by Frank Conroy
"These two are the sanitation department."
She repeated the gesture, dropping them into a different carton.
"What's going on?" Claude asked.
"This stuff is all mixed up," Al said. "We're getting it organized."
"For the archives," his mother said with satisfaction in her voice.
"The what?"
"The archives," she repeated. "It was Al's idea."
"Sure," Al said. "Lot of important stuff in here. Got to save it for the future." He looked up at Claude. "You know. History."
All at once Claude understood. He knew perfectly well from previous conversations that Al considered the hoarding of all this printed material to be an expression of Emma's disturbed state of mind. "Got to wean her away from it," he had said, "like a junkie off horse." Claude was moved by the man's seemingly inexhaustible patience, going through thousands of pages of trash as if it were important material. Al watched Claude carefully. It was a delicate moment, an invitation to live out the necessary lie, to treat Emma, temporarily at least, like a child, and a sick child at that. Al's face betrayed nothing but an extreme alertness. Claude gave the faintest nod.
"Moving it over to my building," Al said, busy again. "Got a safe place there."
"My archives." Emma gave a little laugh. "On Park Avenue."
"I take 'em two or three at a time in the cab. Everything numbered. Emma puts it down in the book."
"Can I help?"
"No, no," Emma said quickly. "We've got a system."
Satterthwaite's office was a small cubicle off the music room. The man himself, now that Claude had a good look at him, had an odd appearance, seeming, with his blue-white skin drawn taut and shiny over his face—so taut Claude imagined someone behind the man, with his knee in Satterthwaite's spine, pulling the skin at the back of his head—his slightly bulbous eyes, his lips blue, like some large fish.
"It says before I can apply for your composition class I have to take harmony," Claude said.
"Yes." The faintest trace of a lisp.
"I've had a lot of harmony already. And theory."
"From whom?"
"Mr. Weisfeld. You know Weisfeld's Music Store on Third Avenue? He started teaching me years ago."
"And the internationally renowned Mr. Fredericks? A bit there too?"
The delivery was so flat and emotionless Claude could not tell if irony was intended. Had he thought it was, he would have gotten up and left the room. After a moment he said, "Well, it came up all the time. He assumed I knew harmony, and mostly we worked on interpretation."
"Do you?"
"Do I what?"
"Do you know harmony?"
"Well, yes, I guess I do. I mean, I'm sure I don't know everything but..."
"Do you have an hour? Right now?" Satterthwaite got up and went to a filing cabinet.
"I guess so. Sure."
As Satterthwaite pulled out a drawer with his short arms, even his body seemed fish-like. His feet, in black shoes, heels touching, toes pointing out at a wide angle, were like fins. With the curve up to his wide waist, closing then to his narrow shoulders, and the head very close to the body, he looked like a dolphin standing on its tail. He extracted some papers from a file and handed them to Claude. "This is the final examination from last year's harmony class. You may do it in the next room." He glanced at his wristwatch. "Return in one hour."
"Okay. That seems fair." Claude took the exam papers.
"Fair?" Satterthwaite said, turning, his hands folded at the small of his back, to look out the window. "Fairness has nothing to do with it, Mr. Rawlings. It is a matter of requirements:"
Claude went into the other room, took a desk near the piano, and went to work. The first set of questions instructed him to identify a long list of musical terms relating to scales, modes, and their harmonic properties. He flew through these. Next, a series of chords to be identified in the context of various key signatures, including second and third inversions. Then he was asked to analyze some modulation series from Mozart, Bach, and Haydn. Only one chord, in the Mozart, was somewhat ambiguous due to the lack of a root, but because the previous chord was clearly a C, he called it a G, with a ninth.
The last question made him smile: "Western music uses twelve tones. There are twelve tones on the piano—not eleven, not thirteen or fourteen. Why? Why twelve?" He remembered the precise moment in the basement of the music store so many years ago when Weisfeld had explained it to him. Now, glancing up at the clock on the wall, he realized he'd used up only fifteen minutes, so he decided to try to impress Satterthwaite.
The overtone series (he wrote), also called the harmonic series, is determined by nature. The piano string at low C vibrates at 64 per second, but also segments of that string vibrate separately at the same time, the pitch going up according to the length of the segment—two halves, three thirds, four quarters, until they get too small to matter. One-half length of the low C vibrates at 128 per second, or an octave higher. That is the first overtone. One third the length of the low C creates a G above the second C. That is the second overtone, and the interval is a fifth. Now the overtones keep going up, but the one that really matters is the G, because it is the loudest, and the closest to the tonic C. So nature says if you take any note as the tonic, its closest relative will be a fifth above, the root of the dominant.
If you go in a straight line from tonic to dominant, and then make the dominant a new tonic going to its dominant, and keep on going on a tempered piano (he very much enjoyed remembering to put in this last bit, and even underlined it), you get C, G, D, A, E, B, F#, C#, G#, D#, A#, F, and C again. That makes twelve tones before you come back to C, and that's why there are twelve instead of some other number.
He took the pages in to Satterthwaite, having used only half the allotted time, and placed them on the desk. Satterthwaite looked up from his book. "Finished? Check your box tomorrow."
"Yes, sir."
"You've done Fuchs, I suppose? Sometime in the distant past?"
"Yes, sir."
"Fine." He went back to his book.
They often walked up to the luncheonette on First Avenue for cartons of coffee and donuts, which they would take down to a bench overlooking the East River. Ivan talked incessantly, so intent on his ideas Claude sometimes had to guide him past fire hydrants and ashcans like a blind man.
"So of course it had been building for some time," Ivan said, "but then fifty years ago everything changed. Just like that!" He snapped his fingers. "And fifty years is nothing, historically speaking. The blink of an eye. Most people still don't know it happened."
"They know about the atom bomb," Claude said.
"They know it worked. They're vaguely aware that there's some sort of connection between mass and energy. But it's just a bomb. I'm talking about the big picture. Of course, once you get into this stuff you have to read in about a dozen different directions—physics, cosmology, history of science, philosophy, things like optics. It's fascinating, but I still sometimes feel as if I'm jumping all over the place. Just the other day I found out that in terms of size, man is apparently in the exact center of the observable universe."
"What do you mean? Watch it! Don't step in that."
"The largest thing we know about is the red-giant star. The smallest is the electron. We're in the middle—we're just as much larger than the electron as the red giant is larger than us."
"Hey, Copernicus would've liked that."
"Yes, he would. On the other hand, I don't particularly like it. It seems such a coincidence."
Claude pushed open the door to the luncheonette. "So it's a coincidence. Didn't you say it's a coincidence that the moon is exactly the right size to cover the sun in an eclipse?"
They sat on stools and ordered coffee and donuts to go. A skinny old man filled the cartons right in front of them.
"Yes, well, that's an oddity, but there's no place to go with it. This other matter"—he made a quick humming noise, which he sometime
s did when chasing down a thought—"Look, you go down and down and there's the atom, protons, electrons, and it doesn't matter if they're little balls or wave phenomena or whatever. Heisenberg comes in and you can't look at anything smaller because the beam of your fancy flashlight is going to knock the little thing away or change it or something. So you're stopped at that end."
The skinny old man had the order ready, but he stood motionless, watching Ivan.
"At the other end you've got the red giant. But where are we looking from? From Earth, right? Looking out at the visible universe, everything speeding away from us, the farther away the faster the speed. Doesn't the question of scale enter here, possibly? Suppose we could somehow get so big we got out of the universe—forget about the curvature of space for a moment—you know, if we got out we could look back, or down or something, who knows what we might see? But we're topped at that end too."
The old man put the coffee containers, each with a napkin and a donut on top, on the counter.
"Maybe," Ivan said, reaching out, "everything is in the middle, from its point of view. Maybe there's no middle."
They were out the door and on the sidewalk before Claude said, "Hey, we didn't pay him." He went back in and gave the old man fifty cents. "Sorry."
The man nodded. "Tell me something. Do you understand what he's talking about?" He seemed genuinely curious.
"Not all of it. I usually get the drift, though."
"That must be some school you boys go to. I get 'em in here all the time, but that fella takes the cake." He moved down the counter, shaking his head.
"He thinks you're nuts," Claude said as they walked toward the river.
"Sure he does. He thinks a ten-pound cannonball falls faster than a one-ounce marble too. He'd bet money on it." Ivan quickened his step. "It's been three hundred and fifty years since they proved that everything falls at the same rate, and that fellow still doesn't know it. But then, even Newton, most elegant of thinkers—no, I take that back, second most elegant of thinkers—even Newton, although he knew it, didn't know what to do with it. You know his explanation?"
"No, I don't."
"He just sidestepped it. He'd worked out damn near everything else. The principle of inertia, the three laws of motion, all that, and it was really beautiful. But his law of gravitation? The cannonball and the marble? I just read a description. How did it go?" He stopped dead in the street, raised his head, and stared at the sky, repeating from memory: " 'The mysterious force by which a material body attracts another body increases with the mass of the object it attracts. If an object is small, its inertia is small, but the force that gravity exerts on it is also small. If an object is big, its inertia is great, but the force that gravity exerts on it is also great. Hence gravity is always exerted in the precise degree necessary to overcome the inertia of any object. And that is why all objects fall at the same rate, regardless of their inertial mass.' Lincoln Barnett."
"You mean you memorized that?" Claude said, his voice rising. "You remember it word for word?"
Ivan started walking again. "No, no," he said impatiently, "it's just a trick. I can see the page in my mind. Sort of read it again. It's useful sometimes, but it doesn't mean anything."
"Wow."
"But you see how he fudged it? That's some kind of a coincidence, gravity adjusting to inertia like that. No experiments to back it up. And what about gravity acting instantaneously over millions of miles? Inverse of the distance notwithstanding. Instantaneously? Like nothing else in nature? Einstein didn't believe it."
"Is that why he—"
"That and a lot of other things. All the tag ends of this and that, little discrepancies, various conundrums like absolute motion. We say something is going a thousand miles an hour, but what if the thing it's going on is going ten thousand miles an hour in a different direction?"
"Subtract?" Claude suggested.
"And the solar system is moving, and the galaxy is moving, and the universe is expanding? There isn't any fixed point. There isn't anything stationary to measure from. You see the problem?"
They reached the promenade and sat on their favorite bench. The day was bright and crisp, the river glittering in the sun. For a few moments they ate, drank, and regarded the scene. Behind them they could hear the shouts of boys playing basketball behind the high wire fences of the Bentley School playground.
"Einstein was only six years older than I am when he saw the new system," Ivan said. "And it's taking everything I've got to even begin to understand it."
"Don't worry about it," Claude said, licking his fingers. "You should hear some of the music Mozart wrote when he was six and seven."
"The trouble is, we're so thoroughly trained by what we see directly." He spread his arm to indicate the vista before him. "The banks of the river. The river. That tug with the barges going upstream. The sunshine. Clouds up above. It's our little system and it's hard to push one's imagination beyond it."
"So what did he say about gravity?"
"It's the same as inertia. You know when you go up in a fast elevator? When it's accelerating and your stomach goes bloop? Well, everything in that elevator gets pulled down equally, regardless of its weight. Your stomach or the change in your pockets, no difference."
"But that doesn't work. They're standing upside down in China. The earth can't be accelerating in two different directions."
"It can, actually, but that isn't relevant. The elevator image is what he calls a thought experiment. It starts getting very complicated as he builds them. I'm working on it, but you get some wild stuff. Everything is related. Matter is just congealed energy. Energy—light, radiation, et cetera—is just, uh, released mass. Space itself is affected by the mass in it. It sort of bends around heavy stuff, ergo light bends as well."
"What do you mean? Space? Emptiness? Emptiness bends?"
"Yes, I know. It's hard to imagine because we can't visualize it. But the fact is, there's only one constant, unchanging thing in the universe—the speed of light. It's the same everywhere. It doesn't change if the source is coming towards you or going away. It always moves at 186,282.4 miles per second. It helps me to not even think of the speed, but to just think it is. I mean light is."
"You've lost me," Claude said.
When Claude had gone to his school mailbox for the harmony exam, he'd been surprised to see it unmarked, with only one notation at the bottom of the last page: accepted for composition, in Satterthwaite's severely slanted hand. Nor had any mention of it been made since. All the more remarkable, Claude thought, because there were only two students, himself and a moody, self-absorbed math whiz named Platt. Twice a week they sat, one seat away from each other, in the front row of the music room, watching Satterthwaite drift back and forth in front of the blackboard, lecturing with his slight lisp, filling the air with chalk motes in rapid spasms of erasure.
Then one day—the big day, Claude was later to think of it—the startling news was revealed. Satterthwaite wrote I x V I on the board.
"This," he said, tapping the board with the chalk, "represents the music of the classical period and almost all of the romantic period. I, establish the tonic; x, develop harmonies as long as you like; leading to V, the dominant; and returning to I, the tonic and closure. Tonal music. It has prevailed for more than three hundred years. This is what you've been doing in your little exercises up to now." He went to his desk and sat on the corner. "But as you have no doubt noticed from my daily analyses of the romantics on the board, there is a progressively more impatient pressing against the bounds of tonality rising through the latter part of the nineteenth century. More and more work at the edges of the system. Do you see that?"
"Yes," said Platt. "Definitely."
Claude nodded.
"So things were building up, and then, all at once, about fifty years ago, everything changed." He snapped his fingers, exactly as Ivan had done. "Like that!" The smile on his tight face was almost eerie. "Schönberg!"
Silence. Satte
rthwaite raised his hands in the air, folded them as if in prayer, touched the end of his nose, and said again, more softly this time, "Schönberg"
And so, in the next few classes the story was told. Schönberg's early traditional work. His brave leap to atonality and the long period of grappling with its theoretical implications, culminating, finally, in the twelve-tone system of composition. The greatest and most exciting advance in the history of music, according to Satterthwaite.
"You must understand that tonality is nothing more than the way we have been trained to hear. Assonance, dissonance, these are matters, in a certain sense, of fashion. Nothing more. We have been trained into tonality, and the new music can train us out of it. Someday, when the larger and purer music has opened our ears, we will hear everything differently. You understand what I'm saying? We will hear differently. And that, gentlemen, is what this class is all about. I will lead you out of your tonal prejudices into an entirely new world. The world of the future."
Both boys were mesmerized by the change in their teacher, from a distant, sarcastic figure to a man seized by a vision. They glimpsed a kind of messianic prophet breaking through the cool facade, and for a moment it scared them, it was so abrupt and powerful. But, almost as if by an effort of will, the fire in his eyes was suddenly extinguished and he was back to his old self, moving to the board.
"So, let us begin. We start to use a new vocabulary. The tone row, for instance."
It was raining outside, so they lounged in the common room, on opposite couches, their feet up on the low table in between.
"Say that again, please," Ivan requested, pulling at his right eyebrow, trying to see the hairs, his eyes crossed.
"What are you doing?" Exasperated, Claude made a clucking sound.
"I'm listening, I'm listening. Say again."
"Well," Claude said, "you write what he calls a set. You use all twelve tones in any order you want, but no tone can appear more than once in the set."
