Body & Soul

by Frank Conroy

  "Now," said Fredericks, "shall we work?"

  Going back to the city in the train, Claude sat by a window and stared at the sky. Telephone poles whipped by with metronomic precision, but he was barely aware of them. His head was filled with Fredericks's instructions. Play the black keys with the long fingers, consider refingering any manuscript that does not follow that principle. Maintain as straight a line as possible between elbow, wrist, finger, and key, move arms laterally along the keyboard. Keep a loose wrist and shift smoothly through hand positions, keep the legato going through one perfect hand position after another. Never turn the hand when the thumb goes under. (Menti!) Keep the hand gently arched at all times. These technical matters were clear, and Claude had already felt in his body, during the first session, what it was Fredericks was after, and the boy knew he could do it. But the matter of dynamics—of what soft was and what loud was and what everything in between was—seemed a great deal trickier. The boy realized that whatever else was going on in Fredericks's ability to make such magically pure music, dynamics was a crucial element, and Claude had no idea if his own fingers, or his ear, were up to it.

  "There are degrees of forte, certainly," Fredericks had said, and banged out a two-handed chord in the middle register so loud it made Claude's cheeks vibrate. "As I'm sure the admirable Herr Sturm has demonstrated to you." He whipped the handkerchief from his cuff, coughed discreetly, and replaced it. "But consider this: the louder it gets, the less important are the degrees of separation. How useful is the difference between a triple forte and a quadruple forte, after all? Not much. And then, you can only hit the thing so hard before the strings start breaking. No, it's the other end that particularly deserves our attention. The quieter you play, the more important are the degrees of separation. The human ear can discern the differences between triple pianissimo and quadruple pianissimo quite easily. N'est-ce pas?"

  "What?"

  "Oh, forgive me. Miss Rockefeller used to be my eight o'clock, and we sometimes spoke French. The point is, you look at the manuscript and you see various degrees of pianissimo, but they are only the crudest sort of guide. For us"—and here he had raised a finger in the air again—"there are ten thousand degrees of pianissimo."

  Sitting on the train, Claude worried about that. Had Fredericks been exaggerating to make a point, or had he meant it? If he was serious, Claude was going to have to learn to play the piano all over again.

  The main room of the basement apartment began to fill up with files and bundles of newspapers. She would stack the newspapers—a month of the Daily News, the Wall Street Journal, the Post, the Herald Tribune, the New York Times, the Brooklyn Eagle, and half a dozen more she bought daily—tie them with string, and pile them against the walls. When wall space ran out she set the bales elsewhere, and eventually the room could be negotiated only through a pattern of interlocking paths. She worked at the couch, with the typewriter on the table, surrounded by file folders, papers, stamps, envelopes, letters, news clips, and various reports and official-looking documents. She no longer went straight to work in the morning, but waited for the mail delivery, sorting through everything before she left.

  Mystified, Claude would examine the white and manila envelopes that arrived from the Office of the Mayor, the Board of Estimate, the Deputy Commissioner of Trade, the Municipal Workers' Union, the Board of Education, the Office of the City Attorney, the Assessor's Office, and on and on. Letters from committees, various organizations, city councilmen, and others. He understood that these were responses to communications of her own, but what could she possibly want from the Parks Department?

  Dear Emma Rawlings,

  In response to your letter of the fourteenth instant, all questions regarding the collection of trash in Central Park should be directed to the appropriate office of the Dept. of Sanitation.

  The budget information for the Bronx Zoo may be found in the Annual Fiscal Report of the City of New York.

  Sincerely yours,

  Sheila Mahoney

  Public Information

  Parks Department

  And why, when she had received this letter, had she crumpled it up and thrown it angrily into the kitchenette (from where he had later retrieved it)? "Bullshit! Bullshit!" she had cried. He didn't know what to make of it.

  One morning in the castle, after a year of lessons, Claude played the Mozart B Minor Adagio he'd been working on for two weeks. Fredericks nodded. "Coming along, coming along." Then Fredericks played it himself, and the boy shook his head.

  "What?" Fredericks said in mock alarm. "No good?"

  "It's beautiful. I just wish my fingers could, I mean, when I try to control them to that extent I can feel it just so far and then I can't feel any further. Touch. I'm talking about touch. At a certain point I hit a wall."

  "Good."

  "What do you mean? It's awful. It feels awful. I can't do anything about it."

  Fredericks rose from the piano. "Let's go into the library." He surprised the boy by gently taking his arm. "It's good," he said as they moved across the great bright room, "because very few players ever get to the point where they realize the wall is there."

  The sudden physical intimacy made the boy blush. Fredericks was a fastidious man, and the gesture was so out of character it seemed to suggest that Claude had risen to some new and higher status. "Then there is a wall."

  "Of course," said Fredericks. "For all of us."

  In the library Claude stood by the French windows while Fredericks went to his desk. The boy glanced at the bright river and then saw some movement outside on the balcony below. A short, slender young woman with black hair, wearing a red bathrobe, walked to the railing and paused there. She raised her hand to her mouth and took a puff of a small, thin cigar. The blue smoke drifted over the stone railing.

  "Come here," Fredericks said. "Stand here." He held something in his hand.

  The boy walked over and faced him. He received a glass ball about the size of a peach pit attached to a string.

  "Hold it like this." Fredericks also had a glass ball. He held the string between thumb and forefinger, the ball hanging motionless below. The boy did likewise. "You will find there is an attraction between these pieces of glass," Fredericks said. "Like magnetism, even though they are glass."

  Fredericks reached out and pushed Claude's glass ball in such a way that it swung in a circle. "Do not move your hand or your fingers. Remain absolutely still and let the ball swing. All by itself."

  Claude obeyed, watching the glass ball go around.

  Then, very gently, Fredericks swung his own ball so that its circle came within two or three inches of the path of Claude's.

  "Now keep still and watch."

  When, after a moment, the orbits of the two pieces of glass brought them near each other, Claude both saw and felt his ball move slightly out of its orbit toward the other one. It was quite distinct. A little jump.

  "You see?" Fredericks said. "You held perfectly still?"

  "Yes." Claude was amazed. "Magic. Is it magic?"

  Fredericks took the glass balls and put them back in his desk. "Some people would have you believe so, but it isn't. It only feels like magic."

  "Well, what is it, then? What made it do that?"

  "You did."

  "No, I didn't move. Not one bit. Anyway, I could feel it. I could feel a little tug when it jumped."

  "You believed the pieces of glass were attracted to each other."

  "Well, you said they, I mean, I didn't actually know whether—"

  "Listen to me, Claude," Fredericks said. "This is important. It's because you believed."

  "But that's like magic. You said—"

  "I said you did it. You did it without knowing it. Tiny micro-movements in the pad of your thumb and the pad of your forefinger. Infinitesimally small movements below your level of physical awareness, magnified because of the length of the string, making the ball jump."

  Claude looked away and stared into the middle distan
ce for several moments. "Are you sure?" he asked finally.

  "I'm absolutely sure. I'm positive." Fredericks moved back and sat on the edge of his desk.

  Claude turned up his hand and looked at his fingers. He touched his thumb and forefinger together.

  "You understand the implications?" Frederick asked.

  "I'm not sure." Claude continued to move his fingers. "It seems so strange."

  "It's the other side of the wall."

  The boy looked up.

  "I've just shown you that your fingers can do more than what you physically feel them doing." He made a little arc in the air with his hand. "The other side of the wall."

  Claude thought about it. "Yes, but how? How do you do it?"

  Fredericks got up from the desk and stood directly in front of the boy. "You must imagine the music in your head. Imagine it shaped and balanced the way you want it. Get it in your head and then believe in it. Concentrate, believe, and your fingers will do it."

  "My God," Claude whispered.

  "Anything you can imagine clearly, you can play. That's the great secret."

  "So it goes beyond the body," Claude said.

  "Exactly."

  "How's the Wiener schnitzel?" Weisfeld asked.

  "Good." Claude cut a piece, squeezed a little lemon juice on it, and popped it into his mouth. "Almost as good as Helga's."

  Weisfeld put down his stein of beer. They sat in a booth in the Rathskeller, under a large fake boar's head on the wall. "I had a postcard from them. They've opened a donut shop in a little town called Boca Raton. They swim in the ocean every morning."

  "Aren't they old for that?"

  Weisfeld shrugged and ordered another beer. "Not so old, really. And it is warm down there."

  "Boy, the food was good. After, she'd always ask me what I thought. Was the crust flaky enough."

  "Yes. I had some wonderful dinners there."

  "Mr. Fredericks says he knew the maestro."

  "Of course he did."

  "He says I'm lucky about the trust money because he's a very expensive teacher."

  Weisfeld received a fresh stein. "He is the most expensive." He touched his mustache with a napkin. "Mr. Larkin was somewhat taken aback when I told him. But Fredericks is the best, I told him. The best in the country."

  "I wonder what would have happened if I hadn't had him," Claude said. "I mean, by now I can't even imagine what would've, how I could've..."

  "He saved you a lot of time," Weisfeld said. "And when he has a student with as much music in him as you have, he respects it. That only happens a few times, you know. Only rarely."

  Finished, Claude put the knife and the fork, tines downward, on his plate. "I can't play like him."

  "You're not supposed to. That's the last thing he wants."

  "I know. He can tell when I ... He stops me."

  "Very good." Weisfeld nodded.

  "He says we're almost finished."

  Weisfeld drank some beer. He was slightly flushed. "And how do you feel about that?"

  "It's okay." In fact, Claude was uneasy at the prospect. For over two years—interrupted only when Fredericks had traveled or appeared in concert, which was seldom—the weekly ritual, and the attendant preparation for it, had been the basic principle of order in Claude's life. The regularity of lessons with Fredericks, and work and practice at the music store, had been his lifeline. "It's okay."

  "You can go back for a visit anytime if you want him to hear something. If you want an opinion, or whatever."

  Claude nodded.

  Weisfeld leaned forward. "But now you should start thinking about school. About regular school. This can't go on. You have to go to a good high school."

  Claude's instantaneous reaction was fear. In his mind the huge, shadowy municipal institutions he had heard about seemed like engines of impersonal malevolence, dark prisons where his every weakness would call down great forces that would grind him to nothingness. He would get beaten up. To the teachers he would be no more than a number. He would be alone, and he would lose himself.

  "Why? Why do I have to?" He heard the fear in his own voice, and that made it worse. He attempted to cover it by drinking some water.

  "Lots of reasons," Weisfeld said. "Mr. Larkin is concerned, for one thing."

  "He doesn't even know me."

  "He knows more than you think. He's a good man, a very remarkable man, and he has your best interest in his mind. Believe me."

  Claude stared down at his empty plate.

  "You need to be with other children, you need to..."

  Without meaning to, Claude clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth—a sound of impatience, of dismissal.

  Weisfeld jerked his head back in surprise. For several moments—moments that were extremely uncomfortable for the boy, who had not wanted to reveal so much—he said nothing. "I take it you disagree?" he said finally.

  "I'm sorry."

  "No, no. I understand. The whole thing scares you for some reason. That's part of it."

  "I mean other kids...," Claude started. "They just seem like kids, they just, they just—I don't know."

  Weisfeld waited, as if to let the implication of the boy's inability to fully express his thought sink in. Then he sighed. "Claude, you're not the first young player to be in this position." He had the boy's attention now. "This is an old story, and a lot of people have thought about it. We've talked about this before. You want a good, balanced education. You want to go to college and find out as much about everything as you possibly can—the arts, philosophy, science, good and evil, all of it. The history of human thought, Claude. It will make you strong." He tossed down a kirschwasser, his eyes glistening. "And you're going to need it."

  "What?" This was a new Weisfeld. The implicit threat was a brand-new way of talking. "What do you mean?"

  "We all need strength." He nodded, as if agreeing with himself. " Life is full of surprises."

  Claude sensed this was a retreat, so he pushed. "I think I'm strong enough," he lied. "I'm not afraid of surprises."

  "You should be," Weisfeld said. And then abruptly he shifted in his seat and looked out over the room. "It is surprising to me—I mean, if I take the long view—it is very surprising to me that I'm sitting here getting drunk in a German restaurant." He gave a short bark of laughter. "Drinking German beer."

  "You're not drunk. I've seen my mother."

  "Yes, you're right. Not quite." He pushed the various glasses on the table away. "Time to stop."

  7

  "YOU MUST WEAR a jacket and a tie," Weisfeld had said. "Be polite, but volunteer nothing. They're hiring you to play the piano parts, just the way they hire people to drive their cars or serve the caviar."

  "What's caviar?"

  "Fish eggs. Roe. Considered a great delicacy. You won't be getting any."

  "That's okay with me."

  And so, at the age of fifteen, height five foot five inches, weight one hundred and sixteen pounds, dressed in a wool jacket, gray trousers, white shirt, and a blue tie from Bloomingdale's basement, Claude Rawlings stood at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Eighty-eighth Street at four o'clock in the afternoon and regarded the Fisk mansion.

  Surrounded by tall apartment buildings, it was an architectural anomaly—a three-story building of gray stone set back from the street, with a slate roof, mullioned windows, and Doric columns framing the entranceway. There was a short curved driveway, arcing from the avenue to Eighty-eighth Street. He walked across its cobbled surface, past an empty black limousine whose license plate caught his eye. Number 57, with various official-looking badges and emblems of thick metal attached to its upper rim. Weisfeld had explained that Dewman Fisk was high up in city government, and that among his posts was that of deputy mayor. Claude climbed two steps to the door and rang the bell.

  A uniformed maid opened the door. "Yes?" She was quite young. Puerto Rican, maybe, the boy thought.

  "I'm supposed to be here at four."

  "Yes, y
es. Come in." She turned away.

  She had a white bow tied at the small of her back, and the two ribbons that hung from it moved with her narrow hips as she walked through the foyer into a large, high-ceilinged room in which clusters of delicate-looking antique furniture stood in different areas around low, highly polished tables. There were flowers everywhere—vases of them, small and large, different shades of color for each bunch. Red, pink, salmon, white, and then, at one end of the room, near the fireplace, a profusion of various blues held in crystal and porcelain. Flowers of different shapes, bursting, drooping, fountaining up out of green ferns. "I change them every other morning," the maid said. "It takes two hours."

  She walked to the end of the room opposite the fireplace and climbed three wooden steps onto a shallow curved platform. She went behind curtains that covered the entire wall. After a moment the curtains began to part, and he realized he was looking at a stage, complete, as he took the steps to the apron, with footlights. When the curtains were fully opened he saw a grand piano and some chairs and music stands at stage left. The maid emerged from the wings and indicated the piano bench. "Wait here. They'll come."

  He sat in the shadows and watched her descend, weave her way through the flower-drenched room, and disappear through one of its many doors. From behind the piano he could see partway into another large room, opening off the first. Bookshelves. A long table covered with magazines. Two black leather chairs. Standing brass lamps with green shades made of glass. He could hear voices, although he saw no one.

  He glanced through the music on the piano. A mélange of excerpts, transcriptions, reductions, and selections, mainly Mozart but also some Mendelssohn and Schubert. He could not find a full piece of music anywhere. He took care to leave everything in the order he had found it. Bending his head, tilting his right ear to the keyboard, he tried a quiet chord. The action was so stiff he barely got a sound. With the damper pedal down he played a few soft scales, put his hands in his lap, and waited.