The two of them despised Laura’s wedding.
He began to take her to student concerts. Sometimes he played in them, but more often not. He complained that he was not doing well enough at the piano — the practice rooms at Juilliard were too much in demand, the waiting lists were too long, he didn’t get sufficient time. There was a piano at his uncle’s (Laura had been given lessons as a child), but it was a second-hand upright, wildly out of tune, and hardly adequate. He worked at it anyhow, wincing when a note turned up sour, until his aunt protested that she couldn’t endure the racket one minute more, her ears were ringing, the neighbors were warning her that the noise was drowning out their favorite radio programs.
“Look at my dumb cousin,” he told Bea. “She and that dimwit Mister Debit-and-Credit have three whole rooms to themselves, and what’ve I got?”
“Laura’s bed,” Bea said promptly. “At least you’re off the couch now. Besides, they can afford it, Harold has his job and Laura’s applying for her teaching certificate —”
“I need a place of my own. I need a decent instrument. A grand, and the space for it.”
“You could change to something else, couldn’t you? Something smaller, and . . . portable.”
“Portable? Put it in a sack and drag it around. How about a kazoo? A kazoo would do me just fine, it could go right in my pocket. Maybe a whistle? Bach on a blade of grass, it wouldn’t cost a cent. I could just sit with it in a closet and not bother anybody. Or an oboe, that’s the rajah’s idea, don’t tell me it isn’t —”
It was the oboe that stung — Marvin’s private taunt, not that Marvin would know an oboe from an organ grinder with a monkey. The ludicrous word itself: oboe, oboe, a monkey bleat, a jungle sound. Marvin had long ago declared war on Leo. Leo, he said, was going nowhere, and what did you expect from an oboe, what could you get out of a type like that? Two years before, Marvin had been pledged by Kappa Beta Kappa; he was elated. They had never before taken in anyone on scholarship, and certainly never a Jew named Nachtigall. A Lehman, a Schiff possibly, those old Hebrew bluebloods. He didn’t have the looks, he didn’t have the money, he couldn’t exactly figure why he had been chosen (they actually called him the Chosen One), and it was true that they made good use of him, though not always to the point of abuse — he helped with math and chemistry, and wrote their papers now and then, in that fake pretentious hifalutin prose he supposed their professors liked. He liked it himself, and tried it out in letters to Breckinridge’s sister. He was a kind of convenience, an in-house tutor. He suspected that his wasn’t the only frat to keep a Jew for this purpose, but he put the thought away: it was too cheap, a cheapness to be overcome. If helping out (he didn’t think serving) was the price, it was worth it, an investment, it would pay off in the future. And he got a lot from them: he saw how they dressed, how they talked, their shoes, the crease in their trousers, their boredom between syllables. He was learning to drink as they did, cheerfully and boisterously. They were all good fellows. When they drank they ragged him: he was the Chosen One, he was Hardware Boy; sometimes — affectionately, frat-style — he was Jewboy. And sometimes not so affectionately: Will it be bagels or knishes for breakfast this morning? Or the blood of a Christian child? But they had taken him in! The grandson of an immigrant who sold pots and pans. “And you,” he admonished Bea, “want to get stuck with an oboe.” Kappa Beta Kappa — it stood for Courage, Boldness, Conquest — was honing his power to insult. From the very beginning Marvin hadn’t comprehended Leo.
And Leo was quicksilver: Bea could not keep up with him. “Still,” he threw out at her, “if I have to do it with a blade of grass,” and veered into his sidewise grin. It was the kind of self-satisfaction she had come to recognize: he was single-minded, he had a strain of what now and then struck her as fanaticism. But Marvin too was a fanatic. He had set himself on a straight course upward. He was shrewd, he hustled, he had a campaign. He had his eye on Breckinridge’s sister. There was money there, and an attractive diffidence, and a quiet, almost suppressed, way of watching him, or pretending not to. Marvin didn’t covet the money — he intended to make his own — but it was the shyness and the quiet that lured him, Margaret in a white dress, her head down, glancing up at him with her nervous inquisitive anxious look. Her napkin tricornered on her lap. A tiny blossom, a mere three petals, stitched into her gloves.
Leo’s course was strangely, almost mystically, inward — it wasn’t a course at all, it was the opposite, it was indefinable, to know it was not to know it, it was the pulse of a river, it was a rod of light, he would go where it led, he was mercurial, he was protean, he wasn’t for the explicit after all, he was illumined! He explained that the instrument itself didn’t matter, that all the world’s instruments were joined in an operatic clamor in his brain; whole orchestras. He wasn’t born to regurgitate or copy — he wasn’t destined to be a commonplace musician, however skilled (here he sniffed out a nostrilful of scorn) at “interpretation.” Let those practitioners, those inspired mechanics, interpret as they pleased: he was the horn of plenty who fed their French horns, their clarinets, their tubas, their flutes and cellos and violins! He was the thunder-maker who commanded the bass, the drums, the cymbals! They were the fingers, the tongues, the lungs, the hands merely; the creatures of the notes, the score, the skin of the thing. He was a seer — their Wagner, their creator, their god. What he divined, they must obey. He was the thing itself — the vibration that steamed up from a cauldron stoked by demons, or out of a tornado stirred by a rush of an armada of divinities. He was going to compose symphonies, couldn’t she grasp this?
Poor Bea protested that she took him at his word, but wasn’t he contradicting himself, and if he didn’t need a piano really, then why . . .
“Are we back to the kazoo in a sack? Your famous principle of portability? Listen, Beatrice,” he scolded, “man doth not live by Tao alone. There’s the reality principle too. I have to have a piano, a Baldwin if not a Steinway, I need a place of my own — how many times do I have to say it? Especially when you’re in a position to help, and you do nothing.”
Bea in a position to help?
“Your parents,” he said.
“They’re in the store all day.”
“That hole in the wall. Your mother speaks of it as though she’s in steel, she’s running an empire.”
“My aunts think she would if they let her.”
“They” was Bea’s father. Bea’s mother had a head for business. She was ambitious; her husband was not. He was content with his modest legacy, the product of his father’s ascent from customer peddler — door to door with three monstrous suitcases packed with knives, ladles, spatulas, can openers, sieves, frying pans, screw drivers, pliers, even tea sets — to shopkeeper. Bea’s mother had arranged for a grand neon sign that swung crimsonly from a creaking metal arm: AMERICA’S HOUSEHOLD EMPORIUM. But it was still only Leib Nachtigall’s small shadowy hardware store, despite the newly installed fluorescent lighting. Bea’s parents knew every nail, every washer, every picture hook in the tiny drawers set in tall wooden cabinets ranged side by side along the dark walls. Her mother hoped to enlarge the business; she planned to buy the vacant store abutting theirs. But her father demurred: one shop was enough, he said. It was commonly understood (by Bea’s three aunts, her mother’s unmarried sisters) that Marvin had inherited his push from his thwarted mother, who subscribed to The Cutlery Courier and Hammer & Saw Digest and dreamed of founding a chain of hardware stores, while Bea’s father, when there was a lull up front, rested in a private rear nook and read George Meredith and Henry James. The lulls were frequent.
Leo said, “It doesn’t have to be anything like Laura’s. The mob, that extravaganza of a dress, the silly cake, those damn birds, the ushers, the bridesmaids, my God, the flower girl, the bloody ring boy, the whole thing a pageant, a parade, a cavalcade, a saturnalia, a phantasmagoria —”
Leo’s affectations. Bloody?
“Leo, what are you talking about?
”
“Parsimony, my dear, bloody parsimony. We’ll skip the wedding and keep the honeymoon.”
So it was a marriage proposal. It was also a directive. Bea was to persuade her parents to forfeit the usual wedding palace and its paraphernalia (phantasmagoria, saturnalia!). The cost of all that stupidity would very nearly pay for a Steinway grand, even if it had to be a reconditioned one — but anyhow Leo had a connection at Juilliard who had a connection with someone at Steinway who might get them a good price on a new one. They would need only one room big enough to hold the piano, an icebox, and a hotplate, and that would suffice. As for the rent, Bea should do what Laura was doing, and teach. It was all sensible and practical; it was operating on the reality principle.
“Besides,” Leo pointed out, “your college hasn’t cost your family a nickel, so they owe you something, don’t they?”
“Leo, I don’t want to teach.”
“What else could you do? Anyhow it would only be for a little while, until I get on my feet.”
“Do composers ever get on their feet?” she wondered.
“This one will,” he said; it was the certainty principle.
To their tiny new apartment (but Leo called it “my atelier”) Bea’s father brought boxes of useful things: an array of carving knives, half a dozen aluminum cooking pots in graduated sizes, a set of silver-rimmed spice jars, an egg timer, a pepper grinder, a scissors, a cutting board, a tea kettle, a strainer, a steamer, a pitcher, and three tall bottles of furniture polish. He stared respectfully at the piano — it wasn’t a Steinway after all, but it was certainly a grand, and costly enough. Wherever you tried to walk, it was always in the way. To get to the bed, you had to go around the piano. The bed itself was a present from the aunts, who were feeling cheated: it wasn’t responsible, it wasn’t respectable — to sneak off to City Hall, without so much as a ceremony, without family, without a normal wedding! The aunts believed that just as Marvin took after his mother, it was Bea who took after her father: he actually thought of the piano as his daughter’s dowry. It gave him a veiled chill, like something out of an old tale.
“Well, Beatrice,” he said, “it looks like you’ve married a future concert artist, so don’t forget to keep the wood oiled. You don’t want to let such beautiful wood dry out.”
Bea’s mother blew out an exasperated breath. “Concert artist, they’re nothing but a pair of senseless kids, they don’t know what they’re doing.” And then, sotto voce (but Bea caught it), “Marvin will do better.”
Her parents were quickly gone. They rarely left the store together; one or the other had to stay behind to tend to any stray customer in search of a wrench.
Leo threw himself on the bed and pulled Bea down with him. Her toes were inches from the piano’s black flank. “Nasty old virginal voyeurs,” he said.
“Who?” Nearly everything Leo uttered was new to her, and unexpected.
“Your mother’s old-maid sisters. Why do you think they gave us a bed, of all things?”
“Generosity,” Bea said bravely. “They haven’t got a lot of money, but they heard we needed some furniture —”
“And why is it you’re always bringing up money?”
Unfair: it was Leo who was fixed on money, or why else had he urged her to follow Laura into that terrible school? Those wild raucous young thugs who worked on greasy engines, why should they care about Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and how could she possibly make them care? Laura’s principal had been willing to hire Bea, even without experience; he had an urgent opening for an English teacher. And as Leo had promised, it was Bea’s job that paid for their atelier.
“God only knows,” he persisted, “what those old-lady sex maniacs imagine we’ll be doing in their bed —”
Bea had never imagined what her aunts might imagine.
“Then I’ll show you,” Leo said.
The bed and the piano, the piano and the bed: it seemed to Bea that the piano, so hotly close to the bed, fevered it with unpredictable paroxysms. She could not tell when it would lunge; each time it was the same, and also different. The piano was a delirium, a maelstrom. It rocked her and tossed her; it swallowed her up and threw her out. It was insidious, it swam in her blood and then coughed her out as foreign matter. Leo, steadfast at the keys, was inventing those sounds: they were, he said, the crash of his footsteps through a wilderness, he was battling his way into a mighty thicket where no one before him had gone, he was creeping upward toward an undiscovered peak as arduous as Everest, or else he was on tiptoe, lullaby-soporific, or as explosive as twenty tons of TNT. He told Bea to listen for gunfire, and groaning war machines, and the treble howls of falling planes or women keening. He was at war with the piano; the piano was at war with itself. And then he would drop onto the bed, a spent runner returned from an alien kingdom bristling with cannon.
Bea went every morning to her classroom. It smelled of male sweat, of seats fumy with uneasy odors, of salami sandwiches, of sneakers rubbery and faintly urinous. It smelled of beer. The brutish muscles of young men bulged under their sleeveless shirts. Their dark voices made a blue-black din. They laughed at Julius Caesar, so she tried “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere.” They laughed at that too.
Leo was beginning to grumble about his days at Juilliard.
“But you told me the training’s important, it keeps you channeled,” Bea countered.
“It keeps me trammeled. I feel cramped, I’m stultified over there, I can’t breathe. The place is a vault, it’s airless, not that it’s anyone’s fault exactly, it’s just that they don’t know what to do with you if you’re an original.”
“Aren’t there lots of composers who come out of music school?”
“Lots? Lots? For God’s sake, Bea, the real thing doesn’t crop up in clumps, they don’t graduate them a dozen a year, it shows up maybe once in every five generations, why can’t you understand this? And ‘music school,’ very nice, I like the way you put it. Music school, high school, allee samee, what’s in my head all day is no different from what’s in yours, is that what you’re telling me —”
“Well,” she said, “what do you want to do?”
“Do! That’s just it, I want to do it, actually do it, not go on pretending to be just another up-and-coming composition drudge when I’m already there. I feel it, I know it, I know what’s in me, I’ve got my ideas. Gershwin, Schönberg, Cage, don’t think I’m not on to them, what they’re up to, and you bet your life I intend to leave them all behind —”
Leo, burbling, gurgling, winding on and on, half satiric, self-seduced, concealing what he really meant by telling what he really meant: he meant to make his mark in the world, she saw this, she believed him, it was nothing like her own insubstantial fantasies, she had abandoned these, oh easily, easily, they had evaporated, leaving not a rack behind; her fantasies were no more than a dictionary of clouds. Leo’s talk was artifice and rattle and shuttlecock; but (she knew this) it masked the detonations of his will. It was as zigzag and made-up as the crashing music in his mind.
Which was why, in the end, Bea tore up the tickets. The nerve of that girl, that so-called niece: a stranger, an intrusion, an invasion. A violation! Those secretive roving eyes, that casually encroaching finger daring to strike a note, any note, one key interchangeable with another, one poison as bitter as any other, a trespass, a violation! Laura might have been accommodating, she was always willing to do a favor, but what was Othello to her? Laura and Harold preferred the movies; they went often.
So did Bea, but alone, clandestinely: she had her reasons.
8
August 14, 1952
Dear Aunt Bea — you don’t want me to call you that, but it’s hard to change. I’ve always thought of you as the Unknown Aunt, and maybe you’ve thought of me as the Non-Existent Niece. When I barged in on you in New York (that has to be how it felt for you), we weren’t really at home with each other, were we? It was only one night, and even if it sounds unreasonable and selfish, I did
want you to know me a little, at least enough to defend me. What must you have been thinking when I didn’t turn up last Friday, as I’d promised? A whole week’s gone by, and I wonder whether you’ve heard from dad, or is he still stuck with whatever it was you cooked up to tell him, some nice soothing story about how you just had to have more time to get the lowdown on Julian.
What I hope you’ll help with now is another big fib to ward off dad, though I can’t think what it should be — I know he’s going to have himself a meltdown, and the truth is I can’t face it. So I’m leaving it to you to do it for me, maybe out of that family feeling dad’s suddenly discovered he wants from his long-lost sister. You saw the postmark, you’ve already figured out that I haven’t left Paris. I’m not coming back, anyhow not for a while, I never meant to, and you’re right to condemn me as the most horrible liar in the world, but I had to fix it somehow to get away without dad breathing down my neck every minute. I’m here with Julian and Lili (Julian calls the two of us, Lili and me, the Botanicals), and I can’t tell how long it’ll be — there’s a lot to take in. I can’t explain it all in this letter, since I want finally to get it in the mail, and I know I should have written days ago. Please don’t blame me too much, it’s only that it’s so complicated here, more than I ever guessed. Whatever you can do with dad, I’ll thank you forever.
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