by Frank Conroy
"Why not?"
"If you use a note more than once, it might suggest a tonality. Like, that's the tonic. The point is to avoid anything that suggests tonality."
"Aha. I understand, vaguely."
"And then, get this. As you go along you can use the set the way you wrote it. You can use it upside down, backwards, or backwards upside down."
"Sounds like Bach, a bit."
"But only those ways," Claude said. "And anyway, the whole point of Bach's system was to reconcile chromaticism and tonality. There was a reason for his so-called rules."
"Why do you say 'so-called'?"
"Because he broke them all the time. Whenever he wanted. These rules are strict."
"At least they're simple."
"Not that simple," said Claude. "Once you've made a set, you're allowed to state it beginning on any one of the twelve tones."
"Hmm."
"You can state vertically, in chords, or horizontally, like some weird melody. It gets complicated. But the thing is, I don't see what the big deal is. I don't understand where the rules have any reason behind them, except to avoid tonality."
"A negative raison d'être."
"What does that, I hate it when you speak French, what does..."
"Sorry, sorry. A negative reason for being. Avoid tonality and be forced into the new way of hearing you were talking about. Maybe it is a big deal. Maybe they think some new kind of hyper-harmony will emerge? Sounds very idealistic. Like Marx saying the State will wither away."
"It just feels wrong somehow," Claude said. "The whole thing."
Claude's daily routine during this time was highly structured, having come about quite naturally. It gave him a sense of security. Interruptions, unexpected events, or unforeseen demands on his time could make him irritable. He woke in his cot at five-thirty every morning—to the sound of the Big Ben alarm clock he'd gotten from Weisfeld to catch the train to Frank's Landing in the old days—ate cereal in the dark and silent kitchenette, went up Third Avenue to the music store, entered with his own key, and went down to the basement for two hours of practice on the Bechstein. Scales. Exercises to warm up, to get the fingers supple, the arms and shoulders moving smoothly. ("Not just a digital exercise," Fredericks had said. "They are beautiful. They can be played beautifully." Claude had discovered the truth of those words.) And then an hour or so of sight-reading. To the right of the Bechstein's music stand was a large and ever-changing pile of music— where both Claude and Weisfeld tossed manuscripts of all kinds—from which Claude would blindly pull something, play it, and then move it over to the pile on the left of the music stand. Then forty-five minutes to an hour of concentrated effort on whatever special piece he was working on at the time At eighty-thirty Weisfeld would open the door at the top of the stairs and cry, "Good morning good morning!" Claude would then finish ud and ascend for the coffee Weisfeld brought down from his quarters in large mugs. They usually sat on stools by the cash register, or sometimes up front looking out at the street. By nine o'clock Claude would be at school. Except for the time he spent with Ivan, he used every available minute—free periods, lunch, part of gym, assembly—to read, prepare for his classes, or do homework. The other boys, most of them relaxed, good-natured, given to larking about at every opportunity, seemed nevertheless to respect his privacy and did not tease him. Indeed, sometimes when they passed him as he worked in some corner, or sitting on the stairs, they would lower their voices, nodding as they passed. He knew a few of them by name, but most only by their last names, as they were addressed in class: Baldridge, Keller, Wilson, Abernathy, Cooper, Garcez, Peabody.
At four he was back in the store, waiting on customers, arranging the stock, sweeping the floor or doing whatever else was needed. Occasionally Weisfeld would go out for short periods, coming back with a book or some groceries. Now and then he would unlock the door to the second floor and go upstairs for a nap. Claude could hear the creaking of the floorboards as he moved around up there.
He usually ate supper at Wright's, the Automat, or one of the cafeterias on Eighty-sixth Street. He had a favorite meal at each establishment. Then he would return to the store—Weisfeld most often having retired for the day—and go down to the basement to listen to records, copy scores, play the piano, compose (both at the piano and at the worktable), and read manuscripts and books. He was home by eleven and asleep in his cot by a quarter past. There were interruptions—the movies, weekend wanderings with Ivan, and sometimes he would run into Al and Emma having a late supper as Al came off shift.
Claude had noticed that the kitchenette was now scrupulously clean and orderly, and that there were some new cooking utensils. Al, it turned out, was a good cook.
"I don't know how you do it in such a tiny space," Emma said one night.
"Just keep it organized," Al said with a shrug. He shook a frying pan, turned a knob, peered into a pot, and began to set out dishes. "Try a little taste?" he asked Claude.
"Sure."
Al turned his back and went to work.
Emma, with a regular-sized bottle of beer, was in a cheerful mood. "We did well today. We both had trips to Idlewild, and Al picked up two cases of oil uptown at half price."
"Remember that guy under the overpass?" Al said. "Ran into eight cases somehow." He gave a little laugh. "He's all right, though. Might get him to do a ring job. The car could use it."
"How is Mr. Weisfeld?" Emma asked. "I saw him in the street. He always looks so pale."
"He's fine. He just doesn't go out much."
"Well, give him my regards. Thank him again for all he's doing. I still can't believe you're in that fancy school."
Al turned and presented the food. Shaved ham with redeye gravy, greens with butter, and hash brown potatoes with bits of onion and green pepper. All three of them fell to.
"Damn, that's good," Emma said.
Al presented four biscuits that had been warming in a pot on the hot plate. "Make biscuits in a pot. I used to watch my momma."
"Where is your momma?" Claude asked, savoring a bite of ham.
"Oh, she dead. My daddy too. Long time ago." He ate fastidiously, giving the food his complete attention for several moments, and then took a sip of beer. "It's some story," he said, lowering the bottle. "Like in a book."
"What happened?"
He ate some more, then looked out into the middle distance. "They was out in the field, chopping cotton. The sky was getting dark and the bossman, he standing there in the wind, feeling a few little bitty drops of rain, he get mad and starts telling everybody to work faster. See, he wants to make the quota and go on back to the house. He got this little leather stick he's always swatting in the palm of his hand, you know? Ain't a real horsewhip, it's more like a lady's horsewhip. So he starts moving through the rows, hitting people on their feet, on their ankles, shouting at them hurry up, he ain't got his hat."
"My God," Emma said, sitting up.
"Well, that bossman, he start hitting my momma's feet, and he don't know my daddy's in the next row. Now my daddy, he was a big man, and I mean big. They called him Bear. His name was Sam but everybody called him Bear. He rose up and told the bossman stop hitting my momma. Bossman call him a no-account nigger and hit him right across the face with that leather stick." He stopped, ate a bite of food, and looked first at Emma, then at Claude. "Now, you got to remember my daddy standing there with the cotton knife right in his hand. Bossman ain't got no time to unbuckle everything and get out his gun. Can't do it if my daddy make a move. By now there's people standing around watching, see what's gonna happen. It's raining. My daddy throw his knife on the ground. Bossman try to go for his gun, but my daddy is on him in a flash, just pounding away with his great big fists look like two smoked hams. He just beat the Jesus out of that man, sloshing around in the mud and the rain, bringing him down. And my momma screaming at him to stop, pulling his rope belt as hard as she could, trying to get him off that white man." He took another sip of beer and stared at the bottle
. "So all that hollering brought another bossman, come over from the other side of the field to see what's going on. Now this one has his gun out. He lifts it up and points it straight at my daddy. My daddy just stand there, Momma behind him on her knees, moaning. Now everybody waiting for him to pull the trigger, and he's just about to when suddenly a bolt of lightning comes out of the sky with thunder like the end of the world, and that lightning go straight to the gun. Can you beat that? It goes straight to the gun, like it was aimed. Course, I suppose it was the iron really, but anyway that second bossman drop dead as a stone."
Both Claude and Emma had forgotten about their food and sat still as statues. Al took some greens on his fork.
"So what happened?" Claude asked. "I mean, your parents?"
"The Klan got them two nights later. Strung them up by the river."
There was complete silence. They stared at Al for what seemed a long time, until the faintest wisp of a smile appeared on the black man's mouth. Emma immediately burst into laughter and almost fell off her stool.
"What? What?" Claude cried.
Now Al was laughing, nodding his head.
"Oh, you had me," she said, wiping tears from her eyes. "You had me good."
"What?" Claude repeated.
"Just funning, boy," Al said gently. "A little entertainment. Just a way to pass the time."
"You mean..."
"My momma died of sugar in the blood. My daddy was a drunk, broke his head on the toilet in the back of a bar one night. That's the way it really was."
Claude had buried (but not, of course, completely extinguished) the memories of his early childhood—the vague nausea, the loneliness, weakness, and vulnerability. Fear of those old ghosts drove him, without his knowing it, into a dependency on ritual, and into a highly compartmentalized way of life. If there was anything remotely like a center to his existence, it was Weisfeld and the studio below the store, but his mother was separate, school was entirely separate, his love for Catherine was both hidden and separate, the movies were a world unto themselves—and it was as if he were a slightly different person in each setting. He intuitively sensed that this was a good thing, that the compartmentalization worked to protect the most valuable and personal source of strength he had, music. Only when he was in music awash in it, could he feel truly secure Only music had the power to lift him out of himself and relieve him of the burden of himself. There were moments with Catherine moments in the movies moments while reading a book or chasing down ideas with Ivan moments of silence in the mysteriously calming and strengthening presence of Weisfeld—but these were evanescent, transitory echoes of what he got directly from music.
At school he did almost everything he had to do right there on the premises. He would come early or stay late if necessary, adjusting his schedule to maintain the compartments. His high grades he took as a confirmation of this strategy.
Thus he became uncomfortable when Satterthwaite's twelve-tone challenge began to leak out of the compartment of school and into the rest of his life. He found himself playing Schönberg on the Bechstein, listening to Schönberg on the phonograph, and studying scores in an increasingly tense state of frustration tinged with fear. He understood the mathematical and structural nature of the work, but that was all he understood. He was not learning to hear in a new way, and if there was music in there, he was missing it. He said nothing about this for months, until one morning when Weisfeld asked an innocuous question about school.
"I should have skipped Satterthwaite's Music Three," the boy said.
"Really?" Weisfeld raised his eyebrows. "Why is that?"
"It's all twelve-tone." Claude looked down. "The other kid is a math whiz, and he loves it, can't get enough of it. I hate it. It's driving me crazy."
"Why?"
"It doesn't seem to matter what it sounds like. I mean, they don't really seem to care. It's all just structure. I don't even bother to play the stuff I hand in. I write it out in study hall and don't even try to hear it in my head."
"Which would be difficult in any case," Weisfeld said. "Satterthwaite admires Schönberg?"
"Schönberg is God."
"A certain amount of talk about purity?"
"All the time. And the word 'free,' he uses that a lot and gets excited."
"I see." Weisfeld watched the boy for a moment and then stared upward, beginning the slow stroking of his mustache that he did, unconsciously, when he was thinking. Claude knew when to remain silent. The thinking on this occasion went on for an unusually long time. Finally Weisfeld got up and said, "Let's go downstairs."
When they reached the basement Weisfeld turned with a smile. "Remember Fuchs? Counterpoint when you were just a little squirt?"
"It was fun."
"You got all hot—I remember it, your face actually turned red when you weren't allowed to use parallel fifths. Boy oh boy, you were steamed. 'Why not? Why not?' you'd asked. You loved the sound of them."
"But you explained it. It made sense. Give up that sound and the lines will fit better, and you get other sounds."
"Let me see something you've done in twelve-tone." Weisfeld went to the piano.
Claude went to his worktable, rummaged around, and came back with a single sheet of music. "It's awful," he said.
Weisfeld held the paper in his hand and studied it for several minutes. He traced each bar with his fingertip, occasionally giving a small nod or a barely audible grunt. Then he put the paper on the music stand and looked at it for another moment. "This is not awful. That little rhythmic figure in the second bar, the way you fool around with it here and spread it out over all of this. And then backwards. That's clever, doing it with the rhythms as well as with the notes. What's the tempo? You haven't marked it."
"I don't know. Allegro, I guess."
Weisfeld leaned forward, put his hands on the keyboard, and launched into the piece, playing firmly. As the motive was developed, dissonances flew left and right, thick as firecrackers at Chinese New Year, and the piece moved forward without a tonal center, without any home base, making Claude feel slightly queasy. All it had, as Weisfeld finished, was an odd kind of lilt, like a cross between a waltz and a march. To Claude's ear it didn't really end, it just stopped.
"So," Weisfeld said. "Not bad. Runs out of gas, sort of, but not bad at all."
Claude pulled out the chair from his worktable and sat down. "I just don't get it."
"It's inventive. You follow the rules. You're thinking."
"But it doesn't sound like anything!" Claude sounded like a child—ready, almost, to cry. "It's all over the place. I can't control it. I'm not allowed to control it." He slumped forward, looking at the floor, his head in his hands.
" Ahh," Weisfeld sighed, as if the boy had said something important.
"What do you mean, ahh?" Claude asked wearily. "I don't know what you mean."
"It's all right." Weisfeld got up. "Go to school now, before you're late. Let me think about this and tonight we'll have a talk. We'll close early and take a walk in the park. Okay?"
Claude nodded.
The very fact that he'd mentioned the matter to Weisfeld made Claude feel a good deal better. At school that day—it was a Thursday and he did not have Satterthwaite—he'd even cracked a joke in American history. A rather slyly delivered pun on 'seamen' and 'semen,' which everyone got immediately, had even won a grudging guffaw from the teacher.
Weisfeld surprised him by closing the store almost as soon as Claude got back. The boy couldn't remember the last time he'd closed early. They walked to the park in a comfortable silence and made their way to the gravel path around the reservoir.
"You're not a kid anymore," Weisfeld said, walking slowly with his hands behind his back. "You're on your way to becoming a well-educated young man, and we're getting into deep stuff here. I can't just tell you, you know what I mean? So I'm going to ramble. My thoughts. Maybe right maybe wrong. Maybe useful maybe not. I've been thinking about it all day because I know this music makes you
uneasy. It maybe even scares you a little. That is understandable, but unnecessary, really. Unnecessary."
Some people rode by on the horse path. Then a young woman, dressed as if for a fox hunt in an English movie, walked along leading her horse by its bridle. Every now and then she'd turn her head and speak angrily to the animal.
"Satterthwaite says it's the future of music," Claude said.
"With all due respect," Weisfeld said, "nobody knows the future. Not about music, not about anything. All we can do is guess, believe me." He stared at the water through the chain-link fence, his small feet making soft crunching noises as he walked.
"People are attracted to systems. It's human nature. They're always looking for systems, hunting them down, thinking them up. Not just about music, about everything. Sometimes it's good, sometimes it's not so good."
"Like what?"
"You've heard of Karl Marx?"
"Communism."
"Right. But not at first. A brilliant man. Reads everything—economics, history, anthropology, philosophy, everything. A moral man too. He wants to make things better. So he creates a system. I mean an intellectual system, an analytical system, like a tool you can use. He covers everything, the system can explain everything in economics, all you have to do is look it up. People start to build on it, develop it and so forth, and what do you get? Where do you end up?" He paused and shot Claude a glance. "You get Stalin, that's who you get. One of the greatest monsters of all time."
"But didn't he help beat Hitler?"
"So? Two monsters fighting. Plus, in the beginning they played footsie. But let's get back to the question of systems. That's what I want you to think about. The urge to make systems. Mr. Schönberg is not alone, I can tell you."
"Is his system good or bad?" Claude asked.
"Wait. It isn't that easy. You think if it was that easy I wouldn't tell you right away?"
