Theophilus North

by Thornton Wilder

  “What?”

  “Chamber music. Do you know what that is?”

  A strange thing was happening. Charles’s face already a mottled red and white had turned scarlet. He was blushing furiously.

  Suddenly I remembered—with a bang—that to very young Americans the word “chamber,” through association with chamber pots, was invested with the horror and excitement and ecstasy of the “forbidden”—of things not said openly; and every “forbidden” word belongs to a network of words far more devastating than “chamber.” Charles Fenwick at sixteen was going through a phase that he should have outgrown by the age of twelve. Of course! He had had tutors all his life; he had little association with boys of his own age who “aerate” that suppressed matter in giggles and whispers and horseplay and shouting. In one area of his development he was “arrested.”

  I explained what chamber music was and then I laid another trap for him to see if my conjecture was right.

  “There’s another club, also very select, at Saratoga Springs, whose members own racehorses and bet on races, but seldom ride them. There’s an old joke about them; some people call it the ‘Horses and Asses Club’—the members don’t sit on their horses, they sit on their asses.”

  It worked. The crimson flag went up. At chapel services in the school where I had taught, the Bible readings occasionally reminded us that Abraham or Saul or Job had lost a large number of asses. The air in the auditorium would become tense; in the seats reserved for the smaller boys there would be agonies of suppressed laughter, convulsion, and desperate coughing. I went on serenely. “Which club would you rather belong to?”

  “What?”

  “The Baltimore doctors wouldn’t give a pin to get into the millionaires’ club at Saratoga Springs and the horse-owners wouldn’t be caught dead listening to a lot of chamber music. . . . But I’m wasting your time. Are you ready to say that you’d be willing to work with me on the finer points of the French language? Be perfectly frank, Charles.”

  He swallowed and said, “Yes, sir.”

  “Fine! When next you’re in France you and Eloise may be asked to some noble’s country house for a pleasant weekend and you’ll want to feel secure about the conversation and all that . . . . I’ll sit here and wait until your mother returns. I don’t want to interrupt your practice any longer.” I put out my hand; he shook it and rose. I grinned. “Don’t tell that little story about Saratoga Springs where it might cause any embarrassment; it’s all right just among men.” And I nodded in dismissal.

  Mrs. Fenwick returned followed by Eloise.

  “Charles feels that he’d like to try a little coaching, Mrs. Fenwick.”

  “Oh, I’m so relieved!”

  “I think Eloise had a large part in it.”

  “Can I come to the classes, too?”

  “Eloise, your French is quite good enough. Charles wouldn’t open his mouth if you were there. But you can be sure that I’ll miss you. Now I want to discuss some details with your mother.” Eloise sighed and drifted off.

  “Mrs. Fenwick, have you ten minutes? I want to lay a plan before you.”

  “Oh, yes, Mr. North.”

  “Ma’am, are you fond of music?”

  “As a girl I seriously hoped to become a concert pianist.”

  “Who are your favorite composers?”

  “It used to be Bach, then it was Beethoven, but for some time I have become fonder and fonder of Mozart. Why do you ask?”

  “Because a little-known aspect of Mozart’s life may help you to understand what is making life difficult for Charles.”

  “Charles and Mozart!”

  “Both suffered from an unfortunate deprivation in their adolescence.”

  “Mr. North, are you in your senses?”

  (I must now interrupt this account for a brief declaration. The reader has not failed to notice that I, Theophilus, did not hesitate to invent fabulous information for my own amusement or for the convenience of others. I am not given to telling either lies or the truth to another’s disadvantage. The passage that follows concerning Mozart’s letters is the easily verifiable truth.)

  “Ma’am, half an hour ago you assured me that you were not a bashful-minded woman. What I am about to say requires my discussing what many people would regard as vulgar and even distasteful matters. Of course, you may draw this conversation to a close at any moment you wish, but I think it will throw some light on why Charles is a closed-in and unhappy young man.”

  She stared at me in silence for a moment, then clutched the arms of her chair and said, “Go on.”

  “Readers of Mozart’s letters have long known of a few that he addressed to a cousin living in Augsburg. Those that have been published contain many asterisks indicating that deletions have been made. No editor or biographer would print the whole, feeling that they would distress the reader and leave a stain on the image of the composer. These letters to his Bäsle—a German and Austrian diminutive for a female cousin—are one long chain of childish indecencies. Not long ago the famous author Stefan Zweig bought them and printed them, with a preface, for private distribution among his friends. I have not seen the brochure, but a musicologist I know, living in Princeton, gave me a detailed account of them and of Stefan Zweig’s introduction. They are what is called scatological—having to do with the bodily functions. As I was told, there is little or no allusion to sexual matters; it is all ‘bathroom humor.’ They were written in the composer’s middle and late teens. How can one explain that Mozart who matured so early could descend to such infantile jokes? The beautiful letters to his father, preparing him for the news of his mother’s death in Paris, were written not long after. Herr Zweig points out that Mozart never had a normal boyhood. Before he was ten he was composing and performing music all day and far into the night. His father was exhibiting him about Europe as a wonderchild. You remember that he climbed on Queen Marie Antoinette’s lap. I have not only been a teacher at a boys’ school, I have earned my living during the summers as counselor at camps and have had to sleep in the same tent with seven to ten urchins. Boys pass through a phase when all these ‘forbidden’ matters obsess them—are excruciatingly funny and exciting and, of course, alarming. Girls are supposed to be given to giggling, but I assure you boys between nine and twelve will giggle for an entire half hour if some little physiological accident takes place. They give vent to the anxiety surrounding the tabu by sharing it in the herd. But Mozart—if I may put it figuratively—never played baseball in a corner lot, never went swimming on a boy scout picnic.” I paused. “Your son Charles was cut off from his contemporaries and all this perfectly natural childish adjustment to our bodily nature was driven underground; and has festered.”

  She addressed me coldly, “My son Charles has never uttered a vulgar word.”

  “Mrs. Fenwick, that’s the point!”

  “How do you know that something is festering?” There was a sneer in her voice. She was a very nice woman, but she was being hard pushed.

  “By sheer accident. In our conversation he gave me pretty hard treatment. He asked me if I had belonged to certain extremely exclusive clubs at Yale, and when I told him I had not, he tried to humiliate me. But I have had a lot of experience. I was beginning to think very well of him; but I could see that he was living in a capsule of anxiety.”

  She put her hands over her face. After a moment she regained possession of herself and said in a low voice, “Go on, please!” I told her about the musical club in Baltimore and about Charles’s crimson reaction. I told her that I had made an experiment and invented a club for card-players which offered rewards for the best and the worst players called the “Tops and Bottoms Club” and aroused the same response. I explained that for boys—and probably girls—during certain years the English language was a mine-field sown with explosives—words, dynamite; I said that I had remembered Mozart’s letters and that Charles had been brought up by tutors, cut off from the life usually led by boys. I said that he was entrapped in
a stage of development which he should have outgrown years before and that the trap was fear and that what she had called his snobbery was his escape into a world where no shattering word was ever spoken. I had asked him if he would like to work with me in the hope of bringing his French up to Eloise’s standard—and that he had agreed to it and that before he left he had shaken my hand and had looked me in the eye.

  “Mrs. Fenwick, you may remember Macbeth’s question to the doctor concerning Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking: ‘Canst thou not . . . Cleanse the stuffed bosom of that perilous stuff Which weighs upon the heart?’ ”

  With no tone of reproach she said, “But you are not a doctor, Mr. North.”

  “No. What Charles needs is a friend with a certain experience in these matters. You cannot be sure that doctors are also potential friends.”

  “You believe that Mozart outgrew his ‘childishness’?”

  “No. No man does. He outgrows most of his anxiety; the rest he turns into laughter. I doubt that Charles even knows what it is to smile.”

  “Oh, Mr. North, I’ve hated every word you’ve said. But I think I can see that you are probably right. Will you accept Charles as a pupil?”

  “I must make a proviso. You must discuss it with Mr. Fenwick and Father Walsh. I could teach French syntax to Tom, Dick, and Harry, but now that I have glimpsed Charles’s predicament, I cannot spend all those hours without trying to help. I couldn’t teach algebra—as a friend of mine was paid to do—to a girl who was suffering from religious mania; she was secretly wearing hair shirts and sticking nails into her body. I want your permission to do a thing that I would not dream of doing without your permission. I want to introduce into each lesson a ‘dynamite word’ or two. If I had a student whose mind and heart was absorbed by birds, I would build French lessons about ostriches and starlings. Learning takes wings when it’s related to what’s passing in the student’s inner life. Charles’s inner life is related to a despairing effort to grow up into a man’s world. His snobbery is related to this knot inside him. He won’t realize it, but my lessons would be based on these fantasies of his—of social grandeur and of the frightening world of the tabu.”

  She had shut her eyes, but opened them again—”Excuse me; what is it you want?”

  “A message from you that I may occasionally use low earthy images in the lessons. I want you to trust me not to resort to the prurient and the salacious. I don’t know Charles. He may develop an antagonism against me and report to you and to Father Walsh that I have a vulgar mind. You probably know that ailing patients also cling to their illnesses.”

  She rose. “Mr. North, this has been a painful conversation for me. I must think it all over. You will hear from me. . . . Good morning.”

  She extended her hand tentatively. I bowed saying, “If you agree to my proviso, I can meet Charles in the blue tea room behind us for an hour every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at eight-thirty.”

  She looked about confusedly for her children, but Eloise and Charles had been watching us and hurried forward. Eloise said, “Mr. North won’t let me come to the classes, too; but I forgive him.” Then she turned and threw her arms about her brother’s stomach and said, “I’m so glad Charles is going to have them.”

  Charles, standing very straight above his sister’s shining head, said, “Au revoir, monsieur le professeur!”

  Mrs. Fenwick stared at her children with a distraught air and said, “Are you ready to go to the car, dears?” and led them off.

  Two days later Eloise approached me at the close of the last of my tennis classes and gave me a note from her mother. I put it in my pocket.

  “Aren’t you going to read it?”

  “I’ll wait. Just now I’d rather take you to the La Forge Tea Rooms for a hot fudge sundae. . . . Do you think this note engages me or dismisses me?”

  Eloise possessed three forms of laughter. I now heard the long low dove’s ripple. “I shan’t tell you,” she said, having told me. This morning she had chosen to be all of twenty years old but she slipped her hand into mine—in full view of Bellevue Avenue, astonishing the horses, shocking the old ladies in their electric phaetons, and very definitely opening the summer season.

  “Oh, Mr. North, is this really our last class? Shall I never see you again?”

  We didn’t sit on high stools before the soda fountain, as once before, but at a table in the furthest corner. “I was hoping that you’d have a hot fudge sundae with me every Friday morning at exactly this time—just when I finish my lesson with Charles.” We were hungry after all that exercise and addressed ourselves to our sundaes with a will.

  “You really do know a lot about what’s been going on, don’t you, Eloise?”

  “Well, no one ever tells a young girl anything so she has to be a sort of witch. She has to learn to read people’s thoughts, doesn’t she? When I was a little girl I used to listen at doors, but I don’t do that any more. . . . You grown-ups suddenly woke up about Charles. You saw that he was all caught in . . . a sort of spider’s web; he was afraid of everything. You must have told Mother something that made her frightened, too. Did you tell her to ask Father Walsh to dinner?” I remained silent. “He came to dinner last night and after dinner Charles and I were sent upstairs, and they went into the library and had a council of war. And way upstairs, miles away, we could hear Father Walsh laughing. Mother’s voice sounded as though she had been crying, but Father Walsh kept shouting with laughter.—Please read the letter, Mr. North—not to me, of course, but to yourself.”

  I read: “Dear Mr. North, Reverend Father says to tell you that when he was young he had worked as a counselor at a boys’ camp, too. He told me to tell you to go ahead—that he’ll do the praying and you do the work. It comforts me to think of the lady in Salzburg for whom things worked out so well. Sincerely, Millicent Fenwick.”

  I don’t believe in unnecessarily hiding things from young people. “Eloise, read the letter, but don’t ask me to explain it to you yet.”

  She read it. “Thank you,” she said and thought a moment. “Wasn’t Beethoven born in Salzburg? We went there when I was about ten and visited his house.”

  “Is it hard to be a witch, Eloise? I mean: does it make living harder?”

  “No! It keeps you so busy. You have to be on your toes. . . . It keeps you from growing stale.”

  “Oh, is that one of your worries?”

  “Well, isn’t it everybody’s?”

  “Not when you’re around.—Eloise, I always like to ask my young friends what they’ve been reading lately. And you?”

  “Well, I’ve been reading the Encyclopaedia Britannica—I discovered it when I wanted to read about Héloïse and Abelard. Then I read about George Eliot and Jane Austen and Florence Nightingale.”

  “Some day turn to B and read about Bishop Berkeley, who lived in Newport, and go and visit his house. Turn to M and read about Mozart, who was born in Salzburg.”

  She slapped her hand to her mouth. “Oh, how boring it must be for you to talk to young girls who are so ignorant!”

  I burst out laughing. “Let me be the judge of that, Eloise. Please go on about the Encyclopaedia.”

  “For another reason I read about Buddhism and glaciers and lots of other things.”

  “Forgive me asking so many questions, but why do you read about Buddhism and glaciers?”

  She blushed a little, glancing at me shyly. “So that I’ll have something to talk about at table. When Papa and Mama give luncheons or dinner parties Charles and I eat upstairs. When relatives or old friends are invited we are invited, too; but Charles never comes to table if anyone else is there—except Father Walsh, of course. When just the four of us are there he comes to table but he scarcely says a word. . . . Mr. North, I’m going to tell you a secret: Charles thinks he’s an orphan; he thinks Papa and Mama adopted him. I don’t think he really believes that, but that’s what he says.” She lowered her voice. “He thinks he is a prince from another country—like Poland or Hunga
ry or even France.”

  “And you’re the only one who knows that?”

  She nodded. “So you see how hard it is for Papa and Mama to make conversation—and in front of the servants!—with a person who acts as though he were so far away from them.”

  “Does he think that you are of royal birth also?”

  She answered sharply. “I don’t let him.”

  “So at mealtimes you fill in about Buddhism and glaciers and Florence Nightingale?”

  “Yes . . . and I tell them the things you’ve told me. About the school you went to in China. That filled a whole lunchtime—I embroidered it a little. Do you always tell the truth, Mr. North?”

  “I do to you. It’s so boring to tell the truth to people who’d rather hear the other thing.”

  “I told how in Naples the girls thought you had the Evil Eye. I made it funny and Mario had to leave the room he was laughing so.”

  “Now I’m going to tell you something. Dear Eloise, if you see that Charles is cutting his way out of that spider’s web a little, you can tell yourself that it’s all due to you.” She looked at me in wonder. “Because when you love someone you communicate your love of life; you keep the faith; you scare away dragons.”

  “Why, Mr. North—there are tears in your eyes!”

  “Happy tears.”

  So I met Charles at eight-thirty on the following Monday. In the intervening time he had relapsed somewhat into his haughty distrust; but he deigned to sit in his chair facing me. He was like a fox watching a hunter from behind a screen of foliage.

  My Journal does not contain an account of our successive lessons, but I find, pinned into it, an almost illegible schema of our progress—the day’s syntactical problem and the “dynamite words” at my disposal: auxiliary verbs, the subjunctive, the four past tenses, and so on; derrière, coucher, cabinet, and so on. I find no notations for my campaign against snobbery, but it was never long absent from my mind. The day usually began with a little shocker, then went on to forty minutes of pure grammatical grind, concluding with free practice in conversational French. The entire lesson was conducted in French which—for the most part—I shall translate here. (Every now and then I’ll give the reader a little run for his money.)