science Fiction," and disembarked at the small station called Frank's Landing at seven-twenty.

  Following a map drawn on the back of an envelope by Weisfeld, he walked through the village toward the Hudson River, feeling uneasy in the exotic surroundings. Hedges. Trees. Lawns. Wooden houses set back from the deserted streets. Nobody about but the milkman and a paperboy on a bicycle. In the unnatural hush he could hear the wind moving in the trees. It was like something from the movies.

  Mr. Fredericks lived in a castle, an enormous turreted, crenelated edifice of stone looming over gatehouses, garage, and a semicircular driveway. The gravel crunched under Claude's feet as he approached the main entrance. He rang the bell and stood before the great oak doors.

  After some time they opened, and an elderly black man looked out at him. "Master Rawlings?"

  Confused by the honorific, which he had never heard before, he nevertheless nodded.

  "Very good," the old man said. "Please follow me."

  White marble floor. Twin curved stairways on either side. High above, a crystal chandelier. They walked forward through a padded door into a hallway, turned right along a wider, carpeted hallway, and stopped at another leather-padded door. The old man opened it and stepped aside. "If you would wait here in the library, Mr. Fredericks will be with you shortly."

  Claude entered and the door was closed behind him. A pair of tall windows let in thick shafts of sunlight. Bookshelves rose to the ceiling on either side of a large fireplace, before which clustered a black leather couch, a wing chair, a loveseat, and a low table holding neat piles of books and music manuscripts. Claude sat on the edge of the loveseat. The library was completely silent except for the infinitesimal ticking of the large porcelain clock on the mantel. The time was five minutes to eight. Half a dozen dark portraits of different men, all posed similarly and dressed in the fashions of earlier times, covered the far walls.

  At precisely eight, when the tiny chimes from the clock began to sound, a pair of double doors at the end of the room swung open and a man entered. He was small—not a great deal taller than Claude—and slender, with a narrow head, curly hair, and a long chin. "Good morning," he said with a slight bow as Claude sprang to his feet."Thank you for your punctuality. With me, things go by the clock." He went to the wing chair, sat down, crossed his legs, and looked at the boy for several moments in silence. "Sit down, please," he said at last. "May I call you Claude?"

  "Yes. Sure."

  "Good." His small thin hands hung in the air on either side of the armrests. He wore a blue blazer, white trousers, and highly polished black slippers. A light blue ascot was folded perfectly at his neck and a white handkerchief nestled in the cuff of his left sleeve. "You have been playing mostly Bach, I understand. Any Mozart?"

  "Not very much. Hardly any. The D Major Sonata."

  "That's good. A clean slate, as it were. What exercises?"

  "Scales, arpeggios, thirds, sixths, and octaves." Claude could read very little in the man's slightly imperious face except a sense of self-possession that the boy found somehow reassuring. "C. P. E. Bach. Cramer."

  Mr. Fredericks nodded and then raised an index finger without lifting his arm from the armrest. "No more than three hours of practice a day. From now on."

  Claude liked to practice, and for a moment he considered saying so.

  "Three hours of work with total concentration," Fredericks said, "will be sufficient. More than that can drag you down."

  "Yes, sir." In the back of his mind he thought he could always play jazz if he wanted to keep on.

  "Now." Fredericks rose smoothly. "Let's go in."

  It was a long, bright room with large windows and a set of French doors along one side overlooking the Hudson River. A pair of concert grands stood side by side at the far end of the room. As Claude followed Fredericks across the thick carpeting, he felt the silence of the room pressing gently upon him. There were no background sounds of any kind—no humming machines, no hissing radiators, no creaking wood. It was as if the entire room were frozen under a spell. Fredericks sat at one piano and waved Claude to the other. There was music on Claude's, Bach's Invention VI in E Major. The stand was folded down on Fredericks's, and the lids of both instruments were propped fully open.

  "Play the first section, please. Ignore the repeat."

  Claude ran his eye over the twenty bars, which he knew well, placed his hands on the keys, took a breath, and began to play. Five or six bars in, Fredericks said, "Wait. Stop. Let me hear it not legato. See if you can play it non legato."

  Claude thought about it for a minute and began again, concentrating on the value of the notes, unconsciously pulling his shoulders in and moving his head closer to the keys. He played with extreme care, almost holding his breath. As he pressed and released the last isolated bass note, he was afraid to look up.

  "Good," said Fredericks. "You connect the notes. No one is entitled to use legato unless he can connect the notes without it. You un
derstand?"

  Claude nodded.

  "Actually, it probably doesn't matter if you understand. You seem to do it naturally, which is best of all. Do you sing?"

  "No."

  "It's good to listen to singers for that. Only the best, of course."

  Fredericks straightened his back, lifted his chin, and played the same piece. Claude had not known what to expect, and was momentarily confused when Fredericks played at perhaps half the volume the boy had done. It seemed at first too soft, and Claude wondered if this was some instructive trick, but then, very quickly, as the lines flowed, he heard the exquisite control with which Fredericks released the music into the air. It was eerie. The piano seemed to disappear and somehow the lines themselves filled the boy's consciousness, the architecture of the music lucid in every small detail, the whole statement sealed, floating, and folding into itself, and into silence. Claude ached at the beauty of it. He wanted to leave his body and go chase the music into whatever hyperspace had swallowed it. Fredericks turned his head and the boy stared into his eyes, motionless, breathless, as if staring could somehow bring the music back.

  After some time the faintest smile appeared on Fredericks's lips. "You see?" he said. "Easily, easily..."

  Claude tried to speak but could not. He felt a strange calmness far back in himself even as his brain raced with the implications of what had just occurred. He'd played those twenty bars hundreds of times, heard Menti, Sturm, and even Weisfeld play them, and yet he knew that just now he had heard and understood them completely for the first time. He felt on the brink of something, as if every atom in his body were undergoing some subtle change, some minute realignment, to prepare him for entrance into a new world. He felt alive.