Knowing When to Stop

by Ned Rorem

The Essex served us for many seasons. When we traded it for a blue Buick, I kept a metal doorknob. If gold could be melted, so too could pewter or nickel or whatever the doorknob was made of. For an hour I fried it in a skillet. Nothing happened.

  The house on Rosemary Street also abutted a wood, conifers rather than oaks; the smell comes through more acutely than the sight. Indeed, although we were in the house later than the one on Hesketh, memories seem more blurred. A few tableaux persist, the first one painful.

  Mother’s mother, Mama Miller, visits us. How frail and ancient she’s become, still with that wistful trusting smile. She is taking a bath. I chat with her, watching those sacklike breasts in the soapy steam, and she is laughing. Without warning I draw forth the pitcher of ice water hidden behind me, and throw it on her. Her false teeth fall out from the shock. I flee. From downstairs I hear Mama Miller crying and choking. When Mother comes home, Mama Miller tells her all. I deny it.

  In Chicago we’d had a maid. Everyone had a maid, usually Negro, in those days, even lower-middles, and so did we, except during Mother’s spells of melancholia when Olga, who had been a nurse, would come to stay with us as friend, cook, and therapist. Olga was gone now, and we seem to have hired a man, black. He didn’t know how to mix bread with milk for breakfast. Once, when he drove me to town, he stopped off somewhere leaving me to wait in the car for what seemed hours. He came back smelling of what turned out to be alcohol. Why would anyone drink? It seemed a pursuit without a goal.

  If Mother told Father about the farm scene on Hesketh Street he never mentioned it. Did we yet know where babies come from? Our parents answered questions as they came, thoroughly and frankly, but didn’t answer what wasn’t asked. First things first, one thing will lead to another. Sex was not (yet) an obsession, but animals were, and would become more so. Skippy, a movie about a lost dog, came out that year, so did The Champ, both with Jackie Cooper, whom I loved, and both so terribly sad.

  Father when he kissed us good night had a stubble which we liked and didn’t like. I wore corduroy knickers and was sloppy.

  We always had a baby-grand piano, a Stark. Father maintains that when I was four I stood at the keyboard one fine day and to everyone’s surprise played, lentissimo but without missing a beat, “My Country, ’Tis of Thee” in C. Obviously I was imitating some grown-up. Since then—I realize this now—most of what I’ve learned about piano playing has come from emulating peers. The same goes for composition: I’ve gleaned less from formal lessons than from piracy. (Chaplin, on being complimented for his tenor voice, replied: “But I don’t really sing at all. That was my imitation of Caruso.”) Formal lessons, though as yet nonexistent, were just around the corner.

  If they were financially middle class, our parents were culturally faintly highbrow. If they were not specifically musical, they did eventually aim to expose us kids to the best of everything as they understood “best.” Mother was a fair sight-reader of hymns and carols. She could thump out Pomp and Circumstance, “The Wedding of the Painted Doll,” Chopin’s Prelude in A Major (the “easy” one), solos of Ethelbert Nevin, and dozens of songs popular in her girlhood. She had neither technique nor feeling, and performed always at the same dynamic level, loud and hard. Father had a good light baritone and loved to use it. His renditions of “Danny Boy,” “Old Folks at Home,” and Dvořák’s lilting “Songs My Mother Taught Me” made me cry. So did “Old Man River,” “Sylvia’s Hair Is Like the Night,” and especially “From the Land of the Sky Blue Water” (which Mildred Bailey recorded a swing version of, end of the decade). When they could afford it they would go to the theater, or to concerts with a repertory classier than the one they professed at home.

  One late evening when they returned from a Paderewski recital in Constitution Hall, we were awakened by Mother at the piano improvising extravagantly inaccurate arpeggios. Coming downstairs we found her, still in her blue sealskin coat, seated at the keys in a swoon of exaltation at what she’d earlier experienced.

  Next day Rosemary and I began piano lessons. She was eight, I was seven.

  All piano teachers are women, and all are called Mrs., the noun—or is it an adjective?—of the safely mated or widowed. There exists no such breed as the male music instructor for beginners, men having more solemn concerns.

  Such misconceptions are no less prevalent today than in 1930, when we began to “take” from the first of seven women who would represent Art in my early life. (Rosemary eventually dropped out. As older female sibling with less facility, rivalry developed, and she settled the score by switching to theater.) This was Mrs. Davis, an amateur musician who had a way with beginners. She taught me to read notes. Just as the nearly imperceptible span between being unable to decipher words (“Look, Grace, look. See the little bird?”) and seeing a page as an unfolding flower, so it was with staves and clefs and rests and flags. The sight of sound became an adventure and, for the future composer, a challenge. But of repertory I remember nothing, and thus the bewitchment of music was not yet there for me.

  In June of 1931 we moved back to Chicago for good. Our apartment, in the eight-story structure at 5617 Dorchester Avenue, was on the second floor above the north archway leading to the garages. This was my realest and firmest home, the only one I think of when dwelling upon my Chicago youth, my growing up, the site of all First Times, deflowerings, anxieties, and wicked joys. (For the record, our phone number was Midway 7231.) Much of this zone of Chicago’s South Side called Hyde Park, more specifically the university area, is unrecognizable today, but our block, between Fifty-sixth and Fifty-seventh streets, is unchanged. When I returned sixty years later, the wire fence between our garage area and the Edwards’s backyard still sagged from where I had vaulted it a thousand times, and in the pavement remained the initials N.R., incised when the cement was wet. Nothing today seems larger or smaller, nothing seems dreamlike or haunted, the neighborhood has simply frozen, reinforcing the happy truth that I will never grow up. From where do we draw our sustenance? From the evanescent past which is nonetheless always here? Or from the unstable present which shifts mercurially each millisecond even as we talk? Not, certainly, from the future which by definition can never exist.

  On nearby Kenwood Avenue stands the bank of buildings where Mrs. Pickens, the second piano teacher, professed her craft. She wore purple and served tea brewed from senna leaves after each lesson. With her guidance I quickly mastered “Cherry Blossoms,” all on the black keys, and another more complicated number called “Mealtime at the Zoo” in which I crossed hands. Soon I graduated to Mrs. Hendry, befriended by my parents at Friends Meeting. At her students’ recital on Blackstone I played, badly, the Brahms A-flat Waltz, after which I felt undeserving of the hot chocolate and oatmeal cookies served to the assembled families. To this day I’m queasy about eating if I’ve not worked well, and still nurse a vague guilt—increasingly vague, thank God—about taking money for the exhaustingly agreeable task of composing music.

  I was (so was Rosemary) back in the University Lab School now, to remain for the decade.

  In second grade occurred a Parents Evening at which each pupil demonstrated, as at a fair, that section of a medieval castle he had constructed. Edith Harris’s elaborate portcullis was the best. The worst was my keep, or larder, for which I’d prepared a dreary little speech starting, “This is the keep.” When Edith’s mother paused to inspect my work, I began, “This is the keep …,” but she moved quickly on.

  When the Sino-Japanese War resumed I only half understood, even as today I only half understand, any plans for armed force. (While I write this, 11 January 1991, it is no secret that 80,000 body bags are being flown, along with living troops, to Saudi Arabia in preparation for the insane conflict that is due to begin next Tuesday night.) In third grade with Miss Richardson, War was a storybook noun. Now I picture myself perusing the “funnies” in the Sunday Chicago Tribune as Mother and Father explain that a real war is erupting in the East. Was that a first indication that I am not the
center of the universe? Here on the sun-swept dining room floor the colored paper is spread out, while across the globe seven-year-olds like me are screaming.

  Another trauma of the period was Roosevelt’s repeal of Prohibition, legalizing first beer and wine, then strong spirits. I was afraid to walk to school alone; the movie of Huckleberry Finn proved that any boy could fall prey to drunk monsters running loose. Nor was the recent kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby very comforting. I was bemused that my own parents should welcome repeal—that, indeed, Quakerism notwithstanding, our larders should be stocked with wine.

  But they were Quakers philosophically, not religiously. If pacifism as a mode was implanted at birth, God was never shoved down our throats. Sunday was a special day but not a holy day. (Mother says I always said I’d know Sunday in a cave. Anyone growing up in Chicago is imbued, if only through osmosis, with Seurat’s Grande jatte, which hangs in the Art Institute but splays its Sundayness throughout the city.) We went regularly to Sunday school, while the elders went to Meeting, always followed by a midday Sunday dinner across the street at the Quadrangle Club, or at home, prepared by the maid. Roast chicken, candied sweet potatoes, braised celery, lettuce and tomato salad without dressing, and a dessert of Bavarian cream or, if there were guests, hot raspberry tarts. Sunday school consisted of reading plays and poems and sometimes preparing skits. Meeting was a silent and intimidating ritual, inspiring uncontrolled laughter when we children attended. The maid, depending on the year, was Mary or Minnie or Adele or Helen; Mother, for reasons of equality, always addressed each by her family name. The guests would be left-wing, well-read Quakers, or colleagues from the university, or business associates of Father’s.

  The business associates, some of them close friends known as the Committee on the Cost of Medical Care, set up shop in New England for four summers. In 1930 the center was Burlington, Vermont, where we rented a cabin with Olga.

  In 1931 and 1932 we settled in Wolfeboro on Rust Pond, where Father taught us to swim. There were my water wings and bathing suit (males didn’t yet wear trunks) and Father’s broad hand supporting my belly in the waves, a hand he gradually withdrew, along with the water wings, leaving me afloat without realizing it. Like reading words or reading notes, a kinetic knowledge, absent in the morning, is present at noon and forever thereafter.

  We all got conjunctivitis in the pond and bumped blindly about the kitchen, eyes sealed shut by pink glue.

  Blueberries by the billions, the size of cherries, were picked, as well as tiny wild strawberries on the slopes of Copplecrown and Tumbledown Dick. Hawthorne was evoked in the murky caverns near the Old Man of the Mountain, and kerosene wicks were clipped weekly in our unelectrified cottages as Mother spoke of her girlhood in the inflammable haylofts which passed for inns when she was a PK. Always in the background was Father’s secretary, a Miss Ring—she had no first name—dowdy, businesslike, a pince-nez, resembling pictures of Emma Goldman, and using a cane, cordial but aloof from Mother and me and Rosemary.

  One of these summers Father wasn’t around much. Mother with us kids, plus Simba, went on a fortnight’s car trip through New England and lower Canada, aimless, languorous, searching for something that didn’t exist. Mother often took a room to herself where we occasionally heard her sobbing. In Maine we shared à trois the unforgettable oceanic sunsets smearing the horizon with conch-shell pink and nectarine and sorrow. The sadness of nature seemed suddenly so much vaster, more important, than the sadness of man.

  We had a meal in a woodsy retreat off the highway, very Vermont, candlelit tables, cranberry muffins. (Years later I would realize that the French, as public gatherers, prefer fish-bowls; Americans collect in caves.) At a nearby table were a man and two women. Were the women beautiful? They wore hats with wide brims tilted at a rakish angle. They wore rouge, lipstick, earrings, and sported cigarette holders. We stared. Mother said maybe they were from New York. Maybe actresses.

  Somewhere in New Hampshire we stopped at a tourist home with a white out-of-tune upright upon which I banged out little motives. Also a rambling garden, like Grandaddy’s, with flocks of those rubicund sparrows one never sees in the city, row upon blood-red row of snapdragons into which we put our fingers and pretended they’d been bitten, and boulders big and little placed about with Japanese randomness. I darted among the rocks, insouciant. The lady who ran the inn told Mother that my childlike energy reminded her of her dead son. Next day I darted again, no longer insouciant, aware of being watched, and taking cruel joy in this.

  Another guest at the inn was a woman alone. She would converse with Mother. Didn’t Mother think The Well of Loneliness was a beautiful book? Mother stiffened. No, she didn’t especially think so. Early next morning we left.

  I asked Mother about The Well of Loneliness. Well, it’s about “thesbians,” people drawn to their own sex. “I think I’m a thesbian,” I said.

  I am gazing at a snapshot in the family album, taken by Father. I am scowling, unkempt, holding at my hip a pan such as prospectors use. Near me is a neighbor boy, nameless, a foot taller than me, brown curly hair, ruddy cheeks, what Mother would call a handsome lad. He too holds a pan. Am I eight? Is he ten? When Father’s not there this “lad” pushes me around, torments me, and his skin smells troublingly of sunlit masculinity. The pans contain botanical specimens, moss and algae, maybe some beetles, even thrush eggs. These too I inhale anew with pleasure. Nearby, on a fetid pond, the purple dragonflies, in chains of three, four, even five, perform their iridescent gang-bangs. This boy chopped off the legs of live frogs, saying that they were eatable. The frogs’ bodies flopped about for a while, then grew still.

  Annual motor trips East stretch into four days, stopping at attractions like the Finger Lakes, and in Oberlin to see paternal relations. Likewise the trek back West where, after the virulent healthiness of three months in the great outdoors, the vaguely ominous Burma Shave ads strewn along the route, and the grimy oxygen as we skirt Gary, the eventual smallness and startling familiarity of Hyde Park contain a definite glamour. School days are again imminent; but here suddenly we’ve returned too soon—nothing’s in the refrigerator, dust everywhere, and the fall leaves aren’t yet falling. Excitement of eating out, maybe at the Quadrangle Club, more likely at some dump on Fifty-fifth Street in the urban dusk, while Olga, always on a diet yet always overweight, unpacks back at the apartment, gives Simba his dogfood, makes our beds.

  Back to school. One night I paint my toenails with a banana-smelling polish called Scarlet Tanager from my sister’s makeup kit. (Rosemary was going to be an actress, and makeup was very important.) Next morning, a Friday, is swimming day in gym class. While I and another boy are propelled through the pool on the shoulders of Mr. Prosser, the gym teacher, I glance down at my naked feet, see the forgotten red nails, leap humiliated into the waves, half drowning the other boy and Mr. Prosser.

  When Miss Richardson assigned an oral report on A Recent Interesting Experience there was no question but that I should review Mary Wigman’s solo dance recital. Wigman, the expressionist, the “dark, heavy, earthbound” (her words) choreographer from Germany, precursor of Martha Graham, had performed the week before in Orchestra Hall and left me intoxicated. One dance involved nothing but herself for seven minutes twirling, twirling, silver lamé skirt fanning out to defy gravity, right arm crooked at the elbow and raised, palm out, like a Navajo saluting, left arm crooked at the elbow and lowered, palm back, like an Egyptian profile, arms together thus forming a swastika as they continually traded positions. Another dance, called Lament (that was my first brush with the evocative word), was accompanied solely by a gong—a square gong.

  Other boys in the class reported on the talents of Babe Ruth. That my presentation on Mary Wigman should be met with glazed stares by one and all, teacher included, was more curious than wounding. Hawthorne wrote: “It is a good lesson, though it may often be a hard one, for a man who has dreamed of literary fame, and of making for himself a rank among the world’s
dignitaries by such means, to step outside the narrow circle in which his claims are recognized, and to find how utterly devoid of significance, beyond that circle, is all he achieves, all he aims at.” Substitute “musical creation” for literary fame” and that sentence describes the lifelong frustration of myself and each one of my colleagues.

  Like every child I hated scales. When I was able to get around the keys I became more intrigued by improvisation than by practice. Obsessed with the notion of inventing sounds, I would quit the dinner table, unexcused, and rush to the piano. Or leave the bathroom, pants still around my ankles, and rush to the piano. I spent whole days pounding our Stark, making up pieces but not writing them down. (Except for titles: “Tragic Bubbles on the Ruby Lagoon,” “Corpse in the Meadow,” “A Streamlined Carol”) Most parents do not have a preadolescent who prefers Scriabin to softball. Nor does every son assume that his classmates rush home after school, as he does, to write music.

  • • •

  Wilhelm Pauck, of the theological seminary at the university, and his wife, like other academic Germans who could afford it, Gentile as well as Jew, had fled the homeland for America as Hitler’s rumblings augmented. It was they, as friends of my parents, who invited us to Mary Wigman’s dance concert and who took us backstage. (I had never been backstage, much less seen a theatrical personality at close range, or heard a foreign language, and the chattering of German was as euphorically strange as the choreography.) It was they who introduced my parents to Paul Tillich.

  Father was frequently out of town in the line of duty, visiting hospitals and the nuns therein, and Mother sometimes saw friends on her own. One of these was Tillich, with whom she had a date. Tillich was already on his way to becoming the world’s most famous theological philosopher, and Mother may have been flattered by his attentions. Anyway, when they came back to the apartment my sister and I, who shared a room, were long since abed in our double-decker. Rosemary’s whisper awakened me. She bade me accompany her to the kitchen. Through a crack in the swinging door we saw Mother and Tillich embracing dramatically, in the style of Hollywood stars, he leaning over her like Valentino, she with her head bent back and laughing. Rosemary and I, with our dear, trusting voices, called quietly: “Mother, Mother.” Immediately Tillich came to his senses, apologized, vanished. It happens that my report card had arrived that morning, and as usual it was distressing. I said to Mother: “I won’t tell Father about Mr. Tillich if you don’t tell him about my low grades.”