by Frank Conroy
Mr. Dove, a rather severe man in his fifties, formally dressed—the sartorial antithesis to Mr. Shanks—knocked politely on the practice room door one morning and came in with a score of the concerto. Claude had one of his own, and they sat at the nested Steinways and worked through the music for several hours. Dove was intelligent, scrupulous, and totally focused, possessing great powers of concentration. He did not chitchat or ask any irrelevant questions. He made good suggestions about matters of notation, tempo, and some of the score markings, explaining that "the British usually mark it this way." Claude was tired at the end of the session, but Dove still seemed fresh. "We've gotten a lot done," he said. "Perhaps a short meeting next Monday? Same time?"
"I'm very grateful," said Claude.
"Not at all."
It became Claude's habit to take tea at Brown's every afternoon. Comfortable armchairs with handy side tables filled a long room off the main lobby. Waiters brought pots of strong tea and offered small crustless sandwiches—cucumber, cheese and tomato, watercress. A table of pastries was displayed under the tall windows. As the afternoon light softened, the room hummed with conversation, the clink of cups and saucers, and the rustle of newspapers. Scents of pipe tobacco mixed with the sharper, higher smell of Virginia cigarettes.
At first he didn't realize what he was seeing. A glimpse, through the people milling near the lobby, of a curved, black wing of hair below a pale jaw. It disappeared as a fat man interposed, and then Claude froze, cup in the air. Catherine walked into the room, her chin lifting as she scanned the crowd, looking for someone. Her darting eyes found Claude and stopped. A suggestion of a smile as she moved forward. He realized—and the thought seemed impossible, unreal—that she'd been looking for him.
"There you are," she said. "The man at the desk said you might be in here." She stood there in a simple dark green dress, buttoned to the neck, a tan raincoat over her arm. Thinner, but otherwise unchanged—enormous dark eyes, a faint flush under the cheekbones, the carved mouth that smiled full-out now at the effect of her entrance. "May I join you?"
Flustered, his mind racing, his body recovering from the shock, which had been as tangible as electricity—a frisson right up his spine—he got to his feet, knocking a saucer to the carpet as he did so. He tried to speak, but wound up nodding and indicating the chair next to his own.
She bent smoothly to retrieve the saucer. She had an air of composure, her movements suggesting certainty, an inner certainty he could sense but not name. He was almost overwhelmed by her proximity, by the power emanating from her small, narrow-shouldered frame.
A waiter had materialized out of thin air. "Will you be taking tea, Madam?"
"Yes. Thank you." She turned to Claude. "I read about it in the paper."
"Yes," Claude said.
"I called the offices and said I knew you."
"I thought you, I mean didn't you, aren't you in Australia?"
"I've been here for two years," she said. "I'm at London University."
"Ah..." His mind continued to race.
"I'm getting a doctorate," she said. "But what about you? How did all this happen?"
"Did you return my letter unopened, or did somebody else?"
A look of puzzlement. "What letter? What do you mean?"
"Nine years ago I wrote you a letter."
She frowned. "Nine years ago..."
"It was an invitation to my first major concert. The Mozart Double Piano Concerto, with Fredericks."
"I never saw it. You say it was returned?"
"Yes. It was right around the time you went away, the time you eloped."
Her hands were clasped between her knees. She looked down at them for a moment. "That explains it, then. Someone at the house sent it back. I'm sorry about that."
"It's okay," he said. "I just wanted to know. It's not important. But that concert was the beginning, in a way." As they sat drinking tea and eating sandwiches he told her of his career as a performer, Weisfeld's death, his estrangement from her cousin Lady, his attempts at writing music, which had culminated in the piano concerto which had won the London Symphony competition. She then told him of her discovery of medieval studies at the University of Melbourne in Australia, the birth of her daughter, Jennie, her breakup with her husband, and her immigration to England.
"You've never been back to America?" he asked.
"No. And I never will go back."
"But why?"
She shook her head. "Let's change the subject. Are you free tonight? Do you want to have dinner?"
"Why yes. Of course. I'd be delighted."
"Good." She rummaged in the pocket of her coat and wrote her address on the back of a British Museum call slip. "I have to run to pick up Jennie. Seven-thirty?" She stood, handed him the paper, and walked away.
He stayed in the armchair long after the tea things had been removed, his head back on the antimacassar. In some ways she was the same—her directness, bluntness almost, her quick intelligence, her odd tendency to go inward sometimes for a moment or two, staring at nothing, like someone in a brief cataleptic trance, and then come out of it and go on as if nothing had happened. ("He used to hate it," she would tell him later, speaking of her ex-husband. "I think it scared him. No, that's not quite it. He resented it. Whiteouts, he called them.") But she had lost the superior manner, the snobbishness, the habit of putting on airs like an actress playing a role. The disdain was gone, replaced by a kind of watchfulness. Her speech, however, had gone slightly British—idioms, traces of accent—and he found it unsettling. Not that she was affected, but more as a subtle expression of her eagerness to embrace the culture in which she found herself. ("Sometimes, in the shops, I can tell they don't know.") Most striking was her seriousness. Even when she laughed, it was somehow the laughter of a serious person. In this, oddly enough, she reminded him of Weisfeld, from whom in every other aspect she could not possibly have been more different. As the light failed he found himself hunched forward, head in his hands, staring at the carpet.
"Can I get you anything, sir?"
"What? No, thank you. I was just leaving."
A dark street. Row houses. The sidewalk was so narrow he almost struck the brick of the building when he opened the cab door. Number 84, gray plastic numerals tacked to the dark green wood. A small, narrow door, flush to the wall. He knocked, backing up a bit out of reflex and almost going over the curb. Down the block a drunk weaved in the middle of the street, bottle in hand, softly singing some strange modal melody. He paused under a lamppost, looked up into the weak cone of light, and then veered off into the darkness.
The door opened inward and Catherine stood with her back to the wall so he could pass. "Come in. Straight back."
It was a house built for midgets, cramped, low-ceilinged, everything too small. He passed two dark rooms on his right, ducked his head, went down a step, and entered a tiny kitchen. A girl of about six sat at the central table with a coloring book. She looked up—curly brown hair, green eyes, a dusting of freckles across her nose. "Hello," she said.
"This is Jennie," Catherine said behind him. "This is Mr. Rawlings."
"You called him Claude before," Jennie said, rolling her crayon in her fingers. "I'm going to Paris tomorrow," she announced to Claude.
"That's great. Do you speak French?"
"No, but my daddy'll be there, and he does."
"He has a place in the country," Catherine said. "She goes for a month every spring."
"We catch fish in the river," Jennie said, and went back to coloring.
He was startled to feel Catherine's soft touch on his elbow. She led him back to the front of the house, switching on the light in the first room. A desk, two chairs, a wooden rocking horse, and hundreds of books neatly arranged in stacked fruit crates against the wall. There was a dark, worn prayer rug and an electric fire. Cheap curtains on the window. A small, severe room, lit by a single bare bulb hanging from the center of the ceiling.
"We share the back room,
" she said.
He didn't know what to say. He went over and looked at the books. Many had markers—slips of paper with handwriting—spilling from their tops.
"All I do is work," she said. "Here and at the BM."
"What's the BM?"
"The British Museum. The reading room is my idea of heaven."
He turned quickly to see if she was being ironic. She was not. "Scholarly pursuits," he said.
"I'm a student. And I love the period."
"Do you know—well, I suppose you must—you know about your mother?"
"Yes. Would you like a drink? I have some cheap plonk, I think. I'll get it."
Plonk, he intuited, was wine. She returned with two glasses and a half bottle of red. She poured with a steady hand. They sat—she on the corner of the desk, he on a wooden chair—and she lifted her glass in a toast. "Here's to life," she said.
"Yes, indeed. Strange as it is."
She wore black slacks, a white blouse, and a gray cardigan sweater. "I've got some chicken."
He was torn. The intimate flat, the sense that he was a visitor at the physical center of her life, and that the circumstances, however mysterious, might reveal something, all suggested that he stay. Years ago he had been driven to distraction by her elusiveness, and would have thought this an opportunity to press, to flush her out at last. But now two things were happening to him: an urge to deny his younger, weaker self and the simultaneous perception that although everything about her situation had changed, reversed even, she was nevertheless still elusive, still wrapped in mystery. It was the sheer force of her personality, he thought, of her character, prevailing over any and all circumstances. His memories of her as the disdainful, precocious girl-child with a fondness for playing with fire, all those memories and others he had created to protect himself, all of it melted away in the face of her extraordinary self-possession. How was it that at twenty-six she was a full woman, with that still-point of womanly strength none of her contemporaries, in Claude's view, had been able to find? Or was it once again her beauty—even more striking now, a radiance to take one's breath away—affecting his perception of what might lie beneath it? Of her maddeningly secret soul?
"Let's go out," he said. "Is there someplace nearby? We can take Jennie."
"She's eaten." Catherine got off the desk and went into the kitchen. As she came back with the child, she bent over to kiss the top of her head. Jennie continued down the hall. Claude heard the sound of a door and the unmistakable tattoo of the girl running upstairs.
"She'll watch the telly with Mrs. Jenks upstairs."
"Mrs. Jenks?"
"Our landlady, poor old thing. All she has is this building and a tiny pension. She loves Jennie and Jennie loves her, so it works out."
"Is Jennie in school?"
"Oh, yes. The very best. He pays for it."
They walked the dark street, Catherine on the sidewalk and Claude in the gutter, took a few turns, and entered a small square. An Underground stop, a pub, a greengrocer's, a tobacconist, and a small Italian restaurant. There were seven or eight tables inside, only the two by the window occupied. Claude pointed at a double in the far corner and they sat down.
"This is a treat," she said, smiling, and opened a menu.
While she was studying it, Claude made a beckoning sign to the single waiter, a slight, sallow youth with bad teeth, and ordered a bottle of Bardolino. The menu was simple and the prices low. An entire meal cost no more than tea at the hotel. He gazed at her bent head, the hair so black it shone. "Mmm," she murmured, and then found another item. "Mmmm." He glanced at the menu but couldn't concentrate.
"Melon and proscuitto," she said as the waiter poured the wine. "Then directly on to the veal scaloppine with just a little pasta on the side."
"I'll have the same," Claude said.
They sat in silence for some moments. Claude felt almost dreamy watching her hands in the candlelight, glancing at her face—rose, milk, ebony, her eyelashes like thick brush strokes executed with oriental precision. She seemed entirely at ease, as if they were old friends.
"I hope you can come to the concert," he said.
"Of course I'll come. It's an honor. The world premiere, after all."
"I've never heard it. With an orchestra, I mean."
She thought about that. "You'll be rehearsing. Or have you already started?"
"Soon. Everything's been put back because of a change in Copland's schedule."
"That must be irritating."
"I don't mind." He tapped his glass. "I never get jumpy till the day before, so it doesn't matter."
"Do you know Copland?"
He shook his head. "But I think his music is wonderful. He's courageous."
"You mean the directness? Like Appalachian Spring?"
"Exactly. He's run against the trend." Claude was surprised and pleased at her observation. "You know his stuff."
"A little. The BBC. I listen at night sometimes, after Jennie's gone to bed."
"They talk about the folk themes, the jazz elements, but the thing is, when you really listen to it, it's very, very intelligent music, and full of emotion."
He went on for some time, talking about various modern composers, sometimes waving his knife and fork in the air. She ate steadily, cleaning her plates, even catching the last of the sauce with a bit of bread. "The trouble with me is," she said, wiping her hands, "I don't really know about anything much after 1500." She smiled with the faintest trace of slyness, as if to suggest a certain hidden pride in her deficiency.
"The Dark Ages," he said.
"That's usually a reference to circa 500 to 1000, but it's a misnomer. There was a lot going on in those monasteries."
"Not much music."
"Maybe not. Chants. I really know more about 1000 to 1500— just up to the start of the Renaissance. It's a tremendously exciting period to study because so little work has been done. Practically fresh territory, you could say. Good for somebody young." She leaned forward in her enthusiasm. "I can actually make finds."
"You mean, what, manuscripts?"
"Well, that's always a remote possibility, but I meant more tracing influences across languages, across cultures, seeing things appear to sink forever and then show up unexpectedly someplace else, sometimes the last place you'd expect. It's like a hunt. Lots of hunts. I'm a huntress."
"Aha," he said, recognizing a flash of the old Catherine.
"I've published two papers. I'm good at it, and I love it."
He nodded. "You've found your work." After a moment he said, "I know it sounds old-fashioned, but I think it's incredibly important to have real work. You know? It doesn't matter what it is, just so it's something that tests you, so when you go forward you grow. A lot of people seem to go around in circles." He felt a twinge of guilt as he realized he was talking about Lady.
"Well," she said, looking down, "without work I don't know what would have become of me." She stated it as a simple fact, somehow conveying that further thought on the matter was irrelevant.
They walked back to the house at an easy pace, talking about London, the British tolerance of eccentricity, an actor named Terry-Thomas whose comedies they'd both enjoyed, and the craze for mod clothing. She made not a single reference to America, nor, following her lead, did he.
As they approached her door he felt himself shudder from the tension. He jammed his hands in his pockets. She took out her key and turned to him, watching his face for what seemed an eternity.
"I have to get up at the crack to take Jennie to the airport," she said.
"Yes, yes. Of course."
"But you need to call a cab." She opened the door. "Come in."
"That's okay. The main drag's over that way, right? There'll be a stand."
"There is one," she said. "Go left for a block."
"Good night, then." He backed up a step, and again his heel nearly went over the curb.
"It was lovely," she said. "Why don't you come tomorrow for tea."
The door closed.
The summer after his freshman year Claude had worked at the store while studying composition with Weisfeld.
"Take a good look at this," Weisfeld had said, handing him the score to Charles Ives's Symphony no. 2. "Tell me what you think." He had winked, something he rarely did.
Claude spent more than a week analyzing the five-movement piece, plunging deeper and deeper into the puzzle. When he thought he'd tracked everything down, he went back to Weisfeld. "It's very strange," Claude said. "The writing is beautiful, but what a weird way to go about it. The whole idea. I don't understand, really."
"How many did you find?" Weisfeld asked.
Claude opened the score. "Actually, I caught on before the ones he wants you to hear most clearly. 'Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean,' 'Turkey in the Straw,' 'Camptown Races,' 'America the Beautiful.' " He slowly flipped pages. "Tristan. The E Minor Fugue from The Well-Tempered. 'Bringing In the Sheaves.' Beethoven's Fifth. 'Massa's in de Cold, Cold Ground.' " He pointed with his index finger. " 'Joy to the World.' And this is Brahms. After a few days I began to think the whole thing may be quotes, all of it, some of it from hymns and stuff I don't know, or songs. You start getting into it and there are fragments everywhere, altered phrases, snatches. He does it so much you think, well, maybe he didn't write any of it, maybe the whole thing is made of quotes."
"It's a distinct possibility," Weisfeld said. "No one will ever know, of course."
"But why? I mean, you'd think he'd want to write some melodies himself. If he could do this—it's amazing, really—he could certainly write music of his own."
"I can't answer the why," Weisfeld said. "But the second part raises the question. Maybe it is music of his own. It feels like music to me. More than the sum of all the bits and pieces. I can feel him, if you get what I'm saying."
