by John Gardner
He was, this Yegudkin, a big-bellied, solidly muscular man who, for all his age when Buddy Orrick knew him, still had black hair and a black moustache, with a few bits of silver and touches of white, especially where it grew, with majestic indifference to the narrow-minded taste and opinion of the common herd, from his nose and ears. The sides of his moustache were carefully curled, in the fashion favored by nineteenth-century European dandies, and he was probably the last man in Rochester, New York, to wear spats. He wore black suits, a huge black overcoat, and a black hat, and his wife, who came with him and sat on the long maple bench outside his office door, never reading or knitting or doing anything at all except that, sometimes, she would try to speak to his waiting students—mumbling questions and remarks in what the student could not even recognize, at first, as broken English—Yegudkin’s wife, shrivelled and twisted, though according to Yegudkin she had once been the most beautiful woman in the world, wore long black dresses and black gloves. They would come, early on a Saturday morning, down the long marble hallway of the second floor of the Eastman School of Music, the General as erect and imperatorial as some benevolent, sharp-eyed Slavonic king, moving slowly, favoring the old woman who crept along beside him, clinging to his arm; and seeing Buddy Orrick seated on the bench, his books and French horn in its tattered black case on the floor beside him, he would extend his left arm regally and boom, “Good morning!” like a genial but not-to-be-ignored command.
Buddy, who had risen at first sight of Yegudkin, would say shyly, “Morning,sir.”
“You haff met my wife, Mrs. Yegudkin?” the old man would say, taking the great black cigar from his mouth. He asked it each Saturday, month after month.
“Yes sir. How do you do.”
The old man was too deaf to play in orchestras anymore. “Hvatt’s the difference,” he said. “Every symphony in America, they got a Yegudkin. In Hollywood at the movies, my boys play horn for twelve dollars a minute. Who teaches them to make so much money? The General!”
He would sit in the chair beside Buddy’s and would sing, with violent muscular gestures and a great upward leap of the diaphragm to knock out high notes—Tee! Tee!—as Buddy read through Kopprasch, Gallay, and Kling, and when it was time to stop, give Buddy’s lip a rest, Yegudkin would speak earnestly, with the same energy he put into his singing, of the United States and Russia. The world was filled, in the late forties and early fifties, with Russophobes, and Yegudkin, whenever he read a paper, would be so filled with rage at the stupidity of man he could barely contain himself. “In all my age,” he sometimes said, furiously gesturing with his black cigar, “if the Russians would come to this great country of America, I would take up a gun and shot at them—boof boof! But the newspapers telling you lies just the same. You think they are dumb fools, these Russians? You think they big fat-face bush-overs?” He spoke of mile-long parades of modern, terrifying implements of war, spoke of Russian cunning, the beauty of Russia’s oldest cities, spoke with great scorn, a sudden booming laugh, of Napoleon. What it all meant Buddy Orrick could hardly have told you, at the time, and since he never answered, merely agreed politely with whatever the General might say, the General probably had no idea at all of where Buddy stood on these matters of such importance. Nevertheless, he raged on, taking great pleasure in his rage, sometimes talking like a rabid Communist, sometimes like a rabid anti-Communist fascist, sometimes like a poor citizen helplessly caught between mindless, grinding forces. Then abruptly he would stop, and Buddy would raise his horn and they’d go back to work. He put Buddy in the Eastman Junior Symphony (Howard Hanson would remember him years afterward as having always played sharp) and got him paying, though not very well-paying, jobs with small orchestras.
The General rarely played for his students, though even at the time Buddy Orrick studied with him, when Yegudkin was in his seventies and no longer performed in public, the old man claimed he practiced six, seven hours every day. Buddy heard him once. A new horn he’d ordered from Germany, an Alexander, arrived at his office—a horn he’d ordered for a graduate student. The old man unwrapped and assembled it, the student looking on, and the look in the General’s eyes was like madness, or at any rate lust, perhaps gluttony. When the horn was ready he went to the desk where he kept his clippings, tools for the repair of French horns, cigars, photographs, and medals, and pulled open a wide, shallow drawer. In it he had perhaps a hundred mouthpieces, of all sizes, shapes, and colors, from raw brass to lucite, silver, and gold, from the shallowest possible cup to the deepest. He selected one, fitted it into the horn, pressed the rim of the bell into the right side of his large belly so firmly that the horn was more a part of him than the limb of a maple is a part of the tree, clicked the valve keys a moment to get the feel of them, and played. In that large, cork-lined room, it was as if, suddenly, some awesome creature from another sphere of reality, some world where spirit is more solid than stone, had revealed itself. The sound was not loud but was too big for a French horn, as it seemed to Buddy Orrick. Too big for a hundred French horns, in fact. It fluttered and flew crazily, like an enormous trapped bird hunting wildly for escape. It flew to the bottom of the French horn register, the foundation concert F very few among even the best can play, and went below it, and on down, as if the horn in Yegudkin’s hands had no bottom, and then suddenly changed its mind and flew upward in a split-second, absolutely flawless run to the horn’s top E or concert A, dropped back to the middle and then ran once more, more fiercely at the E, and this time crashed through it as a terrified bird might crash through a skylight, and fluttered, manic, in the trumpet’s high range, then lightly dropped back into its own home range, and abruptly, in the middle of a note, stopped.
“Good horn,” said Yegudkin, and put it in its case.
Buddy Orrick stared. Timidly he said, “You think I’ll ever learn to play like that?”
Yegudkin smiled, beatific. “No,” he said.
Nine
One of Buddy Orrick’s virtues—though he was then unaware that he had any virtues—was that he couldn’t be discouraged by the knowledge that he was destined never to be the greatest French horn player, or the greatest anything else, in the world. Nothing in his background demanded anything like greatness of him. His Grandmother Orrick had been a good, honest lawyer, as some of his cousins would be the best country or, later, city lawyers they knew how to be, but with no strong urge to become flashy trial lawyers who defended rich murderers in spectacular cases, or to become famous and powerful politicians, or even to become rich. His grandfather and father were merely careful, honest farmers who kept their animals fed and sheltered, saw to the general upkeep of their land, kept the fences patched, and never sold a bushel of apples that wasn’t a firm, honest bushel. Neither his father nor his grandfather saw virtue in working harder than was necessary, violating the Sabbath, or neglecting the non-material needs of their families. Buddy’s Grandfather Davis, whom he never saw, was in a sense emblematic of what they all stood for. He was the best possible carpenter, which in his day was merely to say a good carpenter. His prices were fair, he understood his tools, he left no gouges, cracks, splinters, loose pegs, badly sunk screws, or carelessly unbeveled edges. The idea of greatness was inherently foreign to a family so firmly and even proudly middle class. Nor was it in their nature to pick and choose what kind of work, in their chosen professions, was worthy of them and what work not. When Charles E. Davis, carpenter, was hired to put the roof on the tower of the St. Louis railroad station, he looked up and sadly shook his head, thinking what a hell of a ways it would be if he happened to fall, then gathered together his tackle and went up, with his helpers, and put the roof on. The houses he built were square and true and had no foolishness in them except what some fool demanded and paid good money for. His sheds and barns were as steady and firm as any in Missouri, though no one could tell which barns were his and which ones were built by Clarence Rogers, his partner, or by Odell Crow, from across the river. He was a craftsman who worked by med
ieval standards, to whom it would have seemed a sacrilege to introduce some clever, original detail, some cunning device that might serve as a signature. Only time, he would have said, can determine value. In both style and structure, he approved what had been tested, what had proved inoffensive after years of looking at. When he fished he used cane poles, cotton lines, and corks made of cork, and made no concession to machine technology except metal fishhooks and lead eargrip sinkers. (As Martin Orrick would write, reconstructing his grandfather’s character on the basis of old letters and family talk, “He might have been persuaded, by the passage of an acceptable number of years, to give his tentative approval to the precision and intricacy of an Ambassadeur reel, the smooth hardness of monofilament line, but it would not have been within the twentieth century.”) With conservative care like a carpenter’s, with the determined, step-by-step diligence of a farmer in the days when men still ploughed with horses, Buddy Orrick—or rather Martin—would write his long, complex novels, constructing, half a page a day, his incredible interlace of literary theft and original labors of imagination, leaving drafts constructed from the center outward, intricate and messy as the confused, enormously serious web of a black widow spider, drafts so cluttered by cross-outs, inserts, and erasures, balloons and parenthetical questions or remarks, that no one but the author could figure them out, and not even he when as much as a day had passed. One looks in vain through the early drafts for any sign of brilliance or even common wit; one finds only corrections aimed at getting colors more exact, or changes in the estimates of a building’s height, or revisions of the weather. Surely any other writer would have quit in disgust a dozen times, but Orrick labors on, so that one begins to half believe—at least with regard to his own writings—his famous remark on literature, that “genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent obdurate stupidity.” In his teens, when writing poetry and fiction was still for him a casual hobby, he put this stubborn, almost mindless doggedness into playing the French horn. Yegudkin had of course been right, he lacked the true musician’s gift; but he had, as he would always have, amazing persistency, and playing allowed him not to think. On a summer evening after chores, he would sometimes walk out past the barn with his horn and climb the steep hill to the apple orchard and play—his father’s cows watching from the far side of the electric fence—until his lips felt flabby and he could hardly keep his eyes open. He would play scales, lip trills, open-horn arpeggios, études, fragments from concertos, orchestral snippets. Sometimes on clean-smelling warm summer nights he would walk farther, to the wide, high hill at the back of the farm from which he could see all the houses and villages for miles around, and there, in sight of his neighbors’ lights but as safely remote from their judgments and opinions as from the stars overhead, he would play his emotions without daring to name them, without even directly feeling them, lightly distracted—as once he had been by ensilage in his collar—by the exigencies of horn technique. He became in those moments, as he would become in his writing long afterward, a sort of human conduit, a spokesman for the ordinary human feelings coming up from the scattered lights below (and from his own chest) and a spokesman for the ice-cold absolutes in the black sky above him—though he felt himself separate from, rejected by both his neighbors and the stars; and because he was only a musician, not a philosopher, he had no real idea what it was—if anything at all—that his music was expressing. It would be the same when he was a famous novelist, years later. The stories he told would be intricate, elaborately plotted, complex; his characters would have the depth, the ambivalence, and the ultimate unpredictability we encounter in real people; the world he created would seem, in his best work, more solid than the world of the reader’s chair; but Martin Orrick, moon child—born, that is, under the sign of the Crab—would have no more idea what his novels meant than did the shelves on which they stood. He built them of carefully recollected emotions set side by side or one against another—the emotions of characters, the emotions implicit in particular kinds of language, the emotions embodied in particular acts—and he tinkered with the thing he’d brought into the world with an old-fashioned carpenter’s stubborn, unambitious concern for workmanship, until he could feel his creation beginning to resist him, beginning to be itself, at which point, like any benevolent god, he would abandon it, wishing it good luck.
Thus the French horn, though he would never be a really first-rate player, nudged Buddy Orrick partway back to health. For all his self-hatred and self-pity, he couldn’t help but see that he was better on the horn than most people his age—easily better than anyone that year in the All-State Orchestra, for instance, where he played principal horn. His emotions were still too raw, his insecurity and fear of discovery still too great for him to be anything but generous—defensively shy and friendly—toward players less well trained than himself; but he was improving. Before long he would think himself much better than he was and would hurt people’s feelings by showing them, more or less gently, all they were doing wrong.
Needless to say, when he saw his cousin Joan now, she accompanied him on horn concertos. They were by this time writing to each other regularly and had even joked of marrying, though they hadn’t yet held hands. When the time for his Eastman Preparatory School recital came, on which his scholarship depended, he wrote and asked her to come to New York and accompany him. She agreed to come. The visit would turn out to be one of considerable significance in their lives, both for better and for worse, though part of its significance they wouldn’t understand for some time.
They played the Mozart third concerto and the relatively easy Beethoven horn sonata, and he played well, as she had known he would. To Joan—and no doubt to his mother and Aunt Mary, beaming in the first row—he looked wonderfully handsome, playing the horn. He was dressed very formally in a suit and tie, as she’d never seen him except perhaps once or twice at church, and he had that touching scrubbed-farmboy look, comic and poignant (a word she pronounced at the time, only having read it, pwagnant). He missed, at most, only two or three notes in the whole performance, which she knew was remarkable on that slippery instrument, and he had, there in the paneled auditorium, a beautiful, soulful tone. It couldn’t really be said of him, as people had said of her (and would say all her life), that he had remarkable talent. In fact in certain ways, she was prepared to admit—though her heart crashed wildly at sight of him—her cousin was musically stupid. Though his technique—result of pure diligence—was impressive, he sometimes went sharp, and he couldn’t even hear it when you pointed it out; and he rushed his sixteenth notes and, when you told him so, stubbornly insisted it wasn’t true. His stubbornness really was amazing, in fact. She was the one who was supposed to be from Missouri. But she found ways of tricking him into slowing down—without his even knowing what was happening to him—and as she told him, brightly smiling (so that he, too, smiled), he played in tune much more frequently than not.
Her unbeautiful period, it ought to be mentioned, was by this time behind her. She’d grown into her nose; by some mysterious process her mouth—in fact, everything about her—had changed, become all one could wish. She even noticed it herself. Though Buddy didn’t mention it, she knew, much to her delight, that he too had noticed. Running to meet her on the platform at the Buffalo train station, he’d stopped suddenly, a few feet away, and had blushed bright red, as her father would do, so that she too had blushed. Then he’d come to her quickly, for fear he’d lose his nerve, and had given her a quick hug, as he always did when they met again after months apart, and she’d turned her face just slightly, so that her cheek brushed his, and she’d smelled his country after-shave and felt the coldness of his ear. He snatched up two of her heaviest bags to hide his embarrassment and said, “It’s really neat to see you.”
She smiled, watching him, wondering if he’d look up, and feeling, as always, much older than he, though she was in fact one month younger to the day. “You too,” she said.
When they practiced he worked
with an earnestness that amused her. She did not guess—though it would come to her much later—that what made him play so carefully, so tensely and therefore awkwardly, was not fear of the recital but fear of looking bad in front of her. (During the recital his nervousness would make him forget about her and he would play lightly, easily, no longer thinking of the music note by note.) All the time they practiced his family hovered near, his mother leaning over her left shoulder to watch the notes fly by, his ten-year-old sister leaning over her right, his red-headed baby brother standing at Buddy’s knee, watching with an expression of awe and loving admiration, though he must have heard Buddy play like this a thousand times, and often from that same position, standing by the bell of Buddy’s horn. Sometimes his mother would say “Hmpf” with interest when Joan picked her way more or less successfully through a difficult passage (it was all difficult, when it came to that; the piano reduction had been done by an idiot), but though she was watching the notes, Buddy’s mother didn’t think to help out by turning pages. In short, it should have been a miserable business, Joan leaning forward toward the music not really in order to see the notes but because Buddy’s mother and sister were crowding her from behind; yet it wasn’t miserable, only funny and exciting, he cluttered room, completely unlike anything you would ever have seen at her mother’s house—the piano top so crowded with pictures of friends and relatives, including a large, colored picture of herself, that you could hardly find a place to put a pencil down—the clutter of emotions—the family’s pleasure in the music and delight in her cleverness, Buddy’s nervousness, his slight embarrassment at the behavior of his family, though it was obvious that he also felt affection for them, and her own confused feelings of pride, love, embarrassment, claustrophobia. When they finished the first movement Buddy’s mother and sister clapped and cried “Bravo!” and Buddy was more embarrassed than ever. Then his father came in, smelling of the cow barn, and came to the doorway, smiling as he always did at sight of her, and said, “If music be the food of love, play on!” Buddy looked down, and Joan studied him, then said, “Ready, baby?” He glanced up and, after an instant’s hesitation, nodded.