Gryphon

by Charles Baxter

  I stood up and walked out of the room.

  Becalmed, I drifted up and down the hallways of the building for half an hour. Then a friend of mine, a student of conducting from Bolivia, a Marxist named Juan Valparaiso, approached and, ignoring my shallow breathing and cold sweat, started talking at once.

  “Terrible, furious day!” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “I am conducting Benvenuto Cellini overture this morning! All is going well until difficult flute entry. I instruct, with force, flutists. Soon all woodwinds are ignoring me.” He raised his eyebrows and stroked his huge gaucho mustache. “Always! Always there are fascists in the woodwinds!”

  “Fascists everywhere,” I said.

  “Horns bad, woodwinds worse. Demands of breath make for insanes. Pedro,” he said, “you are appearing irresoluted. Sick?”

  “Yes.” I nodded. “Sick. I just came from Stecker. My playing makes him sick.”

  “He said that? That you are making him sick?”

  “That’s right. I play like a robot, he says.”

  “What will you do?” Juan asked me. “Kill him?”

  “No.” And then I knew. “I’m leaving the school.”

  “What? Is impossible!” Tears leaped instantly into Juan’s eyes. “Cannot, Pedro. After one whipping? No! Must stick to it.” He grabbed me by the shoulders. “Fascists put here on Earth to break our hearts! Must live through. You cannot go.” He looked around wildly. “Where could you go anyway?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “He told me I would never amount to anything. I think he’s right. But I could do something else.” To prove that I could imagine options, I said, “I could work for a newspaper. You know, music criticism.”

  “Caterpillars!” Juan shouted, his tears falling onto my shirt. “Failures! Pathetic lives! Cannot, cannot! Who would hire you?”

  I couldn’t tell him for six months, until I was given a job in Knoxville on a part-time trial basis. But by then I was no longer writing letters to my musician friends. I had become anonymous. I worked in Knoxville for two years, then in Louisville—a great city for music—until I moved here, to this city I shall never name, in the middle of New York State, where I bought a house with a beautiful view.

  In my hometown, they still wonder what happened to me, but my smiling parents refuse to reveal my whereabouts.

  Every newspaper has a command structure. Within that command structure, editors assign certain stories, but the writers must be given some freedom to snoop around and discover newsworthy material themselves. In this anonymous city, I was hired to review all the concerts of the symphony orchestra and to provide some hype articles during the week to boost the ticket sales for Friday’s program. Since the owner of the paper was on the symphony board of trustees, writing about the orchestra and its programs was necessarily part of good journalistic citizenship. On my own, though, I initiated certain projects, wrote book reviews for the Sunday section, interviewed famous visiting musicians—some of them my ex-classmates—and during the summer I could fill in on all sorts of assignments, as long as I cleared what I did with the feature editor, Morris Cascadilla.

  “You’re the first serious musician we’ve ever had on the staff here,” he announced to me when I arrived, suspicion and hope fighting for control on his face. “Just remember this: be clear and concise. Assume they’ve got intelligence but no information. After that, you’re on your own, except that you should clear dicey stuff with me. And never forget the Maple Street angle.”

  The Maple Street angle was Cascadilla’s equivalent to the Nixon administration’s “How will it play in Peoria?” No matter what subject I wrote about, I was expected to make it relevant to Maple Street, the newspaper’s mythical locus of middle-class values. I could write about electronic, aleatory, or post-Boulez music if I suggested that the city’s daughters might be corrupted by it. Sometimes I found the Maple Street angle, and sometimes I couldn’t. When I failed, Cascadilla would call me in, scowl at my copy, and mutter, “All the Juilliard graduates in town will love this.” Nevertheless, the Maple Street angle was a spiritual exercise in humility, and I did my best to find it week after week.

  When I first learned that the orchestra was scheduled to play Paul Hindemith’s Harmony of the World symphony, I didn’t think of Hindemith, but of Maple Street, that mythically harmonious place where I actually grew up.

  Working on the paper left me some time for other activities. Unfortunately, there was nothing I knew how to do except play the piano and write reviews.

  Certain musicians are very practical. Trumpet players (who love valves) tend to be good mechanics, and I have met a few composers who fly airplanes and can restore automobiles. Most performing violinists and pianists, however, are drained by the demands of their instruments and seldom learn how to do anything besides play. In daily life they are helpless and stricken. In midlife the smart ones force themselves to find hobbies. But the less fortunate come home to solitary apartments without pictures or other decorations, warm up their dinners in silence, read whatever books happen to be on the dinner table, and then go to bed.

  I am speaking of myself here, of course. As time passed, and the vacuum of my life made it harder to breathe, I required more work. I fancied that I was a tree, putting out additional leaves. I let it be known that I would play as an accompanist for voice students and other recitalists, if their schedules didn’t interfere with my commitments for the paper.

  One day I received a call at my desk. A quietly controlled female voice asked, “Is this Peter Jenkins?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well,” she said, as if she’d forgotten what she meant to tell me, “this is Karen Jensen. That’s almost like Jenkins, isn’t it?” I waited. “I’m a singer,” she said, after a moment. “A soprano. I’ve just lost my accompanist and I’m planning on giving a recital in three months. They said you were available. Are you? And what do you charge?”

  I told her.

  “Isn’t that kind of steep? That’s kind of steep. Well, I suppose … I can use somebody else until just before, and then I can use you. They say you’re good. And I’ve read your reviews. I really admire the way you write!”

  I thanked her.

  “You get so much information into your reviews! Sometimes, when I read you, I imagine what you look like. Sometimes a person can make a mental picture. I just wish the paper would publish a photo or something of you.”

  “They want to,” I said, “but I asked them not to.”

  “Even your voice sounds like your writing!” she said excitedly. “I can see you in front of me now. Can you play Fauré and Schubert? I mean, is there any composer or style you don’t like and won’t play?”

  “No,” I said. “I play anything.”

  “That’s wonderful!” she said, as if I had confessed to a remarkable tolerance. “Some accompanists are so picky. ‘I won’t do this, I won’t do that.’ Well, one I know is like that. Anyhow, could we meet soon? Do you sight-read? Can we meet at the music school downtown? In a practice room? When are you free?”

  I set up an appointment.

  She was almost beautiful. Her deep eyes were accented by depressed bowls in quarter-moon shadows under them. Though she was only in her late twenties, she seemed slightly scorched by anxiety. She couldn’t keep still. Her hands fluttered as they fixed her hair; she scratched nervously at her cheeks, and her eyes jumped every few seconds. Soon, however, she calmed down and began to look me in the eye, evaluating me. Then I turned away.

  She wanted to test me out and had brought along her recital numbers, mostly standard fare: a Handel aria, Mozart, Schubert, and Fauré. The last set of songs, Nine Epitaphs, by an American composer I had never heard of, Theodore Chanler, was the only novelty.

  “Who is this Chanler?” I asked, looking through the sheet music.

  “I … I found it in the music library,” she said. “I looked him up. He was born in Boston and he died in 1961. There’s a recording by Phyllis C
urtin. Virgil Thomson says these are maybe the best American art songs ever written.”

  “Oh.”

  “They’re kind of, you know, lugubrious. I mean, they’re all epitaphs written supposedly on tombstones, set to music. They’re like portraits. I love them. Is it all right? Do you mind?”

  “No, I don’t mind.”

  We started through her program, beginning with Handel’s “Un sospiretto d’un labbro pallido” from Il Pastor fido. I could immediately see why she was still in central New York State and why she would always be a student. She had a fine voice, clear and distinct, somewhat styled after Victoria de los Angeles (I thought), and her articulation was superb. If these achievements had been the whole story, she might have been a professional. But her pitch wobbled on sustained notes in a maddening way; the effect was not comic and would probably have gone unnoticed by most nonmusicians, but to me the result was harrowing. She could sing perfectly for several measures and then she would miss a note by a semitone, which drove an invisible fingernail into my scalp. It was as though a Gypsy’s curse descended every five or six seconds, throwing her off pitch; then she was allowed to be a great singer until the curse descended again. Her loss of pitch was so regularized that I could see it coming and squirmed in anticipation. I felt as though I were in the presence of one of God’s more complicated pranks.

  Her choice of songs highlighted her failings. Their delicate textures were constantly broken by her lapses. When we arrived at the Chanler pieces, I thought I was accustomed to her, but I found I wasn’t. The first song begins with the following verse, written by Walter de la Mare, who had crafted all the poems in archaic epitaph style:

  Here lyeth our infant, Alice Rodd;

  She were so small

  Scarce aught at all,

  But a mere breath of Sweetness sent from God.

  The vocal line for “She were so small” consists of four notes, the last two rising a half step from the two before them. To work, the passage requires a deadeye accuracy of pitch:

  Singing this line, Karen Jensen hit the D-sharp but missed the E and skidded up uncontrollably to F-sharp, which would sound all right to anyone who didn’t have the music in front of his nose, as I did. Only a fellow musician could be offended.

  Infuriated, I began to feel that I could not participate in a recital with this woman. It would be humiliating to perform such lovely songs in this excruciating manner. I stopped playing, turned to her to tell her that I could not continue after all, and then I saw her bracelet.

  I am not, on the whole, especially observant, a failing that probably accounts for my having missed the bracelet when we first met. But I saw it now: five silver canaries dangled down quietly from it, and as it slipped back and forth, I saw her wrist and what I suddenly realized would be there: the parallel lines of her madness, etched in scar tissue.

  The epitaphs finished, she asked me to work with her, and I agreed. When we shook hands, the canaries shook in tiny vibrations, as if pleased with my dutiful kindness, my charity, toward their mad mistress.

  Though Paul Hindemith’s reputation once equaled Stravinsky’s and Bartók’s, it suffered after his death in 1963 an almost complete collapse. Only two of his orchestral works, the Symphonic Metamorphoses on Themes of Weber and the Mathis der Maler symphony, are played with any frequency, thanks in part to their use of borrowed tunes. One hears his woodwind quintets and choral pieces now and then, but the works of which he was most proud—the ballet Nobilissima Visione, Das Marienleben (a song cycle), and the opera Harmonie der Welt—have fallen into total obscurity.

  The reason for Hindemith’s sudden loss of reputation was a mystery to me; I had always considered his craftsmanship if not his inspiration to be first-rate. When I saw that the Harmony of the World symphony, almost never played, would be performed in our anonymous city, I told Cascadilla that I wanted to write a story for that week on how fame was gained and lost in the world of music. He thought that subject might be racy enough to interest the tone-deaf citizens of leafy and peaceful Maple Street, where no one is famous, if I made sure the story contained “the human element.”

  I read up on Hindemith, played his piano music, and listened to the recordings. I slowly found the music to be technically astute but emotionally arid, as if some problem of purely local interest kept the composer’s gaze safely below the horizon. Technocratic and oddly timid, his work reminded me of a model train chugging through a tiny town inhabited only by models of people. In fact, Hindemith did have a lifelong obsession with train sets: in Berlin, his collection took up three rooms, and the composer wrote elaborate timetables so that the toys wouldn’t collide.

  But if Hindemith had a technocrat’s intelligence, he also believed in the necessity of universal participation in musical activities. Listening was not enough. Even nonmusical citizens could learn to sing and play, and he wrote music expressly for this purpose. He seemed to have known that passive, drugged listening was a side effect of totalitarian environments and that elitist composers such as Schoenberg were engaged in antisocial Faustian projects that would bewilder and ultimately infuriate most audiences, leaving them isolated and thus eager to be drugged by a musical superman.

  As the foremost anti-Nietzschean German composer of his day, therefore, Hindemith left Germany when his works could not be performed, thanks to the Third Reich; wrote textbooks with simple exercises; composed a requiem in memory of Franklin Roosevelt, using a text by Walt Whitman; and taught students, not all of them talented, in Ankara, New Haven, and Buffalo (“this caricature of a town”). As he passed through late middle age, he turned to a project he had contemplated all his life, an opera based on the career of the German astronomer Johannes Kepler, author of De Harmonice Mundi. This opera, a summary of Hindemith’s ideas, would be called Harmony of the World. Hindemith worked out the themes first in a symphony, which bore the same title as the opera, and completed it in 1951. The more I thought about this project, the more it seemed anachronistic. Who believed in world harmony in 1951? Or thereafter? Such a symphony would have to pass beyond technical sophistication into divine inspiration, which Hindemith had never shown any evidence of possessing.

  It occurred to me that Hindemith’s lifelong sanity had perhaps given way in this case, toppled not by despair (as is conventional) but by faith in harmony.

  For the next rehearsal, I drove to Karen Jensen’s apartment, where there was, she said, a piano. I’d become curious about the styles of her insanity: I imagined a hamster cage in the kitchen, a doll-head mobile in the living room, and mottoes written with different-colored inks on memo pads tacked up everywhere on the walls.

  She greeted me at the door without her bracelet. When I looked at her wrist, she said, “Hmmm. I see that you noticed. A memento of adolescent despair.” She sighed. “But it does frighten people off. Once you’ve tried to do something like that, people don’t really trust you. I don’t know why exactly. They don’t want your blood on their hands or something. Well, come on in.”

  I was struck first by her forthrightness and second by her tiny apartment. Its style was much like the style in my house. She owned an attractive but worn-down sofa, a sideboard that supported an antique clock, one chair, a glass-top dinner table, and one nondescript poster on the wall. Trying to keep my advantage, I looked hard for telltale signs of instability but found none. The piano was off in the corner, almost hidden, unlike those in the parlors back home.

  “Very nice,” I said.

  “Well, thanks,” she said. “It’s not much. I’d like something bigger, but … where I work, I’m an administrative assistant, and they don’t pay me very much. So that’s why I live like a snail here. It’s hardly big enough to move around in, right?” She wasn’t looking at me. “I mean, I could almost pick it up and carry it away.”

  I nodded. “You just don’t think like a rich person,” I said, trying to be hearty. “They like to expand. They need room. Big houses, big cars, fat bodies.”

  “Oh, I
know!” she said, laughing. “My uncle … Would you like to stay for dinner? You look like you need a good meal. I mean, after the rehearsal. You’re just skin and bones, Pet—… May I call you Peter?”

  “Sure.” I sat down on the sofa and tried to think up an excuse. “I really can’t stay, Miss Jensen. I have another rehearsal to go to later tonight. I wish I could.”

  “That’s not it, is it?” she asked suddenly, looking down at me. “I don’t believe you. I bet it’s something else. I bet you’re afraid of me.”

  “Why should I be afraid of you?”

  She smiled and shrugged. “That’s all right. You don’t have to say anything. I know how it goes.” She laughed once more, faintly. “I never found a man who could handle it. They want to show you their scars, you know? They don’t want to see any on you. If they discover any, they just take off.” She slapped her right hand on her forehead and then ran her fingers through her hair. “Well, shit, I didn’t mean to do this at all! I mean, I admire you so much and everything, and here I am running on like this. I guess we should get down to business, right? Since I’m paying you by the hour.”

  I smiled professionally and went to her piano.

  Beneath the high-culture atmosphere that surrounds them, art songs have one subject: love. The permutations of love (lust, solitude, and loss) are present in abundance, of course, but for the most part they are simple vehicles for the expression of that one emotion. I was reminded of this as I played through the piano parts. As much as I concentrated on the music in front of me, I couldn’t help but notice that my employer stood next to the piano, singing the words sometimes toward me, sometimes away. She was rather courageously forcing eye contact on me. She kept this up for an hour and a half until we came to the Chanler settings, when at last she turned slightly, singing to the walls.