Welcome to Witchlandia

by Steven Popkes

  “Want to go to breakfast with me? You can tell me how Guillermo Sabado knew your family and we can speculate endlessly about why your uncle hates my dad.”

  oOo

  Pujol left before eight. I slept a couple of hours. Then, it was time to get to work.

  I had three pieces I was playing with the Boston Symphony: the Brandenburg Concerto Number 6 and a new work by a composer named Ross. They were also doing the orchestral version of the Liszt Hungarian Rhapsody Number 2—which I loved to play as a solo piece. I had been exposed as a kid to an old video tape of Rhapsody in Rivets—a bunch of animals build a skyscraper with all the sound effects being the music. A grand romp, and that was the way I played it. But not yet with the BSO.

  Ross had been commissioned to write yet another work for Conclave. He had chosen a piano tone poem about, predictably, witches and the Salem witch trials. For the last several years, I had seen several such commemorative pieces. “Isn’t it terrible what we did to those poor, poor, misunderstood witches back before even our immigrant parents got here?” You can guess the drill. Like most commemorative pieces, they were uninspired. Big, grandiose works in G major without a dissonant note or minor key among them.

  The Ross piece had the small benefit that it was more memorial than commemorative and at least contained a mournful tone that I liked. It was something to work with.

  I only needed to freshen up on the Liszt and the Brandenburg. I hadn’t played them in a few months but I still knew them pretty well. The Ross needed some attention.

  I worked through the piece all afternoon, broke for dinner and then hit it again hard that night. I had it pretty well cowed by ten o’clock. Then, I knocked off. You work a piece too hard and it can get stale. I was going to go over it enough times at the rehearsal.

  I called Eli. If it was too late he’d let the machine pick it up. Otherwise, he’d answer it or not, depending on his whim.

  “Hello, David,” he said when he picked up. “How are you doing?”

  “Not so bad. What are you doing tomorrow?”

  He paused for a moment. “Nothing terribly important, I suppose. Why?”

  “I’m giving a concert on Sunday. Tomorrow’s the rehearsal. I’d like you to come.”

  “A rehearsal?” He chuckled. “David, I can afford a real concert.”

  “I know. But I think you’d like what I’ve planned. Besides, it’ll give us a chance to talk. There’s no chance after a concert.”

  “True.” Another pause. “I think that’s a good idea. I’ve been meaning to call you. We have a lot to talk about.”

  I didn’t ask him what about. I was afraid I knew

  “Good.” I gave him the time and then begged off further conversation, pleading a need for sleep.

  I went out on the porch with the last of the Barrilito and sat on the wicker chair. The night was cool and clear but warm for October. The only lights I saw were coming into Logan so the witches were either not flying or flying in the dark.

  I knew how that went.

  I had watched Katelin for the last year. She’d been miserable. I admitted to myself I took pleasure in that. A sort of look how well you do without me. See how important I am? I saw now the truth of the matter. Maybe I had been important to Katelin. Maybe it had been me that messed her up. Not so much “how well you do without me” as “look what I’ve done to you.” I looked hard at myself and didn’t like what I saw.

  I took the bottle back inside and put it up in the cupboard. I needed to get to sleep if I could.

  Tomorrow I was going to have to figure out what to do.

  Chapter 3.4: Saturday Morning, October 30

  I woke up at seven without interruption. Katelin hadn’t mysteriously appeared to wake me with forbidden sex and the police failed to pound on my door. I figured it might be a good day.

  I made breakfast: coffee and a roll.

  I put on shorts and my shoes for a run and went out on the porch. I stretched for a moment, then took off. Down the hill to the causeway and over to Stage Fort Park, followed all the while by a GPD cruiser. I ignored them.

  I like running. I can’t manage to think when I run. When I walk I’m always thinking about the music, what I’m going to do the rest of the day, how interesting the trees look and the state of the harbor. But when I run all I can think about is how to breathe, where to avoid the potholes and the cars.

  I didn’t stop until I’d passed through the park and was starting the return. That was a little over a mile. I slowed down for a minute, thinking about what was coming.

  I didn’t know how the conversation with Eli was going to go. But I had an idea it wasn’t going to be what I expected.

  oOo

  I like to nail everything down the day before a rehearsal. That way I’m free to take advantage of interesting things that happen during the rehearsal itself. I already have my point of view on the piece so I’m free to look at other people’s. Other musicians have different methods. That is mine.

  I’d been reading a biography of Mozart but I was too antsy for that today with everything that was going on. But I needed to do something.

  Music binds time. The time between the notes is as important, if not more important, than the notes themselves. I knew a painter when I was in France who liked to work up his initial studies from shadows. “The shadows,” Mark had said, “are more important than the light. The absence of light defines where light can be.” Maybe it’s something like that.

  I didn’t want to fill the silence with brooding.

  My parents had immigrated to America from Portugal. They had married late, not expecting children. Then, I had come along.

  Like a lot of Portuguese and Italian immigrants, they wanted to grow a piece of home on their property. Olive trees don’t make it through the New England winter but grapes do. Over the driveway and before the tiny detached garage, my father had built a grape arbor of pipe and wire. They had been growing there since long before I was born.

  This variety had already lost its leaves and needed to be pruned. I went outside with the shears in hand.

  The arbor was that small—perhaps twelve feet square. I hadn’t pruned it since Dad had died so the vines had, naturally, knit themselves together in a blanket of thick woody stems. I started tracing out the branching.

  Guillermo had taught me how to do this. It was one of the few places where our lives touched. I always wanted to be home from the hospital when the vines were to be cared for—Eli had never really appreciated it. From when I was tiny and just carried the tools, handing them Dad, to the point where we were working on trimming together, tracing out a particularly recalcitrant branch to determine if it was a keeper or just a leader that needed to be removed.

  At the end of the job, we always had a monstrous collection of ropy branches lying in the driveway. At that point, Dad and I sat on chairs and quickly wound them together—almost braided them, actually. I never knew where Dad had picked this up. The final result was a bundle. Dad had built a small fire pit in the back yard. We put the bundle in the fire pit and lit it—usually at night. He and Mom would sit and drink wine. Our backs would be freezing in the cold fall air but our faces and hands would be warm from the burning branches.

  When I finished I had the obligatory pile of branches on the driveway and the grape vines were in straight rows across the arbor. I knew how to bundle them up but without Mom or Dad, it seemed pointless. I stuffed them into garbage bags and put them out by the curb, then went inside, intending to shower and make an early lunch.

  There was (inevitably) a knock on the door. I peeked through the window on the door and Pujol was waiting patiently outside holding a paper bag.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked as I opened the door.

  “Trying to repair Sabado/Pujol relations.”

  I chuckled. “Can’t fix what you don’t understand.” I opened the door the rest of the way and gestured him in. “I’m getting in the habit of cooking for you.”


  “Yeah,” he said dryly. “About that.” He passed me on the way to the kitchen and sat the bag on the table. Out of it he brought bagels, lox, cream cheese, white fish and orange juice.

  “Wow.” I stared at the feast.

  “I don’t know what pianists have to eat before a concert.”

  “Not much. Usually just coffee and a roll.”

  “So you’re not going to eat?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Then, consider me an overachiever.” He pointed to the chair. “Let’s eat.”

  Pujol laid out the bagels and lox and everything else on the table. In a few minutes there was a pot of coffee on the stove that didn’t smell like I’d made it.

  We didn’t talk much. We were too busy stuffing our faces.

  Finally, I sat back. “The white fish was good. Lox, too.”

  “Direct from Pujol Fish.”

  “My compliments to your dad.”

  “I’ll be sure and tell my uncle.” He fell silent for a moment. “Okay. What’s going to happen at the rehearsal?”

  “I’m going to drag Eli away from Symphony Hall and meet Dooley. We’re going to talk. Then, Dooley’s going to turn himself in.”

  Pujol stared at me levelly. “It’s not going to be just an hour like you told Hoffman.”

  “Likely not.” I sipped my coffee. “But I think it will be all right. You’re going to have to make nice to Hoffman. You’re my lawyer, after all.”

  “I was thinking of letting you go as a client.”

  “Where would that put Sabado/Pujol relations?”

  “Yeah.” He drummed his fingers on the table. “You have a destination in mind for your rendezvous with destiny?”

  I leaned forward. “I know the Nonantum is going to be at Aquarium Wharf about dinner time. I plan on sneaking Eli out the back door and downtown. If Hoffman can keep the police off us for an hour we’ll be in the harbor.”

  “You’re going to escape?”

  I shook my head. “But the harbor is a good place to have a conversation without interruption. I hope, anyway.”

  Pujol drummed harder. “You’re not going to be able to manage this without my help.”

  “I’ll manage.”

  “No. You need me to keep Hoffman focused on our deal. So I’ll be coming to the rehearsal as well.”

  “Suit yourself.”

  He pointed at me. “You have no idea what you’re doing, do you?”

  “Not a clue.”

  oOo

  We put the leftover food in the refrigerator and then I booted Pujol out. I ran through some light drills to warm up. I worked through the Ross piece—just the highlights to refresh myself on the ideas I’d had last night. Then, I walked around Gloucester. Sure enough, a GPD cruise car followed me. I didn’t mind.

  The day had warmed and the crowds were out again. There were no flyers out this morning save those working through practicing the final events. I watched as a set of colorful flying flags shot overhead—the Czech team, I think—working out the kinks of the z-sprint. I half expected to see Katelin.

  When I was a kid they demolished the crumbling docks surrounding Captain Jacobs Park and built the event piers. The piers were big enough for a crowd of a few thousand—much smaller than the Garden or the stadium down in Foxboro. They had been built for the overflow from the Salem Gardens, built over the water in the eighties when Conclave had outgrown the high school. Boston, Foxboro—even Providence and Portland had tried to lure Conclave away from Salem. But Salem held onto it with steel fingers. They reluctantly shared event space with Gloucester only when they were utterly forced to the wall by lack of space.

  I walked down to the Gloucester House and along the waterfront. I could only get within a couple of blocks of the piers without a ticket but it was close enough to see athletes coming and going. Some of the contestants waved at the crowd. We waved back.

  I walked down Washington Street and made it to the station just as the inbound train was pulling in. Punctuality on the commuter rail isn’t a virtue; it’s a miracle. I took it as an omen things could conceivably turn out well.

  oOo

  Rehearsals at Symphony Hall are open to the public. They’re a gift from the largess of previous generations. Years ago the elite thought listening to classical music might improve the riff-raff. Of course, they didn’t want the people intruding into the actual concerts. Opening the rehearsals to the public allowed them to uplift the common people without associating with them.

  All good ideas are diluted by time.

  The ticket prices to the Boston Symphony Orchestra are malignantly expensive. The tickets to the rehearsals are merely damned expensive. Thus, uplifting the poor became uplifting the middle class. As far as the arts were concerned, the poor were on their own. Let them eat blues.

  I shook hands with Levine and got to work.

  The Liszt and the Bach didn’t take more than a couple of hours or so to figure out. Levine and I saw the pieces pretty much eye-to-eye. We’d worked on them together. It was just a matter of running through the pieces and getting the kinks out. Then we played both of them through pretty much letter perfect.

  The Ross piece was much more problematic.

  It was a three-movement concerto form—allegro, adagio and allegro, all in D. But the sections were blended into each other. The first allegro started in D major but ended on a low E-flat minor chord that led into the adagio. The adagio had a slow blues progression that begged for some electric backup. But since Ross was a purist, all we had was the entire BSO. The adagio wandered in the fields for a bit before ending in E-flat major. That set the stage for a lively, if derivative, dance tune back in D major. I think his intentions were first movement: the new world. Bright future. Open vistas. All that sort of thing—Dvorak’s New World Symphony revisited. Second movement, mourning what had happened to the witches and how that soiled the purity of the ideal—not that the Puritans believed in the American Dream or anything. Historical fact doesn’t mean much to composers. Third movement was some kind of Hope Dance, a kind of Triumph of the Will in music but without the added complexity of the Third Reich.

  I suggested to Levine that we weren’t going to score any points just playing the piece. It wasn’t good enough. So I figured we’d push a real performance down its throat. Sort of like seventies rock bands: the music wasn’t that interesting but my-oh-my couldn’t those guys sing? The thing was, the BSO had really good musicians and there were some fun, if not very challenging, parts for them to play. I wanted them to milk it along with me.

  It’s not easy to get a First Violin that’s been playing the equivalent of lead guitar in the biggest conceivable rock band to actually act the part. Not that they don’t have egos—we all have egos. When the FV stands up and plays out the long solo at the end of the Brandenburg’s third movement, there’s no shortage of strutting and posturing as he plays. But compared to the bumping and grinding of even a mediocre garage band, that FV looks like a spastic on parade.

  But Levine and the BSO were willing to try.

  We went through the highlights and then started at the beginning.

  And it clicked.

  The beginning was more or less straightforward. A quick theme in D major. Nothing interesting until the orchestra hands it off to me. That’s when the piano introduces the blues riff.

  I pounded it in place. Big, thick chords like blocks hammering down the keyboard. I saw the First Violin snap to as he figured out what I was going to do. I handed it off to the orchestra and they picked it up with enthusiasm. I just sat back rippling the keys while they shaped it back and forth and handed it off to the FV.

  The FV lit into the theme like he was playing at Shea Stadium. He surprised me with an almost bluegrass feel. Bluegrass blues. Flatt and Scruggs plays James Johnson.

  He handed it back to me.

  This was the way of the whole first movement right up to that mournful E-flat.

  I started out the second movement with
the low, soft theme—like a lullaby, I thought as I played. A lullaby for the dead. I felt better for Ross.

  It came to me halfway through the second movement, after I had given the theme to the orchestra, that the music applied to me and Katelin. The hopeful beginning. I’d never been that happy before, playing for Katelin in that cramped little apartment in Columbia. There had been a creek nearby. We’d had to cross an ancient bridge to get into the parking lot. A couple of times that winter we’d stayed home, preferring to snuggle in rather than chance a crossing.

  If the first movement was our irrational joy, what was the second? The descent into the Valley of the Shadow of Death? That long decline into obsession for me and the drinking and misery of her? There had been hope for us—I realized that now. We had squandered whatever we had. It was gone forever.

  The orchestra handed the theme back to me. I turned it inside out and began the third movement.

  Right at the heart of the third movement was the only real inspiration in the piece, a blend of the blues riff in the first movement and the minor mourn in the second. It was a duet of a strong and simple theme reminiscent of a hymn or a folk tune backed up by a harmony that Ross had to have heard from some deep Southern gospel choir. The result was simultaneously lively and poignant, like a child singing a workchant amidst the dancing rhythms of textile machinery. I was convinced Ross had discovered this tiny theme and that had been the germ for the rest of the piece.

  As I was playing, I thought of everything that had happened in the last forty-eight hours. To follow the metaphor to the ground—and if I was going to follow this piece down the rabbit hole there was no holding back—this movement had to represent unreasonable hope. Not the hope that we would ever get back together. That couldn’t happen—I’d seen that in Katelin’s eyes at the police station. This was the hope that something could be salvaged, that redemption was possible.

  I handed it to the BSO. The BSO handed it to the First Violin. The FV took it and held on to it, half dancing himself as he fiddled it down. Then, we took it together, first me on the theme and him on the harmony, then me on the harmony and him on the theme. I stood up and brought it together with this long run up and down the keyboard as he held this high, high note impossibly long.