by Frank Conroy
"The thing is," Thorpe began, but his companion interrupted.
"Let's leave it there, Tom," Ed said, straightening up. "Mr. Rawlings has things to do. Thank you for your time, sir."
Thorpe's head swiveled in surprise.
"You're welcome." Claude nodded to Folsom. "Sorry I can't help you."
Claude showed them to the door, stepping back one step to watch them through the side panel of the window as they made their way down the sidewalk. Folsom walked directly to the corner, appearing to respond as Thorpe moved from one side of him to the other, talking animatedly. It was as if, trying one ear without success, he would scurry over to try the other.
A Cadillac limousine waited at the curb. Thorpe held the door for Folsom and followed him into the rear compartment. Then the car pulled away.
They all seemed to be Irish. Mr. Muldoon, a short, square man with crew-cut gray hair and green eyes set close to his nose. "I'm here to look at the wiring," he said, presenting his City of New York credentials.
"I'm just curious," Claude said. "What are you supposed to do if I say no."
"Whaddya mean? It's the city. You can't say no."
"So you go get a cop? Is that it?"
"Hey, give me a break here. They tell me to look at the wiring, here I am."
"Did they tell you what to find?"
"My tool chest is getting heavy. You going to let me in or what?"
Claude let him in.
Over the next week or so he let in Mr. Heaney, the fire inspector, Mr. Crawford to take a look at the plumbing, and a Mr. O'Dougherty, building inspector, who arrived with an assistant. Quite soon official letters started coming, which Claude forwarded to Mr. Larkin, who eventually telephoned.
"They have you over a barrel, I'm afraid."
"Can we appeal? Go to law?"
"Yes, certainly. But the expenses would be great and the outcome uncertain. We'd have to get bonded inspectors of our own to counter their assertions—and who knows, it's an old building, some of their assertions may be correct. The legal work would add up to a lot of hours, more if they made us jump through hoops, which we can reasonably assume they will."
"What do you advise?"
"If it was me, I'd sell."
"Yes," Claude said, "that's probably the rational thing to do." He paused. "I've thought about it, but for some reason I just can't bring myself to do it."
"In which case I see no alternative to compliance. If you comply, I don't see what they can do."
"What does that entail?" Claude asked, and then listened to the sound of rustling papers.
"Major items," Larkin said. "Rewire the whole building. Break through the rear wall on the first floor and install a fire door. Replace the furnace and boiler. There's some other observations about illegal pipe widths in the upstairs apartment, but that's about it."
"Can we use funds from the estate to do the work?"
"Yes we can. They will be more than sufficient."
"Let's do it, then."
"Okay. I'll get a letter off today that informs the city of our intent to comply. That will surprise them, I'm sure. We'll have to put the work out to bid. You want me to take care of that?"
"Please. And I appreciate your help."
"You'll be billed my usual rate. But this one is fun. I just hope nothing goes wrong."
In a matter of days, teams of Luris Corporation workmen erected a sort of open tunnel from around the corner on Eighty-third, all the way up the block, and around the corner on Eighty-fourth. Using pipe, plywood, and two-by-fours, a protective ceiling was mounted over the sidewalk. The structure did not stop for the music store, although access to the street was unimpeded. Claude was astonished at how quickly the work was done.
A week later his own workmen began arriving at seven A.M. every day, dispersing through the building to address their various tasks. Plaster dust filled the air as the old wiring was torn from the walls, and Claude was forced to pack up all the instruments without cases in sealed cardboard boxes. He covered the pianos with dropcloths, emptied the display windows, and piled up books, scores, supplies, sheet music, and parts into every enclosed or partially protected place he could find. Great crashing sounds emanated from the boiler room downstairs against the steady thump of boots from the men working on the pipes above. It was a daily scene of disorder and confusion, the workers in constant motion, dust everywhere, electric tools whining up to painful frequencies, wires tangling underfoot, equipment and building materials covering every surface.
Late one afternoon, after a week of chaos without any visible progress, Claude sat alone on a folding chair near the front door and regarded the mess. He was exhausted. It seemed to him that he had moved every object in the place a dozen times. He couldn't recognize the store, and he had a moment of doubt. Had he been wrong? Would the place ever look and feel the same? He got up and walked carefully to the rear, stepping over various hurdles, to examine the wall where the fire door was to be installed. It had already been stripped to the bare brick. He reached out to touch it, and then remembered the night he'd woken Weisfeld, who had come down disoriented in his nightgown. The bare brick was at the same spot Weisfeld had placed his hands. Claude interpreted this as more than a coincidence.
Larkin called the next morning.
"They've upped their bid fifteen percent. They say it's their last offer, only because their work schedule forces them to commit one way or another on the new building. What should I tell them?"
"I'd thank them, but no thanks. Sincere regrets that we weren't able to help." Claude had to shout over the sound of hammering.
"You know what surprises me the most?" Larkin said. "That they couldn't find some way to block our building permit."
"Maybe they ran up against an honest man."
Now the Luris trucks came early every morning and took all the space on the west side of the avenue. Waste chutes were constructed and demolition workers began gutting all the buildings simultaneously, starting at the top floors and working down, the whole length of the block. There were workmen everywhere, like ants crawling over some huge, ruined cake.
The last of Claude's crews to finish were the boiler men. Getting the new equipment off the truck and down the exterior shaft (as the Bech-stein had come down) involved dismantling some of the Luris scaffolding, and a good deal of arguing, stalling, and consultation had to be gotten through before the job was accomplished.
After a second round of inspections by the city—conducted somewhat perfunctorily this time, Claude thought—the building was found to be in compliance. His next task was to complete the cleanup and replace all the stock. The original appearance of the store's interior was of course engraved in his mind, and he knew he could put everything back exactly where it had been. He started in the rear, by the new fire door. He also uncovered the Bechstein in the basement and began playing several hours a day.
One night, asleep in his bed upstairs, he woke up at the sound of a tremendous crash, so loud it might have been an explosion. He ran downstairs and found that a municipal garbage can had been thrown through the plate-glass display window, sending shards of glass half the length of the store. Rotten fruit, newspapers, a moldy bedroom slipper, and various kinds of trash spilled over onto the floor of the shop. Claude called the police and spent the rest of the night cleaning up. The next day he arranged for the open space to be covered with plywood. A week later the same thing happened to the other display window. With it also boarded up, it was very dark inside the store, and it became necessary to leave the lights on all day. Claude decided it might be wisest to wait before replacing the windows, and to put off the question of when to reopen. He consoled himself with the thought that now they had done everything they could possibly do short of firebombs, that he had only to wait them out. He believed they would not dare something as obvious as fire, and in that, at least, he was correct.
Working at the Bechstein, he became aware of a curious tension in the muscles of his arms and back, a kind of thickne
ss in his body that kept the music from flowing as it should. He could control some of it by will, but could not entirely shake it. He called Fredericks in Paris, who prescribed long, hot baths, deep-breathing exercises, two-mile walks every day, sex every day (Claude let that one pass), and specific relaxation exercises for the hands, arms, and shoulders. Fredericks also said the problem was quite common and would no doubt go away even if Claude did nothing. The thing to avoid was becoming obsessive about it, which would only prolong it. "It will pass," Fredericks said. "Just work through it, and one fine day you'll wake up and it will be gone."
Claude had assumed that the demolition would begin at the end of the block. However, the tall crane with the wrecking ball parked directly in front of the music store. Claude ran out and began buttonholing workmen. Eventually one of the foremen told him the first building to go down would be the one next door, Mrs. Keller's. When Claude asked why, the man shrugged his shoulders. "That's the plan. Start in the middle and work out."
The next day Claude was unpacking books in the front of the store when a great, rippling crash jammed the air and the floor shook under his feet. A fine dust appeared as if by magic. Claude was squatting, and when, after a few moments, the next crash came it was so violent he lost his balance and fell backward. He got to his feet and wondered what, if anything, he should do.
The third shock was even more powerful, shaking the entire building. He happened to be looking at the E-flat silver bell over the door when it occurred. The bell rang faintly, and he was momentarily hypnotized by the sound. He focused entirely on the bell, and when it tinkled again at the next shock he found himself comparing its weak clarity with the deep, rumbling, chaotic sounds from next door. He stood motionless, closing his eyes and listening with total concentration, listening across the entire spectrum. Without thinking about it he began to time the blows of the wrecking ball, anticipating them.
And then something extraordinary happened. At the precise instant of the crash, followed a split second later by the bell, he hallucinated the full sound of an orchestra and a piano playing two chords in succession, the first chord dissonant and the second consonant. The hallucination was clear and precise, complete in every musical detail, which he instantly memorized. Then it was as if he had gone deaf to real sound. Although his eyes and the soles of his feet told him the demolition was continuing, he heard nothing. He held the memory of the two chords in his head and walked slowly to the rear of the store. He went down the stairs, got a pencil and paper, and sat at the Bech-stein. It took half an hour to get the two chords out of his head and, fully scored, onto the paper. When this was done he sat for an hour looking at them, his mind working rapidly, spinning out every conceivable musical implication of the tension inherent in the chords. He glimpsed structure after structure, and as his excitement grew, so grew his ability to imagine ever more complex structures, until finally, trembling with exhilaration and terror, he forced himself to get up, walk around the studio, and calm down. He now had a great deal of work to do—an entire piece to write—and he knew he would have to pace himself. Otherwise the music would overwhelm him, suck him right out of existence like a great star swallowing a comet.
In the course of his studies Claude had learned a great deal about the concerto—from the baroque, through the classical and romantic, right up to Bartók's work before the war. He was aware of the ways in which the form had developed. As well, he knew of the double meaning of the word itself: to join together, to work in concert, but also, from the Latin, to fight, or to contend. The E-flat silver bell represented the solo instrument (piano) engaged in a battle for survival with the more powerful sounds of demolition representing the orchestra. This had come to him, he believed, in a moment of unconscious inspiration and had given rise to the aural hallucination, which he interpreted as a mysterious confirmation of the whole idea.
He pulled out the old blackboard and began sketching various ritornello-sonata structures using symbols, trying to decide on a rough blueprint. From his own library he got the score to Beethoven's fourth piano concerto and analyzed it, paying particular attention to the wild struggle going on in the second movement. He forced himself to leave the studio and pass through the escalating violence of the scene outside to go to the Juilliard library to look at Weber's Conzertstuck, Liszt's two concertos, Copland's 1926 Piano Concerto, and even Schönberg's Piano Concerto of 1942. He drew schemata for each of them, took them home, and thought about them.
When he began to write the first movement he had several false starts. The first statement of the two magic chords was to occur in the second movement, and so he had to work backward to a certain extent, backward and forward at the same time. He was able to sustain the requisite concentration for stretches of two to three hours, at which point he would become slightly manic and begin to write too fast. When this happened he would break for an hour, eat something, take a hot bath, read the paper, or work on the stock. Anything to stop chasing the music, anything to slow himself down. When he was calm he would go back to work. Very soon the days began to run together. The building continued to shake, the crashing and roaring, the jack-hammers, the air compressors, and the sound of the great trucks went on all day long, but he was too absorbed to notice. Often he would emerge from the studio in the middle of the night and be surprised by the silence.
In bed, he read Bartók scores until his eyes grew heavy and his mind drifted sideways. His dreams were surreal and filled with color. The wreckers woke him every morning.
He had a late supper at a bar and grill on Eighty-sixth Street. Corned beef sliced to order, cabbage, and a boiled potato from the steam table. When he ordered a beer it was green.
"What's this?"
"Saint Paddy's Day. The first one is on the house."
Then he noticed the decorations, green bunting, shamrocks cut from silver paper. It was a rowdy crowd at the bar, people standing two or three deep, knocking back shots, shouting and laughing, spilling beer on the floor. Many of them, he knew, had been drinking all day, having come back from Fifth Avenue and the parade, and would eventually stagger home to the tenements on the long, dark streets between Third and Second, Second and First. These were the diehards, workingmen in their twenties and thirties mostly, going for broke, and there was a dark edge to the general hysteria. He saw two bus drivers, still in uniform, each with a pint of half-and-half, drain their glasses in a race. The loser bought two shots of whiskey.
Alone at his table against the wall, Claude ate his food quickly, eager to be out of the din. He had a second beer and, just for the hell of it, a shot of Jameson. Aware of a comfortable warmth spreading from his belly, he moved carefully to the door.
"Sorry," he said. "Excuse me."
A dark-haired youth slipped on the wet floor and Claude caught his elbow in time to prevent his falling.
"Thanks, mate." He looked about sixteen years old.
Outside, the sidewalks were crowded with revelers, but they thinned out when he turned downtown on Third. After a block the avenue was empty of pedestrians, awash in the eerie brightness of the new streetlights which subtly changed the color of everything. Claude walked along, thinking of Fredericks's question about superstitiousness. He had answered it honestly enough, and he believed himself to be a rational man, but at the same time the magic chords had seemed to arrive from out of this world. The longer he worked on them, the more they seemed a message. It was uncanny how, wherever he was in the concerto, they seemed to contain the clues—sometimes faint and sometimes unmistakable—he needed to proceed. Like the golden pitcher of myth, they never emptied, never ran dry.
As he crossed the avenue at Eighty-fourth Street, he saw two men on the northwest corner with their arms linked, dancing a jig, dark scarves flying, their faces tinged green in the artificial light. They moved with precision, the heels of their heavy boots striking the sidewalk simultaneously, their thick bodies hunched as they danced in a circle, as if around some ancient, peat-fed fire.
&nb
sp; As Claude stepped onto the curb they changed their direction and danced over to him. The taller of them reached out a curved arm, attempting to link with Claude and draw him into the dance. Instinctively, Claude pulled back.
"Sure now, you've got to dance," said the taller of the men, lunging to force his arm under Claude's.
"No, really," Claude began, but now the men were on either side of him, one holding his arm and the other reaching up to encircle his neck. They pushed him across the sidewalk toward the aluminum lamppost.
"What, what?" Claude managed to croak through the stranglehold.
"Everybody's got to dance," the tall one said, his whiskey breath hot on Claude's face. "Everybody's got to cooperate, don't you know." Suddenly he shot his elbow into Claude's stomach. Bent over, gasping, Claude felt his arm being wrapped around the lamppost. Another blow to his stomach and he fell to his knees. The shorter man held a foot-long length of pipe in front of Claude's face, showing it to him. The taller man held Claude's arm against the lamppost.
The pain was intense and the world began to get dark. He saw the greenish face and the brown teeth. "Next time, the hand." He blacked out.
Senator Barnes's limousine pulled up to the corner of Eighty-sixth and Park right on time. Claude opened the door with his good arm and got in.
"How long do you have to keep it on?" the old man asked.
"A month or so," Claude said.
The cast started at his left elbow and proceeded to the heel of his hand. There were holes for his fingers.
"Can you move them?"
"Yes." Claude demonstrated. "The doctor at Bellevue said I was lucky. A nondisplaced fracture of the distal radius, otherwise they would have to immobilize everything."
Senator Barnes leaned forward and slid open the glass panel to the driver's compartment. "One Forty-eight West Fifty-seventh, Henry." He slid the panel shut and fell back in his seat as the car moved forward. "Does it hurt?"
